Sound the fairy call, p.1
Sound the Fairy Call, page 1
Sound the Fairy Call
By K.L. Noone
Published by JMS Books LLC
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Copyright 2019 K.L. Noone
ISBN 9781634869041
Cover Design: Written Ink Designs | written-ink.com
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All rights reserved.
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are solely the product of the author’s imagination and/or are used fictitiously, though reference may be made to actual historical events or existing locations. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Published in the United States of America.
* * * *
For everyone who believes in fairies, romance, and enchanted forest groves.
* * * *
Sound the Fairy Call
By K.L. Noone
Gather to your fairy piper
When he pipes his magic tune:
Merry, merry,
Take a cherry;
Mine are sounder,
Mine are rounder,
Mine are sweeter
For the eater…
—Robert Graves, “Cherry-Time”
Mud. Mud and rain. Mud and rain and tree roots, Eoan amended, having just stumbled over the fifth one in as many minutes. No decent roads.
Of course no decent roads existed. Too much fighting. Too few men left to care about smooth tracks for village cart-wheels.
He put one foot in front of the other, in the rain.
He’d liked the country, briefly. It’d been green. It had reminded him of the gentle mists and jewel-green rolling hills of his foggy island home.
Country was a misnomer, of course. The present war had split the region into brittle pieces; he wasn’t even sure where the most recent map-lines’d been drawn. He might’ve walked through one country, or three, or more: Erdély, Dobruja, Tisza, so many others. The once-strong Osmanii Empire splintering apart. Wars of independence. Wars of the human against the inhuman, or so the rumors ran. In those rumors the supernatural, the inhuman, the fae and vampires and garwolves, always fought on the side of evil, naturally. Which side that was depended on the storyteller.
Eoan sighed, and nudged a rock with his boot. The rock bounced, but not very far, and into a puddle. This seemed fair.
Eoan himself remained personally ambivalent on the subject of the fairy-kind. Half of his Northern Isles mercenary company’d sworn up and down that their sergeant-at-arms could turn into a wolf and rip a man’s throat out; this might’ve been true, given the man’s disposition, but remained unwitnessed. Eoan had never seen any of the otherfolk, and he tended not to believe in unseen visions.
Not these days. Not after what he had seen.
He did believe in having the freedom to choose. The freedom from oppression. The freedom to live. That was more or less why he was here. Why he’d been here.
The rain unhelpfully slid down the back of his neck and found a home between his skin and his shirt, under leather which pretended to be a coat and did no good at all. He sighed again. The rain shrugged and kept going.
Maybe he should just stop walking. Maybe he should sit down here, on a fallen tree in the green-grey haze of forest, and never move again.
The faces came back and haunted him. Friends. Fallen. Flames.
He’d signed on as a mercenary because he’d thought that’d offer answers to a few looming problems, and maybe also help some people both personal and close to home, and hypothetical, as yet unmet. He wasn’t a bad fighter; he’d figured out his own height and weight and broad shoulders with minimal youthful awkwardness, and he’d learned everything he could from older passing soldiers, visiting companies, his retired-sergeant father before the sickness and the solemn funeral. He’d never been much good at anything else—not quick and clever like his sister, not charming and eloquent like his brother, only solid and big and protective. But he could put that largeness and that protectiveness to use. And he could send most of his pay back home to his mother and his siblings, to the sprawling ó Flannagáin family inn at the emerald island’s southernmost tip, the inn which brought in steady customers but required upkeep.
And he’d wanted to do some good. Of the causes in the world, getting a poor region out from under the crumbling but cruel grip of the Empire had to be a worthwhile one, he’d thought.
Maybe it had been. At first.
He’d been barely old enough to join up. Nobody’d asked his age, though he’d wondered whether they might. The company captain’d looked at his build, noted his father’s name, and waved him in.
Three years later, he found another rock to poke with his boot. This rock bounced ahead of him and vanished down the road.
Three years, and they felt like a lifetime. Like he’d grown old, bent under knowledge he couldn’t set down.
In mockery of this line of thought, the rain blossomed into a full-blown storm. Thunder and all.
“Right,” Eoan muttered, “thanks,” and tried to wipe some of it off his face, an endeavor doomed to absolute failure.
One foot in front of the other. Enough feet, and he could find a coast and a ship and a way home.
And maybe in the inn’s light the faces of the dead would go away. The exhaustion, he thought, never would. Lead in his bones. Scars, not the visible kind, though he had a few of those, too.
He hadn’t even been fully paid. He understood why. He’d known when he’d severed those ties. He’d dropped his company insignia in the mud on the way out.
The storm let up a bit, possibly in sympathy.
The forest he was currently navigating had ancient history. Stories, the peasant family who’d fed him that morning had murmured. Fairies. Changelings. Strange beasts and outlaws and wolf’s-heads. Men who’d gone out hunting and never returned, or returned seventy years too late and speaking in an idiom of years gone by. Warnings: stay on the road, don’t speak to strangers, eat nothing. The iele will smile and take your hand.
