Faerie Misborn Read online

  Faerie Misborn

  Titania Academy Book 1

  Also by Samaire Provost:

  Mad World series:

  #1: EPIDEMIC

  #2: SANCTUARY

  #3: DESPERATION

  ROMANOV series:

  #1: ROMANOV – Vengeance Never Dies

  #2: (title coming soon) (2020)

  The Paladin Princess series:

  #1: The Pirates of Moonlit Bay

  #2: The Pirate Queen

  #3: The Lost Treasure

  #4: The Pirate Prince

  #5: The Death of the Queen (2020)

  #6: The Fountain of Youth (2020)

  #7: Magellan’s Tears (2020)

  Titania Academy series:

  #1: Faerie Misborn

  #2: Faerie Elemental (December 2019)

  #3: Faerie Born (January 2020)

  Faerie Misborn

  Titania Academy Book 1

  Samaire Provost

  Black Raven Books

  This is a work of fiction. All of the geography, characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Black Raven Books

  Faerie Misborn.

  Copyright © 2019 by Samaire Provost. All rights reserved.

  Cover illustrations copyright © 2019 by Melody Simmons

  Printed in the United States of America.

  For information, including permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to [email protected] or to

  Black Raven Books, P.O. Box 3201, Martinsville VA 24115

  The text was set in 12-point Californian FB

  www.samaireprovost.com

  ISBN-13 978-1-948594172

  ISBN-10: 1948594172

  First Edition: October 2019

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Dedicated to the homeless children, and to all those living rough. May the magic they possess bring them prosperity and enrich the world.

  Faerie Misborn

  Chapters

  1 – Thief

  2 – Oral History

  3 – Alone

  4 – Chance

  5 – The Letter

  6 – Head Injury

  7 – The Market

  8 – School Supplies

  9 – Misborn

  10 – Happy Birthday

  11 – Arriving at the Academy

  12 – Orientation

  13 – The Assigning

  14 – Familiars

  15 - Bonfire

  16 – Lost

  17 – Interrogations

  18 – Enough is Enough

  19 – A Secret Kept

  20 – Secrets Suck

  21 – A Shooting Star

  22 – Forest Outing

  23 – Nightfall

  24 - Attacked

  25 – Confusion

  26 – The Faerie Ring

  27 – Specter

  28 – Cursed

  29 - Assembly

  30 - Bombing

  31 - Melancholy

  32 – Sunset and a Sighting

  33 – A Secret Revealed

  34 – A Surprise

  35 – Explanations

  36 – Genius

  Advance Notice of New Books

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Chapter One

  Thief

  “HEY! COME BACK HERE!” The shopkeeper shook his fist at me as I ran. “THIEF!”

  I was thirteen years old, skinny as a rail, and small for my size.

  So I was fast. Really fast. I could run like the wind, even while carrying the two loaves of bread.

  I heard a police whistle behind me, but I didn’t stop to look.

  If you stop to look, they catch you.

  I raced down the alleyway, stuffing the bread into the sack hanging from my shoulder as I ran. They were hot on my heels; I could hear them breathing behind me.

  More like puffing. Fat old man, you can’t catch me.

  I reached the end of the alley, and leaped, catching the top of the dumpster with both hands and swinging my feet up. Scrambling to the back edge, I jumped up and caught the side of the second-floor fire escape, and swung myself over the eight-foot-high chain-link fence to the next alley.

  This alley led away from the street where I’d just swiped the bread, the deli that had the table on the sidewalk full of just-baked bread, to tantalize people with the smell and lure them inside. The soup they were then sold was gross. I’d seen a rat fall into the vat last month, and the gross thing was, so did the cook. He hadn’t fished the thing out; he’d left it in. I guess he figured, “more meat for the soup.”

  I didn’t eat rat. Aunt Clare always told me they carried disease and to avoid them. We’d been lucky: We hadn’t had to eat rat yet. Though things had gotten lean in the last year. Aunt Clare had gotten older, and she didn’t really gather food anymore.

  That was up to me. And I was good at it. She’d taught me well, after all.

  But it was still hard.

  “Being skinny will help you, Holly,” Aunt Clare had said. “You can run faster, you can squeeze through gaps in fences better, and you can jump farther. Sometimes jumping rooftops is the only thing that’ll get you away from the coppers, and it’ll save your hide. So stay thin and lean and live to read another day.”

  Aunt Clare love to read. She had two books she kept guarded and read to me most nights. She’d taught me to read from those books.

  I ran down the alley, my feet padding the ground noiselessly in my sneakers.

  Aunt Clare had procured the canvas sneakers one night six months ago, and they were already getting tight.

  “You’re growing like a weed, Holly,” she’d said, smiling.

  “I am a weed, Aunt Clare,” I said ruefully, trying to brush out my wild hair with my fingers.

  My hair was kind of white, at least after I went swimming in the canal. Most days it was grey, and wild. An untamed mess of tangles, Aunt Clare called it.

