He hadn’t realised it had understood any of his encounter with his godparent.
The faeland paused, and Wyn braced himself. Stariel’s answer came as a soundless pulse of force, a swell of fierce resolution, and then nothing but the lingering taste of pine on the back of his tongue. He blinked. On the one hand, it wasn’t the attack he’d feared, but on the other…what had Stariel done?
He retrieved the lockbox where he’d stored Lamorkin’s amulet and threw back the lid. The magical object that stared up at him was not the same one he’d deposited. What had been a teardrop of red stone when Lamorkin had given it to him was now deep blue, glittering oddly. It reminded him strongly of star indigo, a rare mineral found only within Stariel, and its signature too was an odd mingling of his godparent’s magic and the faeland’s.
“What are you up to, Stariel?” he asked it softly. There was no response. “If you have broken this…” But he could not think of an adequate threat. He hung the altered amulet around his neck, but before he could stand, the door burst open and Marius flung himself into the room.
“Wyn! You’re all right! I thought…” He came to a screeching halt at the sight of Wyn’s fae form. His eyes widened, darting from feather to feather.
“Thought what?” Wyn said, rising in one movement, icy foreboding crystallising at the point of every quill. “Where’s Hetta?”
Marius re-focused with a sharp breath, worry making his face gaunt. “Gone. There was… Alex and Hetta, they went riding, but Jack just found Alex, and she can’t remember what happened except that they went outside the boundaries. I thought something must have happened to you, that Gwendelfear had told Alexandra something through that damned locket, but if you’re here—”
Marius’s eyes were wild, and he rubbed his temples with the heel of his hand. Marius’s land-sense was weak, but Wyn wasn’t even connected to Stariel and his head was throbbing with the faeland’s anxiety. It would be worse for the Valstars.
Wyn stared down at the crumpled note in his fist. Aroset had tried to use compulsion on Marius and failed. What if she’d succeeded on another Valstar? That damned locket indeed. How easy it would have been for Aroset to subvert a spell set by a lesser fae, to lure Alexandra out to meet her with some plea sent in Gwendelfear’s name. What falsehood had she made Alexandra tell, to make Hetta leave the safety of Stariel? Oh. I thought something must have happened to you, Marius had said. If Hetta had thought he was in danger… Oh, he was a fool.
“Is Alexandra all right?”
“She’s pretty shaken, but she’s not hurt except for Stariel giving us all headaches. I’ve never felt it like this before. It won’t—was it compulsion?”
“Maybe. Probably.” Wyn thought of Hetta’s younger sister, that bright-eyed innocence coming face to face with Aroset’s sadism, and his chest constricted. Forgetfulness was relatively easy to induce, but the fact that Alexandra knew she’d forgotten something meant it had been done hastily, with brute force rather than skill. If Aroset had damaged Alexandra…
“What’s going on, Wyn?”
Wyn closed his eyes and took a deep breath before opening them again, the ice forming a cage around the lightning shivering in his veins.
“Aroset has taken Hetta. I am going to get her back. Watch Alexandra carefully.” He turned towards the window, but Marius grabbed hold of his arm, stopping him.
“What are you doing?”
There was no time—and if Wyn were to face the Maelstrom, he couldn’t afford softness. He pushed past the other man, breaking out of his grip without effort.
“Wyn!”
“I am sorry, Marius, but I need to go.”
And he wrapped a glamour around himself, obscuring his form, and flung himself from the balcony. Behind him, Marius swore a blue streak, but Wyn didn’t look back as he flew towards the mountains.
Resonance made all types of translocation easier, and the Indigoes were the closest match for the Spires within a reasonable distance. In theory Lamorkin’s translocation spell should be powerful enough to work regardless, but the amulet would give him a single chance to breach the wards of ThousandSpire, and he couldn’t afford to waste it. Please let Lamorkin not have thought it a good idea to make the translocation take me directly into the Maelstrom’s heart. Please let me be lucky, this once.
