The nearest village, even on wings as quick as mine, was nearly half a day’s flight from my castle. It would give me time and distance to think, I reasoned, as I set myself on the path.
But by the time I reached the village, though, I did not feel I’d had nearly enough time to think at all. I’d come to no new conclusions about the various problems pricking at me. I still had to visit Rúnwebbe before I’d be able to speak to the human, and beyond that, I still needed to tackle larger problems – Skalla and the council, the star-darkness, and finding my mate. The issues were bound up together in a tangled web that even Rúnwebbe would envy.
I pushed it all aside for now to focus on my current task, hating how the human’s face was the hardest to push aside of them all.
This Sionnachan village stood on a high, broad hill, bare in the middle of dense forest. At least, it had the last time I was here. It had grown since then, the buildings spilling down the hill into cleared land, pushing the forest back. The village buildings looked so squat and short compared to the spires of the castle I’d come from and the trees scattered around. Sionnachans made their buildings using materials from the trees, but they did not carve up into the trees themselves the way my father had done when he’d built the castle for my mother. Typically, Sionnachan buildings were boxy, or cylindrical, made from crystal tile and bricks, their roofs angled to help the snow slide off and not build up too heavily on top.
I landed at the base of the hill, in the centre of a lane mostly cleared of snow. I walked along the broad lane, which led up the hill. A sled pulled by two graceful sontanna crested the hill ahead of me, beginning the descent. I stepped aside to make way, taking note of the way the two Sionnachan males in the sled twisted to gape at me in disbelief as they passed. Another Sionnachan, who’d been sweeping snow away from her front door, dropped her broom and then hastily flattened her ears at the sight of me. I grunted a greeting at her, which caused her to nearly jump out of her tawny skin. When I took a step towards her, she gasped and fled inside, leaving her broom half-buried in the snow.
Getting answers may not be as easy as I’d hoped, I thought to myself as I retrieved her broom and stood it up against the bricks of her home. Here, beyond the mountains, the trees grew in slightly different variations. There were fewer pink and green trees and many more purple ones, which meant most of the buildings in the village glinted like purple gems among the snow.
I was glad to see so many new buildings. The village had clearly prospered in my time away. And yet, there was an arresting sort of relief that overtook me when I reached the top of the hill and found the main road through the village fundamentally unchanged. When my eyes fell on one of the largest buildings – a broad tiled cylinder shining in the afternoon sun – I knew exactly where it was I needed to go.
If I wanted answers, if I wanted to talk, where better a place to go than the local pub, where tongues were loosened by ale?
I unfurled my wings and flew there, landing at the pub’s door before wrenching it open and stepping inside.
I was right – this was the place to come for chatter. The main circular room of the pub was filled to the crystal rafters with it. More than two dozen Sionnachans ate, drank, and conversed along spiralling benches that curled inward from the rounded outer wall.
One by one, though, as the Sionnachans took notice of me at the door, they fell silent. Somewhere, a goblet smashed to the floor.
At the centre of the pub, where the long benches finally ended their inward swirl, was a large circular counter with a hollow in the middle where the pub master stood. For a brief moment, I thought I recognized him, with his distinctly spotted black and cream colouring and pale blue eyes. But he was taller than the last pub master I’d known. And younger. Another descendant, no doubt.
He was louder than the last pub master, Gershen, had been too. Louder, and apparently bolder. Where Gershen would have given me a brief, gruff greeting, barely audible over the sounds of the pub, this new one called out to me, his voice rich and clear, meeting my eyes with a grin when no other Sionnachan in the vicinity seemed capable of even drawing breath in my presence.
“Lord Wylfrael! Ashken sent a burrowbird with word that you’d returned. We all wondered if you’d come here.”
“I have returned,” I said, a perhaps redundant confirmation of what my appearance had already told them. But it seemed as if they needed more confirmation. Most of them looked like they couldn’t make any sense of what they were seeing.
A whisper from a bench on the other side of the pub caught my keen ears. “So old Ashken hasn’t lost his lane in the snow, then.”
“No, he has not,” I said crisply, reining in my annoyance at the way the villagers had so obviously doubted the word, and the sanity, of my old Master of the Grounds. “You would all do well to respect my staff whenever you come into contact with them, and to heed their words as if they were words direct from my lips.”
Flattened ears, and muttered phrases of “Yes, Lord Wylfrael. Of course, Lord Wylfrael,” rolled along the benches like wind bending the flowers in a field.
I frowned, not liking the way this interaction had begun. I did not enjoy the role of the angry lord, but angry was all I’d been since I’d awoken. I breathed in deeply, smelling firestone and meat and Sionnachan fur, fur just like my mother’s, and reminded myself to be calm. Civil. The Sionnachans were gentle and good, but they were clearly wary of me. I also reminded myself that, though they called me Lord Wylfrael, they were not beholden to me. My castle, and the forests around it, were my mother’s ancestral lands and now belonged to me. But I did not own the land they lived on in this village – they did. They called me lord, as they had also done for my father, not because we required it but out of their own half-fearful deference to stone sky immortality and power. Sionnachans had no kings, no landlords, and each village was completely autonomous of every other.
But because I was a stone sky god, with powers they could scarcely imagine and had never even witnessed in their lifetimes, to them I was not simply Wylfrael. I was the long-lost immortal lord, carved out of stories passed down by their parents and grandparents, a childhood legend brought to life right before their very eyes.
I did not want to be a half-forgotten legend. I wanted to exist here, to be real in this time and place. To be known as I had once known this world so well. A living god. Not a ghost.
“I’ve come to greet you all,” I said, my voice a controlled boom in the space. “To let you know that I have indeed returned, and to inquire about activities near my castle. A little over thirty days ago, a machine landed, bringing with it interlopers called humans. What do you know of them?”
The Sionnachans shifted on their benches, eyeing me and each other uneasily.
The pub master was the one who answered, the only one who seemed at all at ease with me in their midst.
“We know only what Ashken sent by burrowbird, my lord,” he called while polishing a goblet with a spare rag. “We heard tell of these people and their sled from the sky, but have not seen them ourselves. We thought it best to give them a wide berth, and they have not come to seek us out.”
So, basically what Ashken already told me, then. There had been no real contact between the invaders and my mother’s people. It was for the best. The Sionnachans were too peaceful to launch an attack against invaders the way I had done. I did not like to think what would have happened if the aggressive humans and their weapons had made their way here eventually...
“I will inform you now, then, that the humans have left. I do not believe they will be back.” I did not tell them that I’d killed nearly as many humans as had escaped on the machine. They were already unnerved by me. No need to frighten them further.