“Sorry!” Benedict said, but when he reached out to her again, she shrugged and shook her head violently, so he backed away. She lay where she’d fallen, breathing hard, giving her memory a chance to catch up with the rest of her mind, even as her body rediscovered use of its limbs.
Somewhere beyond this world, music played. Here she lay on the floor, not dancing, while Le Sacre sang on through the night. She closed her eyes and clenched her teeth, forcing back the scream that wanted to burst in furious frustration from her throat.
Heloise hauled herself upright, shook the hair from her face, and addressed herself to Benedict. “Where’s the mirror?” she asked.
For a moment he looked as though he wouldn’t answer her, and that moment was in itself the most dreadful of all. Then, drawing a deep breath, he turned and picked up the ebony-framed glass from the floor behind him. Without a word he handed it to her.
Heloise lifted the mirror in both hands. She stared at the dark and shattered glass. It could hardly even be called glass anymore, so ruined was its surface. She tilted it so that the moonlight coming through the window might fall upon it. Even then it did not shine. It was as black and blank as a broken stone.
“No,” Heloise hissed through her teeth. “No, no, no, no! This isn’t right!” Still clutching the mirror in both hands, she scrambled to her feet. Ignoring Benedict’s whispered protests, she ran across the Great Hall, sprang up the dais stairs, and darted around Rufus’s great council chair. The pale light through the windows only just reached the huge mirror glass hung on the wall at the back of the dais, barely enough to reveal any reflection.
But Heloise took hold of the big, heavy frame, stood on the tips of her toes, and stared into the lower half of the glass. She saw the shadow of the back of Rufus’s chair. She saw taller shadows that were the framing pillars of the dais. She saw the high, looming shadows of the rafters in the ceiling, and she even saw the smudge of shadow that indicated the reflected minstrels’ gallery.
But where she stood there was no shadow, no indistinct form. Though this glass was as unbroken and smooth as it had ever been, it held no trace of Heloise’s reflection.
Benedict approached from behind her. She saw his reflection, indistinct but certainly his. “What’s wrong?” he asked.
Heloise stood still, holding his broken mirror in one hand, her other hand grasping the big mirror’s frame. She couldn’t look around. She couldn’t bear to face him. But she whispered, “They took it from me. She took it.”
“Took what?” Benedict asked, his voice very low as though he feared to be overheard. “Heloise, what did they take from you?” He put out a hand to touch her shoulder.
Heloise, seeing the movement in the mirror, darted out of his reach, moving around so as to keep Rufus’s chair between them. Her eyes were bright and fey in the darkness, and for an instant they shone with an otherworldly blue gleam.
Then she dropped his mirror—his broken, dark, useless mirror—into the seat of Rufus’s chair. She descended the dais steps in a single jump, landing hard on the floor below and falling in a half-crouch. But she was up again in a moment and dashing across the hall. She heard Benedict’s half-whispered protests behind her and paid no heed. The moonlight seemed to chase her, and she fled it for the darkness behind the heavy wooden screen.
She left the Great Hall behind, left Benedict where he stood. She raced down the great staircase, almost certain that her feet splashed in the water of the falls though she felt no wetness. Surefooted despite the darkness, she continued at full speed down the long gallery, little caring if she met anyone, if startled eyes saw her. Her face was set, her eyes intent, and she turned neither to the right nor the left.
She came to the Tower and ran up the stairs, taking two or three at a time. Gasping for breath by the time she reached the top, she nevertheless fell upon the door, pounding it with her fists. “Alala!” she cried. “Princess Alala! Let me in! Let me in!”
Nothing. Not a sound, not a glimmer of an impression that anyone heard her.
“Dragons, dragons, dragons!” Heloise cursed, plunging her hand into her pocket. She drew out the three-part branch, which did not gleam or shine but looked dull in her hand. One would never know it was anything more than a random twig plucked from the forest floor. With another biting, “Dragons!” she shoved the branch into the lock and twisted. For a moment she feared the branch would simply break. Then she felt the bolt give way.
