by Frewin Jones
“I know it is hard,” he said, his voice full of sympathy. “But you are Princess Tania of Faerie; that is the undying truth. The person you were in the Mortal World is gone forever. Trust me, Tania, I wish only to bring you comfort. Do not grieve for that which is gone. Forget the Mortal World.” His intense eyes burned into her face. “There are those here that love you, that have always loved you. Turn from the past, Tania, and accept that you have purposes and duties here in your father’s Realm.”
“What kind of duties?” she asked. “And what purpose? I don’t feel like I have either of those things.”
“Then learn more of your inheritance,” he said. “Discover who you are and seek to know the Realm of Faerie better.”
“How?”
“Your sister Princess Sancha may hold the answers,” he said. “She spends her days steeped in the ancient texts, and she has much wisdom. Go to the library and speak with her.” He stopped walking and turned, resting his hands on her shoulders and looking deep into her eyes. Tania realized that without her even noticing, he had brought her all the way to the door of her bedchamber.
“I must leave you, Tania,” he said. “But heed my words: Do not go again to Princess Eden for aid. She can give you none, and I would not have you poisoned by the serpent of her unreason.”
He bowed low, lifting her hand and kissing it lingeringly and softly before turning on his heel and striding away. She gazed after him, suppressing an urge to run after him.
At last, she went into her room and closed the door, deep in thought. Maybe Gabriel was right; maybe Eden wasn’t the right person to go to for help.
“I’m not going to give up on getting to see my parents, though,” she said aloud. “I don’t care what anyone says.” She walked over to the bed and picked up the book. She would go and talk to Sancha. And she’d show her the leather-bound book; maybe someone with Sancha’s knowledge would be able to shed some light on where the book came from, and who may have sent it to her.
She found Sancha alone in the great library, sitting at her desk with a large open book in front of her. The pages were framed with narrow, intricately intertwined ribbons of bright colors—green and red and yellow. The beautiful, scrolling script looked handwritten, a pale powder blue against the ivory pages, and at the start of each new paragraph, the first letter was decorated with finely drawn illustrations of vines and leaves and flowers.
She read a few words over Sancha’s shoulder.
We are all still here—no one has gone away…
“Hello,” Tania said. “Are you busy?”
Sancha smiled up at her. “No, I am at my leisure,” she said. “I am reading Earl Marshal Cornelius’s diary of the Wars of Lyonesse. But are you well, Tania? I was concerned when you fled the dining table last eve. We wished to follow you and give you comfort, but Gabriel said we were wiser to let you be. What was the matter?”
“Oh, you know.” Tania shrugged. “Just stuff.”
Sancha looked puzzled. “Stuff…?”
Tania placed the book in front of her sister on the desk. “I thought you might be able to tell me something about this,” she said.
Sancha stared at the book in amazement. “By the sun, moon, and stars!” She gasped. “Whence came this? How is it that you have it?”
“Good question,” Tania said. “I was kind of hoping you’d be able to tell me.” She smiled. “I take it you know what it is, then?”
“It is your Soul Book,” Sancha said, reaching out one long-fingered hand but drawing it back again without actually touching the book. “It has been missing for centuries.” She looked up at Tania. “It was in your keeping all the time?”
“No way. The first I saw of it was a couple of days back,” Tania explained. “It was sent to me on my birthday. No return address, no note inside, nothing.” She frowned. “What’s a Soul Book?”
“Come,” Sancha said. “Bring the book. I will show you where it belongs.” She stood up. She made a liquid gesture with her hand over the book that she had been reading. Tania watched in astonishment as the book closed itself and lifted off the table. It floated for a moment, then glided across the library, turning slowly until it stood upright in the air, before slipping into a gap on one of the shelves.
Sancha was halfway across the floor. She turned. “Will you come?” she asked.
Tania let out a breath. “Is that your gift?” she asked. “Being able to move things without touching them?”
Sancha smiled. “Indeed,” she said. “And most useful, is it not, for one whose life is spent among all these weighty tomes.”
