Bones of the Fair

by Host, Andrea K

  "Well, yes! I mean, I know you've had practice, but he's the Diamond! He doesn't do things like this."

  "He's still human, Aspen."

  "Maybe." He leaned forward urgently, needing her to understand. "But there's something very wrong. Didn't you notice? You should have seen him yesterday morning, barely listening to Chenar. It's like he's stopped caring whether we get out of here or not, like he's given up. And the Diamond doesn't just give up. He never has before." He realised he was glaring at her, heard the accusation, and protested: "But it can't be because of you. He saved you, and if the idea of you dying really and truly bothered him, then the last thing he'd be doing would be giving up. That's not how the Diamond is!"

  "No." She said it softly, with a deep regret Aspen found peculiar. "Nor has he, or we wouldn't have suffered through this morning's experiment. But, you see, it was Suldar who saved me."

  "What, so it's a fit of pique?"

  She looked away from him, and he was immediately sorry for snapping.

  "I think it does bother him." The words were tentative, as if she thought he'd up and shout a denial. "But he seems to have found that out just as we discover that It is quite happy to have me die. That It wins either way."

  Aspen stared at her. "Do you believe that? That this thing wins whether you live or die?"

  "I–" She bent to pick up the kitten, which had been lurking about the kitchen since yesterday morning, and watched impassively as the savage little creature tried to bite her fingers. "I'm short of other explanations."

  "And the Diamond's out taking a walk?"

  "It takes a while for It to wear off completely, and with the miscasting–"

  "Miscasting?! The–"

  "I think he was trying to draw shield. And, yes, I have some idea what miscasting means for him." She sighed and stood up, cradling the kitten. "If you don't think it's about me, then consider what this represents. After all, you've known all along his aim has been to protect Darest. Now it seems that the simple solution of just getting rid of me is far too risky. And that may have been an option he was relying on to save Darest."

  Aspen frowned at her, not caring for the implications.

  "How long do you think he'll be gone?" he asked eventually. "You do realise that the only reason why this morning's little snuggle-session wasn't a command performance was because he told them all that while you were recovering from dying we needed to focus on trying to detect and prevent any attempts to puppeteer them. They're all expecting to meet at midday to discuss what to do next, and no-one's in the mood to be put off."

  "I expect he'll come back. But I wouldn't count on it." She didn't sound like it mattered one way or another.

  Aspen's instinct was for denial. The Diamond was business first, always. With tempers back at tinder-point, he wouldn't indulge himself going off being upset somewhere. But then, if he'd really lost control of a casting... The Diamond was a mage above all else. A great-mage. Control was everything.

  "I guess I'll go back to sleep," Gentian said, unenthusiastically. "I've stopped wanting to fall over every few seconds, and I think I'll try to consolidate that."

  "These ladies of leisure, spending their whole lives in bed," Aspen said half-heartedly, making a face at the dishes he had to wash. "Off you go then."

  With a faint, crumpled smile Gentian drifted out, and it was only after she was gone that Aspen realised what he had said. Feeling less than clever, he delivered breakfast to the rest of his guests, then returned to his room to dress. And then to stand outside the Diamond's door.

  It stood an inch ajar, and there was no murmur of saecstra, but the divinations were still there, keeping watch over an empty room. A light push and he could survey the damage. Sheets draggling off the bed, scattered with fragments of glass and wood. Half a desk and a few sticks that had been a chair. All centred around a two-foot depression in the floor, the smooth-grained beams buckled as if a boulder had fallen out of the sky.

  The Diamond, the ultimate in cool, calm and collected, had thrown himself out of bed, made it halfway to the window and tried to cast – it probably had been a shield. And true-magic drawn without due care had destroyed instead of protecting. Pure luck the room wasn't decorated with fragments of Gentian and Aristide as well.

  Aspen felt rather than heard movement behind him, and turned to find Leton. Dark eyes made that brief, comprehensive survey – flick, flick, flick – and finished on Aspen's face.

  "Come away from here."

