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Crumbs: Burning Tower Part 3

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Faerie Silver (Chapter Eleven)

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Kingsguard (Book One)

Goblin Armor (Book Two) +++ “We can’t afford to be seen searching for them. It’s dangerous enough to have the Shadow King and our Queen missing. Far worse would be for anyone but us few to realize it. There are a few of our spies I trust enough to tell them the truth, but for the most part, we’re looking for a moons-wings traveling with a soldier. I just hoe they aren’t dusting Snowbell’s wings dark, or we’ll never find them.”

~A letter from Demonbone to General Stoneskin

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Their first day in Pondvale was relatively quiet. Resin followed Shorl down to the water and spent his time helping the tolla haul in the nets while the town’s many gobesh swarmed over them to bring in the catch. After that, their time was filled with breaking down the fish for the meat, bones, and teeth that provided the town with everything from food to weaponry.

Snowbell joined the town’s only healer, and it wasn’t long before they were deep in conversation about the medicines of the faeries, hidden as new knowledge from the alliance. Thanks to Catnip, she knew more than enough to hold up her end of the conversation, and she eagerly set to learning everything the healer, an aging gobesh with a lot of dokka blood, knew.

Resin didn’t know what they were up to, but he waved when they flew over the nets, off to collect herbs, most likely. He wanted to protest, the demon was still out there somewhere, but there was only so much protection Snow would accept if they weren’t in immediate danger.

READ THE WHOLE STORY HERE! +++ Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

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More Stories!

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West and South

At the Sign of the Silver Rose

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“I need your phone.”

“No you don’t.”

“I do if you want me to help hide us. Hand it over.”

Jax did not want to give Tanglethorn his phone, but he didn’t have much choice, all things considered. Lydia would rally quickly and when she did, they would have the full force of her fury on their tails. He did not want to find out what she would do to him if she managed to catch up with them. He grumbled and took a hand off his truck’s wheel to dig in his pocket for his phone. He unlocked it and passed it to the Fae beside him.

“Unexpectedly cooperative,” Tanglethorn muttered. Jax hadn’t expected him to understand technology. Many of the residents of Underhill viewed most tech with. At best, hostile suspicion. Tanglethorn, however, seemed comfortable with it. He dialed a number in quickly, and held it to his ear. Jax could hear it ringing. It must have been a little loud for Tanglethorn’s Fae ears, but he didn’t turn it down. A courtesy, maybe, so Jax could listen in. A sleepy male voice answered and Tanglethorn breathed a sigh of relief. “Mucker. It’s me. I need help.”

The growls Jax could hear starting on the other end of the line silenced abruptly and were quiet for a long minute.

“Anything,” he, apparently named Mucker, replied. “Where are you?”

“About four hours out from your farm. Is your land still cross-plowed?” Tanglethorn asked, apparently aware of the dirty tricks to keep Underhill’s residents away from someone. Some of the Good Folk couldn’t cross a cross, cut into the earth. Something about the parting of ways. Jax didn’t know exactly how it worked, but it did. Cross-plowing cut the land into deep furrows that crossed each other over, making thousands of deep crosses. It made crossing such land very difficult for the Good Folk. “I have a need for protection, at least long enough to arrange a proper escape.”

“Yeah. All but the road, and I can cross it over easy enough. You have someone after you?”

“My sweet cousin wants something I don’t care to give her.”

“Aye, that’d do it. I’ll get the plow out and meet you at the gate.”

Mucker didn’t say goodbye when he hung up, and Tanglethorn passed the phone back.

“Take the highway west and south,” he instructed Jax as they made the main road, going a little faster than was safe. “Don’t worry about police. I’ll handle them if we get pulled over.”

“I bet you will,” Jax muttered, but he didn’t doubt that Tanglethorn was as good as his word. He would have wrapped Jax up in glamours if Jax wasn’t warded against them. A normal human would belong to him between one glance and the next. “Who’s Mucker?”

