Claire didn’t brush away her tears, holding his gaze despite her trembling, despite the guilt and horror that made nausea rise to choke her.
The fairy’s eyes softened a little, or perhaps Claire only imagined they did.
“Help me out of the sun. I’d rather die on my own terms than eaten by one of the dark lord’s ravens,” he muttered.
Claire used his tiny sword to cut a swatch from the lower hem of her shirt, then carefully helped him roll onto it. She lifted the fabric like a hammock, biting her lip as she heard him nearly hyperventilating in his effort not to cry out.
Would I be that brave?
At his direction, she found a pile of broken paving stones a short distance away. She pulled a few pieces of stone off the top, propped them up to make a sheltered enclosure, and then carefully slid the cloth inside.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered again.
His voice barely reached her ears. “Don’t eat or drink anything. Not anything. Got it?”
“All right.”
He glared at her, a thin blue slime dribbling from his mouth. He coughed again. “Not even a drop of water.”
“All right,” Claire repeated. “I won’t.”
His eyes closed, and she waited, but he said nothing else.
The endless walls gave Claire the sense of being stuck in some unending labyrinth, twisting and turning and leading her ever onward. She fled from an echoing, wolf-like howl; minutes later, as her footsteps slowed, she had the strange sense that she was being herded toward… something.
She looked up and found the tallest structure above the walls and distant trees.
Rescue the fairy imprisoned in the deepest cell under the castle at the center of the city.
She took a deep breath and continued walking.
Chapter 6
The structure might have been the castle; she wasn’t entirely sure at this point. Everything was so different when she saw it up close, as if magic, distance, deception, or simple misperception made her vision completely unreliable.
The stone walls towered over her, rough and unpolished. The door in front of her was large but not fancy, hewn of rough wood dark with age. She imagined it was a servants’ door, an impression borne out by the creatures that entered and exited at irregular intervals. Many of the creatures appeared to be some species of Fae, like the fairy she had so grievously injured but much larger and apparently flightless. They wore an interesting variety of clothes, and after nearly an hour of noticing the repetition in their attire, Claire realized that many of them were probably wearing uniforms.
One Fae wore rich gold fabric with a slithery sort of texture; it draped over his shoulders like a second skin, highlighting his sharp clavicles and finely drawn musculature. The cloth was drawn tight around his narrow waist with a belt of glinting silver set with clear stones that reflected rainbows. Claire wondered whether he was a servant or a prince, until he looked upward with a nervous flinch of his shoulders and hurried inside. She decided he must be a servant; no Fae prince would scuttle like a frightened mouse into the shadows.
Quite a number of the servants wore shapeless cloth tunics belted with rough leather. More interestingly, they wore cloths over their heads. A dark cloth was draped over the sides and back of their heads, and it was tucked under the edges of a soft, nearly featureless mask.
The masks were white with generous holes through which the wearer could see out. They appeared to be gently shaped to a vaguely humanoid shape, with a soft bump for a nose, rounded spaces for the cheeks, and dainty pointed chins. The mouth was a small circular hole in the mask itself; Claire imagined that the wearers were saying “Oh!”
What should she do? No one who had entered or exited the palace looked particularly human, but some of them were approximately her size.
She licked her lips and waited for her moment.
Finally a servant slipped inside, leaving the door to close behind himself, or possibly herself; Claire sprinted across the short intervening distance and slipped in just as the door closed.
The servant turned to her with a startled cry.
Panicked, Claire reached for the servant’s face, intending… well, she wasn’t quite sure what she was intending. Probably something ineffectual, like slapping a hand over the servant’s mouth.
The servant stumbled backward, throwing a hand upward as if to ward off a blow, and Claire tripped on the long robe, falling forward. They landed in a tangle of limbs, the servant whimpering, flailing, trying to crawl away, elbowing Claire in the side of the head.
Sparkles erupted behind Claire’s eyelids, and she flailed in response. “Quiet!” she hissed, grasping at the servant’s robes. “I’m not going to hurt you!”
Her hand caught suddenly on the servant’s belt, and she pulled, trying to keep the servant from getting away. The servant, small and lithe and terrified, thrashed like a hooked fish. Claire cried out as a pointed elbow hit her on the bridge of the nose. A sudden clonk thudded in her ears, and the servant abruptly went limp.
The servant had thrashed so hard he, or she, or it, had struck his head on the stone floor.
Claire carefully let her fingers relax, wincing at the pounding headache just behind her eyes. The servant didn’t move, and now that the body was still, Claire felt how small it was, how thin and fragile, like a small-boned eleven year old. It was impossible to tell whether the motionless body was male or female without invasive groping, and Claire whispered, “Are you all right?”
Nothing.
The hallway, or tunnel, had some sort of faint ambient lighting from the top of each wall, but the sparks dancing behind Claire’s eyes were much brighter. Her groping fingers followed the lines of the clothes upward to narrow shoulders, to cloth bunched around the neck, to the mask. Soft breaths came through the holes at intervals, which reassured her. She couldn’t find any sort of attachment mechanism for the mask.
