Twelve Days of Faery

by W. R. Gingell

  Perhaps tomorrow he would ask Althea about them.

  Day Eight

  “Unseelie again,” said Markon, peering into the soft darkness of the Door. “I’m beginning to sense a pattern.”

  “There’s not too much difference between Seelie and Unseelie when it comes to humans,” Althea said matter-of-factly. “To them we’re more like talking dogs than anything. The Seelie are just as happy to murder us as the Unseelie: the only difference is that they’ll do it with a smile instead of a wink.”

  “I see,” said Markon, grateful for the twin iron bands around his wrists. “Speaking of murder, which particular bit of magic do we have to thank for bringing us to this piece of Faery?”

  “Sal was showing me some of the sights yesterday afternoon,” said Althea. “I found a few remnants of magic where Parrin’s first sweetheart and one of the women who tried to break the curse were last seen. It’s– well, it seems familiar, but I can’t place it.”

  “Does the room look familiar?”

  “I can’t even tell it is a room,” said Althea, reaching for Markon’s hand. “Familiar or otherwise. Are you ready?”

  Markon wrapped his fingers tightly around Althea hand, said: “Oh, about as much as usual,” and stepped through the Door with her.

  At first there was only confusion and soft darkness, while they stood hand in hand to get their bearings.

  Then a male voice said: “What a delicious surprise!” from somewhere in the velvet darkness. It was soft, smooth, and entirely seductive.

  Althea said: “Bother!”

  “Sweetness, that’s not very kind of you,” said the voice reproachfully.

  Markon, his teeth set on edge, flexed the fingers of his free hand in an instinctive desire to wrap them around the throat of the speaker. He couldn’t make out anything in the darkness, but as he frowned into the shadows a flare of silver burst into being and swiftly formed a swirling ball that lit the entire room. In its light, a rather annoyed Althea could be seen, her gaze directed toward the rumpled bed where a half-naked male fae was lounging. He yawned and stretched sinuously for Althea’s benefit, then rolled lightly across the wine-coloured bedspread and to his feet.

  “I thought I recognised the magic,” said Althea. “I should have picked another sample.”

  “You cut me to the quick,” sighed the fae. His eyes flicked over her in a way that immediately doubled Markon’s desire strangle him, but it wasn’t until the fae strolled over and curled one arm around Althea’s waist that he said curtly: “I take it you know each other?”

  “Oh yes,” said the fae, lowering his head in what Markon had no doubt was an attempt to kiss her.

  Althea, putting one hand on his bare chest to push him away firmly, said: “Not particularly. Carmine, if you try to kiss me again, I’ll–”

  Through his teeth, Markon said: “Again?”

  “Sweetness, the company you keep is slipping decidedly,” said Carmine. He released Althea but still stood by far too close.

  “This isn’t a social call!” said Althea. She sounded harried. “Markon, this is Carmine. He tried to buy me some years ago. Carmine, this is Markon. He’s my human, and if you even think about–”

  “I’m not your human,” said Markon grimly.

  Carmine said: “I wanted to marry you, sweetness. There’s a difference.”

  Althea looked rather helplessly from Markon to Carmine; and Markon, in spite of his annoyance, began to grin.

  “We’re here for information,” he told the fae. “You saw us come through the Door, I take it? Well, fae are being pulled through to the human world and forced to attack human women.”

  “Believe me, I know,” said Carmine, his teeth showing in a half-snarl. “And could I catch the little wench, I’d show her a thing or two!”

  Markon’s eyes snapped to the fae’s face. “Wench? It was a woman?”

  At the same time, Althea said: “Are you sure?”

  “My darling sweetness, I trust I may know a female figure through something so flimsy as a cloak, no matter how well her face is hid. What’s more, she was playing with a spell not of her own making.”

  “So we were led to believe,” said Althea. “You were called through more than once, weren’t you? I found pieces of your magic where at least two of the girls disappeared.”

  “You know my kind heart,” said Carmine, winking at her. “The burden was to kill, injure, or steal. I chose to steal: to damage a human maiden was more than I could bear.”

