The Fairy Letters: A FROST Series(TM) Novel

The Fairy Letters

Published by THE EDGE

THE EDGE is an imprint of Sparklesoup LLC

Copyright © 2011 Kailin Gow

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First Edition.

Printed in the United States of America.

ISBN:
1618140248

ISBN:
978-1618140241

DEDICATION

For
my husband, for writing me letters.

The Fairy Letters:

These are the letters Prince Kian wrote during the
time of his separation from Breena in Silver Frost (Frost Series #3).

Letter
One

My Dearest Breena,

They
will remember us. Long after these wars have been mourned and then forgotten,
long after Summer and Winter fairies lay aside their rancor for one another and
forget that they have ever tasted hatred, they will remember – Summer fairies,
and Winter too – of a fairy king who loved his queen. They will remember that
the war ended, and after there was peace at last there came a time of glory, a
golden age, in which Winter and Summer stood united: one powerful Feyland. And
they will remember too the love that brought the Summer and Winter Courts
together – a love so great that it shattered the very boundaries of magic – and
they will think of us and our love not as a danger, not as an ill, not as a
transgression, but as the force that saved our world.

I
have to believe this, Breena. Every day that goes by, I force myself to imagine
a world in which there is not only peace between the two kingdoms, but peace in
my heart as well. I know what my duties as Fairy Prince are. I know what my
duties are to the land of Winter. And yet – despite all this – I know that my
heart will never truly be whole unless the treaty that unites my land with
yours is followed by the promise that unites your hand and heart with mine.
Perhaps you are stronger than I am, Breena. You were able to put aside our love
and work for peace. That was something that sometimes, in my most anguished
hours, I am afraid that I would never be able to do. If I were forced to choose
at this very moment between the peace we strive for and the future with you of
which I so often dream, I know that my heart would be torn – the
right
answer,
the unselfish answer, would perhaps not be the answer I would be able to give.

Funny,
isn’t it? I spent my whole life learning how to be a Prince – what a Prince wears,
how he moves, what he thinks, what he eats, what he drinks, what he does. I was
trained from an early age to rule Feyland – much to the dismay of my sister
Shasta, for she so longed to wear the crown that had been forced upon my head
(before, alas, her love for Rodney clouded that earlier ambition). I learned
early on that what I wanted, that what my heart wanted, was of no matter: all
that mattered was the good of Feyland. My mother the Winter Queen taught me
these lessons, lessons that – I knew – she wished that my father had been alive
to teach me. When I first met you on your sixteenth birthday, all I could think
about were those lessons: it was my duty to capture you, my duty to take you
hostage, to use you as a pawn in our war against Summer.

And
look at me now. Once, I was willing to forego all my desires, my attractions,
to cast aside my fairy intended in order to serve the interests of the Winter
Court. But now you are the strong one, Breena. You are the one able to make the
hard decisions, the ones I cannot make, because when the thought of being
without you crops up in my mind I can focus on nothing but taking you in my
arms, kissing your shoulders, stroking your soft hair and kissing each wispy
strand. We are apart now because of your strength, your courage, your wisdom.
You did all this without the benefit of any fairy lessons – any upbringing at
court. You never had a Queen Mother locking you in the dungeon overnight
because you had failed to show sufficient humility when playing games with
fairy squires. You never had a fencing-master engaged to chase you over miles
of tundra to ensure that your arm did not tire in a fight. You never spent
hours poring over the annals of past rulers of Feyland: great kings and queens
whom you admired, and whose bravery you were told to exceed. And yet you proved
yourself a great Queen nonetheless.

I am
writing these letters to you with a twofold purpose. One is a selfish one – to
assuage my own pain, my own loneliness, by writing to you, by sending a little figment
of my soul to you in every stroke and every curve of this blueberry ink.  I
feel that, by writing to you,  I am keeping that ephemeral and gossamer thread
that connects us alive – I am igniting the magic that unites our souls. If I do
not write to you, if I do not find some receptacle for all the words and pains
and passions that gush forth like the Arctic Waterfalls of the Far North from 
my soul, then I fear that I – like poor Shasta – may go mad.

