Chains of Gaia

by James Fahy

  “Oh, it is,” Calypso said. “Great value and great power, looked at from certain angles. A dangerous thing in the wrong hands, which is no doubt why it has been hidden away here at Erlking for so long. The last person to have knowingly handled this was the Fae explorer, Hammerhand himself.” She glanced at Robin, seemed to consider something for a moment, and then decisively passed it to him.

  “As with all things at Erlking, this is your property,” she said simply. “It is called the Mask of Gaia. An almost legendary thing. It was crafted by old beings of the Netherworlde. Older than the Panthea and the Fae. Long ago, carved from wood taken directly from the Elderhart. For a long time, it was a treasure of the dryads.”

  “What’s a dryad?” Robin asked, turning the mask over in his hands. “And what’s an Elderhart for that matter?”

  “Dryads are a type of earth Panthea, Scion,” Karya explained. “They are to Earth what nymphs are to Water. They are at one with the trees, forests, nature at its deepest roots. They are very, very reclusive. The Elderhart is a tree, or rather a great circle of trees. Enormous. Some people don’t even think they exist, that it was only ever a myth. They were said to be the mother trees of all the Netherworlde, the first. The greatest forest in our world shares its name.”

  “Well, the elder trees clearly exist if these dryads carved this mask from them, don't they?” Jackalope mused.

  “But why is it legendary?” Robin asked his tutor.

  “Because it is imbued with true-sight,” the nymph explained. “Varnished in the clearest sap of the Elderhart and blessed by the very elemental of the earth itself, when the elemental still walked the world, long long ago. It has great power to the wearer.”

  Robin held the mask up, inspecting it. It was quite light. “True-sight? What you mean like x-ray vision or something?”

  Calypso shook her head. “The mask shows the wearer the past, memories, the truth of a thing, or the truth of a person,” she said in low tones. “A terrible thing. Never put it on. Not unless it is absolutely needed. The power in it resonates with your own mana, and as I am sure you have been told before, as Scion of the Arcania, you have the greatest store of mana of any of us.”

  Robin frowned to himself. The truth of a thing? He held the mask up and peered through the eyeholes, holding it carefully away from his face so as not to ‘put it on’ by accident. He swung it around, catching Karya in his sights.

  “Don’t you damn well dare!” she said, batting it down, almost out of his hands. “The truth of a thing is a private affair. How would you feel if I could look straight into your head and saw all your deepest secrets and things, eh? It’s rude to pry.”

  “And dangerous,” the nymph agreed. “Many claim to seek truth, my student. But truth is rarely what people wish to find, in the end. Truth can be ugly. “

  “I can see why the dishonourable thief wanted this,” Jackalope said with guarded wonder. “Imagine what some might pay for such a thing. What even Eris would give for such a tool.”

  “Don’t get any ideas, treasure hunter,” Karya gave him a sidelong look. “This is Robin’s by right, no-one else’s.”

  “But surely it really belongs to these dryad people?” Robin asked Calypso. “It’s their magic mask, right? Why should it be at Erlking? Shouldn’t it be returned to them?”

  The nymph made a face, indicating that whether it stay or return was none of her business or concern. “It was entrusted to Erlking long ago, clearly. War was upon the world. Perhaps it was safer here.” She looked thoughtful. “I wonder where Ffoulkes finally found it?”

  “Um … He didn’t … I did,” said a voice behind them. They turned as one to see Woad sitting up, looking a little drowsy, but awake and fine.

  “You little blue terror!” Karya said, though there was relief underneath her indignant tone. “You went and got yourself kidnapped?”

  “Why were you helping that weasel, Woad?” Robin wanted to know, though he too was mainly relieved to see the faun was okay. Woad absently stroked Inky, who still curled contentedly in his lap. He looked a little sheepish.