The door did not open silently as it had before. Heloise had to put her shoulder to it and shove with all her might, and even then it groaned and screeched and protested noisily, as though it had not been opened in a century or more. Her feet scraped on the stone stairs, and when at last the door swung wide, she fell into the room.
Into the silent stone chamber, with its close walls and its single window. Onto the bare, hard floor, a wooden floor, dangerously rotted in places.
Heloise braced herself with her hands out before her on the floor, like an angry cat prepared to fight. Her eyes darted to every shadow, but there was nothing to be seen—no life in the shadows, no faint hints of trees or blossoms. No tapestries. No mortal maidens. No Faerie princess.
“Heloise?” Benedict’s voice called cautiously up the stair. No doubt he was trying even now to squeeze his way up after her.
Heloise rose and, placing each step cautiously—half afraid that she would plunge through the floor and down any number of stories to some un-guessable landing below—she crossed the room to the window. It had no glass, only an empty space gazing out over the night-filled landscape. Heloise saw Canneberges before her even as she had glimpsed it when she’d stood at this same window the previous night. But then she had looked through Faerie eyes, and she had seen the land in brilliant detail. Now she had only her own mortal eyes with which to see, and she could discern only moon-tipped lumps and formless plateaus.
Along the horizon she saw the dark outline of the Oakwood.
“Alala?” she whispered. “Are you here?”
She felt nothing. No voice in her head. No whisper, no faint impression of a presence. It would be all too easy to think she’d imagined the pocket world she had walked in the night before.
Yet somehow she knew, without knowing how she knew, that Alala stood beside her.
“She took my mirror magic,” Heloise said. “I can’t enter the world beyond the mirror. Not anymore. Mother took my magic.”
Silence filled the room. Absolute silence made all the more absolute for the struggling grunts and grumbles of Benedict as he sought to climb the narrow stair. Heloise strained her ears, strained her heart, strained the unconscious senses of her soul and will for any sign, any word. Anything!
But she was alone. No voice to guide her. No help, no hints.
She turned slowly from the window and stared into the dark chamber, gazing upon the spot where Evette had sat and worked upon her tapestry, creating the magic of memory, her efforts serving to capture Alala forever in Mother’s ensorcellment. So they would continue till the end of days, spinning mortal magic in a Faerie realm, each stitch securing more power for Mother, each tug of the needle affixing the binding . . .
“No,” Heloise growled. “I’m not through just yet.”
Benedict appeared in the doorway. He saw the outline of Heloise’s wild hair against the window, but he could not see her face. “What is this?” he demanded. “Have they gone? Did you break the curse?”
Heloise did not answer. Heedless of the creaking, rotted boards beneath her feet, she stomped across the chamber and shouldered her way past Benedict, moving swiftly down the stairs. “Where are you going?” he whispered as loudly as he dared.
“To the Oakwood,” she called back over her shoulder.
“Why? What for? Are you coming back?” He tried to pursue her but couldn’t keep up. He thought she had outdistanced him and vanished, but then he felt a cold hand touch his in the darkness. “I don’t know if I’ll be back.” Heloise’s voice rose up from a
few steps below. “I don’t know anything. But I’ll try. Wait for me and keep your window open.”
She was gone. Benedict stood alone in total darkness, his head and shoulders bent to fit in a too-small space. The memory of that burning woman engulfed in red flame seared his mind with a branding scar that would never fully heal.
Grandmem sat in her doorway while the dawn rose up around her. She held her customary carrot in one hand but did not chew it. Her hands hung limply in her lap. She merely watched the horizon, her faded eyes seeing little, her heart feeling much.
She muttered, “Oh, Cateline! She failed. I know she did. She failed her sister even as I failed you.”
She bowed her head. Though her ears discerned the faintest breeze of a laugh, she paid it no heed. Only when a distant voice sang like a chant, “Help her, help her, help her,” did Grandmem murmur as though in response:
“Help her. Lights Above us, help her!”