  “Well, you’ve got to give them back now,” said Althea. Markon was unpleasantly aware that she wasn’t keeping up the act of being fae with this particular fae. Apparently she didn’t feel the need to pretend with him.

  “I’ve always loved your optimism, my sweetness,” said Carmine, sliding his arm around her waist again to pull her close. He looked down at her through his eyelashes and murmured: “Whatever makes you think I’ll give up my new subjects to you?”

  Althea said: “I wish you’d put on a shirt, Carmine. You know you can’t win me over with your tricks, and I honestly don’t know why you still try.”

  “I hold a cherished hope that one day they might work,” said Carmine, with a crooked smile; but he let her go and threw himself on the bed again. “The older lady you may not have. She’s sworn fealty to me and I’d be sorry to lose her. The younger you may have in exchange for a certain promise.”

  Althea narrowed her eyes at him. “What promise?”

  “Certainly not any that you’re thinking of,” Carmine said piously. “For shame! Perhaps I’d give her up freely if I could, but as it happens I am not free to give her up under the burden laid on me. But if I were to have another burden laid on me—a bargain struck that named her as payment of my side of the bargain—well, who knows what bargains humans will make, after all?”

  “What is it you want?” asked Markon. He, like Althea, was highly suspicious of the fae’s motives.

  “I’m glad you asked that, human,” said Carmine affably. “There’s a certain curio owned by a...ah, friend...of mine. He’s decidedly set on keeping it, too, the cur!”

  “Fancy that,” said Althea. “I suppose you want us to steal it.”

  “The thought did cross my mind, sweetness. You’ve such a talent for it, after all.”

  “Contract, or handshake?” asked Althea, and to Markon’s mind it looked as though she was blushing faintly.

  “Oh, a handshake between friends, of course,” said Carmine; and then, more formally: “I will turn the girl over to you.”

  “We will steal your curio,” said Althea, as formally. She shook the hand that Carmine offered, a quick, precise gesture. “Where is it?”

  “Why don’t we sit down with something to drink,” said Carmine, his teeth gleaming silver. “This could take a little time to explain. I’m so glad you called, sweetness! And to think that I was bored today!”

  “How are we going to get in there?” said Markon despairingly. “It’s glass! It’s a mountain of glass!”

  “It is, isn’t it?” said Althea. Her blue eyes were dark with amusement, her cheeks whipped pink from the snowy breeze that tugged at her braid. “I’d forgotten how lovely it looks under the full moon. They do love their beautiful, impossibly geography, the Unseelie.”

  “I suppose that explains the snow as well.”

  “No, it usually snows around here,” said Althea. “It’s at a higher altitude than the rest of the cantons. Whenever I came here–”

  She stopped. Markon, who was conscious of a grinding jealousy, said in a carefully colourless voice: “You spent a lot of time here, I gather?”

  “The only happy moments I had in Faery were spent here,” Althea said. “I was generally kept in a much more...oppressive...atmosphere.”

  “He made your life happier?”

  Althea laughed. “He made it more interesting. There’s always a game afoot with Carmine.”

  “So I see,” said Markon, with a significant look at the
glass mountain that rose before them, high and sparkling in the moonlight. “I wonder what he wants with this sword.”

  “Shard,” Althea corrected absently. “And so do I. A broken sword isn’t generally held to be a useful thing. Even as a magical artefact a single shard of it doesn’t seem likely to be particularly helpful.”

  “More importantly, how are we supposed to get in there? It’s a pity Carmine couldn’t tell us more.”

  “I’ve got a few ideas about that,” said Althea.

  “I thought you might,” Markon murmured. “Do any of them involve me kissing you?”

  There was a brief pause before Althea said: “Not this time.”

  “What a shame,” said Markon, enjoying himself all the more when he saw the deepening of colour in her cheeks.

  Althea put her chin up slightly and said: “In the legends it’s all eagles and apples, but that’s to climb the mountain.”

  “And we want to get in,” he agreed, allowing the refocus of subject.

