The War of the Flowers

by Tad Williams

  "Thank you, Lord Hellebore," she said at last. "I'm sorry we're late. It . . . it was my fault." "It is Beauty's privilege to keep others waiting," he said, so smoothly and kindly that for a moment it almost seemed like there might be a heart beating inside his chest. His black eyes flicked over her again, slowly but not unduly so, an expression of power so great that it did not need to insult others to prove itself. It was like being examined for preferred cuts by a goblin who had every expectation of eating you one day. "Yes, very lovely."

  Her father was nodding ever so slightly. Her breath caught in her throat. Was this the plan, why she had been brought here? Was she simply going to be given to the master of Hellebore House as a kind of tribute?

  With only the most gently proprietary air, Hellebore took her arm and led her and her father toward the largest elevator — the "ogre box" as it was sometimes called in the great houses. It had to be large and strong: two pairs of bodyguards got in with them, shoving their huge bodies back against the walls to maximize the protection and also to leave as much room as possible in the middle of the elevator for their smaller employers. All four guards had set their lumpy faces in expressions of blank seriousness. She was sure her own expression wasn't any more cheerful, and her father nearly always looked like the funerary portrait of some famous general. Only Hellebore, murderer of thousands, appeared to be enjoying himself. He caught Poppy's eye and winked. She managed through sheer strength of will to keep her knees locked and her body upright.

  It had been years since she had been on the upper floors of Hellebore House — some kind of parliamentary holiday party decades back was the last time she could remember — and she was a little surprised now to see how relentlessly ordinary it was. The décor was fashionably sparse, the paint fashionably luminous, but other than a certain drained and nervous look on the faces of the employees scuttling past (who all stopped to bow and tug their forelocks before passing their master, though he never acknowledged the tributes) things did not seem much different than in Thornapple House or any other of the most powerful family house-towers. It was only in backwater operations like Loosestrife House or the Bluebell-Mallow Cooperative that you heard someone whistling or singing, or saw people stopping to converse within sight of one of the ruling clan. Only in those families where they had given up on attaining power did things ever get lax.

  How she longed to live in such a family! "I hope you'll forgive us, Poppaea," said Lord Hellebore suddenly as they stepped out of an elevator on the fifty-second floor into a wide lobby with a midair fountain at one end, an endless curl of running water hovering in the air. "I have some important business with your father — it will not take us long. If you'll wait here for just a moment, I'll find someone to show you around."

  "Oh, no, please." The idea of being left on her own for a while was the most hopeful thing she had heard all day. "Don't bother anyone just for me."

  Hellebore smiled and winked again. Her father was smiling too, which made her skin crawl. "No trouble at all. And then we'll see you for lunch. They do a rather nice white venison here in the house restaurant."

  The pale woman behind the desk — very pretty, with the ropy hair and drowned, woeful look that suggested she might have nymph blood, nodded respectfully at Poppy as she rose from behind the desk. "Can I get you anything, Mistress? Betony tea? Some spring water?"

  "No, I'm fine, thanks." Poppy took a seat. A magazine rack suddenly glimmered into view beside her where a moment before there had been only bare wall. Impressive touch, she thought. She plucked out a copy of Tower Life and opened to a fawning article on Lord Lily and the massive re-decoration of Lily House. A chill ran along her spine as though someone had slipped an ice cube down the back of her blouse. Lily House was gone now, rubble and ashes. She looked at the date on the magazine and saw that it was only a few weeks old. She supposed it had come out just before the attack. The real question was why the Hellebores still had it in their waiting room.

  But they'd think it was amusing, she realized, and went cold and prickly all over again.

  "Mistress Thornapple? Poppy Thornapple?" She looked up, startled. The figure looming over her was so tall that for a moment she took him for a polevik. When he stepped back she saw that although he was extremely long and lean, several handspans taller than she was, he was still only an ordinary fairy like herself. Then she got a good look at his face, emotionless as a mandragorum's, and started wondering again.

  "Yes, I'm . . . that's me."

  "My father wants me to show you around." "Father? You're . . ." "Antoninus Hellebore." He nodded slowly, as though someone was whispering the instructions on how to do it in his ear. "They called me Anton at school. You can call me Anton."

