“I would be both happy and honored,” replied Gaius. “Though for the last one, I recommend you ask Valerie’s father. Didn’t you save him from a fiery dragon-related death when he was a goose? I bet he’d be happy to help.”
Suddenly, he pulled away and bowed before her. Rachel took a step backward, confused.
“May I have this dance, Miss Griffin?”
“Most certainly, Mr. Valiant.” Rachel curtsied in delight.
She stepped forward and placed one hand in his and the other upon his shoulder. The two of them waltzed around the room to the glorious strains of “The Skater’s Waltz.” Twirling across the dance floor, Rachel felt a rush of gratitude to her grandparents for insisting she learn to waltz. She was by no means a great dancer, but she moved with a graceful swirl and did not embarrass herself by stepping on her partner’s feet.
Gaius was not an accomplished dancer, but he was neither was he awkward. Ordinarily, it would have been the man’s responsibility to make sure that they did not bump into other couples, as it was the woman’s to avoid treading on her partner’s toes, but that was not much of a challenge here, since they were incapable of bumping into the ghostly dancers. Still, Gaius did see that they did not dance through any other couples, which might have been considered rude.
Rachel, her heart overflowing with love, gazed up at his face with its slightly-smeared stripes of blue war paint. What an amazing evening. She was certain she would not have felt nearly so confident had she come with someone else. Gaius was so supportive, so witty, so clever, and so compassionate, not to mention that there was a certain comfort, when surrounded by specters and ghouls, to being in the company of one of the Roanoke Academy’s best duelists.
They circled the floor, swept away by the lilting music. The moment hung like a jewel amidst the traumas of Rachel’s trouble-filled life. Doubly so due to the piece the musicians had chosen. “The Skater’s Waltz” had long been Rachel’s favorite. She could not hear its lively strains without recalling her mother sweetly humming it, as she taught Rachel to skate on the lake at Gryphon Park. The weather seldom grew cold enough to freeze lake water in Devon, but her mother had stood on the shore near the boat house and played her flute. Silver sparks had drifted across the lake, until the whole surface had frozen solid, and the gazebo on the small island had been coated with patterns of jagged frost. Hearing that melody still brought with it a promise of hope and cheer and hot chocolate.
As the piece came to its triumphant finale, punctuated by a peal of thunder from the tor, Gaius spun Rachel to a stop and dipped her over his arm. Rachel had practiced such dips many times with her dancing instructor, but that had not prepared her for the exhilaration of the real experience. She gasped as she arched backwards, suddenly off balance, and laughed giddily.
When at last he drew her upright, Gaius pulled her to him. She rested there, her cheek pressed against his chest.
“Gah! That’s cold!” Gaius jumped. “Hey, who are you? What are you doing?”
Rachel glanced up. A young man dressed in dark, elegant clothing was tapping Gaius’s shoulder, as if requesting to cut in and dance off with his partner. His fingers bounced off Gaius’s clothing, but Gaius shivered. The ghost drew his hand back in dismay, as if touching the inside-out garments had caused him pain.
It was a young man whom Rachel recognized.
“Myrddin!” Rachel cried in joy. Turning to Gaius, she declared, “This is my uncle. The one I told you about.”
Gaius bowed graciously, making a sweeping gesture from the ghost to Rachel. “I would be a cad were I jealous of my girl’s deceased uncle. Please. Be my guest.”
The elegant opening strains of “The Blue Danube” spilled through the room. Rachel took her place across from the ghostly boy, waiting for the long introduction to end so that the dancing could begin. One hand hovered over Myrddin’s immaterial shoulder. The other, she held near his hand. A faint scent of lavender accompanied the ghost, which was only proper for the shade of a young man who had been heir to immense lavender farms, the main crop grown at Gryphon Park propre.
The waltz began in earnest, and the partners began to dance. With slow, solemn grace, Rachel and Myrddin swept around the room. She stared up at him, smiling slightly. The ghostly boy gazed back at her, his face serious, but his pale eyes ablaze with gratitude.
