by James Riley
“A human, here?” she said, smiling slightly. “Tell me: Didn’t I ban your kind from Avalon under pain of death?”
Fort’s eyes widened in shock, but before he could answer, a familiar voice spoke up from his side. “This human child knocked me over, Your Majesty!” the faerie he’d fallen into shouted. “I demand a thousand years of his service in restitution, and not a minute less!”
The queen turned her gaze on the faerie, and he immediately went silent. “You would make demands upon your queen, my child?” she asked quietly.
“Of … of course not, Your Majesty!” the faerie said. “But the laws are clear that I am owed something for his attack.”
“Indeed they are,” the queen said, spinning her scepter on one finger. “But I don’t believe that humans live for a thousand years, my son.”
“I’d happily accept one hundred years of living service, and nine hundred of undead service,” the faerie said.
“That sounds fair,” the queen said, turning back to Fort. “And what say you, human child? Why did you attack this poor faerie?”
Fort opened his mouth to speak, but it was so dry, he had to quickly swallow first. “I didn’t mean to, Your, uh, Majesty,” he said. “I was looking for a friend, and I tripped going around a corner, so accidentally—”
“Purposely!” the faerie shouted.
“Let him speak, my child,” the queen told him. “Go on, human.”
“So I accidentally fell into him,” Fort told her. “I gave him an apology right away—”
“You gave him an apology?” she asked, one eyebrow raising. She turned to the faerie. “You didn’t mention that he’d offered restitution, even if it wasn’t equitable.”
The faerie seemed confused by this. “It was but words, my lady. Nothing concrete.”
“Nevertheless, he gave you something in return for his actions,” she said, and the air around her began to darken like a storm cloud. “And now, you seek to waste my time with outlandish claims of servitude without taking into account what you’ve already been given. Where is my restitution for that, child?”
The faerie’s mouth opened and closed for a moment in fear, before he bowed low. “I offer my apology to you, Your Majesty. I can only beg your forgiveness.”
“No, I think my forgiveness is worth more than that,” she said, and nodded at the guards. “A few years in the dungeon should help you not take other people’s time for granted.”
The faerie started to object but disappeared instead, along with the two guards who’d been holding Fort. Somehow, Fort felt even more terrified of the faerie queen without them at his side. A few years for wasting her time? And she’d already said she’d banned humans under penalty of death!
Why hadn’t that part been on the sign beneath the tomb?
“My children have so much to learn, even still,” the queen said, turning back to Fort. “Now, little human, what have you to say about breaking my law? I haven’t allowed your kind here since the Pendragon.”
All of the warnings from Rachel and the old man jumbled together in Fort’s mind, and he had no idea what to say. He knew he shouldn’t bargain with the queen, or tell her what he wanted, but she already thought he’d broken her law, so really, was there anything he could say that could make things worse?
“I came looking for the tomb of King Arthur, the Pendragon, Your Majesty,” Fort said, hoping his honesty would at least be worth something. “I was hoping to find an item he once had.”
Behind him, the faeries gasped but quickly went silent at a glance from their queen. That didn’t bode well.
“Something of the Pendragon’s?” the queen asked, raising an eyebrow. “And why would you care about anything of his?”
“There is a war coming, Your Majesty,” he said, clasping his hands together to keep them from shaking. “Back on my world. And I was, uh, hoping to stop it?”
She smiled. “You humans and your wars. You never cease to amaze me.” She turned away, almost like she was losing interest. “The Pendragon failed to fulfill his agreement to me, and thus I claimed him and his possessions, even in death.” She shrugged. “Unfortunately, undead humans tend to spoil rather quickly, which comes with quite an odor, and seem to be of limited use in such a case. Therefore his belongings are all I have.” She looked at him almost lazily. “Tell me why I shouldn’t just kill you for breaking my laws, human.”
Fort cringed. “We’re definitely much more useful alive than dead, Your Majesty. I didn’t realize that humans were banned from Avalon, or I’d never have come.”
