Gloaming

by Charlotte E. English

  Ghislain said: ‘Night and Moon are often together. With Margot’s help, I believe I can reach them.’

  That left Sun, and Rain. ‘I will go looking for Rain,’ said Florian, and added cheerfully, ‘It often finds me, at any rate, when I am out-of-doors. And if I do not find the Rain, it rather stands to reason that I shall instead bump into some sun.’

  ‘I will look for the Sun,’ said Pharamond.

  ‘No, father,’ countered Sylvaine firmly. ‘I will go. You are the only person who can reliably deliver us all back into this room, and to mother. You must wait for us somewhere we can easily find you.’

  Pharamond’s mouth twitched. ‘In this house?’

  ‘It’s the Brightening, however,’ said Oriane. ‘It shall not be quite such a chaos. Perhaps the ballroom?’

  This proposition was accepted. Only then did it occur to anybody to wonder — Oriane among them — how it would be possible to leave the room in the first place.

  ‘We have this,’ said Pharamond, and held up a tiny book. It was filled with paintings, and the one he had chosen depicted the very same ballroom in which he would be waiting. ‘I only need a mirror.’

  ‘Can you, Thandrian?’ murmured Oriane. ‘You would only need to hold it for a bare minute, I think, and perhaps less.’

  The clock mustered itself with a whirr of gears and a creaking of aged wood. ‘Be ready, Pharamond,’ Oriane warned. ‘You shall have your mirror in a moment, but it is beyond Thandrian’s ability to keep it still for long.’

  Pharamond nodded, but barely had Oriane finished speaking when a mirror winked into existence not far away. It wriggled and warped, but it held; with a cry of triumph, Pharamond jumped after it, his book at the ready. Under his direction, the blank glass soon reflected a vision of the ballroom of Laendricourt, drenched in light and high colour.

  ‘Go!’ Pharamond cried, and he was obeyed. Sylvaine went through with Florian, first; then Margot with Ghislain; then Nynevarre.

  ‘Quickly,’ said Pharamond, for the mirror was writhing about, and threatened to vanish or crack at any moment.

  Two rapid steps, and a little leap; Oriane was through. The ballroom was not empty; she emerged into a room full of people, some of whom had doubtless been dancing a few moments before. Music played from somewhere, but the dancers had stopped, to stare instead at the jumbled knot of people who had appeared so abruptly in the middle of the room.

  Oriane turned, to watch after Pharamond — and here he came, tumbling out of thin air to land, with admirable grace, upon his feet.

  Behind him, an agitated sparkle was all that announced the presence of the mirror, and it was soon gone.

  Oriane thought of poor Thandrian, left once again alone, and wondering, perhaps, if they would ever return for her after all.

  We will, she promised silently, hoping that Thandrian would believe it.

  And then, to business. ‘Right,’ she said aloud, ignoring the indignant chatter of the dancers whose revelries they had interrupted. Really, it was far too early in the day to be dancing anyhow! Avoiding Pharamond’s eye, she checked that the neckcloth was still secure around her throat, picked up her skirts, and strode for the door.

  Florian

  It stood to reason that, in order to find the Rain, one must first take oneself outside.

  Florian tried this.

  It was not a simple matter.

  ‘Do you know how I can get outside?’ he said to the first person he saw, a large red-haired woman with (inexplicably) ram’s horns atop her head. She was seated at the sole table in a large, red-painted room, partaking of the contents of a silver-covered dish which smelled of fish and lemons.

  She honoured Florian with an arrogant stare and pointed at the same door through which Florian had just stepped. ‘That way,’ she said.

  ‘Thank you,’ said Florian gravely.

  The woman returned to her dinner, and Florian to the door.

  He asked the same question of the next person he saw, a small man in a striped blueberry-coloured coat whose hat was almost taller than he was. This red-cheeked little man looked up from tending the oversized flowers that clung to the walls of his greenhouse, and directed a quelling stare at Florian.

  ‘Not through here!’ he said in a harsh whisper, as though the flowers might be startled were he to speak too loud.

  ‘Thank you,’ Florian sighed, and bowed his way out again.

