Chapter 16

I woke up the next day, not much the worse for wear ... but weary, in every bone, muscle, fiber and wing part.

We, all of us, were camped together in what looked like to be the gardens of the old island castle. Although everything here was mostly dead and given away to ruin, they were restful. Even the strewn rocks had sort of a Japanese Zen garden sort of gentle appeal. Somewhat relieved, I took a short follow-on nap for another few hours until I was gently awakened for dinner. It was evening, of the next day. I’d slept for virtually a full day!

Over a large campfire pot of canned chicken and rice stew, Barry quietly filled me in with the rest of the minor details of our final victory and narrow escape. The flying Fae ladies had only just made the banks of the river when the sky and air all turned to fire, for miles around where the pyramid had been. The blast, quite circular, like a perfectly round small sun, had scorched everything out to about eight miles, leaving a perfect ring of fused sand ... now turned to opalized glass. Of the pyramid, nothing was left, he reported, not even a single bare stone. Where it had stood, was a deep round fused glassy/marble crater scoured deep into the surrounding glass-fused sand. When he had scouted the area in the Goat earlier this morning, he could see that at the curved bottom of the crater the ground was bubbling, still molten red hot!

There was no sinister black portal from beyond, no menacing undead, just a fairly normal desert now with an eight-mile radius sea of glass out to its edge, near the river. That sounded pretty final and wrapped up with a pretty bow as far as I was concerned!

For a small victory feast though, everyone was pretty subdued. We were all tired to the bone and just glad now that everything was finally over. The Quest, the final last one, was done. We ... and Mother, had really won. And at what I thought was still an entirely acceptable total cost.

I had the small tiny feeling that the cost would still yet somehow manage to grow over the years, and perhaps never really be considered ‘paid in full’.

The heroic Quest was over – good had conquered over evil. Shouldn’t that mean that we would all live now Happily Ever After?

First of all, the heroes and heroines were an exhausted wreck. Our cavalry, men, centaurs and horses were a mass of bandages and it took some effort to learn how to magically heal wounds to keep them all alive. Dottie showed some talent for it and her daughters kept their charges on the road to mending as well. I just had no knack for it ... or else I my will was so exhausted that I had little to give.

Here in our secure camp it was days before we could even consider starting our long journey home, and for most of that time I felt a need to get away from the other’s, even my fondest lover Barry, to be alone. I needed to think about everything that had happened, right from the start. Our women’s Quest and then our unified final charge to defeat the evil of the Outer-lands forever. Now that endless land was just normal desert ... with the addition of a LOT of glazed opaline glazed glass that probably would sell for a fortune as cut squares for windows back in mundania!

The Outer-lands were just another place now, the barriers now all gone that had kept Mother’s love away. One of the smarter, greater Fey, like maybe myself, could build an entire lovely kingdom of her own here, a few feet at a time, bringing life back to the barrens. Also more urgently, the Nether-lands cried out for us, to me, to bring them all back together and heal the many terrible wounds of that land as well. Their bear leader, Ursine Bear was most insistent upon that!

In fact, as I found out once I reached the castle of the Magic Kingdom, that not a single royal map clearly even dictated what the exact western border of their realm was! At best, they just showed a vague outline of a huge forest usually called the Dark Forest, and assumed it went on forever. It didn’t, but it was a pretty huge and fairly normal wild virgin forest with lots of deer, black bears, questing beasts and the odd peculiar enchanted creature or witch with the urge for privacy. When the forest ended, the western hills began ... nearly endless too, and the Nether-Lands began.

There was enough land here, on both sides of the river for two new and distinct marches or counties, to form a unified large duchy. With the island and it’s ruined keep in the neutral center. Yes! That would be perfect and permit no possible favoritisms between the two lands. After a lot of reflection, and hours of discussions with our anthropomorphic friends, we presented Barry and the prince a fait-de-accompli.