Eoan knew enough scattered local dialect to know that iele simply meant they. Themselves. He’d asked. Had gotten only headshakes. Unnamed.
The little girl had said, very gravely: dracul. And had given him a shiny stone, a pebble polished by time, in case the dragon might take that instead of him.
He smiled, just a little, remembering; and ran fingers over the stone, in his pocket. Dragons. Witches. Fairies. Maybe real, maybe not. But the weight was real, and comforting.
More steps. More rain. Somewhere, somewhere, a bed and a place to stop and sit and breathe. And—
—music?
He paused. Surely no minstrel troupe would be mad enough to set up on a deserted forest track mid-storm. But there it was: music. Winding through raindrops and tree-trunks, ghostly and ethereal and omnipresent as sorrow and mirth.
He turned, trying to see through sheets of water. The music stretched out coy fingertips and trailed invitation along his skin. He felt the hairs rise along his arm.
The melody beckoned. It also yearned, pleaded, coaxed. It needed something, or mourned something, or held a hole in the center like loss woven in water and silk and spider’s-web.
He said, an abrupt and weary impulse, drawn out by that line of grief like gold under the tune, “Can I help?”
He did not know what he could do; he did not know why he’d said it. But he didn’t keep walking, either.
The music hesitated. So did the rain, pattering to a temporary standstill. Eoan raised eyebrows. “Did you do that, whoever you are, or was it coincidence, then?”
“I would love to take the credit, but in fact the latter.” The voice materialized out of nowhere, wry and otherworldly and amused. “Can you help?”
“You sounded sad.” He was still searching. No good source. “So I’m guessing you can’t do anything about this storm? It’d be nice if you could.”
“I can try asking the closest su iyeshi. I am not a water spirit.” This time the voice sounded closer and rather bemused; Eoan spun around to find the single most beautiful creature he’d ever seen, leaning against a mossy tree-trunk, arms crossed, an antique bone flute dangling startled from one graceful hand.
Eoan forgot words. The man—man? A fairy? A fairy, had to be, with that elemental liquid grace, with that comment about talking to water spirits—was…
Was magical. No other term for those wide lapis-lazuli eyes, that curving mouth, sinful and inhuman. Those endless legs, a touch too elegant and elongated to be mortal, poised in careless harmony with the trees. Long silvery hair, a waterfall casually braided over one green leather-clad shoulder.
A fantasy come to life. Bewitching. And Eoan, being human, staring, was bewitched.
He took a step forward. And tripped over another tree root. The leather coat, waterlogged, tugged him down.
&n
“I’m not going to—abducting? Oh, thanks…” He gave in and let the hands push him onto a damp log. Dimly, he registered the fact that he’d left the path. Not far—he could stretch out a boot-toe and tap man-made wheel-ruts—but incontrovertibly.
“Here.”
Eoan looked at the wine-skin. And the fairy-hand holding it. “Um.”
“Oh, really. I’m hardly going to poison you after I’ve just rescued you from the clutches of the ground. Drink it. And don’t move for a moment.”
“Um,” Eoan said again, intelligently, and took the wine-skin. The fairy-person vanished for a pair of heartbeats—and vanished was the right word, simply melting away between one tree and the next—and then returned, waving bread and an apple and a hunk of cheese at him. A leaf had taken up residence in that silver shimmer of hair. “Food. When was the last time you ate? And don’t look at me like that. This came from a tavern two miles ahead.”
“You stole food for me?” His gran had sworn up and down that fae existed, the Fair Folk, otherfolk who’d smile by midnight and vanish under a hill. Eoan had been entertained by those stories, in the way of a young man who loved his grandmother and who’d never seen a fairy.
He’d seen one now. One who’d stolen food for him, evidently.
The fairy retorted, “I doubt you can live on moonlight and elderflower wine. And I did pay. Was one gold noble sufficient, do you think? I could’ve left two.”
Eoan tried to inhale bread, coughed, and managed, “You might’ve just bought the entire tavern…”
“Oh.” Water-sapphire eyes considered this for a second or two, then visibly shrugged, setting the thought aside. “Would you like the gold, then? I have more.”
“You’re offering me money?”
“It’s not as if I use it. Better?”
“I think so.” His head was spinning, though at this point that was more to do with the overall situation and less about tiredness and hunger. “Go back to the part where you said abduction.”
“Was that not clear? You belong to me now.”
“Sorry,” Eoan said, and put the wine-skin down, very firmly. His lips tingled. Wild blueberries and dandelion ice lingered on his tongue. “I have people to go home to.”
“People.”
“Family. My mother. Don’t you have a mother? Or an acorn you hatched out of or something?”
“I doubt I’d fit into an acorn, and folklore has rather a lot to answer for. I can make you stay.”
“Yes,” Eoan agreed, watching the bone flute, watching slender fingers. “You could.”
The limpid labyrinths of those eyes changed. Annoyance; but interest too, hiding in the depths. “Stay.”
