At the revelry, Cassandra reasoned that the best way to deal with her fear of seeing Lorcan was distraction. For the first time, she attempted to include herself in Tani’s group rather than standing back and lamenting their aversion to her. By now she had begun to get the hang of the names and relationships they discussed, so she was better able to follow the stories. The extra attention to her appearance tonight was causing interest among the boys. This had the added bonus of making Cassandra more popular among the girls. All in all, she began to have a rather good time. The night wore on, and she became increasingly confident that Lorcan was not going to show up. She became positively jolly.
Abruptly, conversation in the group ceased, and all eyes fixed on a point directly behind Cassandra. Her heart and stomach plummeted in tandem to her feet, and then bounced back to her throat. Her reaction was the exact opposite to that of the girls around her. While they twittered and preened, Cassandra tightened her jaw and did her best to shrink. She experienced an unnerving feeling that a dragon was breathing its fiery breath over her left shoulder.
‘Good evening ladies,’ said the dragon, his voice urbane and honey smooth. ‘What a delight it is to have you all to myself.’ A chorus of giggles rippled through the group. Cassandra wanted to be sick.
Lorcan spent a few minutes making polite conversation. Cassandra had to admit to a grudging respect for his social aptitude. He certainly knew how to work a group. He found something to inquire about and something to complement about each girl. These fae are way too gullible, she thought. When he got to Cassandra, though, he dropped the flattering small talk. He took hold of her elbow in a vice-like grip, which he managed to make look gentlemanly, and addressed the whole group again.
‘I hope you’ll excuse me if I steal Cassandra away from you for a short time?’
Cassandra looked pleadingly at Tani, who responded with a shrug of helplessness. The rest of the group stared in disbelief as Cassandra was drawn away.
Lorcan led Cassandra to a fallen branch beyond the edge of the circle of light.
‘Sit down here, Cassandra.’ Any trace of civility and good manners was gone. Even his posture had changed from relaxed gentleman to vigilant predator. This was a persona he saved especially for her.
Cassandra bristled with outrage at his autocratic tone. She considered taking him on and refusing to sit, refusing to cooperate. He certainly deserved it. She had a good bit of nausea starting and she concentrated on it, trying to bring it forth. A decent vomit now might end this little meeting quite nicely. But she couldn’t cook it up into anything more substantial than an unpleasant feeling, which was causing more bother to her than to him. Why could she only vomit at inopportune – and totally mortifying – moments?
She decided then that it would be quicker and easier to answer his questions and be rid of him. There was no point making this into a power game that she was never going to win. She sat down with a sigh, expecting him to sit down too. He remained standing, putting one foot on the log beside her and leaning his forearms on his thigh. It was a deliberate ploy to intimidate her and, unfortunately, it worked. He looked every inch the virile, indomitable warrior.
‘You haven’t really accepted that I’m not a danger to you have you?’ Cassandra asked.
‘I never said I had accepted you as being not dangerous. I said that, for now, I’ll accept your claim that coming here was accidental. All humans pose a danger to the fae, whether they mean to or not.’
‘If that’s the case,’ Cassandra shrugged, ‘why not let me go home? I promise I won’t ever bother you again.’
‘Unfortunately – for all of us – it’s not so simple. What makes you most dangerous now is your knowledge of us. We know from experience that humans are dishonest. We could never take your word that you’ll keep our secret.’
‘Being human doesn’t make me dishonest.’
‘Of course it does.’ Lorcan appeared to consider that the most ignorant utterance he’d ever heard. ‘All humans are. Their self-interest is too strong for them not to be. They change the truth to suit their own ambitions.’
Cassandra could not simply let that go. ‘That’s rich: you lecturing me on self-interest and dishonesty. I think quite a bit of both was involved when Eerin decided to shrink me and then make sure the search party would never find me.’
‘Pfff.’ Lorcan flicked a hand through the air. ‘That was your fault. If you hadn’t come, it would never have been necessary.’
‘Well, I’m sorry to have corrupted you all with my humanness. Feel free to send me home at your earliest convenience.’
