Crimson

by Warren Fahy

  Selwyn’s head rolled on the pillow, and his last breath extinguished the candle’s flame, leaving them both in darkness.

  Hours passed as the dawn began washing away the shadows, even as darkness fell deep as midnight over the new king of Ameulis.

  Chapter 2

  The Burning World

  The sight of his father’s ravaged body transfixed him. The sun seeped through the lightstone walls, suspending them both in amber. At last, Trevin broke away and strode to the high-arched window.

  He opened the shutters and the bracing sea wind swept back his tangled hair. His haggard face shone white as marble, absorbing the blazing sun. The irises of his eyes were black. His aquiline nose was chiseled at an angle to his upper lip resembling the profile of his grandfather. Trevin breathed the fresh air in and, at last, he turned, revitalized.

  Gathering his father into his arms, he descended the winding course of stairs past the tower’s galleries, salons, libraries, apartments and finally its servants’ quarters. The torches lining the curving corridor at the bottom of the stairs were now doused—servants must have tended to them.

  He realized there must be many people on the island and yet, since he had arrived, the Dimrok had seemed completely deserted. The walls around him were now lit by the watercolor radiance of the sun, filtered green, purple and blue through the maze of lightstone.

  The ceiling rose 40 feet as he entered the empty throne room. A shiver crossed the back of his neck. The wedge-shaped room made the empty crystal thrones of king and queen seem gigantic on their dais. Two standards spread over the wall above the tall-backed thrones. Woven in Ameulintian silk and Norlanian gold, one bore the device of Gieron, Bondairtlen founder of Ameulis, and the other the emblem of Elwyn Gheldron, first Cirilen-Lord of Ameulis. A thousand years and 33 monarchs had passed between them before their staffs were crossed to mark the union of Gieron’s line with the Gheldrons. And five more centuries had passed since then.

  Trevin left the throne room quickly through its arch, whose ash-wood doors had never been closed, and he crossed the verandah that encircled the tower to the great marble staircase.

  As he descended the gleaming steps he saw the blue-green fields of rushes that rolled beyond the forest like waves to the island’s northern edge, where he was going.

  On a cloudless day, Ameulis itself could be seen from the tower’s pinnacle, but from here the mainland was hidden behind the sea’s curve. Only a green hint on the belly of the clouds suggested the kingdom’s presence.

  Passing two semi-circular terraces and then a round courtyard of blueberry-and-cream alabaster, Trevin finally crossed over a wide square courtyard of grass until the stairway ended at a gate through the outer wall that enclosed the tower’s grounds. The broad lawn he had bolted across the night before stretched green before him now to the forest.

  He carried his father’s body across the greensward and entered the woods, steeling himself. In the daylight, the trees were bright and showed no sign of the night’s violence. The path, rimmed by boulders painted white, had been raked clean without a single footprint left behind.

  Trevin came to the fork where one path led west to the bay. He took the path north, instead, through the heart of the forest.

  His childhood memories seeped back into his mind like the scents and music in the wind. Each part of his grandfather’s forest played one note in every key on a variety of golden instruments placed in the branches of the ancient trees. When exploring Cintairn Gheldron, as the forest was called, one quickly developed an awareness of where each musical note originated and gained a sense of the entire forest. As a breeze flowed south, a shimmering tone from the northern edge would shift gradually across the scale of notes. At the forest’s edge musical instruments in harmonics of three notes produced mellow chords strummed by the wind’s wafting fingertips. Perched high in branches, bells in golden pinwheels spun, flashed, and jingled. Golden rattles shook exotic rhythms measuring the gusts and fluting birds accompanied the weather’s meandering melodies with wry harmonies.

  As Trevin crossed the enchanted forest memories returned of rippling chimes serenading summer sunsets and organ pipes throbbing in hollow trunks during winter tempests, music composed and forgotten except to its witnesses. He remembered an opera that swirled the orchestra of trees one night during a typhoon as the storm bell tolled.