  “Well…he bet me I couldn’t find it,” he said. “Firey-moustache-man met me in the corridor. Late last night. I was just sneaking down to the kitchens for a snack…” His eyes flicked guiltily to Hestia, who looked silently outraged. “Anyway,” he said hurriedly. “That bit’s not important. Firewhiskers, he was up and prowling about. Weird, I thought. He said he was looking for a mask, but then … then he said that it was a very special thing, and not just anyone could find it. Only the very best and cleverest kind of person. When I asked him about it, he was really annoying. Kept telling me not to bother myself. That it was beyond my grasp. Mine! Me, a faun!” He sounded affronted, his yellow eyes wide. “I’m the best at finding things! I could find the flicker in a candle, I could. I could find the hair on a fish, the song in a stone! He just laughed at me and bet me I couldn’t. Said if he lost the bet, he’d make me a sandwich himself.”

  Robin rolled his eyes. “He played you,” he sighed. “And drugged a sandwich, knowing you’d find it. Then he’d have the mask and a faun as a bonus. Cheeky sod even stole my satchel to stash you in.”

  Woad nodded. “Swedenborgian space is a very strange place to be,” he said seriously. “I think it’s given me indigestion.”

  “But where did you find it?” Karya asked. “Ffoulkes has been searching for weeks, clearly, and none of us have ever seen this thing before now.”

  “Oh, it was easy." Woad pointed behind them at the main doors to the house. “Hidden in plain sight, of course. No-one ever looks at things properly around here. No one ‘cept me.”

  Jackalope opened the front doors of Erlking, letting in a chilly breeze, and he and Robin stepped outside onto the stone.

  “Look up, numbskulls,” Woad pointed. Robin followed the faun's direction.

  Above the great doors to Erlking, in the stone arch into which the entrance was set, there was a carved face, a swirling circle of leaves, a man with a beard of foliage. It had been the very first thing he had seen when he had first arrived here. He still remembered Mr Drover explaining that it was a sculpture of the oak king. Now, Robin saw, a portion of the circular carving was missing, like a piece of a jigsaw puzzle. He currently held its eyes in his hands.

  “Right over the doors,” he said wonderingly. He looked at the others. “So, what do we do now?”

  “About the mask?” Calypso asked. “Put it away, if I were you. Keep it safe. All things come at the appointed time, Robin Fellows. If it has come to you now, perhaps Erlking meant for it to be found at this time.”

  She glanced past the boys, through the door at the wide sweeping avenue of trees. “Besides. We have other, more pressing matters, which require our attention.”

  “Yes,” said Karya. “You said someone is at the gates. Redcaps?”

  Jackalope bristled. “Redcaps are vile creatures.”

  Robin was beginning to think that Jackalope considered most things ‘vile creatures’, but in this particular case, he agreed. He had met redcaps before. Withered, mean little creatures who lived deep underground in the Netherworlde, burrowing beneath graves to make their homes. They were bright red, like lobsters, with long hooked noses and chins, and black eyes, meanness and sharp teeth in downturned mouths. Henry had described them as evil garden gnomes.

  The last time he had had dealing with the redcaps, they had helped him out, in their way, but they had also betrayed him to Mr Strife.

  “Redcaps are a blight,” Hestia piped up, tucking away her smelling salts. “They come to steal the cabbages from the gardens. Mr Drover, he puts up horseshoes on wire. Nasty tinkling things, to keep them out. No redcap has set foot in the grounds of Erlking for a good long while.”

  “And they are not within the grounds now,” Calypso told them. “As I said, they are at the gates. I believe they are waiting to be admitted. They seemed official, as though they were here on business.”

  Robin wished ferv
ently that his aunt had not left. She would know the right thing to do. But with her and Drover gone, technically, he was master of Erlking. Everyone was looking at him, waiting to see what he said. He twirled the mask in his hands a few times, then passed it to Karya.

  “Pop this in my satchel for now,” he said. “We’ll worry about it later. Right now, I think I ought to go and walk down to the gates and see what these things want with us.” He reached into his back pocket and drew out Phorbas, looking for a moment at the slim, ornate dagger, and hoping he was making the right decision. He passed the knife to Jackalope, who took it silently, but with a questioning look.

  “You come too,” he said. “Keep that out of sight. Hopefully, we won’t need it, but Erlking is the home of the Fae. We should present a united front. This cuts more than cheese.”

  Jackalope curled his lip, making it perfectly clear that of the many things Erlking was, he clearly didn’t consider it a ‘home’, but he nodded anyway and tucked the knife into his jeans.

  “Surely we should all go?” Karya said. “Calypso too?”

