All That Glitters

by Auston Habershaw

  Hool felt her hackles rise at the sight of the thing. “I don’t like that statue.”

  Tyvian sighed. “You’re not supposed to. My mother is sending me a message.”

  Hool frowned, still staring at it. “What’s the message?”

  Tyvian took a deep breath and walked toward the huge, ivy-­covered house that stood beyond the courtyard. “The message is ‘I told you so.’ ”

  Glamourvine had been the family home of the Reldamars for seventeen generations, built at a time when the nations of the West were in a state of near constant war and the world looked a lot more like Eretheria than it did presently. Saldor had begun to emerge from its vassal-­state status as merely “the region surrounding the Arcanostrum,” and the magi were becoming less like isolated monks and more like active members of the world at large. The other nations of the world didn’t like this—­they saw it as the clear threat it was—­and there was much rattling of sabers and swearing of bloody oaths. Glamourvine, therefore, was built primarily for defense.

  What separated it from the other defensive buildings of the world—­a veritable smorgasbord of keeps, holds, castles, and forts—­was that it was built for defense by magi. This meant the building itself—­an elegant, stone-­and-­lumber villa, covered in flowering ivy and filled with windows—­was comfortable, spacious, and filled with sunlight. The woods and gardens surrounding it, however, were a different matter. Glamourvine was effectively invisible to the outside world save for a few predesignated pathways, such as from the house to the dock on the river and another to the main road that led back to the city. The rituals that had made this so were of the ancient sort—­sorcery done with time and meticulous care rather than by more modern magecraft—­and as such were as firm as the ancient stones of the house itself. If Tyvian was safe anywhere in the entire world, he was safe here.

  Assuming his mother didn’t turn him in.

  The door was open but no one met them. Once there had been a great many servants in his mother’s employ, but over the years she had gradually reduced the number of actual living humans present in her home. That, of course, didn’t mean his mother no longer had servants—­far from it—­just that they weren’t usually human. Or living.

  The River Hall—­as the entry hall by the river entrance was named—­had vaulted ceilings and cast iron and silver chandeliers of the most delicate workmanship. A sweeping staircase dominated the room, its balustrades carved from dark wood in elaborate pastoral patterns—­vines, flowers, hares, and foxes. Everything in the hall was in perfect order—­not a speck of dust, not a corner ignored. The décor was as tasteful and ornate as Tyvian had remembered it—­full without being cluttered, impressive without being gaudy. It made the Argent Wind look like a carnival tent.

  “This is very pretty,” Hool said. It was enough to make Tyvian do a double take—­compliments were not Hool’s strong suit.

  Tyvian eyed the life-­size portrait of his great-­aunt Daria over the stairs. “Don’t gawk, Hool—­it will only encourage her.”

  Hool sniffed in its direction. “The picture? Is it magic?”

  “No—­my mother. She’s watching us. There’s nothing that happens in this house that she doesn’t know about.”

  Tyvian spotted a card atop a table by the door, no doubt left there by his mother some hours ago, as she was expecting them. He picked it up and read the note, penned in the flowing, beautiful hand of Lyrelle Reldamar.

  Dinner is at seven; the clothing you ordered has been delivered to your room. Please attend me in my solarium at your earliest convenience. Though I know you will refuse it, the fountain by the River Gate is enchanted to heal your wounds.

  Tyvian sighed—­she even knew about his wounds. “You know, Hool, there’s no reason you need to keep that shroud on here. It isn’t as though my mother doesn’t know what you really are.”

  He had barely finished his sentence before Hool had it off. She shook her mane and breathed deeply. “I’m hungry—­how long until dinner?”

  Tyvian pointed to the antique spirit clock in the corner. “It’s at seven—­figure it out. I don’t plan on attending, myself. I’m going to bed. You’d better come with me.”

  Hool fell into step behind him as he plunged into corridor after corridor of pure, unadulterated nostalgia.