  He noticed jewel-colored pheasants watching him now from the trees. Black squirrels and silver possums crept behind him down the path and fat gray toads leaped to keep up with Selwyn’s procession. Even a blue owl rolled a yellow eye toward them from a knot of the towering fig tree, whose bronze bell was now still. Then Trevin spotted a curious creature that looked like a crimson elk crossing the path ahead. Riding on its back was an ugly creature that looked at the young Cirilen for a moment before the buck lunged over a boulder and disappeared into the undergrowth.

  Floating somewhere between his grief and dread, Trevin staggered weightlessly after his long sleeplessness until he finally reached the forest’s northern edge.

  And then he waded through the blue-green rushes and patches of swirling orange and red wildflowers until he reached the Dimrok’s edge and looked down. And his tears fell 400 feet into the sea that beat the island in slow fury below like the last droplets of love he had kept for this world.

  “A great and good man,” he said, trembling as he challenged the sky then, “is dead before his time! Who are you to dare this Cirilen and me, I wonder? Come forward, and without a lens or stone I will chase every trace of you from Hala! Come, Crimson. I think I’ve seen you before, at Serrid—and you were weak! Mark this well and before the watching Gairanor this day: I will be your doom if you would be mine.”

  Trevin lunged upward, and he cast Selwyn over the edge, reciting the Spell of Passage, “Selwyn awake, too-oh-nair!” before his feet touched the ground.

  His father’s body hovered over the cliff as his soiled robes caught fire. And the white flames shed silvern sheaves of ash. With a thunderclap the wings of an eagle swept aside the cinders, and its golden beak and talons gleamed as it spread feathers like mother of pearl.

  The great bird turned north toward Ameulis, floating in place as its wings streamed ash, pumping against the wind. It wheeled then and dropped three rings from one talon: the rings of king, husband, and father, which Trevin caught with the stroke of one hand.

  After a last hard look over its shoulder, the great bird tucked its wings and plummeted down the face of the palisade.

  Trevin watched the snow-white raptor swoop barely from the sea, dipping its gold beak in a cold crest far below and shivering droplets from its neck. The shining bird climbed a spiral in the air past Trevin and scaled the heavens, higher than any other bird could follow. And Trevin lay back, his legs over the cliff, as he watched the shrinking avatar until it finally dissolved in the dazzling blue.

  Trevin finally left the edge of the island as the mid-morning sunlight edged the rushes with gold and gilded the bumblebees. Lavender blossoms shaped like globes of tiny buttercups flamed on the wind-stirred field and orange corkscrew blooms called “Dimfires” pirouetted—flowers that he recognized like long-lost sisters now. He saw a few flocks of wild sheep in the distance, their arched heads high as they observed him across the flowering swells like dolphins poking their heads from the waves.

  A gusting warmth of summer mixed with an anxious chill of fall in the air, and he swooned as a great weight lifted from his shoulders and an even heavier weight replaced it. His father was free—and he was a slave. Selwyn’s words mocked him: “That which is closest…” He laughed, bitterly.

  Trevin was desperately lonely here on this island when he was a child. He had called the kingdom “the boredom.” He had brooded through six years of pageantry and ceremony before his father had finally arranged passage for him to the island of Damay. The happiest day he remembered in Ameulis was the day he had left it, eleven years ago. He had only been sad to say goodbye to his fath
er, who had stolen a few brief chances to fish with him on the sea and a few moments in the forest to teach him his first charms. Everything else about this island, and the kingdom whose king it imprisoned, filled him with loathing.

  When the six-year-old Trevin, with his serious black eyes and night-black hair, had boarded that broad ship laden with 260 enrid tree saplings bound for his family’s faraway isle eleven years ago, the world had finally seemed ahead of him. His heart had raced as the ship’s giant crackling sail pulled them over the blue dunes of open sea. And though his Ameulintian courtiers did their best to entertain him on that long voyage, their doting had quickly annoyed him. The mariners, on the other hand, were not afraid of him. So midway through the voyage Trevin decreed that no more courtiers should bother him so that he could spend time with the mariners, instead.

