The Canard (Prequel to One Flame)

Alifa iníon Mab, Princess of the Winter Court, Lesser Mayor of the Palace serving under the Sundered Throne of the Split Horizon, was frosting over. Her skin, a luminous sea green from a blend of her mother and wet nurse's milk, had a thin layer of ice coating it as her eyes moved about within their frigid confines, seeing the world through a filter of frozen tears.

Her older sister, the Princess Heir to Mab's Court, Grand Duchess of the Emerald Forest, and a bunch of other titles, was sleeping soundly beside Alifa. Her living armor of pine was in its seed form, clenched in Princess Clephesia's fist.

Princess Heir Clephesia iníon Mab was out on a series of quests, raising her reputation so that one day she could become the Queen of the Unseelie Court. While technically it was a birthright system, there had only ever been the One Queen of the Unseelie, Mab iníon Áine, who had garnered the favor of each of the Síog-Tiarna, the lords of the fae, under her control and protection. Without deeds to back up her blood, it was unlikely that Clephesia would ascend to the throne of the Winter Court.

And so, her bookish sister in tow, the Scion Unseelie started running all about Faerie accomplishing deeds, fighting trolls, and wooing maidens as a Knight of the Sundered Throne. Alifa had been happy to come along, on her own personal quest to root out the cruel and heartless and cull the world into a better place, though her and her sister rarely saw eye-to-eye when it came to Alifa's more ruthless side. Faerie was bordered on the east side by a great sea with a surplus of storms and hungry sea monsters. They very rarely saw approach from the East, and none that survived. On the west, Faerie ended with the mountain range of the Baba, a race of crones who needed to take the life of a babe to reproduce. A babe from the world of men.

Faerie saw no border problems from the west that the Baba didn't handle on their own.

Faerie was isolated, dealing only with the world of men on its own terms. And so, when their business at the Western Border of the Winterlands was concluded, Clephesia was startled to hear that their next quest, given them from their mother herself, was to investigate the unthinkable: A human colony, set up on the Eastern Coast of Faerie.

Alifa had seen something like this coming for some time. She had read any scrap of paper she could find about the world outside all her life, and she knew that some human civilizations built their whole mythos around their need to go out and conquer all in sight. Tales of great kings who left markers at the furthest point of their empires that read: "I have conquered all behind me. If any man is to truly call himself great, he must take more" abounded in history. And so, when Clephesia had asked in shock whether or not men had enough land for everyone, Alifa had dryly replied: "not enough land for everyone's ego."

She was still a bit proud of that.

It was not a difficult journey to the Eastern coast of Faerie, they had merely needed to wander the Mists of the Banshees and secure passage over the Kelpie Swamps. Now they were along the brackish river of the shellycoat that was fed by the seas, very near to the colony being built. Alifa had suggested they approach in the morning, to stay in the relative safety of the river boggarts' territory while they slept.

It had been long enough. Alifa shook the frost off and tapped Clephesia on the arm. The Princess Heir blinked awake, her amber eyes shining into Alifa's pale blue. Then she immediately sat up and whispered into her hands, slapping the seed within them onto her chest. Roots grew down her body, and branches twisted around her arms until Clephesia was clad in her living armor in minutes.

"What's the rush, Boots? We haven't had breakfast yet."

"We're being watched." The Princess Heir looked up at a black-wooded tree rising out of the river. A brown, fuzzy creature resembling a bat with no wings grinned at them and scampered higher up the tree, its big bright golden eyes shining as it scrambled for height.

"How did I miss it?" Alifa asked, flipping her black book with a cover perpetually secreting water open to her fighting spells.

"Because you weren't looking for it." Boots's armor finished growing her shield on her right arm and the sword at her hip, and she readied both. "You in the tree! State your business!"

The little creature lifted both of its tiny, four-fingered hands into the air. "Hey, hey! I didn't know you were a Knight! I just wanted to steal your food is all!"

"Oh, in that case we're really overreacting," Alifa muttered, and opened their food sack. She poured the rocks out.

"Just wanted to, huh?"

"You didn't let me finish!" It shouted, and swung down on the tree, wrapping a very thin tail around a branch and somehow supporting its weight on it. "I wanted to steal your food... and so I did! It's a prank I like to pull! Like my third favorite!"

"What is your favorite prank?" Boots asked, morbidly curious.

