#also why did he never question about where Arthur was in Faerie

[helenofblackthorns]

Andrew Blackthorn is a very... perplexing character to me because we know next to nothing about him but all his kids seemed to like him as a dad... and yet some of the only things we do know about him are that he a) gave Helen & Mark childhood trauma via Keats instead of having a normal conversation and b) he used to restrain Ty in order to "train him" to the point it made him throw up. like idk if there's a particular intention behind his character being good or bad (in general) but I definitely hate him lmao

[theredraccoon]

A Desperate Proposal - Ch 4

Simon never thought that he would be the guy that needed a prenup to get married. That was for rich people with yachts and assholes who didn’t think that marriage meant sharing and compromise. He’d always envisioned something pretty simple: his mom and sister, a chuppah, a ketubah, a person of indeterminate gender underneath it who loved him. Jewish weddings were actually remarkably straightforward.

In sharp contrast to that lovely, hazy vision of a wedding that would now, sadly, never be reality, Simon had been confronted with a stack of paper a solid two inches high, which contained the initial contract that the Shadowhunters had sent over. Simon knew that political weddings were always nightmares and that there was a lot more in that stack than just wedding vows, but holy shit, there were so many details and such a short amount of time to absorb them. 

Raphael had explained that the timeline for the marriage contracts had been the first order of business after the initial Alliance had been agreed upon, with Shadowhunters actively pushing for a quick turnaround. The Downworlders had two days to review this first contract and submit changes to the Clave and then the Shadowhunters had an additional two days to respond. After that, each party had only a day to make final small alterations and nothing substantial could be significantly altered. And then on the seventh day, instead of resting, Simon would be getting married. 

Sighing, Simon rubbed his forehead and tried to refocus, shifting on the exceedingly cushy chair. It seemed that Magnus had anticipated them sitting down for eight million years during the negotiations and had thought ahead about comfortable seating. Or maybe the chairs in Pandemonium’s conference rooms were always hedonistic; that would definitely be in keeping with Magnus’ personality. 

The High Warlock himself seemed to be just as bored as Simon, rings flashing as he covered his face to hide a small yawn, red silk brocade catching the light from the chandelier. Simon felt his lips curl up as he remembered the man’s pout when he, Raphael, their secretary James, and Magnus had entered early that evening and had found the Seelie Queen, Meliorn, and another unnamed Seelie already sitting at the head of a long rectangular table. Magnus had immediately frowned and waved a hand and the table had instantly rearranged itself to be perfectly circular. It gave off a distinct ‘King Arthur and his Knights’ vibe and seemed to piss off the Queen, so it was probably the right move. 

By the time everyone had filed in, there were twelve of them around the shiny round table, each contingent sending their leader, their second (usually the one getting married off, like Simon) and a secretary/notary/lawyer-type person whose job it was to sit there and take notes. That’s what Simon had initially thought, anyway, but he was rapidly revising that opinion as he listened to the Seelie secretary argue with the warlock representative about… flowers? The position of Mercury the night of the wedding? Simon had long lost the thread of the conversation. He thought longingly about his imaginary dream wedding, with his sister’s gentle teasing and his mother fluttering around worrying about food. Simon grimaced, now thinking about his future husband’s reaction to the wedding feast including blood. Would they even have dinner afterwards? He couldn't remember. Simon eyed the stack of paper. He thought maybe it had grown in the last hour since he last looked at it. 

A sharp slap on the glossy wood stopped the speakers mid-word and made everyone except the three people directly opposite Simon startle. 

“Enough. This wedding minutiae is what tomorrow and all the damn lawyers and diplomats are for. We should be talking not about the wedding itself but the marriages and what they actually mean for all of us.” The irritated words came from the strikingly beautiful Black woman that headed the New York pack of werewolves. 

Maia Roberts had been the pack leader for the last three years, ever since she’d gotten fed up with the previous alpha and challenged him for control. Apparently he’d been quite the dick. She’d been a positive force since, her no-nonsense attitude smoothing out some of the longstanding hatred between the wolves and the vampires, and some of Simon’s accounting headaches had disappeared when she took over. Turns out when there are fewer fights and fewer things constantly being broken, your expenses went down. Simon might have even tried to make a play for her one day, he was that relieved (and she was that gorgeous) but it was out of the question now. 

Anyway... Everyone around the table was alert now, and Simon could see a frightening gleam in the Seelie Queen’s eyes. She was masquerading as an older matriarch today, her flower crown nestled in dark curls piled high on her head and just the hints of lines on her face. Simon thought she looked like she'd walked straight out of Downton Abbey. 

"And what do you suggest we talk about then, Ms. Roberts?” The Queen’s tone was curious, her voice rich and smooth and somehow girlish, which was jarring coming from someone who looked a little like a grandmother. The Faerie was a mystery box that Simon had no interest in unpacking. 

“Let’s talk about what these alliances will mean in both the present and the future. What are Downworld responsibilities in terms of patrols and helping the Shadowhunters? Right now and after we defeat whatever the fuck is killing them? How many of our people are we going to have to put forward and potentially lose? What is the role of the couples themselves? Are they figureheads? Propped up for all to see with no other real purpose? Or are we actually going to try and see if we can use them to build better relationships with the Shadowhunters?”

Simon was sitting up straight now. Around the table, the other future grooms were also leaning forward. Magnus’ fingers were sparking ever-so-slightly, Meliorn's eyes had actually fully opened where before they’d been hooded, and Luke’s jaw was tight and his shoulders set back.  

A bitter laugh came from Magnus’ right, where his second, Lorenzo Rey, sat. Simon hadn’t met him before and honestly, from the look of him, that was probably fine. Where Magnus’ clothes made him seem fun and eccentric and flashy, Lorenzo’s finery just made him seem snooty and ostentatious. He stared at Maia down his long nose and said, “You don’t know your history very well, young wolf. The Clave might be panicking right now but as soon as they get through this crisis, it will be back to the same; we are regulated to the fringes and we are supposed to be eternally grateful for their help. There will be nothing long term that comes from this, no matter what this contract pretends to say.” The sneer was pronounced.��

Simon watched Magnus bristle and puff up, probably in defense of his boyfriend, er, fiancé, but he was cut off by an unexpected source. Raphael hadn’t moved a muscle since the contract negotiations had started hours ago, besides a faint twitch when Maia had pounded on the table, but he spoke clearly now. “I disagree. I think the time is ripe for change and that the Lightwoods are actually committed to using this disaster to change the way Shadowhunters interact with the Downworld. Alec Lightwood has shown himself to be an honorable man in my dealings with him. I say that we should discuss what is possible and put it into the contract to return to the Nephilim tomorrow.”

Lorenzo leaned forward and put his hands flat on the table. “Ah, yes. The Lightwoods. Before I even address the futility of what you’re saying, can someone please explain to me why the Clave only put forth Lightwoods as marriage prospects? Especially considering Maryse Lightwood’s… history.” 

This time the response came from Luke; the quiet, even tone intimately familiar to Simon. He rubbed absently at his wrist. Their relationship since Clary’s death, Simon’s Turning, and the revelation that Luke was a werewolf had been turbulent to say the least. But ultimately he was still the same man that Simon remembered being such a large presence in his childhood and the need to listen closely to what Luke was saying was strong. 

“Maryse committed terrible crimes during her time with Valentine and the Circle. So did I. No one denies that. In the twenty years since Valentine was defeated though, she has actively worked to make amends. She has her faults, to be sure, but we are all capable of change. If nothing else, look at her children— Alec, who reached out to us, instead of just demanding our help, and Isabelle, who has already been doing her part to help Shadowhunter-Downworld, uh, relations.” 

A small amused titter ran through the group. Simon shifted in his chair, uncomfortable. He knew that Luke probably hadn’t meant it that way, but sometimes the misogyny of the Downworld smacked him in the face. Too many beings in this room were born in a time where laughing at women who slept with others was acceptable. Simon opened his mouth but before he could say anything, Magnus chimed in, and took the conversation in a different direction. 

“Before she married Robert Lightwood, Maryse was a Trueblood, one of the oldest and most powerful families in the Clave. She is a political creature at heart and she is still very well connected. Her words, in spite of, or maybe because of, her history, hold sway in Alicante. And Jace Lightwood, before he was adopted into the family, was a Wayland, another important lineage. Michael Wayland was earning a reputation as a master weapons maker before Valentine killed him. I think his son still carries one of his swords. So they may all be Lightwoods, yes, but they have reach and power. Raphael is right; if we can make these marriages actually mean something then the Downworld has a chance to be heard for the first time in centuries. We need to try.” Magnus’ voice was firm and unyielding.

Simon cleared his throat and jumped in; he actually had knowledge here. “The contract states that Downworlders will be responsible for joining Shadowhunter patrols from now until whenever they are able to restore their numbers to their previous level. So, like, probably at least fifty years? At least a generation or two, depending on how many kids they produce at a time. And they propose that the couples act as liaisons between the Downworld and the Clave, working together to solve disputes that come up, which I think will be really useful. Living arrangements are trickier though.” By the time he finished, Simon found himself the focus of eleven different sets of eyes. 

He shifted uncomfortably and then rolled his eyes. “I’m sorry, did no one else do the reading? I mean, I know there were way too many boring details in there about the exact cut of suit we’ll all be wearing, but there were actually some good ideas buried in that crap.” 

Under the table, Raphael’s knee was suddenly pressing against Simon’s, even though his outward expression didn’t change. Simon knew what it meant though, and silently preened at the approval from his Sire.

The werewolf secretary, a hulking fellow with shaggy blond hair, cleared his throat and said, in a surprisingly pleasant voice, “The vampire is right; we are all required to help the Shadowhunters with patrols only until they recover. Maia has a point though, we have room to negotiate what our involvement will be in the future. The other three couples besides us involve immortals. The werewolf commitment might involve multiple generations but to Seelies and vampires, fifty years is nothing. So you should think about what will happen after your Shadowhunters die. The language is pretty ambiguous, I think they are waiting for our response. It’s also really vague on kids.”

“There will be no offspring from these unions.” The Seelie Queen’s words were swift and hard. She was sitting rigidly in her chair, tension obvious. Simon’s eyes flickered to Meliorn and it was clear that he was also holding himself deliberately still. Simon wondered how the Knight actually felt about marrying the woman he was already sleeping with. He was also self-aware enough to realize that he was focusing hard on the Seelie’s reaction in order to not dwell on the idea of having children himself. 

Simon’s internal freakout was stopped by Magnus’ equally fast and firm words. “There might not be children from the marriage between your subject and his wife but the language should stay ambiguous. The Downworld might be aligned on many things but we are not a monolith and your words are not law. Who agrees with me?”

“I do.” Luke’s words were clearly symbolic but Simon caught the grateful glance that Magnus threw him.

Simon swallowed hard but said, “I do as well.” 

Magnus knocked his knuckles on the wood of the table. “It’s settled, the language about children stays. Your conversations with Meliorn are your own, Your Majesty.” The Queen was glaring daggers at the Warlock but he blithely ignored her, and continued, “I do know that Shadowhunters take their marriage vows seriously in terms of adultery, even in arranged marriages, but there is no requirement that the marriage itself be consummated to be valid and binding.” As the only one who hadn’t even met their future spouse, much less had sex with them, Simon could feel how the others at the table avoided looking at him, but thankfully Magnus just kept rolling. “The marriages and that restriction on outside affairs ends with the death of the Shadowhunter though,” a dark shadow passed over Magnus’ face and Simon felt a surge of sympathy knowing his feelings for Alec, “as do our roles as liaisons, unless we decide to change that.”

Simon didn’t often think about his immortality, for good reason; it scared the shit out of him to think about being in his twenties for millenia unless something killed him off first. Contemplating watching his husband grow old and die while he didn’t added a whole ‘nother layer of fucked up to this situation. Simon wanted to run away from this whole thing and anger and frustration choked his throat and he could feel his fangs trying to descend as he lost control over his emotions. 

A cold hand wrapped around the fist he hadn’t realized he’d made and then Raphael addressed the table, saying quietly, “Why don’t we break for lunch. When we return we can hammer out the details of the liaison positions and the living arrangements for the couples. Then we can continue with the other main points of the contract.”

Magnus stood instantly and made his way over to the bar set up on the far side of the room, reaching for a martini glass with one hand and a bottle with the other. At least he’d have company in his misery, thought Simon bitterly. They should set up some kind of club. Shadowhunter Husbands In It Together. SHIIT for short. Sounded about right. Simon sighed.

The others were starting to get up and move around the conference room, although the Seelie Queen was having a heated discussion with Meliorn in whispers, while the other Seelie sat there with an inscrutable look on his face. Simon got up and made his way over to the fridge at the other end of the bar from where Magnus was sitting, opening it to grab a bag of O negative. The other two vampires had followed him so he pulled out two more and looked around for some glasses. He found some fancy highball ones and got busy pouring, letting his hands take over while trying to clear his mind. James, who Simon barely knew because the older vampire had always treated him with a silent sort of awe, thanked him quietly and then fled to one of the armchairs set up in another corner. 

Raphael stayed though, and together they watched the other people in the room mill around, most of whom had scattered themselves around the large area, although the werewolves were still a tight knot. Simon’s Sire took a small sip of blood from his cup. “Do you want to meet Jace Lightwood before the wedding? There is still time to do that.” Simon opened his mouth and then closed it a second later, taking a gulp from his own glass instead. Raphael shifted and said, “There is also still time to put my name in before the Clave instead, although you will have to take over as Clan leader.”

Simon startled so hard that the heavy, viscous liquid actually sloshed out over his hand and he swore and put the cup down on the bar before sticking his fingers in his mouth. Raphael watched him fumble, staying still in the way that only an undead vampire could do. 

“No. No, I won’t ask you to do that. The Clan needs you, I’d be a terrible leader, I know you’ve said that the other vampires would follow me but I definitely don’t want them to do that, they are all eight hundred years old and don’t understand any of my references and it would be a complete disaster and I’d run the Clan straight into the ground in like, a year, and you would be so mad at me and it’s just a terrible idea. No, I’ll marry this Jace person and hopefully he’s not a raging asshole and we can get along and we’ll figure out whoever is murdering Shadowhunters and we’ll murder the fuck out of them instead. And no, I don’t want to meet him before the wedding, I’ve done so much research on arranged marriages— do you know it’s still incredibly popular in the Mundane world? I totally thought it had gone out of style but apparently not— and most of the feedback from married couples that made it work is to let yourself be surprised at the altar and see your spouse at their finest and best and then you have a really great first impression of them and it’s better to do that instead. Yeah. So I’ll meet him in a week.” Simon finally made himself stop talking and drained his cup of blood instead, feeling the metal in it coat his throat and settle in his stomach.  

Raphael was wearing his “Simon Face” again but only said, “All right, Simon. We’ll keep things the way they are. I’m going to talk to Magnus before we keep going.” 

Simon bobbed his head, not daring to open his mouth again, and he watched Raphael glide down the bar to where the warlock was on his second drink. He knew how deeply Raphael cared for his friend and Simon hoped that he would have some comforting words for a man who was clearly already deeply in love with the Shadowhunter he was marrying. 

Putting the empty glass back onto the bar, Simon thought about the articles and blog posts he’d read from people in arranged marriages. There had only been a few actual horror stories, thankfully, and most had just been about how to live with another person comfortably even if you weren’t in love with them. There were a few entries though that stood out, shining examples of couples who talked about how the person they married ended up being their soulmate, someone they couldn’t imagine being without. Simon knew that his situation was much more complicated than most, but—  

He could hope, right?

[neapolitanadonna]

cottagecore has taken over my life. can i request a scenario where human au England is living in this little cottage in the flower fields and he sees this strange girl in the fields all the time? He just kinda watches her and admires her and stuff and cute soft cottage core things ack I'll leave the creativity to you THANK YOU!!!

Oh you KNOW my cottagecore ass had fun with this one. I genuinely felt soft writing this so I hope everyone feels soft too. I love getting the opportunity to make imperialists look soft, its by far my favorite hobby of this quarantine. 

Also this is a bit long, so remember to click keep reading!!

Arthur was a hardworking man in the government who, despite practically signing his life away to it, hated the government. His London flat, aggressive cabbies, black coffee at 5 in the morning, three piece suit everyday life was something that got him far in life, it was a shame that most days, he couldn’t care less about it. 

After his grandmother passed, she left him her small brick cottage in Painswick. At first he thought of selling it, not that he needed the extra money, it would just be a shame to leave empty real estate. He didn’t think he would ever spend his days in the little place, but in a time where he tried to manifest nothing but peace, the universe brought him to the cottage. 

He spends his weekends there. It isn’t big government buildings and the bustling streets of London, but to him, it’s perfect. If he wasn’t tethered to the responsibilities of being an adult, he would pack up everything he had and move to the cottage. He considered it often, he had nothing left in London for him, anyway. He lived alone in London and in Painswick, but Painswick felt less lonely. 

His grandmother's cottage was relatively secluded, far enough from the little village to be truly alone, but close enough if he needed to walk to get anything. However, oddly enough, even if there were no other residences near him, one particular creature always showed up in his backyard. 

He wasn’t a fan of judging a woman by her physical traits, but he remembers the first time he laid eyes on her perfectly. It was cinematic, and if it was a film, he would watch it again and again. She wore a baby blue dress with a flower print that fell just above her knees. Her hair was pulled back into braids with two little bows the same color as her dress. He couldn’t quite see the color of her eyes from his window, but they held some sort of power in them even from afar. As she gently walked through the flower fields, she tucked the wildflowers she picked into the weaves of her braids, filling them with Bluebells, Columbine, Daisies, and Cornflowers. She didn’t trip over plants or roots that peeked through the dirt. She seemed to thank the earth each time she picked a flower. As he watched her card through the flowers, spin in the field, then sit under the Crab apple tree up upon the hill, he figured he must’ve been hallucinating. It had been a long week of work, he had gone through so many rough emotions that it was possible she was an angel and he was on the verge of death. 

Until she showed up again. 

Her visits to his field were almost scheduled, but sporadic all at the same time. She would come, sometimes pick flowers, others leave them alone, but dance among them either way. She would sometimes bring little baskets of peaches and bread for herself, other times she came with nothing but herself. She once got close enough to a deer that it let her pet its head, the same thing happened another time with a rabbit. His grandmother used to tell him stories and lore about Painswick, how faeries disguised themselves as humans to lure them in. He couldn’t help but wonder if his grandmother wasn’t just telling old tales. There was no way this girl was human. 

She seemed devoid of any human flaw. She couldn’t have been any older than 20, but even though Arthur was 23, his position aged him five years. She always seemed so happy, so carefree, like nothing in the world could have made her upset. If anyone else came through his property to take his flowers, he would be sure to lecture them, but she was his only exception. 

It was a Saturday morning when Arthur woke up feeling less on edge than usual. He was so used to having a migraine that waking up without one felt like a giant weight off his shoulders. The light filtered through the old blinds just perfectly, hitting the old paintings of flowers on the wall. It occurred to him that he did more staring out his window into the fields than he did outside. Maybe today would be the perfect day for him to spend a day out there, no stress, no work, and definitely no migraine. 

The sun was still rising as he walked out into the fields. He never noticed it before, but bumble bees danced around every honeysuckle and corn flower. He supposed they would be hard to notice from far away. 

He set down his little blanket at the base of the crab apple tree. It made him feel a certain sense of anxiety knowing that this is where the ethereal girl usually spent her time, that he was sitting in her spot despite it being his property. He looked out on the fields, the sun rising behind them, and began to realize why the girl loved it here so much. 

He spent a good while like this, staring off into the fields, down at his cottage, the trees and wood that extended beyond the fields. He only stopped daydreaming when he heard humming. 

He recognized it as Donovan’s “Sunny Goodge Street” before he processed who the humming could have possibly come from. When his brain finally did process, yes, it had to be none other than the voice of the girl, he felt his heart leap into his throat. She must’ve been coming up from behind, and his best option was to sit absolutely still from the other side of the tree hoping she would walk the other way around and avoid him completely. 

It wasn’t that he didn’t want to talk to her, but he couldn’t quite admit that he was afraid. She had all the odds of the universe on her side, she might’ve been mother nature herself, and who was he compared to that? Unfortunately, his desires came to a fault. Her humming stopped, and her footsteps got louder. A soft, faint giggle could be heard from behind the tree. 

“Hello?” Arthur’s heart leaped to his throat again. Such a sweet voice she had, too. In retrospect, he should've moved, stood up to greet her and introduce himself, but he was frozen. He spent all week talking and negotiating with big government hot shots, yet he couldn’t face a silly girl who spent her days in the flower fields. 

“Are you hiding from me?” She giggled again, and then she was next to him, standing above him. He couldn’t help but exhale deeply the moment he saw her. His cheeks were for sure red, such an embarrassing thing for a grown man, he thought. She wore the same blue dress she wore the day he first saw her, her hair let loose and gently curled around her shoulders, instead. 

“Are you the funny man who lives down in the cottage there?” She asked, taking an uninvited seat in front of him on his blanket. She smelled like honey, roses, and the morning. She was even more beautiful up close than she was from his bedroom window. 

“Lots of questions you have for me. I should be the one asking who you are. This is my property” Arthur replied. The moment he said it, he felt a pang of guilt. He had a hard time talking to somebody without being defensive anymore. The girl didn’t seem to care. 

“I’m really sorry.” She smiled, almost solemnly. “I’m __. There was this sweet old lady, Mrs. Kirkland, who lived here quite a bit ago. She was a regular at my nans flower shop in town, she used to invite me over quite a bit to have tea. Before she passed, she told me I could still visit the fields whenever I wanted. It never occurred to me that somebody else would be living here after she…” 

“Oh, don’t worry, __.”  Was all Arthur could muster up saying. The way her name spilled off his tongue sent a shot of adrenaline up his spine. __. So very fitting. 

