by James Fahy
“So … you … carried me?!” Robin could feel his face burning red with embarrassment. He looked up to the large man hefting him through the forest like spindly-legged luggage. “Erm … you can put me down now … thanks,” he muttered, self-consciously wiping his mouth with the back of his sleeve. “I’m fourteen, not four.”
“You’re only just fourteen,” Woad said with a raised finger. “Like, one inch over thirteen, if you ask me.”
The dryad, Robin noticed, gave Karya a questioning look, to which she replied with a nod, before releasing Robin from his grip and letting him down to the floor.
Robin had intended to leap down in a nimble and manly fashion, to prove that he didn’t need carrying anywhere like a helpless child. The intended effect was somewhat ruined by the fact that one of his legs was completely asleep, so that instead he fell on his face like a sack of dropped potatoes.
Woad sniggered helplessly as Robin scrambled back to his feet, secretly thankfully for the soft carpet of moss.
“Bloody, bloody hell,” he muttered as the faun passed him his satchel, which he had been carrying. He swung it onto his shoulders and looked around. “Where are we?” he asked, still a little bleary. “What time is it anyway? And what do you mean you couldn’t wake me?”
Karya rolled her eyes at him and picked a small tangled branch out of his mussy blonde hair with a kind of grudging affection.
“One at a time,” she said. “We’re still in the forest obviously, where else would we be? But we’ve covered quite a lot of ground since we set off at dawn.”
“It’s almost dinner time,” Woad said, answering Robin’s second question. “You slept right through noon. I think there’s only a couple of hours left before the sun goes down again, lazy Fae. We couldn’t afford to waste time waiting around for you to catch up on your beauty sleep though.”
They all set off walking again, passing out of the mossy clearing and back beneath the familiar repetition of the tremendously large tree trunks. Robin struggled to keep up, stamping his tingling foot to try and wake it up. He wasn’t about to embarrass himself further by telling them that he couldn’t walk fast yet as he had agonising pins and needles in his left buttock.
“And as for waking you up,” Karya said. “Exactly like I said. We couldn’t. You were sleeping so deeply. I actually wondered if you’d been enchanted.” She glanced at him with narrowed golden eyes.
“You haven’t, have you? Been enchanted I mean?”
Robin gave her a deadpan look. “Only by your charming personality,” he quipped.
She blew air down her nose. “Good. That’s something at least. Maybe you were just exhausted, I don’t know. You were raised mortal. You might be Fae but the human world has still made you softer than a soft boiled egg. The point is, we tried for a good half hour and Woad even checked to make sure you hadn’t licked any snails without us knowing about it. We couldn’t wait around for ever. Our guide offered to carry you.”
“Well … thanks for that,” Robin said, grudgingly. He was trying to remember what he had dreamt about but it had slipped away to the back of his mind, the way dreams do. Tantalising glimpses on the tip of his tongue. Honey-light and whispers and cold hands?
As they marched onwards through the deepness in the late afternoon, he attempted to tell Karya about it.
“A dream about what?” she wanted to know. Robin scratched his head, noticing how dusty and grubby his hair was. A centaur chase, a run in with a banshee and being dragged hundreds of leagues underground will do that for you. He wished for nothing more than a river to clean up in.
“It’s all muddled,” he said, frustrated with himself. “But it felt … I don’t know … important. Something about … bees? There was a humming, I think.”
“Bees.”
“Kind of … and a queen, and being eaten alive. I distinctly remember being told something about that.”
Splinterstem and Woad had wandered a little ahead while Karya and Robin talked, and now Karya touched Robin’s arm, causing him to stop a moment. She checked to make sure they were out of earshot of the others. “It might be nothing,” she said. “I don’t want to worry Woad, you know he thinks you belch rainbows and the sun rises and falls on your command. Also, I don’t want to spook our guide if I can avoid it, but when I tried to wake you up, something odd did happen. The others didn’t see it.”
“Odd how?” he asked.