The amulet burned cold against his throat as he flew, absorbing heat without ever warming. It fit with the winter landscape, the snow drifts deep this high in the mountains. Arctic cross-winds buffeted him, and storm magic crackled over his feathers.
He landed in a snowdrift above the tree line with a soft, graceless thump. Pulling himself out, he shook the snow from his wings.
It had been a long, long time since he’d thought deeply of his homeland, but he thought of it now, closing his eyes and letting the mountains’ cold seep into him. Aerest, the capital, would be cold and dry in this season, bitter winds screaming through a thousand narrow openings and rattling the bridges. The sun was setting here, the Indigoes already in deep shadow, but in ThousandSpire the city would be set afire with the reflected light from the many gemstones embedded in its buildings.
He gripped the pendant tightly and drew in the power of the storm, feeding the resonance into Lamorkin’s spell.
“Take me to the Maelstrom,” he told it. Translocation magic sprang from the stone, creating a brief, temporary connection between here and there, opening up around him and sucking him through.
He emerged falling through churning sky. Gravity and wind wrestled to claim him, yanking him down and sideways and over. Violent magic swamped him, blurring his leysight to a blinding tangle till he had to close his eyes against it.
His hope of avoiding the Maelstrom’s touch had been futile. He wasn’t just close to the Maelstrom; he was in it. How far in? Probably he could escape from its edges. Probably. He had to escape; he hadn’t come this far to fail, not now. Scrabbling desperately for his air magic, he tried to stabilise his fall, but the winds here were not tame things to be so commanded. They punched through his magic as if it were nothing, shredding and tangling what was left. He tumbled, helpless as a dandelion seed, losing all sense of orientation as he fought to find up, to beat his wings against the relentless down. His vision flashed white even through his closed lids: lightning.
He had to get out, now, but as his wings buckled, he knew, deep down, that it was already too late. Feathers ripped and tore free, and his gut clenched in sheer animal terror as the wind whipped his wing around to an angle it was not meant for.
For one horrible, endless moment, he bent. And then, with a snap of bone, he broke.
32
The Maelstrom
Hetta paced the circular cell, furiously. The alternative was to pace fearfully, and she’d rather not encourage that emotion just now, stuck in a cell atop a mind-bendingly high tower. The cell’s shell-pink rock floor and ceiling were held apart by narrow, evenly spaced white bars that went all the way round. They were disturbingly tooth-like, and the wind cut straight through them. Was this the fae version of a dark dungeon, or a special privilege reserved just for her? She wrapped her arms around her chest, wishing she hadn’t lost her hat. Her ears ached with cold.
The Court of Ten Thousand Spires. The land was alive, but she felt no connection to it. Was this how non-Valstars felt in Stariel? Its alienness thrummed up through the rock, a vast, unsettling presence. She reflexively reached for Stariel for reassurance, but there was only a faint, worried echo along the bond.
Her tower lay on the outskirts of a city big enough to rival Greymark, the largest city in the North. And it was only one piece of what felt,
from the vastness of ThousandSpire’s presence, like an entire country. It’s so much bigger than Stariel, she thought, feeling very small as she looked out on the forest of rocky towers. And I’m probably the only human in the whole of Faerie. She hadn’t quite grasped the scale of what she was grappling with before. Prince Rakken was right—this went beyond just Stariel, beyond just her and Wyn. She hugged herself tighter.
The titular Ten Thousand Spires that made up the city varied in height and girth. Had anyone counted them or was the name merely poetic exaggeration? Buildings bristled atop some of them, and others had doorways in their sides. The whole was criss-crossed with alarmingly improbable bridges spun out of threads so fine they looked like toffee turned to stone. It was all very well for creatures with wings, but the sight gave her a horrible sense of vertigo.
Inevitably, her gaze slid to the other side of her tower, and her stomach lurched. There, the rocky terrain fell away steeply to a vast plain with a bristling storm whirling in its midst, deep purple and flashing with non-stop lightning. It was much too close for comfort. This had to be the Maelstrom Wyn had spoken of; it definitely deserved a capital letter. The horrifying vortex spun, ever-moving and yet strangely anchored in place. It hasn’t gotten closer in the last five minutes, she reassured herself. It must keep its distance from the city. They wouldn’t have put her here just to be eaten by an oversized storm, surely?
