The Towers, the Moon

by Andrea K Höst

  Floating in a forest of shivering trees. Hide-and-seek, one of dozens in gowns of silk and nothing. A woman with dark hair, a swan's face, and wings of ice shared a conspiratorial glance with Rian as they dodged the eyes of hunters.

  A game of Forfeit? Rian shook herself free and immediately lost herself to a plum-dark thread.

  Hands dragged her down, while the winds hauled her up, and Rian cried out, torn between death and the Night Breezes. And then Aerinndís Gwyn Lynn was there, lifting her free, and for a moment Rian had her arms wrapped...

  The thread twisted, split.

  Rian cried out, torn between death and the Night Breezes. A bone parted, and she screamed. The Night Breezes scattered...

  A thick scarlet shimmer caught her.

  She stood on tip-toe, bare feet planted on one of his thighs, and bit delicately into his long throat.

  A glimpse only, before a mulberry thread caught her.

  Lying at his feet in a pool of her own waste and vomit, wondering what Martine would do now.

  Rian squeezed her eyes shut, blocking ribbons and threads. She was on the floor, but not ill. And she clutched...not a lamp post. The rhythmic pulse of his blood steadied her. She listened to it, ear pressed to cloth, until most of the dizziness had gone, and then she risked opening her eyes.

  The ribbons and threads were all still there, but less dominant, and they no longer dragged her into them. This, then, was the power of the Tower of Balance. She had not known that their ability to 'follow the lines of consequence' meant they could see possible pasts as well.

  Should she be glad she hadn't seen anything of import? Only confirmation of her probable return, in a century's time, to bite him. And that she'd had her hair cut short, and was not so terribly dressed, the next time.

  That was useful to know, but she had to focus on the current century. One hand at a time, she let go of the Duke of Balance's leg.

  "How long have I been sitting like this?"

  A thrumming told her: "A little under an hour."

  She looked up, finding it uncommonly dark, but it was only when he shifted them that she realised that he'd had his wings folded forward and around them both. Their movement was like the night sky tidying itself away.

  "Do you see the world like that all the time?"

  "When I exert myself. I wished to know how much you could endure."

  Her current view was of leg and leg. So much leg. Rian stood, taking stock of herself. The straps of the tissue dress were askew, and she'd lost one of her soft dancing shoes, but she did not feel ill, and the dizziness was almost entirely gone.

  "And now you know," she said, finding her shoe. "Do you consider it a successful experiment?"

  "Yes."

  She felt more than heard the word. Rian's ability to sense emotion rarely worked with beings of considerable power, but she was suddenly sure that this mattered to the Duke of Balance. Not because he had taken a step toward bringing some complex scheme to fruition, but on a deeply emotional level. She took a step away from him, but only so she could properly see his face. This was inscrutable, but she had expected nothing else.

  "Well, since I don't know what you hope to gain by having the person I'll be drink from you, I won't wish you luck. But I hope circumstances arrange themselves to the point where you can tell me."

  "Thank you," he said, simply. "Alexandrine will take you to the halls."

  Accepting dismissal, Rian offered him a sketch of a curtsey, and collected her mask and veil. This last was heavy, and she counted ten night-dark teardrops hanging from its edge. She put it on without comment, settled her mask in place, and left.

  (viii)

  The Court member with champagne-coloured hair was sitting on the edge of the circular outer balcony, dangling her legs over the enormous chamber of coloured light. A single red thread and two ribbons phased into Rian's view above the woman, but Rian resisted any impulse to try to follow them.

  "Is your name Alexandrine?"

  The woman glanced up at her, and nodded.

  "Mine's Rian. Do you ever find it difficult not to talk about all the things you see and hear during the competitions of the Court?"

  "Not at all," Alexandrine said. "Most of it is very dull. The interesting matters are those that it would be sheer stupidity to discuss." She stood up, still more than a foot taller than Rian, but no longer seeming so formidable.

  "Do you ever wish you could participate?"

