by Karen Chance
Doors opened, lights came on, and people in robes and frilly nightcaps came out of bedrooms to peer over the stairwell. And then to mutter things under their breaths at the sight of us and go back to bed, some slamming their doors behind them. I lay there, panting and confused, while the room spun around me. And while the ladylike acolyte beside me laughed and laughed and laughed.
“That was wonderful,” she finally gasped out. “Wonderful! Do you do these kinds of things all the time?”
“Feels that way,” I said, dragging myself up, and mentally adding another bruise to my collection.
And then I went back to bed.
Chapter Twenty-One
I finally went for that talk with Gertie the next morning. It was long after dawn by the time I woke up, but it looked almost as dark as night, with rain drenched skies and gusts of what would have been snow if it was slightly colder. My daily gown had yet to arrive, so I went downstairs in my robe, hoping for breakfast.
What I found instead was Gertie in her sitting room, wearing a cherry-colored bathrobe of bright, Chinese silk and a matching pair of booties. Even when lounging around, she liked to make a statement. And she liked to be comfortable, which was why the booties were fur-lined, the chair was overstuffed, and the fire in the red brick fireplace was going gangbusters.
However, she wasn’t in front of the flames as usual, but over at a small card table by the window. Rain was shushing against the panes, although it was less a reminder of the cold, inhospitable streets outside and more of a soothing background noise. Strangely enough, it added to the cozy.
Gertie didn’t look up at my approach, but I pulled out a chair and joined her anyway. She was reading Tarot, something I’d never seen her do. It wasn’t going well, judging by the frown on her forehead as she studied the cards. And by the sudden swipe of her arm as she knocked them to the floor.
“Bad reading?” I asked, a little taken aback. Gertie, for all her oddities, was fairly controlled. I’d seen her smack down a misbehaving Were or tell off a mage with poorer than average manners and never lose her cool.
But it looked like the reading had offended her.
“Disappointing,” she said tersely, and settled back in her chair to stare out the window.
I knelt to pick up the cards, then crawled under the table for one that had almost gotten away. It was the Wheel of Fortune, which I was used to seeing as a pretty golden wheel set against clear blue skies, with stylized depictions of the four elements—earth, air, fire and water—in the corners. Meanwhile, three figures rode on the wheel: a sphinx, a snake and a dog-headed human.
It was some of the strangest imagery in the Tarot, which was saying something. But this card was even worse than the version I had back home, because it wasn’t from the modern Ryder-Waite deck. This was the far older Tarot of Marseilles, which had dialed the crazy up to eleven.
It made me smile, because people were always trying to attribute all kinds of meaning to the wheel riders. I’d heard everything from the dog guy being Anubis, the god of death, symbolizing rebirth, to the snake being Typhon, a monster who had tried to overthrow Zeus, symbolizing the dawn of a new order. Since Typhon had failed, I thought that theory was reaching, and it was one of the more halfway understandable ones.
I wondered what the theorists would make out of the imagery here. The Marseilles card still showed three riders, but this time they were . . . a skirt wearing monkey? A bat winged hell beast? A uniformed maybe rabbit? Or was that last one supposed to be a lion? I honestly couldn’t tell.
I also didn’t think it mattered. I’d always just assumed that it was three funky looking figures undergoing metamorphosis, which was what the card stood for: big change coming, for good or for bad. Good if read upright; bad if reversed.
So, what did it mean if it was found under a table?
On that, the card was silent.
A log popped loudly, and it seemed to shake Gertie out of her reverie. She looked at me. “Feeling better?”
“Yes.” I didn’t elaborate.
“Good. We need to take a trip.”
I glanced at the weather outside without enthusiasm. “Really? Where?”
“You tell me. Where did you dig up that bastard of a fey?”
Well, shit.
~~~
Half an hour later, instead of sitting down to a nice, hearty breakfast, I was shivering in a borrowed dress and a pashmina in the ruins of a Romanian castle.
It hardly deserved the term anymore, being just a pile of tumbled down stones on a windswept hillside, the whole covered by a thin layer of snow. There were vines and brown weeds scrawling over everything, and the only remnant of the great gate was a toothless arch, the fearsome portcullis now broken and mostly missing. I spied a few rusted and pitted teeth among the weeds, which the earth was busy reclaiming.
“This is where it happened?” Gertie didn’t look impressed.
“Well, it was a while ago,” I pointed out, because we were still in her era. Although even with that, the hillside was oddly bare. There didn’t appear to be enough ruins to account for the castle I’d seen. But maybe the locals had cannibalized them for their homes or churches.
After all, why carve out stones for yourself when you could just go pick them up?
Gertie grunted, maybe because of the cold wind that had just sliced across the hilltop, as if it would like to cut us in two. Or maybe for a different reason, I thought, as I felt a swirl of the Pythian power. One that wasn’t coming from me.
“No!” I yelled and grabbed her arm, disrupting the spell.
She hiked an eyebrow, which caused me to flash back to my childhood, when my old governess had worn that same expression, more times than I could count. It didn’t help that Gertie was in all black today, a stylish number with jet beading and ebony ribbon that looked like she was on her way to a fashionable funeral. It reminded me of the type of thing that Eugenie used to wear, accessorized by the ruler of doom, which appeared whenever I was caught doodling instead of working on my lessons.
