All That Glitters

by Auston Habershaw

  “Can you get it off?” Tyvian asked.

  “To determine that, I’ll need to see it, won’t I?” Lyrelle beckoned him with one finger. “Come on.”

  Tyvian slapped his ring hand in his mother’s palm, face screwed up in what he imagined was a singularly juvenile sulk. It occurred to him that perhaps his mother was right about him—­he had not matured much. This, of course, made him even angrier.

  Lyrelle turned his hand over, peering at it intently. Tyvian felt the air shift slightly as his mother’s will shaped the ley of the room. Good sorcerers could use just their hands to work spells, great ones could just use their voice; Lyrelle Reldamar only had to will it, and it became fact. This reminder of his mother’s power was suddenly sobering. He took a deep breath.

  “It can be removed,” she said at last. “There would be dire consequences, though. In my opinion, it would be unwise to remove it.”

  Tyvian’s heart doubled its pace. “Do it anyway.”

  Lyrelle shook her head. “The ring is no longer a distinct entity, Tyvian. It works as a kind of capacitor for your better self—­drawing those parts of your soul that appeal to your better angels, if you’ll forgive the poetry, into itself and concentrating them. To remove it would mean removing much of what is good in you, which would likely drive you mad or even kill you. At minimum, you’d become a monster and a sociopath.”

  You mean like you? Tyvian wanted to say the words, craved the cathartic release they would bring, but didn’t. He clenched his teeth. “So you won’t do it?”

  Lyrelle patted his hand gently and spoke very softly to him. “Tyvian, why would I remove the ring when I went to all that trouble to get it put on you in the first place?”

  It seemed as though time had stopped. Tyvian couldn’t breathe, couldn’t even manage to speak. The words echoed in his mind like commandments from an angry god: . . . when I went to all that trouble to get it put on you in the first place.

  At last, he managed to get something past his lips. “What? What did you say?”

  Lyrelle released his hand and folded her own hands on her lap. She sighed. “What choice did you give me, really? My son, a smuggler and a thief, carousing with pirates and vagrants—­it was intolerable.”

  “You . . . you did this to me?” Tyvian held up his ring hand like evidence before the court. “H-­How?”

  “The Iron Order is a cell structured organization, but a poorly done one. Members, once they reach a certain level of redemption, are supposed to go about being Initiators, but they have no guidance or support to do so. I’ve studied them for some time—­fascinating group, if naive. Whoever set the whole affair up had some romantic notions about knights-­errant, questing about the countryside righting wrongs and bringing new members into the fold. In practice, it hardly ever works that way.”

  Tyvian stood up and stumbled back in his haste to retreat. “So, what—­you tracked down that thug, Eddereon, and enjoined him to slap this boil on my moral backside?” He snorted out a cynical little laugh. “Was there a sales pitch? Did you practice?”

  Lyrelle didn’t smile, but her eyes sparkled in the dying light. “Yes. And yes. The hoary old brigand was very pleased with the opportunity, to be honest. I got him away from the League, where they were planning to dissect him like a diseased frog.”

  “Tarlyth.” Tyvian shook his head. “You knew about Tarlyth.”

  Lyrelle rolled her eyes. “You met the man—­do you really think he was a double agent by dint of his guile? Please. I had been feeding that ridiculous idiot false information for years. I’m rather disappointed you killed him—­he was extraordinarily useful.”

  Tyvian rubbed his temples—­the complexity of his mother’s plot (how many years could it have taken to execute?) was unbelievable. “All this? Just to . . . to . . . shackle me to this thing?”

  Lyrelle snorted. “There we are again with your cries of ‘freedom’ and ‘self-­determination.’ Spare me, Tyvian. I gave you your freedom—­I left you alone for fifteen years, the prime of your youth, and what did you do with it? Hmmm?” His mother’s eyes were like spikes. “Pray tell me what you have done with your precious freedom? What have you to show for it? You’re homeless, Tyvian. You’re a wanted criminal whose only friends are impressionable adolescents and wild animals. Now, if you’d gone off and become a blacksmith or a tailor or married some sweet farmgirl somewhere, maybe this would be a different conversation, but you didn’t, did you? Take a good hard look in the mirror, my son. If you like what you see, you aren’t half as intelligent as you think you are.”