  Alexandrine's smooth features twisted with lively amusement. "For every thing I might envy, there are ten I am glad to avoid. Fashion, for instance."

  Rian laughed, and allowed herself be picked up by the armpits once again. But instead of launching into the shifting light below, they changed location with abrupt, unsettling immediacy, to an alcove in a curving corridor.

  The slope told Rian they'd left the area around the Tower of Balance, and she was not surprised when a few lazy beats of Alexandrine's wings brought them to the entrance of a completely different open room. The upper assembly hall of the Gilded Tower.

  Rian's first impression was of space and music. The place was enormous – larger even than the antechamber of the Hall of Balance – and even an orchestra should have been swallowed up by it, but instead sound filled the entrance where Rian and Alexandrine stood. Delicate, fluting melody, but with an underlying beat.

  Like the hall on the lower tier, the room sat at a conjunction in the curving filigree of the dome, and sloped grandly. One side rose in tiers, while the curving ceiling also provided a far wall, and was studded with wide balconies. The flattest area rested in between these two points, like a stage within a particularly vertical amphitheatre. Rian could not track the number of people – the vast majority winged – walking and flitting and dancing. One thousand? Two? And every one of them complicated by a halo of ribbons and threads.

  "The Dukes," Alexandrine said, indicating the balconies. "And the Sun Court."

  The five largest balconies, best positioned to watch the wide central part of the room, stood out for the height of most of the occupants. Four Dukes, for the four ruling towers, each as attenuated as the Duke of Balance. Around their great chairs stood figures that were small only by comparison.

  The fifth balcony belonged to a collection of miniatures. No wings, no long spindly limbs. The Sun Court. A dozen humans, all of them veiled and masked, but doubtless the five seated would be the Royal Family. Even the Dauphin's young son was present – presumably for a ceremonial appearance, since the revels of the Gilded Tower hardly seemed suitable for a boy of eight.

  Rian's attention, however, was for the woman seated on the opposite side of the King from the Dauphin, Dauphine and their son. The Dauphin's older child, Princess Heloise. And, though it was impossible to be certain at this distance whether it was the correct mask, standing behind her chair was a slim man wearing the face of a lion.

  "Midnight approaches, and with it the night's primary challenge," Alexandrine said. "The rules are beneath the Time of Red Petals."

  This seemed to be an enormous arrangement of flowers, not too far to Rian's left.

  "What–?" Rian began, but Alexandrine was gone. Rian had been 'given the means' and now she, somehow, had to work out how to take advantage of the opportunity.

  The thick scent of roses swamped Rian's senses as she approached 'the Time of Red Petals' and found a clock the size of a cartwheel. Twenty minutes before midnight. Immediately below the clock's face, an elaborately curlicued notice set out the rules of an elaborate three-stage challenge.

  A hunt. A hunt combined with hide-and-seek. It would cost potentially all of Rian's Tears of the Night to play, put already-inadequate clothing at risk, and the winner would walk away with, according to the notice, 'A Pool of Tears'. A fortune dazzling enough to momentarily steal Rian's breath.

  Forfeit is a game you play to lose.

  Étienne would appreciate all this enormously, and in other circumstances Rian supposed she might find herself stimulated
. But the need to win the Mask of Léon overshadowed every distraction. How? There was no obvious path to the viewing platform where the royal family were located. Would D'Argent enter the challenge? And what did the rules mean by "participants will be determined by song's touch"?

  Rather than dither, Rian found the nearest convenience and tidied herself, and then collected a small plate from one of the many tables of refreshments. Sitting down, she ate and looked for solutions.

  Music. Dancers, effortless and graceful in the sweeping movements dictated by low gravity. A swirl of la clochettes. A few feet away from Rian three red-winged women faced a taller blue-winged woman.

  One of the threads around the taller woman tugged at Rian, and she cautiously followed it, wary of ending up on the floor again. But – perhaps because it was not her own thread – she was not thrust so completely into experiencing 'a possibility', but saw it more as an image. The blue-winged woman, sword in hand, held the red-wings at bay.

