Jennifer Armintrout - Child Of Darkness

He remembered why he had come. It occurred to him for the first time that, although he had found his way here, finding Dika would be a much different task. He would have to enter the settlement, not just survey it from afar.

Dika had never told him what to expect of her home, nor what to expect of the people there. It was possible that she had not properly thought through the consequences of his being there, that she had no idea how other mortals would react to an immortal creature in their midst. But such carelessness was not like Dika, and so he concluded that it would be safe to enter the camp.

There were no guards; at least, no formal display of armed might, but a few males wandered at the outskirts of the camp, and one, upon spotting Cedric, approached.

“Do you speak our language?” he called, pulling something off of his back. A gun, one of those strange Human weapons that incorporated the magic of fire and force. Cedric stepped back instinctively. He did not care for such objects.

“I have this,” he called out in lieu of answering the question. He held out the map, and when the mortal came close enough, he let the man take it.

The man frowned at the paper. “Who gave you this?”

“Dika.” It was the only name he had. Did mortals, Gypsies, have other names? Secret ones that only they used with each other? “She told me her name was Dika.”

The mortal laughed. “Dika is a very common name. I suppose next you will tell me that she has dark hair and eyes?”

Cedric had nothing to say to this. The man continued to regard him with wary amusement. He did not return the map.

“I can walk you back to the Strip, friend,” he said, tucking the folded paper into the pocket of his shirt. “But you cannot become lost in our land again.”

“I must speak with her.” Though Cedric tried to keep his voice even, he heard the desperation in his words. “She has told me that you are leaving soon. That this will all be gone. I cannot chance not seeing her…I have made a terrible mistake.”

The mortal’s eyes narrowed. “How do you know of our leaving?”

“Because Dika told me. She told me. I can’t give you proof, but please, I must find her.” Cedric could say no more, only look to the man with what must have been pleading on his face, and wait for his decision.

Finally, the man sighed the heavy sigh of something giving way. “You are an outsider. You will have to take your case to the Dya.”

“Dya,” he repeated the word, rolled the unfamiliar shape of it around his mouth. “Dika did not mention this.”

“If you wish to see Dika, you will have to obey our rules, friend,” the mortal said, his smile not so kind.

There was little else Cedric could do but agree and follow the man through the maze of the mortal city. They passed the rough dwellings, came to cleaner, neater homes—as clean and neat as anything in the Underground could be—made from the same mortal materials, but with a certain air of pride about them. The children running the winding paths here were not as dirty, and the garments hanging to dry were much finer.

The people stared at Cedric as they passed. Mortals were roughly shaped, as if each was cut from a spare scrap of cloth, rather than crafted from the finest bolt. Of course, his appearance would stand out to them. Could they tell he was not mortal? He was built larger than most Faeries, but he stood only as tall as an average Human woman. The Gypsies were small people, though, wiry and compact, and Dika had not known him to be Fae, when they’d first met. He’d thought then that it was something of an insult, to look mortal. He still did, when other Fae muttered it about him. But now, now it might serve him to appear Human.

The mortal man led him to the center of the city. Only here did the plan of the settlement make sense. All of the winding streets led to the center hub, where a huge, communal fire blazed. Groups of singing, dancing, feasting Humans clustered around the wide pit of flames, mortal bodies writhing like salamander shadows in the firelight. Cedric’s guide skirted these groups, smiling or calling out to wave at someone, but he never veered from his path.

It was only after they had rounded the fire pit and started down a wide avenue that Cedric noticed people following them. On the other streets they’d taken, he’d assumed the traffic behind them had been the normal progression of bodies moving to their intended destinations. But this street was empty of dwellings, lit only by the flickering light from the communal fire, and the trailing mortals were evident. Cedric looked over his shoulder once, saw the eagerness and anticipation in their eyes, and did not care to see them anymore.

At the end of the path loomed the ancient, gnarled roots of a tree, the top of which would stretch into the Upworld sky, but the trunk and branches were not visible here, beneath the ground. The looping tentacles lay like the sleeping form of a Leviathan, those underwater creatures that mortal men no longer feared, though they should. It caused a shiver to crawl between Cedric’s wings; Faeries, too, feared the horrors of the deep.

A Gypsy wagon, like the ones Cedric had spied tramping through the forests of the mortal realm centuries ago, sat beneath the cascading roots, dwarfed by the coils that unfurled around it like embracing arms. This was where the mortal led him, and the people behind them stopped, either from respect or fear.

A small fire crackled beneath a smoke-blackened cauldron, and a female knelt beside it, the flames gilding her glossy black curls. Cedric stopped, though the Human continued on without him. “Dika?”

She turned, seeming to see the other Gypsy man first, then himself, and then the crowd at the edge of the camp. Her smooth face creased with confusion. “Cedric? You’ve come here?”

The answer was obvious, as he stood before her, but he did not say so. “You are the leader here?”

She came forward slowly, shaking her head. “No. No. I stay here with her…to help her.”

The mortal who had led him there drew himself up to his full height. “This stranger has come to this camp uninvited, and he must face your grandmother’s judgment.”

“He was not uninvited. I gave him a map to find us. I invited him here.” She squared her shoulders and glared at him, unblinking. It seemed neither of them would ever look away from the other, then the door of the wagon opened, and their attention shifted.

A lamp of many-colored glass hung beside the wagon door, and it swung wildly, sending a rainbow of shadows across the figure that emerged. At first glance, the figure seemed not even Human; a hunchbacked thing, like a rune stone jutting up from the ground, with a head covered by a leather cap with dangling flaps that obscured her face. She shuffled, and with each step the shells and trinkets wound on cords around her neck and arms clanked and jingled. The Humans waited with speechless patience as the woman made her way forward with a maddeningly slow gait.

When she was close enough to be heard, she pushed the flaps of the cap away from her face, revealing a countenance so marred by age that it resembled to Cedric some kind of rotted fruit shrinking in on itself. Two shrewd black eyes peered out from beneath eyebrows grown thick and white with age, and her seemingly toothless mouth worked from side to side as she regarded the mortals. “Dika, go and stir the stew pot.”

Dika left. In her obedience, she did not say a word for Cedric’s defense, as though she was not concerned about leaving him to this crone’s devices.

Then the old woman looked past the mortal who had led him there and declared with delight, “Why, Milosh! You’ve brought me a Faery!”

This was obviously a surprise to Milosh, as well as to the audience clustered behind them. But to the Dya, this development seemed as natural as if she’d found a coin in the street. “I think,” she pronounced with gravity, “I shall call him Tom.”