The Fairy Letters: A FROST Series(TM) Novel (9 page)

Tell
me I am wrong, Breena! Tell me I have nothing to fear – that your heart belongs
to me and is mine alone! Such joy that this would give me is beyond the bounds
of thought; indeed, I alone would hardly be able to bear such rapture!

Yet
despite my rancor against him, I am also grateful for him. Many times when you
were in danger (and once, as I well recall, when I was in danger), Logan has
risked the fur off his lupine back to protect you and those you loved. He is a
steadfast friend – as dependable in those labyrinthine chambers of the Summer
Court, with all its mysteries, as he once was on the battlefield. While at
times the thought of him so close to you – able to smell the swell,
intoxicating perfume of your flesh, able to touch the smooth skin of your
shoulder, close enough to feel your breath upon his lips – drives me to
tormenting distraction – at other times I feel a vast sense of relief that you
are not alone in that faraway place, that you have somebody to protect you, to
look after you, somebody in whom you can confide your secrets, even if that
somebody is not me.

I
remember when Logan and I first met – we were both young lads, arrogant and
proud, and he had just returned from spending time with you in the human world,
and he was with his father, The Wolf King. When he heard I was curious about
you, every aspect about you, he grew wary of me and protective of you.

“What
makes you so curious?” he asked me. “Do you intend to go after her, seduce her
like you fairy princes do to humans, Snow Prince?”

“Of
course not,” I heard myself scoff, with all the pride and arrogance of a young
fairy soldier. “She is nothing to me! But I am curious as to the goings-on of
this strange land beyond the Crystal River. Likewise, I am concerned with her
safety – for as long as she is alive, she may yet grow to challenge Redleaf's
power, and Redleaf's reign – and perhaps then peace might be affected.”

Logan
looked soulful. “I cannot imagine,” he said darkly, “that Breena is nothing to
anyone.”

I
remember feeling slightly a pang of jealousy like a lightning-bolt in my heart
– but I composed myself and hid my feelings. Did this Wolf – I could not help
feeling – intend to make my bride his own? Our engagement was long-broken, by
the code of Feyland, and yet I could not help but think that you were mine –
that he had no right to you, no right to love you, not when that magic I so
tried to deny still bound us. I could not have explained my melancholy to
myself, but I remember that the night after meeting Logan, I felt for the first
time the sense that I could very well lose you, Breena, and not to the mortal
world, but to someone else.

Letter 11

Dear Breena,

I
have trained over twenty years to be a great fairy. I have been well-versed in
the various Fey arts required of me. I learned to fight both with natural
weapons and with magical ones, to harness my strength such that – when dueling
with an enemy – I could seemingly slow down time well enough to choreograph my
next move. I could make the sword clatter from an enemy's hand and fall to the
barren earth simply by wielding my magic. I could read minds – not the
telepathy that I exchanged with you, my beloved – but a kind of eavesdropping
on weaker fairies. I could glamour – though not as well as Shasta – and
although it took considerable effort I could even glamour and hide my wings, as
I was forced to do on occasion when masquerading as a particularly tall elf on
one espionage-expedition to find out about the proposed elf-Summer alliance. I
worked day and night to forge these skills, beneath the twin suns of Feyland.
After your departure, and after my father's death, I gave up all my leisure
activities, all that had once given me joy. The few paintings I made of you and
of Feyland – those you saw hanging upon my hunting lodge walls – I gave up
after my father was laid in the earth. I stopped playing music, and no longer
did the traditional fairy waltz to which we once danced within the walls of the
palace. No more walks in the countryside, breathing in the fresh pine air of my
kingdom – for I even forgot my father's maxim, his directive that I never
forget the love that underpinned my hatred, the desire to protect that
underpinned my desire to kill. I forgot even how I loved the feel of the snow
powdery in my fingers, the sweet smell of cinnamon that pervaded the winter air
– in short, I forgot all that I had once known and once loved. I did not know
what I was fighting for when I went out to war.

I
was fighting for hate. I was fighting for anger. I was fighting for vengeance.
And in this single-minded fury that made me into the fairy I am today I thought
that I was growing into my destined status as heir to the throne, that I was
becoming a true fairy Prince. I thought that my coldness, my cruelty, my
ruthlessness in battle – that they were all hallmarks of what I should have
done and been. They made me a great fairy.

But
I was wrong, Breena – and I did not know how wrong I was until I met you. For
when I saw how you – a girl of sixteen who had all her memories of Feyland
enchanted out of her – learned to come into your own, to become the fairy you
were always meant to be, I learned that it is not cruelty and coldness that
makes a fairy, but kindness and love. I have watched you over these many
months, watched you learn to command your magic, watched you learn to fight and
to protect yourself, learn to harness the golden rush of power within you. I
have watched you overcome great obstacles, and display a greater strength of
character, a greater courage in the face of danger, than I could have ever
thought possible.

And
you have taught me so much, Breena. For in your eyes I learned the true makings
of a great royal fairy. For it is in your ability to love – not only your love
of Feyland, which is so pure and strong that it makes me ashamed of how I
forgot my own country-love in the cloud of my hate, but also in your love of
your friends and family – your father and mother, your newfound allies Shasta
and Rodney, and even (though the thought gives me a pang) Logan. It is your
lack of fear in the face of the ancient love-magic, your willingness to
challenge these long-held fairy conventions in favor of what you believe to be
right and true and good, that makes you such a great fairy.

Ah,
Breena, if I could only come to you in person, stretch out my wings to protect
you from the sweltering heat of the Summer afternoons and clasp you in my arms,
whisper into your shoulder and neck how proud I am of you! For my respect for
you, and in all that you have accomplished, has only grown alongside in my
love, like two vines twined and flowering together. You give me hope, Breena –
that one day, as I learn to come into the kind of strength you display – you
and I can rule together as a new kind of royal fairy – growing together.
Learning together. Loving together.

