by Violet Grace
‘And the spiritual realm?’ I ask.
‘Transcendence intersects with the other two realms in Serenissima as well. Both humans and Fae can access it.’ And then, her eyelids fluttering, she adds, ‘But, it’s much more difficult for humans to achieve such an enlightened state.’
She sips her tea, content in her superiority. Memories of Tom break through: flying with him in Transcendence. That feeling of peace and love and of being one.
‘Everywhere else in the world, the three realms are separate,’ the Chancellor explains. ‘But in Serenissima, the fabric of the realms is so wafer-thin that Fae and humans almost rub shoulders. All that separates the realms in Serenissima is – how shall I put it? – a matter of perspective.’
‘Human Venetians throughout the ages have glimpsed the Art from Fae living amongst them,’ the Luminaress says. ‘Of course, the human authorities have used propaganda for centuries to dismiss sightings of the Art in Venice. They call it old wives’ tales or the ramblings of drunk sailors – or, more recently, inebriated tourists.’
She’s talking about the Agency, I think. I guess it has an Italian branch.
The Luminaress hands me the complete file on House Grigio.
‘Study it well,’ she says, her eyes never leaving mine. ‘When the stakes are this high, we can’t have more of your mistakes.’
I leave the Luminaress and the Chancellor and start back along the corridor, the Grigio dossier heavy in my arms.
A low, resonant voice comes from the adjoining room. ‘I don’t like it.’
Tom.
His morning frost seems to have thawed. He’s reclining in a velvet reading chair in my private library – which just happens to share a wall with my sitting room.
His eyes are glued to my favourite book, which I summoned from Volgaris: Jane Eyre. Anyone else might think he was offering an ill-considered review of the classic, but I know that, with his unicorn senses, he’s heard every last detail about the official visit to Serenissima.
I step into the library and turn to lock the door behind me.
‘Not here,’ I whisper. ‘The walls have ears.’
He unfolds his long frame from the chair and places my book back on the table. I lay the dossier next to it and offer him my hand. He slides his hand into mine. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t notice how they fit together so perfectly.
I have to concentrate to remember the words of the transfer spell, so distracted am I by his delicious warmth, radiating from my palm up into my body. A shimmering plume of dust envelops us, the bookshelves and furniture of the library blur and moments later we’re bathed in the blood-red hue of rubies and the ageless scent of incense.
The Temple.
‘I haven’t been here since …’ says Tom, staring at the empty space.
‘Gladys’s funeral,’ I finish for him.
He wedges his hands into the pockets of his kilt and nods.
‘I come here all the time.’ I stare up at the Chandelier of Light suspended from the arched-ceiling alcove behind the altar. It’s like an exploding star frozen in time, each glistening diamond made from the compressed ashes of past luminaresses.
I check the doors of the Temple, making sure they’re locked.
‘The visit to Serenissima. It’s a mistake,’ Tom begins.
I turn to face him. ‘A mistake?’
He pauses a beat, which makes me think he’s still working through his thoughts. ‘Like you said, there’s work to be done here.’
I sit down on the pew and let out a sigh.
‘What’s this really about, Tom? You tell me that I’m not being the person I’m meant to be and when a chance finally comes along to prove myself, you want to stand in my way?’
He folds his arms over his broad torso. ‘There’s more going on here than they’re telling you.’
‘Nothing new there.’
I look over at him, strong and tall in the red light reflected from the ruby-covered walls. Not for the first time, I find myself wondering why he came to my window all those years ago. And more to the point, why he is still here, despite all the complications that come with loving me. It’s not like he doesn’t have options.
‘Can’t you see that I need to show them all that I can do this, that Gladys wasn’t wrong about me?’
‘So find another way to prove yourself,’ he insists.
‘Why?’
He shakes his fringe out of his eyes. ‘I don’t know. You must know that the Order is more divided than ever.’
‘They look pretty united to me – united in their dislike of me,’ I say. ‘The only difference between them seems to be how openly they display their disapproval.’
