Chapter 29
DAVID
We ran. We didn’t ask questions. We didn’t slow to cover our trail. We just crashed through the way we’d come, Mom and Cearo using their magic to rip the bushes and brambles from the ground and throwing them out of the way. I looked back once and you’d think a giant had passed through. Maybe that would’ve been a good strategy to begin with.
It didn’t take nearly as long to get back. It was a bit discouraging to see how little distance we’d covered, but at least we got here fast.
Cearo skidded to a stop as soon as we reached the field. “Careful. We need their help. Do not step on them.” She dropped to her hands and knees and began looking for the hob tunnels. They started a couple of yards in. I hadn’t noticed them before, but now they were obvious because a ton of the little hobs had emerged to shovel snow out of the entrances. When they’d gotten it as clear as they could, they went back in and plugged it up with bark to keep new snow out.
Cearo got one’s attention just before it went under. She shoved a finger into its hole, which set it off on a rant as comical as the one Eric pissed off. This wasn’t the time though. And I thought she wanted us to avoid making them mad.
“Cearo, what do we need them for?” Mom asked. “We can’t burrow with them. We’d destroy their colony by our sheer size.”
Cearo didn’t answer. She started speaking soothingly to the hob in another language. It was different than the one she’d been murmuring in her sleep. This one prettier and less familiar sounding. Soon the hob calmed down and Cearo continued more urgently.
“Do you understand them?” I asked Mom. Eric and I were bouncing up and down behind them to keep our blood circulating.
“Not really. They’re going too fast.” Right as Mom spoke, Cearo pulled her finger out of the tunnel and the hob ran inside. “So they’re not going to help us?”
“They are. They know the land. It is hard to tunnel here in some places, but they have mapped the easiest routes to the other colony. We may be able to follow alongside them.”
“All the way to the gate?” Eric asked, hopeful again.
“No, they do not know how to get there. But the other colony is in one of my hide-outs.”
“I thought you didn’t have one around here,” I said.
“It is several hours out of the way. We will be back tracking some.”
“We can’t do that,” Mom protested. “We can’t go back. It’s a matter of time before the Seelie find a sign of us and then they’ll only be getting closer.”
“It will only be getting colder here.” Cearo’s words were barely out of her mouth before it felt like the temperature dropped another ten degrees. The snow came down harder and wind started blowing. It battered us so hard we nearly fell over. It made the cold that much more apparent. Cearo put a hand up and used her air element to redirect the gusts as best she could. There was only so much she could do though. Mom nodded her assent to the plan.
The hob dug his way back out with a second one following behind. He yelled something at Cearo that I hoped she got, because it was lost on the wind for me. Then he burrowed back in, plugging up the entrance and leaving the second hob outside with us. Cearo bent down and picked him up. She put him close to her ear so he could yell directly into it. He pointed to our left. Cearo nodded sharply and took off in that direction.
We all followed them, hopping through the deepening snow. I hadn’t seen an end to the field in this direction when the view was clear earlier. It went on so far that I felt like we weren’t making any progress, the view in front of us never changing. I had no idea how they knew when to stop, but the hob pointed at the ground and Cearo skidded to a halt.
We are past the colony now. We need to get underground,” she yelled back at Mom.
Mom nodded and together they made a hole, just wide enough for us all to fall through. We brought a good amount of snow with us, so they sealed it off quickly and tunneled forward to get to a dry spot. The hob lit a tiny torch that he had brought with him. He handed it off to Cearo. It was barely the size of a bundle of toothpicks in her hand, but it gave off a surprisingly bright flame. At least we could see and wouldn’t be running into the walls or each other constantly.
Eric and I started forward again, but the tunnel failed to expand for us. “What’s wrong?” Eric asked Cearo and Mom. “Why aren’t we running like we did after breaking out of the Seelie prison?”
“Calm down,” Mom told him. She was breathing hard. “Let’s just catch our breath. The Seelie aren’t on our tails yet.”
