by B. V. Larson
But not this year. This year, the vile Pact had been broken, and peace was at an end.
He wasted no time. He did not even wait until the cover of darkness to move. All he could think was that the fool Oberon would relent. That somehow Myrridin, that cursed wizard, would manage to trick their fool of a lord yet again. Piskin planned to be in a cradle long before nightfall. Even if the Pact lay broken for only a single day, he planned to be back in the arms of a pretty maid.
He had his new young mother all picked out. Lanet Drake was her name. She dwelt in Riverton, the only true town the River Folk had on their island stronghold. Her house was the biggest and finest structure in town, Drake Manor. Freshly married, Piskin’s maid-to-be had long red hair, a perfectly upturned mouth, and a new baby that was barely a season old. Her voice was melodic, her breasts were ample and her squalling brat got the best of everything. Equally important, the father was often away up the river working as a foreman of herdsmen. It was always best, Piskin knew, that the husband was away at first. Sometimes, the fathers became wise to him, but rarely the mothers. And, even if she did begin to suspect the truth, a maid who’s first born was a changeling would protect him instinctively.
He bounded over the absurdly low wall that surrounded Drake Manor and bounced from tree to tree in excitement. It had been so long! He tried to stay low, but so great was his joy that he almost sprang out in front of a guardsman. This last surprised him. He had been all over the manor during the preceding weeks and had never seen an attentive guard on duty. The walls themselves were a joke, of course. They had no wards on them and he doubted they would have kept a three-limbed rhinog out.
But there he was, a guardsman, eyeing the trees with suspicion. He had a bow in his hands and although he probably couldn’t have hit a cow with it, Piskin eyed the thing with worry. A single arrow could take the life of a Wee One, like a man pole-axed. The humans seemed to have an idea of what was in store for them. Luckily, they were clearly ill-prepared for the likes of him.
Circling the guardsman and staying under cover, Piskin made his stealthy way to a certain third floor window. There, from inside, he could hear the sweet humming of his new maid. He dared not peek inside and gaze at her. There would be plenty of time for that sort of thing later. She would feed the brat by four, he knew, and with any luck he would have completed the switch by then.
There were only two tricky parts to the work of a changeling. The first, of course, was getting the mother to leave the child alone long enough to steal it. Some mothers seemed to hover over their children night and day, it could be quite frustrating. The second part was even harder. He would have to make off with the infant, dispose of it somewhere where it would never be found, and then return to the crib to take its place. His plan in this regard was simple. He would spirit away the child to the nearest cliff overlooking the Berrywine River. A loop of leather around one chubby foot and a hefty stone attached to the leather cord would do the deed. That was all that he needed. They would never find the child.
Naturally, all of these steps had to be completed quickly and quietly before the mother grew wise. Some changelings worked with an accomplice for this very reason. One would carry off the child, while the second would spring into its bed and shift into the guise of the infant on the instant.
Piskin preferred to work alone. Others of his kind would at best get in the way, or at worst, disrupt the operation. He thought about waiting for nightfall, but his greatest fear was that another of his kind would come along with exactly his plans in mind and beat him to this fresh-faced maid. He had to move fast, before every Wee One in the Haven came for what he already thought of as his infant.
And so it was that when another tiny throat cleared itself nearby, Piskin bared his teeth in way of greeting.
The intruder stood only a few paces away, at the corner of the very ledge Piskin stood on. The other had come around the corner of the building, just as calmly and nonchalantly as you please.
The invader wore a derby hat. He tipped it to Piskin in the manner of one greeting a fellow.
“Sirrah, this window is taken,” hissed Piskin, his lips curling away and his nose crinkling.
The other walked a few steps closer, seemingly unsurprised by Piskin’s mood.
“Dando’s the name,” he said, offering up a long-fingered hand.
Piskin stared at the hand and fumed. “You’ll not have her,” he growled. “I’ve marked her, she will be mine. No one touches that brat but me.”
Dando eyed him with upraised eyebrows. “No need to be rude about it.”
“Piss….off,” Piskin told him, pronouncing each word with exaggerated slowness and clarity.
“You are a thick one, aren’t you?” Dando said, tapping his candlestick nose.
Piskin stepped forward menacingly. If his rival wanted a fight, he would have one.
Dando put up a stopping hand in his face and tsked at him. “Foolishness. One sound from me, one bound in that window, and she’ll be wise to us. You’ll never get past her after that.”
Piskin breathed hard and fumed. “What will make you go away?”
“I want to help,” said Dando. “We will do this together. But after, I must have the child.”
Piskin blinked at him. “You want the child? To what purpose, Sirrah?”
Dando shrugged. “What does it matter to you? I have my own reasons.”
Piskin considered, but at length he gave in. There was no easy way for him to remove Dando from the equation. Worse, if he waited around any longer, more of his kind might show up. He would have to trust that Dando wasn’t a fool, and would escape cleanly with the infant.
And so it was done as Dando had suggested. When the maid went for a moment to brush her long red locks, the switch was made. Dando carried the infant off and away into the forest, under the very nose of the pathetic guardsman.
