Her hands flew to her mouth, shaking. She made a noise deep in her throat.
Unable to bear her look, Ben turned to the Gargoyle. The monster was staring at him, expressionless. “You are called Strabo. You are a dragon, not a Gargoyle.”
He turned back to the Lady, determined. “And you are …”
“Nightshade!” she hissed in fury. She shrank from him, and her smooth face contorted with despair and recognition. “Holiday, what have you done to us? What have you done to me?”
Ben shook his head. “We have done it to ourselves, each of us in turn. This place has made it possible. Magic stole our memories when we were sent here from the Heart. Do you remember? There was a man with a box. There were notes purportedly sent by each of us to the other, bait for the trap that was used to ensnare us. Some sort of spell wrapped us about and sent us here, into the box …”
“Yes, I remember now!” Strabo growled, who in spite of having his identity uncovered still did not look like the dragon. “I remember the man and his box and the magic netting us like fish! Such power! But why was it done? Look at me! How could I have been changed so?”
Ben knelt before him. The clearing was hushed and closed about. It was as if their world had stopped moving.
“We are in the fairy mists,” he said quietly. “Think about how we appear. We have become the things we most fear we might really be. You are a monster, loathed and despised, an outcast that no one wishes to look upon, hunted by all, blamed for everything that cannot otherwise be explained. And you cannot fly, can you? Your wings have been stripped away. Haven’t you always feared being earthbound? Flying has always provided you with a form of escape, no matter how terrible things were. Here, you have been cheated even of that.”
He paused. “And look at me. I am what I feared most to become. I am the King’s Champion, his handpicked destroyer, his butcher of enemies, nameless and empty of everything but my fighting skills and my desire to use them. Even my armor has become a weapon, a monstrous apparition called the Haze that eliminates any enemy who threatens. I fear killing more than anything, and so for me it comes to pass.”
He stopped himself, unwilling to say more. They did not know he was the Paladin, only that the Paladin served the King. He would not have them know more.
“Nightshade,” he said softly, turning back to her again. She crouched down like a cornered beast. “What is it you fear most? What frightens you? Loss of your magic, certainly. You have said as much. But something more …”
“Silence!” she screamed.
“Being human,” Strabo snapped. “She loses power when she acknowledges her humanness. Her emotions make her weak; they steal away her strength. She must not let herself feel. She must not be tender or soft or give love …”
Nightshade flew at him, nails raking at his face, but Ben pushed her aside, bore her to the ground, and pinned her there while she spit and screamed like a madwoman. Nightshade had been changed in more ways than one, he thought as he held her. He would never have been able to do this in Landover, for Nightshade had ten times his strength. She was indeed without her power.
She went quiet finally and turned her head aside from him, tears coursing down her pale face. “I will hate you forever,” she whispered, the words barely audible. “For what you have done to me, for what you have made me feel—all of it a lie, a monstrous deceit! That I could care for you, could love you, could have you as a woman would a man—how could I have been so stupid? I will hate you forever, Holiday. I will never forget.”
He stood up and left her lying there, still turned away. There was nothing he could say to her that would help. That she had been made to feel something for him was unpardonable; that she had been deceived into thinking him her lover unforgivable. It did not matter what she had felt before. The chasm that had opened between them would never be bridged now.
“The Labyrinth is a part of the fairy mists.” He straightened his cloak, knocked askew in his struggle. “It was Willow who called to me in my dream. She called from another part of the mists. When I went to her, I could sense that where she was and where I was were joined. I was reminded how the mists work on those who are human or have left that world. They use fear against us, to change who we are, to make us over, to confront us with that which will drive us mad. Where there is no reality but that which we create, imagination plays havoc with our emotions. Particularly fear. We are lost when that happens. We cannot control it as the fairy people do. They told me so once. They warned me against it.”
