Bones of the Fair

by Host, Andrea K

  "No, I would like to see if there is some last chance of salvaging your daughter. And this ridiculous boy probably needs to sit down before he drops."

  ooOoo

  Aspen had been completely taken in. But correct in his first opinion: Aloren of Ceria was entirely worthy of worship.

  "You knew all along," he said softly, as they followed the two Shapers through a sun-swamped breakfast room looking over fields of blue. "Gentian's history."

  A softly hummed note was all he had for answer, and then they were past the breakfast room and, around a twist of corridor, filing into a bedroom made heady by the scent of at least three flowering vines competing to suffocate the enormous window.

  The room had clearly been refreshed in preparation for a daughter's long-awaited return, but otherwise preserved for the girl who had left it at fourteen. She probably wasn't much larger, a slip of a thing lying as if asleep.

  With a dispassion that shouted refusal to display grief, Frid Calder touched her daughter's forehead, then stepped back. "Is a farvelti binding possible over the distance she's been moved?"

  "Range is only limited by the strength of the caster," Aloren said, and drew the room's sole chair to the bedside. She nodded Aspen toward it before turning to carefully inscribe the spell's form on paper Laeth Varpatten pulled from a drawer. "Not all Magisters take oaths against forbidden casting when accepting the rank, but it is very common. You, however, have the strength, but are not bound by oath. Do you feel able to try?"

  "I have to." There couldn't be any wavering now, not with Leton at stake.

  Magic was ever a double-edged sword, bent readily to any purpose, and all too liable to spring back into your face at the first mistake in composition, pronunciation or purpose. All students of magic had to overcome the fear that followed their first warped casting, to learn not to dwell on the things that could go wrong. Focus was everything, and something Aspen had always lacked, giving him more than enough reason to shy away from difficult tasks. Worse still was casting a spell that would make you feel awful even when successful.

  After studying the form, Aspen closed his eyes, sorting words and intent, and trying to shut out what his body was increasingly disinclined to let him ignore. The farvelti was a dreadful spell, not the sort of thing he'd ever want to cast, with too many non-common words, and it would feel awful, hateful...

  A cool hand brushed his cheek. "Hold the binding only long enough to ensure that she is aware of this place and her body. Don't touch her while the spell is in effect."

  Simple expectation should not buoy him so. And urgency should not be the goad to drive him on. But still the first word filled his mouth, and then came the second, and along with the form he had to build the intent, the certainty of the thing this spell would do, and that it was a thing he wanted to happen, to take the spirit of a solemn creature called Gentian, who looked so insignificant and fragile, but was stubborn as a rock, and fix her here where she could be useful to him – and perhaps to her own self as well.

  "Tell me your name," he said. "Speak." The binding word, the command, and he only just managed it because into the grief and anger that filled Goldenrod came confusion and shock and pain.

  ~...~

  It was an inchoate fragment of sound. Aspen, who had cast with his eyes shut, opened them hastily, but the body had not moved, remained a living wrong, empty.

  "Did I fail?"

  "No. Command her to answer. Force the response. Stop hesitating."

  "Speak," Aspen repeated, voice high, and the Elachar rushed too quickly from his mouth. He could feel it distort, taking on his own hatred of being pushed. He was someone who laughed and invited, teased and sought the pleasant way. Not ever someone to take a friend by the throat and choke them until they cried out and did what you commanded.

  The spell fell apart, leaving him with a stinging face, as if he'd been slapped. Which would probably have been Gentian's response if he'd tried such a thing when she was still alive. Or an elbow to the throat.

  "I – I'm so sorry," he said, overwhelmed by all that could be lost to a single hasty word. Gentian's parents, hopes raised and immediately crushed. The flames of a Phoenix snuffed. The Diamond, with nothing to stop that first crack forming, and all Darest to pay the price.

  "Wait." Laeth Varpatten's voice was husky. "Can't you feel her? Daughter. Welcome home."