When at last she found the strength to raise her head again, she saw a distant figure running with awkward, loping strides. A gawky young person who did not use the dirt paths and roads but cut directly across the newly tilled fields, sprang over lumps of earth and ditches, and splashed through the shallow edges of the cranberry bogs.
Heloise darted past and never once turned her head to see or acknowledge her grandmother. She ran without pause all the way up the road leading into the Oakwood. Grandmem, watching her progress until she vanished from sight, heard again the sighing whisper on the wind, “Help her . . . help her . . .”
Just as the sun cast its light in full morning splendor upon the fields and forests of Canneberges, Heloise plunged into the ever-present darkness of the Oakwood.
She had run much of the way from Centrecœur. The distance between the forest and the Great House was too great for her to run the entire way, but when she could run no more, she’d walked or trotted and so made good time. Here at the end of her journey she ran again, as fast as she could go, along the familiar paths she had trod many times before.
But when she came to the place where only a week before she had first heard the shadowy Faerie language sung—when she came to the dark fir tree where the Lion-Prince had hidden from her sight and watched her as she worked—there she leapt over the ditch and left the path behind, plunging into the deeper forest.
She could not run now. The growth of trees and underbrush was too great, even at this time of the year before spring’s green growth had thickened. Broken branches and nettles clawed at her bare feet, tore the skin of her legs. These she ignored save for the occasional grunt of pain.
Patches of sunlight fell through the new green foliage, casting dappled patterns upon the forest floor. Heloise avoided the light and made always for the darker shadows.
She began to shout: “Imoo! Prince Imoo!”
What was it Alala had told her? “I passed into those trees, shouting for Mother, for Uncle, for Brother, shouting their Faerie names, which I will not tell you, for they are sacred among my people.”
Sacred, secret names with which they did not wish to part.
Heloise paused to cup her hands around her mouth. “Imoo!” she bellowed at the top of her lungs. She did not know if it was the Lion-Prince’s name or even part of his name. It was only a guess, a hopeless, foolish guess. But if Alala was Princess Imoo-Alala then perhaps it would be close enough. “Prince Imoo, Son of Night!”
“Cease your braying, mortal beast. I am here.”
A shudder of change passed over Heloise. She felt a shift, an alteration in the trees. Nothing overt—nothing she would have been able to describe clearly in words. But she knew in an instant that she no longer stood in the Oakwood. No, this was a different Wood entirely. A solemn, timeless, forever realm, the Between of all worlds, Faerie and mortal alike.
The Lion-Prince stood behind her. She couldn’t hear him, not even the depths of his breathing, for after his initial speech he had gone completely silent. But he could not disguise the intensity of his presence, and she knew that his magnificent lion’s muzzle even now rested in the air but an inch or two behind her ear.
“You must answer me three questions each day,” Heloise said, and she was careful to allow no sense of inquiry in her voice, to make her statement as firm as possible. “I’ve thought back upon our meetings, and you answered me three questions each time before you left. You didn’t want to, but you did. Which means it’s part of your law. You have to answer me.”
The Lion-Prince said nothing. For all she knew, Heloise stood in the middle of that forest, surrounded by trees, speaking only to herself.
She swallowed a lump of fear and continued, “Your Mother broke the law.”
The silence was neither acknowledgement nor acquiescence. It was silence, pure and simple.
“She broke the law,” Heloise persisted. Then because she couldn’t help herself, she added, “Didn’t she?”
“No,” said the voice of the Lion-Prince, a low growl in her ear.
Heloise felt her bones quiver as though they’d been turned to water. With an effort she remained upright and forced her shrinking voice to speak. “She did! She stole my magic! I know the law, or enough of it, anyway. The . . . the . . . the Dame of the Haven sent me a message. She said that you could not kill me or prevent me from trying to break the curse! I was dancing Le Sacre, and I was going to make it through the night. I know I was. I was well into the dance, and I wasn’t going to die. I’m stronger than I think! Your Mother broke the law when she stopped me and stole my magic.”
