Fell Beasts and Fair: A Noblebright Fantasy Anthology Read online

  Fell Beasts and Fair

  A Noblebright Fantasy Anthology

  Leslie J. Anderson

  C.A. Barrett

  Terri Bruce

  Aaron DaMommio

  M.C. Dwyer

  Anthony Eichenlaub

  Francesca Forrest

  Chloe Garner

  W.R. Gingell

  Lora Gray

  Kelly A. Harmon

  Tom Howard

  Rollin Jewett

  Tom Jolly

  Samuel Marzioli

  Amanda Nargi

  Aimee Ogden

  Beth Powers

  Darrell J. Pursiful

  Charles D. Shell

  April Steenburgh

  Alena Sullivan

  Troy Tang

  Edited by

  Robert McCowen

  Edited by

  C. J. Brightley

  Spring Song Press

  Copyright

  “Cloudy with a Chance of Dropbears” by W.R. Gingell © 2018 W.R. Gingell

  “Don’t Wake the Dragon” by M.C. Dwyer © 2018 M.C. Dwyer

  “Blanche, Bear-Wife” by Alena Sullivan © 2018 Alena Sullivan

  “A Midsummer Night’s Bedtime Story” by Charles D. Shell © 2018 Charles D. Shell

  “Love and Room for Monsters” by Amanda Nargi © 2018 Amanda Nargi

  “Inheritance of Nightmares” by Beth Powers © 2018 Beth Powers

  “Angus McCarn and the Tale of Two Tales” by Rollin Jewett © 2018 Rollin Jewett

  “Everything Mimsy” by Samuel Marzioli © 2018 Samuel Marzioli

  “Boirdeleau, WI (Population 3,017)” by Aimee Ogden © 2018 Aimee Ogden

  “The Gallows Maiden” by Francesca Forrest © 2009 Francesca Forrest, originally published in 2009 by Drollerie Press in the anthology StereoOpticon

  “The Boy Who Didn’t Believe in Halloween” by Tom Howard © 2018 Tom Howard

  “Siphoning the Flames of Life” by Kelly A. Harmon © 2018 Kelly A Harmon

  “Winter Horses and Other Unknowables” by Leslie J. Anderson © 2018 Leslie J. Anderson

  “Last Knight and the Burning Sands” by Chloe Garner © 2018 Chloe Garner

  “Necessary Threads” by Lora Gray © 2018 Lora Gray

  “Pinecones” by C.A. Barrett © 2018 C.A. Barrett

  “The Pooka’s Day” by Darrell J. Pursiful © 2018 Darrell J. Pursiful

  “Road Trip” by Aaron DaMommio © 2018 Aaron DaMommio

  “The Dove of Assisi” by Troy Tang © 2018 Troy Tang

  “The Unanswered Riddle” by Tom Jolly © 2018 Tom Jolly

  “The Lady and the Unicorn” by Terri Bruce © 2018 Terri Bruce

  “Like Sand in Your Teeth” by April Steenburgh © 2018 April Steenburgh

  “When Gracie’s Father Fought” by Anthony Eichenlaub © 2018 Anthony Eichenlaub

  “Canticle of the Sun.” St. Francis of Assisi. Translation by the Franciscan Friars Third Order Regular, accessed 5 October 2016.

  “Canticle of the Sun” by St. Francis of Assisi, believed to have been composed in 1224. Translation by the Franciscan Friars Third Order Regular, accessed 5 October 2016.

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  Print ISBN 978-0-9891915-7-9

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  Published in the United Sates of America by Spring Song Press, LLC. www.springsongpress.com

  Cover design by Kerry Hynds of Aero Gallerie.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Contents

  Acknowledgments

  Foreword

  W.R. Gingell

  Cloudy with a Chance of Dropbears

  M.C. Dwyer

  Don’t Wake the Dragon

  Alena Sullivan

  Blanche, Bear-Wife

  Charles D. Shell

  A Midsummer Night’s Bedtime Story

  Amanda Nargi

  Love and Room for Monsters

  Beth Powers

  Inheritance of Nightmares

  Rollin Jewett

  Angus McCarn and the Tale of Two Tales

  Samuel Marzioli

  Everything Mimsy

  Aimee Ogden

  Boirdeleau, WI (Population 3,017)

  Francesca Forrest

  The Gallows Maiden

  Tom Howard

  The Boy Who Didn’t Believe in Halloween

  Kelly A. Harmon

  Siphoning the Flames of Life

  Leslie J. Anderson

  Winter Horses and Other Unknowables

  Chloe Garner

  Last Knight and the Burning Sands

  Lora Gray

  Necessary Threads

  C.A. Barrett

  Pinecones

  Darrell J. Pursiful

  The Pooka’s Day

  Aaron DaMommio

  Road Trip

  Troy Tang

  The Dove of Assisi

  Tom Jolly

  The Unanswered Riddle

  Terri Bruce

  The Lady and the Unicorn

  April Steenburgh

  Like Sand in Your Teeth

  Anthony Eichenlaub

  When Gracie’s Father Fought

  Afterword

  Acknowledgments

  Many thanks to the talented authors who contributed to this anthology and to all authors who infuse their works with noblebright ideals.

