Changelings: The Novelization (Book 1)

Chapter Five: "Heir"

Chapter Five

“Heir”

Miranda tripped on the uneven ground. Sully lifted her up roughly by the rope binding on her hands, straining her arms and making the orichalcum edges bite against her already chaffed skin. Miranda yelled in frustration, pulling away, but Sully’s grasp was inescapable.

“Hey, you better behave,” he told her, unfazed by her struggles. “I'm taking you home to meet Mother, and I hope for your sake she likes you.”

Miranda looked at him in horror. Mother. He was taking her to Mother Redcap.

Her personal exposure to the Fae was minimal – Axel was the only Fae she was aware of prior to the invasion. But he had tried to get her up to speed about the important players, and the woman known as Mother Redcap was one of them.

Her real name was Gothel. She had been beautiful once, a Goblin princess from the house of Gnome who beguiled the normally clear-headed Pellinore and became his wife. But theirs was an unhappy marriage, with Pellinore unable to deal with Gothel’s wild mood swings and fierce temper. He found any excuse to get away, volunteering for every heroic quest that came up. Meanwhile, Gothel was left in her castle, alone and with nothing to do.

She dabbled in the arts of the Gnomes, such as smithing and engineering and chemistry, but soon found it too boring. Pellinore disappeared after the Questing Beast – after a decade passed he was presumed dead by most. Gothel believed it was an assassination. She began to believe that everyone around her, from servant to noble, was jealous and plotting against her. As her sanity left her and her malice grew, she developed a morbid taste for violence and suffering. Torture and blood-sport became her main source of amusement, until she finally discovered a way to combine her skills with her passion.

She took a page from the playbook of Mad Queen Glorianna by experimenting on the blood of her own people. She invented a system for mass-production of orichalcum and instituting the practice of transmutation-as-punishment, all within one fell decree. Because of her bloodlust, and for the murder of her own stepdaughter Rampion, she became known as Mother Redcap. The kind-hearted Pellinore would have been horrified to see what his wife had done – but he never got the chance to return home and set things right.

Based on these tales, Miranda knew that Sully was dragging her to certain doom. “That crazy witch?! She'll kill me!” Miranda exclaimed.

Sully kicked her. “Shut yer mouth!”

“What do I care?! I’m dead anyway! HELP!!! SOMEBODY HELP ME!!!” she screamed into the forest, not caring if she sounded like a damsel in distress. She didn’t know who would be able or willing to help her at this point, but it was worth a shot.

Minutes before her cry for help, Jaron Lamar was surveying the town. Hawthorne had very little in way of natural lakes and rivers - the water now there was due to the invasion, and it was not only shallow, but contaminated and suited only for the breeding of mosquitoes. One of the Undine’s main concerns was making it habitable, by purifying the water and constructing permanent dams – this effort was to be spearheaded by their young Changeling prince.

Instead, he was regaling a pair of Undine women with tales of ‘his life in the human realm’ for ‘educational purposes’.

The Undine women had blue seal skin, fin ears, wavy tattoos, and armor made from the shells of their deceased ancestors. They had lived in the Otherworld all of their lives and had spent the last century as Undine infantry, so they were certain that their prince was a warrior of some renown in this strange land. And Jaron was not about to disappoint them.