The Treacherous Secret Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  The Treacherous Secret (Fairendale)

  Beginning

  Secrets

  Plans

  Change

  Promises

  Friends

  Blackbird

  Death

  Girl

  Words

  Banished

  Quiet

  The End

  Don’t miss out on the next Fairendale adventure!

  About the Author

  A Note From L.R.

  The Royal Family of Fairendale

  The Villagers

  Staff of the Castle

  Important Prophets

  Dragons of Morad

  The missing 12-year-old children

  Read all the books in the Fairendale series!

  Season 1:

  Book .5: The Good King’s Fall (a prequel)

  Book 1: The Secret

  Book 2: The Pursuit

  Book 3: The Crossing

  Book 4: The Dragons

  Book 5: The Aftermath

  Book 6: The Separation

  To see all the books L.R. Patton has written, please click or visit the link below:

  www.lrpatton.com/store

  Batlee Press

  PO Box 591596

  San Antonio, TX 78259

  Copyright ©2016 by L.R. Patton. All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing. I appreciate your taking the time to read my work. Please consider leaving a review wherever you bought it, or telling your friends how much you enjoyed it. Both of those help spread the word, which is incredibly important for authors. Thank you for supporting my work.

  www.lrpatton.com

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Printed in the United States of America

  First Edition—2016/Cover designed by Toalson Marketing

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  To my mom,

  who taught me

  the power of

  fairy tales.

  Beginning

  IF one were to visit the kingdom of Fairendale, it would take quite an extraordinary mind to imagine what loveliness it wore once upon a time.

  This is the land all fairy tales wish they could inhabit. It is the kingdom where the Violet Sea lends its tributaries with grace and generosity, where mermaids wait just below the shallow waters to call out to those brave enough to cross their bridge from the village of Fairendale to the kingdom grounds, where colors of every hue shimmer in the great green grass and the brilliant blue sky and the lacy flowers of orange and yellow and scarlet.

  The kingdom, as it used to exist, lived in a perpetual fall, that season of crisp, cool air whispering in ears and stroking cheeks and sneaking into bedroom windows to lie beside sleeping children. Now the wind is hard and biting and bitter, as if anger blows across this land. And anger is certainly justified in its blowing, as we shall soon see.

  It was not so very long ago that Fairendale lost what remained of its loveliness, dear reader, but to its people, a whole lifetime has passed. They have forgotten what their beloved children used to sound like. They have forgotten the music of laughter. They have forgotten the pleasure of busy chatter. They have forgotten joy.

  This once-grand kingdom has faded into a colorless shadow land, dark and sinister and cold.

  The children were the light of the kingdom, you see. And now they are missing.

  Why are they missing?

  Well, now, that is a story worth telling.

  Secrets

  AT the time our story begins, the kingdom of Fairendale, though not as brilliant a land as it was before the days of its tyrant kings, overflows with color and music and the laughter and presence of children. Children peeking into a shop window, where the baker puts on his elaborate show of kneading bread on a wooden table and flipping it into the air and catching it with his eyes closed, pretending not to notice all of the eyes watching him. Children standing as near the shoemaker as they can manage, trying to predict how many times he will punch the awl through the leather before he decides the work is done. Children racing to the warm home of Arthur and Maude, where welcome lives in smiles.

  Arthur is the village wood maker, a gentle man nearly as narrow as he is tall, with hair the color of dirt dusted with snow. Maude is his stringy wife, so thin and stretched she could very well disappear in the space between their red oak door and their home’s front window, where she stands every morning to watch the village waking. One hardly sees her hair for the kerchief tied around it, but when wisps do escape their hiding place they are the color of wet sand. The two are terribly poor, but they are happy and generous, the kind of people who always have spice cookies to serve and a lesson to teach, especially when it comes to the friends of their two children, which is practically every child in the village. Arthur and Maude’s children, Theo and Hazel, love everyone they meet. And everyone they meet loves them as well.

  Arthur spends his days making ornate furniture in his workshop directly behind his family’s humble cottage, though the villagers are much too poor to pay him a decent wage for his craftsmanship. Instead, they pay him in bread and shoes and milk. (He would have done it for nothing, but they insist. “You have growing children to feed, my good man,” they say. As if they do not have children of their own.). When he is not working, Arthur teaches magic to his daughter and the village girls. He is quite proficient in the world of magic, having studied it for many years. Arthur does not have the gift of magic, of course. He, of anyone, understands quite how dangerous the gift of magic could be for a man or a boy who carries it. He merely teaches it, and the kingdom looks on with curiosity but no real alarm. Arthur is no threat. He is simply an old man with great knowledge. Great studied knowledge.

  Magic, you see, is a very powerful gift in the kingdom of Fairendale and its surrounding lands. A male with magic is considered a grave danger to the royal line, for the king’s crown can only be stolen by a magical male child. Females with magic are coveted, but, sadly, largely dismissed, mostly promised to princes in hopes that they will produce a magical child and secure the royal family’s throne for many years to come. But they are never regarded as a serious threat of any kind. Of course we know how powerful females can be, but, alas, the land of our story is not so keen to notice such things.

