Aspect Of Winter Read online

  “C’mon, it’s Halloween, you two. Even if we’re going to spend it fighting, we may as well get into the spirit of it all.”

  Just then, the last of the sun disappeared beneath the horizon and it got noticeably darker. “Trick or Treat” was ringing out from all around us, and the creak of doors opening and adults pretending to be scared or impressed joined them. Halloween had begun in earnest.

  A noise like a thousand screams, each somehow no louder than a sigh, suddenly filled the air. I could smell strange spices, and a cold wind started up. The moon suddenly filled the sky, tinged orange as it loomed above us. A small crease of light hung in the air about a hundred feet away from us, just the tiniest line. With a sharp crack, it stretched out in a zigzag pattern, until it resembled a closed eye, with only the tiniest sliver open, with strange green light pouring in. The eye opened, and eerie cries echoed throughout the graveyard. Samhain, like Halloween, had begun.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Naturally, Sam’s first response was to rush over to the portal. Self-preservation isn’t exactly one of her most noticeable qualities, and so she was the first one to see the Sidhé as they began to pour through.

  As Sam was calling us over, a hand forced its way into the world. Five long, pale fingers grasped the edge of the green light and pulled the rest of the arm through, revealing bare silvery-white skin. The Sidhé stepped through and unfolded to his full height, towering above us at around seven feet. He was dressed in strange splotches of moss that clung to his slender form and gave outlines to the musculature below. A sharp jaw, aristocratic nose, and two white eyes were laid out on his lean face. His hair was long and shaggy, the same silver as his skin, reaching down to the middle of his back. He looked around at us for a moment, mild surprise registering on his face as he took in the scenery. When he saw the bonfire, with the food and drink as well as the gemstones laid out, he… trilled. There’s not really a better word for it. He threw back his head and let out a high, clear laugh, and then looked at Sam directly.

  “Ah, young lass, ‘tis good to see that not all of the old customs have been forgotten. Ye’ll have no trouble from me, on this Samhain night. And here I thought I’d found something new, only to be greeted with one of the oldest sights of time itself. Come join me as I feast. Drink and make merry with me, and I’ll make this a night to remember.”

  He held out his hand in a complicated gesture, bending low in a half-bow, as if waiting for her to take hold of him. His moon-bright eyes were shining with mischief and a spark of something else. Something far more primal. It made me shiver to look at them.

  “Sorry,” said Sam. “You’re not my type. I’m happy you like the arrangements, though. I bid you welcome to Gaia’s good earth, and offer to you the good bounty we have.”

  The Baí Zé had been clear on what we had to say to the ones who came through and accepted the offer of food and fun instead of mischief. We had to respond in ritual form or they’d see it as a slight. He also said to take absolutely nothing any of the Fair Folk offered us, even if it were as simple as an invitation to dance.

  The Sidhé withdrew his hand with the same elegant gesture, and instead turned back to the portal, forcing it to open wider with his arms. He cried out with unvarnished glee and spoke.

  “Come forth, my friends, and join me in the festivity! Tonight we are honored here by the old ways, long since thought forgotten! Let us not disrespect the good hospitality we are offered!”

  More strange cries echoed through the portal in response to his words, and soon another Sidhé made her way through. She was in every way the female counterpart to the first, her long silver hair also shining untamed in the harvest light. Her eyes swept over us, registering the same slight surprise as the first one.

  “My,” she purred, her voice low and full of warm delight, “It has been a long time since the Good Folk have been treated thus. And what a treat it is, to be greeted so openly. I accept your offer of bounty and good welcome, and shall join in the revels.”

  And with that she glided towards the bonfire, entwining her arm with the first one to come through.

  We weren’t expecting any thanks to be given tonight for our efforts or to learn the names of any of the Sidhé that would come. They firmly believed that name-knowing was a form of power and that showing gratitude indicated a debt. The Fair Folk were always careful to never give thanks undeservedly, and if you were foolish enough to thank them, you’d find yourself whisked away into servitude in one of their hidden mounds. That’s where the name came from; Sidhé literally referred to the many hills and mounds that cover Ireland, where the Fey supposedly make their homes.

