The Towers, the Moon

by Andrea K Höst

  "How far?"

  "The left isn't out yet," Milo said bluntly, though he looked very sorry for the girl. "But soon, I think."

  He added something in Latin to Ned, which Griff couldn't follow so easily, though he got the general idea because he'd already heard how this worked: if both bits of bone poked through before the Towers faded, the girl would vanish as well, returning with the Cour de Lune to their Otherworld. Because she would have become part of the Court, unable to stay in this world during the day.

  "Josette has gone for your family," Milo said next, back in French.

  "They won't come. They hate me now. Everyone hates everyone now, and won't stop shouting and arguing, because of what I am, because of what that shows." She curled even tighter. "Une bâtard."

  Griff leaned away from the girl, murmuring to Milo: "What's a bâtard?"

  Milo pulled a wry sort of face, then said to the girl: "None of that is your fault. Your family is still your family, and even if they argue and fight, they would want to be here."

  The girl shook her head, and murmured: "Bâtard," again, then added, "I am not Papa's any more."

  Ned, to Griff's surprise, said softly in Prytennian. "It means a person whose parents didn't marry."

  "Like the children of the Suleviae?" The rulers of Prytennia weren't allowed to marry, so all their children would be this. But Griff realised his mistake. Nathalie meant that her mother, despite being married to someone else, had had a child to one of the Cour de Lune.

  Griff could hardly imagine what it would be like, to be where this girl was. To not only find out his father wasn't his father, but to be becoming…not himself. Not just taller and hairier, and thinking that perhaps kissing wouldn't necessarily be like two slugs wrestling, but someone with things coming out of his back. And the children of the Cour de Lune left – became not a proper part of the world – when their wings started. Like all the rest of the Court, they would fade with the night, but they wouldn't return until their wings finished growing. That could take years and years, so long for some that everyone they knew would be gone before they came back.

  It would be like dying before you were dead.

  Gingerly, because he didn't want to disturb her back, Griff touched the girl on her elbow to get her to look up.

  "Who taught you to tie your shoelaces?" he asked. "And threw you into the air, and carried you on his shoulders, and clapped the loudest when you came first in a race? Those are the bits that matter. That's what makes someone your da, not anything else. Nothing changes that."

  Nathalie's swollen eyes filled with tears, and she began to cry again, in floods. Ned somehow got herself in the way, so the girl could clutch her around the waist, though there didn't look to be any non-painful way for Ned to hug her in return. The sobbing finally caused the left lump to burst, and unpleasant liquid gooshed down the girl's back.

  This was properly revolting, but Griff hoped it would at least make it a little less sore. He didn't know if he'd helped at all, or just made things worse, and joined Milo in looking awkward and peering up at the curving filigree arching over them, marking the progress of the sky lightening beyond the distinctly faded domes.

  "Nathalie!"

  Swarms of people, quite far away, shouting. They should look funny, trying to run-swim as quickly as possible across the park, but they were too frantic, and too upset. Nathalie looked up, then shuddered into Ned's lap again, but Milo uncurled her.

  "Not enough time," he said. "Come. Let them say goodbye."

  He and Ned each took one of the girl's hands, and bounced toward the swarm. Griff, following behind, could already see a difference, a strange greyness and lack of definition to the figure in the middle.

  Then the leading edge of the trail of people met them, and there were hugs and kisses and an awful lot of crying. Nathalie was already markedly less there, but still, there was enough remaining for her to hear, to look up, when a man – too far behind to hope to reach them – bellowed across the park:

  "Nathalieeeee! Papa will always be Papa. Papa will always love you!"

  Then the last of the glow faded from the Towers, and left the park with just a lot of weighted-down wingless people, crying.

  Milo, solemn-faced but practical, located Eleri and Josette, red-faced and panting in the trailing pack. "One drama is enough for the morning," he said, and diverted them back in the direction of the hotel.

