Briarheart

by Mercedes Lackey

  There was a blinding flash. And when I could see again, she and all her creatures were… gone. There were just a few tiny black rags fluttering down from the ceiling and a scorched place on the floor where she had stood.

  The Dark Fae were the first to react—and with faces now distorted by fear, they fled. Some opened portals right in the Hall and stepped through them; some took to the air and crashed through the windows to escape. A few ran for the door behind them, eliciting more screams from the guests they ran into or over on their way out. In an instant, the Light Fae set out in hot pursuit except for the first four or five from the front row who rushed to my side. I watched the pursuers for a moment; they weren’t in pursuit to catch, they were merely making sure none of the Dark Fae returned. They still couldn’t attack the Dark Fae—the one who’d started this was very dead, and if anyone here had been thinking of allying with this stranger, that thought had probably been blown out of their heads when I turned the tables on her.

  A purple-haired fellow dressed mostly in scarves took my right hand while a dignified blond with blue-and-yellow bird wings got my left elbow, and between them, they helped me to my feet. I gazed into the Fae faces around me, my head still not working very well. “What happened?” I asked, dazed, as Domna returned through the pantry door.

  Domna placed her hand on the bird-winged Fae’s shoulder and gently moved him aside. “That, my dear young mortal,” she said, “is what we would like to know!”

  My knees more or less buckled at that point, and the purple-haired Fae caught me and lifted me in his arms as if I weighed nothing. “Up,” Domna ordered. “We must gather in the King’s private chambers.” She looked around at the other Fae and nodded. “I see all the Council are here, save Bianca and Brianna, and they are already upstairs. Let us go. Take young Miriam up, Ealsfird.”

  Most of them flew out the smashed windows. I was too dizzy to think clearly, but it was fortunate that my purple-haired rescuer was thinking for both of us and carried me into the pantry and up the privy stair, probably guessing that this was where everyone else had gone.

  He located where everyone was by following the buzzing of voices in Mama’s solar. He was still carrying me when we entered the door.

  “Oh, my god—Miri!” gasped Mama, after seeing me being carried this way. My rescuer put me down, and I managed to stagger toward her. Mama was holding Aurora in one arm as she embraced me with the other, and that gave me a chance to reassure myself that Aurora was all right.

  She looked up at me and cooed and burbled, and I nearly wept with relief. “I’m fine, Mama,” I repeated over and over until she finally believed me and let me go. I wobbled over to one of the couches and thumped into it heavily.

  Bianca sat down next to me while just about everyone else was doing their best to make sure Mama and Papa got calmed down. “I know your brain is most probably swimming,” she said, and patted the hand I had resting on the couch between us. “But I need you to answer some questions now before your memory fades.”

  “I’ll try,” I said, with uncertainty, as Domna separated herself from the rest and came to sit nearby and listen.

  I was feeling dizzy and light-headed, so I didn’t think about what I was saying before I blurted it out. Normally—especially with Fae—I’d have thought twice about anything I was going to say. Belinda had trained me pretty strictly that way.

  Bianca asked me a lot of questions: Had I done anything like this before? (Of course not.) Had I ever played about with magic even a little? (It never even crossed my mind.) Did I ever sense that something was going to happen before it did? (No.) Had Papa’s wizard asked me questions about magic? (Never!) And a lot of other questions about how it had felt when I stopped the curse and how it had felt when I deflected the interloper’s magical attack back on her. Really detailed questions. Bianca even suggested words when I hesitated so I could put a finger on what I’d been doing, and say, “Yes—like that.” Words like “bastion,” for instance, when she asked what I had been trying to make myself into.

  Then Domna asked me how I was feeling now. “A little sick,” I said. “My head is still spinning. And I don’t think I can stand up right now.”

  She tsked, twirled a finger over her left hand, and created a whirlpool of sparkling motes of light; and a tiny sapphire-colored bottle coalesced out of them. She picked it up with two fingers and handed it to me. “Drink this,” she commanded. “All of it down at once or you’ll choke on it.”

