The King and Queen of the Gela Wey

Captured a Sylphen and locked it away

When it saved the brother the king wished to betray.

Oh wicked King, wicked Queen, of the Gela Wey.

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Prologue

 

Sylphen: Term used when referring to any species whose soul is composed primarily of magical energy. ~ Albern's Dictionary.

 

            “But what about the sylph?”

            Adeline, who had hauled herself up from the moss-covered masonry that had been her seat, froze. She glanced down at a pig-tailed girl sitting on folded legs in the grass. The girl stared up at Adeline with as serious an expression as a child could manage. The rest of the tour group shifted attentively where they stood or sat, watching Adeline intently as they waited for the answer.

Adeline blinked in mild surprise. She had told the tale of the Gela Wey and the fall of its “supposedly” immortal king and queen countless times since becoming a tour guide, and no one had ever thought to ask about the fate of the sylphen. Adeline had forgotten how perceptive little urchins could be. Her nieces and nephews had been particularly trying in their inquiries.

            “He escaped, I imagine,” Adeline said, brushing twigs and moss from her red brush-broom skirt. Escaped or was killed, she thought. The only record history had of the creature was the queen's account in one of her journals of its capture, but the queen had never said what she had done with the thing beyond enslave it. If the tales were true, the poor thing would have been tortured, and had it survived its torment, it would have gone mad. Mad sylphens of any species were more often than not put down like rabid dogs. Adeline kept that bit to herself.

            “Well, ladies and gentlemen, that ends our tour of the Gela Wey,” she said, ignoring the girl's incredulous glare. “I thank you for coming. Do stop by the Palace Cafe if you’re peckish, and visit us again soon.”

            The response was polite applause from the eclectic group. Men in denim overalls and women in time-worn dresses picked themselves up from where they had sat in the grass with their children. Men in suits and women in knee-length skirts and fur-lined hats, already standing, picked their way carefully around stones that had once been a palace. The little pig-tailed girl in her too-big dress and clonky boots skipped ahead of her parents as if her question had long been forgotten. She sang, “King and Queen of the Gela Wey, who caught a sylphen and locked it away…” Other children joined in.

            Adeline waited until the entire group had exited the skeletal palace remains. She then grabbed up her hiking stick leaning against her former seat and followed. At the edge of the meadow where the palace had stood was the stone frame of what had once been a portcullis or a drawbridge, Adeline wasn’t sure which. They might have been impressive things, once upon a time, but now stood like a weathered old man pathetically spiting time.

As Adeline moved through the gate she waved at where Bernard sat in his rusty folding chair, squinting through his glasses at the sports section of the morning paper. The kindly joke among most of the staff was that the only reason Bernard still took the tickets was because he and the gate were comrades in age. His knobby hands shook with a mild palsy, making the paper rattle, and a cool breeze plucked at the thin threads of his white hair.

            “Evening, Bernard,” Adeline called.

            Bernard looked up from his paper, blinking owlish eyes. “Wha? Oh, yeah, evening Addy. Good go today?”

            “As good as it ever gets, I suppose,” Adeline said, pausing for their usual chat.

            “Ah, don’t sell yourself short, Addy. You’ve got the gift of a storyteller. Not like that Mrs. Cross. Like taking a tour with a sour old school matron when she's on the schedule. You give the tours more spice.”

            Adeline snorted and waved off his compliment. “More spice. Gods, Bernard, I walk them through blasted rubble and through blasted trees, not show them the wonders of the universe. A story or two doesn’t make a difference.”

            “Does in my book. Speaking for myself, I remember stories better’n years, and Mrs. Cross prefers telling things in years. In 1701 some important bloke sneezed into a handkerchief and then had mutton for dinner. It’s enough to drive even a history professor batty. Plus she don’t do magic.”

            “Bernard, I never do magic on the tours.”

            “You don’t have to. Just them knowing you have it is enough.”

            Which Adeline regretted; not that she had magic, but that people thought it made her somehow more important, more official than she really was. Most sorcerers weren’t sorcerers without having some government position attached to their name. It wasn’t the magic they saw, since they never really saw it, only the title. A title that said ‘yes, I once lived in the capital city, and worked for emperors, princes, and dukes.’

            Thank the Four Gods no perceptive little girl or boy had thought to ask why a government sorcerer was now giving tours.

            “Whatever you say, Bernard. Whatever you say,” Adeline said with a dismissive flap of her hand. She turned toward the little gravel path that wound through the trees and would lead her to the Palace Cafe. Some tea, maybe a blueberry muffin, and her shift would officially be over and she could head home. She'd had enough of walking, today, and longed for her armchair and a good radio show to relax to.

            She had managed two steps when a commotion pulled her attention back behind her. Adeline sighed wearily.

            “Head up, Bernard, the college lads are coming.”

            The area of the palace was often swarming with university lads or lasses allowed to poke around the ruins so long as they stayed within the area. Also so long as someone - either the professor in charge of the lot or tour employee - was there to make sure they didn't muck the site up. They were forever pestering Adeline with some new find, begging her to perform a time spell on it to determine it's age, only to suffer the indignity of the item being a year-old bit of broken bottle.

