by Warren Fahy
Pigg found a fat yellow slug on the root of the enrid tree as he reached it, and he scarfed it down, smacking his lips. The slug wasn’t the candy the Queen would be, of course, but it was a tasty appetizer.
Pigg’s nostrils caught her scent. His gnarled ear heard her step, nearby. He froze, lying perfectly still.
She strode to the rope ladder, stepped onto the lowest rung, and rose like an angel in the night as soft as a whisper.
Pigg’s mind spun in wonder. What a divine meal for my belly!
He waited until she was asleep.
Neuvia climbed from the ladder into her room and started packing her clothes into one of her burlap carrot sacks. She threw in the golden spyglass, then scooped the apples and nuts off the windowsill into the bag.
“Why?” Toy asked.
“Be still,” she said crossly, wiping away a tear. “Do not speak another word to the Queen tonight!”
Toy bit his green tongue, vexed. He watched in silence as she rolled blankets and put them in the sack.
She raised a plank of the floor and reached into the water tank. Untying the spider rope from the golden handle of Gieron’s scepter, Neuvia wet a towel and drew it from the water, wrapping it quickly. She put it headfirst down one of her tall boots, which she had filled with enough water to cover the diamond. Then she placed the boot in her bag.
She pulled the bearskin cloak around her shoulders and fastened the emerald clasp at her throat. Toy slipped his sleek head over her furry collar, saying nothing.
Neuvia tied the sack to the rope ladder and let it descend, climbing down the ladder after it. Then she hoisted it over her shoulder and set off.
The owl hooted a low, quizzical “hoo” from a low branch of a tree as she passed, and she blew it a kiss as it tilted its heart-shaped face, sadly.
She struck straight through the woods to the moonlit ramp that led to the beach. At the bottom she crossed the sand and heard Stargazer’s sail flapping her luminous claw of canvas in the darkness. Kneeling before the vessel, Neuvia felt tears come to her eyes as though she were before her mother. “Milady,” she said. “I cannot do this. Take me away.”
As though the wind itself were using her canvas for lips, Stargazer answered: “Come then!”
Neuvia jumped into the craft, whose sail filled as she slid down the beach and met a welcoming wave that drew her into the sea.
Neuvia propped her bag of provisions against the stern thwart and pulled out one of her rolled-up blankets. Drawing the quilt around her, she peered over the gunwales. As she passed the northern point of the bay, with its gasping grottos, she heard whistling words ripple over Stargazer’s sail.
“If nothing harms you, you’ll live a thousand years…”
Neuvia’s eyes widened.
“Who shall be your mate?” hissed the wind.
Neuvia had no answer as she looked up at the trident sail.
“If you leave Trevin, you will see 20 lovers go from blossom to dust.”
A tear like quicksilver rolled down her cheek.
“Trevin is yours for a thousand years, but only you can save him,” the breeze whispered.
Neuvia rested her head on her sack of provisions and looked up at the stars. “Toy,” she said, closing her eyes. “Speak now.”
“The King is going to Wynder, my Queen, right now! If you hold Gieron’s stone, I can take you to him!”
“All right. But how? Here?”
“I will protect you.” Stargazer’s sail whispered, then it sagged and snapped as she tightened her sheets and came about.
Neuvia reached inside the boot and, feeling its handle, pulled the scepter out, holding the square diamond on her chest. “As Queen of the Tintilisair, I command you to put me to sleep this instant, Toy.”
Toy tightened his coils around her throat and found the pulse points, restricting them and slipping her gently out of this world.
He came to her on the verandah of the Windernalia Lightstone Tower.
They embraced, and trumpets sounded from the terraces as verdant banners unrolled from the tower’s highest windows. People cheered around them, dressed in courtly clothes of festive hues that changed even as the wind played over them.
They were finally King and Queen, shining and lovely in the benevolent sphere of their dominion, making any other world seem but a dull fiction.