“Do we all have gifts?” Tania asked, hefting her book in her arms and walking over to where Sancha was standing. “I know Cordelia can understand animals, but what about Zara and the others?”
“Zara’s gift is in her music,” Sancha said. “She can weave enchantments in song that would make the stars weep and the sun roar with laughter!” She smiled. “Hopie’s gift is healing,” she continued, but now her voice fell. “And Eden had a great aptitude for the Mystic Arts.”
“What about Rathina?”
“Her gift has not yet revealed itself,” Sancha said. “But she is only seventeen—the gifts usually make themselves known during our sixteenth year, but sometimes they come later, so there is time yet for Rathina to discover her own unique blessing.”
Sancha led Tania across the black-and-white floor to a winding wooden staircase. They climbed to the first book-lined gallery, then circled the room until they came to a second stairway.
Sancha led her all the way up to the fourth gallery, high above the floor. Tania’s head was filled with the smell of leather and of ancient paper. Particles of dust circled in the golden sunlight that poured in through the long windows. There was a kind of stillness up here near the domed ceiling that made Tania want to hold her breath and move on tiptoe so that it would not be disturbed.
She looked down over the polished wood banister. The spiral pattern of the floor seemed to start revolving. She quickly looked away.
Sancha stepped into a small alcove with padded leather benches. At the far end, under a sunlit window, stood a reading lectern carved into the shape of an eagle with its wings spread wide. The shelves were filled with books. Sancha pointed to a dark gap between two of them.
“Here is where your Soul Book should rest,” she said. “Between the Soul Book of Zara and that of Earl Marshal Cornelius of Talebolion.” She looked at Tania. “He is our uncle, the younger brother of our beloved father. Do you see? The books are in order of rank; all the high-born of Faerie have Soul Books. They tell the tale of our lives. Yours went missing soon after you disappeared. Some thought you had taken it away with you, but Rathina said it was not so.” She frowned. “Did the book come to you while you were still in the Mortal World?”
Tania nodded.
“But you know not from whom?”
“I don’t have a clue,” Tania admitted. “I’ve read some of it, but the story stops when I did my vanishing act, and there’s nothing in there to explain exactly what happened.”
“Now that the book has been returned, the story of your life will begin to spin out onto the pages once more,” Sancha said.
“Sorry?” Tania said. “Run that past me again.”
Sancha blinked at her. “The book belongs here,” she explained. “Now that it has been returned, more words will come.”
“Will they?” Tania said. “How? Who’s going to write it?”
“The book will write itself.”
Tania grinned. “Get out of here!”
“Mercy, Tania!” Sancha looked shocked. “You cannot order me from my own library!”
“No, sorry, I didn’t mean…” Tania began. “Oh, never mind. But you mean the story will just carry on now that the book’s back here? That’s amazing. Am I allowed to take a look?”
Sancha nodded, gesturing toward the lectern. “Let it rest there, and you will see.”
Tania opened the book
on the lectern, turning the pages until she came to the place where the story of her life had just stopped dead.
“Oh, wow!” Sancha was right. There was already more writing than she had seen before.
She followed the new gothic script with one finger, reading aloud.
“Full joyous was King Oberon and all of his Realm upon the return of Princess Tania after five hundred years of sadness,” she recited. “Grim night turned into glorious day and all the people made merry, returning to the palace to give thanks and to gladden their eyes with the sight of the one who had been lost to us for so long.”
Tania turned the page, desperate to find out what had happened to her between leaving Faerie and being born as Anita Palmer sixteen years ago. There was plenty more writing, but all it did was detail the things than had been going on over the past few days.
Disappointed, she turned back to the original ending. “There’s nothing about what happened to me after I disappeared,” she said. “There’s a five hundred year gap!”
“It could be that the power that dwells in the books cannot see into the Mortal World,” Sancha said.