  Robin shook his head. “No. I remember redcaps. I think they’d see that as a sign of weakness, all of us together. Better just me for now. I have to show them I’m the master of Erlking after all.”

  Karya gave him an appraising look. “You’re becoming more a Scion every day,” she mused. “Last time we met redcaps, you were so green behind the ears, all you could do was mumble like a clueless moron.” He couldn’t tell if this was a compliment.

  “Whereas now, you can meet them with chin held high,” Woad piped up encouragingly from the sofa. “Like a well-informed moron instead.”

  *

  Robin walked down the long avenue of tree to the gates below on legs which still felt a little shaky. The deception of Ffoulkes, the discovery of the mask, and the fact that they had almost lost Woad … all of this was still running through his head. And now redcaps? It had been a busy Halloween morning. His body, filled with adrenalin which had nowhere to go, was making him jittery. Jackalope stalked by his side in silence, Phorbas glinting in the sun in his belt buckle. Robin guessed that the older Fae thought it prudent, if redcaps were afoot, that the knife be on display, just to show that the two were not unarmed. Robin wasn’t expecting aggression, however. As they passed through the corridor of dead and crunchy leaves, the autumn colours drab and rusty above them, thin flakes of snow began to fall, floating through the air as light as pollen, and Robin had the strangest sense of deja-vu.

  When had he last been at the gates of Erlking? Had there been pollen? His memory came flooding back. Not pollen … but bees, and Peryl.

  “Someone’s injured,” he muttered aloud, remembering the man sprawled in the hedge in his dream. “An old man.” He felt Jackalope’s questioning stare.

  “How would you know that?” the silver-eyed boy wanted to know.

  Robin shook his head, in an attempt to shrug off the dream. In his mind, he heard Peryl's voice. “He’s not here yet … but he will be, soon.”

  “I just do,” he replied. He wished Aunt Irene had waited another day before leaving. She was the calm, still sense of order at the heart of Erlking. With her absence, Erlking felt to the boy like a ship unanchored, free to be tossed by the waves.

  The gates, just as in his dream, were large, black iron affairs, wreathed with trailing ivy, each stone gatepost in the high outer wall topped with a curious gargoyle. There were no bees.

  But there were two redcaps. Short, leathery-skinned creatures with long, wicked faces and skin as red as blood. They were wrapped in tattered black furs against the October cold. Their tiny eyes regarded Robin and Jackalope brightly, narrowed with either suspicion and malice, as they approached.

  They were holding something up between them, a lumpen shape.

  “He arrives at last,” one of the redcaps rasped, its voice insectile and filled with dry clicks. “The Scion of the Arcania,” his voice sounded full of scorn.

  “And another,” the other redcap muttered, peering darkly at Jackalope, whose hand had drifted to the hilt of his dagger, hovering over Phorbas. “Another knight of Erlking, perhaps?”

  “I am Robin Fellows,” Robin said, stepping up to the gates with as much authority as he could muster. He was painfully aware that his jeans were still damp and ink-stained around the shins. “Why have you come to Erlking?” He looked over both creatures. He didn’t think he’d seen them before. Robin had spent some time deep in a redcap burrow the previous year, but the creatures seemed largely interchangeable in appearance to him.

  “You are collecting Fae, it seems,” said the one who had spoken first, nodding to Jackalope. Its mouth split in a horrible smile, revealing small, yellow teeth. They dropped the lumpen shape they were hoisting between them on the ground with little ceremony. It banged against the outside of the cold gates.

  “We have brought you another.”

  Robin looked down, eyes wide. It was a man … no a Fae. Unconscious and wounded, dried blood crusting the emaciated frame of his dark skin and curling horns. Thin flakes of snow drifted into his eyelashes and settled in the grooves of his curling ram's horns.

  Robin realised that he knew him. He’d met this Fae before, once, in the Netherworlde, near the Temple of the Oracle.

  “Hawthorn?” he breathed.

  The redcaps leaned forward, poking their extremely long noses through the iron bars.

  “Let us in, Scion of the Arcania,” one of them demanded. “We bring this offering. The Netherworlde requires saving, and you … You owe us a debt.”