  With a grimace, I unstoppered the bottle and did as I was told, and I nearly came out of my skin. It was like drinking fire! But the burning vanished quickly, leaving behind a lovely warmth that spread all through me; my head stopped spinning; and I began to feel normal again.

  Now Brianna joined us. Looking past her, I saw that the rest of the Fae were in conference with Mama and Papa and that Aurora was in the cradle that had somehow been brought from the nursery, with Melalee standing over it like a brooding dragon and brandishing a candlestick as if it were a weapon. And while I absolutely sympathized with her instinct to protect Aurora, she did look kind of absurd. Then again, maybe her instinct was right; some Fae were susceptible to silver.

  “Well,” said the third one of the godmothers. “I certainly didn’t expect my gift to be exercised quite this soon.” She tilted her head to the side and looked at me. “And what are we to make of you?”

  Domna snorted. “She’s Fae-blooded, that’s what we make of her. How much and from where, I have no idea. We’ll have to research her family tree.”

  Those words evidently caught the ear of the Clerk of the Court. Like the Light Fae, he had somehow weathered all this with his wits and aplomb still intact. He sidled over to her. “It has to be on her father’s side,” he said, talking as if I weren’t there. Which, truth to tell, I was used to from the clerks and older courtiers. I didn’t like it, but I was used to it. It’s just the way some people are when they get old; they act like anyone younger than they are is invisible. “When His Highness proposed to the Queen, I traced her mother’s lineage back so far that if she had any Fae blood, it couldn’t be more than a fraction of a droplet.”

  “What about her father?” Brianna demanded.

  Now the old man looked at me out of the corner of his eye and shrugged. “Not Court business,” he replied. “She wasn’t marrying the King, her mother was. The only importance she has is that she owns a baronial farm and manor and a knight’s manor, and both of those are gifts of the Crown.” Having tendered these pearls of wisdom, he sidled back to the other discussion.

  Domna snorted. “What an irritating little man.”

  “He’s saved us a lot of work,” Bianca pointed out. “Now we only have to concentrate on…” She raised an eyebrow at me. I licked my dry lips.

  Mama wasn’t paying attention to any of this; she was deeply involved with whatever Papa and the Archbishop and a growing gaggle of other important people from Papa’s Privy Council were talking about.

  “If I have living grandparents, Father never told me about them or… anything,” I said lamely. “There’s nothing about his parents anywhere that I know of—oh, wait—I remember one thing.” The three godmothers hung on my every word, and I flushed with embarrassment that what I remembered was so trivial. “I was told once by one of the other knights that a beautiful woman came to the Knights’ Hall with my father when he was six or seven. She asked to see Sir Delacar. She said a word or two to him, and he took her and my father to a private room, and when they came out, he told everyone that Father was now his page and that if anyone bullied him, Delacar would beat the blackguard three times around the courtyard with his sheathed sword. The lady disappeared, and Father went into Delacar’s service, and everyone assumed that Father was one of Delacar’s…” I blushed.

  “By-blows,” said Bianca briskly. “Well, I think it’s clear that he wasn’t.”

  “In fact, I think it’s clear that he was fully Fae or at least half,” Domna opined. “The question
is, why would a Fae woman entrust her precious child to a mortal—and a mere knight at that?”

  “Maybe she wasn’t Fae at all. Perhaps she was mortal, and the child was her half-Fae son with a Fae lover?” Brianna asked. “That makes more sense, doesn’t it?”

  Domna pinched the bridge of her nose between her thumb and forefinger. “At the moment, the only thing that makes sense is that we need to get this child trained, and the sooner the better.”

  The other two nodded, but my mouth dropped open. “Wait—me? But—”

  “Your sister is in grave peril,” Domna said ominously. “Think about it. A powerful Dark Fae from outside this kingdom spirited herself here secretly and established a home so hidden that not even the native Dark Fae knew about her—and why? Was it all so she could attack Aurora on her christening day? And why would that be? She played very cleverly within the Rules, but what is so important about this particular child and this particular kingdom that she would do this?”