The Lion-Prince said nothing. But his previous answer remained echoing in Heloise’s ear: No.
She had to use a question. She had to know. “How can she steal my magic from me and not break your law?”
“You cheated,” said the Lion-Prince. “And now you have but one question remaining.”
A series of gasps and protests leapt to Heloise’s lips. But many of them could have sounded like a question, and she couldn’t afford to lose her last one so foolishly. So she held them inside, struggling with equal surges of rage and despair pulsing from her heart and rushing through her veins. In a voice as low and steady as she could manage to make it, she said, “I am my reflection. My reflection is me.”
Silence. But she felt the heat of the Lion-Prince’s breath on the back of her neck, stirring in her hair.
“It’s true. I did not cheat. I used the mirror magic, but it was me. I entered your world to dance Le Sacre.” She hated to say it, hated to use her final question on something she felt she should be able to discern for herself. But though she stood with her fists clenched, her mind racing through every possibility, she could reach no conclusion. So she whispered, “How was I cheating?”
“You are your reflection,” said the Lion-Prince. His voice seemed to fill with a slow, dangerous smile. Heloise felt it even though she could not see it. “Your reflection is you. But your reflection is not the whole of you. It is but a part, a very small piece. You risk nothing when you move inside it. Without risk, you can never, never break the curse Mother has placed upon your family. You will never kill our Alala.”
His words sank into her head and simmered there. But with each passing breath, the heat of them rose until it brewed to a boiling point. Sweat dripped down Heloise’s face, though the air was still and mild. Her breath came in little panting gasps.
“They died,” she said before she could stop herself. “Three of them. Three of the other cursebreakers who tried to dance—they died. They came to your hall, and they danced, and they gave their lives. They risked everything and they died! How is that not enough? Why did their deaths not count?”
She spun around then, but the Lion-Prince was not there. She knew he was still near, however. His enormous presence had not gone, though she could not see him. She wrung her hands and shouted into the great Between, “How many deaths does she need? How many mortal lives will satisfy her? Am I to be but one of dozens? Is that the answer? I must die along with the others, alon
g with who knows how many more? Tell me. Tell me!”
“You have already asked your three questions,” said the Lion-Prince. He appeared suddenly before her as though he had stepped out of thin air. But he wasn’t a lion; he was a man, tall, beautiful, wild, and deadly. He gazed down upon her with an expression she could not read. Terror roared in her head until she could not think, could scarcely breathe.
But the quiet part of her brain, the still place behind her fear, nudged her consciousness. He could have gone. He doesn’t need to be here. He has fulfilled the law, yet here he stands.
Heloise stared up at the Lion-Prince, meeting his eyes. Though but a moment before she would have shrunk into nothing under his gaze, she met it now, strength for strength, knowledge for knowledge. For she now knew something he did not want her to know. Or perhaps . . . perhaps he did want her to know and was only afraid to tell her himself.
“You want to set Alala free,” Heloise said. She knew it for truth as the words left her lips. “You want me to break this curse. You want to liberate your sister from Mother’s prison so that she can die.”
A muscle tensed along his cheek, and for a heartbeat the prince looked more like a lion than a man. “Immortals cannot die,” he said. “It is too dreadful an end. Sister must live on. Forever!”
“But she’s not immortal anymore,” Heloise said. “She’s mortal, and mortals are meant to . . . to . . .”
She stood alone in the Oakwood. The vastness of the Between was gone, and the confines of her own world surrounded her. The Lion-Prince had vanished as though he had never been, and her words fell unheard into the gentle spring air:
“Mortals are meant to die.”
THIRTY-FIVE
Benedict sat in a chair drawn up close to his cold hearth, staring into the grey embers. Occasionally he used a metal-tipped poker to stir up the ashes, but it was no use; the fire was long dead, never to be revived. His room was as cold as a tomb.
A Branch of Silver, a Branch of Gold Page 31