Trix and the Faerie Queen
Alethea Kontis
© 2016 by Alethea Kontis
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All rights reserved. For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, c/o Alethea Kontis, PO Box 512, Mims, FL 32745
www.aletheakontis.com
Cover Design by Rachel Marks
For the children too smart for their own britches
And for the adults who remember being them.
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Contents
1. The Emissary
2. The Brownie that Fell from the Sky
3. The Great Stag
4. The Spirit Sister
5. The Return of Saturday Woodcutter
6. The Spriggans
7. The Leprechaun
8. The Blood Court
9. The Bear Prince and the Magic Sister
10. The Catacombs
11. The Magic Game
12. The Star
13. The Champions
Acknowledgments
—Sneak Peek—
About the Author
Also by Alethea Kontis
1
The Emissary
“Lizinia, watch this!” Trix leapt off the branch and flew above the forest floor.
The sparrows would not have called it flying. Squirrels, on the other hand, knew exactly what he meant. Trix stretched out a hand and caught the vine he’d been aiming for. He wrapped his elbow around it and prayed it was sturdy enough to catch his weight.
It was.
With a holler, Trix let the vine carry him into a high arc. He turned a quick somersault in the air, but instead of straightening out for a clean dive, he kept his body pulled into as tight a ball as he could manage. Lizinia’s shrieks of joy as he hit the water made him smile.
Once below the dappled surface he stretched out in the water, kicking toward shore. A school of minnows scurried through his hair and a medium-sized trout brushed silkily against his belly. This inlet was warm compared to the cool of the night. The last time he’d been swimming he hadn’t needed to breathe air. But that had been a wish, granted and run its course.
Lizinia jumped up and down as he resurfaced. Her gleeful clapping clanked like an enthusiastic cowbell as her gilded palms met again and again.
“Thank you, thank you,” he said with great condescension. “That is, without doubt, the largest splash I have ever made in my life.” Thanks to Papa Gatto’s enchantment, he now possessed the taller, heavier body of a young human man and not the lithe scrawniness of a fey boy the same age.
“My turn!” cried the golden girl.
“You don’t think the water will—?” But it was too late. Lizinia had already leapt from her spot on the bank, clothes and all. There was little grace to her entrance, but her splash was epic. Trix gave a proud shriek of his own, blinking salty droplets out of his eyes as his body bobbed up and down in her wake.
He commended himself on discovering this choice spot. He’d just been thinking that they needed a respite after their long day of walking eastward, away from Rose Abbey, along the Impossible Ocean’s edge to the legendary home of the King of Eagles. As if he’d been granted another wish, that respite had appeared. Thanks to the magical seawater his angry sister had conjured, what had once been a sheer cliff face now made a magnificently deep swimming hole.
A hole from which Lizinia had still not risen.
A hole into which that girl, entirely covered in gold, had just jumped.
Most people with common sense would have remembered that gold did not float. Trix Woodcutter rarely qualified as “most people.”
“Trixie, you are a prize idiot,” he said to himself, because neither Peter nor Saturday were there to say it for him. He took a deep breath and dove hard.
The trout, sensing his distress, joined him. The fish swam at his sides, so that he did not have to worry about injuring any of them with his furious kicking. The further they descended, the darker the water became. Trix was wondering how he might find his companion without sight when a bright light burst out from the crescent-shaped bone that hung from a thong around his neck: Wisdom’s tooth. A tiny glint reflected back from the shadows. Trix kicked faster in that direction.
Where some might have panicked at such a predicament, Lizinia had simply begun climbing the cliff face. This was one of the things Trix loved most about Lizinia: she was just as happy an adventurer as he.
With a wave of Trix’s hand, the trout swam up beneath Lizinia and nestled under her arms, propelling upward with their strong tails. They made faster progress than Lizinia had been making on her own, but their scales continued to slip off Lizinia’s slick golden skin. Trix’s heart pounded in his chest, desperate for air. He grabbed her hands and tried to pull her up on his own, but even with his new and improved body, Lizinia’s gold was easily half again his weight.
Trix caught Lizinia’s eye. He forced himself not to be frightened. Just as he was about to lose all hope—and any chance of breathing again—they began to ascend. Trix swam down to Lizinia’s feet. Her golden slippers rested upon the backs of two very fine snapping turtles. Her head broke the surface soon after that, and they both gasped for air. After a few deep, blissful breaths, Trix helped pull his companion to the shore.
“Perhaps our next attempt at swimming should be in a shallower pond,” she said when she caught her breath.
“Perhaps indeed. Thank you, friends!” Trix patted the heads of the turtles and bid them farewell before turning back to Lizinia. “I’m sorry. I did not think about the gold.”
“I didn’t think about it either,” said Lizinia. “Which is more my fault, since it is my gold.”
“I should have at least had the trout check the depth for us.”
Lizinia waved her hands and then let them fall to the grass. “Next time.”
