From Fairies and Creatures of the Night, Guard Me Read online

  Wulf tried to remember. There was a proper way of saying this part. A rhyme. He liked rhyme, because you always knew just where you stood with a bit of verse. But, try as he might, he couldn’t quite seem to recall the last two lines of the boon poem. It had been a while since he’d had to say it, after all. With a sigh, Wulf gave up.

  “Well, I suppose, the standard fare: your firstborn child to be handed over or I’ll eat you alive and grind your blood and bones with my teeth.”

  “You can’t grind blood. Also, I think grinding is for herbivore teeth and yours don’t look like quite right. And I don’t exactly intend to have any firstborns – why would you even want one? They are rather a lot of trouble, you know.” She thought a little longer about their predicament. “Naturally, you can’t have my cat. Do you have any other boons you could ask?”

  While he could not recall this question having ever come up in the whole course of his very long career, Wulf was almost certain it was positively scandalous to discuss a troll’s teeth in polite society.

  He sniffed. “That is not how this conversation goes. Don’t you know that there are rules and expectations of genteel behaviour by which one must abide at all times! Oh, very well. I demand three honest answers to three questions.”

  She looked amused. “You, sir, are a terrible snob, and I don’t even know your name. Mine is Penny, by the way. But alright. That’s very Monty Python. How about we strike a deal for my passage over the bridge?”

  Wulf looked suspicious again, wondering if there was any traditional precedent for bargaining with one’s supper. If his father could see him now, Wulf felt certain he would have found himself instantly disowned. It did not bear thinking what his great-grandfather, infamously known as Herbert the Bone-Crusher, gentletroll of the bridge, would have said. Herbert the Bone-Crusher had hunted mortals for sport.

  Suddenly, Wulf just wanted to go home. “What sort of deal?” he asked morosely.

  “Well, I’ve got an energy bar in my bag. I’m sort-of living on them until pay day. It’s blueberry flavour, and surprisingly quite edible. I’m really not supposed to hand these over, you know. The Erlking says I’m corrupting his denizens with processed foods, and there was that whole unfortunate incident with the fairy horse eating a fruit and nut bar… But if you don’t mention it, I won’t.”

  Wulf had heard of the horse incident: the baekhesten were notoriously temperamental even without ingesting mortal foods. It didn’t take him long to draw some very sensible conclusions. It was just his luck that this was the same girl responsible for that fiasco. Penny – he’d heard of her, alright. He really couldn’t decide which was worse: bargaining with her, or waiting to see what trouble she would surely cause.

  Great-grandfather Herbert had never eaten blueberries. Or energy bars, whatever they were.

  Wulf deliberated a moment, feeling a guilty kind of curiosity creep over him. He’d never had an energy bar before. He suddenly felt like he could do with a bit more energy.

  He tapped a talon on the railing frenetically as he thought.

  “Please don’t do that,” Penny winced.

  “What? Oh. Sorry.” He stopped tapping. “Well. It isn’t at all the done thing. I don’t think an energy bar would answer at all… Oh, very well. Just this once,” the troll said at last, still not looking entirely convinced.

  “Will it make you feel better if I were to lend you my copy of Persuasion? It’s quite a nice edition. I’ve got all the Jane Austens. Anne and Frederic are just lovely.”

  The troll looked up, a little more cheered by this prospect.

  “Would you? I’ve never actually read all of them. I usually only get the books that people forget on benches on the bridge, so a lot of them aren’t particularly enjoyable.

  “Set works,” Penny nodded knowingly. “My flatmate says that you know a book will be a miserably boring read if it’s won a bunch of literary fiction awards and they force undergraduates to read it.”

  “I have a whole shelf of those. And books people didn’t like that well-meaning relatives got them for Christmas. You know, the kind they feel bad just giving away. I even have a well-worn copy of Freshwater Fishing in Finland. I got all the way to chapter three of that one, you know. It was a particularly slow month.”

