by L. K. Rigel
Max sank to the lowest step of the stone stairs and leaned against the wall, suddenly worn out. “What now?”
The wyrder sat down across from him. “We wait.”
The next day, late, after midday, the word came: Gorlas was dead.
The lady of the castle came down to meet Sir Kaigh, the knight who brought the sad news. “Tell me how it happened,” she said, showing an appropriate amount of tears.
“He died in battle, my lady, and brought honor to all of Dumnos,” Sir Kaigh said. “I was with him as the sun rose on the battlefield. There were no clouds, no mist. The sun blinded him, and the enemy’s blade slipped through his armor and lodged in his heart.”
“Last night, you mean,” Igraine said. “He died last night, I’m sure of it.”
“I was there, my lady.” The knight shot Utros a sharp look, his discomfort uncontained. His silence screamed, And where were you? “Lady Igraine, your husband died this morning, at dawn.”
The lady paled, and her lover caught her as she fainted in distress.
Max rose. Ignoring Merlyn, he walked out of Tintagos Castle, sick at heart at the part he’d played in the wyrder’s dark scheme. It had been a mistake to come here—and why had he done it? For fame? He was as disgusted with himself as Sir Kaigh had been with Utros.
Served him right for listening to that vainglorious treesap, Merlyn.
He headed for the faewood and the closest portal to the fae realm. He’d avoid the fairy court and keep to the tunnels. He just wanted to get home to the Blue Vale, to anonymity, and his apprenticeship with Vulsier.
« Chapter 7 »
Goblin’s Curse
THE NEXT MORNING in the Blue Vale, Max rose late, bothered by a hangover of self-doubt. He shuffled out to the front room, muscle and bone aching like never before, and put the kettle on to boil water for tea.
Returning the crane to the flame, he heard a shuffling sound from his sleeping quarters and a familiar purring, self-approving ooh!
His heart leapt. The thieving fairy was back.
He crept to the door, grabbed for the handle and missed it. Drat. While he was gone, one of the young gobs must have moved the handle higher up on the door for a prank. He’d see to the treesap later.
He eased the door farther open to take in the pretty sight. As he’d hoped, she’d found the emerald bracelet. His heart fluttered and contracted with the sweetest pain. The fever mist had gone, but he loved her still!
“Oh!” She whirled around to confront him—by her expression, a tart insult already formed on her lips.
Max was ready too—ready to kiss that insult away.
But something happened. Her eyes widened in fear, and her hand went to her throat.
“Who… who are you?” She looked frantically around the room. “What have you done with my prince?”
“Your… I’ve done nothing. Ack.” Max cleared his throat. What was wrong? The voice that came out of him was not his own. It had the texture of coarse pounded rock. “I am your…”
Her prince? Had she really called him that? He’d never been so happy!
“Aaiieee!” The fairy dropped the bracelet and popped out.
Max felt the dreary emptiness in the room. She wasn’t merely hiding. She was truly gone.
A ray of morning sunlight splashed through the window and hit the emeralds on the floor. Pain shot through Max’s back as he shuffled over to pick up the bauble, and when he bent down he could barely right himself again.
Squaring his shoulders, or trying to, he caught his image in the long mirror.
He didn’t know if the long, agonized cry he heard next came from his own lips. Perhaps he had heard it from the window.
The wailing began. Throughout the Blue Vale, echo upon echo, guttural, full-bodied cries of anguish and bewilderment. Man-gob, fem-gob, the most ancient, and the young. None were spared. Even the children were not spared.
That day every goblin of the Dumnos fae shrank one, two, three—even four feet in stature. Backs bent, shoulders hunched, brows knitted together, skin creased. Benign and beautiful smiles became scowls of anger and pain. Taut, smooth skin became lined and creased. Max’s sin in creating Mistcutter was to be paid for by them all, the payment taken in the goblins’ greatest pride: their beauty.
A wind rose up, fierce, angry. Aeolios was coming.
Goblins from all over the vale came out of their huts and cottages to gather in the square. They were hoping for answers, and Aeolios obliged them with a message from Brother Sun and Sister Moon. He stretched out his arm dramatically and pointed to Max.