Lorcan took his foot off the log and stood tall and large with his hands on his hips. He shook his head. ‘It’s not my decision to make. The only person who can reverse the transformation that brought you in is our sage and,’ he fired each word at her as though they were bullets, ‘She – Won’t – Do it.’
‘Your sage? So it is possible?’ Cassandra ignored his tone – barely even registered it. She was suddenly filled with hope. ‘I need to speak to her! Where do I find her?’
‘She doesn’t live around here.’ Lorcan sounded irritated that his interrogation was being hijacked. ‘She lives a long way away and it’s a dangerous journey. You certainly can’t do it. I told you, she won’t agree anyway, so there’s no point.’
‘Please!’ Desperation overshadowed Cassandra’s fear and anger. ‘I’m sure she’ll understand if I explain. Please. Tell me how to get to her.’
‘It won’t ever happen, Cassandra. Get over it,’ he snarled as he stepped away.
‘You know, girls don’t really go for the ruthless tyrant type. Didn’t your mother ever tell you that?’
‘I am not a tyrant,’ he ground out between gritted teeth.
‘Tyrant,’ Cassandra spat.
‘Human,’ Lorcan spat back.
With a powerful swoop of his wings, he took flight, disappearing into the darkness.
— CHAPTER 30 —
Keystone Species
Cassandra was stunned.
So it wasn’t impossible to have her incarceration reversed, just nearly impossible.
She didn’t rejoin the revelry, but slunk off home. She lay awake in her hammock thinking about the sage and the possibility of going back to the human world. Eventually, she succumbed to a disturbed sleep.
The next morning at breakfast, Tani sat beside Cassandra, desperate to hear all the details of her tête-à-tête with Lorcan. Cassandra was the envy of all the girls for being singled out by him. Being dragged off into the darkness was even better. It made her a hot conversational topic and the subject of much speculation. Brack and Chayton had not left yet – Cassandra suspected they had deliberately hung around to hear her story – so she found herself relating the conversation to the four of them. She omitted the bit where she’d personally attacked Lorcan, making herself more the innocent victim than was strictly accurate, but she assured herself that, in essentials, it was an honest account.
‘Lorcan would be the one to take you to see Zabeth. That’s why he reacted so badly,’ Brack explained.
‘Imagine that,’ Chayton muttered. ‘A fae not wanting to spend a day with a human.’
‘You’ve changed your tune,’ Tani snapped back at him.
Cassandra let them squabble between themselves. ‘Zabeth?’
‘Our sage,’ said Oonnora.
‘What’s a sage?’ Cassandra asked.
‘Sages are fae who have spent hundreds of years studying the laws that govern the universe.’
‘Hundreds of years?’ The eleven years Cassandra had spent at school already felt like forever. ‘That’s a lot of study.’
Oonnora nodded. ‘Yes, it is. The laws themselves are quite simple once you see the whole picture, but the possible permutations and combinations are virtually infinite. There are always going to be elements that are unknowable and unquantifiable, such as free will and love … hate. It’s never going to be possible to know everything with those sor
ts of wildcards operating, but the sages come close.’
‘And in order to become so wise, sages live in seclusion, well away from the day to day hubbub of village life,’ said Brack. ‘Getting to our sage isn’t easy. Not many people know the way or have enough experience to take on a journey like that with a dead-weight human along for the ride.’
Cassandra was learning, out of self-preservation, not to take Brack’s insults personally.
‘Why would Lorcan be the one, then?’
‘A few reasons,’ said Oonnora. ‘He’s a watcher and he’s been given the job of watching you; he spends a lot of time in the human world; he’s trained for it and he has quite a bit of experience; he also does that trip fairly often.’
‘Yes, he said he was a watcher.’ Cassandra remembered Brack telling her that Ith had been a watcher. It gave Cassandra a creepy feeling to be told that Lorcan had been given the job of watching her. ‘What is that, exactly?’
