by Gow, Kailin
“But are you quite sure?” Raine was saying. “I mean – could this be a trick? Some deceit of the pixies?” her voice was shaky with fear.
“No, indeed,” my mother furrowed her brow. “It is one of my most trusted soldiers – he says it's true. In an effort to quell the uprising in the Spring lands, Summer has marched not only into Spring – massacring a good number of their rebels – but also killed a good portion of the protective forces we sent into the region.”
“But – it was an accident, surely...?”
“No accident,” my mother's voice was harsh and cold. “They passed beyond the Spring borders and into Winter territory – raiding one of our villages near the border.”
“No!” Raine clapped a hand over her mouth. “He would never, Frank would never...”
“Flametail, as I understand it,” my mother said, raising an eyebrow, “was not consulted on the matter. He was not in the palace when the decision was made – a decision made by Redleaf and Redleaf alone. Not that she'd admit it, of course. My sources tell me that she made it quite clear to the soldiers on all sides that Flametail had made the decision to go on the offensive.”
“But where was Frank?” My mother pleaded. “Why would he have left Redleaf alone – alone to…”
“I'm right here!” A booming voice echoed up the stairs. Flametail was bounding up the stairs, his ginger hair brighter than usual in the candlelight. “Raine, I'm so sorry – so sorry...I couldn't bear being without you another moment – I wanted to visit you in secret...I missed you so much...”
“Well, this is a mess,” my mother said archly.
“Frank, how could you leave Redleaf alone? Knowing what she'd do – knowing how much she wanted to stir up discord?”
“I never knew it was this bad...” Frank shook his head. “I know you tried to warn me – but I thought it was just...” he gave a deep sigh. “Petty jealousy on both sides – I should have listened...should have known better.” His shoulders hung down limply, his stance burdened with guilt.
“You've put me in a dreadfully awkward position,” the Queen said. “By coming here just when news of your attack has been announced – by all rights I should keep the three of you hostage.”
“Daddy...” I heard you whisper softly – but the name was strange to you. I couldn't help but wonder how long it had been since you had seen this man who so loved your mother, and yet who could never quite find the strength to do the bravest thing.
“No!” Raine cried. “No – I've had enough of this! Frank – I've loved you, you know that, but I cannot allow Breena to be put at risk.”
“Raine,” Flametail's voice was coaxing and soft. “We'll sort this – I'll divorce Redleaf, denounce her as a traitor...”
“And do you think anyone would believe you?” My mother scoffed. “Your policies about Spring and Autumn have been divisive for decades – and I can bet you the life of this kingdom that my people will be crying out for vengeance for the bloodshed wreaked by this latest attack. They will demand that we retaliate – and if you try to avoid responsibility for the attack, they will think you are a liar and a coward as well as a murderer. Even I believe in your innocence only on the strength of Raine's testimony to your character – you're foolish, even stupid, but you're not smart enough to be a murderer.” The words stung, and I heard you whimper. I wrapped my arms around you, wishing that I could close your ears from these difficult sounds.
“Then what do we do?” Flametail looked hopelessly at the women around him, waiting for an answer.
“Raine and the girl must leave Feyland immediately,” said my mother. “They aren't safe here – not with the hatred engendered against them as members of the Summer Court, and they certainly won't be safe at the Summer Court. How easy it would be for any one of Redleaf's courtiers to get away with murder and pin it on us...”
“No...” my mother whispered.
“They will leave Feyland tonight.” My mother decided. “As for you, Flametail – I fear holding you in this prison will cause more trouble than it is worth. We may yet be able to reach a peaceful settlement – in time – if you go back to the Summer Court and try to put things right. Perhaps we can fight a few battles – just enough to kill enough of your men to match ours – and then the people's bloodlust will be quenched.”
“Kill my men? How can you even think of such a thing? They're my soldiers, aren't they?”
“For God's sake, Frank!” Raine grew angry. “Couldn't you have thought of that before running off here...?” Her face grew flushed. “I love you – you know I love you – but not enough to let this war start up for my sake.”
