I ended up assisting the rested Leigh in supplying water and herbs and poultices and creams to the proper recipients. Hauling basins and small bundles of herbs or little pots of medicines didn’t strain my body and seemed to help my tense and aching muscles loosen up and ease a bit.
Some of that, of course, was my accelerated fairy healing. These women had no such advantage. It made me feel almost embarrassed or ashamed to be a fairy. I reminded myself that shame rarely bred useful recourses, and focused instead on offering what help I could. I did wish that I had studied healing at a some point of my life. I had studied baking and various forms of art, but I’d never taken the time to learn healing past the most basic form. I regretted that now.
Well, I had time. Once I was out of here, I would have to find a way to add healing to my studies.
I never wanted to be caught flat-footed again.
Leigh and I were also in charge of making sure everyone had food and drink in front of them before we paused to rest for a moment ourselves. It was about that time that Gabriel appeared and made his own limping way to the fire.
He pointed the end of the ladle at me. “Now, that was a peculiar thing, seeing you dancing there with Leigh’s face on you.”
Tired as I was, I managed to smile. “How could you tell? I thought it was a perfect disguise.”
He shook his head. “I don’t know. I could just tell. I always can tell with that sort of thing. It’s a gift.”
I regarded him silently as he dished up some stew and sat down to eat. His face looked too thin, gaunt almost, in the way of someone who has been burning the candle at both ends for too long.
Was this, I wondered, one of our missing heroes?
I asked him, when his chewing slowed to a less desperate pace.
“I believe I was intended to be so at some point,” he agreed. “I was a soldier at one point. I served as a mercenary and ended up coming to the island to solve the mystery of the dancing princesses. The next thing I knew, I was dancing away the nights with the other poor sots who tried to break this spell.”
That was the most words I’d heard him line up in a row. And it gave me a lot to think about. “Where do the other gentlemen go, during the day? I’ve only seen you.”
Gabriel made a vague gesture with his spoon. “They help out up at the castle. The unicorns don’t care for them much and vice versa. Oddly, none of us can tell someone outside of the spell about what’s happening. It’s like we can’t talk at all. The servants all act as if we’ve been here forever.” He shrugged and reached for a goblet of water.
“I need to talk to someone,” I said, to the room in general. Silence greeted my announcement. “I either need to go find him, or someone has to get a message to him.”
The Bellatrices exchanged glances and immediately started shaking their heads.
“We do appreciate what you did for us tonight,” Caroline said. “But if we let you go there’s not guarantee that you will return to us to help us break this spell. What is going to make you return here again once you are free?”
“My word is binding,” I said. “I’m a fairy. My promise is an unbreakable oath.”
Joette shook her head. “No. We only have your word for that. And what we know of Fairy Godparents is nothing but twisted Magic and death.”
I sighed, but I understood what they were saying. In their place, wouldn’t I feel the same way?
“Is there a way to send a message out?” I asked. I didn’t have hopes to the answer. They would have tried any way possible to break this spell.
“I can’t leave,” Gabriel said. “Nor can the rest of us men. We’re bound here until we die.”
The look in his eyes suggested that this had been tested and experienced. There had been twelve male dancers to dance with the twelve princesses. What happened to the excesses?
I didn’t want to imagine.
“I could go,” Leigh volunteered.
The other warriors turned to stare at her with equally worried and horrified expressions.
“If I take Paeonia and Grace disguises me, I can leave. I have always been able to go further than the rest of you.” Leigh stated her case calmly, at odds with the youth of her face.
Having worn that visage all night I felt rather protective of it.
“You’d be risking your life,” Erika said.
“All of our lives,” Heidi added.
“Even the unicorns,” Amanda said softly.
I could tell that last one struck Leigh to the core, but she remained firm. “I can do this,” she said. “Paeonia will not allow anything to happen to me.”
“How will you get off of the island?” I asked. I tried to imagine the little warrior and her unicorn trying to board a ship incognito.
Leigh smiled beatifically. “That’s why it has to be me. Paeonia is a flying unicorn and I am the only one she will let ride her.”
The others nodded when I looked to them.
“Is this important enough to risk our lives for?” Bella asked seriously.
“If we want to get justice for what has happened here,” I said seriously, “we must do this correctly. The f—creatures I was to reach are the only ones all fairies will heed. I would not risk anyone’s life if I knew a better way to fix this land and bring the guilty to justice.”
In fact, I would love to see Astraea sweep in here and throw judgments down on the fairies that had twisted this place so vilely, but I was counting on Dallan’s more subtle approach to get us out of this mess without anymore unnecessary deaths.
“Who is it you want to contact?” Gillie asked, mistrust written all over her face.
I found myself explaining about Justice and Mercy and their role in the keeping of our world and the keeping of fairies. I explained about my cousin and what she had done and how Dallan and Astraea had given her the choice to leave our world instead of facing death. I probably talked too much about them, but it was the closest I could get to being with them right now.
“I like the thought of the female winged Justice,” Diedre said thoughtfully. “She sounds like our High Priestess, before she was murdered.”
