Reviews:
Anonymoose - Well, thank you so much for leaving a review now! I'm glad you like Hiccsti's more deadly side. It was something I debated on including, but really, he didn't exactly stint on killing bad guys when he absolutely had to in the cartoon, so why would that change after 1700 years of dealing with brutal humans? :D Thank you for the review!
KenS1220 - Yay, I'm glad you like it! I hope you enjoy this chapter just as much!
OechsnerC - Aw, thank you for the compliment! I'm glad you took the time to leave a review! :D
-
"Why can't I use magic too much?" Elsa asked curiously. "You never answered that."
"Because you are human," said Asta. "Mostly. And your magic is the magic of the Old World, not Avalon. Avalon magic will…. Um…" she put a finger to her chin thoughtfully and looked upward. "It will just... change you," she said at last. "I do not know how to explain it. If you change too much, you cannot leave again. As it is with them." She gestured at the coffins with their comatose occupants.
A chill went through Elsa and she glanced at Hiksti's face to see that he was worried. "Alright, noted," she said. "Don't use too much magic."
"How will she know if it's too much?" Hiksti demanded.
Asta shrugged.
"You should go," Hiksti told Elsa suddenly. "We should just send you home right now. I can't risk losing you here."
Elsa stared at him. "You think I'm going to just leave you here?" she asked. "There is no way that's happening."
"Elsa, my love," Hiksti said, stepping closer to her. "You use magic as naturally as others breathe. It's all the time. To make things like the saddles and the clothes, to light your way, for protection - even when you don't mean to, you use it. You use it when you get angry or upset or when you're startled or afraid, and you don't even know you're doing it until it's already happened."
Asta watched the exchange between them with interest, her yellow eyes bouncing back and forth over and over again.
"I… yes," Elsa said. "That's true. But who's to say that I haven't already used too much? I'll just be careful, is all. No monumental feats if I can help it."
"It takes a lot to use too much, though," Asta said.
Elsa turned to her. "What do you mean?"
"The queen who raised this castle, that was it for her," she explained. She trotted over to the coffin with the black-haired beauty with the bow and arrows. "Diana," she said. Then she came to the red-head Hiksti had been looking at earlier. "This is Morgan Le Fey. She did a lot of magic. All kinds of spells, like healing spells and shape-shifting."
"Myrddin made a portal," Hiksti pointed out. "Did he have to stay?"
Asta tilted her head and thought about that. "I do not think he used Avalon magic for that," she admitted. "It does not feel the same. He made the portal from there to here." She stood a bit straighter. "My parents knew him."
"I'm so sorry that they were killed," Elsa said to the girl.
"Why?" Asta asked her. "You did not do it. It was done by that mean Son of Adam."
"Do you know their names?" Elsa asked. "Or the language they speak?"
"They speak like this," Asta said, and switched from speaking Norwegian to speaking English. "Kill them! Aim for the heart, lads! Harvest the scales, the liver, and the meat for market! Load those logs onto the ship, make haste! How much gold have you gotten, this time?"
"English," Hiksti said. "They're English." Elsa nodded in agreement, looking troubled.
"Not good," she said.
"Not the worst," Hiksti argued.
"What do you mean, of course they are the worst!" Asta cried, stomping her foot. "They murdered my parents!"
"This King," Hikist said, pointing to Arthur's coffin. "Is their legendary king. They would never hurt Arthur, or any of these fairy queens, most likely. You don't have to stay here to protect them, they don't need it, not from these men. Maybe label his coffin, though, so they understand who he is."
Asta pouted and sent a resentful look toward Arthur. "I want him to wake up and command them to go away," she muttered.
"If I recall the legend correctly, he's to sleep until England's hour of greatest need - and right now that doesn't fit the bill. England's doing very well for itself, has built up quite the empire with colonies all over the world."
"So how do we repel these English invaders?" Elsa asked. "They've only got one of the greatest armies in the world, right now."
Hiksti paced back and forth, and Panda got up and followed him, imitating the serious body language, much to Dapple's amusement. "How many men usually arrive?" he asked Asta.
"Many and more," she told him.
"Can you give me a number?" he asked.
"I have nothing in my pockets," Asta said, after slipping her green-skinned hands into them and searching. "What is a number?"
Elsa was shocked. "You know," she said. "Like one, two, three, four, five," she said, ticking off her fingers.
Asta blinked at her. She suddenly started running around, arms akimbo, making a gruff sound in her throat out of pure frustration. "Many and more!" she yelled. "All of your fingers!" She gestured wildly to the coffins. "All of their fingers!"
"A hundred," Hiksti said, frowning. "Or more."
"Hiksti, we can't fight a hundred men," Elsa told him.
"Not alone," he agreed. "We'll need help."
Elsa stared at him for a moment more before they both turned to look at the two Night Lights with them. Dapple drew back a bit at the intensity of their stare and Panda tilted his head to one side. "Mrrrr?" he queried.
Hiksti looked at Asta again. "How often do they come?" he asked her.
Asta shrugged her shoulders again. "Sometimes," she said. "By and by, the mist rises, and they come."
Elsa sighed, but couldn't blame the poor orphan for not knowing math and how to tell time. "Can you take us to where they come?" she asked her gently.
"I can do that," Asta answered. "What will you give me?"
Elsa dropped into a crouch to bring her face more level with Asta's. "How about I teach you numbers?" she suggested. "It's a very useful tool that will serve you well in your life."
Asta considered this for a moment, and then nodded. "Deal," she agreed.