“Ignorance of the law is no excuse,” the queen said, growing even more bored now. “Still, you are just a child, and I admit I could not actually give you the maximum punishment. Perhaps merely three decades in the dungeons will teach you to stay out of our realm?”
Three decades? Fort’s eyes widened. He couldn’t even imagine being that old! “Your Majesty, I’ve already learned that lesson—trust me! There’s no need for a dungeon!”
“I’m afraid there is, child,” the queen said. “We can’t be seen to be lenient on your kind invading our realm, now, can we? You humans tend to accumulate like flies, and once you infest an area, it’s ever so hard to get rid of you.”
She held up a hand, looking away, and two more guards appeared at Fort’s side. He knew he had to change her mind, or this was going to be it: Damian would get the book, given that he was a dragon and therefore allowed into Avalon; the world would go to war; and everything would be his fault, all while he waited until his forties to be let out.
“Please, wait, Your Majesty!” Fort shouted, and she turned back to him, looking annoyed. “I give you my apology!”
She smiled. “It’s been used, child, and I don’t want one secondhand. Even if it were still new, breaking the law combined with trying to take what’s mine of the Pendragon’s holdings is worth considerably more punishment than a mere apology.”
“Worth how much?” Fort shouted as the guards grabbed his arms. “Maybe there’s something we can trade!”
She looked at him, and he could feel something warm inside his head, like the sun on a hot day. “I see you’ve had contact with … a dragon egg?” she said, perking up a bit. “Fascinating, child. Perhaps there is room to bargain after all… .”
And then she stopped and stood up from her chair, and the entire room went dark.
“The Old Ones?” she shouted, and the walls began to shake. The other faeries ran out of the room as silently as possible, and even the guards backed away. “You, human, have had contact with the Old Ones?”
- THIRTY -
THE QUEEN’S FURY HAD THE floor shaking so hard that Fort fell to his knees, landing painfully. The guards now fled as the walls began to crumble, and Fort wondered if he wouldn’t even need to be sentenced, that he’d just die here and now.
“Answer me, human!” the queen of the faeries shouted. A strong wind blew in out of nowhere, threatening to pick him up off the floor entirely. “What business did you have with the Old Ones?”
“No business!” Fort shouted over the howling wind, shielding his face with his arms. The ground split just in front of him, and he pushed backward, falling onto his behind to keep away from the crack. “They were trying to return to my world, and I tried to stop them!”
“You, a pathetic human child, faced the Old Ones?” the queen roared. “Lies! You would have been destroyed in an instant!”
A powerful gust of wind slammed into Fort, slamming him several yards backward. He landed hard, knocking the air from his lungs, and for a moment, he struggled just to catch his breath as the queen advanced on him, her castle crumbling around them.
“I almost was!” he shouted when he could breathe again. “I was lucky, I promise you. I shouldn’t have been able to face them, but I had help. My friends are much better at magic than I am, and they were the ones who really saved us all!”
Suddenly she was looming over him, as if she had teleported to the spot. �
�Your friends, powerful ?” she hissed. “You speak of these humans?”
Jia, Rachel, and Ellora appeared in the room, their expressions quickly turning from shock to fear as they realized what was happening around them. The green faerie also appeared next to Ellora but took one look at the queen and fled.
“Fort!” Rachel said as she moved to stand in front of Jia, bracing herself against the wind. “What did you do?”
“Look into my mind, Your Majesty!” Fort shouted, trying to push to his feet and failing. “You can see for yourself what happened!”
The queen sneered but leaned forward, and this time, her touch wasn’t warm in Fort’s head, it was searing hot. As Fort screamed in pain, he saw what she saw: facing Ketas in the courtyard of the first Oppenheimer School, watching D’hea dissolve in the Dracsi dimension as the other members of his family looked on, all of it.
And just like that, the white-hot pain in Fort’s head disappeared, and the wind and shaking all ceased in the castle.