  It flew behind me when I ran, a white/grey silvery beacon, and helped the coppers spot me in a crowd. It was not an asset, let me put it this way.

  I wore a brown hoodie, the hood covering my head of crazy platinum hair, the drawstrings tied snugly under my chin. It helped to hide me in a crowd, and in dark alleyways.

  I turned and ran down a sidewalk, slowing as I approached a crowd.

  Slipping in through the edges, I lost myself in the throng of people walking, and I disappeared.

  New York City was a great place to live if you were homeless, Aunt Clare had always said.

  Whenever she would say that, I wondered why she didn’t mention the winters, which were cold as ice, the rats, which managed to get in everywhere, and the dangers.

  Dangers of being grabbed by coppers.

  Dangers of being robbed by the others who shared the streets with you.

  Dangers of getting sick.

  Dangers of getting stabbed.

  Lots of dangers.

  I was now walking rapidly through the crowd, one hand firmly wrapped around my bag holding the precious bread loaves. Aunt Clare and I hadn’t eaten since yesterday, and I had a hollow feeling in my stomach.

  Ten minutes later, I turned down between two buildings and into a side door that led down to the subway system.

  Ten minutes after that, and I was walking down a nearly dark subway tunnel beside tracks that had been abandoned before I was born.

  I trotted faster, then ducked into an alcove, lifted a heavy metal grate, and slipped into our home.

  The spot was barely seven feet square. It was lined with discarded coats, blankets from the shelters and giveaways, and a small, flea-infested old mattress Aunt Clare
and I had dragged in five years ago.

  “I’m back,” I whispered, setting the candles I had swiped on the crate that served as a table. A button lamp sat there, flickering fitfully.

  Aunt Clare had made it last month.

  “Let me show you how to make a button lamp,” she’d said. “My parents had these when I was a child.”

  She’d taken a small metal disk that we’d used to burn candles in, it had wax at the bottom, and she’d put a small tear of fabric from her shirt, threaded it through a large plastic button from an old coat long since lost, and stuck it in the wax.

  Then she’d lit it.

  It didn’t give much light, but it lasted forever and stubbornly refused to go out.

  “It will stay. It will stay for a long, long time,” she’d said.

  Aunt Clare was asleep on the bed, wrapped in an old tattered blanket.

  I leaned over to her face and kissed her cheek.

  Her eyes opened, fluttering softly in the dim light.

  I pressed one of the loaves of bread into her hands, and she sat up and began to eat.

  I sat facing her in my own little nest. My back against the wall, and my knees drawn up to my chest, I began to nibble on my own loaf of bread.

  She was all I had.

  “Aunt Clare?” I whispered, rubbing her arm. “How are you feeling today?”

  “Ohh,” she yawned. “I think I’m feeling better, child.” She took a bite out of the small loaf of bread. “Mmmm, this is delicious!”

  The bread loaves were about ten inches long and crusty on the outside, baked to a golden brown. The inside was soft and fluffy, just the way Aunt Clare liked it.

  I smiled.

  “Mmmm, it is good, isn’t it?” I crunched the bread with relish.

  We ate in silence for a few minutes.

  Our little corner of the world was small and dirty, and the walls were stained with old water runoff, and no matter how much I tried, I could never keep all the insects out, but one thing that set it apart from the other cubbies underground in this old subway tunnel was that it was warm.

  A few years back, we’d had a woman who befriended us, and shared her food with us. She’d been homeless a few years and had learned the ropes from others in the city.

  She’d been nice and asked to sleep in our cubby in exchange for sharing the food she stole, and we let her.

  That had been a mistake.

  After two months of this situation, she’d pulled a knife on us and forced us out of our cubby. “Yours is the only one that’s not freezing!” she’d screamed.

  It was true that the underground could be brutally cold during winter. But she was right: ours was the only cubby not freezing.

  In fact, it was warm enough so I could take off my coat.

  So, we’d grabbed our stuff and fled, while she’d brandished the knife at us and glowered.

  We’d spent a day looking for a new space to sleep in, and finally found one, about a half mile down the tunnel.

  It was another warm cubby.

  I wasn’t sure I understood what was going on, but Aunt Clare and I had spent the evening talking in whispers about it.

  “Holly, sweet baby girl, you’re the reason why the cubby was warm,” Aunt Clare had hugged me and whispered, then put a finger to her lips. “No one can know.”

  No one can know.

  I never understood this thing I did, but I did realize that it was because of me. When I left the cubby for a long time, the temperature slowly dropped until it was freezing.

  Once, I had been gone for two days, because I got caught in a bad deal with several people chasing me and the coppers were around, and I just ran. I ran and ran and ran, then found an old coal chute I could hide in. I had some food in my bag since it’d been the end of my hunting-for-food day, so I was fine. Even though there’d been snow on the ground outside, I was able to huddle in the three-foot space and wait it out.

  It had grown warm while I crouched there, and I’d decided to stay.

  But when I finally emerged and was able to make my way back to Aunt Clare in the cubby, I’d found her shivering and the cubby had been freezing.