  There were an unexpected number of people out and about, looking tired and worn as they, too, headed back to their hotels. People who had been up all night, bouncing or watching the fliers or the special acrobatic performances, or just being light. Griff watched faces, and noticed that hardly anyone was smiling.

  The Towers were magical and wonderful, and yet even when you weren't losing one of your family to them you would feel this flatness, this disappointment every morning, when the normal world pressed down on you.

  "She won't know anyone there," Griff said, as they passed beneath the outer dome.

  "They say the chrysalides are cared for most kindly, at least until their wings have developed enough to determine what Tower they belong to. Then…" Josette shrugged eloquently. "Then it would depend on how well you match your Tower, I suppose." She sighed. "I own, I am glad, after all, that my wings never came."

  When Griff stared at her, she laughed, though not particularly cheerfully. "It is supposed to be a wondrous gift, after all, to discover yourself part of the Court. You live for centuries, you stay young, and you can fly. Everyone checks for the start of their wings, and twice as often if they happen to be angry at their parents."

  The newspaper wedge was gone from the back entrance of the hotel, but Milo simply strolled around to the front and came through to let them in. They slipped upstairs, Josette vanishing with a wave. Griff, hungry once again, sat by the window picking over their fruit basket until Ned came and rubbed his shoulder.

  "Buck up," she said. "We made things a little better for her. I'm sure we did."

  "There needs to be a way to stop things changing all the time," he muttered.

  "Things stopped changing, you'd never get any new buildings," Eleri said.

  "Might be worth it," Griff said, since there were plenty of buildings already that he had yet to see.

  France made change obvious and inevitable. Every day the Towers glowed and the Court came and went. Four times each century the Towers swapped control, and supposedly all the people started caring about different things, and if their king wasn't good at the new things, they got a new king, and… It made Griff tired just thinking about French kings, let alone girls who grew up and sprouted wings and stopped being part of their families.

  He glanced at Eleri, and saw she was staring out of the window again with that expression she'd never worn until a few weeks ago. And they were all supposed to just get used to the new Eleri, like the French were supposed to swap from debating competitions, to the things that the Gilded Court did that people spoke about in hushed whispers.

  Was Eleri still Eleri? She at least was right in front of him, and not faded into an Otherworld. If he could change anything back, it would be his parents, not his sister, and a whole summer spent wanting to do that hadn't made any difference.

  Griff sighed, and opened the window, and then started planning the places Aunt Arianne could take them all, now that he knew airships wouldn't make him sick. If everything was going to inevitably be different, he'd best grab at the different things he liked, in case they too faded out of reach.

  Forfeit

  (i)

  Arianne Seaforth had spent her summer acquiring wealth, responsibilities, and secrets. Not least of these was an ability to catch flashes of emotion from those around her, and so when her oldest friend and sometimes lover, Martine Lourien, suddenly flared with shock, hurt and dismay, Rian naturally looked about for a reason.

  They were visiting the crammed and labyrinthine workrooms of the Sourné, Lutèce's premier museum, and although the basement halls
were badly lit, Rian knew there was no-one nearby. At least, not anyone with a heartbeat to betray them to Rian's new senses.

  "Martine? Something wrong?" She saw no obvious explanation among the racks of costumes, and the work tables festooned with pieces from the Sourné's Theatre Collection, all in various states of restoration.

  "Ah, no – my mind is off in the…I was thinking of Milo."

  Rian studied her friend's angular profile, but Martine bent to open the drawers of the desk that belonged in particular to her, and the dark wings of her straight black hair fell forward to hide her face.

  "Since he's still hauling bags at the Hotel, I take it Milo did not win the part in Bonheur's company?"

  Martine straightened, smiling as she always did at mention of her son, but then blowing out her breath in disgust. "No, and I was so sure that they wanted him! It seemed certain! But I have hopes of his latest audition, for he is perfect for Tesaire! It is not mere partiality that makes me say so."

  "Death and the Moon is in production?"

  "Yes, at the Voltari. Milo reads Tesaire so well. They simply cannot overlook him."

