Wayfarer (The Empyrean Chronicle)

by Siana, Patrick

  “No, no,” he said, “I’m not ready.”

  Asa’s hands were on his own, holding him fast, tears pouring down her face. Another wave of pain came and with it that terrible white—a sun-bleached, bone-white, void of space or time. “Asa, I can’t see...”

  The pain ebbed but he was falling. Falling away from Asa, falling through the ground, falling away from the world.

  Chapter 36

  Appeal to the Elder Fey

  Bryn made a hasty retreat for the balcony. Unladylike sweat streamed down her face and stained her dress, so she chose the closest exit so that she wouldn’t be shamed before all the court at the queen’s week’s-end banquet.

  The cool air did much to restore her. A bracing breeze ruffled the wet hair plastered to her brow. She gripped the balcony and sucked deep, welcome breaths into her panic-tightened lungs. When her hammering heart slowed she eased her death-grip from the balcony and set off down the stairs on careful feet. She had walked these steps with Elias the night of the feast day that Eithne had called to celebrate the end of the Scarlet Hand’s brief but terrible reign over Galacia.

  She could still feel his hand in hers. Her pulse had raced that night too, but it was moved not by fear, but by something else all together. Bryn hated herself for the hot tears that streamed down her face, but she had no more power to stop them than she did a runaway carriage.

  The royal gardens had become their place. Elias was drawn to the mystic power of the wytchwood, and before he left Lucerne he had wiled away many an hour beneath her boughs. Since he had traveled via the spirit of the tree, the illusion that obfuscated her true aspect was dispelled to his eyes and held no power over him, ancient as it may be. When he took her by the hand, she too could see the wytchwood for what it truly was, and feel the inexorable gravity of its aged presence.

  Under the boughs of Atya, they were invisible to passersby. Hidden away from the ever watchful eyes of court and kingdom, Bryn discovered that she could truly breathe. She hadn’t realized that all her life she had held something of herself back, for she knew she was ever judged and measured by all around her from her own kin to the countless courtiers, guardsmen, household staff, and visiting dignitaries. All those years she had taken small and demure breaths, through her nose, using only her lungs, never breathing from her stomach, for she remembered well her mother’s admonition that a lady breathe only through her nose and never through her mouth, nay, she was never to be seen to exert herself or sweat in public unless she was taking a riding lesson.

  Secreted beneath the protective cocoon of the wytchwood with Elias, she had occasion to breathe through her mouth, from her diaphragm, as he stole her breath away with his kisses.

  It seemed a dream now, a fragmented memory from another life. At times she doubted if those stolen moments had ever happened at all, for since she had awoken on that strange and fateful day nothing had seemed right with the world. Her dreams had become bizarre and so vivid, and at times the visions encroached upon the waking world, and she had to wonder if she had gone mad. Since Phinneas had hypnotized her the dreams and disenfranchised memories had worsened by magnitudes, and she had thought on more than one occasion that perhaps they were nothing more than manifestations of her subconscious mind.

  Danica alone could understand her plight, and was the one soul she could trust with her terrible secret. Danica had suffered a similar affliction under the power of the nefarious Slade. That Danica was able to survive and return from the brink was all that gave Bryn hope. The White Habit was certain that the strange anomaly in the ether and the peculiar vortex that accompanied it was responsible for Bryn’s difficulties. She had vowed to keep Bryn’s secrets and to see her restored, even as she swore to find a way to rescue Elias from wherever he had gone.

  Bryn was glad for Danica’s faith, for hers had waned, and she had begun to despair that she would never see Elias again.

  Bryn looked up, her feet having taken her to the trunk of the wytchwood that Elias called Atya. Without his touch and the power of his singular magic she couldn’t see Atya’s true aspect, but she knew the abiding spirit of the elder fey was there, hidden beneath an illusion as old as her bloodline. She thrust through the secret shield of magic, though she could not even sense it ripple around her.