“Which means it can only tell me what happens when I’m here, in Faerie,” Tania said. “Well, that’s just great!” She looked at Sancha. “How am I ever going to make sense of who I am without knowing what happened to me over the past five hundred years?” She felt a catch in her voice. “Sancha, I’m only sixteen. I’ve got a birth certificate and everything. That leaves four hundred and eighty-four years that I don’t know anything about. Isn’t there any way of finding out?”
Sancha looked nervously at her. “There is a way, possibly.”
“What way?”
“If your spirit is strong enough, then it may be that I can learn what befell you,” Sancha said. “But it is perilous.”
“I’ll risk it,” Tania said.
“The strength of spirit must be yours,” Sancha said. “But the peril will be mine.”
“Oh.” Tania frowned. “Is it really dangerous?”
“It is, indeed,” Sancha said. Her dark eyes were very somber. “The Soul Book belongs to Faerie, but your spirit is split between this Realm and the Mortal World. I may be able to use the power of the book to bring the two halves of your spirit together, and then you may learn the lost secrets of your mortal past.”
“Couldn’t I do it on my own?” Tania asked.
Sancha shook her head. “You do not have the power within you while your spirit is divided,” she said. “But I will help you, Tania. Come, take my hand, and we shall see what we shall see.”
Sancha clasped Tania’s hand. Then, without looking directly at the book, she reached out and rested her other hand on the open pages.
“No matter what happens, you must not break the bond,” Sancha said, closing her eyes.
It was a long time before anything happened. Tania watched her sister’s face closely for a sign that she could see into Tania’s past mortal lives. There was nothing, except that Sancha’s breathing got more and more shallow.
She was about to suggest they give up when Sancha began to speak in the softest of whispers.
“Swans fly o’er the coral roofs,” she murmured. “Entwined with lace and ribbons of powder blue…low, below the slow hello, the eyes upturned, the faces pale…”
“Sancha?”
“…the majestic sweep of the ice blue sea…and white-eyed cliffs a’towering…” Sancha’s voice had a low, melodic lilt, but Tania couldn’t make any sense of what she was saying. “…enticed by distant murky mouthings, to wander in the baleful depths…” Then Sancha’s body stiffened and her fingers dug into Tania’s hand.
“Ahh! This is a perilous place, indeed,” she muttered, and her eyelids flickered restlessly. “There is disease and death and malice and wickedness here.” She grimaced. Her voice grew louder; she sounded frightened. Beneath Sancha’s hand, Tania saw that the pages of the book were glowing with a grisly dark red light, as if the paper was smouldering and about to burst into flames. Thin wisps of smoke began to rise between her fingers. Tania got ready to pull her sister away from the book, prepared to stop this, no matter what Sancha had said.
“This is a horrible place,” Sancha said, her voice cracked and weak now, as if from long suffering. “I am not Tania. I am Tania. I am not. I am. Oh, angels of mercy defend me! I am in a small dark room, in a hovel, lying in a bed with filthy sheets over me. Oh, the stench, the stench of it. There is dirty straw on the floor. I am sick, so sick, and there is such pain, terrible pain.” Sancha’s head rolled from side to side. “People loom over me, but their faces are clouded with resignation and despair. I am dying. It is such a strange, dreadful feeling as the life drains from me. I have some terrible, terrible disease, a deadly sickness, I am mortal.” Her voice rose to a wild scream. “I am dying!”
XIV
Tania wrenched her sister’s hand away from the smouldering book and the two of them went tumbling to the floor. Sancha’s screams stopped abruptly, but Tania was afraid that she had broken the link too late.
Her sister lay on the boards for a few moments, panting and trembling, her face shocked and ash white.
“I’m so sorry.” Tania gasped, crouching over her. “Are you all right?”
“The book burned so,” Sancha said. She lifted her hand and gave it a puzzled look. “But the pain is gone, and there is no hurt,” she said, displaying her flawless palm to Tania. “I believed the danger would be far greater.” Her face clouded. “Mercy! The book!”
