Queen's Gambit

by Karen Chance

  But I did not think that it had been the Svarestri, who had seemed as surprised by it as we were.

  I put the canteen aside.

  There was also the knife that I had managed to hang onto somehow, although Ray had taken it “fishing.” And a few strips of the first blanket, which he had ripped up for bandages. And that was all. That was everything we had to help us survive in the hostile environment of an alien world.

  Fifty-fifty, I thought.

  I put the blanket aside and started massaging my legs, trying to get them working again, but had to stop when the pressure opened one of the wounds. I frowned at myself—I should have expected that—and rebandaged it with some more blanket strips. The wounds were deep, as if the fey had been attempting to hamstring me, but not dangerous, and they did not impede my movement as my legs were nonfunctioning anyway. But it felt strange, not being able to feel my fingers moving over my flesh.

  There was no pain, even when I washed the seeping wound in fey wine to disinfect it. Dhampirs do not suffer from infections, but that was on Earth. Who knew how it worked here?

  I thought about that, then unwrapped the other wound and disinfected it, too, just to be safe. Again, there was no discomfort. It was almost as if my legs were not there at all, which was . . . disturbing.

  I tried telling myself that it would be fine, that I would return to Earth, reunite with Dory, and that our body would be whole again. Only, what if this was our body? I had assumed that the original had stayed with her, simply because I was used to thinking about it as hers more than mine. But what if she had the duplicate?

  What if I returned to her, and paralyzed us both?

  I pushed that thought away—hard—because it made the cold water beading my skin feel like it reached all the way to my heart. I shivered anyway, probably because my tunic was wet. I pulled it off and laid it in the sun, and even found a small patch of warmth for myself while it dried.

  The rocks overhead looked a bit like an open hand, I decided, with four fingers of stone sticking out, and the thumb being the stony protrusion behind me. It showed me the sky in pieces, but provided a little shelter in case it rained. Assuming that it did that here.

  I didn’t know because I didn’t know the rules of this place. Not any of them. It made me uneasy, like the thought that I might not be able to fight off an attack if it came.

  But there was nothing obviously threatening at the moment, and I had started to relax by the time Ray returned, with four large fish, a crab-like creature, and a sliced-up nose. And a slightly horrified expression when he caught sight of me. “Oh, hey! Hey, yeah. Um—”

  “Is something wrong?” I asked, because he’d looked away. And then almost turned his back on me.

  “No, no, hell no. Not a thing. It’s just . . . it gets cold here, at night. You, uh, should probably put that tunic back on.”

  I reached over and felt of it. And to my surprise, it was dry. The strange material had wicked away the water and the sun had warmed it. I pulled it over my head and Ray was right. I did feel better.

  “What is it you have there?” I asked.

  He glanced over his shoulder, and looked faintly relieved for some reason. Then he looked down at his catch. “Oh. Crab,” he explained, shaking the obviously dead creature. “I’m gonna enjoy cooking this bitch up. It almost took my nose off.”

  “Can we cook?” I asked, as he squatted down by the river to clean his catch. The sun, or what passed for it here, was getting lower. It would be dark soon, and a fire would show our location all too well.

  And that was assuming that the trees didn’t get us first.

  Ray shrugged. “May as well. We have to have a fire anyway.” He thought about it. “That’s rule number five. Never sleep without a fire, especially not at water’s edge.”

  “But if we light one, somebody might see us.”

  “And if we don’t, something might eat us.”

  “There seems to be a lot of that going on,” I pointed out.

  He started to say something, but then looked up and saw my face. Or perhaps he read my mind, and picked up on some of the strange feeling I was having. Not fear exactly, but something approaching it. Anxiety? Was that the word?

  “That’s the word,” Ray said. “And if you didn’t have any around here, you’d be either stupid or crazy.”

  “All right,” I said.

  “In Faerie, you gotta pick your battles,” he added, working on the fish. “Look, I’m not gonna lie to you and promise that we’re going to make it out of here, okay? I’m not gonna do that. But I will promise that tonight, we’ll do the eating.”

