They were expected: the first set of double-doors on the landing was wide open, and when the guard of waterfae jostled Markon and Althea into the room, a woman in blood-red robes of lightly wafting silk was waiting elegantly on a dais at the end of the room. The guard stopped a respectful distance away, propelling both Markon and Althea to the forefront of the group, and waited at salute until the elegant woman nodded careless at them.
She had dark, brilliant eyes that pierced the room above a mouth painted exquisitely red, and when her eyes lighted upon Althea those scarlet lips curved in a thin, deadly smile.
“My dear, it’s wonderful to see you again,” she said. Her voice wasn’t loud, but it somehow carried throughout the entire room. “I have to admit, I wasn’t expecting to see you! I did think that with the little accident that occurred when you left...”
She let the sentence trail off suggestively, and even Markon, who very much wanted to know how this tale fit together—had Althea killed a fae? Or was his understanding of the situation confused?—felt chilled.
Althea said quite calmly: “It wasn’t an accident, Moriwen.”
Those sharp black eyes narrowed, then a laugh rippled out. “You always were a truthful one, weren’t you? Really, I should be rewarding you: thanks to you, my situation is very...pleasing. But I do think that regicide ought to be discouraged, after all; it really wouldn’t do if my subjects felt they could dispose of me at a moment’s notice and with no reprisals.”
“That would be a dreadful,” agreed Althea.
“I didn’t actually think I’d have to do it, you know. I thought you’d be too sensible to come back here again.”
Althea shrugged one shoulder. “Yes, so did I. Accidents will happen.”
“Oddly enough,” pursued Moriwen; “I would have sworn that you’d fight to the death rather than be brought back here. Which brings me to the question of who is this delightful human? Never tell me he was used as leverage? My dear! How...touching!”
“Very human of me, wasn’t it?” said Althea.
“The human side of you is not what worries me, my dear,” said Moriwen. “It’s unfortunate that you decided to return to my canton. I really rather admired what you did. However, it’s no use mourning over what can’t be changed. Your execution will take place tomorrow. Take them both to the Hold and make sure you put the human to sleep.”
Execution! thought Markon, stunned by the rapidity of it all. And tomorrow! Around him the fae guard were murmuring their Yes Majestys. In his ear, the female fae whispered: “Sorry, pretty thing! If you’re lucky, they’ll let me keep you. But the changeling human has a way of turning luck.”
She hauled him after the rest of the guard while Althea was pushed ahead, the white of her shift visible through the moving fae.
Moriwen’s voice, amused, distant and cool, said as they left the room: “I know it’s dull, my dear, but I won’t feel quite comfortable until you’re safely in the Hold. Even your significant magic will find it difficult to escape banded iron.”
Iron made no sense, thought Markon, force-marched down flight after flight of corkscrewing stairs. The Hold was apparently far below the sea-shelled roads and cut deep into the rocky sea-bed: all reasonable enough for a waterfae. Iron, though? How could the Fae imprison anyone in iron if they couldn’t even touch the stuff? But when they arrived at the bottom of the stairs, it was iron just the same. A dome reminiscent of the larger dome outside, the Hold was formed from band upon band of metal bolted together and overlapping each other, a great messy pile of menace to which none of the guards seemed to want to get too close.
One of the fae opened the curved door with a pair of manipulating sticks and a degree of skill that suggested he had done it many times before, and to Markon’s outrage Althea was bodily tossed into it without regard to either her dignity or her limbs.
“She said to put the human to sleep,” said one of the guards, his disinterested eyes lighting on Markon.
“I’ll do it,” said the female fae who still held Markon. “Go to sleep, pretty thing. Things will be nicer when you wake.”
There was a frozen sliver of time between the moment Markon realised she’d laid a spell on him and the moment he realised that it hadn’t worked. The fae’s eyes narrowed as he remembered his iron bands in a shock of relief, and Markon slumped immediately, hot and cold with hope.
One of the fae chuckled. “Resistant little thing, isn’t he? Oh well, he’s gone now. Throw him in.”
