Aristide inclined his head, every bit as imperious as his mother, no glimmer of irony in the gesture. He believed the Fair in some way responsible for Darest's decline, and had judged his King due that dangerous honesty.
"But why court them?" Soren asked, and was immediately made to feel the outsider as Aristide turned mocking eyes on her. He would not soon forgive her probing.
"We are in no condition to fight any kind of war, Champion," he replied, ever so courteous. "Outnumbered, outclassed on every side, dying by inches. Our neighbours are all very anxious we don't reforge alliances with the Fair, because they are in truth Darest's greatest strength, the reason none of the West has quite dared invade. With Fae help we may be able to recover, become the power we once were, while moving into direct conflict with The Deeping would only hasten Darest's end. As all this paper suggests, we have been caught in a trap, suffering from something we cannot prove. Ten thousand intangibilities. In theory Darest is protected by the former Fae Queen's edict that Dariens be left alone, but her successor has made a practice of not questioning events which seem to us so suspicious. 'Courting' the Fair, as you say, may give us the opportunity of obliging her to do so."
He looked at Strake. "Perhaps more quickly than anyone could have anticipated. The Tzel Aviar was perfectly placed to witness what can hardly be termed anything but Fae interference in Darest. The result is an unprecedented audience with their Queen. It is –" He paused. "– far more than I hoped."
It seemed Strake was not the first bitter pill Aristide had forced himself to swallow. Believing his home under attack by The Deeping, the man had not followed his mother and grandfather's route of hostility. He had sought their teaching, made overtures, then lined up his Rathen king as a demonstration. Played to win.
"Do you have an approach in mind?" There was displeasure in Strake's tone, but no boil-over of anger. Today he was, she realised, more like the person he had been before the Rose's assault. Still irritable, but far more in command.
Aristide's steady gaze acknowledged the shift, though he did not give any appearance of being relieved his king had accepted being made unwitting part of a complex stratagem. "Listen to them," he said. "This is not an opportunity we can force."
-oOo-
Vostal Hill at midday was bronzed by the sun and tossed by a wind carrying wood-smoke and brine but mainly chill. Autumn was shifting.
They had ascended to its flat peak in dignified silence, the Tzel Aviar leading the way, Aristide, Strake and Soren following in a row, and Captain Vereck bringing up a lonely and determined rear guard.
How, Soren wondered, would the Fair come? Through a Walk, just as she and Strake had travelled? Or by one of their air-ships, a fabled piece of magnificence so long unseen no-one outside The Deeping was certain they had ever existed. She stared up into the sky, pale with a tracery of white, then down over grass curving in every direction.
The killer had been here – could it be only yesterday? Stalked her Rathen, then made an unexpected plea and paid the price of exposing himself. He might be dying even now, a problem spawning new questions even as it was solved. And he'd left her feeling hopelessly exposed, vulnerable to any Fair assassin who chose to materialise into existence. The small squad of guards waiting at the foot of the hill were ready with their crossbows, but short of decking him out in full armour, Soren could not think of a way of adequately protecting her Rathen.
Along with the guards, they had a further audience decorating several balconies of both the old and new palaces. There even seemed to be an unusual number of figures lingering along the low sandstone wall which rose above the opposite bank of the river's mouth. No-one close enough to hear or even properly see what was going on, though the arrival of the Court of the Fair would hardly be unobtrusive. She wondered if Lady Arista was one, and how many would be longing to see this encounter fail. Meeting the Fae Court was going to be the most unpopular thing Strake had done so far.
Tzel Damaris seemed to be studying the grass, which had been only lightly grazed, ankle-high in some places. The hill was, it had to be admitted, a more suitable location for a picnic or kite-flying. Would they offer the Queen of The Deeping a seat in a tussock? And a mug of something hot to off-set the wind?
"If you would wait at this spot, Your Majesty?"
