Chains of Gaia

by James Fahy

  The banshee did not finish its tirade. Something had barrelled into it, knocking it aside, and the two shapes rolled off and away from Robin in a confused tangle of flailing limbs and glowing white wisps, leaving Robin lying on the ground, shocked and shaken, his hands at his own throat.

  With a start, his heart thudding enormously in his chest, he realised he had been choking himself, clawing at his own neck, and he coughed shakily, rolling weakly and blearily onto his side.

  It was Jackalope. The boy had forced himself up off the floor and had leapt on the back of the banshee while it had Robin in its grip. Like a feral animal, he had wrestled it away. The two figures now rolled in a glowing flurry of limbs and anger, in and out of the dark shadows and filtered moonbeams, the banshee disappearing surreally. Robin saw the flash of Phorbas the knife in Jackalope's pale hands, slashing furiously at the banshee's form. The knife was having no effect however. It was like cutting fog.

  Robin heard scuffling from the doorway of the old building and turned quickly, still coughing, certain in his horror that a second banshee had arrived.

  To his relief, he saw Hawthorn and Woad, evidently drawn by the noise of the struggle. They stood rooted in surprise, witnessing the scene within. Robin gasping and struggling to his knees in the dark, and Jackalope, the unlikely saviour, wrestling the apparition further in the shadows.

  Robin forced himself to stand, shaking off the images of Gran and Phorbas from his mind. His heart felt bruised, the feelings of guilt and pain still fresh. Unbidden tears were rolling down his cheeks, their harsh and horrible words still ringing accusingly in his ears. But he had to focus. He had to help Jackalope.

  Across the room, the banshee had gained the upper hand, and was rising slowly into the air, shining like a sickly moon, lifting the boy with it, huge claws around his neck. Jackalope's legs dangled and kicked uselessly in mid-air.

  Robin heard Jackalope utter a strangled cry of pain, deep and hopeless, as the formless mist fell from the creature, and Robin stared up at its wavering face.

  It was a Fae. Male and dark-haired. A young man, curling black horns rolling back from above his ears. He glared down at Jackalope from within the flowing white smoke. His pale, silver eyes filled with judgement and hatred.

  “Murderer!” he spat. Jackalope stared back into the banshee's face, at the older boy with this shimmering silver eyes. His own face was ash. Pure shock, crumbling and undone.

  “Slaughterer!” the apparition said, hissing the word through his teeth. “How can you bear to live with what you did to me? Snake! Betrayer! Killer!”

  Robin peered between the two in confusion. The face of the banshee was so like Jackalope’s. The eyes identical, the skin pale, they could have been…

  “Brothers,” Robin whispered into the darkness.

  “You filthy coward!” the banshee roared. “You murdered me! You low, vile creature!”

  A moment of silence hung in the air as the banshee loomed over its captive, judgement made solid in the gloom.

  And then something barrelled past Robin, a smudge of blue, blurred and rapid.

  Woad had run up behind them, vaulting past Robin and launching himself into the air. The small faun somersaulted through the latticework of moonbeams, crashing into Jackalope and the banshee like a bowling ball into skittle pins, breaking the silence of the ghastly moment and knocking the Fae to the floor.

  Winded, Jackalope rolled away, clattering against a tumbledown pile of rotten old furniture and sending up a great cloud of dust.

  The banshee howled at the loss of its prey. The noise, deep and utterly inhuman, shook the rafters, making the floating dust vibrate madly in the moonbeams. Robin fell to the floor clutching his head. It was like being physically struck.

  Woad too was huddled on the floor, arms wrapped about his head as though he was trying to stop it from splitting. The banshee turned on him slowly, the mournful cry mercifully fading, and casually backhanded him with a clawed hand. Robin tried to stand as Woad crumpled backwards, but his legs were numb, his vision swaying back and forth wildly, and he managed only to propel himself face first into the dirt, ears still ringing.

  The apparition floated above Woad, it’s movements nightmarishly slow, and pinned him to the floor, gnarled hands tight around his throat, as it had done the others. The faun glared up at it, a smudge of blood at the corner of his mouth, as it lowered its head towards him hungrily. Woad froze, staring wide-eyed and frowning up at the creature.