  Perhaps what is to come could be blamed on that very oversight.

  The kingdom of Fairendale is ruled by King Willis, known as Your Most High King to the common people. He is not a very kind king, as we shall see in the pages to come. He is partly the reason Fairendale has lost its loveliness, though he is not entirely to blame. But we are getting ahead of ourselves.

  King Willis was born the second son of King Sebastien, a poor boy from the kingdom of Lincastle, which one can find by traveling southeast to the very edge of the Violet Sea. Lincastle is not nearly so beautiful as Fairendale, and when King Sebastien was just a boy of sixteen, a magical boy of sixteen who believed he had been born on the wrong side of gentility, he decided to use his magic to steal Fairendale from the hands of its beloved Good King Brendon.

  Every boy in the seven kingdoms of this magical land has been told the ancient stories all his life—stories where magic is more powerful than blood, where a boy born with magic can steal a throne right out of a royal line, where ma
gic is a dangerous game of power and uncertainty and death. Every parent tells their sons the ancient stories in hopes that they will not try to overthrow a kingdom, as King Sebastien did, for a boy who tries this quest and fails it is banished, for all the rest of his days, to sail the Violet Sea, a sea full of monsters and the living dead and horrors one cannot even imagine.

  King Sebastien, however, stole the crown and wore it for fifty-eight years before it passed to his son. He is an exception to the line of boys who have tried and failed.

  It is not entirely easy for parents to convince their sons that King Sebastien was an exception. It is, in fact, quite often that sons will interrupt the stories of their parents by saying, “But King Sebastien did it.” So the stories these parents tell their sons become more dramatic, more fantastic, more dangerous every year, as I am sure you will understand. Parents who love their children do not want their boys banished forever on a sea as dangerous as a violet one.

  Not that there are many boys who possess the gift of magic in the land of Fairendale.

  No, there are not many at all.

  There is only one.

  IN the cobblestone streets of Fairendale’s village, magic is not hidden among the female children. And there are many female children with the gift of magic, presumably to provide the luxury of choice for a prince who wishes to marry a magical girl. So it is not entirely unusual to see shoes flying from one house to another or dolls walking beside a little girl instead of held in her arms or a wooden car, made from Arthur’s scrap wood, piled beside his workshop, driving itself in and out of doorways.

  Let us see what we have today: the daughter of a man who used to be a sailor, until he fell into the Violet Sea and was dragged to the bottom by mermaids; the daughter of Arthur and Maude, gathering scraps from Arthur’s wood pile so they can make them fly; and her brother, dragging his best friend behind him.

  “What if Papa needs those?” says Arthur’s son, Theo. He is a handsome boy, with wild black curls and clear eyes the kind of blue that makes one wonder if the sky lost some pieces when he came into the world. His eyes dance with more merriment than concern, for Theo is a boy who loves fun as much as his sister does.

  “Oh, Theo,” his sister says, leaning against her gnarled staff. She has the same black curls, except they fall all the way down her back, rather than framing her face, which is home to the same blue eyes as her brother’s. Hazel grins at Theo, her pink lips stretched wide across her teeth without showing them. She knows he is merely playing at concern. Arthur has never been cross with his children—not even when they were little and made it practically impossible to get any work done, what with Hazel’s unrefined magic building boats in the air and Theo swiping perfectly good planks to duel with the other boys in the streets. The wood pieces always ended up splintering, but Arthur simply smiled and said he would find more. They did, after all, live near a populous wood.

  Can you imagine a father like Arthur, reader?

  Yes, well, he is real. He is standing in the doorway of his cottage, watching his children with that same satisfied smile that has often passed his lips of late. Perhaps it is because his children are growing older. Perhaps it is because Hazel has advanced in her magic in such a way that has attracted the notice of the villagers. Perhaps for some other reason, such as only parents know.

  “Come, Hazel,” says the sailor’s daughter. She is a girl of twelve, like Hazel, with milky white skin and flaming red hair and eyes the color of Fairendale’s grassy fields. “Let us take these pieces into the streets. Entertain the younger children.” She lifts her own staff, thicker than Hazel’s, and a bit more crooked, though its hooked end is not nearly so curved as Hazel’s, who uses hers to tend the village sheep.

  “Make it fly first, Mercy,” says the boy behind Theo. It might surprise you to know that this boy is the king’s very own son.

  Perhaps it is unusual to see a king’s son with peasant children. But this particular king’s son is a friendly child and an only child, and he has a kind mother. When Prince Virgil asked his mother if she might bring him some friends, Queen Clarion opened the palace doors and sent him along the dusty road to the village. He would find friends there, she said.

  And he found three of them.

  Theo was the first of the village boys to offer his toys to the lonely prince, instead of cringing away from him, afraid of offending the spoiled boy the village children had only heard about in stories. Prince Virgil is nothing like the stories. He loves Theo as if he were a brother. In fact, sometimes he wishes Theo were his brother, though Theo is a year younger than all the rest of them. A younger brother would suit Prince Virgil just fine.

