Oberon's Children

  Chapter Seventeen: Apprentice

  I did as Robin said.

  For the next two months I did not think of anything but pushing myself. I stopped going to Ite’Ilyn, save for one last time when I told him that I’d found another tutor. He looked confused, but then nodded and wished me luck. I don’t know how he really felt about it – I don’t know how often such things happened. I wasn’t in much of a frame of mind to care.

  I saw Robin every day, sometimes twice.

  The training could not have been more different. Ite’Ilyn was kind, patient, and pleased with any progress I made. He demanded of me only what I could handle, and only pushed me when he knew I could be pushed. He treated me like a prized doll that, with careful handling, would become tempered to the point where it need not be handled with delicate care.

  Robin never spent a single moment with me in which he did not attempt to break me. The first day I entered his room he struck me in the back and sent me sprawling to the floor. In the next instant he was on top of me, holding me down.

  “That was laughably easy,” he said, digging his knee into my back. I gasped at the pain and dug my nails into the wood of the floor. “What you and I are attempting to do is something that will have us strung up and killed if we fail. There will be no beating for us, no punishment. And if you continue to walk around without holding the madness there’s no chance we’ll be able to do any of it.”

  He stood up, releasing me, and I pushed myself to my feet. As soon as I was standing, he swept my legs out from under me and deposited me back on the floor.

  “Are you deaf or stupid?” He was sneering down at me, and my apprehension and fear disappeared in a quick flare of anger. I grabbed for the madness and felt the fever wash over me. I knocked his leg aside, rolling out of his range, and came to my feet on the other side of the room.

  “Better,” he grunted. He turned to the door and slapped his hand against the wooden side. Holding the madness as I was, I saw the Bower’s energy flow into him and his energy flow out to it, and then the wood flowed and moved, growing over the entrance to the room and sealing us in, covering the window behind us, and also lighting the room’s moonstones to give us light.

  “What does Ite’Ilyn do with you?”

  His voice was flat and bored – the question was perfunctory, as if he didn’t care but knew he had to ask.

  “Control,” I said slowly, still on guard. “He teaches how to control the madness and how to walk softly and bend twigs without breaking them –”

  “Oh, by the blood, no wonder you’re awful.”

  He came forward until he was too close to me, but I didn’t move back.

  “You don’t have to control the madness,” he said, his voice a soft whisper as he caressed the words, “the madness is a part of you. You don’t have to control the fact you have eyes, you just use them. You don’t control breathing, you just breathe.”

  I didn’t respond but watched him carefully, ready for him to turn violent again at any moment. He watched me for another few breaths, and then with no further preamble turned away and walked back across the room.

  “You’ll understand or you won’t. It makes no difference. Let’s begin.”

  I nodded, breathing easier now that he was across the room from me.

  “Ite’Ilyn has me begin with –”

  “Fuck Ite’Ilyn.”

  He turned back to me, the danger in his voice silencing me and putting every nerve in my body on edge. I felt like a raw piece of flesh after everything I’d gone through, and I knew it would only get worse.

  But the only way out was through.

  “Hit me,” he said, still standing with his weight off-center on one leg, looking completely bored.

  I swallowed hard and rolled my shoulders. Fine – he wanted me to hit him, I’d bloody hit him. I came forward slowly, watching him, waiting for him to move, but he just examined his fingernails and rolled his eyes.

  “By the blood, I don’t have all night. Either do it or go play with some dolls.”

  My blood boiled and I rushed him, throwing a fist in the vague direction of his face. He barely even moved aside, just shifted his weight and stuck out his knee. I went flying into the wall behind him and slammed my face into the wood. Pain blossomed in my nose and I cursed loudly, trying to feel if I’d broken anything. My nose sent out a nasty jolt of pain when I touched it, but everything seemed to be intact.

  “You’re too slow. Try again.”

  He’d moved to the center of the room, where he stood straddling the cutout where rested his extra wide bed. I rushed at him again, and once more he slipped away to the side and sent me flying with barely any effort.

  “It’s good that you’re angry,” he said, speaking softly and almost to himself. “He made me kill your friend. He’s made me kill many people … and I’m angry too.”

  I rushed him once more, yelling and screaming now, clawing at the air. He dodged back, but this time I kept after him, slowing up just in time. He dodged again, took a hold of my shirt, and threw me sprawling to the ground.

  He continued as if nothing had happened. “I’ve been angry for as long as I can remember. And I’ll be angry until I get my revenge, just like you want to have yours. But if you act out of anger, the madness takes over.”