That
is all that I want. That is all I long for. Oh my darling Breena, how long will
it be until that day comes? How long until I can see you again? My eyes are
hungry – they are starved for your image, and no amount of feasting them upon
beauty here – not upon the Feyland mountains nor the most delicately painted of
frescoes – can satiate their unending longing. Come home to me soon, Breena,
and end my torment!

Letter 12

My Dearest
Breena,

In
writing my last letter to you, it struck me how little you must know about the
traditions of Feyland, even as you yourself have proven yourself one of the
most valiant fairies of all. When your mother read you to sleep, did she not
read you stories like Little Bo Peep and Snow White and the Seven Dwarves and
Beauty and the Beast – all of these, I hear, are popular tales and rhymes in
the land beyond the Crystal River? And while these tales are doubtless filled
with lyrical loveliness (how funny – in a land without magic, even mortals tell
tales of it, and dream of our world!), I mourn that you were not raised, as I
was, on folk traditions and simple tales of the fairy world. I remember my
mother, when I was growing up, telling me a myriad of stories – one of which,
that of Artaud and Tamara – I have already recounted to you. As I grew into
boyhood, so many names sparked and inflamed my imagined – Terabina, the
Beautiful Dragoness, who was transformed into a fairy after she fought so
valiantly in battle on the fairy side, the Autumn King Brasenose, whose wife
gave birth inexplicably to a phoenix instead of a child, and the resulting
phoenix was called Fireflesh, and the pain engendered by this phoenix's birth
is, they say, that which causes so many royal fairy women to be barren to this
day, their bodies resistant against the agony. But now we know it is caused by
something else entirely.

(Is
this true? While the tale – as told by the poet Sigismund Rosenbush – is
certainly a beautiful one, I am more inclined to think that the infertility of
the women of Feyland derives not from an ancient spell, but from a more modern
fear: we do not risk waking the powerful magic forces associated with
fertility, love, and death – even the perfunctory marital rites among royal
couples are rare, given the danger they present, and even rarer still are
successful in leading to pregnancy. My mother's bearing of two children was
rare – even unheard of – in her time; most fairy queens took decades to bear
one! Perhaps one day, when we have let love rule free in Feyland, we will be
able to embrace the dangerous magic behind it, and perhaps you and I shall
together be the parents of a long line of fruitful races – a multitude of fairy
children. But I will not torment myself with fantasies that, in my darker
moments, I fear shall never come to pass)!

I
find your world (although now perhaps it is more proper to say that Feyland is
your
world) to be very strange indeed. Not only the absence from your mind of
the fables that are so very familiar to me (can any child have really grown up
without knowing all about Barkbiter the Unicorn, who nibbled on all the trees
in the forest of Feyland for his supper, and got so ill when he had finished
that all the wood from his supper rose up from his stomach and the resultant
pile of undigested wood became the Great Mound of Sirius? Such a story, when
told by a master teller like my father, is one of the funniest and oft-told in
Feyland over banquets and balls, and each teller embellishes by groaning and
moaning like the over-fed unicorn, much to the delight of his companions!), but
also the way in which your customs are so different from my own. How is it that
cooking – here the very essence of manhood – is seen in your world as being the
provenance of women? (For indeed, had it not been so, Shasta would not have
dared sneak all the way into the land beyond the Crystal River to satiate her
desire for this activity that here, however unfairly, her gender denied her). 
I remember a tale I was told as a child about the very first cook, the warrior
Calthon, who was a great fairy in a time so long ago that there was no division
between Winter, Summer, Autumn, or Spring – there were no kings and queens yet
there, and there was only one sun shining upon all Feyland. And all the earth
was a great desert – there was no snow and no budding plants, no streams and no
ice-storms (forgive me, my style is not so rich as that of the great fairy poet
Sigismund Rosenbush, but I will essay to recount to you these tales in the
manner of a true fairy troubador.)

And
in this barren wasteland the warrior Calthon walked – alone – his stomach
growling and twisting with hunger, and yet there was no food about him – no
beast around him except the one that called from the pit of his bowels “Feed
me! Feed me!” And at last, in this empty world so devoid of life, so devoid of
the stirrings of animals or plants around them, Calthon found himself
overwhelmed by despair and cried out: (as Rosenbush puts it)

“O
magic! O fey! You who know all

and
yet know me not, for if you knew

the
beast I am, what need I have

the
beast without for the beast within!”

And
he addressed the ancient powers – the force of magic that surrounded him, and
with a great flash of lightning he felt the magic stirring, and suddenly before
him appeared a lowing ox, ready to be felled with his sword.

Overjoyed,
Calthon moved forth, ready to strike it down. But as he moved, he heard a loud
voice echoing throughout the barren lands, saying to him.

“O
Calthon, warrior, have what you receive

Kill
to live, for that is the way of life

But
remember the ancient power – thus sanctified

When
you roast this meat, it is a sacrifice to us.

For
a warrior must make his killing holy.”

Thus
did Calthon build a fire to make ready his meat, and as the smoke rose from the
roasting flame he saw its plumes spiral into the air and vanish into the web of
magic that surrounded him. And there, on the spot where Calthon first roasted
the meat, and was thus able to survive another day, there grew the first
fruit-tree in Feyland, and around it many animals – never before seen – came to
live and breed and hunt, each animal, each plant, food for one another.  Then
one day by the tree there appeared a young woman, the first in Feyland, and he
lay with her and that night they roasted again another ox for their
marriage-feast.