“Yes, Your Glory,” Starlit answered quickly. “And so he has!”
“He came . . . and then he left?” Aislynn considered kicking another pillow to the floor, but then thought better of it as it would only keep the sprite here longer. “My,” she said dryly, “that is news, indeed.”
“Yes, Mistress,” Starlit continued, still carefully organizing the pillows, restoring the room to its perfect, pristine state. “The Seeker Dwynwyn has begged an audience with Your Grace to tell you the particular truths of it. Indeed, she awaits your pleasure without should you—”
“What?” Aislynn turned in sudden interest, completely spoiling her calculatedly morose pose. “Dwynwyn is here? Don’t just flit about, Starlit! Show her in at once!”
Starlit was so startled that she nearly dropped a pillow on her own. “Of course, Mistress! At once!”
Starlit expertly tossed the final pillow back in its place just as she flashed through the oval of the doorway to the antechamber beyond.
Aislynn stood quickly, smoothing out her delicate nightgown in her excitement. She nearly forgot the dressing coat, hastily snatching it from the back of a nearby fainting couch and tugging it on quickly. Aislynn panicked for a moment when her wings momentarily got caught in the vents at the back of the coat. She managed, however, to free them just before Starlit drifted into the room in as stately a manner as the small sprite could manage. The tall Seeker floated in behind her. Starlit tried to make a proper announcement, but Aislynn would not wait.
“Dwynwyn!” the princess shouted with a laugh. She ran across the room, quickly folding the Seeker in a warm embrace.
“Mistress Aislynn, how good it is to see you.” Dwynwyn carefully placed her arms around the young faery in return. “Is this a new pattern in your dressing coat?”
“It is, indeed, Dwynwyn—how very clever of you to notice! I’ve been ever so excited to show it to you. A Shivash trader brought it last week, and no one here has seen anything like it.”
Starlit, interrupted in her introductions and now completely forgotten, flared briefly in her frustration and then drifted back toward the anteroom.
Dwynwyn glanced at the retreating sprite. “Do you think I may have damaged that friendship?”
Aislynn laughed heartily. “Oh, I certainly hope so! Starlit is a good servant, I suppose, but she can be just so . . . chipper.”
“Maybe we should be grateful for the cheer while we still can.” Dwynwyn’s thin smile dimmed slightly at the thought. “Which reminds me; I was told you were up here brooding?”
Aislynn turned and walked them both into the room, her arm still around the Seeker’s waist. “I was brooding . . . or at least trying to brood. I thought that brooding might lend me a more serious aspect which the courtiers might find interesting.”
“I take it you have settled on one particular courtier to torment.” Dwynwyn raised a knowing eyebrow.
Aislynn smiled shyly, biting her lower lip. “Yes . . . there is one in particular, as you well know!”
“Deython, of course.” Dwynwyn nodded. “How is your Qest-hai friend?”
“Well enough, thank you . . . though not as attentive as I would like.”
“He is of the second caste, Your Highness,” Dwynwyn said evenly. “There is only so much attention he could pay you without causing considerable scandal to you both.”
Aislynn pouted. “I know. But I enjoy his attentions all the same, and a little scandal might liven things up around here.”
“So you tempt him with your melancholy.” Dwynwyn shook her head as she smiled. “And how far into sadness did you find yourself?”
The princess frowned. “Not very far. It is difficult for me to sustain a really good melancholy. Were the truth of my existence more desperate, I might have some cause for depth and a more serious manner. But look about—my life conspires against any true brooding and condemns me to a shallow joy.”
“Mistress Aislynn,” Dwynwyn said, her eyes turning away from the princess. “The truth of what you suggest may be your undoing. Take care where your heart leads your mind and your words.”
“I shall take your advice, Wyn, as always,” Aislynn replied, gesturing to the Seeker to sit next to her on an overstuffed couch.
Dwynwyn smiled. “You haven’t called me that for a long time, Your Glory.”
“Your Glory?” Aislynn smiled. “You used to call me . . . let me see . . . ‘Slim,’ was it not?”
“Oh, please, Your Glory, that was many years ago!”
“Yes, but not so long that we are no longer friends.” The princess once again patted the couch, this time with more insistence. “Please, Wyn—let’s be with one another as friends. The reality of our stations may wait until another time.”
Dwynwyn sat down next to Aislynn. She looked carefully into the deep green eyes of the young princess. Both of them were about the same age so far as the cycles of the seasons were counted, but Dwynwyn knew she had seen far more truth in the world than her friend. “Truth ages,” went the old Fae saying. If this were so, then Dwynwyn was feeling very old in that moment. The burden she carried with her was one which she was loath to share with Aislynn . . . for as the old faery saying went, a shared truth can never be recalled.
Dwynwyn mourned her friend’s innocence, for the Seeker would soon be an instrument in its death.
“Where is Cavan?” Aislynn asked brightly.
“What?” Dwynwyn said suddenly, as though waking from a sleep. “Oh, pardon me, Aislynn, my mind was distracted.”
“How delightful,” the princess exclaimed. “I don’t often get to see you perform your powers as a Seeker. Is this how it often is for you? Does your mind leave the present in search of the new truth?”