  He picked me up by the scruff of my thin shirt, digging it into my chest so that it hurt terribly. I thought for a minute that he would rip it off to humiliate me, but he only used it to right me and then send me stumbling away as he gave me a sharp push.

  “Insanity is an excellent servant, but a horrible master.”

  I turned back to him, breathing heavily, not knowing what to do. There was a huge well of emotions in me that were all confused and jumbled up together. The image of Faolan kept flashing across my mind, and I felt simultaneously like screaming and sobbing.

  “You’re seeing him now, aren’t you?”

  I didn’t respond.

  “It’s good. You need to remember his face. You need to remember the blood that soaked your shirt, the way his body started to cool in your arms.”

  “And how about the person who actually killed him?” I snarled.

  “I would never have been there if I hadn’t been forced to do it,” he snarled back.

  “You haven’t proven any of what you’re saying.”

  “You have the proof – you saw and heard the proof when you followed us! I can’t do anything without his permission. I am a puppet, bound to him for however long he wishes to pull my strings.”

  We were glaring at each other from across the length of the room, but as he fell silent we both took a deep breath and calmed ourselves. And still the image of Faolan flashed before me, refusing to leave me be.

  “But I’m willing to fight to cut those strings now,” he said quietly. “Are you?”

  “I could just wait two months and he’ll let me go,” I said.

  “You really think he will?” Robin smirked at me, and the new thought caught me off guard. He was right. What guarantee did I have that we really could go? The Erlking had said we could leave, and the Ilyn said it too, but none ever returned. Where was the proof?

  “There’s the thought you needed to have,” Robin said, watching me carefully. “There’s the real thing that’s missing. You know who pulls my strings, you know what I want. But you don’t know what Oberon really wants, now do you? Why would he take all these children in? Why would he really try to save them all? It’s his pride. And he can’t let anyone know he failed. So those that don’t work out, those that try to leave, he let’s them leave … and then sends me to make sure they don’t come back.”

  I had nothing to say in response. What was there to say? It made such terrible sense, much more sense than the idea of a Fae saving children for noble reasons. The world was a dark and terrible place – everything I’d ever learned before coming here had shown me that. Why would this place be any different?

  “Come at me again,” he said. “And
control the anger, channel it. Narrow it to a point and stab me with it.”

  I rushed him again, and many more times throughout that night.

  For that first month there was rarely a time I slept easily. I was often so bruised and battered by Robin’s ministrations that I could never find a comfortable way to lie. Once it was even so bad that I went to Ionmar in the dead of night and asked her to heal me. She asked questions, and I told her I couldn’t explain. For a wonder, she accepted that. Maybe it was the way I said it. Something in her black orb eyes seemed to shrink back from me when I looked at her. She wrapped me in the healing Caelyr silk and followed me back to my chamber, where she bit me and left me to drift off into dreamless sleep.

  The Caelyr venom was one of the only things that could give me peace. The few times I did manage to fall asleep ended with dreams of Faolan staring at me with eyes that should have been hazel but were now dead, black voids that watched me from the blood-streaked mask of his face. I’d be forced up out of my bed by simple inertia, and I’d only be able to banish the cold sweat that shrouded me by grabbing tight to the madness and letting it burn away the anger and the fear that were eating away at my mind.

  I began avoiding the others in my changeling group. I took meals at irregular hours, sometimes getting food myself from the large storage burrows in the refectory because no one else was up and about. I stayed away from the Ilyn, too, and avoided crowds of any size. I wanted to be nowhere near to people that might sway me from my newfound purpose.

  I developed much faster than I could have thought possible. I’d been convinced from the lessons Ite’Ilyn had given me that there was no faster way to learn to control the madness. I’d been wrong.

  “You’re too slow,” Robin repeated for the hundredth time. “Your movements are inefficient – you’re wasting far too much effort. You’re erratic.”

  “I don’t understand what that means,” I growled at him, coming back to my feet. “Explain it better!”

  He grinned at me.

  “I already have explained it. You’re so smart, figure it out.”

  He came at me again. I blanked out my mind and let the madness flood me. He threw a punch at my stomach that I turned away, then tried to sweep my legs out from under me. My mind told me to block the sweep, tried to develop a quick rational plan, but then something clicked.

  I simply reacted. I jumped over the sweeping leg and struck out my own. I fell, smashing the top of my foot into Robin’s cheek as I descended to the ground. I started to curl to turn the fall into a roll, but my rational mind turned back on the next instant and fought me for control. I fell flat on my face with such force that my head began to throb immediately.

