Opal

a novella

Fire

He was tall and as pale as the trees burned by cold and wind, blocking my view of the whitewashed sun above us in the winter sky. He led me away from the great snowy hillock that was my home, providing little warmth and few words. His face twisted strangely as he told me not to look back. I wasn’t used to a face like his, changing as a land of snow is blown about by wind and reformed. My mother’s face never changed. She covered me in thick down, fed me meals from her own stomach, and sheltered me with her wings. That was all I understood. I shivered without her, and my belly ached. I tried to flap my wings but the useless, heavy bones fell to my sides. I felt naked. The tree-like creature said he clothed me, but my feathers were gone and those strange, colored skins he draped over me offered little comfort. Nor was I used to my new legs. For a long time I hobbled and our journey was slow.

I never knew how I could understand him, just that I always had. He was there with my mother even before I was. She had told me so with a low, guttural purr of ease when he was near. Sometimes he would cling to her feathers as snow or whistle past us as a north wind. I had seen him in the strange walking-tree form before, but not often. And now my own body took that ungainly shape as well. I asked if he was my father, not that I cared for one. No, he told me, but he was taking me to him. I wasn’t sure I wanted to go, but I knew not how to return to the shape I’d been born in. Snow clung to our eyes and the odd, wiry feathers on our heads. I didn’t know what I looked like without looking at him. I didn’t know who I was, but he seemed to. So I followed him, bending my limbs the wrong way and folding the wingless stumps around my strange body for warmth.

Stone

My father was King, and took his authority to extremes. I admired him despite myself, his strong features etched in bronze skin, his dark gray eyes deep-set and as cold and fathomless as the sea. His mind was a strong and straight arrow, pursuing life with a poison-tipped will. As a boy, I marked time by his long absences and sudden returns. When at home, he would tear through the keep, wild-eyed and roaring like a caged animal, and I would tremble as a bird in a storm. Mother would send me away with my nurse, keeping herself between us. It killed her in the end; his endless wars, his orderly indifference, his tyranny even at home in his mad pursuit of power. Though I, too, helped to sever her life short. They say she ceased to speak after I left. For at last my father discovered me growing into a man and set me in his sights. I knew I could never be what he wanted; a younger image of his mirror’s reflection. Nor could I bear to marry a foreign princess who might have had a heart akin to his. So began my solitary explorations of the forest, dreaming of the day I would walk away into its leafy embrace and disappear.

Perhaps I was also searching for the truth behind my mother’s tales. Fairy tales, some straight out of the annals of classic folklore, some loosed from the tightly wound spindle of her memories, ten, twenty generations old, passed down through the women of her family. Stories of the Fae. Of course I believed them as a boy. I was a young prince who cared nothing for castles nor riches if at the end of the day I could not find my mother’s arms, and her tales. Over time, though, I grew into reason. My mother’s face, bruised with the seal of my father’s massive ring, swam through my dreams as if to prove her every fable wrong. She was the heroine of her own story, the gentle maiden bound to a cruel king, and there would be no happy ending.

Fire

I never had to speak with the tree-creature; he understood my thoughts and spoke in return with his own. He said he was not a walking tree, but a man. He said he changed me into my rightful form.

My rightful form? I pleaded with my eyes, how could that be?

He took my fragile thought, the perfect white egg from which I’d hatched, and crushed it with new words, “You were human before birth.” I thrust at him the memory of mother; her eyes like the centers of pasque flowers, her beetle-black beak, her white plumage soft as a fog-bathed moon, her talons dripping with blood for me. This he handled more carefully. “She was your mother, and always will be. But she was more. She was what she wanted to be. And when she left with you, she was a beautiful snowy owl, so that is what you became.”

But where did we leave from and why? Why wasn’t my father with her so that she wouldn’t have to hunt so endlessly until her death? Where was he? But for these questions, I only got an answer I couldn’t accept; he was a man, he could not come. Wasn’t this tree-creature a man as well? And he had been with my mother always.

As we fell in elevation the wind held back, allowing the sun to warm my thin skin. I wanted to stop. The world was getting stranger with every step and I missed the familiar cold, even though my new form was ill-suited to it. My companion waited for me patiently. He knew how little I understood. There was something in his eyes he wouldn’t yet explain. So I turned away, standing alone and broken at the foot of a mountain as the last of the snow blew into my eyes, melting into tears.

Stone

I rode beside my father after our last hunt together. My cheek swelled so that my right eye was forced nearly closed and a stream of blood pinched and prickled as it dried. Though he was on my blind side I could almost feel him recoiling from me. I couldn’t help the crooked, idiotic smile that sent a bolt of brilliant pain through my eye. It seemed his violence that day had finally broken my years of silence, and the shock of it, the white face he turned away from my own emboldened, bloody stare, was worth the pain.

Hunting with my father was an unconventional and miserable event. Rather than hounds or a huntsman, my father sent young boys out to chase animals in our direction, while we stood waiting for a mother boar, a stag, a brilliantly plumed pheasant or a fox or two. Then he’d thrust the bow into my arms. The boys were sons of servants, their clothes ragged and ribs showing. They’d stand there panting, half-heartedly circling the prey to keep the animal within shot, waiting for us to claim the meat they would likely never taste. They cringed with fear of a missed shot; an arrow landing in their own flesh instead. I would see within their hollow eyes their large families struggling to get by, hoping for a single rabbit in a trap once a moon, living on berries, beans and prayers the rest of the year. The animals, too, seemed harrowed and starving, just hoping to make an escape once more to feed their young. And what did we need them for? Once, I shot a fox through the heart, and offered it to the thinnest boy, only a year or two younger than myself at the time. My father laughed. “We don’t hunt for servants! And who would eat a fox with a pelt as pretty as this? No, this will be the first of a hall full of mounts for you, boy.” From then on the damned thing hung in morbid display behind my chair in the dining hall, watching me eat the flesh of others. I could feel those marble eyes upon me, waiting to see my own flesh rot away someday. The rest of the corpses watched my father. So much the better. Let death peer at him and not I.

For a few years after that I was able to get away with being a horrible shot. How could he blame a fellow for trying and missing? But it soon became apparent that I had no heart for killing. It wasn’t hunting that bothered me. I enjoyed hawking; bringing a fresh rabbit to the kitchen maids now and again, or slipping one to the servants if I could get away with it. My father, however, pursued every breathing beast in our woods to the point of half-starving the people, even in outlying lands, while decorating the stones of our keep with precious mounts and skins. I had no desire to further contribute to his collection.

That day, I knew by his intense focus on me that I could not feign a missed shot, so I simply refused. My father’s face swelled with blood as sweat flies swarmed around his curling hair like a halo. “You will hunt, or you will not come home with me.” I knew better than his empty threat. All that morning servants had been aflutter with preparation for the Lady Henbane, another prospective bride to accompany me at dinner. Nothing would keep my father from bringing me home to her, not even his temper. But apparently he couldn’t care if I appeared ugly at the table, for he struck me hard with his ring out when I attempted to pass the bow back. One of the hunting party gasped, and the noble beside me had been sprayed with a bit of my blood. My head hummed as though invaded by a swarm of bees, but I knew better than to show weakness. A cold stare despite my wobbling gait and my father backed away, though not before I caught notice of a strange shine in his eyes. Regret? No, I watched his leg tremble as he mounted all too quickly; it was fear. I spoke at last. “You’ll find agony, father, but not from me. It will come in due course for every cruel hand you’ve laid upon my mother.”

We rode home in silence. I could hear the rattle of dry leaves on the cobblestone path like rumorous tongues, whispering of the bitter winter to come. I sucked in the crisp air, let it burn my lungs before loosing it, and smiled a lopsided smile when I saw my mother waiting for us. I could feel fresh blood flow along a path to my jaw. She came running. “A small hunting accident,” my father coughed out before she could ask. My mother turned her back to him, her eyes glistening as she appraised me. She knew the look of his seal engraved in flesh. No, I couldn’t let my mother weep for me as well; she’d suffered enough. I would have to disappear.

Fire

We crossed the high prairie where my constant companion pointed out scattered farmers leading their animals to graze. I watched a swift fly in sharp angles through the maze of stone walls dividing the land. “Men don’t often share well,” he informed me.

Even though the land is ancient and cannot be owned by anyone?

My strange leader laughed. “Try telling them that.” He had explained much along our journey so far, including that he had certain powers—magic, some called it. He said most men and women lived more ordinary lives, such as farmers or seamstresses, and did not change their shape as he did. My father was one such ordinary man, though he was called king, and so had more power than most. I asked what my companion was called and he uttered an odd, guttural sound.

What is a dugald?

His eyes danced with laughter. “My name.”

A name just for you? Do I have one as well?

Dugald rubbed his fingers along the beak that was not a beak. “I’m sure she meant to give you one, but I don’t know it.”

I swallowed that, though it stuck on the way down and my vision blurred for a moment. My father. His name is King?

“No, that is his title, his occupation. It’s the source of his power. It’s a strange thing, child. Don’t ask me to explain it. When it comes to men and their oddities, I know as little as you.”

But you are one.

He didn’t bother to answer that. I couldn’t understand the difference between kingly powers and shape-shifting powers, except that Dugald’s magic gave a more immediate result. I didn’t care for either. I still wanted to be an owl; I longed for flight. I was too young an owlet to try before Dugald took my life away.

“I am giving you a second life, young one. And you may choose to resume the first later if you wish.”

I? I have some power? He built a wall of snow behind which he hid his thoughts. Even in this land of flower-studded meadows, Dugald carried the snow. My unanswered questions often came back in this way, as blizzards that left me blind.

“We’ll talk of that later. For now, you must begin to speak.”

I have been, I challenged. Have we not communicated through all our long journey?

“Not in the standard way. If you want a chance at this life as a woman, you must learn to speak with others.”

But perhaps I didn’t. Being an owl was simple. It was survival—something you could thrust your whole mind and body into without regret. This personhood was complicated. There were choices that led only to more choices, and this backward way of thinking, as if every step forward depended on the last mile you walked. An owl thinks only: fly, hunt, breed, live. People think, and wonder, and dream, and speak of it all. What end did that come to? Dugald’s stories of human existence exhausted me.

“You must try,” he repeated, and I could tell from the green fire in his eyes that he was not going to let this go. I stopped my heavy steps and opened my mouth, letting the cry of a hungry owlet pour out of me. It was, of course, strangely deformed by my human vocal cords. “There,” I huffed with satisfaction. “I tried and I can’t.” But Dugald was smiling with much approval, and laughing by the time I realized I’d spoken aloud.

Stone

Aerin shifted his weight from one heavily taloned foot to the other, tearing holes in my cloak as I walked swiftly through the woods. I’d left my horse in the open field, sent him off to nip at clover and make a slow way back to the stables. I hoped he’d find much to eat and give me time to travel before the guards found his empty saddle and someone began to miss me. The hawk on my shoulder shuddered as sunlight bled away from the dense forest and left us in cool shade. It was not for chill or wariness that his lean muscles quivered, but for the sights and sounds of the forest; he was aching to hunt. Yet I could not free him so close to home, for he would surely be recognized in the skies. Instead I occupied him with scraps of dried meat from my pouch, already diminishing our supply.

As the daylight hours rode steadily west and we sank farther into deep pockets of wilderness, I began to breathe more easily. The land was marked with strange pockmarks of sunken earth where the limestone below had been worn away. Upon exploring these depressions, I found one that opened into a cool underground shelter. I set Aerin free to hunt and busied myself in the last light with one of the massive books that had been made especially for me by the castle illuminator. It was a collection of my mother’s stories, and I was deep within a tale of a lost land of Fae when Aerin dropped a rabbit at my feet. As I stared into the rabbit’s lifeless eye, my head still full of my mother’s voice, I remembered a tale she told me long ago of a princess who’d been turned into a snow hare. The hare had blood-red eyes and in the summer her coat turned crimson rather than brown. I stared at the rabbit before me, its coat matted with blood, and passed the meal to Aerin.

Fire

We tramped through thick foliage, eyes wide in the deep shade. I was surprised by how densely green and rich with life the world could be. Dugald was searching for a path, his eyes scanning the undergrowth. We found it eventually, buried, unused, but surer than the deer trails that led to nowhere. This led to a cottage, small and dilapidated. The door opened on a woman, just as small and just as decrepit, her apron full of various roots, freshly pulled from the meager garden. I felt suddenly afraid as her black eyes searched my own. “The child?”

Dugald nodded.

Her expression changed as she gazed upon me. Again, I was mystified by the language that passed through a single look, those subtle movements of features on the bare landscape of a face. Dugald told me my own was most expressive, most telling. I wore emotions more colorful than the red berries we ate for breakfast. I didn’t believe him, but he said the woman would have a mirror I could look in.

What is a mirror? I asked.

“Glass.”

What is glass?

“It is… like a pool of water, hardened, solid. It gives a perfect reflection.”

I was not interested in the picture this mirror would show. What interested me more were the words the woman could share—stories of my mother. And she had something much more precious in her possession than any shard of glass. She had a diary. Dugald explained it was another way to speak, without sound or expression. It was a thing of symbols, like tracks in the snow that, when read correctly, told a story. What story does this diary tell, I wondered, and why is it important? Don’t the tracks wear away over time? Are the animals in this story even still alive?

His smile was wrapped around something hidden. “Some of them, yes,” he said. “Some not.” Written words, he told me, were forever. Stories stretched beyond death, like time itself, ever changing us, but themselves, unchanged. And this particular story was trapped within a leather-bound bundle the old woman stroked with wrinkled, too-soft claws and handed to me. It was the story of my mother. She had written down her memories for me. It was her voice, her echo in the wind, kept from death, sheltered from time in this small packet of animal skin. The diary was heavy in my hands.

Stone

I don’t know what came over me. Aerin spent more and more time in the forest as I spent entire days holed up with the book. He stopped bringing me prey. He would simply perch just outside my cave and peer in, his head cocked as if he was unsure it was really his old friend he saw, or if the starving, half-crazed human who poured over the leaves of a dead tree all this time was some mad creature he’d never before encountered.

Somewhere buried in the book’s bulk was the story I was looking for, the story of the pale child, buried alive and restored to the earth only to spend her remaining years as a hare. After remembering the tale, I had dreamt of it, and of my mother. She had laughed when, as a boy, I’d wept as she finished the tale. It was one of the few times I felt angry with her. I couldn’t see anything humorous about the story with its abrupt ending, the poor girl cursed to live as a rabbit in the woods, alone and unknown forever after. My mother looked away, but I saw the tears in her eyes as she said, so quietly, “Her fate was not so bad. As a girl I often wished to be so free…” Now I understood, of course. Animals are blessed in many ways. Love, for them, is simply survival and the survival of their offspring. Their deaths are often quick; their enemies have specialized in merciful killing in order to save themselves the hardship of a struggle. Even the deer fleeing for its life must find joy in its bursting leap, its muscles finely strung, awaiting an opportunity for the body to play for its life. What my mother suffered was a piercing, endless death. Every breath left her gasping, every hope drove the barbs deeper in. Had I found the White Hare in this forest, or any other, I would have liked to ask her if she still suffered. She had lost so much in the story before becoming a hare. Did she keep her memories? Or did a berry on a bush, a scent on the breeze, a track in the snow, have more meaning to her now than anything she’d experienced before? I wanted to know. And I wished to find the wizard that changed her, if she truly was hare-brained and happy. I would ask him to pay a visit to my poor mother.

Fire

Dugald and the woman, who called herself Marri, took on the painstaking job of teaching me to read. Marri watched me intently, her dark gaze always upon me, even with her back turned to me. Once, she interrupted my stumbling tongue to ask if I remembered her, my mother.

I looked up from the tome in my lap and nodded. “She is all I can think of.”

“But an owl. That is what I see when her memory burns in your eyes.”

“That is what she was.”

Marri made a sound like stones ground together. “She told you nothing.”

