by Leah Cutter
It was something Garung excelled at.
“Yes,” Garung replied. “It was the only way we could get the backing of the royals,” he added. Which was partially true. Other members of the council had wanted them to explore someplace new. “The troop that took that route was the only one to return,” he reminded his students. Even Garung’s older brother, Ramit, had never returned.
“We should be going after the other troops, the lost ones,” Frieda said. “Trying to find them.” Several of the students nodded in unison.
It was an old argument, one that Garung was tired of. “Then you should form your own troop,” Garung said impatiently. “Seriously. What’s stopping you? Or do you need to write up yet another proof of the importance of moonlight for dancing?”
Silence strung across the room now, jagged and tight.
“That’s not fair,” Pravir said. “We have to prove—”
“Nothing,” Adele said, interrupting. “What you have to do is spread your wings and get out of this cave.” She stared pointedly at Pravir. “When was the last time you actually felt moonlight on your wings?”
“At least my wings are natural, not some artificial construct,” Sree sneered.
Adele stood up, spreading her wings wide. Brass gears, highlighted with blue phosphorous fairy magic, turned as her wings spread. The ends were beautifully scalloped like a butterfly’s. Some of the framing parts were metal as well, gleaming in the cold light of the classroom. “At least my wings work,” she purred. “They were strong enough to get me here. I doubt you could even fly to the top of a young tree.”
“Class,” Garung said, stepping in before the argument escalated too far. “We will only take the strongest fliers with us,” he said, nodding toward the former queen. “But we’ll also need the brightest and the best of you, the bravest and the stoutest of heart. It’s a journey that will be sung of for centuries.”
“As yours has been?” Pravir asked innocently enough.
Garung swallowed down the bile. His trip and his troop were only sung about as a tragedy.
“Don’t repeat my mistakes. Make sure your journey is more memorable,” Garung challenged the young fairy. “Find worthy resources, beyond a kingdom on the brink of destruction.”
They’d lost so many on the trip, not just due to the explosion in the Greater Oregon Fairy Kingdom but the journey itself. Fairies were impervious in battle, fighting on even when they were practically dead. However, cold could kill them, and a sudden cold snap had taken them unawares on the trip back.
Garung’s troop hadn’t brought back anything of value. Even the damaged queen had actually arrived on her own, weeks after Garung and the others. At least Garung had been able to vouch for her, having met her at the northern kingdom.
“Why are we going back to the Greater Oregon Fairy Kingdom?” Titir asked.
“Not just for her,” Sree said, indicating Adele with a nod of her head.
“No, not just for Adele,” Garung assured them. “This is a recruitment mission. The northern kingdom has many craftsmen trained in the old arts, things we’ve lost.” He’d seen that himself, the first time he’d made the trip.
“Things we don’t need,” Pravir declared, looking stubborn.
“Who carves the benches you sit in?” Adele asked. “How overflowing are your feast days?”
Even Garung shifted nervously at that. All the chairs—most of the desks and beds as well—were in need of repair. They didn’t have enough craftsmen in the Redwood Fairy kingdom, those who were both good with their hands and who wanted to work as such. Plus, there had been shortages at the last full moon celebration: Not even enough fresh moon wine for everyone to have a cup.
“We were able to feed everyone in my—our kingdom,” Adele said, correcting herself quickly.
One of the necessary little lies that she’d agreed to, hiding her true heritage from most. Not because they wouldn’t have welcomed her as a queen, but the royals were uncomfortable with her being a queen and coming from the warrior caste.
“Why didn’t we send back a troop right after the disaster?” Titir asked.
“The kingdom didn’t have the resources,” Garung told him. “You know that.”
Titir shook his head. “No. No, I don’t know that. I don’t know why we’ve waited so long. Why we’re going back only now.”
The other students stilled. Titir was the good one, always agreeing with the teacher.
When he disagreed, they all wanted to know why as well.
Garung didn’t have an easy lie prepared for this.
“Maybe I should answer,” Adele said, folding in her wings and walking between the desks, toward the front of the class.
Garung shrugged and moved to the side. He could always report to the royals that she’d insisted fiercely. They’d come to believe most any behavior from the warrior queen—wild, untamed, and touched with madness. He’d admired her at first, but her headstrong nature conflicted with his own at every turn.
“We’d thought for years that the thrice-damned dwarf Kostya had been killed in the explosion, blown up in his own tunnels, when the Greater Oregon Fairy Kingdom was attacked,” Adele said, turning to face the class.
“We were wrong.”
* * *
“What do you mean?” Cornelius asked Sebastian, the old priest. At least they stood alone in the courtyard for the temple complex, without anyone nearby to hear the priest, otherwise Cornelius, as the head of the royals, might have had to take some sort of action.
The stillness of the day settled around them, held in by the cobblestone walls surrounding them. Fairy lights set high in the ceiling of the underground cavern shone brightly, imitating the noonday sun. The songs of the servants in the fields just beyond the temple faded in the distance.
What did Sebastian mean, that it was about time Cornelius showed up? What was the priest implying?