  “Now that,” Robin said, pulling me to my feet, rubbing his cheek, “is what I mean.”

  It became easier and easier. Robin was right: it was about embracing the madness, not controlling it; it was about letting it run wild. He did other things with me then – had me wrap myself in shadows and run through the halls in the dead of night, chasing me so that I couldn’t stop. He had me follow him as he ran through the Ilyn corridors shouting his head off so that I was forced to use the madness to quiet the sounds lest the Ilyn awake and find me there. He made me stand on one hand to catch and avoid stones he hurled at me in the fields in the dead of night, when there was so little light that I had to work with feeling and no sight at all.

  It was torturous, but it worked. I was able to go for longer and longer periods of time embracing the madness, until the only time I had to let it go was when I slept, and even then I woke with it already pounding in my blood, surging and powerful but ready to go where I pointed.

  If I barely slept before, after I was able to touch the madness at will I found I often didn’t need to at all. Sourceless energy seemed to have possessed me, controlling my limbs like a demon. I began to lie awake at night thinking about a million things, but mostly about how I would avenge Faolan, and what I would do when the Erlking was in my power.

  Fear was an alien feeling to me by then. I think that the introduction of Robin into my life had somehow lobotomized that sense of wonder and dread I had felt about Oberon before. Now when I thought of him I felt only a sick and churning hatred in my stomach. I saw what he’d done as the ultimate betrayal.

  Some of the others did seek me out, despite my noted absence from most places of gathering. One night Gwenel and Brandel came to me together when I was eating, early as always, so that we were the only three in the Hall aside from a pair of Urden. They were perhaps under the mistaken impression that together they could do what each might have been unable to accomplish separately. Spending as much time in the madness as I now did, when they sat down across from me I couldn’t help but notice how awkwardly they moved and how slowly they seemed to speak.

  “Mol,” Brandel said. “We want to talk to you.”

  I continued eating and tried not to roll my eyes.

  “Um,” he said when I didn’t speak, “do you mind?”

  Again I said nothing, just continued to eat. I felt them look at each other and it seemed I was confirming whatever their worst suspicion had been.

  “Mol,” Gwenel said, “where have you been?”

  “Training,” I said.

  “With Ite’Ilyn?”

  “Yes,” I said, knowing the lie would go past them. Robin had taught me how to lie by telling half-truths, something that made it impossible for the changelings and Ilyn to spot a lie. I had been training with Ite’Ilyn – just not with him exclusively.

  “What has he been doing to you?”

  I looked up from my bowls – I ate prodigiously now, another reason to come when no one was around – and cocked an eyebrow at the boy. I hadn’t seen him in a while, but he hadn’t changed much. He was longer and lankier, but that was mostly it. He was from Ilyn stock, like Gwenel and I. It didn’t really explain his extremely loquacious nature, but it explained the way so much of the Bower made sense to him.

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  They exchanged a look that communicated quite clearly again that I was as bad off as they had feared.

  “You’ve got bruises on your face,” Gwenel said, speaking very rationally to me, as if I were a small child that hadn’t yet grasped that two plus two was four. “You barely see anyone – and when you do see us, it’s at all hours of the night. When do you sleep?”

  “I don’t,” I said simply. They were both watching me, and I knew they were trying to detect a lie, but when none came they looked more confused than before.

  “You don’t?” Brandel asked.

  “You’re … joking, right?” Gwenel added, alarmed.

  I continued to attack my food.

  “No,” I said simply.

  “But how did you get those bruises?” Brandel asked.

  “Training.”

  “Ite’Ilyn did that?”

  “No.”

  “Then who did?”

  “They’re from training.”

  “That’s not what he asked,” Gwenel said quickly, stepping on the part of the argument like a piece of trailing thread that might unravel my whole story.

  “But it’s what I answered,” I said.

  “We’ve heard that you’ve been seen going into the Puck’s quarters,” Brandel said, the words spilling out of him in a rush. Gwenel winced, and I wondered if she was wishing that she’d chosen to approach me with someone who possessed a bit more tact. He leaned forward, trying to catch my eye, but I didn’t look up.

  “Mol, no one trains with Robin. I spoke with the other Ilyn, and they said he’s never trained anyone. He’s too important – he runs errands for Oberon half the time, and the other half of the time he’s just gone, doing whatever it is that he does. How did you get him to train you? What did you say?”

  I pushed the bowls away from me, finished with both, downed the rest of the water in the cup, and stood.

  “Mol,” Gwenel started,” wait – we don’t mean to pry –”
br />   “Then don’t.”

  “- but we’re worried about you.”