He found it strange from the start that his grandmother left him her cottage, of all things. Maybe, somehow, this was her funny little way of playing matchmaker for him. The blush rose back to his cheeks. 

“I’m Mrs. Kirklands grandson, Arthur. I’m sorry for making accusations.” 

“It’s alright.” She smiled. “I’m sure if I saw some strange girl on my property I would be curious, too.” 

“How did you know I lived here?” Arthur asked, meeting her bright __ eyes. 

“It just feels less lonely when you’re here.” She smiled. “That, and I heard you drop your mug one morning. Your reaction wasn’t all that discreet.”

She giggled, tucking a strand of her hair behind her ear. 

“Oh, for fucks sake, you mean to tell me you saw that?” 

“I promise I’m not a stalker,” her smile seemingly permanent on her face. “Just observant, is all.” 

“I wasn’t accusing you of being one.” 

“Oh, but I can tell you’ve thought about it.” 

Arthur wanted to tell her he didn’t think any malice of her. He wanted to tell her that even if she was stalking him, it was the best intrusion of his privacy he’s ever had. He wanted to grab her little hand that rested upon her knee, but he knew he couldn’t. He’s never felt so intimidated by another person in his life. 

Arthur said nothing to her in response, and instead for a moment, __ studied him, then stood up. 

“Don’t leave.” He said, suddenly. It wasn’t even his intention, it came out of him on instinct. She looked back down on him and smiled, and shook her head. 

“I wasn’t planning on it, darling.” She giggled. “I’ll be right back.” 

Arthur watched her as she tumbled down the hill to the fields, the tall grasses and flowers welcoming her like she was a part of them. He finally had the opportunity to sigh, and run a hand through his hair. He couldn’t stop thinking about how his grandmother probably set this whole thing up for him, she was always a clever woman. 

__ came back a few minutes later with hands full of flowers. She sat back down in front of him, and carefully broke the stems of the flowers to make them shorter. He wanted to question her process, but instead just watched her. He finally made a noise when his breath hitched as she moved to push some of his hair out of his face. 

“You have the most beautiful green eyes I’ve ever seen.” __ marveled, her own eyes gentle as they looked into his. 

“I- Thank you.” Arthur held back a stammer. She brushed his hair from his face again, then gently placed a daisy behind his ear. 

“Perfect.” She giggled, pushing his hair away from the other side of his face to make room for another daisy. 

“You’re ridiculous, woman.” He shook his head, but couldn’t hold back a smile. “Who on god's earth are you?” 

She shook her head, and shrugged. 

“I’m just trying to enjoy the life I was given. No use in living unless you spend every day the way you want.” 

“Do you work?” 

“At my nans flower shop, yes. It’s not as much about money as it is enjoying my time with my nan.” She shook her head. “Besides basic bills and the likes, everything I need I make myself.” 

“Do you drive?” 

“A bike. I never felt the need for a car.” 

“Do you have a cellphone?” 

“Of course, I like to live naturally, that doesn’t mean I’m a barbarian.” 

“I was just wondering.” Arthur chuckled, making the bold move of pushing her hair out of her face. Her eyes fluttered shut and a small smile spread across her face. He grabbed a cornflower and tucked it behind her ear. He felt breath against his arm, there was something so intimate about her breathing. It had barely started to occur to him that this was the girl he’s admired from afar for months. 

“Perfect.” He teased, eliciting a giggle from her. His hand still touched against the softness of her cheek, lingering there, but she didn’t seem to mind. She gently reached for his hand, lowering it from her face, and instead threading her fingers in between his. The softness of her skin, the warmth of her smile, the sweet little chime in her voice, everything about her overwhelmed him. 

God, he wished he could thank his grandmother for this.

[maplesamurai]

The Witch’s Apprentice, Book 1 Epilogue

The rest of the night continued on uneventfully as Arthur Butcher and his new employer, the Witch of the Woods, walked into the snowy Solstice night back towards the Witch’s cottage, with no fae or beast daring to disturb them further after Arthur’s nearly lethal encounter with the dreaded Wild Hunt. It was a very silent journey home, with Arthur still a bit shaken from his recent brush with death, and the Witch of the Woods making few attempts to break the ice. For his part, Arthur did make a few attempts to inquire who the Witch had been referring to when she had interrogated the pixie Umbra about “Her,” but every time he asked, his mistress would evade the question, citing such reasons as, “you need not worry about that for now, my child,” or “we shall see if I am in the mood to discuss that topic later,” until he eventually gave up on asking. This worried Arthur somewhat; in his experience with the Witch, she had always welcomed questions of all kinds, never discouraging any request for knowledge. If the Witch of the Woods was so reluctant to talk about “Her,” then Arthur feared the day he would likely learn firsthand who “She” was…

However, such questions were soon pushed out of Arthur’s mind, as the two soon arrived back at the forest clearing where the Witch’s cobblestone cottage home stood, its windows illuminating the rest of the property with the glow of the Witch’s lit fireplace. As Arthur followed the Witch to her doorstep, he hoped that said fireplace was the only part of the house aflame, as he remembered from his first visit that the fire spirits living in the Witch’s hearth liked to leave for the other parts of the cottage when left unattended. That was likely not the case, seeing as the cottage’s thatch roof was not aglow like the windows were, but he prepared himself to have to run for the fire bucket in the corner, just in case. But what truly awaited Arthur when the Witch opened the front door and he followed her through, he would not have expected in a hundred years; for once Arthur stepped through the threshold, he found a fully prepared Solstice party waiting for the two of them.

  A great banner had been hung from the rafters above with the words, “Welcome, Arthur Butcher” written across it. The entire cottage foyer had been decorated with what seemed to be the very holly and mistletoe that the two of them had collected on this very night. The tea table that usually stood before the Witch’s hearth had been replaced by a great dining table, upon which sat various Solstice food accompanied by sauces of plum and redcurrant, and most notably, a gigantic roast that had unmistakably once been the very boar the two of them had hunted before Arthur was whisked away by Umbra. But most unusual was that the Witch of the Woods herself was already here putting the finishing touches on setting up this Solstice dinner, but at the same time, she was also still standing next to Arthur as she had been all night.

  Having heard them come in, the Witch who was at the dinner table looked towards the door and said with a warm smile, “Ah, you’re back, safe and sound! And here I was worried you’d be late for tonight’s dinner! You two did not run into any trouble out there, I hope?”

  As Arthur looked between the two Witches, trying to work out exactly what was going on, the one who still stood beside him replied, “Unfortunately, Arthur here found himself in a spot of trouble with the Wild Hunt while we were hunting and I had to intervene. There were also a few miscreants with the gall to try to snatch him up from under my nose before that as well, but I made sure to deal with those responsible.”

  “Oh dear, how dreadful! I’m certainly glad you two made it out safe, then! The kettle should be ready if you would like me to pour you some tea before we begin supper?”

  “That would be lovely, thank you!” the Witch next to Arthur smiled, before turning to ask him, “Would you like a cup as well, my child?”

  “Um… sure,” Arthur replied uneasily, before asking, “but what’s going on? Why are there two of you? And when did you find the time to get all of this set up?”

  “It is as I said, my child…” began the Witch of the Woods that Arthur had returned to the cottage with Arthur, only for the sentence to be completed by the Witch standing in front of them, “…we are the only two people in this cottage. And once the two of us left, it was just I who was the only one in the cottage.”

  Still trying to wrap his head around this situation, Arthur asked, “So, there’s been, like, two of you this whole time?”

  “Well, not this whole time,” the Witch at the table admitted, “but there is at the moment.”

  “If anyone would care to give me a straight answer one of these days,” Arthur sighed, “that would be lovely.”

  “In that case, a more detailed explanation may be in order,” the Witch next to Arthur began. “You see Arthur, at certain times there are multiple things that need my attention, like say, when I need to walk a new servant through his first night on the job and prepare a welcoming party for him at the same time. So, in such situations, I’ve found it helps to be in two or more places at once.”

  “Oh, so you can make copies of yourself,” Arthur pieced together as he started hanging up his coat, having accepted the strangeness of the situation at this point. “But you said you needed me around because you occasionally need an extra pair of hands, so why can’t you just do this for those times?”

  “Well, I wouldn’t exactly say I make more of myself as much as I divide up what is already there,” the Witch at the table explained further. “And therein lays the problem with relying on this method, as my magic is also divided amongst my multiple bodies, so I cannot wield my full might while in this state.”

  “You saw a consequence of that earlier tonight, I’m afraid,” the Witch next to Arthur continued as she walked over to join her other self, “Had I been whole, those faeries would have never snatched you up like they did. And that’s not even accounting for how my divided power lessens even further the farther apart my bodies are. Why, I was not even at a fraction of my full strength when I had to travel between worlds for that caravan job with that giant bird…”

  “Furthermore,” the Witch who had prepared dinner continued to explain as her double returned to her side, “my divided selves each have our own consciousness with no awareness of what any of the others are currently experiencing, so if one of me lands in a spot of trouble, the rest of me would not know, so having a servant such as yourself around gives me more opportunities to get lots of things done around here without incurring that risk as often.”

  “Speaking of which, shall we be whole again?” the Witch still wearing her winter coat suggested. “There should not be any reason not to give anything our full attention for now.”

  “My thoughts exactly,” the other Witch agreed, and both bodies shared a chuckle at the pun.

  Arthur began to give his mistress’s two bodies his full attention, interested to see what their merging back together would look like. He had expected the two bodies disappearing into one in a flash of light, or perhaps they would melt into one another like the flesh equivalent of two water droplets joining together. Instead, the Witch who had joined him on their errands simply appeared to walk behind her other self and not come out the other side.

  “Now then,” the finally whole Witch began, “shall we begin our Solstice dinner? I may have had to rush it a bit since I had to prepare each ingredient right after we collected it, but I wanted to make you a nice dinner to help feel more at home here, And surely you worked up an appetite in that unexpected scuffle near the end of our walk?”

  “You could say that again,” Arthur said with a smile as he walked over to the table, relieved that this night’s strange brand of excitement was finally starting to die down. “Where do we start?”

  And so, Arthur and the Witch of the Woods shared their first Solstice dinner together. Despite the Witch’s claims of having to rush to get the whole thing ready, the dinner was excellently made. Sure, he thought, it did not live up to his last Solstice with his family the night before, but then again, nothing could.

  Eventually though, the feast died down as Arthur’s belly grew full and he began to feel exhausted from the long night and all that had transpired therein. As the now empty plates floated away to the kitchen with a wave of the Witch’s hand, Arthur found himself giving a long, deep yawn as he stood up from his chair.

  Taking notice of this as she had gotten out of her own chair and was headed towards one of the bookshelves, the Witch asked Arthur, “I take it you shall be turning in for the night, my child?”

  “Yeah, looks like it,” Arthur continued to yawn. “I don’t suppose I can expect less of a workload tomorrow for Solstice Day?”

  “I’m afraid not,” the Witch answered apologetically as she began to take a book from the shelf. “We have a house call for one of my regular clients scheduled for tomorrow, and I’m afraid he can be quite irritable when left waiting. However, I will handle preparations for the trip to his residence, so you should not worry about waking up early tomorrow. I’d like for you to get a full night’s rest for your first night sleeping in your new home.”

  “Okay. Well, thank you, all things considered.”

  “You need not mention it, my dear. I should be down here for most of the night, so if you require anything of me, do not hesitate to ask.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind, thanks,” Arthur said as he began to head down the hallway, but before he opened the door to the tower stairwell, he called back down to the Witch, “Oh, and miss?”

  Looking to the hallway threshold just as she was about to sit back down and open her book, the Witch asked, “What is it, Arthur?”

  “Thanks for the welcoming party. It really helped me feel more at home here, given the circumstances.”

  “You are quite welcome, Arthur,” the Witch replied with a warm smile. “Have a good night and pleasant dreams.”

  And as Arthur ascended up the stairs of the cottage tower, he reflected on how little the Witch of the Woods had turned out like he had expected. When he first ventured into these woods on that fateful autumn day, he had almost expected her to be the kind of cruel, fiendish hag straight out of a fairy tale, and yet when they had first met, she saved his life and invited him for tea on little more than a whim.  He had feared she would refuse his request to heal his sister when all options had seemed lost, and yet while the price she asked was great, it was something he was willing to pay. And even after she fulfilled her terms of the agreement, she allowed him more than enough time to say his goodbyes and even helped his family further free of charge. Even today, even as he found himself in mortal danger, the Witch did everything in her power to protect him and had done everything she could to make him feel at home.

  A lifetime of servitude might not have been an ideal life, Arthur thought as he drifted off to sleep in his new bed, but if he was to make the most out of a bad situation, then today was not a bad start…

  O – O – O

  The Faerie Realm was a spectacular place. In some ways, it was a mirror to the Mortal Realm; in others, so different that it defied comprehension. The world of the fae held many wondrous sights that most mortals would only dream of, such as islands that floated in the sky as easily as a duck on water, sunsets the colour of the Northern Lights, to trees that bore fruit of meat, bread and sweets, to entire mountains made of gemstone. But perhaps one of the most spectacular was the breathtaking Forest of Roses; one of the many flower forests that took root in this land, the stems of these roses grew taller and thicker than any tree in the human world other than the World Tree itself, their thorns jutted out far enough to be mistaken for oaken branches by newcomers, and their radiant petals of ruby red made the view of this forest from the fields beyond it more beautiful than any sunset seen in the lands of mortal men. Not that Umbra really appreciated the forest’s beauty. She had flown through every nook and cranny in this place hundreds of times, and even if she hadn’t, she was in too foul a mood to appreciate much of anything right now, rebuffing the cheerful greetings of every pixie, sprite and dryad she flew past in a huff.

  It just wasn’t fair, Umbra thought to herself as she flitted through the forest canopy. After all it had taken to be accepted into the Wild Hunt, they just kicked her out because of one screw up! So she failed to bag the old hag’s new servant, big deal! It wasn’t as if the other hunters never missed a mark, and she’d even successfully hunted a few mortal souls while she was out in the humans’ world, so why get so worked up about her one failure? Sure, she still could get invited back if she accomplished a great feat of hunting in the intervening time, but that sounded like too much work; getting someone higher up the chain to land her a spot worked fine the first time, and that was a much better deal! Granted, Umbra did promise to bring the Witch of the Woods’ new servant back to the other side with her, but she could hardly be blamed for the human being so stubborn! What was so great about mopping that hag’s floors that made the human want to stay there, anyway? Okay, he did make some kind of speech explaining why, but it was so boring Umbra didn’t bother to pay attention to any of it. The only thing that could make this day any worse was if Umbra had to tell the one who got her into the Wild Hunt that… she… failed…

  It was then that all of the anger and bitterness over the situation left Umbra and was replaced by sheer, unadulterated terror. How could she have forgotten that “She” would want an explanation for Umbra’s failure to bring the human back? At least with the Horned God she could expect his eternal disappointment and her membership in the Wild Hunt rescinded, but her? There was no telling how that one would react. Anything from a stern talking-to, a calm reassurance that “everyone makes mistakes,” to a (hopefully) swift execution; it was even possible that she might have forgotten that she even asked Umbra to take the human in the first place.

  And it was not knowing that terrified Umbra most of all. If she were able to know for certain whether or not she was a dead pixie flying, she at least at least might have the chance to make peace with her fate, but when it came to dealing with this person, she would have no idea what awaited her until it was too late. But what Umbra felt of her uncertain fate soon became irrelevant, as she then heard a chillingly familiar sound: a sweet, melodious voice calling to her from beyond the giant rose stems, “Why hello, my dear Umbra! Please, do come out where I can see you so we can have a nice visit~”

  The panicked Umbra desperately thought about what she should do, so frightened that her wings fluttered faster than they ever had in her life. Should she try to escape? Or face whatever fate awaited her with as much dignity as she could muster? Or perhaps she could try to hide, and hope that her benefactor would eventually tire of looking and leave, perhaps even losing her surely fleeting interest in the matter and forgetting it entirely. Yeah, that seemed like a good plan… or at least it did, until the great, tree-like roses before Umbra parted, moving out of the way until there was nothing to hide Umbra from her benefactor’s gaze, and Umbra could see her as well, clear as day.

  While Umbra could barely contain her fear towards the faerie now staring her down with a kindly smile on her face, anyone encountering this person for the first time would likely be puzzled about what the pixie was so afraid of. This tall, beautiful woman carried herself with the demeanor of a kindly grandmother, though she looked no older than a human in their late twenties. She had a thin, heart shaped face with a button nose and rosy complexion, and wore a tall, pointed crown of pure diamond upon her head, beneath which cascaded flowing ringlets of silvery blonde hair down to her waist, her fine, silken hair almost metallic in its lustre. Clad in a wide hemmed, ruffled dress of glittering silk which glowed in whichever colours seemed to tickle her fancy at the moment (cycling through sky blue, emerald green and cherry red just in the time it took for Umbra to take in the situation); the faerie was possessed of a pear shaped figure, with wide hips and slim shoulders. From her back grew a pair of glowing, iridescent butterfly-like wings which shined in every colour of the rainbow, and in her hands she held a long, wooden wand tipped with a beautiful silvery blue gem cut in the shape of a star, which she would idly spin in one hand, and then the other. Her full, brightly coloured lips gave a cheerful smile as she looked straight into Umbra with her long lashed, protruding bright blue eyes.

                                                             “Oh, there you are, Umbra!” the radiantly dressed fairy cheerfully said in a singsong voice. “You were taking so long to come out, I was afraid you couldn’t see me, so I made sure to move everything out of the way for you! Don’t be shy now, come fly down here so we can chat about how your Solstice went~”

  “Oh h-hey, Miss!” Umbra chuckled nervously as she flitted down to her patron’s eye level, the tree sized roses resuming their original positions behind her as she passed them. “I was just thinking about you, actually! I just recently got back from the Mortal Realm myself; when did you get back?”

  “Why, nary a minute ago, actually,” the silver dressed fairy answered with a motherly smile. “I would have come back earlier, but there were so many mortal children who desperately needed my attention! But I was sure you would be so eager to share how your time in the Wild Hunt went, so once I was able to come back, I made certain to find you straight away!”

  “Um… yeah, about that, Miss… it went well for the first while, even managed to bag some mortal souls; not as many as I was hoping to, but hey, it was my first time, right? And then I tried to bring back the Witch’s new pet like you wanted….”

  “Yes, I was hoping to discuss that matter specifically,” Umbra’s benefactor mentioned as she curiously looked about the forest left and right, “especially seeing as you seem to alone here at the moment… now I wonder where that silly human could have run off to? Surely you upheld your end of our bargain, right? Especially since I was so kind as to keep my dear sister distracted while you swept the boy away?”

  Umbra bit her lip nervously, desperately trying to find the words to spin her failure in a positive light.

  “Well…” she began, sweating nervously as she continued, “We all have our off days, don’t we?”

  Shooting Umbra a glare of motherly disappointment as she sighed, the luminous fairy twirled her wand in her hand idly as she said in a scolding tone, “So you did not see fit to keep your promise, did you? How sad; I never thought you could be so ungrateful after all I did to convince the others to allow you into the Hunt to begin with?”

  “Well, I…” Umbra stammered in abject horror, “It’s not that simple, you see… I was going to… well, it’s not like I got out of the affair unscathed!”

  Umbra flailed the inflamed stump of her right hand around in plain view as she whined, “Look at what the ungrateful snot did to my arm, with an iron blade, no less,” Umbra paused to sniff pitifully, forced a few tears as she continued to sob, “And if that wasn’t enough, the old hag wanted to kill me! I don’t know what would have happened to me if the others didn’t arrive to rescue me!!!”

  “Oh, you poor thing!” the motherly fairy cooed with a worried expression on her face. “That won’t do at all! Now stay still while I make it all better~”

  And with a twirl of the fairy’s wand, Umbra’s entire forearm was cut clean off at the elbow, stump and all, making the tiny pixie scream in agony as her wings wildly flapped to keep her in the air despite the shock.

  “Now don’t fret my dear!” the fairy tut-tutted disapprovingly, as if she were just scolding a fussy child, “It’s just a little cut; it will all over before you know it!”

  Shaking her head like a disapproving parent, the fairy gave her wand another wave, and immediately Umbra’s entire forearm began to rapidly grow back from the bloodless stump, within seconds restoring the hand that Arthur had cut off, with no sign of inflammation from the human’s iron sword.

  “See, all better!” the fairy cheerfully reassured Umbra with a singsong voice. “That wasn’t so bad, was it?”

  “Feeling better already!” Umbra frightfully declared, giving her patron a thumbs-up to demonstrate her hand was working good as new as she turned around to leave. “Anyway, you’re a busy faerie, so I guess I should be going now…”

  However, the fairy seemed to have other plans, as she gave another wave of her wand, and Umbra was imprisoned within a pink soapy bubble, which magically flew through the air and sent colliding with the stem of the nearest rose-tree, popping on impact; yet Umbra was nonetheless unable to move, pinned against the gigantic stem as her patron floated towards her with a warm, matronly smile on her face.

  “Now, why the hurry to leave, my dear Umbra?” she cooed softly. “After all, we still have the matter of your failure to discuss, now don’t we?”

  Terrified for her life, Umbra desperately tried to speak in her defense, but found herself unable to open her mouth, her mouth sealed shut by the same force pinning her in place.

  “I am so sorry that your stay in the Wild Hunt did not go as you had hoped,” the fairy continued with what in any other situation would be a reassuring smile, not helped by the sharp, tiny thorns that began to sprout out of the rose’s stem around Umbra’s neck, slowly extending towards the pixie’s throat, “but I do believe that our agreement was that in exchange for securing you a spot in the Hunt, you would bring the Witch of the Woods’ new servant back here to me. So seeing as you have returned without the boy, I believe that makes you still in my dept. After all, a promise is a promise, isn’t it, Umbra?”