  Tyvian found himself shouting. “Why do you care? Why must you constantly warp my life to fit your aims? Why do this?”

  Lyrelle rose—­she was tall, straight-­backed. Her voice was flat and even as a calm sea. “Because, Tyvian, I am and your mother, and I love you.”

  “Kroth take you and your bloody ‘love!’ ” It was all Tyvian could stand. He stormed out of the solarium, regretting only that there was no door to slam.

  Like everything else in Glamourvine, the kitchen was a work of architectural elegance unrivaled by anything Hool had seen with her own two eyes. With its low stone arches and fat brick ovens, it was a strange combination of fancy and cozy—­like a warm den, but cleaner and prettier. Maybe it was the scent of the garden drifting in through the open top half of the Eddon split-­door, or maybe it was the taste of centuries of cookfire ash embedded in the cool stone floor, or even just the quiet of the summer evening, and that certain magic that fell over the world between the time the sun set and the bugs came out—­whatever it was, Hool dozed contentedly before one of the wide brick hearths, calm and at peace for the first time in months.

  The cook—­one of the few humans Hool had seen since arriving—­had surrendered her dominion over the kitchen to Hool, and she had taken advantage of it. The ham that had been intended for dinner existed now as only as a faint aroma and a polished bone left on a broad, sticky tray. She had then looted the stasis chamber of a great array of red meat and wolfed it down raw, grunting her approval—­it was fresh, as though just slaughtered. Hool knew it was sorcery, but for once she didn’t care.

  Eating in the human world was a difficult thing for a grown gnoll. In the Taqar, a pack of gnolls would take down a few bison and eat their fill in one grand feast. It would take hours—­after the initial drinking of the hot blood (a distinction reserved for the hunting party), the animal would then be butchered into meaty hunks and gulped down with great enthusiasm. The bits that escaped the initial feast would be roasted and then savored by the pack leaders and elders—­cooked meat was a delicacy—­while the young and the meek licked and cracked the bones. The inedible portions (the bowels, mostly) would be left for the jackals or the birds, and then everyone would sleep for the rest of the day. All told, Hool typically would ingest around twenty pounds of fresh meat per kill, and then would be able to go without food for several days. It was an efficient and enjoyable way to live.

  Humans, Hool had concluded, ate like bison—­they grazed, a little at a time, all the time. They ate several meals a day of very small portions, which meant they basically spent all of their waking hours either eating, preparing to eat, or cleaning up after having eaten. Hool had spent the better part of the last few years being in a perpetual state of mild hunger thanks to this nonsense. Now, for the first time in a very, very long time, she had been permitted to eat her fill. Her stomach shuddering in gluttonous joy, she lay listening to the crickets’ lullaby and imagined she was sleeping under the million stars of the Taqar sky with nary a human being in sight.

  Tyvian stormed in and slammed the door behind him. “Bitch! Kroth take her!”

  Hool sat up, her ears erect. “What happened?”

  Tyvian looked her in the eye, and Hool was fairly certain she had never seen Tyvian angrier in her life. His face looked like it was going to split at the seams and ru
n around screaming. “Don’t trust her, Hool! Don’t buy into the act, you understand?”

  “Who?” Hool cocked her head. “Your mother?”

  Tyvian threw up his hands, pacing the kitchen. “Who else would I be raging about?”

  “Why are you mad at her for lying?” Hool snorted. “You lie and cheat ­people all the time. You like doing it.”

  “This is not the same. I do what I do to be free, and she does what she does to clap ­people in chains, Hool—­she’ll do the same to you, if you let her, understand? She isn’t a mother, she’s a slave mistress, dark-­hearted as the blackest Kalsaari fleshmonger!”

  Hool laid her ears back. “Don’t talk about your mother that way!” she barked. “She loves you!”

  This made Tyvian’s face turn practically purple. “That,” he snarled, jabbing a finger in Hool’s direction, “is complete bullshit! Pernicious, fatuous nonsense!” He then stormed out the Eddon door and into the garden.

  Hool watched him go and shook her head. “If he were my pup, I would beat him. Stupid humans,” she muttered in gnoll-­speak. She lay back down, turning herself around a few times to get the position just right, and put her head on her hands.