They scrambled up. The open book lay unharmed on the lectern. There was no sign of charring or burning on the ivory pages.
“Weird,” Tania breathed.
Sancha straightened her clothes. “’Twas a curious and fearful experience, indeed,” she said. “And not one that I ever shall repeat.”
“But did it work?” Tania asked. “Did you find out what happened to me when I first went into the Mortal World?”
Sancha frowned. “Do you remember nothing?”
Tania shook her head.
“Then your spirit is too deeply divided,” Sancha said with a sigh. “I am sorry, but I fear that you may never be able to remember your mortal past.” She shuddered. “It is a monstrous place, the Mortal World. I know not how you endured it for so long.”
Tania looked at her. “Please tell me what the Soul Book showed you,” she begged.
“I must rest,” said Sancha, putting a hand to her chest. “I am very weary.” She walked unsteadily to one of the benches and sat down.
Tania sat beside her and rested her arm across Sancha’s bent shoulders. “I’m so sorry you had to go through that,” she murmured. “It sounded terrible.”
Sancha lifted her head to look at Tania. “I believe I know how you fared when you first entered the Mortal World. You fell victim to some deadly plague almost at once.”
“I died?” Tania asked with a shudder.
“Indeed, for once you were there, you became subject to all the illnesses and misfortunes of that awful place.” Her eyes filled with tears. “My poor sister, all alone and in pain, such pain!”
Tania squeezed Sancha’s shoulders. “It’s all right, I’m fine now,” she said. “But if I died, how come I’m still here?”
Sancha straightened up and took her hand. “Your spirit was released by the death of your mortal body,” she said. “Light and helpless as thistledown in the wind, your spirit waited to be born anew—babe after babe, down all the long mortal years. And as your mortal form succumbed to sickness or mishap, your spirit drifted free to be born again and again.”
Tania leaned back against the wall. “That’s a lot to take in,” she breathed. “Basically, I’ve been alive one way or another since the sixteenth century.” She gave a breathless laugh. “I could probably work out how many people I’ve been if I thought about it.” She shook her head. “Actually, I don’t want to think about it. My head would probably explode.”
“I wish that you could remembe
r those lives,” Sancha said. “I would very much like to know more of the Mortal World, despite its horrors.”
“It’s not so bad these days,” Tania told her. “Whatever I died of the first time around is probably totally curable now.” She looked at her sister. “I’d go back, just for a while, if I knew how to control my power,” she confessed. “I want to see my parents—my mortal parents, I mean.”
Sancha’s eyes were soft with sympathy. “I cannot help you,” she said gently. “Nor would I, even if I could. You belong here now. None of us would risk losing you again.”
Tania knew there was nothing more to say. She couldn’t expect anyone here to understand why she wanted to go back to the Mortal World. But that wouldn’t stop her from trying. She couldn’t let her parents suffer not knowing where she had gone or if she was even still alive. She would have to find a way of walking between the worlds, and if she had to do it alone, perhaps that was for the best.
Later that morning, Tania, Zara, and Rathina watched from the battlements above the Great Northern Gateway as Oberon and fifty lords and ladies of Faerie rode out with pennants and banners fluttering to begin the long journey to Castle Ravensare. Riding behind the King and the nobles of the Court were squires and attendants, some leading heavily laden pack ponies. And at the end of the procession, two mule-drawn wagons rumbled along, filled with supplies for the journey and gifts for the earls and dukes who would attend the gathering.
“It is two days’ ride,” Zara told Tania, leaning over the battlements and waving at the colorful horseback figures as they followed the path that led through the parklands and up into the purple-heathered downs. “I wish Father had taken me with them. It will be such a grand procession, and there will be feasting and merrymaking at journey’s end.” Her eyes shone. “Uncle Cornelius will be there with his wife’s sons, Titus and Corin. They are so handsome. Indeed, I do not know who I like the better.” She grinned at Tania. “But there would be much sport in the choosing!”
“Fie, Zara!” Rathina scolded. “Do you never think beyond such frivolities?”