  “That is a great deal of work,” said the purple-haired Fae. “And yet, there is no sign she intended anything else. She brought with her no army, no allies, so she did not intend to harm anyone but the child—”

  “Exactly!” Domna said grimly. “Surely you see what that means?”

  Bianca rushed to answer. “It means that something about Aurora is portentous and that either the Dark Fae of some other realm know it or some mortal, king, or wizard knows it and hired a powerful Dark Fae to eliminate her, one clever enough to calculate a way to get the task completed without breaking the Rules. And it is something no Dark Fae resident in this kingdom is aware of.”

  “We can’t protect her,” Brianna said grimly.

  “The wizard could do that now,” said Domna. “Simply take her away, hide her until we can think of a way we can keep her protected.”

  “Oh, because that has always gone so well in the past.” Bianca snorted. “Or need I remind you of all the times it hasn’t? She needs an actual protector with powerful magic! I do respect Gerrold, but he is old and hasn’t the stamina to ward off an attack like the one we just saw.”

  But I have Fae magic.…

  “Am I bound by the Compact, the Rules, and the Strictures?” I asked aloud.

  “No, of course not, dear,” Domna said absently. “You’re at least half human. You are outside the Rules.”

  I still hesitated. Because this was terrifying. Just because I’d managed to prevail by sheer force of will the first time, it didn’t mean I could do it again. I sure wasn’t expert enough to be a knight. And a knight—a magic knight—was what she needed.

  But then Aurora giggled, and my panic fled before determination. I was not going to let anyone harm my sweet baby sister! And boys younger than I was were made knights all the time. If they could go to war, surely I could find the courage to defend her!

  “All right,” I said, my voice shaking but my fist clenched. “I’ll do it. I don’t know how, but I’ll do it.”

  “Do you think she can?” asked Bianca.

  “We could train her ourselves,” Domna pointed out. “She’s not the first half-Fae to appear and need training. We’d have to train her anyway, so why not focus that training on how to protect the baby?”

  “Well, we’ll have to do something given what just happened.” Brianna looked into the middle distance. “No one has tested the Rules and the Compact this blatantly for three hundred years. I don’t think we have any choice in the matter.”

  Papa and Mama had caught wind of the tail end of this conversation and turned to us with looks of horror on their pale faces.

  “She’s only fifteen!” Mama cried.

  “I’ll not have you risking a child!” blustered Papa, and I was more or less shoved unceremoniously aside and talked over, under, and around by Fae and humans all at once. It went on for long enough that the potion started to wear off, and I felt a headache start between my eyebrows.

  “Stop!” I finally shouted. And amazingly enough, they all did and stared at me.

  “Look,” I said into the sudden silence. “The godmothers all say that I’m Fae-blooded, but since I’m not Fae, the Rules don’t apply to me, and I can do whatever I want to any Dark Fae who sticks its nose into our business.”

  Well, that wasn’t exactly what they’d said, but I supposed it was close enough.

  “They said they’ll train me so I can protect Aurora.” Mama’s lips started to move in protest, but I turned to Papa. “The christening’s over. Aurora should be fine until she’s thirteen, right? That’s the next time she should be vulnerable. Papa, that’s thirteen years for me to learn Fae magic. That’s three more than it took for you to go from page to knight!”

  “That’s true,” he admitted as Mama’s face took on an expression of dismay.

  And now I turned to her. “You always say how much like Father I am—well, what would Father have done, even at fifteen? He’d have said the same! Mama, I have Fae magic. What’s going to protect Aurora better? A knight with a sword or a knight with magic?”

  But it was Papa who answered, his brow clearing. “Someone with both,” he said softly, looking at me as if he saw not me but his old friend, his fellow squire, Geniver. He turned to Bianca. “Is there any reason why she can’t learn weapons along with magic?”

  She smiled and held out her hand. Another one of those streams of sparkling motes of light appeared vaguely in the shape of a sword, then mostly in the shape of a sword—and then a sword manifested out of them before vanishing in a little poof. “None whatsoever,” Bianca replied. “I’ve been known to prefer the sword to the wand many times.”

