bzedan | The Audacity Gambit, XVI:2

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The meeting was at the Terrin’s house. Emotions warred in Emily, it wasn’t very long ago to her that Becky had sat on the porch and told her about the Sidhe while the children slept inside. Janice opened the door for Emily, who tried to keep her expression firm as she faced the crowded room.

As with Janice and Becky, the years she’d been gone could be seen in the bodies and faces of the court with grey hair, wrinkles and age’s softening and sharpening of features. Emily was glad for her aunt’s protective presence at her back. It was going to be hard to forget a lifetime of deference to adults. Janice leaned against the door frame, but Emily stayed standing, hands loose at her sides.

“You can go back.” Emily’s mouth was dry but she pressed on before anyone could interrupt. “Through the arbour, good thing you’ve kept it up. I had to kill the queen to win you this and she told me—” the eyes watching her sharpened and tension ran through the court’s shoulders like a wire being tightened. Emily forced the words out and they began to flow in disgust. “She told me what you all were, what you did. Not that anybody cares, that’s how they are, how you all are, everybody is just pawns. Others seem to rarely matter in the games you play to save yourself from everlasting boredom.”

She stood planted, her body frozen in place with anger. “You got bored with two hundred years of comparative peace and, rather than go elsewhere to find trouble to lighten your days you decided to meddle. A war is a lovely change, isn’t it? And if it ruins and kills others that’s both a sad side effect and a spice. Playing double agent just adds to the excitement, I’m sure it was thrilling to lie to comrades, when they believed you were on their side. Even finding out you’d been exiled, stripped of your powers and forced to mortality couldn’t have been too worrying.

“Not a bother at all, just a new opening for another game to play, with the freshest material of all, children! You could sculpt a mind from the start, with the additional bonus of manipulating the progeny of people you’d betrayed. How brave of all of you, to get so into your roles as mortals, and how dedicated, to birth and raise children ignorant of their true purpose—creating the barriers and limits needed to create your key to the door of the Sidhe.

“I’m mixing my metaphors here, but I’m sure you’re all getting it. Here’s a better one for you, a bonsai tree. Harassed and encouraged, just so, to grow in a way that pleases the eye and suits a purpose. How well your experiment performed! It took longer than expected and I’m sorry if you began to bore of the game you were playing, but you’ve won! You can go back to your precious fairyland and playing the long con.

“But what are you going to do with your children? Will you bring them with you? Will they wake up one morning, alone in their homes? Do you plan to give them any explanation?” Emily paused her tirade for a breath, measuring the room. There was chained anger in their faces. She could feel her aunt behind her, pressed against the door, a twitch away from bolting. Janice had noticed what Emily had tucked into her waistband when they’d stopped at the trailer on their way to the meeting.

“So,” she spat. Everything was growing a sparkling halo, with the overly sharp edges that Emily remembered from late nights studying while drinking the strongest coffee. “Are you such spineless shits as that? Mind you, I wouldn’t be surprised if your eagerness to vacate the mundane world has short-circuited any send of responsibility you might feel towards the people you’ve made.

“You owe us more than that. The one thing I did learn in the Sidhe is that you don’t get something for nothing.” Fluidly, Emily pulled the knife from her waistband and held it above her head. It flared briefly—a shining broadsword and sliced blades from the ceiling fan—then was again a dull, bloodstained knife. Jagged whirring from the fan accompanied her final words. “I got you your passage by killing the queen. But I never named a price for taking this quest. Before you leave this world, you have to decide what to do with your children and I have to approve.”

Janice nearly fell as she swung the door open. They left as the silence erupted into an arguing ocean of babble.

Mirrored from Journal of a Something or Other.