Don't Let the Fairies Eat You (7 page)
Duncard did not know if this was trickery or sincerity. He didn’t like the idea of opening himself to an enemy’s attacks, especially when they wanted to take his life, but Grund had been in the armor for many years now. If nothing else, he felt the old knight deserved to see his family, and planned to take Grund for a visit home once the knighting ceremony was over.
The next day, Duncard bowed before the king, was patted on each shoulder by the king’s sword, and swore his service to the royal family and the kingdom. “I wish to award you a keep to hold your squires and pages, your family and theirs,” the king said. “More importantly, I need a good man to hold that fallen territory, a dark stain on my bright kingdom. This place was once the home of Ser Grund, a knight loyal to my service, but now I fear evil has taken the land. Ride to the keep and cut the wickedness from within. When this is done, the keep shall be yours.”
Out of earshot from the king and court, Ser Duncard told Grund all he’d heard. “We’ll set off to our old home at once,” the new knight announced. The next day, he put on the armor of Ser Grund and rode back toward Grund’s keep, hoping the situation was not so dire as the king believed.
Arriving at the edge of town, Duncard and Grund noticed an unsettling quiet. No one laughed or shouted, no dogs barked and no birds sang. The houses looked fine, if a bit dusty, but no one peered from the windows or roamed in the streets, as if the town surrounding the castle had been suddenly abandoned. The keep was certainly not abandoned—firelight shown in the windows of the main hall and Duncard rode his horse through the entry gate to see what had happened here.
“Call for my wife,” Grund said. “Call for my children, my servants. Call for anyone.”
Duncard shouted the names he remembered, but received no answer. He dismounted his horse and stalked the keep’s main hall, bellowing names until he supposed the people were gone, and if any evil remained, it would have pounced on him by now. Then he and Grund heard a sickly, wet laugh echoing from the back of the keep, near the kitchens and the dungeon pits.
In the kitchen on a stool sat a squat, round woman in a black cloak, with a scrunched up face and a staff knobbed by a red human skull on one end and a white skull on the other. “I hear you calling names,” she cackled. “But I have seen no soul here besides my sister for many months. What fun it is that you’ve visited us. I am the witch June, and my sister is September.”
“Where are all the people?” Duncard asked, drawing his sword.
“Some escaped, some were eaten by my sister,” June said, hopping off her stool. “She remembers the names of all she’s devoured. If you wish to know, you must seek her in the deepest of the dungeon pits. Do as she commands and your questions will be answered.” The little witch hobbled through the kitchen and another hall, to where the stairway to the pits descended. “Have a drink,” she said, offering Duncard a pitcher of beer. “I find it helps to be drunk before speaking with my sister and this special brew will slosh you in one swig.”
Duncard thanked the witch without meaning it and carried the stone pitcher with him. “Do not drink that,” Grund said. “It’s likely cursed or poisoned. I don’t trust these sisters.” Duncard did not drink, no matter how much he would have cared for a beverage after the journey.
They descended the steps, passing empty cell after empty cell, the bars rusted and blanketed by cobwebs, yet Duncard did not see a single spider. At the bottom of the pit, he found a bed big enough to hold ten men and their wives, and a large, dark lump took up most of the space. When Duncard stepped closer, a white face looked up from within the wriggling mound.
“So, my sister has sent me a man,” September said, crawling naked to the edge of the bed. She was as thin as her sister was thick, but just as short. The great lump filling the bed was her dark hair, piles and piles of it. The nude, ghastly woman beckoned Duncard closer. “Not any man, but a knight in shining armor. Come, ser. What do you wish to know?”
“Your sister tells that you’ve eaten many of the people from this keep and town,” Duncard said. “We—I wish to know if you’ve devoured certain names.” And he told her the names of Grund’s wife and children.
“My memory is tied with my happiness, for the happier I am, the better I remember.” September grinned maliciously. “Wed and bed me, and we will make many children, and from their mouths, they will speak the names of all whom I’ve consumed. Then you will have your answers and I will have a husband at last, so we will both get what we want.”
Duncard stared hard at the little witch and realized her hair was not human hair, but spider legs, tiny, wriggling, countless billions and billions of spider legs, all alive and twitching. “No, I won’t be marrying you, for I have a wife and, well, circumstances.”
The young knight had no need to justify his refusal further and September didn’t wish to hear. Her plume of writhing spider legs swelled across the pit’s bottom, crawling after Duncard as he darted up the stairs, his armor clattering all the way. Behind him, the stone steps were torn apart by the scrabbling legs and the witch’s mad pursuit.
“Spill the drink!” Grund shouted, and Duncard did as he was told. The needling legs found the wet steps hard to grip, and could not tear them apart to slow Duncard’s climb from beneath his feet. He reached the top of the stairs before he realized he’d lost his sword in the chase. Yet when the spider legs came grasping for his head, Grund’s steel tongue slashed upward from the mouth of the breastplate, blocking the legs’ strike. Again and again, the tongue lashed and beat at them, until the only spider legs left were those falling apart from September’s scalp.
With no spider legs to defend her, Duncard grasped the witch by the neck. “Tell me, does your sister have any tricks we should fear?”
Normally September would have lied, but the snarling face on Duncard’s breastplate coaxed the truth from her. “Her staff bears two skulls,” the naked witch said. “The red skull drains all the blood of anyone whose flesh it tastes. The white skull pours a slick poison, made from the blood, that will slither down your throat and twist your stomach in knots the moment it touches your tongue.”
