by James Fahy
“What is it she’s got you translating for her though?” Robin wanted to know.
Karya wagged a finger at him. “Now that would be your guardian’s business, not yours,” she said mysteriously.
The two boys stared at her blankly and expectantly for a few silent moments, until finally she rolled her eyes and relented. “Although to be honest, I’m not being peevish or secretive, I honestly don’t know what it is,” she admitted. “She just gave me a copy of the text which she had written out herself from the original source, and asked if I could shed any light on it. I have no idea where it’s from or what it’s in regard to.” She sighed. “It could be a letter she owns, an old prophecy maybe, a piece of poetry, a ransom note. It could be an ancient shopping list for all I know.” She scratched at her temple with the blunt end of the pencil, looking irritated with herself. “I figured, seeing as I’m staying here for the time being, I may as well try and make myself useful. I’m not making much progress anyway. Two weeks’ work and I’ve only got two words so far.” She held up her scribbling for their benefit. “This symbol here…” she pointed out “ … the wiggly line with the sharp diagonal across the top of it, I think is meant to be the letter H … or maybe S,” she added uncertainly. “Which, when coupled with the rest of these letters makes this word here either ‘Shade’ or ‘Hades’.” She pointed to another collection of symbols. “And this here is almost certainly the symbol for the word ‘Dark’, but not the dark of a closed cupboard or a grave or anything like that. More a big, roomy dark, like space or the night sky. You can tell that by the little lines radiating out, see?” She frowned deeper. “Although it could also be taken to mean ‘shadow’.”
Robin and Henry didn’t see at all, but they nodded encouragingly nonetheless.
“So … Dark Hades then,” Henry said thoughtfully. “Or Shady shadows? Sounds cheerful. Whatever it is she’s got you working on, I don’t think it’s an old love letter.”
Karya sucked the end of her pencil. “I think, I think it’s a name … it has all the hallmarks of a protean pronoun, but it’s too early to say really. Still…” She looked up brightly. “It’s better than kicking a rubber ball around like some kind of dog doing tricks.”
“Oi! There’s a lot of skill involved,” Henry muttered mutinously, rising to the challenge. “I can keepie-upie to two hundred and fifty on a good day.”
“That must come in incredibly useful,” Karya replied dryly. “I can decline a noun.” She blinked at him. “I find my skills more practical.”
“I can decline a noun too,” Robin said, trying to lighten the atmosphere. “Noun? No thanks, I’m fine for nouns.”
Karya and Henry ignored him, neither breaking their defiant stare.
“I can swim ten lengths without needing a break,” the dark haired boy said challengingly.
“Very impressive. I can play seven different instruments,” Karya replied coolly. “But I don’t feel the urge to shout about it.”
“I can eat my own body weight in ham and not feel sick.”
“I can track a deer through a trackless bog.”
“I can belch all the way to T in the alphabet.”
“I can tear a hole between two worlds and jump between them.”
Henry paused, mouth half open. Karya raised her eyebrows expectantly. Henry shut his mouth and shrugged amiably.
“Fair enough,” he conceded. Karya smirked a little, shuffling her papers.
“If you two have quite finished,” Robin sighed. “I wondered if you wanted to take a break, Karya, and come with us. Henry and I are going to the kitchen to annoy Hestia. She might feed us to make us go away.”
“I am afraid that shall have to wait. For now,” a cool voice said from behind them. Robin whirled, feeling his face turn crimson with embarrassment.
His elderly Aunt Irene, a slender, dignified spire of a woman, was standing at the top of the great stairs. She looked mildly amused. But only very mildly.
“Your presence is required, my nephew, down by the lake,” she said.
“The lake?” Robin asked, surprised, as Aunt Irene descended the staircase in a stately manner and a swish of softly rustling silks. “But … I thought the lake was beyond Erlking’s boundaries?”
Erlking, he knew, came with certain boons and bonuses. Robin, and anyone else, was safe from intentional harm within its limits.
