Unnatural Issue Read Online Free Page B

cleaning. So she took an apple and bread and cheese in her pockets, waited until no one was watching her, and walked quite calmly out of the gardens to the green trees she could see. There she had demanded, wordlessly, but firmly, that someone come to keep her company. Someone nice. Someone who knew things. Someone who could explain these wonderful new sensations she was having.
    She got Robin, who was quite as surprised as she was.
    Suiting his form to hers, he had appeared as a child rather than an adult. She had intrigued him no end—and the Fae were always attracted to mortal children.
    “I was tempted to steal you away, you know,” he said, finally leaving the fish alone and rolling over on his back to stare at the sky. “You with a father that didn’t want you, and all that power in you—you were exactly the sort of mortal child that most calls to us.”
    “I know that now; I didn’t know that then.” She began plaiting grass stems into a slender braid. “I’d have likely gone with you.”
    Robin sighed. “I couldn’t. Your land needed you. I could feel it calling you. But with all that power—it was too dangerous to leave you untrained, and your fool of a father wasting his life in blaming you for what was none of your doing—you’d have been left to the first mortal Mage to see you for what you were.”
    “It might have been one of the Gypsies,” she pointed out. “That would have been no bad thing.”
    “Except they’d have stolen you too, and this is the land that needs you.” He sighed again. “Alas for me, there was naught for it but to train you myself. Bother responsibility!”
    She pulled a face at him. “Oh, and such a burden I was too!”
    “Dreadful,” he agreed. She laughed.
    Then they fell silent; she, considering what he had said about troubling times coming, and he—well, who knew what one of the Fae thought? It could have been nothing more important than how to pull a little mischief off, or deep sobering thoughts about keeping England safe. Or, he might not have been thinking at all.
    There was no doubt that she could not have had a finer or stricter teacher. She had been given such a thorough education in the ways and means, the dos and don’ts of Earth mastery, that she very much doubted there was a mortal Master who could find fault with anything she did.
    She wondered if her father even realized that the only reason why he had not attracted dangerous Elementals to the neighborhood and to himself was because she had aided the land in walling off the Manor and the gardens that he had poisoned, encysting it in the same way that an oyster or clam would cover something that irritated it in nacre. Robin himself had begun the process, and she had added to it, layer on layer, whenever she had the energy to spare.
    Within the Manor boundaries, she had worked to protect every member of the household as best she could. The task was made a bit easier by the fact that her father was not actively trying to harm anything, and the blight about the house was merely the natural reflection of the blighted and embittered spirit of the Earth Master himself, not an actual curse or active poisoning.
    “It’s going to be war,” Robin said soberly, out of the blue. “Not just a little war, neither. There’s a lot of mortal nastiness afoot, beyond and above that. Wicked weapons, things that should not be allowed. It will come to touch everyone before it’s over.”
    A chill came over her. He must have been Foreseeing, sitting there. “What must I do?” she asked at last.
    “Warn the Coveners. Be vague, though, tell ’em to scry it out for themselves. They’ll be more like to believe it that way. I’ll do what I can to help them see true.” He sighed. “And this is why so many of the Fae have cut themselves off from the mortal world. ’Tisn’t just the Cold Iron, ’tis what you lot insist on doing to yourselves and the good earth.”
    “But you stay . . .”
    “I’m the Oldest