Mustardseed: faerie of the Goodfellows

Mustardseed was one of the Fae of Avalon, a faerie who served as a male maid to Titania, Queen of the Faeries, and ran with the band of tricksters called the Goodfellows. In the days before Mimir ever wandered into the Nine Realms, when the future counselor of Kratos was still known by names such as Puck and Robin of the Goodfellows, Mustardseed was counted among his closest faerie-folk friends. No one in the Norse lands ever laid eyes on him. He was known there only through the stories Mimir told of his vanished youth in the court of Oberon.

A maid in the court of the Faerie Queen#

Mustardseed belonged to the Fae, the magical folk of Avalon, a land that lay wholly apart from the Nine Realms and beyond the reach of the Norse gods. The domain was ruled by King Oberon and his consort Titania, Queen of the Faeries, and it was in the Queen's household that Mustardseed found his station. Together with his faerie friends Cobweb, Moth, and Peaseblossom, he served as one of Titania's male maids, an arrangement that never seemed to trouble him despite the title.

The duties of the Queen's attendants were gentle ones. Mustardseed and his fellows sang lullabies for Titania as she rested and stood watch over her bower, keeping every unpleasantness away from their sleeping mistress, the spotted snakes, the spiders, and the beetles that crept through the faerie forest. Their labor was not always matched by their King. While the maids worked to drive off the insects and the smaller beasts, Oberon was known to summon far larger animals toward his wife's resting place, leopards or boars or bears, one more cruelty in a marriage that had soured badly. In those days the royal couple quarreled openly. Titania had forsworn the bed and company of her husband, and when their courtiers spoke of the rift, the talk turned to the infidelities each ruler laid at the other's feet. Mustardseed served his Queen through all of it, a small constant figure in a court where the great powers of Fairyland made war on one another with spite and spellcraft.

The Goodfellows#

Beyond his service to Titania, Mustardseed belonged to a rowdier fellowship. He was one of the Goodfellows, the crew of faerie-folk who followed the trickster called Robin, and it was in that company that he became a friend of the faerie later known to the Nine Realms as Mimir. In those years Mimir went by such names as Puck and Robin of the Goodfellows, serving King Oberon as errand boy and unofficial jester, and Mustardseed, Cobweb, Peaseblossom, and Moth ran with him through the forests of Avalon.

The Goodfellows earned their reputation. By Mimir's own account they got into all manner of nonsense together, playing cruel tricks on unsuspecting mortals for the sport of it. Most of the Fae considered such meddling a serious offense, but Oberon found the chaos entertaining and let it continue, and so Mustardseed and his friends passed their days in mischief under the protection of a King who enjoyed the suffering their pranks caused. Whatever else could be said of that service, it forged a bond Mimir carried with him across worlds and centuries.

Waiting on the ass-headed Bottom#

The strangest chapter of Mustardseed's recorded service came through his King's own scheming. Oberon, quarreling with Titania and bent on humiliating her, ordered Puck to place the Queen under the spell of a magic flower, an enchantment that would make her fall in love with something preposterous. The magic did its work. Titania woke with the love juice on her eyes and doted at once upon Nick Bottom, a mortal weaver wearing the head of an ass.

Enchanted as she was, the Queen appointed four faeries to serve the needs of her new beloved: Peaseblossom, Cobweb, Moth, and Mustardseed. The mismatch between mistress and mortal showed in everything. Titania promised Bottom jewels and a bed of pressed flowers and spoke to him in language bedecked with dewberries, painted butterflies, and moonbeams, while the weaver took no interest in the magical services the faeries might have performed for him. He greeted each of the Queen's attendants by the plainest reading of his name, and to Bottom, Mustardseed was simply a spice made to flavor his beef. The faerie apparently took no offense, not even at the mortal's remark that Mustardseed's kindred must surely make the eyes water. Bottom's coarse talk wore on the poetic Queen more than on her servants, and Titania at last bade her faeries tie up her lover's tongue before he was brought to her bower, where she offered him the soothing music of her attendants. Through the whole absurd interlude, Mustardseed did as his enchanted Queen commanded, patient servant to a donkey-headed weaver until the spell ran its course.

Remembered in Valhalla#

Mustardseed never left the lands of the Fae so far as any record tells, and his fate after Mimir's departure from Avalon went unrecorded. His name reached the Norse realms all the same. Long after Mimir had fled Oberon's fading favor, lost his body to Odin's cruelty, and found a second life at the side of Kratos, the old ambassador entered Valhalla, a place that made its visitors relive the memories they carried. There Mimir was drawn back to the days when he lived in the forest serving King Oberon alongside his crew of faerie-folk, Cobweb and Mustardseed among them, and he shared with Kratos the misadventures of that former life, the nonsense they got up to and the cruel tricks they had played on mortals.

It was the only time Mustardseed was ever spoken of in the Nine Realms. A faerie maid of a distant Queen, a Goodfellow of a vanished fellowship, he survived in the Norse world as a single fond memory in the head of his oldest friend.