  The body still didn't move, thin chest rising and falling at the same unhurried pace. But Gentian's father wasn't looking at it, but at the window framed by leaves, and a reflection in the shape of a girl.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Goldenrod. The strongest Gentian had ever felt it. A place she'd once thought as much a part of her as her heart, and at long last she had returned to it. Its joy was an ocean, embracing her, lifting her up.

  The balm of reunion could not hold back an awareness of pain, of having been scalded, and of pins driven through all her joints, and yet there was no weight to it at all. Instead a cascade of shadowy sensation, and she drifted away from it, only to find focus again when she realised her father was there. She could barely see him, could catch only an echo of his voice, but with effort she could make out his face, and there her mother. Beside her...Aloren? Aspen, seated, and...

  She faded, surprise breaking her concentration, but Goldenrod rose to support her and she didn't entirely lose the image of her room.

  Had she been injured? She focused again, trying to move toward the figure on the bed, a body with her face. Could she simply insert herself into – !

  Loathing. Gentian shattered beneath it, that giant's blow, all too familiar, but this time there was no feeling of being crushed, no waking, no racing heartbeat.

  No heartbeat at all.

  Fragmenting and recoiling, she fled, and Goldenrod swelled around her. She felt more a part of it than she'd thought possible, as if the long stretches of flax clothed her flanks, the secret paths of water danced with her pulse, and the riot of plant life breathed with her, turned with her to face the glory of the sun.

  A crowd of feet intruded, trammelling one grassy slope. A stitch in her side, it helped keep her separate, able to think.

  Had she been ejected from her own body by her hated enemy? It. Dawn. Selvar. But...no, what she'd felt had been an echo, a residue; poisonous slime from a slug that had crawled through her veins.

  Intolerable.

  Anger was helpful. Anger, and an overwhelming sense of having been cheated out of her right to battle. How had It won so easily? Though the odds were impossibly against her, she would have fought to her last breath, fought every moment of possession, done everything she could to sabotage her enemy's plans.

  Whatever the case, she could fight now. Slime was nothing. She had plucked countless slugs and snails from her gardens. The pain was beside the point. She had endured it every morning. The hate only conjured rigid determination, and an unexpected rush of pity. What had led those sisters to such a pass? The Fair had created them and thought them an experiment gone too far? Treated them with honour and feared them and put walls about them, and...

  Gentian blinked.

  "Oh, thank the Sun."

  "No, don't touch her."

  Her mother's voice and then Princess Aloren, sharply commanding.

  Gentian turned her head. That wasn't a simple achievement. Her body kept slipping away from her, as if it had been greased, and at the same time it stung and pinched and simply did not feel like hers. More a puppet whose strings she did not have the knack to pulling, and she struggled to lift a hand, her fingers jittering spasmodically. But it was her hand, hers, no other's. She held it out to her mother and did not flinch from the sting of contact.

  It became noisy then, as Gentian tried to hold on to herself, and greet her parents. Aspen interrupted to babble out a stream of explanation that was less than easy to follow, though his urgency at least was clear.

  "That seems a little unfair on Captain Djol," she managed, because the rest of it, the idea of her
death, and then Suldar's and Selvar's...

  "A travesty," Aspen fumed, tugging his left hand through already disordered hair. The other...there was something very strange about him. "I – there's no time, I'm sorry. Do you think you can stop them?"

  "I think that I'm not likely to be able to walk."

  She was finding the knack of talking, but only if she focused on it absolutely. Still, she had ready hands to keep her upright, and she thought she could hold on to herself at least long enough to make some pointed comments about duels to Aristide, and about other unexpected things.

  "What's wrong with Aspen's hand?" she asked, after he had hurried off ahead of them.

  "A price paid."

  Aloren had answered, and Gentian spent some of her attention turning her head so she could look at the princess. Magnificent as the sun, and twice as inscrutable. Had she paid a price? Or would she...

  "What's this? Alive after all?"

  They had descended far enough to see the crowd in the west meadow, only to meet Prince Jurasel on his way to the house.