  There was no face. The banshee has stopped. It hovered, suddenly motionless, above the faun lying at its feet. There were no features that Robin could see at all, nothing but a blank mask of unbroken skin, into which Woad trained his fiery, unblinking eyes.

  Nothing moved in the room. The only motion Robin could see was the rapid rising and falling of Woad’s chest as he panted for breath beneath the floating horror.

  It was as though someone had pulled the plug on the creature. The banshee hung perfectly still and silent in mid-air. Not attacking or retreating. Showing nothing to its intended victim. No face, no apparition. Even the smokey cloud of its body had stopped in mid-air, frozen in its ceaseless billowing.

  For several seconds, nobody moved.

  “Banshee stares at me, I’ll stare right back,” Woad declared defiantly, his bright yellow eyes glaring up fearlessly at the looming spectre. “I’m not the blinking kind of faun.”

  With his free hand he gestured to the others. “Now would be a good time!” he added, a little urgently.

  Hawthorn rushed forward past Robin, and he saw that the old Fae had his travel pack slung across his shoulder, and was reaching into it as he ran towards Woad and the paralysed, deactivated banshee.

  He withdrew a jar, large and filled with something white. Robin realised it was the salt which Hestia had gifted to Jackalope as they had left Erlking.

  Hawthorn lifted it aloft and hurled the jar overarm at the creature. It sailed through the air like a spinning grenade, exploding on impact as it crashed into the banshee, covering both it and Woad in a large white cloud of salt.

  The banshee reared and screamed, shaking dust from the rafters, and making Robin cover his ears again against the deafening sound. It released Woad, flailing around as though it had just been drenched in acid. Its folds whipped and snapped, steaming and smoking. And then, before their eyes, it dissolved, burning away and breaking apart like paper to a flame, grey ash blown to the wind in crumbling and dissipating fragments, until nothing remained but flickering embers and a long, fading scream of sorrow.

  The salt settled like snow on the dirt around Woad.

  Robin hurried over and helped the faun up, grabbing him by both arms and pulling the boy to his feet.

  “How did you … what did you do?” he spluttered, his heart still racing.

  Woad shook like a dog, dislodging salt in a flurry of flakes. “I’m not scared of myself,” he muttered by way of explanation.

  Hawthorn appeared at Robin's side, looking down to Woad. “Banshee. The creature can only show you your guilt, your own fears.” He managed a grim, lopsided smile in the dark. “This one has neither. As innocent as a babe.”

  “But not,” Woad pointed out, brushing salt and dirt from his arms, “as helpless.”

  “They show the darkness within,” Robin said quietly, remembering what he had read about banshee back in Erlking. “They confront you … with your darkest deeds.”

  He turned slowly, followed by the others, to see Jackalope, standing in the shadows. The boy was wavering and unsteady, his breath coming in ragged heaves. He still clutched Phorbas, and there was blood and dirt on the side of his face. He stared at them all across the darkness. His silver eyes wide and hard behind the messy tangle of his hair.

  “Well,” he said eventually, when the silence in the room had grown long. His voice was flat and hollow. He still looked incredibly shaken. “There you have it. Now, you know.”

  “That was your brother,” Robin said, his voic
e was quiet, but it carried in the darkness. Jackalope didn’t reply immediately. The knife shook slightly in his hand. Nobody spoke.

  The room was very still and quiet around them, hushed in the absence of the monster, but a terrible dread and dawning realisation hung over them all. The air was thick with it.

  “Why did the banshee show you your own brother?” Woad asked.

  Jackalope’s eyes flicked to the faun, and then back to Robin. His lips were tight and pale.

  “He called you betrayer,” Hawthorn said in a low voice. “Deceiver? What is it that passed between you, boy?”

  Jackalope took a stumbling step back from them, deeper into the shadows. He was still gripping Phorbas tightly, his knuckles white as bone as he tried to keep it under control. He shook his head, almost imperceptibly.

  Hawthorn frowned. “Jackalope,” he said, quietly. “I will have answers. I must.”

  Robin knew only too well what Hawthorn had said earlier. His views on betrayal. The lowest act a Fae could visit on another. Robin felt as though his stomach was sinking.