0o0o0o0o0o0o0o0o0
They spent the night in the castle, and by mutual agreement they made their beds in one of the tower rooms, which was furnished with comfortable couches and furs and pillows, and gave a fantastic view of the surrounding countryside. Hiksti took the time to fish from the lake, providing enough for himself, his wife, the dragons, and the orphaned fairy to eat. Elsa cooked the fish and went with Asta to gather wild greens for a salad. He smoked the rest over a fire well into the evening to take with them on their journey south.
They slept well and left the next morning. Asta rode with Elsa on Dapple, while Hiksti rode on Panda. They followed the river that flowed out of the lake as it snaked through the heavy forest southward, toward the sea.
It took them three days to fly there, as the dragons were pushing against a headwind the entire time. When they landed the first evening, Asta tumbled to the ground and spread her arms against the earth, pressing her face to it and kissing it fervently. "I do not like flying so high!" she moaned. "It is cold! It is too far from the earth!"
"I wish you'd told me you were cold," Elsa said, patting her shoulder. "I would have loaned you my cape. I don't mind the cold, you see."
Asta rolled over and looked up at her. "How does your magic manifest, Elsa Elemental?"
From the corner of her eye Elsa saw Hiksti grin at her new title. "Ice and snow, for the main part," she said. "But also light and wind and sometimes water, if I concentrate. And cloth."
"Hm," Asta hummed.
"Alright, let's begin your lesson on numbers." Elsa found a good stick and began to clear leaves and debris away from the bank of the river to reveal the wet clay beneath. She drew a 1. "This is one," she told the girl. "It means only this many." She held up a finger.
Asta looked at her finger and the number in the clay. "One," she repeated. "This many fingers."
"This many anything," Elsa corrected. "We have one Hiksti, and Hiksti has one whole leg. We have one Elsa, and Elsa has one stick in her hand. We have one Asta, and Asta has one nose on her face."
Asta giggled and touched her nose. "I have…" she cast about her body. "I have one tongue!" she shouted. "I have one heart!" She thumped her chest triumphantly.
"Exactly!" Elsa said. "Good job! I would like you to write the number 1."
Asta took the stick from her and clumsily copied the 1 in the clay next to Elsa's, then gave it back when the Snow Queen extended her hand for it.
"Now, this is two," she said, drawing the number.
By the time Hiksti had cooked their dinner, they had gone all the way to ten, and Asta was examining the dragon's feet to see if they had ten claws or not. Only four per foot, as it happened. "One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten," she kept muttering to herself, counting pebbles on the ground, leaves in the trees, her own fingers, and everything else.
The next day Elsa made sure to wrap Asta securely in her cape and blanket, and the child complained less when they landed. The fairy orphan proved to be a very quick study, and by the time they were ready to turn in, she had learned her numbers all the way to one hundred. She'd spent the better part of the evening lining up small pebbles in neat rows and columns of ten, and counting them and writing as many of the numbers as she could in the clay riverbank.
"I like the patterns," she told Elsa. "They just repeat again and again. It is easy."
"Wait until you try long division," Hiksti told her with a grin.
During their third day the terrain changed, sloping down from the great forest as the river carved a ravine. By late afternoon they found the mouth of the river where it left its high ravine walls and met the sea, and there was no sign of any ships in the bay or the watercourse. Even without an immediate threat they decided to make camp well back in the trees at the top of the ravine, looking down the cliffs to the wide beach below. Their campsite wasn't inaccessible from the beach, but the climb would be arduous and slow-going at best.
Elsa taught Asta how to count to one thousand, and that only took her an hour for the child was a very astute person who was eager to learn. She had just introduced the concept of addition when Hiksti, who had been scouting around the campsite, came back with a brace of rabbits.
"There are signs of logging," he told Elsa as he started skinning the carcasses. "Probably two hundred fifty or sixty stumps to the east of us." He sighed. "And a small pit full of bones."
"Bones?" Elsa asked, goosebumps raising on her arms and neck.
"A few dragons," he said. "And more than a few fairies." He glanced at Asta. The green-skinned child poked her stick viciously into the ground a few times, scowling and apparently trying not to cry. She scrawled 250 in the dirt. "There's also an abandoned village," he said. "All built in the trees. I'm guessing fairies."
Elsa breathed in and out slowly and kept the magic at bay, willing control over her emotions. "Was that your village?" she asked Asta, who nodded silently. "What happened to the fairies who lived there?"
"They killed the elders," came the little orphan's voice. "And they killed my parents and my friend's father. The rest of us fled. We ran and flew away, into the trees, and up the river. I ran and ran and ran, until no one was around, any more. And I kept going north along the river, until I found the castle."
"Can you tell us how long ago that was?" Elsa asked.
"I do not even know how old I am," Asta said. "If we could find my tree perhaps you could tell," she suggested.
"I happen to know a lot about trees," Hiksti said, and Elsa recalled his sojourn to the New World and how he spent a couple of decades 'looking at trees'. "Can you find it for us?"
"It is by the village," Asta said. "In the Children's Grove." She rubbed her arms and shivered despite the day's heat.
"Have you been back there, since that first time?" Elsa asked her.
Asta nodded. "Twice I came. I saw what they did. The village was empty. Then the men came again and I never returned."
"We don't really need to know," Hiksti decided. "We won't make you do anything you don't want, alright, Asta?" he said gently.
The child looked up at them gratefully, and Elsa's heart squeezed. Silently she vowed that whoever hurt this child and her kin would pay for their crimes.