He wasn’t happy about it. Already in his mind’s eye, Prince Magnus had ‘conquered’ these lands (and damned near all by himself too!). Mentally, he’d already crowned himself Emperor, or something like that, and being forced to face reality didn’t improve his mood. Barry had already turned down one Dukedom before in his life and the idea of putting the crown of a petty king on his brow was frankly laughable. No way, ever, would my hubby bow down before some self-crowned ‘God-Emperor’! The new ducal lands here were far enough away from the Magic Kingdom so that ‘royal interference’ would be minimal, now and hopefully for a very long time to come.

That decided and settled in my head, I spent the last morning of our stay upon the island wandering and climbing over the stone ruins, using my Fae senses to figure out what the small castle here had once looked like, when new ... and how I could restore it once again! I didn’t shift a single stone block, but I could sense the roots of the structure and how each of the ruined stones once fit together, and felt that we could restore it ... and make it our home, our new forever home!

On our last afternoon there, I took Barry’s hand and bade Dot to grab Jack’s, and the four of us took the relatively short uphill trip across to the Nether-side of the river, to once again climb up that great lush and green but bare sugar loaf shaped hill, to stand once again upon it’s crest, to behold miles and miles of virgin land surrounding us ... our new domain!

Here, my heart-link with Linda was still faint, and far too distant still to communicate through, but for a moment I could feel, touching my foot through the grass, her breath, and a whisper in the soft early summer warm breezes.

“I love you...” I thought I heard the wind murmur in my ear, for just a brief moment and then gone. I think Dottie heard her voice too, because like me her eyes were swelling up with tears. Then we all hugged and kissed each other a couple of hundred times in happy love, and then, as if of the same mind we all grasped hands, the four of us, like in a square-dance circle and we began to dance! On the crest of that glorious hill, we swung each other around in a circle first one way and then the other, laughing, still crying and has deliriously happy as four people had even been together in their entire lives! First in our clothes, but later quite entirely naked and joyfully bare to our special world.

We danced the entire afternoon, without pause, break or rest, until the sunset began to fall, as we hopped this way and that, switched arm links with every partner and stomped the ground and clapped our hands with joy! Below, down near the base of the hill, many of our animal friends, including the bears and the goat, and assorted other stuffed, toy or cartoonish animals too held their tiny hand and paws and silently watched us, never making a sound as night fell slowly upon our intimately special and private hilltop.

As the darkness fell, so did we, upon the soft warm grass, first in pairs and then together a soft and ever so pleasant jumble and squirming of loving flesh. No one, none of our friends below or any of our other companions back on the island disturbed our lovemaking, for all of that long soft warm summer’s night. By starlight and glowing approval of the ever-full silvery moon, we affirmed, avowed and reasserted our special, endless love for each other and felt neither exhaustion or complete satisfaction with our efforts until the very first light of dawn peaked upon the hills to our east, towards our old home. Maybe sometime during that endlessly wonderful night, for a moment, I thought I could see with my far-too clouded and joy-filled eyes, the sight of Linda’s shade, something like a foggy ghost or a moonlit apparition ... but I felt her smile and yet also infinite sadness, that she couldn’t be there now, in the flesh once more to share our rapture! All too soon, in a blink as they say, she was gone, but the comfort of her smile warmed my heart for many long days that followed.

I couldn’t describe how we made love that night. It was all much the same as usual, but yet quite entirely different, as if we were all made again to virgins on this earth and to feel the ecstasy of sex, real pure love and sex ... not fucking, for the very first time. No fathomable act was left unfilled or physical position or entry unattempted. I cannot find any even passable earth words to describe ... any of it.

It was the best lovemaking of my entire life. Anything that I could hope to feel or experience from that day onwards, while pleasant, has yet felt imperfect ... that something important and significant was missing. Sex was still good for me, always, but equally now inadequate in dozens of tiny small ways.

We didn’t even dress again, leaving the hill, our hill, that morning. Our friends down the hill had kept silent vigil with us, holding small candles during the dark, as if they were witnessing something sacred and too holy to ever be spoken of thereafter. No one said a word, then or about this special night even many years afterwards and we walked back down to the river and took a quick and rather chilly bath, and then climbed up to the island and through one of the old broken walls and rejoined the others.