Leaving the witch in the dungeons, Duncard went back to the kitchen, swordless, but not without armor. He found June standing on her stool, with her two-skulled staff readied in her little hands. “So, you are not my brother-in-law, nor my sister’s next meal, but no matter—you’ll taste a fine brew!” First she aimed the white skull at Duncard’s mouth, but Grund’s tongue knocked the blow away, and his armor face twisted at the taste of the witch’s poison. Then the witch thrust the red skull at Duncard’s arm, but it bit down only on the hard steel of his protective breastplate.
Just then, Grund’s face vanished from the armor and Duncard was left to face June by himself, with no sword and no ally. The witch sneered, lunging with the white skull again, but not a drop of venom poured out. Instead, a soft, milky fluid dribbled, building in a narrow column until it rose taller than Duncard and took the shape of a man—Ser Grund, as he was the day he became part of the armor. Turning quicker than Duncard ever could, he snatched the staff from the witch’s hands and sent the red skull biting after her face. It drained the blood from her small body and filled the staff with poison. Grund then took the staff and loomed over Duncard.
“For seven years, I have lingered in that armor for the curse you put on me,” he said. “For seven years, I have not seen my wife and children, I have missed my home, all from you, and they may be dead. Would this place be as safe and sound as I left it, I would marry my youngest daughter to your son when they both came of age, and our united families would serve the king from our home here. That future may be gone, of course. I’m no liar and you’ve gained my respect for your swordsmanship, but if I cannot find my family, I will murder you and take yours. So you’d best find them now.”
Duncard hurried back to the dungeon pits, where his sword rested on the ruined stairs near the naked witch September. The witch might have known who she’d eaten and where to find Grund’s family, while the sword gave Duncard a chance to fight Grund. He picked up the sword and brought it to September’s neck. “Where is his family? I cannot wed you and I will certainly never bed you, but you can have your life if you’ll answer.”
“And if I ate his family, what then?” the witch asked. “I will be killed, and then you will be killed, for his grudge is strong and any righteousness of your vengeance has been undone by us sisters, come to this keep without a keeper in the black of night, hungry and merciless and merry in our hunt. I ate them all, skewering every squealing babe and sucking the meat from their bones. What will you do—keep your honor and die, or find some way around this? I have ways, ser. Many ways.”
Duncard knew his last magical agreement had cost Grund greatly, far worse than he deserved, and yet he could not give up his life, his wife, and his son. “He has your sister’s staff,” Duncard said.
“But not my sister’s wit.” September led Duncard back up the stairs, to where Grund waited. “If you wish to free your family and see them once more, you must take the staff to the highest point in the keep and break it across your knee. The skulls are those of two mystics whose power hides secrets in the world. You will see your family when the staff is broken.”
Grund wasted no time taking the staff up to the highest tower of his keep and smashing it over his knee. The skulls shattered at each end, spilling their lifeblood and deadly brew. His family did not appear—instead, a tiny pixie flew up from the town and Duncard recognized her as Kechaeli, the fairy who had helped him curse Grund all those years ago.
“You have cut my youngest daughter’s hair, slain my eldest daughter though she stood not past your waist, and now you’ve broken my staff,” the fairy bellowed, her voice thundering from the clouds like that of a dragon the size of a mountain. “Woe to you, cursed by the fairy-blooded. Woe to you, for your family is dead. Woe to you, for the boy has stolen all and will live amid our blood, while you will cease to live at all.”
Before Grund could snatch the pixie from the sky, September kicked his legs and sent him tumbling off the castle. Duncard was left with the small witch and her perplexingly smaller mother. “Twice we have saved you from your former master,” Kechaeli said, fluttering in Duncard’s face. “A third time he will come for you, this time to ruin your family as a specter. You must mix blood with us, like it or not, and have children of the fey whom you will not understand, whom will live long beyond your death, and whose faces will haunt your life.” The little fairy smiled. “Still, you’ll live and be loved, and September will dine no more on human flesh, but blossom with motherhood like the harvests of her namesake.”
Duncard felt he had little choice—he had saved himself twice through dark deeds and would not leave his family to suffer. He hid the small witch away before bringing his family and squires to the keep and filling the town with merchants, blacksmiths, and farmhands once more. When all seemed right again in the town, and his wife and son were settled into their new home, Duncard visited September’s bed in secret castle chambers in the night. During the day she appeared as a lady in waiting, a sister of a friend, Duncard told his wife, though his wife doubted the strange woman would ever find a man.
Yet soon the pale children of September began to fill the keep, her belly swelling and emptying every nine months until there were seven of them, outnumbering Duncard’s three trueborn children. The witch’s children were pleasant and quiet, if a bit strange, but they were blood and family, and Duncard did not complain of their presence.
One evening, Duncard thought he heard a wailing outside the castle walls. He looked through a window toward the setting sun and spied a faint shadow skulking around below. It wore Grund’s face and moaned in Grund’s voice. “Why does your vengeance matter more than mine? Why does your family grow vast while my line has ended? Come to the window, brides of Duncard, and hear me tell his sins!”
Faces appeared beside Duncard, but they did not belong to either his true wife or his secret one. His seven pale, fairy-blooded children huddled protectively around his waist. They stared and sang sweetly as the sun vanished and the sky grew purple, then black. The shade of Grund slid back into the night, forsaking his castle one final time, and Duncard never saw him again outside his own regretful nightmares. Grund had been beaten by the fairy-blooded in life, and had no power to best them in death.
In time, the castle was taken by such blood as well, by September and her children. Thick trees with heavy bark sprang from between blocks of stone in the floor, roof, walls, and towers. Duncard’s children loved the changes, playing games with their fairy half-brothers and half-sisters, and Duncard’s grandchildren did the same.