by Cassia Meare
What's the matter, Sefira?
The matter was that everyone was afraid of Nemours, and she hated that more than anything.
All of them cowards. Delian and Ty, scraping after their big brother. Lamia, salivating every time his name was mentioned. And Ahn saying she respected him — when in fact she was afraid.
Ahn had been wrong, nevertheless, to tell the human girl that Nemours was getting the Knowledge out of ambition. Wrong to say he had attacked Ydin and Virso. That had been vile.
Sefira remembered everything as if it had happened today and not way back in time. The problem with immortals was that they remembered and remembered. And she wasn't like Ty, the baby, remembering the good things. She wasn't like Delian, avoiding the memory of chaos and clinging to his pleasure and his laughter. She wasn't like Lamia, waving everything away except what was next and new. She wasn't like Ahn, thinking there would be an ultimate design and secret meaning to everything.
She wasn't like Nemours, accepting bad and good and all the consequences.
Sefira was angry.
Ydin striding through the Hall, spurs ringing. Father, though not her father, scowling at her as if wondering what the hell she was. He had preferred his white guards, who moved down the corridors as if they owned it. Perching on the stone outside with wings open, and swords ready. Black eyes watching everything.
What had there been to watch, when Aya and Virso had created it all?
And then Nemours' steps. Nemours laughing, picking her up and throwing her in the air. Up, up, up as if she were flying. He would always catch her.
There was nothing like the sound of Nemours' laughter. She hadn't heard it in a while, and he hadn't heard hers. How they had laughed together. He had tickled her until she screeched. She would play with his hair; he would sit there, so patiently, and let her tie it into knots. Sibulla would laugh and comb his hair with her fingers, and he would give Sefira a secret smile. It was their game.
Night would fall, she would get sleepy and settle in his arms. She would put her face against his neck. He would sing to her.
How she had loved Nemours.
Until the day he came in, dripping in blood. Black blood, from the guards. Blue blood from killing Ydin.
Sibulla picking up Ty, just a baby. Sefira and Lamia escaping, each to a different hiding place, before Ahn could stop them.
Nemours finding her behind a column, telling her he would not let anyone hurt her.
A terrified Lamia finding Delian in the armory and pulling him, her arm around his neck. "Let go of that sword. You can't help!" He had been just a boy.
"Hide them," Nemours had told Ahn.
Virso’s roars. Mother's shrieks.
They hid in the maze, or Virso would find them. Virso wants us all dead, she heard Sibulla whisper.
"Mother," Ahn whispered. "Mother, protect us!"
Ty was so good, he never even cried. And Sefira bit hard on her lip not to make a noise.
Swords going for so long, and Nemours screaming. Sibulla running into the Hall to die with her husband.
And then Nemours — but only half of him. The very arm that had held Sefira, the shoulder on which she had fallen asleep every night, gone. Gone. Just half of him. Sibulla, her eyes turned all gold without pupils, as if she had wanted to go blind after what she had seen.
Sefira let out a moan, and Thady patted her leg. Let her have her bad memory. She wished she could get past that moment more quickly, then the kona was good. The best thing.
She had never let Nemours go near her after that, not even when he was whole again.
"I failed you," he had said one day. "I know."
No, no, no. It was the fear. The fear of you being gone. My brothers. My sisters. Because of that ... thing. That Father, not my father. Mad. Mad, and Mother too.
Love makes you weak, she thought — as she did every day. She thought it as she looked at Thady. She loved Thady, her friend at all hours, and it made her weak. But Thady also helped her to be strong. They trained together. They raided the mountains together and slept outside, listening for werewolves and demons. They would kill the twisted beasts, rid the world of vermin. Then the serpents in the Sweet Seas too. And the witches. Everything.
She wanted no short cuts around the war. She wanted a battle, head on. A battle against her brother because she no longer loved him. He was a part of everything, and it was time for that to be over. She would conquer him, then she would forget.