Caroline studied me with a more jaded eye. “You sound more than half in love with him,” she said. “We cannot afford to be blinded by your affection for this creature.”
“I love him,” I admitted. “But it is for the clarity I see him with, not blindness. Dallan is incapable of being anything but who he is. He is the Voice of Mercy.”
“And she is the Song of Justice,” Diedre said softly, sounding more than a little enraptured herself.
“I can be gone in an hour,” Leigh said firmly. She stood up and brushed her hands off on the trousers she was wearing. “I can put a pack together with everything I need and go.” She turned to me with her eyebrows raised inquiringly. “From you, I need to know how I can reach this Mercy creature of yours and, if you are able, a Blessing that will protect me from the other Godparents.”
Now, that was a thought. Blessings were both the simplest and most complex of all Fairy Godparent workings. They did not use much Magic, but when they were artfully done, they could be extremely effective. Blessings were like levers; they could do much with little force needed.
Even with the Magic here bound so tightly, I should be able to manage a Blessing just from the energy within myself.
“Are you sure?” I asked her. “I won’t ask you to die for me.”
A quick flash of a smile passed over her face, including a pair of appealing dimples. “I won’t do it for you. I’m doing it for us, for this land, and for the unicorns.”
Yes, that would work.
While the Bellatrices and Gabriel put together a pack and cloak for Leigh, I focused on designing Blessings for her, her pack, her unicorn, this venture, everything I could think of.
I drew on the Magic of their hospitality to me. That always made Blessings easier to bestow. It helped that Leigh and her order deserved the Blessings I offered to them. They had saved my l
ife, healed me, fed me, dressed me… and yes, there had been both bread and salt. They had fulfilled all the requirements for good hosts.
So, I was free to Bless them with all the power I could reach.
For bonus, I Blessed their feet and their slippers and their shovels and rakes… all the little tools and things that would make their lives go better.
It was not a great work of Magic.
It was a thousand tiny, specific whispers.
By the time Leigh was ready to go, I was drained and exhausted, but I was also as close to happy as I had been since I came to this place.
Leigh climbed aboard her dark, dappled winged unicorn, her dark cloak pulled over her head. She looked down at her sisters—sisters of purpose if not blood—and laughed.
“Don’t be so serious,” she teased. “I will be back before you know it.” She tilted her head towards me. “And you, if you’re going to borrow my body again, make sure you dance beautifully.”
With another soft laugh, the pair took to the air and flew low over the close-by forest. Their passage made no sound at all, but I found myself holding my breath.
If all went wrong, would we even know?
Joette clapped my back gently. “Come on,” she said. I could see the worry on her face, even in the darkness that surrounded us. “We all need to rest, and you will have to wear Leigh’s face day and night until she returns again. This will be more challenging than simply playing her part to dance.”
I drew in a deep breath and nodded. I followed after her, limping only slightly. The twelve of us hobbled back towards our shelter.
Still, I could help looking back over my shoulder as we reentered the hall. It may have been my imagination, but I thought I saw the faintest flash of silver in the distance.
It may have just been the moon.
Chapter Twelve
When I first donned Leigh’s face and form, I would never have imagined that I would spend an entire day playing her part. I certainly never expected to sit up in the castle as her and work on embroidery all day.
As it happened, I knew a little about embroidery. One of the many crafts and arts I had attempted to learn had been various fiber arts, including several different forms of embroidery. I had attempted most of them.
That didn’t mean that I had any talent whatsoever.
The “princesses” and I sat in a circle in the middle of a room designed to be bright and feminine and elegant. A piano and harp stood in one corner of the room, waiting to be played. The walls were painted in bucolic murals where lambs with long tails cavorted around lovely ladies clad in pale blues and pinks and various fruits and grew around them in a border. Each of these panels was surrounded by enormous frames of wood covered in gold, gilt and gleaming.
Even the high ceilings had been painted with pale romantic colors of scenes full of flying horses and fat naked cherubs somehow in no danger of catching their death of cold.
We were also ornamentally displayed, should any servant or visitor happen to stick their heads in through the open door. We wore pastel gowns, our hair piled on top of our heads and pinned in place with fetching little hats. I had never seen more lace in one place.
“We can speak here without fear of being overheard,” Gillie said as she neatly pinned a strand of the lace she was making onto the pillow that held it. The pattern she was creating with fine thread was too complex for my mind to follow, yet she didn’t hesitate in shifting threads and pinning another one down.
Caroline, who was knitting with four fine needles, nodded in agreement. “They never listen in here,” she murmured, pausing to count out stitches before resuming. “Once we are in here, they assume we are fully occupied.”
I glanced to the doorway. It had been a while since even a servant had checked in on us. We were completely alone.
“Do keep working, though,” Joette said, nodding to my still hands. “They do notice if we haven’t accomplished anything in our time here.”
Isolde stood gracefully up from her stool. “I think I will practice piano for a while,” she said. She winked slightly at me as she floated by on her way to the instrument.