Looking joyously into each other’s eyes, Neuvia and Trevin turned hand in hand to meet their magical subjects. And their people here were real, though not like any people who lived in Hala. For they were Wyndernalia Ameulintians, possible spirits half-formed and with different faces and names from those who had yet existed there. And though these wynders were childlike and simple, many were ancient. They crowded around them, praising their King and Queen and asking eager questions about their plans for Wynder and Hala, the latter of which seemed to interest them greatly.
“How will you lead us, lord?” one of them asked. “Where shall you take us?”
Neuvia said, “It seems only freedom can be damaged here, so we shall defend only this. What do you think, my Love?”
Trevin turned to her, amazed. “The Queen is the rose in the garden of my mind. So do her words unfold. Nothing shall pervert her law!”
“Teach us the ways of right and wrong, lord,” said Theosophiclar, who was the Court Engineer. He had helped Elwyn, Selwyn, and Trevin gather the Wynder forces they summoned for their Hala deeds. His three blue eyes were bright under three red eyebrows. “Here in Wynder there is no death or damage that cannot be undone. What is good? What is evil? Teach us, we beseech you!”
“We shall tell you what these words mean in the other world,” Neuvia said, “so that when the King calls some of your spirits to his service in Hala you shall love its laws and know their wisdom and serve his other kingdom as splendidly as you do here.”
“My Queen has had another revelation,” Trevin said. “Even my grandfather did not think to prepare his Wynderne subjects with moral reasoning! He preferred to trust his own rigid commands, instead. I shall enlighten you with understanding, therefore, as the Queen suggests, so that I may summon you with confidence, if that time should come.”
The Wyndernes cheered and horns blared as Trevin stole a moment with his queen.
They walked into the throne room, then, and when they were alone, he held her close.
And their embrace was out of time as joy eclipsed all doubt. And they ran outside to share another day of rapture.
Wyndernia is a place of spiritual license where the will may take infinite form as readily as it might be changed inside one’s mind. Its limitations are not of material but of spirit, and it is vital not to exceed the limitations of one’s own soul there. The virtues that guide us are meaningless outside our finite world. Wyndernes have no understanding of them.
But when our earthly spirits stream through Wyndernia transmogrifying, we must fix the first world from which we came like a lodestar—or risk the danger of going mad and forgetting the need to return to Hala, which is our mother, our body, as our lungs are to our breath. We must not forget we are not Wyndernes.
—Elwyn Gheldron, summer of 577, After Sentad
So wrote his grandfather in a book entitled Wyndernia, which Trevin had discovered in the library of the Wyndernalia Lightstone Tower. The book was made of Hala material that Elwyn had allowed into Wynder during one of his feats of sorcery.
This time, he and Neuvia were able to spend a longer time in Wynder, waking up to find yet another day before them for weeks. Trevin and Neuvia discussed their daily observations nightly at their dinner table with their magical subjects. As they learned from the Wyndernes the ways of Wynder, Trevin and Neuvia taught them the ways of Hala in return, so that they may know of ‘good’ and of ‘evil’ should they ever come to serve them there.
During their days and nights in Wynder they were pleased to hear tales of Elwyn and their more distant ancestors, some of whom had gone mad in Wynder and were called out by the Gairan
or. They even heard of Trevin’s own feats on Hala in songs honoring the slaying of Knot, the raising of the Gyre and the Angha, these last greatly troubling him. For Trevin had taken little memory of these deeds with him to the innocent serenity of his second life.
One day during their stay, their peace was shattered as the sky-borne navy of a Wynderne king, whom Trevin’s advisors called “Blox,” launched his attack upon the Dimrok in broad daylight.
From the Lightstone Tower, Trevin spotted Blox’s soaring armada long before it had arrived. He was thrilled when he saw that the ships were flying the flag of the forgotten land of Ghenten that had long ago separated from what had once comprised the Tintilisair.
The aerial formations swooped down from the clouds over the Dimrok. He did not rally his people to form an army, as his advisors urged, but jumped out of the window of the tower himself and flew into the sky to find the armada’s flagship, a ten-masted vessel in the midst of the cloud-borne navy.
