Gloaming

by Charlotte E. English

  They had been in error. All at once, the hum of energy through Thandrian’s refuge ceased to seem promising and began instead to bristle with menace. The mirrors had once been a tool in Thandrian’s hands, but no more. They were a menace, warped beyond recognition, no longer the passive and helpful conduit of the Chanteraines’ magics.

  And what had they done but gather them all together, and merrily turn them loose? So the Elements were watching them: so what? Working all together, building upon each other’s powers, they would soon be beyond all hope of control.

  The consequences could only be catastrophic.

  ‘We must get out!’ cried Sylvaine, and began, frantically, to pace. ‘The Elements must stop, let the mirrors go—’

  ‘Let them go?’ said Thandrian sharply. ‘Why, what have you done with them?’

  ‘Gathered them,’ said Pharamond tightly. ‘We were to use their power to free you, and mend the rift. All of us at once, and the Elements! A fine plan!’ He spoke bitterly, but not even then did his composure waver. ‘We have erred, but perhaps it is not too late. We must get out.’

  ‘Get out!’ cried Thandrian. ‘How!’

  No one had any answer to give, and an appalled silence fell.

  The hum of energy grew, and turned suffocating. Oriane gasped for breath, panic spinning her mind in useless circles. They’d done the worst possible thing, and could not undo it; and all their friends were at the mercy of the mirrors!

  The room shook, the floor trembled, and the sound of tearing fabric rent the air.

  ‘It’s too late!’ cried Oriane, and then a vast, soundless explosion rocked Thandrian’s room, and tipped it mercilessly about. Oriane fell, striking the floor painfully, and could only lie there, curled into a shaking ball, as the world frayed, tore, and fell apart around her.

  Shrieking, Oriane fell with it.

  Florian

  Florian soon began to feel that something had gone awry.

  He appeared to be the only person suffering any unease, for the Elements were having a fine good time exercising their will upon the mirrors. They took their revenge upon them for every irritation, every inconvenience, every malicious trick the looking-glasses had ever wrought. They drove the glasses before them like cattle, weaving their purloined magics back into a coherent whole, and celebrating their success as the hum of amplified power grew.

  But the mirrors seemed far too easily subdued. It looked to Florian as though their show of disobedience was a pretence; compared with their earlier efforts at escape, their struggles now were weak and perfunctory.

  The whirl of magics grew until Florian’s hair stood on end with the pressure, and his head ached. Glass sparked.

  When the singing began, he knew they had gone badly wrong. The song of the looking-glasses was exultant, and it should not have been. Florian did not perfectly understand what was going on, but that the tables had quietly turned he could have no doubt. The Elements thought they had the mirrors at their mercy, but it was not so; they were at the mercy of the mirrors.

  What interested Florian most at that moment was the question of why. What had happened to the mirrors, to twist them so? He did not think for a moment that Thandrian would have designed them thus, or that Pharamond could have wished to create such ill-natured enchantments. Nor had they been described as such, in Pharamond’s tale. They had once been a dutiful kind of magic, transporting their creators from Otherwhere to Otherwhere without a trace of mischief. And now they were not.

  Was it the effects of Arganthael itself? Laendricourt was much changed by its long duration under disordered magics; perhaps the same was true of the mirrors.

  Florian went to the nearest of the thirty-seven glasses, and stared into it.

  He did not much expect to see anything of note, but he caught a glimpse of something whirling in the depths of the glass: something he could not make out.

  ‘Here,’ said Margot, suddenly beside him. She unstoppered a glass bottle — the same one he himself had once tried to carry to Oriane, it looked like, though the colour of its liquid contents was different — and took a drink. Then she passed it to him, and laid both her hands against the mirror.

  ‘Clever,’ said Florian admiringly, and followed suit.

  Everything around him fell away, Margot included, and for a searing instant he was no longer himself; he was the mirror. And his whole world pulsed with pain. He felt drunk on it, mad with agony, and could only scream.