  Rian could feel Martine's frustration, but also a good deal of confidence. The problem was not Milo, then. From the way Martine was checking and re-checking every drawer, it looked like something was missing from among the pieces she was restoring.

  "Isn't something like the Moon desperately unfashionable now that the Gilded Tower is ascendant?" Rian asked, eyeing the contents of the desk. A wooden mannequin head, a pair of embroidered gloves, and an elaborate waistcoat. A line of typewritten cards identified them as pieces from the Léon Bonnaire exhibition.

  "Bah. Why? It is romance, and tragedy, and skewers Rome. That does not go out of fashion. The actors, they will perhaps wear less clothing than they would have under the Sky Court, but Milo, he looks good without his shirt."

  Rian snorted at this frank assessment, but then fell silent, and let the break in the conversation stretch as Martine continued to unobtrusively search. The collection bequeathed by France's great actor-playwright was more than extensive, but Rian did not need to puzzle out exactly what was missing. She knew her friend. Martine was not careless, and the loss of some prize of theatrical history would ordinarily spur her to decisive action. There was only ever one reason for that familiar pained betrayal: Milo's father.

  "Martine," she said, keeping her voice even, uninflected. "What has Henri taken?"

  (ii)

  "Why couldn't Henri stay safely out of the country?"

  "That is rhetorical, yes?" Étienne Boulanger paused in checking his reflection in the Tower train's darkened window to glance at Rian.

  "He was established in Aquitania! A devoted patron, an adoring audience. A playhouse ready to set him up in any role he fancied."

  "But Bordeaux is not Lutèce," Étienne said, with all the complacence of a born Lutècian. "It is particularly not Lutèce under the Gilded Court. You have no taste for the delicious, Rian."

  "I like to see what I eat," Rian retorted, but that only sent her handsome cousin into peals of laughter, oddly deep and resonant in the thickened air beneath the Towers of the Moon.

  "Or, at least, who," she added, with a faint quirk of a smile. "Anonymous games with masks sound all very exciting until you reflect on a few of the possibilities behind them."

  "Does anyone on your Never list have wings?"

  "No." Rian had never even spoken to one of the Cour de lune, let alone found reason to avoid them. "But wings will not necessarily make me like the person."

  "And yet you go all the same," Étienne murmured, pausing for a long, evaluating glance. "What can Henri have taken from Martine that would send you chasing after him?"

  "Does it matter?" Rian asked.

  "It can't be money. Martine has never had an amount worth the cost of all this." As a light outside the window marked their slow progress through the tunnel to the Island of Balance, Étienne gestured toward the extremely expensive clothing he and Rian were wearing. Fountain garb: the newest Court fashion.

  While Étienne's trousers and doubled layers of elaborate shirt and long-skirted coat were things of dark, durable cloth, Rian's dress drifted about her in an airy shimmer. Not a single garment, but four slips worn one on top of another, and fashioned of tissue-thin, faintly glowing and extremely sheer cloth – Fela, produced by the Towers themselves. The innermost was a transparent sheath that reached all the way to the ankles, with a single side-split for movement. The layers that stopped at the knees, hips and sternum were no thicker and, although they were looser, the silken cascade tended to cling. When a couple danced together beneath the Towers – with all the swirls and lifting involved in dancing in the unnaturally low gravity – their clothing would represent the stonework and the water of a fountain.

  Underwear was considered gauche.

  "And it's not as if Martine would have any amount of money for Henri to appropriate," Étienne was saying. "Let alone things he could sell to raise a worthy stake for the games. Everything else of hers he took long ago. But…yes, that's it. Henri hasn't taken anything of Martine's worth your while. But he's visited her at work."

  "Let's not play this game, Étienne."

  "Very well. Shall we talk of you instead? Young! Rich! Notorious! Three grand achievements in a few short months, and I do not know which I am to congratulate you for more."