“Well …” She looked a little concerned. “You opened your eyes for a second, you know, how people do sometimes when they’re asleep and if they’re weirdos, and they … well, they weren’t blue. They were green. Bright green.”
Robin frowned at her. “That’s only ever happened when–”
“When you become the Puck, as you call it, yes I know,” she said impatiently. “Like I said, I don’t want to make something out of nothing. For all I know your eyes are always like that when you’re asleep. I’m hardly in the habit of sneaking into your room at night and peeping under your eyelids. But…given the situation.” She shrugged, trailing off. “Also, after I saw your eyes, I looked down and your mana stone was … well … dark.”
Robin automatically touched his mana stone around his neck, glancing down. It was its usual green grey, shot through with silver.
“Dark?”
She nodded. “Listen, I know you’ve kind of lost control a couple of times recently. Maybe it’s just your age, who knows? I just think you need to keep it in mind. Focus on the mana-management techniques Calypso has been teaching you.”
They set off walking again, for fear of letting the dryad and Woad get too far ahead and out of sight.
Karya was right, Robin thought. He had lost control on more than one occasion. Throwing Jackalope across the room back at Erlking, making all the stones explode when Hawthorn had been trying to teach him a basic cantrip, throwing half the wall of Briar Hill down at the centaurs. That last time had really taken it out of him. Even Hawthorn had been concerned when he had passed out. Was his fear a reality? Was the Puck really becoming stronger than he was? Rising to the surface more and more, even keeping Robin pushed to the back of his own mind during sleep? He tentatively voiced these concerns to Karya.
She gave him a thoughtful look, and didn’t reply for a while, but when she did it was with a reassuring tone.
“I’ve said it before and I’ll tell you again. You do realise there is no ‘Puck’ don’t you, Robin?” she said. “It’s a name you made up. I don’t know why. Some way for you to cope with the fact that you have all this power inside you that you didn’t want and didn’t ask for.”
She smiled at him through her frown. “It’s all you, the Scion. You’re just getting used to who you are, that’s all. And it’s not like the Puck is a bad guy anyway. You saved all of our lives last Christmas back on the Isle of Winds. Moros and Strife would have killed us all if you hadn’t been the Puck. And then you beat Peryl and saved Henry from the flooding tomb this summer.”
“It doesn’t feel like me,” Robin countered. “It feels like something else is mixed up inside me.”
“You need to stop fighting yourself,” she advised. “I didn’t even know a Shard of the Arcania could shatter until it happened under that lake. We don’t really understand yet what that means.” She shrugged thoughtfully. “To be honest, I didn’t know a Shard could summon a great big marauding forest monster either. Even I don’t know everything, Robin Fellows, hard to believe as that may be.”
“Maybe my using that mask fed the Puck-magic,” Robin suggested. “It’s ancient elemental magic after all.”
“You need to come to terms with the fact that you're not normal,” Karya told him bluntly. “Sorry not to sugar coat it, Scion, but you’re not and you never will be. Whatever inner conflict you have going on, you need to get on top of it. You need to own this power, or it will probably tear you to bits.”
Robin grudgingly nodded. “Don’t I even get a break for being angsty-teen age then?”
; She shook her head, smirking. “No time for that,” she said. “And it wouldn’t be a good look on you anyway.” She must have noticed that beneath his flippant comments there was a note of genuine worry, as she looked at him calmly.
“I see things that haven’t happened yet, remember?” she said. “Most of the time it doesn’t make sense, but whenever I’ve seen you in the future, nine times out of ten, you know what I’ve seen?”
He shook his head questioningly.
“Not a basket-case. Not some kind of withering personality consumed by the Puck,” she told him. “I see a brave and strong leader. Confident and unafraid. You’re not even afraid of Eris," she added with raised eyebrows.
Robin found this quite reassuring.
“Let’s catch up with Woad and the jolly green giant,” he suggested, and they set off faster, hopping over a tangle of tree roots. Robin briefly wondered to himself what Karya saw the other one time out of ten, but something superstitious stopped him from asking.
