Grave Debt

by D. D. Miers

  "A wishing table," Cole said, raising an eyebrow. "I've never seen one in person."

  "There are only three still on this plane," Greenwood replied, serving himself from the dishes nearest him, all of which contained food I didn't recognize but which looked indescribably good. "I own two of them. The ship reportedly carrying the third was lost at sea in the 1300s, and it has yet to resurface."

  "I'm guessing you intend to take it the minute it does?" Cole said, poking curiously at a dish near him which looked like lobster mac and cheese.

  "Of course," Greenwood replied. "I collect such things. And please, feel free eat anything except for the dishes in front of me. Whatever is closest to you should be your favorite, or the table's best guess. There's no danger. The table doesn't convey enchantment the way most fairy dishes do. It's very convenient for guests."

  Cole hesitantly took a big spoonful of the mac and cheese anyway. Ethan was already eating a huge piece of fried chicken with no regrets, even if the food was enchanted. I tested a bowl near me, which smelled like tomato bisque and nearly forgot why I was here at the first spoonful. It was the most delicious thing I'd ever tasted. I shook off the temptation to sample everything at the table to start my interrogation.

  "Is that why you were at the funeral parlor?" I asked. "You wanted to collect the candle."

  "It's not polite to discuss business at the table," Greenwood said, without looking up from his food.

  "I don't care—" Cole grabbed my shoulder and shook his head. I clenched my jaw in anger, reluctantly giving in and, after a moment of sulking, served myself some soup.

  "So," Cole said, casually over steak and rosemary potatoes, "how long have you been living on earth?"

  "Longer than you've been alive," Greenwood answered evasively. "But not so long, comparatively. How long have you been homeless?"

  I expected Cole to flare up in anger, but he barely reacted.

  "About as long as I've been studying necromancy," Cole replied. "You said you have human guests over often? Do you do a lot of socializing with humans?"

  Greenwood’s fork hovered over his food, but then he smoothly resumed with no further emotion.

  "I said I have guests," he clarified. "Human and otherwise, exactly as often as I feel like having company. Necromancy is an unusual pursuit. How does your family feel about it?"

  "Oh, about the same way they feel about any magic," Cole said again, with no emotional reaction despite the barb. I hadn't seen anyone trade nonanswers and veiled insults like this since the last family reunion. Or not so veiled, in Greenwood's case. "How does the court feel about your . . . habits?"

  A muscle in Greenwood's jaw twitched, and he held his fork in a white-knuckled grip, but his expression and tone remained neutral.

  "I would never presume to guess the court's feelings," he said. "I operate with my queen's permission, and that is all that's required. I take it your family is deceased, then? How tragic."

  "Oh, no, they're alive," Cole said with a small, cold smile. Greenwood gripped his fork so tightly I thought I heard it creak. "You said your queen ordered you here? Now, uh, which queen would that be, exactly?"

  Greenwood slammed his fork down on the table and stood up. "Pardon me," he said. "I've suddenly lost my appetite."

  Cole snorted, and Greenwood flashed a dangerous glare at him.

  "Great," I said immediately. I didn't understand exactly what Cole had done, but I wouldn't waste the opportunity. "Then let's get back to business. You owe me an answer."

  "'You owe me' is a dangerous phrase to throw around with the Fae," Greenwood said, and knocked twice on the table. "We take debt very seriously."

  All at once, the food on the table vanished completely, leaving the plates gleaming as though they'd never been used. Ethan brought his teeth down on a piece of chicken that was no longer there and frowned pitifully.

  "You knowingly put me in danger when I'd never done anything to you," I said, standing up as well. "I'd say that means you owe me."

  "I was simply returning a valuable family heirloom to its rightful owner," Greenwood replied. "An act of charity for which I've been rewarded with violence and rudeness. If anything, you owe me."

  "You knew the candle was dangerous!" I accused him.

  "You can't prove that," he replied, loftily.