Without pausing for an answer, Tzel Damaris paced slowly around them, then stopped some three feet behind, in the direction of the palace. Kneeling, he ceremoniously set down the only object he'd brought with him: a flat case of sueded leather. As meticulously as if he were performing the Service to the Sun in the grandest of temples he opened the case and folded back a velvety cloth to reveal a dozen felt-backed partitions, the largest of which held what for a moment Soren thought was Aristide's trump blade.
It was the decorations; whorling, swirling knots faintly etched. But a moment's attention showed the thing not to be a knife at all. Instead, it was a round spike of metal set like a blade. Balancing it lightly between his palms, Tzel Damaris lifted it to the height of his face, then plunged it into the ground.
Bemused, Soren shifted so her arm brushed her Rathen's and felt him stir in response, but his eyes did not waver from the Fae. From the case Tzel Damaris now selected a thumbnail-sized object, glossy brown, which he dropped into the hole he had made. A seed. The remaining partitions all contained seeds. Did the Fae plan to grow a portal?
Without a glance in their direction, he closed the case, stood and walked past them. Pacing with even stride to a point nearly thirty feet south, he knelt once again.
Imagining how this must look to those who watched from the palace, Soren checked Aristide's expression and found only absorption. Strake wore the beginnings of a wary frown, half inclined to demand explanations or order a stop.
"Well, you said you wanted a garden," Soren whispered, and succeeded in startling a smile from him. He switched his attention briefly, grazing her hand with his, enough to make her glow. Then it was back to watching the Tzel Aviar, who planted six seeds in all. After the two north and south, he moved further out and set one each north-west, north-east and so forth, to form a rectangle about the initial pair. Then he closed and sealed his case and moved into the centre of the area he had defined.
After inclining his head in recognition of Strake's patience, Tzel Damaris unhurriedly raised his eyes to the sun and said: "The Court of the Fair is called."
It was a proclamation, echoing despite his quiet tone. Strangest of all was that Soren understood it, for the words had not been spoken in Darien. There was no immediate result, but both Aristide and Strake reacted as if to a sudden, distant noise. Then the seeds grew.
The four outermost were lorams, slender trunks of black stretching up clean and clear for over thirty feet before curving inward, reaching out branches to twine into an amber-gold roof. The two planted facing each other seemed to be some kind of maple, their smooth brown bark twisting into wide, high-backed forms, garlanded with triple-lobed leaves shading from vivid red to dried rust. Living chairs. Thrones of fire and blood.
It took no more than a count of ten for Vostal Hill to assume its crown, and in that time the Court of the Fair came to Darest. Not aloft in a winged ship or stepping through a portal blazing with magic, but simply there. They dwarfed the Dariens as even the trees did not, sheer height becoming secondary to the weight of their numbers. There were surely more than could be held within the area Tzel Damaris had circumscribed. Some seemed to be occupying exactly the same spot, yet there was not the tangled intersection of form which should result.
Every one of them, Soren realised as she struggled with awe, was standing in their own pavilion of loram. Not in Darest at all, but somewhere balanced between a dozen different hills and meadows and forest glades. She could see those places, fragments of elsewhere past people who weren't really on Vostal Hill. Straight ahead she could see a city of lakes and bridges, arches and vaults of white stone dripping with foliage in every Autumn hue. Celoras, the Heart of The Dee
ping, fabled and forbidden. And yet, she could still see the Bay of Diamonds, the images laid on top of each other and lent an air of complete unreality by some property of the light, which had a sharp, blue-washed quality.
A tiny bell chimed, just once. Small as it was, the sound rang clarion-clear and parted the crowd like reeds in the wind, a corridor opening down the centre of the pavilion. And as the note died it brought with it awareness that it was the only sound, that the rush of Autumn breeze and distant surf and any incidental clatter from a living city had been sealed outside the loram frame as solidly as if behind stone. In this hush stood Desteret, Queen of the Fair, one hand raised to touch the wrought maple arm-rest of the other throne.