I straightened my spine and tried to look at her out of the dispassionate eyes of an owl. “She told me warmth. She told me shelter. She told me weariness after a hunt. She told me listening, and watching, and blood. She told me love.” It was the first time Marri’s mouth curved upward in the expression of approval I knew from Dugald. She turned away, pouring her attention over the vegetables on the table that was little more than a slice of tree, rough bark still ringing its core.

“Have you any idea how old you are?” she asked at last.

I knew what age was, but I knew also that the cold world of a white owl defined it in different stages than those of men. I said what I knew, “I was approaching the days of walking from the nest. I could not yet fly, I still needed Mother for food, but I was soon to wander.”

Marri nodded as if she understood. “You look to be that in-between age, not a child but not a woman. I’d guess you to be about thirteen or fourteen. Your father will be surprised. It has been years, but not quite that many.” We talked a bit about time in the human world; the slow tick of days, months, seasons and years. Then Marri stood abruptly, waving a wrinkled hand at the unturned pages in my lap. I began once more to stumble over the sounds and meanings of those strange black scratchings.

My head spun by the end of every day, and I had to take many breaks, simply to walk in the woods or sit alone in the garden and listen to birdsong. Their voices calmed me, each different bird with its own language of trills, peeps, squawks or coos. Some sang incredibly intricate songs, a tapestry of ancestral memories the individual varied only in the slightest way, and yet, even with those, so few meanings were communicated. Most said the same thing, in different voices: “There is danger!” or “Choose me as your mate, see what I can provide,” or “Mother help, I’m scared or lost or empty with hunger.” This last I knew well, of course. Its rasping squeak was still foremost in my mind. Mother, please return. Mother, please find me! Mother, I am empty without you.

Despite the difficulty, I was determined. I would learn this written word, these scribbled songs with their strange meanings, many of which spoke of things I’d yet to see or understand. I would put all of my energy into it because once, long ago, my mother sat closed within stone, her hand resting upon her swollen belly (Marri explained this to me), thinking of me and my future, and struggled to put these words down. I had always devoured whatever she brought to me, whether old or fresh, dry or juicy. Not all went down easily, but every bit was important to my survival, and every bit took a piece of her life to acquire. I would swallow her written song as well, those tracks in parchment the color of old, soiled snow from that distant time. Whatever strange love she poured out for me with the last of her life, I would know it, and live.

Stone

At last we moved on. I watched where the sun rose and from there turned north. Perhaps we would find the Dark Wood, where it was rumored the last of the Fae still lived. Of course I knew this as myth and fairy tale, yet where else would I go? We had come from the west, and to the east was our enemy’s kingdom, where I would surely be recognized. To the South was a great swatch of wasteland before reaching the sea. I doubt we could have survived it, just Aerin and I. No, we had to keep to the forest, and far from men. I had no desire to be found, not then, not ever. I only wished I’d been able to take my mother, but she would never have made it far. It was as though her broken heart affected the whole of her health and she was as frail as an old woman. I’d left her my ring. I knew she needed no further explanation.

It was some weeks we lived in the forest, traveling ever north, Aerin and I. He stayed true to me though I scrapped his leash and used it for a makeshift belt. I’d grown a bit thinner, though I did begin to eat what he brought me, hare or otherwise. I had long forgotten that tale, of which I couldn’t find in my book. Perhaps it was in some other volume. Or perhaps my mother had dredged it up from memory. I could hardly recall how long it had been since I’d left home, let alone the origins of the fairy tales told in my youth. After a time, I scarcely remembered why we kept north, except that somehow it was important. But more than once I stayed in one place for many days as the weather became bitterly cold. At last, I could see no end to the snow, and no point in traveling farther. I came dangerously close to falling asleep in the white drifts several times, with only the sharp cries of my keen companion to save me. At last, though, not even Aerin could coax me out of the deep bed of snow I’d sunken into. It was so deep, in fact, that as I looked up, it seemed almost that I was sheltered within white walls. Aerin swooped at me, screaming in my ear with worry. “All right,” I sat, looking around myself, relieved to at least be somewhat beneath the wind. “Yes, friend. Maybe this will do after all.” Aerin sat stoically on the highest stable jut of a large fallen branch only a hand-breadth away. He swiveled his head to the side, turning his sharp eyes away from me, as though he’d done with me at last. I couldn’t help laughing, and continued to snort and shake with delirious hilarity at odd moments as I set to work on the snowy hole I’d sunken into. The snow was fresh and soft, so it was an easy thing to dig down a little deeper and elongate my depression. What was difficult was attempting to get out again. It was like the snow seraphs I made as a child. Once you made the perfect little angel, how did you get up again without ruining it? I didn’t want to collapse the unstable walls of my snow shelter, so instead I slid down from the foot of it, and stood up a ways away, shaking the snow out of my clothes. Next I went to work gathering pine boughs. Larger branches I stuck into the snow on either side of my depression so that they curved upwards like wooden ribs and met above. Around these I packed in smaller and smaller boughs and branches, then strips of bark and, at last, packed the whole outside solid with snow. Now the only way in was through the hole in the bottom where I’d first sneaked out. It was a narrow space, and fast becoming slick as I slid in and out again and again in order to bring in small pine boughs to line my bed. Once I felt a slight shift when the snow settled just as I was half out of the hole. I waited for a tense moment, then startled several crows with a wild laugh. Wouldn’t that be the perfect end? My father’s men would find me at long last, my rear end hanging out of a mound of snow, drawers flapping like a tattered flag in the wind. Aerin dropped from the sky and landed neatly on his heavy perch, his eyes searing into mine as though searching for a last scrap of sanity. I could only laugh all the harder.

As the blush of sunset deepened, I dragged my things into the tiny shelter. I had been scraping clean and saving all the furs from the prey Aerin had brought me along our journey. There was enough not only for coverings for my boots and a warm blanket sewn carefully together with the tough thread I’d taken from my mother’s stores, but also a covering for the little hole that served as my door. As I packed the snow around it to hold it tight, the world suddenly darkened. Aerin was shut out and I had no light to read by. I settled in, gnawing on ideas as my stomach snarled and twisted. If I survived until morning, I could dig a fire pit nearby and roast whatever Aerin startled up.

Just as my shivering subsided and I began to grow drowsy while the air around me warmed, a single icy drop fell upon my nose. The snow packed into my roof was thawing. I turned on my side and fell into a dream of spring—of hacking at small trees with my axe and building a real shelter; something with windows, above ground, and much, much larger. I could construct a chair and table, even a simple bed. I’d lay slabs of wood over the floor and even fashion for myself a broom. Who said a prince couldn’t survive alone in the woods? If he only knew, my father might be proud for once of his bookish, soft-hearted son.

I awoke several times that night, shivering in my tomb as tears of ice fell on me. I never knew if the visions pressing upon my mind were dreams or hallucinations, but I saw her in them; the girl awake in her coffin, blinking as the clear lid of ice melted and rained down upon her pale face.

Fire

Marri was a far better teacher than Dugald and had mostly taken over my lessons. After weeks of putting sounds to symbols and meanings to sounds, then stringing those together as notes in a song, I could read mostly on my own. I went to her now and again with an odd word or a notion that was new to me, but most of the few books in her little house I could read quite well. After struggling through her recipe books, mushroom guides and aged volumes of poetry she said I was ready to read my mother’s diary. It was important to her that I read it myself because she, nor anyone else, had laid eyes upon my mother’s words; they were meant for me alone. So I tucked the heavy journal under one arm and followed the dark between trees until I was deep within the shadowy dreams of a slumbering wood. Turning over the parchment I saw that much of it was left untouched. My eyes burned as I thought of all the emptiness she’d left me; empty fields of snow and sky, empty parchment soft and worn against my fingers. At last, I began to read:

“I am not sure of the day, nor even the year. I struggle to remain in my true form, when I could so easily be small and compact, adorned with thick feathers. I could slip through the open window and spread white wings. I could claim the sky. The snow would be a welcome shelter. My every bone aches with worry for you. Every heartbeat is hurried, hunting for the right time to hide away with you. Meanwhile I remain as this heavy, long-limbed creature, caged in stone and shivering, with one purpose—to write. I must write to you, my child, now, so that one day, if you return here in your rightful form, you will know our story.

I wanted you to know her, my Bari, as I did, so I opened her diary for the first time this morning. It is now late and still I struggle to form words on a page as I stare through a lens of tears. I hope that her diary will be here for you to read as well, but as I am unable to protect it with the same magic that preserves these words, I will retell much of it here.

Her crowning is our very beginning. She was young, pretty, shy and hopeful. She had been chosen to marry the King of Mount Emmout, and they had withheld all the important details. She thought her mother and father wept with tears of joy during the elegant, yet surprisingly simple ceremony. Later she would know they had mourned for her, for the broken future her marriage held. Quickly, she was swept away from the cheering nobles, from her weeping parents and the multitude of applauding strangers. The iron gates were lowered, the shutters snapped closed with an echoing crack in every room, and the servants ushered away. Her king did not take her to his bedchamber, as she had nervously expected, but sat her down in the library, doors sealed behind them. She shivered with sudden apprehension as the candle he lit flicked light across the river of tears carved into his troubled face. She does not write his exact words, and I often try to imagine them. I am sure he felt her loss. He was, after all, a good man, and a man who knew love.

Once the circumstances were laid out before her, the new queen resolved to be, if not a true wife, at least a friend and servant to her king. She was queen regardless of his past and would live up to the standard she had set for herself in every way.

In the beginning, she was kept busy with learning, entertaining, and travel. A queen can be as involved and industrious as she chooses, and dear Bari threw her whole self into it. In many ways, she felt freed from the confines of a traditional marriage. Hadn’t she always wanted to travel? Hadn’t she wished to make her own decisions, to be in control of her own life and to learn the things so often restricted from women? But as the first year of their marriage passed, she could feel the sharp edge of loneliness piercing through her careful armor. When she was honest with herself, she admitted she had also longed for, and even expected, love. And then, one day, with the door open to the library where she poured over an illuminated historical manuscript, she overheard a sudden gasp from the gossiping maids, and quieted her thoughts to listen. Eolande, the king’s first and true wife, the only woman he loved, whom all his subjects assumed either dead or abandoned in the Dark Wood, was pregnant. Her health had been failing as she was kept hidden in a secret passage of the castle and none had expected her to live much longer. The king had revealed Eolande’s existence to Bari on their wedding day. Now the frail woman was with child. Would she survive the pregnancy? Would the child? But it wasn’t such bad news, really. Bari wished only for the king’s happiness, and a child would surely be a blessing. What was it, then, that brought her to sudden tears? She couldn’t be jealous, she hardly knew her husband, only seeing him when circumstance demanded it. Though he was always kind to her, he was distant. No, Bari suddenly realized what it was that made her heart ache. It was the child. She, herself, would never be a mother.

That is what she thought, at least. How could she have known? But that child, that unexpected wonder who few thought would be born alive, was me, and I had more in store for Bari than heart ache, though that was surely my first gift to her. I must stop for the night. My grief is ruining the ink.”

Stone

Despite my shelter I was always bitterly cold. I began to wonder why I’d traveled so far north. To the Fae, I recalled, after reading through my book again, but why? How could I call to them, and why would they want me? The Fae were known as the Spirits of the Wood because they were in tune with every cycle and stage of the earth. Some said they could hear the trees speak, some that their own spirits were bound with animals, and that if too much of the wilds were wasted away, the Fae would eventually disappear. Men were also out to cut them down. Fae had powers a mortal man could never fathom. They understood the elements, the nature of things; they could start a fire with thought or bring down rain from the heavens with their own tears. Though I never heard tell of them using their powers for the sake of harming another, men feared them. So they began to hunt them. The Fae headed north into the coldest forests, places few men could survive. But could the Fae? I knew they had existed once, but now? Perhaps the only Fae left were those in the tales of my book or my mother’s own memory.

Those were perhaps the only living beings my father left alone. He started wars and hunted men, and slaughtered every creature in his wood, but he never sought the Fae. It was certainly not compassion, nor wisdom, nor even indifference that kept him from their trail. Indeed, when couriers spoke of other kings adorned with the strange Fae jewelry after their men hunted down a band of them, my father would have the courier banished. His men were fast to learn what not to speak of. I think, in fact, he feared the Fae, though I couldn’t understand why. Many feared them, yes, but my father? He who plunged a spear into the belly of a giant bear as it reared up before him? He who threw himself into battle dressed as a common knight, simply because, he said, he loved to fight? I asked him once about the Fae. He cuffed me, of course, and he said, “They don’t exist, boy, don’t be such a damned fool.” But he seemed the only one to think they were naught but myth. I remembered how he looked at me after hitting me that last time. I learned then that he could not accept that which he feared.

So it was fitting that I should disappear into the Dark Wood and seek the Fae. But how could I find a people who so feared my own? I felt a fool for it, but I found myself searching the sharp eyes of crows, listening for direction in the chirp of a chickadee, piecing the snow into falling words. My eyes would linger deep within the flames of my fires, seeing a flash of a face, fingers entwined with the lifting smoke, a single, golden eye that blinked and left me blind. I wondered what would become of me if I never found them. I decided I would seal myself up in my snow-shelter to sleep the sleep of death rather than return to my father. I was done with him, with all my fellow man.

Fire

I clung to my mother’s words, desperate to grasp their meaning as I fell through her memories. Of course Marri wouldn’t allow me to ask her anything about Mother’s diary. If she suspected it, she would shush me and I’d scarcely see her for the rest of the day. So I began to ask general questions, like how did kings and queens come to power, how much power did they have, what are the rules of marriage, and how does one become a mother? She laughed at the last question, saying only, “By a blessing.”

Was I a blessing to my mother? I often lapsed back into speaking through my thoughts, as I’d done with Dugald, but Marri seemed to hear them just fine. That made me wonder, because Dugald had said most people couldn’t hear thoughts unless they had some kind of powers. What magic did Marri have in her, and who was she after all? These questions she would avoid with a stern look. She explained how everyone has their secrets and it isn’t kind to pry. But don’t you know all there is to know about me? She turned away my thought and filled my head with a variety of mushrooms and herbs she wished to have for her stew, their dense heads and spicy aromas overtaking my senses.

Later Dugald said that he hadn’t told her everything. She didn’t know, for example, that I’d been an owlet and knew nothing of my human form when he’d taken me away. She knew what she needed to know—that Eira was dead, that I was her daughter, that he had brought me from a far off place and that I had much to learn. But why not tell her everything? I saw a flutter of white as he reminded me of his blizzards of ignorance. “Because,” he said, “it makes a person of power too vulnerable. You are as much a sorceress as I am a wizard, though you have hardly tapped that tree. And so is Marri. We keep certain things to ourselves, for our own protection as much as to protect each other. If we knew every secret, our enemies would only multiply.” I didn’t understand about his reference to tapping trees or what enemies were (though I could tell by the hardness of his eyes they were something to be avoided), yet I could well imagine vulnerability. That was a feeling I knew all too well since my mother’s death.

Just as I was beginning to grasp the first entry my mother had written, I read on and wondered. My questions seemed to propagate like Marri’s mushrooms in the rich, deep soil of my mother’s words:

“How can I explain what we are? I wonder, will you know, by the time you read this? Will I be there to tell you? Perhaps not, so I shall try to explain it here, though I myself cannot fathom the remote people we have descended from.

First, I should tell you why my mother, Eolande, lived in secret within the castle in that land of men. My father had journeyed into the Dark Wood only once, when rumors were escalating that the Fae were planning some sort of attack on the people of Mount Emmout. Though seen less and less often, their magic is deep and powerful; they are feared with good reason, though also with much misunderstanding. I know little of the source of this speculation about an uprising, but I know that my father, as king, was ever pressured into responding to the peoples’ concerns. He traveled alone to the Dark Wood, only planning to stay a single day and night, to take council with the nearest tribe of Fae and find out their intentions. He was startled to be met at the edge of the wood by a daughter of their queen. She was alone, and though she showed him all around their kingdom in the Dark Wood, he never saw anyone but the young princess. They spoke long into the night, and she convinced him that her people wanted nothing to do with his, that they in fact were retreating farther and deeper into the woods to avoid contact with his spreading kingdom. My father was immediately satisfied, and yet, he asked many questions, if only to keep her talking. She fascinated him with her thick curtain of black hair, her starlit eyes and small figure. She made him laugh, reassured him, and even revealed to him treasures from their stores. Theirs were sacred objects made from feathers, bone, pelt and stone. None were worth even the smallest ring of gold on his finger, and yet, he saw that they held more value than his entire kingdom. They held stories of her people, they were ancient, and some, magic. He promised to leave her forest and her people in peace, and she, in turn, promised herself to him, for by the time the night was through, they had fallen in love.

