Hannah J Boddy

Aldfrith was, quite frankly, surprised to still be alive.

So, I have spent the last couple of months rewriting HFHS and BBCB into first person – which, to be clear, is probably the right call, but it does mean that I have had to cull a number of scenes that I am sentimentally attached to. However, there is no way that the narrator could know anything about Aldfrith and his angst, so I thought I’d share the butchered scenes on here instead:

Aldfrith was, quite frankly, surprised to still be alive. 

He figured that three months of continued life must have meant that Oberon hadn’t remembered his face that fateful day in the human realms. It seemed highly unlikely that he would have let such insubordination simply slide; after all, the last person to question Oberon that openly was now in exile. And it was only exile because he couldn’t work out how to kill her. 

Or at least, that’s how the rumours went. No one seemed fully certain of why Iphigenia had been exiled. Aldfrith had heard that it was matricide, but he’d equally heard it said that Oberon had been the one to kill Titania. Rumours also claimed it was due to her excessive violence in the Expansion. Aldfrith didn’t hold much weight with that one. She’d apparently refused a suitor, destroyed half the Citadel, provoked the other twelve kings, tried to make a power play, written an overly suggestive poem, punished low-level guards by pinning them by their wings to the Citadel walls… the list went on and on. But by far the most popular rumour was the one that said all she had done was voice doubts about Oberon’s plan in front of his rival kings. 

Aldfrith didn’t want to find out how severe the punishment would be to someone questioning Oberon, when they didn’t have the added benefit of being his heir. He hadn’t intended to say anything – certainly not aloud – hadn’t meant to do anything other than keep his head down, but then Oberon had been so gleeful, so childish, so dishonourable, that the words just slipped out before he could stop them. He’d panicked. Oberon had turned on him so quickly, pushed him and no plausible lie came to mind, and he’d pointed out the poisoning before he could stop himself. 

What Aldfrith did know was that someone was punishing him. It wasn’t any divinity, casting the weighted dice of fate towards something horrible, but something much more tangible. Much more present. This was the third month that he’d spent on patrol at the entrance to the human realms. That could never be a coincidence. It was such a mind-numbingly boring duty to have, staring out endlessly from the mouth of the cave, all day, every day, his limbs gradually stiffening, aching from the persistent damp chill in the air. Spring touched the sprawling urban world below him, but not on the Mountain. It was eternally winter up here. 

After the first fortnight though, Aldfrith would give anything to have that dull, repetitive, isolation back. After the first fortnight, word had spread that the wall had come down, that passage into the human realm was possible once more. That was when people started appearing in small groups, bundles in arms, bribes ready. That was when Aldfrith had to start turning people away, watching their hollowed faces coming back over and over. 

He’d been told not to let anyone through from either direction. Orders were orders. 

Orders got his friends killed. Dorian and Corinth. 

A century of childhood spent with them, training side by side, helping each other out, hiding from generals together, learning together, ended just like that. A century of being everything to each other, of being as much a part of those two friends as he was himself, cruelly ripped from him. A century of joy and laughter and innocence corrupted by the death it ended in. Oberon might have been cruel, but the indifference of his daughter was a whole different kind of cruelty. He’d never let these starving, helpless, dying Unseelie Fae fall into her hands, thinking that they were escaping Oberon’s tyranny. She’d been selfish enough to shut the walls between the worlds, starting the inevitable decline that fell upon Unseelie. They no longer had the room, the resources, the workers to live life as they ought to. Unseelie was dying and it was all her fault.

In the mouth of the cave, sword drawn at the ready, Aldfrith swore that he’d end Iphigenia Chrysaed if it was the last thing any Unseelie ever did.