She swallowed and turned away from the Maelstrom. She needed to focus on getting out of this cell. How fortunate that anger always seemed to bolster her pyromancy, for without Stariel to draw on she would need everything she could muster.
Hetta glared out through the bars, stoking her anger. How dare Wyn’s sister have played that trick, luring her out of Stariel through Alexandra? She’d taken Alexandra with her out on the estate, and they’d been far from the house when Alexandra had received an urgent message from Gwendelfear. Except it hadn’t been from Gwendelfear, clearly. As soon as she got home, Hetta was destroying that dashed locket; if only she’d taken it off Alexandra in the first place! Was Alexandra all right? The last thing she remembered between there and waking here cold on the cell floor was a woman with blood-red wings and the sudden heart-sinking realisation that she’d stupidly walked straight into a trap. Then everything had gone dark. But the fae woman—Aroset, it had to have been Aroset—had seemed entirely focused on Hetta, and if Alexandra wasn’t here in the cell with her, hopefully that meant she was safe back home?
Hetta tried not to think of Wyn. He was almost definitely fine, probably still immersed in banking mundanities. After all, Aroset wouldn’t have needed to capture Hetta if she’d already had Wyn, would she? But that wasn’t a helpful line of thought, to know that she was in all probability being used as bait to lead Wyn to his death. Or to use against Stariel, somehow. Maybe the price of her release would be the terms Prince Rakken had laid out earlier, giving Stariel over as a vassal state.
Anger threatened to tip over into fear, and she hurriedly built it up again. She refused to let the Court of Ten Thousand Spires intimidate her. She took off her gloves, tucking them into her coat pocket. Her chilled fingers brushed the silvery feather she’d been keeping there, and she closed her eyes for a moment, taking a deep, shuddering breath to steady herself. She would find a way out of here.
Opening her eyes, she removed her hand from her pocket and let heat pool just under the skin of her palms as she turned purposefully towards the locked door. It was made of the same white bars as the walls, though these ran the full length of it. She ran her fingers down one to try to work out what it was made of. The texture was more like ceramic than stone, but she didn’t notice much more than that because the bar zapped her.
She jerked back, and her fireball was more instinctive outrage than escape attempt, but it hit the slanting bars and fizzled out. As it snuffed out, the threads of a spell lit up. Sight and excellent visual memory notwithstanding, even she needed more than a split-second to properly examine something. She conjured another fireball and flung it at the bars, this time deliberately trying to take a mental snapshot of the fae spell as it illuminated.
The threads were peculiar, in the same way that Wyn’s house spells had been. Well, it’s not as if it’s surprising that these are fae spells. She took a breath and concentrated on the threads of the spell. If she stood on Stariel soil, she could’ve leaned on the faeland for knowledge and understood them, but here she was on her own, and this fell outside everything she knew of human magery. Still, they seemed familiar somehow. They reminded her of the air magic Wyn had used to sweep the lug-imp corpses into a heap. Air magic, she thought with a blink. Air magic, defusing fire. Fire needed oxygen to burn. What if the spell were somehow designed to take that away?
Could she overwhelm the spell, somehow? She had a lot of anger. She raised both her palms and let it boil out of her. Fire hit the bars with a disheartening sizzle. The temperature warmed a little, but the icy winds carried most of the heat away. She poured magic at the bars until she wobbled and had to cut off the flame, panting. The bars didn’t look even slightly singed. Her heart sank. She put a hand in her pocket, wrapping it around the silvery feather again for comfort.
Before she could decide her next move, footsteps sounded below. Hetta peered as far as she could through the bars of the door, careful not to touch them. The staircase wound around the outside of the rocky spire, and there was no handrail. Her stomach gave a worrying tilt of vertigo, and she closed her eyes briefly. She wasn’t afraid of heights, but still!