  Poppy was startled again. She knew the name — Lord Hellebore's eldest had been at school with Orian — but had never met him before. Among the Flower houses he had always been said to be a bit unusual. Once, as a very young girl, she had even convinced herself that "unusual" could mean "kind," and had developed a short-lived fantasy of Anton Hellebore being someone who might take her away to live in a beautiful castle full of singing birds. She was glad her younger self had grown into a woman who could look at this slack-jawed scarecrow without feeling disappointed. "Hello, Anton. You knew my brother Orian back at Dowsing Academy, I think."

  "Oh, yes." He nodded again. "Orian died recently, didn't he? I remember someone telling me that he was killed." She expected him to say something about how sorry he was, but instead his next words were, "Follow me."

  As he led her on a rather perfunctory tour of the family-compound portion of Hellebore House, Poppy had a chance to observe him. She couldn't quite put her finger on what made him so strange, other than his polevikian physique. He was a little dull, especially in the social niceties, and your average stone had more of a sense of humor, but she could also see streaks of intelligence, and sometimes more than streaks: his explanation of the family tower's complex mirror-system was dizzyingly technical and far too offhand to be mere show. But there was something damaged about him, as though at some point his brain had been removed and then restored and the connections hadn't grown back just right. It was more than faintly creepy. He talked with something approaching genuine pleasure about inanimate objects, especially things that were dangerous, but he not only didn't acknowledge any of the employees, servants, and distaff family members who saluted him, like his father he didn't even seem to notice them, as though they were vibrating at a frequency that Poppy could see but he could not.

  Finally, though, a family member arrived that he did see — that he couldn't avoid seeing.

  "You have a friend!" The woman was sharp and shiny and beautiful as the blade of a saber, her hair a brilliant gold that belonged on the head of a dairymaid, and perhaps once had been. She wore a youthful pants and shirt combination — perhaps a little too youthful, but that was Poppy's opinion, the harsh judgment of actual youth. Poppy could smell expensive antiaging charms. So far, they seemed to be working. "Anton," the woman said, "you must introduce me."

  His face churned with emotions she could not read, but he only said, "Yes, Mother. This is Poppy Thornapple." "Oh, of course, we met at your family's Midwinter's Day party a few years ago, didn't we?" She took Poppy's shoulders in her hands and placed kisses like the nudge of a parrot's beak on each cheekbone. "So nice to see you here. How are your . . . how is your father?" She seemed to have remembered at the last moment that Poppy's mother was dead.

  "Fine. He's with Lord Hellebore right now." Aurelia Hellebore showed an impressive amount of teeth. "And so Anton is keeping you company. Charming! I tell you, you must come for tea some day and we can get properly acquainted. And shame on your father for not bringing you here sooner, although these hostilities have been hard on us all. How old are you now, dear? At least a hundred, yes? Well, you've grown into a most delightful young woman." She waved her hand. "Now you must excuse me — I have ever so much to do today. I'm only in town until tomorrow then it's ba
ck to the country. You young people have fun!"

  Lady Hellebore vanished, followed by a small retinue of servants. Poppy was still trying to figure out why the meeting had felt so unspontaneous — it was Lady Hellebore's house, after all, so why shouldn't they run into her? — when Anton Hellebore made a strange growling noise in his throat. His face had grown even more childishly sullen, as though the presence of his mother had momentarily sucked away half his age.

  "I don't want to get married," he said. For a long moment Poppy had no idea what he was talking about. Then, just as she made sense out of the whole day and abruptly found herself fighting a wave of nausea, Anton turned to her. "Do you want to see my stepbrother?"

  "What?" "My stepbrother. Well, my adopted brother. Everybody always asks me about him — they all want to know what he's really like. Mother and Father won't let anyone meet him."

  So this is your little thwarted bit of revenge, she decided. A rule you can break. Because they're thinking about pairing you up with me, and you're probably not even interested in girls. Or boys, either. "I've heard about him. People call him . . ."

  "A Terrible Child." Anton smirked, then turned and walked toward the elevator, this time without even a "Follow me." "It's a stupid name," he said over his shoulder. "He doesn't do anything." He waited until the elevator door had closed behind them, then leaned close to her. His breath smelled like copper. "I've killed lots of people," he told her in a conspiratorial whisper.