“If you leave the castle in disguise,” my mother said to Flametail. “Nobody will know you've been here. Return at once to the Summer lands and we will try – goodness only knows how – to sort out this mess. As for you,” she glared at Raine. “We'll need to get her out of here – now!”
“No!” I cried, forgetting that we were meant to be hiding. “No, you can't take her away from me!” The idea of losing you – not merely to the other side of Feyland, but rather to a world so distant it could only be imagined – felt as if the tremors of an earthquake were splitting apart my soul.
Our parents turned to look at us.
“Kian!” My mother cried. “I told you to stay...”
“Please!” I pleaded, and your voice joined mine. “Don't take her away – please don't take her away...she's my bride...I love her.”
The words stopped my mother short. Her face turned pale, and her eyes shone icy blue and silver. “And look at these two.” She made a contemptuous gesture at Flametail and Raine. “Look where love got them.” She rushed forward, grabbing your arms, and dragging you forward. “It's the only way, girl,” she said. “We need you out of here – and we need you safe. It's for your own good.”
“You can't take her!” Flametail's voice echoed mine. “She's my daughter. I love her...”
“Frank,” my mother whispered, taking his hand. “If you love her, let me keep her safe...”
His great, ursine frame seemed to melt into the floor as grief overtook him. “I've been selfish, Raine,” his voice shook. “If there's one thing I can do to fix this – if there's one unselfish thing I can do...I'll do it now...”
He came over to you. “Goodbye, Breena,” he whispered, kissing the top of your head.
“Daddy!” you cried, your voice rising higher and higher. “Daddy, what's happening?”
“One day,” he whispered to you, and although Raine and my mother could not hear it, your thoughts transmitted the words to me. “You will be a greater queen than I ever was king. I promise you that.” He looked up to my mother. “Please,” he said. “One favor. I don't want her to suffer – I don't want her to miss me, miss this. Make her...make her forget.”
“It will be done,” said my mother, and with that the three adults rushed from the room, carrying you – still screaming in their arms.
“Breena!” I felt myself call the name, but in my pain I was insensible to myself – less a being than a disembodied sense of agony, of loss, with no direction and no reality – only a single, unending rhythm of pain. “Breena! Breena! Breena!”
Letter 6
My dearest Breena,
And then you were gone, and it was eight years before I saw you again. You had the blessing – and the curse – of my mother's memory spell. You remembered nothing of our sweet and happy childhood together. But I remembered. I lived with the memory every day – the memory of a beautiful face with kind, penetrating eyes. The memory of my soul coming to meet its twin in the purple orchards of the Summer Court, of our two loves – stronger than the strongest magic in Feyland – uniting together – at first, these memories overwhelmed me, so that when I woke in the morning, I saw before me not the events of the day but rather memories of the days that had been. When I breakfasted, I breakfasted with you, and tasted the berries and oranges of the Summer Court even as I ate the thick slabs of brown br
ead and heavy eggs of my own kingdom. When I drew and painted and fenced in my lessons, I imagined that the figure beside me, teaching me, accompanying me, was not that of my tutor or of my fellow-pupils, but rather of you – your lithe form alongside me, accompanying me, whispering to me, giving me strength.
But all that was soon to change. For as I grew from a lad into a warrior, my concerns changed too. Art lessons, at my mother and father's behest, were abandoned for lessons in military strategy; history of Feyland lessons were abandoned in favor of more fighting lessons. The whole tone and tenor of the palace was different, now. Where before, the solemnity of the Winter Court had been somber, but beautiful, now the whole palace and its grounds reverberated with danger. A war was coming. We could feel it. My mother and my father grew colder and more distant than ever – I rarely saw them, so locked away were they in the royal ante-chambers, trying desperately to arrange alliances with giants or dragons to protect their interests, trying desperately to avoid war.
It had seemed, at first – a brief glimmer of hope – that war could be avoided. For the first six months after the attack, my mother and father executed some skillful diplomacy – the Summer Court gave up its claims on the furthest reaches of the Spring lands, which officially were given up to Winter, and we hoped against hope that this would be enough. After all, the palace gossip went – it was Redleaf who was our enemy, not Flametail – not that the populace of the Winter kingdom knew that.