In his new third-floor home Piskin shifted into the form of the baby he had replaced. He pulled the warm swaddling over himself. Happily, he settled in and waited for his four o’clock feeding.
When Lanet Drake returned to the crib to check on her baby for the thousandth time of the day, she cocked her head. She did not frown, but rather looked perplexed. She had not thought that an infant could smile so widely at such a young age.
But her baby boy was indeed grinning at her. Grinning hugely.
Chapter Three
Blighted
Mari Bowen was seventeen today. This was a fact that everyone in the Bowen household was keenly aware of, because she hadn’t stopped talking about her birthday all morning. Mother had tired of it, promising her sausages, butter and marmaladed pumpkin bread for supper if she would only stop going on about it.
Mari pouted. What she really wanted was a new calico dress she’d seen in a shop down in Riverton. By bringing up her birthday approximately every two minutes, and the dress perhaps once every eight, she’d hoped to somehow convince her family to buy it for her. Instead, she was sternly ordered out of the house to find an ash leaf with two terminal leaflets. Rather like four-leaf clovers, such ash leaves were rare, but possible to find given a keen eye and enough time. They were considered lucky, but in addition to that they were powerful wards against the Faerie. Mari’s mother worried that her family had no good protection against the little beasties. Mari thought it was a lot of fuss about nothing. So what if a little manling came to steal their pies from the windows, or to drink the cat’s milk? She wouldn’t mind seeing one, if the truth were to be told.
And so it was that she found herself at the edge of the Haven Woods, where her family farm ended. There was a large stand of ash trees there, so it seemed as good a place as any to start looking. She wanted to find the ward quickly and get back to the house. If such a ward were truly lucky, perhaps it would help her get her new dress.
She worked her way along the edge of the trees, examining the leaves that still hung on and rattled on the trees first, then pulling back her tresses as she bent to eye e
ach one on the ground. She carefully toed them apart and looked at the ones on the ground critically. She stepped delicately, not wanting to finally find her ward and realize she had crushed it with her foot all at the same time.
An hour passed, perhaps more, and she began to grow frustrated. Her smile had faded and grown into a furrowed frown. Her hands were still in her hair as she examined the leaves on the ground but now they were tightly balled fists. This was a fool’s errand. She slowly, as the second hour was wasted away, came to believe her mother had sent her here to spend her birthday alone on a hilltop. All to save a few pennies. They could have simply bought one of Old Tad’s wards down at the Riverton docks. It was ever so with parents, they appreciated their coins more than their offspring! Toeing leaves with increasing disdain, she had taken to kicking them up into fluttering puffs.
It was after one such kick that she thought to hear something. She looked up from her search, blinking. Was that the sound of distant pipes? Had some of the boys from the festival come out to play upon the commons again? She thought of the well-dressed Drake boys with their fine cloaks. She also thought of the strapping, if simply dressed, Rabing boys. Both these mental images met with her approval. She smiled, listening to the music, which slowly grew in intensity and volume.
She looked around at the trees that surrounded her, and realized she had stepped inside the grove of ash trees at some point in her search. Her father’s field was only a dozen yards away. A fine spring crop of grain stood ready for harvest outside in the sunlight. Each stalk waved in the breeze. All together, the stalks resembled a thousand cat tails, moving in unison.
She frowned and blinked, eyeing them. Could it be? She thought that the grain moved with the music she was hearing. She watched for a moment to be certain, and soon she was. Could the music just be the sound of the wind? Had some clever soul built a pipe that played as the very wind itself blew through it?
Intrigued, she took two steps toward her family’s field of grain. Then she heard a voice begin to sing behind her.
It was a fine voice, a voice that was pure and clear and which uplifted slowly, more beautifully than any birdsong. The words of the song were unknown to her, but the voice was more beautiful than any human throat she had ever heard, or that any human in history could have produced. Entranced, she turned around slowly.
A smiling boy stood under the ash trees. His skin was pale, and it did in fact seem to glow, just a trifle. He was about her height, and somehow looked both her elder and her junior at the same time. He had a black shock of unruly hair on his head. Around his shoulders a cloak fluttered, having caught the same breeze that waved the grain and made the music. She could see his teeth inside his smile, and each of them was white, square, and perfect.
The sight of him awoke something in her. She felt a rush of heat from her midsection that spread out like an explosion to her limbs and finally her head. She took a deep breath, partly closing her eyes. A heady scent of flowers overwhelmed her. Such freshness, such fine scents! As a farm girl, she rarely had known fragrances that were kind to the nose. Her hand came up and touched her own throat.
She forced her eyes to open again. She feared that the boy in the cloak would have vanished, but he had not. Some part of her knew what he was. It was clearly an elf. She had been told all the tales of such beings. But it was a very different thing, listening at the knee of oldsters telling warning tales, versus the fact of being right there in an elf’s glorious, intoxicating presence.
She need not have worried about the elf vanishing. In fact, he was closer now. He never took a step forward while she watched, preferring to move when her eyes were shut.
“Who are you?” she managed to gasp.
He smiled more broadly. “I’m an old friend of the family,” he said.