He lighted on its deck and knocked on the door of the captain’s cabin, entering to find the surprised king dressing himself in polished armor before a golden mirror. The belligerent king’s face had the pallor and shape of a lump of clay with red stubble on his head. Trevin was scornful, for a Wynderne King could have chosen any form and yet he chose this lumpy one to deliberately mock beauty. “What is your name?” Trevin asked.
“I am King Blox,” said the startled Wynderne. “You must be the weakling king, Trevin! Another mad Cirilen?”
“Freedom is not enough for you, eh, Blox?” observed Trevin. “You must help yourself to the freedom of others, as well?”
“I shall take you for a prize,” Blox smirked. “And squeeze your kingdom dry in my fist!”
“Indeed?” Trevin nodded. “I should send you down to Hala in the form of a powerless mortal. There you will not rule others but likely be hated by them, instead.”
Blox smirked as Trevin cast him down in righteous wrath out of the Wynderne World and into Hala to learn that mistress’s humbling laws.
Having decapitated the invading navy in a single stroke, Trevin won a victory everyone celebrated. In one stroke he had reunited Ghenten with Ameulis, if only in the Wynder World.
For this and other deeds, Trevin was celebrated as a wondrous monarch, especially by the grateful folk of Wyndernolian Ghenten, though few Wynders could remember the Tintilisair from Elwyn’s time with their hazy histories and fragmented memories. Nevertheless, Trevin’s deed was thrilling and they decided that Hala must be peopled with romantic souls ablaze with mysterious valor. And it was soon the wish of many of their subjects to go to Hala and take part in the important struggles going on there.
For days after his triumph the Wyndernolian Tintilisairians engaged in festivities, contests, and celebrations. And during this time Neuvia was taken under the wing of her three Ladies-in-Waiting in Wynder, and she became fast friends with them as they shared adventures: Kateri with red hair and yellow eyes, Tinefri with black hair and black skin, and silly Wethia, who had but a rope of brown hair sprouting from the top of her otherwise shaven head. Neuvia accompanied her Wynderi sisters as they jumped off cliffs and changed into birds and ran as wolves together. When they finally explored the submarine coves and tunnels in the Dimrok’s shores, Wethia comically went as a narwhal while Neuvia and Kateri swam as green-and-white orcas.
One night, as they all whispered things to each other and reclined on a silk carpet in a clearing of the forest, Trevin conjured illusions before them. He picked a red rose, and to his surprise its petals turned blue, and they all cheered.
When Neuvia related the moment the next morning to the people on the gaming grounds under the Lightstone Tower, they applauded and rose in the air, trumpeters, cats, and all.
“Good people!” she challenged them. “Let us play a game I just thought of,” she said, taking Trevin’s elbow.
“Let us entertain the Queen.” Trevin smiled.
They all twittered, eagerly arrayed in the sky, for they could feel the magic of the Hala World brimming in the Queen. “Let all the ladies change into cherubs and all the gentlemen change into cupids, each cherub and cupid armed with a golden bow and silver arrows. And let each arrow of pleasure earn a kiss!” Lelinair proclaimed.
The Wyndernalians were ecstatic and at once the entire populace of the court shape-changed into armies of cobalt-blue cupids and pink cherubs with gold-feathered wings, all laughing in a cacophonous chorus as some blew horns for the hunt.
Even the King and Queen entered the contest with their subjects, with golden quivers full and bows bent, diving into the woods to dodge and stalk each other among the musical branches whose chimes and reeds accompanied the hunt with nimble music.
For 27 nights in all they slept and woke together in their second kingdom to such amusements. Then, one night, he dreamed while he slept in Wynder.
Trevin dreamed that he was falling out of a storming sky and below him was an obsidian sea.
He finally found his buoyancy and stopped his fall. But below him, Trevin saw a ship foundering on violent waves.
He flew closer and noticed the crew hauling the rolling caravel’s torn sails. Before her prow, the great arm of the Gyre rose from the sea, shining blue in the starlight.
The men on the ship pointed and shouted with recognition at the beast, and Trevin felt dread run him through.
A man with a large blue eye tattooed on his bald head flung a harpoon high over the prow. But the harpoon missed the Gyre’s arm, which seemed to see it coming and bent to one side.