Soon after they wed in the forest, the queen and several of her bands in attendance. My father, knowing Eolande would not fare well outside of her wood, nor be accepted by his people, built a small stone cottage on the border between their lands where they often stayed together. Some were certain he meant to create peace by the marriage, and some assumed he was even planning to strategically gain a stronghold in the Kingdom of Fae, while others guessed he had been cast under a spell by her people, or by Eolande herself, and a few thought he’d merely gone insane. None imagined that he simply loved her, and she him. Finally, those who wondered if he sought to claim a stronghold within that other kingdom, or even sought a truce with the Fae, began to doubt him, and his people called for action. He was looking less like a king, and more like a traitor, or perhaps a prisoner of the Fae. His noblemen demanded that he abandon Eolande and return to his castle at once. One thing I know I inherited from my father was his stubborn will. In fact I believe it’s been told that he actually laughed at the demand. This, of course, did not go over well, and he was on the verge of being overthrown, killed and replaced, when he finally came to an agreement with his people. He would return to his castle, never again to venture into the Dark Wood and would continue to protect them from foreign threats so long as Eolande and her people were left alone, to live freely as they always had in the Dark Wood. And so it went, for a while, until some suspected that he was still sneaking off to that stone cottage on the doorstep to the Dark Wood. Indeed, I’m sure he was. The demand was made that the king remarry. Fearing for Eolande’s safety, he consented, allowing his people to vote and choose his ‘fortunate’ bride. The young, sheltered Bari was decided upon and the wedding was in fast order. Only the king, Eolande herself, Bari and a handful of trusted servants knew that Eolande was hidden within the castle’s very walls. She didn’t fare well there, of course, as Fae are meant to live in the wild, to be in constant contact with air and earth, water and sun, and in commune with trees and living creatures, not holed up in stone cells, however elaborate they may be. For the few servants who knew the fearful secret, it was almost a relief that Eolande seemed at the close of her life. And then she was blessed with a child.

I certainly threw a hitch in things. Now the king had not only to hide my mother, but me as well, for I was born alive and healthy, my screams piercing the night. After a month spent in isolation with my mother and me, seeing that I was healthy but that my mother grew frailer by the day, my father arranged a meeting with poor Bari. By this time, Bari was fighting a deep gloom. She had lost interest in many activities and ceased to travel. She sat before the king patiently as he struggled to express himself. I think she must have made the suggestions audible herself upon understanding his dire situation. Yes, she reassured him, she would keep the secret always. Yes, if Eolande left this life, she would take the child as her own. This was no heavy burden for her. Bari, in fact, had done much pondering, and was ready and willing to become a mother by any means. She already loved me, she told him, even without ever having laid eyes on me. My father wept openly with relief. He couldn’t believe her willingness to help, her kindness in his time of need, when so many would gladly have betrayed him and his little family, and she had received nothing but grief from the situation. She reassured him, then and always, and that was the beginning of their friendship. Suddenly Bari was swept into his world as she visited Eolande and myself, the baby Eira, and became my second mother and a sister to my dying birth mother.

By the time I was four months old, my mother was confined to her bed and rarely awake. The king watched over his beloved in silent vigil and Bari cared for me every moment of the day. Eolande received Bari well, even adored her. She was too weak to entertain jealous thoughts and Bari was a constant source of comfort and devotion to us all. There were even times when my mother asked to speak with Bari alone, and the king overheard their laughter and was relieved. Bari wrote of the day when Eolande made a discovery she had hoped she would never learn. Though dying, Eolande had ample opportunity to observe those around her while she lay quiet and still, and she was very perceptive. As Bari sat beside her on her bed, Eolande smiled knowingly, and stroked her face. “You love him,” she stated simply. Bari was terrified. What could she say? Her face was red from the revelation—there was no denying it. She had in fact fallen in love with my father as she comforted him, watched him gently tend to his infant daughter and dying wife, and reassured him privately after court accusations were hurtled upon him, cracking his stoic character. Bari could think of nothing at all to say, and dropped to her knees beside the bed, her mouth open and quivering. Eolande laughed, as well as she could, and told the poor woman not to be afraid, that she was glad to leave her husband in the arms of a woman who truly loved him, even if he was blind to it. She told Bari what a blessing she had been to all of us, and that she in fact deserved my father’s love more than anyone.

And so it was that the tearful Bari stood beside my father on a high terrace and presented me, five and a half months old, for the kingdom to see. My mother had died, and my father had it announced that Bari had been confined during her pregnancy and my first few months of life due to an illness that threatened us both. It was good that my father had raven black hair, just as my mother and I had, and that Bari was pale from being indoors for months on end, and indeed she and I were truly white enough to look as though we were both recovering still. The people cheered. Everyone believed, and Eolande was forgotten, for a time. It is hard to admit, but I wished, sometimes, that I could forget as well, and truly be Bari’s daughter. She was the only mother I knew, and she meant more to me than anyone. Now that I feel you, my sweet child, kicking in my own womb, I feel a great sadness for my birth mother. I cannot imagine giving you up, surrendering to death. I think it was only Bari, and her great love for us all, that gave my mother enough peace to let go.”

Stone

I glimpsed the White Hare. Aerin had killed a handful of snow hares during our long winter days, but this one I knew to be the one from my mother’s tale. Her eyes were deep red, her body larger than others of her kind, and not only the tips, but the entirety of her ears were black. I knelt, watching her frozen form, her pelt quivering to the fast pace of her heart. She pretended not to exist, wishing to vanish before my eyes, white against white, so I waited. Finally she relaxed a bit, sniffing at the snow-covered earth. I opened my mouth to speak, to whisper something to her, and she bolted.

I forgot the Fae I had been searching for. She was all I wished to find. I would not leave there without knowing her, the White Hare.

Fire

It was as though the sky had thawed above that warm forest, empty of the ice crystals I knew, spilling cold rain upon me instead as I sat, stunned. My great grandmother was Queen of Fae. My grandmother, her daughter, was a Fae who fell in love with a man, a king, and who hid away in his castle and died for it, leaving my infant mother in the care of the king’s new wife. My people are Fae, and men; I am both. So what, or whom, are Fae? When I posed this question to Marri, squatting in the puddles around a patch of rhubarb, she sat back on her heels and rubbed her fingers over her sunken eyes for a long moment. She sighed, and perhaps sobbed. I waited, staring at the mud that darkened the frayed hem of her skirt. She said at last, “But for the half-bloods, they are all but gone.” Her voice fell as my eyes lifted, searching her face, “Now, they are only spirits. We lost so many…” She turned back to her garden and wouldn’t speak to anyone for the rest of the day.

I asked Dugald what I really wanted to know: are Fae men who can turn into birds? He said some of them, yes. Or other animals. They have kindred spirits with the earth; they can access her life more directly. He explained that those with powers are those who have at least a drop of Fae blood. Men, on their own, have no magic. Then I knew that Dugald and Marri were also Fae, at least in part. I wondered if we were of any relation. Fae or otherwise, the old ones seemed to keep many secrets. So I buried myself in the ferns and read on, relying on my mother’s words, pressed along with the fragile ghosts of flowers in her journal, to explain away my questions.

“Bari was honest with me always. Before I was old enough to understand her words she told me about my mother; who she had been, how my father had loved her, how she had died. She ceased all her former activity and went nowhere without me. She even secreted me to my mother’s funeral, dressed in heavy, dark robes, with me bundled underneath. She wrote of that day,

‘My tiny girl slept in my arms, a heavy secret beneath my wrap. I sneaked glances at the Fae who attended the service. They buried Eolande beneath the stone house where she and William first made their lives together. Vines had been trained to crawl over the stones of the house and covered the roof with deep purple flowers as I’d never before seen. Dark petals fell through the mist like heavy, black tears. I wept for her, your mother. I wept for you, too young to understand, to shed your own tears for her. I wept for him as well, though I dared not look at your father at all that day. His grief like rain, his love for her so true, it caused a very selfish hurt in me, one I kept private but which caused me much suffering. And I thought, as I glimpsed the deer skin and rabbit fur she had been wrapped in, how my silk dresses in the castle should all have been hers. How the garnets of my crown were her birthstone, not mine. How the wedding ring of pure gold burned my finger through to the bone. I had taken everything she should have had for herself, and hadn’t meant to! But oh, the most precious thing of all—my sweet child, my new daughter, my Eira… somehow I seemed to feel entitled at least to you. Entitled to the quiet gurgles, the smiles and bubbles of laughter, the fat fingers that entwined themselves so tightly in my mousy hair, so unlike your own. I would not feel guilt for keeping you, for loving you as she surely would have.’

As the service ended, a woman in a rustling robe of rain-wilted leaves approached Bari. Her black hair was swept up and veiled with dew-studded spider webs, her dark eyes lined with age and grief. They glimmered with secrets as distant as the stars. She bobbed her head in respect, then asked in the faintest whisper if she could see the child. She smiled as the blood drained from Bari’s face and reassured her that no one else knew and that she was bound to secrecy, for fear for the child’s life. Then Bari knew who she was: the Queen of the Fae, Eolande’s mother. Bari told me how her hands shook as she tugged back her robes and revealed my plump little face to my grandmother. She told me, with tears in her eyes, how she felt such sadness that I slept, my eyes shut to the mystery of my people, and she bent a finger to stroke me awake, but the queen shook her head. ‘Let her sleep,’ she told her. She said also that I was beautiful. Bari’s heart filled with fear that she would take me, and what could she do? The Queen of the Fae was no one she could argue with, and my own blood after all. But she told Bari, ‘Your people never survive among us. She has her father’s blood in her and should remain with him. I wish I could do more for her.’ She placed a small, white stone upon my forehead and thanked Bari. Bari knew the Queen understood the risk she took by claiming me as her own. She told me, ‘I knew she placed the same trust in me her daughter had. I will do my best to honor her people. I will always be honest with you, my daughter. You have been gifted to me, the most precious gift in the world, a gift I will guard with my life.’ And she did. Oh, my Bari! The only mother I knew, how she suffered for me. How I loved her, and grieve for her still.”

Stone

I found her story at last, enclosed in the heart of the book like a dark secret. I had read through the stories before and after it, and never saw the tale of the White Hare between them. There was magic in that book. Perhaps the illuminator had been part Fae.

The story was just as my mother told it, though I’d forgotten many of the details. The princess was born to a king I recognized by name as one of my father’s many enemies. When the child was still just a girl she fell into a deep sleep and never woke. At last they could not feel her breath, and though the queen pleaded for her life, they began preparing for her burial. The queen, in her grief, requested that the casket be fitted with a glass cover so that she could watch for the fog of breath from the child. Days passed and no one could see any hint of life, so the princess was taken from the keep in her glass covered coffin. No one is sure why, but they buried her in the Dark Wood, far from the castle grounds. Though no one suspected but the queen, the poor girl was indeed buried alive. A wizard, in the form of a falcon, heard the girl calling from her grave and flew to her aid. He took the form of a bear and quickly dug up the coffin, his claws scratching the glass lid. When he opened it, she sat up and gasped in fear at the sight of the bear. The wizard returned to the shape of a man and told her, to her great misery, what had befallen her family during the time she’d spent below ground. The people had attacked their own king, suspecting treason, killing him as well as the two younger daughters. The queen escaped, ran away into the woods and hanged herself from a tree. The poor princess was so grief-stricken she begged the wizard to end her life, but he would not, and instead swore to protect her. To do so, he turned her into the White Hare, her pale skin becoming snow-white fur, her black hair becoming the black tipped ears of the hare. Her eyes, red with grief, remained red as blood in her new form. The wizard was said to have gathered seven forest creatures, putting spells on them to make of them the guardians of the White Hare. The last line of the story says that she still lives a wild and lonely life in the Dark Wood.

It had been over a fortnight since I’d seen her last, so I settled in for a long wait and tethered poor Aerin to his perch beside my shelter.

Fire

My mother’s last entry:

“It was only natural for my father to find himself returning Bari’s affection in time. So it was that the man and woman who were husband and wife in name alone came first to be friends, to trust and rely on one another, and then at last, to fall in love. Together they had two daughters, my two younger sisters. We became a family, sheltered from the violent kingdom my father ruled. We were very close, all of us. Bari loved her own children only as much as she loved me, and even, I think, she worried for me much more. I miss them terribly. My sisters were very young when they took me away. Claire was three, Elisa not even a year. I was seven, and had grown ill. It was true what my grandmother had told Bari: I could not have survived among the Fae. But it was not easy to live in my father’s world, either. I might have thrived, had I been allowed to play and wander outdoors in the sun like other children. But I was so very different. My looks set me apart; it was all too obvious that I carried within me the blood of the Fae. Fae grow uncommonly pale when kept from the sun and our eyes are more than uncommon—they are inhuman. There are no colored irises, but only very large pupils, so that our eyes are simply black, and they shine with an odd light, as if we hold within them constellations of knowledge, secrets, and stories, ancient stories. Indeed, we do. We are more deeply connected to the earth, more animal, and yet more sentient than humans. One look at my eyes and my complexion, and anyone could tell my ancestry. So I was hidden from all but my mother, my Bari, and my sisters and father. There was only one maid my mother trusted to let around me. She became very important to my survival.

I am sick with grief and shaking. It is true what they say: harboring new life causes every emotion to intensify; every funny thought to bring tears of hilarity, every grief to wound as it never has before. I will try again tomorrow to record the greatest tragedy of my life. It is important, and you must know. I fear I will not be in a proper form to tell you when you make your way into this world.”

Marri sat beside me as I watered her garden with my sorrow. So much blank parchment, so much unwritten, unknown. That was the end of it, all I would hear from my mother in her own words, and I felt as though she had died all over again when I closed the book. But Marri brought me another. She said, “This was not written by her, but it might help. It is written about her. A legend, a story of her life, so many details left out and some not quite right, but all the same, it is written in truth.” The heavy volume she slid into my lap was embossed with gold lettering that read, “Stories of Fae and Other Earthly Mysteries.” She thumbed through the yellowing pages of parchment and opened it to a beautifully illuminated tale called The White Hare.

Stone

Without allowing Aerin to hunt, and in the depths of an unrelenting winter with so few tools to my name, I was beginning to starve. It didn’t seem such a bad way to go as my hunger pangs subsided to nausea, and the thought of food at last made me ill. I kept myself refreshed with melted snow and sat in a patch of trees just outside my snow-covered shelter, always waiting for a mound of white to separate itself from the snow pack. She had returned several times, staring with her red eyes. Each time she disappeared and I went to inspect the place, I’d find some small, dead creature; a songbird, a mouse, a mole. Was she hunting for me? The meat I gave to Aerin, to keep him in good health and make up for his imprisonment. I ate nothing but the winter berries I saw her plucking from the brittle shrubs, or fern fronds budding up from the mud. Spring was coming on at last. The cold was no less though, and I did not expect to make it till warmer weather settled in.

Fire

Marri gave me something else, something I’d forgotten entirely, when I asked what Fae looked like. She gave me her mirror. Indeed my eyes were frightful, black as night and shimmering; colorless, but with too much light. I’d never taken much notice before, but Dugald’s and Marri’s were the same. I missed my mother’s amber owl eyes, but realized her woman’s eyes must have looked as mine did. I touched my black hair, thick as a pelt and long. I wondered how much I resembled her.

Dugald, too, read the tale of the White Hare. He’d heard tell of it, but hadn’t read it for himself. He huffed at the mention of the magic done by the wizard, who I knew to be him. He shut the book with a crack and told me to ready myself. Why?

