Chapter Twelve #2
The speaker was at his ease near the doorway, leaning back in a chair with his hands behind his head, and with one foot supported on a knee. Yes. He had the fair hair, green eyes, and pointy ears that were typical of the fae, at least here in Britain. In Europe, too, or so Taz understood.
The fae put his foot down and stood as he spoke. “Rose is dressing. There is hot water in the jug.” He waved at the washstand, where a jug waited next to the bowl. “I shall await you in the living room, to show you the way to the meeting circle.”
Taz was ready in minutes. He shrugged into the straps of his harp case and put his coin pouch inside his shirt—he wasn’t leaving either behind, just in case the fair folk decided to eject them immediately.
In the living room, two of the fae waited: the man who had been waiting in his bedchamber, and a woman. A moment later, they were joined by Sephie, and something in his heart eased to see her.
With the man leading the way and the woman bringing up the rear, they traversed the passages again, and eventually exited the cave.
Taz was reasonably certain the path they followed through the trees was not the one they’d come down earlier.
It wound and wove until he had lost all track of direction, and then suddenly they came out into a clearing.
“The meeting circle,” the man had called it, and it was a roughly circular clearing about fifty yards in diameter, with the occasional tree encroaching to break the symmetry.
“Meeting” certainly applied. Dozens of fair folk, men and women, sat on the grass, perched on fallen logs, or stood.
Perhaps one hundred, all told, of all ages, all finely dressed—some in long robes, some in gowns, some in tunics and hose.
All had the tell-tale green eyes and pointed ears, though some had dark hair instead of fair, and some dark skin rather than pale.
Every face turned to watch Taz and Sephie being escorted out into the center of the clearing.
“Which one is the king?” Sephie whispered to Taz, but those pointy ears must be acute, for all those near smiled or even laughed. Some turned to speak to others beyond the range of her whisper, and the laugh spread outward until all of the assembly watched them with amusement.
Sephie, predictably, bristled. “Should I have said ‘queen’, then?” she asked their escort, but another person answered her.
“The folk have neither kings nor queens, short-life.” The speaker looked to be in his sixties or seventies—though if that was true, he was fit and healthy for his age.
He was one of those wearing a robe, but it was open over an ankle-length tunic, both garments so fine and rich that Taz would have guessed him to be the king of this forest, had it not been for the words he’d just spoken.
Having apparently come to the same conclusion, Sephie dropped him a curtsey. “Are you the leader, sir?”
Another ripple of laughter across the clearing hinted that the question missed the point, and the man confirmed it. “Not I,” said he, and then, to the meeting at large, “I arrived late. No one came forward to lead this meeting, did they?”
That produced a flurry of shaken heads and a chorus of murmured negatives.
“Why would we need a leader to talk?” asked one of the ladies, this one in a knee-length tunic that had been embroidered with a forest that rose from the hem and nearly touched the waist. It must have had a spell on it, for unicorns danced through the trees, moving in a circle around the wearer, and birds and butterflies flew through the branches.
“Our brother has told us of your request,” she told Sephie. A wave of her hand indicated Druisten, who smiled and waved. “Some of us have questions, short-life.”
Another lady spoke. “You are Rose, are you not? And you say you are the cousin of the dragon lord. Tell me, why are you hiding from him?”
“My cousin discovered I had been spying on him,” Sephie said. “I would not tell him who told me to do so. He sent for an enchantress to change my mind, but I escaped before she arrived. If he catches me…” She shuddered, leaving it at that.
One of the Fair Folk put the unspoken into words, saying with deep disapproval, “Forcing a mind can damage it. You did well to run.”
“To do such a thing to family!” exclaimed another. “These short-lives are so treacherous.”
“She was spying,” commented another. “That was the first betrayal of family. I say turn them both out of the forest and let them seek refuge elsewhere.”
“My cousin works for England. My father gave his life for Wales,” Sephie explained. “How could I refuse to serve the cause for which he died?”
Some nodded, some shook their heads, and some merely looked bewildered. One of the later asked, doubtfully, “Whales? What have whales to do with it? And what sort of whales?”