  “On the other hand, what the knights and princes wanted was on top of the mountain in the stories.”

  “Yes, but those are only stories, aren’t they?”

  “Stories in Faery are never just stories,” Althea said seriously, kicking up tiny flurries of snow as she started energetically toward the mountain.

  Markon belatedly started after her, kicking up his own miniature snow-storms.

  “What do eagles and apples have to do with it all?”

  “Something to do with an apple tree that produces golden apples, growing on the top of the glass mountain.”

  “It seems unlikely,” said Markon. “But I suppose if we’re not sniffing at a tree that grows golden apples we can’t be too worried about how it grows on a mountain of glass, after all. I suppose the apples were greatly sought after.”

  “Oh yes,” said Althea, placing one hand on the great glass base of the mountain. “If a man could get a golden apple from the top of the glass mountain and bring it to the king of the canton, he’d give the man his daughter in marriage.”

  “I wonder what he wanted with the apple,” said Markon curiously. “A bride-price for a princess is worth a lot more than a golden apple, no matter how odd it may be.”

  “It makes you wonder what was wrong with the princess,” nodded Althea. “But there were a lot of suitors regardless: including, in the end, a young schoolboy who cut the paws off a lynx and clawed halfway up the glass mountain. The eagle, which was there to fight off all comers, thought he was carrion and swooped for him. The schoolboy seized it by the feet and held on tightly even when the eagle rose in the air to shake him off, and the eagle carried him the rest of the way to the top of the mountain.”

  Markon, who was staring at her in patent amazement, said: “That poor princess! Did she have to marry the schoolboy, I wonder?”

  “More than likely,” said Althea absently. She was studying the glass monstrosity with a frown. “The fae are horribly fair when it comes to honouring promises. There has to be a door here somewhere.”

  “Maybe we can find a handy lynx to slaughter,” said Markon, grinning.

  “Claws!” said Althea. “Of course! Well, why not?”

  “Why not indeed?” Markon said, completely out of his depth.

  Althea tipped her head at a section of mountain slightly to their right, and he saw what she meant. There were parallel scorings in the glass that ran from just under shoulder height to the snow: two sets of them. If he looked at them the right way, he could almost imagine that they were claw marks. If a lynx’s claws were capable of scoring glass, that is. “No lintel, though.”

  “I don’t expect we’ll have to actually kill a lynx,” said Althea doubtfully. “See if your nails can make a cross-section, Markon. Fingers and thumb, I think.”

  “Your nails are longer,” said Markon, but he did as he was told. There was a painful shriek of nails against glass, and when he pulled his hand away a fresh set of scratches marred the glass from one set of vertical scratches to the other.

  “Yes,” Althea said; “But I have a feeling that the mountain likes to challenge men particularly.”

  Markon put his palms flat against the rectangle of glass and pushed. Much to his satisfaction, it sank inward with barely a sliver of sound, and disappeared into the dark blue interior of the glass mountain.

  “I think you may be right,” he said. He was deeply reluctant to venture into that yawning rectangle of dark blue shadow, but Althea was already ducking beneath his nail-marked lintel and into the mountain, and he found that he was even more reluctant to let her out of his sight. Markon followed her into the mountain.

  The passage was at first quite rough, with dull cuttings of glass crunching ominously beneath their feet, but before long it grew sleeker and wider, and they began to see the smooth edges where it joined another passage up ahead.

  Behind them, Markon heard the glass doorway snick back into place and closed his eyes briefly in resignation. He could only hope that they would be able to get back out when the time came.

  Althea, who had eagerly pressed ahead, called to him from the joining of the passages. “Come and see, Markon!”

  He did, and found that the passage theirs joined had a small cutting that gave access to a view of what was to come. He was entirely unsurprised to note that they were looking down on a crawling, sprawling mess of glass walls, ways, and tunnels.

  “What a warren!” he said, with a sigh.

  “Not a warren!” Althea said, her eyes sparkling: “A maze! I wonder why Carmine didn’t tell us.”