  But she couldn’t sleep. Hool knew it instantly—­sleep would not come. It would not come because Tyvian was about to do something very stupid, and she was the only one who could possibly prevent it. Worse still, if she didn’t prevent it, she would wind up alone here, in this hostile land full of sorcery and hordes of smelly humans, and have no way of getting Brana and Artus back from whatever foolish trouble they had gotten themselves into. Hool sighed—­being the voice of reason was never a rewarding job.

  She got up and took the door into the garden. Outside, the dusk dulled the wondrous flora into submission, letting fireflies take the stage as they drifted lazily on a humid breeze. She caught Tyvian’s scent among the riotous array of smells wafting from the garden and set about following it.

  Tracking him, she soon found herself in a hedge maze lit by strange, phosphorescent flowers sprouting from the hedges themselves. Abruptly she realized Tyvian’s scent had vanished—­sorcery. She might have called out, but that would only reveal where she was—­that was a stupid, human thing to do. She was a gnoll; she was a hunter. She put her ears back, crouched low in the manicured grass and stalked her way forward.

  There were no human sounds in the maze—­just the sound of the crickets and, farther away, an orchestra of swamp frogs seeking a mate. A minute later, taking a few turns on instinct, Hool found herself in a wide-­open space at the center of the maze. It was dominated by a broad, perfectly circular pond in which floated hundreds of lily pads and water blossoms. Fireflies buzzed around the pond’s placid surface, granting the whole place an eerie starlight glow.

  There, sitting on a stone bench at the edge of the pond and glittering like the moon, was a beautiful woman who smelled so strongly of magic it made Hool’s eyes water—­it had to be Lyrelle Reldamar. The sorceress looked at her with Tyvian’s eyes. “Finally I meet the mighty Hool—­I’ve been waiting for you.”

  Hool didn’t know how to react—­she had never seen a human so unconcerned by her presence before. It was unnerving. “What do you want?”

  Lyrelle motioned for Hool to sit on the bench next to her. “To talk, that’s all. One mother to another. It is so very rare that I am hostess to a great gnoll of the Taqar.”

  Hool approached slowly, a few steps at a time, her hackles raised. “You are a sorceress—­I don’t like that.”

  If Lyrelle heard her, she gave no sign. “How would you describe your experience as a human female? I understand you’ve been going about in a shroud for some time now, correct?”

  Hool’s eyes narrowed. “How would you know that?”

  Lyrelle shrugged and smiled sweetly. “Sorceress, remember?”

  Hool settled on her haunches about three paces from Lyrelle. “Human men are idiots. They have no discipline. They are spoiled. I don’t know how you let them boss you all around.”

  Lyrelle laughed; her voice was like music. “Oh, but not all of us do, dear Hool.” She passed her hand, palm downward, over the pool of water and gazed into it. “Of course, those of us who do not obey draw the ire of the men who seek to dominate us. They call us names—­witch, temptress, liar . . .”

  “I know. Does this have a point? I am looking for Tyvian.” Hool edged closer, trying to see what Lyrelle was looking at in the pool, but from her perspective it just looked like still water.

  Lyrelle fell silent for a moment, then took a deep breath. “Your son—­your pup—­what is his name?”

  “Brana. Why?”

  “You are upset with him, aren’t you?”

  Hool didn’t like where this was going; her body tensed. “How do you know that? Can you read my mind? Stop it.”

  Lyrelle sighed. “All creatures desire one thing above all other things—­freedom. They wish to be free to determine their own path, to shape their own fate. This is true, yes—­you’ve felt it, I’ve felt it. All of us. It’s very sad, really.”

  “Why? What do you mean?” Hool shook her head. “You are trying to confuse me.”

  Lyrelle stood up and stepped to the edge of the pond. She looked Hool in the eye. “When was the last time you were truly free?”

  Hool thought, despite herself. She thought back to life on the Taqar, running with the pack, the breeze through her fur. Was that freedom? Maybe not—­she was bound by various obligations to the pack even then. “You are trying to trick me.”