  Desperate to not provoke her benefactor and wary of the thorns currently threatening to skewer her neck, Umbra poured what little movement she could muster against the restraining magic into rapidly nodding in agreement.

  “Well, I’m glad we agree, my dear!” the fairy chuckled. “Now, seeing as we will be working very closely for the foreseeable future, perhaps you could tell me more about what happened to prevent you from bringing the boy here?”

  The fairy waited for Umbra to answer, but soon realised that the pixie was still unable to speak as she still strained against her power, and the thorns growing from the tree-like flower mere seconds away from drawing blood. Eyes wide with this realisation, the fairy lowered her wand and embarrassed, apologised, “Oh, I’m so sorry, my dear! Silly me, I had forgotten you could not speak it such a state!”

  Finally freed from her invisible restraint and the thorns quickly receding back into the mighty flower’s stem, Umbra fell from her place before taking flight once again, albeit remaining in her mistress’s sight so as not to provoke her once again. Taking a deep breath, Umbra finally answered, “Well, the thing is, I almost managed to talk him into coming here with me, but he said he was fine slaving away for the old hag for some reason I can’t remember, so I figured in he wouldn’t get his butt through the gate, I could just bring his head…”

  “Well, that wasn’t very nice of you!” the fairy chided Umbra, before pressing her wand to her chin and admitting, “But I suppose I never specified for you to bring him here alive, so I can’t really blame you for that. But please, do continue.”

  “Alright, so I was about to put the human out of his misery and finish the job, but the Witch managed to catch up with him at just the last second and let him cut off my arm! And she’d probably have done worse to me herself if the rest of the Hunt didn’t arrive in time to bail me out!”

  “Oh, how dreadful! I’d forgotten how just how mean my sister can be! I had hoped I could have delayed her for longer, but I just could not stay there for long! After all, it was Solstice Eve, and there were so many mortal children out there that I could not disappoint!”

  “Of course not, Miss!” Umbra chuckled nervously. “Speaking of that, she actually wanted to know about why you were doing back in her forest again…”

  Her face immediately brightened with joy, the fairy cheerfully said “She asked about me, did she? How wonderful! And what did you tell her?”

  “Well… just what I knew about it, really. Just that you wanted to see her again, so she’ll probably be expecting you soon…”

  “Excellent! I do hope I can drop in for a proper visit; I have been wondering if she ever managed to improve on her previous tea brews!”

  “Well… I’m glad you’re looking forward to it, Miss! But, what about the human, then?”

  Looking off to the distance wistfully, Umbra’s benefactor mused, “It seems so sad, really; the boy’s story has only just begun, and already he seems to have little hope of living happily ever after… I suppose that I will have to visit him as well and remedy that. After all, every child could use a Fairy Godmother…”

[amaryllisblackthorn]

okay but like no one talks about arthur blackthorn enough ??

like this guy was tortured in faery and obviously holds no warm feelings towards them but like he doesn’t hold it against mark and helen who are kind of like reminders of his time in faery ??

(not liking faeries)

“Perhaps you are confused,” Arthur said coldly. “You might have heard of my niece and nephew; you might think that because our relatives Mark and Helen have faerie blood you will find a kinder hearing here than you would at some other Institute. But my niece was sent away because of the Cold Peace, and my nephew was stolen from us.”

Kieran’s lip curled up at the corner. “Your niece’s exile was a Shadowhunter decree, not a faerie one,” he said. “As for your nephew—”

Arthur took a shaking breath. His hands were gripping the armrests of his chair. “The hand of the Consul was forced by the betrayal of the Seelie Queen. Unseelie warriors fought beside hers. No faerie hand is free of blood. We are not well disposed toward faeries here.”

“Back when faeries were more closely tied to their demonic ancestry,” said Arthur hoarsely.

“This is the wrong family to have come to,” said Arthur. “You are asking us to break the Law for you, as if we have some special regard for the Fair Folk. But the Blackthorns have not forgotten what you have taken from them.”

(not holding it against Mark & Helen)

While I’m sure we’re all immeasurably relieved that you’ll be looking after the Blackthorn children,” said Luke, “Helen is one of them. Are you saying, by claiming responsibility for the younger siblings, that you agree that her Marks should be stripped?”

Arthur Blackthorn looked horrified. “Not at all,” he said. “My brother may not have been wise in his . . . dalliances . . . but all records show that the children of Shadowhunters are Shadowhunters. As they say, ut incepit fidelis sic permanet.”

“That’s just it,” said Balogh. “As long as we don’t negotiate his release, the problem takes care of itself. The boy is likely better off with his own kind anyway.”

Arthur Blackthorn’s round face paled. “No,” he said. “My brother wouldn’t have wanted that. He’d have wanted the boy at home with his family.” He gestured toward where Emma and Julian and the rest were sitting. “They’ve had so much taken away from them. How can we take more?”

A wave of dizziness passed through Emma along with a terrible mixture of horror and relief and amazement. Julian had stiffened, as if he’d been shocked with electricity. She saw the slight tightening of his jaw, the twitch of a muscle in his cheek. He didn’t open his mouth; it was Arthur who spoke, half-rising from his chair, his voice thready and uncertain:

“Mark?”

“There was a time when the Fair Folk might have freely returned to us one of our own,” said Arthur. “The pain of loss goes both ways, as does the loss of trust.”

“A convoy came to us from Faerie,” said Arthur. “They offered to return Mark to his family, and in exchange, we would help them discover who was killing faeries in Los Angeles.”

“And you said nothing of this to the Clave?” said Robert. “Despite knowing you were breaking the Law, the Cold Peace—”

“I wanted my nephew back,” said Arthur. “Wouldn’t you have done the same, for your family?”

“You’re a Shadowhunter,” said Robert. “If you must choose between your family and the Law, you choose the Law!”

“Lex malla, lex nulla,” said Arthur. “You know our family motto.”

“Then let me ask Arthur this, Clary,” said Robert. “What punishment would he choose for Nephilim, even young Nephilim, who break the Law?”

“Well, that would depend,” Arthur said, “on whether they were punished already, five years ago, by losing their father and brother and sister.”

“We would have protected Mark,” said Robert Lightwood. “There was no need to fear the Clave.”

Arthur was pale, his eyes dilated. Yet Emma had never heard him speak so eloquently, or with such clarity. It was bizarre. “Would you have?” he demanded. “In that case, why is Helen still at Wrangel Island?”

“She’s safer there,” snapped Robert. “There are those—not myself—who still hate the faeries for the betrayal of the Dark War. How do you think they would treat her if she were among other Shadowhunters?”

“So you couldn’t have protected Mark,” said Arthur. “You admit it.”

not to mention that he’s more than willing to take Emma in to?? like okay we know that his mental state leads him to be unable to take care of any of them really but like still

“Absolutely not,” Julian said. “Emma lives in L.A.; it’s her home. She can stay at the Institute. That’s what Shadowhunters do. The Institute is supposed to be a refuge.”

“Your uncle will be running the Institute,” said Jia. “It’s up to him.”

“What did he say?” Julian demanded, and behind those four words were a wealth of feeling. When Julian loved people, he loved them forever; when he hated them, he hated them forever. Emma had the feeling the question of whether he was going to hate his uncle forever hung in the balance at exactly this moment.

“He said he would take her in,” Jia said. “But really, I think there’s a place for Emma at the Shadowhunter Academy here in Idris. She’s exceptionally talented, she’d be surrounded by the best instructors, there are many other students there who’ve suffered losses and could help her with her grief—”

“Yes, yes, I understand,” said Jia. “Very well. Your uncle doesn’t mind, Julian, if Emma lives in the Institute, and the institution of parabatai trumps all other considerations.”

Helen was nearly finished packing the belongings that she had brought with her to Idris. Uncle Arthur (he had told Emma to call him that too) had promised to send on the rest. 

the quotes are from city of heavenly fire and lady midnight. i don’t think i even went into lord of shadows (where arthur, you know, willingly died to keep his family safe) and i made this post before queen of air and darkness came out.

like of course he shouldn’t hold anything against helen and mark but like honestly while it would have been wrong to it would also have been idk understandable if he had? like he went through a super traumatic experience in faery and helen and mark are linked to both faery in general and !! to a specific faery who was complicit in his traumatic torture. but he doesn’t hold it against helen and mark, considers them family, and loves them and like while that’s the right thing to do i also really appreciate him for that ?? like idk i just feel like arthur deserves more appreciation

[nicksreadingblog]

Some spoilers...

To anyone who hasn’t read about thease series, i suggest watching the movie as the acting, scenery and special effects are incedible! 

I’ll leave a link so you check out the trailer!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I99bp9SOhcQ

Right, so you’ve actually chosen to spoil the plot for yourself. if that’s what you desire, keep on reading as I will be answearing some questions, explaning the events, what happed and what not...

-What kind of story is it?

A horror, thriller and fantasy story wich is about a family that chronicle the adventures of the Grace children, twins Simon and Jared and their older sister Mallory, after they move into the Spiderwick Estate and discover a world of fairies that they never knew existed;

A family moves into a old mansion and finds it is surrounded by magical creatures. In the movie, Freddie Highmore plays the lead character Jared Grace. He also plays his identical twin brother Simon wearing slightly different clothes, hairstyle, and makeup. He has a sister named Mallory (played by Sarah Bolger). His mom Helen Grace makes them move to their Aunt's mansion because they have nowhere else to stay since she is getting a divorce. Aunt Lucinda (the owner of the mantion) was put in a mental hospital so the mansion is empty when they arrive.

-When did the story take place?

In 2008;

In 1928, Arthur Spiderwick writes a Field guide about the many Faeries he has encountered. After finishing the Book, he hides it away for fear of Mulgarath, a shapeshifting ogre who plans to use the Book's secrets for evil. Eighty years later, recently divorced Helen Grace inherits and moves into the abandoned Spiderwick estate with her children.

-Where did it happened?

Maine; The Spiderwick Estate, more seldom known as the Spiderwick Mansion, was a large Victorian estate located southwest of a town in Maine, New England.

-Who were the main characters in the story?

Jared Evan Grace – The main character, a 9-year-old boy. Jared is a brave and resourceful natural leader, shown to be good at creating plans.

Simon Everett Grace – Jared's identical twin brother. At first Simon seems to be the near opposite of his brother. He keeps a tidy appearance, is said to enjoy reading, and loves collecting and caring for animals, particularly ones that he's rescued.

Mallory Grace – Jared and Simon's 13-year-old sister. She is an avid fencer who takes nearly every opportunity to practice, sometimes enlisting the help of an unfortunate brother.

Arthur Spiderwick – The author of Arthur Spiderwick's Field Guide to the Fantastical World Around You. He worked as a publicity artist and spent many years researching faeries by doing field work and by contacting other researchers (for example, for his entries on dragons and giants).

Lucinda Spiderwick – The daughter of Arthur Spiderwick and the cousin of Helen Grace's mother, making her the Grace children's great aunt.

Helen Grace – The overprotective mother of Jared, Simon, and Mallory. She is strict at times but she can also be caring.

Thimbletack - The Spiderwick Estate's Brownie, a fairy who guards the Spiderwick mansion but, if angered, can become a vengeful and nasty boggart. Later in the series he ends up stealing the Field Guide and hiding it, believing this will be for the better.

Mulgarath – An evil, shapeshifting ogre who wants to take over the world by using the information in the Guide to find out the weaknesses of humans and the many faerie species.

-Which characters did I like best? Why?

All of them...

The thing is, that all of the characters played an essential roll in the story plot, it’s actually quite difficult to pick one as a favorite since they all have diffrent rolls. But i woud say I liked it how Thimbletack guided them to do the write thing, even though some of the things he said didn’t make sence at the time.

- What do I think of the book's title?

In a cuple words: Its the best it coud be.

For real though, i absolutely love how the title emphasizes the plot of the story and how it kind of gives it that mysterious feeling that encourages you to read it.

- What do I think of the book's cover? How well does it convey what the book is about?

As a cover, i was pulled into it rather quickly.

It undoubtedly made me curious as to what’s going to happen and what the book is all about. Again, they did an amazing job with everithing! its a full 5 star for me.

The movie cover

[anditjustmadeherkind]

Diana Wrayburn 

“There,” Diana said, checking the bandage on Gwyn’s arm one last time. “I wish I could give you an iratze, but . . .” 

She let her voice trail off, feeling silly. She was the one who had insisted they go to her rooms in Alicante so she could bandage his wound, and Gwyn had been quiet ever since. 

He had slapped his horse’s flank after they’d climbed from it into her window, sending it soaring into the sky. 

She’d wondered as he looked around her room, his bicolored eyes taking in all the visible traces of her life—the used coffee mugs, the pajamas thrown into a corner, the ink-stained desk—whether she’d made the right decision bringing him here. She had let so few people into her personal space for so many years, showing only what she wanted to show, controlling access to her inner self so carefully. She had never thought the first man she allowed into her room in Idris would be an odd and beautiful faerie, but she knew when he winced violently as he sat down on her bed that she had made the right call. 

She’d gritted her teeth in sympathetic pain as he started to peel away his barklike armor. Her father had always kept extra bandages in the bathroom; when she returned from her trip there, gauze in hand, she found Gwyn shirtless and grumpy-looking on her rumpled blanket, his brown hair almost the same color as her wooden walls. His skin was several shades paler, smooth and taut over bones that were just a shade alien. 

“I do not need to be ministered to,” he said. “I have always bandaged my own wounds.” 

Diana didn’t answer, just set about making a field dressing. Sitting behind him as she worked, she realized it was the closest she’d ever been to him. She’d thought his skin would feel like bark, like his armor, but it didn’t: It felt like leather, the very softest kind that was used to make scabbards for delicate blades. 

“We all have wounds that are sometimes better cared for by someone else,” she said, setting the box of bandages aside. 

“And what of your wounds?” he said. 

“I wasn’t injured.” She got to her feet, ostensibly to prove to him that she was fine, walking and breathing. Part of it was also to put some distance between them. Her heart was skipping beats in a way she didn’t trust. 

“You know that is not what I meant,” he said. “I see how you care for those children. Why do you not just offer to head the Los Angeles Institute? You would make a better leader than Arthur Blackthorn ever did.” 

Diana swallowed, though her mouth was dry. “Does it matter?” 

“It matters in that I wish to know you,” he said. “I would kiss you, but you draw away from me; I would know your heart, but you hide it in shadow. Is it that you do not like or want me? Because in that case I will not trouble you.” 

There was no intention to cause guilt in his voice, only a plain statement of fact. 

If he had made a more emotional plea, perhaps she would not have responded. As it was, she found herself crossing the room, picking up a book from the shelf by the bed. “If you think there’s something I’m hiding, then I suppose you’re right,” she said. “But I doubt it’s what you think.” She raised her chin, thinking of her namesake, goddess and warrior, who had nothing to apologize for. “It’s nothing I did wrong. I’m not ashamed; I’ve no reason to be. But the Clave—” She sighed. “Here. Take this.” 

Gwyn took the book from her, solemn-faced. “This is a book of law,” he said. 

She nodded. “The laws of investiture. It details the ceremonies by which Shadowhunters take on new positions: how one is sworn in as Consul, or Inquisitor, or the head of an Institute.” She leaned over him, opening the book to a well-examined page. “Here. When you’re sworn in as the head of an Institute, you must hold the Mortal Sword and answer the Inquisitor’s questions. The questions are law. They never change.” 

Gwyn nodded. “Which of the questions is it,” he said, “that you do not want to answer?” 

“Pretend you are the Inquisitor,” Diana said, as if he hadn’t spoken. “Ask the questions, and I will answer as if I’m holding the Sword, entirely truthfully.” 

Gwyn nodded. His eyes were dark with curiosity and something else as he began to read aloud. “Are you a Shadowhunter?” 

“Yes,” said Diana. 

“Were you born a Shadowhunter, or did you Ascend?” 

“I was born a Shadowhunter.” 

“What is your family name?” 

“Wrayburn.” 

“And what was the name you were given at birth?” asked Gwyn. 

“David,” said Diana. “David Laurence Wrayburn.” 

Gwyn looked puzzled. “I do not understand.” 

“I am a woman,” said Diana. “I always have been. I always knew I was a girl, whatever the Silent Brothers told my parents, whatever the contradiction of my body. My sister, Aria, knew too. She said she’d known it from the moment I could talk. But my parents—” She broke off. “They weren’t unkind, but they didn’t know the options. They told me I should live as myself at home, but in public, be David. Be the boy I knew I wasn’t. Stay under the radar of the Clave. 

“I knew that would be living a lie. Still, it was a secret the four of us kept. Yet with every year my crushing despair grew. I withdrew from interaction with other Shadowhunters our age. At every moment, waking and sleeping, I felt anxious and uncomfortable. And I feared I would never be happy. Then I turned eighteen. My sister was nineteen. We went to Thailand together to study at the Bangkok Institute. I met Catarina Loss there.” 

“Catarina Loss,” said Gwyn. “She knows. That you are—that you were—” He frowned. “I’m sorry. I don’t know how to say it. That you were named David by your parents?” 

“She knows,” Diana said. “She didn’t know at the time. In Thailand, I lived as the woman I am. I dressed as myself. Aria introduced me as her sister. I was happy. For the first time I felt free, and I chose a name for myself that embraced that freedom. My father’s weapons shop had always been called Diana’s Arrow, after the goddess of the hunt, who was proud and free. I named myself Diana. I am Diana.” She took a ragged breath. “And then my sister and I went out to explore an island where it was rumored there were Thotsakan demons. It turned out not to be demons at all, but revenants— hungry ghosts. Dozens of them. We fought them, but we were both injured. Catarina rescued us. Rescued me. When I woke up in a small house not far away, Catarina was caring for us. I knew she had seen my injuries—that she had seen my body. I knew she knew . . .” 

“Diana,” said Gwyn in his deep voice, and stretched out a hand. But Diana shook her head. 

“Don’t,” she said. “Or I won’t be able to get through it.” Her eyes were burning with unshed tears. 

“I pulled the rags of my clothes around my body. I screamed for my sister. But she was dead, had died while Catarina ministered to her. I broke down completely then. I had lost everything. My life was destroyed. That’s what I thought.” A tear slipped down her face. “Catarina nursed me back to health and sanity. I was in that cottage with her for weeks. And she talked to me. She gave me words, which I’d never had, as a gift. It was the first time I heard the word ‘transgender.’ I broke into tears. I had never realized before how much you can take from someone by not allowing them the words they need to describe themselves. How can you know there are other people like you, when you’ve never had a name to call yourself? I know there must have been other transgender Shadowhunters, that they must have existed in the past and exist now. But I have no way to search for them and it would be dangerous to ask.” A flicker of anger at the old injustice sharpened her voice. “Then Catarina told me of transitioning. That I could live as myself, the way I needed to and be acknowledged as who I am. I knew it was what I wanted. 

“I went with Catarina to Bangkok. But not as David. I went as Diana. And I did not go as a Shadowhunter. I lived with Catarina in a small apartment. I told my parents of Aria’s death and that I was Diana now: They replied that they had told the Council that David was the one who had died. That they loved me and understood, but that I must live in the mundane world now, for I was seeing mundane doctors and that was against the law. 

“It was too late for me to stop them. The Clave was told that David had died out on the island, fighting revenants. They gave David my sister’s death, a death with honor. I wished they had not lied, but if they had to wear white for the boy who was gone, even if he’d never really existed, I couldn’t deny them that. 

“Catarina had worked as a nurse for years. She knew mundane medicine. She brought me to a clinic in Bangkok. I met others like myself there. I wasn’t alone any longer. I was there for three years. I never planned to be a Shadowhunter again. What I was gaining was too precious. I couldn’t risk being discovered, having my secrets flayed open, being called by a man’s name, having who I was denied. 

“Through the years, Catarina guided me through the mundane medical procedure that gave me the body in whose skin I felt comfortable. She hid my unusual test results from the doctors so they would never be puzzled by my Shadowhunter blood.” 

“Mundane medicine,” Gwyn echoed. “It is forbidden, is it not, for a Shadowhunter to seek out mundane medical treatment? Why did Catarina not simply use magic to aid you?” 

Diana shook her head. “I wouldn’t have wanted that,” she said. “A magic spell can always be undone by another spell. I will not have the truth of myself be something that can be dissolved by a stray enchantment or passing through the wrong magical gate. My body is my body—the body I have grown into as a woman, as all women grow into their bodies.” 

Gwyn nodded, though Diana couldn’t tell if he understood. “So that is what you fear,” was all he said. “I’m not afraid for myself,” said Diana. 

“I’m afraid for the children. As long as I’m their tutor, I feel like I can protect them in some way. If the Clave knew what I’d done, that I’d sought out mundane doctors, I’d wind up in prison under the Silent City. Or in the Basilias, if they were being kind.” 

“And your parents?” Gwyn’s face was unreadable. Diana wished he would give her some kind of sign. Was he angry? Would he mock her? His calmness was making her pulse race. “Did they come to you? You must have missed them.” 

“I feared to expose them to the Clave.” Diana’s voice hitched. “Each time they spoke of a clandestine visit to Bangkok, I put them off. And then the news came that they had died, slain in a demon attack. Catarina was the one who told me. I wept all night. I could not tell my mundane friends of my parents’ deaths because they would not understand why I didn’t return home for a funeral. 

“Then news came of the Mortal War. And I realized I was still a Shadowhunter. I could not let Idris suffer peril without a fight. I returned to Alicante. I told the Council that I was the daughter of Aaron and Lissa Wrayburn. Because that was the truth. They knew there had been a brother and a sister and the brother had died: I gave my name as Diana. In the chaos of war, no one questioned me. 