  A boy in Glamourvine was a boy born under a fortunate star. Tyvian’s childhood had featured every comfort, every courtesy. The ancient villa, with its long corridors and labyrinthine chambers, its wood-­carved gargoyles and secret passages, was the perfect environment to hone such important boyhood skills as hiding, sneaking, exploring, and filching dessert an hour before suppertime. As Tyvian walked, he and Hool’s footsteps muted by the lush rugs into chapel-­like silence, he went back to that time. The faint smells of wood polish and dry mustiness of sun-­worn tapestries brought it all back to him in crashing waves of memory.

  Gods, he should have been a happy boy. At the absolute edges of his memory, Tyvian could see his mother’s smile as she leaned over his bed, hear her soft voice telling him a story as the sun went down and the shadows grew long across the gardens. He really couldn’t tell when that had changed or what had happened. As he grew, the warm smiles of Lyrelle Reldamar had grown colder, sharper. She did not tell him stories anymore, but rather lectured him. You are a bastard, Tyvian, she had told him once, and that means you must take your life twice as seriously as anyone else. That had been uttered on his tenth birthday, when his mother informed him that there were to be no more birthday parties.

  “What is wrong with you?” Hool asked as Tyvian paused by a door—­a door he hadn’t opened in over a decade.

  Tyvian shook his head. He felt foolish moping over a loss of birthday parties, when there were boys like Artus, whose own mother had banished him to a foreign country so he wouldn’t have to go to war at the age of thirteen. “This is my room,” he said.

  Tyvian’s chambers were as spacious as they were comfortable—­anaglypta wallpaper in baroque swirls, thick velvet curtains for the broad windows, a balcony overlooking one of the gardens, a bed the size of a wagon, satin sheets, mattress stuffed with down. Nothing seemed to have changed except Tyvian himself.

  Hool grunted. “How many of your brothers and sisters slept in that bed?”

  Tyvian laughed. “If Xahlven had tried to slip into bed with me, I would have murdered him.”

  Hool shook her head. “No wonder you don’t like ­people. Rooms like this made you think you were important without you even doing anything.”

  Tyvian shrugged—­thanks to his injured shoulder, the gesture hurt a great deal, but he swallowed the pain. “Yes . . . yes, well, I’d best get out of these rags. Some privacy, if you don’t mind?”

  Hool’s ears went back. “Why? I’ve seen you naked before. I can handle it. Besides, you might need help with your shirt since you were stabbed all those times.”

  Tyvian scowled. “Just get out, will you please?”

  She left.

  He tried taking off his shirt, only to discover how right the gnoll had been—­the experience was excruciating. Were it not for the rather impressive pain tolerance he had developed while burdened with the ring, he might have screamed aloud. As it was, he resorted to drawing Chance and using the blade to cut the shirt off rather than try to remove it normally. In his armoire he found the clothing he had purchased that morning in the Old City. He pulled on a fresh shirt—­a weirdly easier process than getting one on, though still painful.

  Feeling halfway normal again, Tyvian sighed and walked out on the balcony. The garden beneath him was a museum-­piece of sorcerous horticulture—­flowers of impossible colors growing in perfectly geometrical beds among slender dwarf yews clipped into improbable curves and spirals, trellises of wisteria vines in full bloom, their chains of lavender blossoms dangling artfully over groomed pebble paths. The scent of damp soil and flowers wa
s so thick, the air was like soup. In the distance he could see a beefy gardener—­one of the few remaining servants, apparently—­clipping a hedge. The man looked familiar, but Tyvian couldn’t place him and didn’t remember the names of any of the gardeners from when he’d left. It was doubtful the man had worked here fifteen years ago anyway.

  It was a strange thing to be standing there again. He had sworn he would never come back—­he wanted to be rid of his mother’s schemes and manipulations. He had wanted to choose his own path, not live in a house where his path was already laid out. It was typical adolescent nonsense, in its way, but it had shaped his life. He knew that his fate was his own, that all the choices he made in his life could be of his own free will, and to that end he had abandoned the wealth and prestige of his family in exchange for the seedy underbelly of the world, where things were more fluid. Standing there, looking down at those beautiful gardens while two stab wounds throbbed in his arm and shoulder, he wondered for a moment if he had chosen wrong.

  But only a moment.