They were no gentler with Markon than they had been with Althea. It was nearly impossible not to try to break his fall; but it was over so quickly, the door slammed shut again with such dispatch, that any movement that might have betrayed him was lost in the shutting of the door.
Soft, cold hands cupped Markon’s face before he could gather his shaken limbs together enough to rise or even open his eyes to check for damage.
“Markon! Oh, Markon, I’m so sorry!”
“So am I,” croaked Markon, discovering the discomfort of a cut lip and wondering if his eye was as swollen as it felt. He opened his eyes and found Althea staring down at him with her mouth open, a halo of glow bugs clinging to the iron above her head.
“You’re awake! How are you awake? I heard her say the spell– I saw the magic go out!”
Markon grinned, pulling painfully at the cut on his lip. “Maybe I’m immune to fae magic.”
She went for his wrists at once. “Why didn’t you tell me you had dispelling bands?”
“I forgot I had them,” said Markon, fending her off and tugging at his wrist-laces until his cuffs were over the bands again. “I’m rather glad I did have them, aren’t you?”
“Yes: for all the good they’ll do you,” she said. The glad light was already fading from her eyes, shadowed by the iron frame around them.
“I’m awake. We’ll work it out from here.”
“There’s no working it out. I can’t use magic to get us out of here because of the iron, and you can’t open locked doors.”
“We’ll work something out,” said Markon again. “We stole a Fae relic from a glass mountain and escaped being made glass ourselves. We can escape an iron–”
Althea’s bitter laugh cut him off. “We can’t, you know. This place is– well, I grew up here. It’s not...it’s not a nice place.”
“Althea–”
“Not now, Markon,” she said wearily. The soft light from the glow bugs seemed to smudge her face: she looked physically sick. Her back was still as straight as ever, but there was a terrible rigidity to it.
“Now,” he said firmly. “Did you kill someone?”
“Yes.”
“Did you kill their king?”
“Yes.”
“How? Why?”
“He was my master. He was the one Carmine tried to buy me from. By then I was so crazy from the...the horrible pressure of here that I would have been glad for it. Glad to be bought and sold like a pair of shoes. I can’t bear to be squeezed like this.”
“This king you killed: was he the one that stole you?”
“Yes. They like to do their own work sometimes,” said Althea, coiling his wrist laces around her fingers. “Do you know, he kept me on a leash until I was fifteen. He said that I needed to be broken to heel.”
“He did what?”
“He’d take me with him when he left the dome and give me just a little bit of air. Then he’d let me off my leash.”
“How much air?”
“Never enough to run away. Only enough so that it seemed possible.”
There was a slow, cold rage coiling around his stomach. “Did he give you air in the same way that fae gave me–”
Instead of answering that, Althea said: “I knew there was a day coming when he’d either sell me to Carmine or give me an...official place in his retinue. It might have happened that way if I hadn’t developed a talent for magic. He saw it and decided it was too dangerous to let me keep it.”
Markon frowned. “To
let you keep it? It was yours. How could he prevent that?”
“He tried to steal it. He often took me to other cantons—I was never sure if it was to bait me or them—and so it didn’t seem odd when he took me across to one of the Unseelie cantons. Seelie don’t do spells that steal magic or life, you see. They’re above all that nastiness. But they will pay the Unseelie to do it for them.”
“I see,” said Markon, chaffing her hands. They were far too cold and his wrist laces had knotted around her fingers. “How did you manage to turn the tables on him?”
“You learn a lot about magic, living with the Seelie,” said Althea. “Almost by accident, but more if you pay attention. The spell he put me in was a big sprawl of parts and chalk over a wooden floor, and I could tell enough of what it was to know what he was trying to do. I thought– I thought there was no hope for me, and I knew I’d live and die underwater with this horrible pressure always hovering over me. Then I saw that the only thing regulating the direction in which the spell worked was a little rod of wood. It was so tiny and light, and it turned without moving a hair of the rest of the spell.”
Markon realised that he’d stopped chaffing her hands and began again.