"Well, I've never done it. But I'd love to find a sharp rock, sneak up to someone in the night, stab them in the throat, and laugh at them! It'll be funny!"

As Clephesia frantically shook her head, Alifa shrugged.

"That prank is only funny with very bad people."

"Líf!"

The little creature leapt from one tree to the next and started running away.

"By order of the Princess Heir, stop!"

"Wait, you're a princess -- ach!"

It lost its grip on a branch and fell down into the brackish water. Thinking fast, Alifa flash-froze the muck around the fuzzy thief, so her lower body was totally encased in a cube of salty ice.

"Here's a prank I like to pull. Tell us where you put our food or I'll turn you over so you drown."

"Akh! Ah! Okay! I hid it in my home tree, near the human village!"

"You live near there?" Alifa asked. "Could you show us the way?"

"Ah... will you let me out?"

"Of course. And then you're going to lead us to our food sack and the human village... and tell us anything you know about it."

The little fuzzy creature nodded quickly. "Yes, yes, of course! Now let me out, it's cold in here!"

Alifa smirked and spat. Her spittle flew all the way to the block of ice and landed with a hairline fracture that grew until the frozen water shattered and joined the rest of its brackish brethren. The thief swam to shore in a hurry and shook herself dry, splashing both princesses with the river's brine.

"You're a puca, aren't you?" Alifa guessed. "I've never seen one before."

"Yep! That's me. The most fearsome and dangerous of Puca! You may call me Wenny!"

"It's nice to meet you, Wenny." Clephesia extended her hand, palm-down. Wenny had to jump a little to kiss it. Her mouth was mostly tooth.

"A pleasure to meet you, Wenny. I am Princess Heir to the Winter Court Clephesia iníon Mab, Scion Unseelie--"

"I'm Alifa," the sea green half-nymph interrupted. "Lead on, Wenny."

"Your stuff's this way. Come on!" Wenny motioned the princesses to follow her. "At first my whole family was pranking the town. We were dumping their supplies in the ocean, spooking their weirdly quiet friends away from their work, and I even managed to sneak around and tie everyone's pants together in a long line one night! Great stuff! Then..." Wenny scowled. "Then the humans started putting out bowls of milk for us, and just like that, everyone else in my family just backs off, drinks the milk, leaves them alone. I can't be bribed like that! I'm a proud Puca, and I'm going to keep causing all sorts of mischief!"

"Is the milk any good?" Clephesia asked pleasantly.

"Oh, it's the stuff of legend. I've never had milk before, it's just... wow, it's amazing. You really should try some."

"We have," Alifa said. "You certainly have too, at least back when you were a newborn."

"Eh, Mom wasn't really the nurturing type. Oh! Here it is, everyone stay quiet."

The sisters shared a glance before following Wenny to a big tree with a few dozen of the little furry Puca bounding about on it, swinging about and leaping to neighboring trees to strip them of fruits and nuts. In a community pile of the gathered foodstuffs, Clephesia spotted a pile of frozen fruits, veggies, and roots. She calmly began filling up their food sack with them, silently thanking her mother that the chill of the sack had kept their food preserved even in the time it was out in the open.

A cacophony of annoyed voices was eventually quelled by Wenny.

"Arright, shut up! I stole that stuff from her and her... friend?"

"Sister."

"And her sister! They caught me, they get it back, you all know the rules."

The complaints dulled down to a low grumble, and Wenny led them on to a clearing marked by a border of tree stumps. Clephesia gasped seeing the fallen section of the forest, but Alifa kept looking right ahead.

The coastal colony was built from the corpses of trees. That much was to be expected, the fishing villages on the other side of the Baba mountain range did the same. What jumped out to her was how... flat everything was. Oh, the villages near Faerie's mountain borders had gardens, but this... Alifa had never seen agriculture to this scale. Before her very eyes, beasts of burden were being directed to go across uprooted fields of dirt, seeds being sown in the soil behind them as they split it with blades strapped to their backs. From her studies, Alifa would assume the seeds to be some sort of grain.

"Alifa, what did they do to those poor unicorns?" Clephesia asked, on the verge of tears.

"Those are just horses, Boots."

"What?"

"Horses. And the smaller ones are donkeys, I think. They're... like the kelpies of the fields. They're fine, Boots. They're supposed to look like that. Wenny, what do you know about this place?"

"Well, they call it 'Manville.'"

"Manville?" Clephesia repeated.