  That was most likely a challenge during the reign of the Tower of the Drum. Swords were not at all easy weapons to use in low gravity, but there was a long tradition of using them during the Drum's reign. Rian was not quite close enough to hear whatever the leader of the red-winged women was saying, but all four departed together.

  A few minutes of experimentation showed Rian she could not follow every thread or ribbon of those in her view, but only those that tugged at her when she concentrated on them. Distance did not seem to limit this ability, so she turned her attention hopefully back to the Sun Court's balcony.

  Although the man in the lion mask had a generous swathe of ribbons attached to him, none of them tugged at Rian. Perhaps it was too far. She tried the Princess instead, and then the King, but nothing happened. Frustrated, Rian let out her breath and watched, hoping for clues to reaching the balcony, as the Dauphin and Dauphine rose and collected their young son, ushering him toward a rear door.

  A ribbon attached to the boy tugged at Rian, and she followed it and saw him a few years older, shouting angrily, then breaking off to scratch at two stretched red lumps above his shoulder-blades. Wings, in their first stage of visible development.

  Rian blinked away from the image, and stared at the small family. The boy was a chrysalide: a child born to one of the Court of the Moon and a human woman. And thus not the Dauphin's son, and not heir to France after his supposed father.

  Did all the members of the Tower of Balance know this? Was this the 'means' Rian had been given to regain the Mask of Léon? Princess Heloise would certainly…what?

  Heloise had been the Dauphin's only child until she was fourteen. The birth of her brother had meant that instead of eventually ruling beside a carefully chosen husband, she would be a tool to strengthen alliances. Common wisdom expected a marriage to Prince Gustav of Sweden within the year.

  Rian, who had met Gustav and liked him, and would never ever want to be married to him, did not know enough about Heloise to guess whether she would find his energy – and collection of mistresses – at all tolerable. The princess had been a noted participant in the salons during the Sky Tower's reign, when the Arts were celebrated above all else. She was also a patron of the theatres, but her reputation, balanced between honouring the Court of the Moon and matching the multiple intersecting definitions of a 'proper' woman in France, kept her generally circumspect. The friends known as her myrmidons were at least not openly her lovers.

  What would D'Argent do with information about the young prince, if Rian tried to use it to trade for the mask? Should Rian attempt to approach the princess instead?

  Was this her small choice with large consequences?

  Setting the question aside, Rian looked about her until she spotted an arbiter, and went to ask what 'determined by song's touch' meant.

  "Chosen by the sweet-singers," the man said, rather unhelpfully, and then added: "Listen. You can hear them."

  The fluting music had died away, to be replaced by a single pure tone. Thin at first, but swelling into a knife that cut through the breastbone and exposed something quivering. At the point where it became painful, the sound transformed into a chorus, an exchange of notes, and then they came, flooding up from the sloping curve beneath the balconies. Tiny motes in shades of soft fawn and dark brown, moving as a cloud but then dispersing and settling toward the room's revellers.

  Rian had expected birds, and so it was not until one of the motes dropped onto her head, and then scuttled down her arm, that she saw that the sweet-singers were tiny furry animals – similar in design to squirrels, except with a stretch of skin between front and back limbs. Not-quite wings. The one that had landed on Rian was smaller than her hand, but with twice as much plumy dark tail, currently wrapped around her wrist.

  "There," said the arbiter, faintly amused. "You have been chosen."

  "I've never heard of them before," Rian said, lifting her hand to better study the tiny creature. Primarily pale faun, with stripes of chocolatey brown edging to black across eyes, cheeks and neck, and then down the spine. Another shot past, not using its wings for flight, but instead vibrating its tail.

  "It is rare for them to come to the Towers," the arbiter said.

  Rian wondered whether the sweet-singers, like other inhabitants of the Court's Otherworld, were reborn human souls but, before she could ask, a murmur of interest rose and the arbiter turned, watching gravely. Rian followed the line of his gaze and saw that several of the tiny motes had zipped up to the level of the balconies.

  "The current leaders of the challenges, the season's champions, stand with the Dukes," the arbiter told her.

