Caelihn

by Jenna Elizabeth Johnson

  “What are you doing in here?”

  Meghan dropped the folder she had been rifling through and huffed a great breath of exasperation as she turned her eyes toward the ceiling.

  “Niall,” she said sharply, “you are as bad as Robyn! The entire castle doesn’t need to know what I’m doing every minute of every day.”

  His eyes widened even further. “Sorry. I can’t help it, you know,” he said defensively.

  Meghan just glared at him, but Niall’s lingering look of innocence easily crumbled her defenses. “Fine!” she said in defeat. “If you must know, Robyn has agreed to help tidy up this room a little.”

  Niall murmured something that sounded suspiciously like, “About time,” but dropped his eyes the moment Meghan flashed him an accusing glare.

  “Can I help?” he asked quickly, most likely hoping to make amends for his remark.

  Meghan took a breath to respond, then stopped to consider. “Actually, do you think you could fetch some of the other boys to clean out the fireplace and check the chimney? It’s freezing in here, and a fire would be most welcome.”

  He beamed, ducked his head and disappeared.

  “So,” I said, picking up a folder similar to the one Meghan had just set down. It looked like it was from the mortal world, not Eile. Clearing my throat, I continued, “What is all this junk, anyway?”

  Meghan flinched ever so slightly. “All the stuff from my room back in Arroyo Grande.”

  I gave her a disbelieving look, and she shrugged.

  “Mom said Logan and Bradley were getting too old to share a room, and since mine was just sitting there, empty, they might as well make use of it.”

  “Apparently, it wasn’t as empty as she might have thought,” I said dryly, waving my hand around.

  Meghan flushed a little. “Nope.”

  “Why didn’t you just throw all this away?”

  She gasped in mock outrage. “Are you mad? This is an accumulation of eighteen years’ worth of memories! I couldn’t just throw it away!”

  “Oh, really?” I countered, holding up a faded poster of some neon cartoon character that had been very popular when we were five. “This is worth holding onto?”

  Meghan’s brow creased, then she smiled and shook her head. “I didn’t say every last piece in here is worth holding onto, but I would like to go through it and keep what matters.”

  “So, I can chuck Crazy Eyes here?”

  I flapped the dusty poster in front of her, and Meghan gave me the thumbs up. With far more pleasure than I’d like to admit, I crumpled the poster into a tight ball and threw it into the closest waste bin.

  For the next few hours, we continued with our work. I ended up making two piles. One was for the stuff I thought for sure Meghan would want to throw out, the other for the items she should go through. Niall returned during that time with two other boys, one older, one younger, to check out the fireplace. Once they had removed the charred logs and swept up the soot (depositing a great deal of it onto the floor), they spent another several minutes inspecting the chimney. Finally, they declared it clear of any obstructions and got a new fire lit.

  When I could finally see patches of the floor showing through the rubble, I drew in a deep breath and said, “So, do tell me what it’s like being a Fae princess married to Eile’s bad boy.”

  Meghan, who had been rifling through a stack of open envelopes, froze and fixed a sharp glance in my direction. I grinned broadly, showing all my teeth, and proceeded to drag a dusty cardboard box toward me.

  “Eile’s bad boy?” my friend countered, her voice tinged with just a hint of derision.

  “Yeah,” I shrugged. “I mean, he does give off that vibe.”

  I peeled open the box, trying my best not to send a cloud of dust into the air, and discovered several scrapbooks inside. I picked one up and started flipping the pages.

  “Cade is not a ‘bad boy’,” Meghan insisted.

  Photographs of Meghan and her family decorated the pages, bringing to mind the weekends we used to spend in her basement room with Tully, watching our favorite movies and putting together these dumb scrapbooks. Except, now they didn’t seem so dumb, especially since it was a life both Meghan and I had left behind. These were the precious memories worth holding onto.

  Taking another deep breath, I added the scrapbook to the ‘Save’ pile and reached for the next one.

