Chains of Gaia

by James Fahy

  Karya nodded in understanding, and looked at Robin critically. “At least smooth down that bush of hair before you go in there,” she instructed him.

  Robin, not quite knowing what to expect, closed the parlour doors behind him. The room within was quiet. Hawthorn the Fae was sitting up on a long sofa, his wounds cleaned. He looked tired. Threadbare and hungry, but he had looked that way when Robin had last seen him too. It was possibly merely the way he looked. It was still an odd experience to Robin, seeing another Fae, especially one with horns. Hawthorn's curled and nestled in his ragged mop of hair, their lustre catching the late afternoon sunlight as he turned his head with interest to watch the boy enter.

  Seated close by, each in low armchairs, were the redcaps, who had removed their black fur coats. This hadn’t improved their appearance much. Hestia had lit some lamps against the falling light outside, and the room was a series of cosy pools of light in shadow, deepening by the moment as the early British evening fell over the hall.

  “Ah, the prophesied one,” Hawthorn said, his voice languid, if a little raspy. He regarded Robin through heavy-lidded eyes, his head tilted slightly like a cat. “Robin Fellows. You have grown taller as I have grown thinner since last we met.”

  Robin looked from the Fae to the redcaps, who were eyeballing him in thin-lipped silence. Their eyes were like chips of shining coal. He was unsure what was expected of him.

  “It’s good to see you again,” he said. “You’re very welcome at Erlking, Hawthorn. You can rest here, and heal, if you need to.”

  Hawthorn gave a short dry laugh. Robin didn’t understand what was funny. “You are your father’s son,” the man said. His voice was a little mocking, but Robin saw genuine warmth in his eyes. “What a fine lord of the manor you have become.” He coughed a little, beckoning Robin into the room. “He always had that earnest face too. Come, sit,” he said, beckoning Robin into the room. “Your offer is most graciously delivered, and extremely tempting, I admit. I have no time to rest on my laurels however, and nor do you. I heal quickly. Quicker than you might imagine.” He glanced at the two redcaps. “Though I owe much to Terp and Tine here, of course.” He nodded at them graciously enough, though Robin sensed the man’s caution at associating with redcaps. “Had they not found me on the edge of the forest when they did…had they not brought me here, well …” He gave a thoughtful tilt of his head. “This would be a shorter tale to tell. Necessity makes for some odd bedfellows indeed.”

  Robin pulled up a footstool and sat before the sofa, still wondering what on earth redcaps were doing helping a Fae in the first place. They were not, as far as he knew, known for their charity. He looked to them for explanation, though he still had no idea which of them was named Tine and which Terp. They could have been clones of one another. Twin goblins with pinched and rosy faces.

  “Calypso, my tutor, said you’d escaped?” he asked. “Escaped from where? What happened to you?”

  Hawthorn sat up fully, swinging his thin but strong legs off the sofa and pushing himself up on his elbows with a grunt.

  “Long story very short,” Hawthorn said slowly. “You know from when last we met abroad in the world, you and I, that I live free, despite Eris’ wishes. Well, even I have bad luck sometimes.” He sighed. “I was captured. Months ago, while out on a routine forage for supplies.” His lip curled in a distasteful way. “Foolish of me. I had grown overconfident in myself, having eluded them so long. But they are still combing every inch of the Netherworlde for the last of us, Eris' death-hounds I mean. The Peacekeepers.”

  Robin knew of this already. Most of the remaining Fae who had not been killed in the war when Eris rose to power were now enslaved. Many of them living in horrific slave camps, imprisoned as Jackalope had once been, before his escape. The few remaining free Fae who had managed to escape this purge were now outlaws, living wild and hiding in the wilderness, often alone and desperate. Eris’ forces of Peacekeepers hunted them relentlessly.

  “Peacekeepers took you by surprise?” he asked. Hawthorn looked insulted.

  “Not just Peacekeepers, young one,” he said. “I am a Master of Earth. I may be old, tired and half starved, but I still have all the wits and wiles about me that I did when I served the King and Queen as Sidhe-Nobilitas.” He looked around the room. “This was my home for a long time, Erlking. Seems strange to be back here, after so long.” He looked back at the boy, shaking his head. “A knight of the Fae is not so easily taken by mere scarecrow-dolls.”