  But attention was not for the four largest balconies. Instead, the crowd – or at least the humans among it – watched King Florentin, and beside him his granddaughter, directly in the path of one tiny, swiftly-moving creature.

  The air of anticipation in the room was palpable. The Sun Court's princess might dress herself in impractical clothing and sit to watch the Gilded Court's revels, but participating, even behind the 'feather's breadth of deniability' of the masks, would be the height of poor judgment. There was an enormous gap between 'believed to be doing' and 'seen to be doing'.

  Did the princess have the option to not enter the challenge? Would it offend the Court of the Moon if she refused, or would she pay the price of her reputation for not leaving the room before midnight? She at least made no move to leap from her chair and dodge for the nearest exit, watching the approaching flyer as calmly as the Duke of Balance.

  The man in the lion mask stepped in front of her, and Rian was as pleased as the crowd disappointed. This development put D'Argent within Rian's reach, and at least suggested something of his personality.

  Raising the hand decorated by sweet-singer in front of him, D'Argent bowed his head to it, and then more deeply to the King and Princess Heloise, before turning and leaping precipitately off the balcony to the crowds below, the long skirts of his coat billowing.

  The sweet-singer riding Rian's own hand piped two ascending notes, so pure and piercing that Rian shivered.

  "Assemble with the chosen," the arbiter instructed. "You are to dance the song of the sweet-singers before each stage of the challenge."

  "They're calling the tune now, are they?" Rian murmured, considering the tiny creature firmly attached to her wrist. It watched her alertly in return. "And who pulls your strings?" Rian added in an undertone, then shrugged and joined the crowd.

  (ix)

  Five hundred chosen. Rian knew the number because one of the members of the Gilded Tower playing organiser was counting half under her breath as the dancers were gently prodded into groups sorted by height. Toward the very centre of the crowd they rose to nine and ten feet tall, but at least a third of the dancers were human, and most of the Court members were in the seven-foot range.

  Rian, unsurprisingly, found herself matched with other humans, and a single shorter Court member: barely six feet tall. The Court member, a woman with vividly blue wings wearing a peacock
mask, gave them a centre for a well-known opening formation.

  The Dance of Fives, as old as the Towers. The symbolism was obvious, and the woman of the Sky Tower seemed to relish situating herself as the Tower of Balance. Rian and the three others in the group placed their right hands on her shoulder, and waited as the last dancers shuffled into place. The whole room – audience, organisers, dancers – fell silent.

  Song, the sweet-singers, pierced the air.

  With a less familiar measure, Rian may have stumbled, but the Dance of Fives was something every child in France learned, and every visitor who wanted to dance beneath the Towers was taught. She moved automatically, and kept her step when wings flared in the groups around them. Even when her group's centre dancer, lifted ceremoniously in the air, stretched her wings to their fullest and spun before dropping down, Rian kept dancing, breathing in time with the pure and perfectly synchronised piping of the sweet-singers.

  It had the air of ritual. This was how the Dance of Fives was meant to be. The sweet-singers, the glimmer and flare of wings, the swirling leaps. Rian was mesmerised. Exhilarated. And, for the first time that night, aware of those around her as more than obstacles in the way of her goal. When peacock-mask swirled down, each layer of her fountain dress separated, and Rian watched, and felt the woman's pleasure, and thought about the forfeits she might pay – or take. If Aerinndís were here…no, Rian did not want to court Aerinndís in a milieu such as this. But she very much wanted to dance with her.

  The song ended, and Rian reminded herself of the one forfeit that was important that night. She looked around for a lion.

  A single turn discovered a kingly half-mask almost directly behind her, close enough that the wearer might have heard her indrawn breath if excited murmurs had not risen to fill the space left empty by song. The crowd was already moving, and Rian shifted a little closer, studying worn leather, tracing tiny lines in the cracked silver paint. The Mask of Léon, without a doubt, worn by a man of middle height who looked young and fit and was presumably an actor calling himself Lionel D'Argent.