n this young adult neopagan supernatural fantasy rewrite of Edmund Spenser’s Elizabethan The Faerie Queene, nine young Irish boys in 11th Century Leinster were made precocious through elven magic, and trained as message runners.

Six of the boys were captured as pixies and held in iron cages to be tormented and tortured to death by a ravaging crowd driven to frenzy by a fey terror, leaving three survivors to recapture the blatant Deargbeithíoch, the Dread Beast of 1,000 tongues.

Not all goes to plan. They keep making mistakes. If they fail in their sworn task they are doomed to eternal servitude to the fell sprite Oilill Sceolan, known as Al-il, errant page to Artegal and Caelia, high king and queen of the ancient Tuatha Dé Danann, in their throne room beneath the great towering rock, Sídhe Creig.