Yet I
have another purpose. I am afraid – I do not fear admitting it – that in this
long absence you will forget me, forget us, forget the words and worlds we have
shared. Not at first, of course, but over time your memories will dim, as all
memories do. I fear that one day you will be unable to recognize the sound of
that sweet melody played for us at our first dance in Feyland, that you will be
unable to remember that first meal we shared in my hunting lodge, the
conversations over my paintings, the first time we kissed. If I cannot be there
with you physically, to remind you of these moments and to create new ones,
then I will, at least, do what I can: I will write you a series of letters, one
each week, and tell you stories about Feyland. I will tell you all that I
remember of you – even those childhood impressions you likely have long since
forgotten – and I will tell you too about all the things I never told you when
we were together – myths and stories of Feyland, memories of my upbringing at
the Winter Court, legends of fairies who fell in love before love was banned in
our kingdom – anything that can bring a smile to your face. It is only in our
separation that I realize how much there is that I wish to say to you, how much
I never said to you. I pace the walls and corridors of my castle and grow angry
with myself because I never told you the story of my mother’s favorite
courtier, or because I never laughed with you about the drawing-lessons we took
together, lessons I doubt you even remember. There is so much of my life, my
memories, I have not shared with you.

This
is my offering, then. I have told you many times that I would give myself for
you – utterly and totally. If I cannot sacrifice my life for you in other ways,
then at least I can give myself thus: sending you a piece of me, and of my
love, with each letter that goes forth from this palace.

And
perhaps one day, in the dream I have described, when we are remembered as King
and Queen of a beautiful and peaceful land, and our love is recorded in the
annals of Feyland, these letters will be discovered by some clever-minded fairy
historian, and my passion quoted and recorded in dry history-books. Children
will read in school how Prince Kian pined for his beloved fairy queen – and
they will laugh because they know how the story ends: of course it has ended
for them, as you say in the human world, happily ever after. But you and I
don’t know this yet. We are caught in the middle, you see – we cannot look
back, as I hope and pray that these children will do, and say
of course – of
course it all turned out right in the end.

We
just don’t know.

But
because if I let myself rest on that uncertainty my mind would collapse within
itself, I will not dwell. I will think of those children whom I imagine reading
our love-story in the history books, and pretend that it has all been decided
already. We will prevail. We will survive. We will remain together – in love.

I am
thinking back now, as I write this, to the very first time I heard your name
mentioned. It is a hazy memory, glazed over by time. I must have been five
years old, a small toy prince wearing clothing I had not yet grown into,
fumbling with a sword that reached at least two feet over my head. I was in the
hills around our palace with that fencing-master of mine – for five years of
age was not too young to learn to fence. He was not at this point strict with
me, the fencing master (the severity came later, after my father’s death, when
my mother’s grief was so great that she imagined she could resurrect my father
from my unripe bones), and we were playing a game that, while ostensibly a
duel, had ended up something rather more like a particularly high-stakes game
of tag.

And
then I saw my father coming up over the hills, wearing his enormous fur pelt
(it hangs on the wall of the Great Hall now) and his silver crown shining and
glinting in the light of the white winter sun.

“Kian,
my boy,” he said to me, enveloping me in his great pelt as he knelt to my
level. “I’ve got some news.” He sighed. “The scion of the Summer House…is a
girl.” He gave a great laugh of relief. “Bet you’re relieved to hear that, eh,
my boy?”

I
nodded, but in truth I had not remembered that there was to be a scion of the
Summer House at all. I knew vaguely that if we headed west past the Autumn
lands we would arrive in a land of ripe oranges, and that my father spoke of
these people admiringly, though with some wariness at their power, but if my
father had mentioned to me that the consort of the Summer King was with child,
I had completely forgotten it in favor of more enjoyable childhood pursuits
like riding and fencing.

“Just
as well,” my father said to me. “If she had given birth to a boy, he would have
been your greatest friend or your greatest enemy. But instead she’ll be
something else entirely!” Of course, I didn’t know then what he meant – the
closest I had come to understanding girls was an inchoate sense that my sister
Shasta was not quite like me – but the words have a bitter meaning now.

For
my father was wrong. You may be a woman, Breena, but you are my closest friend.

And yet
– curse this war! – you are still my greatest enemy.

Letter 2

My Dearest Breena,

The
last time I wrote to you I told you about the very first time I heard your name
– on the lips of my father. If only I had known then about the magic that
sparked in the air at that incomparable sound –
my Breena
, born in the
Summer Court! But the name still meant little to me – the idea of a princess,
born in some faraway tower, swaddled in the golden silks of the Summer Court,
meant as little to me as the lessons in the language of Ancient Fay my tutor
tried in vain to make me memorize. No, I was still a young lad, and girls were
in my mind a race at once infinitely stranger and yet infinitely less
interesting than the giants of Coburn Causeway in the far northern territories
of Zaphon. How I blush to think of those days, when my youth and my stupidity
did not admit a female presence to my mind or to my activities – even Shasta,
much to her consternation (and to my mother's!) was excluded from my boyhood
games. But all that changed, Breena, the moment I met you. I was a child, and
you were a child, and yet that very first sight of you – your shimmering eyes
staring with the wisdom of ages out at mine – convinced me.