Fury Convergence

by Chrysoula Tzavelas

  Branwyn blinked.

  Severin still sat in his armchair, and she stood in front of him, just as she had a moment before. As the fragment of experience flickered in her memory, she shifted her weight. She was fully clothed. So was he. Physically she felt… definitely uncomfortable… but not like she’d just…

  “Did I just have a dream?” she demanded, scowling. She recognized her own dreams, influenced by the flavor of recent events.

  One corner of his mouth tilted. “Back to the status quo?” Then he added, “It’s not a good idea to visit me while tired, cupcake. Dreams work differently here.”

  She scowled, and the hate she felt was the old, familiar hate: the tip of an iceberg she knew how to avoid. That… other, purer hate, that murderous rage, was somehow tucked away now. The thought of later brought it close to the surface, but all she had to do right now was look away.

  She looked at Severin instead. “You’re a giant asshole.”

  “Aww, I like you too, cupcake. Did you want to talk about Rhianna more?”

  “What is there to say?” If her glare was lasers, he’d be on fire.

  Calmly, he said, “I see what you see. I don’t know what was taken. I won’t tell her. Is that about it?”

  Branwyn drew her eyebrows together. After a moment, she said, “Thank you. Now let’s go back before… before something else happens.”

  “Of course, cupcake.” He grinned his asshole shark grin. “It sounds like you need a nap.” And the window featuring Rhianna swooped over them.

  11

  The Domain of Summer

  Branwyn’s overnight bag made an adequate pillow, but the sailing stone was as hard as a rock. That about summed up her current sense of humor. She stretched out in the pavilion’s shade and spent a few minutes trying to sleep. But she couldn’t. She was too angry, too tense, and the memory of the Belly of Death was still too close.

  “Sev!” she said as she sat up, because she didn’t want any cracks about leashes.

  He turned in his chair, giving her a skeptical look instead.

  “When you do that forehead-sleepytime thing, are you just making people sleep normally, or is it weird?” She’d seen him put annoying people to sleep previously, and she’d heard how he’d used it as a supremely simple solution to calm Zachariah’s panicking twins once.

  “It’s sleep,” he said. Then he added, as if an irrelevant afterthought, “Dreamless sleep.”

  She was not amused. “Fine.” Then she stretched out again and said, “Get on with it.”

  “Somebody’s so cranky,” he murmured, and crouched beside her. She gave him her best laser glare until his finger touched her forehead. Then sleep swept over her, completely irresistible, peaceful. Dreamless, and nothing at all like the walk from Tucker to Faerie.

  Branwyn woke to Rhianna shaking her. “Come on, wake up, Branwyn!” But she’d been far too deeply asleep to just jump to her feet, or to even do more than frown at the worried note in her sister’s voice.

  “What…?” She shook her head muzzily and managed sitting up.

  Rhianna moved behind her and started fixing her ponytail like they’d done for each other as kids. As she finger-combed Branwyn’s hair, she said, “It’s not an emergency, but the handmaiden says we’ll be passing into Summer’s Domain soon, and Sev is off dealing with the beast again.”

  Sleep-drunk, Branwyn tried to process this. “Again?”

  “Yeah. He’s… he’s had to put it down twice already since you fell asleep. He said it wouldn’t be worth it to wake you.”

  “It keeps coming back?” Any minute now, Branwyn would get excited about that. Or possibly fall back asleep. That last sounded like a good idea.

  Rhianna tightened Branwyn’s ponytail, yanking on her hair. “No, no. Stay awake. Or, if you must go back to sleep, get him back here first. The handmaiden doesn’t want to enter the Domain without him present. She said it would be improper.”

  Branwyn looked around. The handmaiden stood beside the control table, both hands placed on the surface. In the distance ahead of them, a green and golden flower the size of a mountain filled the horizon. The vast meadowlands were edged by a cliff-drop on one side and a barren field dotted with enormous trees on the other.