  The bed called to him, the rich summer air and the exhaustion of the day weighing down every part of him. He gingerly slipped himself beneath the blankets, careful not to jostle his arm too much, and had barely laid his head on the pillow before sleep took him.

  For the first time in over a decade, he slept without his sword at hand and without checking to see if the door was locked.

  CHAPTER 16

  MOTHER

  Tyvian’s eyes shot open. Somebody had been in his room—­the click of the door closing had awoken him. He sat up bolt straight, flailing for Chance and suddenly aware of how stupid he had been to let his guard down. He rolled out of his bed, half tangled in sheets, and managed to snatch his sword from the bedside table.

  There was no pain.

  He flexed his left hand—­nothing, not even stiffness. He felt his shoulder, clean and smooth as though no knife wound had pierced it. There wouldn’t even be a scar.

  This was his mother’s handiwork. He should have expected it. He suddenly felt very silly, crouching on the floor like a cornered animal. He took some deep breaths and let his paranoia cool.

  How long had he been sleeping? He glanced out the window—­the sun was low on the horizon, its light barely splitting the tree branches. He had been asleep less than an hour, maximum. He was still exhausted, still a little foggy from his ordeal that day, but there was no sense in putting off the inevitable anymore. It was time to see what Lyrelle wanted from him.

  He stood and began to dress. He felt as though he were dressing for battle. In a very real sense, he supposed he was.

  The solarium was an enclosure of pure mageglass—­a decorative dome etched with frosted, arabesque patterns reminiscent of a tree canopy. The design mirrored the growth of actual vines, which, by some clever sorcerous manipulation of the mageglass surface outside, had found purchase and grown up and over various sections of the dome. Inside, the dying light of day was filtered into a mix of verdant greens and frosty whites, which played off the mageglass furniture nicely, their own design in keeping with the motif of the room. The floor was of spotless eggshell tile; the air was as filtered and cool as that of a mountaintop in Galaspin. Tyvian entered the room wearing black with gold accents, Chance at his hip. Lyrelle, of course, wore white.

  Lyrelle Reldamar was well into her sixties, but looked not a day over forty-­five, thanks, no doubt, to a lifetime of sipping cherille and a variety of clever and almost invisible cosmetic glamours placed upon her person. To say she was beautiful would be too simplistic—­there is a great variety of beauty in the world, and not all of it comparable. Lyrelle was beautiful like spun glass—­elegant, smooth, perfectly proportioned, but also hard. Lyrelle, with her golden hair arranged in a sophisticated array of pins and curtailed by a wide-­brimmed sun-­hat, was not a woman men wished to hold or kiss; hers was a beauty that stopped men dead and demanded their rapt attention. Her eyes—­piercing blue, as was the Reldamar family trait—­peered down a porcelain nose at her son, taking him all in with a single sweep and a flutter of full eyelashes. “Tyvian. How nice to see you again.”

  “Mother,” Tyvian said. He could think of nothing else to say at that moment; he felt entirely on his guard, as though Lyrelle had pulled a knife on him by saying hello. He wanted to relax—­he wanted to pretend as if the past fifteen years of no contact whatsoever hadn’t happened and he could sit down and chat with his mother like a normal person. He couldn’t, though. He stood there like a soldier under review.

  Lyrelle looked over his shoulder, as though expecting somebody else. Pure affectation, of course—­Tyvian’s mother manipulated with gestures as much as with words. “And where is your gnoll friend?”

  “It’s your house; you know perfectly well where she is.”

  Lyrelle let that pass and patted the chair next to her. “Come, sit. We’ll have some tea.”

  “A bit late for tea, isn’t it, Mother?” Tyvian pulled out the chair across from Lyrelle and slumped into it, forcing himself to attempt an image of the blasé young man even if he didn’t feel it and wasn’t really young anymore.

  Lyrelle’s eyebrow arched at Tyvian’s posture. “Hospitality can never be tardy, Tyvian. Besides, you’re frightfully thirsty, aren’t you, dear?”

  Contradicting her would be pointless, so he didn’t bother. “You seem to be maturing at a modest pace—­my congratulations.”