            “Probably found someone's shoe string and thought the queen used it to garrote someone,” Bernard said with a chuckle. He went back to his paper.

            Adeline frowned. The boys’ pace was rather frantic for a group eager to have Adeline cast a time spell on their find. When the nearest boy, a fellow in a bowler cap with bits of blonde hair sticking out, saw Adeline he seemed to melt in relief even as he ran towards her.

            “Oh, thank the Four, Miss M,” he said. “You need to come with us, quick. Henry, get to the cafe and get on the phone, see if you can get the doc to come down here.”

            Adeline was already following the boy as he led the way back, with Bernard on his feet and ambling behind them.

            “Was someone injured?” she asked. She was nowhere near adept at healing magic. Few sorcerers were, the human body too complicated to piece it back together without knowing the finer details of how it all worked. She knew, at least, how to stop excessive bleeding, halt infection, and lessen the pain, which was better than nothing.

            It was a dark haired chap who answered with a very hesitant and uncertain, “Well, he doesn’t look healthy, that’s for sure.”

            “We found him stumbling about the place, but he wouldn’t let us near him,” said the blond lad.

            They went deep into the ruins, skirting around the edge of the woods looking hazy and dark in the late afternoon. The boys brought Adeline to the remains of a foundation all the archeologists believed had been either the throne room or banquet hall, no one could ever seem to agree on which.

Adeline saw, sitting on one of the cracked blocks that had been part of a wall, a ragged, hunched shape. The boys fell back, gathered close together like a clutch of frightened birds. Standing near the hunched figure but not too close was Harold and Mick, who would often come out to help the college folk with any heavy lifting. They were broad men, Harold being retired royal army, and yet they stood well away from the pile of skin and bones as if it were a sleeping wolf. Adeline barked out a laugh.

            “Don’t tell me this new find bites,” Adeline said.

            “He might,” said Harold, eying the rag pile warily. “He growled, Addie. And I don’t mean some pathetic little sound, I mean growled. There weren’t anything human about that growl.”

            Adeline slowed, moving as she would when approaching a frightened dog. Dry grass crunched beneath her feet, raising a cloud of seed pods.

            This was the Gela Wey, and this field with its man-made stones was all that remained of the home of the King and Queen. Magic had blasted the palace to nothing, and even two centuries later the forest refused to claim the area.

            You didn’t take bodies that growled inhuman growls lightly, not in the Gela Wey. Not in the field where the king and queen had built their castle.

            Adeline made sure to keep two arm’s length of space between her and the rag pile. She circled him… or her, she couldn’t really tell… slowly as she studied what she could see of him.

            By the Four, he was filthy, as if someone had seen fit to splash mud and blood on him, let it dry and then splash on more. And thin – lords he was thin; the rotten remains of what might have been a white shirt hanging low on a chest ridged by visible ribs. His face was long and sharp with jutting bones, and his hair a short, dark matted mess.

            Adeline straightened. Wrapped around the young man’s skinny wrists were a pair of manacles. They were so rusted that even a child could have snapped them off. This boy had been held captive for quite some time, no doubt locked away and forgotten. Yet his hair was short as if recently cut, and he was still alive.

            Interesting.

            Adeline crouched in front of the boy. The filth and his thinness made determining his age a challenge, but if Adeline had to guess she would have put his age at around twenty or so. She ducked her head, attempting to see beneath the fringe of greasy hair shading his eyes. She smiled.

            “Hello,” she said. “My name is Adeline. I promise I’m not here to hurt you. Can you tell me your name, sweetheart?”

            The head moved enough for his eyes to dart up and glare at her. They were beautiful, a green as green as the leaves on the trees and moss of the deeper forest.

            They were also angry.

            Adeline arched an eyebrow. “I suppose that wasn't the correct question to ask. Listen, it’s all right. I’m not going to hurt you, no one here is going to hurt you.” She reached out with the intent of brushing his hair back and proving her promise.

            The young man didn’t move, not his head nor his eyes. But there was, most definitely, a very animal growl rumbling from his person. It was a high sound that was both guttural and clicking. Adeline retracted her hand.

            “Sorry,” she said. “Avoid touch, I understand.” She dug into the pocket of her brown button coat and pulled out a pair of tinted glasses.

            “Don’t mind these,” she said, holding them up. “Just a little novice creation that comes in handy for seeing the unseen.” She slipped the glasses onto her face.

            “Oh,” she breathed in astonished delight.

            Adeline still saw the boy, who continued to glower at her with those bright green eyes of his. But surrounding him like mist was a new shape, mostly transparent but not so transparent that Adeline didn’t know what it was she was seeing. It was too large a shape not to know.

            Adeline could safely say she had been wrong about the boy’s age.

            The lad was a sylphen. A dragon sylphen, sinuous, winged, and shades of green from pale to emerald to dark as the pines, with a mane of green fur down a long neck, flowing as though underwater. Lords, it was beautiful, even partially transparent as it was.

Adeline couldn’t help but gush “Oh, you are gorgeous.”

            The sylph's eyes rolled up into the back of his head. He pitched forward, and Adeline lunged, catching him just in time and leaving her with an armful of filthy, emaciated dragon.