Free Rise of the Fey by Alessa Ellefson

tomorrow? You are his squire now, after all.”
    I lay back down as the bloated, black-veined bodies of Agnès and Rei flash before me, just like my father must have looked almost twenty years ago….
    Somehow, Arthur knows more about all of this than he’s admitted. No surprise there. The question now is: How am I going to make him talk?

    I jerk awake as a pillow slams into my face.
    “Wake up, you sloth. It’s time for mass.”
    I crack an eye open to check the windup clock set on the windowsill. “But it’s only three in the morning,” I say.
    “And we’ve got a lot of extra cramming to do,” Keva retorts. “We’re at war, remember?”
    I dutifully roll out of bed and grunt as my feet hit the floor, blinking in the incandescent light provided by the salamander up on the ceiling. I look back at my bed wistfully.
    After Keva’s revelation last night my mind wouldn’t shut up. It isn’t until it conjured an image of Arthur, tied down to train tracks and screaming like a damsel in distress, that I finally conked out, sometime after the Matins 6 bells.
    Without a word, I follow Keva down the flights of stairs, and out the Northern Door. The courtyard’s gravel crunches like a gazillion chips under the feet of dozens of knights as we rush to church. But when we finally step inside, I suck in my breath.
    “It’s gotten a little more crowded since you left, hasn’t it?” Keva says. “It’s amazing how fear makes people more pious. That and the Board’s finally bothered to send some extra knights over to help out.”
    She motions me forward and I follow her down the nave, catching snatches of conversation as we pass the benches filled to bursting with people.
    “Look,” a woman says, elbowing her neighbor in the ribs, “that crossbreed’s dared to show up here.”
    “I still don’t see why Arthur picked her,” an older man says, pulling on his saucer-sized earlobes. “There are plenty of suitable young squires around who could benefit from his patronage and deserve it so much better than this filly.”
    “Shh,” his neighbor says. “She’ll jinx you if she hears you speak like that! I hear her kind always jump at the first opportunity to do evil. Who knows what she’d do to you if she got angry?”
    Ears burning, I rush to our pew, forcing some new, wide-eyed pages aside to let me slide in next to Jack.
    “Long time no see,” I whisper to the boy, his blue eyes gigantic behind his wire-framed glasses. “Where’s Bri?”
    “Uh,” he starts, pushing his glasses up the ridge of his nose, “you’re not supposed to be here, you know.”
    I feel my blush spread to the rest of my face at the unexpected rejection from one I’d considered a friend. I bite down on my lip to hold back the unbidden tears, surprised at my own reaction, when Jack points behind me. Turning around, I find Keva glaring at me across the nave, waving furiously for me to join her behind the KORT pews.
    “You’re no longer a page, remember?” Jack says with a timid smile.
    “Oh, right,” I say, returning his smile before I make my way to the other side, feeling immensely relieved.
    Even if everyone else hates me, it’s nice to know that I’ve still got a few people who have my back.
    I sit down right as the choir starts its procession down to the altar, carrying the thurible 7 , the cross, and a pair of lighted candles. As they spread out around the chancel, Father Tristan emerges from the sanctuary like a disjointed scarecrow in his black cassock. He looks gaunter than he did yesterday at my trial, as if he’s the one who just came out of jail instead of me.
    The greeting is barely over when Father Tristan throws himself into another one of his long, fervent sermons, one that makesthe hairs at the back of my neck stand on end, and I find myself slouching over in my seat to avoid the reproving gazes that are bound to find me.
    “And remember Saint Paul’s words,” Father Tristan’s clear voice intones, his words