“If he can get control of the kingdom,” I overheard my mother saying once, “perhaps this could all be averted – but he hasn't got the strength...”
And then, almost seven months to the day after the first attack – the unthinkable happened. A group of Winter fairies from the regions that had been attacked – those who had lost their brothers and sons (and even – for Redleaf's army was merciless – their sisters and daughters) decided that a diplomatic solution was not enough, that the peace it promised did little to honor the memory of those they had lost. They organized a militia ten thousand men strong, and then marched through the Summer-controlled areas of Feyland, laying waste to Summer settlements and Spring settlements alike, and even marching straight into the Summer kingdom, spraying the lands with silver, transforming their pain and their loss into gallons of fairy blood. Their desire for justice became transmogrified into a desire for revenge, such that the damage they did – I am ashamed to say – far outstripped the damage first done to us.
“There is nothing we can do now,” said my mother. “The people have chosen war. We can either ignore it – and let the populace fight uncontrolled – or we can do our best to do the thing with honor. We must fight.”
Her words were like a death-knell in my heart. I may have been a soldier, but I still remembered with such fondness the palace of the Summer Court – the various attendants and courtiers who had been so kind to me when I was a boy – the jovial Plumseed, the shy but ever-sweet Allison, the flame-haired Rodney. How could I go up against them in battle? And my heart twisted in agony, too, at the thought of you – sequestered away in the human world, your thoughts enchanted so that they were no more of me or of our love. How, I raged to myself, could I bring myself to hurt those whom you had loved? How could I betray you – my beloved – in that way?
I confess for the first year of the war I was a half-hearted fighter. I marched alongside my father and Shasta in battle – for her part, Shasta was a far more eager warrior, for she had not yet met Rodney, and she had maintained my mother's patriotic spirit far more than I had. She resented bitterly that I was to be king, feeling herself far more suitable to the task, and did her best to prove it to my mother and father by outstripping me on the battlefield. Considering her eagerness and my apathy, it was easy at first.
And then came the Battle of the Silver Bridge. Shasta and I were leading a company of cavalrymen down south, by the Birchwood pass near the border between Summer and Spring, and my father likewise was leading the infantry further up the cliff, across the Silver Bridge which had not yet, by virtue of the tragedy that occurred that day, received its terrible name. Redleaf and Flametail – for it appeared that he had little success in stopping Redleaf's war, for she held all the real power on the throne – had sent forth their greatest army yet – not only Summer fairies, but all their traditional allies: flame-flanked phoenixes and lava imps, and even a few Red Unicorns, who had left behind their traditional cloisters of peace and meditation to take part in a war that they saw as just.
My mother, standing with her troops at the center of the battlefield, commanding the other regiments, allowed herself a gasp. “We'll never take them,” she whispered, horror in her voice. “There's too many.”
We could hear the shouts now – bloodshed and agony all around us. We could hear the cries of phoenixes exploding in mid-air, the neverending wail of dragons whose scales had been sliced to the earth; we could see nothing but bursts of silver for miles around us.
My mother's eyes fell to the “bridge” - a narrow rock walk stretching out over two miles over which it was necessary to pass to enter into our regions – a pass between two mountains that stood high like a tightrope over the rushing waterfalls of the Birchwood Valley. She looked up at me. “If we could only destroy the bridge,” she said. “As they're crossing...”
“Mother!” Shasta frowned. “It would take powerful magic to do that...”
“Do not doubt my magic!” my mother's voice was high and strong. “Round up our troops, tell them to retreat from the bridge, tell them to wait on the other side – in case we fail...”
“Fail?” Shasta put her hand on her sword. “We'll not fail!” She kicked the sides of her horse, and sped away into the winter forest.
“You too, Kian,” my mother said, fixing her blue eyes upon me. “Hurry!”
I did as she commanded, hoping as I did so that I would not spy upon the bridge any of the Summer Courtiers whom I knew – willing myself to, if I saw the faces I recognized, be strong enough to let them die, hating myself all the while for my cruelty.