  “Going off of what I already know about him,” I drawled, getting back to our conversation, “and from what Devlin has told me, he meets all the criteria. All he needs is a pair of black leather pants with a matching jacket, some dark sunglasses and a five o’clock shadow.”

  Meghan dropped the pile of envelopes she’d gathered together and stared at me.

  I gave her a wary look. Her changeable eyes were narrowed, and she’d turned her focus onto me, forgetting the envelopes. Huh. For some reason or another, she didn’t like my title for her husband. Time to find out why.

  I shrugged. “What? It’s true. He already has tattoos, owns a classic Trans Am and hunts monsters with a big sword. He’s also got the whole dark and mysterious thing going on.”

  “Devlin has tattoos,” Meghan pointed out. “And piercings.”

  I grinned wickedly. “I know. He’s a bad boy, too.”

  Meghan rolled her eyes.

  “Why does it bother you so much?” I asked, reaching for a third scrapbook.

  My friend heaved a great sigh and turned back to her envelopes. Her posture suggested she had decided to give in to my pestering, but there was also a tightness about her shoulders she couldn’t seem to shake. I perked up. Meghan had always gotten this way in high school when one of us, usually me or Tully, managed to pry open a door on some secret she was trying to keep from us. Meghan was about to tell me something, and I had a feeling it was going to be big.

  “Robyn, when I wrote those letters to you, Tully and the boys after the battle with the Morrigan, there was something I didn’t tell you.”

  She looked up at me then, her mouth drawn tight, her eyes darkening to some color between blue and green. Intrigued, I shoved aside my box of scrapbooks and folded my legs in front of me, resting my elbows on my knees and propping my hands beneath my chin. I imagined I resembled a young child in a classroom, eager and intent on hearing a story from her teacher.

  Meghan took one look at me, and I could tell by the way her eyebrows drew together that she was already regretting what she was about to divulge. Oh well. Too late to back down now. If she tried, I’d just keep bugging her. It was one thing for me to be mildly curious and then told to back off, but quite another for her to dangle the bait in front of me and then decide she didn’t feel like fishing after all. In those situations, I was like a barracuda, more than willing to leap onto the boat to get the morsel I’d been tempted with. Was I afraid of landing in the fisherman’s net? Nah. If I did, I’d just use my nice, long, pointy teeth to get away.

  My friend turned her head to regard the grey sunlight spilling through the grimy window overlooking the garden. Clearly, she was unsure of how to begin. Go ahead, I thought at her, take your time. I am patient.

  Finally, she turned back to face me and said, “There is something about Cade you don’t know. A reason why he has all those characteristics that would make you view him as a bad boy.”

  She paused, and I waved a hand, “Go on.”

  She gave me a terse look, and I simply smiled and batted my eyelashes.

  Meghan scrunched up her nose. “I’m not saying you are wrong with your observations, but being a bad boy in Eile isn’t just about the vibe someone gives off. It goes deeper than that. In the mortal world, it means you are the tall, dark and slightly dangerous guy most of the girls go for. Back at home, if Cade had gone to Black Lake High, he’d have had an entire flock of girls drooling after him.”

  I quirked my lips and nodded. Couldn’t argue with her there.

  “But here in Eile,” she continued, “those characteristics have
made Cade an outcast his entire life. There is a term for what he was, before he married me. People here called him Ehriad. It is someone who is an outsider, a wandering warrior with no family and no ties. Cade had his sister and foster father, but it wasn’t enough to take away his Ehriad status.”

  Meghan paused to collect her thoughts. I furrowed my brow and prompted, “Why was he an outcast?”

  I had only met Cade a few times, and although I thought he still had an aura of trouble surrounding him, I couldn’t imagine him being a complete outcast.

  “Because,” Meghan said carefully, “of who his mother was.”

  My eyebrows shot up. “Who his mother was? She’s dead?”

  I knew nothing about Cade’s parents. I’d never thought to ask. Guess I was going to find out.

  Meghan gave a wry smile, then looked me in the eyes. “Yes. She’s dead. For now.”