  “Of course, sorry.”

  He sighed down his nose. “No, it was the Ravens themselves. Of all the luck in the Netherworlde, perhaps I have the least.” Hawthorn gave a humourless laugh. “It was Strigoi and his unit who finally captured me. That black dog and his own hunting party. Didn’t expect to run into him in that part of the world. Took me by surprise. Even I am not match for that one.”

  Robin's interest deepened at the mention of the name. “Strigoi?”

  The weather-beaten Fae studied Robin’s face a moment in silence. It was an odd sensation. Like being appraised by a large and dangerous cat. Hawthorn was as quiet and unguarded with his mannerisms as Ffoulkes had been false and brash. He seemed to wear his emotions quite openly on his face.

  “I see from your expression that you know of whom I speak?” he enquired. Robin nodded.

  “I met Strigoi in the summer,” he explained. “He and the Grimms captured me too. But I got away.”

  Hawthorn seemed impressed. “Then that is something else we have in common, my boy. Strigoi is the most dangerous of all Eris’ razor blades. He is not a man to be trifled with. Perhaps you really are the one the prophecies spoke of after all, if you can escape him, little sapling that you are.”

  “I didn’t do it alone,” Robin said quickly. “I had help. My friends.”

  Hawthorn nodded. “Well,” he allowed. “I didn’t.” He shrugged. “I was taken to the Hive.”

  “What’s the Hive?” Robin wanted to know.

  “It is a prison,” the Fae explained darkly. “The largest and most secure outside of the city of Dis itself. It is situated deep within the southernmost reaches of the great Elderhart forest, far west of us here at Erlking. In a poisoned part of that wood. A great windowless, doorless pyramid, squatting on a bald hill. Filled with despair. Impossible to breach.”

  “It is where the Empress Eris puts people to be forgotten,” one of the redcaps, Terp or Tine, rasped with a wicked smile. “A dark hole of shut-in security, filled with the lost and abandoned. A grave for the living, and guarded by the swarm. The swarm and its new queen.” It cackled at Hawthorn. “You must have annoyed the Empress very much, faerie-man, to end up there.”

  “I was Sidhe-Nobilitas once,” Hawthorn said. “Like this boy’s father. The ultimate enemy of Eris and everything she stands for. She hates us. Of all the Fae still evading her particular brand of ‘justice’, we few still living from that line vex her most. And Strigoi?” His hooded eyes narrowed in undisguised hatred. “He hates us all the more. Vile thing that he is … low beast.”

  “But how did you escape?” Robin asked. The Fae shook his head.

  “There’s one way in and out,” he said. “Cunning and timing, that’s how.” He waved Robin’s question away.

  “What is important is not my capture or my escape, this explains only why I was deep in the forest at all. What matters here is what has happened in the Netherworlde since I escaped, since I ran, fleeing deep into the Elderhart, and … what I found there.”

  “Or what found him,” the redcap corrected. Its companion nodded in agreement. “That is why we bring him to you.” Its eyes were drops of ink, shimmering in the lamplight.

  “A darkness roams the forest, Scion of the Arcania,” Hawthorn said grimly. “A great and terrible beast. It has laid waste to much, it has even attacked the deep dryads themselves. But of late, not content with merely destroying the great forest and any who dare to travel through it, this creature has left the confines of
the Elderhart. It is becoming bolder, and now it plagues the villages and towns which skirt it too. It has ventured out onto the great grasslands more than once, each time bringing destruction untold.”

  “A beast?” Robin asked, looking between all three of them, his eyebrows raised in question. “What kind of a beast?”

  Hawthorn reached for a cup of water which, left by Hestia, stood on a table by the sofa, and took a long sip. “When I stumbled upon it, I did not clearly see. Something huge. A snake perhaps, or something like one. Claws and teeth and shuddering motion. It rarely leaves survivors, so eyewitness descriptions are unclear.”

  “Many believe it is a drake,” one of the redcaps rasped.