Cornelius attended the temple more regularly than the other royals, always leading the chorus hymns and not falling asleep during the sermons. He said his daily prayers, both in the morning and in the evening, thanking the sun and moon gods for continued life.
Though Cornelius would admit that he missed the days when services were more about dancing in filtered moonlight and celebrating the rising sun than sitting and listening to myths and stories that he’d learned as a child.
But those times had been in the old country, back in London, centuries before he’d risked everything and traveled across the ocean, following Thaddeus to the New World.
“About time you finally woke up and looked around you,” Sebastian grumbled at him. He shrugged his wide shoulders, causing his yellow robes to settle more firmly across his broad chest. “You did wake up, didn’t you? You did notice that there are more funerals than births? A lot more? Which isn’t right, particularly for a race that’s as long lived as we are?” The priest’s wings opened and closed nervously, the yellow streamers floating in hypnotic patterns.
Cornelius hadn’t even thought about how few birth ceremonies he’d attended in recent years. Births were messy, and not part of the usual order, his typical daily flow. Not that the fairies ever had that many children—they lived a long, long time. Too many young ones and the Greater Oregon Kingdom would quickly overflow.
But still. It might have been a year since Cornelius had drunk the new moon wine served at a birth.
“What’s happening to our people?” Cornelius asked. Though Sebastian was younger than Cornelius—he’d taken his vows just before they’d left the Old Worlde—he always seemed much older than his years.
“Eh. Come this way,” Sebastian said, turning back the way he’d come, ponderously leading Cornelius across the stone courtyard and into the back living areas of the temple.
Cornelius looked around curiously. He’d only ever visited the tall, golden temple building out in the front of the complex, where the royals gathered to worship the sun god and the moon goddess. He’d never been in the smaller huts behind
the temple, where the priests lived, or the large common room all the priesthood shared.
After looking around, Cornelius swallowed his disappointment. The common room was more stark than the warriors’ barracks. Plain wood benches lined the walls of the common area. A hearth glowed in the center with a cheery magical fire. The walls were plain as well, made from plain brown stone. Unlike the rooms in the palace, both the top and the bottom of the wall held the same drab color.
Only after Cornelius’ eyes adjusted did he realize the walls glowed faintly. Now that he looked more carefully, he saw the murals, pictures depicting the lives of the gods, stories he’d learned as a child.
But the murals weren’t static, no, they moved.
Plionius slowly, gracefully, handed the basket of golden flowers to the first Queen, Georgina. On another wall, Klimunia was tricked into a drinking contest by the hero Oswald and forced to give up the secret of flight. Next to the hearth showed the blessing of the boats by Comalinka, before they crossed the dark stream into the underworld where the greatest fairy souls waited to be reborn.
“Fascinating,” Cornelius told Sebastian when he realized the priest had been standing impatiently beside him for some time while he marveled.
“Old magic,” Sebastian insisted. “Not this new-fangled clockwork.”
Cornelius stiffened. “What are you implying?”
Sebastian waved an indifferent hand at Cornelius. “Not meaning anything you don’t know. We’ve fallen so far from our past that you don’t even know how this was created.”
It was the same old refrain that Cornelius had been hearing since he’d first met Sebastian: The priesthood all thought the fairies should go back to the ancient times, when they lived barefoot and naked in the woods, battling constantly. When the fairies were smaller and much more vulnerable, outside and attacked by predators, instead of safely underground.
“I know how this was created,” Cornelius lied, though none of the royals he knew had such magic.
The priest snorted, obviously not believing him.
“So give me your counsel, then,” Cornelius snapped. “Or do you believe that the reason our people are dying is because we’re too decadent?” This wasn’t helping him at all.
“While that’s part of the problem, actually, no, I don’t think that’s what’s causing the decline of the fairies,” Sebastian said. “It could be a cure, though.”
“What do you mean? That forgoing our comfort would somehow bring the race back?” Cornelius asked. He’d heard this argument more than once and had always dismissed it.
Fairies who longed for the past and some flavor of the good olde days generally hadn’t actually lived through them.
“You royals have brought peace, yes. Order,” Sebastian said while making a face, as if the word tasted bad. “But there’s nothing to strive for. No dreams.”
“I don’t understand,” Cornelius said. He loved the peace of his days, how one flowed into another, predictable as the lights brightening the top of the fairy kingdom every morning to simulate the sun so far above. His soul thrived on such predictability.
“Fairies don’t need moonlight to live,” Sebastian said.
“I know that,” Cornelius said, exasperated when the priest didn’t continue.
“However, the dreams that slide down those moonbeams, now that’s something different.” Sebastian waved his hand at the fireplace. The flames sparked up, dancing.
Despite himself, Cornelius found his attention captured by them. It occurred to him that the royals should light the great fires in the palace more often, or even have more bonfires in the courtyard, set the people to dancing.
But what would they be celebrating? What great obstacle had they overcome? What magnificent triumph had they had?
Cornelius was starting to see what the priest meant.
“The people have no dreams,” Sebastian said. “While the queen was mad, and drove the castes too hard, at least she gave them a purpose. Merely existing…it isn’t enough.”
