Anne Kelleher - Silver's Lure

“What if they look up?” Chrysaliss whispered. “We should go higher.”

Loriana froze. Like her mother, she despised heights. Beside the squat old birch, its boughs interlaced, a graceful ash soared high.

“Come on,” Chrysaliss was tugging at her, pulling her off the birch and onto the ash. “Come, we have to get higher—higher where they won’t see us—” A clawed hand snaked around her ankle and yanked her down. She disappeared below with a high-pitched scream.

Gasping, Loriana bolted. Across the limbs, light as a wisp, she darted, dashing from branch to branch, following the line of the river that carried her, against all instinct, away from the Forest House. But the horns were louder now, the goblin drums less insistent. She paused to catch her breath in a hollow of a bending willow. The goblin roars were louder, if possible, but she heard the battle trills of the warriors, saw the flashes of light zigzag across the sky like summer lightning. They were fighting somewhere very close, she thought. She curled up as tightly as she could within the hollow, her arms wrapped around her knees, her face tucked down. The sound of her friends’ screaming echoed over and over, and she trembled, bit her lip and tried to stop shaking.

But the smell of burning and wafting smoke choked her and, peering cautiously out, she looked around in all directions. Another noise was rising on the wind, a noise only the sidhe and the trees could hear. It was the screaming of a living tree on fire. Loriana’s gut twisted and nausea rose in the back of her throat. She staggered, clinging to the trunk of the nearest tree, and felt the pain resonate underneath her hand. They all shared it to some degree; they all felt it. And then someone stepped around a tree, a tall figure, pale as a goblin in the sun, carrying what appeared to be something limp and dead.

At first she thought the figure was her father. But it can’t be Father, she thought. But the figure had his walk, his stance, his set of shoulders. Not his hair, for Auberon’s was as copper as her own, and this man’s feathered around his face in coal-black waves, reflecting blue glints in the moonlight. He was mostly naked, but for a pair of torn boots and ragged trews of the kind the mortals wore, and she wondered why he didn’t come up into the trees out of harm’s way like any reasonable sidhe. Intrigued, she watched him as he passed beneath the willow. Swift as a cat she uncurled herself and crept silently just behind him.

He paused, looked up, and seemed to sense her presence. She darted around the trunk as he hoisted himself into the tree. He turned one way, then another, and their eyes met. In the dark, she saw the green gleam of his. “Who’re you?” she whispered.

“I’m Timias,” he replied, and the name made her eyes widen.

This is Timias? Raised by her grandfather, King Allemande, beside her father Auberon, after his own family was slaughtered, Timias was hardly mentioned by anyone at Court, he’d been gone so long. She’d been still a child when he left. He looked like a pale imitation of her father in the starlight.

“Who’re you?”

She opened her mouth to answer, when violent movement in the trees behind him caught her eye. She gasped and pointed over his shoulder as the biggest goblin she had ever seen burst through the trees, running, it seemed, directly at them both.

Timias grabbed her wrist and pulled her up higher into the tree, but not before the goblin spotted them. As the goblin leaped for them both, Loriana saw her mother and a dozen or more mounted sidhe come riding into the clearing. As the sidhe raised their weapons, Loriana clung to Timias’s hand. “What is that thing?”

“That’s Macha, their queen,” he answered. “The sidhe have a king—the goblins have a queen.”

The enormous queen reared up and around, dwarfing the warriors on their dainty white horses.

“And that’s my mother,” Loriana said. She tried to see past him but he wouldn’t let her.

“We have to run,” he said. “Now!”

He dragged Loriana stumbling and weeping through the trees. At last he paused. “I’m sorry if I hurt you.”

“That was my mother,” she whispered, wiping her face. “Leading the warriors, that was my mother.”

She heard the soft intake of his breath. For a long moment, they sat in silence in the dark. Then he said, “You’re Auberon’s daughter, aren’t you?”

She raised her eyes to his. He was staring at her almost the way a goblin would and for a moment she felt a prickle of fear. Don’t be silly, she told herself. He saved your life. “Yes,” she said. “I’m Loriana.”

She expected him to say something, but he ducked his head and said, “We can go lower now, I think.”

Instinctively, she clung to his hand. The palm was wet, the skin was fleshy, but he held her strongly, firmly and she was comforted enough to let him lead her. She could see the lights, hear the shouts of the Court.

“What were you doing out there?” Timias was asking her.

Her lower lip trembled as she looked up at him. “We were bathing,” she said.

“Did no one warn you to stay out of the wood?”

“Of course they did,” said Loriana. “The wood, not the bathing pool by the river.”

He took her by the elbow and pointed. “Look—we cross that stream, we’re there.”

She took a deep breath, forcing herself to follow his voice, to cling to his hand. Her grandmother had nothing good to say of Timias, her father spoke of him seldom if at all. But he’d come back just at the right moment. She thought of her mother and her friends and the other warriors and tears filled her eyes. She followed him blindly, and stumbled against him, not realizing that he’d stopped, for no apparent reason, in the middle of the path.

“What is it—” she began as she peered around him, but the words stopped in her throat. She gulped, blinked, and blinked again, as if she could clear away the nightmarish scene spread before her. The banks of the little stream were pocked with blackened grass, and on it, creatures that oozed whitish substances flopped miserably about. She looked up at the holly tree beside her, wondering why she felt nothing at all from the tree, and realized the tree, and all the others around it, was dead, the berries dull and black amidst the waxy gray leaves. “What did this?” she whispered. “Do you know what happened here?”

To her surprise, Timias nodded, his mouth a straight grim line. “This is what happens when silver falls into Faerie.”

White Birch Druid Grove

“Deirdre?” Catrione called. She barged into the courtyard, heedless of the rain sluicing off the edges of the roofs in solid sheets. She glanced frantically around in all directions. How was it possible Deirdre could’ve vanished so fast? She looked back down the corridor but saw nothing. She decided to check each room once more when she heard her title called.

“Cailleach!” She looked up to see Sora scampering across the puddles, skirts kilted high. When she caught sight of Catrione, she paused beneath a dripping overhang and beckoned frantically. “Catrione—a troop of warriors has just come, with a message for you.”

“From the Queen?”

“From your father.”

Now what? she wondered with a sinking heart. She beckoned to Sora. “My father can wait. I need you to help me look for Deirdre.” Tersely, she explained what had happened. “Deirdre ran right past me, but I was behind her—she couldn’t have made it down the corridor in her state. So you take that side and I’ll take this one and we’ll look in every room. She must be hiding in one.”

But a search yielded nothing. Sora twisted her hands in her apron and looked down the corridor to the end, where the door swung open in the wind. “You should go talk to the men, Catrione.”