  “No drake has been sighted south of the Gravis Glaciem for four hundred years,” the other argued. “Some say it is the forest come to life. A living tree-snake. Leaves and bark and rock. Biting and clawing.”

  Hawthorn ignored the bickering twosome. “Regardless of what ‘many believe’ or ‘some say’, one thing all agree on is that this creature is dangerous. Something has happened in the forest, boy,” he said. “Something terrible. A Shard has been found, a Shard of the Arcania, and a monster has awoken. Villages burn. Livestock is slaughtered. It terrorises those who live within and without the forest also. Wherever it goes, the vegetation dies, tree and field and glade withered in its wake. The very life sucked from them as a vampire sucks blood.” He looked thoughtful. “And the dryads? The great guardians of that forest? They do nothing about it. No word from their noble king. They are silent on the matter.”

  Robin’s eyes were wide. A Shard of the Arcania had been found?

  “It is a problem even for the redcaps, drake or not,” Terp or Tine said, nodding gravely, his long red nose bobbing. “My people, we live under the earth, yes, safe in the deep, moist dark, where it is good and it is quiet. But we have one town above, up on the surface, only one.”

  “Spitrot,” the other continued. “It lies on the eastern border of the great forest. Far from the Hive, far from the deep dryads even. It is the place we use when we need to trade with surface dwellers. For the exchange of the riches of the earth, for meat, for treasures.”

  He leaned forward, his long, dark red talons worrying the arms of the chair with a creak. “A week ago, Spitrot was attacked by this scourge of the forest. Many redcaps were killed. Many.” It made a grizzly face. “The town … is in ruins.”

  “These two here,” Hawthorn explained. “When their town was attacked by this creature, they were part of a hunting party. Redcaps who entered the great forest in vengeance, chasing the monster. Hoping to capture and kill it.” His face was serious. “They found it alright. They are the only two of that party left alive.”

  The redcaps growled low. “There were sixteen of us,” one said. “The beast took us, one by one. In the shadows of those great trees. It is large, it is violent, and it is destroying all. We fled to save our skins.” He pointed a finger. “And that is when we stumbled on this one, a Fae, bloodied and delirious, wandering the woods, another victim of the beast.”

  Robin processed what he was being told.

  “So if a Shard of the Arcania has been found in this huge forest, and somehow a scary forest-monster-killing-machine has turned up at the same time, it’s a pretty safe bet that the two are connected, right? You think maybe this thing causing chaos in the Netherworlde is somehow using the Shard? Using its power for its rampage?”

  “The dryads of the Elderhart,” Hawthorn said. “They have a settlement deep in the forest. They are a secretive people, but old. They ruled all the forest once, though since Eris rose to power, they have struggled to maintain even their own small borders against her forces. Especially since the Hive was constructed and the southern portion of those woods fell to Eris. You would think they would take action against this beast of the forest themselves, but they have not. It is believed that, fuelled by the power of the Shard, the creature is growing. Becoming more powerful, larger, more dangerous still.”

  “They cannot take action,” the redcaps told Robin. “These dryads. They have a king. And the king is missing.”

  “The dryad king … is missing?” Robin tried to keep up.

  “Taken by the beast, it is feared. It is they, the dryads, who are to blame for this calamity. Who else could unleash such a force? This monster ravaging the land is surely a wild wood spirit run out of control. They are leaderless without their king, helpless to stop it.” The redcap made a distasteful face. It pointed at Hawthorn. “As were we. So, when we find this Fae in the woods, our own kin slaughtered, and our home above ground, our town of Spitrot, burning still, he says one thing to us.”

  “Erlking must help,” the other redcap said.

  Hawthorn looked deep into his glass, then up at Robin. “I was indeed delirious,” he said. “By this point, I had been on the run from the Hive and the swarm, and hunted by this great forest scourge in the deepest part of the woods. I admit I was close to death, with no water or food, and little mana remaining.” He shrugged. “In my addled mind, I must have believed Erlking to be what it once was, a grand fortress, filled with the finest Fae, with the Sidhe-Nobilitas, with the King and Queen themselves.” He looked a little distant, glancing around at the parlour. “But those days are long gone.”