  I felt my face crack, and then smile. Ray had a way with words. It wasn’t a conventional way, but it was a way.

  “I’ll make the fire,” I said.

  * * *

  The meal was simple but good. Hunger is the best sauce, as someone once said, and I was very hungry. I ate all four of the fish, some of the dried fruit, and most of Ray’s crab. It had almost taken his nose off in an epic battle, so he had eaten some as a point of honor.

  He had also drunk another pint of blood, reducing our stash to three, which told me how much healing he’d had to do earlier. A master shouldn’t have needed another feed so soon. Especially not with a family back on Earth to draw from.

  “Can your family not supply you?” I asked, as I handed it over.

  He rolled his eyes, which I was beginning to see as a favorite gesture, and poked our fire with a stick. He’d found some driftwood along the banks, so we had a good blaze. It was chilly now with the sun down, but the fire warmed not only us but the rock behind us. I thought we’d sleep comfortably enough.

  “You seen my family, right?” he said, after a moment.

  “Yes.”

  “So, what do you think?”

  I ate a fish eye. “I think they are too weak to help you, and that it is my fault.”

  He looked up, the firelight splashing his face. “Why would it be your fault?”

  “I am not a proper master. Neither is Dory. Your old master could give you power through the blood bond, but we cannot. As a result, your people draw from you, but you have no one to draw from in return. It weakens you.”

  Ray picked at the mostly empty crab shell. “That’s one way of looking at it.”

  “Is that not how you look at it?”

  He shot me a look. “No.”

  For a while, nothing else was said. The wood popped, the wind rustled through the treetops, and the water murmured over the stones. I looked up, and the rocky fingers seemed as if they were reaching out, to clutch the sky. There were stars visible, but no moon. I wondered if Faerie even had one, and felt a strange quiver at the thought that I didn’t know.

  “I look back,” Ray finally said, “at four hundred years of slavery. You know when Dory cut off my head that time?”

  I nodded.

  “We were nothing to each other then; never even met. I was just some loser she’d been sent after, just a paycheck. Yet she was more polite to my decapitated corpse than my old master ever was to the whole man. That fucking prick.”

  I blinked.

  “So you gotta weigh it out. On the one hand, sure, I don’t get any power boosts, but that miserly bastard never gave up much anyway. And on average, I’d rather have some goddamned respect than all the power in the world. You know?”

  “No,” I said honestly. “I have never met a vampire who did not crave power.”

  “Didn’t say I didn’t crave it,” Ray corrected. “Right now, I crave the heck out of it. I just crave something else more. You spend four hundred years being treated like nothing, just nothing at all, and maybe you’d understand.”

  This time, I was the one who was silent.

  “I did,” I finally said, and saw him blush.

  Or maybe that was the fire. It was sending a cheerful glow over the flat stone beneath us, the rocks behind us, and the fingers above. It had also given Ray back his youthful appearance. There was
no gray in the shock of black hair, and the blue eyes, so startling against the tanned skin, were unlined. At a guess, I would have said that he was Changed young, no more than early twenties.

  “Nineteen,” he said roughly, and looked away. But a moment later, those blue eyes were back and staring at me challengingly. “What about you?”

  “I am not a vampire,” I pointed out. “I was not Changed.”

  The eyeroll was back. “No, I meant what do you want? You asked me, so it’s only fair.”

  I agreed that it was fair. It was also difficult to answer. I decided to take my time, as he had, and lay back against the warm stone to look at the stars.

  Like everything else here, they were both familiar and not. The small, pinpricks of light were the same, but there were no familiar constellations. Orion, the Big Dipper, the Pleiades . . . they simply were not there.

  Of course, they wouldn’t be, would they? I had heard that Faerie was in a completely different universe, connected to our own solely by a small breach in space-time. It was on the “heavenly” side, whereas Earth was part of the “hells”, although those terms did not have the same connotations that I had been taught as a child. They simply denoted the rules under which the two universes operated, acknowledging that their magic, and possibly even their physics, worked differently.