“A friend,” Tanglethorn said, oddly fond. He fiddled with the layered silks of his scandalous robes and showed far too much leg for decency. Jax did his best not to look. Tanglethorn might not be able to glamour him, but he was as vulnerable as anyone to old-fashioned seduction. “A better friend than I deserve, certainly. I helped him escape a vicious fate a long time ago. He knows I would not call for less than a threat to my life.”

“Can he help us?” Jax was considering how and where to hide Tanglethorn. It wouldn’t be easy. Lydia was very powerful and she had a lot of connections. It wouldn’t take long for her to call in any of the other hitters she liked to work with. Jax wasn’t the only one on her payroll, and he didn’t look forward to fighting one of his own. “I have a few bolt-holes, but it’s gonna take time to get to them.”

“Mucker’s land is cross-plowed, and the road is seeded with iron shavings,” Tanglethorn laid out a description of his friend’s home with a wry smile. “His fence is of rowan boards, with living rowan trees and holly along the inside of the fence-line itself. He grows Saint John’s wort and red verbena.”

It was a serious protection. As close to a fortress against the beings of Underhill as could ever be wished. Jax was impressed, although he did have some concerns. “How do we get you onto the land? That will repel you as much as any other Fae.”

“It will. You’re going to have to do something I would rather you didn’t to get me inside,” Tanglethorn said, and grimaced, his lovely face twisted at the very thought. “You heard Lydia use my Name. I assume you already knew it, and I thank you for not using it to bring me to her. Now, I need you to use it to force me across the property line.”

It was a trust, and one that Jax hadn’t expected, even with their current situation. The use of a Faerie’s Name was either a sign of deepest affection, or a cruelty beyond any other they could imagine. Most Fae would rather be buried alive in iron sand than have their Name spoken aloud. To use it to force Tanglethorn across a Fae-repelling line like the one he spoke of would be torture.

He must truly fear what Lydia would do to him to not only allow, but to request such a thing.

That kind of trust needed a trust returned. Jax understood all the things Tanglethorn was saying, and all the things he wasn’t.

So he reached down to his belt, and slid his thumb over the edge of his long hunting knife just enough to break the skin. It barely stung, and he let a single drop of blood run free before he closed his finger over the cut to seal it again.

“I will never use your Name without your explicit consent,” he promised on his own blood. He didn’t take his gaze off the road, but he saw the way Tanglethorn gaped at him. “I’m a murderer, but not a monster. So I’ll use it to get you to safety, but I’ll never speak it again unless you give me permission.”

“It’s dangerous to make an oath to someone like me,” Tanglethorn said softly, but he gave Jax the first genuine smile Jax had yet to see out of him. “I accept your oath, Hunter. It’s a kindness I did not expect, when the road yet to come is so dark.”

“When you’re hiding, sometimes the dark is a friend,” Jax said, and pushed his truck to go a little faster as he merged onto the highway. “So, west and south. I can do that.”

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At the Sign of the Silver Rose:

Cold Iron Buckshot

Troll Market

Strike a Pose (Subscriber Only!)

For My Life (Subscriber Only!)

Reach the Door (Subscriber Only!)

Iron Spike (Subscriber Only!)

West and South (New!)

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MASTERLIST

#faerie #faeries #fairy #fairies #goblin #goblins #goblin armor #forest #nature

The Shadow Wold is under threat. Demons swarm at the borders. Resin will have to face the worst of the Wold’s dangers if he wants to save his home from destruction.

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What are Imps? (Deleted scene, Kingsguard)

Hello darlings and happy Monday! Today’s story was brought to you by Andrea! Darling thank you so much for your support!

Prompt: what are Imps?

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“Imps,” Demonbone said with he practiced air of a lecturer, “Are the backbone of the army’s communication. Tireless on the wing, capable of following most simple directions, and difficult to catch by enemy or animal, they are very useful indeed.”

He held out a hand and closed his eyes for a vreif moment. A pinpoint of light glittered across his hand and turned into a small creature. Resin leaned forward with the rest of his troop. It wasn’t that he hadn’t seen imps before. His father’s Guard and the king himself used them often enough. They were so rarely still long enough to get a good look at them, however.