  Mutely, Aspen followed his Phoenix, wondering just what kind of explanation he wanted to make. And was faintly surprised to find himself being led upstairs to the Aurak's apartments, where he discovered the three Atlarans and the golden Aloren sitting over the remains of breakfast.

  The Aurak gestured for him to sit down, and asked: "Is your master injured?"

  Perhaps explanations weren't going to be necessary. "There wasn't any blood," Aspen said neutrally. "You felt the backlash of his casting?"

  "Of course. Magister Couerveur had some concerns about the possible consequences, should he succeed in sensing our enemy's touch. He asked me to spend this morning attempting to discover any sign of castings linked to us. If we can find them, we may be able to discover a way to break the link before they trigger."

  The Diamond had delegated. The strategy of a drowning man, or simple good sense? Whatever the answer, Aspen was heartened by signs of forethought and glad to put himself in the Aurak's hands, to spend a morning following orders and not thinking about what might happen next. Scrying and casting minor shields and making himself feel like he was doing something useful.

  He began to see why Rua was so proud of her lord. Aurak Bes might be just as far from a solution as the rest of them, but he went about his experiments with such genial interest that a desperate problem became a particularly tricky puzzle they would all enjoy solving. And Aloren and Leton stayed and were themselves, powerful and glorious and distracting, so it wasn't until it was nearly midday, when Aurak Bes tried and failed to sigil-call the Diamond, that Aspen found himself facing his worst thoughts again.

  "Magister Couerveur must be shielded," the Aurak said, and though his tone was matter-of-fact, Aspen could see he was worried. "Come, let us go down. There is much to discuss."

  No-one demurred. Perhaps even Aloren didn't want to question the Diamond's behaviour. Not only run off to be upset, but hiding now? A man who'd never flinched in his life? Who had barred himself from Darest's throne without an eye blink and managed to rule after by making sure the King never disagreed with him? The Diamond Couerveur putting magical hands over his ears so they couldn't talk to him?

  What had he discovered? Surely Gentian's near-death and a handful of failures couldn't truly rob the man of the confidence that had brought Darest so far. Because, Aspen realised, that was what he hadn't seen in the Diamond this last day. It wasn't a question of whether he was upset, it was the lack of that ice-edged certainty, that rock-hard sense of purpose, direction, which made him so different.

  With the day progressing so well Aspen was hardly surprised to see, when they reached the entry-hall, that Gentian had escaped the safety of her bedroom and seemed intent on throwing herself to the lions. Was Aspen supposed to protect her while the Diamond was off being upset?

  But Dariens weren't Gentian's only friends. "Child, is this wise?" the Aurak asked, putting both hands on her shoulders, a greeting mixed with admonition. "You should be regaining your strength."

  "I'm very tired of sleeping." Gentian's eyes had grown bright and strange since Aspen had fed her breakfast, and he was unhappily aware that she was not looking for a champion. That she thought herself past rescue.

  "I think it's going to end today," she added then, with an otherworldly calm Aspen didn't like at all.

  The Aurak considered her sorrowfully. "I have, I own, been feeling an air of expectation which I cannot explain."

  "That is Suldar." Aloren, for once actually frowning a little, hummed as she came dow
n the stair into the hall. "Her melody has changed."

  It sounded like more harp music to Aspen, but after a pause the Aurak gave his definite nod. "I believe you are right, Your Highness."

  "Is a change so significant?" Leton's hand was back on the hilt of his sword, knuckles white. "She can't have played exactly the same thing these past thousand years."

  "Can she not?" Trailing a faint, sad refrain, Aloren went through the main door, and swept them all along in her wake, out to join the other heirs of the West standing before Suldar's statue.

  And they were not what Aspen had been expecting either. The Cyans, even fiery Jurasel, were clustered together looking distinctly uneasy. Chenar and Rydan stood a short distance away, frowning up at the sun. The Saxan Crown Prince had evidently been continuing his dangerous line of experiments, and showed plain signs of spell backlash. Rydan looked exhausted and hopeless, like a half-grown boy facing a noose.

