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Killian Honeywood

It all started with the Fairies, who weren’t feared nearly as much as they should have been, in my opinion.

When most people thought about Fairies, they imagined one of the tiny Tinker Fairies, which were mostly harmless, mischievous little creatures, with delicate, gossamer wings. I sometimes glimpsed them out of the corner of my eye frolicking among the flowers in the garden or perching in the trees laughing down at me as they tossed twigs or berries at my head as I passed by. The cook told me I should leave out a bowl of cream for the Tinker Fairies, and in turn, they might leave me some Fairy dust, which brought good luck. I should gather it carefully if they did and keep it hidden away, she said, because you never knew when it might come in handy. They’d never left any, as it turned out, but I was always hopeful. I needed all the luck I could get.

At any rate, those Fairies were not the kind I meant.

I’d heard that once, a very long time ago, a large group of angels revolted against God and started a war in heaven. God, in his terrible and entirely justifiable wrath, ordered the gates of heaven to be shut and sealed forever. All those who were still within heaven remained angels. Those who had escaped and fallen into hell became demons. And all those caught in between—in the places where the world was in danger of coming apart at the seams—they became Fairies, neither angels nor demons, but something else entirely.

Again, it wasn’t the tiny ones, but the bigger, more beautiful ones who were so dangerous to mortals. I’d heard many stories about the fierce and mysterious Sidhe Fairies of the Tuatha de Danann, for example. They were the ones who were powerful enough and vindictive enough to make a man’s blood run cold. Pronounced like Shee, they were descendants of an ancient, warlike people in the British Isles, who had once been the gods of ancient mythology. These Sidhe were fierce, known for their big, muscular bodies, their potent magic and their otherworldly beauty. These Fairies, like their close cousins, the Elves, could be savage and unpredictable, and they made bad enemies.

There were perhaps fifty or more Sidhe Fairies tribes alone, and all of them were capricious and could be cruel. You never knew which they might decide to be, so it was best to stay clear of them entirely if you could. Their high king was named Larek, and he was dark in his heart and his mind and in what passed for his soul.

And his only son was Prince Bracca.

If I took Bracca completely out of the equation, which seems like an unreasonable thing to do, seeing as how this story, like my life, mostly revolves around him, then the beginning might be early one sunny morning in June. I awoke with an odd sense of dread, but without any notion of why I felt that way. Was there some revelation at hand? I was not particularly insightful, to be honest. My deepest thoughts mostly turned around what the weather would be like on any given day or perhaps what to have for my next meal. Normally, morning was the time I liked best, when the day still stretched out ahead of me, full of promise and ready to be anything I could imagine—a world of possibilities.

That morning, things felt somehow off and far from normal. A sense of portent sat on my chest like a heavy bird of prey, its talons dug deep in my chest. It was the strangest feeling—it was as if something were coming for me—something big and important that would change my life forever. If I’d only known then where my destiny lay, then maybe I still could have changed things. Or then again, maybe not. I believe a poet once said, “Will in us is overruled by our fate.”

Prince Bracca was my fate, and I wouldn’t have missed him for the world.

Of course, it was always best for mortals to stay inside during the Solstice nights, safe in their beds with the covers pulled up over their heads for good measure. My old nurse saw to that, but then she was a worry wart. Not only was she a stickler about Solstices, but she thought that nighttime was the time when the Fae were out and about for hours at a time, and it was healthier for mortals to be indoors. Otherwise, you might well encounter one of them and suffer the consequences.

For the same reasons, she never allowed me to swim in the ocean, because she said the Mer People—who were, after all, a type of Fairy, could drag me under and take me to the bottom of the sea.

Perhaps the most consistent story she told was how the Fairies and even sometimes the Elves abducted children right out of their beds and took them away to be raised in their realm, leaving changelings behind in their places. However, I never truly believed that story.

From what she’d said, these Fae didn’t even seem to care about their own children all that much, let alone anyone else’s, and that begged the question, who exactly would raise all those changeling babies they supposedly took? Female Fae were said to make appallingly bad mothers, and their babies were mostly raised in an offhand, casual manner. A less nurturing bunch I never hoped to meet.

Personally, I doubted they would even take a child away to be raised in the first place, because babies were far too much trouble. More than likely, they’d drop the child off at some poor peasant’s house, who already had more children than they could feed. Or they might leave them in the woods somewhere while off they went, dancing in the moonlight or getting drunk on Fairy wine and forgetting where they’d even left them.

Nevertheless, the thing that no one really mentioned all that much…the thing that was only whispered about and never spoken about out loud, was that the phrase, “Away with the Fairies,” was a real thing. Fairies took people away with them all the time, and not just babies but adults as well. And the ones that were taken were never seen nor heard from by anyone who knew them ever again.

I knew this to be true—because it happened to me.