  "Not precisely," Gentian replied. "But I am trying very hard to be."

  "And out to spoil the entertainment, hm? That explains the flight of the eager apprentice." He indicated Aspen, thrusting his way toward Aurak Bes.

  Although the Tejustra circle looked to have been already marked out, stopping the duel hadn't truly been an urgent task. Even non-mages would sense Goldenrod's reaction to her return: joy overlaid by concern and lingering anger. Aristide most certainly had, and while he was standing opposite Captain Djol, he had turned to look not at the flurry caused by Aspen, but at her.

  The straightforward pleasure this gave her provided a helpful surge of energy, but the strain of clinging to her body was becoming marked. Not knowing for certain if she could continue to do this did not put her in a forgiving frame of mind as her parents guided her through the hastily-parted crowd to consider the person who had killed her.

  Rydan looked satisfactorily like he'd been flaying himself internally, and he had an entertaining back-and-forth struggle to meet her gaze. His mouth moved, formed a word, but produced no sound. The crowd shifted around them, but Gentian could not spare the energy for them, refusing to drop her own eyes.

  "I trust this settles the matter, Couerveur," said a dark-haired man, moving to stand beside the young Saxan prince. "There's no need to pursue this injury now."

  "It is no longer my question to answer."

  Gentian smiled, not so much for the words, but for the faint shifts of a superb mouth that told her that Aristide Couerveur had decided to enjoy himself.

  "I don't understand why the Tejustra," she said. "Knocking someone on the head with a rock hardly warrants an honour duel."

  "Because it had marginally fewer consequences than arresting him or incinerating him on the spot."

  Aristide could be very frank when he chose to be, and the Saxan king responded with cold affront, while Gentian looked back at Rydan, and then past him to a lean man with close-cropped dark hair, and lines of care etched into a face kept otherwise blank.

  "I'm curious, Prince Rydan," she said. "I somewhat comprehend what drove you to cave in my skull. I do not understand at all what impulse leads to you sacrifice Captain Djol."

  "Sacri–! Magister Calder, I am truly...I would pay anything to undo my stupidity. But be assured that – ah..." He glanced awkwardly at Aristide, drew a steadying breath and managed a quiet dignity to add: "I am sorry, but Leton is an unparalleled duellist. It was not his life at risk."

  She almost laughed and, indeed, she thought that Captain Djol did as well, raising his eyes to the Sun as if he despaired of idiocy. The considerable audience was not so restrained, and Prince Rydan stared about him in confusion at the murmur of reaction.

  "A Tejustra is often fought with the aid of weapons," she explained. "But it is a duel made by rule of the precepts. The laws that bind true-mages."

  Comprehension dawned, and Prince Rydan whirled to face Captain Djol. "Leton. I didn't – I would never–!"

  "I know that, cub." Captain Djol lifted a hand impatiently. "You were still my charge, and I did not anticipate the path you were taking. But now you must face the judgment of the one you injured. Raise your chin and accept it."

  Rydan gulped, and Gentian wondered dispassionately if he would faint, but he spun on his heel again and gave her an unexpectedly defiant look.

  "Enough of this." King Meneth snatched at the chance created by her interruption. "Accept blood price and be done. I am taking my sons home."

  "No."

  "Do you think you can stop us? If you wish to push this pathetic remnant of a kingdom to the brink, try to strike him down."

  The crowd shifted, Saxan mages backing up their king's warning and making their presence felt. She hadn't the energy to try to measure numbers, but they didn't truly matter.

  "I don't need to," she said. "King, you are in the place where I was born. The place that carried me through fourteen years of dawns. That longed for me over fourteen years of exile. That felt my death, and helped me back over the brink from it. And you are threatening me."

  Rydan cried out as Goldenrod responded not to the conversation but to her emotions, to her marking of an injury against a down-cheeked boy who Gentian saw no reason to simply forgive.

  "We are all senserel here."

  ooOoo

  "A young birch," her father observed, and glanced about. "Carly, are you by? Put up some fencing, or the goats will ringbark it."

