When truths uncovered cannot be forgotten. Or forgiven.
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Faeries Don’t Forgive
Heart of the Worlds Book 2
by TF Burke
Genre: YA Epic Fantasy
Returning to Nonderu,
the underworld court, to rescue her dad should have been simple after the
malevolent soul-sucking Boggleman fell to his presumable demise. They just need
to find a way in. And get past the Mockmen trolls.
Instead, Aunia is attacked by a fanatical soldier cult that seeks to kill or
capture her. Plus, her unmanageable magic notifies deadly wererats of her
location. It also hurls her into an evil sorceress’ study. If all this wasn’t
enough, she’s fighting a different battle with Mathias, her pegasus-riding
love. His insistence to keep her hidden is more infuriating than any of their
enemies. It leaves her determined to kick anyone who says first love is easy.
Worst of all are the truths she’s uncovering. Truths that can’t be forgotten.
Or forgiven.
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Chapter Seventeen
Clurichauns
What makes a man something worth admiring and when will you doubt his worth? — Queen Didianne, in the reign of the mad queen
A buzzing brushed Aunia’s skin like a hive of bees as she lurched in a mad attempt to keep her footing. The smell of woods, perfumes, and herbs had disappeared and in its place was the stench of waste, unfamiliar food, and burning metal.
A village-full of voices swirled within the buzzing . . . one pulled at her plaintively, though she couldn’t make out the words. Dust skated over Aunia’s feet as she appeared in a long boxed-in area surrounded by bulging timber buildings covered in faded paint and smeared pitch. And pressed within this area were more people than she had seen in her entire life.
“I said let the child go,” a gruff voice said from behind her.
Aunia swiveled.
An older man with a broken-nose, well-muscled and tall, like Oskan from her village, stood in front of two men in red cloaks.
“We don’t take orders from you, Mason,” the shorter of the two red-cloaked men said. He yanked a small boy towards him by the arm and the child’s sandy-haired head bounced off his chest.
“He’s hungry is all,” the broken-nose man said. “I’ll pay for him.”
“Bugger off,” the red cloak said.
Aunia stepped forward. “You can’t let a child go hungry.”
Several of the people glared at her.
“Shut your mouth, rover,” said a pillar-built woman with a messy bun, brown hair streaked in gray. She stood in front of a building with large windows and a swinging sign, which read ‘Forged Tankard.’ “Ain’t no food he stole.”
“Brana,” the broken-nosed man growled.
The woman rolled her eyes and pushed past him, holding up a small ring with two finger-length keys. “Missing these?”
The larger of the two red-cloaked men reached under his cloak patted his side, and his face turned red. “It’s the stocks for ye, boy.”
The boy dropped to the cobblestones and the shorter, red-cloaked man yanked him back one-handed. Held his other hand high to strike.
“Stop it,” Aunia yelled.
The larger of the red-cloaked men turned in her direction.
“Not the stocks.” A bearded man in a long-sleeved patchwork tunic, white powder streaks along his sleeves, stepped forward. “You’ve the boy’s mother in custody already. She was an unbraceleted faeblood. He’d be the same. You know it. It’s prison he should go.”
Faces pressed against the glass windows of the Forged Tankard’s tavern. Some folk stepped forward. Others melted back, including the broken-nosed man.
Aunia shook. Taya was indeed right of cities being dangerous. If this was how they treated small children . . . but what could she do? She was only one in a crowd.
“Stop,” she slid back, beseeching the broken-nose man. “You have to help. He’s just a boy.”
But the man slid into a narrow alleyway between the tavern and another building, and past a pig rooting in a pile of broken barrels, jugs, food scraps, and rags.
“She ain’t my mom,” the child screamed. “Not my real one. She picked me out of the garbage. I was just a slave to her.”
The taller, red-cloaked man yanked the child’s sleeve up. “Unbraceleted. You. Run to the Yanna’s forge. Grab a cuff. Now.”
“Don’t be thinking of calling on any magic,” the shorter, red-cloaked man said, bending to sneer those words in the child’s face.