She hesitated, but then the thought of another servant entering the hallway and sounding the alarm helped her decide. She ran her fingers around the edge of the mask again, still unable to find any method of attachment. Frustrated, she pulled on the mask itself, one hand on each edge.
To her surprise, the mask came off in her hands.
The servant was still wearing a mask.
In the dim light, Claire squinted from one mask to the other, frowning. The servant looked exactly the same as it had a moment before, thin body sprawled helplessly on the floor, masked face upward toward Claire. She leaned forward, trying to look into the eyeholes, but the shadows made it impossible to see the servant’s true face.
Claire had an odd thought, looking into the depthless black of the servant’s eye holes. Perhaps there’s nobody in there at all. She gasped in terror and sat back, her heart thundering.
She licked her lips and pressed her fear down, balled it up into a knot and tied it neatly, then put it aside. I don’t have time to panic right now, she told herself.
She studied the mask in her hands. It was indeed made of some fine, soft cloth, and kept its shape by starch or magic or a plastic mask form beneath the cloth. Claire smiled, momentarily amused to imagine a fairy king using glue to stick fabric onto a plastic mask, but then the smile faded. The mask had no texture of starch, and no weight of plastic; it was as fine and light and featureless as air.
With a deep breath, Claire placed the mask over her own face.
Chapter 7
Despite the lack of any way to tie on the mask, it stayed in place. Claire felt it gingerly, careful not to dislodge it, feeling the edges resting lightly against her temples and her jaw.
Must be magic.
She looked down at the servant and felt… nothing. Why didn’t she feel guilty or concerned?
A moment ago her heart had been pounding with a combination of the fear of discovery, worry that she had badly injured the fairy servant, and a general anxiety that seemed entirely reasonable, given her situation.
The servant’s face was still hi
dden in the mask, the body sprawled bonelessly on the stone floor. She felt vaguely that she ought to care whether it (he? she?) was dead or seriously injured. The worry was there, but distant; as long as no one realized she was responsible, the incident seemed almost irrelevant. Claire rested her hand on the figure’s chest, feeling cloth and a faint warm solidity beneath her fingertips, moving softly with each breath. At least the servant was alive. Whether it recovered or not had nothing to do with her.
Claire took a deep breath and let it out slowly, feeling the mask move with her skin as she grimaced. It was surprisingly comfortable, and she ran her fingers over the smooth surface again.
She wondered whether the mask was suppressing her terror, and whether it would do more if she wore it too long. The thought wasn’t as terrifying as she imagined it ought to be.
In fact, she wasn’t terrified at all.
That should be unsettling.
If the mask were responsible for her feeling—or rather, not feeling anything—like this, then surely suppressing feelings was not the mask’s only purpose. Perhaps it was intended to make the servants compliant. If so, even if it helped her blend in, she should take it off.
She tried to remove it, her fingernails digging into the mask edges and pulling as hard as she could. No matter where she gripped the mask, she could not get it off.
Claire paused and thought. At least there was some benefit to not being able to be terrified. The mask suppressed her feelings, but she could still think. Suppressing feelings alone wouldn’t really control someone, so something else must be coming.
I can’t take off the mask, so what should I do?
I don’t care.
Oh! That’s how it controls the wearer. If I don’t care about anything, then I won’t have any troublesome tendency to do what I want. I will be left with whatever I’m told to do, and I won’t mind doing it.
Well, I won’t let that happen to me. Even though I don’t really care, I remember what I was supposed to do.
No, what I should do.
Her mind was still her own, so that’s what she would use.
Claire stood and crept down the hallway as quietly as she could. The soles of her bare feet stung, and she shivered in the cool air.
For a time she encountered no one as she walked an endless maze of hallways. At each intersection, she chose her direction at random, finding corridors of red carpet and gold-papered walls, then flagstones and brick, and later flagstones and rough stone walls. She grew so confused that she stopped in the middle of a hallway, trying to remember whether she’d turned left or right when she entered it. She looked behind herself, and found an endless straight corridor stretching for what seemed like miles.
The halls were shifting around her.
She thought vaguely that this ought to be frightening, but she was not frightened.
The hallway came to an intersection and she did not know which way to go.
She stopped to consider the decision.
It might have minutes or hours later when she realized she had been standing still for a long time. She didn’t care which way she went, so she had been simply standing and waiting for instruction.
No! I must decide. I can decide with no feelings. And I must hurry, because this might get worse.
She flew down the hallway, careened around a corner, and ran headlong through several more corridors. She stopped abruptly when she heard voices.
Despite her lack of fear, she knew voices meant danger. Claire froze, unsure what to do, and the speakers turned the corner.
“Oh. Another one.” A Fae woman turned up her nose at Claire. The Fae was white-blonde and as beautiful as a snowflake, all sharp angles and frost. Her voice tinkled in the air like dulcimer music.
“I think he likes the masks on them.” The male Fae eyed Claire contemptuously. “Makes them interchangeable.”
Claire shrank to the side of the hallway, glancing down in horror to realize that her pajama shorts and threadbare t-shirt were as distinctive as royal dress in this land. Why didn’t they remark on her clothes? Perhaps the strange attire merely looked exotic to them. Or maybe they didn’t notice at all; the woman’s expression had not shown any surprise.
