by Kate Gragg
I was amusing myself comparing Lydia-Glorian’s well-manicured hands to the equally well-manicured ones the guy in the painting had and trying to guess if old Glorian had ever gone elbow-deep into a drain spout to retrieve a dropped chicken wing when the play ended abruptly and Saunders took the stage again. He cleared his throat and frowned.
“Seeing that painting brings about mixed emotions in me. It was my son Titus who posed for it, shortly before he competed here last year. It is, of course, in honor of Glorian that each newly minted knight receives at least one piece of armor fashioned after his original suit. Which piece that is being illustrative of that particular knight’s best quality and enchanted with some benefit that will help him perform his duties. Those of you that complete the trials, and I hope that you all do, being that there are so few of you, will return here with your prizes for the armoring ceremony, where we will see your full suit in all its glory. Legend does tell that a knight of Glorian’s merit may one day appear again in the complete set of enchanted armor. I had hoped that my dear son Titus would be that knight, but fate had other plans.”
The crowd applauded, then petered out as they realized that wasn’t quite the right note to strike. Finally, some wise soul saved the day by raising a glass.
“To Titus,” he said.
“To Titus!” everyone called out, relieved to have something proper to do.
“Thank you,” Saunders said, nodding gravely. “I only hope that one among you turns out to be his equal.”
“You can count on it,” Clifton said, rustling his chainmail, but it didn’t seem like Saunders heard him.
Oh, but then a nice warm bed, right Joe? I sure got my hopes up when we all marched up to this massive house set on a cliff overlooking the ocean (the better to fling yourself off of, Joe), which turned out to be Lydia’s family’s house, so I certainly had questions about that, but no, it turns out then there was another party and more dancing and thank every god that was ever named, more wine too, but how the hell do rich people find the energy to do whatever it is they do to stay rich when they never sleep.
All I could do was slam goblets of wine down my throat and nod noncommittally while millionaires fished for information about whether I was a dark horse they should bet money on or just a warm body dragged in at the last second to round out the numbers. Even my assuring anyone who asked that yes, I was very much just a warm body dragged in at the last second to round out the numbers, don’t you remember, you were all there, didn’t stop them. They all believed the ludicrous backstory Althea had made up about me, yet remained skeptical about my having even the most basic of physical ability. They made me do pushups, and lift chairs over my head, and inspected every inch of me, concluding that the muscles I happened to know were from hauling buckets of wash water up to rooftops day in and day out were clearly from elite military training. Denying it only made them believe it harder.
“Rough hands,” my fat friend from the boat said, too drunk evidently to remember that we’d already met. “He’s a horseman.”
“And a broad chest,” agreed his wife, “probably spent time high up in the mountains as a young child. Thin air’s good for the lung capacity. Do you mind if I measure your neck?”
“That seems a bit–” I stammered, but she was already snapping her fingers at a waiter to fetch her a measuring tape. Seventeen inches, it turns out. No wonder I could never find shirts that fit.
They had a big oaken board up in the big oaken great hall, right above the big oaken great fireplace, with all the rankings of all the players and all their odds, and by the end of the night I was rated almost as highly as Clifton. And boy don’t you think he let me know how he felt about that.
Every time I got close to Lydia the Pirate Queen, someone whisked her away for a turn around the ballroom floor. She spent what little time she had between dances tittering with a bunch of other girls with crowns of garden clippings on their heads and flower names like Pansy Bell and Hyacinth Kittering and Briar-Rose Schoenstein.
The girls with the flowers, I learned, were all the runner-up prizes. The best knight got the flashiest girl, but anyone else who finished had the right to place an order with one of the grim, mustachioed old men sitting up on the dais and take his daughter home, along with a hefty dowry. I wondered how much Lydia was going for. If she went at all, that is. The shortage of eligible bachelors this year meant most of these girls were going home spinsters, which I gathered was generally accepted to be a tragedy in these circles.