“I’m . . . not a faeblood.” The child stopped his struggling and with his wrist in the guard’s grip, pointed in Aunia’s direction. “That’s the one you want. A real faeblood. Didn’t you see? She just skipped out of nowhere.”
The larger man straightened. “You. Rover.”
Aunia backed away, nearly colliding with a press of people guarding her back. Rover? But of course, she was wearing their garb. And by their expression and harsh tone, they did not like rovers.
“Don’t think you’re going anywhere,” one woman in a dark gray gown said.
Faeblood . . . this is how the people saw Reina. “I’ve . . . I’m looking for flyers,” Aunia said. “I flew with them over the Grashbear. Mathias. Keston. Fallo. You’ve had to have seen them. This is Dalin, isn’t it?”
The scowls of the people deepened. They shuffled closer. People in front of her and behind her, but the alleyway . . . could she flee with that pig in the way? Pig. She blinked. It had a quilted cloth saddle fastened around its girth with knotted cloth straps. And stitched cloth saddlebags hanging along the pig’s side. Who would be riding a pig?
[for a 700+ word excerpt use the verbiage above OR include the rest of the chapter for just under 1500 words]
“Look alive,” a raspy voice sounded.
Aunia squinted. Amongst the broken wooden boxes and broken jars, two little men, shin-high, drank from a clay jar over half the size they were. Clurichauns with their rosy, weathered faces. They were solitary beings generally. The last time she saw one was in Gaitha’s basement lapping up a bit of spilled apple brandy.
Someone, the taller red-cloak, grabbed Aunia’s upper arm and a raw thrill, like a sharp nail, rose through her throat. “Leave me be.”
She yanked. He held her firm, his fingers pressing into her flesh like a vise.
The adrenaline spike landed against the pit of her stomach like a stone. Mygul. She sucked in a breath, squeezed her eyes shut, hoping to coax a pinching sensation in her temples. Nothing. Her mouth turned to dry paper. Did she even have her glowing blue globefire anymore? She hadn’t seen it since the Boggleman’s veil tendril lodged itself in her gut when she stood on Hebsolum’s palm. Did that mean Hebsolum had it? Hebsolum, the thief who took her mother’s amulet. The only good thing he had done was to help her cage the roiling blue storm cloud made of Edvaras’ magic . . . but her bit of magic . . . the one that caused mischief, made her an outcast, kept her safe. He must have taken it, too.
She squeezed her eyes shut. Prison. Was that where they were sending her? How would Mathias even find her? A soft mew escaped her and Aunia shook her head. She couldn’t show weakness. And there were clurichauns. Faeries often would help her. Would these?
She turned her head to the alleyway where the clurichauns swilled leftover booze from broken crockery. “Help me.”
One of the clurichauns looked her way, bright eyes going wide. “She sees us.” His voice, gravelly and sing-song, sounded over the clamor of human voices.
“She don’t.” The blonder of the two clapped the auburn one’s shoulder. “She do. Drat it. On our way, Sharpish.” He pointed to the pig.
“She be the one Mara made mention.”
“We can’t be making the Boggles mad now, can we, you know,” the blonde one said. “We go.”
The Boggles? Did he mean the Boggleman? Aunia struggled against her restraint. “I want to, too.”
“Want to what?” the red-cloaked man sneered.
“Want you to let go,” Aunia said between her teeth. “You’re hurting me.”
The man tightened his grip. “I’m barely holding you.”
Aunia struggled toward the alleyway. Saying please would cause possible faery aid to disappear but what poem could she utter? Aunia groaned. “Help me now it’s good folk fashion. Aid to for those who seek compassion.”
“You call that a poem,” the blonde clurichaun said. He shook his head then made a running jump onto the pig’s back. His green pants contrasted with the wine-stained saddle. “Come on, brother.”
“Brandy. I’ll bring you brandy,” Aunia yelled.
“No one bribes the guard.” The stinging heat from his slap rang into her cheekbones. “Where’s that Davis? Cuff her good and she can blubber whatever nonsense with the other lobheads.
“Don’t know,” the shorter of the red-cloaked men said. He still clutched the boy’s arm. “But that face is sweet even with your handprint.”
“Ah, that’s done it,” Sharply said. “Dismount, Gargle. Now.”