*
The forest of the Elderhart was endless. Being told this was one thing. Seeing it on a map was another. Passing through it was another still. It became hard to imagine there was anything but the forest, in all its secretive majesty. Vistas changed, terrain changed, but the woods seemed eternal. Robin fancied that whole generations could live their whole lives within its maze-like embrace, never once seeing beyond its borders to open land and bare hills.
Karya agreed with him. People did, she told him. They were called dryads.
The last light of the setting sun was upon them before they stopped again. Robin had been walking in silence for some time, wondering where Henry was, somewhere in this endless whispering cathedral, wondering how Jackalope was, solitary somewhere in the Netherworlde once again, and trying very hard not to speculate on the fate of Hawthorn. He was gazing at the ground as he walked, mesmerised by the play of the evening light on the sea of autumn leaves, how it made everything glow like spun gold, so he only noticed the others had stopped when he walked right into the back of the dryad, getting a mouthful of leaves from his woody clothes.
“Are we stopping to camp?” he enquired, after apologising.
“No,” the man replied. “We are here. The home of my people, the sanctuary of the dryads.” He waved a hand before him. “Welcome, outsiders, to Rowandeepling.”
Robin stepped around Splinterstem, joining Woad and Karya. The land before them stopped in a cliff, grassy moss tumbling over the rocky edge into a deep chasm that was dizzyingly precipitous. The gully was very wide, curving away from them like a horseshoe through the forest. Deep at its base, Robin could see the gold and red tops of trees, far below in the chasm, and weaving between them, the silver ribbon of a stream.
Across the canyon in the forest, which he now saw curled back in to meet itself, a huge natural empty moat, the land rose up again in a wide island, covered in the tallest trees Robin had yet seen.
There were only a dozen trees on the distant bank, growing in a rough circle, but their dimensions were beyond impressive. Robin had seen photographs back home of the giant redwoods which grew in parts of the mortal world. Some of them so tall and wide that they had tunnels carved through their bases, roads threading through them, wide enough for a car to pass easily.
These trees dwarfed them. They were titanic.
“Those are the elder trees,” Karya said, with a deep respect in her voice. “So they do exist. Some say they are the oldest in all the Netherworlde, Scion.”
The dryad nodded. “And beneath them, deep under the soil, we have guarded the heart of the forest. The Heart of Gaia, held in safety."
Breathtaking as the sight of the large island with its immense circle of super-trees might be, Robin was confused.
“But, there’s no buildings, no people,” he observed, scanning the forest island. “There’s nothing over there except the trees themselves,” he said curiously. “I thought you said this was your settlement. The home of the dryads?”
Woad put a blue finger under Robin’s chin and pushed up, tilting the boy's head back.
Robin stared. The immense elder trees soared high into the sky, breaking through the canopy of the rest of the forest, epic natural cathedral pillars spearing into the sky, up and up, before finally erupting into their own separate roof of autumn foliage. Up there, at the very dizzying heights of the tallest branches, he could make out lights in the setting sun. Glimmers here and there. It was too far too make out any further details.
“Up there?” Robin said quietly.
“Since the time the Panthea first came to the Netherworlde,” their dryad guide said. “Very few outsiders have even been permitted this deeply into our realm, and fewer still have been admitted to Rowandeepling.”
“Bet there’s never been a faun up there before,” Woad grinned happily.
Robin felt humbled. The weight of being the Scion seemed to settle on his shoulders.
“We are honoured, however,” the dryad continued, dropping respectfully to one knee before them. “To receive one such as you, and your companions.”
Robin shuffled awkwardly at this act of deference. “Um…thanks so much,” he said. The dryad looked up at him blankly, a tiny frown on his brow.
“I wasn’t speaking to you, child of the Fae,” he explained. He turned his head to Karya. “I was addressing this one.”
Karya nodded respectfully as Splinterstem stood again. Robin, slightly mortified, gave her a questioning look. She shrugged at him almost imperceptibly, as if to say she didn’t have a clue what the dryad was talking about either.