The goblin who would be king
Has a terrible song to sing
He gave men the curse of knowing
They could dare the high gods’ undoing
But the high gods’ justice will not be denied
Sun and Moon now break all goblin pride
Only Max knew what the god of wind meant, but the others followed Aeolios’s gesture and seemed ready—even eager—to blame him for the catastrophic turn of events. For a moment, he thought they were going to seize upon him in their rage, but Vulsier stepped forward.
“You should go,” the old gob said. He leaned close. “For a time. For your own safety.”
Max knew what he had to do. He hitched his pony to its cart. As he adjusted her bridle, the pony nickered sympathetically. “At least you still love me, old girl.” He gave her a sweet carrot, and they set off for the closest tunnel.
Once inside, he tentatively cast the illumination spell on the wall candles and let out a long, shuddering breath in relief. Thank the high gods. He was still goblin. The magics were still with him.
Without looking back, he cast a transport spell to Merlyn’s cave.
The wyrder was there with two others. Merlyn had just placed a bowl of gruel in front of a child who sat at a little child-sized table.
“Hello, friend goblin, hello.” Merlyn made no remark on Max’s changed appearance.
The other man in the cave, sitting some distance from the child, was fae.
“I’ll be going, Merlyn.”
The fairy rose, emanating contained but ominous power. He locked onto Max with a look, a rude grab to test the goblin’s will and fortitude. Max swept the air before him as if batting away a gnat, and the fairy backed off.
“Another time, Maxim.” He popped out.
“Who was that?” Max said. “He was no Dumnos fae.”
“Pay Sarumen no mind,” Merlyn said. “He’s not as dangerous as he likes to think. Have breakfast. Meet young Artros here, the son of Utros and Igraine. How do you like his table? It’s of my own design.”
“Hmph,” Max grunted. It was easier to grumble than to hear that gravelly new voice come out of his mouth.
The boy looked to be about three years old, though Max had been gone from the human realm less than a day. What had Merlyn to do with the boy? What was he scheming at with a fae from Sarumos—one who’d gone Dark, by all appearances?
“Artros.” Max shouldn’t have walked away from Tintagos Castle. He’d left a bad situation to fester. Even if this was just the human realm, it had been wrong of him.
“The very one, and the future king of Dumnos, a greater monarch than his father can ever hope to be.”
“Perhaps it will be so—if you have no hand in it.” Max’s ugly goblin grip fueled by rage, he grabbed the wyrder’s right wrist. First things first, he wrenched the ring from Merlyn’s finger, which apparently enhanced the wyrder’s power, and in dark ways.
“No!” the wyrder cried. “How did you do that? It’s impossible!”
“No.” Max showed the ring. “Not to me. I’m the greatest of all goblins. Haven’t you seen it?”
“Oh, young gob, you don’t know what you’ve done.” The wyrder’s face paled. His eyes and cheeks sank into his skull, and his skin wrinkled like an old man’s. “I’m dying,” were Merlyn’s final words.
“Good,” Max said to the skeletal remains.
&nbs
p; The boy got out of his chair, holding onto a hunk of bread and honey, and examined his dead guardian, his little eyebrows knit together. He looked up inquisitively at Max.
Max said, “I take it as an indication of your future greatness that you haven’t started crying by now.”
The goblin tucked the ring into his pouch and searched the cave for the abominable weapon, which he found among Merlyn’s many fine tunics and robes. There had been no time to make a scabbard, so he wrapped the sword in a good length of uncut flax linen and took it out to the wagon.
“What do you think, Mavis?” He held one of the wyrder’s robes under his pony’s nose. “Catch the scent of Avalos?”
The pony flicked her ears and nickered encouragingly.
“Maxim?” Little Artros had followed Max out of the cave.
“Aye, you’d better come too.” He put the boy on the driver’s bench and climbed up alongside him. “Until I figure out what to do with you.”
In the goblin tunnel, Max cast a transport spell guided by Mavis. In an eyeblink, they were driving along a perfectly manicured path through a rolling, clean wood, past a pristine lake, and headed toward a sort of temple.