  He went on in this style for some time, wandering from room to room with ever-decreasing hope, until he came to a small room with honeycomb-patterned walls and glass all set into the ceiling. Enthroned within was a stately old woman with bees knitted into her tall, powdered hair, and whose eyes were the exact colour of honey.

  She smiled sweetly at Florian.

  ‘Young man, you have the air of the lost,’ she said, not unkindly.

  Florian might have fallen at her feet with gratitude, for they were the first friendly words that had been addressed to him for the past hour. ‘I am trying to get outside,’ he explained. ‘I want to find the Rain.’

  She lifted one withered hand, its prominent veins all purple and blue, and pointed. ‘That way,’ she said with a sickly smile, and there materialised a dainty white door. ‘Go that way for the space of sixteen breaths,’ she said. ‘Or it might be seventeen, I do not altogether recall. Then turn the bluebell way and go on again. You will find the Rain.’

  Florian was profuse in his thanks. He spent a moment in wondering what the woman did in her odd little room, alone except for the bees; but he dismissed the idea and went quickly through the door, unwilling to lose his passage out now that one had been made for him.

  Sixteen breaths. They were among the oddest instructions he had ever received, and he did not know quite how to follow them, for of course he began to breathe differently the moment he was paying attention to it. He tried his best to breathe as he normally would, and counted carefully through sixteen. Along the way, he passed down a garden path of honey-coloured jewels, fringed all about on either side with grasses and ferns. There were tall hedges set a few paces back from the path, so tall that he could see nothing behind them. Each was thick with toffee-brown leaves, and crawling with bees. Their humming filled the air.

  At the end of sixteen breaths, he was forced to stop, and stared onward in dismay. There was nothing there, no turning, no alternative path: just the same garden path stretching on and on, and the same tall hedges either side.

  Perhaps it was seventeen after all, though he did not see how. But he tried it anyway, inhaled and exhaled as he stepped smartly on. And everything changed. The path suddenly veered away to the right, and on the left materialised a glade of drowsy bluebells interspersed with thin little trees.

  Florian went that way.

  Soon he came to the edge of a wide, still pool. At least, it was mostly still. Its surface was speckled with the appearance of raindrops dripping into the water; but this was puzzlesome, for the sky was still clear and there came not a hint of water falling out of the sky.

  ‘Ah,’ said Florian, and stood a moment in thought. He did not see any sign of an Element there, but since it was clearly raining somewhere inside the pool (was it, perhaps, raining from the bottom up, instead of down out of the sky?) he said after a little while: ‘Hello, Rain. I’ve come to have a word.’

  The droplets stopped.

  ‘Hey!’ called Florian. ‘Don’t make off! I promise I mean no harm! Supposing I could harm the Rain, which I doubt. And my request is not so very bad, at that!’

  ‘I imagine it is,’ came a chill, shivery voice from the air near Florian’s left ear. ‘But I am bored, so I will hear it anyway.’

  The Rain was a boy wearing a river for a cloak. He had fog for his hair, and wore a fine, lively deluge for a robe. He regarded Florian out of limpid grey eyes, and waited.

  Florian explained.

  ‘Oh, the mirrors,’ hissed the Rain, and his shoulders drooped. ‘They are always getting into my pool, and stirring th
e waters about.’

  ‘If we are successful,’ said Florian hopefully, ‘You will not be troubled by them anymore.’

  ‘There is one now,’ said the Rain, ignoring Florian’s words. Looking where the Rain so coldly gazed, Florian saw a twinkle under the water, and a spurt of movement like the passage of a big, silver fish.

  ‘You couldn’t manage to bring that one along, could you?’ Florian ventured. ‘We’re going to need all of them brought back to Thandrian.’

  The Rain sighed, took a step, and melted seamlessly into the pool like a bucket of water poured into the sea. When he emerged again a few moments later, he had a mirror in his hands. The mirror was not very happy about this development.

  ‘I know,’ sighed the Rain. ‘But it will be for the best.’

  The mirror sighed, too, and went limp, like a length of drowned silk.

  Florian led the way back to the ballroom.