Trix rolled onto his back, his breath finally slowing to an even rhythm, and thought about how grateful he was that there would be a next time. He stared up into the sky and thanked every star scattered there. This had once been one of his favorite pastimes, before the Impossible Ocean and the start of his adventures.
“Were you scared?” he asked.
There was a pause before Lizinia answered. “I think I forgot to be scared. I was too busy trying to climb back up.”
Trix smiled. It was the sort of thing he would have said. “You just jumped right in and I didn’t even think…does that mean you can’t take any of your clothes off? Not even your shoes?” When Lizinia had told him the story of how the cats had dipped her in gold, she had said that her greedy mother and sister could not remove her golden clothes, try as they might. But she hadn’t mentioned that they couldn’t be removed at all.
“No,” she said. “I don’t mind, too much. This is a fine dress, and it protects me from everything.”
Trix had enough sisters to know that the tone of her voice hid something. “But?”
From beside him on the grass, he heard Lizinia exhale. “It will sound silly, I know, but I miss colors.”
“You could wear a dress over your dress. Or an apron or something.”
“That sounds even sillier.”
She was right. Outfitting Lizinia would be an unnecessary burden.
“I miss baths, too,” she said. “I had high hopes for our swimming adventure.”
“As did I,” said Trix, though for different reasons. He’d wanted to feel like he was home, just for a little while. He missed the Wood, his family, and the life he’d lived as the boy he wasn’t anymore. He sent up a few wistful pleas to the stars. And when his thoughts stopped being selfish and shifted back to Lizinia, he realized he had missed something fairly important.
“Wait. You can’t take off your undergarments?”
“Nope.” He could tell she was smiling when she said it. How long had she been waiting for him to ask?
“Then how do you…?”
“…void my bowels?”
“I was going to say ‘poop,’ but yes.”
“I just don’t,” she said. “I didn’t realize it for a while after the cats gave me my ‘gift,’ but eventually it came to me. I don’t really need to eat or drink much. Sometimes I go days without it. You may have noticed.”
Since his growth spurt, Trix had been eating like a horse. He thought Lizinia’s lack of appetite was simply a courtesy. “But you do eat. I’ve seen you. What happens to it all? Where does it go?”
“I’m…not sure.”
“You’re not sure?” Trix didn’t mean to be purposefully daft, but it did seem the important sort of thing a body should just know.
“I think maybe it turns to energy,” she said calmly. Mama and most of his sisters would never have humored him this long in such a conversation—another point in Lizinia’s favor. “I do know that whatever I eat affects the gold of my skin. The quality—even the color—changes depending on what I consume. I lived off magic apples mostly, back when I lived with the cats, but Papa Gatto would sometimes bring me things on his visits. Nuts make my skin harder. Strawberries give it a reddish tint, if I eat enough of them. Cantaloupes are just horrible.”
“What happens to your skin when you eat cantaloupes?”
Lizinia shrugged. “Nothing. They’re just horrible.”
“Wow.”
“What? Trix, you’re staring at me.”
“And here I thought the stars were amazing.”
“It’s not amazing. It’s just how I am.”
“Trust me,” said Trix. “To the rest of the world, you’re pretty amazing.”
“Speaking of amazing…” Lizinia’s golden finger pointed into the sky. “What’s that?”
Trix turned and propped his head up on one hand. A glow lit the distant horizon to the north, outlining the White Mountains with a feathered aura of green and pink and gold. “I don’t know,” he said. “But it’s beautiful.”
They watched the shifting, glittering lights in silence for a while. And then a great roar filled the air. It sounded very far away, which meant it had to have been a particularly great roar.
“Was that a bear?” asked Lizinia.
Trix sat up. He grabbed his shirt and pulled it over his head. “No.” Trix put his shoes on and then helped the golden girl to her feet. “I’ve heard that sound. Before I met you. It is the sound of the earth breaking.”
“Should we run?”
Trix held fast to Lizinia’s hand, but he did not move. The noise had happened, but he felt no vibrations beneath his feet. Not so much as a breath of wind stirred the leaves in the trees of the forest around them. He closed his eyes and searched inside himself for the Fear that Needa the spider had taught him about. There was a sort of…tingle…at the back of his neck and in his belly. This might have been the animal magic inside him telling him flee, but his instincts were still not strong enough to know where.
A second great roar sounded, loud and long and…angry.
“That was not earth,” Lizinia said confidently. “That was an animal.”
Trix had only ever met one animal legendary enough to make that sound, and the lingworm had been adamant that dragons no longer existed.
“Wait,” he cautioned.
Trix should be able to sense something. He should be able to feel what nature was telling him. Despite his appearance, only a small piece of Trix was human. The rest him was mostly fey…and mostly Prince of Eagles. But as he’d known nothing about that last bit until a few days ago, that half of him remained useless.
“Um…Trix?” Lizinia’s hand squeezed his gently.
“Shh! I’m trying to concentrate.”
“Yes, I know that, but…” She sighed. “We have a visitor.”
