A Place Beyond The Map by Samuel Thews Read Free Book Online

wool over your eyes, is that it? No, mate. This is bad and this is real, or I’m Morgan le Fay.”
     “Well, if all you say is true,” Phinnegan whispered after several silent moments, “this does sound bad.”
    “Believe me now, do you,” the Faë sneered. “And oh yes, it is bad. Quite. The devil take me for being so careless.” Periwinkle continued speaking, but his voice dropped so and he assumed the Faë was talking to himself.
    “How could you be so stupid? Did you really think they wouldn’t notice?”
    “Notice what?” The question escaped Phinnegan’s lips before he could hold it back. Raised with manners as he had been, he thought it rude to listen in on another’s conversation, even when that conversation was with one’s self. But he couldn’t deny he wanted to know the answer to that question.
    The Faë became silent. As the moments passed, Phinnegan’s anger and frustration rose once again and they betrayed him in his voice when he spoke.
    “Would you just tell me what the bloody hell is going on?”
    Phinnegan’s demand was greeted with further silence. He could almost feel the harsh glare Periwinkle was undoubtedly casting in his direction. 
    “What’s going on is we’ve been captured,” Periwinkle stated after a few moments.
    “ Captured ? By whom?”
    “Well if the stories are true, and I have no reason to believe they are not, then Féradoon is now sort of the unofficial headquarters for that favorite son of the Faë, Vermillion. He and his lot are our most likely captors. I told you, they’ve got a vice grip on this world now. And they’re squeezing her for all that they can. I never should’ve activated that stone.”
    “Activated the stone?” Phinnegan recalled the smooth, spherical wishing stone. “Is that what you were doing then, when you were making it sing?”
    Although he could not see Periwinkle, Phinnegan assumed the Faë must have been nodding his response out of habit, forgetting that they conversed in total darkness.
    “Err, yes. “When the wishing stones are activated, they open a sort of window between our worlds. Not anything you can travel through, not one that size anyway, but you can see and hear things. The stones are linked to the Faë that saved them.”
    He paused for a moment, then continued, his voice quiet.
    “They’ve been watching mine, no doubt, so I thought to trick them by using the stone of another. I was going to give it to you, if you remember. Evidently their tracking methods are better than I gave them credit for.”
    The Faë’s admission that he was likely being watched reminded Phinnegan of the deep, booming voice they had heard back in Ireland beneath the wych elm.
    “If they were watching you…does that mean that you did those things that the voice said? That you are a thief? A traitor?”
    “Well, mate, I don’t need to tell you that I am a bit of a thief. Your father’s pipe, if you recall. As to the traitor bit, if standing up to that lout labels me a traitor, then I wear it proudly.”
    Phinnegan pondered this answer. In his short life, he had heard of courageous rebels who resisted some unfair authority, even peacefully, and were labeled criminals and traitors. Of course, these people had all been written about in books, whether fictitious or historical, but the principle was the same.
    “What did you do?” Phinnegan swallowed the lump in his throat.
    “Did you kill someone?”
    Periwinkle chuckled in the darkness.
    “I may be a thief and a ‘traitor,’ if they want to call me that.  But I assure you I am no murderer. I’ve only…well, shall we say disrupted…some of his plans. That’s all. I’m a bit of an instigator, you could say.”
    “What sorts of things have you done then?” Phinnegan asked, his curiosity piqued by this admission.
    “Most of it boils down to a bit of thieving. But with a Faë like that, stealing some trophy ruins the whole conquest for him. But I’ve done a bit of vandalism as