His aunt nodded. “Yes, it is. That is quite correct. I am glad to see your memory is intact. But you will be quite safe at this time. There is someone waiting to meet you there now. Your faun was supposed to give you the message almost half an hour ago.” She glanced around at the three of them gathered in the hall. “I assume, from your presence here, that this did not happen.”
Robin, Henry, and Karya all exchanged blank looks. None of them had seen Woad, Erlking’s blue-skinned resident faun, all morning.
“Evidently, he was waylaid by his own impulses,” Aunt Irene continued. “I have noticed his vendetta against the indigenous squirrel population of Erlking’s grounds has reached new and bloody heights of late.”
The three children exchanged glances once again. Woad hated squirrels.
“No matter. If you set off now, you can still be at the lake in good time,” his aunt said. It was a firm command, artfully phrased as a light observation, which was her usual manner.
“Let’s go then,” said Henry brightly, rubbing his hands together and clearly happy at the thought of finally getting a dip in the cool water after all, but Irene shook her head.
“Just Robin if you please,” she said firmly. “Henry and Karya, the two of you remain here. I daresay you will manage to annoy my housekeeper perfectly adequately without my nephew’s help.”
Robin and Henry managed to look sheepish. Karya indicated her notes sprawled before her on the tabletop. “I don’t really have time to entertain Henry,” the girl said loftily. “I haven’t made much more progress on this I’m afraid. I have a name … I think, or several variations of one, and I’m close to confirming whether the writer is male or female … I think female … but that’s all.” She looked apologetic. “It’s such a rare dialect. I’ve been working on it solidly.”
“Excellent work,” Irene said, coming around the two boys to stand at Karya’s shoulder. She raised her half-moon spectacles from where they rested on a chain around her neck and peered down at the paper. “It may be a long and arduous task that I have set you, Karya, but I cannot stress how imperative it is that this be translated correctly, even if it takes both of us months on end.” She seemed to have almost forgotten that Robin and Henry were there.
“Umm, Aunt Irene?” Robin said. He was loath to distract the imperious woman from her engrossment with Karya’s scribblings.
“Yes, Robin?” his aunt replied without looking around, a tiny frown line on her forehead as she roamed over the young girl’s findings.
“It’s just … you didn’t say…who exactly am I going to be meeting at the lake?”
Irene glanced back at him, her pale blue eyes filled with what looked like cool amusement. “Why, your new tutor of course. Now run along.”
A NEW ENGAGEMENT
Robin’s curiosity was almost overwhelming by the time he had crossed the long sloping meadow behind Erlking’s hill, the grass wavering in the heat haze. He made his way under the cool foliage of the woods, tramping along the dusty path which led down to the lake. A new tutor, he thought, warily.
Passing out of the long, winding tree-lined path, he headed back out into the baking heat and bright sun. The lake was laid out before him, a bright glittering disc under the blue sky, enclosed on all sides by the dense forest. Two odd and weathered stone totem poles lay at the end of the path just before the shingle, marking the boundaries of Erlking’s reach. Henry hadn’t been exaggerating about the lake. It was large and beautiful. Here in high summer, the expanse of water shimmered in its own mirage-light. A secluded oasis in the lush green woods. Off, in the middle of the green-blue wate
r, there jutted the irregular hump of a small mossy island, shaded in thick trees. Robin knew that there was some kind of ruin out there nestled in the overgrowth, a ‘folly’. Henry had told him all about it. Just another of Erlking’s many oddities. Grey-black stones poking through bare branches like a jumble of broken mossy teeth. It was utterly hidden, lost behind a veil of bushy trees. The island itself seemed misty and bluish in the haze.
The lake looked sparkling and cold. It made Robin want to kick his trainers off and step out into the inviting water, cooling his blood in the baking heat. Only the slight worry about drowning horribly stopped him.
Robin halted in his tracks, his feet crunching in the gravel at the lake’s lapping edge. A tall slender woman was standing out on the water’s surface like some pale vision from King Arthur’s legends.
The woman was some distance from the shore, standing perfectly still like a pale ghost, halfway between him and the island with its creeper-covered ruins. She was wrapped in a long silvery blue dress which curled and twined around her sinuously, a ceaseless ripple of movement which shone in the sunlight. Her skin was milky-pale and her long hair was so fair it seemed almost translucent, floating around her shoulders.
