Trix and the Faerie Queen (The Trix Adventures) - Softcover

Kontis, Alethea

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1942541082 ISBN 13: 9781942541080

Publisher: Alethea Kontis, 2016

Synopsis

Join Trix Woodcutter on an epic new animal-filled adventure! Fey magic and animal magic: that troublemaking imp Trix Woodcutter has both, if not the ability to use them to their full potential. While traveling with his companion—the golden girl Lizinia—to see the King of Eagles, Trix is sent a vision of the Faerie Queen, who is in desperate need of his help. An evil sorceress has stormed Faerie and trapped all the fey magic under the Hill, leaving the Faerie Queen powerless! Trix’s talent for communicating with animals is desperately needed...but before he braves the wild world of Faerie he must arm himself, with nothing less than the bow and arrows of a god. With the help of his gilded companion, her ghost-cat godfather, a blind brownie and a sister or two, the Boy Who Talks to Animals must befriend a mischievous leprechaun, best a wolf, and journey into the depths of Faerie to restore order and free the fey magic before the imbalance destroys the world. Trix and the Faerie Queen is second in The Trix Adventures and sixth in the Books of Arilland Series. Fans of the Woodcutter Sisters: Desperate to know what happened to Saturday and Peregrine after they found Trix at the end of HERO? Here’s your chance!

About this title

From the Author

In my fairy tale books of Arilland, Mama Woodcutter always says,"Everything happens for a reason." She does that because my own mother has always said, "Everything happens for a reason." (We writers do tend to write what we know.)
 
But we all know that's a load of crap,right? People say, "Everything happens for a reason" in an attempt to make you feel better about The Exceptionally Horrible Event That Has Just Occurred (TEHETHJO). Like, for instance, when you splatter turmeric allover your vintage white shirt with the handmade Belgian lace, but the red top you're forced to change into is the one that catches Prince Harry's eye and WHAMMO. You're sipping tea and eating eggs with the queen because reasons.
 
Yeah. Right. No. Things in life just happen--good or bad--and those things become the reasons for whatever happens after. It's plain-old scientific cause and effect. Now, how you decide to act in the aftermath of TEHETHJO is the sort of thing that defines you as a person. There's fate, and there's free will.
 
I am all about forging one's own destiny.
 
Maybe it's because I started out as a child actress, or because I did a lot of improv in high school, but all my TEHETHJOs typically turn out pretty great. I don't make lemonade, I make limoncello. Unfortunately,knowing that doesn't automatically turn life into sunshine and baby otters while I'm standing at ground zero during global thermonuclear war.
 
Like, for instance, when my boyfriend and my publisher dumped me in the same 24 hours a couple years ago. (Small spoiler:Prince Harry doesn't show up at the end of this, so don't hold your breath.)You know that thing where a person's soul metaphorically shatters into a million pieces? That. TEHETHJO. All over the inside of my poor Firefly-class Volvo.
 
But if TEHETHJO hadn't occurred,then the book that's releasing this week would never have existed. NEVER. And it's the best book I've ever written.
 
Trixter was meant to be a stand-alone novella that told the story of what happened to Trix Woodcutter while his sister Saturday was questing about in Hero, since the publisher had politely asked me tore move his entire subplot. At the same time, it was my tribute to Andrew Lang's Crimson Fairy Book.It was not meant to be Volume One of The Trix Adventures. That fey scamp of a little brother was not meant to find a companion and traverse continents and chat up all sorts of legendary beasties and save the world. He was not meant to become my fairy tale Doctor Who.
 
And yet...there I was, writing a scene at the end of Trix and the Faerie Queen that was not in my outline, giggling and weeping over my keyboard at the same time. Because reasons.
 
The Trix Adventures are beautiful books, and the rest of the Woodcutter Sisters will be better for me having written them I have become better for having written them. I have been made whole again, regenerated, and Alethea 3.0 is fantastic. I did that. TEHETHJO might have been the inciting incident, but I'm going to stand up and take credit for this one.
 
If everything really does happen for a reason, the reason Trix and the Faerie Queen exists is me. 
 
And I am so incredibly proud of that.

--Alethea Kontis (posted on John Scalzi's "Big Idea", Spring 2016)

From the Inside Flap

The Emissary

"Lizinia, watch this!" Trix leapt off the branch and flew above the forest floor.

The sparrows would not have called it flying. Squirrels, on the other hand, knew exactly what he meant. Trix stretched out a hand and caught the vine he'd been aiming for. He wrapped his elbow around it and prayed it was sturdy enough to catch his weight.