  I sat up from my relaxed position and gazed at my friend as if she’d sprouted horns. “For now?” I repeated with a pinch of cynicism. “What, is she going to come back to life? Is she some sort of goddess or something?”

  This time, Meghan’s smile was cold, her eyes haunted. “Yes, as a matter of fact she is. And someday, she will come back to life.”

  I stared at her, the prickling sensation of realization dawning upon me. A dead goddess who, although defeated, could never truly be destroyed. No. Way. In a slightly raspy voice, I demanded, “Who?”

  “The Morrigan.”

  Even though I had known the answer before Meghan spoke it, the acknowledgment hit me in the face like a bucket of ice water. I drew in a shocked breath and gaped at my friend in slight horror.

  “No freaking way!” I hissed.

  The Morrigan, the goddess I had once revered, and later despised for her role in making my friend’s life a living hell, was Meghan’s mother-in-law? Or, had been her mother-in-law? That must have made her relationship with Cade pretty complicated.

  A million questions swam through my head, but the one that surfaced above all the others was, “Have you always known?”

  Meghan shook her head. “Remember the night I missed senior prom?”

  I nodded. Oh yeah, I remembered. She had asked me to cover for her, and when she and Cade disappeared without a trace, my parents had come down hard on me. I didn’t blame them. I was pretty ticked at her myself. Not only had she dragged me into trouble as well, but I had been terrified something had happened to her. When she finally did show up, after missing for two days, Meghan had fed me some excuse about losing track of time and not being able to get into contact with us.

  “That’s when I found out. Cade and I had been at the Dagda’s for a party when we received word the Morrigan was planning on crossing through the dolmarehn to hurt my family. We raced back to Luathara only to realize she had set a trap for us. That’s when the truth had come out, the truth about how she was related to Cade and how she had treated him like a slave since his birth. On top of everything else, that was the day my glamour finally decided to wake up,” she said, her voice slightly rough. “That’s why I didn’t return home right away. It knocked me out.”

  Meghan stopped speaking and turned a shade paler, her eyes doing the same. As much as I wanted to press her for details, I held off. Clearly, something awful had happened that night

  “Anyhow,” Meghan continued after taking a breath, “that’s why Cade is an outcast, or at least why he was. Even now, despite all we did to defeat the Morrigan, some people in my mother’s court still do not trust or like Cade. Danua discouraged our relationship at first, but she has since warmed up to him.”

  Once the initial shock of learning Cade was related to the Morrigan wore off, I cleared my throat, eager to apologize for enticing Meghan into spilling her soul. It never occurred to me that my prying could cause hard feelings until after the damage was already done. My curiosity could be such a jerk sometimes.

  “Sorry,” I said. “I didn’t realize calling Cade a bad boy would stir up such awful memories.” I took a breath and shrugged my shoulders, smiling a little. “But I’m glad you told me. I had no idea how bad it was for you. You always brushed us off, and I just assumed it was guy problems. Now I see why you didn’t include all of this in your letter.”

  Meghan snorted. “I didn’t want to worry you all, so I left out all the nasty details.”

  For a few moments, we let the silence stretch between us. The faint whisper of flames dancing over the logs in the fireplace, and the gentle patter of the rain that had finally started to fall, soothed our frayed nerves.

  “Other than dealing with the lingering contempt of a select group of my mother’s courtiers, and all the nasty things the Morrigan’s flunkies have thrown at us since her death,” Meghan finally said, “married life with my bad boy has been wonderful.”

  I looked up at her only to catch a dreamy smile plastered on her face. I chuckled, well, snorted would be a better term. Meghan giggled along with me, and then told me all about Cade’s many qualities and how he was constantly doing things to please her.

  “The twigrins were a gift for defeating the Morrigan,” she informed me. “He remembered how much I liked them during our trips through the Weald, so he gathered up a small family of them and moved them to the alcove where they now live.”

  “I still can’t believe I’ve never seen them before,” I admitted. “Maybe the noise of the Wildren keeps them away from the village.”

