“I suppose not.”
But how would we know?
“We should go back.” Ossilius was staring at the pile of recovered Trident bodies. His mouth was drawn down in such sadness that Gulph put aside his own misery.
“You don’t know that Fessan’s here,” Gulph said. “He’s probably safe somewhere, planning the next attack.”
“Perhaps,” Ossilius replied.
The following day Gulph found himself seated once more at the table in Lady Redina’s courtyard. He still felt dazed by his meeting with Kalia, and although he knew he should be hungry, the familiar selection of fresh fish and bowls of tiny steamed vegetables held little appeal. He was sitting close to the vase again, he saw with relief, so he could at least tip away his goblet of wine when he got the chance. He’d just have to try to eat the rest.
“And this young man is Gulph,” Lady Redina was saying. With a start he realized she was introducing his party to the handful of Celestians also invited to the feast.
“Pleased to meet you,” he mumbled, forgot the Celestians’ names almost as soon as he’d heard them, then panicked as he considered what Ossilius had said about magic and memory.
Get a grip, Gulph! he scolded himself. You’re just distracted, that’s all.
As they picked up their forks, a sixth Celestian appeared around the corner of the house and crossed the courtyard to join them at the table. She was small, and very light on her feet. Her long, red-gold hair flowed like a pennant behind her.
It was Kalia.
His pulse racing, Gulph rose from his seat, his mouth filling up with formless words. Ossilius pulled him back down.
“Stay calm, Gulph,” he whispered. “Let us see what unfolds.”
“You are welcome, Kalia, if a trifle late,” said Lady Redina. She spread her arms and addressed the whole assembly. “This is a feast of welcome for our new friends. I say ‘friends’ and not ‘guests’ because you are all part of Celestis now. It is your home for as long as the crystal endures.”
There was something final about this that Gulph didn’t like. But he heeded Ossilius’s advice and bit his tongue. He glanced toward Marcus and Hetty. They were citizens of Idilliam—surely they’d heard the name Kalia before? Would they make the connection? But they showed no sign of recognition.
“It is pleasant to see you again,” Kalia said to Gulph, helping herself to a plate of oysters.
Again, Gulph tried to speak, and failed.
“Oh. Do you know our new friends, Kalia?” Lady Redina’s voice carried smoothly across the table.
“Not really. We happened to meet yesterday. They had wandered into the chasm. I helped them.”
That’s all true. Gulph held his breath, waiting for Kalia to reveal what he’d said about her being his mother.
But she said no more. His secret was safe, and that was a relief. Still, curiosity burned in him. Kalia clearly recalled meeting him, but had she forgotten what they’d talked about? Was she affected by whatever magic held sway here too? Or was she simply being discreet?
There were so many questions.
How can I ask any of them without giving myself away?
Then it came to him.
After emptying his wine goblet surreptitiously into the vase, Gulph cleared his throat and said, “Do you know someone called Sidebottom John?”
Lady Redina smiled warmly and spread her arms wide. “I know everyone in Celestis.”
This idea was oddly unnerving. Gulph pressed on. “Well, I met him here yesterday. He was a jester in the Tangletree Players—we’ve known each other for years. But when I approached him, he didn’t recognize me. Isn’t that peculiar?”
“The poor man,” said Lady Redina. “How very sad.”
“Do you know what happened to him?”
“Your friend was discovered wandering by the silver lake. I believe he must have found his way down to Celestis from the world above, just as you and your friends did, Gulph.”
We hardly “found our way.” We fell.
“As for the state of his mind, I judge that he is suffering from the shock of war. You have told me about the recent terrible events in Toronia—the fighting, the atrocities. Is it any wonder his mind has closed up like a flower?” She shook her head. “The poor, poor man.”
“I suppose you’re right.” Ossilius had suggested the same, after all.
“Perhaps . . . if your friend were to spend a little time with you, his memory might be stimulated.”