I rose up as Diana in battle. I fought as myself, with a sword in my hand and angel fire in my veins. And I knew I could never go back to being a mundane. Among my mundane friends I had to conceal the existence of Shadowhunters. Among the Shadowhunters I had to hide that I had once used mundane medicine. I knew either way I would have to hide a part of myself. I chose to be a Shadowhunter.” “

Who else has known all this? Besides Catarina?” 

“Malcolm knew. There is a medicine I must take, to maintain the balance of my body’s hormones —I usually get it from Catarina, but there was a time she couldn’t do it, and had Malcolm make it. After that, he knew. He never directly held it over my head, but I was always aware of his knowledge. That he could hurt me.” 

“That he could hurt you,” Gwyn murmured. His face was a mask. Diana could hear her heart beating in her ears. It was as if she had come to Gwyn with her heart in her hands, raw and bleeding, and now she waited for him to produce the knives. 

“All my life I’ve tried to find the place to be myself and I’m still looking for it,” said Diana. 

“Because of that, I have hidden things from people I loved. And I have hidden this from you. But I have never lied about the truth of myself.” 

What Gwyn did next surprised Diana. He rose from the bed, took a step forward, and went down on his knees in front of her. He did it gracefully, the way a squire might kneel to a knight or a knight to his lady. There was something ancient in the essence of the gesture, something that went back to the heart and core of the folk of Faerie. 

“It is as I knew,” he said. “When I saw you upon the stairs of the Institute, and I saw the fire in your eyes, I knew you were the bravest woman ever to set foot on this earth. I regret only that such a fearless soul was ever hurt by the ignorance and fear of others.” 

“Gwyn . . .” 

“May I hold you?” he asked. 

She nodded. She couldn’t speak. She knelt down opposite the leader of the Wild Hunt and let him take her into his broad arms, let him stroke her hair and murmur her name in his voice that still sounded like the rumble of thunder—but now it was thunder heard from inside a warm, closed house, where everyone was safe inside.

[marcythewerewolf]

I am suddenly reminded of my giant, never to be written TDA AU, where the events of Lady Midnight happen a few years earlier, and slightly differently. Malcolm successfully raises Annabel and then kind of kidnaps the Blackthorn kids and quickly loses any control of the situation because Annabel is not a happy zombie girl and Julian and Emma aren’t making things easy for him and Arthur’s ghost is kicking around. Also Diana is trying to hunt them down and the faerie courts get involved. Everyone is mentally ill and everyone is messed up. It’s a disaster, and I just wanted to get it all down somewhere since I love it and it will never be expressed in the two million word epic gothic format it truely deserves, so a super long summary textpost will have to suffice. Warning for being just... so long. This is practically fic, guys. 

It would start shortly after Julian and Emma’s parabatai ceremony, I think, so they’d be fourteen or so and still dealing with this fresh soul bond on their consciences. When the deaths start up Diana successfully conceals them from lil’ Emma, and because all the people who would foil him are too young to really put up a fight or be much of an adversary, Mark doesn’t come back and Malcolm more or less gets away with most of his plan up until the last part. He still needs that Blackthorn blood. 

Meanwhile Julian is starting to have suspicions. Handling most of the Institute’s paperwork in secret, he’s cottoned onto the fact that there is an ongoing investigation and Centurions are in the city (the Clave sent a cursory note to Arthur). He tells Emma and while she tears off to search the city as much as a fourteen year old girl without a car can, he guards the Institute. He’s there when Malcolm turns up and asks to speak to Arthur alone, upstairs. He’s perceptive enough to realize something is off, and confronts Malcolm. Malcolm, who has known Julian for years now and is getting kind of tired of lying, lays it all out on the table. Yeah, sure, I’m totally going to murder someone. I thought your uncle might be nicer to you, since you haven’t harmed me much, literal ninth grader that you are, but I will absolutely take you down and grab Dru if that’s what it takes. I’m a warlock, I could do it. Make a choice, Julian. And don’t get in my way. 

And Julian, still not old enough to grow a beard but with his father’s blood on his hands, hesitates. That’s enough. Arthur draws himself together, falls over his desk, and says Malcolm can have him, under one condition. He has to promise to take care of the Blackthorn children. 

Malcolm is delighted, since a willing sacrifice is so much better. He’ll look after the kiddos, sure thing. No skin off his back, once Annabel is back. But Arthur’s a big man, and Malcolm isn’t, so Julian is enlisted to help carry him out. 

Julian is like neck deep in this and having nine different crises, but there’s no way to back out. He helps carry Uncle Arthur out. He tells Livvy and Ty (all of twelve) to hold down the fort until he gets back, because Uncle Arthur is very, very sick and Malcolm is helping him. Then, once they’re out of earshot, he puts a knife to Malcolm’s throat and makes him swear again, on his life, that the children won’t be harmed. Arthur is important. He’s all that’s keeping their family together. 

“I’ll fix that,” Malcolm reassures him, and portals off, and comes back with Uncle Arthur’s blood all down his shirt and a waxen, slightly stunned looking young woman with long dark hair and Blackthorn eyes in his arms. 

“She tried to stab me a little,” Malcolm says, looking lovestruck, “But I think she’s just in shock. Help me get her to the Institute, will you? Then tell your siblings to pack their bags. Emma too, I suppose.”

The choices at that point are to go along with Malcolm, or tell the Clave that the only family member willing to take care of them all just got murdered by a rogue warlock. Julian is willing to get a little kidnapped for that, at least for now, while he makes another plan. 

He tells the kids and a recently returned, slightly grimy, disappointed Emma that something terrible has happened, he’ll explain later, but for now they need to get out. Then, just for effect, they set the Institute a little bit on fire on the way out. Just the bits they don’t use. 

Malcolm is kind of overwhelmed as well. He expected to be going back to his cottage in Cornwall with Annabel, triumphant, with the Clave none the wiser to his scheme. Instead he’s mildly daggared, and has half a dozen kids on his hands who he kind of promised to take care of. And he may have spilled a bit too much of his plan to Julian, so he doesn’t want the boy leaking that to the Clave. He could just murder all the baby Blackthorns, but that seems a little unfair, especially now that Annabel is awake. She’s less stabby if she wakes up and is immediately disoriented by a ten year old girl asking her lots of questions about her hair. 

The cottage won’t fit them all, but not going to Cornwall is... not an option. He really needs to return to the site the tortures inflicted on him and Annabel to really feel like love has won out. He ends up dropping the kids at the Cornwall Institute, and then staying to keep an eye on them. It’s a place full of bad memories, but it can also fit a lot of people. They dust the spiders out, settle the kids down and then Julian and Malcolm and Annabel have a Chat. 

(Emma is barred, because she still doesn’t know Malcolm killed her parents.  He rather suspects she wouldn’t like that. Julian doesn’t know either, but he trust himself to keep it a secret less with Emma around. She’s wily and more focused on revenge than child protection.)

Julian wants a guarantee of safety for the kids, a modicum of security, all the comforts of home. The Institute at Cornwall, once it’s cleaned out a bit, can provide that. He wants to know they won’t be separated. Malcolm can definitely promise that. Malcolm wants to know that Julian isn’t going to snitch on him to the Clave, or talk to the Clave, or really go anywhere near the Clave. Julian isn’t ready to say that unless the pot is sweetened a little, so Malcolm pulls his ace. He has contacts in Faerie and he can try to negotiate for Mark’s return. That seals the deal. 

Annabel doesn’t say much, but she’s listening very closely, and occasionally asking questions about how the Clave works these days, and how the Blackthorn kids are related to her, and how they ended up parentless, and why Julian is so blase about the fact his uncle just got stabbed. The last one kind of messes Julian up, which by extension messes Annabel up, and Malcolm kind of vaguely dismisses the meeting by picking up his girlfriend and fleeing. 

MEANWHILE

Diana Wrayburn shows up to work the next morning and finds out that all her charges have disappeared into the night with most of their possessions, there is blood all over the front hall (Arthurs) and also a third of the Institute is smoking mildly. Authorities are alerted. A full scale investigation is launched, with Diana both desperately trying to find her kids and also not blow her cover. 

Ty is exploring the grounds of the Institute, finding lots of fun bugs and hidey-holes and investigating. Dru is helping. Livvy is locked in a spider free room with Taavy. Ty finds lots of interesting old books, some sketches, and some hints of Annabel and Malcolm’s former life. He thinks they were nice. They grew up together, just like Julian and Emma!

Back to the big couples, Emma is not happy about being locked out of the loop, and compensates by finding Julian ASAP and grilling him for details. She gets... some of them. Not enough. There is a parabatai fight, ending in a parabatai makeup, because even Emma has to admit it’s all pretty messed up. Julian finally spills some more deets, like the fact that Arthur has been ill for years and also he died as part of a ritual to bring Annabel back from the dead. He says Arthur’s participation in this human sacrifice was “not really voluntary, I don’t think, it was messed up”. He does not mention his part in the messed up. Then he says Malcolm can get Mark back. Emma says she thinks Malcolm is very shady now and she doesn’t trust Annabel, but for Mark, she’ll refrain from stabbing. 

In a closed room, behind two sets of doors, Annabel is saying much the same thing to Arthur’s ghost. Arthur, like any good if befuddled uncle leaving his brother’s kids with a murderous immortal, decided to stick around through the afterlife. Unfortunately none of the Blackthorn kids can see him, so he can’t do much for them. Annabel on the other hand spent a lot of time dead and is very much aware of his presence. They have a conversation that more or less boils down to: “Your life sucks, my life sucked, Malcolm is messed up, I’m sorry, but let’s focus on the little ones, shall we?” There are some arguments. Even in death Arthur is still prone to rambling. His illness didn’t stop when his heart did. Annabel just got forcibly revived and is just super duper traumatized. They bounce off of each other for a while before Arthur makes an impassioned plea on the behalf his niblings, which is only slightly ruined by the fact that he can’t remember some of their names. Annabel decides that she will also not stab, and she will go talk to Malcolm. There are going to be some changes around here. She didn’t come back from the dead to be anyone’s happy ending, especially not Mr. Murder A Middle Aged Invalid. They’re doing things Annabel style now. 

*cue sunglasses and long YEAAAH*

*also cue the disaster of the century as six kids, a murderer, a ghost, and a dead girl, try to play happy families in a rundown old ghost house in England*

 Malcolm is pretty desperate to please, even if it means playing nice with the little Blackthorns. He pretended to love them for years, pretended so hard sometimes he forgot he didn’t. He can pretend a little longer, especially if it’s what Annabel wants, or at least what he thinks Annabel wants. 

Julian and Emma are pretty desperate to keep Malcolm and Annabel away from the kids, but aren’t sure how to do so without revealing the whole “semi-murdered Uncle Arthur” thing which seems... less than ideal. So at least for a little while it’s all adorable, slightly creepy hijinks. Malcolm tries to take Tavvy and Dru down to the store in town for a shopping trip, Emma runs interference. Unbeknownst to anyone, Uncle Arthur’s ghost helps. Annabel and Livvy bond while Julian freaks out in the background. Everyone pitches in with magic and runes to get the spiders out of the basement, but because of Ty’s campaigning they have to do it non-lethally. Just good, cute, unsettling stuff while the kids settle into the abandoned Institute and Annabel readjusts to life. Movie night! Ice cream on the beach! 

Annabel and the twins bond especially. She values their contributions a lot, and they like having someone new and adult and mostly trustworthy around. She’s like a cool older sister who’s actually old enough to drive. Sometimes you can hear her wake up screaming at night, but it’s all fine. She shows them all the places around town and the Institute where she and Malcolm used to hide and play, teaches them about the animals and the plants and the pixies in the sea grass. She and Livvy spar. It’s very sweet. People on th

All the while Julian and Emma are putting pressure on Malcolm to follow through on his promise to get Mark back. Malcolm is busy doting on Annabel and cleaning up the cottage and setting up wards to protect them all from the Clave, but Julian and Emma are insistent. They demand action. This is because they have a Plan, or at least thirty percent of one. 

Since they’re still kids, and they are technically hostages, they figure they’re all right. No one can blame children for cooperating with their captors. They snuck into town to call Helen and Aline, assured them that they were all right, and checked in on the status of the Clave (the investigation into the disappearance of the Blackthorn children is ongoing but being blamed on faeries because why not?). All the while they’re collecting information on Malcolm, what magic he has active, and what his ties are the the courts, so that they’ll have a good body of blackmail material. They general gist of the plan is to get Mark then make a run for it and seek refuge in Idris, possibly lighting some things on fire on the way out. With information and maybe a few magic relics grabbed from Malcolm, they figure they can make a deal with the Consul. At the very least, Mark will be with Helen, and not alone. 

It isn’t a very good plan, but they’re fourteen. So sue them. 

Malcolm is dragging his feet though, which means Emma and Julian are left brooding and trying to take care of the kids and maintain some order in an orderless environment. Julian gives them lessons, so they won’t be behind when they go back. He and Annabel bond over art, it’s great. 

BACK WITH DIANA

Things are not great. She’s been cleared of all suspicion, because why would she be the culprit, she’s a Shadowhunter, but there’s little progress on actually finding the Blackthorn kids. The Clave is super not happy, since Nephilim blood is precious and losing six full blooded Shadowhunters in training at once is less than ideal, but all they’ve done is sent lots of war parties to negotiate with the Seelie and Unseelie courts which Diana doesn’t think is going to get them anywhere. The whole thing is quickly becoming less about finding the children, and more about demonizing faeries, and by extension, Downworlders, further, and she’s had enough. 

She makes a choice. She leaves Idris and the investigation, goes back to LA, and starts searching for the truth on her own. This cop is going rogue. Of course, like most people looking for something in LA, she starts with Johnny Rook, who is locked down in his house under like twenty wards. 

After she breaks in, she and Johnny argue a lot. She meets little Kit, which gives her enough bargaining power in the conversation to weasel out of Johnny that Malcolm is the one who told him to hide, that Shadowhunters were looking for trouble. Diana realizes that Malcolm must have been a suspect as well, he was close to the Blackthorns, and goes to his LA house, only to find it abandoned. She calls him, he tells her he got interrogated but didn’t have anything helpful to say and wanted to get out of town in case they were looking for someone to blame. 

Dead end. Diana decides to take a different approach. She asks Catarina and some other warlocks of her acquaintance to help dig up a connection between the Blackthorns and the deaths the Silent Brothers told her to hide, the ones killing faeries and humans around Los Angeles. Looking back, she thinks she recognizes the symbols on the bodies from Emma’s Wall of Revenge, and there’s a definite suspicious circumstance there. Then she figures out how to get to Wrangel Island to talk to Helen and Aline. 

They’re weirdly unhelpful, closed off and edgy about the investigation. Part of that might be that they’ve been hurt before, but Diana feels like something is off. It all stinks, and she needs to figure out why. 

So she goes back to Johnny Rook. This time, she’s getting answers, even if she has to camp out in front of his house and harass him to get them. 

Arthur’s ghost and Annabel are bonding over the time they spent in Cornwall as young people, centuries apart, and the dangers of loving where love is forbidden. Annabel opens up about her memories of her death a little and has some traumatic flashbacks. Arthur quotes Marcus Aurelius at her. 

Malcolm finally brings Iarlath home and introduces him to Julian and Emma, “Yes, these are the children I am in a mutual blackmail pact with, my girlfriend loves the little rascals to death, bless them” and starts to open the issue of Mark. Iarlath is here for his own reason entirely. Shadowhunters are asking about children, Malcolm. They’re very insistent. It’s making trouble and it’s jeopardizing the King’s interests. You need to either kill these kids and blame it on some else or return them in a non-dangerous way. Like, maybe cut out their tongues so they can’t say anything? Idk, just a suggestion. 

Malcolm: Dude, Annabel wouldn’t approve of that. 

Iarlath: Why does everyone always get boring after they get into a relationship?

Emma and Julian are both obviously very alarmed, but Julian, a forward thinker, always, has a way to pull this in his advantage. The Clave isn’t happy, huh? Well, he could make that easier, maybe misdirect them a little bit. Some anonymous letters saying the kids have run away, for example, or some other way to push blame onto an alternate party. Iarlath gets where he’s going and has to admit, it’s not a terrible plan to shift the fault. In fact, the Seelie Court has a long history of cooperating with the kidnapping of Blackthorn children, doesn’t it?

Julian is starting to feel a little bit out of his depth, so Emma makes some vague threats as well, and Iarlath decides he’ll talk it over with his king and get back to you, Malcolm and kids. Maybe you’ll get your big brother back, who knows? In the meantime, the Unseelie Court will be keeping a close eye on him. 

Everyone leaves the meeting feeling a little shaken up. Malcolm suggests a day out on the town, mostly because he really hates being in the Institute, but their plans get interrupted when Annabel sprints in saying that she saw a warlock woman with blue skin in town. Luckily the lady didn’t known her, or know enough to recognize Annabel in jeans and a tee, but Annabel rightly surmises that this means someone is poking around Cornwall. They hustle the kids down to the basement and Malcolm goes back to his cottage to run interception on Catarina, who started looking up Blackthorn scandals as a favour to Diana, remembered Malcolm’s history with the family, and is now getting suspicious. Ty beats everyone at Uno while Malcolm convinces Catarina that he’s looking for the missing Blackthorn tykes too, really! He decided to use their old family home in England as a base, figuring English raised Arthur might decide to come back if they were to escape from their captors. 

Catarina buys it, but just barely, and she leaves sounding mighty suspicious. This means that it’s probably time for a change of pace. Time to hide out in the Unseelie Court!

The Blackthorns are reluctant to go, and so is Annabel, for her own reasons. Since Arthur spent a lot of time in Cornwall when he was younger, he can more or less hang out around the Institute, but he can’t come to Faerie, and she likes having a ghostly presence on her side. Also, knowing he was who rescued Malcolm but not her, she is not the Unseelie King’s biggest fan. 

There’s an argument, and despite technically having more power in this situation, Malcolm is helplessly outnumbered and gets shot down. Eventually he concedes defeat, but does point out that it’s probably not a good idea for the kids to leave the Institute anymore, which does Not make Livia happy, because, as it turns out, she has been taking advantage of the trips to make friends with a bunch of local girls and now has a crush on a mundane girl she met at the beach. 

Nevertheless, Julian rules, best to stay safe. Livia flounces off to sulk, accompanied by a sympathetic Dru. Emma goes to practice stabbing things, since she has a lot of anger issues to work out at this point and is getting antsy cooped up. All the Shadowhunters kind of are. They’re meant for fights, not interminable politics. 

Back with Diana and the Rooks, we get a lot of worldbuilding about the Market and Johnny’s place in it while Diana just relentlessly trails him, and by extension little Kit, though she is trying to leave the kid out of it. 

She has lots of contacts due to her medical needs, but nothing like Johnny’s reservoir of friends and favours. She sees Barnabas and Anselm, and marks Anselm down on her list of suspects since he and Arthur were close. Nothing related to the Blackthorns other than a lot of ill-will comes up, though everyone is even more against the fair folk these days, and she sees Hyacinth putting up a fight against the new surge of prejudice. 

Eventually Johnny catches her and she and he have a long conversation full of thinly veiled threats. Diana brings up Emma’s visits to him, Johnny points out that that’s more Diana’s fault then his, then makes a veiled reference to Diana’s medical status. Diana lashes back with an ill thought out jab at Johnny’s kid, young Kit, and Johnny panics a little. Actually, a lot. Maybe even a little too much. 

In a flash of insight, Diana throws one of her weapons at him, and it lights up when he catches it, confirming her suspicions. She now has the power needed to make Johnny talk, at least a little, but finds with a sinking feeling that she really doesn’t want to use it. She’s not going to ruin another set of lives through the Clave. She apologizes, recommends Johnny find Kit a good combat teacher because she saw that boy trying to come and confront her a few times and if he’s that much of a troublemaker he should know how to fight, then excuses herself, promising not to mention it to anyone. Johnny, in a rare show of good faith, throws her a line. Something is going on with the Unseelie, something dark and complicated, and factions inside faerie aren’t happy about it. He suggests she find someone there willing to talk to her. 

Once again, it comes back to the fair folk. Diana is not thrilled. 

And a cut to Helen and Aline, who have their own stuff going on. When your mysteriously missing younger sibling calls you out of the middle of nowhere and tells you not to worry, it somehow raises even more questions. Helen trusts Julian absolutely, but she also knows he’s just a kid and whatever’s going on with him, he’s going to need help. So Helen is kind of putting together an army, through Skype. She’s got Magnus and Alec, who know Clary and Jace are at the Seelie Court, interrogating her and looking for the kids. She knows there are other people out looking for them too. Someone named Tessa and someone named Jem and a lot of other Downworlders, who know clearing their name is bound to get the Clave to stop poking around. The New York Wolf pack and Magnus’s alliance have promised to help out if things come to a fight. 

Aline is handling the Shadowhunter side of things, coordinating with her mom and listening to gossip from her dad and passing it on. Meanwhile Helen and Aline both are keeping their eyes on some weird ward activity, looking for any sign that they need to call in the troops. 

Diana calls up Anselm Nightshade and has a nice chat with him about the best way to get in touch with the fey outside of Clave rules. Anselm, who used to be a Shadowhunter once, comments that he knows for a fact the Rosales family used to have ties to them, and they’re not too far away. Diana considers this for a while, considers Anselm with his shady business dealings and seventeen tiny dogs, and then decides she’s going to trust him on this one. In the meantime, she asks him to talk to the local Downworlders and make it clear that the best way to get this Manhunt and Blame Party About The Blackthorn Children over with is to find the real culprits. Otherwise, the Clave and all the Shadowhunters who she knows have just been waiting for a chance to scapegoat the Downworlders? They’ll start a war, or a registration or something. 