Shasta and I whipped through the crowds of soldiers, ordering them to retreat, ordering them off the bridge. One by one, the regiments retreated – much to the confusion of the Summer armies, who chased them down the bridge. Soon, the bridge held beneath its rocky weight nearly all of the Summer armies – and the Winter fairies, clad in blue, remained at the other end.
“They're planning to fight us off at the other end of the pass!” I heard one summer soldier say. “We'll get them.”
I rode back to my mother. “Do you have the magic to do it?” I asked her.
She nodded. “It will take all my strength – but it is the only way. If this army gets past they will have nothing stopping them from getting to the Winter Court and taking us over completely. I have no choice.”
We looked up at the bridge, as my mother took a deep breath, waiting to unleash the fury of the Winter magic she held upon the bridge, sending the rocks tumbling into the rushing rapids of the waterfall.
And then she stopped short. There, upon the bridge, was one group of soldiers clad in blue – one regiment of Winter fairies who had failed to get the message. And there, among them, was my father, valiantly fighting against a phalanx of phoenixes.
“No,” whispered my mother, “no.”
“Get him out of there!” I shouted. “We need to get him off the bridge!” A childish wail broke through in my voice. “Daddy!” I had not used that name for him since I was a child.
“I must tell him...” my mother closed her eyes, and in the fluttering of her eyelids I could recognize the familiar marks of telepathy. She may have been wary of emotion, but at that moment I knew the truth – my father was her true love, for only through him was my mother able to communicate in that way. I could see her lips moving, quivering, as she whispered to him – what must have been words of warning, words for him to leave.
Her eyes shot open, and as she turned to me I saw that they were glazed over with tears. “He sa
ys…” her voice shook. “Your father says that he's very proud of you.”
“Mother, no!” I shouted.
“And that he loves you very much – and that he knows this is the only way...”
“No!”
“He says goodbye,” my mother whispered, choking back her tears. And with that she closed her eyes, and I felt a sudden burst of magic – a blue tidal wave of force – course through me – a single freezing shock that seemed to radiate out from my mother, who was shaking and glowing – a blue lantern in the midst of all that silver. The force of the magic shook the earth, tore the trees from their roots and tossed them up into the air, churned up the waterfalls until they became a single, silver tornado.
And then the magic hit the rock bridge, and in a single, terrible instant the rocks came apart, powdered into dust, and all those standing on the bridge were plunged into the waterfall below. A few, able to respond quickly to the shock, let their wingspan loose, but it was too late – those less able fairies, panicking, had clung to them – and in the chaos that followed – the rearing-up of unicorns, the implosions of phoenixes unable to withstand the desperate attempts of falling fey to cling tight to their backs. Not one fairy escape, but all plunged into the churning, hungry deep of the waterfall, consumed whole by its furious maw.
Tears were streaming down my mother's face as she saw the bodies tumble downwards, settling at last, after the awful screams had died down, in the pool at the waterfall's edge – a pool turned silver by the blood of Summer and Winter fairies alike. “It was the only way,” she whispered. And then the tears froze on her face, and the grief in her was emitted in a single, agonized wail – and then I never saw her grieve or cry again. That was the last time I have ever seen my mother display emotion – the last time I saw her display anything other than an implacable military strength, a desire to win the war at all costs.
One hundred thousand Summer soldiers were killed – and my father was killed – and of the two I still cannot fathom which tragedy was greater. I know only that we fished my father's body out of the pool to give it a proper burial – and alongside it I saw the bodies of Plumseed and Allison, their eyes staring at me – as if pleading for me to end the suffering that had tinged the bridge and the pool with that noxious color. I know only that from that moment, I had no time to love, no time to mourn. The war was irreversible now – too many had died; too much had happened. My mother's pain had turned to inflexible will – and mine did likewise. There was no time to think about love any longer – nor was there time, my darling Breena, to think of you. Rather, it was necessary for me to leave behind those childish dreams – dreams of love, of passion, of happiness – in favor of the work that was to be done.