It was a lovely spring day. Apple blossoms fluttered in the trees, and the air was devoid of mist of any kind. Every breath enriched Max’s soul.
He began to hope the angered fever that now gripped his fellow goblins would one day burn away and he could return to his home in the vale. In any case, if it took until the end of his immortality, he would find a way to atone to the high gods and lift the curse he had brought upon his people.
For now, he hoped the abbess of Avalos would accept the load of trouble he was bringing to her for safekeeping—Mistcutter, Merlyn’s ring, and the future king of Dumnos as well.
« Chapter 8 »
Fever Mist
Eleventh Century Dumnos. Glimmer Cottage
“AND DID UTROS stay with Igraine?” I asked Kaelyn. “Was it true love?”
How long? How long since I’d heard another human voice in the same room with me and originating outside my head? Real and wonderful and soul-nourishing. Kaelyn’s tale of Tintagos Castle—of Mistcutter, Maxim, and Merlyn and of Utros and Igraine—entranced me not only with its meaning, but also with the symphony of its words.
Vibrations danced in the air and splashed against the steel fire pit and sank into the cave’s rock and dirt walls and bounced off every physical thing.
After ten years, two voices in one day. Kaelyn’s and the silver knight’s.
And ah, the knight’s voice! Musical and male, sending shivers through my body. I grew up in a house of women, where the very sound of a man talking brought a sense of holiday and the promise of… something wonderful. Prince Galen’s voice was now an echo of what it once was. Diantha’s too.
That’s why I had to live. That’s why I couldn’t take the easy way—just remove the ring… and die. It was my fault the prince and princess were trapped in their between-world hell. I was bound to live until I set them free, and without killing someone else in the process.
“He did.” Kaelyn’s real voice brought me back to reality. “And it was true love. Well, as true as you’ll find under the circumstances. Utros reigned a decent while for a king of Dumnos, for as long as the high gods willed it. He died when Artros was seventeen, old enough to safely be revealed to the world.”
“Igraine’s son was Artros of the Round Table.” I knew that much.
“Yes. Well.” Kaelyn frowned. “Of course Merlyn lived centuries before my time, despite what you may have heard about the long-lived wyrding women of Avalos.”
I had never heard anything about the wyrding women of Avalos. I’d never heard of Avalos.
“So when I moved in here, Merlyn had been gone a good long while,” Kaelyn said. “I found him there on the floor, as if he’d died where he’d fallen, forgotten by the world. In case his ghost was looking on, I buried his bones down by Nine Hazel Lake. I figured it would please his prideful self to be so close to the Lady, and sun and moon both know I don’t want him hanging around here. I had to clean the place out, front to back. First to go was the forge. Ack. The bloomery became the fire pit. Maxim helped me with the flue.”
“Maxim—the same Maxim, goblin of the Blue Vale?” I said.
“Goblins are fae, you know. Immortal. He doesn’t look so ugly once you get used to him.”
“That’s so sad that he lost his beauty.” I meant to ask if the poor goblin ever saw his fairy again, but Kaelyn moved on to other things and I forgot the thread.
“I found this near Merlyn’s skull.” She touched the circlet of brass berry leaves that held her hair in place. “Merlyn’s, I suppose. His great legacy, along with a few trinkets.”
She indicated a shelf on the wall which displayed a vase made of glass embedded with jewels. I picked up the object, and in turning it I realized it was a cup. “Is it magical?”
“It has nothing of the wyrd about it,” Kaelyn said. “Likely they would know at Avalos. I should send it there for safekeeping.”
“Tell me about Avalos.” I returned the cup to its place. “Is that where all the wyrding folk have gone? Do many live there? Can I…?”
I wanted to cry. I knew the answer before I asked the question. I could never go where there were other people.
Kaelyn came to me and covered my hands in hers, her touch gentle and loving, like a mother’s. She closed her eyes and rubbed her thumb over the Oracle’s ring. “It’s time for you to go back, my dear.”