  As he wandered over the swirling field memories returned to him, and he recalled the morning he had peered through the porthole of his cabin and first beheld Damay: the island of steaming jungles and chattering waterfalls and flowers the size of wagon wheels and animals as smart as children. That morning he guided the good mariners in their landing boat toward a beach that they could not see with their Bondairtlen eyes, and his Cirilen kin had come to receive him in a long gondola, appearing out of a clear fog before the startled sailors.

  Trevin’s schooling on Damay was far more arduous and tedious than he had expected. He had been taught to be nature’s slave so that he could be her master, but he had yet to be her master and seemed perpetually her slave. To his adoring kin he had excelled, and yet, after eleven years and no end in sight, Trevin finally decided he was through with abstractions and exercises, theories and history, as a crushing boredom menaced his heart once again. “The world is not made of parchment!” he proclaimed to his beloved mentor seven days ago.

  Dantair, the Patriarch of the House of Gheldron and his grandfather’s only brother, was nearly laid to waste by his finest pupil’s charges.

  “I have squandered precious years here!” Trevin cried. “If the Crown of Arnarus is lost in the Serrid Strait, why cannot one find it, Dantair? And if the diamond skull of King Peltor lies at the base of the falls of Esher, why can’t we simply detect it and hoist it from the sea? I can do all these things! What great good could be done with such lenses, Dantair! It’s an evil waste of precious time to read forever of such jewels languishing lost. Why have you trapped me in this paper prison so long?”

  The ancient Cirilen begged Trevin not to act rashly.

  And Trevin had left that night.

  And now he pondered the curse he had inherited, once again: that which is closest. And he laughed, surprising himself, for he felt an arch confidence. Nothing could be dear to him now. He had nothing to part with and nothing to lose. There was nothing he loved now and nothing he could ever love. So, he thought, contempt shall be my armor. Contempt for the crown that encircles my freedom and disdain for the kingdom that is my dungeon. I shall defend myself with endless scorn from a forge eternally hot. If anything is foolish enough to approach my heart I should merely smite it away for good sport. How easily I shall confound this absurd assassin!

  Resolved, then, and fortified with his invincible strategy, the seventeen-year-old Trevin Gheldron strode down the ancient path of Cintairn Gheldron when he heard a high, clear girl’s laugh trickling through the trees.

  He sensed rushing water nearby.

  He saw a light trail that broke off to the right, from where the sound seemed to originate.

  Trevin took the path, defiantly, and soon he reached a grove of trees with hand-like leaves and cobalt flowers that saturated the air with vanilla fragrance. A glade opened, and in the branches of the surrounding trees there had been placed a harmonic of instruments that blended chords with the ebbing air.

  He approached a grotto at the far end of the glade, where a waterfall cascaded into a swimming pond. As he approached the green pool, he noticed shelves carved into the rock for sunbathers on the far bank. One of them was wet.

  Trevin leaped over the jade water onto the far ledge. And on the smooth gray stone between his boots he beheld the watermark of a beautiful maiden pressed naked onto the rock, an image so ravishing in every detail that his heart broke even as it evaporated. He felt her eyes then, and looking up he knew it was she, though he saw only her eyes.

  Neither could endure the thrill of that mutual stare. But neither surrendered it.

  At last, they both looked away and hung their heads in convalescence, organizing themselves for their introduction.

  “Sir, you startled me!” she scolded him, first.

  Trevin noted that she held a green linen robe closed at her throat. He looked at her raven-black hair, shell-white teeth, and pomegranate lips. “I am most sorry,” he mumbled. “What is your name, milady?” he demanded.

  “My name is Neuvia. What is yours, good sir?”

  He bowed, humbly. “Trevin.”

  He expected her to gasp. But she did not. Indeed, it might have been any name to her, it seemed.

  “Then you are the Lord of the Tintilisair now.” She nodded. “I am glad!” She kneeled, bowing her head. Then she looked sidelong at him, wryly. “For Ameulis.”

