The Book of Pearl

by Timothee de Fombelle

  “Who is in the chamber?” he repeated.

  Arån was well aware of Taåg’s powers, and knew better than to make an enemy of him.

  “I threw a wounded lioness in there,” replied the archer to cover his tracks. “We’d seen her change form three times before we captured her.”

  “Who is she?”

  “First a weasel, then a bird, then a lioness. What she is now I’m not sure. The king himself doesn’t know her name,” said Arån, quickening his step. His whole body was soaking wet from the storm he had just confronted. Outside, a powerful wind was whipping up the sea and bending the cedars. He had inspected the fortifications, as far as the point where they petered out on the wild coast, but the hurricane remained at the castle’s doors. Archers passed up and down the corridors carrying torches, and around them the thick walls of the armoury were lined with metal and weapons.

  “Let me go up to the glass chamber,” Taåg said.

  “I have orders not to allow anyone to enter.”

  “Those orders don’t concern me.”

  “I seem to remember that in the past, it wasn’t your decision whether you went up there or not…”

  Taåg shuddered. He had spent the terrible, isolated years of his confinement in the uppermost reaches of the winter castle, a captive in that chamber where magical powers were sent into disarray. He’d almost been driven mad between those glass walls, the very ones that had been built on his instruction to lock up unruly genies.

  “I will obey my king if he orders me to bring you up,” said Arån. “Be patient.”

  Four men approached them as a metal gate creaked open, and Taåg was pushed aside by a stream of archers.

  Arån and his troop climbed high up the dark tower, where the air was all the cooler with the altitude. The twisting stairway seemed never-ending, and the wind played it like a pan flute. Through the arrow slits in the pumice stone, birds could be seen battling the squall outside. Arån ordered his men to stay at the top of the stairs as he entered alone to join the king.

  Once the door swung shut, silence descended.

  In front of him, the young king was standing before a vast glass structure, a perfect cube, in the centre of the room.

  The glass walls were divided into a patchwork of irregular small panels with soldered edges, like stained-glass windows. There was a layer of mercury trapped between the panes, which meant that anyone on the outside of the chamber could see in, while the captives – prevented from seeing out – were faced with a myriad of their own reflections.

  Arån didn’t notice Oliå straight away, and for a moment he thought the king was gazing into an empty box. Then, as he approached the glass wall, he finally saw her.

  She was sitting in a corner of the chamber which she hoped was a blind spot. An exhausted Oliå had been locked up in the dead of night and, huddling into that spot, had immediately fallen asleep to forget the nightmare of the chase.

  The previous evening, at the source, the white puma had been the first to detect the presence of Iån and his archers. Crouching close to the ground, Oliå had heard the beast collapse at the side of the stream. The archers had seen the girl emerge next to the source, and she would have been shot through from all angles had the king not intervened to tell them to take her alive.

  But when she instantly transformed herself into a weasel and disappeared into the brambles, the king realized that the odds were against them, and he changed his mind.

  Dead or alive. That was the new order.

  A hail of arrows beseiged Oliå as she climbed a tree trunk and leapt into the neighbouring branches. She had spent a long time as a weasel when she had wanted to shun her human form, after the queen’s death. She knew by heart how to use her tail as a balancing pole, and how to taper her body to slice through the air. Now she was flying across the treetops in the darkness.

  But these were the best archers in all the land, each one with a quiver on his back that held two hundred arrows. They ran beneath the branches, eyes trained upwards and fingers drawing their bowstrings taut. With every leap, she could feel the sharp tips brushing past her fur. She had made the wind blow unpredictably, which disrupted the arrows’ flight and helped her to glide. But when a fresh volley nearly pinned her against the bark of a tree, she realized that her time as a weasel was coming to an end. Dodging the arrows, she slipped below a branch covered in ferns and emerged as a swallow, before darting up into the night sky. Seconds later, she would have been high above the clouds, touching the stars, but she never had the chance: an arrow whistled through the air and broke her wing.

  At first, Oliå span round on herself, hanging in mid-air, too stunned to react, the forest, lake and red horizon flashing before her as the arrows continued to streak past.

  In years gone by, she had been a hummingbird, a frog or a butterfly at the mercy of children, but never before had she felt so vulnerable. The advantage of the eternal youth that was ruining her life was that it had kept her safe from fear.

  That night, as fear overwhelmed her for the first time, she understood that something had changed. What was happening? A new sensation was coursing through her tiny feathered body as it tumbled to the ground. Meeting Iliån had sparked a revolution inside her.

  She felt vulnerable. And this discovery emboldened her as she plummeted like a stone in the night. The branches of the trees broke her fall. Just as she reached the dark undergrowth, her shadow started to expand, and her new feline body rolled across the blanket of dead leaves. She stood up. The wound she’d sustained as a swallow was still throbbing, but now it was on the front paw of a lioness. She bore another wound, too: the one left by Iliån when he had abandoned her at the lakeside.

  Oliå purred. She could already hear the archers’ cries as they went on with their search. She disappeared into the darkness, treading carefully on her paw before stopping to lick the wound. The voices seemed to be heading further away.

