The Fairy Letters: A FROST Series(TM) Novel (6 page)

“If
he can get control of the kingdom,” I overheard my mother saying once, “perhaps
this could all be averted – but he hasn't got the strength...”

And
then, almost seven months to the day after the first attack – the unthinkable
happened. A group of Winter fairies from the regions that had been attacked –
those who had lost their brothers and sons (and even – for Redleaf's army was
merciless – their sisters and daughters) decided that a diplomatic solution was
not enough, that the peace it promised did little to honor the memory of those
they had lost. They organized a militia ten thousand men strong, and then
marched through the Summer-controlled areas of Feyland, laying waste to Summer
settlements and Spring settlements alike, and even marching straight into the
Summer kingdom, spraying the lands with silver, transforming their pain and
their loss into gallons of fairy blood. Their desire for justice became
transmogrified into a desire for revenge, such that the damage they did – I am
ashamed to say – far outstripped the damage first done to us.

“There
is nothing we can do now,” said my mother. “The people have chosen war. We can
either ignore it – and let the populace fight uncontrolled – or we can do our
best to do the thing with honor. We must fight.”

Her
words were like a death-knell in my heart. I may have been a soldier, but I
still remembered with such fondness the palace of the Summer Court – the
various attendants and courtiers who had been so kind to me when I was a boy –
the jovial Plumseed, the shy but ever-sweet Allison, the flame-haired Rodney.
How could I go up against them in battle? And my heart twisted in agony, too,
at the thought of you – sequestered away in the human world, your thoughts
enchanted so that they were no more of me or of our love. How, I raged to
myself, could I bring myself to hurt those whom you had loved? How could I
betray you – my beloved – in that way?

I
confess for the first year of the war I was a half-hearted fighter. I marched
alongside my father and Shasta in battle – for her part, Shasta was a far more
eager warrior, for she had not yet met Rodney, and she had maintained my
mother's patriotic spirit far more than I had. She resented bitterly that I was
to be king, feeling herself far more suitable to the task, and did her best to
prove it to my mother and father by outstripping me on the battlefield.
Considering her eagerness and my apathy, it was easy at first.

And
then came the Battle of the Silver Bridge. Shasta and I were leading a company
of cavalrymen down south, by the Birchwood pass near the border between Summer
and Spring, and my father likewise was leading the infantry further up the
cliff, across the Silver Bridge which had not yet, by virtue of the tragedy
that occurred that day, received its terrible name. Redleaf and Flametail – for
it appeared that he had little success in stopping Redleaf's war, for she held
all the real power on the throne – had sent forth their greatest army yet – not
only Summer fairies, but all their traditional allies: flame-flanked phoenixes
and lava imps, and even a few Red Unicorns, who had left behind their
traditional cloisters of peace and meditation to take part in a war that they
saw as just.

My
mother, standing with her troops at the center of the battlefield, commanding
the other regiments, allowed herself a gasp. “We'll never take them,” she
whispered, horror in her voice. “There's too many.”

We
could hear the shouts now – bloodshed and agony all around us. We could hear
the cries of phoenixes exploding in mid-air, the neverending wail of dragons
whose scales had been sliced to the earth; we could see nothing but bursts of
silver for miles around us.

My
mother's eyes fell to the “bridge” - a narrow rock walk stretching out over two
miles over which it was necessary to pass to enter into our regions – a pass
between two mountains that stood high like a tightrope over the rushing
waterfalls of the Birchwood Valley. She looked up at me. “If we could only
destroy the bridge,” she said. “As they're crossing...”

“Mother!”
Shasta frowned. “It would take powerful magic to do that...”

“Do
not doubt my magic!” my mother's voice was high and strong. “Round up our
troops, tell them to retreat from the bridge, tell them to wait on the other
side – in case we fail...”

“Fail?”
Shasta put her hand on her sword. “We'll not fail!” She kicked the sides of her
horse, and sped away into the winter forest.

“You
too, Kian,” my mother said, fixing her blue eyes upon me. “Hurry!”

I
did as she commanded, hoping as I did so that I would not spy upon the bridge
any of the Summer Courtiers whom I knew – willing myself to, if I saw the faces
I recognized, be strong enough to let them die, hating myself all the while for
my cruelty.

Shasta
and I whipped through the crowds of soldiers, ordering them to retreat,
ordering them off the bridge. One by one, the regiments retreated – much to the
confusion of the Summer armies, who chased them down the bridge. Soon, the
bridge held beneath its rocky weight nearly all of the Summer armies – and the
Winter fairies, clad in blue, remained at the other end.

“They're
planning to fight us off at the other end of the pass!” I heard one summer
soldier say. “We'll get them.”

I
rode back to my mother. “Do you have the magic to do it?” I asked her.

She
nodded. “It will take all my strength – but it is the only way. If this army
gets past they will have nothing stopping them from getting to the Winter Court
and taking us over completely. I have no choice.”

We
looked up at the bridge, as my mother took a deep breath, waiting to unleash
the fury of the Winter magic she held upon the bridge, sending the rocks
tumbling into the rushing rapids of the waterfall.

And
then she stopped short. There, upon the bridge, was one group of soldiers clad
in blue – one regiment of Winter fairies who had failed to get the message. And
there, among them, was my father, valiantly fighting against a phalanx of
phoenixes.

“No,”
whispered my mother, “no.”

“Get
him out of there!” I shouted. “We need to get him off the bridge!” A childish
wail broke through in my voice. “Daddy!” I had not used that name for him since
I was a child.

“I
must tell him...” my mother closed her eyes, and in the fluttering of her
eyelids I could recognize the familiar marks of telepathy. She may have been
wary of emotion, but at that moment I knew the truth – my father was her true
love, for only through him was my mother able to communicate in that way. I
could see her lips moving, quivering, as she whispered to him – what must have
been words of warning, words for him to leave.