  Directly behind the sailing stone, but far back, was the fire: red flames flickering through smoke, and the occasional flash of a long, curved thorn. Beyond that, Night moved across the land.

  “You might as well look up, too,” said Rhianna. “Get the whole picture. And then get him back here.”

  Obediently, Branwyn looked up. There was the brilliant blue sky, and the white sun that seemed somehow brighter, and, oh, there was the moon, too… and a plurality of rainbows… and a curving white band…

  “A ring?” she asked, with simple amazement.

  “The handmaiden called it the Binder,” said Rhianna grimly. “One of the world-spirits. It’s not supposed to be visible. But they’re all very interested in our mysterious pursuit.”

  “Okay…” Branwyn shook her head thoroughly. “Right. Severin.” She’d been trying to focus on the task requested of her, not call him, but evidently that didn’t matter.

  A little busy here, cupcake, he whispered.

  “Come back,” she whispered back.

  Instead of arguing, he stepped out of the air. He wasn’t burned this time, but blood dripped down both his arms from under shredded sleeves. Crouching before Branwyn, he took her chin in his hand and turned her head this way and that in rhythm with his words. “You should still be sleeping. What is it?”

  Branwyn blinked at him, then pointed at the handmaiden. When he released her, she flopped back on her sister, sliding down to use Rhianna’s lap as a pillow. “Wow, yeah. That was some sleep. Not good sleep for being on an adventure though. Dangerous. Gimme a minute.” Her eyes drifted closed again.

  “Yeah. I suppose he felt he could keep you safe while you rested,” said Rhianna thoughtfully.

  Branwyn’s eyes popped open again. She stared at her sister’s forearm and saw that awful glint. “Is there any coffee in that backpack? I’ll eat it dry if I have to.”

  “I think so. Let me up.”

  Branwyn sighed and pushed herself upright again. Severin was leaning against one of the pavilion supports, looking back at the fire following them. Branwyn wondered if he’d figured anything out about it, but put off asking until she felt she could do something with the answers other than say, “Wow….”

  Instead she looked at the sky. The face on the moon was different in Faerie. More real, somehow. And the rainbows more closely resembled beautiful dresses spilled across the sky than prismatic effects.

  Rhianna appeared beside her again, shaking a dark fluid in a water bottle. “Instant coffee, liquid form.”

  It helped, some. Branwyn was standing, feeling more like the problem-solver she was supposed to be and trying not to dwell on the events immediately before her nap, when they passed into Summer’s Domain.

  There was no customs check, nobody to shake their finger at Severin and declare him contraband, despite the handmaiden talking of proprieties. The sailing stone simply slid through a wrinkle in one of the vast petals that walled off Summer’s Domain, and the air itself changed. The air of the meadow March had been fresh, but Summer’s air smelled sweet, full of the verdant perfume of a mild summer dawn, something Branwyn had experienced about three times in Pasadena, California.

  That they were in a vast flower remained true within the Domain, with the golden petals curving into the sky all around them. In the far distance, what had to be the Summer Court shimmered: a second crystalline flower high on a twisting white stem. Between them and the high bloom were gently rolling fields, cultivated and dotted with clusters of round houses rising on squat stems of their own. But it was the same sky above, crowded with heavenly objects.

  “The beast won’t come through the wall?” Rhianna asked the handmaiden.

  She shook her head. “It is very unlikely. And if
it did, it would provide the Summer Knights with some entertainment.”

  Severin’s mouth twisted sourly, and Branwyn wondered if he wasn’t enjoying the fighting anymore, or if he just didn’t want to share. Either way, tough luck for him. If Branwyn had to suffer, so could he.

  She asked the handmaiden, “Did you ever figure out what it is? Or why it keeps coming back?”

  “I have no answers. Your monster seemed to have the situation managed, save for the way the world-spirits are responding.” The handmaiden looked up at the crowded sky. “That is more disturbing, and it is my happy thought that fae far greater than I must also be concerned.”

  “Hmm,” said Branwyn. “I’ll let that be my happy thought too.”