“You might as well end up dead,” Briar-Rose gulped into her punch cup. She’d apparently been the one nominated to size me up, and we’d done a few haphazard twirls around the dance floor ourselves before she took pity on me and let me sit down on one of the little horn-backed chairs lining the walls.
Oh, did I not mention that everything, literally every-goddamn-thing in that haunted house was made out of dead animals? The chairs had once been a herd of cow-like beasts, their double-tipped horns ornamenting the backrests and their birch-patterned hides furnishing the cushions. The chandelier was all antlers. The wall sconces were very surprised-looking fish with candles stuck down their gullets. The punch cups – the punch cups! – were sawn-off eggs rimmed in gold and set on little pediments of gold-tipped teeth from some beast I couldn’t possibly name.
I would have asked Lydia, along with a lot of other things, only I literally never got to talk to her except for when she would drag me into a shadowy alcove and bark orders about how men of means stand this way or hold their canapes that way, and had Briar-Rose told me yet that I was dancing all wrong? Whenever I tried to demand what I was actually meant to do here, she would snap it didn’t matter, everything would be fine, we can’t be seen talking like this, get back out there and play the part.
Sometime after the stroke of midnight, rung in on a deafening clock these nutters had suspended from the ballroom chandelier from a rope of what I can only imagine was braided snakes, the party wrapped up at last. Lydia and her bouquet of friends vanished down a long hallway dedicated entirely to the display of severed animal heads, while a footman ushered me upstairs to a stuffy room that, while certainly not to my taste, at least didn’t have any wildlife in it.
The footman lit some candles, blew out others, and fluffed up the quilted featherbed that I just knew would be murder on my back, then lingered in the doorway in a pointed way that made me worry he wanted a tip, which would be hard to oblige since I literally didn’t have a penny to my name.
“Uh, good night,” I said, hoping he would get the hint.
“I’ve got money on you, sir. My next week’s pay.”
“I really don’t think that’s a good idea. There’s a clear favorite here, and I’m really not as qualified as the stories make me–”
“Not to win,” the footman scoffed, “to be the first to see the beast and live.”
“The beast?”
He nodded intently. “Something out there in the woods, taking men that venture in there. Eating them, I figure.”
“What exactly did happen last year?” I asked.
“Twenty men go out the first day, thirteen come back. Second day, it was five. Third day?”
He leaned in close, dropping his voice to a whisper.
“It was none.”
“Did any of them say what was out there? Before they got taken themselves, I mean.”
“One of them tried to find it,” he said, “vowed to investigate. Titus Saunders. He’d win each challenge quick and then ride around looking for the others, trying to save them.”
“Saunders, like–”
“Lord Saunders’s son, that’s right. The princess’s one true love, I heard.”
“Why are you telling me this?”
“Because you’ve got a secret,” he said, tapping his nose. “I seen you when you did the dances. You’re magic.”
I’d caught a lung-scalding whiff of something unnatural on the wind and had stepped aside during the ceremony to cough u
p a swarm of ruby-winged dragonflies with human faces. They’d flown off into the night before anybody noticed. Or at least I thought.
“It’s not what it looks like,” I said.
“Magic never is. But this island don’t like blokes who bring their own magic. Punishes cheaters of all sorts. But maybe the beast won’t see you coming.”
I thanked him and sent him on his way with the assurance that if I saw the beast, he’d be the first to know. If I lived.
Then I ordered my mind to stop seeing monsters in every shadow, stumbled into that over-iced layer cake of a bed, and slept my first-ever night on a mattress. It was murder on my back.
Chapter Eight
I wiped the sweat off my brow and looked at the card.
The Isle of Teems is known for its birds. You will be judged on the quality of the one you retrieve.