  I stopped, set my fists on the table and leaned toward them, looking at them both now.

  “You don’t need to be,” I said simply, quietly.

  Brandel swallowed hard, but Gwenel wasn’t one to be intimidated. She leaned forward, her courage only failing her when she reached out to grab my hand and at the last second changed her mind, thinking, correctly, that if she touched me, then any moment we might be sharing would be completely ruined.

  “I don’t know what happened,” she said, speaking quickly, “none of us do. All we know is that he disappeared.”

  “He has a name,” I growled at her.

  “Faolan,” she amended quickly. “Faolan – he’s gone, and no one knows what happened. All we heard were rumors that – that he was ….”

  She trailed off, waiting for me to acknowledge that I’d heard it too: the rumors that Faolan had been killed.

  “That he was what?” I asked, throwing it back in her face.

  “We don’t know,” Brandel said quickly. “But with you acting so strangely, we thought that maybe you –”

  I stood up and left without another word, leaving the bowls and cup where I’d been. They both stared after me until I was gone from the room, but I didn’t care.

  I went back to Robin. I kept careful track of the time now, and we had only a few weeks left before I would have to make my decision.

  “Where is he?” I asked that night, after the bout of training when I was supposed to leave. Robin had once again managed to thwart everything I’d tried to do with the madness, but it had taken him longer this time. I was growing stronger – we both could feel it. My growing prowess emboldened me, and my state of body and mind was such that I no longer had a sense of what I should or should not do.

  “What?”

  “Oberon. Where is he? Why do I never see him?”

  Robin snorted and turned away again. He was doing something with a section of the Bower wall, and I saw something light up and then the bark fell away. He reached into the dark hole he’d revealed and pulled out a long piece of cloth that I realized was Caelyr silk somehow done up to make a towel. He used it to wipe himself down, ignoring me until he was done.

  “He lives in the highest room – the first one that he used the madness to make.”

  “Where?”

  “The top of the Bower – you didn’t get that from ‘highest room’?”

  “How do we get there?”

  “We don’t.”

  “What?”

  I realized that I’d developed a concept in my mind of a grand confrontation, where Robin and I would one night go to Oberon and force him to admit to what he’d done. I’d assumed we would trap him.

  “We don’t get there – no one can get there without him guiding us.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “By the blood, you’re thick today. Did you hit your head?” He threw the towel back into the wall and sealed up what I was coming to realize was a closet of some kind that he had hollowed out using the madness. “It means that I’ve only been there once, and he took me there himself. We won’t go there.”

  “Then what are we going to do?”

  “That’s my business.”

  “You need my help.”

  “Indeed.”

  He turned to me with that familiar look of contempt, and I realized now it was as much for himself as it was for me. The idea that he couldn’t do this on his own rankled him, and he hated me for seeing him like this.

  “So how do I help?”

  “You do what I tell you. And you’ll know no more about it until the night in question.”

  “When?”

  “When I tell you.”

  I wanted to scream at him and punch him, but I did neither. It was obvious I would get no answers out of him, and to keep trying would be an exercise in futility. I moved toward the door but stopped before leaving.

  I felt odd in that moment, and I think I might have realized somehow in the midst of everything that this was the last moment we would have like this. Time seemed to slow, as if I’d hit a pocket of dead air that somehow was detached from the rest of the world. My mind turned in an odd way, and suddenly I was seeing myself from the outside, as if I were floating up and behind myself, looking down. I saw Robin too, saw him exactly as he was – a broken man, full of grief and pain that I might never fully understand. I saw what we were about to do, and I had the first honest reaction to it since we’d bled together in the alcove the night of Faolan’s death:

  I hated Oberon because I loved him.

  I turned back to say something, and Robin turned to me at the same time. I could tell from the look in his eyes that he had been feeling something very similar to me. His face was relaxed, and he had neither his mocking grin nor his contemptuous sneer in place. He was just looking at me, his consciousness unfettered, for perhaps the first time since we’d met.

  I realized he felt the same as I did, and I think he recognized it in me. I think it’s why we both felt so broken, why we both felt so wretched, because behind it all he looked just as I did. His eyes, usually bright and lively, were sunken and heavy-lidded, and his face looked more gaunt than usual, his cheekbones standing out high and heavy.

  “I wish he was as good as he’d said he was,” I said quietly. It was almost a whisper. “The dream was so beautiful.”

  Robin watched me with that dreadfully bare face, those stripped, raw eyes, and said nothing. He didn’t need to – I probably hadn’t even needed to.

  There are some disappointments that are only cheapened by words.