  After that, a steady stream began to make its way through the opened gate. I was pretty sure we’d just seen two of the Leanan, who were basically the flirts of Irish folklore when they were the friendly sort, and the life-draining succubi of them when they weren’t. The ones that followed, however, were a much more varied bunch.

  Dozens of little people then began to come through. They were about two feet tall, with exaggerated faces showing good humor, wicked mischief, and general good cheer. The Clurichaun, more commonly known as leprechauns and goblins, had arrived for the party. They streamed around and sometimes between our legs, making a beeline for the alcohol that Tyler had laid out with the cookies. The bonfire went from being nearly empty to being full of laughter and general raucousness in seconds as the Clurichaun joined in the fun. The male Leanan began to pick up some of the Clurichaun and twirled them around giddily, pretending to throw them into the fire before settling them back down. A tipsy Clurichaun approached the woman, and she rewarded him with a kiss on his beet-red nose. I think all three of us were grinning dopily as we watched the party start in full force.

  A soft voice from portal behind us interrupted our observations.

  “Excuse me?”

  We whirled around, only to be faced with the image of a massive Sidhé, in the form of a barrel chested man well over eight feet tall. He was dressed in soft mosses patched across his body, with twigs and leaves sprouting at random intervals out of his body. He had thick and unruly black hair and a truly spectacular beard that draped nearly down to his knees. He carried what looked like a birch tree staff. Despite his wild appearance, his soft brown eyes contained a surprising gentleness.

  “I’m not so rude as tae simply brush by ye as the littler fellows are ken to do, but I would dearly love to partake in the festivities all the same. Might I have your blessing tae to so?”

  “Oh,” I said, flustered. “Uh, yeah, sure. Go right ahead. I, uh, I bid you welcome to Gaia’s good earth, and offer to you the good bounty we have.” The giant’s eyes twinkled with amusement, and he gave us all a shy smile before walking past.

  “So,” I whispered. “Anyone remember what sort of Sidhé that guy was? I thought most of them were supposed to be tiny or like scary-pretty?”

  “I think we just saw a Gille Dubh,” Tyler whispered back, a little awed. “He’s a tree spirit. He has one of the forests of the Sidhé world under his protection. They’re ridiculously strong, but also shy and gentle.”

  Wow. Word gets around quickly, I guess. I wouldn’t have guessed that cookies and cheap beer made for a good supernatural party, but apparently I was wrong. The three of us just stood there for a while, watching as the Gille Dubh picked up a cookie, furtively biting into it and spraying crumbs all down his beard. There was a slight mewing noise and the head of a black cat poked its way out from his beard and to lick up all the crumbs. The Gille Dubh patted its head fondly, and went for another cookie.

  I stopped watching as the woman fey from before, the Leanan Sidhé, came storming up from the bonfire all of a sudden, clutching one of the ice diamonds I had made.

  “Good hosts, it is only because of your hospitality and custom that I am not currently at your throats,” she said, her white eyes glowing eerily. Tyler took a protective step forward as I edged back, and I felt the pressure of his hand on my chest.
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  “I will assume that you are ignorant as to the nature of what you possess. Where on Gaia did you come to possess a Token of Winter? He has not walked this land in millennia, along with the other Seasons. To offer Tokens of Winter, on Samhain… it is a dangerous thing that you do. The festival is meant to usher in the coming of the White Season. What if He were to take it as an invitation to arrive Himself?”

  I shot Sam and Tyler a panicked look. I had no idea what she was talking about! I didn’t try to do anything; I just made these things! The Leanan saw me, and misinterpreted the fear she saw.

  Her eyes softened slightly, the pale glow relenting.

  “Ah, lad, worry no more. It’s an honest surprise to see such a thing as this, which even we thought to be reduced to mere myth and legend. But Winter walks no more, child, and it will be safe tonight. I will, however,” she added, “be taking these with me at night’s end to ensure they cause no strife. Worry not, I will give recompense.”

  With that, she walked away, calm again, swinging her hips perhaps a little more than necessary. Sam’s gaze was locked onto her, uh, lower regions.