Ahn had been like a mother to her, but Ahn was wrong. Whatever that priest was about to do was wrong. You stood and you fought — not like Aya, when Virso had tried to kill them. Not with magic or underhanded things. It made her angry when Ahn did that.
But before the battle, she would give Thady the hekas and make her stronger than mortals. And since Nemours did what he wanted, one day Sefira would make Thady immortal, and the two of them would create an army such as the world had never seen. An eternal companion in arms, forever trustworthy, was all she needed.
Nemours had hidden on Earth; he had used hekas on Delian and Ty; he went around with a human from a trash world. He was corrupt. His time was over.
"And if we meet your brothers?" Thady asked suddenly, holding on to Sefira's ankle as if to anchor her in reality. As if not to let her fly, like Nemours used to do. "What do we do?"
"We make them sorry," Sefira said, her eyes closing.
17
Elinor could only think of High Hall as a thing unto itself. Almost like a living creature of Otherwhere.
The petrified eyelid of the dragon, Ty told her, had formed a hill, and from that hill they had carved the entire thing. It had been made at a time of magic still, when to create such a place, so strong and yet so full of delicate and exquisite ornamentation, was easy for immortals.
Delian seemed to resent the fact that they were not capable of such feats now more than Ty did. The youngest of them all had perhaps not enjoyed their full powers as much, although Delian — taking Elinor to the chapel she had visited with Ahn — showed her the story of creation again, and dwelt on the time of conquests, as he called them.
"Best of all time," he said, indicating the knights fighting with them against dragons, white guards and monsters. "We never saw their like again."
"But it was your father who made these," Elinor pointed out, tracing some of the monsters with her finger.
"Not my father," Delian said, touching the back of his neck.
She supposed the two princes seemed young to her in spirit because they weren’t in fact old. Not any older than she was, she thought wryly, although they had lived their full five hundred years. They seemed younger, certainly, than thousand-year-old Nemours — who was not jaded, as he had told her in Fez, but who yet had shadows deep inside his eyes.
As Ahn had.
As Sibulla had, even in the expanse of gold without pupils.
Sefira was a different thing, too. She had no shadows, only turmoil.
"You’re too young to wish for times past," she told Delian. "Considering how long you'll live, in any case."
"You’re always railing against modernity," he pointed out, following her into the corridor.
"Not always." There were things she liked, and she was learning not to dismiss the whole for the parts. She was learning not, as Delian had drolly put, to throw the baby out with the bathwater.
The room she was given had thin columns rising in spirals, carved arches, and a balcony perpetually open to the air and the breeze — like Sibulla's. It had hot and cold water coming from pipes, as England did now. It had light; you only had to make a pulling motion with your hand over lamps or nooks in the wall — more if you wanted it brighter. The light, or fire, did not hurt your eyes. They said it came from the sun.
"Like solar power," Ty explained.
But the sun was growing dim.
In the night, Elinor listened for the cracks. The silence was deeper here, as if she could truly sit and hear stars shifting, and the dance of s
uns and moons and the lonely winds of space. Nemours, Ty had said, was made of such stuff. But then that meant everyone was. The worlds were endless and made of the same stuff, and everything was connected, and this was what the princes (and she) could not accept to lose. She listened as if she could hear the hurricanes and earthquakes of Earth across the void.
When such thoughts became too vast, she concentrated on smaller and more familiar items. Everything in this wing of High Hall was beautifully made in fragrant wood, soft cloths, flashing jewels, polished lapis lazuli, onyx and marble. The colors of Nemours: blue, gray and black.
They had no technology in Otherwhere. Nothing ringing, beeping, intruding. They didn't need it — they had all the beauty of Elinor's world without the smells or any of the ordure. Without the rotting and the disease.
At night, red lights flared and traveled slowly over the city, as if guarding it; as if watching.