Anselm agrees. He’s seen this sort of situation before, he’ll keep an eye out. Questionable business ventures or not, he knows no one really profits in a conflict, especially not the closest people to the epicenter of it. 

With that promise in hand, and some century old intel on the Rosales, Diana heads down to Mexico City to find someone to talk to about faeries. 

Back at the Blackthorn house, tensions are running high when Iarlath comes back and says that the king will see them, in person, to discuss the matters of Mark Blackthorn and getting the Clave off their back, because it is kind of an emergency at this point? It’s getting emergent. He doesn’t say as much, but he does look a little nervous. 

With Catarina poking around, leaving anyone behind isn’t really an option. They’re going to have to haul everyone to the Unseelie Court, including the little kids. Julian isn’t happy about that, but no one is really happy about this. Time passes strangely in faerie land after all, and they have no guarantee except the King’s word that things will still be peachy when they get back. 

Still, they get everyone decked out in coats and socks and sturdy shoes, pack some bags of food and weapons (though Iarlath insists that they won’t need the latter) and set out for the nearest fairy fort to make their entrance, Iarlath escorting them and making all the Blackthorns very uncomfortable. 

(Annabel whispers goodbye to Arthur before they go, and promises to take care of his nieces and nephews. Arthur gives her some bizarre advice about dealing with the fey, then promises to look after the house.)

They trek across faerie, which takes more time than it should because Taavy and Dru get tired and Emma gets distracted by a revel and kisses a very cute boy who then turns out to be about four hundred years old. Iarlath tries to rush them, but Annabel and Emma object to being bossed around on principle and push back. When they enter Unseelie lands, Julian is the first to notice that their runes don’t work like they’re supposed to, since he’s been using them to keep everyone old enough to wear them awake and moving. Malcolm administers some emergency ice cream as a replacement, and they all move on, but are moderately freaked out because Faerie isn’t supposed to work like this and Iarlath refuses to answer questions on the topic. 

Eventually they make it to the court, where the Unseelie King greets Malcolm like he knows him, and Annabel like he knows of her, and gives the Blackthorn children a general unimpressed once over before asking who he’s supposed to be negotiating with here, because all he sees are children. Not even big children! 

Julian, trying to hold hands with all four of his younger siblings at once, says it’s him, he’s in charge. Relatively in charge. Emma is his stony faced backup while he awkwardly makes his case, but the entire thing is undermined by the fact that Dru is staring at everything and Ty is laying on his stomach inspecting the grass with interest, and also he’s holding a six year old. Livvy is getting increasing distracted by the nice boys, presumably the king’s youngest sons, on the edge of the circle, and is starting to wander off towards them, and eventually does escape with her twin to explore, much to everyone in the Court’s delight. The overwhelming impression is that they think this is like watching a bunch of kittens trying to scam the UN. Very cute, little Shadowhunters. 

Livvy, meanwhile, is making friends and taking names among the preteen section of the Unseelie Court, while Ty hangs back and listens carefully. One boy pushing his way from the very back of the throng is catching his attention though. He looks about thirteen, or so, with fair hair and the rich clothes of nobility, and people keep trying to hold him back from the Shadowhunters but he’s hard to deter. Ash, as he introduces himself, hasn’t ever seen a Shadowhunter before and has some questions. Livvy is tightlipped on the subject of her family, but friendly, and asks lots of questions in return. Ty, sensing based on the sudden guard presence around them, that this fellow young man is important, very loudly brings up the subject of their brother Mark who was stolen from them and who they really want back. Ty is straightforward, but earnest, and eventually the adults around decide that a pair of twelve year olds, Shadowhunters or not, probably aren’t a threat to Ash and the younger princes. They all talk about weapons for a while, while Ty, a born mystery solver, hangs back and thinks for a while about where he’s seen Ash’s face before.

Diana goes to the Mexico Institute and first has an audience with Cristina’s mother which goes very, very badly and more or less ends with her threatening to call the Clave because they will not be involved in treason. However as Diana leaves, she is pulled into a corner by the dynamic trio of Cristina, Diego, and Jaime, sixteen and fourteen, respectively, and pretty interested all of them in faeries. Cristina especially likes the idea of getting in touch with them, especially to save the Blackthorns (Diego says she has a minor fixation) and is willing to offer her substantial teenage knowledge, access to the Institute library, and the help of some of the elder members of the Rosales clan who Diego and Jaime know might be more sympathetic. Although the family history with the fey doesn’t get discussed much anymore, it’s still there, and it might be enough to help Diana. 

After some hasty research, because she doesn’t know how much of a time limit she’s on, Diana decides the best thing to do would be to jump the moon path as soon as possible and use some information from the Rosales to find the Wild Hunt, one of the parties Anselm mentioned Hyacinth mentioned was not thrilled with the current situation in faerie. She knows Julian and the Blackthorns well enough to know that they’ve never truly forgotten about Mark, and whatever’s going on he might be involved. Seeing the Hunt, much less straight up summoning them, is wildly dangerous, but Diana is willing to give it a try. 

The second young Cristina Rosales, teen optimist, hears about Diana’s plans she wants to come as well, but Diana, Diego, and Jaime all talk her down. Diana departs, alone, to make her way into faerie. On the way in Cristina Rosales catches up with her. Diana tries to send her back, but Cristina refuses to be dissuaded and uses her medallion, a powerful charm against the dangerous time streams of the realm, as a bargaining chip. Since, short of wrestling the Rosales girl home, which Diana doesn’t have time for, she doesn’t know how else to make her go away, she reluctantly accepts her assistance. They cross into faerie together, meeting various guardians along the way and doing the usual faerie song and dance of riddles, enigmatic advice, and strange sacrifices. Diana gives up a weapon that belonged to her late sister, and Cristina is told when she would naturally die, which shakes her even though she admits that as a Shadowhunter she’s probably not going to make it that far. 

Eventually they’re on solid ground, and by a stream of blood, Diana readies herself to call the Wild Hunt. She makes Cristina hide, then calls on Gwyn Ap Nudd. Gwyn Ap Nudd, obediantly, appears, along with a stampede of riders bearing down on her. Without flinching, Diana stands them down, and, shouts her intentions. Gwyn, suitably impressed and a little charmed, stops and dismounts. 

Diana says she is looking for the Blackthorn children, whose disappearance has caused so much chaos, and that failing that she would like to see her brother. For the sake of all of Faerie, this matter must end as soon as possible. 

Gwyn admits he doesn’t have Mark anymore, though he wishes he does. He was taken by emissaries of the Unseelie Court, and is now in their custody. Besides, even if Gwyn wanted to help, which he kind of does because this whole disaster is getting messy and also Diana is very pretty, he couldn’t. He and all his riders swore not to go after Mark. Also, though you are lovely, strange Shadowhunter lady, you did just ring up the Wild Hunt. That has to have consequences. 

Prepared for this by the Rosales kids, Diana answers that she’s willing to meet her fate, but first, she would like a favour. A small gift, for a doomed woman. Gwyn, sensing where this is going and willing to be “tricked” into not murdering this very nice lady, agrees, expecting to be asked for a rowan branch picked by his own hand, or something like that. Which, in fairness had been what Diana was planning. 

Except... a young man with blue hair is making frantic hand gestures as her and he looks like he’s been crying, and do you know what? Diana Wrayburn hasn’t gotten far through playing it safe so far. Instead, Diana asks for his cape. 

Gwyn is furious. He calms down quickly though, seems to realize what’s going on, and begs her to ask him for anything else. Anything but this. 

Now, they’re really cooking with gas. Diana asks for, just to start with, the full story of what’s going on and why. The Hunt, meanwhile, is pulling a discovered Cristina out of the underbrush, but Gwyn waves them down. He’s being blackmailed by an attractive lady over here. 

Gwyn gives up the whole story, and then some, at least as much as he can say without violating his oaths. Something is going on with the Unseelie, it’s not Super Great, Mark was taken by them, he’s probably there now. The other Blackthorn children he hasn’t heard direct word of, but if they took Mark something must be going down. Diana tells him everything she’s figured out as well, that there is a faction in the Clave determined to make life hard for Downworlders, that they’re coming down hard now, that the fey are being scapegoated with every day the Blackthorn kids stay missing. She says that she thinks Julian and Emma left to find Mark and possibly revenge for the deaths of Emma’s parents, who might have been killed by the Fair Folk or another party in the aftermath of the Dark War, as part of some dark rite, and that they’re in way over their head. Also, this is Cristina, she won’t leave me alone, because all I needed was another teen in danger. Gwyn agrees, kids are trouble. For example, slightly traitorous blue haired boy (introduced as Kieran) has been trying to run away every day since Mark was taken, and frankly Gwyn doesn’t blame him. 

Cristina recognizes the sigil on Kieran’s gloves as that of the Unseelie King, and asks if Kieran is one of his sons. Gwyn can neither confirm nor deny. 

Recognizing that Gwyn really wants to help but can’t Diana comes up with a plan. Gwyn can’t go after Mark, but surely he can repay her for not taking his cloak by letting her and Cristina go and lending them Kieran to “guide them to the Unseelie Court” (and most certainly not do any Mark rescuing whatsoever). 

Gwyn is straight up delighted to agree, hands over Kieran with orders to take these nice ladies and help them however he can. Then, just to be safe, he gives Diana a kiss and slips her an acorn she can summon him with in the future. 

Kieran is sulky until he realizes this is his Mark rescue chance, and then brightens up considerably. He still isn’t good company, but he pulls Cristina and Diana up on his horse and swears he’ll convey them to the Unseelie. He really wants his Mark back. Cristina is visibly puzzled as to why, meanwhile Diana is just resigned. She hates working with teenagers so much. 

Back with Julian, the Unseelie King is ready to make his case. It’s a very short case. It goes, hi, we have your brother, we have some ideas of ways to make the Clave leave us alone, and you’re all going to cooperate, or else. Just to make his point, he drags a very bloody, semi-unconscious Mark out, and then starts to make his demands. 

He wants the Blackthorn children, and he wants them peaceably, and frankly since their runes and steles don’t work and they just wandered into his court without securing really good terms of safe passage, he doesn’t think he’s going to have much trouble with this, right Malcolm?

Malcolm hesitates, and Annabel goes off. 

Everyone, faerie and Shadowhunter alike, watches as they have just the most epic row in the history of rows. There is shouting, there are accusations, there’s a lot of “I brought you back to life!” and a lot more of “well maybe you didn’t consider that I didn’t want that!”. It’s messy, both of them are rapidly flirting on the edge of a total nervous breakdown since most of their mental health at this point is questionable. Although it starts off being about the Blackthorn children and how much Malcolm hates them and how much Annabel hates that he hates them (which makes Dru and Tavvy very upset) it eventually devolves into a rehash of their shared past. It’s... disturbingly like Emma and Julian’s childhood, actually. Especially in the details. 

All of their story is awful and heartbreaking and the Unseelie seem to be really into it, honestly, which makes sense. Even Emma and Julian are nodding along as they slowly back away with the kids. The closer they get to the specifics of Annabel’s resurrection though, the more edgy Malcolm (who still has some self preservation instincts) gets. He really doesn’t want Annabel talking about this, but Annabel is on full rant now. She can’t be stopped, won’t be stopped. 

Uncle Arthur’s death, in every gory detail, spills out from her, the way the blood felt on her skin, how she could feel herself coming back to life, inch by painful inch as his lifeblood flowed out. Julian is shaking. The twins are staring in horror, and so are Dru and Tavvy. Even Emma, who mostly knew this happened, is pretty upset. No one likes to hear about an old man being killed. 

But Annabel goes further. She talks about rituals, about hands, about dark murders, about burning and drowning, and Emma slowly starts to feel recognition sink over her. She knows this, she knows she does. 

“So many people, Malcolm!” Annabel shouts, “So many people I had to feel die, just to come back to life. Do you know what that’s like, do you? Ever since you killed that couple two years ago, I felt everything.”

Emma knows at almost the exact same moment Malcolm realizes how close Annabel is to spilling the secrets that have kept Julian and Emma more or less cooperative. He moves on Annabel, hands raised. 

And Emma, in the middle of the Unseelie Court, stabs him in the back with Cortana. 

There is silence for a second. 

Then the Unseelie King starts clapping, and eventually the whole Court is, a hollow sort of applause that rings around the children, cages them in, reminds them of how outnumbered they are. 

“Now that our little piece of theater is over,” he suggests, “And you’ve killed, frankly, the only one of you who I think could put up much of a fight here, why don’t you all surrender?”

Back with Diana, Cristina is in full sixteen year old form, asking Kieran all sorts of questions about the Hunt and Mark and is it really so bad if Gwyn gives up his cloak. Kieran is ignoring her, and Diana is focusing on logistics. She isn’t so naive as to think they’ll be able to charge into a full faerie court and win. She’s going to have to do this stealthily. Luckily Kieran, who knows his way around the court, thinks he can help. Anything to help Mark. 

In the Unseelie Court, things are not going great. Annabel has rallied and is trying to make a case for herself and the Blackthorn kids, using some of Arthur’s quotes about Faeries and also some random latin, but while it does distract everyone (there’s nothing the folk love more than a good show and a compelling disaster, and Annabel is more or less the Hottest of Messes right now) she isn’t putting together much of a coherent argument. Julian grabs one of her lines about “children and the mad” though and uses it to point out that technically, all the Blackthorn’s fall under the purview of the fey right now, and can therefore demand certain rights, unlike enemy Shadowhunters who wandered in illegally. 

And... no one can really argue right now that they aren’t children and Annabel isn’t mentally ill, but really, child, what are you going to do with that, demand trial by combat?

Almost immediately upon hearing that this is an option, Emma does so. She wants trial by combat! For Mark! He’s blood, and blood matters to faeries, and they want him back, as is their right as relatives. 

The Unseelie King accepts, of course, because it would be wrong not to. However he’s not willing to let Emma face combat, he needs these kids alive to placate the Clave. No, he wants Annabel. 

Annabel isn’t in any sort of state to fight right now, that much is obvious. She’s a powerful warrior, but no one staring at the love of their life’s corpse on the ground is really in much of a state to fight. Whatever her (big) issues with Malcolm, they did love each other, and between that and the Baseline Stress of being Annabel Lee Blackthorn at this point, she’s barely managing to not disassociate out of her. 

Julian is actually ninety percent panicking now, because he doesn’t want Emma to fight but also he doesn’t want Annabel to lose (which she definitely will). Emma grabs his arm, taps “TRUST ME” on his hand, and nods. He knows what he has to do, he clearly does, even if she doesn’t entirely yet. 

So Jules, well read up on the fey because he’s had to be, fourteen, and utterly determined, steps forward, kneels next to Annabel, and slashes a tendon in her left leg. Blood spurts, Annabel collapses. Then he stands up. 

“I think technically Annabel is injured now, and unable to fight duels? Take Emma, or me, I guess, but I think you’re going to have better luck convincing the Clave Emma accidentally died then me. She’s impulsive, you see.”

He keeps eye contact until the Unseelie King, rapidly losing patience with this and the Blackthorn kids period, gives the order to have his champion readied. They’re fighting a duel with a little girl, apparently. 

Against the fully armoured faerie knight, Emma looks even more outmatched than wild eyed Annabel (who Julian is now trying to bandage up without looking away from his parabatai). She proves herself quickly however, making up for what she lacks in reach and size and experience with sheer tenacity and down and dirty fighting. At one point she does knee her opponent in the groin. She’s got way more skill than her age would suggest, and she gets him down on the ground eventually. Jules’ nod is all the confirmation that she needs that she needs to make the killing blow. 

She’s killed faeries before, but here, in the hush of the ring, with her adversary prone and not actively trying to kill her, it feels different. When she removes his helmet with shaking hands, she’s almost unsurprised to see her mother staring at her with wide, fearful eyes. 

Emma hesitates. She falls to pieces. And amid the laughing of the crowd, there is a childish shriek and Ty drags Ash forward, with a knife to his throat. 

Livia has a split second of trying to scold him for being rude, before she realizes that this is her twin and she’s always behind him. She draws her sword too, and uses it to keep everyone else at bay as Ty pulls Ash in front of the King, which takes longer than you’d think. Ash is strong for his age, or anyone’s age, and clearly has some combat training, but turns out to be no match for the combined strength of the twins and the element of surprise. 

As soon as Ty grabs him, the earth starts quaking, little shakes at first, but growing in size. By the time they’re standing in front of the furious King, next to Julian, the rumble is audible and Ty has to shout over it to say, 

“Let us go, or we’ll kill the Queen’s son.”

He doesn’t mention the other thing, because he’s not sure of it yet, but the moment of recognition as Dru looks at the boy is enough. Ty’s good at mysteries, and he knows this boy is the key to freedom. 

Back at Wrangel Island, Helen and Aline have already noticed the surges of magic around LA and Cornwall that marked Malcolm’s death. Now their entire maps are going wild. Something is up, as clearly as the sky is blue. Helen calls Magnus, waking him up from sleep, and tells him it’s time. Magnus turns over and wakes up Alec, who immediately contacts Jace, who is in the Seelie Court feeling the same phenomenon, and tells the Queen to find every warrior she can, now. Jem and Tessa, crashing on the Bane-Lightwood apartment’s pullout couch while they help with the case of the Missing Blackthorn kids, wake up immediately ready to help. Slowly, an army pulls together. 

In Los Angeles, Johnny Rook grabs Kit off the couch and throws him through the front door, before a swarm of demons descend on the house. Across the city, Catarina, searching Malcolm’s house, has had to save herself from the whole thing collapsing on her. When she fights her way out of the rubble, she notices the cloud of demons down city immediately, and on instinct moves to help. 

She gets to a bloody and running Kit, recognizes his face even though years of inheritance has changed it so much. With him pulled tightly to her side, she banishes the demons, using almost every bit of power she has. She’s older than Magnus, and she knows what she’s doing. 

Even with her considerable skills, it’s too late for Johnny once she gets to him, and she feels a moment of regret for the great-great-great adopted grandchild she never knew.

Then, because she’s a healer, she takes Kit away. It’s not healthy for a boy his age to be seeing things like this. 

The hostage situation unfolding in the Unseelie Court is Not Going Great. Weapons are finally being drawn, patience with these Shadowhunters wearing thin. Ash is still trying to fight free, and has bit Ty doing so, and now both Ty and Livia and Dru are restraining him one limb at a time. The ground is still quaking. Their steles are shaking slightly to, which concerns everyone. Emma is still on the ground, cradling what looks like her mother. Still, Ty remains adamant and the fact that they aren’t dead yet means he’s on to something. Julian pushes their hand. 

Except, as the Unseelie King reminds him coldly, he has a hostage too. He turns back to Mark... 

Only to find the guards around Mark in various states of being on the ground, and Kieran and a young dark haired girl in Shadowhunter clothes trying to sneak him away. Mark, who refused to even look at his half-siblings when they were placed in front of him, is similarly reluctant to trust Kieran. The Unseelie Court put him through some stuff. He is, however, not as opposed to Cristina, who’s a relative stranger and not immediately threatening.  

More faeries approach them, but Kieran shoots them, even as his father shouts curses on him as a traitor, and other things to the tune of “you get back here right now, young man!” Kieran wavers, but stays firm. Gotta save that Mark. 

In this drama, Annabel crawls Emma, still crying on the ground, but mostly forgotten amid the chaos. Emma is desperately trying to help her “mother” but no one is paying attention. 

Annabel pries her hands away, holds her close, and talks low and fast to her, about Julian, about the Blackthorns. 

You love him, don’t you? More than life itself? You would do anything for him, you have done anything for him. You put your revenge aside to help his brother, Arthur heard, Arthur told me, sweet girl. Now, put aside the past to help him, or he might die.

Her words shake Emma out of her reverie, just enough. It’s the memory of Julian’s skin on hers and the Blackthorn children, and the Hall of Accords when there was nothing but each other that helps her the rest of the way. 

She stares down at her mother, her mother’s lips moving, begging for help, telling her how much she loves her, how much she cares. 

“I avenged you”, she promises, and stabs down. 

The glamour lifts, and Emma, shaken but now starting to realize that she’s been tricked, pulls herself up, and Annabel as well. Waving Cortana wildly, they hobble over to Julian and the others. Faeries try to stop them, with swords and blows, but Diana is over her, protecting her, and helps get them back to the main group, the Blackthorn children and the wailing, increasingly hard to control Ash. 

Kieran and Cristina make a break for the woods with Mark, and Diana leans into Julian’s ear and says, “Explanations later. Your brother is safe, we need to go.”

Julian nods, and slowly the little bundle starts moving backwards, using Ash as a shield, the ground shaking underneath them. The court lets them, because they have no other choice. As soon as they’re away from the bulk of the group, Julian scoops Tavvy onto his back, tells Dru to hold onto him, and tells them all to run. 

They try. 

It’s nearly impossible, as a cluster of children and unwilling hostages and the injured. They can’t even let go of Ash for long enough to hand him to Emma, because he is just a tiny wolverine of a boy, and so Ty and Livvy are burdened down. Annabel is still limping. 

Kieran and Cristina are waiting for them, because Cristina made them, but they still have only one horse and no hope of escaping on foot. Kieran, realizing how big of a rescue operation this is, starts to regret things. The King and his steeds will be coming, sooner rather than later. 

Annabel, leaning on Emma for balance, right herself mostly and asks for a sword, because she’s going to stay behind and fight them off while everyone else runs. There are protests, some more heartfelt than others, but at the moment with her hair in her face  and her eyes flat, it seems to be the only thing Annabel is sure of. 

“I promised your Uncle I’d take care of you,” she say, “And it is not fair for the living to die, when the dead are right there to take the blow. Now go.”