“I was sure the Unseelie fae had seen me do it,” Althea said. The straight line was between her brows again. “I was sure he had. But he went ahead with it anyway: started up the spell, then winked at me and left. When– when my master stopped screaming and withered into a ball in his section of the spell I thought I’d only stolen his magic. I didn’t know—I should have known—that it would kill him.”
“How could you possibly have known?” murmured Markon.
“Fae are all magic, especially their nobles,” Althea said, matter-of-factly. “Snuff that, and they’re gone altogether. It should have been obvious to me. I still wonder if I’d have done it if I’d realised.”
“He would have done the same thing to you.”
“Yes, but I wouldn’t have died of it.”
“No, you’d have died of old age in Faery, still under your master’s control.”
“Yes,” said Althea. “I think that’s why I couldn’t be sorry. Not really. At the time I was just so sick and glad and horrified that all I could do was run.”
“Where did you go?”
“Nowhere in particular. It was hard to get used to his magic, the way it moved and reacted, and I spent a lot of time just learning how to use it. So long as I kept moving I was safe enough, and after a while I began to hear rumours of a Door between here and there.”
She was a little brighter, Markon thought. Perhaps a little more hopeful. It seemed good to foster distraction, so he said: “A Door like the ones in my castle?”
“Yes, except this one was open from the Faery side,” said Althea, sitting up straighter. There was a touch of colour to her cheeks again. “There aren’t a lot of them: they take immense power to open, and I wasn’t sure enough of my new magic to try one myself.”
Markon felt a dawning of cold realisation. “That espionage magic in your suite, the spell you said was made of fae magic–”
Althea looked slightly apologetic. “It really was fae magic. It’s just that it was my fae magic. I didn’t expect anyone to make a move against me in that way, you see. I felt a drain during the morning but I’d just been in the Infirmary and a slight drain is normal when I finish off a healing spell, so I didn’t pay any attention. It was very cleverly done. Someone formed the espionage spell from my own magic, and then told Doctor Romalier what to expect.”
Markon began to laugh. “And you simply told them the truth!”
“Yes,” said Althea, catching a little of his mirth. “Honestly, I was half-afraid I wouldn’t get away with it. It was a bit of a nasty moment.”
They sat without speaking for a few moments, Markon’s silence appreciative, Althea’s thoughtful. Then she said: “I may have an idea of how we can get out of here.”
“They won’t come for us for a while yet,” said Althea. “They’ll unlock us tomorrow, but they’ll send us a meal first. They like their ceremony, and it’ll give them time to gather a crowd. The important thing is that they’ll only send one fae with breakfast– or two at the most.”
“That sounds reasonable,” said Markon, beginning to understand. “They’ll know I’m asleep, after all.”
“And I can’t use my magic in here,” said Althea. “That’ll put them off their guard enough to bring the meal right into the Hold. How are you at hand-to-hand fighting?”
“I make do,” said Markon, who was still an enthusiastic and well-practised part of the Montalieran Weaponless Unit. Something about the quality of his smile as he said it must have satisfied her, because she nodded decisively.
“You’ll have to be on the floor when they come in,” she said. “Somewhere near the door, I think. They won’t come in if they don’t think you’re under the influence of the spell.”
“Wouldn’t the iron from the cage stop the sleeping spell anyway?”
“No. If I’d put the dispelling bands on you after the fae put you to sleep it wouldn’t stop the spell, either: the iron only prevents any new magic from sparking. They’ll be convinced that you’re asleep. Use that advantage, because it won’t buy you much time once you get up.”
“What then?”
“Up the stairs and out of the dome,” said Althea. “They’ll have the keys to get out. We’ll only have half an hour, maybe less, and if they have to chase us they won’t try to capture us again. They’ll just kill us.”
Markon hadn’t expected anything else. He said, lightly: “That sounds fair. What now?”
“Now we wait until tomorrow.”
“I thought they didn’t have day and night here.”