  Lyrelle smiled. “You look as though you intend to tie a damsel to the spirit engine tracks and cackle.” When Tyvian grimaced, she patted his shoulder gently. “Oh, don’t despair, dear—­it’s a good look for you. Not all my children could have inherited Xahlven’s jawline. I think your whole ensemble is rather dashing, in that villainous-­rake kind of way. You could do with a good moustache, though.”

  Tyvian’s ring hand tingled, but he noted that it wasn’t the ring that was doing it, but rather himself. He was suddenly very conscious of it—­the ring was an anchor waiting to be dropped at the wrong moment. He didn’t want to sit here and chitchat with his mother about Xahlven’s cheekbones and his facial hair. “Mother, I’d like to discuss the reason I’ve come.”

  The warm smile slipped from Lyrelle’s face like the prop it was. She sat back in her chair as invisible specters brought in the tea and poured it for each of them. “Why Tyvian, you didn’t come—­you were summoned, dear.”

  Tyvian took a breath to steady his anger, which was building far too quickly to be rational. “Very well—­allow me to rephrase. Why have you ‘summoned’ me here?”

  Lyrelle sipped her tea. “I’ve always been very fond of Myreon Alafarr. It’s a gross injustice, her imprisonment. That trial was a sham.”

  “That’s an incredible thing for you to say, Mother, considering that you’re the one who framed her.”

  Lyrelle snorted. “I did nothing of the kind—­poor Myreon was the victim of being too good at her job. I merely made certain you heard of it—­and here you are, come back to rescue her.”

  Tyvian scowled. “I’m not the rescuing type.”

  “Have it your way.” Lyrelle shrugged. “Why have you come back, then?”

  Tyvian said nothing. He tried to determine what it was his mother wanted him to say—­to sever her interminable ability to know exactly what it was he would do and why. He got nowhere, just chasing his own thoughts around and around inside his own head, a puppy perpetually after his own tail.

  Lyrelle raised her teacup to her lips and sipped, watching her son over the rim with a steady, insect patience. “I trust you met with Gethrey Andolon?”

  “So that’s what this is about? You summoned me back here to do what—­stop him?” Tyvian searched his mother’s face for a reaction.

  There was none. “You may assume that if you wish—­I deny it. Poor Gethrey works under the assumption that his plans are invisible to us, but they could not be more transparent. Xahl
ven is well aware of his doings and will handle the situation. Your interference is not needed or warranted.” She snorted. “Such a caricature of a villain, that man—­your influence, I should think. Shame your sense of taste couldn’t have rubbed off on him, too. Have you seen his ship? Gods, what an eyesore—­it is one of the few vessels that I feel might be aesthetically improved by a good naval engagement.”

  Tyvian shook his head and pressed on. “Well then why summon me? Why use Myreon? What does this have to do with Andolon?”

  “Is that you asking a question, Tyvian?” Lyrelle chuckled lightly—­the mature, throaty amusement of a predator examining hapless prey. “I thought I was an irredeemable temptress and liar whose every answer to a question was as reliable as a desert mirage. Has something changed?”

  Tyvian grimaced at the echoes of his own words, spoken in this very solarium fifteen years ago. He, a young man of scarcely twenty, enraged at the fruits of his mother’s latest manipulation, screaming at her in a way he never had before. The anger was still there, too—­smoldering, barely contained. If this conversation took but one wrong turn, he would be screaming at her again. “I haven’t come back because I wanted to. I’m not going to apologize.”

  “Oh, and what are you here to do, then?” Lyrelle was grinning. She held out her hand. “Let’s see it.”

  He felt his cheeks burning, but it wasn’t with embarrassment. He wanted to strike her—­had a visceral need to do something she didn’t expect, that she hadn’t made happen. He wanted to prove he wasn’t a puppet. He clutched his hands together, running a finger over the ring, which still seemed to tingle with anticipation—­perhaps also with a warning not to strike his own mother.

  Lyrelle rolled her eyes. “Now I’ve gone and made you angry, have I? Really, Tyvian—­have you matured at all in the past decade? Grow up and show me the ring; I’m curious to see it up close in any event.”