  “That sounds like a collection of hotel room books.” Penny pulled a face. “If that’s not a cry for help, I don’t know what is. You could join a book club. They deliver everywhere these days.”

  Wulf shuffled, claws clicking. It was a tempting idea. Great-grandfather Herbert had never read a book in his life, though he had used one for a bonfire once, in winter, when he happened to eat a travelling magister he’d met at a crossroads. It was not well-bred for trolls to indulge in such fancies as reading books – or even pretending to read them. Though, of course, using them as fuel was perfectly acceptable.

  Wulf had grown up on stories of the Bone-Crusher’s exploits, and he certainly didn’t want to betray the Old Ways. Surely the infamy which Wilhelm had brought down on the family name was quite enough.

  “I suppose I could see about the book club.”

  “Think about it. Can’t be much to do under that bridge.”

  After some more digging, Penny found the energy bar and handed it to the troll, mindful of the razor claws. She hoped the Erlking wouldn’t hear about this – he was already quite insufferable about the fairy horse incident. Some people just didn’t know how to let things go.

  Then, she glanced down at her watch.

  “Well, I’ve got to go now. I have piano. But I’ll drop by to give you the book first thing tomorrow. You’ll have to give me your name, though.”

  The troll blinked and then decided he was too far gone to revert to propriety at that point.

  “Wulf.”

  He hoped this didn’t count as actually becoming friends with a mortal – next he’d find himself opening an arts and crafts shop next to his cousin’s ridiculous coffee house.

  Of ice pixies and wine casks

  It all began with an infestation of ice pixies.

  Ice pixies were easily the prettiest of all creatures in the Hinterlands: Penny thought they were also the most heart-breaking.

  They were tiny and brittle, no bigger than the first joint of a pinkie, and distantly related to the common green garden pixie. Their eyes were bright and black, their hair a greenish shade of silver and their wings twice as long as they were tall. The wings were clear and glassy, like cut crystal or a pattern of frost on a window.

  They reminded Penny of pale hummingbirds.

  According to the Erlking, they were also pests, in that they got into wine barrels and milk, and just about anywhere else you did not want them. The Erlking had been very annoyed when a single pixie somehow got into his castle store rooms and finished an entire barrel of his best Elfin wine. He insisted that where one ice pixie went, others would soon follow. As it turned out, he was quite correct: it was not long before his wine cellars saw a veritable infestation.

  For most of the year, ice pixies could be seen in their multitudes around glaciers and the distant arctic regions of the Hinterlands where they swam in cold, rich waters and sunned themselves on ice floes. Occasionally, they would amuse themselves by conjuring snow flurries to blind wayward travellers.

  They only came down to warmer places in winter and stayed until spring, when they melted with the snow and were absorbed into the soil. They never returned to their glaciers, and they never lived longer than a season. Ice pixies always ceased to be around the time the first snowdrops began to show.

  Penny supposed there was something deeply symbolic in all of this, the kind of thing literary critics could pen whole books about, but she just felt infinitely sorry about the whole thing.

  “You wouldn’t be so upset about them if they got into your winter food stores,” the king’s steward, a very disgruntled count, huffed upon seeing the look on Penny’s face.

  The crux of the matter seemed to be that you couldn
’t not have ice pixies in winter any more than you could cancel winter itself. It was only to be hoped, the king had said grimly, that anyone with enough power to try that also had enough common sense not to mess around with seasonal weather patterns. It didn’t matter how one felt about discovering the things frolicking in thier soup.

  But surely there were limits, the king and his steward agreed grimly, outlining a plan of action to a group off jumpy-looking servants and advisors, all dressed in make-shift armour.

  In the Hinterlands, it was not unusual to see the pixies whirling around revellers every Yule, though the pests had enough common sense to keep well away from the high Yule bonfires, and you had to take care to hide whatever food and drink you did not wish them to steal.

  They were pretty enough when they faded into the falling snowflakes on a crisp winter night, and sometimes you could feel their chill wings brush against your face as they flew by.