  “I’d really like that,” I said fervently. There were female knights—not many of them, and there were none in our Court at the moment, but they did exist. It wasn’t as if I was going to be something entirely unheard of. And, to be honest, that had been one of the things I was going to ask Papa about—to let me train with the squires.

  And it looked as if Papa had made up his mind.

  “Very well then,” Papa said, with a firm nod. “We’ll give her every weapon to defend herself and her sister that the mortals or the Fae can muster. Mornings, Miri, you’ll train with the squires. Afternoons with the godmothers. Let this be my official decree, and let no one interfere on pain of punishment.”

  Mama clutched his arm but didn’t object. The Clerk of the Court scribbled it all down. The godmothers looked pleased, the other Fae on the Council a little dubious but not so much that they were going to disagree.

  Only the Archbishop looked unperturbed. He placed one hand on my head. “You have a brave soul, a kind heart, and a good mind, Miri. You have my blessing.”

  Somehow that settled things for me, and I felt the decision drop into place inside me. I was still scared of all of this, but it felt right. I sighed.

  CHAPTER THREE

  A FEW DAYS LATER, I WAS JOLTED OUT OF SLEEP BY THE SOUND of my curtains being yanked unceremoniously open. Sunlight streamed in my window, smacking me in the face and making quite sure that I was thoroughly awake. “Time to get up,” Belinda said sourly, staring down at me with a scowl. “Your knight training starts in an hour.”

  I jumped out of bed and quickly put on the garments she laid out grudgingly, handling each one as if it were poisoned—slightly baggier breeches than the boys wore made of brown moleskin, a loose cream linen shirt not unlike a farmer’s smock, brown boots, and a matching wide belt. Then, at Belinda’s abrupt gesture to sit, I took a seat on the little stool from my dressing table, and she pulled all my hair up onto the top of my head and coiled it into a bun and pinned it in place. And she didn’t do it gently, either. Every inch of her radiated how much she disapproved of what I was doing, and I did not care. As soon as she was done with me, I bolted out of my room to the stairs. She could work out her bad temper on something else.

  I ran down to the kitchen; had a quick breakfast there of warm bread and butter, milk, and an egg; and pelted for the Knights’ Yard as fast as my l
egs would carry me, reveling in the freedom of my new clothing. I wonder how much of a fit Belinda would throw if I decided to wear this instead of gowns except when I really had to? But I knew the answer, of course. It probably wouldn’t be worth the way she’d loom over me every chance she got like a disapproving storm cloud. I wish Aurora were old enough to do without a nurse and get Belinda for her governess. Belinda and I were like fire and tinder. We would never agree, and we’d always be in conflict. But Mama would never turn her out because where would she go? She was too set in her ways to go to a new household.

  When I got to the yard, there were five people there already. Giles, two boys I didn’t know about his age and height, and two of the younger maids of honor, Susanna and Raquelle, who were about my age and height, and whom most of us called Anna and Elle. They were all wearing pretty much what I was wearing.

  I didn’t know most of the maids of honor, but I did know Anna and Elle. I liked them; I’d wished over the year that I’d been here that we didn’t keep going in opposite directions all the time. But they had their duties to their mothers; when a lady was living at Court, she couldn’t have all the personal servants she’d have in her own manor, so daughters were expected to serve as their mothers’ personal maids. And if you had a surfeit of girls, you loaned out your eldest to ladies who didn’t have daughters. That built alliances between families, got girls at least familiar in passing with eligible boys, and was supposed to help keep Court politics from getting out of hand.

  I’d had what I thought was a good idea after the godmothers had left. I was going to need someone to train with, someone on my level, which would ordinarily mean the humiliating fate of training with the little pages. But if I could get four or five others from the Court who were about my age and lacked experience—that would be different. Plus, they’d be a lot of help. We’d be Aurora’s special bodyguards. Maybe I could even get them weapons and armor that were good against magic.