  She pressed her hands against the trunk as she had seen Elias do. “I cannot see you, or hear you, but I know that you can hear me. Elias has disappeared, presumably through some vortex in my chamber. I know that you can feel it. I also know that you have seen the world turn many times from your perch here. I know that your eyes can see far and wide.”

  Bryn’s regal appeal crumbled, as did she. She slipped down to her knees and pressed her face to the craggy bark of the wytchwood and wept. “Please, help us if you can.” She composed herself presently, with great effort. She turned and sat against the great tree, one cheek pressed to its trunk.

  She squeezed her eyes shut, and despite herself hot tears leaked from her clamped eyelids. “All I want in all the world is to see him again.”

  Overcome and dizzied from her emotional outpouring, Bryn’s head drooped to her shoulder and she fell at once into a deep and dreamful slumber.

  †

  A rustling of leaves brought Bryn from her slumber. Someone approached.

  The details of her dream had already grown hazy but she recalled having been in the forest glade in a deep wood—one that looked remarkably like the Hartwood, but it was different somehow.

  She took her time collecting herself. Whoever approached wouldn’t be able to see her as long as she was secreted beneath the enchantment of the wytchwood. She would wait for them to pass and then steal out.

  The sound came again, this time closer. Bryn’s heart dropped. The branches of the wytchwood herself had just moved. Whoever—or whatever—was present had actually pierced the enchantment of the tree and was beneath her boughs. It was nigh impossible for anyone that couldn’t see past the enchantment to gain the cover of the tree’s low-reaching limbs, because the enchantment made the tree look like a white ash ringed in bushes of Ittamarian thistle—a beautiful but wickedly thorned plant that stayed in bloom during even the coldest of winters.

  Whoever had designed the illusion knew their art well, for no one ever ventured closer than a couple of feet, fearing the poisoned barbs of the northern thistle; which meant that whoever was on the other side of the behemoth trunk of the wytchwood was either one of the Sentinels or someone that she did not want to encounter alone and unarmed. She turned about as footfalls sounded behind her, and discovered that she was wrong on both accounts.

  A lithe woman stepped from the cover of the boughs. She had caramel skin and—impossibly—dark and dewy green hair. Bryn tensed.

  “Fear not, Princess.”

  Bryn eyed the woman, her white gown and her bare feet. “You know who I am?”

  “You are known to me, yes. The Starchild has a special place in my heart, and you have a special place in his.”

  “Then you have the advantage of me, for I do not know you.”

  “Many were the hours you spent beneath my boughs with Elias. I was happy to hide you and him from the world for a while. I have grown lonely as my sisters have slowly passed from the world, and there is no balm for the weary, or the aged, like youth and beauty.”

  Bryn’s mind worked, trepidation overcome by curiosity. Memories flashed in her mind. Her distraught trip to the wytchwood in the royal gardens came back to her. “You claim to be the wytchwood?”

  “I am the spirit of the tree, yes. I am called Atya. Your appeal has not fallen on deaf ears. I am here to help you, and the star children.”

  Bryn took a tentative step toward Atya, who stood several paces away. “Do you know where Elias is?”

  “Yes,” said Atya, “but the question is not where but when.”

  “When? I don’t understand.”

  “You are looking for a time mage, are you not?”

  Bryn eyed the spirit, suspicious
once more. Was this a trick of their elusive enemy? “How do you know that?”

  Atya spread her hands. “I can see much from here, Princess. And like you I retain some memory of what happened before the rift.”

  “If what you say is true then why haven’t we seen you before? We could have used your help more than a few times.”

  “I am not here in the same way that you are. I inhabit an ethereal realm between your material plane and the astral plane. It would be more accurate to say that I am in a different energetic state than you, though I don’t think this will make sense to you.”

  “You’re bloody right about that,” said Bryn.

  “Humans have lost the ability to see a fey such as I, and that is why I haven’t had open communications with you before. And in this quasi materialized form, I can’t venture without the borders of my tree.”

  “If what you say is true, then how is it that I can see you now?”