  "Uh, actually," Ethan interrupted, holding up a hand. "I heard your conversation about the candle with the curators. Daphne made it really clear how dangerous the candle was, and what could happen if it ended up in the hands of a necromancer. I mean, even if you don't owe Vexa, you probably owe the curators for promising to help them and then giving the candle away instead of retrieving it. And, since I represent the curators, I guess that means you owe me?"

  A flush climbed up the back of Greenwood's neck, but he took a deep breath and dismissed it.

  "Fine," he said. "What is it exactly that you want?"

  "I . . ." I started to demand answers, then remembered what we were actually here for. He might only let us have one favor. I didn't want to waste it on explaining something that was already done. "We want you to help Ethan. He has a curse. We don't know who cast it or what the parameters for breaking it are, and its progress has accelerated. We need it broken fast."

  Greenwood looked at Ethan expectantly.

  "Yeah, that's what I want," Ethan said after a beat as he realized the Fae man waited for his confirmation. "Please. Anything you can do would be appreciated."

  Greenwood sighed and rubbed his eyes.

  "Fine," he said. "If that's really what you want. Seems a bit wasteful to me, but it's your loss."

  He led us out of the dining room and deeper into the house. We passed through long, opulent hallways, strange parlors, grand ballrooms, up and down endless winding staircases. The house was much larger than it appeared from the outside. It also became increasingly clear that the view through the windows we passed were not of the neighborhood they should have been. I saw busy streets in foreign cities, unfamiliar mountain ranges, tropical shores. And once or twice I saw vistas that I knew existed nowhere on earth.

  As we walked, I fell into step next to Cole. "What was that at the table?" I asked him in curious whisper.

  "Fairies live by rules like they're laws of nature, right?" he said. "Including rituals of etiquette. If you'd insisted on talking business at the table, he would have been justified in throwing you out. Otherwise, he would have just kept eating until we gave up and left or passed out or whatever."

  "So you had to make him want to leave the table?" I assumed, and Cole nodded.

  "Question-for-a-question is one of the most common fairy rules," he explained. "I just kept asking questions he didn't want to answer. Luckily, figuring out the best way to piss people off is something I'm naturally talented at."

  "How did you know it would work?" I asked, feeling an odd combination of retroactive fear and relief.

  Cole didn’t have an answer.

  At last, Greenwood stopped before a pair of enormous wooden doors carved with the image of a giant tree. Its branches grew past the top of the door, sprouting live green leaves. A carved eagle sat among the branches and a serpent wound around the roots. A bright-eyed squirrel perched on the trunk, just above the keyhole. There were no handles, but when Greenwood bent and whispered something into the hole, the door swung open silently on its own.

  "Through here," he said, walking through the doors. "If you value your sanity and various body parts, do not touch anything."

  Cole, Ethan, and I exchanged a look, all of us feeling this was probably our last chance to turn back. We didn't know remotely what we were walking in to, but I knew it was our best chance for saving Ethan. I took a deep breath and followed Greenwood through the door.

  Chapter 14

  We entered a massive library with shelves lining the walls that rose up at least two stories high. The glass ceiling spilled golden late afternoon light through the room, though when we'd arrived it had been well before noon
. The room stretched at least a football field's length in either direction, and the arched open doorways at either end implied more awaited beyond them. The room, filled from wall to wall, had things in glass cases, on dark wood tables, and in huge tanks—a million disparate objects, fantastic and mundane, jewel-encrusted and wrapped in rags, huge and small, impossible and utterly unremarkable. I was completely overwhelmed, stunned into awed, reverent silence.

  "This way," Greenwood said, impatiently, leading us through the rows of cases, past a golden astrolabe spinning in the air a foot above the stand it was placed on. The case beside it held a heavy leather-bound book from which roaches and flies constantly crawling out of, only to dissolve into dust a few inches away. Past that was a red umbrella which, despite being in a reinforced case with multiple heavy locks, appeared to be completely normal. I had to fight the urge to stop every few feet to stare at each new puzzling wonder we passed. Many of these would have looked strange even to normal vision. But to my magical senses, they absolutely crawled with magic. Some were infused, the magic flowing through them like blood through veins. Others seemed woven out of magic completely, their commonplace components a thin façade.