Julian and Diana, no nonsense to the end, make them. Kieran is already gone, and he’s taken Mark and Cristina with him (To get the Hunt and help, he promises, but his horse cannot carry more, especially not people who might fall off, and though Cristina tries to give up her seat to Tavvy and Dru, the little ones can’t be trusted there) Livia pauses and reaches over Ash to pat Annabel’s hand and say goodbye. Emma lingers the longest, making sure everyone else runs into the woods, runs toward safety. 

“Thank you,” she says to Annabel. 

Annabel shrugs. “Go. Love your Julian, make the most of it.”

Emma is momentarily too scandalized to remember she needs to run. “We’re parabatai,” she points out, “It’s illegal.”

Annabel, sweet Annabel, shrugs. “Two centuries ago, I could not love Malcolm,” she points out. “And I paid the price. Make a better story, Emma Carstairs. And take care of our nephews and nieces. Now, run for your life.”

Emma does. Being young and fast, she catches up with the others quickly, and then keeps pace with them as they trip and fall over roots and branches, as the earth shakes around them. Julian tries to make Ty let Ash go, but as he collapses to the ground the earth starts going suspiciously ashy around him so Ty just grabs him by the collar again and keeps running. No time for that, whatever that was. 

They run, and run, and run, as the hounds close in behind them. There are some screams, Annabel’s, behind them. Diana gives in and picks up Dru, so they can go faster. 

Soon they are running on ash, white as the moon, and not the forest floor. Soon they are running breathless. 

When the army comes out of nowhere in front of them, Emma almost goes at the first person she sees just on instinct. The fact that it’s Clary Fray, looking oddly at home on a faerie horse, somewhat dissuades her. 

Ash, screaming at the top of his lungs, and Ty, halfway to a meltdown and screaming with him, collapse into a puddle as the group stops short and are quickly separated by Seelie Knights, which does seems to make Ash shape up somewhat. He seems almost... relieved? Delighted? Only Ty is really sure what’s going on and Ty has decided that if he is no longer needed he’s just going to fall apart. Livvy holds him tightly, but she’s crying as well. The rest of the Blackthorn kids dissolve as well, once the immediate threat is gone. Emma is injured from her duel, and finally realizes it. Tavvy and Dru are shellshocked but in the clingy way kids are. They refuse to let go of Julian, and Julian refuses to let go of Emma, and Emma won’t let go of anyone because she’s terrified if she does they’ll die, and frankly even though Clary and Jace are here, Emma isn’t really in a mental place to trust anyone anymore. 

Diana takes over as the leading adult, which is good, especially when Kieran shows up with the Hunt. Someone needs to adult here. She helps bandage Emma up, because runes still aren’t quite working. Then, once they’re back in the relative safety of the Unseelie Court, a blonde woman who looks like Mark applies poultices to Emma and the Blackthorns and a totally out of it Mark who calls her something in the language of the faeries that makes her cry. Then, she puts them all to bed. 

When they wake up, the world makes a little more sense. 

Things have been sorted out more or less in secret, in meetings between the Seelie Queen and Clary and Magnus, and at least one that blue haired Kieran got to attend which he is very proud of. Once Mark is sensible, there are tearful reunions. Diana introduces them all to Cristina, who “gives Emma a run for her money in terms of bullheadedness”. 

Clary brings them all in front of the Queen, who is resplendent. Ash, the screaming boy, looks very different and yet very much the same, in Seelie finery, sitting on the step below her. He and Ty and Livia make faces at each other. 

The matter of Ash’s ancestry is not exactly brought up, but with him in full daylight, it’s impossible to deny whose child he is. Emma looks livid. Julian just looks resigned. A tired looking Clary promises it’s all under control, seriously, auntie’s promise just, maybe don’t mention this to the Clave? It could make things... difficult. 

All the Blackthorn children promise, as long as they get Mark back. 

That’s more difficult to negotiate, but it gets done, and he’s theirs again, fresh faced and shining. Kieran is reluctant to see him go, but he’s even more reluctant to see Mark hurt again. 

Politics happen, in bits and pieces, but with their brother returned to them, the Blackthorn children don’t care. 

It’s when they get back to the Clave that things really get complicated. There are rounds of questioning, the Mortal Sword again, for the second time in their young lives. Clary coaches them all carefully on what to say, so as not to reveal too much. The reveal that Malcolm and the Unseelie Court collaborated on some great evil that literally shook magic to its core is enough to spook the Clave, they don’t need to know about Ash or some of the other messy stuff. 

The Cold Peace is upheld, to some extent, because there can be no forgiveness after what the Unseelie King did. The Queen on the other hand, is reluctantly welcomed back into the fold, some of the restrictions on her are weakened. 

It’s all Jia can do to protect Mark from the same backlash, but she does, using the great help the Blackthorns were and their bravery, convince the Clave that Mark can be forgiven, Helen pardoned. It will take a while to reassign Helen and Aline back, but they will come back and take over the LA institute as soon as anyone can find a qualified replacement for them. In the meantime, Diana is the Blackthorn children’s temporary guardian. It’s an empty gesture, at this point everyone important knows that Julian has been raising the kids for a while. 

Still, it seems important to at least try to protect the children, though at this point, Livia says they might as well not try. Been there, done that, been traumatized. 

(Tavvy and Dru are back to having nightmares of death and their father’s blood, except this time it’s Malcolm who’s being stabbed. Never mind how cruel he was, first he was kind and that’s a hard thing to forget. Livia and Ty’s nightmares are more ghoulish, they dream of Annabel’s fate and the empty Cornwall beach and the ground turning to ash underneath them. Emma doesn’t have nightmares, but she and Julian aren’t really sleeping these days. They sit up together instead, in each other’s arms, with the kids on the bed next to them, and find that as long as they draw an energy rune the next morning, they’re fine, which is weird. Maybe being in faerie made them stronger.)

Before Helen and Aline come back, there is one more thing to do. Julian asks Magnus to take them all to Cornwall, to the Institute there, and with all the Blackthorn children in the main hall, he thanks Uncle Arthur. He tells him their all fine now, they’re safe, and Mark and Helen are coming home, and please, if he can, he should be at peace now. The Blackthorns have had enough restlessness in death. 

Then, he and Emma take the children back out, through the paths Malcolm and Annabel once walked, and they go home. 

(As they pass the church on the way out, there’s an incident with a demon that has Magnus very concerned, but Emma and Julian light everything on fire, so it’s an issue for another day.)

Some more notes on this AU

Jem and Tessa are kind of miffed that as soon as they took a second to spend on another project, Catarina found the lost Herondale child before they could. They very much appreciate her help saving Kit though. Catarina is more reluctant to surrender this Herondale bb to the Clave, and instead offers to raise Kit in New York herself. He can go to the Institute after school and learn safely there. Kit adores her, and gets along well with Alec, although not so much Jace at first. He and Ty and Livvy meet though Clary, and stay in touch because Catarina insists Kit have other Shadowhunters his age to compare his life to. Livvy is delighted to have a penpal. 

The twins also keep in touch with Ash, although that’s less willing and more of a burgeoning nemesis-hood. Dru, possibly just to spite the twins, possibly as a way of acting out, insists she has a crush on him. Luckily time passes differently in faerie and the Seelie Queen is eager to keep him away from people, so other than a few instance of belligerent eye contact and some accidental dream sharing, it’s mostly at a distance. 

The primary reason they even see each other at all is because Kieran got handed to the Seelie Queen as a “hostage” after all the polticking went down. (It was the safest way to keep him away from his family and out of trouble.) Unfortunately Kieran isn’t going to let a little thing like technical prisonerhood prevent him from seeing Mark. Mark is still readjusting to being a Shadowhunter, and Kieran makes him confused, but it’s a good confused and also no one knows how to make them stop. 

It means lots of “Taking Kieran Back To The Seelie At 3AM” though. 

Cristina is delivered back to her family with a condemnation a dagger for bravery and an Official Scolding From The Consul. She’s grounded until she’s eighteen but she’s too happy with the results to care. She helped rescue Mark Blackthorn! She and Diana stay in touch, and though Diana she and Emma become especially close. Cristina swears that as soon as she’s of age she’s taking her travel year in LA. Diego and Jaime feel neglected in contrast. 

Helen returns to take care of the kids, and she and Mark are reunited, and it’s beautiful, but it’s still been years and she’s awkward around her younger siblings. Julian does a lot of the day to day childcare work, but he’s finally not taking care of every issue at the Institute on top of that and everyone comments on how less stressed he seems to be with his sister home. He and Emma spend a lot more time together, keeping their growing relationship secret. They learned a lot from Malcolm and Annabel, including how not to get caught. 

Bad things are still happening demonically speaking. No one is quite sure how to stop it, not even the Seelie Queen. Clary swears they’re going to get it under control though, and at least for now, Emma and Julian trust her. 

I think there would definitely be some followup books dealing with the Unseelie King’s revenge and Emma and Julian hurtling down the path of catastrophe and also Ash being a little anti-christ. The Black Book is still missing, ect. Annabel and Malcolm would come back as actual zombies. That sort of thing. I just really wanted more Blackthorn feels a tighter, more family focused narrative. Also, more Malcolm and Annabel. (And more Diana and Arthur, it turned out. Just, more traumatized grownups.)

I just... love these tragic kids so much and I want them to self destruct more explicitly and ten times as slowly. 

[valntinemorgenstern]

Review: Lord of Shadows

★★★★★

As always, my thoughts on Cassandra Clare’s books are prolific, multiplicitous, entangled, sometimes joyous and delighted, sometimes troubled and difficult; I could happily write numerous lectures and essays on this woman’s books, and Lord of Shadows comes as no exception. So, in the interest of keeping this as readable as possible, the first section of this review will contain my general thoughts, and the section after it, a more detailed (and, probably, sweary and incoherent) fangirl mess list of my very spoilery thoughts/opinions/feelings.

General 

In my opinion, Lord of Shadows is a huge improvement on Lady Midnight (I wrote an exceedingly long review on it last year that more resembled a disorganised splurge, but in sum:). For me, LM was an enjoyable, enthralling read as Cassandra’s books always are, but I was baffled by the claims that it was her best-ever book. For me, it consistently failed to hit the right chord, the characters didn’t spark on the page; the pacing lagged, and then rushed; I had a multitude of issues with plot, structure and character decisions. Most of all, the characters failed to draw me to them in the way that I was accustomed to with most of Cassie’s vast cast of characters. I’m pleased to say that I feel mostly over all of that now. I’m certain that this was also present in LM, but I think I appreciated this a lot more, given how much easier I was with the story as a whole — I was consistently impressed in this instalment with the quality of writing. LoS is strewn with some fantastically lyrical, poetic flashes of prose that, as I was reading, I just had to kind of sit back in astonishment, turning over that scintillating metaphor, or that line of dialogue, or that paragraph of description in my mind. At the risk of repeating myself, it’s obvious that Cassandra is, stylistically, far more mature, daring and sophisticated than the Cassandra writing TMI 6 years ago (I also think that this is related to a greater tendency to indulge in some flowery and exploratory prose, hence the ever-growing length of her books, but I’m not complaining).

I think by nature of the fact that this was the second in the series, there was no time that had to be spent lingering over long expositions and the tediousness of setting up unfamiliar characters; it didn’t take 300 pages for the motor to start turning. One of the developments that surprised me was how much the narrative eye in this instalment really starts to wander from Emma / Julian as its primary focus, as it mostly is in LM. I absolutely loved how much it started to scoop up the rest of the Blackthorn family, and even other characters like Arthur and Kit (though I can imagine there are some Jemma fans who might be a bit disappointed with this decision). For me, having this distance from Emma’s POV was wonderful / I really welcomed the opportunity to attach myself more deeply to other characters (to be honest, I wasn’t hugely enamoured with Emma in LM) and this made the story so much easier to invest in. In the end, it has actually warmed me to Emma a lot more, so I’m happy.

Very Spoilery 

FREAKED OUT by how many things I ended up predicting (without knowing I ws predicting them?) Consistently dogged by the feeling of déjà-vu and that I’d secretly thought that thing might happen. By no means had an exhaustive list of theories, only a couple of solid ones, and the rest ephemeral, half-baked, flippant daydreams of ‘oh, what if x got with x? wouldn’t THAT be a twist!’ and then….it happened. It happened with: Dru and Jaime becoming a thing (what sort of thing has yet to be seen, but HMM); Kit x Livvy (like, Livvy what even was that? hey you’re a male; you’re in my line of sight!); Arthur’s death (this is a whole topic in itself and Don’t Get Started™); the hinting that Ty and Kit may become parabatai in lieu of an immediately romantic relationship (their dynamic reminds me so much of Will and Jem) and thus HA HA history repeats itself in both ways…

OVERJOYED about the fact that Mark x Emma never properly materialised. Last year, this was not only an alarmingly popular ship, I thought, but also one that Cassandra seemed to be teasing would be become canonical in LoS. At this point I legitimately and seriously considered whether or not I’d bother reading Lord of Shadows, as this was probably the biggest NOTP I’d ever had. It was a deal breaker for me. So, very pleased.

I went into this determined not to ship Mark / Cristina / Kieran as a three way, and wow oh WOW, did Cassie utterly, remorselessly obliterate this! Major, major FUCKING KUDOS to Cassie’s skill and craft here for managing to completely overturn the way I feel about this polyamorous ship. I completely take back everything I said about feeling uncomfortable with this, because DUDE I am struggling to see how they’re gonna avoid a threesome at some point. This ship is electric and has so much chemistry, I’m not gonna lie, there were moments where I was thinking I was shipping it even more than Jemma…

LOVED everything in Faerie. Just! Ugh! Loved how dark and dreamy it was and the high-fantasy overtones and how reminiscent it was of mythology and Goblin Market and Arthurian romance.

All the classical + 18/19th literature allusions! The lit student in me was elated. ‘The nightmare life in death was she’ MY SOUL WAS IN COMMUNION WITH YOU CASSIE.

So lovely to return to London again! (and, woah, wasn’t expecting them to be there most of the book?) Tempered, though, by its portrayal as run-down, neglected Institute that has (somehow? I WANNA KNOW CASSIE) fallen out of The Herondale’s hands and into the management of The Highsmiths? Made me very sad indeed to see this.

i could write a whole meta of the depiction of Herondales in this book. (Lmao for a series allegedly supposed to focus on the Blackthorns and, for once, not-about-the-herondales, they still end up being a pretty damn important)

There is like, not a single POV from Kit (shocked by how huge his role is in this book?) where his Herondaleness is being mentioned, questioned or alluded to. HA I EAT THIS SHIT UP

How delightfully frustrating that, with regards to Kit, far more questions posed than answered. (The woman in his dreams? So he remembers his mother? How come only now? How the hell do the seven riders of Mannan have anything to do with him / how do they recognise him? Evidently the mysteries surrounding his heritage are tangled up in Faerie as well…) Loved how protective he was of Ty, and how brilliantly they work together. In LM, Kit was depicted as very sheltered and innocent, but he really comes into his own in LoS — loved how he was starting to mould what he’d learnt from his father with what he was learning as a Shadowhunter.

TMI DREAM TEAM REAPPEARANCES FUCK YESSSSSSSSSS MAGNUS YOU’RE A BABE AND HAVE THEY MADE STATUES OF JACE YET??

THE ENDING

T H E  E N D I N G

T   H   E     E  N  D  I  N  G

WHAT IN GOD’S NAME

It was like: trundling along nicely, some angst, but danger is mostly over, cue some boring meetings (Idris tho!! I have missed you!) and then — BANG BANG BANG BANG! Magnus (and Tessa?!) is/have been illWHAT?! Robert is dead, and Livvy is dead. CHRIST ALIVE. One thing after the other.

Did not see any of that coming. At all. Gut-wrenchingly, heart-stoppingly shocking stuff. I had to put the book down, and gaping, looked up laughingly and whispered a series of profanities to myself. That said, I expected Robert to die at the end of TMI (and was sincerely surprised he managed to survive it — had a whole theory about it) and wondered, at the time, why Cassie kept him going. Now I see why she waited till now: a strategic decision, so that there would have formed a dark force i.e. the Cohort to replace the vacuum his death as Inquisitor would leave with.

Livvy!!! I am so, terribly sad.

I am also so so scared for Queen of Air and Darkness.

[dailybestiary]

Knight & Megapon Ants

Knight ants are a special caste of ants dedicated to defending their colony’s home.  They grow particularly wide heads to protect their colonymates, who also benefit from the greater coordination signaled by the knight ants’ pheromones.  

Megapon ants, meanwhile, have the rare distinction of being (in the editions I own, anyway) the only Bestiary species I’ve seen to not merit a description. (Heck, I can’t even Google a good definition for megapon.)  But at CR 6, they’re nothing to sneeze at; they can carry prodigious amounts of weight; and their Strength-sapping poison suggests the sting of a fire ant or some aggressive, prehistoric lineage.

A clan of dwarves uses alchemical scents to tame and coax behaviors out of their ant livestock.  A local war calls most of the clan elders away from the hold, and when they return they discover that the artificial scents have spoiled.  Their knight ant guards now bar the way to the lower levels, no longer recognizing the dwarves as friends.

A martial arts master with some training as a druid believes in basing his forms and stances off of those in nature.  In order to learn his specialized skills (in game terms, teamwork feats), adventurers must study knight ants in the tunnels of their hill—without killing a single one.

Adventurers are racing through the canopy of the great god’s-home trees, fleeing cannibals hot on their trail.  They come across a column of megapon ants using their bodies to create a bridge for themselves and their giant aphid thralls.  If the adventurers can find a way to sneak across the ant bridge, they will easily lose their pursuers.  Otherwise they might have to fight the enormous ants and the kuru-maddened cannibals at the same time.

—Pathfinder Bestiary 5 27

I recently relistened to the audiobook version of Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, read by the outstanding Simon Prebble.  I first listened to it during a massive, speeding ticket-filled, two-day road trip from San Francisco to Portland via Crater Lake several years ago.  I’m happy to say I loved it then—so much so that in my hunger for more I discovered Naomi Novik’s Temeraire series and Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey–Maturin books—and I loved it now—so much so that I accrued $28 in overdue fines because I had other books checked out and didn’t want to give any of them back.  (If you throw in the speeding tickets, that’s compelling evidence that good books make me make bad choices, apparently.)

JS&MN truly is an extraordinary book—all the more so because it’s a first novel.  (Neil Gaiman’s quote about a fragment from one of Clarke’s early drafts—“It was like watching someone sit down to play the piano for the first time and she plays a sonata”—still holds up.)  The true-to-the-1800s language, the sense of place, and the treatment of academic arguments as being as important as a battle are nearly perfect.  I love the characters; I love the world; I love the faerie lore; I love almost everything.

Because I love it so much, certain things still drive me nuts.  Most of these little things are insufficiently answered (to my mind, at least) questions or breakdowns in verisimilitude: How can Mr Norrell justify obstructing the progress of all other magicians if he publicly claims to want to restore English magic…why does Childermass remain with Mr Norrell for so long even after the meanness of his master’s character is revealed…why do Lady Pole and Stephen Strange’s maladies go so long undiagnosed, even with a faerie glamour to blame…things like that.  In reality, the book may be better for not answering these questions, but they still leave me fidgety with agitation.

A second listen did also confirm a major beef I had the first time I listened to it, though: It is a figure eight of a work, its whole shape constantly circling around two black holes of noninformation.  

The first is that the actual working of magic is barely shown and never explained.  Clarke has said that she “really like[s] magicians,” but weirdly she seems willing to gloss over the magic they do almost entirely. (Early in the book this is amusing—even the characters are impatient to see magic done—but by 2/3s of the way in it’s infuriatingly coy.)  We almost never get a sense of how it feels for the magicians to do magic, or why these two men have succeeded where almost no one else has.  (That they were prophesied doesn’t cut it.)  It’s a staggeringly strange omission, especially to a fantasy fan audience used to reading about how it feels to come into one’s power, whatever that power may be.  Strange in particular stumbles into magic and then the narrative curtain closes; when it reopens he is already a thaumaturgical Mozart.  That is, as the South Park kids would say, some total BS right there.

The second problem is that this is a work of alternate history that refuses to share its alternate history.  True, the novel purports to be written by someone from Strange’s acquaintance only a generation or so later, so much of this knowledge is assumed to be held by the reader.  But despite all its many, many, many footnotes, the book barely gives us a coherent alternate timeline, and so much of how the novel’s history diverges from our own is unclear.  (For comparison, Philip K. Dick is a downright clumsy author compared to Clarke, but I can tell you more about the history of Man in the High Castle, and it’s a mere pamphlet next to the Bible-fat JS&MN.)  I don't need much more detail, but I do need more.

Worse yet, not only has Clarke created a fictional northern England with a fictional Raven King that we don't know enough about, but she also seems to have fallen a little in love with him. (Strong evidence of this is that the characters positively won’t shut up about him; he even gives his name to the novel’s third act.)  It is dangerous to fall in love with fictional people or settings, and doing so is a surefire way to undermine the story.  (Notice, for instance, how Tolkien burns the Shire, and how J. K. Rowling—whose writerly smarts are often underrated—is careful to get her characters out of Hogwarts after the love letter to it that is The Order of the Phoenix.  Now compare that to, say, The Name of the Wind, which struck me as loving its central character just a bit too much, or the insufferable anime Clamp School Detectives, whose love for its own impossible setting is a veritable fountain of onanism (see what I did there?) that eventually feels like a taunt to the viewer who will never attend there. You can’t love your fictional children too hard, and Clarke loves John Uskglass.

So as I said, a great novel, but a figure eight thanks to these two crucial holes.  Do not under *any* circumstances let these prevent you from reading it though!