“They don’t. Not exactly,” Althea said. “They decided by consensus how long a day ought to be and then made it law. It may be the only law that both Unseelie and Seelie abide by. Unseelie put out their lanterns for night and Seelie like to sleep under the sun in their disgustingly picturesque bowers anyway, but neither of them need more than four or five hours of sleep. When they say tomorrow, it means after their sleep cycle. We’ve got quite a few hours to wait yet. You should try to sleep.”
“Only if you do,” said Markon.
He did intend to sleep. There were a few somewhat smelly but really very comfortable seal-skins in the iron cage, and it was surprisingly pleasant to stretch out below the glow-worms with his arm supporting Althea’s head. Much to his relief, she went off to sleep straight away, and though it didn’t quite take the tension from her face it did ease the crease in her forehead. Markon, settling himself to sleep, found that his mind was moving too fast and with too many thoughts to be able to relax.
Foremost of these thoughts, was the rapidly growing and excessively inconvenient one that it was impossible that Althea should marry Parrin. If it was only the dismaying, delightful fact that he’d fallen in love with her, he would have made more of an effort to fight the feeling, but it had occurred to him at some stage in the last few days that perhaps Althea wasn’t completely indifferent to him. For a moment or two it had even seemed as though she might– but what was the use of that? thought Markon wearily. There was the contract they’d signed. It seemed to hang before him when he closed his eyes, Althea’s neat, precise writing spelling out the terms of their agreement, their signatures side by side. He’d looked at it often enough. Althea, in recompense for having broken the curse, was to be wed to–
Markon’s eyes flicked open and he grinned joyously up at the glow-worms. There was no curse. There never had been a curse. It would be enough to break the contract, at any rate. And later there would be time to persuade Althea that marriage to him was, after all, more appealing than marriage to Parrin.
Markon closed his eyes and waited for the fae who would bring their meal, his lips curving in the darkness.
There were two of them. Markon heard their footsteps on the stairs and quietly woke Althea, then took his position by th
e door. Althea stood straight and poised at the other side of the cage, her eyes glittering in the shadows, and Markon closed his eyes as the fae manipulated the door open once again.
He couldn’t see them, but he felt draft of the first fae as it stepped over him.
“You might as well both come in,” said Althea dryly. “I’m not likely to overpower you without my magic, now am I? Nor am I likely to eat all of this, so help yourselves.”
Another draft swept overhead. Markon’s eyes snapped open and he rolled silently to his feet behind the fae who had just entered, hoping with all his heart that fae had much the same physical weaknesses as humans.
He punched the first fae by his temple. The fae dropped to his knees with a surprised grunt that made the second fae turn, dropping the tray of food to draw his dagger. Markon kicked the first fae out of the way and stepped lightly forward to meet the second just as Althea smashed the tray over his head. If the tray had been heavier it might have worked: as it was, it merely seemed to anger the fae, who said through his teeth: “I’ll deal with you next, changeling human!”
Markon sidestepped a lightning fast sweep of the dagger and closed with the fae quickly, gripping his wrist and twisting it as he spun away again. The fae broke free with a punch to Markon’s stomach, but the dagger clattered to the rocky floor and was immediately pounced on by Althea. To Markon’s relief she didn’t try to interfere again: she stood by in perfectly composed silence as the fae faced up to him and said: “You’ll live to regret that, human. Not for long, but you will.”
“We don’t have much time,” said Markon, smiling grimly at him. “So if you wouldn’t mind fighting instead of talking, I’d appreciate it.”
He went in for the punch while he was still talking: a quick, twisting uppercut that would have landed beautifully if the fae hadn’t also twisted at the last moment. It knocked him sideways despite that, and Markon closed again swiftly, following it with two quick punches to the fae’s stomach. He didn’t duck quite quickly enough, and took a hit to the temple that made his ears ring and his knees buckle slightly. The fae, sensing weakness, took two swift steps forward and was met by a double-fisted uppercut from Markon. This time it connected with a force that snapped the fae’s head back and sent him straight to the ground with a sickening crack of head meeting rock.
Twelve Days of Faery Page 11