It was as though Trevin had seen this man in this very place, long ago. It was Lince Neery-Atten, the sailor he had met before his coronation, and long before that in a dream.
Trevin flew down and confronted the Gyre, whose arm was tipped by a cluster of eyes waving on translucent stocks. “Never attack men who fish upon the sea!” Trevin commanded it. “Attack only those who fish for me!”
And the greedy eyes on the stalks curled away from Trevin, and the Gyre’s arm disappeared beneath a wave, letting go of the ship.
Trevin heard a cheer from the deck as he rose through the cloud like a streak of chalk to escape their sight.
He woke, then, his cheek on Neuvia’s hair, wondering about his dream, worried suddenly about his other kingdom for the first time. When he dreamed in Wynder, he realized, his spirit could return to Hala with a presence more potent than he imagined. This must be how his dreams had come true, when he was a child.
He smiled, wishing to tell her of his discovery, be he decided to sleep a little longer and tell her when they breakfasted on another day of bliss.
When he woke in the morning, however, the scent of her still sweet in his nostrils, the sheets were clammy and cold. The Scepter blushed deep red beside him in her place, and its bloody radiance filled the room like a gushing wound.
“Wake, Mistress!” Toy hissed.
Neuvia opened her Hala eyes. The very weight of her eyelids told her that she was back.
The ceiling above her glowed pale blue. She saw Stargazer had clewed her sail and stepped her mast so that she could pass through the low arch of the grotto. She wondered how much time had passed.
“Cover the stone—she’s taking us out!” Toy feathered her ear.
Neuvia wrapped the scepter of Gieron in a wet cloth and slid it into her boot inside the sack.
Her muscles felt weak and she was suddenly very hungry.
Stargazer sliced under the arching entrance of the grotto in a valley between swells. She ruddered herself onto the open sea and her mast rose as if lifted by her trident sail.
Noisy seabirds thronged the cliff. The waxing Silver Coin was sinking behind the southeastern horizon in the misty dawn. Wind whispered across Stargazer’s sail: “To Ameulis?”
She smiled, wryly. “Take the Queen home.”
Stargazer came about. “The Queen is brave,” said the breath across her sail.
Book Two
AMEULIS
&n
bsp; Chapter 13
Ameulis
Four years later, while sleeping in Wynder, Trevin dreamed again.
And his spirit, once again, emerged into Hala out of a cloudy sky over the Gulf of Gwylor.
His flesh was no more than a chalk rubbing on the air, faint and far away from his first self two worlds removed.
Like a breeze, he moved north over the fifth island, which he had just created. Its heart still burned like a crimson coal under a cloud of steam.
Atop the mighty cliffs of the Gulf of Gwylor to the northwest, carved in living rock, a cunning castle appeared before Trevin. He remembered the handsome fortress vaguely from his youth. It was called Castle Martharr. Rain poured down as he approached the turrets that resembled the glistening heads of kings watching over the great gulf of Ameulis’s southern coast.
Trevin alighted inside the highest window of the tallest tower, which was carved out of a massive vein of jade streaking through the palisade. In the tower’s topmost room he found a bronze spyglass on a tripod. Peering through the lens Trevin was alarmed to see that it was aimed at the still-glowing island he had raised.
He wound down the tower’s stairs like a ghost, hoping to observe the castle’s residents. For he wanted to see some sign of how his kingdom was faring in his absence.
His recollection of Castle Martharr grew clearer. There was a swimming pool, he remembered, in one of the castle’s courtyards where he had watched royal divers perform when he was a child. His father had let him spend a day with the Martharr children, Teldon, Lelinair, and… Nil?
Voices were audible when he got to the bottom of the stairs. He peered through the crack of the door at a spacious hall with a great window that framed the Gulf of Gwylor.
Among those gathered in that tall room Trevin recognized a number of faces. The mariners Karlok Isopika and Lince Neery-Atten were squeezed together on a fancy couch, and beside them in a chair sat Nil Ramesis. Trevin realized why Nil Ramesis was so familiar to him now. He had been introduced to him as one of the Martharr children when he was a boy. He could not understand why he now used a different name.