“You did face them,” the queen said, looking shocked. “Just a handful of children, and you kept them at bay, when numerous human adults succumbed to their magic. I never would have considered such a thing!”
“That’s right,” Fort said, just glad to not be in a dungeon right now. “The adults weren’t much use, but we stopped the Old Ones!”
Before the queen could respond, Rachel ran over and knelt on the ground between Fort and the queen, facing the monarch. “Your Majesty, you have my utmost apologies for whatever offense we have caused. Please tell me if I can make it up to you in some way?”
The queen looked down at her with amusement, which was a thousand times better than the cold boredom she’d shown Fort when sentencing him to death, let alone her rage. “You humans always offer deals without any idea of the price. You’d think by now you’d know better.”
“Some of us do, Your Majesty,” Rachel said, giving Fort a dark look. “But we have to protect those we care about.”
The queen reached out a hand toward Rachel and pulled the girl’s chin up to look at her. Shockingly, the queen smiled. “You are brave, young one,” she said. “I can see that you know what it is that you offered. You do this to protect your kin?”
“Not kin by blood, Your Majesty,” Rachel said. “But my friends are still family. And not just them. We came here to try to keep our people safe from a war that shouldn’t happen.”
“Is there any other kind?” the queen asked, looking away for a moment. “You children fascinate me. I’ve seen human adults flee the Old Ones, cowering at the very sight of them, but you stood your ground. Perhaps it’s foolishness on your part. It certainly isn’t rationality. But maybe what I need is a bit of foolishness.”
Fort’s eyes widened. He didn’t like where this was going at all. The old man in Cyrus’s cottage had said not to bargain with the queen, and this sounded an awful lot like that was where it was headed.
But if it were a bargain or a few decades of jail, did they even have a choice?
Rachel seemed to have come to the same conclusion. “I would be interested in hearing your thoughts about that, Your Majesty,” she said through clenched teeth.
In spite of everything, Fort couldn’t help but be impressed by how good Rachel was at all of this. Apparently, her love of Dungeons & Dragons and fantasy really was coming in handy.
The queen looked away again. “You have not yet been long in my kingdom, but even you will have noticed how there are but children here, no adult Tylwyth Teg other than myself.” She turned back, her eyes blazing with anger. “That is the fault of the Old Ones, one in particular. I bargained with him to save my people, after Q’baos took over the dwarven kind during the humans’ uprising. I couldn’t allow the same thing to happen to my people!” She sneered. “But what the Old One didn’t tell me was that to spare my people, he’d regress them into children, freezing them at this age forever.”
Turning the faeries into children? That could explain why they hadn’t seen any others as old as the queen … and why the elfin skeleton they’d seen back at the Oppenheimer School looked so much taller. It must have come from before that all happened. But why would that work? “What would making them younger solve, Your Majesty?” Fort asked.
“They would no longer be powerful enough to stand against the other Old Ones,” the queen said, her rage turning into a sort of sad exhaustion as she fell back into her throne. “He lived up to the letter of our bargain, while dooming my children to never grow older or have children of their own. My people have become frozen in time, ever youthful. But that wasn’t the extent of the curse!”
“What more could there be, Your Majesty?” Rachel asked, speaking slowly, like she was watching every word she said.
“Your kind,” the queen said, the anger reigniting. “After the war that exiled the Old Ones from your planet, my de-aged children tried to reach out to your kind, playing harmless pranks and jokes on them. But somehow, you humans grew angry when you found your own children replaced by changelings.”
Stealing a human child and replacing it with a changeling was a prank? Fort’s eyes widened, but he quickly tried to look sympathetic as the queen glanced at him.
“All children have done that sort of thing, Your Majesty,” Rachel said, giving Jia, Ellora, and Fort a quick, terrified look.
“It got to the point that I had to close my dimension off entirely, lest the humans try to punish my children,” the queen continued as if she hadn’t even heard Rachel. “Now we are cut off from everything, an island in the midst of a void, a people frozen in time. And it’s all the fault of a bad bargain, an untrustworthy Old One.”
