The Fairy King and his Cursed Queen ✔

2 | LOVE CHILD

I was a child of love...I'd thought. For all things of precious creation should come from love. My path into this world came in secret, in a shed, and, I suspect, with me falling into the mud.

In the years to come, I never did get well.

By age three, my mother was dead, and I was brought to a man said to be my father. I suppose he was.

He was the first one to poison me, but not the last.

And as I lay dying in the streets, wanderers found me. What they left of my remains was unrecognizable as human.

That was my first encounter with the fairy queen—the one to save me.

She always liked fixing broken things.

As I observed the strange actions of the new fairy queen, I concluded that this one was no different. She did not saunter up to a pile of blood and bones and restore it to life. No, she knelt, peering into a wall of ice.

More specifically, at the gnome trapped behind it.

Always a fixer. And never all that smart.

I should have told her to leave it, but I couldn't help myself.

Thick globs of snow covered the world outside this cavern where I kept her. It was a hollow tunnel, capable of emptying out into the nook of a life-syphoning tree. As it needed to sustain itself, all creatures, all things with life, eventually sunk into the lake of the Forgotten, only to end up here...trapped.

As this gnome though proportioned as a dwarf rivaled humans in height, perhaps that was what interested her about him.

Gnomes lived below ground. The way she studied it, one would think she'd never seen anything like it before.

When she searched around her, snatched up a rock, and rushed the ice, I believed it.

"Hold!" I caught her hand.

The shock in her eyes surprised me in kind.

It wasn't often that I stared at her. I could not say why I hesitated—only that I had. I'd also kept my distance, waiting for her to prompt our transformation into fairies.

Such a suggestion did not come. Instead, she said something foolish. "Oh, right. Of course, you'd have a better idea." She stared past my shoulder to the ice and wore a look of wonder. "Do you wish to melt it? Would this entire area flood?" She looked up but could make out nothing of the lake above us. The cavern was strong and sturdy. "We could climb out—after we shrink him down, of course. I—"

The rock striking the ground by her feet shut her up.

"Free it?" I asked, doubtful that my ears hadn't betrayed me. What nonsense to speak. "You'd dare steal from Manoj?"

Patience was never my forte. I'd learned it as a consequence of wars. Not every day, not every weather, not every army was a perfect fit.

When I'd first met the fairy queen, I knew no patience. I'd since learned it and put it to good use now as I explained, "Everything here belongs to Manoj." Her eyes still held confusion, so I cast my gaze upwards. It would take her a moment to understand but the moment she flinched, I knew she saw it, the thick roots. "This is the tree of life. Manoj. He lives, and he breathes, and he does not give back what he claims."

The function of a fairy queen would be hard to explain as Manoj was difficult to understand. A simpleton could imagine what I said next.

"Fairy queens bring life, fairy kings collect it—eliminate it, but we both do so for Manoj. He's our father—our source of life."