“That won’t do much good,” opined Carmine. “It’s too spindly. What are you trying to reinforce over here, anyway?”
“It’s not for reinforcing,” Fancy told him, and rammed her right knife through the wallpaper. Ignoring Carmine’s protests, she turned her wrist sharply, and a vast ticking of clockwork began behind the paper. A small hole began to form above the top of the chair, spiralling as it grew, and before long, it was an opening big enough for a reasonably big Fae to duck through. The tunnel beyond it was comfortably high, though the edges were rimmed with what looked suspiciously like iron.
Carmine watched with a grim kind of helplessness. “I would like to know how you got this in here without me knowing about it, Fancy.”
“That was the easy part,” said Fancy, glancing back worriedly at the door. The thumping and shouting had grown as more Fae beat at it, and there was already a distinct sense of magic working against Carmine’s spell. “You’d best get in, my lord. The door won’t hold for very long, and the passageway will close up again in a few minutes. Once it’s closed, we won’t be able to use it again.”
“I have to say, Fancy, that it doesn’t seem like a very useful passageway.”
“It is if you’re trying to escape from someone who can’t get in,” said Fancy. “It goes directly to the human world, by the way, so once you’re out, you should be able to meet with Barric.”
“Leaving aside for a moment my complete disinterested in meeting with Barric,” began Carmine, “I would like to know why you keep saying ‘you’ and not ‘we’.”
“You’ll have to mind the edges of the passageway, too,” said Fancy. There was a very large thump! at the door, and the whole was edged with golden Seelie magic. “Just at the beginning here: they’re iron. You’ll need the chair to climb in.”
“I saw that, thank you very much,” Carmine said. “What I want to know is–”
“Climb in now, my lord,” Fancy said, drawing her knives. “I can’t keep you covered if you’re running around the room like a cricket. I’d rather have you out of the way.”
Carmine, muttering, did as he was told. He could see the spell that was working away at the door, and he knew better than Fancy how potent it was. Crouching at the entrance of the passage, just out of reach of the iron edges, he peered back into the room and said: “Why did you come with me that day, Fancy? You still haven’t answered me. I know there was the whole brouhaha with your brother trying to marry you off, but I’m sure you could have stood up to him. You were already making plans to save that princeling from his fate.”
“I could have,” said Fancy, reinforcing the stacked furniture with one boot. “I was going to, actually. That day– that day when you arrived– it’s what I was going to do. Are you sure you want to hear this, my lord? You won’t like it.”
“Fancy.”
“All right,” Fancy said. Her shoulder was to him, her eyes on the door to their left, and her blades had already begun to move a little in the air. “I came with you because the first moment I saw you, I fell in love with you.”
“Wait,” said Carmine. “This isn’t what I was expecting. Fancy, do you mean that you’ve been living with me for five years– that I’ve been so careful not to– and that– Fancy!”
“I’d never fallen in love before,” said Fancy reflectively, her right foot edging forward in response to a particularly loud crack! “I was quite old, even then: thirty years old and never married, or in love. It took me by surprise.”
“Stop,” said Carmine, his voice uncertain. “Stop it, Fancy.”
“All right,” Fancy said, smiling a little. “But you did ask, my lord. I warned you that you wouldn’t like it.”
“That’s not what I meant. I meant– you’re telling me this because you think you’re not coming with me, aren’t you?”
Fancy was silent for a moment. Then she said: “Perhaps the door will come down after the passage closes. Perhaps it will come down before. If it comes down before, I’ll be here to guard the entrance until it closes safely.”
Carmine, in exasperation, said: “I should have known! Of all the times to choose to tell me that you love– I won’t be sacrificed to, Fancy!”
“If you try to come out, I’ll only hit you on the head and put you back in,” said Fancy, without looking around. “There’s no sacrifice: there’s no future for Fae and human couples, after all.”
“Not a particularly long one,” agreed Carmine. “But I’ve heard it’s a sweet one.”
“And when I’m white-haired and people think I’m your grandmother?”
“I’ll be just as frightened of your sharp knives and sharper tongue,” said Carmine promptly. “How will we know the passage is about to close?”
“It’ll start ticking,” Fancy told him. There was another crack, and this time, they could see the glimmer of Seelie and Unseelie through the door. “That will be the clockwork starting up again.”
“I’ll call out to you when it starts,” Carmine said. He was breathing too quickly, the breaths ragged and short. “Make sure you’re close, Fancy. If you’re not close enough, I’ll jump out again and give the Fae a merry little chase around the room before I die.”
That did make Fancy look around. “Don’t make me hit you on the head, Carmine.”
“Try it,” invited Carmine.
The door cracked one last time, a groaning creak that it was, and Fancy snuffled a small, exasperated laugh. She turned and darted for the passage too quickly for Carmine to do more than instinctively raise one hand in protection, and kissed him full on the mouth. Carmine overbalanced onto the seat of his breeches, and was too slow to snatch her back and reciprocate in full: Fancy was already back in position between the passage and the door, and meeting the first of the Fae as they came through the splintered door.
Carmine, his face white, watched every slash and pivot intently, counting with a concentration amounting almost to despair, the number of Fae struggling through the stricken door. He was so intent upon the fight and the count, in fact, that when the tick-ticking began, he heard it only as an answer to the counting in his head. It was when the amount of Fae in the room became constant, and yet the count in his head still continued, that he half-stood, convulsively.