  “Sam. Stop drooling.”

  “Not after that display. I’m an artist! I’m allowed to appreciate works of art when I see them!”

  I tried to roll my eyes with Tyler, but he seemed just as captivated. I sighed.

  The Leanan Sidhé turned around once more, looking past us at the portal with a sharp gaze. She hissed a something that sounded suspiciously like “here already?” with a mixture of irritation and anger.

  The bonfire seemed to dim a bit. The flames, which had been leaping about merrily, dimmed down to mere coals for a moment. I snapped to full alert, and Sam and Tyler joined me. Something was coming. The other Sidhé sensed it too, but they seemed more interested in watching than helping. I was pretty sure that I saw one of the Clurichaun collecting bets, actually. Only the Gille Dubh seemed at all concerned. He was staring at us anxiously, his big hands gripping his birch staff so tightly his thick knuckles were turning white.

  The fire suddenly roared back up again, the flames tinged an eerie purple. A keening noise filled the air, coming from the portal. The air became charged with energy as something began to force the portal to open wider. With a final sigh it complied, the jagged crack of light spreading to around twenty feet wide and opening up even further.

  It happened all at once. Screams of rage and fury filled the air as thousands, and I do mean thousands, of vaguely human-shaped clouds with glimmering yellow lights for eyes flew out of the portal, forming a hurricane of spirits around us. The air was filled with them, and their hatred was so intense that we all cowered slightly. They kept flying counter-clockwise around us at dizzying speeds, until it seemed like we were surrounded on all sides by a swirling gray wall, interspersed with pinpoints of yellow light. Then they separated, rocketing off in every direction, leaving smoke and ash to fill the air.

  Pulses of white light began to flare up as the Sluagh Sidhé, the dark spirits of Irish lore, slammed themselves into the candlelight protecting the graves. Some of them vanished as they were pulled into the mirrors, but most of them flew through the few trees dotting the graveyard, flying too high to be caught. We breathed a collective sigh of relief as no corpses began to rise up. We hadn’t missed anything, thankfully. The spirits weren’t relenting, however, and the air was already beginning to thicken.

  “Sam!” I shouted. “I don’t think the mirror trick is going to work for these guys! They aren’t taking the bait! What was the other weakness that the Baí Zé said they had?”

  “It was light, Fay! Really powerful light, enough to affect the souls of the dead!”

  Sam muttered a few words, and a Light orb began to circle around her, keeping the Sluagh Sidhé at bay, and I did the same. Tyler stuck close to my side, protected by the pale light surrounding us.

  Then the redcaps arrived en masse. Dozens of diminutive creatures, similar in appearance to the Clurichaun save for their bloodred hats, ran through the portal, each clutching a wickedly sharp bone sickle. They were grinning wildly, and their serrated teeth gleamed.

  “Sam!” I shouted, “we need to act, now!”

  I gritted my teeth and pulled out a few of my ice diamonds that I hadn’t laid out in front of the bonfire, and dropped them on the ground as the redcaps approached. I focused hard and the ice began to run like water, gathering around our feet and rising. Soon we were all wearing small boots of ice, except for the soles. Hopefully it would provide some small protection against getting our tendons sliced open by those sickles.

  A second later, they were on us. Tyler had backed away rapidly and was leading a few of the bloodthirsty creatures to the side.

  Sam had… whoa. Her own shield was up and ready. Sam had modified the Minor Orb spell again. She had conjured her five orbs and sent them rotating helically around her body, almost too fast for me to have seen them. In the second before the redcaps forced me to pay attention to my own fight, I watched as the first one to get too close to her was just blasted to one side with incredible force. A few of the Sluagh Sidhé flying through the air were pushed aside from the wind her orbs were generating as well.

  “Inertia, bitches!” Sam screamed victoriously. Sweat was pouring down her brow from the effort, though. She wouldn’t be able to keep it up for long.

  I went with a little more of a basic defense, dropping my Light spell to concentrate. Focusing on the image of the sickles the redcaps near me were carrying, I let out a breath, and lowered the temperature of the bone as much as I could. About half of the redcaps around me dropped their weapons in shock, afraid to pick them back up as frost coated the entire length of their weapons, while the other half managed to hang on somehow and advanced.