  As he tried to think of a response she began hunting her sandals. She found them and sat on a stone above the waterfall, lacing them to her ankles. When she finished, with Trevin still unable to articulate a comment, she rose and pushed her fingers back through her wet hair, her eyes like jewels cut from the summer sky. “I must go! I am a servant girl and will be missed in the kitchen, my lord.” She hesitated. “Do you have a favorite dish? I’ll make it for you, if you desire it.” She smiled, indifferently.

  “I… remember scrambled eagle’s egg, and Dimrok leeks,” he muttered.

  “You shall have them. And black biscuits, too!”

  Trevin watched her, speechlessly, as she set out through the heart of the forest using no path.

  Chapter 3

  Artimeer’s Reason

  The Coronation drew nearer, and more ships bore Ameulintians from the mainland to the Dimrok. Yet even as the island became crowded, it seemed only to become more desolate to Trevin.

  Above him, the Lightstone Tower flew the long green bunting of Ameulis, snaking like a silken green serpent in the sky with the yellow banner of Norlania, spun of gold silk, now shining below it as well. In Elwyn’s time the gold-rich island of Norlania had been united with the “Tintilisair,” which was the name of the commonwealth Elwyn had forged with nearby lands beyond the shores of Ameulis before his death. Like the forgotten land of Ghenten, Norlania no longer answered to Ameulis’s king, but her golden standard had been carried more than a thousand miles as a gesture of good will by her ambassadors for the rare occasion of Trevin’s coronation.

  All seemed to know in advance, it seemed, that this moment was coming—all except for him.

  Lords and ladies celebrated, danced, supped and toasted on the sunlit terraces and verdant lawns below the tower. A rainbow of fruits indigenous to all regions of Ameulis adorned the banquet tables and the finest vintages made from the rarest grapes and berries of the Tintilisair flowed. Circulating servers enticed partiers on the terraces with golden platters of roasted meats, curried cheeses, sour breads, sweetmeats, spiced nuts, and mulled wine. Yet the celebrants craved nothing more than Trevin’s presence, which no enticement, it seemed, could induce.

  As he peered from the window of his father’s room high above, he scrutinized all the things he found himself wanting to do, taste, and drink, and all the people he wished to meet. For there were many in that illustrious crowd who appeared delightful to him even through his father’s golden spyglass. He spotted a group of mariners swinging mugs of beer in the outer courtyard on the green—sea captains who were boasting and sparring like children. But as he remembered the mariners of Ameulis fondly he invoked his father’s warning and disciplined the urge with harsh doubt.

  He decided, however, that he simply must call
for the mysterious beauty he had met in the forest as soon as his immediate affairs were settled. He knew that she, above all, posed the a great danger to him, for he had not been able to put her out of his mind. He must study her, he decided. He must study everything that threatened to steal his heart, so that he might test his defenses and improve his chances against the curse his father had cast in stone before him. Here was a weak point in his armor. The closer she came to his affection, the stronger he must volley her with scorn. He must use her every loveliness as a reason to improve his fortifications, an ideal opportunity to toughen his armor, and, indeed, an added reason to resent her for making him do so. Thus, he must build his defenses, layer by layer, hard as rock and sharp as thorns, cold as an ice that must grow ever colder.

  The bell rang, interrupting his plummeting train of thought. “Enter!” he snapped.

  The heavy trapdoor rose in the center of his chamber and an attendant poked his grizzled head up into the room. “Lord Trevin! Artimeer is here to see you regarding the Coronation.”

  “Who?” Trevin had seen seven obsequious oldsters already that morning. He had been measured, choreographed, versed, blessed, and couldn’t imagine what else they could do to him besides stuff an apple in his mouth and roast him for their feast.

  “Artimeer, my lord,” the page said. “Selwyn’s court philosopher.”

  Artimeer, yes, Trevin recalled. Artimeer was one of the very few who stood out among his father’s courtiers enough to make an impression on him. The old philosopher had never treated him like a superior and had even seemed sympathetic to his peevish sense of humor. Ah, Trevin thought, how nice to find a friend. Then he corrected himself. “Let him enter.”

  An old man climbed the ladder, slamming the trapdoor behind him with a casual flourish. He appeared much the same, thought Trevin, though years had sculpted him leaner and sharper, like a weathered mountain.