Haven Magic (21 page)

Modi appeared at his side. “I will remove it,” he said, taking a step toward the tree.

At this, Gudrin came alive again. “No, Modi! Don’t touch the axe!”

Modi’s hand stopped, but it didn’t retreat. Brand watched Modi’s face and his huge hand, frozen in the middle of reaching for the axe. He knew there was a great struggle there. Clearly, he wanted the axe for his own. In the end Modi retreated. Gudrin stood weakly and took her book from her rucksack.

“Lay your hands on the handle, Brand,” she said.

Brand stepped forward, blinking. How was he supposed to pull the blade out of a foot of hardwood? What would the axe do to him?

“No!” said Modi.

“Silence!” shouted Gudrin with what seemed to be the last of her strength. “You will obey me and you will honor the words of your father.”

Modi backed off and turned away. His shoulders hunched and his head hung low, he glowered at the ground fiercely. No one came near him.

“Brand?”

Brand stepped up. He glanced at Modi once, then at the others. Everyone watched him.

“Remove the axe and place it back in my pack.”

Brand nodded and laid his hand upon the handle.

Brand felt the power of it course through him. It was as if he held the reins of a massive horse that shivered at his touch. He was reminded of the presence he’d felt when he had confronted the Shining Lady and Oberon.

“Bruka!”
Gudrin cried in the language of the Kindred.

In response, the axe worked itself out of the hard flesh of the tree. Brand tugged at it, but it was the axe that did the work. He felt as though he drove a powerful animal, merely guiding it.

It came free in his hand and he felt a greater surge of well-being...of
power
. The axe made him feel stronger. So strong, that its heavy curved blades were as light at a wand in his hand. Slowly, a wide grin opened his lips and spread over his face.

Gudrin opened her rucksack and offered it to Brand.

Brand froze, just as he had seen Modi do in reaction. He stared at the axe, and the Amber Jewel in the blade shimmered back at him, as if in acknowledgment , or perhaps as a form of greeting.

Gudrin shook her rucksack suggestively.

Brand knew what she wanted. But the thought was unthinkable. He couldn’t put down the axe, he couldn’t let go of this power. She was asking too much. She wanted a thief to give back the master’s purse. She wanted a prisoner to slam the dungeon door closed. She wanted a starving beggar to give up a leg of roasted ham.

He thought of the Shining Lady and of Corbin’s Dead brother Sam and of Telyn. Beautiful Telyn.

He stuffed the axe into the open maw of the rucksack. The beautiful Jewel vanished into darkness again.

Everyone relaxed.

“It is done,” said Gudrin.

She sagged down to one knee, and then collapsed.

Epilogue

The battle was over, but they all knew that the war was just beginning. Suddenly tired and calm, Brand and the others picked themselves up and did what they could to staunch the flames. But Froghollow would be a ruin by morning, none of them doubted that.

In the flickering light of the burning house Brand had loved so much, Gudrin came to him and spoke with unusual gentleness. “You are a strong one. Strong of spirit as well as of limb. Few can willingly release Ambros once they have taken it up, and fewer still can do so without getting blood on its curved blades.”

Brand nodded. He knew it was true, he had held Ambros and knew the power of it.

“The enemy has been driven off for now. But life will not be easy for the River Folk from this day forward.”

“We will have to make weapons and prepare for war,” he said grimly.

“Perhaps,” said Gudrin. “What is certain is that your people and mine have a great problem, Brand,” said Gudrin. “I’m asking for your help in solving it.”

Brand looked at her seriously. Her face was old and craggy and worn. Females of the Kindred are rarely attractive, but Gudrin was perhaps even less so than the average. But still, he saw in her a certain beauty, a certain inner strength. She had done everything she could for him and his people by taking Myrrdin’s place.

“I’m grateful for all you’ve done,” Brand said. “I’ll help you in any way I can.”

She nodded. “I knew that you would.”

End of
AMBER MAGIC
Book #1 of the Haven
Series

Translated from the
Teret,
the compendium of Kindred wisdom:

On the topic of Wee Folk: Do not discount them!

Wee Folk are common members of the Fae, and come in many varieties. Most have faces and bodies that resemble tiny, thin humans. Often confused with elves, goblins and wisps, they are a unique race. All Wee Folk are smaller than any elf, as elves are generally the size of small adult humans. They are smaller than goblins as well, who can be distinguished by their evil toothy faces, cat-like eyes and ears, as well as their normal height of approximately three feet. Wee Folk can’t be classified as wisps, either. They possess much more intellect, and are larger than wisps. Most significantly, despite their ability to make huge leaps, they completely lack wings. Another clear differential trait is the preference of the Wee Folk to wear clothing like humans. They are not, however, exactly like small humans in appearance. When examining one of their type, a human will often describe them as doll-like. Their faces resemble a caricature of a real human face. Their features are often pulled and exaggerated, with noses like waxy candles, hair like straw, or eyes like glass marbles.

Wee Folk do possess some natural craft with magic. For the most part, their magic is weak, but it’s always helpful in their favorite pastime: trickery. Many have the ability to shape-shift. This shifting ability isn’t uncommon, but it is specific. Most Wee Folk capable of shifting can only change into one thing, usually an animal or other type of small, mundane person. In the vast majority of cases, their shape-shifters can only change into something that is approximately the same size and weight as their original form. The humans refer to such creatures (and to other Faerie capable of similar tricks) as
changelings
.