They sailed about the floor together, in time with the other ghostly dancers. Myrddin could not touch her inside-out robes, so his hand hovered just behind her back. His other hand appeared to clasp hers, though all Rachel could feel was a coolness that soon made her fingers tingle uncomfortably. Still, she did not remove her hand. When the climatic finale arrived, the ghost could not dip her, but they spun rapidly together, ending with a bow on his part and a curtsey on hers.
Then, Thunderfrost’s Boy was gone, and Rachel stood alone on the floor, her fingers tingling from the cold.
Looking around, Rachel’s heart leapt into her throat. Over by the violet-blue hearth, Gaius stood surrounded by Wilis. The pale women with their flowing tresses leaned toward him, trying to touch his face and hair with their long insubstantial fingers. Rachel ran toward them, her heart hammering. The other side of the ballroom seemed unexpectedly far away. She felt as if she were trapped in one of those nightmares where she ran as fast as she could but never traveled anywhere. Terrified, she ran faster, but someone else arrived first.
The floating young girl in the strange garments, with the long flowing kelp-like hair descended upon the Wilis. They hissed at her like snakes, but they slowly backed away from Gaius. When they had departed, the young girl turned and ran a long blue-white finger along Gaius’s cheek. He jerked back, clapping his hand to his face.
“C-cold!” he gasped.
Rachel arrived out of breath and leaned over, panting.
“Fear not, Gaius Valiant.” The floating young girl-entity spoke with a high sweet voice, and yet there was something eerie, almost disturbing about it. “I shall not hurt you. Nor you, Rachel Griffin.” She turned her head and fixed her all-black eyes on Rachel. “The two of you helped my mistress, when she was in distress. I am grateful and in your debt.”
“W-who are you?” Gaius asked, startled. “And, more importantly, what are you? You’re not a ghost. Your finger was solid. I could feel it.”
“I am a fetch,” replied the young girl. She gazed at them with her enormous eyes.
Rachel’s mind raced backward, searching her memory for a time when she and Gaius rescued anyone who owned a fetch.
“Oh!” she cried suddenly. “You are the China doll, aren’t you? The talking doll that belongs to Magdalene Chase!”
The fetch-maiden nodded.
Rachel thought of the pale little girl who was the only student at Roanoke smaller than she. She remembered coming upon the little porcelain doll attempting to drag her mistress to the infirmary, after Magdalene refused to yield to the geas that attempted to force her to hurt her classmates. Rachel and Gaius had found the two of them—the unconscious girl and her doll—and brought Magdalene to the Infirmary.
During the first week of school, Magdalene had come to meals sporting huge bruises. Her sister, who was actually her cousin, had been beating her. Dread had put a stop to that, at Rachel’s request, but Rachel did not know if the doll knew that this, too, had been Rachel’s doing.
“You were kind to my mistress,” the fetch-maiden said to them both. Turning to Gaius, she added, “and you are trusted by the Swan King. I will look out for you. No Wili shall dance you into your grave.”
“Swan King!” Rachel leaned forward. “You mean Vladimir Von Dread!”
“Wait. What’s that?” Gaius looked back and forth between them intently.
“That’s what the gypsies called Vlad in the princess’s vision of his past. They called him the Swan King, and one of the knights called him the Beggar King.”
“Vlad is rather interested in hearing about that vision. If you could convince your princess to speak with hi
m, he would be very grateful,” said Gaius. Turning to the floating fetch-maiden, he said, “Do you know something of Vlad’s previous life? Or did you just call him that because the swan is the national symbol of the kingdom of Bavaria?”
“My mistress and I hail from Lohengrin, where the Swan King ruled. We were under his protection.” She turned her overly- huge eyes to Rachel’s face. “That is why his detractors called him the Beggar King. Because while he was ruthless to his enemies, he protected the weak and the downtrodden. No one molested widows or orphans in a territory ruled by the Dread King.”
“He had three names?” Gaius looked confused.
The fetch-maiden nodded. “To his people, he was the Swan King. To his enemies, he was the Dread King. Only those who dared to mock him called him the Beggar King, though I believe it was a moniker that he wore with pride.”
Gaius blinked.
The fetch-maiden shrugged. “He had many more enemies than friends. History remembers him as the Dread King.”