‘Don’t joke, Chess. Not about this. Many of them haven’t forgiven you for the pyct virus.’
‘Damius tried to destroy most of the population of Albion, but I’m the bad guy because he used my DNA to do it,’ I say, unable to keep the edge out of my voice. ‘I saved their fairy butts but they’d still rather blame a half-blood than admit that one of their own pure-blood Fae did such a thing.’
‘You already know it’s more than that,’ Tom says cautiously. ‘Don’t forget that the traditionalists wanted the untrammelled power locked in the Chalice back and you were supposed to give it them. When you destroyed all that power, you also destroyed their only hope of unbridling the Art in Volgaris. They saw it as proof that your humanity, your morality, weakened you, that your judgement can’t be trusted.’
‘Ungrateful pigs,’ I say, standing up and kicking one of the pews.
‘Maybe, but they’re powerful pigs.’ He looks at me, real concern in his eyes. ‘There are whispers, Chess. Some in the Order are starting to wonder if Damius taking the throne wouldn’t be so bad after all.’
‘Wow. A megalomaniac psychopath is a better option than me. This is officially a low point in my life.’
‘They don’t trust him, but they see him as one of them. Not…’
‘A mongrel,’ I say flatly.
Tom looks pained by the word, but he doesn’t deny it.
‘Well, if what you say is true, it’s even more important that I go to Serenissima. If I can prove to the Order that I’m Queen material, then that might at least stop all the mutterings about Damius.’
I cross my legs, my silk gown skimming along my calves. ‘There’s something else you need to know. My mother told me to go.’
I tell him what happened in the crypt. His brow furrows and he shakes his head.
‘Impossible,’ he says.
‘What?’ I say, a little too defensively. ‘I know what I saw and heard.’
‘I’m not doubting you, Chess, but what you’re describing is outside the laws of reason. If your mother’s life force really did escape Damius’s imprisonment and reunite with her body, why did it leave again? Where is it now?’
‘It happened,’ I insist. ‘She was desperate for me to help her. She needs me to go to House Grigio, even if I have no idea why.’
I slump forward on the pew and cradle my head in my hands.
Tom sits next to me, his energy nudging up against mine. Silence settles between us and I feel my stomach beginning to unclench.
His wide, gentle hand glides down my hair and rests on my shoulders. Slowly, he swivels me around to face him, pulling me into an embrace. I pause there for a moment, my cheek nestled against his chest, listening to his heart beating through his t-shirt, strong, grounding and steady.
My hands slide around his torso to his broad back, and before I realise what I’m doing, my fingers are lightly tracing the muscular peaks and troughs beneath his t-shirt.
The rhythm of his heartbeat changes. It’s erratic, racing.
I look up and our eyes lock. He offers up a dimple and I watch, transfixed, as the smile moves into his eyes. It melts me. I breathe in his salt and musk scent, making my blood pulse as I’m consumed with the ache of wanting.
Tom has stopped breathing, his lips red and slightly parted, waiting.
‘We can’t,’ I say, forcing myself to slide away from him. Gladys’s last words echo through my head: Do not let anyone distract you from your true purpose. Or ruin everything we hold dear. I can still see her eyes boring into Tom as she spoke.
‘Words, Chess,’ he says, reading my mind. ‘They were just words. They don’t mean a thing.’
‘Everything she ever said meant something.’
Gladys spoke in riddles brimming with wisdom and truth. I don’t know what she meant when she spoke about my true purpose. But I do know that she was warning me against Tom.
‘Nothing terrible has happened,’ he says with an edge of frustration.
‘Yet.’
‘Chess.’ He looks at me through his eyelashes. ‘You’re here with me right now, aren’t you? Just like you were this morning, and the day before and the day before that. And the natural order is still in balance.’
‘But each time I feel like we dodged a bullet. Anything more between us is a risk I’m not prepared to take.’
‘I was there too,’ he says, his voice rising as he slings his arm over the back of the pew. ‘It was a hurried ramble from an eccentric old woman who never thought I was good enough for you.’