  Lyrelle smiled. “Your son, my son, you, me—­all of us want to be independent of the world around us. We all buy into the fiction that we make our own decisions, but we do not.” She touched a finger to the surface of the water, sending ripples out in every direction. “As mothers, we understand this, don’t we? As soon as you look into the eyes of that screaming little thing and it looks back at you . . .” Lyrelle closed her eyes, breathing deeply. “ . . . you know your choices are no longer your own. You are bound, more keenly than any sorcerer ever bound any demon.”

  “You’re saying that Brana doesn’t understand this. Neither does Tyvian.” Hool nodded. “What does that have to do with me? Why are you bothering me with it?”

  Lyrelle opened her eyes. “Do you think I’m a monster, Hool?”

  Hool snorted—­that was some question to be asked by a human. “No. There are no monsters.”

  Lyrelle laughed again. “Oh, there are—­there very much are, my friend, let me assure you. But I am not one. I have simply recognized my place in the world—­I am not free, not any more than you are. I am bound to the things that make me who I am. Those who call me witch simply misunderstand my guile for cruelty.”

  Hool frowned. The woman was talking like a lunatic. “Why are you telling me all this?”

  Lyrelle laughed. “I’m distracting you, Hool.”

  Hool stiffened. “What?”

  Lyrelle nodded. “I need to keep you out of the way long enough so that the Defenders don’t encounter any surprises while arresting my son.”

  Hool stood. “WHAT?”

  Lyrelle, though dwarfed by the size of the gnoll before her, seemed entirely at ease. “Why yes—­haven’t you noticed the maze has changed?”

  Hool lunged for Lyrelle but passed through where the sorceress ought to be. There was nothing there—­only the fading shadow of the great sorceress’s simulacrum. Her voice floated on the wind. “It is for the best, Hool. It is best for our sons, too.”

  Hool spun around, looking for an exit to the clearing—­there was none, or none easily seen. “No!” She rushed to the hedge, trying to force her way through, but the enchanted plants pushed her back out. “NO!”

  Above, in the distance, Hool heard the cry of griffons on the wind.

  CHAPTER 17

  ARRESTED

  Tyvia
n knew who the gardener he had seen through the window was. He knew it in his bones.

  He stormed past the perfectly coiffed flower beds and the artfully arranged wisteria vines; he pushed his way through a hedge (a childhood shortcut, now overgrown), skipped across the stepping-­stones in a reflecting pool, and found himself at the gardener’s shed. There was a fire burning inside, throwing a cheery light through the single, vine-­wreathed window. Tyvian didn’t bother knocking. “Eddereon! Come out here! Face me!”

  The door opened and there stood Eddereon, but not the hairy mountain-­dweller Tyvian had first met. He had shaved and cut his hair; he wore a simple white shirt and blue canvas trousers, but they were clean and well-­kept, as though regularly laundered. But for his size and the wild, black chest hair curling out from beneath his collar, Tyvian might never have recognized him. Eddereon smiled his toothy smile. “Well met, Tyvian Reldamar.”

  Tyvian resisted the urge to slug him in the guts. “Don’t give me that storybook bullocks, Eddereon. How did you know I would be here? How long have you been waiting for me?”

  Eddereon rubbed where his beard used to be. “Well, it’s been almost a year since your mother hired me. Ever since that stunt in Galaspin with the ballista and the schooner—­lost track of you there, so I came here.”

  Tyvian scowled. “Thick as thieves, you and Lyrelle, eh?”

  Eddereon closed his eyes and nodded, sighing. “She told you. Please—­won’t you come in?”

  Tyvian eyed the shed—­it barely looked large enough to contain Eddereon, let alone both of them. “Astrally expanded?”

  Eddereon shook his head and went inside. “I’m just a simple man with simple needs.”

  Tyvian scowled but followed him. There was a small hearth with a clutch of small logs, cheerfully aflame. Beyond that, there were two chairs, a trunk, and a hammock hung out of the way but clearly intended to be strung from one corner of the shed to the other. On the walls there was an array of hoes, shears, spades, rakes, and saws hung neatly between precisely placed wooden pegs. Eddereon sat down to face the fire; when Tyvian sat down across from him, their knees were touching. Tyvian tried crossing his legs, but that would mean roasting either a foot or a knee over the fire. He resigned himself to pressing his knees together, like a virgin at church.