  They are also extremely irritating when they took up temporary residence in your house. No one in the Hinterlands left out saucers of milk for the ice pixies, as mortals had done for countless centuries. That would have been akin to sending out gilded invitations for them to move right into your wine cellar.

  Despite the aggravated expression on the king’s face, Penny could not bring herself to mind them: they were such pretty things. Perhaps it was because she did not have a wine cellar for them to infest. Besides, she rather felt that if they wanted her kitchen, they’d have to fight it out with the perennial kitchen moths.

  “Couldn’t you just find some way to work around them?” she suggested to the Erlking as he was fastening on the thickest gloves he owned. The castle was in such a state of emergency that even the king had to lend a hand in securing the perimeters. But first, of course, he had to secure his hands from astoundingly painful pixie bites.

  “Most decidedly, no. They don’t negotiate. You are just fortunate that you cannot hear what they are saying.”

  Penny sighed. “I can hear what you’re saying most of the time and I’m still on speaking terms with you.”

  That might have been the wrong thing to say, because he gave her a thin little smile and made her help. Pointing out that the state of his castle was really none of her concern did absolutely no good.

  She spent the next five hours having to shake ice pixies out of tapestries and closets, sweeping them off bookshelves before they started to melt, and trying to avoid their teeth. The castle was large and labyrinthine, and the ice pixies had certainly wasted no time in securing the whole perimeter.

  It was not how she had planned to spend her day, though she got a healthy sense of enjoyment out of watching the Erlking try to wield a feather duster. He stared at her incredulously when she put one in his hand, informing him that if she was going to spend her Saturday de-pixie-ing his home without using magic, he was certainly not above doing the same.

  It didn’t take Penny long to find out that ice pixies could turn very nasty very quickly when riled, and riled they certainly were. They had sharp, hard little teeth, like jagged shards of glass, and jaws worthy of any alligator. She was forced to bedeck herself in ungainly dragon-hide thigh-boots and a pair of equally ungainly thick gloves that reached well above her elbows, and this still left her nose and ears completely unguarded.

  “You know, this is not the New Year’s prep that we do back home,” she muttered to no one in particular, giving her hand a tremendous shake in an attempt to get rid of one especially persistent pixie, which had bitten into the glove and refused either to let go or listen to reason.

  Penny had to admit that she was impressed by the sheer number of ice pixies that had suddenly taken over the castle. They seemed to be everywhere, and they were nothing if not persistent. They hid in the heavily draped curtains and behind couches, within cavernous wardrobes and inside scarves, bonnets and hats. For all that they melted when they got too close to fire and warmth, they appeared drawn indoors with an almost fatalistic ardour.

  The Elderking surprised Penny by easily agreeing that the things ought to be taken outside and set free – she had expected at least a good fifteen minutes of the sort of twisty, slippery negotiation Hinterlanders loved to indulge in. To be fair though, he couldn’t possibly have ordered a cage of ice pixies sent to the dungeons without sounding ridiculous.

  The steward had half-heartedly muttered something disapproving, but he’d obligingly taken his cage outside regardless. The man had certainly suffered more that his fair share of bitten noses that night.

  The king had watched the proceedings with a long-suffering expression that perfectly conveyed his feelings at having had to deal with the same annual disaster for countless centuries.

  The Erlking shook out his coat, which was made of a heavy gold-embroidered velvet that seemed a sort of magnet for pixie teeth. “He’ll be muttering over this for weeks yet, but it is much better to toss them out of doors than to have to placate grandmother,” he told Penny wearily.

  The Winterqueen had an inexplicable fondness for the things, as it turned out. She kept a whole swarm of them in her winter garden, as the Erlking had had the misfortune to discover when he’d stumbled into their nest as a boy. Who knew that what he’d taken for empty beehives had not only turned out to be very much occupied, but occupied by some of the most vicious creatures imaginable?