She frowned, very slightly. Really, it was only a twitch of her brow. She closed her eyes to concentrate, knowing that when she opened them he would be closer still. “Tell me your name, elf,” she said. She recalled, vaguely now, that knowing the true name of one of the Fair Folk gave you a certain power over them.
The elf chuckled. She opened her eyes again and discovered that he was not only closer, but was off to her left now. He had circled her. She turned to face him again.
“I will tell you my true name,” said the elf, gazing into her eyes, “but first, you must do something for me. You must dance with me while I play my pipes. It has been so long since I’ve danced with a true maiden.”
“Dance?” she asked, feeling almost sleepy.
“Yes girl, dance with me,” he said in a husky whisper, and then he began to play his pipes.
The music was unlike any she had ever known. Far more powerful than the musical winds she’d heard before, the music erased thoughts from her mind. The very sound of it overwhelmed her senses. She was powerless, swept up in it. She began to move, in random steps and jerks at first, but soon, as the musical tempo increased, she found herself twirling and performing leaps she’d never seen another human manage.
The elf chuckled and praised her. He played and he played and he danced with her, matching her wild movements easily. As they danced, the light grew more dim, and her breath grew heavier. She caught sight of her family grain fields, they were distant now as they had danced further into the woods.
Then the elf touched her, as they danced. Just a tiny contact to her wrist, or her flying foot as she kicked, or a grasping caress of her hair as it flew freely. Each contact sent a jolt of desire sweeping through Mari. She had never felt these sensations, and each time he touched her, she danced harder.
She knew, in some small part of her mind, that she was lost. This was how it happened, she knew. But she had never understood until now how a person could let themselves become bewitched. Always she had told her siblings that the person in the story was a fool, a weakling, one that could never be like her.
And so it was, as she danced, that they came under a huge ash tree. A thousand leaves carpeted the ground beneath it, and a thousand more hung to flutter overhead from its twisted branches.
She spun, then spun again, caught up in the dance. She was tired now, more tired than perhaps she’d ever been in her life, but she continued dancing. Nothing else was possible.
Then, by chance or design, she saw it. A single leaf hung apart from all the others on that greatest father of old ash trees. The leaf hung from the last twig on the longest, lowest branch of all.
It was a leaf with two points.
Thinking in fact not of the elf at all, but of her mother, and her birthday, she reached out from her wild gyrations and snatched it from the twig. It hung on for a desperate moment, making the twig dip as she tugged. If the leaf tore, it would be of no use, but that didn’t matter to Mari in her dream-like state of mind. She only wanted it to complete her quest. With it, that calico dress down in Riverton might yet be hers. That thought was still so strong in her mind that it won through the enchantment, and allowed her to take this single, snatching action.
The leaf came free, and the music died in her ears. She fell to her knees, holding the leaf in her hands.
The elf stood before her. Even his sides heaved slightly. He was far from winded, but she was strong for a simple River girl, having danced for longer than most.
He reached out gently and touched her chin with his delicate hand. “Are you finished so soon, my dear? Are you ready for me now?”
She looked up at him, almost beyond comprehending his words. She struggled not to pass out upon the moldering bed of leaves. Taking huge, gulping breaths, she slowly met his eyes, and then lifted the leafy ward up to him.
He took in a great breath when he saw it. He did not exactly hiss, it was rather the opposite of that sort of sound, it was the sucking in of air, rather than the heavy expelling of it.
“Where did you manage…?” he asked in exasperation.
“I want to know your name,” she said, still gulping in air as might a man who had been freshly drowned and reawak
ened. “We have danced. Now tell me your true name as was our bargain.”
The elf reached with his hands to take up two bunches of his black hair. He pulled at it, and after his hands came away, his hair stayed up in two drooping spikes.
And so it was that the elf told her his true name. The girl shuddered to hear it, for although it wasn’t a name she had heard before such as Oberon, it was still a powerful name. Their bargain complete, the girl regained her feet and walked back to her mother’s house, where marmaladed pumpkin bread awaited her for her birthday supper.
Behind her, standing at the edge of the grove of trees, the elf watched her go. In an act of sheer spite, he lifted a single long finger and let its tip grow black and oily. With that finger, he reached out and touched the crop of grain.
Every stalk in the field darkened, curled and grew noisome.
Chapter Four
False Wards
Old man Tad Silure was the head of the least reputable clan in all the River Haven. His clan had no proud homestead. Rather than impressive structures, his folk were known for ramshackle cabins that perched along the river front on rickety stilts. They fished by hanging nets down into the flood of the Berrywine, as there was no easier way to put food on their table. Most of their time was spent, however, smoking pipeweed in cheap clay pipes and sipping corn whiskey from rarely corked jugs.
Old Tad had another business on the side: he sold wards against the Faerie. It was easy work, but it only provided him enough coin to purchase a new jug of whiskey every week or so. The one exception to this was the time directly preceding the festival and the annual renewal of the Pact. During that one week, he often outsold the rest of the year put together. Every superstitious farmer, hand-wringing new bride and general idiot worrier came to him then, concerned the Pact had seen its last gasp, and bought a trinket for protection. He considered them all fools, of course. Dammed fools. But they had coin, and he always managed to smile his snaggled teeth at them when they laid it into his fish-smelling palm.