  A vision filled his mind, colouring his awareness right up to the corners. He felt the great, crashing thunder of magic as Arganthael split in two, was half deafened by the cacophonous noise of it. But even as the valley was sundered, the mirrors also broke. Thirty-seven cracks splintered his ears one after another: the sounds of glass smashing, like the time Florian had merrily thrown away a boot and then watched, dismayed, as it sailed straight through a window.

  The mirrors, warped and broken, drank in magic with insatiable greed. They were trying to mend, but they could not; they only grew swollen and fat, and sicker than ever.

  He snatched his hands away from the glass, unable to bear the pain an instant longer.

  Margot was doubled over nearby, one hand braced against Florian’s arm. ‘They’re all broken,’ she panted.

  ‘How do you mend broken glass?’ said Florian helplessly.

  ‘You don’t. It’s impossible.’

  But Florian was looking at the clock. ‘You don’t mend them,’ he said, ‘but what if you could drain all the magic out of them, and make them nothing but glass again?’

  Margot caught his meaning immediately. ‘Oh, but we are doing exactly the opposite! They are all making each other stronger!’

  ‘Yes, that must be stopped at once—’

  Too late, for with a final, unbearable pulse of magic the mirrors flared so brightly that they burned Florian’s eyes, and the world shook around him in a thunder of grinding stone. He fell, hands desperately covering his face as tears poured from beneath his seared lids.

  When he was able to open his eyes again, the thirty-seven sides of Thandrian’s clock-room were once again vacant. The mirrors had gone.

  So, Florian was bemused to note, had Moon. And then, all in a tumble, the other Elements vanished, too.

  Margot

  The last thing Margot thought she heard, somewhere beneath the tumult, was the sound of Moon’s high little voice raised in ear-splitting discontent. It was she who disappeared first, directly after the explosion of power that threatened to split her into pieces.

  Then the mirrors had vanished, and that fact struck Margot as odder than all the rest.

  But then Margot was vanished, too, all in a flurry. She came out in a serene, moonlit arbour, as composedly seated as though she had been there all afternoon. The scene around her was not unfamiliar: she recognised the twisting curves of the old trees’ contorted boughs, silhouetted in the low light; she knew the silvery fruits that hung from their boughs, and felt again the same peace she had known upon looking into the grove before. She had seen it through the window in Pharamond’s workshop in Argantel.

  And now she was here.

  Some things were different from her memory of the place. For one, a small pool of clear, glassy water lay before her, and that had not been there before.

  For another, the arbour was no longer a place of quiet serenity, for it was filled with people. All the Elements were present, seated around the pool in a circle. The one they called the Skies was stationed to her left; he caught her eye, and winked, displaying no signs of suffering the same disquiet she was feeling herself. On her other side was Rozebaiel, her hands webbed about with stranded silks she was busily knotting together.

  There were a few empty spaces around the pool, but these were soon filled. Florian popped up first, looking dishevelled and uneasy. Then came Sylvaine, who glared about herself in high dudgeon, but did not speak. The last place was taken by Oriane.

  Margot waited for her father to arrive, or Thandrian a
nd Pharamond, but in vain. They did not appear.

  Moon presided.

  ‘This is my very favourite place,’ she said sternly, and for some reason Margot thought that she was talking to the water. ‘You will behave in here, and be good to my friends, or I will make you very sorry!’

  She spoke with the authority of a child instructing her dolls in good behaviour, but Margot still could not decide just who she was addressing.

  Until the pool twitched and glittered, and then bubbled and boiled, and a thrashing commotion sprayed water everywhere, and sent up a billow of steam.

  ‘That is not what I said!’ bawled Moon, and stamped her foot. She waded straight into the pool, until the water flowed up over her knees, and began stomping about in a bristling fury. Glass broke under the water.

  ‘Lunavere,’ said Night warningly. ‘This is no time for your nonsense!’

  Moon looked a little chastened. ‘Yes, Father,’ she said in a small voice, and climbed out of the pool again. She squatted over it, water streaming from her clothes, and touched the surface much more gently. ‘Come out,’ she crooned. ‘I will make you all better!’

  A sheet of water rose up out of the pool, and hung there shivering as though it were cold.