He took a deep breath. “What we have done in our travels, where we have gone, who we have encountered, is not real. Or not real beyond the Labyrinth. Do you see? We made it up, all of it! Together or separately, I don’t know which. The townsfolk, the River Gypsies, the Gristlies—they were all representations of creatures from Landover. The people of the Greensward, the once-fairy, Rock Trolls, G’home Gnomes, or whatever. They don’t exist outside our minds or these mists or this prison in which we are confined.”
Strabo shook his head. “The fairy mists would not affect me or the witch as they would you. We are fairy creatures ourselves. Yet look at me. I am more changed than you! And no less riddled with the fear you describe. And I did not sense it! I should have been able to do so, having access to the mists in my passage from world to world. Nightshade might be banned from the mists, but I am not. No, Holiday. There is more to this.”
“There is the box!” Ben snapped. “The box is something more than a container for the mists. It is a trap strong enough to hold such as we. Another magic works within it.”
“It is possible,” the other agreed thoughtfully. “But if so, then what magic can free us?”
“I’ve been thinking about that,” Ben said. “When I remembered who I was, I remembered something else, too. I think that our identities were stripped from us to wipe out any chance that we might remember anything that would help us escape. This trap was set up to work two ways. First, to make us forget who we are. Second, to steal away any magic we commanded, to render us impotent. Well, we’ve overcome the first, so that leaves the second. No magic. And we can’t escape this trap without magic.”
He glanced from one to the other. Nightshade was back on her feet, ramrod straight, her expression flat and set. “But I think that Horris Kew or whoever it was who put us here might have made a mistake. The magic intended to be stolen from us was innate. That’s why we were changed in different ways. You were changed most of all, Strabo. Your magic is inherent in what you are—a dragon—so you were changed to something else entirely. Otherwise, you could use your fire to escape this trap, because your fire is your greatest power and among other things it lets you cross between worlds.”
He turned to Nightshade. “And you were stripped of your magic for the same reason, although it was not necessary to change your appearance because how you looked made no difference to whether your magic worked. But the result was the same. Like Strabo, you were trapped without a means of escape because the magic you relied on most, the magic inside yourself, was gone.”
He paused. “But it is different with me. I have no innate magic. I came to Landover without any and still possess none. So I was not affected. My memory was stolen, and that was enough. As long as I didn’t remember who I was, what danger did I pose?”
“Get to the point,” Nightshade snapped coldly.
“This is the point,” Ben replied. He reached into his tunic and pulled forth the medallion with the graven image of the Paladin riding out of Sterling Silver at sunrise. “The medallion of the Kings of Landover, given to me when I was brought over from my own world. It invests me with the right to rule, it gives me command over the Paladin, and it does one thing more. It lets me pass through the fairy mists.”
There was a protracted silence. “Then you think …” Strabo began and stopped.
“It is possible that the magic of the talisman was not leached away in the same manner as your own, that our prison is designed to render
the magic of living creatures useless, but not the magic of inanimate things.” Ben paused. “Beyond Landover, the medallion lends no authority to rule and will not summon the Paladin. But it will allow passage through the fairy mists. Perhaps it can do so here. It has retained its link to the armor of the Paladin, even though that armor comes in the form of the Haze. It was recognized by the Gristlies and warded us from them. Perhaps it can set us free as well.”
“If we are indeed imprisoned in some part of the mists,” Strabo pointed out dourly.
“If,” Ben agreed.
“This is a very slim chance you offer us,” the other mused.
“But the only one we have.”
Strabo nodded, his ugly face almost serene. “The only one.”
Nightshade came forward then, all black anger and hard edges, and stopped before Ben. “Will this really work?” she demanded, her voice dangerously quiet.
He met her gaze and held it. “I think so. We will have to take the medallion into the mists and test it. If it does what it should, we will emerge from the mists where we entered them.”
“Restored to ourselves?” Her eyes glittered.
“I don’t know. Once we are beyond the prison and its magic, we should be.”
She nodded. Her face was white marble, her eyes gone almost red. There was such fury mirrored there that he shrank inwardly from it.