My knuckles throbbed in memory, but I held on anyway.
“We can’t go back there,” I said. “I can’t take him on again! I barely survived last time, and—”
“Cassie.”
“—I’m not even fully healed. If we meet him again right now, I’m screwed—”
“Cassie.”
“—do you understand? Completely and utterly—”
“Cassie!” Gertie’s voice snapped like a whip. “Calm yourself. We are not going back.”
I paused with my mouth still open. “We aren’t?”
“Hardly.” Her lip curled. “I have no more desire to see that . . . creature . . . than you do.”
She looked down at the hand that still had a death grip on her arm. I tried to tell my fingers to release, but it looked like they weren’t as trusting as I was. They held on.
“Then why did you summon the power?” I asked.
Gertie eyed me while the wind tossed the ribbons on her hat around. “For a little trick you seem to have forgotten.” She looked at the sky. “What were the conditions like when you were here before?”
“Conditions?”
“For instance, the time of day.”
I blinked at her, and finally managed to remove my stubborn hand. “Late afternoon?”
The Pythian power swirled again, making me tense up. But the only thing that happened was that the sun sped up overhead, causing the stones that remained upright to throw dancing shadows on the ground. They looked like sundials gone haywire, which I guessed they sort of were.
“Like this?” Gertie asked, when they stopped.
I looked around. “Yeah. I think so.”
She nodded. “And the color?”
“What color?”
“Of the sky. Was it the same?”
I stared upward, trying to remember such a trivial detail. It was hard, since I’d mostly been looking down at the rushing river that I’d hoped not to end up in. But t
he pale blue dome overhead seemed about right.
“Maybe?”
“Hmmph. We’d best hedge our bets,” she decided. And a second later, we were standing somewhere else.
I hadn’t expected the shift, as the Pythian power had already been surrounding us and therefore gave me no warning. I landed awkwardly, stumbling on a rock-strewn terrain a few feet from the edge of a cliff. Pebbles rolled under my shoes, but Gertie steadied me with a hand under my arm, allowing me to regain my balance.
I recovered, only to find myself looking down from one of the surrounding mountains, along a shelf of land well above the castle’s stony corpse. From this angle, that term seemed completely appropriate, with the tumbled stones looking like bleached bones protruding from the earth, as if some great leviathan had fallen on the spot. It made me think of Aeslinn and the body he’d have left, had I managed to kill him on the Thames.
What would Zeus have done, had his ride perished? Would he have died, too, since their souls seemed to be intermingled? Or were they sharing power some other way, and it would have just pissed him off? Because I didn’t see Zeus trusting Aeslinn with his life . . .
“Cassie!” I blinked and realized that Gertie was looking at me impatiently. She was no more tolerant of inattention to lessons than Eugenie had been. I rearranged my face, and tried not to look like I was skeeved out just from being here.
“Yes?”
“We’re about to begin. Watch carefully.”
I watched, although for a moment there was nothing to see. Just the ruined castle on its isolated hill, the churning river, gray and angry and far below, and a lot of trees. Then I noticed what looked like a plastic bag, which had blown into the air a good way off the edge of the drop.
Only they didn’t have plastic in this era.
A moment later, it started to expand, growing from a tiny thing, the kind you’d lug your groceries home in, to something the size and shape of a kiddie pool. And I realized that it wasn’t a tinted bag, slightly distorting the color of the sky behind it, after all. But rather a hole in space, showing a completely different view on the other side.
It grew some more, rippling a little at the edges, and I realized that I still had it wrong. It wasn’t a hole in space but in time. I could see the castle through the wider opening, just like in the present day. Only what I was seeing looked very different.
“Telescope spell,” Gertie said, before I could ask. “Another way to look before you leap, and one that keeps us out of the byways.”
I nodded, but didn’t ask any questions right then. I was too busy staring at what the telescope was revealing.
It ran across the toppled remains, and everywhere it moved, a changed version of the castle appeared. One still old, still moth eaten, and still looking like it had grown up with the surrounding mountains, eons ago, or been magicked out of the earth. But this version was intact, upright, and sturdy, with towers appearing out of nowhere and pennants flapping in the breeze.
And, yes, I had seen this trick before. Only that time, Gertie had used it to flood a night sky with light from a distant, sunny day. Creating a searchlight out of literally nothing.
I hadn’t had a chance to see how she did it at the time, because the person she was searching for had been me, and she hadn’t been in a good mood. That was back when we were still adversaries, and I’d mostly been interested in avoiding her. Now, however, I felt myself getting excited.
“How are you doing that?”
She showed me.
Okay, that was clever. It involved sending a tiny tendril of the Pythian power from one place to another, and linking them like a portal. Only instead of cutting through space, she was cutting through time. And best of all, it didn’t take much power, because nothing was passing through but images. It was like a pinhole camera, a tiny thing that projected a big image onto a wall, only our wall was the current reality . . .