The Fae man was gold; he was sun-kissed brilliance; he was fire. His eyes were a green-gold that glinted with irrepressible mirth. His hair fell in luxurious ringlets around his face, his teeth glinting white as he grinned at Claire. He licked his lips, his eyes sliding down her body, lingering on the curve of her breasts through her shirt, on her slim waist, on her scratched and dirty legs, all the way down to her bare, bleeding feet. As the Fae woman began to turn impatiently toward him, his gaze lingered and caressed like a physical touch, lecherous and unwelcome, far too intimate for any friend, much less a stranger. His gaze reached the necklace, and the Fae woman tugged on his arm. His eyes fixed on the pendant for an instant and widened. Then he turned away.
The Fae woman strode on without giving Claire another glance, and she almost breathed a sigh of relief. Then the man glanced over his shoulder and gave Claire a wink.
Something snapped at her, catching her a stinging blow to her right thigh, and she bit back a cry.
They didn’t even look back at her; the Fae woman’s sparkling laugh echoed as they turned down another hallway and out of sight.
Was that hall there before?
Claire was sure it hadn’t been, and she glared at it while rubbing her leg. She glanced down to see a bleeding welt across her thigh. “She whipped me!” Claire muttered, seething with indignation.
The feeling, or lack thereof, wasn’t exactly anger; there was less emotion and more a sense of injustice. The Fae woman was casually cruel for no reason other than her own amusement.
The indignation gave her new resolve, and she held it close as she hurried onward.
She found a stairwell and followed it down, down, down an endless stone staircase.
Claire frowned, her bare feet curling against the frigid stone. Distant torches cast faint, flickering tongues of light up the walls, glinting on the worn granite beneath her toes.
Unease curled within her. I shouldn’t be here. I should go back up. A desire to leave crystallized within her. The feeling was wrong. It was not her feeling; it could not be, because she had no desires of her own.
So the feeling of wrongness, the desire to flee, must be forced upon her, as it would be on anyone wearing the mask.
That probably meant she was heading in the right direction.
She shuddered and crept ever downward, following the spiraling staircase into the depths of the earth.
Chapter 8
At last Claire came to a door. The stairs curved away to her left, silent and cold.
How do I know this is the right door?
She didn’t. But it felt wrong, as if she should back away. She should go any direction but through the door.
She pushed it open.
The door swung open with an ear-splitting creek.
Claire gasped.
The fairy prisoner was bound, hand and foot, with heavy brass manacles that looked obscene on his fine-boned frame. His face was pale and sharp. He glared at her, baring his teeth in a bitter smile.
“Have you come to gloat?” he murmured.
“I’ve come to rescue you.” Claire's voice shook. His youthful beauty struck her as terrible and profound, his bright eyes gleaming like sapphires in the dim light. He looked innocent and dangerous, his golden-blond hair tangled with spiderwebs and dust.
“You've what?” He tilted his head and stared at her.
“I’ve come to rescue you,” Claire repeated. “Not that I know how. I’m pretty sure I’m lost. The hallways turn on themselves like spaghetti, and I think I hurt someone in the hallway.” She leaned dizzily against the rough stone wall at her shoulder.
I'm going into shock, she thought distantly. It's about time, too.
The fairy’s eyebrows arched in an aristocratic expression of skepticism. “Oh, is t
hat what you're doing? I thought you were about to swoon.”
“I hadn’t planned on it,” Claire whispered, her heartbeat thundering in her ears.
“Well, you may have chosen the fastest way to convince me you aren’t one of Them. So now, if it’s all the same to you, I’d prefer it if you’d get these chains off before the guards come back.”
“I don't know how.” A few slow deep breaths pushed the dizziness to the back of her awareness, where it lurked like a shadow at the edges of her vision.
The fairy laughed, his voice like the plucked strings of a harp, pure and perfect in the dank air. “Oh, you are an innocent, aren’t you? Here.” He pushed his hands to the extent of the chains. “You’ve a mask on. I think everyone with a mask has authority over prisoners.”
“What do I do?” Claire stared at his hands. They were as small as a child's hands, narrow and white and strong beneath a thick coating of grime. Dark blood crusted the edges of the manacles where they had dug into his thin skin; the wounds were both old and new, as if every movement for weeks or months had injured him anew.
“Just pull them open. It’s magic.” His sharp eyes swept over her masked face.
She put her hands on the metal and pulled, feeling the hinges open without a hint of resistance.
“Thank you.” The fairy winced as he flexed his hands. “And the ankles, please.”
His trousers appeared to have been torn off just above the knee, leaving his lower legs and feet bare. Claire winced in sympathy as her fingers brushed his bony ankles, bloodied and torn by the rough metal.
The instant the last bond was free, he snatched her hand and raced out of the cell.
He pulled her up and up, round and round the spiraling stairs. Claire’s legs flew beneath her, but she still stumbled as she tried to keep up. He was too fast and too strong. She cried out as his hand tightened on her wrist as they rounded a corner, and he stopped abruptly.
The Lord of Dreams Page 4
