In the Land of Stories Old

Chapter 50

According to Ari, the Kingdom of the Rock Trolls had once been less than a day’s ride from Arendelle, possibly two days’ walk. He’d been dismayed to find that the shallow river which had once marked a boundary between the two kingdoms was now a gorge filled with jagged rocks and tumbling, deadly white rapids, and that on the other side of the gorge the land was mostly rock-strewn steppes only occasionally disrupted by patches of scraggly brush and wind-twisted pine trees. The gorge had proved too wide and its sides too steep for any of the usual methods of getting across to work, and so Merlin had drank a bottle of something from his pack and then magically encouraged a land-bridge to grow across it at the narrowest point they could find. He was stumbling with exhaustion afterwards, but the bridge was wide and solid and looked to be quite permanent, and if he had to make the crossing half asleep and thrown over a grumbling Arthur’s shoulder nobody else said anything about it. He was still a bit tired the next morning, but after downing a mug of tea which he quite obviously did not enjoy the taste of he was fine to keep walking.

Ari did notice that they made camp early that night, though, but he didn’t say anything because, again, no one else did. He’d never been around one of the magi before, but from what he was seeing he had to assume that they had limits as to how much power they could use without tiring themselves. He was also assuming, based on what he’d seen and heard so far, that Merlin had an exceptional amount of magic at his disposal compared to other magicians. But at the same time, the amount of power which had once been thrown around by what they called ‘grand high fairies’—presumably to differentiate them from the less harmful kind which were still around—was apparently so far above anything even Merlin could do that there was simply nothing like it left in the world. And that worried Ari, because he knew there was still one grand high fairy left, somewhere, and she’d been the very worst of them all. If she were to break free and no one was around who could stop her, he wasn’t sure what would happen to the now much smaller, struggling world of men which had bloomed from the ashes of the Cataclysm.

He finally decided that he needed to tell them the rest of what he knew, and requested an early stop for the second night in a row. And around the fire that night he told them about the Blue Fairy Lord Sel had chastised for playing cruel games with his people, and about the Fairy Marguerite who had destroyed lives and families, cursed innocents, and eventually been caught in her own net when one of those innocents had turned the power of Ragnarok on her. He told them about how the other fairies had supposedly worked together to break the power of the Sea Kings and call the Deep Magic, aiming the force of it at Arendelle, and how that had drained magic from seemingly everything, forcing all of the Lords of the Seas to seal themselves away before they were so weakened they succumbed to the Sleep just like the gods before them had been forced to do. He spoke of the sickness which had been released by the fairies, of the terrible storms and winds which came after the power of the Lords of the Air was also broken, of the earth tremors which seemed to be shaking the foundations of the world once the other lords also fell to Dreaming. “It was even affecting me,” he admitted. “It was like I was…flickering, like a candle flame in a draft. I wasn’t able to do anything but watch, there towards the end. But I remember that Elsa tried to send John away with their children and he put them on a ship but refused to leave her, and I have a vague recollection of her enclosing them both in the ice of Ragnarok before the Deep Magic struck. They aren’t in the Hole, I’ve looked. But they’re somewhere, I know they are. And I suspect the Fairy Marguerite is too, because that same ice is what formed her prison and Lord Sel said it would last a thousand years.”

Arthur drummed his fingers on the side of his bowl. “So possibly in the farther reaches of the South,” he suggested. “Doesn’t the difference in the water temperature make the currents? The ice might have gone with the currents.”

“It did.” Jack was staring into nothing, and touching his forehead in an odd way; a faint light shining through his shirt said his medallion was glowing. “It would have gone that way, because ice is buoyant and the current would have pushed and pulled it, like a cork in a stream. All such things eventually end up as part of the Ice Mountains of the Farthest Southern Waters.”

Ari’s brown eyes went wide. “Did…that lord touch you?”

Jack dropped his hand and wrapped his arms around himself with a shiver, closing his eyes. The light from the medallion flared and then died. “He does not speak or name himself, and his touch is so cold. I was…distracted by the strange warm weight of his depths, and did not realize that he, also, had laid a charge on me.” He shook his head. “They are there, sealed in ice as clear as the purest diamond. All three of them.” That was when Merlin reached over and touched his cheek, then grasped his shoulder and shook him hard. “What…”

“Hans, he needs the tea,” Merlin said urgently. “He’s cold as ice, he was using magic.”

“But I do not have…”

“You do now,” Merlin told him. He looked Jack in the eye. “Jack, did all seven of them lay a charge on you?” Jack nodded. “And the power in the medallion?”