“That does fit him,” murmured Gaius.
“Why did he have so many enemies?” asked Rachel.
“He was a conqueror and a slayer of all who opposed him. Once he had conquered a land, he set up great statues. Using the same secret art that allows me to look through the eyes of the porcelain doll, he watched his subjects from those statues. If he spied any mistreating a widow, or a child, or a poor man, or a gypsy, they died a screaming, horrendous death.”
“That…sounds like Vlad, too,” Gaius said. “Well, except for the screaming, horrendous death part. He’s very insistent about us protecting those less able than ourselves.”
“How many lands did he conquer?” asked Rachel.
“By the time the Four Horsemen rode abroad, he was the master of sixty-five worlds.”
“Sixty-five worlds?” choked Gaius.
“There are sixty-five worlds!” cried Rachel.
A look of sorrow came over the fetch-maiden’s pale bluish features. “Not anymore. Once there were millions of worlds, billions. As many as there are stars in the night sky. But most of them were lost. Only fifty remain.”
“Oh my,” whispered Rachel.
“That’s…really upsetting,” muttered Gaius. “So. Beggar King. Dread King. Swan King, eh. Does it say something about my boss that, of those three, Swan King is the hardest to swallow?”
“He does have a cloak of black swan feathers,” said Rachel.
“How’d you know that?” asked Gaius, surprised.
“He had it in the past, too,” said Rachel, not adding that she had seen it in Von Dread’s closet the time she visited his bedroom. “It was in the princess’s vision.”
“He wore it in the old days,” said the fetch-girl, “before his death.”
“He…died?” asked Gaius.
“Died. Or was spirited away moments before his demise, as happened to many—including my mistress.”
“How?” Gaius asked.
“After the World Tree fell, the Arcana could not agree on how to defeat the Four Horsemen…” the fetch-maiden began.
“The World Tree fell?” Gaius gasped.
“I saw that,” whispered Rachel, recalling the great white wolf and the corpse of the deer beside the huge, broken trunk in the dreamland of Transylvania, “…or a dream version of it.”
The fetch-maiden said, “I do not know what dire enemy felled the World Tree. Perhaps, it was the Svartalfar, who had been gnawing on it since the dawn of the sidereal universe. Perhaps their dread mother took revenge for the death of her son, Delling. Perhaps, it was some more dire and yet unknown enemy, I know not.
“But as I said, the Arcana were divided. The Dread King and six others chose to act, without waiting for the proper concord. Their act shattered Saturn’s Table. All seven died—or were thought dead—but their efforts succeeded. The Horsemen were vanquished. The few worlds that remained did not perish.”
“I wonder if I was involved with that,” muttered Gaius.
“Oh! You are that Gaius Valiant!” The fetch-maiden began to giggle like a little girl. “The Destroyer of Star Yard. The Doom of the Galactic Confederacy!”
“You’ve heard of me,” he said darkly.
“You are famous. Or infamous.”
“Was I…” his voice wobbled between hope and dread, “…an evil conqueror, too?”
She threw back her head and laughed, a shrill girlish laughter, giving them a glimpse of her shark-like teeth. “No, you were an over-confident fool who made a single deadly mistake.”
“Great.” Gaius grumbled morosely. “Not an evil super villain. Just a galactic-empire-destroying buffoon.”
Rachel lay her hand on Gaius’s upper arm, hoping to comfort him. He ran his hand across his face, smearing his war paint, and tried to smile at her.
“Were the Starkadders from your world, too?” Rachel asked curiously, hoping that a change of subject would give Gaius an opportunity to recover.
“No,” the fetch-maiden looked disdainful. “The get of Geri hail from Toverwald.”
Rachel’s brow furrowed. “Geri, as in ‘Freki and Geri?’ Odin’s wolves?”
“The same.” The fetch-maiden turned to Gaius, who was still looking troubled. “Fear not. Perhaps, you are like my mistress. She is far different now than once she was.”
“Was she a gypsy?” asked Rachel.
“No, a lamia.”
Rachel made a noise in her throat, aghast. “There are good lamia?”