“You had better hope so, play-King,” she said softly. “Because if we do not escape this madness and I am not made whole again, every part of me, every piece of who and what I am, I will spend the rest of my days waiting for a chance to destroy you.”
She drew her long cloak close about her, a dark ghost in the misty dawn. “You have my word on that. Now get us out of here.”
Time seemed stopped.
Willow walked slowly, steadily through the mists, placing her feet carefully with each step. She could not tell where she was going. She could barely see the ground she trod. If this was a trap, she was finished. The haze was so dense that she would be on top of whatever snare might be waiting long before she could identify it. She was proceeding on trust, and where the fairies were concerned this was not particularly reassuring.
But after a while, the air began to clear. It thinned gradually, like dawn coming out of night, a slow giving way of greater shadows to lesser. The light strengthened from black to gray, but still there was no sun. Gradually the mist receded until it was entwined within a wall of trees and scrub. Willow looked about. She was in a jungle of tangled trees and vines, damp and fetid earth, and silence. There was no sound about her, no movement, as if all life had been destroyed.
She moved forward a few tentative steps and stopped. She looked about again. A sinking feeling unsettled her stomach. She knew where she was. She was in the Deep Fell, the home of Nightshade.
For an instant she thought she must be mistaken. How could she possibly have come here, of all places? She moved forward again, searching the jungle about her, trying to peer through the thick canopy of the trees, to see beyond the shadows, to convince herself she was wrong. She could not. Her instincts and memory were quite clear on the matter. She was in the Deep Fell.
She took a slow breath to steady herself. This might be another fairy trick, she thought. It might be their revenge on her, letting her wander into Nightshade’s lair. Trust your instincts, Edgewood Dirk had advised. Trust not the cat. She exhaled. Whatever the case, she must escape quickly or she would be discovered.
She moved swiftly through the thick, green tangle of the Fell, anxious now to gain the rim of the Hollows while it was still light. Though morning was not yet here, it was quite conceivable that she could wander the Fell until nightfall without getting free. Many had. Many had never come out. She kept silent in her passage, using her skills as once-fairy, taking heart in the fact that at least she was back in Landover. She wondered how her instincts could have misled her so. She had to have been deceived by fairy magic. How cruel and spiteful of them, she thought angrily.
Then sudden pain shot through her stomach and limbs, and she doubled over. She dropped to one knee, gasping. The pain lasted only a moment and was gone. She came back to her feet and hurried on. Within minutes, it returned. It was stronger this time and lasted twice as long. She knelt in the tall grass and clutched at herself. What was happening to her?
A jolt of recognition snapped her head up.
It was the baby! It was time!
She closed her eyes in frustration and disbelief. But not here! Please, not here!
She struggled to her feet and continued on, but in seconds the pain returned, dropping her back to her knees, so strong she could barely breathe. Her teeth clenched, she tried to rise one final time and then gave it up. The baby would decide, the Earth Mother had said. Apparently the baby was doing so now. Willow knelt on the floor of the Deep Fell and cried. Her child should not be born in this foul place! It should not be born in shadows and darkness, born out of the sunlight! Did the fairies have anything to do with this? Had they planned it this way, their spite so great at losing the child that they now wished it harmed?
Tears continued to leak from Willow’s clenched eyes as she groped at her waist for the pouch containing the precious soils. She found it and pulled it free. She loosened the drawstrings. The pain was coming in sudden spurts that wracked her body. No preparation for this birth, no time to adjust. It was happening quickly, coming so fast that there was no time left for thinking.
She crawled a few feet farther to a patch of bare ground and clawed at the soil with her fingers to loosen it. It was not difficult to do; the Deep Fell’s earth was damp and soft. When she had cultivated a small patch, she opened the pouch and spread the soils she had gathered in a wide swath about her, reaching down to mix them in. The pain was continuous now, rising and falling in steady waves. She wished she knew more about what to expect, wished she had asked the Earth Mother. Giving birth for the once-fairy was an inconstant and differing experience with each child conceived, and she knew so little of how it worked. She gritted her teeth harder, mixing the soils together, those of the old pines in the lake country, of the place called Greenwich in Ben’s world, and of the fairy mists, working them into the soil of the Deep Fell.