“I suspect,” said the older man they had mistaken for a king, “Rose refers to the country, not the great air-breathers of the deep blue sea.”
“Yes.” Taz thought it was time to take some pressure off his lady. “We both work for freedom for Wales, or as my people call it, Cymru.”
“Ah, I see,” said yet another of the people, giving a scornful twist to his words. “It is short-life politics.”
“England has had a boot on the throat of my people for a long time,” Taz explained.
“We want to be free. We want to rule ourselves. The English want our coal, our wool, our grain, our labor. But they give us no say in our own lives. You say that you have no kings. Surely you can understand our wish to be free?”
“We do not concern ourselves with your countries, your quarrels and your wars,” said the scornful fae.
The older man was more diplomatic. “We are few, we fae. You outsiders are many. We have survived for millennia by staying out of the affairs of those who are not fae. Do not mistake me. Should one of your kings decide to wipe us out, we would make his endeavor very expensive in blood and sacrifice, and would probably survive. Probably. If it were your Napoleon or your Wellington or their ilk? We might lose many forests of our kind. We cannot and will not take sides in the affairs of your people.”
“Then you will not hand us over to the English authorities,” said Sephie, hopefully, “for that would be taking sides against us.”
The fae exchanged glances and chuckled.
“Your father died for the cause, you say,” said one who wasn’t laughing. “Does your church not teach that such a death is holy? Why do you avoid it?” His tone and the jut of his chin made it a challenge.
“I have always thought,” said Taz, “that I would be proud to give my life to win freedom for Cymru, but I would hate to die for something that did not achieve anything. My spy flowers were discovered before I could listen to the meeting they had heard. Besides. I have just discovered that Se—that Rose is my bard partner. We have sung together three times. Only three! We are just beginning to discover one another. I am not ready to depart this life yet, and certainly not for such a failure.”
“Sing,” said an older woman. She cast a look around those near her, and added, “If they are a bard mage pair, then let them sing for us. Music is a pleasure we all enjoy. Music from a bard mage is a joy. Music from a bard mage pair, though! You younger ones have not lived long enough to have heard the last bard mage pair within easy reach of our forests. Let them sing, I say.”
There were nods and murmurs of agreement.
“You have brought your harp, Owl. Will you sing?” the older woman asked.
The love that the Fair Folk have for music was a consistent theme in the stories about them. Perhaps he and Sephie would be allowed to stay if they entertained the fae well enough.
He lifted his harp out of the case, and strapped it on so it rested against his chest. “Do you have a song you’d like to sing?” he asked Sephie.
“Do you know ‘The Faithful Hound?’”
Taz nodded, and played the first notes. It was tempting to use their music as a spell, to persuade the fae to give them refuge.
But even as the thought occurred to Taz, he rejected it.
The fae were notoriously hard for ordinary mages to affect, and if he and Sephie tried and failed, he could imagine several endings to the story, all of them dreadful.
Even so, the magic they could make together was in their music.
Taz could feel it. He could almost see Prince Llewellyn, his faithful hound with its muzzle soaked in blood, and the baby missing from the cradle.
And the audience stared into nothing, as if they, too, could see the tale of the ballad being enacted before them.
The faithful hound slain by its master, and the baby, safe after all, playing on the floor with the tail of the great shaggy wolf that the hound had killed to protect the child.
They swayed with the music, some of them moving their lips as if they were singing along.
After the first song, he and Sephie sang another, and then another, their throats wetted from time to time as someone would pass them a cup or a glass of whatever was circulating through the crowd.
If the audience was spellbound, so was Taz.
He was shocked when someone put their hands over his on the harp strings.
“Enough, Owl,” said Druisten. “While you and Rose have been singing, the sun has long since gone down, and the moon has risen. We would not wish the new bard mage pair to strain their voices. Allow me to show you back to your rooms.”
“We are to stay, then?” Sephie asked.
Druisten shook his head. “No decision has been made,” he said. “But for tonight, at least, this forest is your refuge. I am returning to my own forest, but you shall see me again, I promise.”