  She didn't know any way to respond to that except to keep her mouth tightly shut and to breathe shallowly. "I have!" he said, a little defensively. "In my experiments. You don't find anything out if you don't. I'll show you my laboratory later if you want." The elevator opened and she had to move out because he was behind her. "Just this way," he said.

  The air on this floor was noticeably warmer, as though the household hob had forgotten to keep it circulating. It was damp, too — Poppy was suddenly conscious of her blouse sticking to her back. She was not conscious of much else except a distinct queasiness. She felt like she was floating, as though her head were a bit of dandelion fluff being carried on a breeze down the hot, moist corridor.

  The window began halfway along the passage and continued for a dozen paces. The room on the other side of the glass was so cloudy with steam that it was impossible to make out anything except a few vague shapes — furniture, as far as she could tell, low white chairs and a white table. Even the walls seemed to be white. The whole scene reminded her uncomfortably of an underground mirror-show one of the girls at school had gotten hold of, and had shared at a late-night party. Supposedly copied from a scientific research project, it purported to show the ghostworld — the place where all the mirrors connected — and at the time, surrounded by giggling housemates, Poppy had thought it mostly boring, but the roiling emptiness of it, the suggestions of faces and contorted shapes, had come back to her in several nightmares.

  As if summoned up by those unsettling memories, something emerged from the back of the steamy room and came toward her, only stopping when it reached the long, water-beaded window. It was a child, a boy, quite ordinary looking at first except for the curly sparrow-brown hair and slightly plump face, but there was some other subtle oddness about him that she could not immediately name. He was a little shorter of limb than most children his age, and his eyes were a most unusual color — not violet or emerald green or robin's egg blue as she was used to among the Flower families, but brown. It was only after a moment that she realized his features and proportions were not simply outside the usual norms. He was a mortal.

  "There he is." Anton was striving to sound jocular, but was not altogether succeeding. "Wave to him." The little boy watched her, expressionless, separated from them by a pane of glass and less than an arm's length of distance. It was his eyes that held her, and not just their strange, earthy color, like a mud-stirred puddle: they had a quality of intelligence that did not match the rest of his childish features, a regard as deep and cold as a cloudless winter sky. Then the boy smiled at her, a slow exposure of teeth that made his adoptive father's predatory grins seem warm and benevolent. She turned away, gagging.

  "Wait!" Anton Hellebore called after her as she hurried back toward the elevator. "Don't you want to see my experiments . . . ?" —————

  She found her way back through the maze of corridors to the waiting room. The nymph-secretary looked a bit startled to see her, but offered tea again.

  "Nothing." She could barely make herself speak. It felt like something was screaming in her ear, telling her to run as fast as she could. She sat, tapping her fingers, a magazine unread on her lap. What was she doing here? Being led around like a prize heifer while the Hellebores sized her up, that was what. But even though they might want to marry her to that gangly freak, she had no illusions as to which bull she would be expected to service. There was no misreading the cool, satisfied look that Hellebore Senior had given her.

  And that thing in the foggy room . . . ! She stood up, thinking for a moment that if she did not get to a bathroom to splash cold water on her face she would faint. But once she was on her feet she kept moving toward the door.

  "Mistress Thornapple?" called the secretary. "Are you leaving? You really shouldn't walk through the house by yourself."

  She opened the door to the corridor and the elevators.

  "Is there a message for your father . . . ?" She pulled the door shut hard behind her.

  31 IN THE BLOOM YEARS

  Caradenus Primrose came into the tent with the rigid face of a man submitting to judgment. No, not just an ordinary man, Theo thought, but some king forced to answer to commoners.

  "You have been here several days now," the fairy lord told him, "and my debt is still undischarged." His voice sounded much more troubled and sorrowful than his expression would have suggested, and Theo immediately softened.

  I guess he can't help it — it's like he went to some stick-up-the-ass private school. Well, he probably did, but even for a Flower-fairy he's pretty puckered. "I think I said that I wouldn't force you."

  Primrose shook his head. "You did say that. But to be candid with you, Master Vilmos, it is my own knowledge that I did wrong to you that causes me pain, not any compulsion you have put on me."