"They certainly do not," Alifa insisted.

"I mean... I don't know. They might. Well, let's see. They first touched down about a year ago. Only in the last New Moon did people start going further in, scouting out places for a second town."

"That must have been why Mom heard about them," Clephesia guessed.

"Yeah. No worries though, they always run back naked, starving and scared, usually get on the first boats that are leaving if they can manage it."

"Speaking of their boats, how did they get here through the storms and monsters?"

"I overheard a little about that," the Puca recalled, scratching her head. "Apparently they've learned some way to predict the storms, and only go when they're not raging."

"Really?" Alifa asked with interest. "I'd like to learn how to do that."

"As for the monsters, they throw some 'livestock' overboard whenever a monster attack starts. It seems to have worked so far, but I don't know what 'livestock' are."

"Those people." Alifa pointed to a few fenced-off collections of creatures in turn. "Sheep, pigs, cattle. Men grow them and use them for food and milk."

Clephesia held her stomach. "I'm gonna be sick."

"Is that so different from hunting and fishing?"

"Yes, Líf, it is! Hunting and fishing isn't the same as someone being raised for slaughter, cooped up, their entire life controlled by those who are waiting for the right time to kill and eat them!"

"Getting milk from them though," Wenny considers. "That's actually pretty cool, maybe I could keep a few..."

"Those are PEOPLE!" Clephesia bellowed, and Alifa shushed her. Continuing in a furious hiss, Clephesia insisted: "they don't deserve to spend their whole lives imprisoned! We need to free them!" She drew her sword, a still-living tree branch that grew into a deadly edge.

Alifa gripped her sister's hand and lowered it. "I know we're usually on the opposite sides here, but I don't think we could drive them all out on our own. Plus, this isn't like with the Baba, where one of the folk under your protection was being harmed. So far as we're aware, the only interaction they've had with any of the citizens of the Winterlands has been giving milk to the Puca. If we attack them just because they're here, and they're citizens of some far-off human king, it's an act of war, Boots. We need to learn why they're here..." Alifa squinted.

"They're loading up the ships. If they just go back and forth, carrying colonists and supplies, that should be going to where these people are all from. If we can get on board, we should be able to find out why they're here. Maybe they're just looking to expand into Faerie. Maybe they're running from something. Mother sent us to gather information, and that's what we'll do. We'll have to disguise ourselves as humans."

"How do you propose we do that? All the humans I've ever seen have brown skin. We're green."

"Humans' skin tones are not so different from a dryad's," Alifa said, opening her pack woven from the silk that the Ant Queendom traded with their mother in exchange for a special oil that could be lathered across tunnel walls to prevent cave-ins. "So some of their cosmetics should be able to help us pass well enough." She withdrew a small pouch filled with make-ups. "You'll have to conceal your living armor."

"Hold on, I haven't agreed to go yet," Clephesia reminded her. "Why don't we just talk to the people in charge and tell them if they don't leave we'll have to make them?"

"If they're still getting regular shipments from home, that means the people in charge are more than likely back where their supplies are coming from. If we talk to the 'leader' here, the best we'll get is him or her playing mother-may-I with whoever's holding the pursestrings back home. If you want to negotiate, we still need to sneak aboard a ship."

"You mean I'll have to... walk on... and live in... a vehicle made of the mutilated corpses of trees?" Clephesia looked queasy again.

"Can I come?" Wenny asked.

"Chin up, Clephesia." Alifa put a reassuring hand on her shoulder. "These people don't seem to have much in the way of arms and armor. I don't think they're a conquering army. Once we convince them that it's more dangerous than beneficial to land here, I think they'll pack up and go home. But we have to find the right people to impress that upon, and find out for sure why they're here. Can we do that, Boots?"

Clephesia gave an uneasy nod. "Okay Alifa, we'll try it your way."

"With me, right?" Wenny asked again.

"Can you stay hidden?" Alifa prompted.

"Oh yeah, I'm the quietest! Also, very small!"

Their skins powdered and Clephesia's armor back in its seed, the Princesses were still the only ones wearing silk colored dark purple from being spun in the Amethyst Orchards. They were dressed very finely, and drew plenty of attention. Every ten steps Clephesia moved to charge at the fenced-in sheep, and Alifa grabbed her arm and pulled her back onto track to move on past the farms toward the colony.

"Cast off your -- what are those things called?" Clephesia called, half-directed at a horse pulling a plough.