“I stopped following orders when I walked out on my company captain, thanks.”
“Ah. The village. Doára. Yes.” The fairy-person sighed, too. And actually sat down on the damp grass next to Eoan’s log, tucking infinite legs under him like a newborn foal. The gesture made him, if not more human, something closer. The leaf remained caught in his braid. “I did know about that.”
They’d been told to burn the town. To bar the gates, more specifically, and then burn the town. Harboring enemy soldiers. Protecting spies. Punishment.
Eoan had refused. Had walked away. And the town had burned behind him.
Flames flickered at the edge of his vision again. He shut his eyes, opened them.
“If it makes you feel any better,” his fairy said, in a way that would’ve been believably light and casual if those brilliant eyes hadn’t been watching his face, “we saved some.”
“…you what?”
“Not everyone. Not enough. But the ones who would listen, who followed us, myself and the river-horses and the zâne—proper fairies, I mean, the flittery dancing well-intentioned ones, you people do tend to call us all fairies—and the căpcăun, ah, ogres, you’d say, I think. I even talked them—the ogres—into eating a sheep or two, instead of a human or two, as payment for the assistance.” A wave of one hand, as if the salvation of lives were simply a day’s work. “The music’s good for that. They’re around, someplace. The people. In the woods.”
“They’re alive?”
“They are. Many of them, if not all.”
“Thank you,” Eoan said. “Thank you.”
“I can’t—we can’t give them back themselves. If you follow fairy music, you end up changed.” With an eyebrow-tilt that might’ve been a shrug. “Some of them might stay in the forest. Some of them will come out poets, artists, philosophers. Or insane. But some of them will come out. And they’re alive. I did what I could.”
Eoan swallowed. Thought: he’s not human, he’s not human, he’s beautiful, and he doesn’t think like you do and he caught you when you fell and stop staring at his mouth…
“Am I changed? If I followed you.”
“To be fair, you practically fell over on top of me. And aren’t you?” A single sinuous motion brought the fairy-person closer to his legs, kneeling on the grass while Eoan sat on his log and tried not to too obviously clutch at soggy oak for sudden support. “You listened to me play. You drank fairy wine. And you look as if you feel lighter, now.”
“You saved people.”
“I did.” A pause landed, not uncomfortably, oddly introspective. “I wonder whether they would have said yes, though. If they’d known there might be a chance of not going home again. Not remembering their—not that it matters. It’s done.”
“You were sad.” Eoan put a hand out to touch his shoulder; his fairy-person came back from memory, startled and wordless. Eoan explained, “I mean earlier. Playing. Was that…were you ever human? Once?” He didn’t quite know why he’d asked. The question’d been there. Hovering.
The fairy looked even more startled, and something else—wistful? Wondering? “Not that I can recall. You said you had a mother. Will she miss you?”
“Yes.” The word ached in his throat. Fresh-baked bread and brown ale and his little brother Conor leaning in the doorway, all red hair and dirt-scuffed freckles. His sister Deirdre singing her heart out, hoping to be a bard. His mother opening the inn’s doors to everyone, stranger and friend. The heart of the village, and a refuge for those passing through. “Yes.”
“Stay.”
“I can’t—”
“For an hour. Two. No more.”
“Oh,” Eoan said, and their eyes met. He heard the echo of that answer, which was not a lie: were you human? Not that I can recall. “Yes.”
The fairy took his hand. Pulled him into the trees.
The afternoon shimmered. Silver and jade. Wood-bark and the cool whisper of water and grass. Eoan dropped cloak and coat in a clumsy leather-and-buckles pile and winced at the noise. Dazzling blue eyes came over, though, entertained and unoffended, and hands slid beneath his shirt, tugging at fabric. “So many layers. So inconvenient. How do you ever put up with all this? Does that untie?”
“Yes. We can’t all walk around half-naked in the dew like you.” He put out a hand, stroked faintly glittering hair back behind a pointed ear. His fairy-person looked up, surprised but happy; Eoan did it again, fingers lingering, and earned a smile.
“I like that. Being touched.”
“I can tell. I like touching you.”
This earned a breathless laugh, but the hands paused, expressively so, lying like an oath of fealty over patched linen. A magical being, Eoan thought, pulled out of moonbeams and starshine; acting as his squire, kneeling to tug off his worn boots, by choice. He said, “Come here,” and the magical being did, flowing like quicksilver back to his feet and into welcoming hands.
The kiss tasted like music. Like tumbling notes of ecstasy. Like glittering arias and soaring extended heights. Like rain, and dandelion stems.
The fairy-person naked was music as well: slender and elegant but nicely muscular, honed and strong and deliciously male. He had pale skin, starlight and diamond skin, smooth and cool; he had a scar or two on a forearm, a calf, small and inconsequential, dark as aged ivory. They made him more tangible somehow, more real: a person, with stories.
He also had a lovely cock, and that was very real too: long and curved and elegant as the rest of him, stiff and hot and obviously wanting.
