Men see what they need to in times of war. But what men claimed to have seen during the Great War defied imagination. Henry V’s angel archers descending to save the British at Mons. Lord Kitchener lost on a mission to reclaim Ultima Thule. The defeated Kaiser’s rambling claims of a Masonic conspiracy. The Zimmerman Telegram. The U.S. Marines, Teufelshunden to their enemies, coursing through the mud of Belleau Wood to snatch the Allies from the jaws of death. Most of the stories were so absurd that one could be justified in believing the rumors that the real battles were being fought on the magical plane by the hidden masters of the secret orders on both sides of the conflict: The Thule Society. The Golden Dawn. The Theosophists. The Germanenordern Walvater of the Holy Grail. 
 
The armies in that shadow war were the shining troops of the Seelie Court. The Gentry of the Sidhe, they were true to their nature as Unfallen – the angels who would not take sides in the great war between Heaven and Hell. They danced through the trenches with light-hearted indifference, playing tricks on their allies as easily as they did their enemies. Yet their very fickleness was what drove them to heroism, for when they conceived a passion for a mortal, they would sacrifice all for love.
 
But what of the other Fae, the Unseelie Court? Exiled to the Middle Kingdom just as their brothers were, they would not consort with humans. Instead, they roamed the woods and the mountaintops, the desert and the other places in-between. But it was said that valor drew these creatures as hungrily as love and beauty drew their Seelie brethren. And mired in the senseless chaos of the trenches, it was only too easy for a soldier to believe that the Wild Ride was mustering to restore the honor of the Sidhe.
 
This is the tale of one such raid. This is the Tale of the Lost Company of Ker-Ys.
 
The girls stepped into the moonlight much as they had stepped off of the special train that had whisked them from the tenements of the Lower East Side to a month’s stay in the Catskills, where they would enjoy life as it had been lived before there were factories, when simple crafts like spinning and weaving made life itself an art. Kitty was as thin and wary as when she had first been lured into the Settlement School, not by the promise of free food, but by the books the kindly librarian doled out from her cart if she were offering bits of fish to a stray cat. Mellie was her opposite, having learned the power of her blue eyes and red-gold curls early. She took the lead as her right, tugging a reluctant Kitty toward the pool that lay still and silent at the far end of the clearing, 
 
 “Don’t be a silly spoil-sport,” she scolded. “This was all your idea. If you didn’t want to come, why did you tell me the story?”
 
It had been a mistake. Kitty knew that much long before Mr. Adams had surprised her in the library, his breath heavy against her neck, as he pronounced her drawing a Rare Talent. Kitty had been copying the pictures from a book called Cian of the Chariots, whose vivid blue cover with its red-cloaked hero and his intricately worked armor reminded her of the pictures in her head she could not yet get down on paper, although the art teacher at the Settlement School assured her she had enough talent that she might aspire to illustrating the ladies’ magazines one day. But it was not the noble charioteer who whose story had held her attention. It was Dynan's elfin horn that she longed to draw: transparent as the summer heaven, yet threaded with wild scrollwork of fire. 
 
Mellie hadn’t cared about elfin horns. Mellie only had ears for the story that lay behind it, a tale that lay in the distant past when:
 
There were dwarfs and elves and powers of enchantment in the land, as all men know; and some have lingered on in hidden places, now and then showing themselves, for good or ill, to one of our race. In deep glens and forest shadows you meet them, it is said, and chiefly by the fountains that come bubbling up with the life of the under-world. 
 
In such a country as this dwelt Dynan's mother's mother's mother, I know not how remote in ancestry. One day, passing through the meadows to bathe, as was her custom, in a secret pool fed by undying springs under curtaining boughs, she heard a faint cavern-muffled call from before her, and was minded to return. But coming a little nearer, she found the place quite vacant, save for dipping ouzels and water-rats that went gliding away. Having waited a while, she laid aside her garments, and stepped in through the shallows. Then again out swelled the cry, but now deep-throated, vehement, exultant, and very near, seeming to heave up the water before some bodily presence. It thrilled and wrapped and all but overcame her; yet she sprang away, snatching her clothing, and wrapping it around her as she ran. And, running thus, she heard yet a third time that voice of the under-world, but now sent after her in accents of more than human despair. Yet she had seen no form at all; and the Three Shouts was the only name she could ever give, or which might be given.
 
“He calls for you in the moonlight,” Mellie pressed Kitty. “We all hear the shouts. Why don’t you answer?”
 
Because much as the pain in that midnight cry wrenched Kitty’s heart, she dared not help him. She had been warned about what had happened to her mother by a succession of nuns, nursing sisters, and teachers. “I should never have told you,” Kitty said, her eyes on the moonlight glinting off the water, as she thought about the poor creature beneath. Trapped. Just as she had been by Mr. Adams’ appreciation of her Rare Talent. 
 
“Books are for reading, not telling,” Kitty told Mellie.
 
“Well, you did tell me. And now I’m telling you that the lady was a fool to run away. But I won’t be such a fool. No, when he shouts to me, I’ll make him fall in love with me and he’ll sweep me off to fairy land, where he will shower me with gold and rubies and dresses as gold as the sun and as silver as the moon.”
 
That was a fairy tale. That wasn’t how the story went at all. In the real story, the lady hadn’t run away: 
 
She must have sought that pool again – overcoming her fear, or because of it, for there are strange things in enchantment. It is thought, also, she made tryst with him otherwhere. A dimness, not human nor heavenly, was seen beside her in lonely rambles; and one starlit eve she had vanished quite away. Long afterward she returned, and bore a son among her own people, with a tale of wedlock in wild, lonely places, by rites unknown; and this magical token, wrought by no earthly hand, she showed as her voucher. When the right lips blow it, the voice of the Three Shouts will be sent abroad, and hosts of terrible power will come to the rescue.
 
“It’s not right,” Kitty repeated. “They exact their price and claim their own.”
 
“Well, what do you care—other than you’re a jealous little cat?” Mellie asked, pulling her shift over her head to reveal her high breasts and slender waist, displaying them proudly in the glistening moonlight. “He’ll not be coming for you when he can have me.”
 
Kitty turned away, her lips moving with lines of poetry culled from her only memory of the sad-eyed woman who once upon a time used to sing her to sleep. “We must not look at goblin men,” Kitty repeated the only words she could remember her mother ever having spoken to her. “We must not buy their fruits. Who knows upon what soil they fed their hungry thirsty roots?”
 
Did anyone know the answer to that question? The god-fearing farmers of Woodstock who gathered nightly around the pot-bellied stove in the general store had opinions. Their families had a long history in the Catskills, rooted in the wisdom of trusting only in themselves and the Dutch Reformed Church as bulwarks against the dangers that prowled these mountains still. But the artists who had descended on their quiet village in search of something called the Light, not only sought those dangers, but tried to tame them and claim them for themselves. 
 
They would learn soon enough that such dangers could never be tamed or claimed. The good Lord had created the Bible and Church Elders for a reason, and woe unto those who ignored such gifts. So, when new girls started to go missing ten years after that first time, the council around the pot-bellied stove dismissed the question as the result of foreign ways and foreign wars. And when one of the missing girls was found floating in the spring that was said to be haunted, they locked their doors and reassured their wives and daughters that such threats would never trouble decent women such as themselves.
 
 
© Erica Obey 2021.
 
This is an excerpt from the novel Dazzlepaint by Erica Obey, Walrus Books 2021.