‘It’s a role that’s become increasingly important as time goes on,’ said Oonnora. ‘Long ago, fae and humans were friends. But humans have a tendency to want to dominate other species and … well … let’s just say that we stopped being friends. We started hiding from you, and eventually we decided it would be easier if we made ourselves invisible to you. After a while, you started to think of us as fiction.’
‘Which suited us very nicely,’ said Brack.
‘So, where do watchers fit in?’ Cassandra asked.
‘Humans are changing the world in huge and irrevocable ways. It’s important that we know what you’re up to, what you’re planning and what you’re likely to do next. Watchers go out into the human world and collect that information.’
‘Like spies?’ asked Cassandra.
‘Exactly!’ exclaimed Brack happily.
‘No! Not exactly.’ Oonnora scowled at Brack. ‘It shouldn’t have such negative connotations. It’s more about being forewarned than warfare. We’re not warmongers.’
‘Like humans are,’ finished Chayton.
‘It’s exactly the same as spying,’ Brack argued. ‘Oonnora’s right, though. We don’t go around starting wars, which is why you’ve got away with as much as you have and still are. But we won’t let you destroy our world and our existence. There’s a point at which we’ll have to deal with the human race, and it won’t be a war: we’ll simply exterminate you.’ He punctuated this with a casual wave of his hand as if he were talking about swatting flies.
‘Can you do that?’ asked Cassandra, a chill shivering through her body. Exterminate. Neutralise. For peaceful people, these fae seemed pretty ruthless.
‘Yeah!’ Chayton laughed, enjoying Cassandra’s horror.
‘Brack! Why would you tell her that?’ Oonnora actually seemed surprised at Brack’s unvarnished honesty.
‘It’s not as if humans have much of a problem with killing each other off anyway,’ muttered Chayton.
‘You’re telling her such a sanitised version,’ said Brack. ‘I’m just rebalancing.’ He turned his attention back to Cassandra. ‘You see, humans are not one of what we call a ‘keystone species’. If we got rid of you, nothing bad would happen. As a matter of fact, the rest of the world would be better off: forests would grow back, endangered species would recover, oceans would become full of fish again. Lots of good stuff. Everybody’s happy.’ He sat forward, warming to his tale. ‘Now, take ants as another example. If ants were to disappear, the entire world would be in trouble. It would set off a chain of major extinctions of other species. And what about bacteria? If bacteria disappeared, the catastrophe would be even worse.’
If Oonnora had been able to kill with a basilisk stare, Brack would have been one dead fairy. He finally seemed to sense that he’d pushed his luck too far because he glanced at her and stopped talking.
Chayton either hadn’t absorbed the non-verbal communication or didn’t care. He filled the silence with some juicy information of his own. ‘Besides, we have enough justification to exterminate humans with what your collectors do to us.’
‘Collectors?’ That sounded familiar to Cassandra. Hadn’t Lorcan mentioned collectors?
‘Humans with fae sight,’ Tani explained.
‘They collect fae to keep in bottles or glass boxes.’ Disgust coloured Chayton’s words. ‘Then they get together to show them off and trade with each other.’
‘Humans without fae sight do the same thing with fish and other small, defenceless animals,’ blurted Brack before he could stop himself. He immediately lifted his cup of tea to his lips and drank deeply, eyes darting nervously to Oonnora as if to demonstrate that his mouth wouldn’t be doing any more talking.
‘That’s what happened to Lorcan’s mother,’ Tani told Cassandra. She turned to Oonnora as though Oonnora had spoken. ‘What? It’s no secret.’ She leaned towards Cassandra and explained in a conspiratorial tone, ‘That’s why he became a watcher. His father went to find her and never came back. So now Lorcan’s obsessed with finding both of them.’
‘I think Cassandra’s heard enough,’ Oonnora said in a low voice that was filled with menace. Brack, Tani and even Chayton clamped their tongues.