Before Gulph could say anything, Lady Redina was snapping her fingers and telling a servant to seek out Sidebottom John and bring him to the feast.
Gulph didn’t know what to say. He’d started out convinced that Lady Redina was hiding something, yet here she was clearly willing to help.
And if it works—if I can help him remember—perhaps I can help my mother, too.
“Thank you, Lady Redina,” he said, toasting her with his empty goblet. “You’re very kind.”
With the meal over, the dinner guests left the table and began to mingle and chatter in the garden. Gulph strolled alone between rows of sculpted ruby roses and beneath overhanging crystal fronds that tinkled like chimes in the breeze. At any other time, he would have been curious to explore, but all he was really interested in was seeing his friend.
At last the servant returned. Trotting after him was a beaming Sidebottom John.
“I remember you,” John cried immediately, seizing Gulph’s hand.
Gulph grinned and felt his heart swell. “You do? You really do?”
“By the gollies, I do! We did meet on the path yesterday. I had my fruits!”
Gulph felt crushed. “Is that all you remember, John?”
“On the path.” John nodded vigorously. “We was on the path. You, and me, and the fruits.”
“Yes. Yes, we were. But what about before that? Do you remember Idilliam?”
“Iddle Ham?”
“We performed for the king. Then everything went . . . there was fighting and . . .”
Gulph’s words dried up as Sidebottom John’s face grew slack with incomprehension.
How can I get through to him?
“You like fruit, yes?” he said with sudden inspiration.
John’s face lit up. “Fruits is my favorites.”
“Stay there!”
Gulph grabbed three apples, as shrunken as the tiny vegetables, from a bowl on the table, then drew John to a secluded spot behind an outcrop of green crystal. Out of sight of the other guests, he bent his knees a little, then began to juggle the fruit.
“That’s good!” John exclaimed, clapping his hands together like a delighted child. “That’s is clever.”
Gulph continued to juggle. The apples rose and fell in their endless round. It was a kind of practical magic—the kind of magic anyone could do.
No—not just anyone.
“You can do this too, John,” he said. He stopped juggling and let the little apples drop, one after the other, into his left hand, then held them out. But Sidebottom John backed away, shaking his head.
“Oh no, John can’t do the flippities. That’s for the clever folk. Like you.”
“But you can do it, John. You really can.”
Something flashed momentarily across John’s face: a fleeting expression of . . . what? Remembrance? Sadness? Fear? Gulph couldn’t tell. It was there and gone too quickly.
“No,” John said emphatically. “John doesn’t do that.”
“All right. How about this?”
Gulph dropped the apples, bent double, and went into a handstand. Still on his hands, he walked a complete circle around John. When he was back where he’d started, he jumped onto his feet again.
“That’s clever too.” John clapped halfheartedly, but his brow was creased.
“You can do it, John. You taught me how!”
“I doesn’t remember that!” Tears sprang to John’s eyes. He started backing away. “Why d’you tell me things I doesn’t remember? I
doesn’t even know you. Go away! You makes my head hurt!”
Gulph pursued him. “Please, John, try!”
“Go away!”
“You have to remember!”
“You isn’t my friend! Go away!”
Why won’t you just remember! he thought, ashamed at the sudden wash of anger, but powerless to prevent it. By now he’d backed Sidebottom John against the green crystal outcrop.
“What did this to you, John? Was it some kind of magic?”
“Don’t like magic!” John batted at Gulph with his hands, trying to push him away.
“Please, John, I just want to help you!”
“Don’t need no help! Just want to go home!”
“Where is your home, John? Do you remember that?”
“Go away!”
Gulph’s head felt hot and dry, as if a sandstorm were scouring the inside of his skull. What’s happening to me? Then he recognized the sensation: it was the peculiar, arid feeling that came over him whenever he was about to turn invisible. What he’d come to think of as “desert trance,” although what deserts had to do with invisibility he had no idea.