  Under my shirt, I wore a wooden pendant, a thought-speech charm Ethan had given me which allowed me to understand him while he was in his wolf shape. Up until this moment, it had been the most incredible piece of magic I'd ever seen. I'd been mystified and fascinated by the skill and delicacy involved in its crafting. That spell, which I'd laid up at night staring at in such admiration, seemed positively clumsy in this treasure trove of enchantments, like an origami swan folded by a skilled amateur next to a masterpiece.

  Certainly, some of the items here were less delicate in their crafting. There was a stack of silver coins that bore no trace of the carefully folded fractal spellwork on the charm. But even these burned with a kind of force and raw emotion that made me tremble if looked at it too long. They were stamped with a single, mighty letter, heavy with cosmic meaning. My feelings were the closest to religious ecstasy I'd ever experienced.

  Transfixed by the ocean of pain bound up within the coins, I jumped when Greenwood tapped me on the shoulder.

  "Best not to stare too long," he advised, putting an arm around me to shepherd me along. "It can be dangerous."

  "What is all of this?" I said, too enraptured to remember I was angry at him. "It's incredible . . . beautiful. Look at the geometric fractals on that one! How did they do that? And that one, God, the spellwork almost looks alive, like flowers growing! Where do you learn that? Who did it? How?"

  Greenwood raised an eyebrow as I babbled, but a small smile turned up the corner of his thin mouth.

  "Curious," he said. "Most people who see my collection want to know what they do, not how they're made."

  "Well I want to know that, too," I said, a little overwhelmed. "But you might as well ask what an antique baroque table is for. It's a work of art. The value is in the craftsmanship, not the utility."

  "I'm inclined to agree," Greenwood said. "Here, have you noticed this vase? See how the spell is worked to follow the pattern on the porcelain?"

  "That's amazing!" I gushed, leaning close to see. "Look, it's even in the tiny leaves!"

  Cole cleared his throat, catching my attention. Cole frowned and Ethan, embarrassed, alternating between gazing between the ceiling and the floor.

  Greenwood's arm was still around me and shrugged out from under it quickly, my face hot. Greenwood backed away, hands in the air, and with an elegant gesture, led us on again.

  Ethan asked quietly, worry tightening around his eyes. "He's not working some kind of enchantment on you or whatever, is he?" Ethan asked quietly, worry tightening his facial muscles.

  "No," I said quickly, then had second thoughts and examined myself. "No, I don't think so. This is just really cool stuff! I've never been around this kind of magic before. It's exciting!"

  "Okay," Ethan said, smiling though he still looked worried. "Just be careful."

  "Stay focused," Cole suggested. "We still can't trust this guy. If he gets the opportunity, he could do a lot worse than just kick us out."

  I nodded, reminding myself what we were here for. Ethan's life depended on this. It wasn't the time to be getting distracted by cool, shiny things.

  Greenwood led us to a strange device with a variety of mirrors and magnifying lenses on a complicated golden armature. It was taller than Greenwood and currently set up over a long table on which several small enchanted objects lay.

  "Artificer's glass," he explained, as I marveled at the incredibly subtle spellwork in the golden frames around each lens. "Very rare and very useful for examining magic. I use it to study and maintain the enchantments on my collection."

  "Is that the lucky coin we found the other day?" Ethan asked, pointing to a coin shinier than usual, laying on a bench.

  "It is," Greenwood confirmed, picking it up. "The probability warping effect appears to be slightly stronger than usual. I was attempting to discern the cause. There seems to be a paragraph in the magical script that closes the usual loss/gain loophole. To a degree anyway. You can have it if you like."

  He offered it to me, and I took it without thinking, though Cole made a warning noise in his throat.

  "It's harmless," Greenwood assured me. "Lucky coins are very small magic. There are thousands of them in circulation, at least. Most people don't even realize what they have. But they can make life a little easier."

  "Thank you," I said, tucking it into the pocket of my dress. "I appreciate it."