Cassandra sighed. It was all starting to make sense. No wonder Lorcan hated her. He wouldn’t want to do a human any favours. While she pondered this, last night’s debate played through her mind. She leaned forward, thumped her head down on to the table, thumped it again for good measure and stayed there as if comatose. Trust her to put her foot in her mouth. She’d forgotten he had lost both parents. In her own defence, it was an easy mistake to make since he didn’t seem to be the type to even have parents – or ever to have been a child, for that matter. Still, she couldn’t believe she’d made that crack about his mother. Even if he had deserved it.
‘Surely there’s someone else who can take me?’ she mumbled into the tabletop. ‘What about another watcher?’
‘Yeah, there are others,’ Brack said. When Cassandra didn’t immediately respond, he spoke quietly to Oonnora, ‘You know, I’m finding this human surprisingly entertaining. She’s just odd enough to keep me amused.’
Tani tutted her tongue.
Cassandra lifted her head.
Brack said, ‘But Lorcan would be the best one for the job because he’s both young and extremely competent. Because of what happened to his parents, he started his vocation much younger than is normal and has been zealous about it since the first day. So, despite his youth, he’s very experienced. He’s also fitter and stronger than the older watchers. If anything goes wrong, he’s your best bet to keep you safe.’
Cassandra wasn’t at all sure that Lorcan would lift a finger to keep her safe, even if he was charged with the onerous task of taking her to the sage; in fact, she wondered if he wouldn’t be her greatest source of danger, but she kept her suspicions to herself.
‘But no one is going to take you without Eerin’s approval, ’ Brack said. ‘She made the decision to bring you in, so she’ll judge if you can go and who will take you.’
Cassandra’s heart skipped a beat when Tani said, ‘I can take you to see Eerin now if you want.’
— CHAPTER 31 —
Special Request
Cassandra struggled to suppress her panic as she and Tani approached Eerin’s house.
The expectation of meeting Eerin again made her extremely nervous. She could not, in any way, describe their first meeting as having gone well.
Tani was Eerin’s apprentice and was heading over there anyway, so it was convenient for her to show Cassandra the way.
‘Eerin’s the best mystic in Gillwillan,’ Tani said as they walked, gathering her hair up to twist into a knot at the back of her head. Cassandra was jealous of how easily she could do that and make it stay put. She didn’t even seem to be concentrating on it. ‘I’m very lucky to have her as my teacher. She’s seriously considering training to become a sage. I think her husband, Fil, would quite like to live a secluded life while Eerin studies. He’s a ranger, so he can move any
where.’
‘What does a ranger do?’ asked Cassandra.
‘They look for sick or injured plants and animals and heal them. We never have enough rangers; they’re always looking for apprentices. The busiest time is now, in summer, when water’s scarce and the heat accelerates deterioration. It’s also the worst time for humans invading the beach, trampling everything, throwing rubbish everywhere and generally being oblivious to anything but themselves.’
Cassandra was grateful they had reached Eerin’s house. Tani seemed to be only in the warm-up stage of an ‘evils of humanity’ monologue.
Fil opened the front door before they reached it. He was on his way out for the day and he stepped outside and closed the door after them.
The house was dim, but not in a gloomy or sombre way. It was filled with soft furnishings in intense jewel tones. The effect was lush and inviting. On tabletops and shelves were exotic and beautifully crafted ornaments. They found Eerin sitting peacefully on a voluptuous sofa abundant with soft cushions.
Tani disappeared into another part of the house, leaving Cassandra alone with Eerin. Cassandra began to wonder why she ever thought she could pull this off.
This was all Lorcan’s fault.
‘Hello Cassandra,’ said Eerin, without rising from her seat. She motioned to the sofa opposite her. ‘Please sit down. Would you like some tea?’
‘No, thank you.’ She knew what ‘tea’ meant now. Aside from that, she wasn’t sure she could even swallow. She had thought her request would be simple, but now her mind spun considering how to broach the question.
Eerin stared serenely at Cassandra. Apparently, she felt no need to fill the silence with idle chit-chat, but Cassandra became uncomfortable very quickly. If she’d been able to think of any idle chit-chat she would have warmed up with it now but, as usual, her brain had closed down due to stress. Taking a deep breath, she launched directly into her sanitised version of the conversation with Lorcan.