Please, she thought. Please don’t let this harm my child.
Then she cast down the empty pouch and with an effort came to her feet. Wracked with pain, feeling the child stirring anxiously now within her womb, she prepared to give herself over to the change. The child would come when she was in tree form. She had not been able to tell Ben that. She did not know that she ever could.
She shed her clothing and was naked. Then she placed herself at the very center of the soils she had mixed and dug her toes into the earth.
At the moment of her transformation, she was at peace. It was out of her hands now. She had done all she could do to assure her child’s safe birthing. She had kept the trust of the Earth Mother; she had brought back the soils that were required. There was nothing left for her to do but to let her child be born. She wished suddenly for Ben. She wanted to feel his presence, to have him touch her, to hear some small words of reassurance. She did not like being alone now.
Her eyes closed.
Slowly she transformed, fingers and toes lengthening to twigs and roots, arms splitting into branches, legs fusing to a trunk, the whole of her body changing shape and color and look. Her hair disappeared. Her face vanished. She twisted sinuously as bark covered her over. She sighed once, and then she was still.
Hours passed and nothing moved within the Deep Fell where the willow tree rooted. No wind rustled its leaves. No birds flew onto its branches. No small creatures climbed its smooth trunk. The air brightened to a dull, hazy gray, and the summer heat intensified, trapped within the jungle’s dank tangle. A rain passed through and faded. Water dripped from the supple limbs onto the ground.
Noon approached.
Then the tree seemed to shiver with some inner turmoil. Slowly, agonizingly, wh
ere the trunk began to branch skyward, the skin split apart and a broad shoot pushed out into the light. It appeared quickly, as if its growth were accelerated, thrusting and twining upward. It broadened as it grew and changed shape.
In moments, it had become a pod.
Within the pod, there was movement.
Stash
Questor Thews and Abernathy stood together on the parapets of Sterling Silver and looked out across the lake that surrounded the castle island to the throngs of people streaming onto the grasslands. They had been coming all day, tens growing to hundreds, hundreds to thousands. Most had come from the Greensward, though there was a scattering of Trolls from the Melchor, wights from the barren wastelands east, and villagers and farmers from some dozen or so small communities directly north and south. They came as if vagabonds, bearing no food or blankets or even the most rudimentary implements for firemaking. They seemed not to care. Men, women, and children, some with old plow horses and mules, some with a ragtag following of dogs and cats, they had trekked their way here from wherever, as diverse a gathering as ever there was. Now they milled about across the lake from the castle and stared over at it as if hoping someone might invite them in for a good meal.
It was not food they sought, however. What each of them craved, what every single one of them had come to obtain, what all of them were determined to have at any cost, was a mind’s eye crystal.
“Look at them,” Abernathy muttered, then shook his head so that his dog ears flapped gently. “This is truly dreadful.”
“Worse than what we had anticipated, I’m afraid,” Questor Thews agreed solemnly.
They had been anticipating some sort of trouble ever since Abernathy and Bunion had returned from Rhyndweir with the story of the black-cloaked stranger and Horris Kew. A vast stash of mind’s eye crystals awaited them at Sterling Silver, the stranger had insisted. It was there for the taking. Abernathy had dutifully reported every last word to Questor Thews, and so they had braced themselves. But it was Kallendbor and the other Lords of the Greensward they had expected to face, appearing with their armies to exact an accounting, marching up to the gates to force an entry. Instead they found themselves confronted by thousands of farmers and tradesmen and their families, simple people who bore no weapons and wore no armor, all of them hungry and tired and misguided, all of them standing about like cattle waiting for someone to lead them to the barn.