  This at least explained why Leton had been so terse and preoccupied. There was something particularly upsetting his Saxan charges. Odd. Even if they thought a horde of Atlarans were right at that moment demanding the Aurak's return, there was no reason to go round acting like their kingdom was foundering while their backs were turned. That edge of imminent and catastrophic defeat had to be due to more than a change of musical tone.

  Or was it? What was different about the song? These were some of the most powerful people in Sumica and they were scared. They were small, ineffectual things waiting for something bad to happen.

  "Where is Couerveur?" Jurasel asked, with something very like concern. Prince Chenar merely glanced around wearily.

  "Not here," Gentian answered, still with that unnatural calm. "I'm sure he won't mind if we start without him."

  "And where do you suggest we start?" Jurasel asked, giving her a sharp glance. He was smart enough to see something strange in Gentian, though it didn't stop his questions. "Dhara and Seylon haven't produced any rabbits out of hats, and my own shields and scries were the usual waste of energy. All we ever get is more questions. We haven't made a jot of progress since the day we got here. No way out, and the only sign of this invisible enemy seems to be in your head. Can you at least tell us anything of use?"

  "I can give you another question." She looked past him, gesturing at a stony woman at the foot of a flight of stairs. "Why put a statue of yourself at your front door?"

  "Vanity?" Jurasel was impatient, but he looked at the statue nervously. "It's stone through and through, at least. Feel a strange affinity do you?"

  "Nothing. We don't feel any of them, do we? None of Telsandar's deaths. But we can make a guess at a lot of this story. A thousand years ago the Fair Shaped themselves a pair of sisters. Immortal, immensely magical. By comparison the Fair were senserel – powerless. And one day all these senserel vanished, wiped out in a single moment. One of the two sisters must have been responsible. And the other..." She stared at Suldar's building, where the harp flowed on unheeding. "Came out here and looked down at her sister, the only creature in all the world anything like her–"

  "And turned her to stone."

  It was Desseron who had spoken, and perhaps it was the straightforward belief in the girl's voice that broke through to Gentian, because her eyes lost some of their unnatural brilliance and she looked down. "The death of a monster."

  Walking blindly past Jurasel she stopped before the statue. "What is death, to someone that powerful? We know that around a week later the valley was put under a preservation spell, then sealed away altogether. And even that wasn't enough – the entire land was abandoned. Because Dawn was dead but not gone."

  Gentian reached out, a negligible figure before the graceful height of the statue, the fingers of one thin hand splaying out. Aspen, whose whole world seemed bent on tilting toward disaster, felt it tip another inch and exclaimed "Don't!" even as she blasted stone to powder.

  Not one of them managed not to flinch. Even Aloren cast a quick, concerned glance at Suldar's building. But sudden retribution failed to strike anyone down, and the music flowed on unceasingly.

  Gentian was wide-eyed, but far from done. "The shield keeps her out of this valley," she said, staring down at the scatter of dust and grit. "And I let her in. I'm not sure why the rest of you are even here, but I'm sorry for it. As for what little we can do..." That too-steady gaze swept over Aurak Bes. "We are not quite senserel in this, Sir. Are the precepts not clear? We need to protect Darest–"

  "We need to leave."

  The Diamond, cold and precise and every bit as rock-hard absolute as his namesake, chose this moment to materialise from thin air, standing at Gentian's elbow. Not a hair out of place, not a crease in the unrelieved black of his clothing, and no measure of uncertainty in those star sapphire eyes as he added: "We need to leave today."

  Chapter Eighteen

  Gentian had gone through every option. She was Its primary tool and she had no way of changing that. But if her own fate was fixed, she planned to at least upset Its schedule. Anything was better than sitting in her room waiting for whatever happened next. To have Aristide, grim but no longer blackly frozen, suddenly materialise and talk of leaving, robbed her of numb acceptance and left her dizzy.

  She was out of step with the rest of the prisoners. Aspen looked simply and profoundly grateful and, after a gaping moment while they assimilated the fact that he'd been prowling about invisibly, the heirs of the West shifted straight past shock and anger into taut readiness.

  "You have something?" Lady Dhara stepped forward, dark eyes searching Aristide's face. "A new development?"

