Crimson

by Warren Fahy

  At last, she saw Trevin open the shutters of the north window, and look out over the Dimrok.

  “Take my voice and fling it far, carbuncle,” he whispered and touched the Cronus Star to his forehead. It caught fire as he raised the bleeding gemstone. The storm darkened the sky, and all who remained on the Dimrok could see the tip of the tower smolder like an ember. A rumbling voice of thunder made the air tremble:

  “LEAVE THIS ISLAND AND NEVER RETURN.

  AMEULIS AND TREVIN MUST NEVER MEET.

  LEAVE THIS ISLAND OR YOU WILL LEARN

  A WRATH MOST TERRIBLE AND COMPLETE.”

  And all else who had not yet left yet fled to the harbor then.

  The jewel’s violence fed his rage, urging stronger words than he had wished to utter. Yet Trevin did not regret them, for he hoped that words alone might be enough to protect his subjects from him.

  He closed the shutters of his windows then and sat on the edge of his bed. And he dived back into the Cronus Star to follow its infinitely splitting stairways of time and knowledge wherever he chose.

  Day gave way to night as the weather worsened. Violent gusts howled and ransacked the woods as rain came down like gravel on the roof of the treehouse, which rode the storm as all seven boughs rolled and pitched. Yet Neuvia slept, somehow, until the storm bell tolled once, and she woke to find a silver squirrel sleeping next to her cheek. She stroked it in surprise before returning to the battle against her nightmares.

  Chapter 8

  The New Queen

  Trevin’s treehouse was quite elaborate for one he had designed, with help from two elderly court architects, when he was four years old.

  Neuvia Gheldron knew it well. This was the secret citadel of the young prince that no one else could find inside Elwyn’s forest. When she announced that she had discovered it as a little girl, no one believed her and assumed that she was make-believing. Only Selwyn knew that she was telling the truth. At banquets where she served the guests treats he had protectively patted her head whenever she described visits to Trevin’s sylvan keep.

  Trevin’s treehouse was built in the branches of the sturdiest and most flexible variety of tree in the forest, the white star enrid, which grew nowhere but on the Dimrok. The tree it occupied had seven main branches sprouting in a spiral from its towering trunk. A rope ladder hung to the ground from the highest room, 50 feet up. When one stood on its bottom rung, a counterweight was unlatched that gently drew the ladder to the top. By adding weights one could ride it back down to the ground.

  Neuvia woke to a gray morning, immediately setting to work to make her home habitable. She added a few more river stones to the leather sack of the ladder’s counterweight after smearing all the leather parts of the ladder with lard to rejuvenate them. Then she disengaged a gear, engaged another, and descended with a whoosh. When she stepped back onto the ladder, it engaged the other counterweight and she rose gently.

  But this time she caught the ceiling of the first floor with a light hand and climbed in, tying off the ladder.

  This room was low and wide and curved around the ivory trunk into which Trevin had carved war mottoes like “Never Yield” and “Heroes Live Longer than Cowards!” Tarnished miniature swords, pikes, and a mace hung from racks. In this room she and Trevin had each defended the treehouse from imaginary sieges.

  A closed stairway corkscrewed around the trunk from this room, passing the inner rooms on all seven branches of the treehouse. Steps carved onto the muscular branches reached to outer rooms, which were held in muscular white tree-hands. Interwoven over these rooms was a natural thatch of foliage starred with white flowers. Neuvia climbed the stairs past the first branch, which held game rooms, or one war room and one game room: inside it she remembered finding some of Trevin’s games half-played and sculptures of mermaids half-painted and monsters half-created or half-destroyed.

  On the next branch up was what she thought must be a magic room. She entered it now.

  Crude charts and phosphorescent stars were painted on the indigo ceiling. Childish fetishes, a goat’s horn and a row of dried red island lizard tails, dangled from hooks on the wall. There was a finely woven basket filled with ancient triangular coins from a foreign land. She found a rock collection in a wooden box and remembered how, when she was a little girl snooping through Trevin’s things, she had thought them all to be magical. And maybe some of them were, she realized.