She started playing, a tinkling, complex confection of sound. It was loud enough that we would not be overheard, but not so loud that we would have to raise our voices. After a few moments, Erika rose also and crossed over to the harp.
I scolded myself internally for being several centuries older than these women and not being half as skilled. I needed to start practicing and learning more, if these short-lived humans could put me to shame so easily.
And without effort. They weren’t trying to embarrass me. That somehow made it less bearable.
“I need to know who attacked me,” I said, leaning over Leigh’s embroidery and carefully outlining her existing work in matching silk thread. I hoped I didn’t ruin her masterpiece with my pathetic fumblings. “I didn’t recognize that Fairy Godparents last night and they weren’t who I was expecting.”
“We see many different Godparents, nearly every night,” Heidi said. “We did not see who exactly attacked you, but…”
“They are all under the power of Ferdinand and his second, Cooper,” Bella said. She bit through a thread and bent over her sewing box for a new color. “Even if they were not exactly those who attacked you, it most definitely was at their command.”
I grimaced. It would have been better to have absolute information.
“How long until Leigh returns, do you think?” Kayla asked, her eyes flitting from the crocheting in her lap to the great line of windows that lit the room on the west side. The afternoon sun streaming in made it impossible to see anything else.
I frowned and shook my head. “I told Leigh to go straight to my house first. Hopefully she will find Dallan there and be able to return. With winged mounts it’s about six hours journey each way, but…”
“They need to be safe,” Fiona nearly whispered.
I nodded.
I knew we were all aware of the danger the youngest Bellatrix was facing. If anyone in the fairy world saw her and was part of this terrible conspiracy, all would be lost. The plan was for Leigh to get to my house, find Dallan, and hurry back in the safest way possible.
“I will need to take her place on the dance floor again,” I said.
Around me, heads nodded in agreement.
“I wish I could offer all of you the same rest,” I added. My feet twinged in sympathy. Mine were healing, but I knew theirs couldn’t.
“It’s not so bad today,” Diedre said, wiggling her feet a little. “My feet hardly hurt at all.”
The others echoed murmurs of agreement. I wondered if that meant my Blessings had worked. I could only hope that was the case. When a spell went right, there was usually a sense of resonance that told me all was well. With Blessings, all I had was hope.
I tried to focus on the embroidery in front of me. Leigh had designed a lovely piece with red birds against a white, snowy backdrop. I decided to work on the quills of an evergreen tree branch in the background. I was pretty sure I could hide my inferior stitchwork there, yet still show enough progress if the piece was inspected as the others had implied.
This was a gilt prison, but it just felt like any prison. The pretty room and lovely dresses could not disguise the underlying sense of captivity.
The warriors played music on the harp and piano. They painted and built with threads of silk. They whispered and they planned. The strength here was hidden by fabric and beauty, but it was not muted.
The long walk to the ballroom was unchanged. In fact, I couldn’t be sure but it felt as if my feet were stepping in the exact same places that they’d stepped before. I felt like a little wind-up toy, retracing the same motions over and over again.
It was easy enough to imagine myself as a cog in a machine set to generate Magic. In my imagination, I saw my pretty gown—gold this night—as a gear, spinning among other gears, always in the right place.
With the ticking of the
great clock on the wall, we began our dance. We lifted our arms and spun away from our partners, only to be drawn back into their arms. We balanced precariously on the tips of our toes and darted away again, always returning, always moving.
There were more fairies present in the ballroom than the night before. They kept appearing and disappearing from my view. The way they wandered and moved off-rhythm to the music was a mockery of my own captivity. That they were free and I was not was painful enough, but that they delighted in the difference made the pain turn to rage.
Imbalance is the product of Chaos. It is the opposite of order and degrades all it touches. Light must have its darkness. Music must have its silence. Air and Earth and Water and Fire and Spirit must all remain in harmony. Time balanced life, even for us fairies. Life balanced Death. Seasons were born into new seasons and lost only to return again. Tears in the darkest hour of night turned to hope with the break of light across the horizon of a new day.
Even insects knew balance. They started as worm and grew to beetles and then back to the ground they started from.
Only humans, and now fairies, sought to disorder that which was balanced. They invited hate and betrayal where love and kinship should live. They claimed superiority instead of unity. They trampled those who were silent and silenced those who spoke and made examples of those who screamed.
If they pushed it too far, Chaos would win and all would be lost. Our world would be erased.
Better that than we contaminate another world.
I felt their eyes on me—the eyes of the Godparents—as we danced. I did not think they singled me out. I thought, perhaps, they stared at us each in turn. Maybe they were trying to search for more information about my “death”. Maybe they were simply enjoying the power they held. Maybe even some of them appreciated the beauty of what they witnessed here, the glory of the dance without the will of the dancers.
I supposed that was possible.
I was too aware of those eyes. My heart was one thing the Magic could not, or simply did not, control. It raced inside my breast, propelled by terror and anxiety. It hurt, but it was a good hurt, because they hadn’t taken this away from me. They couldn’t.
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