  Nynevarre

  Rozebaiel had several favourite little nooks across Laendricourt, but Nynevarre knew which of them she loved the most. It was the same spot in which she had been found, when she had first manifested among them. There was a rose-arbour adjoining the kitchen garden — the roses had been confined there, once, before they had gone mad and claimed all the house instead. Rozebaiel had been discovered there curled under a rose-leaf, a baby no larger than Nynevarre’s fist.

  Nynevarre knew this, because she was the one who had done the discovering.

  ‘Little rose,’ she sang, as she walked that way. ‘Your Aunt Nyn has need of you.’

  Rozebaiel replied at once, the dear child, as she always did. ‘I am here under the leaf.’

  She had made herself tiny again, and tucked herself up snugly under a bush. This favoured plant, tended so long by Rozebaiel herself, had been putting out oddly-coloured flowers for some time. It now sported blossoms of every rainbow colour, and its thorns were silver.

  Nynevarre drew back the leaf, and touched Rozebaiel with one gentle finger. The child looked like a rose herself, diminutive as she was, and wearing her red-petalled skirts. ‘Are you well, child?’

  ‘I have had such a horrid day!’ sighed Rozebaiel as she began to grow. ‘What a terrible place is Argantel! I do hope I shall never have to go there again.’

  She was back to her proper size by now, and shaking out her skirts, an expression of petulant crossness creasing her little flower-face. Nynevarre wrapped her in a soothing embrace, and murmured calming things. ‘Now, my poor dear. I quite understand. But I have a fine adventure for you, and at the end of it there will never again be an Argantel to go into, for it will all be Arganthael once more. Shall you be good, and help your Aunt Nyn?’

  ‘Only tell me!’ said Rozebaiel, and Nynevarre did.

  By the end of her recital, the rose looked both grim and exultant at once, and made to stride off straight for the ballroom.

  ‘Not just yet, dove,’ said Nynevarre. ‘The mirrors, remember?’

  Moments passed, and the roses rustled. Then Rozebaiel’s hands shot out, one, two. Glass glittered and sparked, and something gave an indignant shriek.

  ‘I have got two,’ said Rozebaiel, and they lay there on the floor before her, smothered in rose-leaves and feebly twitching. ‘There shall be more come to us, along the way.’

  And off she went, dragging her captives behind her, as ruthless now as she had been forlorn before.

  Nynevarre hurried along in her wake.

  Sylvaine

  ‘How does one find the Sun?’ mused Sylvaine. She had met with a little luck early on, for a chance opening of a random door had immediately offered her the prospect of an exit into the outdoors. It was incongruously placed, for Sylvaine had wandered into somebody’s bedchamber, and the door stood directly behind the velvet-canopied bed. But she went through it nonetheless, already growing used to the contortions of Laendricourt, and did not much remark it when the door sidled shut behind her.

  There was a wide lawn beyond, recognisably a lawn even if the grass did insist upon being blue. Off Sylvaine went, heavy at heart but full of purpose, and kept her face turned up to the sky.

  She could not help grumbling a bit as she walked, for the burdens she carried would not entirely be forgotten. ‘And my father would neglect to tell me!’ she burst out, after a minute’s silent trudging. ‘Not even my mother’s name! And to sit, year after year, and bleat that he could not find a mirror! My poor mama! I would have found a way back, if he had only told me. I would have stopped at nothing to release her.’

  She was lost in such remonstrances as these, spoken to the clear, bright air, when a man materialised beside her and fell into step with her.

  It was Mistral.

  ‘I see you are troubled,’ he observed.

  Sylvaine only grunted.

  ‘Matters are never so bad as they seem?’ he said next.

  ‘They are for my mother,’ said Sylvaine darkly.

  ‘Are they really?’ Mistral sounded intrigued, as though the possibility of anybody’s being in genuinely dire circumstances was a new idea for him. ‘I wish you would tell me all about it.’

  So Sylvaine gave him the whole story, and the plan they had subsequently formed, and was gratified to find that he seemed fully as enthusiastic about offering her aid as she could wish. ‘But of course we must free her!’ he proclaimed. ‘And poor Argantel, too! I never saw so sorry a place in my life.’ The winds swirled around him as he spoke, and became a gale; Sylvaine grabbed on to her shawl before it could sail away.