“Because you have learned all you need to here. It is time we move on.” I knew where he meant to take me, as we’d discussed it before, but there was no mention of a prince in the tale, nor in my mother’s diary. I had no knowledge of my father, of who or what he was, other than king. Just like the people of my grandfather’s kingdom, I was afraid of what I couldn’t imagine.

Stone

She began to appear more often, sometimes several times a day. I thought I was hallucinating, but at last she came directly up to me and collapsed at my feet. She lay still, though she shivered and panted with fear as I ran my trembling hand over her side. She didn’t seem to be injured, nor too thin. I couldn’t understand her behavior, and it frightened me, so I clapped my hands and yelled for her to shoo. She startled to her feet but stood still and staring, her ears pinned back like a pair of black braids against her back. As I stood, my knife slipped from my loose trousers and plunged into the snow. She darted towards it and pawed wildly at the snow, sending up a spray of powder that glittered around her. I stepped back as she finally yanked the knife out with a flash of silver and drug it in her fine teeth to my feet. There she lay down again, with the tip of the knife pointing towards her heart.

I admit I was likely only half-lucid those days, but I knew what I saw, be it dream or otherwise. She was offering herself to me, her blood to keep me from starving. I knelt beside her, sure now of her humanity, and flung the knife away into the trees. The woods spun around me, as I was unused to so much movement with such a long-empty stomach. I last remember the sight of her closing her red eyes before darkness enveloped me as well.

Fire

Why does Marri live alone, so secluded in the woods?

A whirl of snow drifted my way, no matter that we were deep within a tepid, green forest. I stared at the back of Dugald as he picked his way through the underbrush. There were no more trails and I was growing weary of fighting through the branches that swung back into my face as Dugald pushed ahead. Fine. Then what about you? I smiled at the blizzard that beat against my face and watched the bits of dazzling white scatter like no more than a sudden shower of sunlight shed from the towering trees. It was good to see that familiar white, to almost feel its chill. And you won’t say a word about my father, I suppose. At that Dugald stopped and I almost fell over his stooped form. He fought with a tangle of branches and thin vines, cursing, until he was turned around to face me. He stood to his full height, growing before me like a young birch, and sighed a breath of wind that caught up the leaves around us, evoking a collective shiver among the trees. “I know you’re frightened…”

I never said I was afraid.

“All right. But to put your mind at ease, or at least to quiet your endless pestering for a bit, I will tell you that your father is a kind man and that he did not abandon you or your mother. In fact… never mind. I’m sure he’d like to tell you some things himself. Besides, I will be staying there with you for some time.”

I rolled my eyes, Oh, wonderful. I look forward to all the snowballs you have to throw my way. In truth, though, it was a relief to hear. So far, Dugald and Marri where the only non-owl companions I had ever had, and I wasn’t always sure I could trust even them.

“Are we done with the questions, then?”

Am I distracting you? Is that why we’re lost?

“We are not lost. And no, you cannot distract me. I am able to shut my mind to whatever I wish. Or whatever is inappropriate to discuss.”

I know. The snow. But can’t you find something to tell me? I don’t feel like an owl anymore, but I still feel naked. I mean not, I just…

“There is much you have to learn.”

Yes! I feel foolish. Please teach me.

Dugald nodded sagely before turning back to fighting the brush. I held back my thoughts, waiting in silence, but only the leaves spoke in protest as we pressed through them, and nothing more passed between us. The foliage became less dense after a time and daylight, growing old and feeble, thrust a narrow staff of sunlight through the trees, poking at the ground here and there, stabbing at a mushroom, a violet, a hollow in the leaves. I opened my mouth as my patience was dwindling and my stomach beginning to growl, but shut it quickly when I heard the sound of movement behind us. Dugald spun, seeming too agile for his age of a sudden, and then was… gone. Just as my mind reached out, questioning, I heard his thoughts. Enemies. We must hide. You cannot see me? I shook my head, my eyes scanning the trees around us, both for any sign of Dugald and whatever, whoever, theses enemies were.

Good, now you must do the same.

How?

Concentrate. Imagine what the wind is. Become it.

All right. The wind?

His thoughts roared back at me, whipping my hair away in a sudden gale, Do it now! I heard a crash behind me, as if trees were falling, and whirled to see two men riding on massive, dark beasts that were swifter and larger than any creatures I’d seen in my sheltered life so far. Gusts of air burst from their nostrils in loud huffs and the men yelled things I couldn’t understand. I stood with my mouth open as they kept coming; they would run me down. Then my fear gave way to anger. What business did they have pounding down upon me? Who were these men but mortal fools who sat upon the backs of animals, yelling as if the world were ending? What did they know of power? Or of me, my life as an owlet, sheltered in the snow fields, of my mother who was both screeching, white, ravenous mother bird and protector, and woman-Fae, magic enough to change shape and understand the stars and earth? As the thoughts flashed through my mind the greenery around me lit with bursts of yellow. A golden column rose up around me, growing hot with fury. The men were still shouting, but now I could hear the fear in their voices, and the animals they rode upon reared up, screaming, terror in the whites of their large eyes. One man fell from his mount, scrambled to his feet and ran back the way he came. The other bolted on his beast, veering around the brilliant column of light and wind that encompassed me, doubling back through the trees. I’d never felt such fierce heat, my vision going white with fear. What had they done to me? I tried to lift a hand to my face, but there was nothing to lift, nothing of solid form about me. My entire being was no more than the flickering, blazing light that climbed ever higher, my voice nothing but a cackle of bursting brush. But through the rise of dark air flowing above came a flurry of white and a coolness that pierced my heat. The white grew, falling like a sky full of stars, hissing in protest against my skin of liquid gold. Slowly, I began to shrink. The light dulled, no longer burning my eyes, and the air grew thick and dark. I coughed, my chest heaving; my body had returned. I collapsed to the damp, black earth, cleared of green growth and stinking. The white burned and I shuddered at the touch of Dugald’s snow. He covered me with it, washing away my heat and confusion along with the black film that stained my skin. “Are you all right?” he asked me.

I don’t know. What happened? What did I become?

He laughed, the snow circling his face until it settled into his wisp of hair and unkempt beard. He scratched his bedraggled head, “Well, you certainly didn’t disappear!” He was staring, as though seeing me for the first time through his night-black eyes, a flicker of gold flashing through them like a startled thought. “It’s been a long time since I’ve seen the flames of a Fire-skin. A long time, indeed.”

Stone

The smell of an herb-infused stew woke me. Firelight flickered up and down the stacked logs along the inside of a cabin, licking the walls clean of cold and isolation. A white haired man stood over the pot that hung above the fire, stirring its contents with a wooden spoon. I attempted to stand, to greet him and ask where I was, but was poked in the face instead by a branch jutting out from a pine-bough bed nearby.

“You’re awake, then.”

I didn’t mean to ignore him, but as I rose I saw the most beautiful woman asleep on that pine, covered in a quilt of rabbit fur. Her large, well defined eyes were folded closed like flower petals beneath a thick night of black hair, almost blue in the firelight. Her skin, though, even in the shadows that danced over us, was far too pale, and I wondered about her health. She murmured in her sleep and I was caught in the crease between her lips…

“Anything to eat, young man?” The older man’s brows rose as I turned my gaze to him at last. I was surprised to see Aerin perched comfortably on his narrow shoulder.

“Please. And you are?”

“The wizard.”

“I see.” As I knelt by the fire, a steaming wooden bowl placed in my hands, I remembered falling into a dream next to the White Hare in a bed of snow. So that was her, the beautiful woman asleep, and he was the wizard; the falcon who had found her, the bear who’d dug up her early grave, and her powerful protector. “So you’ve returned. And you’ve restored her natural form. Why?”

“No, young prince. You restored her. I only helped her to find her first animal form; the hare. She was unused to magic, couldn’t comprehend it on her own, but the power was always hers.” He leaned close as he spoke low, “I did slip in a spell of my own as she transformed, so that should she find love, even deep in these woods so far from men and even Fae, she would return to herself for a time to see it through.” He sat back, sliding a thumb over one wild eyebrow. “She didn’t protest, when I told her what would happen. I suppose she never imagined her heart could be stirred by anyone, what with the state of grief she was in. But she was merely a child, then. Seasons change and years blow by. And here we are.” He was grinning at me quite sheepishly.

“You’re saying… she loves me?”

“Call it what you will. The intended sacrifice of her life to save yours was enough for the magic to come undone, anyway.” The wizard smiled, sipping from a bowl of his own. The gleam in his eyes told me he’d known love a time or two himself. It took everything in me not to turn back to staring at the beauty who slept behind me. Yet I felt much apprehension as well. I knew her story, knew of her past, and her latest self-sacrificing act, but I didn’t rightly know her. In fact, I couldn’t imagine, what with the magical existence as a hare complicating things, what she thought or felt or how much humanity was left in her, or even how old she was. By God, I didn’t even know her name!

“Eira,” the wizard whispered. I was stunned that he seemed to read my thoughts, but then, he was a wizard. “Her name is Eira, and you’ll have time to get to know her, if you wish. I invite you to stay in my cabin, unless of course you prefer your own little shelter…” He laughed at the look I gave him. “Of course, you’ll have to contend with the rest of The Seven. They won’t be eager to relinquish their allegiance to her. They’ve all become quite enamored, each in his or her own way, I think.”

“The Seven?” But he never bothered to enlighten me. We were both too absorbed in the flavorful stew and when it was finished, I found my worries and wonders closed up in a soft, black satchel of sleep.

Fire

I stared a hole through Dugald’s back as he turned to amble on through the brush as though no more than a day’s stroll lay ahead. “I won’t go any farther until you start explaining.”

“Hmm, and stubborn too. But that we already knew. All right, girl, stand up and brush yourself off. Keep using your mouth to speak and I’ll keep talking, while we make our way out of these damned woods.”

I brushed the black and gray powder from my limbs and shook out my hair. “Firstly, what is a Fire-skin?”

Dugald shook his head, “Firstly, you should know that I did what you asked. You wanted me to teach you, so there was your first lesson.”

“The gold light that burned?”

“No. It’s called fire,” he threw a questioning gaze my way. “Didn’t you notice it at Marri’s? You must not have paid any attention when she cooked. And I most certainly did not call up that fire just now. You did.”

“I? But…”

“Listen, now. I brought those men to us. I called the birds to me and the men followed, wondering what was about, and from a distance they saw what they knew to be half-bloods. There are men all about this forest, none of them so afraid of anything as us, and they have taken oaths to kill us on sight.” He swatted at an overzealous dragonfly, as if wishing away the dark subject. “We have avoided them so far by way of magic. It’s called cloaking; you’ll learn this in time.”

I stared through every gap in the trees, wondering.

Dugald caught my glare and the skin gathered around his high cheek bones in a half attempt to smile. “We’re safe, now.” He shrugged, reminding me, “You asked me to teach you. It was an obvious enough first lesson. What is more important than learning who your enemies are and how to defend yourself? And you did a fine job, young one. Much better than I expected, in fact.”

“But what did I actually do?” I could almost see the yellow light gleaming around me again and smell the smoldering brush. I did indeed remember Marri’s cooking fire, but it had seemed so tame, then. Nothing more than a small animal made of light that danced about as it warmed our food. I hadn’t even thought of it when that brilliant light enveloped me. It was so fierce then, so all consuming… Dugald kicked at the earth by my feet, snuffing out a few sparks.

“You must learn to focus, girl, or we’ll be back to flames all over again.” He shook his head in bewilderment, “The new men of science would call that spontaneous combustion, though I doubt they’ve ever seen it. You’ve learned what all Fae must know; how to escape into the elements. Each of us has an element we are born into, a place from which we draw our powers. I have seen it in so few, but truly, yours is Fire.”

So I was using fire; it was my power? I thought someone did something to me, I thought… How does it work?

“Ah, Ah! Remember the rule, now. You won’t be able to communicate through thoughts with your father, and communicate with him you will. Use your words. I’ll teach you, but you must speak!”

“I’m sorry, I forget. But about the fire?”

We walked in silence for a while as Dugald led me to a stream, waved me off to wash up, and turned his back to give me privacy.

“Fire is little more than heat turned wild. Men can make fire, but not without kindling and a fire stone, or sunlight and a beveled bit of glass. A storm can create fire with a bolt of lightning. But you have the rare ability to create it with your mind. All Fae are connected to the powers of one element or another. We must learn to control our emotions, our thoughts, our energy, and thus, our powers. It is very dangerous, otherwise. I will train you, but it will take time. For now, you must keep your temper in check.”

I sank back into the coolness, letting the water eddy around my arms like a cloak, soothing away the heat I remembered, and feared would return. “You aren’t able to control fire?” I asked after rinsing my mouth and spraying the water out over the bank, coming just short of Dugald’s heels.

“My element is Air. I can make storms of any kind. I could make a lightning burst and hope a spark would catch and burn, but it would be simpler just to start a fire by hand.”

I watched as the stream I’d sprayed froze in the summer air, aging like clear skin as it creased and cracked, pulling together a handful of leaves. “Why do you always make snow if you can create any kind of storm?”

“When your mother… when I came to help you, I used your memory of snow and my magic with wind to quiet you, to calm you. I knew you would relate to the snow.”

“What about Marri? What powers does she have?”

“What would you guess?”

“Powers over roots and mushrooms? Over soil?” I reached down to pick a pebble out from between my toes, felt the soft sand beneath me and lifted a handful to scour my skin. But what could a person do with earth? Throw sand around? I flailed suddenly, splashing violently as my head slipped under for a moment. I righted myself quickly, spitting up the water I’d swallowed.

“All right in there?” I could hear Dugald grinning around his words.

“I think so. The sand shifted below my feet and I fell. Did you know you can’t breathe underwater?”

Dugald inhaled a laugh, then coughed. “Well, your mother could have, if she’d wanted to. And yes, you noticed Marri’s thoughts centered around soil and planting and all things that grow in Earth.”

I shrugged, “She was constantly digging in it anyway. But what do you mean about my mother? What could she do?”

“Breathe under water. Though I doubt she even knew it.”

“Why wouldn’t she have known?” I had wrung out my clothes after washing and was shivering as I dressed. “You may turn around now.”

“Did you know you could create fire? Until you have a reason to access your power, or unless someone teaches you, you are blind to it. You should practice your new-found skill now. Make a small fire to warm yourself by and we’ll eat.” The old man sunk down and settled right where he was in the undergrowth, waiting for me to perform the miracle of flame once more. Of course I was far from angry, then, and in my wet clothes I shivered; the golden, tinder-hungry beast seemed little more than a farfetched dream. Dugald yawned, “And your mother—from what I just told you, what would you guess she drew her powers from?”

“I can’t imagine. All I have learned of her is that she was always white; a pale child, a white hare, a snowy owl. If white were an element that is what hers would have been.”

Dugald looked thoughtful at that. “Her powers dealt with Water, but her preference was always for cold, for frozen water…”

“For snow.” I whispered, blowing at a spark that winked into existence. Slender flames fluttered up, waving wildly at my face and burning my eyes.

Stone

When next I woke, the wizard was gone, and Aerin with him. I had slept on the bare, earthen floor, curled up next to the dwindling fire. My body ached as I slowly stood, the notion sinking in that the wizard had likely drugged me, or put me under some spell. Perhaps he had never been there at all. But there I was in that miraculous little cabin and behind me, the beautiful Eira slept on beneath her quilt of rabbit pelts.

Having nothing to do but to wait for her to awaken, I poured over her story in my great book once more, trying to glean any more understanding of her from the pages. “The wizard was said to have gathered seven forest creatures, putting spells on them to make of them the guardians of the White Hare…” I remembered then how the old man had warned me about The Seven. Had one of The Seven called him here? Where were they now? And what were they?

