Seven Dreams

by English, Charlotte E.

  Fabian said nothing. He was thinking deeply; Serena recognised that posture and the intense silence that went along with it. He was doing the same thing she was doing: thinking back over all the dealings they’d had with “Baron Anserval” and trying to work out what it all meant.

  Serena failed there. ‘Anserval is a major masquerade,’ she said, frowning at the erstwhile Baron. ‘Lady Fenella’s just a persona, with a carriage. But the Baron? The house, the servants, the collections?’

  Bron shrugged. ‘The aristocracy’s frequently up to no good, both in Irbel and abroad. G.A.9 likes to keep an eye on them, and for that, you need someone on the inside. Someone fully accepted, not just an occasional character. They chose me.’ He evidently considered this an achievement, but Serena wasn’t so sure. His acting talents were undeniably superior, but in his place, she wasn’t sure she would have been pleased to be assigned such a long-term role.

  ‘I don’t buy that,’ Serena replied. ‘All that, just for basic surveillance? Come on, really. What was the game?’

  ‘Nothing to do with you,’ he said briefly. ‘You were a useful cover once or twice, I admit. And then you provided an easy entrance into all this riddle stuff.’ He cast a scornful glance at the Seven Dreams rhyme still glimmering in the sky, making his feelings about the whole assignment painfully clear.

  ‘So you knew about the key all along?’ Serena said. ‘The one that was in “Baron Anserval’s” collection?’

  Bron hesitated. ‘Yes,’ he said.

  He was lying, and making a remarkably inept job of it considering his apparent aptitude for deceit. Serena hid a smile, and did a horribly inept job of that, too.

  ‘All right, no,’ said Bron irritably. ‘We don’t know where it came from or how it got there. Probably we got it as part of a job lot of old rubble. Stuff to line the shelves, you know.’ He eyed Serena, and his irritable manner vanished behind a smooth smile. ‘Did you think we were infallible?’ he said, eyes sparkling with amusement. ‘That’s cute. We do our best, of course.’

  Serena opened her mouth to offer some deservedly harsh retort to this nonsense, but she was distracted before she could speak. Fabian moved. In one gesture, he ripped off the blond, perfectly styled Bastavere wig he’d been wearing so much lately, and threw it. It sailed a long distance, and landed in the waters of a tiny, swift-flowing beck that passed nearby.

  ‘You just pissed Egg right off with that, there,’ Serena commented.

  ‘Um,’ said Fabian. ‘Yeah. Oops.’ He shook out his much longer dark hair and tied it back into a tail, already looking more comfortable. So much more so, in fact, that Serena felt a moment’s gratitude to Anserval or Bron or whoever he was. Maybe Fabian just needed to stop pretending for a while, and he’d be okay.

  By the time Anserval-Bron had finished removing the immediately disposable articles of his disguise, he looked very different. He was younger than Serena had supposed, and he’d lost the Baron’s smug manner and air of self-satisfaction — though he had gained more than a hint of cockiness and self-importance to balance it out. Serena still felt little liking for him, although perhaps that was merely discomfort; all her fine efforts as Fenella, wasted! She was downright embarrassed to think that he had known all along that she was acting, but she hadn’t guessed that about him.

  ‘Don’t feel bad,’ he said kindly. ‘We’ve worked with Torwyne before. You do all right, with what you’ve got.’

  He probably meant it well, Serena was charitable enough to concede, but his comments still rankled. He was magnanimous, as though her precious Agency was a minnow compared to the shark of G.A.9, and she and Fabian were children flailing about with a few cheap toys. ‘Thank you,’ she said stiffly, earning herself a knowing grin in response.

  Damn him.

  It occurred to her that Eva and Tren were silent in the face of these revelations. Llandry and Pensould merely looked confused, but Eva looked nicely composed. She caught Serena’s eye, and Serena detected a faint twinkle before her ladyship looked away.

  Oh, dear. Eva had known. She had known! How mortifying. But then... Serena’s quick brain flashed through the connotations of that, and came up with an answer to Fabian’s questions of only a little while earlier. What was she doing on this flight? She was here to counter Bron, that’s what. Eva had needed an airship to go after the keys, but the LHB couldn’t muster the funds for that; only G.A.9 had that kind of money. So she’d used Serena’s — or rather, Lady Fenella’s — connections with a man she knew to be a G.A.9 agent to gain access to his ship, knowing that, sooner or later, he’d break cover and take over the expedition.