Returning to the Magic Kingdom, we took the eastern trails home, through the endless hills of the Nether-lands and then cutting though the southernmost edge of the Dark Forest. Nothing and no one delayed or hindered our passage. We traveled slowly, so that the still wounded horses and centaurs, not to mention the still exhausted men, wouldn’t force their pace. We broke camp early before sunset and slept late, not leaving again until an hour or more after dawn. We let the slowest member of the prince’s cavalry set our pace, which wasn’t much more than a crawl.

It took a week to reach the edges of the Black Forest and we skirted it to the south and a few days later entered the Magic Kingdom proper. We regularly now began to pass villages, crops, fields, woods and orchards and our slow pace became yet slower. We’d break camp for the night by early afternoon now, at the most convenient village or town with a good tavern. The prince in his haste had not brought much of the old-ready and he had barely two gold coins on him, but it was enough for ale a’plenty for everyone, a good bed for us at night and a proper stable for our now thin and scarred, tired weak-kneed mounts.

We dithered, dallied and delayed, leaving later each day and stopping sometimes by noon, and none of us were quite sober by dinner time. This turned out to be a problem, because the prince tended to get aggressive and argumentative when deep in his cups. There is a lot of shit that Barry won’t take ... and back-talk from his apparently ungrateful son is one of them. On the last two nights of our trip they nearly came to blows over a discussion of ‘divine right of kings’ (the prince was entirely in favor of it) and really, Jack was the only one of us who had the patience and could keep the prince in reasonable good humor and keep him from starting a fight he’d certainly lose.

It took us another week to ride at last across the castle drawbridge and inside the iron-gates of the keep courtyard. By then we were all rather tired of the adventure and just glad that finally it, everything, was now all over with! With every mile we took eastward, I felt even more regret for leaving our new home. Even if it was populated with Technicolor eccentrics and currently our home was just a vast mound of stone rubble. The castle Steward was there to find rooms for Jack and Dottie, I supposed Gertie and our cavalry already had quarters here somewhere outside, with the castle guard. I knew the way already and grabbed for Barry and myself the best guest suite, which was the old evil princess’s room, from back long ago. Nothing much in it had changed, except most of the old blood stains had been scrubbed away.

We just parked our clothing bags there and stomped right back downstairs, to get my hubby’s noble title confirmed, fast ... before any more shit flew! With clinched teeth, the rather ungrateful prince, with his soon-to-be bride Amanda beaming lovingly at us, he pronounced our titles loudly to the assembled court and everyone cheered. Of course they did ... anyone who didn’t was going to get turned into green hopping thing by me!

The prince then signed a rather formally written parchment that I magically produced into his hands, and glared at him it sign it ... and he did without reading it! To be certain, many of the clauses of our duchy’s’ rights and privileges were a bit vague, and undoubtedly excessively over-generous, in our favor. I wanted it established now, right from the start, that our duchy was semi-autonomous from the Magic Kingdom and that we owed only nominal, token obedience to the crown.

Duke Barry was confirmed before the dais of the royal throne and I was a Duchess, once again, but I quickly found that my title of Fairy was far more important and prestigious.

We ought to have left right then, but really we wanted to be there for Amanda’s wedding to the prince. It had long been foretold and I was in no mood to remind the girl that the prince, her husband to be, could be a wanker when he was drunk or in a bad mood. She told me later that she knew exactly what she was getting, and being twice as smart as he was, she had him (and the royal court) quite wrapped around her fingers within days. I did stop in a quiet hallway once, the evening before the ceremony, to jam my wand up his nose and tell him precisely what I would do to him if I ever even heard a hint that he had touched her in anger or disrespected her. Extremely convincingly, I think.

Amelia’s mixed heritage was of little or no concern to most of the court, but her marriage into the royal family did bind the last overly conservative centaur tribes in obedience to the Kingdom. A long simmering problem was now permanently resolved. This also helped with political relations with many of the other non-human tribes. From the time she arrived at the castle, Amelia began assuming both racial roles publically, always appearing as human inside the castle or its grounds, but returning to her centaur form when outside it, traveling.