I straightened, then, listening as the forest broke into chaotic laughter just outside the cabin walls. I could hear the curious snorts and disgruntled growls of a bear and the snapping of underbrush as something ran. Next came the halting call of spotted owl, and strangely, the scratching of insect legs nearby. I jumped back at the sight of a large beetle scurrying down the wall beside my face. Just then the skin door was ripped away by a pair of thrashing antlers as a buck burst into the single room. He tossed the skin to the floor, then stood still, snorting loudly as he eyed me. I turned away hesitantly toward the unmistakable whisper of a snake. I saw, to my horror, Eira sitting up, reaching out to a viper, swiftly making its way to her across the floor. The snake curled around her fair neck, settling its deadly head on her shoulder, tongue flicking out in my direction. But what was even more frightful was the expression on Eira’s face. Her eyes were wide as she stared at me, as though she were as afraid of me as I was of the sudden entourage of wildlife invading Dugald’s cabin. The bear bellowed outside and I stumbled as I stood, almost tripping over my own feet. “Alright! I’m sorry. I never meant any harm, please…” I was embarrassed by my quaking voice, but distracted once more by a fluttering shadow that transformed into a gray bird diving in from the smoke-hole. She landed at my feet, a mourning dove, and cooed softly as she circled me. The deer watched her, lowering his great antlers. The snake also lowered its head and the bear quieted outside. A thick, soft voice said, “I’m sorry we frightened you. I was afraid. I couldn’t remember you at first, but now I think I do. You were growing so thin. You were starving.”

I turned to Eira, “And you tried to give your own life to help me. Why?”

Her face fell and I was immediately sorry for asking. “I’m not sure. Perhaps I’m not what I used to be. The memories still hurt, though. I didn’t want to witness another’s death.”

As she spoke, the beetle fell into my hair and I swatted to get it out. I heard the buzz of wings and saw a glint of green as it flew off, but gasped and backed into the wall when it grew, falling to the floor, then unfolding its now enormous body and sitting up in the form of a little boy. He stared at me, eyes glittering with humor. The snake uncoiled herself from Eira’s neck and slid to the edge of the pine bed, also unfolding her growing form. She emerged as a woman with mahogany skin and hair wound into a thick, black braid that trailed past her waist. “Lucanus, come here!” she snapped at the boy who scurried to her side. I looked to the deer and the dove with expectation and indeed they grew into the shapes of a young man and a middle aged woman. The woman stood close to my side, her eyes closed for a long moment before she smiled and took a long breath, “It has been so very long…” Her eyes found mine at last, kind despite their strangeness. Her hair was a mute brown, growing gray, almost a match to her mourning dove down. Her face was round and full as a ball of dough; she reminded me of the nursemaid I’d loved the most as a young boy. “Forgive us. Eira called and we are sworn to protect her. But I, too, recognize you. Athene and I followed you when we saw you coming near. You seemed to be searching for something, so full of unrest. But you have treated Eira with kindness, as I thought you might. Never did you try to capture her, only to understand her. I am pleased she has returned to her rightful form for you.”

“Marri, please,” Eira whispered, her face glowing with embarrassment. Despite the unbelievable circumstances, I couldn’t take my eyes from her.

Fire

We made our way out of the dense forest and found a hard packed trail (Dugald called it a road) that carried us through rolling, country farms. It had been so long since we’d spoken that the sudden grumble of his voice startled me, like thunder out of the blue sky: “What did Marri tell you about herself?”

I chewed on his question along with a sweet clover blossom, wondering what the cattle found so delightful. “Nothing. In fact, Marri would disappear completely if my questions got too personal.”

“She still grieves. Shall I tell you her part in your mother’s story?”

“Please.”

“Marri is in fact your grandmother’s older sister.”

“That would be Eolande’s sister?”

“Indeed. She came with her to the castle to look after her, in the disguise of a maid. The only way she could keep her identity secret was to keep her Fae eyes hidden, so she simply kept them closed, feigning blindness. There are other ways for Fae to see, you know.” Dugald glanced back at me, then pointed to the sparrows in the orchard we passed. “I can see through their eyes if I choose.” This startled me, but I said nothing, not wanting to interrupt the story. “Marri tended to Eolande till her last, and being your mother’s aunt, she kept a careful watch over her as well. Not even your grandfather or Bari knew her secret identity, and no one missed her but a few maids who grew a bit busier when she disappeared.”

“Where did she go?”

“She followed behind the pallbearers as they took your mother in her casket to be buried in the Dark Wood. That little legend we read in the book Marri had was misinformed about a few of the details. It was not your mother calling from her grave that led me to her burial site, it was Marri, grieving so that the whole earth seemed to cry out from that place. I recognized the voice of Fae and came to her aid. After unburying your mother, I went to the castle in the shape of a bird to see if she could be welcomed back, and that is when I found the castle destroyed and many lives taken.” He pulled at his beard anxiously. “When I helped your grieving mother find an animal form so that she could live safely in the woods, Marri vowed to stay with her and protect her. She chose to take the form of a mourning dove in her grief.”

“Why couldn’t they return to the Fae? Didn’t they have relatives among them? Was my great grandmother still alive?”

“I don’t know how long the Queen of the Dark Wood lived, but they could not have gone to the Fae regardless, because your mother was a half-blood. Half-bloods cannot survive among full-blooded Fae. They require too much, as man does, that Fae cannot provide. Often, Fae disappear into their elemental forms, celebrating the eternal earth by existing as little more than sunlight, wind or stone, sometimes for years at a time.”

“So only Marri stayed with my mother? You left?”

“I left to find others to stay with her and protect her. I had matters elsewhere to attend, but any of the rest of The Seven that I left behind with your mother could call to me should danger arise.”

I remembered that the legend spoke of seven forest creatures under the wizard’s spell. “The Seven. Marri was one of them? Did you truly put a spell on them?”

“The legend was written by a fool. Neither were they forest animals. The first of The Seven was Marri. While I was away, looking for help, a full-blooded Fae named Chumana with her very young, half-blood son, Lucanus, found Eira and Marri and joined them in animal form. Chumana was the last of a once great band of Fae, closely related to your great grandmother’s band. I returned with my brother, Adahy; my young cousin, Athene; and my young nephew, Enapay. Among my family, these were content to live in the forest in animal form and protect your mother. Chumana had taken the form of a viper; Lucanus, a beetle. My brother had lived as a bear with little interruption for most of his life. He remained solitary, but for the sake of Eira and the others, he was a great defender. Enapay’s mother, my sister, had been killed by a hunting party while they ran as deer through the woods, and though he was old enough then to be on his own, he retained the shape in her memory. Athene, though my cousin, was a full-blooded Fae and a healer. She agreed to leave her band in order to live with Eira and the others. She took the form of a spotted owl and often called through the Dark Wood, keeping in contact with her family, still in the Fae band far to the east. Now you see why the legend mistook The Seven for forest creatures.”

I nodded, “A mourning dove, snake, beetle, bear, deer, and an owl… who was the seventh?”

“A raven.”

“And who was he?”

Dugald lifted his brows.

“You? But I thought you had other business…”

“I did. Nothing was more important to me than protecting the Fae from man’s brutal fears. I did a poor job, I must say. Still, I helped protect your mother. Now there are so few full-blooded Fae left. Marri is one. As are Chumana and Athene.”

“Marri is my great aunt,” I suddenly realized.

“Indeed. But all seven of us, with your mother, became a family quite close.”

“What happened to the others?”

“My brother is still a bear, lost in the woods somewhere and perfectly content to be on his own, I am sure of that. Enapay joined one of the last bands of Fae after your mother married. As for the rest, well, you shall soon see.”

Stone

I built another bed in Dugald’s cabin for Marri, who stayed in the form of a woman so she could remain with Eira. For myself I built a smaller hut nearby, cutting apart fallen trees with my axe and dragging back large branches from the woods. The others kept to the forest. Lucanus, the young beetle, often took the form of a boy to follow me about. He was full of questions and strange stories and often confounded by the chores I kept at. Every now and again he would help chop wood, start a fire, or weed in my new garden, but he often got bored and would fly off in his other form to enjoy a simpler life.

Adahy, the bear, was a massive beast who woke me once in the middle of the night, sniffing around my hut. He never showed himself as a man, nor spoke with me, but slunk back into the woods with a satisfied snort. I glimpsed the others in human shape now and again, whispering with Eira as they pretended not to stare at me. They must have missed her being a part of the forest, no one more than Enapay, the deer who as a young man appeared quite close to my age. He seemed half in love with Eira, and I could hardly blame him. He gave me no more notice than a steely stare now and again. I had met many a prince or lord with more humility than he possessed and couldn’t help but chuckle to myself as he hauled armloads of wood around our camp to show how much more he could carry than I. Once, though, I sought him out to ask him, respectfully, if it would be all right for me to hunt. I had fashioned a new bow and arrows, but felt much apprehension about using it when my companions could all take animal form. I would have liked to have taken down a deer, but then there was Enapay. He smirked as I stumbled over my words, attempting to make my wish to hunt clear, yet unoffending. “No need to worry,” he told me. “You could never hope to take one as fleet as me.” Then he darted away as a buck, his white tail flashing arrogantly.

Despite Enapay’s jealous glares, he kept away when Eira accompanied me. We spent much time together in the garden or preparing food, or simply talking as we wandered the woods. I was aware that the joy we shared was what my mother had hoped I’d find in one of the countless potential brides brought to the castle. How the faces I remembered paled beside my Eira, her concave cheeks falling to a softly tapered chin, her full lips shaped like a cowry shell, and her eyes shadowed by combs of black lashes, thick as a pine’s new growth. She was not without her oddities, though. I’d find her bent over to sniff at a print left in the mud while I strode on a ways without her, and it wasn’t uncommon to find her up a tree, or deep within a cave, bits of moss and twigs tangled in her hair. She spoke only of the woods, teaching me how to cure a stomachache with various herbs; imitating the hungry cry of a lynx kitten, which meant its mother was nearby on the hunt; showing me how to decipher the tracks and scat of any number of wildlife to explain what they were, where they’d come from, and what they were doing or looking for. She was no stately princess, but I noticed when I spoke of my former home how she straightened her skirts and lifted her chin, carrying herself with the memory of grace. She’d spent her childhood in a castle as well, daughter of a hunted king. I never asked what she remembered of those days, and she never told me, except to shiver some mornings as she waved away a restless night of dreams. I often wondered what my mother would have thought of Eira, knowing of her Fae blood, her life in the woods, her wild soul. It didn’t seem matter much, though, as I never planned to return.

One evening, little Lucanus sat pensively by my fire. He was uncommonly quiet, watching me prepare a stew with his chin in his hands as his black eyes seemed to drink in the flames. Finally I asked what was on his mind, passing him a bowl, the aroma of which brought him out of his thoughts. “Athene says Dugald will return soon.” Dugald, the wizard. I was glad to hear it, and wondered if my old friend Aerin would return with him. But Lucanus looked upset. “It will be the end of everything. He’s coming to marry you and Eira, you know.”

I turned away, hiding a deep blush. Again I wondered how the wizard seemed to know my only wish. “Does this upset you?” I asked him.

“Not that part. But what happens after?”

“How do you mean?”

“What will happen to us? She won’t need us anymore. Mother says we have become a strong band together. She wonders if we’ll each go our own way.” He peered up at me with his luminous eyes and admitted, “I guess I wouldn’t miss Adahy all that much. I hardly ever see him and he never talks. Once, he swatted at me!”

I had to laugh. “Why would any of you have to leave, though?”

“Enapay said if you marry Eira he will disappear forever.” The poor boy had tears in his eyes, and I could well imagine Enapay had been like an older brother to him.

“I don’t want anyone to disappear.”

“But won’t you take her away, back to the kingdom you came from?”

I sighed. “Although I do wonder how my mother is faring, I have no wish to return. My father is not a kind man and I would never want Eira to meet him. If she is happy here, so am I.” Chumana drifted out of the woods, then, her dark face emerging from the hollows of an oak. She took her boy by the hand, mildly scolding him, but as they turned away she looked back at me with sad eyes and said, “If you wish, Athene could find out about your mother.”

I stood. “Would she?”

Chumana smiled her sympathy as they disappeared into the night.

Fire

The stone cottages clustered closer and closer together as we entered the heart of my father’s kingdom. I was overwhelmed by the noise. Geese chased small children who shrieked madly; merchants selling wares squabbled over space in the narrow alleys; flocks of girls my size wobbled about, laughing and twittering like birds; infants wailed in their mother’s arms and wandering minstrels sang to the tunes of their fiddles or flutes. I skirted the crowds, staying close behind Dugald. Finally, we escaped the townsfolk and neared a wall I could barely see to the top of. He told me it was the wall to the castle’s outer courtyard. Dugald stood fluttering above me like a wind-worn flag, “This will be your second lesson in shape shifting. The only way we will get in is by becoming unworthy of notice. It will be easier for you to take the shape of an animal closely associated with your element. For me, this will be a bird, but for you, it will be a reptile or amphibian, since the cold-blooded are most closely associated with fire. I would suggest a snake or lizard, so that you are able to climb.”

I balked, “A snake?” Though not an animal I had seen in the cold world of the north, I knew it to be the worst enemy of any owl. “But why not an owl? I’m sure I could fly by now. Besides, I never heard of Mother taking the form of a fish or some other water animal, and water was her source of power…”

“Child, you can take any animal form you choose when the eyes of men are not searing through our skins. I will help train you, I promise, but it all takes practice. Your mother was stubborn; from the start she clung to the color white. She said her pale skin saved her once and I think to her, white meant invisibility. We had the luxury of isolation then, so I indulged her. But for now, I’m asking you to do what comes most natural. I know it is strange to hear, but a bird, or anything other than a reptile or amphibian, will not come naturally to you at first.”

“All right. But can’t you just carry me over the wall?”

“Certainly not. It requires immense concentration to stay in form until you are used to it. Should you become heavy or unwieldy you’d likely kill me. You must find a way up and over yourself. I shall be waiting on the other side.” He was gone in a flash of flight before I could protest.

“Fine, then.” I peered around to make sure no one was watching and noticed a snake handler across the alley draping a cobra over a woman’s shoulders. “Should she be innocent, pure of heart and soul, the snake will rest peacefully upon her…” I could hear him say. The woman looked terrified, but smiled anyway. I focused on the scales throwing off glints of gold in the evening sun. It reminded me of fire. I found the form natural and soothing as I watched, my viewpoint lowering until I could no longer see the snake, but saw instead my own black tongue flickering out before my face. I slid along the base of the wall in my new, sleek form. I felt the chill of shadow on my smooth scales and saw above me a great mass of climbing ivy. Hidden in the green vines I made my slow way up the sun-warmed stones.

Stone

“I hope you don’t mind the trade,” the wizard whispered, winking. “I quite enjoy Aerin’s company.” I smiled, sad to see my hawk go, but shrugged. Aerin seemed content with the old man, so who was I to interfere? Dugald stood in the center of a sunlit clearing, tall as the aspens that chattered restlessly above us, while the rest of The Seven lined up on either side to make way for the bride. All were in their animal form but Dugald and me. Lucanus gleamed like an emerald as he scurried forward with our rings, pillowed on a lump of moss. Even Eira hopped across the grass as the White Hare. Dugald knelt, placing a finger along her forehead. “You have suffered, child, and have hidden yourself away. You have grown into a woman in this shelter among friends. Life awaits you, and love, should you open your heart to it. Do you accept this man’s love?” It was odd to see a rabbit nod, her red eyes gleaming up at me, deep as rubies, hiding prisms of light and shadow. Dugald stood, towering over me. “You have wandered far to escape the wickedness of men and start life anew. You called to the Fae, and they heard you. You searched for the White Hare and found her. You loved her despite her other form. She is part woman, part Fae, and as such, she can become whatever she wishes. Do you accept her as she is; will you love her in whatever form she takes?”

“I do and I will.”

Eira rose up beside me, fur falling away into the fine threads of a dress edged with spring flowers. She slipped her small hand in mine and the others, still in animal form, bowed in whatever way they could.

“Then may the Spirits see that you are forever bound as man and wife.”

Our lips met for the first time as all around us dogwoods loosed petals of white hope.

Fire

Descending the wall required a constant tightening of my muscles and much concentration. I grew weary before the ground became clear to my near-sighted eyes. Finally I slid into the dust, tasting the smells around me. One induced great fear until I heard Dugald in my mind.

