King of the Woodlands

Chapter 2

Morning turned into afternoon. Lilibeth ate her whipped potatoes with melted butter, along with an oatcake smeared with honey for dessert. Father still didn't come. She longed to hear the rough baritone of his voice, but it never fluttered out to meet her ears.

Now, while our young Lilibeth stands on her head and reads a book, let us make sense of how things work in her kingdom. Llewellenar is a kingdom where faeries and humans live in harmony. Lilibeth and her family are human (although she'd always wanted to be a faerie).

There are good faeries like the bean tighe, a little old woman who takes care of children and completes chores, and there are bad faeries like changelings, the ones who snatch human babes from their cradles. When a human baby is born, a piper is hired by the family to play a warding song said to protect from changelings. But most of the time, faeries are benevolent—and come in all shapes and sizes. Some faeries even look like humans.

Now, back to our story surrounding contrary, sour, spirited Lilibeth. She waited and waited for someone that would not come.

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Three days passed, each one slower than the last.

On the first day, Lilibeth knocked on door after door, asking everyone where he might've gone.

They didn't answer, of course, fearing for their own lives. She thought them selfish and wished for more apples to throw in their faces, even though she knew they were right to fear for themselves.

Esta was gone too, rushed by her family, who had arrived with a fancy carriage and whatnot. They never even spared a glance at Lilibeth, a child that they were leaving alone. She hadn't had the energy to throw apples at them and lecture them on their selfishness, because she would've done something similar too.

Lilibeth trudged back to her cottage and kicked at the dirt, then found a quiet place to sit under the white-painted trellis of ivy and lush vines. She'd curled up like a small child and wept foolish tears of anger.

Lilibeth could hear the cows mooing in a faraway pasture, hear the bees buzzing in a patch of clover flowers. The bright red cardinal had flown by, perching itself near her foot. She once fed it a bit of her porridge each day, and it had started coming ever since. A faerie had appeared from behind a white flower, wearing a pumpkin-colored tunic and short dark green pants. Its wings dragged on the ground as it peered curiously up at her, along with the cardinal. Usually she wouldn't mind their quiet company.

"You're all a bunch of nuisances," she said to them. They didn't seem to care. And yet somehow their presence comforted her a little bit.

On the second day, Lilibeth tried talking to Father, wondering if Sol, the Sun God, would carry her voice across the sky to where Father was. But no matter where the sun and moon and stars hung in the sky, she never got a response.

The third day trudged by like a child tracking mud over the carpet with his boots—slow and terribly excruciating. Lilibeth fed the cardinal and found a new faerie waiting for her, a she-faerie with short, straw-colored hair and a peach dress. She didn't try to speak to it or offer it any frosted lemon cake.

Finally, the night came. The Moon Queen Cerridwen brought the night early. A few stars blinked lazily in the blue-black sky, and a nightingale began to sing. Lilibeth stayed awake, bundled in a threadbare quilt, her body shaking like the last leaf on a tree.

Father had been taken. She was sure of it.

Never again would he come home bearing squeaky wheelbarrows of pumpkins and grapes and turnips and onions; never again would he sing his folk songs. Never again would he bring her black currant butter cakes fresh from the bakery.

"Don't ever lose your fire," Father once said to her. Lilibeth had been shy as a little girl, the subject of mocking and ridicule. (My, how those insults stung!) She hadn't been strong enough to stand up to the rude village girls until she was ten, the day she'd told Thronel that she could see her bloomers.

And then Lilibeth learned to be strong, to hold her head high and pretend to not care about what others thought. But some part of herself still hurt when the villagers called her strange. Some part of herself felt like she didn't fit in, like she didn't belong here, like she didn't belong anywhere.

But still she remembered when Father had hugged her under the stars and nothing else mattered, when he taught her to read after she'd deemed school too suffocating and boring. She was thankful for him more than she thought possible. He forgave her when she was stupid and never made her feel foolish. Tears filled her eyes.

If no one would go out looking for Father, Lilibeth would.

She threw on Mother's black cherry colored cloak. It was a bit too big for her small stature, but she didn't care. She grabbed a satchel and filled it with coins and her favorite peach-and-marigold lollies.

Lilibeth opened the door and kept her head held high as she walked, afraid that if she looked back, she would fall apart.