“So, yes, gossip travels,” Fergus said around a forkful of eggs. “I’ve been round this area for a while. I think you know why.” He gave me a little nod of confidence, winking on the side away from Starling.
“I do. So does Starling. And Athena.”
He looked a little taken aback, not meeting his daughter’s gaze. Darling leaped up on the table just then, walking regally between our plates.
“This is Darling Hercules,” I told Fergus. “My Familiar.”
Fergus made a noncommittal noise while I offered Darling some breakfast. He started to tell me about all the mice he’d eaten and I asked him to please stop.
“The thing is—” Fergus cleared his throat, “—knowing where you’re going and all...I’d like to come with you, Lady Gwynn. I can be of help perhaps. And I have a vested interest.”
“That would be entirely up to Starling. I trust her judgment in this.”
“It is?” Starling twisted her fingers together. “You do?”
“Of course.” I stood. “Athena, let’s go see that the horses are ready.”
Starling looked pale and more than a little panicked, but I gave her a cheerful grin and herded Athena and Darling Hercules outside. The horses were, of course, saddled, loaded and stamping in the chill morning air with puffs of eager, steamy breath. My team handled things far too efficiently for anything less. Like Larch delivering my black cloak with the green ribbons that Rogue made for me. I needed the warmth.
Athena leaned against her brown mare, her tufted blue hair a match for the clear morning sky, and tilted her head in thought. “Why did you leave it up to Starling?”
I checked my saddlebags for the grimoire, even though I knew it would be in its usual spot, and resisted the urge to look in the sphere to see what Rogue was up to. Probably tangled in Titania’s lush arms. Not that I was bitter. “It’s family stuff. He’s been lying to Blackbird—ironic, since he clearly had no idea she didn’t remember what he told her anyway—and by default lying to Starling, as well. He’s been pretty much absent from their lives because of this obsession and now he wants in, not to spend time with his daughter, but because he thinks we’ll get him closer to his goal. If she doesn’t want to give him the time of day, that’s okay by me.”
“Families seem like complicated things. Like an intricate dance.”
“That’s probably an apt analogy. And, like a dance, when it goes right, it can be a joyful thing.”
“Until someone gets their foot stepped on.”
“My mother broke her elbow while dancing once—extremely painful.”
“You know,” Athena plucked a bit of brittle leaf from her horse’s mane, “before I...changed, I never thought about family. Now I feel this absence of something I never expected to have, like maybe I was better off not knowing I didn’t have it.”
“Blessed are the lilies of the field, for they grow in blissful ignorance.”
Those pretty lilac eyes flashed. “That was me. A happy flower—is that what that means?”
“Yes. Though I think I butchered that quote. It means that they’re happy because they don’t know any better. Being aware of the world means knowing suffering too.”
She pulled out her dagger while she thought, spinning it absently. “You’re obsessed with your quest too.”
“Yes. But I like to think I’m not hurting anyone else. And maybe serving a good cause.”
Starling and Fergus came out the doors. She fussed with tying her cloak. Then met my eyes. “I said he could come along—mainly because I think we could use his help.”
“Good enough for me. Let’s get going.”
Fergus brought round an impressive stallion. Exactly the kind you’d expect the fairy-tale hero to be riding. He saw my dubious expression. “Goes with the territory. There are certain tropes I seem to have to conform to.” A sword that could have played Excalibur in any movie was strapped prominently near the pommel.
Interesting.
We rode out of town, looping back to the road Athena pointed us to. On the horizon, something glittered, reflecting the light of the rising sun. I squinted at it.
“The Glass Mountains,” Athena told me.
To my dismay—and just as in the dreams and visions—they did seem to be actual glass. As we rode closer, the peaks grew taller, jagged edges gleaming sharp, catching passing clouds and shredding them. The smaller, slightly more rounded foothills became more clear over the course of the day. But even this mountain girl didn’t see how anyone could travel through those intimidating sharp valleys.