Gargle patted the saddle. “There’s another tavern were—”
“Certain things don’t get done. Now off brother, lest you go for a ride.”
The two clurichauns glared at each other while some of the townsfolk shuffled aside and a thin man with iron cuffs jogged forward.
Gargle dismounted. “It’s on you if this is a bad decision.”
“I’m always the one you blame.” Sharply scooped up the neck of a broken bottle, drew his arm back and made a mighty throw at the pig’s backside. It hit with a thunk and the pig gave a squeal. People standing at the mouth of the alleyway fell back as the pig pelted straight for Aunia and the red-cloaked man.
“Doxy-churl,” the guardsmen swore. He staggered back, pulling Aunia with him out of the way but Aunia yanked with everything she had in the other direction. The man’s fingers slid over her upper arm painfully. There was the sharp rip of fabric. And then she was free.
Aunia ran.
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Faeries Don’t Lie
Heart of the Worlds Book 1
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Can Two Worlds Survive an Augury?
Releasing a Chandarion’s god-like magic into the world isn’t what
sixteen-year-old Aunia, the village’s outcast, intends. She only wants to
impress Mathias, a visiting seventeen-year-old pegasus flyer, who fiercely
believes the choice—either Faery or Mortal world surviving—has come.
Her action calls forth the Boggleman, a soul-sucking ghoul, who abducts her
dad, eats her faery friends, and sets Dagel demons on her isolated village. And
worse.
The worlds of Ahnu-Endynia are full of faeries, pegasi flyers, myths, secrets,
and themes of belonging, despite being misunderstood. And if you don’t watch
carefully . . . You might be pulled into the Betwixt. . . the space between the
worlds.
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Explaining true love to a garden faery wasn’t easy. Aunia tapped her pitchfork against the stone-slabbed floor and wrinkled her nose against the golden dust while her faery friend, Jennium, landed between a nanny goat’s ears. The escaped animal froze in place in front of the long wooden goat pens while the faery sat cross-legged on her furry perch, folding her iridescent wings, purples, blues, and yellows.
Another of Jennium’s mind-pictures arose in Aunia’s head. This one was of the villagers, old and young, dancing arm-in-arm in twisting steps around a bonfire—fiery sparks rising to the stars.
“That’s the party afterwards. True love is how you feel. How your heart would give away every constellation to see your beloved smile.” Aunia flipped her blond braid over her shoulder and wished she could disappear into the slithering crack along the stable’s high-vaulted ceiling—or, better yet, fly away to the faery world . . .if that doorway wasn’t watched. “But like I said, there’s no one here for me.”
Unlike the two lovers exchanging mating beads this night, she would stand in the shadows as an outcast, too different to be accepted. At sixteen years of age, she needed to accept this would be her life. She scooped another pitchfork of dirty hay onto the dung heap.
Jennium propelled another image—Aunia’s father standing, back turned and shoulders slumped, at his favorite fishpond. The faery tipped her raven-haired head as if to ask, “And where’s your father’s true love?”
Aunia’s hands slid on the pitchfork. She couldn’t answer that. Her father refused to talk about her. But it was obvious he clung to her memory—whoever she was. And he had to have loved her real mom desperately. Why else would he have treated Nehla like a sister. A sister he couldn’t save from being skewered by a wild boar. An accident. An awful, terrible accident.
Stomping, Aunia passed the long pen of bleating goats and turned up the middle junction of horse stalls to the quadruple-sized hay-less stall that had been Nehla’s pottery work area. She frowned at the grain buckets lining the shoulder-high wall where clay boards used to stand. She padded to Nehla’s pottery wheel, draped with a green and yellow blanket, and pressed her knuckles against the scratchy wool. Three years later and it still hurt.
With a light jingle, Jennium landed on Aunia’s head and projected another image—a woman’s silhouette, but not Nehla.
Aunia pulled her hand away from the pottery wheel. For a moment, she made out the curve of the woman’s left cheek, so like her own. Then, the silhouette was gone.
“I don’t remember my mother,” Aunia said. “But she probably had faery sight like me. Maybe she could even see people’s glows.”