They stared at one another for a moment, the distant woman and Robin, regarding each other wordlessly across the glittering expanse. It was, Robin felt, a surreal moment.
As he stared, disbelieving, she began to walk towards him, her movements slow, fluid and graceful, stepping languidly as though the lake were composed of smooth solid glass rather than liquid water.
Robin, unsure of what to do in such a situation, did nothing. He waited, feeling rather awkward and self-conscious as the ethereal woman made her slow and steady way toward him. Her eyes, which were a very calm deep green, never left his for an instant. His seraphinite mana stone beat against his chest beneath his t-shirt, like a deep second heartbeat. Whoever this lady was, besides being the single most beautiful woman he had ever laid eyes on, she was powerful, and her mana flowed before her in waves, echoing in the stone on his chest. Her energy pushed towards him like an invisible fog bank rolling off the lake.
As she finally reached the shore before him, Robin glanced down at her feet, which were bare and just visible beneath her shimmering dress, and saw that each time she placed a foot on the water’s surface, frost and ice gathered and appeared beneath her. She wasn’t walking on the surface of the water at all; she was somehow turning the water beneath her into tiny icebergs and using them like stepping stones. They melted away behind her as soon as she lifted her foot from them.
When she was standing right before him he looked up, realising just how very tall she was. She was taller that Aunt Irene even.
“You are the Scion of the Arcania,” she said softly.
“Um … yes,” Robin replied haltingly. “I’m Robin.”
Her sleepy eyes, which were peering into his own as though she were trying to read the inside of the back of his head, seemed to focus at the sound of his voice, and she looked him up and down slowly, a thoughtful look on her tranquil face. It was as though she had been looking at someone or something else before he had spoken, and the sound of his voice has snapped her out of a daydream. She seemed to see him properly for the first time.
“Robin,” she muttered, as though testing the shape of the word in her mouth. “Hmm.”
A tiny frown line appeared in her pale forehead. Even her eyelashes looked almost transparent. She seemed to be weighing him up.
“Such a small boy … for the Scion of the Arcania.” She did not sound particularly impressed. Her voice was not much more than a murmur. “Such a humble vessel for such a force. A splintered force, granted … but nonetheless…” She blinked at him once or twice, trailing off. Robin had no idea what to say. He felt rather grubby from the heat, his hair stuck to his forehead with sweat. There were grass stains on the front of his t-shirt where he had been lying on his stomach in the rose garden. As far as first impressions go, he had to admit, this wasn’t the best he could have presented. He wished Aunt Irene had given him more notice, and he made a mental note to have stern words with Woad later when he got his hands on the little blue creature.
“Like a storm hiding in a seashell … held to the ear … faint whispers…” the woman pondered aloud, speaking almost to herself. “Why hide your light under this child’s bushel, eldest? What crude camouflage is this?” She shrugged. “But mine is not to question why. Who, after all, can fathom the thoughts of the Fae? Minds like corkscrews, one and all.”
She flicked her soft green eyes to Robin’s mana stone on its cord around his neck. “Seraphinite?” she said, her eyes widening slightly. “Spirit stone. And whose was this, and who’s will it be? How interesting your kind are.” She smiled for the first time at him, and Robin was surprised to find she looked quite friendly for a moment. It felt like the first time she was actually paying attention to him. “Hiding like nested dolls, one in another … in another. Your ways do … amuse.”
Her eyes drifted from the mana stone, which Robin wasn’t quite sure how she had seen, hidden as it was under his t-shirt, and her smile became slightly lopsided.
“I am Madame Calypso,” she said. “You … are extremely late.”
Robin stammered. “I know … I’m sorry. I only just found out I was supposed to be here. My friend Woad was supposed to tell me, that is, my aunt gave him a message but—”
“Hush,” she said, rather matter-of-factly. “I’m bored already.”
Robin hushed.