  Time for the next plan. I drew moisture from the air rapidly, lowering it to the ground and freezing it up from there. A wall of ice rapidly built itself around me, and dull thudding noises resounded as their sickles beat ineffectually against it. I had a second to think, and that’s when they started speaking.

  “We’re going to cut you, boy.”

  “And dip our caps in your blood. I bet you’ll scream. The young ones always do.”

  “We’re going to start with your legs, and work our way up.”

  “Maybe we’ll sample your flesh while we’re at it. You look good enough to eat.”

  “And you’re going to be unable to do anything but watch as we have our fun. And oh, such fun we’ll have.”

  Their voices were high and reedy, and filled with an insatiable bloodlust. The Baí Zé had told us about them. They didn’t care if what they were doing was going to kill me, or if it was cruel and evil. They didn’t know any more than the thrill of blood being spilt. They were redcaps, and blood was what kept them alive. If the blood on their red hats ever dried up, they would die. So we needed to take their caps, and not get chopped up in the process.

  Cracks started to crisscross my hastily built wall, and even though I knew they couldn’t physically touch me, the Sluagh Sidhé above were getting dangerously close. I had to do something quickly.

  I forced the top part of the ice wall to collapse down beneath me and drew even more water from the air, building a pedestal of ice beneath my feet until I was three feet above the ground and safely out of range of the redcaps’ sickles, just as my ice wall shattered. I threw several shards of ice into the air at the same time, scattering the Sluagh Sidhé temporarily. The redcaps halted and looked up at me in frustration, and then one of them grinned and gestured another one towards it. The first one backed up a couple steps, hunched over with his hands creating a foothold as the second one ran towards him and used the boost to launch himself straight at my chest. Before I could react, the redcap’s sickle sliced across my chest, and a line of pain drew itself across my front as blood poured down. I screamed and kicked the redcap off the pillar while it was distracted by my blood falling down on it. The other redcaps had gotten the same idea by then, though, and I w
atched in horror as another couple of redcaps prepared to do the same thing.

  I gathered up the ice shards from the fallen wall, and raised my arms, the ice hanging deadly in the air. If they were going to hurt me, then I was going to return the favor. Instead of setting the shards of ice whirling around me like Sam had with her orbs, I flung some of them at the two redcaps about to make the jump. They were blasted to the ground with several jagged shards embedded in their bodies. They writhed in pain, but their bodies spilled no blood. The Sluagh Sidhé caught in the line of fire also turned into puffs of smoke before reforming safely out of reach, and the others swiftly flew away, giving me room to breathe. The other redcaps backed off a bit, which gave me the time to put a layer of ice atop the gash spanning my chest.

  Ow. That was definitely going to scar. Looking down, I noticed that there was still a lot of ice left on the ground from my ice wall, and I could keep drawing more from the air while my adrenaline high kept me from feeling the exhaustion. I would have been worried about the ice killing them, but their wounds were already knitting together as I watched. I needed to gather their caps, however, so I needed something a little softer. I closed my eyes, and tried to remember what I did back when I was five, and wanted it to snow in the summer. I ground the ice into the tiniest particles I could manage, and gathered them around me along with drawing out more water, this time converting it into snow. The redcaps were busy trying to shatter my pillar of ice so they could get at my legs in a larger group. When I thought I had enough, I sent the snow out from me in a wave, collapsing my ice pillar as I did so.

  The wave of white spread out and engulfed the redcaps, only making a circle emanating about ten feet out from me, but close to two feet deep in that small area. The redcaps were caught off-guard, struggling to move in the snow, which I made denser and more clingy by raising the temperature until the snow was more like quicksand than anything else.

  With only their heads above the snow level, it was easy for me to reach out and grab the caps from their heads. Each one screamed loudly as I took it, like I had taken part of their souls along with their caps. For all I knew, I had. There were a couple of redcaps just outside the snow circle, and they glared at me hatefully. I ignored them, looking around to see how Sam and Tyler were faring.