  He’d try to commandeer any keys they found, too, and that was where Serena and Fabian came in. Eva was relying upon them to prevent Bron from walking off with the keys, by any means necessary.

  She smiled inwardly, feeling at once much better about everything. Bron thought that she and Fabian were just little amateurs, did he? He would regret that. She’d make sure of it.

  Catching Fabian’s eye, she gathered at once that he’d grasped everything she had and felt much the same way about it. They exchanged a tiny nod, and an even tinier smile. In that moment he looked more like the Fabian she remembered, and she could’ve blessed the idiot Baron Bron for his subterfuge and manipulation. For the first time, Fabian was interested in the job at hand; his pride was injured, and he’d do anything he could to outdo the other agent.

  The next few days would be very interesting indeed.

  ‘So,’ said Llandry with a frown, ‘You are not Lady Fenella Chartre after all?’

  Serena cleared her throat. ‘Uhm. No, in fact. I apologise for the deceit, only it was... well, it was...’ she searched for the right word. Necessary? More or less, but that wouldn’t make sense without a lengthy explanation. Fun? No, how inappropriate. Also untrue, on this occasion; her joy in Lady Fenella’s character had gone, and she wouldn’t regret leaving the role behind.

  Fabian saved her with a little of the charm he rarely showed, but which tended to conquer when he did. He made Llandry a graceful bow, smiled winningly at her and said, ‘It’s complicated. While my sister searches through her vocabulary, allow me to introduce myself? I am Fabian Carterett, of the Torwyne Agency of Irbel. The lady is Serena, the younger and much finer Carterett.’

  ‘And why were you all pretending to be other people?’ interrupted Pensould, with a sweep of his arm which took in the former Baron Anserval as well as Serena and Fabian.

  ‘It’s our job.’

  Pensould stared at him. ‘You mean that somebody pays you to pretend to be fake people?’

  ‘Exactly.’ Fabian smiled. ‘Pays rather well, actually.’

  Pensould threw up his hands in disgust and turned away. ‘Never will I understand you humans.’

  Chapter Fifteen

  ‘I have a plan,’ announced Teyo.

  After two days of waiting around in a tiny, run-down farmer’s cottage in Tarvale, which was damp and cold and not at all the kind of hideout that any of the team would have preferred, Teyo was growing bored and Egg and Iyamar were bickering back and forth all day long.

  Simply waiting for somebody else to do something remarkable had never been high on Teyo’s list of priorities, and if he didn’t find something for his esteemed colleagues to do, he might end up killing them both. Or himself.

  At this promising pronouncement Egg and Iyamar instantly stopped sniping at each other and sat looking expectantly at him. They were huddled in the cottage’s tiny and ill-equipped kitchen, gathered around the small fire in a largely futile attempt to stay warm. The three of them were certainly well-hidden and out of the way, but Teyo couldn’t help wondering what they had ever done to Oliver to deserve these privations.

  ‘Two keys have been found, not including the one from the Baron’s collection,’ Teyo began. ‘The two we know about were discovered in Irbel and Orstwych. Meanwhile, according to the rhyme we can expect to see one coming out of each realm. With me so far?’


  ‘Six of them, anyway,’ Egg pointed out, ‘since the Baron already had one from who-knows-where. So, one of the “Dreams” must already be missing its key.’

  ‘Right. No way of knowing which one that is, at the moment. For now, we can assume that any of the following realms may produce a key, and four of them certainly will: Glinnery, Glour, Nimdre, Ullarn and Orlind.’

  Egg and Iyamar nodded.

  ‘We can’t reach Orlind, nor Ullarn either, as the Tillikor Mountains are virtually impassable this time of year. So that leaves us with Glinnery, Glour and Nimdre.’

  ‘Okay,’ said Egg. ‘Where are we going with this?’

  ‘We’re going to Glinnery, Glour or Nimdre,’ Teyo said. ‘That’s what we have to decide.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘There’s no point sitting here waiting for someone to find a key. It could be days, weeks or months, and besides, by the time we reach the site the key’s long gone and it gets harder to track it down. What if we’re already there when it’s discovered?’