  “Will you?” Jackalope replied hoarsely. “Must you?” His mouth cracked in a grim and shaking smile. There was no humour in it, and finding no footing on his face, it fell immediately. He had tried for haughty, but clearly so shaken by the banshee's attack, he could not hide his true horror.

  “Answers can be dark. Not what you want to hear, that’s the problem.” He looked from Hawthorn to Robin, his silver eyes piercing and defiantly dry. “Like your nymph said, Scion. Truth can be ugly, right?” He was staring hard at Robin, as though daring him, challenging him to look away. There was such anger in his face, and such fear. “I kept telling you. I told you all a million times. I’m not one of you. Not one of the good guys. We can’t all be perfect heroes like you, Scion of the Arcania.”

  “He called you murderer, Jack,” Robin said. His own voice shaking a little. “Why did he do that? What happened? Just tell us. It’s oka–”

  “What did you do to him?” Woad asked, interjecting.

  Jackalope looked small and lost and very alone, standing in the moonlit shadows of the ruined warehouse. He glared at each of them in turn.

  “What did I do?” he whispered. “What did I do?” He sheathed the knife with shaking fingers, then looked back up at them, his eyes red. Robin had never seen such despair.

  “I killed him,” he said flatly. His words were swallowed in the dark.

  “I killed my brother,” the boy said again, raising his voice, as though forcing himself to say it out loud. “There. There’s the ugly truth you’ve all been so desperate to hear. Murdered my own brother. Now you know.” He panted a little, swallowing. “I killed him, in order to save my own worthless life. Is that what you want to hear?”

  Robin opened his mouth to reply, but no words came. He felt as though the blood had just run out of his body and into the ground. This couldn’t be true.

  “See?” Jackalope said, lifting his chin at them. His mouth curled into a sneer “Didn’t I tell you I didn’t belong? That there was no place for me at your wonderful Erlking? Now you understand why. Mr brother is dead … because of me. At my hand.”

  He stared down at his own hands, and for a second, his face looked utterly empty. Devoid of anything, just a mask.

  That boy has blood on his hands. The voices of the sisters rang in Robin’s memory. He didn’t want to believe it.

  “It’s not true,” he said simply. “You’re lying. Why are you saying this? You can’t have–”

  “What would you know?” Jackalope snapped. “You know nothing, Robin Fellows. You grew up loved, safe! I grew up in hell! I would have done anything to get out of the camps of Dis … anything.” His shoulders slumped. “And I did. I killed my own kind. The only person who I ever meant anything to.”

  “A Fae … murdering a Fae?” Hawthorn said, his voice dark and a little shaken.

  “I betrayed my brother,” Jackalope said, shuffling backwards. “To save my own skin. To protect my own hide. That’s who I am … that’s what I am … and now you know.”

  Robin felt sick. Woad was staring at the dirt at his own feet. At Robin’s other shoulder, Hawthorn tightened his grip on his bow.

  “I’m not like you people,” Jackalope said grimly. “I can’t take back what I did. Not ever. I’ll never be one of you. I told you I didn’t deserve your kindness, didn’t I? I never asked for it.” His eyes met Robin's across the room. They were shining. “I never asked for any of it … I don’t belong here.”

  He turned and walked, stumbling out of the warehouse and into the ghostly ruins of the town beyond, headed in the direction Robin knew was the gates of Briar Hill.

  “Wait, where–” Robin began, but Hawthorn lay a firm hand on his shoulder.

  “Let him go,” the old Fae said quietly. “Let him crawl back to the shadows. Alone in the wild as he has been before. As he wishes to be again. There is no place in our company for a kinslayer and a coward.” His face was lined with anger only barely held in check. “There is no greater crime, to betray your own. To kill to survive. He knows the cost. It is his to bear, forever.”

  Jackalope had already disappeared from sight, leaving them, swallowed by the dark night.

  Robin felt numb. He didn’t want to believe any of it. Nearly everyone had warned him against the silver-eyed Fae at some point or another. Everyone had secrets, right? Dark moments in their past, but this? He could barely process it.