“We shall start again,” she said. “And take things from there. I am Madame Calypso. I am no more human that you are, little Fae, and I am here because I owe your guardian a debt. The Lady Irene recently assisted me in … leaving my last engagement. She has contacted me to request my assistance in the matter of your … education.”
“Aunt Irene said you were going to be my new tutor. Is that right?” Robin asked.
Madame Calypso nodded drowsily. “Apparently. I have never tutored before, so we will have to see how that goes, I suppose. I am Panthea,” she said. “A Nymph. We are living in interesting times, Scion of the Arcania. Time was, not too long ago, when I would have regarded your kind, the Fae, as a lower class of being. Many Panthea do. Like wild animals, good only for menial labour, or…” She looked thoughtful. “ … sport. But that was before I met your guardian. She opened my eyes to the truth. To the lies of Lady Eris.” She looked away from him for a moment. “The dark Empress of the Netherworlde has something of a talent for sowing discord between peoples. Especially between the Fae and the Panthea. When I think back now…” Her already misty eyes clouded further. “ … I am ashamed of what I once thought of your people.”
She looked at Robin. “I owe your race an apology. All the Panthea do.” She glanced around the water and the trees. “But how does one apologise for genocide?” she said breezily. “I suppose this, agreeing to this position, aiding a known insurgent and wanted outlaw like your guardian, makes me one also. A traitor to the Netherworlde. A rebel. I will be on the Peacekeepers hunted list now.” She seemed to consider this a moment. “How curious. To be an outlaw. Life takes such unexpected directions. Like white water streams. Coils and turns…”
Robin couldn’t help but smirk at the thought of his elderly Aunt Irene as a dangerous outlaw. But this strange, distracted woman was correct in her way. Irene, and all those at Erlking, lived in defiance of Eris and her rule. They were Panthea, all of them, Irene, Phorbas, Hestia, Woad. And all had committed the ultimate crime. Aiding not only one of the Fae, but the most wanted of all the Fae, Robin himself.
“An unwise choice for me … perhaps. I hope I don’t regret it. It is done, however. For better or worse.” Madame Calypso sighed lightly, blinking at him with her deep calm eyes. “Your guardian called for me, and I answered. I honour my debts. It is perhaps the only honour I have retained. I have come to Erlking, the place of the Fae, perhaps the last place. I cannot go back now. My home in t
he Netherworlde…” She trailed off, looking troubled for a moment. Robin could guess what she was thinking. Whatever life she had left behind in the Netherworlde, by coming here, it was effectively over.
“I hope you are worth it, Scion,” she said to him, very directly. She glanced at the water’s edge, where her feet still stood floating in a bed of ice crystals. “Time to set foot on human soil, I suppose. For the first time.” She sighed a little.
Madame Calypso stepped forward out of the water delicately, placing her bare feet on the stones of the shore.
“What a curious sensation,” the nymph said absently, wiggling her delicate toes in the sand between the pebbles. “Well then, Scion of the Arcania,” she said, looking up at him and pursing her lips. “Show me what you know.”
Robin, a little taken aback, stammered at the strange, beautiful woman. “Know? Um … about what?”
“Your skills,” she said, peering at him as though he was stupid. She raised her eyebrows expectantly. “Come now. Don’t be shy. I hear Phorbas the goat-man tutored you in the Tower of Air. Or rather, someone did, at any rate. I wish to assess your aptitude.”
“Oh, ok,” Robin glanced around, at a loss. “Ah, here we go. Um, how about this?”
He raised a hand between them and, focussing his mana through his stone, concentrated and silently cast Featherbreath down into the stones before him. On the beach, a large white shingle rose from the ground, levitating and rotating slowly in silence between them, a large flat stone suspended weightless in the air.
Madame Calypso peered at the stone thoughtfully. “A basic Featherbreath?” She sounded rather disappointed.
Robin couldn’t help but smirk to himself. When he had first started learning the Tower of Air, he had found air magic quite difficult. A lot had happened since that first lesson, however, not least of which was coming into direct contact with the Air Shard of the Arcania. Strange things had happened during his … communion … with the Shard. Since then, he had honed his skills somewhat.