So, we stayed for the wedding (I was the matron of honor) and one week later the old mostly senile king formally abdicated in favor of the young prince and princess. Frankly, right from the start, you could see that it would be the young Queen that would run the court, and most of the kingdom policy from that day onward! Amanda had the proper university training at UCLA just for this time and place, and none of us had the slightest doubt that she could make a great queen.

To the arriving hordes of bards, gleemen and storytellers, we told and retold our stories, politely, if asked, but increasingly it was the prince’s personal version of events that became canon, the usual telling of the adventure. He got lots of facts wrong and he never told the same version of ‘his great adventure’ twice. In his rather selective memory, it had been he that had overcome the evils of the pyramid. We didn’t even try to correct that mistake. He was going to be king and the story would end up being whatever flavor he preferred. In the end, I supposed it wasn’t important what version of events the villagers and townsfolk heard in taverns at night. Anyone who needed to know the differences already knew ... and here in this private journal I’ve already written my own definitive account of the events.

Jack, really being the only one of us that could drink with the new king and give him any sort of good advice that the lad would actually follow, soon found himself appointed the new Lord Chamberlain to the Kingdom, and he was welcome to keep the job! Being a Hollywood producer, dealing with crazy people and insane egos, really was perfect training for managing a dysfunctional Magic Kingdom!

Dottie told me privately, even before the wedding, that she could hear the call of the Magic Kingdom beckoning to her, coaxing her to call it her home, body and in spirit. She relented with disturbing swiftness. At the coronation, it was she that held aloft the crowns of the king and queen and by her word, as the new official Fairy-Godmother of the Magic Kingdom, and by her authority, that she placed the crowns upon their heads.

Jack and Dottie now had their new homes, and fairly happily so!

Gertie didn’t even wait for the wedding before she flapped her wings from the highest tower of the castle and flew off flying east, towards the Dismal Swamp, and further to lands and seas unknown, until she reached the place of her calling ... the great wondrous snowy mountains, and the proud race of eagles that lived there, to become their Fae. No one really missed her and as far as I know she’s never returned here since.

The girls, really now women in every way, Jasmine and Trinity had Fae callings of their own. The day after the coronation, the elder girl dove into the Great River that ran near the castle and was only rarely seen thereafter by most mortals. Her sister flew south and plunged herself into the Great Central Sea, becoming slowly with magical strength and influence the senior Fairy of that vast sea. Both had never forgotten their first magical swims in first the northern lake and then that far-off tropical sea, and it burned within them to return to the water, to stay. Dottie talks to them frequently and they visit upon occasion, but I’ve only seen them a few times since. We’re at different places and doing different things.

Thus were our Quest-Companions at last sundered from each other’s side. Perhaps, mostly for the better. The Fae have to be able to see the long-view of things, at least the smarter ones anyway.

Barry and I snuck out of the castle while the wedding party was in full swing, leaving the second we thought we could get away with it. It was long after dark, but we drove the Goat and her trailer out the castle gate and pointed her nose west, and didn’t let anything stop us, except for food, bathroom breaks, and short catnaps. Our Goat could damn near drive herself and we mostly let her choose our path back home!

We didn’t stop in any village or town and avoided even the outskirts of settlements, until we left the last trees of the Dark Forest and entered our first duchy, which we now named simply Netherland. To be precise, on our signed ducal writ, signed by the King, our eastern border fell exactly half-way in the middle center of the Dark Forest, wherever that is! No one will figure out that exact boundary for years, maybe centuries!

At each refugee camp we gave our new subjects the happy word and at last formally, before an assembly of most of our varied and peculiar population, I formally held up my wand and pronounced myself the patroness Fairy Godmother of the Duchy of Barryhill! We let them feast and grovel with pathetic happiness for a few days, until in revenge Barry pronounced that Ursine Bear was appointed to become his Lord Chamberlain! The goat got a title too, Master of the Ducal Privies! That should teach him!