This seemed to flip a switch in Eric and make him feel how tired he actually was. He bent over to catch his breath also.
“And we will be going slower this time. There will be more in the way,” Cearo added.
“We don’t have any food left, do we?” I asked, realizing another problem.
Cearo shook her head. “I have some at the hide-out, but until then we will have to go without.”
“One more reason to save our energy then. Come on, guys, let’s take this at a nice, easy stroll,” Mom said.
At first it was simple, a straight shot under the never-ending field. But eventually the hob, who was riding along on Cearo’s shoulder, started guiding us every which way so that within minutes I had completely lost my sense of direction. I kept starting forward only to realize midstep that I was supposed to be going right now. I was getting dizzy from all of the sharp, quick turns.
“Is there a reason we can’t go straight?” I asked the next time we made a ninety-degree turn with no warning.
Cearo stopped and shifted the earth in the area we would have gone through had we kept going straight. Dirt fell to the ground, revealing a large, rough slab of gray stone. “There are rocks everywhere here. We have to go around them.” With nothing more to say on the subject, she continued on her way.
Mom looked back at me apologetically. “Sorry, hon, but I think you’re going to have to get used it. We don’t have any other option right now.”
I had to resign myself to this, but I started hanging back more, keeping a few extra feet behind them so I’d have a little warning before a turn. Sadly, this didn’t make much of a difference. My mind was getting fuzzy from the tiredness and hunger and the general discomfort that came from being stuck in this small, dark space. I couldn’t tell how much time had passed down here, but I felt like I’d been walking for eternity. My arms were scraped from all the times I took a turn a second too late, I was tripping over myself since my feet couldn’t keep up with the changing directions, and I was getting dizzier and dizzier.
Finally, I tripped over nothing, and when I landed, I stayed down. I couldn’t seem to catch my breath in here. “How long have we been walking? Please don’t say an hour. It feels like twelve.”
“I cannot be sure of the time, but we are almost there.” When Cearo saw I was still on the ground, she came over and tilted my head up at her, since I couldn’t be bothered to do it myself right now. “I do not like it down here either, but you need to keep going. I promise it is not much farther.”
“When you say ‘not much farther,’ do you really mean that we’re only half way there and I’ll have to endure another twelve hours down here?”
“No, we will be there before you can count to a hundred.”
I didn’t think I’d be able to count to ten an the moment, I was so exhausted. I looked up at Mom and Eric. Mom was fine, probably glad to be surrounded by her element. Eric didn’t look too worse for the wear either. That struck me as odd, but my brain didn’t want to think too hard right now. My gaze went back to Cearo, and I saw the tension in her body and her eyes taking quick glances up, the same way she did when she was forced to walk in the forest when we first met her. She hated being underground too. She needed to be in the air, her favorite element, but she could do this tunnelling thing for a while when she had to. So if she could, then I would suck it up and do it too. Getting back to my feet, I mumbled, “One.”
&nbs
p; After what I thought — hoped — was a few minutes, we stopped. This time it wasn’t because I was ready to pass out. The hob was talking to Cearo and gesturing wildly.
“What’s he saying?” Eric asked.
“There is a large lake just in front of us. He does not know how we can cross.”
“Can’t we go around?”
“No, the rocks come right up to it.”
“How do they usually do it?”
“They are small and light enough that they can sprint across the surface. That is not an option for us of course.” She discarded a couple more options. It was too deep to go under, too dangerous in this snow to climb the rocks surrounding it.
We stayed silent for a minute as we all tried to think of a solution. Finally, when no one else seemed willing to say it, I did. “We have to go through then.”
Mom was the first to reject it. “David, we can’t swim through it. We’d get hypothermia before we made it ten yards.”
“Yeah, and what if something lives in there,” Eric added.
“Kelpies live there,” Cearo said.