  *

  It was several hours into the afternoon before Calypso finally emerged from the parlour into which the redcaps, with their uncanny strength, had carried the unconscious form of Hawthorn the Fae. As soon as the boys had returned to the house with their new visitors and the unconscious man, she had summoned Hestia and all of them had been behind locked doors ever since, leaving Robin, Jackalope, Karya and Woad to pace and speculate as the afternoon drew on and the thin October sunlight faded from the sky.

  “I don’t understand it,” Karya said, for the hundredth time, pacing the dark floorboards of the hallway outside of the parlour doors. She had walked back and forth impatiently for what seemed like eons now. “Hawthorn? The very same Fae we met out on the moors, the one who showed us how to pass through the caverns beneath the Singing Fens …”

  “And almost got us all killed by forgetting to mention the harpies,” Woad added from his perch on the bottom step of Erlking's grand staircase. Inky, safely back in his enchanted bubble, rolled lazily back and forth between the faun's bare feet. “Don’t forget the harpies.”

  “What on earth is he doing here? And with redcaps of all people?” Karya mused.

  “I guess we’ll find out, won't we," Robin replied a little distractedly. He was scribbling on his parchment, sending what felt like the hundredth hex-message to Henry, who hadn’t replied so far.

  Get up here will you? All hell has broken loose!

  And hex me back as soon as you get this!

  He suspected Henry had gone to school without his enchanted card. It would be just like him to leave it in his other trousers. Robin checked the clock in the hall. It was nearly five pm. School was out, surely Henry should be home by now? Down at his cottage in the village. Why hadn’t he got these messages? Or was he wilfully ignoring them?

  “Henry’s going to be livid that the Halloween feast is cancelled,” Robin muttered. Jackalope, who had been perching silently on an armchair by the door, idly spinning Phorbas on its tip and fraying the cloth of the seat covering, looked up, his brow knitted.

  “Cancelled?” he said. “No-one said it was cancelled, did they?”

  “Look, I know you’re in love with old Hestia’s cooking,” Robin said with a sigh. “And this was meant to be your going-away party too, but I think we have bigger things to worry about right now, don’t you?” He watched his scribbled lines sink into the parchment and disappear.

>   “This Fae,” Jackalope asked. “The old man they have brought. He is a free Fae? Like myself?”

  “An outlaw, yes,” Karya said, stopping her pacing. “Living in the wild, like most of your kind who aren’t in camps somewhere. Evading the Peacekeepers and trying to stay out of trouble.”

  “Seems that trouble found him,” Jackalope observed. “By the state of him. Although, at least he still has his horns. He must be wily to have survived the Netherworlde for so long.”

  “Grumpy old lady H will make him better,” Woad insisted with a nod. “It’s what she does. Bakes pies and sets bones. Darns clothes and sews wounds. She holds Erlking together, and everyone in it. She does a lot of it while shouting at us. You will see.”

  Jackalope snorted. “This place falls to pieces without Irene to keep order. You all treat it like a sanctuary. It is not a safe place.”

  Karya fixed her golden eyes on him, dangerously narrowed. “We’re at war, Jackalope. There is no ‘safe place’. You just have to decide where to stand and plant your feet.”

  “Well, I plan on planting mine far away from here, and all this madness, and all of you,” the Fae glowered back at her.

  Robin opened his mouth to interject, but at that moment, the parlour doors opened. Hestia emerged, her arms full of bloodied and dirty towels, which she spirited away toward the kitchens. Calypso floated through the doorway looking unruffled as usual.

  “Is he okay?” Robin asked, getting to his feet immediately. The nymph nodded.

  “His injuries were superficial,” she said. “The Fae was mainly exhausted, though he has suffered in his escape, or so he tells me.” She shrugged with one shoulder. The sufferings of others not being one of her greatest interests. “He is awake.”

  “Escape from where?” Karya asked. Calypso ignored her, her soft eyes never leaving Robin.

  “He, and the redcaps, wish an audience with you, Scion,” she said. “You must hear what they have to say.” She looked to the others, all peering at her with expectant faces. “Alone, if you please. The redcaps are private creatures, especially in their … dealings. They wish only to speak directly with the Scion of the Arcania.” Her opinion of redcaps and their dealings was evident in both her tone and expression.