Trix looked at her, and then followed her gaze up into the trees. There on a low branch, lazily waving his tail, was the smoky outline of Lizinia’s dearly departed godfather, Papa Gatto.
Trix sneered.
Papa Gatto grinned.
Shivers ran down Trix’s spine. A grin on a cat was a disturbingly unnatural thing. Then again, a spectral feline who had the ability to cast spells beyond the grave wasn’t particularly natural either.
The cat’s fur waved in a wind that wasn’t there. One eye disappeared, and then the other, but that grin remained as constant as the crescent moon in a cloud-filled sky. The cat had interviewed Trix at length to decide his fitness for traveling with Lizinia before their initial journey to Rose Abbey. He had not spoken a word to Trix since—though he’d reportedly shared many conversations with Lizinia.
The cat tilted his head, much like Lizinia often did, and then turned and looked deeper into the woods, away from the makeshift shoreline.
“We should go that way,” said Lizinia.
In all likelihood, Papa Gatto was right. But the mere presence of the cat aggravated Trix so much that he was hesitant to obey any advice, no matter how wise. Oh, yes, Trix might have been a young man on the outside, but he was definitely still the stubborn, foolish, petulant boy he’d always been on the inside. He opened his mouth, illogical protest already on his tongue, when he felt the earth shift through the soles of his borrowed boots.
Here were the vibrations.
Here was the rumble he knew.
Like it or not, the dormant part of his animal self was going to have to rely on Papa Gatto’s spectral guidance. As if he could read Trix’s thoughts, the cat’s devilish grin grew wider.
“Run,” said the cat.
Trix and Lizinia ran. The forest around them began to shift wildly. It wasn’t breaking, like it had before—this was more of a pulling. Tree trunks stretched, split, and stretched again. Runners of grass sped past their feet like currents in a swollen river. The colors of the autumn leaves began to blur together, reds, golds, and greens shimmering like the lights in the sky.
Trix looked to the sky. It was still black and full of stars, like every other clear night he’d ever witnessed…save for the lightning now shooting colors around them in every direction, as if someone had angered the rainbows and they’d gone to war.
He turned back to the cliff face, curious how soon the water would swallow him this time. Instead, he saw the waves receding. The Impossible Ocean was leaving Arilland as quickly and dramatically as it had come.
Trix slowed his pace. Compared to what he’d been put through during the ocean’s arrival, this situation seemed far less dire.
“Trix, what are you doing?” Lizinia cried as he let go of her hand.
“There!” He pointed, and they altered their direction to the great tree he had indicated.
The tree was a massive live oak with multiple trunks. Some spread out like branches low to the ground and some shot into the sky—Trix and Lizinia used the former to climb to the latter. Unlike the other trees in the surrounding forest, this tree would have held its own among the trees of the Wood. Most importantly, this tree was not one of the ones splitting into rainbow blurs around them. It sat tall, steady and strong, like an old grandfather who had no time to be bothered with new magic.
They helped each other high enough to avoid being caught in the surge of land, but not so high that the branches weren’t sturdy enough to hold their weight. Trix climbed out further on the limb while Lizinia sat at the base of the branch. She leaned against the trunk and gazed down into the chaos below. The wind tossed her hair wildly about; Trix made sure to stay clear of being whipped by the dangerous strands of gold.
“It’s beautiful,” she said. “I mean, it’s frightening, but it’s beautiful.”
Trix took a moment to appreciate the view. Even if there had existed a similarly safe vantage point when the oceans had come flooding in, the sight would not have been this lovely. Between the water pouring
down from the sky and creeping up from the ground there had only been one color: muddy gray. Now, the swirling colors entranced him. Their movement was more of a rush than a roar. Scents of loam and leaves drifted up to them. It was almost…relaxing. The ceaseless rustle tempted him into sleep.
What?
This wasn’t time for sleeping, this was time to be awake and exhilarated! But there was no resisting the downward pull of eyelids that suddenly felt like anvils. He opened his mouth to call out to Lizinia, but she could not hear him over the din. It was all he could do to situate himself on the tree limb before he finally lost consciousness.
“Have a care, Trix Woodcutter. It would not do to to have you falling to your death right when I need you most.”
Power. The woman’s voice that filled his ears was powerful. It reminded him of someone—a member of his family?—but he could not place it.
“I did not intend for us to meet like this, but time is short. Forgive me.”
Asking forgiveness instead of getting permission was something Trix himself had done too many times to count. He managed to force his eyes open. His head ached as he strained to focus in the new light.
“Where am I?”
This was no place he had seen before. No longer up a tree in the dark, color-melting forest, he now found himself stretched out on a grassy knoll. Wildflowers and clover sprouted in clumps throughout the meadow and brought with them the scent of spring…not autumn, as it should have been. Fat clouds floated by in a sky that seemed to have no sun—the world here was lit with a strange, unearthly blue light.
Trix dug his fingernails into the ground. It all felt so real, even though he knew it couldn’t be. And then he realized what was happening. “No, no, no, no, no. ABSOLUTEY NO MORE VISIONS!”