“I know,” I said. Back to Glimmer Cottage, my prison.
Until that moment, I hadn’t once raged against my fate. I’d accepted solitary confinement as the consequence of my own actions. But sun and moon, I felt such self-pity! If the angels in heaven had wept for me then, I would have taken it as my due.
When Kaelyn released my hands, the double band was cold against my skin. “That should quiet them for another day.” She had a mischievous twinkle in her eye. “Who knows? When you get home, you may find a visitor waiting.”
“Kaelyn, what did you mean before: you saw that I would come? Do you have the sight?”
She considered me for a moment then said, “After a fashion.”
“Can… can you see my death?”
Unlike most, I look forward to my death. Did Kaelyn know how long I’d go on living like this? I could end it all easily. Just remove the ring and die, as I’d watched my mother do. But I had no right. I forced myself to live on in the hope that one day I’d set Galen and Diantha—and my sister, Lourdes—free of the prisons where I’d caged them.
“No, Elyse. The sight comes in trails and tendrils, a weaving of fate and fates. The threads I see touch you but briefly and continue on with your daughter.”
“But I have no daughter.”
She smiled, but this time there was no happiness in it.
“Not yet.”
The ride home was uneventful. At least, I think it was. I was so lost in my thoughts I hardly paid attention to the world. I knew I had ridden across Glimmer Cottage’s boundary when I was bombarded by the nervous chatter of crows.
Not their usual gossipy fare, and not for me. They were disturbed, calling to someone from the yew. “Wyrd Elyse! Wyrd Elyse!”
I recognized the unsaddled horse eating grass in the paddock. And then I saw him, peering up into the yew tree’s branches. He held a bouquet of my lilacs, and the breeze teased his loose white-gold hair, as I longed to do.
The silver knight’s face lit up when saw me, as if he’d stumbled upon the grail. “It’s you!”
“Faeling! Faeling!” The crows kept at it. “Beware! Beware!”
“Your birds are chatty.” The knight met me in the courtyard. He stroked Athena’s neck and gave me the flowers. “I feel sure they’re trying to tell me something.”
As I breathed in the lovely lilac perfume, the silver knight lifted me down from the horse, his hands on my sides, his thumbs close to my breasts.
&nb
sp; “Something… brought me here,” he said. “I can’t explain it, but I think my guardian angel must have been my guide.” He lifted my hand and kissed the palm, exposing my forearm and the very spot where Kaelyn had rubbed the glamour dust.
Yes, that must be it. Your guardian angel, with a little help from mine. Kaelyn’s charm had led him here and had allowed him to cross my boundary.
He lifted the full sacks from Athena’s saddle as if they weighed nothing and set them down by the cottage door. “I’ll put away your horse then take those inside for you.”
Usually I dispatch those kinds of chores with wyrds, but it was a fine thing to watch a man at work in an effort to help and please me.
We shared a simple meal of bread and cheese in the kitchen, and then I showed him all of Glimmer Cottage. On the roof, we drank wine and watched the strange mist retreat to the Severn Sea. The moon and stars took over the sky as twilight became night.
There on the roof, he touched my waist again. He pulled me close and kissed me and moved his hand over my breast, sending hot shivers through me. After watching so many others, I knew what to do.
I wrapped my arms around his neck and pushed my tongue into his mouth, and he lifted my skirts over my hips, and then he lifted me. He pressed me against the wall and pushed his way inside me, grinding and thrusting. I believed his need was as great as mine.
Afterward, he took the blanket from the chaise and spread it on the roof’s floor.
“Wait here.”
He left the roof, and I watched him go out to the garden for more blooms, the crows screaming the whole while. He returned carrying my herb basket loaded with flowers, and his arms were full too.
He took me in his arms again and very slowly removed every bit of clothing from my body. “So lovely,” he said when I was entirely naked. He laid me down on the blanket and arranged the flowers all around me. With a sprig of lilac, he traced my skin. As the bloom lightly grazed my nipples, they hardened, and he dropped the lilac and kissed my breasts. I tingled all over, fire for him burning in my head and between my legs.