“No. None. My mistress was evil, far more evil than young Master Valiant, here. More evil than the Dread King, for he had noble goals to excuse his butchery. My mistress lived in the swamps with the other lamia and preyed on children. She ate babes and sucked the marrow from their bones. I was her fetch.”
“Is she evil now and hiding it?” asked Gaius sharply.
“No.” The little fetch-maiden’s face was suffused with joy. “Now, she is good! Her heart has grown large. And I can be good, too. I have been promised…but I may not speak of that.”
“What changed her?” asked Gaius.
“It was the m—”
Caw!
“I dare not say.” The fetch-maiden ducked her head. “Or the One Who Comes on Wings of Darkness will steal away my recollection of things that once were.”
“You mean the Raven?” Rachel gazed out the window into the night, but the eerie dancing blue-violet flames did not illuminate any black birds, not even when she thought back.
“Of that one, I shall not speak.” The fetch-maiden shivered.
Gaius asked, “Will you answer questions for Vlad, if he comes to speak to you?”
But the fetch-maiden was staring out the window toward the place from which had come the raven’s cry. Winds were rising, moaning as they blew through the broken house. Peal after peal of thunder rolled down from the tor, shaking the few remaining panes of glass.
“I have stayed too long. I must away,” and she fled.
“Well, that was…” Gaius cocked his head, as if listening. “What’s that, William?…Yes, I’m still out. Oh!” He turned to Rachel, his eyes wide with alarm. “It’s 11:52!”
Grabbing each other’s hands, Rachel and Gaius raced for the door and her broom.
Chapter Twenty-Seven:
Wild Hunted
Rachel and Gaius raced southward, flying along the shore of Roanoke Island toward the docks. It would have been faster to fly directly to Roanoke Hall, but Rachel dared not fly over the school’s wards, lest her steeplechaser fail.
Storm winds blew violently up from the south. Trees swayed back and forth like frenzied temple dancers. The remaining autumn leaves were ripped from their branches and sent swirling up in great spirals. There was no rain yet, but powerful gusts buffeted the broom, knocking the riders this way and that.
Twice, they were tossed into a loop, flipping end over end. Each time, Rachel rapidly maneuvered the levers to bring them upright again. She had flown through blustery winds, but nothing like this. T
he air was swirling, gusts coming from unexpected directions. If she hit the airflow incorrectly, it struck the blades of the tail fan sideways, collapsing them or altering their arrangement. This set the entire device spinning, something Rachel had never experienced before. These conditions would have been much easier to negotiate had she been on her stomach, with her feet directly controlling the tail fan. With Gaius behind her, that was impossible.
These were the most difficult flying conditions Rachel had ever encountered. She loved it. She ploughed into the gusting winds, shrieking with sheer exhilaration.
It was not until she began to have trouble breathing that she realized that her boyfriend was clinging to her with all his strength. Glancing over her shoulder, she saw that his face was as pale as the shifts of the white ladies they had left behind at the mansion. His expression was stoic, but his body, pressed against hers, was trembling.
Oh.
Oops.
Rachel reached over and jiggled the levers. The air around the steeplechaser became calm and quiet. She righted the device and flew slowly and evenly.
“What just happened?” Gaius croaked hoarsely.
“I turned on the becalming enchantments.”
“What? Magical air stabilizers?”
“Enchantments to make the air still around us. All high-quality bristlelesses have them.”
“Why did they take so long to come on?”
Rachel bit her lip. “I…only just turned them on.”
“You forgot you had them?”
“Not at all.”
“Then why…”
“You seemed a bit discomforted by the flying conditions.”
“You turned them on…for me?”
“Yes,” she finally admitted.
“But you were screaming in fear.”
“What?” Rachel’s voice rose, sounding very English. “Certainly not! That was joy.”
“Oh.” Gaius cleared his throat. “That’s embarrassing. I’d hate for my girlfriend to come to the conclusion that I’m a big coward.”
“Not to worry,” Rachel replied primly. “I understand that someone who does not fly might have a hard time distinguishing between what’s dangerous and what’s…oh, my!”
Rachel and the Many-Splendored Dreamland (The Books of Unexpected Enlightenment Book 3) Page 34