Soren had expected the Deeping Queen to be haughty, but instead she stood looking over the small group of humans with calm interest: unsmiling, but not cold. That intelligent regard was the first thing Soren took in, even before the typical Fae height, the smooth beauty of her oval face, and the long black hair, elaborately dressed. Her gown was in the eastern style, fine linen of elegant cut, the pale cream cloth embroidered with white thread in scarcely visible patterns.
The bells were in her hair, great strings of them, each no larger than the nail of Soren's smallest finger. Suspended on combs, silver ropes of them framed her face. Others were wound about the thin braids which weighted the mass of hair allowed to flow down her back, and there was a single chain about the wrist of the hand which rested on the throne.
As she folded into her best courtesy, Soren watched Strake from the corner of her eye and saw him incline his head, the greeting of one monarch to another. The Fae Queen had such a singular presence that Soren could scarcely believe it when she returned the gesture. It was like a mountain had noticed the capering of ants. Desteret Saw them.
The silver ropes, so perfectly still a moment ago, swayed but did not give tongue. Then she moved, seated herself, still without sound. It was grace underlined. Soren felt the very ground should tremble.
Strake was stiff in contrast, the suspicions stressed by Lady Arista perhaps playing in his mind, but he took the seat provided. Rearranging themselves so that Aristide stood on one side of their throne and Soren and Vereck the other gave Soren the chance to look away from Desteret. She needed that somehow – to look away, to rest her eyes, as if she had been gazing at the sun.
Groups emerged to her eye, each clustered around some central figure just as the Dariens bracketed Strake on his blazing throne. Each of these would be a Deeping lord, owing fealty to their Queen as Strake's barons did him. Except these 'barons' held dominion over lands as large as Darest itself.
There were perhaps a dozen groups, and in some she found the chill she'd been expecting, in most a kind of tolerant attention which left Soren feeling like a stripling urged upon a stage. The Queen had half a dozen about her, including two of the small eisel or 'lesser folk' more common in the eastern reaches of The Deeping. Only the Tzel Aviar stood alone, and it was to him that the Fae Queen turned now, those strings of bells again swaying but not sounding.
"You have called Council, Damaris of the Wryve." Desteret's words were in the Fae language, yet again somehow comprehensible. And the air trembled with the effort of carrying them: they resonated in Soren's bones, as if that soft, measured voice carried with it the weight of the very earth. "Open the matter."
Tzel Damaris had placed the case of seeds at his feet and stood upright and alone in the very centre of the pavilion. Among his own kind he looked diminutive, but that composure was unassailable, his voice without ripple as he lifted it and said:
"A child of the People has been Shaped."
Chapter Twenty-Five
No race was more closely linked to Shaping than the Fair. Their jealously guarded fields and vast forests were populated by plants and animals found nowhere else in the world, to their immeasurable profit. On occasion they undertook specific commissions for lesser realms, and produced a crop suited to adverse conditions or an animal to combat a seemingly incurable local trouble. The best grains, whose high yields allowed all Sumica to keep famine at bay, were said to have been an ancient gift of The Deeping.
With their long lives and comely features, it was widely assumed that the Fair had practiced their skills on their own kind, with notable success. But the reaction to Tzel Damaris' statement made it clear that if this had ever been the case, it was no longer. It was as if every member of the Court of the Fair stopped mid-breath. Their eyes widened in disbelief and anger, and beneath that there was a dismay which trembled on the verge of something more.
Soren's own first moment of reaction had been an ambiguous irritation, thinking that Aristide's machinations would go nowhere if the Fair were more interested in the condition of the killer than his purpose in Darest. To see them so palpably shaken left her reliving her own scrawling horror, particularly that lonely ordeal in the Tongue. Was this boy something so dreadful even the Fair could not deal with him?
During the initial shock, the Queen had shown as much reaction as the Sun. And when the Court turned to her in a body, instinctive need not put to words but made abundantly clear, that mountain's regard had a quality which brought nothing so much to Soren's mind as an impending avalanche. When the Queen of the Fair said: "Base your claim," Soren found herself sure that if the Tzel Aviar did not, he would fall far. This was an accusation with consequences.