  She moved on, assaying her new home. On the fifth branch she investigated what was a map room, with a lookout room held by the tree-hand at the end.

  The sixth branch was a kitchen of sorts furnished with a seemingly make-believe stove—an iron grill over cobblestones. The outer room was a miniature dining hall with a table and benches and small gables carved with scenes of hunters and animals. Its windows were garlanded with island mistletoe festooned with purple orchids.

  The uppermost branch had a bathing room plumbed with water from a cistern at the end of the branch under a miniature version of Trevin’s room atop the Lightstone Tower. Inside was a bed of goose down, which she thankfully found dry. Last night she had covered it with fresh linens and blankets that she had brought from the tower. The room’s four windows were aligned to the compass points, like his room. Outside the western window was an overgrown windmill to crank water up from the brook and fill the cistern under the floor.

  She sat on the bed and finally changed from her wedding gown into more practical clothes. Pulling on thigh-high socks of Dimrok wool, gray and smooth as polished stone, and dark green pants of cotton that the male servants wore, she chose a thick black silk shirt and buttoned its gray stone buttons. Glancing out the northern window, she caught the last three ships tilting for the mainland. A moment later they disappeared into the murk.

  She lay on the bed, sighing as clouds darkened the forest. She lit two candles and stacked her books beside the bed. She decided to read for the rest of the day, and switched from one book to another as the rain came down in waves. While perusing Selwyn’s General Observations she came across a curious passage:

  Today, my Queen successfully reversed a love charm against me. It fills me with delight. For I had incanted that my lips should taste like her favorite flavor, and suddenly, a few days later, I find her lips now taste like orange—my favorite flavor. She said she did it by uttering the Sarkish phrase ‘too-oh-nair’ after reversing the words of my own charm. ‘Too-oh-nair’ means, of course, ‘justice,’ roughly, in Ancient Sarkish. It appears that even magic may be generated by love’s will.

  —The Twenty-Third of Wheat, 913

  Neuvia remembered Trevin’s charm that hid the treehouse from all eyes but hers and then recalled her own counter-charm. She quickly opened the small red book entitled My First Book of Magic. She saw Trevin’s spell for closing eyelids. “Think ‘look’ to inword eye and close the lid while wundering why,” she read aloud, and she noticed the simple diagram of eye muscles. Thumbing through the pages she found a charm for making a flower bloom, but Trevin noted that the charm only worked with morning glories—in the morning. “Dumb,” he wrote. There was a charm that summoned garden lizards. “Another cheap party trick,” Trevin noted in parentheses. There was a simple motion charm, the words of which a Cirilen could utter to move a plate or book aside. “I think this spell is for old men,” he noted, but he added “Good potenshul.” In fact, this was the very spell Trevin had shouted to repel Knot, Neuvia recalled.

  There was also a monster spell:

  All Monsters remember me

  It took me, now three, to finish thee.

  When all is done, mark my words!

  I’ll feed your brains to the birds.

  Evidently, Trevin had written the spell himself and had tried, unsuccessfully, to translate it into Old Sarkish.

  Neuvia came across a love charm, too. Trevin had drawn red hearts on the vellum of the page in a fountain cascading to either side and under it he had inscribed a charm:

  This treehouse never seen
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  Unless by my future Queen.

  Trevin noted that one dead lizard tail had been burned for his charm. Neuvia cherished the impish spell as she looked out the south window at the Lightstone Tower, smoldering against a darkening cloud.

  As Trevin woke from a sleep of troubling dreams his white candle filled the dusky room with wholesome light.

  The Cronus Star rekindled and bloodied its radiance.

  He hung his head. “You said you would not leave me with this stone,” he whispered to the empty room. He held the red diamond to his heart and closed his eyes. “Neuvia! Perhaps you are my doom’s accomplice without knowing it? Did you keep your promise?” Trevin gazed down through the Lightstone Tower with red suspicion. “Do you watch me even now? I feel sure you do!”