“Yeah, see. I, for one, am not going in there to be mauled,” Eric stated, stomping a foot for emphasis.
“The kelpies,” Cearo said over him. “That is how we get across.”
We all stared at her. Eric was muttering, “No, no, no.”
“They’ll tear us apart,” Mom argued.
Cearo was looking at me. I couldn’t help her though. That one kelpie may have spared me but that didn’t mean all of them would, or that even the nice one would’ve let Mom and Eric go unharmed. I was shaking my head, but Cearo was undeterred. “We can ride them across. Willa will go with me and Eric with you.”
“No, Cearo,” I said. “That’s way too risky.”
“It is the only way we can get there.”
“I’d rather try my luck on the rocks,” Eric put in.
“You would impale yourself on the rocks,” Cearo told him. “This will work.” We were all still adamantly against it. Cearo sighed and sat down. “Think of another way. When you have given up, let me know.” With that, Cearo took out her book and a pencil and began drawing a map according the hob’s instructions. His squeaky dictations were the only sound as the rest of us sat and stared at each other, waiting for ideas. We didn’t have any though. Eventually our grumbling stomachs joined the hob’s voice in filling our cave with sound.
With one particularly demonic stomach growl, I gave up. “Alright, Cearo, can you explain to us how we won’t die if we try to ride the kelpies?”
Eric groaned but didn’t protest anymore. He was starving too. Mom just sighed, surely having come to the conclusion long ago that we’d be stuck with Cearo’s plan, but staying silent out of sheer stubbornness.
“These kelpies already know me, and like the one we met earlier, they will not hurt you. Furthermore, if they see that we are protecting Willa and Eric, they will leave them unharmed as well.”
“How can you be sure about that? They’re animals. They’re unpredictable.”
“Are you telling me you saw nothing more in that kelpie’s eyes?”
I thought back to the intelligence I could have sworn I’d seen in that kelpie. It didn’t act like it was just a horse, or even a weird, predatory horse. It had thought. It had understood me and communicated. “Okay, fine,” I muttered.
Eric’s head shot up. “You actually want to do this?”
I shrugged. “We’ve been sitting here silently, getting no closer to the food on the other side of the lake.”
Mom finally broke her silence. “If they make even one move to bite us, Cearo…I don’t know, I’ll take my chances on the rocks.” She stood and studied the roof. Just as she was about to make a hole for us to climb through, she noticed us all still sitting. “Well?”
Cearo and I shot into standing, and Eric dragged himself up as slowly as possible. “Hurry up, bro.”
He scowled at me. “I want to relish the last few seconds of my life.” I rolled my eyes, but he was up by the time I finished.
“Back up to the walls. There’s probably going to be a small avalanche,” Mom said. She slowly carved out a small hole and sure enough, snow fell through immediately. We were able to use it to stand on as we climbed out.
The cold hit me hard as soon as we were out. Holy shit, we’d been transported to Antarctica. Luckily though, the snow had stopped coming down and the wind had mostly abated. I looked around for our goal, Cearo’s hide-out, and my mouth dropped open. This was not what I had imagined. When Cearo had said rocks, I didn’t think she meant mountains. But that’s what these were. Before me, huge, jagged mountains rose up toward a sky encased in clouds, preventing me from seeing the peaks. There were smaller ones in front of them, but even they were enormous. They looked to be pure granite and many had been carved by nature into sharp points. Cearo hadn’t been kidding when she said we’d be impaled trying to climb those. They’d be deadly in the best weather.
We stood at the edge of these mountains. Behind us, they got smaller and smaller until they really were just rocks. In front of us, we were separated from the largest of them by a perfectly circular lake. There was no shore other than the small one we stood on. The lake looked like it was sitting inside a jagged-edged bowl. The water was a deep, royal blue color that seemed too vivid to be real. It was absolutely still despite the occasional gusts of wind. It was eerie in its stillness. I felt like I should be still too so as not to anger it.