“Do people really manage to traverse these mountains?”
Fergus snorted out a laugh. “Only the crazy ones. And the heroic types. Same thing, really.”
I gave him a sour look. “You did it.”
“Guilty on all charges.”
“Is there any other way to reach Titania’s palace?”
“I’ve been trying for years—that’s why I’m riding your coattails, Lady Sorceress.”
Just great.
We stayed at a Brownie village that night, in the foothills of the Glass Mountains. Staying with the Brownies meant lots of cheerful singing, brandishing of the light-up pillows I’d invented, and being left pretty much alone. Larch joined us with a pack mule loaded with supplies and said he’d stick with us from then on.
“Did Blackbird make it onto the ship for her voyage?” I asked in an innocent tone over dinner. Starling bit her lip, staring at her plate, and Athena looked amused. Fergus visibly flinched. Go me.
“She did, my lady sorceress.”
“I think she won’t find what she’s looking for.”
Larch rolled a blueberry eye in Fergus’s direction. “It appears not.”
“Any way to get her a message, do you suppose?”
“No, my lady. Quite impossible.”
“I hate to think of her, all alone, undertaking such an enormous journey, all for a lie.”
Fergus glared at me over his tankard. “Come from a Catholic family, do you, Gwynn? You’re quite expert with the guilt.”
“I like to think I come by it naturally.”
He sighed. “What would you have me do? We’ve just established there’s no way to get her a message.”
“Make it right.”
“How am I to do that?”
“You could go after her,” Starling said to her plate.
He glanced at her, surprised. “I can’t do that.”
“You can,” I pointed out. “You choose not to.”
Fergus clamped down on the words he had been about to say, pressing his lips together and shaking his head. “You don’t know how things are. What she did.”
“Actually, Daddy—” Starling tossed her hair back and stared him in the face, “—we do know.”
“Do you then?” He breathed and reached out to touch a shining lock of her hair, faltering when she pulled back. “Then you understand, Little Bit, that it was never about you.”
“It is about me. You can’t parse out who gets hurt when you make choices like that.” Starling sounded surprisingly calm. Not the daughter Fergus remembered, by the look on his face. “I’m here to find my brother too. This quest belongs to all of us. You could let us do this and go find Mother.”
Fergus looked pained. “I can’t.”
“She loves you.”
“I know that. And sometimes it’s just not enough. One day you’ll understand.” He heaved himself up and took himself off to his room.
“I already do,” Starling said to the space he’d left behind.
“We can kick him off the team,” I told her.
“Make him go away so I don’t have to deal with him, like you did with Officer Sean?” She rolled her eyes at me. “Yes, of course I knew about that. It’s sweet of you, Gwynn, but I end up feeling like you think I can’t handle stuff for myself.”
“I didn’t mean it that way.”
“I know, which is why I’m not insulted. Yet. My decision stands. If he
chooses to come with us, he can.”
* * *
The next morning we began the climb into the Glass Mountains. It had been a bad dream night for me and I felt as thin and brittle as the razor-edged peaks rising above us. Starling had shaken me awake at one point, saying that I’d been shouting so loudly, a few Brownies had rushed to our defense. Darling Hercules slept beside me for the rest of the night, his purring soothing me, but not loud enough to cover the sounds of the Wild Hunt shrieking through the treetops. I could only hope they didn’t prey through the mountains. As it was, I lay awake for the rest of the night, listening and wondering what the hell I was going to do when we reached Titania’s palace.
We rode on narrow paths through steep-sided ravines, the horses’ hooves sometimes slipping on the slick surfaces. The terrain wasn’t truly glass—at least, not this low down—but more rocky with glassy inclusions. Obsidian rocks jumbled up against boulders of clear crystal. Loose pieces of what seemed to be precious jewels sometimes showered in minor landslides, set loose by unknown creatures following us from their vantage along the ridgelines.