“That’s truly evil, Your Majesty,” Rachel said. “Your children seem to be doing well, though?”
“Oh, they’ve learned from my mistake,” the queen said. “Since the Old One betrayed me, I have raised them to never be tricked again. Now my children know every deal must result in their favor, hardening their hearts to the world, all to keep them safe from those who would do us harm.”
Yikes. That explained a lot and almost made Fort feel sorry for the faeries he’d seen out in the marketplace. Not the one who he’d tripped into, but the rest, for sure.
“I have the utmost sympathy for your plight, Your Majesty,” Rachel continued. “What did you mean, though, that you might need a bit of foolishness?”
The queen slowly smiled. “Ah, you bring us back to the matter at hand. I like your thinking, child. Come, I shall give you all the test. If you prove worthy, perhaps we can strike a deal.”
“What … sort of deal, Your Majesty?” Rachel asked, and Fort could see her shake slightly.
“The kind that lets you leave Avalon before you die of old age,” the queen said as the destroyed throne room began to re-form around them, with the cracks in the floor pushing back together, and the walls slowly uncrumbling. But even as it restored itself, the room faded around them, replaced by a cliff at the edge of a forest. A river ran over the edge nearby, creating what sounded like a very high waterfall.
Now finding himself on the grassy ground, Fort picked himself up to join Jia, Rachel, and Ellora, feeling a tiny bit better standing beside his friends. The trees in the forest behind them grew so closely together that it was hard to see more than a few feet inside it, and there was no telling what they’d find inside if they ran. As for the cliff, from where they stood, they couldn’t see the other side, but the sky above it was a deep, beautiful blue.
Still, it was odd not to be able to see what lay beyond the cliff. Fort took a few steps closer, then froze in place as he looked over the edge.
It wasn’t a cliff, at least not the way he’d been thinking. There was no other side, and nothing beneath them. The water falling over the side just fell into nothingness, down so far that Fort had to back away to keep from getting dizzy.
This wasn’t a cliff: it was an edge. And from what Fort could tell, there was nothing at all below.
… Well, the queen h
ad said Avalon was an island in the middle of a void. Fort quickly backed away, not taking any chances.
“Not many of your kind have been to the brink of the island of Avalon,” the queen told them, standing between six large, upright rocks that almost reminded Fort of Stonehenge. “I would not venture much farther if I were you, humans, as if you fall, you will never land, and will slowly die of thirst and starvation as you tumble for all of eternity.”
“That’s good advice, Your Majesty,” Rachel said to her, giving the others a wide-eyed look as Fort took another, very large step away from the edge.
The queen acknowledged Rachel with a nod. “These mark the graves of the six Artorigios, brave humans who ignored my ban on humans and came to Avalon in search of gifts, treasure that only I could grant them. One came for power, a Welsh general, to save his land from the invading Saxons.” She put a hand on one of the stones, and the same writing they’d seen in the tomb below Glastonbury Tor began to glow on it.
“Another, a Roman soldier, came in search of truth, to better know himself,” she continued, and a second stone lit up. “A third wished for the world, a fourth to learn the minds of humankind, and the fifth to live forever.” The others all showed the same language in turn, until she moved to the center and laid her hands on the sixth stone, the final one, right in the middle of the others.
“But it was the sixth, the final Artorigios, the Pendragon, who came closest to fulfilling his debt to me. And yet, he still failed, just like the rest.”
“What did he wish for, Your Majesty?” Fort asked.
“Peace,” she said, staring at the memorial. “And to get it, he, like the rest, was willing to give me anything I asked for. And yet, all failed to meet their end of the bargain.” She turned around and gestured at the ground before them. The earth beneath their feet began to rumble, and Jia and Rachel held each other to keep from falling over. Fort almost did fall, but Ellora reached out and caught him just before he did, and he gave her a quick, thankful look: They were way too close to the edge of the world to want to accidentally tumble over it.