  Behind him in the silence there came the soft scrape of broken glass and he turned to see Woad, squatting sadly on his haunches, rifling through the salt-strewn earth. He was collecting the shattered shards of glass, the jar which Hawthorn had thrown. He frowned at the faun questioningly.

  “It was Hestia’s gift to him,” Woad said quietly, slowly dropping the glinting broken pieces into Robin’s knapsack. “It was pretty. Seems a shame to leave it behind, even if it’s broken.”

  “I can’t believe Jackalope,” Robin said hoarsely, looking up to Hawthorn, desperate for some explanation. He couldn’t finish the sentence, could bring himself to say that the boy had killed his own brother.

  The older Fae’s face was grim and stern. His long eyes narrowed. He looked old and tired. Very tired indeed.

  “War makes people do things they could never imagine,” he replied quietly. “Darkness is always waiting, within us all, just below the surface. We fight to keep it there. To stay in the light.” He shrugged, sighing heavily. “Some of us lose that fight.”

  He walked out of the warehouse, beckoning for the two boys to follow him.

  “There is no greater crime than betrayal,” he said with feeling. “I know this first hand. Come. Let’s return to the campfire. The night is not over yet and there may be more banshees on the hill. We should set a watch between us, try and get some sleep. We will leave at daybreak.”

  “Jack’s left now,” Robin said, as he and Woad followed. “Will he be okay, out there in the night?”

  Hawthorn looked terribly sad. The night around them was oppressive and deep.

  “I imagine not.”

  OLD ACQUAINTANCES

  Dawn, when it finally came, brought Robin no answers. It brought trouble.

  He had slept only fitfully after the events of the evening. His mind torn back and forth between Jackalope’s horrible revelation and the memories of the vision he had seen under the mask. Memories of his father and Hawthorn, the shattering of the Arcania. Hawthorn had insisted he use the mask, assuage any reservations he might feel about his trustworthiness. Robin had been left in little doubt. He had seen how gently the Hawthorn of the past had cradled his infant self. He had seen how his own father had clearly trusted him more than any other to keep watch over his son, and he had felt the man’s emotions. But Robin felt so unsure about everything else. How could he judge anyone, really, when people could be hiding secrets like Jackalope’s? Hawthorn had said that war makes people do terrible things. Robin had no brothers of course, but cou
ld he imagine killing Henry or Woad, just to save his own life? He thought not. He certainly hoped not. He would die first himself to protect them if it came to that.

  Had Jackalope’s aversion to people, his self-enforced retreat from the world, living a hermit's exile alone up on the Gravis Glaciem all those years, been more than just fear of being recaptured? Had it been punishment meted out by his own guilt? Shame?

  Robin had no answers to any of this.

  The sun had breached the walls of Briar Hill at dawn, thin fingers poking through a cold and clammy mist, forcing away what had seemed an endless night, and Robin finally stirred from his place by the long-dead campfire, only to find Hawthorn absent, and Woad shaking him none too gently by the shoulder.

  “Wha … what is it?” he asked blearily, sitting up. His back ached from sleeping on the cold floor, as though knots of moorland gorse had dug into his spine and cobbles had left an imprint on his ribs.

  “We have company, Pinky,” Woad said grimly. “Bad news at the gates. Come!”

  He set off with no further explanation, and Robin clambered to his feet, peering after his friend in confusion through the thin mist which filled the town square, making it seem even more ghostly and unreal that it had in the night.

  He was about to call out to Woad’s retreating figure, when there was an alarming vibration in his back pocket.

  Robin jumped, startled fully awake and convinced that he had just been bitten on the rear by a grass-snake or some other strange creature, but then, with dawning realisation, he reached into the pocket of his jeans and withdrew a small square of yellowed parchment.

  His birthday present. He had forgotten all about it. The card vibrated again in his hand, fluttering in agitation as if caught in a high wind. It was a hex-message.

  Robin flipped it over and watched as Karya’s unmistakable spiky handwriting slowly appeared before his eyes.

  Scion. Where are you?

  It took him a moment to quickly locate a pencil in one of the many small pockets of his satchel, looking up distractedly through the mist where Woad had disappeared between the sketchy buildings. He shivered a little in the damp morning cold. Leaning against his pack for support he scrawled a reply on the reverse.