Her
eyes shot open, and as she turned to me I saw that they were glazed over with
tears. “He says…” her voice shook. “Your father says that he's very proud of
you.”

“Mother,
no!” I shouted.

“And
that he loves you very much – and that he knows this is the only way...”

“No!”

“He
says goodbye,” my mother whispered, choking back her tears. And with that she
closed her eyes, and I felt a sudden burst of magic – a blue tidal wave of
force – course through me – a single freezing shock that seemed to radiate out
from my mother, who was shaking and glowing – a blue lantern in the midst of
all that silver. The force of the magic shook the earth, tore the trees from
their roots and tossed them up into the air, churned up the waterfalls until
they became a single, silver tornado.

And
then the magic hit the rock bridge, and in a single, terrible instant the rocks
came apart, powdered into dust, and all those standing on the bridge were
plunged into the waterfall below. A few, able to respond quickly to the shock,
let their wingspan loose, but it was too late – those less able fairies,
panicking, had clung to them – and in the chaos that followed – the rearing-up
of unicorns, the implosions of phoenixes unable to withstand the desperate
attempts of falling fey to cling tight to their backs. Not one fairy escape,
but all plunged into the churning, hungry deep of the waterfall, consumed whole
by its furious maw.

Tears
were streaming down my mother's face as she saw the bodies tumble downwards,
settling at last, after the awful screams had died down, in the pool at the
waterfall's edge – a pool turned silver by the blood of Summer and Winter
fairies alike. “It was the only way,” she whispered. And then the tears froze
on her face, and the grief in her was emitted in a single, agonized wail – and
then I never saw her grieve or cry again. That was the last time I have ever
seen my mother display emotion – the last time I saw her display anything other
than an implacable military strength, a desire to win the war at all costs.

One
hundred thousand Summer soldiers were killed – and my father was killed – and
of the two I still cannot fathom which tragedy was greater. I know only that we
fished my father's body out of the pool to give it a proper burial – and
alongside it I saw the bodies of Plumseed and Allison, their eyes staring at me
– as if pleading for me to end the suffering that had tinged the bridge and the
pool with that noxious color. I know only that from that moment, I had no time
to love, no time to mourn. The war was irreversible now – too many had died;
too much had happened. My mother's pain had turned to inflexible will – and
mine did likewise. There was no time to think about love any longer – nor was
there time, my darling Breena, to think of you. Rather, it was necessary for me
to leave behind those childish dreams – dreams of love, of passion, of
happiness – in favor of the work that was to be done.

The
day of my father's death and the breaking of my mother's heart was the hardest
day of my life. From that day forth, I knew, there was no time to think of you
– except in my dreams, when you crept forth, your eyes daring and bold, your
lips soft and sweet. The paintings I had once made of you had aged as you had
aged, and often – when I could no longer bear it – I would sneak by moonlight
to look at them and to see how you had grown – grown into a woman of such
splendid beauty that my heart ached all the harder at our parting.

But
by day I had to be a soldier. By day I had to think of you not of the woman I
had once loved, but as my greatest enemy – the woman whose father's
irresponsibility, whose mother's weakness, whose stepmother's cruelty and
treachery had led to the death of the father I loved so dearly. I could not
think of the Summer Court any longer without hate and anger – for all the loved
ones I had lost in the war, a body count that would grow as the war went on. My
boyhood friends were killed, one by one, until of that set of us that used to
joke together only Flynn – as battle-hardy as I was – remained. The only way to
stay alive, in those days, was to close ourselves off, to give ourselves over
to the coldness of hate.

I
don't know if I ever stopped loving you. In my heart I know that no such thing
is possible – our connection was and is too strong for it to ever be broken.
But I was forced to cloister my love away, hide it in a space of my heart so
deep and dark that even I could not reach it. There was no use in trying to
love you any longer – not when love had caused such pain, such misery. In the
blank, expressionless face of my mother at breakfast each morning – the
thoughtless cruelty with which she told me that if I failed at battle, she
would imprison me in the dungeon as she had once done when I was a child, the
threats she made against me if I dared to leave any Summer knight alive – I saw
my own reflection, newly born. She had grown as cold as the snow, and many now
called her The Snow Queen. Following like a shadow behind her steps, my heart
was as icy as the snow which surrounded our palace. By then, my enemies knew me
as the Ice Prince or Snow Prince, with a deadly sword, and ice chips in my
veins.

And
then I met you again.

Letter 7

My
dearest Breena,

I
still remember with sweetness and strangeness what it was like to see you again
after all those years. You were sixteen, and I twenty-one (though in Feyland,
you were a good old eighteen), and in that time we had both, in a sense,
forgotten each other. I continued waging battles and you continued living your
life in Gregory, Oregon – watched over by that kind Wolf whom I know you recall
so well. And while I watched over you from time to time – Shasta would bring me
tell of you when she sneaked into the Land Beyond the Crystal River on some of
her various adventures – eventually my anger at Summer grew so great that I
could not bear to think or speak or look at you at all. I began to think that I
would never see you again – that you were nothing to me now – no longer my
intended, no longer my bride.

And
then one morning, during the darkest days of the war, my mother summoned me,
her voice cold. “Shasta has been captured,” she said, her eyes dark and
flashing. “Those treacherous Summer villains – she is at their palace, in
Redleaf's grasp! They have a hostage.” She gritted her teeth. “Something must
be done to shock the Court – to shock that
fool
Flametail – into handing
her back.”

“We
can march on the castle tonight, my Queen.” I bowed low, as was customary.