  "Did someone just fart?" asked Mistress Twinge. "I mean, either someone just squeezed off a real goblin-barker or someone's talking about principles of honor. Either way, it's getting pretty thick in here for folk like us pookas who don't have any honor to worry about. Believe I'll take a stroll. Coathook, you want to help me find Streedy? I haven't seen him since breakfast and I want to make sure none of your goblin chums are cheating him out of his shoes or something."

  "Goblins do not cheat," said Coathook, brow furrowed. "As in, 'Goblins don't cheat anyone who doesn't deserve it'? Could be. Could be." Mistress Twinge jabbed a cigar into the corner of her mouth, lit it with an ostentatious flick of her fingers, then sashayed out of the tent leaving a trail of smoke thick as molasses hanging in the air. Coathook followed her, grumbling.

  "The pooka is always trying to shock me, but without much luck," Primrose said when they had gone, and almost smiled. "They are kind people, your friends."

  "They've been nice to us. But I don't think I know them well enough to call them friends yet. I'm not sure I know any of you well enough for that. Sorry, Cumber, no offense. But just . . . I don't really get how things work here." How about Applecore? he asked himself. She was a better friend to you than most of the people you've called that over the years. But he didn't want to think about Applecore just now. "Speaking of, should we offer you something? I don't think we've got much but we might have a bottle of Twinge's dandelion wine under a blanket somewhere."

  "No, thank you." Primrose sat down in a comparatively uncluttered corner. The fairy was graceful in everything he did, but he still couldn't make himself look comfortable with the present cramped and — it had to be admitted — smelly circumstances. Theo wondered if getting th
e story about his great-uncle was going to be worth the trouble.

  "So you actually knew my Great-Uncle Eamonn?" he asked. "Or the man I used to think was my great-uncle?"

  "Would you like me to leave, Theo?" asked Cumber. "No, please stay. You've already kept Lord Primrose and I from having one . . . unfortunate misunderstanding. You're kind of like my translator for the fairy world."

  Primrose made an interesting hand gesture, bringing his palms together until they almost touched. "I am grateful to you too, Master Sedge. And perhaps, Master Vilmos, you would be good enough to call me 'Primrose,' or even 'Caradenus.' "

  Now Theo did laugh. "Sorry! It's just that if you want me to call you Caradenus, you'd better find something to call me besides 'Master Vilmos.' Agreed? It's Theo. Now go on. Tell me how you knew Eamonn Dowd."

  "It was a goodly time ago — between the last two wars. I met him at a house-party."

  "When you say 'between the last two wars,' remember I'm pretty shaky on the history of Faerie. Which two wars? How long ago?"

  "Between the final Gigantine War and the most recent Flower War." Primrose's face hardened. "Most recent before this one, I should have said — and may that murderer Nidrus Hellebore go screaming into the Well for dragging us all into such suffering again!"

  "About two centuries to a century and a half ago," Cumber volunteered. "Our time."

  "Good God," Theo said. "So while thirty, forty years went by in my world — that makes it four or five times longer here?"

  "It isn't always that direct a correlation," Cumber reminded him. "In any case," said Primrose, "it was during what we call the Bloom Years. People look back on it now as a golden age, a time of high living and exciting changes, but even though I was much younger then, I still should have guessed things couldn't be that simple. And so should a lot of other people, but most believed what they wanted to believe. There was a sort of giddiness in the air. People were relieved because even though the king and queen had died in the war, the City hadn't fallen, Faerie hadn't disappeared, things seemed to be continuing — something nobody had been quite sure would happen. It's almost hard to believe that now, but you have to remember that back then no one could remember a time when Oberon and Titania hadn't ruled all the known lands — there weren't even any books in the libraries about such a time! And now they were really gone, but things hadn't collapsed, so of course we were relieved and thrilled. And the Parliament of Blooms seemed to be making changes everybody had wanted, as though the king and queen had been holding back the modern age simply by existing, so now things could move forward. It wasn't as clear then that the Parliament was pretty much controlled by the Seven Families — and for people like me it was even less clear. My family was one of the Seven, so I didn't really notice that not everyone was so very happy, that there were beggars on the streets everywhere, that the war with the giants had destroyed thousands of peoples' homes and livelihoods. There are probably folk out there in the ruling houses today who think what Hellebore and the others have done is just a bit of upset, and who are still going on about their lives, worrying about things like who'll take the Trooping Banner this year. A hundred years from now they won't remember the beggars and corpses, either."