  A warm smile lighted Atya’s cherubic face, and the guileless joy that Bryn saw there erased much of her doubt. “House Denar is an old bloodline. Did you know that red hair is a trait passed from the fey to mankind?”

  A shock of goosebumps broke over Bryn’s arms. “What is it you’re saying?”

  Atya’s smile turned coy. “Only that you may have yet untold capabilities, princess.”

  Bryn eyed the spirit and thought it prudent to not ask too many questions that she didn’t absolutely need answered. “Shiny.”

  “Still, certain...pathways required opening.” Atya’s expression became serious. “When you fell asleep beneath my boughs, you presented me with the ideal opportunity to activate your latent abilities. I apologize that I didn’t first garner your permission to do this, but as it was in the cause of helping Elias and your realm I figured that you would forgive me in this oversight.”

  “You figured right.” Bryn took a breath. “Very well, you’ve earned my trust. Now, what can we do to bring Elias home?”

  Atya drew closer, moving toward her with careful, deliberate steps. “There is one who has traveled to your realm in the past. One who can help you and Elias—a time mage, the last of them. Yet you must take great care, for he is dangerous beyond measure. If he decides that you or either of the Starchildren has jeopardized the great cosmic balance, he won’t hesitate to erase you from time itself.”

  Bryn swallowed, not entirely sure that she wanted to know what Atya meant. “I only want things back the way they were.”

  The fey’s face softened. “Princess, you are not mad, though you are caught in the middle of a withering Arcanum. Your stolen moments with Elias were real. He traveled here from Knoll Creek with the help of another wytchwood, my sister Lecia. She, myself, and Maya are the last of the wytchwood in Galacia, and this is, in part, why Elias’s parents settled in Knoll Creek. The Starchild knew that he would be invisible to the humans of Peidra beneath my boughs, so he traveled this way, for the sole purpose of seeing you in secret.”

  Bryn’s heart fluttered and she blinked away involuntary tears. “So the dreams are memories, then?”

  “After a fashion. As I said you are in the grips of a withering Arcanum. Your memories are from another timeline, for history has been changed and you are at the center of a temporal paradox. Thus, your memories are both real and unreal, for the things you remember both happened and didn’t happen.”

  “I don’t understand any of this.” Bryn scrubbed a hand over her eyes and took a steadying breath. “I’m not sure that I want to. Just tell me what to do. Please.”

  Atya was suddenly right before her, wrapping fever-warm arms around her in a maternal embrace. “Then listen well, child, and all will be well. I shall point you in the right direction so that you and Danica may secure Elias’s passage home. Let me tell you of a time mage named Rasen Motyl.”

  Chapter 37

  Time Mage

  “I can’t find anything on this bloody Rasen Motyl.” Bryn closed the ledger and pressed a couple of fingers to the headache forming between her eyes.

  Danica sighed and closed Olaf’s ponderous travelling memoir. “Nothing on him here, either.”

  “Then it’s a fool’s errand. Or a mad princess’s errand.”

  Danica flashed Bryn her wry smile. “None of that. We’ve only just begun.”

  Bryn locked eyes with the young woman who had rapidly become her closest friend. As a princess of a troubled realm and a covert agent she never had the luxury or the inclination to let anyone get close to her, save for her cousin and old Ogden. Danica was different. The southerner spoke frankly and without guile, at least inasmuch as they were concerned. “You are certain this is the best use of our time?”

  Danica rubbed her hands together to warm them. The tower was cold. She understood Bryn’s concern. The capital was atwitter with the mysterious goings-on in Lucerne. The story of the half-serpent half-man had kindled like a torch on dead pine needles and with each telling it had grown more fearsome. “I do not doubt my encounter with Elias in the dream world, not for a moment. Your experience with Atya is certainly no stranger than that. If you say it happened, I believe you. I also understand why you want to keep this to yourself, and I promise to keep this secret for you.”