  ‘Poor, wicked thing,’ crooned the Moon, and took it. ‘It is not really your fault, is it?’ In her hands it became a mirror again, though it was not the clear, shining, perfect thing it had seemed to be before. It looked what it was: cracked, tarnished and broken. Moon tenderly stroked it, and then it was not glass anymore, or anything solid at all. It was a puff of mist, or cloud, or something like, which Moon swirled around her little fingers and then passed along to the Skies.

  ‘Walkelin, you must help me!’ she panted, as she plunged her hands back into the water. ‘You must all help me!’

  And they did, apparently understanding a process which went far beyond Margot’s comprehension. Walkelin took the swirl of cloudy something from Lunavere and shaped it in some way, frowning in concentration. When he had finished, he held a frosty cup overflowing with a dreamy blue fog. He paused, frowning at Margot.

  ‘Did you ask these good souls, Lunavere?’ he called.

  The child was busy wrestling with another of her disobedient toys, but she looked up for long enough to flash an impudent grin at Walkelin.

  The fact that this was followed by a guilty look at Margot did nothing to reassure.

  ‘There wasn’t time,’ she said, a touch defensively. ‘But who could possibly mind!’ And then she went back to her labours, and not another word could Walkelin draw from her.

  The Skies looked at Margot. He was obviously troubled by something, but he said: ‘She is right, there is not time. I hope you will forgive us.’ And he gave her the cup.

  Margot understood that she was supposed to drink it. She felt a strong foreboding as to the consequences of doing so, for Walkelin obviously expected that she might have cause to regret it. But the cup shimmered agreeably, a thing of such beauty that she could not help herself; she accepted it. And the dreamy stuff that was pouring from within was so mesmerising, she could not look away. It held all the colours of the skies, and the seas as well, and it smelled of everything Margot loved best.

  She drank a sip, cautious. Nothing untoward happened; she was only filled with a delicious warmth which spread right through her, all the way to her toes. It left her feeling both energised and serene, which was a pleasant state, so she drank the rest.

  The moment she was finished, Walkelin handed her another.

  The same process was taking place around the circle. Night was taking portions of mirror-magic from Moon and fashioning them the way Walkelin did, though his concoctions roiled with shadow and gleamed with moonlight. He was giving them to Sylvaine, who received them in her left hand, while accepting cups full of drizzling mist from Rain in her right. She drank them down obediently, though her eyes when they met Margot’s were rather wide.

  Florian was delighting in this peculiar business the way he delighted in everything. Sun was feeding him draught after draught of warm, sparkling sunshine, which he guzzled with gusto. He was on the other side of Rozebaiel, who had ignored Margot in his favour; she was stuffing him full of perfumed concoctions which smelled of such heaven that Margot felt a twinge of envy. But a cup of Rain’s fashioning was put into her hands, and then one each of Night’s and Sun’s, and at last one of rose’s, too, and she was contented.

  Margot began to feel a little dizzy.

  ‘The problem, you see,’ said Walkelin softly, supporting her as she swayed, ‘is that far too much magic has seeped into this place. Potent magic! We Elements, as they call us, are manifesting faster than ever before, but still it has not helped. And the mirrors, they are drinking it all up as fast as they can.

  ‘Lunavere is a clever child, but there is only so much she can do. She will unwind all the magic, though it costs her dearly to do so, and Thandrian’s broken mirrors will be only glass again. But all that magic has to go somewhere, see?’

  Margot began to feel that she did see, and her dizziness increased.

  ‘It would have been kinder to you all if we had been able to absorb it ourselves,’ said Walkelin, and helped her to lie down in the grass. ‘Yes, there, you had better rest a moment. We could not, though, could we? Already we overflow with the stuff; we could not take a jot more.’

  ‘But I could?’ said Margot faintly.

  ‘Oh, plenty. Try not to be afraid, for you shall soon feel well again.’ He bent over her, his old face creased with concern, and looked deep into her left eye, and then the right. ‘Autumn, I suspect,’ he said incomprehensibly, and then Margot, gratefully, passed out.