“Wow … embarrassing,” Woad muttered under his breath with a snigger. Robin heroically resisted the urge to push him off the cliff and into the deep chasm.
“How are supposed to get across?” he asked. “And up? I mean … there’s not even a rickety Indiana Jones rope bridge to fall off, is there?”
“We’re going up in style, Robin,” Karya smiled.
Two figures were drifting down out of the air before them. They had long, tangled hair and were dressed in the same organic mixture of moss skirts, woven flowers and latticed vines as Splinterstem. Their skin was lighter than his, more of a spring green than a deep moss, spotted here and there with darker mottling at the brow and neck. Females he assumed. But their eyes, like his, were large, green and insectile.
Robin didn’t see at first how they were floating. They descended smoothly, arms before them gracefully. A soft purring hum accompanied them, and it was only when they finally landed, nodding in greeting to Robin and the others, that he saw they were winged.
Not feathered but long, thin gossamer affairs. They looked like dragonfly wings, almost invisible in their thinness, a mere membrane which was slightly green-tinged. As they alighted, their vast, purring wings fell still, falling down their backs like long translucent cloaks.
“I have found her,” the dryad told them, quiet triumph in his voice. “Did I not tell you I would return with strength to fight this scourge? This is she. We will take her before the princess.”
The two female dryads were peering at Karya in a strange mixture of awe and wonder. The girl looked a little uncomfortable under the unblinking green eyes.
“My lady,” one of them said, holding out a long arm to the girl. A swirl of twined leaves and moss adorned the dryad's hand, looking like a long evening glove. “Allow us, please.”
Karya allowed herself to be taken by the hand. The other dryad took her other arm, and before either Robin or Woad could say a word, the wings flicked back out, and with a rush of wind and a rolling purr, they lifted into the air once more, carrying the girl up into the sky.
They were fast, spiriting her away into the dizzyingly distant treetops far far ahead.
Robin hadn’t really thought much what a dryad might be like before he’d met one. He had half-pictured something like a living tree, made from bark and twigs, but although these beings certainly clothed themselves in the forest, amongst blending in with t
he verdant wilderness around them, he realised that with their greenish skin, their delicate wings and shimmering eyes, they were more like insects, an evolved race of fireflies.
“I shall bring her entourage,” Splinterstem called up to his companions, who, holding Karya precariously between them, were already at a sickening height and climbing.
“Her what?” Woad said affronted.
Robin had no chance to speak. Their guide’s long cloak parted, bisected in the middle, and great wings, identical to those of the others, flicked swiftly out and into the open air, flexing rapidly.
Without waiting for consent, the dryad reached out and grabbed Robin with one huge hand and Woad with the other, tucking each under his arm as though he were carrying luggage.
“Waitwaitwait–” Woad began, but the dryad bent his knees and sprang into the sky, the downdraft of his wings making Robin’s hair flutter in his eyes.
Robin grabbed the moss-covered sleeve tightly with white knuckles as they shot upwards, leaving the forest floor far behind. They had swung out over the great chasm, making his stomach lurch alarmingly as they were carried at great speed and with very little ceremony toward the distant shimmering trees far overhead.
Robin did his best not to let out a scream. There was no time for anything like that anyway. He was far too occupied with ensuring he didn’t slip out of the dragonfly-man's grip and plummet to his death.
And besides, he could hear Woad whooping with unrestrained delight as the wind rushed at his face.
ASHE AMONGST THE LEAVES
The floor fell away beneath them quite swiftly, the rough circle of the great elder trees soaring high above all else. Soon they were above the treeline, a great ocean of canopy stretching off below them in all directions, an autumn rainforest covering the world. Only the elder trees soared higher, and Splinterstem's mighty wings purred, carrying them ever upwards.
As they finally reached the dryad dwelling of Rowandeepling at the leafy summit, the structure of the place became clearer to Robin.