  "No thanks necessary," Greenwood said with a smile that didn't quite touch his eyes. I sensed I'd made a mistake, if only because Cole looked antsy, but no doom came crashing down on us. Instead, Greenwood waved Ethan toward the bench, moving the other artifacts out of the way. "Please, take a seat."

  With a wary glance toward the exit, Ethan moved to sit down on the edge of the bench and Greenwood adjusted the artificer's glass, dragging lenses and mirrors into position between himself and Ethan and tuning a series of complicated knobs on the side of each lens with the graceful confidence of a musician playing an instrument.

  I watched over his shoulder, while strange images drifted in and out of focus as Greenwood made adjustments—webs of energy, spirals of ambient magic, eerie voids, and once, an image of a long, dark hall filled with candles. Some lenses were clear glass, but Greenwood peered through them and adjusted their focus, all the same, as though he saw something there that I couldn't.

  Finally, one of the lenses reflected an image of the core of Ethan's curse. I'd visualized it before while trying to suppress it. It was roughly spherical, like a snarled ball of yarn, tightly woven and tangled. It festered, burned, and seeped, livid red and sickly yellow. It was at once foul and pathetic, inspiring both pity and disgust . . . and nausea.

  "That is a nasty one," Greenwood said idly. "Monster curses are rare these days, and this is a strong one. I'd warrant whoever did it has been around a while."

  "Is there anything you can do to break it?" I asked. "Or tell us who can?"

  "Let me see," Greenwood hummed, dialing the lens in closer. "I can see why you've had difficulty. The caster definitely went to some lengths to hide their signature. I'd almost say there wasn't one, but that's impossible."

  "Why?" Ethan asked, shifting to see through the lenses.

  "Hold still," Greenwood said, sharply, tilting the lens and adjusting something again. "It's impossible because that would mean this is a self-inflicted curse."

  "Cole mentioned those before," I said. "They're really weak, aren't they?"

  "Exactly," Greenwood confirmed. "Even the strongest self-inflicted curses never do anything that couldn't be dismissed as coincidence or a freak accident. They could never manifest physically this way. No, this is definitely the work of a very skilled individual. Someone with a great deal of practical knowledge about curses. Frankly, it almost looks like—"

  Greenwood froze, staring at the curse.
A moment later he began rapidly adjusting dials, zooming in even closer.

  "No," he muttered. "No, it can't be."

  "Can't be what?" Ethan asked, turning a little pale. "What's wrong?"

  "He wouldn't dare," Greenwood scoffed, still clearly talking to himself. He gritted his teeth as he peered into the lens from less than an inch away, scanning the tiny lines of magical text written into the knotted cords of the curse. "That little goblin, he wouldn't dare!"

  He launched into a diatribe in a language that sounded like water moving under ice or wind through bare branches. Judging by the speed and vitriol behind his words, he did not like what he saw through the lens.

  He shoved the artificer's glass away abruptly, snarling to himself in the same language, and stormed away.

  "Hey, what did you find?" I called after him. "What's going on?"

  He didn't answer, hurrying toward an umbrella stand stuffed with canes, staffs, and sticks. He sorted through them, casting some aside with an impatient gesture. A few hit the ground and cast off sparks or lay there humming intensely as they vibrated across the tile. Finally, he made a wordless, victorious noise as he pulled out an old wooden walking stick with a hole through its densely knotted head.

  "Greenwood!" I shouted, trying to get his attention. "What is happening?"

  Instead of responding, he slammed the walking stick into the ground. With an echo that shook the glass panes of the roof, a doorway opened in the air before him. Nothing like the ragged hole that Uther's teleportation spell had made, its crisp round edges curled and flowered with symmetrical flourishes of power, at once geometric and organic, like an art nouveau window into another world.

  Without another word, he strode forward into it. Shock slowed my reactions, before I sprinted forward. Ethan and Cole shouted my name, but by then I had already crashed through the surface of the rapidly closing portal, which broke across my skin like cool water as I followed the fairy into the unknown.