I’d been about to see if I could duplicate it, since it didn’t seem that hard. But then I noticed what I was looking at, and the spell lacing my fingers faltered and faded. Because some of the cheerfully waving pennants on the castle were on fire—
And so were some of the fey.
A bunch of screaming, running guards could be seen through the viewport in time that Gertie had created, several with plumes of dark smoke following them. A few of their fellow fey tried to put the smoking ones out, pushing them down and throwing the sand of the courtyard over them. But that was dragon fire, and it didn’t help.
One of the unfortunate guards disintegrated on the air a moment later, puffing away into nothingness, with even his bones having burnt down to ash. The other tore away from his would-be rescuers and threw himself off the castle walls. I guessed he was aiming for the river, but he fell out of sight of the viewport before he landed, so I couldn’t be sure.
Or maybe I just missed him, because I was looking for something else.
“Where’s the dragon?” I asked, because it should have been right in the middle of all that confusion, having caused most of it. And, considering how fast dragon fire burned, it must have been there a moment ago, or the fey would have been ash long before this. The guards had even been spaced out in a circle when we first tuned in, with a suspiciously dragon-shaped hole in the middle of them. But now . . .
There was nothing.
“What dragon?” Gertie demanded.
“It was there, in the courtyard, right before my party left. What must have been just a minute ago.”
“Hm. Let’s see, shall we?”
I didn’t know what she meant, but abruptly, the falling, blazing fey reappeared, soaring backwards through the air and onto the battlements again. And then the pieces of his disintegrated comrade flew back together, and the two of them went racing around on fire once more, as time reversed itself. But I didn’t have much of a chance to watch them, because—
“There!” I pointed.
“That’s a dragon,” Gertie agreed dryly, not looking nearly as surprised as I’d have expected. Maybe she’d seen one before. Although she shouldn’t have been seeing this one, because it had appeared out of nowhere, just popping into existence.
It was absolutely the same one that had grabbed me, a fact made clear a moment later, when I caught sight of a tiny Mircea and a tinier me running backward through the chaos. Pritkin was nowhere to be seen, but considering how many tricks he had up his sleeve, that didn’t surprise me. And then I spotted him, over by the mechanism for the gate, wrestling with a fey.
“Hm,” Gertie said, obviously seeing the same thing, but not commenting. She did start time forward again, however, at maybe a quarter speed, and also zoomed in a bit. We were still too far away to make out what anybody was saying, but we could see better.
And there was something to see.
We stood there, mouths agape—at least mine was—watching the huge dragon suddenly shiver and morph and shrink—into Aeslinn.
It had happened so fast that we’d missed it the first time, and had almost missed it the second, despite the slower pace. The king’s body had changed with liquid speed, almost too fast for human eyes to track, going back to his fey form and shrinking down to the approximate size of the guards. The speed had helped to hide the transformation, along with the drifting smoke and billowing clouds of dust and mortar that had been stirred up by his recent trip through the castle wall.
“How many forms does he have?” I demanded angrily.
“Shh,” Gertie said, maybe because she was watching what happened after my little group disappeared.
Aeslinn, now back in his normal body and buck ass nude, grabbed some clothes off a passing soldier—like literally; he stripped the guy in the middle of the courtyard. And then he disappeared again. Only he didn’t morph this time; he shifted, stepping out of space and time like he did it every day.
I stood there, feeling off balance and wondering what the hell I’d just seen.
Because, okay, I understood some of that. I knew that Ae
slinn had used Zeus’s power over the byways to hitch a ride on my spell. Zeus had admitted as much, and anyway, it was the only thing that made sense. But that wasn’t the only weird thing about this picture.
Not even close.
I’d recently had a crash course on dragons, learning that there were sentient ones as well as animal-like ones. It was similar to the difference between wolves and werewolves on Earth. One was an animal all the time, with a rudimentary intelligence mostly used for finding food, while the other could adopt either human or animal form at will.
The sentient type was Faerie’s version of weres, and I’d learned a ton about them in war council meetings, because some of them had joined our side and we were trying to recruit more. They were especially good for reconnaissance, being able to fly into areas that were impossible to reach by foot, and being armored well enough to possibly get back out again. And right now, we needed all the information we could get, both about Faerie in general and about Aeslinn and his merry band of assholes in particular.
Because Aeslinn wasn’t the only one to disappear after the fall of the capital.
The king had sent his remaining army scattering everywhere, leaving us with numerous bands of soldiers to try to track down, many of whom weren’t remaining still. We weren’t sure if they were recruiting, just trying to stay ahead of our allies, or deliberately confusing us and causing us to waste resources. Or possibly all three.
Either way, they had to be tracked, before they turned into guerrilla bands and attacked our allies, destabilizing Faerie even further. And because we’d assumed that Aeslinn was with one of them, and like a game of chess, this war wasn’t going to end until we dealt with him. But now . . .
Well, it seemed that the king had found himself a little bolt hole in time, which might explain why he’d been so damned elusive. He’d been in Faerie, all right, just the Faerie of three hundred years ago. Not that we’d have probably tracked him down, in any case. His people were fiercely loyal; I had no idea why.