  Epilogue

  Sylvaine had always had wild and unusual hair, but this was something else entirely.

  ‘Is it fire?’ she said in a hoarse whisper, her eyes huge with fright. She lifted one hand as though to touch her head, but it hovered a few inches from her hair, and would not be coaxed any nearer.

  ‘N-no,’ said Margot, trying to soothe. ‘Not precisely. It is more like— like—’

  ‘Thunder,’ said Florian. ‘If thunder had physical form. With a bit of lightning in it.’

  Sylvaine looked down at herself. Her comfortable old boots were gone, as were the rest of her clothes. She wore a gown of roiling clouds instead, motes of lightning blazing in the depths.

  ‘I think you are Storms,’ said Florian.

  Sylvaine said nothing for some time. ‘Well,’ she said at last, rather heavily, ‘That is fitting.’ And her lips quirked in her old, wry smile, though they wobbled a bit in the attempt.

  Margot had not yet grown accustomed to her new role either. Not a bit of it. Autumn, had said Walkelin, and when Margot had woken up she had soon seen what he meant.

  She felt different. She felt, oddly, as though she had no body, though she could see perfectly well that she did. She was too light, her limbs too ethereal; she thought she could float right off the ground if she wanted to, and immediately scared herself half to death by doing so. From her new position twelve inches off the floor, she was in no great state to receive several other realisations equally startling.

  Her hair rustled when she turned her head. This was because it was full of leaves, the crisp, russet kind freshly fallen from a waning tree. When she put up a hand to poke gingerly at this unfamiliar mass, she found berries, too. Growing there. In her hair.

  Her own garments were fruits and late-blooming flowers wreathed all about in fog, and she smelled fresh earth and herbs and pungent spices wherever she stepped.

  Margot swallowed hard.

  ‘Oh, dear…’ she sighed, and when Walkelin gave her an encouraging smile she was torn between a desire to cling to this vision of kindliness and wisdom, and a desire to smack him for having landed her in such a predicament at all.

  It took her only an instant to surmise what had become of Florian. ‘Summer,’ she said flatly, and rolled her eyes. ‘How appropriate.’

>   Florian bestowed upon her his sunniest smile. His hair was still green, though it was now shot through with gold, and it occurred to Margot that it probably was grass, now. He wore his verdant raiment jauntily, as though it had always been his, and did not even appear to mind the haze of nectar that hung about him. Bees followed him everywhere.

  ‘Was I not made for it?’ he said. Spreading wide his arms, he made Margot a bow, and winked at her.

  ‘You could very well have been,’ she said thoughtfully, and she was not altogether jesting. ‘You take to it well.’

  ‘I am still myself. Only a bit more… magical.’

  Oriane’s transformation was more puzzling. She had grown grey and pale, which did not seem like her at all. Frost-motes sparkled around her eyes and threaded through her hair, and her gown was a soft flurry of white. She seemed more genuinely cast down by her alteration than the others, for tears shone in her eyes, and she visibly struggled to maintain her composure.

  ‘Winter?’ said Margot, frowning. ‘That doesn’t seem right.’

  ‘Snow, I think,’ said Walkelin. ‘Her heart may be heavy today, but it is not frozen. She could never be so cold.’ He went to Oriane and offered her his arm, which she accepted with gratitude. They walked slowly away together.

  Moon had exhausted herself. She lay in a spread-eagled heap in the grass, not far from the remains of her pool. There was no water left, only a soggy depression in the ground to mark where it had been. Her eyes were shut, but they flew open again when Margot approached, and she gave her fiendish grin. ‘Autumn!’ she said in high glee, and clapped her hands. ‘It is always nice to have new friends.’

  Margot felt briefly like kicking the wretched sprite, but restrained herself. Moon had, in all likelihood, saved Arganthael, and there were worse possible consequences to that than Margot’s having to wear berries in her hair.

  ‘Is everything well?’ she said. ‘Is all mended?’

  ‘All better,’ Lunavere smiled, and shut her eyes again. ‘Go and see for yourself.’