A whiny buzz brushed against Aunia’s hair and a shiny green bug dove behind the stall’s black walnut wood.
Jennium launched up, and Aunia winced at the tug, reaching to free the faery’s tiny feet from her braid. Jennium yanked through, chittering, and landed on an empty pottery shelf—one that rested on iron spikes nailed into the wall. Those spikes had been made from Nehla’s sacrificed pot hooks to keep faeries from breaking freshly made bowls.
“How are you—”
A screech from the stable’s front door sent Aunia crouching behind the pottery wheel.
“The bottle in the back ought to muffle the evening proper,” said Sigmus with his deep wheezy voice.
Aunia tensed. Her father’s closest friend would still be livid about the faeries shoving tadpoles in his boots from yesterday’s yesterday. But it had been his own fault. He had insulted the water fae.
Aunia tiptoed forward and peeked over the stall’s wall. These two were supposed to be stacking wood for the cooking fires. Her father’s head and shoulders, glowing with his usual brick-red aura, seem to float above the horse pen-wall—or did until he dodged a buzzing insect.
Sigmus swiveled, cracking his hands together, presumably squashing the bug. “Ain’t no grace-fall smushing your own pest.”
Dad jutted his jaw. “I can’t do that.”
“And you get a grumping every beading.”
Dad’s red glow dulled. “I am happy for them.”
“Sure. It makes all the sense you hankering to sneak off to the sheep cave.”
“Fish pond,” Dad clarified.
“Well, I’ve a better idea. Wait here.” Sigmus waddled up the middle aisle toward her.
Aunia ducked, pressing a hand over her mouth. Her sigh filled her palm when his footfalls veered toward the nearby tack and storage room.
Sheep-cave? No one was allowed near them. Dad himself had told her the Boggleman lived there now. She eased to a trousered knee and considered. Sigmus was probably just saying that for shock and her father was looking to wander off to be alone.
She had wanted to sneak away earlier, too. Sneak past the gate-minders to the woods for a game of tag with the moss-gnomes or maybe cajole a dryad into playing a whistle-tune. She had almost made it through the gate but got caught, so she ran and hid in the stable.
Aunia leaned against the chest-high wall. It would be better to stay with faery friends instead of being in the village.
The tack room door grumbled open, followed with chalky scuffles from dried leather and thud-clack of ceramics. Sigmus hooted. He probably stashed another bottle of the apothecary’s cider brandy.
Sigmus exited the tack room, popped the bottle, and shouted, “Figure you’ll get a fair healing, spilling out your sorrows.”
“There’s nothing to spill,” her father called back.
Stars. How long am I going to need to hide while they drink?
Sigmus pranced past her stall. Aunia inched forward. Her father stood about ten yards from her in the middle aisle and close to the dung heap.
“Ah, so you say,” Sigmus said. “But I knows these beading ceremonies remind you of yer Tamorian lady wife.”
Tamorian? Lightning crackled in Aunia’s belly and erupted against the back of her throat. “You’ll tell him about my mother but not me.”
Dad whirled in her direction, his glow retreating to a scant fingers-width around his head. She marched out of the pen while Sigmus stepped in her way.
“Move, Sigmus,” she said. “I’m talking to my father. My dad, not yours.”
Sigmus raised his hand. “You’re supposed to be stirring them stew pots.”
“Like you gathering wood?” Aunia tried sidestepping him but Sigmus’ elbow clipped the side of her head. She hunched-over, wishing she could melt Sigmus “Sourling-Beast” into pudding ash.
TF Burke currently
works with NYT David Farland’s Apex-Writers as an admin and marketing
specialist, where she schedules industry leaders for weekly multi-Zoom calls,
provides content for social posts, and hosts several writer-focused Zooms.
Her published works includes hundreds of newspaper articles, blog posts across
various platforms, anthologies, including MURDERBUGS, the second volume of the
Unhelpful Encyclopediam a collection of short stories in WHIRL OF THE FAE, and
the first book of the Heart of the Worlds Series, FAERIES DON’T LIE.
When not writing or wearing other hats, she can be found with a sword and a
dagger in her hands for medieval-style fencing tournaments and melees,
something she’s been doing since 2010.
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