“Fancy!”
Fancy, through her teeth, panted: “Just…a moment…my lord!”
“There are no more moments,” said Carmine, and he seemed surprised by the sound of his own voice, so grey and dry. “Fancy, I refuse to be shut in a draughty passage without you! If you don’t come along at once I will never again wear a shirt. I’ll flirt with every woman I meet! I’ll– I’ll– Fancy, I need you to wake me up in the mornings and refuse to massage my temples! I order you! Fancy–!”
Clockwork tick-ticked faster and faster, and began to whirr. Fancy, sweeping a circle around her with blood-stained knives, darted forward, driving back the assembled Fae with her indiscriminate slashes, then turned on her heel and ran for the narrowing passageway. It was too small, but she leapt for it anyway, long and lean, and something scarlet and warm wrapped around her, and pulled her through…
A clearing in the woods: quiet, cool, and peaceful. All is as it should be– except for the circling maw that is gradually opening wider somewhere toward the edge of the clearing.
“Light, glorious light!” carolled a voice.
“That’s not a very Unseelie sentiment, my lord.”
“I’m not a particularly Unseelie Unseelie, if it– are you quite well, Fancy? You shouldn’t cough like that.”
“I was surprised,” said Fancy dryly. “There are the stairs, my lord. Take care not to let the sun glare too much in your eyes at first.”
“Thank you, Fancy, I have visited the mortal realm before, after all,” said Carmine, emerging from the earth with the air of an immortal gracing the world with his unworldly beauty. Around the clearing, branches squeaked together and leaves whispered against each other, drawing closer to the Fae presence that was Carmi
ne.
“Good grief,” said Fancy, staring around as she followed him. “Isn’t it enough that nearly every woman you meet throws herself at your feet?”
Carmine said smugly: “Don’t be jealous, Fancy: I like you best. This place, though. I quite like it. We’ll come back here again.”
Fancy, who had dropped to one knee to clean her knives, said into the knife-reflection of herself: “Will we?”
“Yes, we will!” Carmine said. “The trees like me. I like to be liked. I’ll build a house here. Perhaps my hollies will wander through.”
“You’ll build a house?”
“Well, perhaps we can find a needy brownie or two, and convince it to help out. After all the death and war and destruction, of course. Speaking of death, war, and destruction, when are we supposed to meet up with this young princess and the Big Man?”
“Tomorrow,” said Fancy. “Outside Harlech. If we want to meet with them, we should get started.”
“I’d rather kiss you again,” Carmine suggested.
Fancy’s hand didn’t cease its polishing. “And the princess and Barric?”
“We’ll walk quickly.”
“My lord, I–”
“Carmine,” prompted Carmine.
“My lord–”
“Fancy, I insist upon being called Carmine. You promised–”
There was a sliver of silence where Fancy considered her oath, and sighed. “Carmine, I told you before: there’s no future for us. There never has been. I’ve accepted it, and I’m quite happy with it.”
Carmine gave her a disgruntled look. “Is that so? Well, I’m not particularly happy with it, and you made an oath–”
“To obey, to be yours, and to do the best for you,” nodded Fancy. “If the first contravenes the third, I have every right to do as I think best. I was very–”
“Yes, yes, you were very careful about how you worded it,” Carmine complained.
“I was,” agreed Fancy. “I’ve seen the result of Fae and human coupling, and that was a coupling where they loved each other. I’ll not do that to you.”
“And your oath means doing everything that is good for me regardless of how I feel about it.”
Fancy smiled a little. “That’s right.”
Carmine, his eyes very bright, said: “So what you’re saying is that so long as you’re human and I’m Fae, there’s no hope for an us?”
“Exactly,” said Fancy, sliding her long knives back into the sheathes that criss-crossed her back. Her face had closed once again.
“Well, then,” said Carmine. “That’s easy.”
There was a distinctly worried line to Fancy’s brow. “What does that mean? What are you planning, Carmine?”
“Never you mind,” Carmine said, his eyes still alight with mischief. “You’d only try and stop me. You just mind your oath and let me worry about my own plans.”
Fancy looked at him for some time, and there was a fond kind of amusement in her eyes. She said: “I don’t think you have a plan.”
“Then I’m happy to tell you that you’re quite wrong, Fancy!” said Carmine, and kissed her. “Right now, I’m going to kiss you again. No, don’t hit me, or I’ll cry.”
There was a brief scuffle, which ended with Carmine on his back in the grass, regarding the sky, and Fancy some distance away, looking conscious.
Being upended didn’t seem to have impaired Carmine’s good humour. He said to the sky: “Later on, I’ll probably kiss you again.”
“You won’t,” warned Fancy, looking even more conscious.
“I will,” said Carmine dreamily. “I’ll even let you hit me–”
“Let me– let me hit you?”
Magnanimously, Carmine said: “Let’s not quibble, Fancy. Couples in love shouldn’t quibble. I’ll let you hit me if it makes you feel better, but kisses there must be. And by the time we’ve finished finding the pieces of this atrociously outdated sword, you’re going to agree to marry me.”
The End…
…Really
Shards of a Broken Sword Page 44