It was a skinny creature. At first glance, the imp looked like a dokka. It had large, sleek wings that looked like dandelion fluff in the shape of dragonfly wings. Its skin was iridescent white, and it had oversized, ghostly blue eyes. As Resin watched, it tried to steal Demonbone’s signet ring, but was not clever enough to realize that, after so many years, the ring no longer came off with any ease. It tried, nonetheless, yanking fruitlessly while muttering to itself, high and squeaky.

“We aren’t entirely sure what they are,” Demonbone continued. He pulled out a faceted crystal on a string, and used it to lure the imp into flight. It buzzed around, so fast that it was difficult to see when it was in flight. “But they are something between ghosts, which are so rare as to be almost pure myth, and demons, which are unfortunately, entirely real.”

He threw the crystal into the air, and the imp followed, a blur through the air that seemed like nothing so much as a bit of seed fluff on the wind. It caught the crystal before it reached the height of Demonbone’s throw and screeched happily.

“Bring it to me,” Demonbone commanded the imp, which grumbled, and returned to his hand with only a little reluctance. As a reward, Demonbone let it keep the crystal, which it mouthed over eagerly. “Imps are useful. As I said, they can follow simple instructions, and have a very goon memory for voices. This makes them excellent spies, particularly in the Faerie Realm, which does not seem to be aware of their existence.”

Resin had seen imps reporting to his father more than once. Although they spoke a high, fast form of the common Goblin tongue, they were reasonably understandable. More than that, they could remember long strings of conversation.

Unfortunately, they made up for that by not actually understanding a lick of it. Simple instructions were all they could follow, and the simpler the better.

“An imp will never be able to tell the difference between a dagger and a sword,” Demonbone explained. He nodded towards his abandoned desk, where a coin, a playing card, and a blunted arrowhead sat. He addressed the imp next. “Bring me the coin from the desk.”

Obedient to his command, the imp went to the desk, but froze when it came to the items laid out for it.

“They can carry a letter, provided that it is handed to them,” Demonbone explained. The imp, apparently drawn to the shiniest object on the table, retrieved Demonbone’s glass pen and brought it over to him. He held it up. “But as you see, this is not the item I requested, and expecting the imp to understand what I meant, or to feel shame for not knowing what a coin is, is unreasonable.”

“What are their limits?” Aconite asked curiously.. He hadn’t been raised around the army, and didn’t know much about imps. Most civilians didn’t. it wasn’t that the knowledge was a secret, but it was something that most people simply didn’t bother to learn. There was little need, when the Wold had a reasonably good mail system, carried by cart and flyer. “They can find specific people, yes? Or they would be poor messengers.”

“For some reason, people are easy, where items are not,” Demonbone said. He took the pen from the imp. “Go to Resin, then to Aconite, then to Silverfish. Then return to me.”

The imp, which had been protesting the loss of Demonbone’s pen, shot into the air and circled the room, pausing before each of them in question. It hovered over Silverfish’s head for a long minute, and then shot back into Demonbone’s hand, lured by the crystal he still held.

“We believe it is because everyone has a slightly different feel to them. A magic contained in the being of what we are, that makes us identifiable to beings that can sense that magic.”

“But we don’t have magic,” Flicker pointed out. “Well, Fireglass and Ivy do, but the rest of us don’t.”

“We all have magic,” Demonbone corrected him crisply. He sent the imp around the room again, this time to each of them in turn. “It is how we exist, and some, myself included, believe it is why we cannot be possessed by demons, which is our greatest defense against them. Without that defense, we would never be able to hold the line at the border.”

“You said imps are like demons?” Fireglass asked. He was always one for tactics, and looked for an advantage in everything. “Are they safe to use?”

“Yes,” Demonbone replied. He banished the imp away with a wave of his hand, and caught his crystal before it could hit the floor. “Although they are something like a demon in that they can be summoned, as we have seen the greater demons do on occasion, they are much as ghosts as well, without the ability to possess other creatures. They also, as you have seen, are drawn to light and things that sparkle. Another thing that sets them apart from demons. Now, sit up and pay attention. It is time you learned to summon them yourselves.”

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