  She stretched, working the last of the sleep out of her muscles. She felt one hundred percent better than she had before the nap. The last twenty-four hours had been hard, cripplingly hard, and there were so many problems she still had to solve. But the deep sleep had let her mind get the filing done and safely tucked away the complex storm of emotions aroused by both monster and sister until she needed to bring them forth as tools and weapons.

  Until then, well, she had Rhianna and Severin as allies, and within the context of this project, she trusted them to work with her: trusted Rhianna’s basic humanity and Severin’s strange desperation. After would take care of itself. Somehow it always did.

  A road twisted through the cultivated fields, but it was well-trafficked by the rural residents of the Domain, and the sailing stone slid instead over a ditch between the road and the fields. The stone moved much faster than the wagons and carts pulled by draft animals that ranged from oxen to giant frogs.

  The inhabitants of the Domain far more resembled what Branwyn would once have expected of faeries: shorter than humans, brown-skinned, with large pointed ears and luminous eyes. They all watched the sailing stone with interest as it passed, and a few waved. Some of them were children.

  Uneasily, Branwyn said to the handmaiden. “There are so many of them. Are they all… where did they come from? Are they changelings?”

  The handmaiden looked at the residents indulgently. “It is a crowded Domain, is it not? They are the children of Harvest, a world-spirit, although I think changelings and mortals walk among them. I know some of the dreamborn who do not wish to be bothered by their changelings send them here. But most of the children of Harvest live as mortals do, albeit far more peacefully.”

  Branwyn looked back at a wizened elder driving a cart pulled by two gazelles. Once upon a time, Severin had dismissed her concern for Tarn’s changelings by comparing them to video game characters. She’d personally seen Tarn’s William killed twice, and he’d been restored each time.

  “Do they ever come to Earth?” asked Rhianna.

  The handmaiden paused, her brows rising as if the question startled her, then shook her head. “No, they could not.”

  Rhianna continued asking general questions about the inhabitants of Faerie in a chatty, friendly way. Branwyn paid attention with only half an ear as she returned to looking around. It was such a pretty fantasy land, but it made her skin prickle and she couldn’t figure out why.

  It didn’t feel like a targeted threat though. She had enough personal issues to solve. Such as her hammer and its three remaining soul charges, and what to do if the Court of Summer proved a dead end toward finding the stolen children.

  She sat down and put the hammer across her lap. It didn’t take much analysis to see that there was no way to shape the discharge, so instead she had a firm conversation with the Machine fragment about giving her more warning. It complained at her, in that wordless way of Machine fragments, letting her know how icky the soul energy felt. After a moment of commiseration, Branwyn withdrew her attention from the hammer and turned to the potentially solvable problem of tracing the kids.

  She could probably do something with a compass, she decided. A compass attuned to mortal blood. Yes, there were other mortals in Faerie, but unless the kids had been split up, there would be quite a concentration of them. But… that was too uncertain, especially in such a short time frame. Not a compass, but a map and a dowsing crystal? She’d need a map of Faerie, and a crystal. But she didn’t really understand dowsing conceptually. How accurate did the map have to be? Would she have to teach the crystal to read the map? Even in the modern age of faeries and wizards, it sounded too much like fuzzy thinking. No, she’d have to come up with something else…

  She spent a while turning over ideas as the sparkling bloom of the Court of Summer grew closer and closer. Then something occurred to her, and she tilted her head back toward where Severin still stood.

  “Sev, you can make charms, right?” She remembered the Queen of Stone, when she’d enacted the vision-sharing magic upon Branwyn at their very first meeting, saying it was a ‘blessing,’ not a charm, but Branwyn wasn’t sure that was more than semantics. And she’d seen Severin doing Geometry-based tether magic.

  He gave her an unfriendly look, possibly still cranky about being summoned back from his final fight. Or maybe he didn’t like being called Sev. “I can.”

  “Did you put anything on Charlie?”