  "I'm hardly the first to enter into the service of a vampire," Rian said, glancing at her own reflection, and then looking away from a face where almost twenty years had been erased. "I suppose becoming Keeper of the Deep Grove is an achievement, though I'm still working out exactly what I'm supposed to do in the role."

  The duties of Keeper were nebulous indeed, especially since they involved few set requirements beyond service not only to her country, but to Cernunnos and the Great Forest. The lack of explanation did not bother Rian nearly as much as the sense that she had spent the summer performing not out of choice, but tugged here and there, following someone else's script.

  "Prytennian ceremonial offices are not interesting," Étienne pronounced. "But I hope you wallow in the resulting largesse at least occasionally."

  Rian smiled. "Perhaps just a little. It's something to not be forever adding up how much everything costs – though I suppose I still add it all up."

  "Yes, and when you asked me to what it takes to visit the Gilded Tower, you winced at every second word. Cultivate insouciance, cousin! Let the diamonds drip from your fingertips with no more than a bored glance – and oblige me by ensuring I am there to catch them."

  "I think you will have to be satisfied with tonight's treat."

  Étienne bowed elaborately, barely keeping his balance, but then said: "How is it, Rian, that Martine can be so clever and talented a person as to overcome disgrace and work her way from dresser all the way to curator of the costume exhibit at Lutèce's most prestigious museum, and yet still be fool enough to let Henri anywhere near the collection in her charge? Now what has he taken? No, don't tell me, I already know." In his enthusiasm, Étienne bounced on his heels, and had to lift a hand to prevent his head from hitting the train carriage's ceiling. "Even Henri wouldn't run about pawning part of the Sourné's collection, so it must be something he thinks he can borrow and bring back. And that makes it entirely obvious."

  With weighty significance he took his mask from the seat beside Rian, and put on first the silver-patterned black cloth that covered his face from the nose down, and then the heavier black headpiece that sat like a low cap over his eyes and the top of his head. These were always animal-themed, and Étienne had chosen the traditional black cat design, with his brown curls hidden by a pair of ebony ears.

  The headpieces were an old tradition of the Gilded Court, a constant maintained through centuries of often wildly differing fashions. The most recognisable item in all of the Léon Bonnaire collection was the mask he had worn to perform before the Gilded Court.

  Well, the truth would have bee
n obvious to Étienne as soon as they found Henri. No matter: her gadfly cousin could hold his tongue when he chose to. The important thing was to get the mask back to the museum before Martine paid for Henri's folly with her hard-won job.

  Rian glanced uncomfortably at her own headpiece, waiting on the seat. Pressed for time, she had selected a mask at random from a wall swimming with feathers and empty eye sockets, only to find herself holding the stylised visage of a white serpent with scales of golden leaves to cover her hair. A rare pattern, and not something she could dismiss as coincidence since she had, only a few weeks ago, given her allegiance to the Forest God Cernunnos, whose emissaries wore the form of golden-horned snakes.

  She touched the laces that would hold the mask in place. Was this tangle with Henri another instance of Rian the marionette, dancing to the tune of gods? But what could Martine have to do with the oblique challenges Rian had been set after becoming Keeper of the Deep Grove? Those were most certainly related to Prytennia.

  Yet it was not as if she had left Cernunnos behind by travelling to France, for the shadow of the Great Forest fell over all of the world. Not sea nor desert nor even polar ice would take her outside the Forest's influence. Somehow, since returning to France, Rian's feeling of powerlessness had only grown.

  Lifting the veil portion of the mask, she settled it carefully into place before adding the headpiece. She looked at the world through a serpent's slitted eyes and considered the dividing line between chance and arrangement. This was perhaps the greatest change to Rian's circumstances, far beyond youth, wealth, and strange powers. This sense of being moved about. A pawn in a game she did not yet understand.

  "Go over the rules for me properly," she said, as the train began to slow. At least France's latest obsession came with explanations.

  "First, always remain veiled," Étienne said, fingering the dark cloth that covered his face below the headpiece. "The veil – and your name – cannot be wagered, removed, or lost."