  Jurasel was just as quick. "Bad news? Or are you actually proposing something constructive?"

  "Yes and yes," Aristide said briefly. "Perhaps we could sit down?"

  He took her by the elbow, which Gentian supposed meant she looked like she was about to fall over, and led them away from the dusty remains of It, to a circle of grass edged with stony benches. The whole scene felt unreal, with everyone falling back into the arrangement from that first night, when they'd sat around a kitchen table and talked of killing Suldar. Before the depth of their predicament had sunk in, and they'd still imagined there was anything they could do. Gentian was again sitting at Aristide's right hand, but with her head full of too-recent hurts and arm tingling where he'd gripped her.

  "The bad news first, if you would, Magister Couerveur?" Aurak Bes said. He was, she could tell, less relieved than wary.

  "We are out of time." It was perhaps the most direct Gentian had ever seen Aristide, gaze steady and mouth firm and unsmiling. But he was himself, far from the distant ghost of yesterday.

  "Today I succeeded in experiencing the same touch as Magister Calder–" He broke off to glance at her and say, "It astonishes me that you ever contemplated returning to this land," before turning back to the rest of his audience. "My perception of Darest is different enough to see more of the mechanism 'Dawn' is using to touch Magister Calder, and through her usurp our strength. It seems this Fae is more trapped than I realised. The valley's shield is double, the inner making a haven and the outer a prison to keep her from running loose in Darest. But the outer shield is not as effective as the inner: she can reach past it in a very limited way, enough to keep the Fair from living in this kingdom. Like Magister Calder, they are something she can touch."

  "So she's a bug under a rock." Jurasel was terse, holding himself in check. "Legs waving. Get on with it Couerveur. Does knowing more about the shield tell you how to get us out of here?"

  His words conjured the faintest hint of a smile, but at the moment Aristide was far more magister than courtier. "It told me that while Dawn was able to bring us through the outer shield, she had nothing to do with our entry into the valley itself. And Suldar certainly did not want or help our arrival. We breached the inner shield purely because the Fair left themselves a door."

  Disappointment was as intense as the hope it replaced.

  "That's all?" Lady Dhara asked. "What's new ther
e? We all know we came here through a door. The problem is, not only is it on the wrong side of the shield, it's not enchantment as I understand it. I spent too many hours staring at the thing and finding no rhyme nor reason whatsoever. Are you saying you've suddenly intuited a structure we couldn't even see?"

  "In a way. It's not a technique I am any kind of expert with, but I have just come from reproducing it."

  Aristide conjured illusion, a small image of himself standing before a blank white wall. Unlike the real Aristide, the miniature was dressed in white and wore a faint sardonic smile as he produced a stick of charcoal and drew a long rectangle on the wall, stretching from the floor to above his head. Then he drew a handle within the rectangle, reached out, and opened a door.

  The image dissolved, sinking into a tangle of whorls that covered the circle of grass: the pattern through which she had brought them into the valley. A knot of Fae script wrote itself into the centre: 'Bow your head in shame before Telsandar'.

  "We recognised it as a door, therefore it is a door." His tone was rueful. "No structure, no Elachar, nothing of the runic resonance we are taught to use. Still, it works."

  Seylon began to laugh. "But this is the stuff of children's tales! You mean all we had to do was make a pretty picture of the thing we walked in through and we could have left? "

  "Not quite. I attempted that days ago, trying to puzzle out its mechanism. Today, I abandoned the 'why' and simply used different centres." The illusion dissolved, and a new knot of script, bare of the border, wrote itself onto the grass. "The difficulty was finding a phrase that acted in the same way as 'before Telsandar', when we wanted to depart. I tried many possibilities, and this one seemed to wake to something more. And I put my hand through it. Through the shield."

  "'Out of Telsandar...Darest'." Princess Kestia sounded only mildly incredulous as she translated the words. "You mean this? You have found our way of escape?"

  Chenar leaned slowly forward, disappointment competing with something like despair. "Escape to what? Does this not simply bring us full circle, back out into that corridor?"