‘Don’t speak of Gladys like that. Ever,’ I say, my voice rising to match Tom’s.
‘It was prejudice, not prophecy. I’m sorry, but she was a stuck-up snob who called me a “useless young man”. And besides, you don’t even know that she was referring to me. She was dying, delirious. She might have been talking complete nonsense. Have you considered that?’
I wrap my arms around my body, words failing me.
Tom stands up, runs his hand through his fringe and swears.
‘You’re hiding behind the ramblings of an old woman. We’ve had this conversation a hundred times and I stupidly keep hoping it will end differently. But it’s time to accept that we’re never going to work this out. We won’t, will we?’
I stare back at him, my panic rising.
‘If you don’t have the guts to say it then I’ll say it for you.’
‘What?’ I say, not wanting the answer. ‘What are you talking about?’
‘Us!’ he says, flinging his arms up in exasperation. ‘You don’t want us! And Gladys is your excuse.’
I jump to my feet. ‘That’s not true.’
‘Then tell me you’ll make your decisions about me with your heart and not with your fears.’
Tom waits a beat, as if he’s giving me one last chance to save what is about to break forever. I open my mouth to speak but no words come out. The last remaining signs of warmth and affection drain from him. His whole body changes. The frost is back. He’s slipping away.
‘I can’t keep doing this – waiting like your lapdog, hoping for you to change your mind about me. It’s clear that’s not going to happen.’
‘What are you saying?’ I ask weakly, hoping desperately that I have misunderstood or that he’s just making idle threats because he’s angry.
‘I can do without the continual rejection. It ends now. I will not bother you again, Your Majesty.’
It’s his bow that stings the most. Perfunctory. Cold. Final.
I can’t feel my limbs as he storms to the front door of the Temple. He slams it with unnecessary force, the reverberations hitting me like shrapnel.
Below, Serenissima is waking and I’m trying hard not to think about Tom. I have not spent the entire journey ruminating about his resignation from the Protectorate infirmary. Just most of it. Every time I walked past his now vacated quarters at Windsor, hoping for a miracle, I told myself that if I just knew where he went I’d be okay. If he’d said where he was going I might be able to find closure. Maybe I wouldn’t feel like the best parts of me are still lying, bruised, on the Temple floor.
And then, this morning when I woke on a bed of feather and down, for a moment I thought that it was Tom – that I was wrapped in his soft unicorn wings. But there was no steady beat of his heart, no scent of salt and musk that both comforts and invigorates me. It was just me, alone, in a strange bed, three kilometres above the ground.
I expected aching hunger but his absence makes me feel naked, incomplete. Vulnerable. Exposed. Even though he’s only been back in my life for a year, I can’t remember how to be without him. And yet I must learn. There is too much at stake for me not to. Besides, he’s made his decision.
Golden morning sunlight shimmers through the bronze-framed window of our airship as we approach what both humans and Fae call the city of love. From the air, the main cluster of islands of Serenissima looks like the tail of a fish. My sharp Fae eyesight focuses on the endless terracotta rooftops and colourful flags strewn above the streets. It all looks so, well, human. The shape and size of the trees and greenery below are similar to what you’d expect to see in London rather than in Trinovantum.
The steady swoosh of air from the wings of thousands of ravens flying in tight formation sounds above us. When I first saw the airships, I thought they were zeppelins made from shimmering black satin. But no – we’re being flown across land and sea, suspended under a flock of birds. My wings must share my lack of confidence in our mode of transport; I can feel them tingling underneath the skin of my back, ready to flare at a moment’s notice.
The passenger cabin is made from beautiful polished oak, fitted out with plush couches and chairs inlaid with the royal seal of House Raven. A stairway leads to a second level, which is reserved for my quarters and the private rooms of the accompanying dignitaries and their entourages.