  When the winds returned, they bore three mirrors with them, each floating listlessly atop a wisp of cloud.

  Mistral patted each in turn, though they squirmed crossly away from his hands. ‘Never mind,’ he soothed. ‘I know it is very shocking of me, but I’m afraid it is necessary.’

  ‘You don’t perchance know how to reach the Sun?’ Sylvaine hazarded.

  Mistral did not precisely answer. His face changed, developing signs of tension, and the clouds behind him boiled furiously around their frantically writhing captives. When they calmed, he lifted his head, and howled a word into the air: ‘Zoralie!’

  Hurricanes whipped the name away, and Mistral smiled.

  A woman appeared. She was gold-coloured, with abundant hair, and eyes that blazed fire. She wore sunlight for her jewels and had bells upon her toes, and sun-silks flared around her as she moved. She was dancing, or had been; she stopped when she saw Mistral, and looked crossly at him. ‘What is it now?’

  ‘I need you,’ he said.

  ‘Again?’ said Zoralie.

  ‘Always.’

  Soon they were all three walking back towards the house, Zoralie’s quick hands darting out once in a while to grasp something shimmering and incorporeal. The mirrors fought her grip, but with every jerking movement they burst into flame, and subsided at length into a cowed quiescence.

  When the group reached Laendricourt, they had seven mirrors trailing disconsolately behind them.

  Margot

  It was Ghislain who found the Night, and the Moon too.

  They had wandered some time without success, for the Brightening bathed the land in such a ruthless glow that no shadow could long survive.

  Margot and her father ventured forth from the ballroom, in some confusion as to where they were to go. ‘Where does Night hide, when the sun shines?’ Margot mused.

  ‘He lives in the shadows,’ said Ghislain. Margot found it was only she who suffered any confusion, for her father’s brisk step and air of purpose proclaimed that he knew exactly where he was going. ‘And there are shadows aplenty, in certain parts of this house.’

  ‘Down below?’ Margot guessed.

  ‘Exactly. It all goes much deeper down than many realise. There are cellars, and cellars under the cellars, and possibly more cellars under those, too, though I have never ascertained the exact extent of it all. I hope we won’t have to.’ He led the way through the house with unerring confidence, despite its being, in Margot’s percepti
on, a veritable maze of haphazardly-arranged chambers and passageways. Before long they stepped into the first of the cellar-rooms, and shadows promptly crept in among the light. But there was still too much of the latter illuminating the rough stone walls, and Margot was not surprised when her father’s brisk step never faltered; on they went, until another staircase led them farther down.

  ‘Why do you need me?’ it occurred to Margot to ask, when her father had led them through several increasingly dim passageways, and on to another set of stairs.

  ‘Because,’ replied Ghislain, ‘The Night does not like me.’

  ‘Oh? Why not?’

  ‘I once tried to steal a piece of his cloak, and he has not forgiven me.’

  ‘Steal! Why ever would you?’

  ‘One of my schemes to get home, and he would not share. I am a great favourite with the Moon, though,’ said Ghislain.

  Margot considered it best not to enquire further.

  Some little time after that, Ghislain sent Margot ahead, into a large room so dark she could barely see where to put her feet. ‘It is safe enough,’ her father said in parting. ‘There is nothing down here that will hurt you; only do not fear the dark.’ And away he went in search of the Moon.

  Margot found it harder to obey his command than she liked. She had never before thought of herself as a person who feared mere darkness, and had enjoyed many a shadowy ramble across the meadows around her house in search of night-scented herbs. But the quality of the darkness here was different. It was thick and smothering; it drank up all light and swallowed it forever, and some part of Margot’s heart refused to believe that she would not be drunk up and swallowed, too.

  She ventured forth anyway. Having but just discovered her father still living, she would not begin by giving him the impression that he had a coward for a daughter! But her bravery was sorely tested when, having taken but five or so steps, a voice spoke out of the shadows. It was so deep in tone that its echoes thrummed through the floor, and there was a fathomless quality to it that brought Margot’s skin up into goosebumps.