Unfortunately, a new qualm came up as I was listening this time: the novel’s hagiography of Englishness. In a 2005 interview with Locus, Susanna Clarke practically quoted Tolkien word for word in her lament that England did not have a myth of its own. (Sidebar: English culture is odd in that its most famous legend, Beowulf, takes place in Denmark, a divorce of a people from its mythic geography that seems to really bother certain writers.  In fact, this lack is responsible for both The Silmarillion and JS&MN.  King Arthur doesn’t work for them for some reason; he’s either too British rather than English—a distinction too arcane for my American mind, but there it is—or too Welsh, and his legend has definitely become too French.  Robin Hood doesn’t work either, for some reason, despite his being safely nestled in the East Midlands.  The tl;dr of all this is that there is no understanding the English mythic imagination when you’re a fat Yank git.)  So Clarke fills JS&MN with her love for England—its people, its cities, and its countryside, especially the North, where she revels in its preindustrial wildness.  And Englishness as a laudatory attribute fills nearly every page.  (More on this can be found over on Wikipedia, but don’t go there until you’ve read/listened to the book, because it’s spoiler central.)

The thing is though, Clarke is smart enough to know that glorifying England, Englishness, Englishmen (emphasis on the “men” there), and king/queen and country has caused a lot of pain for other folks in the world.  So she works very hard to undercut this worship of Englishness, giving strong roles to women, nonwhite, and poor characters, and amplifying their voicelessness in the society of that time through the narrative.  It’s all a genius balancing act, and it all serves to intentionally undercut and deflate the project of England worship that the novel is busily engaged in…

…And yet, Englishness, in the end, wins out.  England remains the hero.  The English countryside itself is instrumental in turning the tide in the final encounter.  Lovely, lush, green, hilly, moor-covered England is still the hero.

Which should be all well and good, but…  Well, I’m just not on board with cheering for England right now. 

I’m a Top Gear fan.  And I watched Jeremy Clarkson’s no-one-is-better-than-us casual racism—as an American I’m spared the overt racism of his other appearances—wax stronger with every season, slowly curdling my affection.  And I watched Brexit throw my expatriate scientist friends’ careers into a tumult and imperil their research.  It was also, more to the point, a triumph of Englishness over the needs of Britishness.  

And here on this side of the pond, I’ve watched a similar dynamic play out, as many Americans have taken to celebrating America—or at least, their mean, small-minded, and resentful notion of it—to the point that pride of place and race have become more important than the principals that make America work.

So I still love JS&MN.  And I think you should read and even love JS&MN.  And zero of what I’ve said in the previous two paragraphs is Susanna Clarke’s fault.  But in JS&MN, a country is a character—the protagonist even. And right now, in 2017, loving a place more than people doesn’t feel that good.

So I’m going to return JS&MN back to the library for another 7 years or so, or maybe for longer.  And the next time I get it out, I hope I’ve fallen back in love with England and America.

Because that is the magic I most want to see.

[victorluvsalice]

AU Thursday: Once Upon A Time. . .Cinder-Alice

Sooo, have I come up with a Valice fairy tale AU yet? Well, I'm happy to say that I have!

Three years after Nebbychan did!

Yes, the AU in question is good old "Cinderella." My friend Nebby did a gender-flip AU called "Cinder-Victor" back in 2016, where Victor was in the Cinderella role to Nell, Bumby, and Barkis, and Alice got to be the princess, which was a lot of fun. I enjoyed it quite a bit, but I figure I might as well detail my own take on the idea, given it seems like the best fairy tale AU for the Valice pairing.

So, as per usual, Victor is the prince of a small but prosperous fishing kingdom, with the main difference being that he's not in an arranged marriage -- at least not yet. His parents are going over prospects and trying to decide which alliances would benefit them the most. Victor understands the need for good relationships between royal families and political benefits and all that jazz, but he can't help but wish they'd involve him in the process more. Mainly so he can meet some of these princesses and maybe, just maybe, fall in love with one of them.

Alice, meanwhile, has been the slave of one Angus Bumby ever since she was about eight or so. She used to be the daughter of local schoolmaster, Arthur Liddell, but that was before Bumby -- who was obsessed with her older sister, Lizzie -- broke into her house, raped and killed her older sister, and then killed her parents. A master of dark arts, he's cast a spell on her that prevents her from telling anyone what he's done or harming him in any way, and forces her to play servant in her own home while he enjoys the Liddell family fortune and puts up a show of being a "philanthropist" who helps orphans (while secretly funneling them off to unsavory sorts). Alice is furious with her circumstances, but can't figure out a way to escape as she doesn't know anything about magic, and Bumby keeps her busy enough that she can't learn.

But then two important things happen:

Firstly, one day, she and Victor stumble into each other at the edge of the Liddell estate. Victor explains he was part of a hunting party of local lords and got lost while they pursued a deer. He and Alice get to chatting, and find they rather like each other. They end up meeting each other regularly by the spot (which has a convenient twisty oak to mark the location), getting to know each other and forming a friendship. Alice of course can't explain her situation, but she's happy enough with Victor being a bright spot in the terrible monotony of her days.

Secondly, she finds a hurt cat on the grounds and, feeling sorry for it, gives it some fish and bandages its wounds as best she is able. It stays the night in her attic room, but vanishes in the morning -- Alice occasionally sees it watching her around the estate, but is never able to tempt it back toward her, despite her desire to keep it as a sort of pet. She contents herself with leaving the occasional scraps of meat under the tree it seems to like best.

Eventually, Victor's parents tire of the whole "trying to figure out which kingdom we want to ally with most" game and decide the best thing to do is let it shake out via a kind of lottery. They announce a grand ball that all the nearby princesses and eligible ladies are invited to, and whomever makes the best impression on the prince will have his hand. Victor is astonished, but cautiously on-board because holy crap he gets a say in this --

Alice, upon hearing of the party and realizing Victor might fall in love with and marry someone else, realizes she absolutely hates the idea and that she's in love with him.

Of course, not being a princess, she's not invited to the big shindig, and while the Van Dorts have generously arranged a party for any commoners who want to attend the same night, it's not in the same location and she'd never be able to sneak into the proper ball. Not to mention, Bumby makes it pretty clear that she's not going anywhere near either party (having noticed her resemblance to Lizzie, and making a few plans to force her to marry him before anyone else gets any ideas). The night of the ball, Alice retires to her room, feeling miserable. . .

To find a large grinning cat sitting on her bed, asking why she looks so despondent when she has a party to go to.

Yes, turns out the cat she helped was the mortal disguise of a Faerie creature, the Cheshire Cat, from the realm of Wonderland. Aiding him when he was injured has earned her a boon, and he and his friends, upon seeing her reaction to the news of the ball, figure spiriting her out so she can enjoy a night on the town seems like decent repayment. Alice, after making sure this isn't going to get her into debt with any Faerie monsters, is all for it, and receives a beautiful blue gown, a hat/mask combo, and glass slippers enchanted to never break. They also throw in a mild charm that will keep anyone from figuring out who she really is, just in case. They spirit her off to the ball, and Alice enjoys a night of dancing and revelry -- mainly with Victor, who thinks she seems both really nice and really familiar, but between the mask and the charm he just can't place her. . .

And then midnight hits, and the Queen of Hearts, the ruler of Wonderland, appears and tells Alice that it's now morning, their agreement was for a night, and if she doesn't leave now, she'll undo all the magic and leave her naked in the castle. Alice promptly bolts for the exit to avoid angering her -- but in the process, loses a slipper. Victor collects it and tells his parents that, if he has to marry a princess after only knowing them a night, the owner of this slipper is the one he wants. Everyone tries to figure out who the mystery princess was, but thanks to the magic, nobody can remember her name or quite what she looked like. Frustrated, Nell declares that whoever fits the slipper can have her son's hand. A lot of young women try, but the slipper, despite LOOKING like it should fit one of them, always seems to be just off. . .

Meanwhile, the Queen of Hearts has discovered the loss of the slipper, and declares that Alice now owes them a boon. She decides that Alice should come serve her for a while in her court. Alice, who has discovered that Bumby is planning their wedding for the near future, is actually all for this, even if she doesn't like the Queen that much -- but Bumby discovers what's going on before she can be taken away, and he and the Queen get into a scuffle over Alice. The Queen undoes the spells Bumby has cast upon Alice, and Alice IMMEDIATELY takes the opportunity to get a knife and stab the bastard to death. With a murder on her hands, she's now even more eager to escape to Wonderland. . .

And then Victor shows up with the shoe. Partly because he's been going around trying it on people anyway, partly because, while having a think about what he enjoyed about the princess's company, he realized that what he liked is that she reminded him of Alice -- which led him to realize he has feelings for her. So he's hoping she's either the mystery princess, or, failing that, he can fake that she fits the shoe so he can marry her. He's -- more than a little shocked by the dead body, but Alice tells him the truth of what Bumby's been doing, and he basically goes "okay yeah, that was definitely self-defense." He gets his guards to help search for evidence and attend to the orphans, then tries the shoe on Alice.

Perfect fit, of course. He's thrilled, as is Alice -- however, the whole thing with the Queen of Hearts stands, and she says that any nuptials will have to be delayed until she's fulfilled her obligation. The Queen is willing to at least let Alice go to the palace and explain what happened to the royals in person (while reclaiming the shoe, obviously), and everyone heads over. Nell is furious that some "nobody commoner using fairy tricks" snagged her son's heart and declares that she won't honor the agreement because Alice isn't a princess.

The Queen of Hearts, who has already decided she Does Not Like this woman and getting impatient with all this nonsense, responds by spontaneously adopting Alice.

Well then! Nell shuts up, realizing she's probably playing with fire; the Queen wonders what the fuck she just did but is obliged to honor it because of her nature (also because Cheshire totally saw it and won’t let her go back on her word); Alice tries not to burst out laughing. She accompanies the Queen back to Wonderland as the new Princess of Hearts, and gets married to Victor in a fairy glade that connects the two realms. And they lived happily ever after, alternating their time between Wonderland and reality.

Bonus: If you want to include Victoria and Emily, they could be princesses that attended the same ball, who both liked Victor and were hoping to make a good impression on him -- only to fall in love with each other while the whole thing with Alice was going on. XD

[helenofblackthorns]

@unicup-blog oh yeah I forgot about that line. however the question of "where are Helen and Mark in all this" does still remain.

like. why would Nerissa hide them? how did she hide them? especially since Helen would've been born well before anything went awry. she also can't lie so how do you keep that secret from your husband? twice?

did she give them to Nene? or another of their sisters even. (which... seems like a bad decision give what's actively happening to Arthur) when theyre are in love they want nothing to do with Helen and Mark & when they're not they can't stand the sight of them :(

also. the line technically is "And the lady beheld the secret fruits of their union and kissed them and tried to love them." which could mean it was a secret from him, but not necessarily? it just says they were a secret. which, when Helen telling the Clave version she says Andrew didn't know they existed but we also know Andrew never talked outright about faerie so that must be something she got from the files. but Andrew could have lied/withheld information to the Clave, and that could be the secret. that nobody but them know Helen and Mark exist.

and I mean. if that's the case & Andrew consciously left them behind, it could have been a decision made out of love. he might have thought they were better off in Faerie than in the Clave, and that they would be more accepted there. and Arthur wouldn't have known so maybe the secret plays a part in driving them apart?

also a couple people brought up that Nerissa may have influenced Andrew into forgetting them or leaving them behind (the only piece of him she gets to keep??) which also could be possible. idk if she could outright delete memories tho.

oh and it's also said that Andrew made up birthdays for them based on his memories of what happened. which could be him remembering weirdly long absences of Nerissa but it could mean like actual memories of their births too. (unrelated. does anyone else ever think about how Helen and Mark were technically born on the same day?)

moral of the story Helen and Mark have never not gone through it and I love rambling about them

whenever I think about Andrew & Nerissa and how their story ended I can't help thinking about Helen & Mark.... where are they?

[maplesamurai]

The Witch’s Apprentice, Ch 7

Soon enough, and far too soon for the Butcher family, winter had come at last. The season’s snow had come as early as the last days of November, at first in the form of light flurries that melted in the sun as easily as the autumn frost, but by December’s second week, everything Arthur could see from the hilltop farmhouse was blanketed in snow, and icicles hung from every rooftop. In Arthur’s final month home, the hearth was kept burning all day round, putting the piles of firewood Arthur had diligently gathered in autumn to good use. But even in the dead of winter, there was still work to be done, and Arthur was happy to keep himself busy and thus his mind occupied away from the coming deadline.

  As the root vegetables his family kept in the garden still grew in winter, Arthur continued tending and picking the turnips, onions and sprouts. While he now needed to be fully bundled up in his coat to do so, he also kept on working on whatever repairs that he not taken care of in the fall, mostly the barn, as he had greatly prioritised the house while his sister was still ill. It was around this time too, that the time came to slaughter the family’s hogs for much needed meat. It was also somewhat hard for Arthur and Morgan to part with the animals they had been tending to all year in such a way, but such was life on the farm.

  What little free time Arthur had this time of year, he spent taking walks around town if it wasn’t too cold to go outside. He liked to take in the sights he had never fully appreciated, from the smoke rising from the townspeople’s chimneys, to the winter salmon leaping over the river rapids, and he also took the time to say his final goodbyes to everyone he knew outside of the family. Occasionally, he would still catch a flash of black out of the corner of his eye only to see a black feathered bird flying away when he turned to look, but by now he had grown oddly used to the possibility that his new mistress may be watching him.

  On these walks, he would often invite Morgan or his parents to join him, wanting to spend as much time with them as possible while he still could. And it was his sister who accompanied him as he took his final walk among the town the day before the Solstice Eve, the sun slowly setting over the horizon.

  The Solstice Festival proper would not begin until tomorrow night, but already Arthur and Morgan could take in the sights of the coming festivities. All across town, dwellings rich and poor were decorated with holly and ivy to ward off what darker spirits would roam in the dead of winter, and at the town square where months earlier the Butchers had sold their unexpected grain, priests of various gods tended the fire pit that would tomorrow night be lit for the festival bonfire. Lamp-posts illuminated the town roads, alight with flames enchanted by the local lord’s wizards to glow in all colours, while farmers wandering the streets spoke proudly of how large their sacrificial boars for the year had grown. 

  There were many holidays celebrating the Winter Solstice among the many cultures across the continent, but in the kingdom of Albion, the most widely practiced was the Festival of the Winter’s Hunt. When night fell on the eve of the Winter Solstice, the old legends said, the Elvenking would ride out of the Faerie Kingdom into the mortal world, followed the riders of the Wild Hunt, to judge each living soul they came across. Those the Elvenking judged as kind and virtuous, were said to be rewarded with gifts such as toys for children and coal to fuel a house’s hearth, left at one’s feet as the Wild Hunt invisibly rode past fast as the wind. Those judged as wicked and cruel, however, would be hunted and spirited away back to the fae realm, to what fate no one knew. These days, some would dismiss such tales as mere myth, only told to frighten children into behaving properly, but occasionally people would hear tell of those who ventured into the night on Solstice Eve never to be seen again, tales that convinced most to stay inside when the sun set this time of year.

  Arthur’s family were always the sort to honour such traditions. After all, Arthur thought to himself as he looked among the ivy draped homes and the icy roads glistening under the light of dusk with his sister walking beside him, it certainly would not be the strangest of tales they discovered to be true as of late.

  “You know, Arthur,” Morgan said to her brother as they continued to stroll past ivy draped homes, making sure to tread carefully on the icy roads, “I’m going to miss taking these walks with you once you’re gone. And I don’t think you’re going to see many sunsets like this inside that forest.”

“You said it,” Arthur sighed. “Part of me wishes I could just stay and spend all my remaining time just taking in the sights like this.”

  “Well, careful now,” Morgan teasingly told her brother. “If you stay out too late, the Wild Hunt might come to spirit you away.”

  “I’m sure I’ll be fine,” Arthur said with a shrug. “They shouldn’t arrive before tomorrow night. And besides,” he paused as he opened his hand to look at the Witch’s mark upon his palm, “I have the feeling they wouldn’t want to dispute a certain someone’s claim.”

  Morgan looked at Arthur’s palm curiously, before saying, “You know, Arthur, it’s still weird knowing how you’ve got that mark on your palm when I still can’t see it.”

  Arthur sighed. Just like the faeries that had accompanied the Witch’s healing spell, neither his parents nor Morgan had been able to see the mark on his palm. Melion had seen it when he arrived too late to stop Arthur’s bargain, but he was seemingly the only one other than Arthur or the Witch herself that was able to. He’d hoped to focus on the here and now and he came out for this final walk into town, but he couldn’t help but recall when he’d asked their Uncle Melion about the subject the day before he had left…

  O – O – O

  It was mid-afternoon on the day the Witch of the Woods had healed Morgan of the White Plague and restored the Butchers’ failed wheat to full health as well, on seemingly little more than a whim. After an unexpectedly busy morning of harvesting a whole field, one would think Arthur Butcher would be spending his free time at rest, but one would be wrong. Knowing how little time he had left among family, Arthur wanted to make that time count. And considering how little he could see his Uncle Melion even before the clock started ticking, Arthur wanted to take his uncle up on the offer he had declined the day prior.

  So it was inside the Butchers’ family barn was Arthur and Melion were getting ready for the latest of the various sword fighting lessons Melion had given his nephew over the years. The two wooden practice swords the two used for these lessons were propped against the barn wall, ready to be wielded, but this time, the weapons were to wait a little longer. For this time, even as Arthur was putting on the gambeson shirt and padded helmet he wore over his clothes to these lessons, his sister was sat on a barrel next to him, not to watch the lesson as usual, but to continue to pester Melion about a certain subject…

  “Ye’re really not gonna let up ‘til ah do it, are ye?” Melion sighed, clearly exasperated from his niece’s constant questions.

  “Nope,” Morgan said happily.

  “Okay, fine, ah can show it tae ye once.”

  And with a sigh of frustration, Melion dropped down on all fours, and the fur cloak on his back enveloped his body, changing as his shape did, until the gigantic, but still human looking man was replaced with a sabre-toothed black-furred wolf as large as warhorse.

  “There,” Melion growled. “Are ye happy, now?”

  “Very happy,” Morgan confirmed. “Does it feel weird when you do that, though? You know, with your fur separating from your body and merging back with it whenever you change shape?”

  “’Twas a bit strange at first, but ah’ve since grown used tae it,” Melion admitted, before turning back towards Arthur and telling him, “Ye just had tae tell her in front of everyone, didn’t ye, Arty?”

  “Oh, I didn’t have to,” Arthur said, barely stifling a laugh, “but I’ve yet to regret doing so.”

  “Of course ye don’t. Ah don’ suppose ye want tae ask anythin’ ‘bout this before we start yer lesson?”

  “Well, there’s one thing I’d like to know before we start,” Arthur admitted. “Not about your enchantment, but about something that concerns the both of us.”

  “Oh?” Melion asked curiously. “And wot might dat be?”

  “Well, remember how back when the Witch healed Morgan, it seemed like only I could see those faerie like spirits she conjured? And back when I made the pact with her, she seemed surprised when I could see the magic of the contract.”

  “So ye want tae know why we can see those things, but others can’t?”

  “Yeah, pretty much.”

  “Well, ah don’t know much about magic meself,” Melion admitted as he made a circle to lay down on the floor as Arthur had seen ordinary dogs do before, “so this is mostly pieced together from wot ah’ve learned from me time with the Witch and from wot magi ah’ve met on me later travels have told me, but the gist of it is that most magical things, like fae and other spirits, are mostly invisible unless they want tae make themselves known. ‘Tis the same with the magical energy that flows through a mage’s spells and the like. Pretty much anyone with working eyes can see the end result of such things, but only certain people can see wot’s really doin’ the work tae get that result.”

  “Okay,” Arthur replied, trying to wrap his head around the concept, “so what makes someone able to see magic, then?”

  “Afraid ah can’t give ye all the answers tae that,” Melion admitted, “but wot ah’ve bin told is that some people are jus’ more sensitive tae these things than most. An’ that doesn’t just mean ye can either see ‘em or ye can’t; some folk can just sense the presence of magic an’ spirits an’ that’s it, some can only faintly see such things, and others see ‘em as clear as a cloudless sky.”

  “And I’m guessing most magic users can see these things, right? It seems that would be an important part of their craft.”

  “Aye. In fact, some wizards ah’ve met have said the Sight’s usually the first hint that someone’s got mage talent. It’s not always the case, though.”

  This made Arthur curious. Could this possibly mean he could use magic himself if he learned how? Probably not, he decided, since he’d never seemed to be able to so much as sour a cup of milk. Still, it was certainly an interesting prospect, even if it was just wishful thinking.

  “The gift can also be more’re less common dependin’ on a whole bunch of factors, like where ye live, wot lineage ye come from, the circumstances of yer birth, or wot creature ye are, as well. Most animals can sense magic around ‘em, fer example.”

  “Speaking from experience?” Morgan remarked.

  “Don’t be rude, Morgan,” Arthur sternly reprimanded his sister.

  “S’ fine Arty, ah’m sure she didn’t mean anything by it,” Melion reassured the both of them. “’Sides, that’s partly true at least. Sure, we wargs are still a people in our own right, with our own language and laws, but we’re still closer tae common beasts than most races are, and our awareness of the magical world be no exception. Anyway, that’s how ah was ‘fore ah met the Witch.”

  “And that changed when you became a skinchanger?”

  “Aye. Ye see, one of the other things ah know ‘bout the whole deal is that inherently magical creatures can see magic, whether yer born as one, or become one later in life. So once ah made that pact with her, ah started being able tae see clearly wot I’d been sensin’ me whole life.”

  “Okay, that explains a few things,” Arthur said, “but I’ve only started to be able to see these things now. If I have this Sight, why haven’t I seen any kind of fae before this? I’ve even seen the lord’s wizards do their magic, but I’ve never seen a flash of magical energy come from them when they cast their spells like I have with the Witch. So why am I only seeing these things now?”

