Chapter Thirteen Lettle #3
Again a pause. ‘What happened next?’ Lettle prompted, conscious of the ever-growing darkness around them.
‘We had heard of a tome in the fae court that had spells that we could add to our library. The fae queens were not willing to part with it. Our extraction failed, causing more commotion than we had anticipated.’
‘You say extraction, but what you mean is you attacked the fae court?’
He shrugged. ‘It was a small fire, that is all–but what are buildings in the face of our mission? Human language is as old as the earth, and it deserves to be in the hands of those who were blessed with it. The fae sent their army across the continent–they believed sorcerers an abomination, and they wished to rid the world of us. Though we had our magic, we had no army. The humans had no infrastructure to support it. I was the first leader to unite the hamlets in over seven hundred years. The most we had were farmers and scythes.’
‘Could you not have taught them your spells?’
A muscle twitched in Afa’s jaw. ‘There was no time for that. We had studied for years just to perfect the ones we did know. I could not in good conscience allow the human language to be improperly used.’
Lettle didn’t think he’d appreciate her pointing out the irony. He hoarded the knowledge he’d gained instead of giving it back to his people.
‘OK, so you had no army. And the fae, I assume, had a big one?’
‘Yes, the largest on the continent. We needed soldiers and we needed them swiftly. So we decided to create one, with the grace of the shadow deer, the strength of the mountain leopard and the speed of the snow fox.’
Lettle’s stomach began to churn with horror. ‘I’ve never heard of those animals before–are they native to this mountain range?’
Afa folded and refolded his hands in his lap.
Then continued as though Lettle hadn’t asked the question at all.
‘Hady, Guso and I all sacrificed one of the animals as I wove the spell, hoping it was enough of a penance for the magic. But it was not.’ He looked at her with those mad eyes and said, ‘The reason you have not heard of those animals is that they all went extinct that day, and in their place the obeah came to be.’
‘You made them.’ Her hand tightened in Ajax’s fur. ‘You made them from a spell. That’s why you know they won’t hurt you.’
‘Come,’ he said–just one word–and all the obeah in the meadow rose up and went to him. They surrounded Lettle and Afa in a circle.
Ajax growled low but didn’t rise up in her defence as the obeah closed in. She realised now why he couldn’t; Afa’s power held him, too.
Lettle had never noticed how utterly terrifying obeah could be. Their powerful shoulders rippled as they prowled towards her. Their sharp horns glittered pearlescent in the fading fraedia light. Their teeth, which she’d only ever seen eat fruit, looked deadly as their jaws hung open, ready to bite.
An army of them was a frightening thing to behold.
‘Stop,’ he said, and the obeah lowered themselves to the ground.
‘I am both maker and destroyer. Now you see the extent of a human’s power.
’ He looked proud again. Proud he had wiped three species off the earth.
Lettle was sickened. If she wasn’t convinced by his insanity before, she was now.
Afa had lost all sense of reason, all sense of morality.
What if he sacrificed it?
She had to look away as she asked, ‘And did you win? The war?’
He was silent for so long that Lettle had to drag her gaze back to him. He sat as still as a statue. She was about to prompt him when he said one singular word: ‘Yes.’
‘What happened?’ She wanted to shake the explanation from his chest, but there was something dangerous in his gaze that made her tread carefully. This was a man whose very words could bind her.
He sighed. ‘They could only be tamed by their makers, but we realised too late, and though they killed many of the fae, they killed my people too.’
He looked into the distance and said quietly to himself, ‘That, I think, is when Hady began to change.’ Then he added, as if to reassure himself, ‘It was the violence; she could not abide the sight of blood.’
‘But you managed to tame them.’
‘Yes, eventually, though they were strange things, good for the purpose for which we had made them, that is all.’
Lettle returned to her burning question. ‘How have you survived this long?’
Again the unnerving smile. ‘I wove a binding, of course. To the oldest thing I could think of–the earth itself.’
‘Why?’
He laughed and she knew it was forced. ‘Look around–one lifetime was never going to be enough time to read all these books.’
‘And this is where you have remained.’
‘And this is where I have remained.’ He spoke as though in conclusion.
But there were too many holes in his story for this to be the entire truth. They regarded each other, both aware of his omissions, but unfortunately Lettle didn’t know exactly what they were.
‘Night has drawn in,’ he said. ‘Come, there is a field of moss nearby that makes a suitable bed.’
The fraedia was the colour of twilight; soon the light would fade completely and they’d be in total darkness. It was already dark enough that Lettle could no longer see Afa’s expression.
‘Do you sleep?’ she asked as she followed him.
‘I do. I suffer from the same needs as any other human.’
But he wasn’t any other human, he was a sorcerer bound to the earth. Lettle shivered.
‘Here we are.’
The moss was more comfortable than she expected, but Lettle didn’t expect to sleep.
As Afa lay down and rolled away from her, she said, ‘Sleep well. We can talk more in the morning.’
He hesitated, before he answered, ‘Sleep well.’
Afa may have lived a thousand years, but my determination is relentless.