Old Friends
Alison
Willow hopped jauntily along the forest trail ahead of Alison and Keir, pausing on occasion to stalk a bug or bird and then trotting quickly to catch back up to them.
The forest path was wildly different from the last time Alison had taken it. The trees that were then just budding were now full of leaves, their heavily laden branches casting a welcome shade from the late spring sun. A number of birds had returned from their southern journeys, and they flitted through the branches and to the ground below in search of food for the hungry babies in their nests. The silence and stillness of the woods had been replaced by a world come to life with light, color, and noise.
“I doubt the Wildcat’s awake,” said Willow. The tabby cat had introduced Alison to one of her wilder brethren, a supposedly fearsome beast that Alison had found absolutely darling. “He likes to sleep in a patch of sunlight on a nice day like this one. I can’t say that I blame him.”
Willow yawned and stretched.
“You don’t have to come with us,” said Alison. “You can always go home and nap yourself if you like.”
“And miss all the fun? Not a chance. Besides, you’ll never find the fairies without me. I have better eyes for them.”
This was true, at least as far as Alison knew. Willow frequently seemed to react to things Alison could not see at all, often by pouncing on them.
“Not at home, as suspected,” said Willow when they reached the Wildcat’s makeshift abode at the bottom of a tree. Alison wasn’t sure how she was able to tell, but she trusted the little cat. “It’s for the best. He’s really quite rude.”
Alison supposed that was true, but he was just so cute about it.
They continued on the trail to the north, Keir growing more tense as the forest began to shift from hardwood to evergreen. This was where the spriggan had tricked them and separated them, and where he had bound them and tried to kill Keir.
“Are you sure you want to do this?” he asked Alison. His brows furrowed as they often did when he worried for her.
Alison rubbed the line with her fingertip and then pulled his jaw to her, kissing him on the lips. She was pleased that the action still left him dazed as she pulled away, even though she had done it dozens of times over the past few weeks. “I’m sure. It’s going to be fine.”
“Are you sure you don’t need the branches?”
Alison had summoned the spriggan in the spring with a bundle of branches the Wildcat had suggested, but Alison was nearly certain that it had caused him offense. “Worse comes to worst, we come back with them tomorrow.”
There had been no need to worry. Alison heard a familiar creaking just moments later, and her eyes caught the movement as they came around a large spruce.
The spriggan walked forward from the grove in his ordinary form, which was much like a man made from a tree, his body the trunk and arms and legs the branches. Like the rest of the forest, he had grown a number of leaves since Alison had seen him last. “What brings you here, my friends?”
Alison gave Keir a pointed look on the word “friends.” “Two reasons,” she said. “No, three.”
The spriggan gestured to them. “Come, sit in my shade and tell me your reasons three.”
He walked onto the trail and planted his feet into the ground. And then he grew upwards, his body extending and curling over as his limbs grew down and out into the shape of a bench. Alison took a seat on one of his legs without hesitation. Keir took a little more coaxing, but he joined her.
Willow looked up at a little nook where the spriggan’s shoulders curled over its body. “May I?” she asked it.
“Of course, little one.”
Willow climbed the spriggan’s body and rested in the nook, nearly beginning to sharpen her claws in its bark but stopping herself.
“Sorry,” she said.
“Not at all,” said the spriggan. “Now, the three reasons.”
“The first reason is to see how you are and how the forest is,” said Alison.
“Ah,” said the spriggan. “This is not truly the first reason, but it is nice of you to say so. The forest is well. It has been a good spring with plenty of rain. Is it not a thing of beauty?”
The spriggan was not easily fooled, but Alison could see he was not offended that she had not come to visit him sooner, and that he knew they were there for more than just niceties. “It has been a lovely spring indeed.”
“The second reason?”
“There is another threat to the town and to the land that surrounds it. The king is coming, and he intends to see that a dam is built across the river. These lands will be flooded, possibly for miles.”
The spriggan bent forward more, his bark creaking as he considered. “A blow to the forest to be sure, but little compared to how much the people take already.”
“True,” said Alison. “But it would be an end to the town. The stone circle. All of it buried beneath the water.”
