Page 1 of Till Kingdom Come

Prologue

Killian Honeywood

It all started with the Fairies, who weren’t feared nearly as much as they should have been, in my opinion.

When most people thought about Fairies, they imagined one of the tiny Tinker Fairies, which were mostly harmless, mischievous little creatures, with delicate, gossamer wings. I sometimes glimpsed them out of the corner of my eye frolicking among the flowers in the garden or perching in the trees laughing down at me as they tossed twigs or berries at my head as I passed by. The cook told me I should leave out a bowl of cream for the Tinker Fairies, and in turn, they might leave me some Fairy dust, which brought good luck. I should gather it carefully if they did and keep it hidden away, she said, because you never knew when it might come in handy. They’d never left any, as it turned out, but I was always hopeful. I needed all the luck I could get.

At any rate, those Fairies were not the kind I meant.

I’d heard that once, a very long time ago, a large group of angels revolted against God and started a war in heaven. God, in his terrible and entirely justifiable wrath, ordered the gates of heaven to be shut and sealed forever. All those who were still within heaven remained angels. Those who had escaped and fallen into hell became demons. And all those caught in between—in the places where the world was in danger of coming apart at the seams—they became Fairies, neither angels nor demons, but something else entirely.

Again, it wasn’t the tiny ones, but the bigger, more beautiful ones who were so dangerous to mortals. I’d heard many stories about the fierce and mysterious Sidhe Fairies of the Tuatha de Danann, for example. They were the ones who were powerful enough and vindictive enough to make a man’s blood run cold. Pronounced likeShee,they were descendants of an ancient, warlike people in the British Isles, who had once been the gods of ancient mythology. These Sidhe were fierce, known for their big, muscular bodies, their potent magic and their otherworldly beauty. These Fairies, like their close cousins, the Elves, could be savage and unpredictable, and they made bad enemies.

There were perhaps fifty or more Sidhe Fairies tribes alone, and all of them were capricious and could be cruel. You never knew which they might decide to be, so it was best to stay clear of them entirely if you could. Their high king was named Larek, and he was dark in his heart and his mind and in what passed for his soul.

And his only son was Prince Bracca.

If I took Bracca completely out of the equation, which seems like an unreasonable thing to do, seeing as how this story, like my life, mostly revolves around him, then the beginning might beearly one sunny morning in June. I awoke with an odd sense of dread, but without any notion of why I felt that way. Was there some revelation at hand? I was not particularly insightful, to be honest. My deepest thoughts mostly turned around what the weather would be like on any given day or perhaps what to have for my next meal. Normally, morning was the time I liked best, when the day still stretched out ahead of me, full of promise and ready to be anything I could imagine—a world of possibilities.

That morning, things felt somehowoffand far from normal. A sense of portent sat on my chest like a heavy bird of prey, its talons dug deep in my chest. It was the strangest feeling—it was as if something were coming for me—something big and important that would change my life forever. If I’d only known then where my destiny lay, then maybe I still could have changed things. Or then again, maybe not. I believe a poet once said, “Will in us is overruled by our fate.”

Prince Bracca was my fate, and I wouldn’t have missed him for the world.

Of course, it was always best for mortals to stay inside during the Solstice nights, safe in their beds with the covers pulled up over their heads for good measure. My old nurse saw to that, but then she was a worry wart. Not only was she a stickler about Solstices, but she thought that nighttime was the time when the Fae were out and about for hours at a time, and it was healthier for mortals to be indoors. Otherwise, you might well encounter one of them and suffer the consequences.

For the same reasons, she never allowed me to swim in the ocean, because she said the Mer People—who were, after all, a type of Fairy, could drag me under and take me to the bottom of the sea.

Perhaps the most consistent story she told was how the Fairies and even sometimes the Elves abducted children right out of their beds and took them away to be raised in their realm, leaving changelings behind in their places. However, I never truly believed that story.

From what she’d said, these Fae didn’t even seem to care about their own children all that much, let alone anyone else’s, and that begged the question, who exactly would raise all those changeling babies they supposedly took? Female Fae were said to make appallingly bad mothers, and their babies were mostly raised in an offhand, casual manner. A less nurturing bunch I never hoped to meet.