Well done. Now, we only need to make it across the outer courtyard to the inner wall. There is a small slit in the stone, an arrow loop, I always use to get in. You will fit through nicely, as well.

How far is it? I can’t see well.

Follow me, I’ll hop along the ground so you can see me.

Though grateful for his guidance, I was terrified of him in his current form. He was a sleek swift and his talons and beak horrified me. I realized how irrational it was, but I couldn’t let go of the fear. I think he felt the same of me as every time I slithered a bit too close he burst into flight before settling back to his hopping gait.

At last we made it to the inner wall. The arrow loop was little more than the narrow space where a thin stone had been removed. Dugald took flight, turned on his side in the air and disappeared through the slit with ease. Compared to the previous wall, this climb would be quick; I had only to scale half the length of my body before falling through. I was surprised to find myself still under the sun on the other side.

We have reached the inner courtyard. Time to return to our rightful shapes.

I thought we’d be inside already! I was exhausted and couldn’t fathom changing shapes or traveling farther on. I lay coiled in the sun, my tongue lazily licking at the smell of a broken egg somewhere near…

I forgot how fully connected the young feel to their form the first few times they change. Your mother had trouble with this as well. His laugh was a savage bird cry. I raised my head and flared my hood in a jolt of fear. Dugald fluttered up and grew longer, as if he unfolded a pair of legs rather than wings. His night-blue plumage seemed to pull in the wall’s shadow as it spread over him, now in the form of a dark robe that fell around a pale doublet and russet jerkins. Duglad stood before me as an old man once more. “Focus on me now, not on what you feel. Remember what it’s like to walk upon two legs. Unless you’d rather I carried you in as you are and set a snake upon your father’s lap.”

I grinned around my fangs. Perhaps I would.

“Get on with it. The guard approaches.”

Indeed I trembled as the earth shook below me with footsteps of increasing intensity. Without eyelids I couldn’t close my eyes, but wished I could, and that thought alone drew me back into my rightful form. A man in full armor leapt at the sight of a girl rising up from the grass where none had been before. His visor was tipped back and I could see from his eyes that he was quite young. He looked from me to Dugald, his eyes widening further. “Dugald?”

“Luc! You’ve grown, boy! I hardly recognized you from the suit.” Dugald slapped the young man’s armored back in greeting and I jumped at the sharp, tinny sound. I couldn’t help laughing as Dugald shook out his smarting hand, but stopped when I found the young guard gazing at me with an odd expression. I closed my mouth tight, wondering if my tongue was still forked, and glanced down at my hands to see if any snakeskin remained. The guard cleared his throat, bidding us to follow him.

He continued to sneak glances my way as we entered a beautiful garden. Willows brushed long fingers over sun dappled statues of various life-like animals. Here a grazing deer, there a humped bear, a mourning dove perched upon a pedestal, in among a patch of daisies a large beetle seemed to plod through the grass, and in a scraggly oak stood the proud figure of a spotted owl. It became clear who they represented when I almost tripped over a stone viper and looked up to find a marble raven peering down from a high branch. I turned to find the knight making his way across the inner courtyard to the central keep while Dugald stood still in the garden, grinning at me. He knew I understood the story the garden so artfully told. But where is Mother? He turned and pointed to a thick grouping of shrubs and there, in a carefully trimmed hole in the center bush, was the White Hare. She was carved from white granite, specks and veins of dark minerals marbling her ears. Her ruby eyes twinkled mischievously in the shifting sunlight. As I knelt into the soft clover that spread out around her I was only distantly aware of Dugald speaking softly with someone behind me.

Stone

As the kiss ended and our union began, The Seven were released from their vows. Dugald spoke over them, “You may each go to your own calling now. The White Hare is spoken for and we have all done our part to protect her. Be free to live as you wish.” Almost before the words were finished, Enapay took to the air in a great bound, his white tail the last we would ever see of him disappearing into the Dark Wood. I wished him well and would forever after think of him when a deer outran my pursuit.

Adahy was also quick to lumber off, first giving a grunt to his brother and lowering his head before Eira. She pressed her hand against the matted fur on his massive head and I couldn’t help the sour fear that crept up my throat. But he passed away into shadow without further ceremony.

Marri kissed Eira’s cheek and squeezed my hand. “If it pleases you, I would like to remain with my niece. I care not where we live, but I will have no other life than to watch over her.” We hugged her gladly and I promised to provide for her as well as I might.

Little Lucanus approached us shyly, his mother at his heels. “I would like to stay with you, Prince Androw. But mother says I must ask what you think.” When I looked up at Chumana her brown face darkened as she smiled. “My band of Fae is lost to us, and though we might join another… my son has found family here, and I too. We would not like to part ways, though we ask nothing of you. We will live in the forest, requiring nothing, but should you choose to travel, we would like to come as well.”

I hugged the boy, roughing up his hair as he grinned up at me. “Thank you. I was prepared to plead with you to let the boy stay had you made up your mind to go. We are glad to have you as part of our family, Chumana.”

Athene approached us last, her tawny hair feathered over slender shoulders and covering one of her luminous eyes. Even in human form she seemed so like an owl with her tiny mouth and large, staring eyes, and most of all, her silence; her lack of expression. But as she held Eira’s hands in her own she smiled upon her. I was ashamed then that I had never made an effort to speak to her, though she too had kept quite distant since my arrival. I knew little of her other than that she kept in contact with her band, hearing her sharp calls carried across the forest at night. I had assumed she would return to them, having family among them, but she surprised us by saying in her whisper of a voice, “I too, wish to remain with you. Eira, I do not wish to pierce your joy with my silliness, but I have much foreboding about your future. The Seven may no longer be, but I would like to see to your safety.” She eyed me with apprehension and I felt my heart quicken. Would I endanger Eira in the future? What did this woman, part owl, a healer and Fae, know of what was to come? Surely more than I. “And Androw,” she said, her owl eyes fixed upon me, “I have news of your mother.”

Fire

“What do you think of her?”

I turned to see a handsome man staring down at me with a look I couldn’t place. I felt like the little lost owlet again, trying in vain to read the strange faces of men. This man was quite tall and had wheat colored hair streaked with gray. The stubble on his chin and jaw was as fine and white as salt. His eyes were young, but he was not. He was dressed so plainly I knew (from all that Dugald had explained) that he couldn’t be anyone of importance in terms of the estate. I glanced back at the stone hare. “I think she can’t be half as beautiful as the real White Hare must have been. I don’t care for her eyes. Still, she’s exceptional.”

“I forget that you knew her in another form. I often wonder how she looked as an owl.”

I stared up at the stranger with new eyes. Did everyone here know about me? I noticed a dirt-caked spade in one hand. “Are you the gardener?”

“Hmm, yes.” He and Dugald shared a laugh. I pleaded with Dugald, melting his snow with a lick of angry flame, but he refused to speak mind to mind. He wanted me to use my words—to play the vulnerable fool. Fine, then, I would. “Please tell me why you laugh.”

The man knelt, his face coming close to mine, and I was startled by the sudden shine of tears in his eyes. Only then did I remember the picture in Marri’s shard of glass. He had the same spattering of freckles across the nose, the same thick brows, though a different color. And his eyes. They were far from Fae, with gold-flecked green radiating from the much smaller pupils; still, there was something familiar about those as well. “Are you my father?” He couldn’t answer with more than a nod, tears spilling over as he smiled upon me.

Stone

I sat down where I was, still in the clover spotted clearing where we stood only moments married. Eira knelt beside me, embracing me as I wept. Poor Athene was mortified. She had no idea what her words meant, or she would never have spoken them at our wedding. They were, in fact, my mother’s last words.

Athene told how she had flown over the castle grounds and kept close to the inner keep, listening to rumors with her sharp owl ears, before swooping into my mother’s open window at last. Mother had isolated herself in the high East Tower after my disappearance. She must have shrunken from her surroundings, sinking further and further into her memories as the days went by, for she was eating little and talking to empty air, telling her old tales to cold stone and smiling at the memories of her boy. Athene was frightened at first, and my mother of Athene: her human form appearing suddenly where before there had been only an owl. But as the two women talked, Athene said my mother seemed to come to herself, to realize who and where she was, and what had happened to me. Athene told of my happy existence in the Dark Wood and how I was to be married to a woman who was half-Fae. At first, Athene skirted around the true identity of Eira, but the tale of the White Hare was one of my mother’s favorites and she recognized it all too well on her own. Mother began pacing again, reciting the tale from memory and worrying over the details. Never had she doubted its truth, but how, she wondered, had I found the White Hare? She secreted Athene into the abandoned library and blew the dust from the volumes until she found one containing the story of the White Hare. Athene was transfixed with the detailed illumination and the wonder of someone she’d never known having heard of her through little marks in a book. She found the beautifully painted owl that represented herself and marveled that the artist had known the color of her eyes and the pattern of bars on her breast. As Athene studied the book, my mother wrote to me. She gave Athene the sealed letter and said, “Wish him well for me, but tell him not to return. His father has descended into madness. It would be better for Androw and his new bride to make a life elsewhere. Tell him also that I will gather my strength, and take the red road into town. He can find me there when the time is right.”

It took a long while before I could speak to explain. Eira and Athene waited patiently, knowing there was more to my mother’s words than first seemed. “It’s a reference to a tale she told,” I said at last, choking on my words. “In the story, The Red Road is the road to heaven.”

As Eira held me through our first night together, she whispered reassurances while I lost myself in darkness and disbelief. At last I asked, “Would you like to hear the tale of The Red Road?” She pulled away from me, listening patiently as I spoke to the shadows. I could see the sparkle of her tears through the corner of my eye, and I could feel her longing to be held, her hovering face like a white moon in the darkness, begging to be looked upon, yet I could do nothing to relax my jaw, to turn my face her way or even reach a hand out to her. The only thing to escape my shell of sorrow was that old story, the hollow words reverberating around us like the distant waves of an ocean we had never seen.

“In the days when the world was young and towns were small and sheltered, a young woman with the voice of a lark lived with her family and sang through her days as she helped work their small farm. She had many admirers, for her voice and her soft, mild nature, but one man among them found himself madly in love, all the more so because she seemed not to pay him any notice. When she refused to marry him, he grew so enraged he called upon dark powers and cursed her. He gave her a drink that took away her voice in hopes that no other man would want her. He hoped she would relent and marry him at last. Instead, she ran away into the small forest nearby to die alone because she was so miserable. No one understood why she could no longer speak. Having never received an education, she could not read or write to explain the situation. Her only company in the forest were the song birds, who landed nearby and sang and twittered to her day and night. One morning she woke to find that she had become a bird as well, and that she could speak with her feathered friends, though it only lasted for one week out of every month. Meanwhile, the man who had put the curse upon her was grieved by her disappearance and had searched all the wood for her, but to no avail. When at last his friends told him she must be dead, he lit the dry brush on fire in his misery and the wind breathed upon the flames, engulfing the entire small forest in a great blaze. The woman was just about to transform from bird to woman when the trees began to smolder. The tiny birds tried to help carry her out of the forest, but they could not lift her as she assumed her human form. She told them, in the last trill of voice that remained, ‘Do not worry about me, my beloved friends. It is time I gather my strength and take the red road this fire burns through my heart. I will see you again in the forests of heaven, in the towns of everlasting light, when the time is right.’”

Silence poured into the room like a flood of rainwater, filling my mind with its cold meanderings. I saw that Eira had lowered her eyes; still, I couldn’t find the strength to reach out to her, drowning as I was in grief. I had nothing to offer the woman I loved, nothing but mute misery.

Marri, Athene, Chumana and even little Lucanus shared their company with Eira while I kept myself away. I was grateful for our friends, but could never seem to manage the simple words to thank them. Our marriage seemed to be built upon the end of my youth, and I could feel it pressing down upon me ceaselessly. I struggled to provide for Eira in the ways I had wished. Everything felt heavy in my hands, my deeds impossibly slow, and the sweetness of our new life together grew bitter as I realized I was spoiling it. But I couldn’t help it. My guilt was too great to overcome; I had abandoned my mother to die. That knowledge would wear upon any joy I felt for years to come.

It was the wizard who I went to in secret. We met in secluded patches of trees that crouched together against the wind and held out the light. Dugald looked upon the situation with Fae eyes, seeing a way for something much larger than my own grief to be resolved. He asked about my father, knowing little of him since the king had always kept himself far from the affairs of Fae. As we discussed my father and made plans for the future, I could feel my heart hardening even as it swelled, like blown glass cooling into a solid, fragile form. It was then that I remembered my mother’s letter, and was surprised to find her thoughts had followed the same path Dugald meant to take. As I read her words to him, my grief settled into resolve; I would fight the injustices suffered by Fae and my mother alike, firstly by declaring war.

Fire

He held out a hand to help me up and I took it, shivering as his calluses grated against my own soft skin. This man, with dirt beneath his nails and eyes that glittered like a sunlit river, was my father. He did not let go of my hand as I stood beside him, but led me deeper into the garden. As the trail twisted on, I pulled him forward, freeing my hand to touch the figure of a man amazingly portrayed in shining stone the color of mud. It was warm under the sun, and smooth where I ran my fingers along the man’s arm. He was young, his clothes torn and disheveled, and a large pack and sheath of arrows were slung across his back. As I moved around to the front of the statue I was surprised by the tall, still hawk that rode upon his shoulder. The man was mid step, and his forehead creased with worry, or determination… something was driving him at a quick pace. I blinked as my father’s voice rolled off the curves of the statue and startled me back into time, “I was a young fool when I set out, so long ago. I should easily have died in those woods.” He laughed as I realized the figure was an impression of him in his youth. I turned to him, wondering at the secrets that lay at the bottom of his river eyes; the stones he smoothed over, the animals that swam through his visions. I had learned about my mother, but of his life, I knew nothing. He smiled, leading me on through the garden in silence as we passed a dozen more images of my young father in stone. Here he huddled beneath a garden trellis, absorbed in some oversized volume while his hawk sat upon the underbrush, ripping into a hare (that apparently wasn’t my mother); there he lay with his face to the sky, his eyes sunken and his clothes hanging from his thin frame, the hawk perched on a dead branch beside him; a few steps away he knelt beside a fire of brilliant marigolds, a wooden bowl in his hands as he gazed up at the wizard. Dugald. I glanced around and found a grackle in the brush, its eyes bright with words unspoken, tilting its head to question me before it disappeared. We passed more statues; my father carving a beetle from a block of wood while a young boy sat watching intently beside him, and then, next to a twisted dogwood, were the stone shapes of a couple, hand in hand, blossoms scattered over their clothes and hair. Stone blossoms, as the real dogwood was past its bloom. “We married in late spring. It was the happiest and loneliest day of my life.” I ignored the living man beside me and walked slowly to the front of the couple, their half-grown daughter appealing to the faces of her parents locked in the past. I stared at the woman my mother had been, her hand entangled with that of the man who was my father. She was my image from Marri’s glass, only fuller, taller, and with a joy in her face I could never know. I looked up to see my father as he was, time catching up too suddenly, etching over his once youthful face and tossing years of gray into his hair. Just beyond him was another statue of the young man he had been gripping an older man in his arms, a sword at their feet. The expression set in stone upon his face was frightening, like a portrait of madness. I looked again at my living father. Mother had loved him once. Would I?

Stone

Over a moon and a fortnight, Dugald and I quietly recruited a small army of dissatisfied soldiers from my father’s own kingdom. It wasn’t difficult. Once led to the safety of our secluded patch of woods, the men openly ranted about my father’s treatment of their families and themselves. How they wished to escape, as we seemed to have. Then they would look upon us with questioning eyes and when my name was uttered, the men would fall to their knees, trembling with fear and shame. I raised them up again, assured them that their freedom had come at last; that I was now my father’s enemy. We trained and talked among the trees, discussing battle tactics and sending raid parties to rob my father’s armory of the weapons we required. Although the men deferred to me, it was Athene who led them.