  He’d had to be bundled inside and thoroughly shaken to get the pixies to loosen their hold. He’d done his best to glare balefully through his thrumming bites at the five silvery figures that had tumbled onto the floor, wearing various expressions of scandalised indignation.

  The Winterqueen had given him her silk handkerchief to wrap around the bite on his hand, and a tremendous scold for having intruded upon their territory and ruined the ambiance of her snow garden. Penny, who had met the Winterqueen on several occasions, could see why she would have found the vicious, pretty things amusing.

  When the castle was at last free of this annual pestilence, Penny had slumped on the floor in the king’s study, gratefully accepting a glass of the Elfish ice wine the king had been so determined to protect. His Majesty, who never sat on the floor, took a chair. They didn’t speak for a long while, as they watched the flames flicker in the grate.

  “Well, now, was that not more fulfilling than going to the bottle store and planning your Yule costume?” the king asked at last, his dark eyes glimmering with amusement.

  Penny snorted. “No. Next year, I reckon, just let them have the castle. And we don’t really have Yule costumes. That’s for Halloween and fancy dress parties, and things.”

  It figured, Penny decided grimly, that when she got home at last, it was to discover that a few of the pests had stowed away in her coat.

  She wondered how she would explain this new infestation to her flatmates. They’d only just got rid of the pantry moths.

  Hliff and Maelstrom

  Once a month, Maelstrom the wizard and Hliff the witch met for tea, a chat, and a glass or two of the rather fiery plum liqueur Hliff made every Autumn. It was an extremely agreeable arrangement on both sides, and they even alternated whose kitchen to use.

  Over the years it had become a sort of ritual. Hliff would bring oatmeal cookies, because Maelstrom liked cookies and didn’t know the first thing about baking. Maelstrom would bring different varieties of tea, because Hliff never travelled beyond her village.

  They had known each other since they were children, and in the manner of children, their first meeting had been truly spectacular: Maelstrom had thrown mud in Hliff’s hair, only to be shoved into a conveniently situated brook. The dispute that had sparked this burst of hostilities was long forgotten, of course, though Hliff had a notion it had had something to do with ownership of an abandoned tree house.

  Having had to trudge home together covered in mud and soaked to the skin proved to be a surprising bonding point, especially given the sudden deluge of rain that had hit them on their way back. They ‘d been filled to bursting with the sort of m
utual dislike that sometimes manages to morph into a peculiar friendship.

  Somehow, they had even found a way to share the rickety wooden platform, making it into a bastion of friendship that lasted them through many adventures, and one ill-fated attempt at bewitching their own flying carpet, until Hliff had had to become a fully qualified witch and Maelstrom had had to go off to some far-away tower to learn wizardry.

  Hliff was one of the only people who knew that Maelstrom’s real name was Tim. He’d changed it when he became a journeyman wizard – he’d felt that it made him sound more interesting. Certainly, a wizard called ‘Tim’ wouldn’t have made it very far in the rather judgemental wizardly hierarchy.

  The witch, who could have easily given the wizards a run for their money when it came to being judgy, had thought it to be a ridiculous name even if you did have robes embroidered with a whole constellation of stars. She’d wasted no time telling him just that and he’d sulked for a good three weeks.

  Now that he was older and less given to wearing dark velvet robes, Maelstrom found himself agreeing.

  Both their tempers had mellowed somewhat since the day at the brook.

  Maelstrom had been the dowager queen’s court wizard for most of his life. He’d been appointed as the Royal Magician long before the queen had had any reason to move into the castle that served as her dower house. He had even been the magical arts tutor to her only son, who now ruled as the present Erlking, before retiring and moving away from the city – as far away as he could get, really.

  Maelstrom’s name turned up in history books and foremost works on the arts and sciences of practical magic. For many years, he had tried being a necromancer, because it paid well, was notoriously difficult to break into, and had seemed like an edgy, dangerous career, before at last deciding that there was nothing remotely edgy about digging up troll bone-yards in the middle of the night and having to spend all of one’s spare time burying things at cross roads.