Larch, sure-footed and tireless, led us through one valley and into the next. Each night I touched the globe as lightly as I could, rose up and traveled the distance to Titania’s palace and back, then pointed the way to him.
I avoided looking inside. It only seemed to make things worse.
And each night we camped under worse circumstances, on flat diamond surfaces that no pile of blankets could soften. Larch and Athena took turns standing guard, though I assured them that no one could get through the force field. I hoped. I hit my store of magic for it every night, sure that Starling, Fergus and I would not withstand the cold. Darling took to sleeping on me, which I didn’t mind that much, since his distracting weight kept me grounded in my body, breaking through the nightmares to remind me that they weren’t really real.
Or, at least, not real enough that I’d actually sliced off my hands. I breathed a sigh of profound belief to awake in the morning—or move from the one reality to the other—and see that my hands remained attached.
One morning we awoke to muffled light, and my heart lurched me out of drowsiness with a great thump. Snow had fallen, clinging to the force field instead of sliding off, shrouding us from the world. The air inside felt thick and close, making me worry for what might have happened if enough carbon dioxide had built up that we wouldn’t have awakened at all.
I used a bit of magic to heat the field enough to slide the snow off before I popped it, saving us from a dousing of snow—something Darling thanked me for, as he rarely did. I fretted as we rode, wondering if I dared protect us again that night. Perhaps Larch or Athena could alert me if it began to snow, but then what? Maybe I could heat it enough to keep the snow from sticking, but that would be a constant energy drain I couldn’t afford. Unless I stabilized it with the globe, which exacted its own toll.
“My lady sorceress?” Larch’s voice broke through my reverie. I’d been riding dully along, immersed in my thoughts, Darling on the riding pad behind me, under my cloak. Starling, Athena and Fergus all looked at me questioningly, which meant it wasn’t the first time Larch had tried to get my attention.
I was getting really tired of people giving me worried looks. “What?”
He pointed. The path before us, already no wider than my arms outstretched, narrowed and began to climb up a sheer-sided peak, brilliantly clear and cold blue in the center. Above, Titania’s palace glittered, lethally lovely.
“We’ll have to leave the horses here and walk up.”
“They can’t stay alone.” Not like we could turn them out to graze in this sterile wilderness of stone.
“I’ll stay with them,” Larch agreed. “Someone of my kind would stand out among Titania’s crowd.”
I realized he was right—in all the visions, I’d never seen a Brownie among Titania’s jeweled throngs of admirers. Spoke well of the Brownies, I thought.
“We’re all going to stand out,” Athena observed. “Unless Gwynn can magic us up some disguises.”
“Maybe so.”
“We’ll see,” Starling put in firmly. “Let’s get up there first.”
Fergus, eyes glued to the palace looming above, dismounted and strapped his sword to his belt. He pulled out various other tools and supplies, fitting them into various pockets of his cloak. Abruptly he looked more like a champion and not the drink-sodden Irishman oozing bitter regret.
“Hold up there, Prince Charming,” I told him. “We can’t just charge up there and storm the castle.”
He flashed me an impatient and arrogant glance. Did he look younger and slimmer all of a sudden?
“You may do as you wish, lady sorceress,” he sneered, making it clear he didn’t think much of my abilities. Given what he’d seen so far, I hardly blamed him. But the attitude seemed way out of line. “The end of my quest is in sight. I must reach out and grasp it.”
“Nice line and it all sounds terribly heroic, but how exactly do you plan to get into the castle?”
His russet hair glinted with gold when he tossed it and a handsome smile in my direction. “I have my ways.”
And with that, he ran up the trail and out of sight.
“So much for him being helpful.”
“I can’t believe he did that.” Starling gazed after him, then held up a hand at my incredulous look. “Okay, I can. But still...”
“The one advantage,” I speculated, staring up the narrow trail, envisioning what stood at the top, “is that anyone watching the trail or guarding the gates might be distracted by his arrival. Could we sneak in after him?”
