by Bo Savino
Chapter 23: For the Birds
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Reggie was up bright and early the first morning of the competition. He couldn’t help it. He had become used to early mornings with the extra magic training he’d been doing with Ryssa. Now that he had the opportunity to sleep in, it just wasn’t happening. He dressed quietly, but even so, the other boys were beginning to show signs of waking.
It was a big day for everyone. Anticipation had the entire Team on edge. The competition was scheduled to last three days: the first was for demonstrating proficiency in animal magic, the second for healing magic, and the third for elemental magic. The fourth day was reserved for a trip back to the Lia Fial.
Team Phoenix had more than a fighting chance as far as Reggie was concerned. He and the rest of the Team had been relieved to discover it wasn’t going to be like the Zombie Zone Olympics, where judges rated them on performance. There were far too many biases against certain members of the Team, and that didn’t equate in his mind to fair and impartial judging and scoring. The Lia Fial had its own criteria—but no one could explain exactly what that was, if they even knew.
Reggie headed into the common room, grabbed a cinnamon roll from the buffet and plopped down on the couch.
An idle thought regarding the prophecy came to mind. He’d have to ask his aunt for access to it some day. If anyone seriously considered him and Ryssa to be the twins of darkness and light, and were concerned about Ryssa’s control—well, did the prophecy mention anything about the twins of darkness and light winning the competition, or becoming leaders in Faery?
It couldn’t, right? He took an absent-minded bite from the pastry. It sat like sawdust in his mouth. Not because it wasn’t good, but more because he wasn’t up to eating and the motion was more mechanical than anything else.
He had attempted to speak with Aurelius about the prophecy and the Hall of Futures.
“There is no real comparison,” his uncle had insisted. Even though Reggie knew he wasn’t true blood-related, he couldn’t stop thinking of him as his uncle.
“Don’t they both tell, or show, the future?”
“Yes and no. The Hall of Futures shows things that could come to pass. It is a record, more or less, of all the ways to arrive at any number of futures. But that’s just it—it shows all of the possible paths and all of the possible futures. With prophecy, the future is a static entity. It’s a future that is already written and will come to pass. In the case of a prophecy, all paths chosen lead to a single, pre-determined future.”
Reggie had not been happy with the answer—he still wasn’t. If the future was already written, and there was no getting around it, then what was the point? Where was the possibility of a happy ending? Weren’t all fairy tales supposed to have happy endings?
Not if you read the Brothers Grimm, he realized. Great. Of all the fairy tales I get thrown into, it has to be the Nightmare on Faery Street. With the Black Knight playing the starring role of the Nightmare King. Doesn’t that just figure?
Jet plopped down on the couch next to him. “So what’s got you so twisted up?”
“Prophecies, Faery—” Reggie ticked off his mental checklist. “—the competition, reality versus non-reality, forced future versus free will—want me to continue?”
“Naw. That list holds enough depression to last the whole week.” The Phooka twin looked across the room to Moira and Ryssa, who were sitting on the smaller couch, staring at their breakfasts. “How’s Ryssa holding up?”
Reggie glanced at his twin, noting the dark smudges under her eyes that hadn’t gone away since her time with the storm elders, the lack of enthusiasm she had for anything anymore, and the smiles that never seemed to reach her eyes—
“I’m worried about her, Jet.” He rubbed his eyes to take the image away. “She’s not herself. Faery has taken so much out of her that I sometimes wonder if it wouldn’t be better if we lost the first round of the competition. She doesn’t do well under pressure—even in school. She can get all ‘A’ grades on her homework and fail every test she takes. I just want my sister back.”
“I know. I’ve watched her—we all have. If it were Moira, I’d be feeling pretty much the same right now.”
“I’m not going to do anything stupid, like sabotaging our chances or anything—” Although I’ve thought about it, he admitted to himself.
“I know. It’s cool.” After a moment, Jet turned to Reggie with a grin. “Personally, I don’t care one way or another. Making the rules in Faery would be cool, and I’d like to give it a shot. But breaking the rules—that’s where the real fun’s at.”
“How Unseelie of you.” Reggie tried to keep a straight face, but failed when Jet waggled his eyebrows at him. Both boys laughed, breaking the tension in the air.