Two other airships fly in formation around us, accompanied by an escort of over a hundred Protectorate officers flying in full battle dress, scanning the horizon for danger. My temples throb as I think of how many people are coming along on this delegation. Other than the Supreme Executor, who is in charge of House Raven in my absence, and General Cassidy, who stayed behind with a skeleton guard, practically anybody who’s anybody in the whole of Trinovantum, along with their servants and guard details, have come. That’s a lot of eyes that will be watching, judging me if I screw up.
I must have drawn the short straw, as I have to fly with the Chancellor and the Luminaress. The rest of the Order, who are just as stuffy as the other two but tend to leave me alone, are flying on the other airships.
Jules stands a few metres from me, silently surveying the whole spectacle – a director with a cast of hundreds. Not only is she my personal bodyguard, she’s also the most senior officer on our delegation. Her hand-picked Protectorate guards stand around the edge of cabin, their bodies taut, ready for action. The off-duty Protectorate officers are either sleeping or gambling their wages in the bowels of the airships.
Abby stretches her legs out on a velvet chaise longue, looking like a bored and unimpressed house cat. She listlessly flicks through an old Vogue magazine from Volgaris. She’s here as my personal apothecary. Hopefully I’m not going to need any surgical-type procedures or anything that can’t be cured with Abby’s potions and sass as I’m between healers at the minute, because, well, Tom.
I was surprised that Abby came. Perhaps she’s following Jules to where the action is. Or maybe she just wants a daily opportunity to take out her anger on me. Tom left me, but apparently I’m to blame for her being separated from her twin. The only words she’s said to me since we boarded are, ‘Once was bad enough, but twice?’
The only other members of my personal entourage are Brina and Callie. They’ve spent most of the last eight hours of the journey glued to the window. I’m guessing they’re about as well-travelled as I am.
My entourage is tiny compared with all the hangers-on supporting the Chancellor and the Luminaress and other members of the Order. It seems ridiculous they all need so many assistants when they could magic up pretty much anything they wanted for themselves. But I’ve come to realise that, like for humans, there’s a certain status that comes from having other people do things for you.
‘Why didn’t we just transfer her
e?’ I ask the Chancellor as he joins me at the window. The airship is spectacular, but when it comes to speed and efficiency, it’s a pile of junk. It’s solid, but it creaks and groans and sways in time to the steady beat of the ravens’ wings.
‘Sometimes, my Queen, speed must give way to the demands of spectacle and majesty,’ he says. ‘Anyone can transfer; we want to make an entrance.’ He points at a patch of sky above the lagoon, he says, ‘Tell me, what do you see?’
I look into the distance, tilting my head to the side, trying to comprehend what I’m seeing. White marble walls and towers, gold domes and spires. A castle, perched on a rocky outcrop, with huge marble staircases built into sheer cliffs that snake down into … nothing?
‘A castle,’ I say uncertainly, ‘suspended in the sky?’
‘Suspended? Are you sure, Your Majesty?’ the Chancellor says. ‘Look again, and this time surrender your mind.’
As the airship sails towards the castle I will the small muscles around my eyes to relax. Bit by bit, the hovering castle recedes as if disappearing behind clouds of mist until it has completely vanished, replaced by an island in the centre of the lagoon. Tall spears of cypress trees stand like guards behind an orange-walled barricade. As we make landfall I notice something else: rows and rows of white crosses.
‘Graves? We’re landing in a graveyard?’
‘San Michele, the cemetery island of Venice – to humans in Volgaris.’
I blink and the island disappears, as my vision refocuses in Iridesca. The castle reappears right above the island. Where humans would see a summer sky of uninterrupted blue, a group of chestnut and black unicorns fly past the castle at a leisurely pace.
‘The castle’s back again,’ I say.
‘Very good, Your Majesty,’ the Chancellor says. ‘Now try to see both realms simultaneously.’
I soften my vision, like when you look at one of those optical illusions where you see a rabbit one way and a duck the other, and the two realities intersect, completing each other. The brick walls that surround the graveyard of San Michele connect organically with the cliffs, reaching up to the castle.