Delian liked showing her around, and was especially proud of his horse, Dancer, which was admittedly a beauty. Horses here were bigger and stronger, their braided manes long and silky. They were of different colors, some with coats that were almost wine-red, some golden with creamy tails.
Dancer was a bright silver. Delian made it trot and jump for her as if it were truly dancing. It moved its head as if to music, shaking a wild white mane. He could spend the whole day riding, and no one should ever say that a horse was not the most magnificent creature in existence or in any way inferior to other creatures (and by that he meant Azure).
He also showed off his quarters, where he had a wardrobe as large as his bedroom, full of what he called booty. There were clothes from different eras — a lot of them from the 2000s, where he had spent much of his time on Earth; designer clothes, he said. There were sunglasses, pajamas, shoes, underwear. He was even prouder of an adjoining room full of weapons: daggers, short swords, broad swords, long swords, rapiers, sabers, chainmail, gauntlets.
His emblem, the horse now wearing a princely crown, was on his cloaks, dagger pommels and breastplates.
"Popinjay," she told him.
"I think you mean elegant," he said, but still looked a little insulted, especially when she was more interested in Ty’s antechamber, which was filled with books from floor to ceiling with the history, politics, religion, and poetry of Otherwhere. Ty's blazon, the crowned raven, meant intelligence as it did on Earth, but also wisdom. And no, he said laughing, he did not have a raven as Sibulla had her golden bird always by her side.
"We didn't get immortal pets, like the Originals," Delian said airily, as if he didn't care. "Ydin, our crazy dead brother, had a red wolf. Have to say it was pretty cool, but it turned as insane as he was. Half ate Nyx, Ahn's fox, that day. The day they came to, you know—" He passed a hand over his throat, meaning the day they came to kill us.
Tempting as Ty's books were, to read about such stories and more, Elinor was more immediately fascinated by a sort of storeroom that held Otherwhere goods. The grimoire on Earth had often alluded to them, but she had had to make do with substitutions. Now she scrutinized and held jars of the original substances used in spells: dried ghostflower and crushed glassflower, black river root, weeping weed and crystalized sea sugar. Other tags identified even more fantastical things, like dragon skin, harpy feathers, mermaid scales, werewolf tooth and vampire fangs.
Strange that she should miss the grimoire, when it had once seemed like the most evil of books to her. She almost felt naked and vulnerable without it, especially considering that a great conflict was imminent.
I suppose I am a witch, and there’s no help for it now.
"Is there a grimoire among your books?" she asked Ty.
"No, only in the Prime Temple library," he said. "And well guarded by the Tho Set-Tuaa."
After a moment’s silence, Delian said, "There’s a dark grimoire too. At least I’ve heard it said, and things that are said are always true."
His brother took a moment to grimace at him in quick disagreement and told Elinor, "It’s probably all in the heads of witches now, if the spells even existed."
"And in the heads of mages," Delian added meaningfully.
Elinor felt that she ought to have both grimoires. But the normal one could not leave the library, and the dark one might not exist. Like Delian, she believed it did.
In the meantime, Delian went to Earth and returned with quite a few things of hers in a basket — but no grimoire, as he was not allowed to smuggle it back in.
She sighed and went through the things. He had brought her some dresses and underclothes that matched, packed with far too much interest. At the bottom of the basket, she found the pocket timepiece and the binoculars, which had been there since she had bought them during her outing to town.
"Your watch will be no good here," Ty observed, taking it. "The hours are different."
"Are they?"
"Our days are longer. Our nights too, which is why we call our moon by different names."
"Vestea the white moon, Eera the red moon and Ina the yellow moon," Delian recited. He threw her a provocative look. "Replaced by the dawn, which is named Mour, guess after who?"
She ignored him. "And there is the White Lady …"
"Heralds Mour," Ty said. "The start of day. Outlasts it, depending on the time of year, and how bright the sun is."
The Hope Star.