Personally, I doubted they would even take a child away to be raised in the first place, because babies were far too much trouble. More than likely, they’d drop the child off at some poor peasant’s house, who already had more children than they could feed. Or they might leave them in the woods somewhere while off they went, dancing in the moonlight or getting drunk on Fairy wine and forgetting where they’d even left them.

Nevertheless, the thing that no one really mentioned all that much…the thing that was only whispered about and never spoken about out loud, was that the phrase, “Away with the Fairies,” was a real thing. Fairies took people away with them all the time, and not just babies but adults as well. And the ones that were taken were never seen nor heard from by anyone who knew them ever again.

I knew this to be true—because it happened to me.

Chapter One

The day that I was taken by the Fairies was the twenty-first of June, 1560, which just so happened to be the longest day of that calendar year. It was also known as the Summer Solstice, marking the time of new beginnings, inner power and the sun leading us to better days.

I didn’t know all that back then, though I’ve come to know it since. If I had, it might have made me feel better. But all I had known at the time was that the day I left the mortal realm was beautiful and warm—and only days later, I was close to freezing to death in the bitterest, coldest weather I’d ever known.

Summer had been slow to appear that year, with May dragging its feet, seeming to hold on longer than usual to the cool, wet days of Spring, as if it couldn’t bear to part with them. June finally arrived, and the sky was a blazing blue celebration of clear skies with no clouds in sight. Everywhere there seemed to be flowers, filling the meadows and gardens with glorious splashes of color. I had always loved summer, and it was by far my favorite time of year. That’s one reason why it had been so hard to be spirited far from my home and into an eternal winter of ice and snow and sunless skies.

I had awakened early on that day in June and went down to the kitchen to cajole the cook into making me breakfast. Though I usually preferred something light like fresh berries, sweetened with cream and honey, I had asked that morning for something heartier to fortify me for the long, vigorous day of hunting ahead of me.

Our father had asked me and my brothers to go hunting for wild boar in the forest by his estate. It was an unusual request, but not totally unheard of. I decided on a bowl of steaming porridge to fortify me for the chilly mornings we were still having and asked the cook to add in a splash of cream. I loved cream and always had. Anyway, I hoped the porridge would warm the icy knot of unease inside me, but it did little to help. I gave up after a while and pushed the dish aside, because I found I was far too anxious to eat more than a few bites for some reason.

I told myself it was nothing—maybe a bad dream only half-remembered or a case of indigestion from the night before. Or perhaps it was because I was about to spend the next few hours in the company of my older brothers, none of whom I was close to or even liked very much. And that feeling was mutual. I was the next to the youngest of five sons from an old, distinguished family led by my father, Sir John Honeywood.

My father was a harsh taskmaster, and he had pitted me and my brothers against each other for as long I could remember—destroying any tender feelings we might ever have felt for each other. We were half-brothers from different wives of Sir John. He seemed to enjoy the way his sons all vied to impress him and gain his favor. We still had to interact with each other from time to time, and this was one of those occasions. Our father had demanded it, and so we danced to his tune, as usual.

We all helped out by working in the Tournament games that Sir John loved so much, and there we also competed for his regard, because that regard was in short supply. None of us wanted to give him any reason to take any scraps of it away and use his fists instead. We grew up not feeling any love for each other, but only a sense of rivalry. Our father believed in not spoiling his sons, and his beatings for even minor infractions were frequent and at times harsh. Between the frequent tournaments and my father’s discipline, my brothers and I were usually bruised and bloody or healing from sprained and broken limbs. My father always claimed he had to toughen us up—teach us to be real men—by allowing us to serve him as his squires and footmen.

On that particular morning, I rose to stand by my bedroom window, gazing out, filled with that strange sense of foreboding I couldn’t seem to shake. Was something awful about to happen? Hunting wild boar with our crossbows could be dangerous, to say the least. Their sharp tusks, aggressive natures, and ability to ambush hunters made them difficult to kill.

The sun was just about to come up all the way over the horizon, and the dew was still heavy and sparkling on the neatly trimmed grass. Our family estate had been settled since long before my birth at a large, impressive property called Scolley Hall,inKent, a county in southeast England not far from the British Sea, the narrow passage between England and France. It was a beautiful old house, if a bit run down, but a large house like Scolley Hall required a great deal of upkeep, and for my father, money was usually in short supply. It was one reason why he hosted the Tournament Games as often as he did and also took part in them to compete for the prizes, which he then sold.

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