  Robert McCowen assisted with every phase of editing this anthology from story selection to copyediting. I’m immensely grateful for his insight and attention to detail.

  And of course, the greatest thanks go to you, dear reader, for believing in noblebright fantasy.

  ~ C. J. Brightley

  Foreword

  Noblebright fantasy offers hope in the darkest moments. In noblebright fantasy, flawed (yet realistic) characters can choose to be kind, honest, and principled even when it hurts. Redemption is possible, and good characters can make a difference.

  Noblebright fantasy is fantasy for our time. It isn’t utopian fantasy—we all know the world can be dark. Instead, noblebright fantasy offers glimpses of what it looks like to oppose that darkness with courage, integrity, love, and sacrifice, and how those choices can make the world a little brighter.

  For more information, please visit noblebright.org.

  Thank you for reading.

  ~ C. J. Brightley, Spring Song Press

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  P.S. - Please subscribe to the Spring Song Press newsletter!

  Cloudy with a Chance of Dropbears

  W.R. Gingell

  They say Behind is dangerous and Between is chancy; that the human world alone, with its blind, bumbling occupants is a haven for the Fair Folk. Well, I’m not exactly one of the fair folk, and if Australia isn’t as dangerous as the most feared parts of Behind, I’ll eat my own wooden leg.

  Properly speaking, there’s Australia Behind and Australia Between, but when it comes to Behind and Between, it’s nearly the same thing no matter where in the human world it joins up. Go anywhere Behind and it’s the same Behind; all fae and vampires and selkies, that sort of thing. A few of us leprechauns, too. Behind is the place the human world doesn’t know exists. Even Between isn
’t too different; it’s just the way it looks that’s different—depending on if you know how to look, if you get my drift.

  It’s not the same when it comes to travelling between places in the human world. I’ve been in civilized places like England and Canada, and it’s a world away from the nightmare land of red heat and deadly animals they call Australia. They don’t let you into Australia from Behind until you’ve passed your survival fitness exam, which should just tell you something.

  I hadn’t passed that exam. I didn’t want to pass that exam. I would have gladly spent the rest of my life in a cubicle safely Behind the human world. And yet here I was, stuck headfirst in a tree on the human world side of Australia, with my behind exposed to the elements and the dull thud of dropbears hitting the ground around me.

  Let me explain. I wasn’t planning on going to Australia that day—that day or ever. I’m a leprechaun, the closest thing you can get to a living calculator, and until that day I was perfectly happy crunching numbers in my cubicle. For us, it’s about the closest thing you can get to pure happiness unless you own your own private supply of gold coins to count every day. That rainbow with the promised gold at the end of it—that’s what a cubicle and something to count means to a leprechaun.

  I was ready for a big day. My wooden leg was hurting when I got up, and that means a day of either finding or losing huge amounts of money. And if you’re going to tell me a wooden leg can’t hurt, you can kick off out of here any time, because mine always hurts when there’s going to be big money, so there. I just didn’t know whether it was going to be a finding or losing day. Finding or losing doesn’t matter to me—I just find out where the money’s gone. Now, if it was my money it would matter a lot more, but it’s not, is it?

  I sat down in my chair at the office in an almost jovial frame of mind. I startled the coffee boy by grinning at him, scaring him so much that he spilled the coffee and had to go back for more. Serve him right, lanky-legged little lollygagger that he was. Grinning a bit wider, I logged onto my work portal and rubbed my hands together to see the first case waiting for me.

  “Never failed me yet!” I declared, slapping my wooden leg. The first case that popped up on my portal was the one I’d been working off and on for the last few months; something from a group called Allied Traders. They were a group that worked across the Between border to trade with the human world, coffee and other stuff that the humans do better than Behind; and on paper, things almost looked kosher. Almost. Then you went a bit deeper and found that the things you should have found a bit deeper weren’t there. Things like human resources—Allied Traders had warehouses on this side and the human side of Between for any resources from the human world—weren’t in the warehouse they were meant to be in. Actually, there wasn’t anything in the warehouses at all except a very sleepy fae guard once you got past the magical defences. Good thing leprechauns are so good at getting past anything magic, isn’t it? That’s what I thought, anyway, sitting there and grinning at my portal. I’d taken a trip yesterday, and last night I’d clued in my supervisor. If I did things right for the next twenty years or so, maybe I’d get promoted up the chain for this.

  I went and got my own coffee before the coffee boy got back, eager to sniff out more payments that had a suspicious lack of product to go with them. I put it down on my desk and settled myself to sit down, but something sharp and hot seared my leg where my Behind Identify Card should be. I yelped and pinched it out of my pocket. Behind magic is the good stuff, but there’s nothing that melts faster than an Identify Card, magic or no magic. Something about magic and the newer human manufactured substances doesn’t blend well.