"Yokes."

"Cast off your yokes!"

"Boots, from this moment forward, we only speak Human. Okay?"

"Right." Clephesia strained her mind to stay focused on how the river folk to the west talked. She tried a few times to get the accents right.

"Hello. My name is... uh uh, Líf, should we come up with fake names?"

"Probably. What were some of the womens' names out west? Oh, and Wenny stay out of sight if you can."

Wenny scrambled up and hid in Alifa's backpack. "Oh, by the way you're talking nothing like the people here."

Alifa stopped right on the spot, grabbing hold of Boots to keep her from walking ahead. "What do you mean? You're saying they don't speak Human?"

"Uh, they're the humans. I think you're the ones speaking it wrong."

"Wenny, focus. You know their language, yes?"

"They've been here almost a year, of course I know their language."

"And our speech, was it the wrong accent? Or was it gibberish?"

"Couldn't get a word."

Alifa dropped down into a sitting position and unslung her backpack, one hand searching through it while the other opened her spellbook to the proper page. "Boots, give me a nectarine and a peach." Alifa withdrew her pouch of herbs and seeds and tossed a few into a small clay bowl. Boots gave her the two frozen fruits and Alifa gripped them tightly until the ice particles moved in a dance up her arms. "Go ahead and put those back, please." Alifa squeezed both fruits into the bowl and tossed the flesh and seeds aside. While Boots flicked the ice on Alifa's arms back into their cold sack, Alifa mixed the bowl by swirling it between her hands. She passed it up to Wenny. "Gargle this and say as many words in... Eastern Human as you can."

Wenny poured in the contents of the bowl and tossed her head back to gargle the contents as loudly as possible, with what might have been words sounding out.

"Uh, Líf, a lot of people are looking at us."

"It's fine, they're working. We'll be on a ship and out of here by the time they head back home." Alifa grabbed the bowl from Wenny and held it steady in front of her. "Spit."

"Oh, Líf, ew," Clephesia said, suddenly remembering this spell. Alifa drank half of the mixture and passed the bowl to Boots.

"Drink."

"Uggggh," Boots whined, but tossed back the mixture as quickly as she could. She then found some mint shavings in Alifa's collection of herbs and started chewing on them.

Alifa followed suit and started putting her supplies away.

"Alright, we'll have to repeat that every morning but we should be able to speak Eastern Human for the whole trip." Alifa threw her backpack over one shoulder. "There's just one more thing we need."

Clephesia became hopeful as Alifa led the way to the sheep farm, then to the farmhouse nearest it. She threw the door open to the surprise of a young woman inside, who looked about to scream for help.

"Greetings, Miss. I was hoping me and my sister could trade in what we're wearing now for something more practical."

When they headed into town, they were both wearing plain wool tunics, with a spare in their packs.

"I don't like the way this feels," Clephesia said for the twelfth time. "And this is taken from those sheep people, isn't it?"

"Yes, but they live through the process," Alifa assured her. "Try not to look at anyone, we're headed straight for the docks."

Alifa picked a ship at random and spotted people walking on a plank up to the decks.

"Fall into that line. Try to look like you belong."

"They're not quite the same shade of brown as the people of the mountains," Clephesia realized. "Are we sure they're humans?"

"And stay quiet." Alifa hissed and stepped into line herself. As they walked onto the deck, Alifa nearly fell on the unstable ground. The boat was shifting in ways she wasn't used to. Clephesia's hands gripped her waist and held her up.

"Stay steady now, Líf. We've been on ships dozens of times, right?" Clephesia said, only half-teasing. "Come on, let's see if there's a place to put our packs over there." She pointed to the nearest set of doors and went up to them. There was a man stationed by them, but he just saluted as they passed in. The princesses copied the unfamiliar gesture and closed the door behind them. There was a desk with some papers, next to a case to keep them nice and protected if some water came in. The place was pretty bare-bones aside from that and a well-built bed, which made sense to Alifa. Everything in here could break if a storm blew in, no reason to put a lot of effort in.

Alifa started reading the papers on the desk. They were a collection of numbers, mostly, totalled up. Some had names of goods written next to them, and some had things like "stipend," "contract," or "transport" written next to them.

"Ledgers," Alifa realized. "I've heard about these. Boots, this calculates how much money the ship makes, and from that it pays a tax to the country it makes birth in!"