  Suddenly, the lioness looked up to see Iån right in front of her. She froze. The king glared. From a nearby thicket came the sound of rustling and heavy breathing, and then a net swooped down on her. She was in too much distress to change one last time into a rat or a grain of pollen. Even Iliån, far in the distance, could hear her desperate roar. Oliå let them carry her off.

  Back in the high tower, Arån and the king were now watching this young girl of fifteen. She had ripped up the men’s clothes she’d been thrown, draping them over her like sheets to keep out the cold. From inside this glass chamber, it was impossible to imagine the storm that was shaking the realm.

  Iån had placed a sword in a scarlet scabbard on the stone floor before him.

  Arån understood why he had been summoned. He had just completed his tenth year serving his master, carrying out all the king’s most sinister tasks: he would have had no hesitation in killing himself had he received the order to do so. But something told him he wouldn’t be able to stomach this new mission.

  The archer took a gamble.

  “Is there any precedent of this in Your Majesty’s lineage?”

  “Precedent of what?”

  “A fairy.”

  Iån remained silent. He was well aware that fairies were descended from fairies, so it was impossible for his own sister to be one.

  “We must question the old servant from the summer palace,” Arån continued. “I can bring him here. He will be able to recognize if it’s her.”

  “No. Stay with me. There’s no fairy here.”

  The king’s eyes never left Oliå.

  “Sorcery has possessed her. She was born stained from the blood of her first crime, and she grew up with that guilt. How can she not be cursed? Where do you see a fairy? This is a sorceress.”

  That description seemed to bear no resemblance to what Arån was witnessing through the glass: a creature more gentle, more pure, more radiant than he had ever seen in his life. There was indeed sorcery in the air, but no hint of any curse.

  “Take my sword,” said th
e king.

  The girl was resting her hand on her wounded shoulder, and in places her white skin had burn marks from the chase. She must have been cold beneath the rags, but she refused to dress herself more warmly.

  “Taåg…” the archer said suddenly. “Taåg can tell whether she’s a sorceress.”

  This time, Iån wavered.

  Arån awaited the verdict with his eyes closed. How would he find the strength to pick up the sword, enter the chamber, watch her clutch the scraps of cloth a little more tightly, as she tried to guess the intention of the armed man advancing towards her? How could he bear to look into her eyes as he raised the weapon?

  “I have no faith in Taåg,” said the king. “Take my sword and kill her.”

  Arån started to talk in a way he would never have dared to before.

  “Permit me to speak out of turn as a mere soldier, Majesty,” the captain continued, amazed he was still alive after such insolence. “But I have watched you ever since you began the search for this young girl. If there’s any chance—”

  “That’s enough, Arån.”

  “If there’s any chance that no bloodline—”

  Iån leant forward and drew his sword from its scabbard, but Arån stood firm.

  “…That no bloodline exists between you and her … we must at least acknowledge that there’s a chance—”

  Iån held the sword aloft before heaving it with all his might down on the glass, which reverberated without shattering.

  Oliå cowered on the other side, turning her gaze towards them for the first time, as if sensing their presence. By pure accident, her eyes fell on the king’s, who relented, slowly lowering his sword to his feet. The king buried his face in the crook of his elbow as the weapon slid from his hands, clattering onto the stone floor.

  “Bring me Taåg.”

  The old genie arrived at the top of the tower a moment later. He bowed before the king, who was awaiting his former tutor on the final step, above where the archers had been posted. The wind whistled through the arrow slits. Taåg immediately noticed the dried tears on his godson’s cheeks.

  Iån started to speak, his voice catching in his throat, and Taåg nodded back at him gently. The genie felt as though he had returned to the time when the young king wouldn’t lift a finger without his consent. It had been years since he had been treated with so much respect. Taåg listened to Iån for a long while. When the king spoke of the girl, the old man even let Iån rest his brow on his mud-spattered shoulder.

  The king was weeping like a child. Taåg held him in his arms, showing him all his compassion and promising to stay by his side. He would go and speak to the girl to establish what they could expect from her. But the king’s despair descended into madness. He moaned and dug his nails into Taåg’s clothes.

  The genie suddenly felt a cold blade by his ear. Iån had drawn his knife and was pressing it into the old man’s temple, right in that thin triangle of flesh through which the skull can be pierced.

  “Enter that chamber, Taåg, and do not return with bad news. Do you understand, godfather? Do not be the messenger of my misfortune.”

  Taåg could hear the king’s rasping breath, and he felt the tip of the blade dig deeper into his skin.

  “And if the news is that she need not die,” added the king, “then tell me that she will love me.”

  Taåg’s voice did not falter.

  “I will tell you what is true, Majesty.”

  “Your life rests on her pale shoulders. As does mine.”

  Iån kissed old Taåg on the forehead and slowly sheathed his weapon.

  Then Iån entered the antechamber, where he had already spent so long looking at the girl through the soldered windowpanes, and pressed his head against the glass.

  Taåg followed his master in.

  He recognized her immediately.

  23

  IN THE CHAMBER

  Taåg was flung violently onto the glass floor, and the door slammed behind him. His eyes darted around the room as he rubbed his aching body.