It was.

With a holler, Trix let the vine carry him into a high arc. He turned a quick somersault in the air, but instead of straightening out for a clean dive, he kept his body pulled into as tight a ball as he could manage. Lizinia's shrieks of joy as he hit the water made him smile.

Once below the dappled surface he stretched out in the water, kicking toward shore. A school of minnows scurried through his hair and a medium-sized trout brushed silkily against his belly.

This inlet was warm compared to the cool of the night. The last time he'd been swimming he hadn't needed to breathe air. But that had been a wish, granted and run its course.

Lizinia jumped up and down as he resurfaced. Her gleeful clapping clanked like an enthusiastic cowbell as her gilded palms met again and again.

"Thank you, thank you," he said with great condescension. "That is, without doubt, the largest splash I have ever made in my life." Thanks to Papa Gatto's enchantment, he now possessed the taller, heavier body of a young human man and not the lithe scrawniness of a fey boy the same age.

"My turn!" cried the golden girl.

"You don't think the water will--?" But it was too late. Lizinia had already leapt from her spot on the bank, clothes and all. There was little grace to her entrance, but her splash was epic. Trix gave a proud shriek of his own, blinking salty droplets out of his eyes as his body bobbed up and down in her wake.

He commended himself on discovering this choice spot. He'd just been thinking that they needed a respite after their long day of walking eastward, away from Rose Abbey, along the Impossible Ocean's edge to the legendary home of the King of Eagles. As if he'd been granted another wish, that respite had appeared. Thanks to the magical seawater his angry sister had conjured, what had once been a sheer cliff face now made a magnificently deep swimming hole.
A hole from which Lizinia had still not risen.

A hole into which that girl, entirely covered in gold, had just jumped.

Most people with common sense would have remembered that gold did not float. Trix Woodcutter rarely qualified as "most people."

"Trixie, you are a prize idiot," he said to himself, because neither Peter nor Saturday were there to say it for him. He took a deep breath and dove hard.

The trout, sensing his distress, joined him. The fish swam at his sides, so that he did not have to worry about injuring any of them with his furious kicking. The further they descended, the darker the water became. Trix was wondering how he might find his companion without sight when a bright light burst out from the crescent-shaped bone that hung from a thong around his neck: Wisdom's tooth. A tiny glint reflected back from the shadows. Trix kicked faster in that direction. 

Where some might have panicked at such a predicament, Lizinia had simply begun climbing the cliff face. This was one of the things Trix loved most about Lizinia: she was just as happy an adventurer as he.

With a wave of Trix's hand, the trout swam up beneath Lizinia and nestled under her arms, propelling upward with their strong tails. They made faster progress than Lizinia had been making on her own, but their scales continued to slip off Lizinia's slick golden skin. Trix's heart pounded in his chest, desperate for air. He grabbed her hands and tried to pull her up on his own, but even with his new and improved body, Lizinia's gold was easily half again his weight.

Trix caught Lizinia's eye. He forced himself not to be frightened. Just as he was about to lose all hope--and any chance of breathing again--they began to ascend. Trix swam down to Lizinia's feet. Her golden slippers rested upon the backs of two very fine snapping turtles. Her head broke the surface soon after that, and they both gasped for air. After a few deep, blissful breaths, Trix helped pull his companion to the shore.

"Perhaps our next attempt at swimming should be in a shallower pond," she said when she caught her breath.

"Perhaps indeed. Thank you, friends!" Trix patted the heads of the turtles and bid them farewell before turning back to Lizinia. "I'm sorry. I did not think about the gold."

"I didn't think about it either," said Lizinia. "Which is more my fault, since it is my gold."

"I should have at least had the trout check the depth for us."

Lizinia waved her hands and then let them fall to the grass. "Next time."

Trix rolled onto his back, his breath finally slowing to an even rhythm, and thought about how grateful he was that there would be a next time. He stared up into the sky and thanked every star scattered there. This had once been one of his favorite pastimes, before the Impossible Ocean and the start of his adventures.

"Were you scared?" he asked.

There was a pause before Lizinia answered. "I think I forgot to be scared. I was too busy trying to climb back up."

Trix smiled. It was the sort of thing he would have said.

About this edition

• Publisher: Alethea Kontis
• Publication date: 2016
• ISBN 10: 1942541082
• ISBN 13: 9781942541080
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 203