  “Honestly, Arty?” Melion said with the closest thing his canine shoulders could give to a shrug, “Beats me. Ah’ve heard that some folk don’t gain the Sight ‘til later in life, and there’s still others where their magic senses come and go, but ah’ve never been told why. Maybe ye’re just one of those cases, but ah’ve already told ye everythin’ ah know fer sure ‘bout the subject. Sorry if it don’ help ye much.”

  “Oh, it’s fine,” Arthur sighed. “I at least know more now than I did before I asked, so it’s not like I lost anything out of it.”

  “Glad tae know ye’re always eager tae learn,” as he stood back up and changed back to his human shape, his furred pelt returning to the form of his fur cloak. “Speakin’ of learnin’, how ‘bout we get started on yer newest lesson. We don’ know when I can next give ye one ‘fore ye go, so ah’ll be sure tae teach ye some of the good moves.”

  Eagerly, Arthur picked up one of the practice swords leaning against the wall, and his uncle made it over to grasp the other one. Then the master and student made their way to the mock ring at the center of the barn’s open space, and each made a ready stance opposite of each other.

  “Well?” Melion asked his nephew, “are ye ready tae begin?”

  “Ready when you are, Uncle,” Arthur replied, and both men drew their weapons…

  O – O – O

  Sighing as he closed his fist and lowered his hand, Arthur looked back to Morgan and said, “Maybe it’s for the best you can’t see these things. It hasn’t exactly helped me, after all…”

  Placing her hand on her brother’s shoulder, Morgan replied, “Don’t you start moping again. We’ve got your farewell party to look forward to, so let’s live in the moment while we still can, okay?”

  “If you say so. Speaking of which, you want to head home? I don’t want to be late to my own party.”

  “I couldn’t have said it better myself.”

  As the two started to walk home, Arthur asked Morgan, “I know we just promised not to dwell on these things, but I have to ask… do you think you’re going to be okay after I’m gone?”

  “Don’t worry,” Morgan sighed, “I should be fine. I’ll probably have less free time since I’ll have to cover your duties around here, but I guess I’ll grow to live with it. It’s not like I’ve been doing my tinkering all that much, anyway.”

  “Yeah, I’ve noticed you haven’t been working on your contraptions as often lately,” Arthur replied. “What’s with that?”

  With a deep sigh, Morgan began, “This… isn’t easy for me to talk about.”

  “It’s okay; you don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to.”

  “No, it’s okay. It’s something I’ve been keeping to myself for a while, and I ought to let it off my chest before you go.”

  “Alright, so what is it you want to tell me?”

  “Well… I never really wanted to spend the rest of my life on the farm. Don’t get me wrong, I like living with you, and Ma and Pa, but farming’s not something I want to do for the rest of my life, you know? But tinkering around with clock parts and stuff has always been something I’ve really loved doing more than anything. So I thought one day, I’d leave the farm, join a clockworker’s guild, and do that kind of work for a living. Sure, we don’t have one here in town, but I figured I could move to the nearest city and join one there. That way, I wouldn’t be too far from home if I ever wanted to come back for a visit, or I could just stop by if I was ever travelling through the area on guild business.”

  After a moment to let it sink in, Arthur asked, “Why didn’t you ever tell any of us this before now?”

  “I didn’t think I needed to be in any hurry is all. I just figured you’d be around to inherit the farm when our folks passed on, so it wouldn’t be that big a deal if I wanted to do something else with my life. But then I got sick, and it seemed pointless to bring up my dreams for the future when it looked like I didn’t have any future left. And then you made that pact to save me, and now it looks like it’ll be up to me to keep the place running once our folks are gone.”

  “Morgan… I’m sorry.”

  “Eh, don’t worry about it. If you hadn’t have done what you did, I probably wouldn’t even be here today, so I guess it wasn’t meant to be either way. It was just a dream, anyway.”

  “I’ll… take your word for it. I’ve never really had any dreams or ambitions, myself. I was always satisfied to just tending our farm my whole life. So I guess neither of us got what we really wanted in the end, huh?”

  The two siblings shared a regretful sigh as they passed through the town gates and began making their way up the road to the Butcher farmhouse, before Morgan asked her brother, “Promise me something, Arthur?”

  “Sure, anything.”

  “Neither of us can mope for the rest of the night. The last thing our parents need is their son being a wet blanket for his own farewell party.”

  “I should be able to manage that just fine,” Arthur replied back with a smile. “After all, you’re the one who broke our agreement to live in the moment.”

  “Okay, you’ve got me there,” Morgan laughed as they began to walk uphill. “But promise anyway, please?”

  “Okay, I promise.”

  Eventually, the two made it up the hill and saw the lit windows of the family farmhouse. However, as they approached the house, the two saw a large, familiar silhouette just at the door, recognisable even through the falling snow.

  “Uncle Melion!” Arthur called, running towards his uncle at full speed as Melion himself turned around to greet him, soon followed by his sister.

  Upon hearing Arthur yell his name, Melion, seeming to be carrying a barrel attached to his back, turned his back to the door, and with a broad smile across his face, opened his arms to accept a great big hug from his niece and nephew.

  “I’m so glad you could come!” Arthur said happily, embracing his uncle tightly.

  “Wot, ye thought ah’d miss me favourite nephew’s goin’ away party?” Melion laughed heartily. “Ah wouldn’t miss this fer tae world!”

  “Glad to hear it Uncle,” Morgan said to Melion as she joined the embrace as well, before noticing the small barrel her uncle had strapped to her back and asking, “What’s that you’ve got on your back?”

  As he finished laughing, Melion looked down to Morgan and answered her, “Oh, this? Just a cask of ale ah picked up on me way here to liven up the party. An’ how’ve ye been, Morgan? Takin’ it easy like ah asked?”

  “Well, I did say no promises, didn’t I?”

  “Well, ah’d hoped ye’d honour me request fer yer folks’ sakes…”

  “Did you honour Pa’s request to play it safe on the job?”

  After a long, awkward silence, Melion broke his embrace with Arthur and Morgan and said, “Well, let’s not stand here in tae cold! We’ve got a party tae get tae!”

  “That’s what I thought,” Morgan said with an impish grin.

  It was then that the front door opened, and Melion turned around to see his brother Harold greeting the three of them.

  “Glad you could make it, Mel,” Harold welcomed his adoptive brother. “And I see you’ve brought the man of the hour back to his own party. So since we’ve got everyone here now, would you three like to come in and join the party?”

  Melion looked own to Arthur for the answer to that, who smiled and asked, “When do we start?”

  O – O – O

  While the Butchers’ household was nowhere near as extravagantly decorated as the town proper had been, but for Arthur’s last Solstice, it was simply breathtaking. A holly wreath had been hung above the door, and the rafters above everyone’s heads were draped with vines of ivy, which hung low enough to nearly graze the top of Melion’s head. A roaring fire had been lit in the hearth, a thick log burning at its center, making the house as warm as a home of peasant farmers could hope to be this deep into winter. In lieu of the magically coloured fires that lit the town square, upon every table in the house stood a lantern with coloured glass that cast light of all colours about the house to the same effect. The smell of a hot Solstice dinner wafted to the door all the way from the kitchen, carrying the scent of roast ham, mashed potatoes, and sauce of plum and redcurrant alike.  

  “Now, this be a sight,” Melion mused as he walked in. “No matter how far ah’ve traveled, no matter wot wonders ah’ve beheld, nothing ah’ve seen ever beats a good Solstice at home.”

  “I’m glad to hear you approve, Melion,” Summer said with a smile as she stepped out of the kitchen with a cooking apron over her outfit. “A Happy Solstice to you.”

  “And tae ye all as well! Say, is this old wolf’s nose deceiving me or does it smell like tae night’s dinner’s coming along well?”

  “Indeed it is, although you should be asking Arthur that,” Summer sighed as she handed her husband a pot of boiled greens to bring to the dinner table. “He cooked most of it. Harold and I were just taking over while he and Morgan stepped out for a walk.”

  “Really, Arty?” Melion laughed as Arthur himself made his way into the kitchen and grabbed himself a cooking apron hanging off of the wall. “They’re making ye cook the dinner fer yer own party?”

  “It certainly wasn’t our idea,” Summer sighed as she helped place the plum and redcurrant sauces on the table while Arthur opened the oven behind her to retrieve the roast boar. “Arthur was adamant about cooking the Solstice dinner. He was even hesitant to take that last walk into town until Morgan insisted he let us take over for a time.”

  “Yeah, well, you guys have always said you’ve liked my cooking,” Arthur replied as he pulled the boar out of the oven and carried it to the dinner table. “So I wanted to take this last opportunity to let you all enjoy it before I have to go tomorrow.”

  “Don’t worry too much about it, Arthur,” Morgan said as she followed her brother to the table, carrying the pot of mashed potatoes. “I’ll be sure to take over your share of the cooking when you’re gone. It’ll probably take a bit of trial and error to get as good as you, though.”

  Arthur shuddered as he placed the roast boar on the table. If there was only one thing he would not miss about his old life, it was Morgan’s cooking. He had sampled his sister’s past attempts in the culinary arts, and while he would never say as such to her face, from then on, every time she expressed interest in cooking the night’s meal he wondered if the family hogs would be willing to share their slop with him instead. At least, he thought, he would seldom be around to taste her future attempts.

  Arthur did not linger on that thought for long, as before the minute had passed, the whole Solstice dinner was on the table and ready to eat. Once the family was seated, everyone was given a wooden mug and their fill from the cask of ale that Melion had brought with him, even Morgan.

  Looking at her mother, Morgan asked, “Not gonna raise an objection to this, Ma? No reminders that I’m still underage for the next three months?”

  “Well, it’s a special occasion, so I can make a second exception,” Summer said before taking a sip from her own mug. “Just don’t expect a third time before your birthday in the coming year.”

  And so, the Butcher family dug in to their meal. The family enjoyed their food and drink, which was followed by a dessert of Solstice pudding once the meal was finished, they sang songs together, and listened to Melion weave bombastic tales about his recent adventures (which were probably more than a bit embellished) as the hours passed by, and before long, the moon had risen high into the sky, shining its light through the house windows with only hours to spare before the true Solstice Eve truly began at midnight.

  It was then, as the Butcher family sat in front of the roaring fire, that Harold Butcher stood up to make an announcement to his son.

  “Arthur,” he began, “we know you don’t normally expect much in the way of gifts this time of year, but given how this is your last Solstice here… each of us has gotten you something as a farewell present.”

  This was a surprise to Arthur. It was true that, because of the family’s lack of wealth, he and Morgan rarely received much in the way of presents. If their parents could afford to gift anything at all, it was usually something collectively given to both children, and if they were lucky enough to have to have Melion visit during the Solstice, he would bring Arthur and Morgan each something that he picked up during his travels, but that was all they could usually expect. So if he was receiving a gift from everyone here, then they truly were making every attempt to make his last Solstice count.

  “I…” Arthur began, taking a look at everyone around him, “I don’t know what to say.”

  “Ye’ll have time to find the words when ye open yer presents,” Melion told him as he made his way to a wooden chest by the door and opened it, taking out three gifts bound in string and brown wrapping paper, while taking another such gift out of his bags and walking back towards Arthur’s seat, handing him the first of the packages, a short and narrowly shaped one. “This first one be from yer old man.”

  “Well, thank you,” Arthur said as he began to tear the paper off of the package. “Thank all of you, really. I never expected you’d do all of this for me.”

  “Don’t thank us all, just yet,” Morgan told him as Arthur finished opening his first present. “Just thank us one at a time as you open them.”

  Looking down into the unwrapped present in his hands, Arthur saw that it was a sheathed foraging knife with a pale wooden handle, which he carefully unsheathed to reveal a curved, silvery blade.

  “Your mother and I have been thinking of what to get you for a while,” Harold explained to his son. “After quite a few scrapped ideas, we thought it would be best to each get you something that would come in useful in your new job, so we can still be with you in spirit after you’ve gone. I remembered that witch saying she’ll need you to go out and gather things for her, so I hope this foraging knife will come in handy for that.”

  “I’m sure it will,” Arthur replied. “Thank you, Pa.”

  Sheathing the new knife and placing it on the small table beside his chair, Arthur began to open the gift signed by his mother, which was flat and vaguely square shaped and felt soft under the packaging. Arthur guessed from the feel that it was an article of clothing of some variety, which was confirmed when he opened it to reveal a dark lime green cloak just his size.

  “I know it’s a bit cliché for a mother to worry about her child being caught in bad weather,” Summer began, “but I can’t help it. You’re no doubt going to working outdoors in that forest, and I doubt that new employer of yours is going to give you a day off because of rain. I also thought to pick a colour that might hopefully help you elude the gaze of that wood’s more dangerous inhabitants.”

  “Thanks, Ma,” Arthur smiled. “I’m sure it’ll help me avoid situations like my first venture into that place.”

  While giving a slight shudder at the reminder that her son was nearly eaten by a monster that one time, Summer gave Arthur a warm smile and a nod, telling him, “You’re very welcome.”

  “How about you open mine next?” Morgan suggested. “It’s something I’ve actually been working on myself, and I’ve been waiting since I finished it last month to see what you think of it.”

  Curious as to what Morgan could be referring to, Arthur began to open the gift signed with Morgan’s name, which revealed a hinged wooden box, which Arthur opened too. But when he saw what was inside, he only barely managed to hold back his tears. Lying atop a linen cushioning in the box was what looked like a brass clockwork bird about the size of a chicken egg, with a wind up key in its back.

  “Morgan…” Arthur breathed as he took the bird-like contraption out of its box, “you made this yourself?”

  “Yeah,” Morgan replied, seeming somewhat embarrassed. “It’s called an ornithopter. I read about them in a book on clockwork inventions at the town library once, so I wanted to sort of try my hand at making one. I’d gotten started on it before I got sick, and by the time I got back to working on it, I was already thinking of what I could get you for your going away present, so the timing just sort of worked out in the end.”

  Arthur legitimately didn’t know what to say. Just today Morgan had told him of her dream of becoming a clockwork inventor that she now had to give up, and here she had given him something she had planned to build as part of working towards that goal. He realised that his sister must have poured her heart and soul into building this gift for him… and he couldn’t help about feel guilty about it, even if he made sure not to show it on his face.

  “’Ornithopter?’” Harold inquired. “Is that some fancy word for a metal bird?”

  “Not really,” Morgan began to correct her father, “but it’s not entirely wrong, either. It refers to a kind of machine that’s built to mimic how birds- you know, it’s better to show you all. Arthur, put it on the floor and wind up the key, and you’ll see what it does.”

  Curious to see what his sister meant despite his guilt, Arthur got out of his chair and kneeled down on the floor, gently placing the ornithopter down there, and wound the key clockwise two times. In barely a second, the tiny machine unfurled its wings, which appeared to be a framework like a bat’s wings with the gaps filled by a cloth membrane, and to everyone but Morgan’s amazement, immediately flapped those wings and began to fly. It only barely rose an inch above the floor and covered about half a foot of distance before it landed again, but it was still unlike anything any of them had seen.

  “Morgan,” Arthur breathed, mouth agape in astonishment, “that’s incredible!”

  “Thanks, but I don’t think it’s as great as it could be if I had more time to work on it,” Morgan said modestly. “It can fly up to just under two feet, if you wind the key all the way. I’m actually kind of disappointed that I couldn’t get it to go farther.”

  “Don’t sell yerself short, now!” Melion contested Morgan with a hearty laugh. “Ah’ve seen the work of clockworkers’ guilds in big cities far and wide, and they’d be lucky tae have someone talented as you workin’ fer ‘em!”

  Arthur couldn’t help but feel uncomfortable about that comment, no matter how well-meaning Melion was when he made it. It seemed true that no one else knew about the dream Morgan had given up so she could pick up the slack in Arthur’s coming absence. Even Morgan seemed to visibly wince at being reminded of that fact, which the others noticed.

  “Morgan?” Summer asked with concern. “What’s wrong?”

  “Oh, it’s nothing!” Morgan lied to reassure them. “I… I’m just really glad Arthur likes it, that’s all.”

  Attempting to change the subject, Morgan continued, “But enough about me, why don’t we top off the evening with Arthur opening whatever Melion got for him?”

  Arthur, just as eager to move on from a subject that was surely distressing his sister, did just that, moving on to what had first appeared to be a strangely shaped package signed with Melion’s barely legible signature, but upon closer inspection, was actually two packages tied together; one long and narrow, and the other short and rectangular.

  “Two presents?” Arthur said in surprise. “Uncle, you didn’t have to-“

  “Don’ tell me I don’ have tae do these things fer ye,” Melion interrupted his nephew. “Like yer folks, ah wanted tae give ye somethin’ ye’d get some use outta, and I jus’ happened tae git me hands on two things that should serve ye well in that forest. So no more complainin’ ‘bout it, jus’ go and open ‘em, Arty.”

  Arthur opened the smaller of the two, which turned out to be a rather thick book entitled, A Manual of Monsters: The Comprehensive Guide to Magical Beasts & Spirits, by Albertus Magnus.

  “As ye no doubt remember from last time,” Melion explained as Arthur flipped through the tome’s pages to view the vividly illustrated magical beasts accompanying the detailed descriptions on such creatures, “the forest ye’ll be workin’ in is home tae all sorts of dangerous creatures, so ah thought ye could use a guide on what tae expect in there and how tae avoid comin’ across ‘em. Ah’m not exactly a book lover meself, but luckily ah meet quite a few experts on such beasts in me line of work, so ah asked an old associate of mine tae recommend a guidebook that’s up tae date enough tae be useful, while still simple enough that ye don’t need to spend a few years at some royal university tae read it.”

  “Thanks, Uncle. I’m sure this will prove invaluable.”

  “Aye, it should be full of useful tidbits like not walkin’ in tae a basilisk’s lair,” Melion said with a wink.

  “Hey, in my defense, I didn’t know what a basilisk’s lair looked like,” Arthur half-jokingly protested.

  “Well, now ye can look it up in that there book tae find out.”

  “And I was also trying to hide from a pack of wargs that had just come out of nowhere to kill a giant boar!”

  “Wot, and ye think it’d be worth it for ‘em to chase after a lone, measly human after expendin’ all the effort it takes tae chase one of those brutes down?” Melion laughed. “’Sides, speakin’ as a warg meself, they’d probably be full after that. Those boars can easily feed a whole pack, but ye’d barely qualify as a snack, methinks.”

  “Can we please talk about something else?” Summer sternly asked the two, clearly not fond of how filling a meal her son would be as a topic of conversation.

  “Fair enough,” Melion conceded. “So why don’ ye open yer second one, Arty?”

  Arthur did so, opening the long, narrow gift, which turned out to be a tool that Arthur had become very familiar with thanks to his uncle: a sheathed arming sword.

  “Ah know how las’ time we discussed this, ah said how ah wasn’t teachin’ ye how to handle one of these so ye could go into that forest. But now, looks like that’s exactly wot ye’ll be needin’ one for.”

  Cautiously, Arthur took pulled the blade out of its scabbard and examined it. It was a double edged blade just the length of his forearm, with a short, straight crossguard, underneath which extended a black leather grip ending in a triangular pommel. But what was most striking about the blade, Arthur found, was that the sword was not made of steel, like he might have guessed, but pure iron.

  “Why give me an iron sword?” Arthur inquired his uncle. “I don’t want to sound ungrateful or anything, but I’m curious why that instead of steel.”

  “And under any other circumstances, ah would’ve given ye a steel blade, but here’s the thing,” Melion explained. “There’s more in that wood ye need tae worry ‘bout than just beasts of the flesh. There’s also fae and spirits that can be more easily deterred by iron than steel.”

  “I…” Arthur stammered as he slid the sword back in his scabbard, once again fully reminded of what he had gotten himself into when he made his bargain. “Thanks, Uncle.”

  But after Arthur had put down the sword with the rest of his presents, tears began to well up in Arthur’s eyes, and he began to cry.

  “Arthur?” Summer asked her son worriedly, getting out of her chair to be by his side, “what’s wrong?”

  “It’s…” Arthur sniffed. “It’s a lot of things. A lot of things wrong and a lot of things right, too.”

  As everyone gathered around Arthur’s chair, he continued, “I’m… I’m really grateful to all of you, you know?”

  “Don’t mention it, lad,” Harold reassured his son as he placed a hand on his shoulder. “It’s your last Solstice here, so we needed to make it count.”

  “I don’t just mean for this, but for everything. We’ve never had much, but you’ve all still done everything you can for me and more, even as our home’s been falling apart.”

  “Arthur, dear,” his mother told him, “you don’t need to thank us for doing what a family should do.”

  “You’re probably right,” Arthur said sadly. “But it still just reminds me of how I threw it all away.”

  “Look Arthur, I’m still not thrilled about what you did either,” Morgan told him. “But I probably wouldn’t even be here today if you didn’t. Besides, remember how you promised no more moping tonight?”

  “Yeah, well it’s my party,” Arthur told his sister with a tearful grin, “and I’ll cry if I want to.”

  “C’mere, Arty,” Melion said softly as he pulled his nephew up to give him a great, big hug, which was quickly joined by his sister, and then his parents.

  “Thanks,” Arthur sniffed, “for giving me the best going away party I could have asked for… and being the best family I could have asked for.”

  “Don’t thank us, dear,” Summer told her son.

  “After all,” Harold added, “we couldn’t have done it without the best son we could have asked for.”

  “Or the best nephew,” Melion added.

  “Or the best brother,” Morgan topped it all off with.

  But eventually, this night too came to an end, and the Butchers tired and made their way to their beds, wishing each other a good night and a happy Solstice for their final night as a complete family in this house.

  All in all, Arthur supposed as he lied down to sleep the last night he would spend in his own bed, this had been the best Solstice party that he could have asked for.

  But the fact that it was to be his last made this night all the more bittersweet.