  “Ah yes, you live in the Weald now,” Meghan said, drawing her knees up to her chest and giving me a bright smile. “Still trying to wrap my head around that. You know, before your letter arrived, I had no idea you had visited the Otherworld. I took it to read on the balcony and must have made some sound of shock, because Cade came running out of the bathroom in nothing but a towel, his eyes wild. He thought I had either fallen from the ledge or that I was being attacked by something. I felt pretty bad about it.”

  I snickered. “I’m sure you don’t regret seeing him in a towel, though.”

  Meghan gave me a half-lidded glance and shook her head, a small smile creeping onto her face. “Nope. Didn’t regret that part. Once I had assured him I wasn’t dying, I read the letter out loud. That’s when he told me about Devlin and the role he played in helping him and Enorah with some monster a while back. Anyway,” she huffed, “tell me more about living with the wild children of Eile.”

  For the next half hour, I told Meghan all about my settling in with the Wildren, everything from describing the cabin Devlin and I shared, to my training in self-defense and fighting and how I had taken naturally to the crossbow. When she asked about Enorah, I told her she had left shortly before our own departure to answer a summons from Danua. Upon hearing the news, my friend sat up a bit straighter.

  “What sort of a summons?” she wondered aloud.

  I shrugged. “I have no idea. She simply said that the high queen had requested an audience with her, and she needed to travel to Erintara as soon as possible.”

  Meghan turned her head and glanced at the fire, her mouth screwed up in thought.

  I waited patiently, hoping Meghan would start to shed some light on the finer details of what had been happening in the Otherworld of late. At this point, all I knew was that she and Cade were helping her mother deal with the aftermath of the Morrigan’s downfall.

  My friend let out a breath and shrugged. “Oh, well. I’m sure Danua will tell us if it’s something important.”

  I wondered if by ‘us’, she meant Devlin and me as well as her and Cade. Meghan tilted her head from side to side and then rolled her shoulders, chasing away whatever tension had been building up. I would have liked to grill her more about the role she and her husband had been playing with regards to the Daramorr and those like him, but at that moment, she picked up another envelope, smiling when she peeked inside. She reached in and pulled out a large photograph.

  “I had forgotten about this,” she murmured.

  Nipping my slight disappointment in the bud,
I asked, “What is it?”

  Meghan flipped the image around, displaying the portrait of a boy around ten or eleven years old. He had dark, thick hair with a little curl to it and brilliant, blue-green eyes. At this stage in life, he was still a cute little boy, but it was clear his soft features would one day sharpen and transform him into a good-looking young man.

  “Is that Aiden?” I asked, the surprise ringing clear in my voice. I scooted across the debris-free section of the floor to get a better look.

  Meghan nodded and held the photo at an angle, so I could see it better. He looked so much older than the last time I’d seen him, but then again, it had been two years and kids grew so fast. Yup, my initial reaction had been correct. With those thick lashes, and those captivating eyes of his, there was no doubt in my mind that he’d be fighting off the young ladies in just a few more years.

  I narrowed my eyes as I continued to scrutinize the almost grown up little Aiden. Now that he was older, he seemed to share more of his sister’s features. They had the same hair and skin tone. Even the shape of their faces were similar.

  “Crazy,” I breathed.

  “What?” Meghan asked.

  I shook my head. “Well, I don’t know,” I fumbled. “It’s just weird how much he looks like you, except for his eye color, of course. You’d almost think he was your real brother.”

  Meghan didn’t say a word. Fearing I had hurt her feelings, I glanced up only to see her biting her lip against a nervous smile.

  That was never a good expression. “What?” I asked flatly.

  “Another little detail I never got around to sharing.”

  She paused, and I nudged her with my toe. “Out with it!”

  “Aiden is my real brother. Danua is his mother, and we have the same father.”

  Honestly, after learning about Cade and the Morrigan, I shouldn’t have been surprised. Especially since I just saw, with my own eyes, the evidence that Meghan and Aiden were blood-related. But really, what were the chances? For two children of the same parents, from the Otherworld, to end up in the same family in the mortal world?