“A town at the bottom of the lake. A strange thing, undoubtedly. But what would you have me do? I have not been able to keep the trees safe. There is only one of me and so many of you.”
Alison didn’t have much of an answer to this. “I don’t know, to be honest. We aren’t sure what we’re going to do to stop it. But if there’s a part for you to play, would you play it?”
“I will always come to the aid of those who protect the forest. What is the third reason you have come?”
Keir, who had been sitting as still as a statue on the spriggan’s knee, turned to look up into its face. There was fear in his eyes, but also a fearsome protectiveness towards Alison that compelled him to speak. “You once felt the hold the old magic had on me. Do you feel any of it in Alison?”
Alison laughed at Keir’s somber tone. The spriggan looked at her, confused by her reaction. “I promised him we’d ask, but the entire thing is preposterous.”
“What part of it is preposterous? I told you when I met you that you had a whisper of the old magic in you as well. That whisper is louder now. It’s more like a murmur, the difference between the wind blowing through bare branches and the wind through the leaves. The breeze is still light, but it’s growing.”
The spriggan moved its arm, causing Alison to jump in alarm. “No, child, I will not hurt you or restrain you as I did to him. The magic in you is not beyond your control, though it seems it may have been beyond your notice.”
“Where did it come from?” asked Keir. Alison could see the guilt in his eyes.
“I suspect it was always there, but it was awakened by you.”
“I knew it,” he said. “I knew it all the way back when you recovered from the head injury so quickly. You could have died. You should have been unwell for weeks, yet you were on your feet and fine the very next day. I knew it then but couldn’t admit it.”
Alison could see that Keir had been considering this for ages. That his guilt had been weighing on him all this time. She thought back to the moments when he’d pulled away from her, moments she thought were connected to his trauma and to the isolation he had imposed on himself. And perhaps they were, but there was something else there all along.
“What does it mean for her?” Keir asked the spriggan. Alison had been so concerned for him she had not thought about what the revelation meant for herself.
She had the old magic in her.
The old magic, which had power great enough to imperil the entire town. The old magic, the maker of dream worlds and the same power that granted the spriggan his stewardship over the forest. The power wielded by the korrigans and the fairies and all the wild things left in the world.
It was her power too.
“It’s for her to decide. Alison, the power that grows within you is your own. You can let it grow and learn to wield it, or you can squash it down and pretend it doesn’t exist. But be careful—the things we try to ignore often become the things that haunt us the most. As long as you pose no threat to the forest, you will be safe in my company.”
“If I wanted to learn to wield it, where would I turn?”
The old magic book Alison had bought a couple of years earlier had not worked. Alison had managed to make a glass bottle explode rather than create water within it as the book suggested.
But then, maybe the explosion was a sign of its own.
“There were once academies dedicated to its study. They took a great number of my trees to make their books, but they always planted more in return. I have not seen their kind in some time, though.”
“Most of the magic academies have been gone for a while,” said Keir. “There are still some scholars who consider magic alongside science, though.”
“If not among your own kind, there are other folk that still practice the old ways,” said the spriggan.
“Like the fairies?” Alison asked.
“Yes,” said the spriggan. “Although they can be temperamental. And they make a mess of my forest. Rings of mushrooms and doors in my trees and harnessing starlight for their evening revelries. They’re a wild folk, and I would expect lessons from them to come with a price.”
Alison knew she should be afraid. She had seen what the old magic was capable of, and she knew there were things in the world that did not share her notions of morality, that people like the wild fairies could not be trusted and should be feared.
But she trusted in herself. That even if she was faced with danger and hard choices, she would do her best to do what was right. And she trusted in Keir, that he would do his best to protect her. And she trusted in her friends, including the softly snoozing Willow, who admittedly wasn’t the most help at the moment as she had found a warm spot on the spriggan’s shoulder to nap after all, that they would help her whatever she asked of them.
“Do you know how to find them?”