She came to us one morning, stepping from the sunlight, her slight frame adorned in armor like the tight green scales of a young pinecone, her hair swept back and her black eyes lit with fire. She would not fight, she told me, but she could train the men and give them the Fae secrets to resolve and courage. And train them she did. Everyone improved his skills and saluted to the young woman as they would a great warlord. Late at night I heard her shrill little contact calls as she ceaselessly summoned her shy family to join us. One sunrise as the mists clung to the forest like a cast off scarf, we rose from our beds on the ground, shaking each other and whispering as the trees seemed to move around us. A root lifted, a branch bent before our eyes, a man fell as the trunk he’d been leaning against shifted suddenly to the right of him. Knots in the tree bark opened into eyes, and faces emerged as loose bits of bark curled out like sharp little noses, holes beneath them yawning into open mouths. A sharp screech sounded and suddenly all was still. I could see the little spotted owl high in a branch, held aloft as if by twisted fingers. She blinked and as I looked again, the trees seemed nothing more than the still and somber giants they had always been, but from behind them crept the slender figures of people; no, nothing human—Fae. Still half in shadow their dark eyes glittered and their worn cloaks swayed and ruffled as they shifted closer, appearing like a murder of crows. Athene’s band had joined us at last.

When all were ready, the remnants of The Seven followed Dugald and me into battle. With Athene’s band of Fae at our backs, my father’s loyal men fell quickly before us, having very little defense against Fae magic. Although the full-blooded Fae would never use their powers for harm, the half-bloods would and did without reserve, and the full-bloods came to the aid of their brethren, strengthening the injured or weary. Eira was present as well, and I caught glimpses of her between blows as she stepped past the throngs of men in combat. She was in plain robes, her feet bare and not a single weapon in her lowered hands. I screamed her name, but saw that the men who came across her let her be, confused by the sight of a woman in the midst of battle. Their eyes lingered, their feet fumbled, and one by one they were slain by our warriors in her wake. When she neared my side at last, I was weeping. “Eira! Go!” I rasped, desperate for her safety. She circled her arms around me and I swung my sword with new vigilance, determined to keep the enemy from her. She managed to hang on through it all, her slender form merging with my own. I had no time to notice what she’d become until men who approached me began lowering their weapons, their faces pale and incredulous. I glimpsed the tips of enormous white wings, minute feathers dropping like snow in an arc above us. I bent in weariness as an open circle spread about me and ever more faces seemed caught in that light, like the silvery brilliance that precedes a terrible storm. As I sank deeper into fatigue, I was only vaguely aware of a rain of ice, falling like daggers, winking brightly as the multitude of fearful eyes raised skyward. With ice, she pierced the hearts of my enemies. With veils of snow, she hid me, until I could disappear into the line of trees. I tried to turn to her, then, to hold her, but she slipped away, melting into cloud. “Find him,” the wind whispered.

I searched for my father within the crumbling keep and found him at last; the man who all his life had been fearless in battle was hiding away in the same East Tower where my mother had ended her life. He was frantically searching her stores for left over poison. He turned to me, sword at the ready as I burst in, the whites of his eyes yellow with bile, sweat raining down his face. When he recognized me, he threw his sword at my feet, rising to his full height as he spat, “Come to the hunt at last, I see. Or will you pass off your weapon even now?” I was ill with rage at the sight of him, scrambling for an easy out in the place where he’d let my mother die alone after suffering under his hand for so many years. His insult only fueled my fire. I had killed him in my mind a hundred times before that moment, when at last I held my sword to his throat. “Still, the boy hesitates. I never had a son, Androw. You were never the man I’d meant to follow me. You were every bit your mother, and you prove it even now.” I’m sorry to admit that had an empty vile of poison not dropped from his hand in that moment, my sword would have sent his horrid head to the floor. As it was, he fell back into the wall and my sword clattered to the stones as I caught him roughly in my arms. He writhed in agony for only a moment before his face fell into my chest. I pushed him off, turning away from his crumpled form to retch.

Fire

My father turned to the statue I stared at, shuddering, and bowed his head. “I’ll tell you everything, child, whatever you want to know.”

“Who was he?” I nodded towards the effigy of the older man.

“Your grandfather,” he admitted with a wan smile. When he finished the tale of the war he’d waged against his own father, he caught me shivering. “Come. I’ll write a book on my sins and you can read them back to me by firelight some day; for now let’s get you settled in.”

The first thing I noticed about my father’s castle was how empty it was. Not of decoration, for he had odd collectables in every nook and corner and living flowers on every sill, but of people. Dugald had explained about my mother’s shyness and fear of men, and how they had always kept the knights out in the courtyards and the laborers to a minimum, but what I saw now was a castle all but deserted. As we traversed through the inner keep’s many corridors, the single knight, Luc, followed my father and me at a distance, quiet despite his armor. He watched over us as though we might be in danger even here. I had been shown many rooms already and no one else was about until we found Dugald, holed up in the library with a beautiful older woman who appeared to be the illuminator. She bowed low to me when I entered, her voice like the ageless wind, “Welcome home, your majesty. We have waited eagerly for your arrival.”

“This is Chumana,” Dugald told me, smiling at my shock. I came to her, taking her brown hands in my own as she rose to her feet. The room seemed to spin as I gazed into her Fae eyes, a black that hinted at green, like the shadows between leaves.

“You look like your mother,” she told me in a whisper, and wiped a tear from my cheek with a slender finger. She looked like everything I’d imagined her to be, and more. I would have said something, at last, if not for the clatter behind me. I turned to see the young knight fallen to his knees, his face pale with sudden realization. “Forgive me, Highness, I knew not who you were!”

I remembered how Dugald had slapped his back and called him Luc and “boy.” So this was Chumana’s son, Lucanus. I smiled at his bent form, the dark curls plastered to his head from the weight of the helmet he now held in one hand. He had been there, a child in the shadows as my parents fell in love. He had been at their wedding, bearer of their rings, I’d been told. I said with wonder, “I also know not who I am.”

Chumana smiled, “What shall we call you, Princess?”

I stared for a moment, then glanced at my father. Did he know my name? I had forgotten that I didn’t have one. Mother had never mentioned it in her diary and Dugald had said he’d never known it. My father cleared his throat, taking my arm in his own, “She will let you know when it has been decided. For now, Princess will do nicely.” I thanked him with my eyes, wishing he could hear my thoughts as Dugald could.

My father bade them to stay behind so he and I could talk in private in the main hall. As we left, I saw Dugald smile upon Chumana with a secret light in his eyes I’d not seen before. I caught Lucanus with a similar look as he glanced in my direction. He reddened as our eyes met, then coughed and turned away.

Stone

Never had a kingdom been so easily won. The townsfolk slew the loyals that fled and broke through to the inner courtyard. Many began to gather round the broken keep, whispers of the white-winged warrior prince passing through the crowd like a Fae wind. The people had suffered so long in poverty that the idea of a new king sent them into immediate celebration, and my crowning took place even before the last of my father’s men had fallen. They cheered, naming me King Androw the Angel. I left the castle abandoned, giving everything it contained, every gold candlestick and silver spoon, down to the last cracked stone, to the people to use in rebuilding their failing farms and dilapidated houses. Many good men and women went to work building a new fort on a hill to the north for my bride and me. Those unhappy souls had watched with relish as the Fae defeated their cruel lord so they hailed their new Fae queen and her companions with great celebration.

Eira had made me into a hero; no one remembered her presence in battle. What they finally saw of her was a beautiful young woman obviously uncomfortable on the dais as they cheered for her. She quickly disappeared into the depths of our newly built keep, hiding away, and I could not understand it. I counseled with Dugald, but his single-minded focus was on her legacy—a half-blood queen able to welcome the Fae back into the world and hearts of men. He hadn’t noticed the sorrow in her eyes, and how she outright grieved as her midriff began to swell. I saw little of her as I was forced to travel often, announcing my regimen to foreign lands, and when home, she was often away in the woods. It was in the hardest winter months that I began to truly fear for her. I would ride through the forest, calling to her, searching for a hare, a woman, a wind with a voice. I would find her at long last, hollow-eyed and silent, nestled in a drift of snow.

I caught her once before she could sneak away. The winds howled with protest against the heavy, oak doors that kept winter at bay, and the white air was thick with frost. “Eira,” I breathed, struck by her calm as she swung a heavy winter cloak over her shoulders. She started, a spark of recognition bringing color to her cheeks at last. I should have taken her in my arms, filled the distance in her expression with my love for her. Instead, I swallowed tears and spat, “You leave me at every given opportunity. Why?”

Her eyes fell, “I don’t belong here, caged in stone. The woods…”

“Then take me with you.”

She smiled weakly. “Androw, you are king, now. They need you. A king who flees to the forest…”

I remembered the story of her father, slain by the misgivings of his people. “Eira, this isn’t the land where you were raised. They won’t…”

Her eyes flashed with animal ferocity. “I will protect our child.” I was startled, realizing how much of her past I’d forgotten. I recalled painfully how another kingdom had celebrated her once as a royal infant, how her Fae eyes had brought the people down upon her family, how she’d been taken away, grown sickly within the keep. How she felt responsible for the deaths of her family. She never spoke of it, but it was there, like a facet that darkened and came to light in her eyes at odd times.

“And I will protect you, Eira. Let me watch over you, let me bring you home from those woods before winter claims you…”

“The woods are my home.”

I flinched as though I’d been struck. “And you are my home. Eira, I will follow you, to the most remote wilderness if I have to. I will not let you leave me.” Something shifted in her face, as though she had found a final piece to something she’d been puzzling over in secret. “Yes,” she whispered, “I thought so.”

After speaking the words I would forever regret, I felt a sharp snap of anxiety, like the heavy metallic click of a lock closing over my heart. But I smiled around my reservations, watching with awe as she removed her cloak and resigned herself to the keep for a handful of long, winter days. She hid away from me in a small, remote tower, and I swallowed bitter memories of my mother, wondering, always wondering. In her last days in the castle, she sent Athene away to search for her grandmother’s lost band of Fae so that she might tell them about her expected child. I could see that she never expected Athene to find them, her eyes vacant of hope. Chumana, with Lucanus, she sent to a bordering kingdom, to search their libraries for some record of her past. Chumana assumed it was a whim caused by the pregnancy, a wish to make known her past to the child she would bear. I laughed bitterly, seeing through her transparent motives, knowing she only wished to be alone. Marri she sent to the woods to gather herbs. When Marri brought the first basketful of flora, I pulled her aside, picking through the cuttings she had gathered, lifting them to my nose. A few were potent, smelling to me like bitter poison. When I asked what my wife was intending to brew, Marri paled with sudden understanding. She promised to watch over Eira, and later assured me that Eira was doing little more than filling vases and pressing blooms between the pages of books. So Marri continued to venture deep into the woods, seeking whatever odd plant Eira requested. She was out, of course, when Eira disappeared.

But I was wrong, seeking wisdom from my mother’s past; death was not the escape Eira sought. I know now that she was using her powers in secret, transferring her fears to the walls around us as a last measure before she left. She had long been preparing, and by the time I was aware of her ambitions, I found myself abandoned, imprisoned in stone.

Fire

The stone tables in the great hall were lined with strange artifacts laid out upon silks. They were carefully placed beneath the many windows, the afternoon light wrapping around each relic like a fine veil. My father led me to a pedestal at the head of the hall. A great tapestry hung above it, mostly done in whites and blues. As we approached, my heart stumbled. It was the scene of my childhood—the barren arctic wilderness of endless snow and sky. A great white owl hung in the air on angelic wings, her face to the observer, round eyes shining with gold-threaded defiance. How I missed her! Just as I opened my mouth to ask about the tapestry, my father, peering down at the pedestal in its single stream of sunlight, whispered, “Your egg.” I stared at the broken pieces of shell resting on ivory silk.

“Truly?”

My father nodded, his eyes shining. “A fortnight after she left, Dugald came to me bearing this shell and told me my daughter had been born. I wanted so badly to come to you…”

“Did you try?”

He laughed bitterly. “Did I! These damned walls… I was battered by the effort, but as always, remained trapped in stone.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Dugald didn’t tell you?”

I shook my head. “He throws snow at me when I ask too many questions.”

My father lowered his brows, “Is that so? We’ll have to see about that. But let me explain. Your mother knew I would follow, even to the snow fields so far from here. She knew I would die in an effort to remain with her, so she used magic to keep me within the walls of the inner courtyard; they are locked to me alone. I tried climbing them, ramming them, blasting them, digging beneath them, … it is difficult to explain. I myself am unsure how they stay impervious, but they do. Should I grow a pair of wings, those damned stones would cast me down to the earth before I could make my way over.” He gave me a look of despair, “Did you think I didn’t try?”

I cleared my throat, embarrassed. “I wasn’t sure. I knew nothing of you. I sometimes…” I had to look away. “I blamed you for her death. A mother owl cannot hunt endlessly on her own without a mate and still expect to care for her young and live. The winter was harsh and she refused to abandon me.” My own tears were spilling over now and my father stepped near as though to embrace me, but started suddenly, throwing wary glances at the candles that flashed and sputtered to life, their flames stretching up as they pointed little golden fingers toward the rafters. I apologized, “I’m not quite in full control of my powers yet. Dugald says I have much to learn.”

My father nodded, his brows arched, “As do I.”

* * *

I was left to sleep in my mother’s favorite room, according to my father: a drafty, high tower that overlooked the vast woods to the North. As soon as I was alone, I searched every crevice and corner, tearing my way through cobwebs and picking at loose stones, for anything that might be hidden, anything at all she might have left behind. It was only when I gave up, stumbling to the newly made bed in the center of the room, that I tripped over a bulge in the rug. I lifted it, revealing a loose plank that sat slightly higher than the rest. Beneath it was a thick block of wood that shifted shape and lightened at my touch. I lifted a small, leather-bound book from the gap and turned it over in my hands. It was carefully engraved with a flower-bearing vine along the edges and was held together by a frayed bit of twine wrapped neatly around its center. I gasped as the twine fell away beneath my fingers, revealing an oval stone embedded in the leather. I brought it closer, finding my own black eye in the smoky amber gem. The leather seemed to crinkle and crease around its edges as I watched, unfolding a thin layer like an eyelid, and to my horror, it blinked. I dropped the book and fell backwards into the wall, gasping in disbelief.

Though my eyes burned with fatigue as the moon made her slow course along the arched window across the room, I dared not look away from the book. It remained unaltered all the while, allowing my heart to slow. Finally I ventured near it once more, brushing a tentative finger along the braided spine. The amber eye was still and blank, as it must have been through the long, dark years it lay in hiding beneath the floor. Soft bits of pelt crumbled and fell away as I opened the cover, the scents of cow hide and dust wafting out. As I’d guessed, it was Bari’s name scrawled inside the front cover. I hesitated then, wondering about the eye. Had it truly seen me? Did the book possess magic? But Bari wasn’t Fae. Had someone tampered with it, putting a spell of their own on her diary? I sent a searing question to Dugald, burning through his dreams. He kicked at the hot coal before waking, not wanting to leave some comfortable memory, but it only caught his boot on fire and he woke at last, swearing. Dugald, I found a book. It blinked at me. Is it dangerous?

He gave a blustery laugh from some distant corner of the keep. You’re very persistent, aren’t you? A blinking book, eh? That’s typical Fae work; a lock, most likely. You’ve probably uncovered someone’s diary. If you’re still alive, and the book opened, then you have gained permission to read. Tell me what you learn, my little blight, but not before dawn!

I shut my mind to his instant snores and began thumbing through the worn pages. They were soft and impossibly thin, like the tender gills of a mushroom, and many were bruised with the dark pigment of pressed flowers. The blooms, parchment thin, slipped from the pages, littering my lap. I sighed, angry with myself for being so careless as I sat wondering which blossom had been placed between which pages. As I tried to place them, the writing caught my attention; I couldn’t decipher a word of it. I realized then that what I had learned from Marri was to read the words of Fae, those being the markings my mother had used in her journal. Bari had likely written in one of the more common languages of men. I would have to ask my father for a tutor.

