by Sharon Lee
"Sometimes wise?" Becca muttered, forcing her feet to move again on the path.
She is yet young.
Her feet faltered again as Becca approached the season wheel she had planted in an attempt to demonstrate a proper cycle to what she had then thought of as the intelligence of the place. Like the rest of the garden, the summer plants showed sere and brown. The plants of the other three seasons, however, showed as hale and hardy as if they were in the peak of their growth.
"There is a process," she said, speaking to the trees as if they were a peculiarly backward 'prentice. "Seedlings begin; they grow, leaf, blossom, give fruit if that is their nature, fade, and fail. They do not spring forth and stand tall in all the strength of their youth until they are struck down."
"What would you teach them?" Sian asked, stopping beside her and considering the wheel in her turn.
"The orderly progression of the seasons," Becca said with a sigh and a shake of her head. "To have all and everything bloom at its own discretion is—unnatural!—and in the end, dangerous. For plant and Fey alike," she added, for the trees' benefit. She turned her head slightly, considering the side of Sian's face. Comely, as the High Fey were, and if her skin was somewhat tanned, it was smooth and unlined. Surely, Becca thought, she was too young—but so had Altimere seemed youthful.
"Were you in the war, Engenium?"
Sian laughed. "Wind and wave! The war was done and the keleigh in place long before I had accumulated kest enough to braid my hair, much less fight!" She sobered, met Becca's eyes and shook her head. "Not many of the Elders remain. Donaden, Altimere, Sanalda—"
Becca cringed, the smell of blood suddenly overpowering the sweet scent of growing things.
"Art well, Rebecca Beauvelley?"
She shook her head, swallowing hard. Compelled or not, she was surely not about to confess the murder of one of the few remaining Elders.
"I am frightened," she said, instead, which was only the truth. "What if the Gossamers try to hold me?"
"Now, I knew there was a reason that I asked to accompany you," Sian said, her voice sharper than humor might call for. "And soon we shall know. It appears that you are expected."
The door into the kitchen was open. Becca's steps faltered, even as the voice of the tree spoke inside her head.
The lightless ones approach, Gardener.
Indeed, they did, and she saw them as never she had before—clearly. Not as ghostly gloves, but as pale, bloated shadows from which velvet-tipped tentacles waved softly.
A scream rose in her throat; she gritted her teeth, but not before a soft whimper escaped. The Gossamers paused, their aspect suddenly tentative, as if they were as wary of her as she of them. Becca forced herself to take a breath—another, and another. She forced herself to recall the many kindnesses she had received from the Gossamers: They had bathed her, fed her, watched over her—even assisted her in the garden! While they were certainly Altimere's creatures, yet she had never felt that they wished her harm—and had often felt that they had cared for her beyond the scope of whatever orders they had received from their master.
"Good day," she said, her voice not as strong as she would have liked. "I require a bath."
Before her, the misshapen shadows roiled. A pair of Gossamers detached themselves from the confusion, and faded, leaving a pair yet to confront Becca and Sian, tentacles waving inquisitively.
Her stomach roiled uneasily. Becca swallowed, and motioned unsteadily. "The Engenium is my guest. Pray—" Pray, what? she thought wildly. Treat her as you would myself?
"Pray treat her with all respect due the cousin of the Queen."
There was a small sound from behind her right shoulder, as if Sian had sneezed. Becca waited, but the Fey woman made no other sound.
"Very well," Becca said. She moved forward one deliberate step, then another. The Gossamers drifted back from her approach, escorting them properly into the house. They passed through the tidy, cold kitchen, past the hall to the dining room, where a single place was set at the gleaming wooden table, to the entrance hall.
There the Gossamers halted, transparent nightmares barely visible against the textured woods.
Becca turned toward Sian, who had followed, silent.
"Can you see the Gossamers?" she asked politely, and gained an ironic lift of a neat brow for her courtesy.
"Surely. Can you not see them?"
"I see them . . . somewhat changed from what they were," Becca answered, with emphasis.
Both of Sian's brows rose. "Do you indeed? They seem precisely as they have always seemed to me."
Good sun, Becca thought weakly. What other horrors had she been blind to in this house?
"Would you care to wait in Altimere's library?" she asked Sian politely. "They will guide you."
"In fact," Sian said, with a sudden broad smile. "I would very much like to see Altimere's library. Pray send for me when you have done with your toilette, and are ready to ride. There is no need to hurry on my account; I have nothing other to do than wait upon you."
Becca glared, but Sian had already turned and was following the Gossamers across the foyer. With a sigh, and telling herself that the Fey woman would be perfectly safe, she turned and mounted the ramp.
Her room was unchanged; the bed covered in yellow damask, turned down to reveal a dozen achingly white pillows and linens as fresh as the season's first snow. Sunlight parted the living vine curtains, and gleamed along the glazed green tiles at the top of the wall. Her combs and brushes were laid out on the vanity, and her reflection ghosted in the depths of the mirror as she passed by.