  "Turn him back!" King Meneth's face had taken on a choleric hue, and he loomed over her. "Blast you, do you think I'll accept this?"

  Unmoved, Gentian did not step back, but was aware of a foreboding tightening of her mother's grip on her arm.

  "I can't," she said. "I didn't change him."

  "That was...this place." The scholar in Aurak Bes had come to the fore. "The land itself. Remarkable. I had no idea you could command it."

  "I don't command Goldenrod. I am merely important to it." She looked from the corner of her eyes at the Saxan King. "And you are still threatening me."

  If anything, this drove King Meneth's colour from red to purple, but Prince Chenar managed to somehow insert himself in front of his father.

  "I am very grateful, Magister Calder," he said, rapidly. "For your forbearance in sparing Rydan's life."

  And not having your steading turn the rest of us into trees, his expression added. Goldenrod's attention was focused fully on them now, and this disparate collection of mages could not fail to be aware how small they were.

  Into a hush built by held breath, Chenar forged on desperately. "May I – may I plead for a further mercy? If you are able to...to communicate with this place, at some time in the future, when you feel that he has had... At some time in the future, would you consider asking this place to turn him back?"

  King Meneth made a choking noise, but then waited, hands clenching and opening.

  Gentian had had no plans to do anything of the sort. She had been attacked deliberately, as part of a larger scheme to damage Darest. Why should she be merciful? It wasn't even that simple a task, since Goldenrod did not possess language. But–

  "I will," she said. "If you give me Captain Djol."

  She'd startled them both, and the Saxan King looked in outright confusion past her to where Aristide stood, managing to annoy her and at the same time remind her that she had far more interesting conversations to have than this.

  "It seemed to me his life was in the process of being thrown away," she said, watching Captain Djol produce a spectacular imitation of a rock. "I'm offended by the waste."

  Nothing could be clearer than King Meneth's reluctance, but the weight of Goldenrod's regard was only increasing. Climbing down from anger, he raised a dismissive hand and said: "It is not for me to command Swordmaster Delmar's future. He is his own man."

  Spite. To announce Captain Djol as Arleton Delmar, subject of a fabled bounty, was to set countless hunters
at his heels. Gentian had no idea what hold King Meneth had had over the man, but the Saxan had revealed a vicious streak in relinquishing it.

  Delmar smiled, an expression spectacular in its cynicism, but he seemed more energised than daunted. "Then I will take my leave, with thanks."

  He nodded at Gentian and walked out of the crowd, and the Saxan royals curtly headed in the opposite direction, King Meneth gesturing for his people to prepare for departure. Gentian sighed with relief, then eyed the birch now spoiling the sweep of the west meadow.

  "I wonder if he'd end up with scars if I let the goats have the occasional nibble," her mother mused, just barely audible, and her father laughed, then let go of Gentian's arm so he could hug them both. Gentian managed not to flinch from the pain of the contact, but he still felt her response and let go.

  "Are you feeling any better at all?"

  "Getting tired," Gentian murmured, watching Aristide ask Aloren a question. The Cerian princess shook her head then nodded toward Aspen, standing with Rua. "I don't think I should sleep."

  It was something to watch Aristide's face while Aloren spoke. Puzzlement, and a flash approaching disbelief, and then an expression that was stunning for its straightforward warmth, something Gentian suspected almost no-one had witnessed before.

  Then Aristide, the Diamond Couerveur, feared and coveted, bowed his head to his apprentice, deeply and respectfully.

  Gentian joined him in the gesture, as did her parents, and then Aurak Bes, the rescued Cyan royals, and even Princess Aloren, highly amused. Honour where it was due. They were all alive thanks to Aspen.

  And to one who had had even less choice about her life than Gentian. Suldar. To the very end she'd been bound about with oaths and her own sister's hatred. The most powerful being who had ever lived, and still unable to escape.

  Silently Gentian hoped Dusk had found freedom in the Moon's embrace.

  Chapter Twenty-Three