  Danica leaned forward and caught Bryn’s eyes with her own. “And I’ll answer the question you’re afraid to ask. I don’t think you’re mad. Trust me, I know mad, and you, sister, are not. Elias—and Galacia—need us. It’s our time to be the heroes. And we follow whatever lead we have until the trail grows cold, and then we follow it some more.”

  “You called me sister,” Bryn said with a shy smile, an expression that was foreign on the brazen princess’s features.

  Danica spoke without thinking. “I know that you love Elias. Perhaps in another life we could have been sisters.”

  Bryn reached across the ancient table and squeezed Danica’s hand. Tears pooled in her eyes, but she didn’t feel self conscious in front of Danni. “Let’s find this time mage. Let’s get our boy back.”

  †

  Eithne smiled down at Lord Oberon—one of the perks of sitting in the tall chair. The wayward High Lord had been glaring at her since the council had begun. “You’ve something to say to me, Oberon?”

  Oberon’s eyes hardened further at her obvious choice to drop the honorific of his title whilst addressing him. “The segment of the council for airing open concerns has not yet come, Your Grace.”

  Eithne smiled. “Lucky are you, sir, that passed are the days when it could be considered treason to stare daggers at your Monarch.” When Oberon sniffed and averted his gaze she said, “Speak. I command it of you.”

  Oberon made a study of straightening his cuffs. Eithne’s smile broadened as she recalled an era when the men didn’t look as pretty as the ladies of court. “Very well, Your Grace,” Oberon said. He glanced around the other lords who sat at the high table. “There are some of us that are more than a little concerned that your Seneschal, dear old Ogden, has been a covert magus all these long years.”

  “Do you now find yourself afraid of dear old Ogden, Lord Oberon.”

  “Hardly,” said Oberon, “but some of the Council of Six feel that this secret brooks a mistrust between her Grace and the other ruling lords of this land.”

  “Do you not know a few arcane tricks?” asked Eithne, who knew how horribly Oberon had faired with his tutors from Arcalum.

  “Well, yes, of course, but—”

  “And do you feel the need to report every minor cantrip you know to this council?”

  “Certainly not,” Oberon said, “but that is hardly the same thing. The charter clearly states that no Lord or high ranking member of the court may hold rank at Arcalum. A separation between crown and Arcalum has existed for centuries, and for good cause, lest I need remind you of the business with Faalor the Black.”

  Eithne silenced him with a flick of her wrist. “I do not require a history lesson from you. Yet I may remind you of another historical law speaking of the indepe
ndency of the government and the church. A history that you clearly need reminding of as you seemed to have forgotten that particular lesson from the past when you got into bed with the apostate Sarad Mirengi.”

  Oberon acquiesced the point by flushing and taking a long pull of his goblet. “As to the other matter?”

  Eithne leaned back and relaxed her shoulders. “Ogden does not have any official rights at Arcalum. He is of my household, and his loyalty brooks no questioning. He stood by me during the coup, through my short sabbatical, and was one of the handful that took back Peidra against an occupying force while you and your two lackeys cowered in your homes behind a ring of mercenary steel.”

  Oberon’s cohorts, reedy Lord Rabidine and bulldog-faced Lord Ogressa grew still and tried to look anywhere but at Oberon, or the queen. This gave Eithne no small measure of pleasure, for she had anticipated this grievance, and had planned her response accordingly. Knowing Ogden waited close at hand, surveilling their meeting, she cast her eyes to the doorway that led to royal cubby and the throne room beyond.

  On cue Ogden cast open the door and walked into the room. He wore the traditional costume of court, but also a rich plum cloak draped across his shoulders with runic filigree sewn into the hem and collar. He held a thin white birch staff in one hand.

  “Shouldn’t you be wearing robes, Magus?” Oberon jibed.

  “We prefer cloaks,” Ogden said, “so as to keep our hands free and unencumbered.”

  “Tell us, Ogden,” said Eithne. “To whom do you swear your loyalty?”

  “The Crown, Your Grace.”

  “And beyond the Crown?” she asked.