Those able to change into human shapes are the most feared of the changelings. Often, the Wee Folk can establish an easy life by simply changing into the shape of a baby or small child, and thus reaping the benefits of a caring human mother indefinitely. Since, in order to succeed, such a scheme requires the kidnapping of the mother’s real infant, it is considered by the humans to be one of the most vile tricks of the many performed regularly by the Faerie. The child in question might be cared for and raised among the Faerie—or equally likely—abandoned to die in some wild place far from home and family. One result is a likely as the other, given the naturally fickle and unpredictable nature of the Faerie.

Although the humans fear them, our people do not. From the point of view of the Kindred, the Wee Folk are generally dismissed as trivial annoyances. Being creatures that favor windy, wild places, they rarely venture deep down into our stone fortresses. We of the Kindred are largely resistant to their tricks and we fall prey to their magicks far less often than do the hapless humans they love to plague.

However, their kind does pose a potential threat in the mind of this author. Unlike the other varieties of the Faerie, they have the ability to thrive and travel in our world, even in broad daylight. They are not restricted to Faerie mounds, nor do they only haunt specific locales like the ghosts that drift about in any ancient ruin. They come and go as they please and aren’t tethered to their own domain. Equally disturbing, they are common and numerous.

As a people they are chaotic and totally lacking in organization. According to all accounts, they tend to be solitary individualists, each creature bent only upon achieving its own desires. In their current anti-social state they pose no threat. However, should this strange race ever form a union of some kind, a collective as large as a nation—should they ever appoint their own king—it is the studied opinion of this author that they would become a new and powerful force in our world as well as theirs. An organized army of magical, tricksy Wee Folk is something no other race would ever want to face.

—
Jerd of the Talespinners, written circa the Third Era of the Earthlight

Chapter One

The Giant

One of the last beings in Cmyru to hear that the Pact had been broken was the Deepwood Giant, Twrog. A flittering wisp told him, whispering tinkling words into his huge, flap-like ears. He took a few clumsy swipes at her at first, as if she were some kind of annoying gnat. But after some of her words sank into his thick brain, he gave pause to his hopeless attempts to catch her and listened instead.

“Whut?” he asked with thick lips and teeth as big as walnuts. He wasn’t good at speech. He rarely had anyone to talk to.

The wisps were natural messengers. They loved gossip and flew far and wide with any tidbit of news to tell every creature who would listen. Today, they had important news indeed to spread. The Pact between the River Folk and the Faerie had been broken. The borders of human lands were no longer protected by the word of Lord Oberon.

Twrog was one of the last to hear about the fateful night that had ended the centuries-long truce between the humans and the Faerie, but he was one of the first to take action. Being a giant rather than one of the Faerie, he didn’t share their cautious nature. The Faerie had incredibly long lifespans, and centuries of experience had taught them to be suspicious of any change in the order of things. One of the keys to a long life, as any oldster will tell you, is to approach life with a fair dose of caution. When they first heard of the broken Pact, they suspected a trick of some kind.

Tricks were, in fact, one of the things the Faerie always expected from others. They lived by trickery, and swore by it. Among themselves, they bragged of every fool they had taken, of every surprise they had sprung. As beings so accustomed to duplicity, they were the very first to suspect its use by others. And so, although they knew that the Pact had been broken, they mistrusted such a huge change.

For many long years they had been punished by their lord for any transgression into human lands, particularly the lands along the Berrywine River. On the banks of the great river lived the humans known as the River Folk. These were the same accursed humans who had managed to forge the Pact in the first place and had meticulously kept their end of the bargain for more than two centuries. The very events which led to the forging of this Pact were considered by the Faerie to be base trickery. And so when they were told the Pact had ended, many of the Shining Folk mistrusted the news. What new trick did the River Folk have in mind for them? Had they spent the long years of peace preparing some foul surprise? Were they so very confident in their defenses, so contemptuous of the Faerie, they had allowed the treaty to drop? What awaited the first of the Shining Folk who ventured to accost a human maiden, no doubt working a field alone at dusk just to bait a hapless shade into making a horrible mistake?

None of these thoughts occurred to Twrog, however. In the first place, thoughts of such complexity rarely bothered him. Secondly, he was a giant, and his race was a people apart from the Faerie. Trickery was not his strongpoint. He had, however, been bound by the Pact. Part of that agreement stated that the Faerie would hold back creatures such as himself, keeping him from violating the borders of the rich lands of the River Folk. He had been forced to be content with trudging through the Deepwood, satisfying himself with the stringy meat and tough bones of the occasional huntsmen who ventured too deeply into the forests tracking a lung-shot stag.

Today, Twrog stood at the very border of the Deepwood. For long years he had traveled to this spot on the edge of the protected lands of the River Folk. Even the ground here was well-worn, the leaves having been pushed away by his heavy tread. The exposed dirt had been churned into a patch of dust.

From this vantage point, under a rowan tree on a hillock, he could see the pig farm that had been the object of his daily scrutiny for so long. But it wasn’t the sights of the farm, so much as the smells of it, that drove his heavy jaws to drip and salivate.

He had not tasted a true corn-fed, farm-raised pig but for once in his life, when he had caught a human with a knapsack that bulged with a salted ham hock. The human had been tasteless and uninteresting, like all his kind. But the ham hock had changed Twrog’s world. How unlike the flavor of his usual fare that ham had tasted!

Salting a meat and smoking it, these were things beyond Twrog’s capacities. He did often cook his meats, of course. He would spit a good catch and toast it, usually unskinned, so that the fur burnt with the flesh. The flavor was always gamey and half raw, but never salted or smoked. When he did manage to spear a wild boar, he always hoped it would taste like the ham hock, but alas, it never did. Something the River Folk did to those pigs made them delicious. Perhaps it was in the preparation, but he suspected it was the pigs themselves that were different. They were nearly hairless and tame, clearly a different variety of animal compared to the wild ones.