  Oliå jumped to her feet. Something had changed in her: a flash of the lioness crossed her eyes when she saw him.

  “I had forgotten you even existed,” he said softly as he looked her over.

  She could never forget him. Fifteen years earlier, on his orders, she had blocked the source and brought about the queen’s death.

  “This time, I’m going to need your help,” said Taåg.

  He wanted to make Oliå believe that he had been thrown into captivity along with her. The king had agreed to this ruse. Taåg knew that for as long as he was in the glass chamber, he would be without his powers, so he had no recourse to magic spells to persuade her. This was hand-to-hand combat, a duel between the fairy and the old genie. He therefore needed to call on other forms of trickery, which was why they were about to speak like two prisoners in the same cage.

  Around them, the game of mirrors created a kaleidoscope, reminding Taåg of his years of confinement, of the times he had banged his head against the glass walls in despair.

  “We have to help each other,” Taåg said anxiously.

  Oliå’s defiant expression showed that she was less than willing to do this. If he was going to escape from this place with his life, Taåg would have to find a weakness in her soul.

  The genie from the marshlands weighed up the situation. If he were to demonstrate that Oliå was not the king’s sister, he would save not just his own life but the fairy’s too. He would also regain Iån’s trust. On the other hand, if she were to remain alive, she would be a constant threat to him. She knew about the crime he had devised; the crime she had unwittingly carried out herself. She had the power to condemn him.

  “Do you know why you are here?”

  She assumed it was because she had dried up the lake all those years ago: the young king was avenging his mother’s death. But she chose not to answer.

  “The king considered killing you straight away, but he hasn’t done so yet,” said Taåg. “You have a greater chance of being released from here than I do.”

  Her eyes widened a little. The old man had crouched down on one knee, as if placating a wild beast.

  Iån looked on from behind the glass wall, without hearing a word of what was being said. He could see Oliå’s face reflected a thousand times over in the mirrors.

  Inside the glass chamber, Taåg still spoke in a soft voice, forced to call on charms other than those he normally used.

  “The king wants to know if you are a fairy.”

  He picked up his staff from next to his foot.

  “Now, I am well aware that you are.” He smiled. “But that response alone will not suffice.”

  “I don’t want to be a fairy any more,” Oliå blurted out.

  “Why?”

  She immediately regretted saying anything, but Taåg seized on her confession.

  “In that case, allow the king to love you.”

  He saw a flicker of curiosity pass over Oliå’s eyes. Taåg pressed on, convinced that he had found his solution.

  “Only a royal kiss can take away the powers of a fairy. Everyone knows that.”

  This was no lie. Indeed, it was the oldest of all fairy laws. The idea of this kiss represented Taåg’s chance: he would deliver the girl to the king and render her powerless by taking away her magic. All he would have to do then would be to keep her quiet.

  “Has nobody ever told you that?”

  No, nobody had. Who would have? Who could she have asked? She had learned what it was to be a fairy all by herself.

  Oliå seemed to have retreated into herself as she pondered what she’d just heard. So there was a reason for the sudden weakness she had started feeling all those months ago. What bound her to Iliån had begun to change her, and all it would take was a kiss to complete her transformation.

  Taåg had no way of knowing her thoughts while she was in this trance-like state.

  “You must not talk of what happened before the quee
n’s death. Do you understand?”

  She looked at him, troubled. So the king knew nothing of the dried-up lake: that wasn’t the reason for her capture.

  “Do as I tell you,” said Taåg, “and you will be freed from this prison and from your powers. Then you can speak on my behalf to our king…”

  Oliå wore an air of innocence that made her look a few years younger, and Taåg believed that victory was within his grasp.

  “Let’s make a pact,” he proffered. “I want a sign of our agreement. Take my hand.”

  This was the prearranged signal for those outside the chamber to bring him out.

  Oliå looked at the old genie’s outstretched hand, while her own was still resting on her wound.

  Lower down, at the foot of another of the winter castle’s towers, in the armoury, a young man had just pulled on an archer’s leather tunic to disguise himself in the throng. Despite being prince of this ancestral castle, and next in line to the throne, it was the first time he had entered its walls.

  Iliån knew that Oliå was being held somewhere in this citadel, and he had come to rescue her.

  Taåg’s dry hand was hovering near the fairy’s face.

  “Quick, I’m afraid they’ll come to take me.”

  On the surface, it might have looked as if Oliå was still deliberating her decision, but inside she was in no doubt whatsoever. How could she refuse a royal kiss when it represented her chance to be with Iliån? She reached out and touched the old man’s hand with her fingertips. The pact was sealed.

  The door swung open and two guards entered the glass chamber, grabbing Taåg and dragging him back into the antechamber, where they were joined by the king.

  None of them noticed that Oliå had pounced soundlessly behind the door and was now hidden there, breathing quickly. Her powers were almost within reach: she just had to make it through the opening, outside the glass chamber, and they would take effect again.

  The chamber door started to close.

  The archers didn’t move, their eyes trained on the chamber. Slowly the fairy stood up, but they still didn’t spring into action. Three armed men and Taåg were blocking her way as the remaining gap narrowed: what did they have to fear, when there was no way through for her?