Athena laughed outright. “You really think you can sneak into Titania’s palace? When she knows exactly who you are? She’ll know you the moment you walk inside her doors. Fergus is not enough of a distraction, especially if he gets himself captured right away. We need a diversion. An inside man.”
“We have an inside man,” I pointed out, “except I can’t really assess whose side he’s on at the moment. If what you say about possession is true...”
“We need someone to talk to him and find out,” Athena agreed. “I can do it.”
“No,” Starling interrupted. “I can.”
“You?” Athena sounded dubious, but I stopped her.
“You’re right. You’re perfect for it.”
Starling nodded, looking oddly pleased for someone taking on a potentially dangerous mission. “If I know how to do anything, it’s visit the fancy folk and suck up to them.”
“I can wish you a gown, jewels.”
“And I’ll be your brainless servant girl,” Athena added in an admiring tone. “Well thought out, Starling.”
“I’m not an idiot,” Starling replied, a bit too tartly but Athena just grinned at her.
I scratched Darling Hercules’s back and he complained about being cold. “Take Hercules with you. I’ll change his coat, just in case anyone recognizes him. He can take messages back and forth, if it comes to that.”
I made Starling’s traveling gown into a party dress of bronze that flattered her shining hair and soft brown eyes. With plenty of jewels lying about, I wished her up dazzling necklaces and earrings. With a grimace of resignation, Athena let me restore her long, powder blue ringlets and insisted that I “dress” her again in the typical dragonfly girl outfit of a sheer little dress and nothing else. When I worried about her getting cold, she wryly noted that no one worried about her sort being uncomfortable and it would be out of character for Starling to have dressed her any other way.
Darling Hercules grumbled, but agreed to the plan, letting me give him an elegant fluffy white coat and blue eyes. He looked rather magnificent, we all thought.
“No,” I told him, “you do not look like a girl. There are plenty of white male cats. And you do not want her attention, do you?”
It was a low blow, but he stopped complaining. Even Darling Hercules had the sense to be very afraid of Titania.
&nbs
p; With that, they stood poised at the bottom of the path, ready to go.
“Tell Rogue...if you can get close enough to talk to him, find out if—”
“I know what to say, Gwynn.”
“I know you do. I just worry that he won’t believe you. Wait. Larch, do you have that dragon’s egg still?”
He bowed with grave courtesy and dug it out of his tunic, from who knows where, since the thing had no pockets.
“May I borrow it for a moment?”
“Anything that is mine is yours, my lady sorceress.”
I ignored that one and took the egg, holding it up to my ears. As I’d hoped, the lily earrings fell off, releasing my flesh with small sighs. I handed them to Starling and she nodded solemnly and tucked them into her dress.
I hugged them both goodbye. Darling Hercules, still sulking, wouldn’t let me, and I felt more than a little bereft, watching them go up the hill without me. Larch and I took the horses back down the trail a ways, to a wider, semi-more comfortable spot.
And settled in to wait.
Chapter Twenty-Three
In Which I Go to the Ball
Titania appears to be less a goddess or queen than a very powerful sorceress, with a far-reaching mental hold on just about everyone in Faerie. Other than that...
~Big Book of Fairyland, “Flora and Fauna”
I tried to enjoy the respite from traveling, the sunshine in our little canyon alcove. But it was exceedingly difficult to relax when people were off risking their lives for your project. This wasn’t something I’d encountered in my old life, really ever. The most I could have hoped for then was that someone would rescue me from a stultifying conversation at a department party. That had been heroic enough, given that they often risked being trapped themselves. I felt like a different person now. Older. Hopefully wiser.
Certainly more tired.
After we ate, I settled in to meditate on my reserves. I could wish that I had a better sense of my fuel reserve, but I just didn’t yet. I’d only ever run it completely down once. I’d hated it enough not to let it happen again.
Rogue’s Possession Page 29