  Prince Virgil has a round, boyish face framed by tight curls the color of the village garden’s soil just before the gardener waters it. His brown eyes, only a shade darker than his hair, smile for him when something amuses him—like magic, most days.

  “You make it fly,” Mercy says, her voice clipped and short. Mercy, you see, does not like Prince Virgil. She has a reason. Most females do.

  “Too easy,” Prince Virgil says. His dark eyes narrow, the fluffy brows drawn low. His fingers, wrapped around the smoothest staff of all those gathered here today, turn white. “I want to see if you can do it.”

  Mercy narrows her eyes and grips her wood chips tighter.

  “You are afraid of the king?” she says, and her smile turns mocking. Years ago, when Hazel and Mercy urged him to use his gift of magic to make a wilting flower rise again, a simply rejuvenation spell, Prince Virgil told them that the king and queen forbade him to use his magic outside of the castle, away from his instructor. Prince Virgil glares at Mercy.

  “Why do you bother bringing your staff at all?” Mercy says.

  “Stop,” Hazel says, and the wood chips suddenly suspend in the air. She looks from Mercy to Prince Virgil and back again. “It is really not so difficult,” she says, and it is clear she is not talking about making wood chips fly.

  We could fill in the blank for her, could we not, reader?

  It is really not so difficult to get along.

  It is really not so difficult to keep peace between friends.

  It is really not so difficult to be kind.

  It must be said, however, that Hazel will learn, soon enough, precisely how difficult it all is. But that will come.

  For now, let us see what will happen when two girls and two boys take some wood scraps from a wood maker’s pile and play with magic in the streets.

  Hazel and Mercy skip ahead of Prince Virgil and Theo, their staffs clicking against the stone path. They laugh at the way the chips spin in the air, almost out of control, the magic keeping them afloat but not stopping their endless twisting in the invisible wind.

  “Make something!” Theo says.

  “What shall we make?” Hazel says, turning back to her brother.

  Before he can answer, a few of the pieces move into position, becoming a wooden flower. Theo plucks it from the sky and leaps up six steps to hand it to a little girl watching him from the doorway of a home with scarlet flowers lining the walk. He pats her head and she grins up at him, awed that a boy like Theo would give notice at all to a girl of seven.

  Hazel shakes her head at Theo, smiling, then points her staff at the pieces that remain, concentrating so hard she does not hear the call of “Dragon,” that her brother flings in her direction. The wind whips her black hair around her face, her blue dress around her feet. She squints her eyes. Her friends watch her, knowing that something brilliant is coming. Hazel’s eyes are always wide with wonder, except when she is performing magic.

  Mercy, of course, could have made something absolutely spectacular by now, but she does not interfere. Sometimes the best way to be a friend is to permit a friend to struggle into doing something she may not have thought possible. And soon enough, the wood pieces rearrange themselves and become something quite brilliant indeed.

  “A puppet!” Mercy says. “Well done!” She would not have
thought of that. She had thought of a ship or a house or a castle, perhaps, something more impressive and intricately complicated. But a puppet is far more fun.

  Hazel is always the best one for fun.

  The children laugh at the puppet that is not really a puppet at all yet, because it is only wood.

  “He needs a face!” Theo says. He raises his hand, and the puppet flies to him. He pulls a dagger from the belt tied around his tunic, where it sits beside the slips of parchment and charcoal piece he carries everywhere, and etches two eyes and a nose and a mouth.

  He does not realize that the other children are staring at him. He does not see his sister’s mouth hanging open. He does not notice his best friend take a step back. Just a small one. But enough.

  “Now he is a real person?” he says, asking more than declaring. He holds up the wood with a carved face.

  The children stare at him. He stares back, confused, until Prince Virgil says, “Did you just use magic to take the puppet from the sky?” The prince’s eyes have turned nearly black, as if a storm lives inside them.

  You see, Prince Virgil knows all the stories, too. He knows that his throne can be stolen from his hands by a boy with magic. He knows he is assured nothing unless there is no boy in Fairendale who possesses this gift.

  And, dear reader, it is unfortunate but true: He wants the throne, at least at this moment, more than he wants a friend. More than he wants a little brother.

  It would be difficult to miss the stricken look that passes Theo’s face, the way his skin pales just the slightest, the way his eyes turn the color of a sky at dawn rather than midday. Still he clears his throat. Still he says, “No.” He looks at his sister.

  “No,” Hazel says, shaking her head. “He does not even have a staff.” She looks at Mercy, then at Prince Virgil. “I knew what Theo wanted to do. I heard him and...” She waves her hand in the air. “Big sisters know their little brothers.”

  And who could not believe a sweet, innocent face like Hazel’s? Because big sisters do know their little brothers, and of course she would realize what her brother wanted at nearly the same time he did, and of course she would use her magic so that he could make his contribution, an etched face on wood, to their magical fun. This boy who has no magic. This boy who is no danger. This boy who is her brother.