  Trevin’s eyes searched deeper than mortal and most Cirilen eyes could see, and when he was certain she was not inside the tower below, he scanned the island through the northern window.

  If she was somehow hidden on the Dimrok, he would find her now!

  She saw a fresh stain of blood at the tower’s peak and then the silhouette of Trevin in the window.

  Neuvia flipped through Selwyn’s book of prophecies and saw words on a page just long enough to read: She must do promptly what she can…

  She looked at the tower, and she spoke an improvised charm:

  While Cronus Star is blinding,

  This place unseen by King.

  Then she added, “Too-oh-nair!” as Conilair had done to volley Selwyn’s spell.

  The tower’s red stain faded as she caught a glimmer in her wedding ring’s stone. Trevin stood looking in the window for a long moment as she lay perfectly still. But finally he turned away and closed the shutters.

  She sighed, wondering if her charm had actually worked. She decided to dive into her books, which she opened on the bed before her, switching from one to the other long into the night.

  Even focusing his vision through the Cronus Star, he had failed to see her.

  She had obeyed him, after all.

  And he drowned in a daze of grief, closing all the shutters and sprawling on the maelstrom of his bed. Only the Scepter guarded him as he sank in its bloody fathoms.

  She read a page of Selwyn’s journal:

  A NOTE ON WIZARD’S SHOES—The sleek craft a young Gheldron must build to complete his education, which is sometimes called a “Wizard’s Shoe,” has proven to be a most curious creature, indeed.

  I mark my appreciation now, I am sad to say, because my own such craft was destroyed today. My will wanes and I, alas, could no longer protect her. Sharpeye was not even at sea when her timbers were sundered. She was being transported over land to a tranquil lake, there to live out her days, when a bloody moon startled the horses and tipped the wagon hauling her.

  In our long voyage together I discovered many marvelous aspects of her nature and I find my sadness unspeakable.

  But I must record here that such supple sailing craft not only follow the stars but act to protect their makers, even if it means disobeying them. Many times, Sharpeye saved my unwary neck even as I scolded her. I wonder, despairing now, about her destruction today, which I had not foreseen.

  —Selwyn, The Fifteenth of Apple, 1051

  Neuvia read the passage and quickly flipped through Selwyn’s Prophecies. In the past hours she had learned to do this. Even though the pages might be blank a moment before, she found that after reading something in one of the other books, a fragment of the Prophecies might become visible on one of the pages. She saw “…she might help…” before the words faded on one page.

  Neuvia remembered when Trevin introduced her to his “Wizard’s Shoe.” The small sailing vessel he had built on the Island of Damay had ruffled her sail on the beach beside the sea monster, Knot, shifting her yard in a distinctly rude way.

  She decided that she would pay a visit to Stargazer in the morning.

  In a small brown book entitled simply Notes she read some entries made by her predecessor, Queen Conilair, in a firm and lovely hand. One was a winding poem that she had written about her pet snake, Toy, who had reposed around her neck like jewelry for 187 years while never eating, growing or aging:

  MY TOY

  Caught by Elwyn’s fearless hand

  In Ghenten’s green-leafed wold

  Already eons old

  With scales white as milk and

  Eyes like purple amethyst

  Sighing now, he softly hissed

  His wish and one demand

  Though his bite could surely kill

  Over even Elwyn’s will

  He wrapped around his hand

  Smooth and lithe and curvilinear

  He asked to be his Queen’s Familiar

  So Elwyn shifted what he planned

  And delivered him to his Queen

  With gemstone eyes and scaly sheen

  He slipped around her neck and

  Coiled like a chain bejeweled

  For all the centuries that she ruled

  More jealous than a wedding band

  And when the Queen did die one day

  He left her neck and slipped away

  To come again from forest stand

  To guard me in my reign

  Regaining royal place again

  Till a new Queen shall command.

  —Conilair Gheldron, The Seventeenth of Whale, 1033

  “Toy,” she mused. Neuvia imagined the illustrious past of the deadly serpent that was such a loyal servant to two Queens. Probably, the ancient snake had died, she thought. For even ancient things must grow too old one day.