Not too much to go on, I thought bitterly. I held the card up to a thin ray of sunlight piercing through the heavy canopy of foliage above, thinking of the time Fritz had gotten excited by the discovery that one could write in lemon juice, let it dry, and have a message that was invisible until held up to the light. A shortage of lemons, as well as a shortage of people in need of secret messages from Fritz, soon put a stop to it, but maybe the organizers of these games had read the same issue of Buccaneer Quarterly.
No luck.
That morning we’d been fed, lectured, blindfolded, and put in separate carriages that delivered us to random starting points in the forest. My carriage driver actually had to double back for me because, not being used to carrying around hardware, I’d left my sword on the back seat.
“Better be less careless than that if you want to make it back tonight, mate,” he’d said in a gruff accent I couldn’t quite place. I thanked him and marched off into the woods, trying to look like I knew what I was doing.
I didn’t, of course. I ambled my way along, clinging to the only two pieces of information I had:
Birds.
Be back by sundown.
I was just smart enough to figure that they meant for me to hunt a bird, but which bird, and with what? Was it even meant to be delivered dead or alive? If alive, a sword didn’t seem very well suited to the task, but then, I didn’t know much about swords. Judging from Lydia’s father’s passion for taxidermy, “dead” was probably the safer bet, but then again, it’s also the harder one to change if proven wrong.
I heard a songbird chirping up above my head somewhere and tried chucking the sword at it, then realized the flaw in my plan when gravity kicked in.
The sword tumbled down, slicing through leaves and vines that did nothing to slow its path toward my neck. I rolled out of the way just in time, crashing through a stand of flowering bushes as the sword plowed straight into the earth where I’d been standing, coming to rest upright in a mound of green moss, its blade winking in the sunlight.
I got up on my hands and knees and reached for it through the brush, but I couldn’t break through the hedge. Even though there’d been enough space for an entire lunkhead to barrel through just moments ago, I couldn’t find the opening I must have made in the dense thicket.
I sat back on my heels and watched in amazement as the flowers bloomed and unfurled new leaves, growing even closer together.
“Seriously?” I shouted, grabbing fistfuls of flowers and trying to wrest them apart. Five minutes into this stupid competition and I’d already been eaten by a flower arrangement.
“Tsk,” a gentle voice said behind me. “Rudeness won’t get you anywhere on this island.”
I turned and saw that I was trapped in a sort of garden. It was nothing like the regimented braces of plantings I’d seen at the Duke’s palace, with its stone-bordered flower beds all laid out according to a strict geometric plan. Flowers grew on top of each other, one color tumbling over another and spilling out onto the mossy flagstone path that wound between them.
Not that I was any expert, but they all had an oddness to them, an unearthly quality. Bright pink daffodils growing on little round bushes like roses do, stands of daisies with different colors on every petal, lilies that snapped at passing flies, and blue-stemmed orchids that drooped from tree branches up above, their petals glistening with silvery dew that something deep down in my bones told me not to touch.
My throat itched unbearably.
The woman presiding over all of this was one of those grand old dames you see outside the opera or riding in carriages where the footmen are dressed to match the horses. Masses of silver hair piled up on top of her head and pinned back with an ebony comb. A high-necked black dress dripping with beads made of jet and onyx. A stern, hawkish face that reminded me of the women who used to petition the mayor to scoop up all the street kids in Cheapside and send us to workhouses for the safety of our morals.
Only none of those women would have been caught dead with a gingham napkin spread over their laps so they could trim a flower bulb with a little ivory-handled knife. She had her sleeves pushed up to her elbows and dirt under her fingernails. The feet peeking out under her skirts weren’t clad in the jeweled silk slippers women like her tended to wear, but sturdy brown boots caked in mud.
“You’re thinking that I’m just as odd as my flowers,” she said, waving off my stammered denial. “Ha. Eccentricities are forgiven at my age. It’s not often I have visitors in my garden. Have the games started already?”
“Just today,” I said.
“So soon,” she said, more to herself than to me. “And things aren’t going well, I take it?”
I shrugged.