  “They got constellations,” Ray suddenly said. “They’re just different from ours. See that line of four stars in a row, with three more curving up from it?”

  I followed the line of his pointing finger, and nodded.

  “That’s Gangleri, the Wanderer. Said to be the ship the gods came here in. The story is that they were like space Vikings, poor adventurer types searching for wealth, lands, people they could conquer—basically anything. They traveled all over their galaxy, plundering the shit outta everybody who didn’t beat them up first—”

  “Beat them up? When they were so strong?”

  He settled onto his back and put his hands behind his head. “Well, that’s the point. They weren’t that strong then. They were only overpowered when they came here, where the rules are different. They discovered that in our universe they were like, well, like gods. They could beat up anybody.”

  “But they weren’t in our universe,” I pointed out. “Faerie is in theirs.”

  “Yeah, but it’s the closest world to the rift on their side, like Earth is on ours. Both worlds are a little weird, ‘cause things bleed over. That’s how the gods found us; we’re not that far away, you know?”

  I shook my head. I didn’t know. I had never heard this before.

  “How did you come to know so much?” I asked.

  He shrugged. “The fey. If you wanna do business, you gotta have a meal, drink some wine, smoke some herb. And while you’re doing that, you talk, so they can decide what kind of person you are. They been ripped off before, but it don’t happen often ‘cause they’ve been trading a long time. They’re pretty good at sizing a guy up. But anyway, eventually they talk back, usually telling stories.”

  “What kind of stories?”

  “Any kind. Every kind.” Ray grinned. “Bullshit, mostly: heroes and villains, epic journeys and daring deeds, damsels needing rescuing from ugly ogres . . . unless it’s the ogres telling the story. In which case it’s usually about light fey trespassers getting what’s coming to ‘em. And about roasting pretty fey princes over a spit until the juices run clear.”

  I blinked. “You traded with the dark fey, too?”

  “Sure, why not? They have portals. They also got stories, but they’re not so nice. The light fey were the ones the gods interbred with. The dark fey were the ones they experimented on. Guess who was treated better?”

  I did not have to guess. Dory had dark fey friends who had fled to Earth, where they were thought of as monsters. Yet they had better lives there.

  I looked up at the glimmering constellation, sailing across the heavens. It resembled a Viking ship, with a long body and a raised prow. But judging by what I’d seen today, I doubted it had looked like that at all. Probably a case of the fey interpreting the idea of a ship in a way that made sense to them.

  Was that all the gods were? I wondered. Just space vagabonds looking for an opportunity, and finding it because of a happenstance of physics? Like a human walking on the moon could suddenly jump higher because of the difference in gravity.

  “What if God was one of us,” Ray suddenly sang. “Just a slob like one of us?”

  I laughed; I couldn’t help it. He always seemed to know what to say.

  “And then Great Artemis’ spell banished the gods and blocked the breech behind them, preventing their return,” I said. “But it had to encompass Faerie as well, since the ley lines connected it to Earth. Thus, cutting Faerie off from the rest of the heavens.”

  “Pretty much,” Ray agreed.

  I watched the stars wheel above us. There were so many here, and so close. Maybe it was just the lack of light pollution, but it looked as if someone had pitched a great, glittery tent in the heavens.

  One the fey could no longer reach.

  I wondered what they thought, looking up at a sky cut off from them forever. At worlds they’d never visit, at a universe they would never explore. I couldn’t imagine what that must have felt like, to be suddenly so alone.

  Or perhaps I could.

  “I don’t know what I want,” I said to Ray.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Dorina, Faerie

  “That’s a cop out,” Ray said.

  I frowned. Slang sometimes threw me. It was what came from having very few conversations over the years. “What does that mean?”

  “It means that you don’t wanna tell me, so you’re evading the question.”

  “I am not evading.”

  “Look, I get it. You just don’t wanna talk about it. It’s okay—”

  “I do not mind talking.”

  Talking was strange after a lifetime filled with silence, but nice. I had discovered that I quite liked talking. It was so much easier to gather information that way, than by merely observing.