Alison and Keir kept a lookout for the new signs of fairy activity the spriggan had shared with them: sounds of laughter or the tinkling of tiny bells on the breeze, flickers of light or floating orbs visible only in the corner of the eye, and the brush of something against the skin as if something had grown into the path that was absent upon closer inspection. But they made their way back to the cottage mostly without event, the one exception being a brushing against Alison’s legs that turned out to be Willow.
Their plans to meet with the korrigans and continue their search for the fairies could not proceed immediately the following day. Keir was needed to evaluate the healing of an injury sustained by the innkeeper, and Alison’s friend Rinka was due to arrive the very next evening.
Alison spent the day tidying up the cottage to prepare for Rinka’s arrival. Brytak carried a new bed frame and feather mattress up the stairs into Alison’s room, asking a dozen questions about Rinka. Alison gently let the young orc down—although Rinka was a bit younger than Alison, she was several years too old to be impressed by a teenager.
As she made her way through the cottage, Alison tried to use the magic the spriggan had told her of to make the work easier. She swept the floors and imagined the dust vanishing but was disappointed to find a neat little pile collected in the center of the room that certainly would have fallen through the cracks before Keir “fixed” them. She willed the pot to boil on the stove, but she was rewarded with only a bubble or two that seemed to come up a little early. She strained at the door handle, begging it to turn while her hands were full of linens up to hang on the line outside, but it did not so much as rattle.
“Maybe your powers aren’t domestic,” said Willow. The cat had slept through most of the chores, but she happily joined Alison outside in the afternoon sunshine. “Try setting something on fire.”
Willow’s face was so adorable and sweet that it was hard to remember that underneath her impossibly soft fur beat the heart of a killer. A most darling killer, but a killer nonetheless.
Alison pinned the linens to the line as she considered the cat’s words. “Keir noticed the magic while I did domestic tasks, but I didn’t. Maybe I’m focusing too hard.” She attached two pins to a sheet that needed at least three and left it to dangle, turning her back on it.
Then she snapped back around, hoping to catch something happening.
It hadn’t. The sheet slipped down from the second pin, forcing Alison to catch it just before it reached the grass below.
“Nope,” said Alison.
Willow gave her a withering look, or as close to one as she could manage with her little cat brows. “Keir’s magic came from a terrible pain he suffered. Do you really hate sweeping and gardening? Maybe it’s that you need to be angry or upset.”
There was a degree of annoyance or impatience in the tasks Keir had observed Alison doing. She liked the results of cleaning and gardening but found the activities themselves tedious. Perhaps her magic was the manifestation of a shortcut, her mind sparing her from boredom.
There were other tasks today that would enable her to test that theory. Washing the dishes, ironing the clothes, pulling the weeds from the garden. The tasks were never-ending.
Still, it would all be worth it once Rinka arrived. She had missed her friend dearly, and she could not wait to introduce Rinka to the aspects of country life she had come to love: the beauty of the landscape, the kindness and community she felt among the villagers, and the freedom from the burden of constantly worrying about having enough coin that enabled her to focus on her art and things that brought her joy. She did not know if Rinka would have the same experience, but she hoped her friend would find her own place out here.
“I’m not angry or upset much these days, Willow,” said Alison. She gave the cat a scratch behind the ears as she knelt to carry the empty laundry basket back in. “I guess I’m just going to have to wait until we find the fairies. Can you keep a lookout for me when you’re out at night hunting?”
“Of course,” said Willow. “I’ve chased lights like the spriggan described into the woods before, but I always lose track of them. I suppose the trick has been to keep them in the corner of the eye all along.”
“Don’t chase them on your own,” said Alison. “Wake me if you find something.”
Willow stretched and scoffed. “I’ll lose them if I let them go. You know I’m perfectly capable of talking to them if I need to.”
Alison hadn’t meant her offense, but she wasn’t sure the cat would manage to resist “playing” with the fairies. There had been some tense encounters with Aras and his family when they flew too quickly within reach of the garden walls.
“I want to see them too,” said Alison, attempting to smooth things over. “I need their help if I’m ever to get control of this.”
“Fine,” said Willow. “I’ll come get you if I see them, and I’ll do my best not to murder them in the meantime.” She purred and rubbed up against Alison’s legs, mostly joking.
Mostly.