  “But a Fae still remains at Erlking,” the redcaps said wickedly. “Not just any Fae, but a Fae who owes a debt to the redcaps. And a debt to the redcaps cannot be undone. All know this.”

  Robin felt a lump of dread settle in his stomach. When he had first met the redcaps, not knowing their ways and traditions, he had promised them anything in exchange for information. Karya had been horrified at the time. A promise to a redcap could not be broken. The redcap leader, a bloated, purple old creature named Deepdweller, had been clearly pleased to have the Scion of the Arcania in his debt. He had not yet collected on it, until now it seemed.

  “We have consulted with Deepdweller,” one of the redcaps said. “He remembers you well, Robin Fellows,” it grinned. “Oh yes, very well. He had heard of your achievements since last he saw you. And he remembers your debt to him. Deepdweller does not forget.”

  “What does he want?” Robin asked.

  “Vengeance!” the other redcap hissed. “Our town is destroyed. Our people dead. Without a link to the surface world, we cannot trade.” It spread its long fingers wide. “He wants you to find this forest demon. This blight killing travellers, stealing useless dryad kings, and terrorising the grasslands. Do what the dryads, in their leaderless bind, cannot. Do what the redcaps could not. Find it, stop it and kill it. Before it destroys every settlement in and around the Elderhart lands.”

  Robin stared at them, aghast. He had no idea how he was supposed to do that. Did these creatures think he was some kind of storybook hero? Riding off on a white horse to slay dragons and save maidens? He swallowed hard, looking back to Hawthorn for guidance, but the Fae was watching him thoughtfully.

  “What will you do, son of Wolfsbane?” he wondered aloud. “Will you refuse the redcaps' call? Or will you honour your word? A Shard of the Arcania has been found in the Netherworlde. It has released something terrible and destructive. Many are dead or lost. This Shard, like all the others, was awakened by you . Your actions send ripples through the Netherworlde, whether you intend it or not.”

  “Ripples of fire, destruction and blood,” one of the redcaps muttered. “This forest beast must be killed. The Shard must be recovered from it. Taken from it! Claim the Shard, take the monster's power away. End this haunting of the forest and avenge us.”

  “You should know, Scion, that I strongly believe Strigoi hunts it too,” Hawthorn said quietly. “I know how to read tracks. He and his ravens are in or close to the forest. If he is there, you can guarantee that Grimms will not be far behind. A Shard hangs in the balance.”

  He set down his cup on the table and sat back, wincing a little, though he looked more healed than he had even since Robin had entered the room. “N
ot only that, but the deep dryads are defenceless against the forces of the Hive to the south, lost as they are without a king to lead them. What is your decision?”

  Robin considered, in the quiet gloom of the room. Not many other fourteen year old boys were given such decisions to make. Being asked to go and hunt what sounded like a monstrous nightmare in another world. Other fourteen year olds had pop quizzes and acne worries. They worried about liking the right kind of music or if there was decent wi-fi nearby. Robin looked down at his hands, feeling his mana stone resting softly on his chest, and knowing that Karya and the others were out in the hall, wondering what was going on.

  But I’m not other fourteen year olds, he thought to himself. I’m Robin Fellows, the Scion of the Arcania, whether I like it or not. What would the Puck have to say if I decided to say no? Aunt Irene isn’t here to answer for me. I’m the main representative of Erlking. And I owe a debt.

  “I’ll go,” he said quietly. “I will repay my debt.” He looked up at them. “Though, I don’t know how, or what I can actually do? The Shards are awake because of me. Whatever happens because of them, well, that’s my responsibility, isn’t it?”

  Hawthorn smiled grimly. “Wolfsbane through and through,” he nodded. “Well said, young lord.”

  The old Fae looked at the two recaps very sharply. “I mean no disrespect to you, or your kind,” he said. “I’m grateful you brought me here, you could have just left me in the forest where you found me. But understand this. If the Scion accepts this burden. If he ends the scourge of the forest, then his debt to your people … all of it … is at an end. Agreed?”

  The two redcaps looked slyly at one another. “Agreed,” they nodded. “We have no doubt he will put every effort and resource into this endeavour. He will find there is as much at stake for him as there is for us.”