  “I suppose it’s possible that Carmine doesn’t know quite everything,” Markon said dryly. Carmine, he privately considered, hadn’t known anything like enough about this venture.

  “Left or right?”

  “Eagles,” said Markon, and pointed at the glass corner to his left. His eyes met Althea’s, as bright as hers were, and then flicked back to the tiny etching of an eagle that decorated it.

  Althea clapped her hands. “Wonderful! How clever of you to– oh!–”

  Markon, who hadn’t quite caught the soft swoosh of something glassy as it slipped through the blue shadows, saw a flower of dark red blossom on the shoulder of Althea’s green dress and flung both himself and her around the corner before the second sliver shattered against the wall.

  “Oh!” said Althea again, panting. “That hurts...rather a lot, actually. What was that?”

  “Hold still,” said Markon, his fingers digging into her shoulder. The shaft of glass still protruded from her shoulder, needle thin and horribly delicate. He drew it from her flesh little by little, slick with blood, while Althea gripped her lip with her teeth and tried to breath very carefully, then cast it aside to shatter on the floor and pulled aside the shoulder of her gown with bloody fingers.

  “I didn’t see it coming,” Althea said, pressing a hand to the open wound in spite of Markon’s ministrations. “It’s only a small hole, Markon.”

  “Small, but deep and bleeding freely,” Markon said grimly. “We’d best keep moving, I think.”

  Althea conjured a small, flowing ribbon of light to ripple along the passage floor in front of them, pushing back the shadows briefly. As reassurance went it was a double-edged sword: it certainly made their way easier to see in the cold blue light, but the flickering shadows it formed had Markon’s eyes darting at every fluctuation.

  “Did you see where the glass shard came from?” asked Althea. Her eyes were also searching the shadows, and the patch of blood on her shoulder was rapidly spreading.

  “No. Whatever it was, it was behind us.”

  “I know,” said Althea. “But there was only the door behind us.”

  “Is there anything about glass shards in the stories?”

  “Not a word. Oh. Markon, look to the left.”

  To their left was a dead end. The rippling light of Althea’s magical ambiance played on the wall; which, at a variance to all the other walls around them, was oddl
y lumpy. Markon tried to tell himself that the lumps only seemed to bulge and grow because of the shifting of the light, but when the suggestion of a head and torso thrust themselves free from the wall, quickly followed by a second glass head and torso, it was impossible to lie to himself any longer.

  “We should walk a little faster,” said Althea decidedly, but Markon was already hurrying her away from the dead end.

  “Do you think it was one of them that did it?”

  “They’re the only other things that are moving in here,” Althea said. “Bother! There are more of them!”

  Markon, who had already seen them—had seen, moreover, the ominous way in which two spike-laden appendages were brought to bear on himself and Althea—seized Althea around the waist and whirled them both down the next passage, regardless of its inscription. Shards of glass spat and splintered at the corner, stinging the back of his neck and biting into his side. Althea, caught close to his chest and shielded from the worst of it by Markon’s body, said in his ear: “Was it an eagle?”

  “Don’t know,” Markon said tersely. “Keep going: they’re following.”

  “I’ll lead,” Althea said, snatching at his hand. “You watch for the glass men.”

  It could have been a nightmare, Markon thought, except for the warmth of Althea’s fingers. They left a trail of blood drops that would have distracted him if he hadn’t been so focused on watching out for more of the glass men. Althea guided him through it, quietly frustrated whenever Markon swept her implacably down the wrong passage to escape another pair of glass men, and unable to use her ripple of light to read inscriptions for fear of drawing more of them. Fortunately the tangle of passages and covered walkways seemed to be more of a puzzle than a maze, and for every wrong way that they were forced to take Althea managed to get them back on the right track like a small, perfectly poised hound. As they ran, blood trickled down Markon’s collar from the cuts on the back of his neck. It occurred to him that there was more blood than there should be, and when he looked down at Althea in the dark blue light of a covered walkway, he thought she was paler than she had been, the whole left side of her bodice stained dark red.