  Now that I looked at the card, it was a lot blacker than it should be. Well, parts of it were blacker than they should be and it was still hot in my fingers, and now there was nothing burning in my pocket… I squinted down at it, irritated to find that my glasses weren’t around my neck, and reached for the desk where the missing glasses should have been.

  My desk wasn’t there. Actually, the office wasn’t there. No wonder the ground was so squishy beneath my peg—it was real grass, not the magic-fake they put in Behind offices.

  Great. Someone had relocated the office without telling me. I’d send off a pretty well loaded message as soon as I found where those goons in Location had parked it this time. I’m as security conscious as the next leprechaun, but there was no way we’d been found so soon after the last move. I looked down at my Identify card again, and it looked a bit red in the middle. Red in the middle, and if I squinted at it just right, there were words making a black scrawl in the centre of the red bit.

  Kill the kid and you can come back, it said.

  I snuffled a dry laugh down at it. Somebody was having a laugh. It was a bit stupid, though; kid was the word used for human children, and who was going to find a kid Behind? I looked a bit closer, and a sticky breeze swept across my forearms, raising goosebumps in spite of its warmth. That wasn’t just red behind the writing. It was Red. If somebody was having a laugh, why was my Identify Card marked Red for Deport? Deportation Red meant tried, executed, and deported. No return to Behind.

  That was stupid. Someone had to be having a laugh. I was still Behind… wasn’t I? But where in Behind was I? I looked around me, dazedly taking in the dark green foliage of trees and the playground, and the half tree that someone had turned into a house—wait. The playground? Fae don’t have playgrounds. And why was the heat so heavy today? Where in Behind had access to this kind of muggy heat? Muggy… muggy heat? There’s no muggy heat Behind; too many weather mages.

  “No,” I said numbly, sweat springing to my brow. “Because that means I’m—that means I’m in the human world.”

  Red for Deport. I was in the human world.

  “What did I do?” I demanded of the hollowed-out tree house, my voice high and panicked. “I paid my taxes. Found taxes. Gave my leg for the Fae Corps in the Third War!”

  I sat down in the grass and buried my head in my hands. This was bad. The worst. I couldn’t survive in the human world. I wasn’t trained. I wasn’t ready. I didn’t even have a job! Who would keep me in gold if I had no job? And the humans—how was I supposed to communicate with them? I didn’t even know if you could communicate with them; it was bad enough trying to communicate with the milk cows that were brought over from the human world when ours died out.

  Something bit me beneath my trousers, and if the air around me was a muggy heat, this was a fiery heat. I yelled and shot to my feet, slapping at the spot, and pinched whatever the heck it was through the trousers and out into the open. It was an ant, squirming and dying, its broken legs flailing at me. With my Sight I could see the poison on its pincers, even if my normal sight wasn’t good enough to properly make out the pincers, and when I looked back down at my leg, horrified, I could see the same poison beginning to course through my veins from the point of the bite.

  But… but it was so small. How could it be so deadly?

  I threw the ant away from me and slapped my hand back over the bite, drawing out the poison in the same way I’d drawn out the ant. It came out reluctantly, as fast-spreading as it had been in my blood. I didn’t know if my legs were weak because of the poison, or the fact that I’d almost left it too late to treat comfortably. What was this place? What place had such tiny, deadly animals?

  And why was it so skin-meltingly hot, for all that was gold?

  I didn’t dare to sit on the ground again. At home the grass was green and plump and cool, free from murderous insects and good for recharging; here, now, I could see that it was teeming with deadly life. Gold only knew what kind of other venomous insects were waiting to kill me. There was a nice, sunny spot on the metal play equipment; it was bright and sunny as well, painted in yellow and orange, and I felt that at least there was a shining spot to the day thus far.

  I breathed out a sigh of relief, hopeful of soaking up a little energy from the sun, and sank down on the metal square.

  I
t burnt.

  For the second time in the last five minutes, I leaped to my feet with a howl, clutching my rear. Was it silver? Who makes human playgrounds out of silver? But there was no debilitating spread of malaise, no nausea; just a pained kind of after-burn that faded slowly but left me disinclined to sit down again right away.

  It was just hot. So gold-fired hot from the sun that it had burned me to sit down on it.

  I whimpered a bit. I didn’t really care where I was anymore; I just wanted to go back home. I picked a spot in the shady brown instead of the sunny brown, and sat down—this time very carefully—on something wooden and duck-shaped that wobbled beneath me but didn’t burn me. A sensation of coolness soothed my burnt backside, but I couldn’t feel anything energetic in the grass beneath my feet.

  I groaned into my hands. “Where can I even recharge in this place?”

  “Athelas likes to use the waterfall in Snug,” said a voice. “Zero prefers the sea. But if you want to use something nearby, there’s always the Huon river.”