Dwynwyn smiled. “Yes . . . and no . . . All truth is observed by the Fae, Princess. All truth already exists, so in that sense there are no ‘new’ truths: only truths we have not yet uncovered. This ability is in all the Fae. The only difference is in the abilities of the Seeker to discover new combinations of truth. We take truths that are known or discovered and put them together in new ways so that we might uncover deeper truths that have previously been hidden. That is where the Seeker excels; by using what is called a second sight to see that truth which had not been seen . . . Are you following this, Princess?”
Aislynn held perfectly still for a moment, her large eyes focused intently on her friend. Then, she said, “No. I don’t understand you at all.”
Dwynwyn sighed. “Perhaps my words are unable to convey it clearly.”
“No! No! I’m sure you said it perfectly.” Aislynn patted the Seeker’s hand. “I’m just, well, it is a truth for which I am unprepared as yet. Were I prepared, I would understand it.”
“Yes, Mistress, that is so.” Dwynwyn took the young princess’s hand. How cool and smooth her dark skin, Dwynwyn thought. How beautiful she was sitting here in her pampered cage. How Dwynwyn hated what she had to do. “There are other truths which you must understand now, whether you are prepared or not.”
“I certainly accept that,” Aislynn replied. “So may I ask again, where is Cavan?”
“I have sent him to my home,” Dwynwyn replied with the truth—as all Fae are compelled to do. The Fae know nothing but the truth as they observe it. Some truths were greater than others, however, and Dwynwyn could not be distracted by lesser questions. “Your mother has sent me to you. There are truths of which you must be made aware.”
Aislynn’s green eyes blinked. “If this is the queen’s truth, why has she not come to tell me?”
“She would have come herself,” Dwynwyn replied directly, “but she believes that I will better be able to answer your questions and convey the full reality to you in a way for which you have been prepared.”
It took the better part of the evening to explain it. To the Fae, truth is an absolute. It cannot be summarized or outlined or compacted. Truth required a full accounting in the mind of any Fae. They believed themselves immortal and therefore the
y had all the time necessary for the full truth—until now.
Dwynwyn recounted to Aislynn every particular relating to the situation, all the while searching for the boundaries of the princess’s knowledge. When her own recitation of facts connected with Aislynn’s understanding, then the Seeker would move to another aspect of the truth, searching again the boundaries of Aislynn’s awareness. From history, legend, reports, and observations, Dwynwyn wove a truth of doom, a truth of fear, and a truth of the unthinkable as though she were working with her bobbin lace.
The last strands of truth were eventually laid. Lord Phaeon had come boldly into the House of Qestardis and demanded the surrender not of the nation alone, but of Aislynn herself to him as the means to unite their kingdoms under his crown.
At last, when her recitation was complete, tears were streaming down Dwynwyn’s cheeks. “Now, my dear friend, you should have no trouble finding cause to weep and despair . . . as I weep and despair.”
Aislynn looked up. Her face, too, was streaked with tears. “So either I am to be sacrificed to this hideous Phaeon or our entire kingdom is to be torn apart by the dogs of the Famadorians and the dogs of House Argentei?”
“It is the truth plain to all the court of Queen Tatyana,” Dwynwyn replied.
“Then I must accept my fate.” Aislynn spoke through choking sobs. “I must be ruined. It is destined truth.”
“No,” Dwynwyn said resolutely. “It cannot be the only truth in the world.”
“There is another?” Aislynn asked tearfully.
“I don’t know,” Dwynwyn replied heavily. “That is what I have been called to discover.”
11
Famarin Gamesmen
Dwynwyn’s quarters were on the northern, land side of the Sanctuary above the main gate. The Queen’s servants, third caste servitors of the first estate, populated this section of the glorious structure. Maids, butlers, cleaners, servers, washers, dyers, tailors, cooks, chamberlains—in short, anyone who served on the floors of the queen—were all quartered in this section of the Sanctuary. Each felt the privilege of their caste deeply. They honored their ancestors for providing it and they honored their children with its inheritance.
The happy caste of royal servants could look out from the shining crystal panes of their quarters and down on the busy populace of Qestardis that was, in every way, below them. The laborer castes and trade castes of the second and third estates were all of lower rank. The servants looked from their windows and gave thanks that they were not among them. Of course, there were other castes above them—scholars, warriors, and a host of castes related to the royal lineage—which all looked down on the servant caste from their higher rooms of the Sanctuary. But to the servants, this was as it should be.
Only the Seekers upset their carefully ordered view of the world beyond the crystal.
Seekers, such few as existed, were included among the serving caste, although with some peculiarity. The abilities of the Seeker for the second sight mysteriously flowered outside of caste. Thus, Seeker talents might suddenly be evidenced in lower castes. When brought to the attention of the court at Qestardis, these rare and prized individuals were tested and, if found with this peculiar gift, elevated often far beyond their former caste stature.
Thus the other servants looked on the Seekers with a great deal of suspicion and not a little envy. Seekers were “out of their place” in the great scheme of the faery gods. It was all unjust and somehow unnatural. So the others of their often new peer caste shunned the Seekers, tolerating them to the letter of royal decree and not a degree further.