She paused, staring, not at the ruined dress or her hair like a mare's nest, though certainly both were worth at least a stare. No, what caught her eye and held it was the blare and blossom of color swirling about her shape. This was nothing like the silvery nimbus that surrounded Diathen the Queen, or the wash of turquoise that played about Sian's slim form—no, this was color in every shade and hue, so that she seemed to be a woman afire.
Involuntarily, Becca looked down at her hands, only to find them brown and cool, with a spiderweb of white scars across the fingertips of her right hand, where the duainfey had blistered her skin.
She looked back at the woman burning in the glass, down-tilted brown eyes beneath winging brows, and a thin, unlined brown face. Frowning, she gazed directly into her own eyes, but could see nothing different in their regard. Was this yet duainfey's virtue at work? Clarity—perhaps clarity was not always to be desired, she thought painfully. Surely, it was no boon, to see the Gossamers' true shape. And this fiery halo—had she always sported such a thing, and simply been blind to its existence? Was this what the Fey saw, who had looked upon and desired her?
Something moved beyond in the mirror, resolving into gently waving tentacles. She glanced to once side, and saw the door to the bath room move suggestively.
"Of course," she said aloud. "I will bathe now, thank you." She walked toward the doorway. "Please send for Nancy," she said, coolly, as one spoke to servants. "I'll want her to dress me when I'm through."
She paused at the edge of the deep tub, and closed her eyes. The Gossamers disrobed her with their accustomed gentle efficiency, then took her by the arm—she forcefully snatched her imagination away from the thought of tentacles surrounding her wrist—and led her into the water.
Elizabeth Moore had filled his pack with all manner of savory things to eat, as if she expected him to be gone on walkabout, or thought him unable to feed himself adequately from the land. After a brief struggle, and only a little prompting from the elitch, he recognized her gift as kindness. He thanked her for her care before turning toward his work, steps measured deliberately, so as not to overtire the elder Newman Jack Wood.
"I won't slow ye long," the Newman said. "Just want to point ye out the way."
"Your care is appreciated." Meri repeated the same courtesy that had won him a sideways smile from Elizabeth Moore. From Jack Wood, he gained an edged chuc
kle and a shake of the venerable head.
"My intrusion into bidness you know better'n any is being tolerated with patience, is what you mean to say." He raised his stick and pointed to the right. "That'll be it, right there."
"There" was a stand of larch, slender trunks showing swatches of vermilion, which was a sign of great age among those trees.
Good growing, Elders, Meri sent politely, as he and Newman Wood approached.
The larches did not answer; indeed the whole area seemed unnaturally quiet. No birds sang from their graceful limbs, no tree-mice scampered among the leaves. And about the larches themselves, there was—a silvery nimbus, more like ice than proper kest, with no such flickers as might even attend a tree's aura.
Meri frowned slightly, and glanced at the Newman.
"Caught it, have ye?" The elder nodded his hoary head. "Took me a month or more o' passin' 'em by before I twigged there was something off. Can't say what it is, though. Just . . . off."
"Recall," Meri murmured, straining to make sense of what he was seeing, "that my life has been devoted to trees. Any . . . oddity will be immediately apparent."
What, he asked the trees silently, do I find here? Is the entire wood afflicted, or only this stand?
Jack Wood laughed. "That's exactly what I said to Lucy when I first spotted it. 'Whatever's going on with them trees,' I says to her, 'it ain't natural. An' if it is natural, it ain't nothing I'm able or willing to take on.' "
Ahead, the larches remained silent and solitary. Meri sighed and looked away, to a neighboring pine, whose venerable branches were hosting a boisterous game of tree-mouse tag, to the tree's sleepy amusement.
"You were," he said to Jack Wood, "wise to send for a Ranger."
"Well, that's a comfort," the old man said dryly, and jerked his head at the lightsome, unnatural trees. "What is off? If you don't mind saying."
The trees were silent, as if they, too, awaited his answer. Meri sighed.
"I don't know," he said, and turned to look into Jack Wood's old and canny eyes. "I've never seen anything like it."
Nancy was waiting when she emerged from her bath, dried with soft towels wielded by deft tentacles, and swathed in a robe of sunshine yellow brocade. It was a relief to see her as she had always seemed—an absurdly tiny creature, wings folded like a garnet and green cloak along her thin back, as she perched on the mirror's frame.
She leapt into the air as Becca took her place on the bench, snatched the comb up in quick fingers, and began to gently work it through the damp knots.
"Thank you, Nancy," Becca murmured. The sight of her flame-limned reflection upset her stomach. She closed her eyes and concentrated on the sensation of her hair being combed.
Eventually, the tugging came to an end. Carefully, Becca opened her eyes, and saw Nancy hovering just behind her fiery left shoulder, apparently at a loss as to what she should do next.
"A single braid, please," Becca said, her voice hoarse. She cleared her throat and continued. "Pin it up securely so that it will go under a hat. I will be riding out immediately." There was a movement at the corner of her eye. She turned her head to look at the Gossamers hovering there.