“So what now?” Mom’s voice broke the spell.
Cearo motioned for me to join her at the edge of the water. “You two stay behind us,” she instructed Mom and Eric. “The kelpies will know someone is here.”
We waited, shivering in the cold, but no one complained, either out of fear of the coming kelpies or respect for the motionless lake. It didn’t take the kelpies long though. Four of them burst from the water with no warning. They ran at us, teeth flashing threateningly, for a few strides before stopping short. They recognized Cearo but were thrown off by the rest of us. They approached cautiously. When they were close, one of them, a blue one that exactly matched the color of the lake, walked ahead of the others. It nodded at Cearo and gave me a curious sniff.
“Holy shit,” Eric breathed behind me.
The kelpie’s gaze shot to him. It seemed like he didn’t quite know what to make of Eric. Food or friend? He looked back and forth at me for advice.
“Don’t eat him, please,” I asked the kelpie.
He grunted at me and turned to Cearo for confirmation that he shouldn’t snack on Eric.
“You can have my next fairy if you leave this one,” she indicated Mom, “and these two humans alone.”
“Your next fairy?” Mom muttered.
Cearo gave her a sideways glance.
My thoughts turned into nothing but a series of exclamation points for a second. She offers up fairies for food. Did she have to admit that now when we were trusting her and her deadly kelpies to help us?
“Not funny, Cearo,” Mom said. Cearo just shrugged.
The kelpie’s head tilted like he didn’t understand the exchange, but then he shook it off and nodded to Cearo. One of the others, this one an algae-green color, came to join us. The other two submerged themselves back into the lake.
“Get on,” Cearo said, mounting the blue one. Mom hesitated but then clambered up as fast as she could and held Cearo in a death grip. The green one watched me, waiting. Slowly, I climbed up. Reassured when it didn’t move to buck me off, I helped Eric up.
They set off immediately. They galloped like they were running rather than swimming, making strangely small splashes. The freezing water didn’t even graze us.
When we got to the halfway point, I was able to make out some lines in the mountain directly ahead. As we got nearer, I realized it was actually a wooden door, painted the same color as the mountains, set right into the granite. There was a window too, covered with shutters of the same gray color.
The kelpies stopped a few feet away from the door to let us off. Cearo jumped off and opened the door for the rest of us as we attempted to fly the remaining distance to avoid the freezing cold water. Of course that didn’t work, so my feet went numb immediately. As soon as I crossed the threshold, I jogged in place to try to work some feeling back into them.
Then I took in my surroundings. Much like the mountains, this was not what I had expected at all. It was like an actual house. Or I guess I would call it a cottage, since it was small and had that old, storybook feel. It had a small kitchen with a wood burning stove, a sitting area with hand carved chairs, and a narrow set of stairs that presumably led up to a bedroom. There were small, handmade decorations all over — a wood carved bird, a clay fox, and hundreds of sketches. This place looked like it came straight out of a Disney movie.
There was already a fire going in the fireplace, so we all made a beeline for it. I nearly jumped out of my shoes when the twigs sitting in front of the hearth got up and scattered. They were hobs, I realized. There were a bunch of hobs running around the place. A few were cleaning various items, a few were cooking in the kitchen, and several had been warming themselves by the fire before we barged in.
“Sorry,” I said to one that I had nearly crushed. It gave me an emphatic “hmph” before coming back to the hearth.
“They keep this place up for me and keep it a secret,” Cearo said. “In return, I share food and protect them from the kelpies in the lake. I also do not step on them.” The hob nodded his agreement and gave me a scathing look. Cearo looked amused at its anger.
We stood by the fire silently for a while, warming ourselves. At one point, a group of hobs carried a heaping pile of food over to us. They were strong for their tiny size. We ate silently as well. Finally, when we had nothing more to occupy ourselves with, Mom voiced a question I’d expected at the beginning of our escape from the Seelie, not now. “So the stories about you are true then?”