“What would you have me do?” Cornelius asked bitterly. “Declare war on the Redwood Fairy Kingdom, to the south?” Since the death of Queen Adele, they hadn’t heard anything from the only other fairy kingdom on the west coast—hadn’t even exchanged messengers.
“War’s always an option,” Sebastian said, giving Cornelius a toothy grin. “That might help cure what ails Bascom and the others.”
Cornelius nodded. Of course. While most of the priests were from the servant caste, Sebastian had been born a warrior, and had the spiked teeth of their kind.
“But that probably isn’t necessary,” Sebastian said, the words falling from him slowly, as if he didn’t want to admit them.
“Then what do you recommend?” Cornelius asked.
If his people needed something to unite them, a great dream and not a great machine or a war, then what was left?
“Revenge,” Sebastian said.
* * *
Adele looked at the students before her. Even that nasty snake Pravir was at least paying attention. The students’ rooms weren’t decorated like the rooms in the Greater Oregon Fairy Kingdom palace, that nauseating mishmash of colors and designs, with the top half of every wall done in a different color from the bottom half.
However, in the Redwood Fairy Kingdom, the rooms were only slightly better. Everything was sterile white here, and no windows, not even fake ones that looked out on painted scenes of woods with fairy circles.
In the student rooms, the desks were mismatched, and the chairs weren’t any better. They reminded Adele of the court, or council as they called it here: Not only did royals serve on it, but warriors, servants, and students as well.
And Adele had thought her people had fallen. At least they’d kept the castes separate, each fulfilling their traditional roles.
Mostly.
When Adele had arrived at the Redwood Fairy Kingdom, still battered from her ordeal in the tunnels up north as well as the trip down, she’d expected to be able to rally the fairies there into following her, to go back and help her reclaim her kingdom.
To her bitterest disappointment, no one had even listened.
The royals here at the Redwood Fairy Kingdom were even more hidebound than those in her kingdom.
And the new student caste? Ugh. They were beyond useless, arguing points of myths and stories from their ancient past. They rarely created any new stories, and what songs they did come up with were in what they called modern style, dissonant and arrhythmic.
She’d make them all take warrior training, if she could. Flying for miles and learning how to grapple in midair, how to survive falling from a great height, how to bleed an enemy dry—those were useful skills.
But for now, it was enough that Garung had gotten a single troop to return to the northern kingdom, to her home.
“You remember the stories of Kostya, the dwarf? How his ohotnik sabotaged our great machine, that would have created a barrier, protecting us from the humans?” Adele asked, as if speaking with youngsters or the slowest of the servant class.
“I still don’t see how this ‘great machine’ of yours could have worked,” muttered Pravir.
Adele ignored him. “Earlier this spring, while I was working with your warriors, collecting supplies for the mid-spring festival, I saw a bird who looked familiar. A robin.”
The students all perked up at that. Most of them had never actually been outdoors and so didn’t know if they could speak to the birds or not. It was an innate skill, though only a few had it, and generally only those from the royal caste.
“He’d spent the summer farther south and was migrating north for the summer. Up the coast. I asked him for news of the kingdom, but, alas, he had none,” Adele said, making sure she looked sad. She’d practiced her speech more than once, with all the appropriate emotions in the right places.
“He did, however, have news of a strange new dwelling, north of the kingdom. It had more garbage collected there than a rat’s
nest.” Adele saw Sree about to object. Careful, careful here. “Of course, the robin couldn’t tell the difference between a dwarf and a fairy. We all look the same to him.”
That at least brought some chuckles, as “bird-brained” was a common enough insult for someone who mistook a student for a royal, though most of them had come from royal stock initially.
“But fairy caves are never messy, not like that. And this creature scavenged alone. The robin never saw any companions or mates. It must be Kostya,” Adele concluded.
“Might not be him,” Pravir pointed out. “Could be another dwarf.”
“And don’t you think we should know about any new dwarves landing in the New World?” Adele countered.
“America,” Sree corrected stuffily.
Adele controlled the urge to sigh. “What if this is a scout? What if there are more dwarves on the way?”
“We could set up a study, to see the effects of a long-term immigration,” Titir said, sounding excited. “The variables would be—”
“Useless when an army of dwarves with their axes come knocking your doors down, wanting to take over your kingdom,” Adele said harshly. “They are our common enemy. They aren’t going to be doing studies. They’re going to bring war.”
A chill descended over the classroom. The students were all too young to remember the old battles: They’d mostly occurred in the Old Worlde, with only a few skirmishes here in the New. America.
But they’d all read about them, studied them: That was what the students did.
Adele tasted the air. There was also a tinge of excitement. Though these students had only ever known peace, and the comfort of their underground kingdom, somewhere, deep within them, lay fierce fairy hearts.
They’d rise to the thrill of battle, if they had a worthy leader to follow.
And Adele planned on being that leader.
Even if there hadn’t been any little bird.
* * *
“Kostya?” Cornelius asked, incredulously. Surely Sebastian was joking. The dwarf had died in the great explosion that had killed the queen and had destroyed the lower levels of the palace. He was responsible for the death of the great machine, his cursed ohotnik and its poisonous gems, causing the machine to blow itself apart.