When she opened her eyes, she caught a flash of pale hair, and her heart lifted in sudden hope, only to immediately plummet. It wasn’t Wyn, though it was, without a doubt, another one of his brothers. There had been a resemblance between Wyn and Prince Rakken’s features, but it was even stronger with this man—this fae. His white-gold hair hung longer than Wyn’s, obscuring half his face, but the main difference was his wings, black as a moonless night. His horns were the same shade.
He drew closer, and Hetta saw that his eyes were pale gold to Wyn’s deep russet, his features an otherwise eerily similar reflection of Wyn’s. He didn’t speak as he drew up to the door, tilting his head curiously.
“You must be either Prince Irokoi or Torquil,” Hetta said, picking through the names and genders of all of Wyn’s siblings when it became clear he wasn’t going to say anything.
The stranger stared at her for a long moment. Had he heard her? She was about to repeat herself when he spoke.
“Aroset calls me Irk. It’s not very nice of her, is it? If one must be shortened, I much prefer the fish-end.”
“Er…I’m sorry?”
“The fish-end,” he said earnestly, the pale gold of his eyes bright with anticipation, which slowly faded at her lack of comprehension. “You don’t understand me,” he said heavily. “You’re the wrong one. The other one—they would know.”
“The other one,” Hetta repeated faintly.
But the stranger was shaking his head. “Stupid, stupid, Irokoi. They do not even look alike! Wrong person; wrong time!”
He appeared to be conducting an argument entirely with himself, and Hetta took a cautious step back from the bars. Wyn hadn’t told her one of his brothers was mad.
Her movement broke him out of his self-recriminations, and he looked up sharply, his hair falling away from his face.
Hetta gasped. A smooth white scar ran from his temple to mid-cheek, directly through his right eye. That eye wasn’t the pale gold of its partner but a shattered arctic blue, beautiful and, she realised after a second, blind.
Blind or not, his gaze was disconcertingly penetrating. “Ah, you have observed Aroset’s gift.” He waved unnecessarily at his mismatched eyes. “Maimed creatures are upsetting to look upon, are they not?”
“Ah—” she began uncertainly, but he shrugged.
“I am Prince Irokoi,” he said with a slight bow. “I unnerve you. I am sorry.” He brushed his hair back across his face, covering the sc
ar. “Is that better?”
“I…it’s fine,” she said. “I was just startled. But you don’t have to hide it. I don’t mind.”
Another slightly too-long pause. “You do mind,” he said. “But I appreciate the lie.” He abruptly put his wings back against the tower wall and slid down to ground level. The stairwell wasn’t wide, and his chosen seat meant his legs dangled over the edge.
She swallowed. It was a long way to the ground. Aroset’s gift? Her stomach twisted again in sudden horror as she realised what he meant.
“I thought I might be less hideous to mortal eyes,” Prince Irokoi said conversationally, gazing out over the vista. He shot her a sly look. “Do you feel sorry for me yet?”
“A little,” she said. “Though not because you’re hideous. You’re very handsome, as I’m sure you must be aware.” Flattery couldn’t hurt, though it was true enough. “It’s just—did you say your sister did that to you?”
“You think I’m handsome!” He beamed at her, but then his face fell. “Is it because I remind you of Hallowyn? We always did look alike, although more so before Aroset filleted me like a fish. Ah! Fish! A recurring theme tonight.” He laughed, silvery and delighted, but stopped as he read her expression. “You don’t think it’s funny.”
Hetta didn’t think it was at all funny that his sister had apparently blinded him, but she didn’t know if saying so would offend him. “Can you help me get out of this cage?” she asked him instead. Hadn’t Prince Rakken said his other siblings—bar Princess Aroset—also wanted their father gone? Maybe that meant this one would be on her side.
He huffed, wings shifting against the stone. The ink-black feathers merged softly into the shadows. “You do realise that you’re asking a prince of the court that’s imprisoned you for help? Did I forget to say that part when I introduced myself? Irokoi Tempestren, eldest prince of Ten Thousand Spires.”
The Prince of Secrets Page 30