Dwynwyn ignored their disdain. It had become to her as a vague but persistent sour smell in one’s own house, something bothersome at first but, in time, blending into the background of daily experience. She knew their contempt but no longer registered it in her mind.
So it was that when Dwynwyn alighted on the Grand Servants’ Balcony, she took no notice of the scorn tossed her way with such a studied casualness. She crossed the polished marble floor of shaped inlay and down the long curving hall teeming with her fellow faeries in the service of the queen. She spoke to no one, and no one spoke to her. She could not have been more alone had she been at the top of the Star’s Throne peaks themselves.
She passed a succession of oval doorways shaped into the ornate wall. Each held a unique pattern coaxed from the wood from which it was formed. At last, she came to a door whose pattern was happily familiar to her. She touched her hand to its surface. The fibers of the wood warmed and twisted at her touch, separating as they pulled back into the framework of the oval.
Dwynwyn stepped quickly inside and gestured at the door for it to close immediately behind her. She just could not bear to explain the condition of her quarters to someone from the housekeeping caste that might happen to pass by her door. One glance around the room assured her that the sight might cause one of those obsessive pixies to faint and die on the spot.
Her quarters were decorated in an early-period bedlam—which is to say, they were not decorated at all. True, the outlines of the original furniture—endowed by the queen—were still discernible to the trained eye. They were nevertheless obscured by an explosion of colors, fabrics, objects, paintings, carvings, scrolls, clothing, bedding, scrawled notes, haphazard stacks of vellum, a menagerie of toys, and, especially, games.
Cavan flew raggedly into the room under a stack of Dwynwyn’s clothing. He strained against its weight, puffing his words out in short breaths. “I see . . . that you have . . . have been working.”
Dwynwyn winced. This always happened when she was under some pressure to discover a new truth. She always started her search with clean chambers—pristine, in fact—and then it all fell apart as she focused single-mindedly on the application of her skills to her work at truth-seeking.
She sighed. “Yes, I have been working. But I’m too troubled to concentrate just now. I need to relax.”
“Relax! With all the trouble in the kingdom you want to lie down and—”
Dwynwyn’s eyes locked on Cavan with a stare that froze him in midflight.
“It will take a few minutes”—Cavan bobbed again beneath the stack of clothes—“but I can have your bed ready for you.”
“No, I’m not tired,” Dwynwyn said testily, her gaze going out into the deep night. The city below her had quieted down into sleep. The glow of the city militia drifted through the still streets under her gaze. “I just want to think for a while.”
“Thinking is work,” Cavan huffed, dumping his burden into a large basket in the corner of the room. “How about a game? Something mindless?”
Dwynwyn chuckled. “Mindless games? That would be just fine, Cavan, but just for a while. How about sylan-sil?”
“What?” came the muffled response under yet another pile of clothing bobbing across the room.
“Never mind . . . I’ll set up the game,” she said as she removed the long mantle of her office from around her shoulders and tossed it onto the floating stack. It dipped downward under the added weight. Cavan groaned in the air but made no other sound.
Dwynwyn grasped several stacks of parchment from off the table in the center of the room and shifted them over to her desk near the window. There actually was no clear space on the desk either, so she simply stacked those papers on top of previous stacks with the mental note that she would need to separate them out again sometime later. In short order, she had cleared the low table as well as the chairs that faced each other across its surface.
“Do you know where I put the game?” she called out to Cavan, as she searched through several wooden cases stacked in one corner.
“I do not!” Cavan replied as he returned to the room. His glow had a decidedly rosy hue to it from his exertions. “How many times have you told me never to disturb your things no matter where you set them?”
“I know. It’s just that I thought you might have seen it while you were— Oh, never mind, I’ve found it.” She pulled a large case made
of polished rosewood from behind an avalanche of scrolls.
“Wonderful,” Cavan groused. “Our kingdom is about to be conquered and I get to stop and be bested by your superior play.”
“You never know.” Dwynwyn smiled, pulling an inner box from the sleeve of the outer case. “The fates may favor you this time.”
“It is your skill that I fear, not the fates.” Cavan drifted down through the air and settled onto the chair’s cushion opposite the Seeker. “Still, if it will help you rest, then I am happy to oblige.”
Dwynwyn opened the hinged outer case completely and laid it flat on the table, revealing the inner playing surface now framed by the sides. Beautifully intricate carvings formed grids and curving lines across its surface in a pleasing array. It was the beauty of the board that had attracted her to the game when she first saw it in a strange little shop in Bay Narrows. The shopkeeper there had told her he had purchased it from a merchant trader from Shivash but that he did not know anything else about its origins. There was something special about it, however, which had attracted her to it. The only problem she had was finding someone willing to play it with her. Playing a game with the royal family would be outside her place. No one of her own caste would have anything to do with her. That left her servant, Cavan, who, she had to admit, was tiring of losing to her so often.
“I’ll let you choose your colors,” Dwynwyn said politely as she opened the inner case. Four sets of eleven worn stones, each of a different color, lay within. Each was cut into regular facets with different facings, and each facing had a different symbol.
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