Dugald called for me before sunrise; a chill wind blowing away my dreams. I grinned, shaking my head at his revenge, and rose to follow the gale. It led me out of the high tower upon which my room in the narrow turret sat, down a flight of steep stairs, through a long corridor that ran past the vast kitchen where wonderful smells escaped to my torment, up another flight of stairs far to the west of the main hall and into another high tower that ended at the corner of an open wall walk. Despite the tour Father had given me, I would never have found Dugald had I not been led. I shivered in the crisp morning air as his storm broke finally, drenching me in my chemise. Still he made me wait, standing on sore feet, my hair dripping and my stomach agonizing over the breakfast I’d been denied. Finally, Dugald stilled the wind and quieted the rain. I snapped my mouth shut on a yawn as the mist cleared; a great, spindly pine appeared to have grown up from the stones. I blinked, and Dugald took its place, wearing a doublet of deep green and a black leather glove that covered his left forearm. An old hawk sat upon that arm, his eyes pearly with cataracts. “Aerin,” I breathed. The raptor cocked his head in response, examining me with his intelligent stare.

“Your father would like you to learn falconry,” Dugald informed me, and a young girl slipped through the door as if on cue. A worn, brown gauntlet covered half her shoulder as well as her entire arm. She kept her head low as she approached me, then knelt, her pretty face filled with uncertainty. “But I’ve another idea.” I raised my eyes in time to catch Dugald’s smirk, and saw it, then; his vision born of falling snow before me. The specks began to cluster as a brilliant, white shape came together to rest upon the girl’s arm. She gasped at the phantom snow owl and it burst, blown apart by her breath. “You wished to fly; now is your chance.”

I stared at the girl’s shaking arm, my eyes already ringed with gold, and laughed. “You offer freedom and captivity in one breath, Dugald. It’s clever. But why?”

“Why?” He hurtled a vision borne on a fierce wind, men in arms gathering in my head; not just two, as we’d seen that day in Marri’s forest, but hundreds, thousands, drawing closer to let more in, finding their way through the dark recesses of my mind with dim torches, as though traveling by night. They rode horses (for which I now knew the name), as well as taller, humped beasts with long, knobby legs. They huddled by fires, building temporary shelters against my howling wonder. Their voices were little more than whispers, my head echoing with their harsh rasping, in a language I couldn’t understand. I found my own thick tongue at last, “Who are they?”

“Your father’s enemies. Enemies of Fae and men alike.”

I shook them out of my head, blinking in the brilliant light of dawn. My vision seemed altered, somehow, as if color bled away, hidden in the sharp contrasts of shadow and light. My head ached and I found I couldn’t move my eyes, but had to turn my head to peer at the trembling girl beside me. I wondered, then. “What are you planning?” I lifted my chin to face Dugald, searing through snow-buried motives with my blaze of doubt. My arms lightened, warming where the gooseflesh pricked, shafts of feathers sprouting beneath the sleeves of my nightdress. How I had longed for this! I shivered, letting go of my human bones.

Dugald let loose a burst of laughter, startling Aerin, who lifted his great wings in protest. I watched a bronze feather float away on a stray draft, dancing around my own loosed down. “Why have you waited? Why haven’t you left before now on those fine, white wings?” Dugald wondered.

Because I trust you. And I need to know.

He nodded, admiring my new form as my wings fought for lift, my legs folding into a broad chest as my gown grew spotted with the black and white markings typical of a female snow owl. I gave out a rasping shriek and the girl cowered beside me, bracing herself as my talons clutched at her arm. Dugald murmured something to soothe her; human words I fought to understand. To me, he said, Stay. Learn. There is much I have to show you.

* * *

It took all my patience to learn to be owl and woman at once; to hear more than the howling call of my northern home, and Dugald shouting in my head. I imagined hearing the piercing whistle my mother had called with; to tell me she had food, to ask if I was safe, to find her way back to me. Even in my dreams I found myself there, a white shadow in the long winter nights, hunting rabbits that stood up and turned into men. Men with fire in their eyes, throwing off words I couldn’t understand.

It took moons of practice and patience to learn what I must. Mornings I spent in musty rooms with multiple tutors, learning new languages; afternoons I rode under the sun in the inner courtyard with my father, casting peregrine falcons from our wrists; evenings I sought Dugald, learning to quiet the feral owl cry, my bones easing into a shape too-well remembered. Late at night we poured over maps as Dugald pointed out the places outside my father’s kingdom where he’d last found signs of our enemies. Though they moved camp as often as possible, he seemed to have found a pattern in their tracks, and he knew of sanctuaries they came back to time and again. It took as much time and more to convince my father that I would return. At last, he conceded, and we were ready. Ella, the young girl who’d grown accustomed to my frenzied landings, thrust me over the widow’s walk, and I dove into the night, flying south beneath a harvest moon.

It took a fortnight to reach the first camp, deep in the high country where trees fell to their knees beneath a tormenting sun, giving way to shrubs and small plants with spines like darning needles. The heat suppressed me in my winter plumage so I dropped my wings, settling for the spindly limbs of a quick lizard I’d caught the night before. I darted about their canvas tents, licking up ants and listening with my sensitive tympanic membranes.

Dugald was there with me; a finch in a bush, a golden eagle in empty sky, a burrowing owl at twilight. How can they plan such things? I asked, shaken by what I’d heard.

There are many left who despise the Fae for what they did the day your father declared war. We have long been finding them, meeting in secret to plan their hunt.

I remembered the men upon horses in Marri’s woods, how they’d tried to ambush us. But what can be done?

There are many half-bloods left. Some suggest war.

I closed my lizard eyes, feeling stiff and groggy in the waning sun. What does Father say?

To disrupt them. Counter their efforts, if we can. But they are aware of us, too; skeptical of every shadow, every creature with a twinkle in its eye. These men grow more and more violent. Your father wants to bring the remnants of the Fae together, to strengthen our efforts. But imprisoned as he is, many pay him no heed. What can a man trapped by a simple spell know about Fae magic, they ask.

Dugald. If it’s so simple, why haven’t you freed him? Or why hasn’t anyone else, for that matter?

It isn’t simple. Not without… he paused, swiveling his owl-head to gaze around. I liked him in that form, regal in his amber frock, his bare legs tall as ever, but overall, a tiny, endearing little animal. Not without your mother’s permission.

I gaped at him, my long jaw gone slack. There’s a way to reach her?

No. Well. I don’t entirely know. There’s a way to untie her from that place, a way to encourage her to let go. I need to do some exploring first, but there must be a way, some key to reaching her. Stop looking at me that way. Don’t think you can get her back, it doesn’t work like that. The dead are dead, lost to the earth from which they came. You will never see her again, at least not in a form that you would recognize. I’m sorry.

I licked my eye, wiping away a human tear that wasn’t really there. If my father could be freed, then what?

He would gain their respect once more and the Fae would listen, all of them. He is Androw the Angel, the only man who has ever led the Fae. They would follow without hesitation.

I shuddered, shaking off my scales, and burst from the sand in a flutter of white. I wondered what those strange men would make of the few feathers that fell; would they recognize the plume of a snowy owl, here in this harsh land of heat and dust? Would they know me for a spy? I rose beside the waking moon, catching a glimpse of Dugald behind me. He had cast off his delicate owl plumage, and lifted in wild flight on a pair of leathery bat wings like bits of the night torn loose. He threw a ping of questions my way, his sonar caught by my sensitive owl ears. But I hid behind the gold fire in my eyes, making him wait while we soared home. I was too busy recalling the delicate blooms I’d found pressed in Bari’s diary. There had been notes beside each, names and descriptions I was just beginning to decipher, written in a second hand I recognized as my mother’s. The words burned through my thoughts, mentions of snowdrops and crimson blood and buried grief. Beside one dark petal was an odd description of a stone grave, shedding petals as dark tears. Dugald had finally spoken the one word I’d failed to interpret in that flower’s entry. The stone was a prison, and the loosed petal, a key.

* * *

As Lucanus and I approached the little pond in the inner courtyard the crowd of geese shuffled away in two directions, honking mild insults as they peered back at us. We settled in the tall grass, plucking at the slender blades in silence. There was so much I wanted to ask him. He had been a part of The Seven, almost like a son to my father, and a protector of my mother, as young as he was then. But he was the first person I found I couldn’t talk to. Words sank like stones in water as my thoughts rushed away in his presence. We watched the cumbersome geese for a long while, avoiding each other’s eyes. At last he said, “Your mother saved my life, once.” I glanced up, surprised, and he laughed. “She happened to be watching as a toad swallowed me whole. She plucked it up on the instant, pinched its middle and out I popped.” We laughed, lifting our faces to the darkening sky. Thunder drummed around us softly, as if the sky laughed with us. “You loved my father,” I said suddenly, turning to see his eyes smiling into mine.

“He was the only man who never left me.” He stared down at his hands. He was twisting together several blades of grass in a ladder-like pattern.

“That’s how I feel about my mother. Do you think she remembers me? Do you think she’s here anymore, watching us somehow? Or did she disappear into the earth and lose her sense of self, as Dugald says?”

Lucanus shrugged and I watched as he twisted his grass braid into a circle and tied the ends together. “Who can say where one thing ends and another begins?” He opened my hand gently, and placed the tiny ring upon my palm.

I fingered it. “Why a beetle?”

Lucanus smirked, “Why not? They’re sturdy little things that no one pays much attention to. And the world is stunning through their kaleidoscope eyes. Not to mention flying.”

“Kaleidoscope eyes…”

“Want to try it?”

I laughed, “A beetle?”

“Or any flying insect. A ladybug or a dragonfly…”

My eyes drifted over the pond where cattails and horsetails swayed. Beyond them was a small figure, hunched and bundled in a tangle of dark cloaks. I watched the old woman make her slow way across the field like a detached mound of earth, ambling about with downcast eyes. Damselflies darted in and out of reeds around her, flashing colors about her dull form. She stopped suddenly, stooping to pluck something from the base of a willow. I could just make out a cluster of yellow-headed mushrooms. I grinned, remembering that their black tangles of shoots were named after bootlaces, recognizing with certainty the only woman in the world who’d taught me such things. I ignored Luc as he threw me a question, lifting my arms to the evening sun instead. Through closed eyes, I could see delicate veins stretched across my unfolding arms. My blood quickened under the sun’s warmth and I could feel the scales, as fine as dust, gathering over my wings. A tugging breeze lifted my light form, and I opened my eyes. Lucanus was right, the vision of the world before me was like a painting in the rain, blurred and repeated, so that motion was a sudden flash of color followed by a disintegrating tail. I leapt and fell in the air, bouncing on minute currents. I could taste the nearby water, the scents of flowers and oncoming rain. I was nothing but a quivering bit of life, a flash of color in the periphery, like a little, lost memory, struggling towards the woman who stood and stared. She whispered to me and I fell, heavy with human bones once more. I picked myself up from her feet and threw my arms about her. “Marri, you came!”

“I was brought,” she said in a cracked voice as she plucked a tiny green beetle from her sleeve.

Snow

The crowd of an entire kingdom was pressed into the inner courtyard, bustling together to watch the public ceremony. The king’s child had returned, and she was about to be named his heir. They drew their cloaks closer about themselves as I wafted past, shivering at my touch. I climbed the turrets to the high balcony, racing swiftly across stone until I reached the only ones I knew; the last of my protectors. I blew about their eyes and lifted their hair, stroking each face with my wandering hands. My chill presence was a tempest they shrank from, teeth chattering despite their heavy clothes. There was Chumana, the illuminator; how little she had changed. Her brown face still glowing with warmth even as my cold rain beat against her brow. And Lucanus, her son; the squirrelly child grown into a long-limbed knight with drifting eyes. I could almost feel the heat of his blush beneath his armor as he stared at my young princess. I pelted him for good measure, my chill tears pinging off his metal attire. Athene, the leader in battle, the healer and courier, ruffled her feathers and snipped at me, gazing skyward with those owl eyes I knew too well.

Marri, I lingered over, giving her a good soaking. She fluffed her hood and grumbled, hiding a smile. She could feel my presence as well as I could see her time-worn face. It was she who first stirred my interest with a slam of the door to her little hut in the woods, weeks ago. I had fallen from the skies and hovered near as she sat in her garden, tucking herself in with the star-specked quilt of night, sewn together by prayer. She had called to me, catching scattered bits of rain and piecing them together until I felt myself being looked upon at last. She carried me along as she set out, beating at the woods and would-be assailants with a twisted hickory cane and blasts of belligerence. I followed, bound to her by the spells she cast, the chants she hurled at my stormy objections. I accompanied her that long way, laughing soft thunder as I gave in to her pull. Now she stood on the balcony, fighting weariness, and wiping her own warm rain from her eyes.

And there was my old friend Dugald. I tugged at his disheveled white hair, whipping it out into cloudy wisps, but his eyes were blind to me, as always. He’d never been all that perceptive, always caressing the future with greedy hands. Now he stood stroking the old, blind hawk who rested upon his arm as he watched my daughter with interest. I knew what he wished for her, seeing in her the emblem of peace he once saw in me. His thoughts skipped over the prejudices, even hatred, still bred in so many minds, and the ambivalence of so many full blooded-Fae, still living apart from human kind. They were so distant now that few knew of their existence anymore; even Dugald thought them lost to the world. Still, Dugald’s intentions were always for good, and he’d made it up to me, in the end. He had been there all those years that seemed to pass in a handful of days, sometimes in the pure white form of a male owl, but mostly as a northern wind; guarding my territory, protecting my nest and guiding me on so many hunts. For what it was worth, he had always cared for her as a father might.

Athene’s band of half-bloods intermingled with the men and women of Androw’s kingdom; eyes as black as night and lit with stars laughing among those rainbowed with blues, browns, greens and gold. Their sunlit faces lifted to me, murmuring as I grew heavy with emotion, my tears turning to fine pellets of ice. They couldn’t know, of course, shaking their heads as they named me Fickle Weather.

But Androw—how his eyes widened and wandered as I sighed into his face. I felt his heart quicken as I fell upon him with the only kiss I could give, my hailstorm softening to thick bits of snow. He touched his cheek, pressing in a single, white kiss as it melted away. I could not undo the binding spell I’d placed upon him so long ago, keeping him prisoner within these walls, though I was sorry for it now. Bari held that key, long dead though she was. The only hope lie pressed in the pages of her diary; a single, dried petal of those deep violet flowers she’d kept from Eolande’s funeral. Like a preserved tear, I’d bound my hurt to it, and Androw’s life to the stones that had been my own prison. If only I could tell him now, if only someone could remove that single petal from those walls… I whispered it into his ear, though I knew he could not understand, for I’d lost the knack for human words.

Marri stepped forward then, her face radiating with the endless love I felt for them all. I thickened myself, trying for all the world to resemble the white down my daughter once took comfort in. I darkened the sky with worry as Marri brought forward the final gift I had left for my child, opening her stiff, crumpled hand to reveal a single opal in her palm. I carried Marri’s cracked voice down to the crowd below so all might hear, “This is the stone the Queen of Fae placed upon Eira’s forehead, blessing her at Eolande’s funeral. Among the Fae, an opal is the symbol of hope, of the earth working together all colors into one being, of new life from death. This stone was given to Eira, the Maiden of Snow and mother of the future. She gave the stone to me in confidence to hold onto until this day; the naming of her daughter. We celebrate our beloved Opal, daughter of Eira, great granddaughter of the Queen of Fae, and daughter of King Androw the Angel, who has brought men and Fae together in peace. May the sun shine upon our princess all of her days.” So I let it, shifting my skirts to allow the blazing star to warm my daughter’s face. Still, I covered her in a thousand white blessings as she took my gift, that silent word trapped in stone; the name I’d never had the chance to give her. She raised it to the sky and the kingdom cheered while I found myself caught in the endless depths of her eyes. They gleamed as she stared at the precious gem, blazing with color and light at the fire sealed within a white stone. Something fell from her other hand; a thin, fragile secret, left to my empty embrace. She found me then, smiling at my sudden flurry of white as I caught the dark petal, and blew it apart with a whisper of her name.

 

Keep reading for a sneak peak of Char, the sequel to Opal

 

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