  ‘But how do we know which one will be discovered next?’ said Iyamar reasonably.

  ‘We don’t. It’s a bit of a gamble.’

  Egg raised her brows. ‘How much of this has to do with being bored out of your head, Tey?’

  ‘Um. Some of it might be because of that, yes.’

  Her response to that was to climb to her feet with a slightly disturbing cackle. ‘I’m bored with Nimdre and I don’t like the Darklands,’ she informed him.

  ‘Glinnery it is, then,’ Teyo said, beaming. ‘Is that okay with you, Iyamar?’

  ‘I... um, yes, but isn’t Glinnery north?’

  ‘More or less.’

  ‘And Nimdre is south?’

  ‘Right!’

  ‘What if we go north to Glinnery and the next key is discovered in the south, in Nimdre? We’ll be way out of position to get it.’

  ‘Not much more than we are already,’ Teyo argued. ‘Anyway, it’s a free-for-all out there. Tracking down and retrieving the keys is going to be really hard whatever we do. Might as well do something proactive, and have a bit of fun while we’re at it, right?’

  Iyamar looked dubious. ‘It’s a rubbish plan, Captain.’

  Teyo sighed. ‘I know, but it’s the best one I’ve got. Unless you’d rather sit here and argue with Egg for the next three weeks?’

  Iyamar blanched. ‘When you put it like that...’

  Egg grinned. ‘Good choice. I can make your life really miserable, girlie.’

  ‘Like you aren’t already,’ Iyamar muttered.

  ‘I heard that.’

  This plan was reinforced the next morning. They left early, provisioned for a considerable stay, and stopped at the bulletin boards on their way to the railcar station in central Irbel.

  DREAM FOUND, BUT WHERE IS THE KEY? shouted the central board.

  ‘So much for Nimdre,’ Egg said cheerfully, hefting her pack.

  Teyo read quickly. A group from the University of Draetre, and other organisations, had found a skyborne Dream in eastern Nimdre, near the border with Ullarn. No key had been found within. The Dream itself had been floating in an enormous bubble, the boards proclaimed, though Teyo had trouble visualising that. It had been secreted behind a ring of peaks so high that no one had ever explored them before. Curiously, the bubble had been filled with water, or something very like it, rendering it both airborne and underwater at the same time. Teyo saw pictures flash past bright with colour: the water was more lavender than blue, and filled with watery fauna the likes of which he had never seen or heard of before. Everything shone with a pearly radiance that was mesmerising to the eye. He wanted to stay and read everything about it, and look at every single picture, but his interest was not shared by his colleagues. Egg was already striding away, and Iya seemed more inclined to follow than to try out her fledgling reading skills on the text. Disappointed, Teyo turned away. He could catch up with the report later, maybe.

  The important thing was that their three choices had now been reduced to two: Glour or Glinnery. That gave them good odds of finding themselves in the right(ish) place at the proper time. It also explained which realm the Baron’s key had come from, which gave them an advantage; as far as he knew, few of the searchers were aware that three keys had been found, not two. A lot of people would waste a lot of time searching Nimdre, while his team would be well away.

  Shouldering his pack, Teyo trudged after Egg in the direction of the station, his pace much slower than her brisk step. They were disguised again, judging it best given Ylona’s discovery of their last hideout. Teyo regretted this, since he secretly hated the wigs. They made his head itch, and he had to resist the temptation to scratch. But it was necessary. They were attired as farmers, which seemed apt given the rural location they had been hiding in, and Teyo did his best to stare around himself in awe, just like a real farmhand might do on his first visit to the big city. He made a hash of it, of course. Serena and Fabian would do it perfectly; he’d hardly know them himself. Teyo wished they were here, not rambling around all over somewhere without him.

  Never mind. He was doing the best he could, and nothing catastrophic (or unsalvageably so) had happened so far. He tried to enjoy Iyamar’s obvious enthusiasm for the venture and set aside his gloomy reflections. If he was leading his reduced team wrongly, well... they would deal with it later.

  He was somewhat heartened to notice a stray corner of Egg’s new blanket sticking out of the top of her backpack.