Tzel Damaris lifted one hand. There was no other warning before the pavilion was gone and Soren, her eyes dazzled and blurred, was seeing a beach at night. There were guards running toward her and, as the vision flickered, a brief image of Strake close by, sword in hand. Her sight flickered again – Damaris blinking, she realised – and then she was looking past the guards, beyond the figure of Aristide to a dark-haired woman in a black surcoat worked with silver and gold. She was holding a sword out at nothing and despite the distance her face was clear, an illustration of paralysed fright, the effort of taking a breath. The sword shook.
Then he was there, a figure in black blocking that of the woman. Damaris had started to move, not running but rapid strides which had him perhaps forty feet away when the woman turned her head sharply and looked up the nearby hill. The figure in black followed her gaze, and Damaris had focused on the profile of a boy, young and startled. Then a quick glance up the hill, but rocks blocked more than a glimpse of the archer. Damaris had looked back in time to catch the boy vanishing too late. Sand kicked up, and then it was the pavilion once again, that flat blue light, the many-layered view.
"There was no discernible use of reserve or trigger, no time at all for structuring force," Damaris continued, ever unwavering. "I judge his abilities to be [innate-constructed-not external]."
Soren, angrily trying to push aside the resurrection of disabling terror, had to blink at the final word, which her ear heard as coralith, but which compounded itself on her mind as three different things at once. The enchantment translating for them could not provide a single expression in Darien which would fully encompass its meaning.
Whatever it meant to be coralith, the Tzel Aviar was obviously not alone in considering it a conclusive argument. The dismay in the pavilion was tangible. Having heard all her life tales which extolled the power of the Fair, it was unnerving to realise that they were truly afraid.
Beneath her throne's crown of Autumn leaves, Desteret turned the weight of her attention to her Court. "Who has knowledge of this?"
With a transgression of such obvious magnitude, simply asking seemed as likely to win a positive response as Soren's attempt to be nice to Aristide. And yet, one group stirred.
There was a waterfall behind this cluster of people, a thin streamer bathing dark, moss-laden rocks with mist as it fell to a fern-shrouded pool. Two men and a woman were reluctantly stepping aside, as if they wanted to shield their fourth, a pale, dark-haired woman dressed in colours to echo the moss, with a single heavy silver wristlet weighting her arm. Although her face was no more lined, she was the oldest-seeming Fa
e Soren had ever seen. The grace of her carriage owed more to care than ease and her slender body, though very upright, spoke its frailty.
"Seldareth would speak," she said, moving to the centre of the pavilion. Her voice had a tenuous quality, woven through with threads of fatigue.
Beside Soren, Strake leaned forward. Seldareth was the name of the Deeping land directly north of Darest. The 'North' which, like 'East', had once disputed possession of Darest. And the place where Vahse had died. On the throne opposite, Desteret moved just enough to set those silver ropes silently swinging once again, granting permission.
Damaris, unselfconsciously collecting his case, moved aside and the woman, who could only be Seldareth's lord, took the central position.
"The boy is Moon-cast," she said, fragile voice apparently finding this a statement almost beyond its ability to deliver. "His purpose is laid upon him beyond the blood, but his structure has not been altered."
A thrill of disbelief ran through Soren. 'Moon-cast' meant nothing to her, but she could scarcely credit that this woman had admitted before the full Court of the Fair that she knew the identity and purpose of the killer who had attacked Princess Sethane's hunting party. It was far more than she had expected from this Council, something entirely solid and real to make firm centuries of unprovable suspicion. The Fair had known. And if they had done this, what else could be marked down to them?
Worried, she glanced at her Rathen. Hands resting on his throne's arm-rests – because they gave him something to grip – Strake seemed to be biting the inside of his cheek, his eyes boring through the woman's thin back. But he did not speak, leap up and demand answers, or even blink. As Aristide had counselled, he was listening. The Court, though still less than sanguine, had seemed to find the news mild relief. Moon-cast was apparently not so bad a thing as Shaping.
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