Now Delian gave his doublet a nudge and a tiny complaint was followed by sharp black ears peeping over his collar.
"Kent!" Elinor cried.
"I know the importance of pets, Lady E," Delian said with a smirk.
It was still not easy for him to deny her things, although he often claimed not to be a pushover. He and Ty watched with some fondness as she kissed Kent and wrapped him halfway around her neck, and the cat purred.
***
In the days that followed, Elinor did not often see Nemours. He was busy discussing war and training for war, and soon Delian and Ty were also busy.
She would sit in a balcony above the armory courtyard and follow their progress. She liked to see how they did things here: everything more perfect and organized than it had been at her father's castle, much as the earl had insisted on order.
Nemours' horse was of such dark blue it was almost black, like Azure. She watched the way he taught the men tilting or sparring, the way he gave orders, the way he displayed a move with the spear. She watched his thighs grip the horse and watched his eyes flash, and she sighed. It must be sorcery, it must.
The root in her was no longer the dead root of sorrow. It was the live root of desire, even more impossible to pluck out.
Such feelings were more forbidden than ever, considering that Nemours' wife had been poisoned in that very castle, and that war was afoot. Elinor was never alone with him. In company, she would sometimes find his eyes on her, and he would let them rest there a moment, piercing her and then leaving her. She held on to those looks as if they were a treasure she could hoard. If he opened a door for her or showed her something in a book or a map, she would find his nearness as heady as a potion. At night she measured the distance between their rooms in her mind, thinking their doors might as well be portals they did not have the magic to cross.
It was wiser to spend most of her time with Delian or discussing the clue with Ty.
At twenty-seven, darkness follows a reckoning.
They had come to no conclusions so far, although they had a good library in High Hall, with Earth books. Even illustrated manuscripts that looked new.
They were all distracted, true. And they didn't want to hunt for the hekas — she suspected they hated magic at the moment.
So she walked the hallways with Kent on her shoulder. Azure had adopted him, letting him lie on her head or between her paws.
Sometimes Elinor went by Sibulla's room and stopped at the door. The princess still stared at the sky.
Elinor felt that she was in the wrong place, seeking to steal Nemours' love from Sibulla. Usurping the place of a girl who had
just died. Azure, however, stood close against her leg as if telling her that she belonged there. That Nemours wanted her there, although it might be wrong of them.
Once, when Elinor ventured further into the room, Sibulla smiled with her blank eyes as the bird on her shoulder opened its tail, creating a glorious golden headdress for her. It stared at Elinor with its neck bent to the side, pensive but not hostile. Elinor could not help starting when Sibulla took her hand and said, "A mercy sharp like a blade, a grief soft as a feather, an end blind as two eyes."
She did not know what the princess meant, but later she told the three brothers what she had said.
"More riddles to solve," Delian said with a groan.
"No," Nemours said, giving a slight shrug. "Just things that will come to pass, whether we want them to or not."
18
"Close your left flank. Left, left, left!"
Delian had ordered Ty to hack at Elinor without mercy. But Ty always had mercy — for what sense would it have made for him to fight a human with all his strength?
Elinor wondered wryly whether it had been a good idea to ask Delian to help her train. He had jumped at the chance too eagerly, and she had not known this side of him since he was permissive and lax when he didn't care about things. He certainly wasn't like that about fighting.
"Good!" he bellowed when Elinor avoided a thrust by stepping sideways. "Now beat him back."
They were on the field behind the castle, with three squires and two pages. Delian was taking this seriously.
During the first training session, Elinor thought she might die. She hadn't been completely idle in her life, as she liked to walk and was an excellent rider, but nothing could compare to the grueling pace of training at swords — even if presently her sword was a wooden stick.
And Delian didn't care if the pace was the same for a soldier of his world or for her. Had she not been stubborn, she would have opened a portal into anywhere else or used Crossing to get to an island where Delian would never find her. But she was a mule, and she bore the constant physical torture.