  “No.” His voice was chilly, his expression forbidding.

  With a flash of dark delight, Branwyn realized that even in this grim mood, she was no more intimidated by him than she would be of a Senyaza monster hunter. It might have been because she had so many other tangled feelings that fear had simply dropped off the register. Or perhaps she just trusted herself to cope with any upsets. In either case that forbidding expression wasn’t going to work on her now.

  “Why not?” she asked. “The twins are loaded down with protective charms and I managed to get blanks set on my family too.”

  Every human had a minimum of seven Geometric nodes, and each node could host a charm that worked as a fixed or activated magical effect. Consent was not required to place them, and it was much easier for a charm creator to place their own than replace somebody else’s. Since the magical effects could be nasty just as easily as they could be useful, unfilled nodes were risky if you interacted with the supernatural… and these days everybody was potentially interacting with the supernatural.

  Severin stared at her for a moment and then looked away. When it became clear he didn’t intend to answer, Branwyn rolled to her feet and moved so she was back in his line of sight. He looked over her head.

  Branwyn looked at his hard jawline and resisted the irrational desire to stroke her finger down his throat. “I’m not going to make you tell me, you know. I’m just going to draw my own conclusions. Let’s see…”

  “Later,” he said tightly. Something in Branwyn throbbed painfully, but he kept going. “Later, we can take out one of your charms and I’ll make one for you. You won’t like it very much, but then you’ll have your precious answer. Doesn’t that sound like fun?”

  Blithely, Branwyn said, “Hmm. I don’t think it’d help much. I was hoping you might have placed something I could use as a hook for tracking her down. Right now, I’m looking at a uniqueness issue.”

  She watched his expression change and took a step backwards. Not afraid of him, not afraid of the grimness fading from his face, just… managing herself and her desire to touch him.

  “What else could you use?” he asked intently.

  “Oh, anything concrete and unique to her. Got any vials of her blood tucked away?” She raised her eyebrows.

  “No. I can find something else though.”

  “Yeah? Okay…” Branwyn stared off ahead for a few minutes. “If you won’t do charms, it gets trickier. I can wake up something that wants to find her, and with your ‘something else,’ I can teach it to recognize her, but the mechanism of action is the tough part.” She gave Severin a quick, distant smile. “Not impossible, though. I just need some creativity and the right materials. And oh look, we’re coming up to the Court. This might not even be necessary.”

  Then she made her way to the front of th
e sailing stone, feeling his gaze on her, and proud of herself for treating him like a client instead of a complication. She’d used her time productively, too. That was just as important.

  There was a cute little village at the base of the Summer Court: picturesque round houses with a hint of the mushroom about them, with gorgeously illustrated hanging signs indicating that here she might acquire a foaming tankard and there a pair of scissors, and oh look, there she could get potion bottles. Actually, that pair of scissors might come in handy later. She made a mental note.

  The stem of the white bloom of the Summer Court was a broad translucent bole, surrounded by a white spiral staircase with absolutely no landings until the leaves began halfway up. The sailing stone spun to a stop in a little courtyard with a burbling fountain near the base of the stairs. Branwyn stared up. There was a dock on one of the giant leaves.

  Airships? This really was a video game world.

  Rhianna handed her the overnight bag. “I keep feeling like I’ve been here before. It’s unreal.”

  “Yes,” Branwyn agreed. “Parts of it, anyhow.”

  The handmaiden deployed the sailing stone’s ladder and Branwyn headed to it. Once she was on the ground, she strode directly to the fountain, where the water forming a stone girl’s hair rushed and swirled in a chest-high tulip basin before spilling into a wide trough. There, she dunked her face into the cold water and wished she had a bar of soap.

  Rhianna said wistfully, “If they offer us a bath here, can we accept?”

  Branwyn glanced at her from the corner of her eye as she slicked water off her face. “You can do what you want. You could have taken the bath before.”

  “Could I have?” Rhianna had a strange little smile, almost as disturbing as that glint.