  When I entered it, she’d been so happy to see me, and had hugged me for a long time.

  “You’re so warm,” she’d said through her chattering teeth.

  I thought about all these things as I ate the bread, chewing slowly, savoring every bite.

  I glanced around our little cubby. It was our world. It was home. I always felt better when I was back home after a day of foraging for food in the city.

  Food.

  It was a constant worry. I usually went to the park or the fountain and watched people eat their lunch, waiting for one of them who glanced at their watch, realized they were late, and tossed the last half of their sandwich or meatpie into the trash. I was there like a flash, picking it back out and running off as I stuffed it into my bag.

  Sometimes no one threw out half-eaten food, and I had to go hunting for something to eat. Then I’d walk down the streets and look for stores that had food out front, displayed to entice shoppers to enter and buy.

  I could often get away with grabbing an apple or orange, a banana or a pecan pie, or a small loaf of bread without being seen.

  But sometimes they saw me. That’s when I ran.

  They’d never caught me, not once. It was a point of pride.

  A far-off noise rattled outside in the tunnel and brought me back to the present.

  I finished the last bite of bread and began picking the crumbs off my coat and licking them off my fingers.

  Chapter Two

  Oral History

  “Aunt Clare? Can you tell me the story of my mama again?” I whispered.

  “Oh, my dear,” she smiled. “You love that story, don’t you?”

  I nodded eagerly.

  “Well, now. Let’s see if I remember it.” She thought for a minute, her finger tapping on her lips.

  “Well, you know that your mama and I were best friends. I met her a week after she’d started on the streets. Her belly was just starting to grow, and that was you inside there.” Aunt Clare smiled.

  “Your mama was the prettiest thing anyone had ever seen. She had red hair — that was from her Irish side — and light green eyes that could dance with merriment. And she always had a wonderful disposition. I think that’s why we became such good friends.”

  “We looked out for one another, too. It’s always easier when there’s two, you know that.”

  I nodded.

  “Well, let’s see. Your mama, Noelle, was just nineteen when I met her in a shelter. It was early fall, and the leaves were just starting to turn in the park. We became friends, mostly because we were so close in age, and had bunks near each other. And she told me her story.”

  “The Christmas before she’d gone on a vacation to Ireland, it was a graduation present from her grandmother, and they went together on this trip, along with some friends. Noelle had just finished high school, graduating with good grades, and was to start at the university that fall.”

  “Which university?” I asked, even though I already knew. I loved to hear the words from Aunt Clare.

  “NYU, dear. She was to major in performing arts. She was a ballet dancer,” Aunt Clare said.

  I shivered in delight. I liked to dance, too.

  “So, Noelle was in Ireland. She said she found it enchanting. She and her grandmother and friends had spent a few days in England and had visited Stonehenge, and Noelle had been enchanted. She had loved it. And then they had flown to Ireland where they were to spend a week. They visited many beautiful places and had had a wonderful time.”

  “And one day, when her grandmother had been feeling ill, because she didn’t travel well and had come down with a cold, Noelle had left her in the cottage where they were staying and had gone for a walk in a nearby forest. It was a rural village, you see, surrounded by woods. Noelle had been on her walk when she’d come across a faerie ring.”


  “A faerie ring is a ring of mushrooms growing in a circle, right?” I said, knowing the story by heart.

  “Yes, that’s right. Noelle described the mushroom ring as being under the canopy of the forest, in a shaded glade, and in a circle of about ten feet. So it was pretty big. She said there was all sizes and kinds of mushrooms, from large brown flat ones, to smaller tall, white ones. Noelle said they were beautiful.”

  I listened raptly. I loved this story.

  “Noelle said the sunlight coming through the trees was dappled and made everything look so enticing that she decided to sit down inside the mushroom circle. So she did. Well, the minute she sat down in that faerie ring, she felt so happy she couldn’t describe it. Just the happiest she’d ever been.”

  “I wish I could see the faerie ring,” I whispered.

  “So do I. It sounds wonderful, doesn’t it?” Aunt Clare said, smiling.

  I nodded.

  “So Noelle was sitting in the faerie ring, and she decided to lie back and look up through the trees. One thing about Ireland, my sweet child, the trees grow very tall and very full, and there are so many leaves! And the sight that met Noelle’s eyes was so beautiful that she fell asleep in the faerie ring.”

  My jaw dropped open, thinking how wonderful it would be to fall asleep in a forest mushroom ring.

  “Noelle said she had dreamed about a man, a man with ram horns and pale green skin, and red berries in his hair. She dreamed he came to her in the faerie ring and sat down next to her.”

  Aunt Clare paused then.

  “And then she kissed him!” I supplied, clapping my hands.

  Aunt Clare smiled. “Yes, in Noelle’s dream, she kissed the man in the forest. She said it was the most wonderful thing in the world, and that he smelled of juniper berries and sunshine and that he treated her with a tenderness she had never experienced before. Noelle said it was a magical dream, and she wished the dream had lasted forever. But dreams never last forever, and we always wake up.”