“I’m supposed to catch a bird,” I said.
She pressed her fingers into the dirt in front of her, making a hole for the bulb and covering it up with crushed flower petals, then dusted off her hands in satisfaction.
“Well, now, let me take a look at you,” she said, standing up and shaking out her skirts. She wasn’t very tall, but I still felt like a bug being loomed over by a cat.
“Birds, birds…” she muttered, and then snapped her fingers in inspiration and plucked one of the ominous-looking orchids from overhead and held it up to my nose.
“Take a few deep breaths of this,” she said. “It should help your reflexes.”
“My reflexes are fine,” I said, leaning as far away from the noxious flower as I could. It smelled like peppermint and burned hair and the back of my throat felt like it was breaking out in hives just getting a whiff of it.
“You’re big,” the lady said, smacking me on the chest. “Big means slow. You can’t be slow out here, no, not out here on this island.”
“Please, I really –”
She buried my nose in the flower and I reflexively inhaled. My lungs exploded into a fit of coughing, with no time to turn my head away.
When I could finally get my eyes open again, the lady was standing exactly where she had been, not a hair out of place. The only difference was the orchid she had been holding was now a steaming-hot cup of tea in a delicate porcelain cup, complete with saucer.
She peered at the flowers painted around the rim.
“Huh! Begonias. I would have thought it would be orchids, wouldn’t you?”
“I’m sorry, it’s my allergies acting up,” I said.
“An allergy to magic,” she mused. “However did you discover you had that?”
What could I say? The man I was pretending to be wouldn’t have done any hard labor.
“It started up when I got to the island,” I lied. “I can’t control it.”
“Pff!” she waved me off. “I’d be a lot more worried if you could, dear. But how on earth do you expect to get through the competition? You know just about everything on this island is magic, don’t you? At least in what’s left of the forest.”
She looked aside discreetly while I blew my nose on my sleeve.
“I’ll just have to deal with it,” I sighed.
“It might help if you covered your mouth when you coughed. Haven’t you got a handkerchief?”
> “Never carry one,” I shrugged.
“Rich man puts it in his pocket, poor man throws it away,” she laughed, pinching one nostril shut and doing an uncanny impression of exactly how the men of Cheapside clear out their noses by firing projectiles onto the pavement.
“My father used to say that,” I said.
“Mine too. Now what keeps you here?”
“The… hedge…” I pointed stupidly. “Is there another way out?”
“Oh, just the one way, I’m afraid. It has to let you through.”
I frowned. I liked magic less and less with every minute.
“And how do I convince it to do that?”
“You were awfully rude earlier,” she said, taking a sip of the tea. “You need to show kindness.”
“I am kind,” I insisted, though I wasn’t sure that was true.
“Maybe,” she said. “I’ll tell you what. Do me a favor and water my garden.”
“How do I…”
“Watering can’s in the well,” she said, nodding her silver head at a little covered well I hadn’t noticed, nestled in a thatch of polka-dotted bromeliads.
She took another sip of the tea.
“Darjeeling! This is really quite good. I admire a man with useful skills, even if they are accidental. Don’t dawdle now dear, my plants get terribly ill-tempered when they’re thirsty.”
I picked up the watering can and dunked it into the well, then turned to ask her which plants to water first, but she was gone, the hedge snapping shut behind her as if to warn me not to get any ideas about barging through.
I watered the plants as quickly as I could, keeping the can at arm’s length to avoid coughing up a whole tea service. When I was finished, I looked around for any opening in the hedges, but they stood stock still, looming silently like they were judging me.
“Really? What else do you want from me?” I said, feeling a little silly to be arguing with plants.
The hedges rustled, though whether it was from the wind or their own volition I couldn’t tell. The gust picked up a cloud of pollen that hit me head-on and made me choke. I ran for the watering can to gulp down some water before I turned the entire forest into god knows what, but the minute I took a drink, the whole world got very strange.