  And yet it required putting into words concepts that did not always seem to fit.

  “Then do it however you like,” Ray said. “We’re pretty simpatico mentally. Just send me the images.”

  Yes, but of what? I thought. There was so much . . .

  “I got nothing but time,” he pointed out.

  I nodded, but then just lay there for a while longer, saying nothing. Pondering how to explain the thoughts and feelings I’d been having over the last few months. It felt odd to have someone ask.

  It felt odder to want to answer.

  “My life . . . isn’t mine,” I said slowly. “I live in the house of Dory’s friend. I do not have a house; I have never had one. I grew up in my father’s house, and since then, my sister has decided where we live.”

  “But I thought you liked—”

  “Shhh.”

  I put a hand on Ray’s arm and he quieted.

  “It is not my house,” I repeated. “And the people who live in it are not my friends. I see the fey sometimes—the honor guard to the princess?”

  He nodded. It was a strange fact that my twin’s best friend had married a fey prince, and was thus a princess, but we had both grown used to it. What I had not grown used to was her bodyguards. Her father-in-law, the fey king Caedmon, had supplied them, and they did not like me.

  “They like you,” Ray protested.

  “They like Dory,” I corrected. “Not at first, but I think they have changed their minds. Yet they watch her, nonetheless, or rather, they watch for me. To see if the monster is going to emerge.”

  “You are not a monster.”

  “No, but I am an unknown, with power they cannot always counter, and thus a threat. I do not blame them; it is their job. But the fact remains, they are not my friends.”

  “I’m your friend.”

  I rolled my head over to look at him. “I would like to think so. B
ut if so, you will be the first in a very long time.”

  I heard childish laughter, from long ago, and it was so real that I started slightly. I remembered too much, and too well; it was both a blessing and a curse. I wondered which this was, as faces appeared in my mental eye that I had not thought about in years, but who had lived on the same street in Venice with me when I was a girl.

  There was pudgy Luysio, who used to distract the candy vendors, so that I could steal a morsel for us both; here was pretty Gerita, with her flashing dark eyes and bouncing curls, who was such a good dancer that people would pay to watch her; over there was Rigi with his wooden sword, who had learned how to fight from a great uncle and then taught the whole street; here was tiny blonde Coletta, who liked to feed the birds . . .

  “Woah, who are they?” Ray asked, because he could see them, too. I could have closed my mind to him, but I didn’t. I did the opposite, because I wanted him to understand.

  And, suddenly, we were back there, my memory perfectly recreating the scene: red bricks and crumbling stucco buildings bordering dusty streets with narrow walkways, because you had to make room for the canals; pigeons nesting in ancient statue’s crowns, dripping droppings down the proud features of some Very Important Person who nobody remembered the name of anymore; heat shimmering off the marble facades of the wealthy, the shiny black paint on the gondolas, and the awed, sweaty faces of the tourists, and darkening the clothes of the beggars with lame legs who got up and walked home at the end of the day.

  “Shit!” Ray said, gazing around.

  I supposed this wasn’t what he’d meant by images.

  “No, it’s just—I just—wow,” he said, and I smiled.

  Venice was indeed overwhelming. There were the scents: spices and dirt, unwashed bodies and exotic perfumes, but most of all the ever-present smell of the sea and the things that came from it, the latter of which the city’s fleet of fishing boats brought back every day to sizzle in peddler’s carts and drive the street dogs wild. There were the people, from literally every corner of the Earth: glittering ladies tottering about on platform shoes, their attendants following them like a flock of twittering birds; harried men, grasping at their hips for swords they weren’t allowed to wear here; foreign merchants with their robes and turbans and troops of slaves; dirty, olive skinned children running underfoot in droves and pickpocketing you if you weren’t careful. And, finally, there were the colors: a city of white sails and blue-green water and black smoke from the kilns at Murano, and huge skies in a whole palette of shades, and towering mountains of clouds that painters came from all over Europe to set down for posterity, but that we saw every day.