Tales of Arilland (17 page)

F
or John Skipp
, who invited me into an anthology called
Demons
and inadvertently gave me the rug that pulled “The Unicorn Hunter” together.

For Doug Warrick and Kyle S. Johnson, who invited me to write a story based on a Nick Cave song…and to my sister, Soteria, for choosing the perfect song for me.

For Brandi Hamrick, who flipped through the tiny notebook I keep in my car and asked, “What’s a ‘Vampire Mermaid’?”

For Jason Sizemore and Lynne M. Thomas at Apex, who were not afraid to publish a Romantic Young Adult Serial Killer Fairy Tale Retelling in a world when everyone else was.

For Eric James Stone—again and always—for unwittingly challenging me to include every single nursery rhyme and fairy tale I knew into a story, thus creating a Whole New World my brain would be happy living in forever.

And for Margo Mann Appenzeller, Casey Cothran, and Chris McCormick—because the geography of my world all started with the map we drew in high school. Arilland literally would not exist without all of us.

My hope is that Aria and Llandyr may yet still exist someday beyond these pages.

O
ne more step
. Two. Three. Three more steps. It was going to take him days to cross this meadow. Years. A lifetime. He deserved it, too, every moment of crippling agony, every scrape, every tear. Family didn’t do this to each other. And yet…

Three days ago, he never would have put a sleeping spell on the stew and poisoned his sister, his brother, the man and woman who had raised him from a babe and never treated him like anything but their own. Three days ago, it never would have crossed his mind to do such a selfish and horrible thing. But three days ago his birthmother hadn't appeared in his dreams and called for him.

Earth breaks; fire breathes; waters bless. Fly to me, my son.

Trix knew what dreams looked like, the real dreams, the ones he was meant to pay attention to. They had more in them than the nothing-dreams of restless nights: more color, more feel, more sound, more taste, more cohesiveness, more details, more memory than memory. Real dreams did not fade upon waking but instead became more vivid, replaying themselves over and over in the mind's eye until the brain teetered on madness with the vision. Real dreams came from the gods. The gods knew how to make a point.

The gods also knew how to abandon someone in their time of need.

Trix would never have been able to convey the urgency of those dreams. The journey to Rose Abbey was one he needed to make immediately and alone. There was also a very good chance that the spell he’d put on the stew wouldn’t work. It’s not as if he had tried such a thing before—

PAIN
.

Oh, the spell had definitely worked. Perhaps a little too well. Shame, too, because that stew had smelled delicious—one of his better accidental concoctions.

“It would have been nice to leave on a full stomach,” he said, before recalling that no one was around to hear him.

Between the Woodcutter family and his animal friends, Trix was never alone in the world. And yet tonight there did not seem to be a soul within sight. Trix heard barely a cricket chirp above his ragged breathing. The twilight he escaped into offered a rare solitude. It was at the same time peaceful and concerning.

A silent Wood, in the main, usually meant trouble.

Trix stumbled again, forced himself back to standing and stayed there for a moment, listening. The wind had picked up.

Trix glanced over his shoulder—he could still make out the very top of the Woodcutter home just above the whipping, writhing grasses of the meadow. Dark clouds gathered in the west, swallowing the sun, but not before something in the tower window caught the fading light and flashed it back at him, like a lighthouse beacon on a foreign shore.

Like a warning.

The world fell completely silent then, as if Trix had stopped his ears with beeswax. The leaves were silent, his breath was silent, his heartbeat was silent. Even the wind was silent.

A moment later, the silence transformed into ceaseless thunder: first a low grumble, and then a growl as the earth bucked and reared, furious and alive.

The ground fell away before him. Trix came down hard on his knees. The meadow rolled beneath his feet, bending and waving like a sea of tall grass...on a sea of tall grass. He was caught up in the fray, helpless to regain his footing, so he tried to ride the earth as it slid and slipped beneath him.

He failed spectacularly.

N
ew York Times
and
USA Today
bestselling author Alethea Kontis is a princess, a fairy godmother, and a geek. She’s known for screwing up the alphabet, scolding vampire hunters, and
ranting about fairy tales on YouTube.

Her published works include:
The Wonderland Alphabet
(with Janet K. Lee),
Diary of a Mad Scientist Garden Gnome
(with Janet K. Lee), the AlphaOops series (with Bob Kolar), the Books of Arilland fairy tale series, and
The Dark-Hunter Companion
(with Sherrilyn Kenyon). Her short fiction, essays, and poetry have appeared in a myriad of anthologies and magazines.

Alethea’s debut YA fairy tale novel
Enchanted
won the Gelett Burgess Children’s Book Award in 2012 and the Garden State Teen Book Award in 2015.
Enchanted
was nominated for the Audie Award in 2013, and was selected for World Book Night in 2014. Both
Enchanted
and its sequel,
Hero
, were nominated for the Andre Norton Award.

Born in Burlington, Vermont, Alethea currently lives and writes on the Space Coast of Florida. She makes the best baklava you’ve ever tasted and sleeps with a teddy bear named Charlie. You can find Princess Alethea on all the social media and her website:
www.aletheakontis.com
. For up-to-date information on all future books, performances, and appearances, be sure to
subscribe to Alethea’s newsletter
.

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• @aletheakontis
  
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