"Please saddle Rosamunde and have her brought 'round," she said, wondering if this order would be obeyed as thoroughly as the others. If she had to force the Gossamers—well, how could she force such creatures? They were not her servants. They were Altimere's . . . creatures, bound to him in ways she she really did not wish to think about. Say, indeed, that they were her jailers, whatever they might desire in their private hearts.
If they had hearts, private or otherwise.
It seemed to her overwrought nerves that the Gossamers did hesitate, tentacles meditatively stroking the busy air. Just as Becca despaired of being obeyed, Nancy spun in a flash of wings, one hand at her hip, the other shaking the comb fiercely. Very nearly Becca could hear her scolding—"You have your orders, then! Be off with you!"
As if they, too, had heard Nancy's mute scold, the Gossamers were gone, fading into the sunlight. Nancy gave a satisfied nod, hefted the comb to part Becca's hair, and began to braid it.
The path had failed to reveal itself. Which was, Altimere owned . . . disturbing.
He expected complications and misdirection from Zaldore, not subtlety. Perhaps she had learnt more from her grandmother than he had supposed. Now, there had been a philosopher both subtle and wily. Lost in the war, of course, like everyone he had known, once.
The mist swirled 'round him, and it seemed for a moment that he saw the curve of a cheek, heard the firm tone of her voice—and that, he told himself, shaking the illusion away, was no more subtle than a bludgeon. Tanalore the White had fallen before despair and extremity had pushed those few of the Elders who were left into madness. She was no mist-wraith.
The mist, though. The mist. There was an odd texture to it, a coarseness, and a will to adhere that he did not associate with the similar mists of the keleigh. Perhaps confinement altered its substance. Though, if it were confined, he had yet to discover the walls that bound it.
Perhaps, he thought, it was not after all the same mist the keleigh manifested, but some other, created to mimic those terrible forces. He could not fathom the purpose of doing such a thing. Nor could he fathom Zaldore's reasons for turning upon him now. He had expected her to use him, and the kest he had collected, in her cause to depose the Bookkeeper Queen. After—that was when he had looked for treachery. Well. Soon enough to learn the answer to this mystery when he had won free.
Perhaps, he thought, he had not been quite wise to accept Zaldore's invitation armored with only a tithe of the kest his pretty child had gathered for him. But, there. His own kest and wits had always been quite enough protection; and the gleanings were intended for another use.
It was warm in this place, wherever it was. Altimere shook a handkerchief from the mist and daubed the sweat from his forehead. He wondered—he did most seriously wonder, if he dared leave his chair and attempt to forge his own path through the mist. That would be a bold move. And risky; very, very risky.
If he meant to survive such boldness, he would need to move while his kest was resolute and his faculties intact. Too much of this—he dropped the handkerchief and watched it unmake itself, back into mist—too much of this would strain the reasoning even of an Elder.
Could it be, he asked himself, the thought skewering him like a bolt—that Zaldore's purpose was to strip him, not of kest, but of sanity?
Altimere sighed and settled back into his chair. Now that, he owned, was a disturbing thought, indeed.
Chapter Four
"No," Becca said, standing in shift and pantaloons at the foot of her bed. "A riding dress, Nancy. That is a party dress."
It was a very pretty party dress—a confection of pale blues and pinks, cut low over the bosom, the high waist tied with a wide ivory ribbon—and it would, Becca thought with a shiver, look well on her. However, she was not so mad as to attempt to ride in such a thing. Rosamunde would have her on the ground in a heartbeat for such folly, nor would Becca blame her.
Before her, Nancy fluttered in midair, clearly agitated. She dropped the rejected frock on the floor, darted back to the wardrobe, and reappeared a moment later bearing a robe of diaphanous purple, stitched with hundreds of tiny mirrors.
"No," Becca said, keeping her voice firm and even, though she wanted to shout in frustration. "A riding dress."
Nancy threw the robe to the floor, where its mirrors glittered disturbingly, dashed back and forth several times, then hovered bare inches from Becca's face, so that she could see the tiny silver face scrunched up in distress and the small hands twisting about each other.
"Never mind, then," Becca said, with an assurance she did not at all feel. "I'll fetch it myself." She closed her eyes, picturing the riding dress she had once owned, a lifetime ago, when being in town with Irene was the most excitement she had ever experienced, and the number of invitations tucked 'round the frame of her mirr
or was a matter of grave concern and no small amount of pride.
In those simple, happy days, her riding dress had been raspberry wool, with black frogs to close the jacket, and leather gloves dyed to match. She'd worn it with a high-necked ruffled blouse, and dainty black boots, shined until she could see her face in them, charmingly framed by a smart little hat with an ostrich feather curling along her cheek.
This dashing ensemble fixed before her mind's eye, Becca stepped to the wardrobe, and pulled open the door.
"Oh!" She could not quite contain that little gasp of surprise, though she had, she told herself sternly, hoped for nothing less.
She simply hadn't expected that it would work.