The feeling intensified. Heat thumped through him, filling him up. Just when he thought he was ready to burst, he felt himself spilling out of his body and into the humid, Celestian air. The sand was pouring out through his eyes, his nose, his mouth, and he was the sand, and the sand was him. John’s face grew enormous before him, and then blurred, and then . . .
I am John. I am inside the cave of his head, looking out through the windows of his eyes. There is movement, dancing light. Sun through smoke. I am afraid, hiding, making myself small. A vertical line of stone: the pillar I am hiding behind. Into the shadows. Hide, John, hide! But my friends . . .
There is Willum, there is Dorry, and there, oh, there is Pip. The players. The Tangletree Players. My friends, in the sun, in the smoke.
In chains.
My friends are in chains, and the chains are in the hands of the undead, the rotting monsters, the bone-men, and they are herding my friends like cattle, and all I can do is hide and watch. I have escaped, but my friends are taken, my friends, oh, my friends are . . .
He was stumbling backward, panting hard, shocked to the core. The eerie sensation of leaving his body had come and gone in the blink of an eye. He’d been Gulph, then he’d been John, and now he was Gulph again. He palmed sweat from his forehead and sat down hard on the crystal ground.
“Is you all right?” said Sidebottom John. He looked puzzled but otherwise unaffected by their brief meeting of minds.
Gulph clambered to his feet. His heart was a horse bolting through his chest. He stared into John’s eyes, the very eyes which, just a few breaths before, he’d been looking out of.
Not out of his eyes. Into his memory.
Was that true? Had that really just happened?
Are they really alive? Willum? Pip? All the others?
He’d never seen the undead taking prisoners before. They just transformed the living into more walking corpses. What cruel, new plan of Brutan’s was this?
Gulph didn’t care. If what John had shown him was true, there was only one thing that mattered now. He clapped Sidebottom John on the arm. “Thank you, John.”
“What did John do?”
“More than you know.”
Gulph marched back between the lines of ruby roses and made for Ossilius, who was standing near an elegant crystal sculpture of a swan, deep in conversation with Marcus.
“Ossilius!” Gulph hissed. “They’re alive!”
“Who is alive?”
“The players. Pip. The others. My friends. They’re alive, all of them!”
“Gulph, wait. How do you . . . ?”
“It doesn’t matter. They’re alive, and that’s that. We have to go back. We have to go back to Idilliam and rescue them!”
“Whom do you wish to rescue?” The voice belonged to Lady Redina. Gulph hadn’t heard her following him; she must have moved in complete silence.
He was about to repeat what he’d said to Ossilius, when he stopped himself. He’d already told her he thought Pip and the others were dead. How could he explain his sudden change of mind?
“Er, my friends,” he stammered. “I was just saying that, er, that if they were alive, I would want to rescue them.”
Marcus looked confused. He opened his mouth, about to speak. Gulph shook his head minutely from side to side, and to his relief Marcus’s mouth closed.
“What makes you believe your friends might still be alive?” said Lady Redina.
“Oh, I don’t,” said Gulph. “Don’t believe it, I mean. It’s just . . . I just hope they might be. If John survived, maybe the others did too. That’s all.”
Yes. That’s all. I don’t have strange powers that let me see into people’s thoughts. In fact, there’s nothing unusual about me at all. I’m an acrobat, just an acrobat.
“I understand,” said Lady Redina. “You are loyal to your friends. The fact that you wish to help them proves that. It also proves that you are brave.”
She brushed the backs of her fingers down Gulph’s cheek. Her hand was hot.
“Sadly, there is nothing you can do. Even if your friends were alive—and I doubt that they are—you cannot now leave Celestis. The lost realm must remain lost. It is the only way to keep it safe from the wars above.”
“You mean we’re prisoners here?”
She looked affronted. “Celestis is not a prison. It is a haven. I am not a jailer, merely the one who has granted you permission to stay. That permission cannot now be taken back. It is the way of Celestis.”
Not a prison? I might as well be back inside the Vault of Heaven.