“Mine to do with as I please. Lord Sel said so.” Jack shivered again, and Noki immediately got a blanket to wrap around him. “Thank you. Last time…Lady Tia touched me to chase the cold away.” He smiled. “And that was when I heard her song, I felt it down to my bones and it was so wild and warm and beautiful, and she chose to claim me because I had heard it. Lord Lu insisted on examining me after that, even though Lord Sel had told him not to—he said Sel’s order had been to keep from driving me to insanity, but then he had let Tia sing me her song and they all recalled the last Jack she had done such to.” That surprised a laugh out of Ari, and Jack focused on him. “You knew of him?”

“Oh, everyone at some point knew of him,” Ari said, rolling his eyes. “He was a sea captain turned pirate.” Blank looks. “Oh, that’s…he would sail around taking others’ ships and stealing their gold. And he was crazy as a bilge rat in the sun, by all accounts, but the seas favored him in ways they have rarely favored any man and he never intentionally killed any who did not in some way deserve it—never innocents, never women, and never any who called for parlay.”

“So he became a raider?” Snow wondered. “But…men who become raiders aren’t good men, and I’ve never heard of one who cared who he killed.”

“Not like that,” Ari told her. “A good many pirates back then were like your raiders, but not all of them and most definitely not him. As the story was told to me, he was a captain of some renown, working the seas for the great trading companies in the days when they ruled as much of the waves as they could. But when they ordered him to carry human cargo on his ship, he first attempted to reason with them and then freed the cargo and turned on his former masters viciously when they would not listen to his objections. They declared him a criminal, and so he turned to piracy.” He smiled, but it was a grim smile. “Queen Tia, I believe, was that man’s patron.”

“Lord Don charged me with never allowing the trade of souls for gold,” Jack said, nodding. “I was…horrified, that our ancestors would trade in human lives as though they were sheep, and swore to him that I would never allow it to happen on my watch. He saw in my mind what we did to the ones who took the children, and he approved and called for Lady Tia to see it. She approved as well, but said she herself would have preferred that those men suffered more before they died. I explained that I had wanted that myself at the time, and so had the rest of us, but we had been afraid to start down that path and she approved of that as well.”

Hans decided to just give Jack the tea he’d been making for Merlin; he could make another mug, and Merlin wasn’t in as much need of it. “Drink this.” Jack obediently drank, and made a face. “I do not care—we are out of honey, and the taste of the anise will not kill you.”

“You’ll just wish that it would,” Merlin tacked on. “But unfortunately, every attempt I’ve made to get it out of the brew has failed. I’m still relatively certain it was only in there because some strange mage loved his licorice too much, but the brew simply won’t work without it.”

Jack drank some more. “Do you not drink two cups of this each and every day?” Merlin nodded. “I swear I will make sure we always have honey from now on.”

“Just drink it and quit complaining,” Hans ordered, digging out another packet of the tea. This new development could be a problem; they had enough of the tea to last if it was being used for Merlin alone, but if Jack began to need it every day as well their supply was going to dwindle quickly.

Merlin had apparently noticed his frown. “He won’t need it every day, Hans,” he said. “He’s just never used magic before, he wasn’t ready for it.” He turned his own frown on Jack. “Does your birth family have family magic?”

Jack shrugged. “I have never seen it, if they do. Perhaps it is like the magic in Arthur’s line, which only comes when it chooses to.” He snorted into the mug. “Or perhaps it involves growing hair, in which case Pierre most definitely has it.”

“Jack’s oldest brother,” Arthur explained to Ari. “He’s…really pretty. As in gets mistaken for a princess pretty. And a lot of that’s because he has really long, flowin’ golden hair.”

“Which his maids spend a good deal of their time brushing and styling for him,” Jack said. “Also much like a princess.” He reached back to smooth the neat tail of golden hair that was now tied at the nape of his neck; he’d been…disinclined to put his hair back up into its usual coif after being crowned, at least in part because the simpler style was how King Adam had worn his and it made him feel closer to the man who had been his distant ancestor. “Now that I am thinking of it, I need to trim mine. Another few inches and I will be slipping close to princess territory myself.”

Arthur snorted. “You have a ways to go before you start to look like Pierre and Marcel, Jack. And your family resemblance to Adam is really apparent when your hair’s like this.”

Jack smiled and made himself take another drink of the awful licorice tea. “Thank you.”

fanfiction In the Land of Stories Old