“Jet,” Reggie glanced around the common area at the members of Team Phoenix in various stages of waking, “why haven’t I seen any kids in New Faery other than the teams? I mean, with a city this size in the Zombie Zone, there’d be at least a couple more around.”
“You don’t know?” Jet looked at him with surprise. “Wow. Yeah. I mean—we’re it, Regg.”
“What do you mean, ‘we’re it’?”
“I mean—we’re it, brah. Well, not totally, but we might as well be.”
“I don’t—”
“Okay. How many kids younger than us have you seen here?”
Reggie thought about it. “None.”
“And you won’t, either,” Jet sighed. “Here’s the thing. Everyone talks about the breaking of the magic by Dana as though it were yesterday. They’ll even say ‘a couple hundred years’, or something like that. In reality, it was over two thousand years ago.”
“But Aurelius is human. And he was supposed to have been around back then—”
“Earth-link—Aurelius said it himself. The only difference between us and the Zombies in the Zone is the Earth-link. Once you get it, well, it’s kind of like being an oak tree. You get your roots in the earth and the older you get, the deeper the roots go and the less likely you’ll topple over. Everything else around you, those things with shallow roots, will die—animals, birds, people—but you go on through your link to the Earth.”
Reggie had never really given much thought to what it meant to be Faery, much less to seemingly live forever. He was stunned. “But they do die—my mother died, and my father—and so did Woody Landstrider.”
“But not of natural causes.”
“Yeah,” Reggie was staggered. “Wow.”
“After Dana gave herself over to the Earth, Faery was a big mess. A whole bunch of weird stuff started happening with the Courts and the magic. Then, just under five hundred years ago, the last kid was born to Faery.”
“What about us? None of us are five hundred years old.”
“We were born in New Faery. When children stopped being born in Faery, there was a huge separation in the Courts. New Faery is the result of one group breaking away to do things differently. There were actually three groups. I think one is on an island somewhere off the west coast of Africa, and the third is down around Australia. I don’t know for sure—there’s little contact between us.”
“The Fey hold grudges for that long?”
“You have no idea.” Jet shook his head. “Anyway, it took the inhabitants of New Faery a couple of hundred years or so to cultivate the land and establish a true bond with it. Once they were able to sort through what needed to be done, and finally got everything perfect as far as they were concerned, a new generation was born to the Sidhe—us. I think your mom had been Ard Ri for about a hundred years at that point. I hear she was real good.”
“Uh, thanks.” What else could he say? He’d never really known her. “But what about since then?”
“That’s just it—there are only about a thousand Faery spread across the island. No more. Our total numbers over the entire world barely top five thousand. Not enough to even qualify as a city in the Zombie Zone. There was one sweep of children born here
in New Faery over a ten-year period—and then nothing. Zip. Nada.”
“And a bunch died in the fireball thing.”
Jet nodded. “Over a hundred children and half again as many full-grown Sidhe. After that, there were only a couple of hundred of us left—”
“And whoever was behind it has been systematically destroying the rest—but why?”
“Don’t know. No one does. But if they succeed, Faery will wither and die—there’s no new blood, and they can’t figure out why.”
“And the Wilt isn’t helping much either, is it? Sounds like Faery’s doomed no matter how you look at it.”
“They’re putting a lot of hope on the outcome of the competitions.”
“Why? How are any of us supposed to figure out what they haven’t been able to puzzle through for hundreds of years? It sounds like a whole lot of work for the so-called winners, with little chance for success and heaps of blame when they fail.”
“Yeah. But think of it this way—if Faery is doomed, do you really want its last years to be spent with someone like Blaze and his buds in a position of authority?”
“No way.” Reggie shook his head. “That’s just scary.”
“Yup,” Jet said. “Which means it’s up to us to do our best.”
“Nothing like a little pressure.”
“You said it.”
“Okay, Team. It’s time,” Aurelius announced from across the room. “Pull yourself together and do what you need to do.”
Jet looked at Reggie with a grin, nodding toward Aurelius. The Counselor stood with his hands clasped behind his back while the members of Team Phoenix prepared to leave.
“Rousing pep talk, eh?”
“Yeah,” Reggie smiled.