“What if I were to leave anyway?”
“Then you will be in exile. Those who leave Celestis may never return. All who try to enter the crystal realm a second time must die.”
Her expression was stern. Her warning was clear. Yet her words brought Gulph grim hope.
So, people do leave. All I need now is to find the way out. And take it!
CHAPTER 12
Everything the same.
Everything different.
Elodie sat at the banqueting table in the grand council chamber of Castle Vicerin, just as she had hundreds of times before. The polished dark wood of the tabletop gleamed in the light of the hanging chandeliers. The silver plates and goblets gleamed too. On the chamber walls hung tapestries celebrating the many triumphs of the Vicerin family through the ages. Near the door to the kitchens, servants stood, awaiting their lord’s command.
Everything just as she remembered.
Everything except me.
And yet, when she looked harder, Elodie saw that there were changes, small but unmistakable.
There are two footmen where once there would have been four. And the tapestry commemorating the Battle of Elder Gorge is frayed at the edge.
Glancing up, Elodie noted that only half the candles on the golden chandelier were lit.
The war is taking its toll.
“Have another cake, my dear,” said Lord Vicerin, waving his hand across the table with a flourish. He sat at the head of the table as usual, with Elodie on his right. For now, they were the only diners.
“Thank you, Father.”
She selected a tiny yellow cake from the plate. It was impossibly dainty, molded with flutes and flowers and iced with bright whorls of color. To Elodie, after weeks spent eating roast wild boar, dripping with fat and served on an upturned Trident shield, it hardly looked like food at all.
“Will anyone else be joining us?” She bit into the little cake. It was unbelievably sweet and sticky.
“I thought it would be pleasant to dine together.” Lord Vicerin inserted a lurid green cake into his mouth, trapping it behind his large teeth and mulching it with his tongue. “Just the two of us.”
His words echoed around the chamber. The vast expanse of the banqueting table stretched into the distance. Far away, in the
corner of the hall, the servants stood impassively.
“Lovely,” said Elodie, the last crumbs of the cake catching in her throat.
As she watched Lord Vicerin dab at his lips—they looked very red, as if he’d colored them with rouge—a sudden thought came to her.
Did you sit here, Tarlan? If so, what did you make of all this?
The idea of her brother in this ridiculous carnival of a castle—that wild boy from the frozen wastes of Yalasti, who spoke with animals and turned up his nose at the slightest hint of civilization—almost made her laugh out loud. She grabbed her own napkin and pressed it over her mouth.
“I cannot tell you how wonderful it is to have you back under our wing again,” Lord Vicerin said, setting his plate aside. “The day you were snatched away by those dreadful ruffians . . . Oh, Elodie, it was the worst day of my life.”
I bet it was, Elodie thought. You’d lost your little puppet, and your key to the throne of Toronia.
“I sent men after you at once, of course,” Vicerin went on. “I scoured the whole of Ritherlee, offered rewards. I was so desperate to have you safe once more.”
Under your control, more like.
Lord Vicerin beamed. Tiny blobs of icing had stuck to his teeth. “And now you have returned and our ordeal is over. Our family is whole once more.” He paused, clearly expecting her to speak.
“I can hardly believe it myself,” Elodie managed to say.
Clasping together his long, powdered hands, Lord Vicerin leaned forward over the polished table. “And here you must stay. Your protection is now my priority, dear Elodie. That is why I must ask you some questions, just a few. Questions about those awful vagabonds who kidnapped you. And about what happened. You do understand, yes?”
“Of course, Father.”
“Let us take this Fessan, for example. How much responsibility does he give to his lieutenants? Is he a dictator? Or is he one of those dreadful people who likes to talk out his problems until the sun goes down?”
“I don’t really know what a dictator is, Father.”
“Very well, then what of his tactics? I understand you were present at the Battle of the Bridge, although what a daughter of mine was doing in the middle of such a scene I cannot imagine.”
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