  It was just past midnight as she was thinking about blowing out her candle and trying to get some sleep when she heard scrabbling in the leaves below. Looking down around the white roots, she saw a large beaver snuffling in the leaves around the trunk of the tree.

  Horror charged Neuvia’s whole body. She flung one of her throwing stones at the creature, striking it on the back. It squawked and tched, shambling off and plopping into the brook, swimming away upstream.

  When she turned from the window, her heart still stomping on her chest, the book of prophecies fell open though the candle’s flame did not stir. She read on an open page “friends trust” before the words faded and an imperceptible breeze flipped the pages.

  She shivered off the chill and tried to calm her nerves by turning her mind to the renovations she had to make to the treehouse.

  She unlatched the windmill. Earlier she had cut away the growth that prevented its gears from turning. Now it turned, and rotated a loop of rope that carried six evenly spaced buckets from the river. A pulley moored to a stone in the brook passed the buckets into the water and the rope took them up to Neuvia as the wide blades of the windmill rotated. She lifted the brimming buckets off their hooks as they arrived and poured them into the sealskin cistern under the floor, then fastening them to the next available hook on the line. Gradually, she shook off the terror of the beaver’s appearance.

  In the morning she would open the valve and water would course down the wooden gutters to clear them of debris and reveal where they needed repair. And then she would take a shower in the room below. As she worked that night to fill up the cistern, squirrels and marmosets appeared to throw berries and nuts on the floor through the windows, like emissaries offering a shy tribute. She pulled back her sweaty hair and laughed whenever one appeared on the windowsill with whatever it had managed to hold onto during the dangerous ascent. “Thank you,” Neuvia said to each, in turn.

  By three that morning the cistern was finally half full, which she thought was full enough to test the plumbing at daybreak. She stopped to eat a midnight snack of berries, pecans, and a small raw egg, which a bird had laid on the windowsill for her.

  She would make curtains later, test the plumbing, and think about what to do about cooking as she generally cleaned away a decade of dirt and dust. But for now she decided to get a few hours of sleep before setting out for the beach.


  Neuvia dreamed that she was watching helplessly as the beaver gnawed the trunk of the tree. At last she was awakened by grapes, apples and nuts rolling off the windowsill and bouncing onto the floor.

  She looked out the west window and saw that it was very early in the morning, as she had hoped. Then she noticed the culprit who had made the commotion.

  Wriggling with alarming speed through a bunch of black grapes on the floor, its proud face smiling and its amethyst eyes sparkling, was the rarest of all snakes.

  At first, she was startled as the serpent wriggled across the floor and extended its head to her bare foot. But she did not flinch—even as the snake’s dark green tongue seemed to taste her naked toe.

  Her whole body froze still as the slender serpent spiraled around her calf and thigh and slid under her shirt across her stomach. She barely breathed as it slipped smooth and cold between her breasts to her neck where it coiled, braiding its length three times around her throat, until it finally grasped its hooked tail in its jaws and, promptly, seemed to fall asleep as its violet eyes turned black.

  “Toy!” she breathed, chuckling softly as she felt the slender snake’s feathery tongue on her throat as if it were tasting her voice. He seemed light as a string and smooth as ivory. “Thank you for waking me in time!”

  Neuvia threw her bearskin cape around her shoulders in the pre-dawn chill. Fog hovered in the treetops outside the window. She pulled on her boots and descended the rope ladder to the ground.

  She was delighted to see the bounty other animals had brought her at the foot of her tree. As well as food, there were bundles of string and bits of metal and glass brought by amorous magpies, which had separated them by class and color in different nooks between the roots. A great horned owl had even offered a rabbit, and yet no ant had touched its flesh.

  Such magic happened around her now!

  Near the rabbit was a neat stack of wooden beams of various lengths, stripped of bark, with every bump and branch gnawed off smooth. She recognized the work of beavers, which chilled her as she recalled the beast that killed her father. The mere sight of their handiwork terrified her.