  Teyo had been to Glinnery only once before, in his youth. He had gone with his father to the market of Waeverleyne, Glinnery’s capital city, to buy new and rare materials for their business. Glinnery was a remarkable place, and the market was justifiably legendary; he had held fond memories of that trip, until the death of his parents had tainted all such recollections forever.

  This being the case, he had privately hoped that his team might pick any realm to go to except Glinnery, though he would rather have died than admit it. Especially to Egg. And now, here he was; not only in Glinnery, but back in Waeverleyne as well.

  Admittedly, it had changed a great deal in the quarter of a century that had passed since his last visit. Or, some of it had. The route from Iving through southern Glinnery to Waeverleyne remained as remarkable and glorious as Teyo remembered: all rolling hills and valleys spread with bright grasses and vibrant flowers, and dotted everywhere with clusters of the strange Glinnish glissenwol trees that were seen nowhere else. They were not like the trees of Irbel, which were clad in coloured bark and decked in wide, frondy leaves. Glinnery’s trees were vast — much, much taller than those of Irbel or Nimdre — and they bore neither bark nor leaves. Their trunks were toweringly tall, wide and gracefully curved, and topped with enormous, spreading caps, plumply rounded and shining blue and purple and silver in the eternal Daylander sun.

  The same trees populated Waeverleyne. In fact, most of the city’s buildings were constructed up and around those graceful trunks, easily accessible to the winged folk of the realm. But here, things had changed. The city had been the site of a brief but brutal war between some of the returning draykoni and the human inhabitants of Waeverleyne. The attackers claimed that the realm had been theirs, many centuries before, and they sought to reclaim it from the human settlers. They had been defeated, but Waeverleyne had borne heavy losses. Teyo saw painful gaps where once majestic trees had grown, still unfilled two years later. Worse, there was the appalling sight of half-burned glissenwol trees, one or two buildings still clinging bravely to their trunks but the upper storeys lost forever.

  ‘Why are the trees burned?’ demanded Iyamar as they neared the centre of Waeverleyne. ‘Come to think of it, why are the trees so weird?’

  ‘They’re “weird” because they’re glissenwol, and they’re burned because there was a war,’ Egg said. ‘Surely you can’t have missed that?’

  ‘I dunno. When was it?’

  ‘About two years ago?’

  Iya sh
rugged. ‘I would’ve been busy trying to eat, around then.’

  ‘That’s no excuse for ignorance,’ Egg snapped.

  Teyo quickly intervened. ‘I asked around, and there’s a decent inn a couple of streets from here. Shall we get settled in? We’d be close to the boards for the news.’

  Egg grumbled something, but thankfully it was inaudible. Iyamar said nothing at all.

  ‘Excellent,’ Teyo said with a bright smile. ‘Let’s go, then.’

  Their stay was destined to be short, in spite of the inn’s many comforts. Teyo was woken in the middle of the next night (such as it was in daylit Glinnery) by the ferocious buzzing of his voice-box. He leapt to answer it, kicking his blankets out of the way and slamming his hand into the activation button.

  ‘Teyodin Bambre, division three.’

  ‘Teyo, this is Rulan Trame, division five,’ said the box. ‘Got a tip-off for you. I’m stationed at Aravin. They’ve found something up here, and I think it’s going to be the one you’re looking for.’

  Teyo felt a flash of excitement, and relief. ‘Aravin’s north of Waev?’

  ‘Due north. The site’s near the coast, about six miles west of the border with Glour.’

  ‘Gotcha,’ said Teyo. ‘Thanks.’ He switched off the box and ran to wake his team.

  ‘Got a proposition for you both,’ Teyo said a little while later, as they collectively shoved food down their throats prior to departure. ‘We need to get up to Aravin fast. We don’t have time for carriages. I’m going to shift, and I’ve got two options for you.’

  Iyamar stopped eating and stared at Teyo, horror-struck.

  ‘I can either carry both of you, or Iya can shift and one of us can take Egg,’ he said. He gazed back at Iyamar, trying to convey by his expression an air of confidence and calm. He knew Iya could do it, even if she didn’t.

  Egg glanced sideways at Iyamar with more than a hint of derision, but to Teyo’s relief she didn’t complicate matters by offering any comments. The silence stretched as Iyamar struggled with herself.