Champion of the Rose - Kobo Ebook (36 page)

They had ascended to its flat peak in dignified silence, the
Tzel Aviar leading the way, Aristide, Strake and Soren following in a row, and
Captain
Vereck
bringing up a lonely and determined
rear guard.

How, Soren wondered, would the Fair come? Through a Walk, just as she and Strake had
travelled? Or by one of their air-ships,
a fabled piece of magnificence so long unseen no-one outside The Deeping was
certain they had ever existed. She
stared up into the sky, pale with a tracery of white, then down over grass
curving in every direction.

The killer had been here – could it be only yesterday? Stalked her Rathen, then made an unexpected
plea and paid the price of exposing himself. He might be dying even now, a problem spawning new questions even as it
was solved. And he'd left her feeling
hopelessly exposed, vulnerable to any Fair assassin who chose to materialise
into existence. The small squad of
guards waiting at the foot of the hill were ready with their crossbows, but
short of decking him out in full armour, Soren could not think of a way of
adequately protecting her Rathen.

Along with the guards, they had a further audience
decorating several balconies of both the old and new palaces. There even seemed to be an unusual number of
figures lingering along the low sandstone wall which rose above the opposite bank
of the river's mouth. No-one close enough
to hear or even properly see what was going on, though the arrival of the Court
of the Fair would hardly be unobtrusive. She wondered if Lady Arista was one, and how many would be longing to
see this encounter fail. Meeting the Fae
Court was going to be the most unpopular thing Strake had done so far.

Tzel Damaris seemed to be studying the grass, which had been
only lightly grazed, ankle-high in some places. The hill was, it had to be admitted, a more suitable location for a
picnic or kite-flying. Would they offer
the Queen of The Deeping a seat in a tussock? And a mug of something hot to off-set the wind?

"If you would wait at this spot, Your Majesty?"

Without pausing for an answer, Tzel Damaris paced slowly
around them, then stopped some three feet behind, in the direction of the
palace. Kneeling, he ceremoniously set
down the only object he'd brought with him: a flat case of sueded leather. As meticulously as if he were performing the
Service to the Sun in the grandest of temples he opened the case and folded
back a velvety cloth to reveal a dozen felt-backed partitions, the largest of
which held what for a moment Soren thought was Aristide's trump blade.

It was the decorations;
whorling
,
swirling knots faintly etched. But a
moment's attention showed the thing not to be a knife at all. Instead, it was a round spike of metal set
like a blade. Balancing it lightly
between his palms, Tzel Damaris lifted it to the height of his face, then
plunged it into the ground.

Bemused, Soren shifted so her arm brushed her
Rathen's
and felt him stir in response, but his eyes did
not waver from the Fae. From the case
Tzel Damaris now selected a thumbnail-sized object, glossy brown, which he
dropped into the hole he had made. A
seed. The remaining partitions all
contained seeds. Did the Fae plan to
grow a portal?

Without a glance in their direction, he closed the case,
stood and walked past them. Pacing with
even stride to a point nearly thirty feet south, he knelt once again.

Imagining how this must look to those who watched from the
palace, Soren checked Aristide's expression and found only absorption. Strake wore the beginnings of a wary frown,
half inclined to demand explanations or order a stop.

"Well, you said you wanted a garden," Soren
whispered, and succeeded in startling a smile from him. He switched his attention briefly, grazing
her hand with his, enough to make her glow. Then it was back to watching the Tzel Aviar, who planted six seeds in
all. After the two north and south, he
moved further out and set one each north-west, north-east and so forth, to form
a rectangle about the initial pair. Then
he closed and sealed his case and moved into the centre of the area he had
defined.

After inclining his head in recognition of Strake's
patience, Tzel Damaris unhurriedly raised his eyes to the sun and said:
"The Court of the Fair is called."

It was a proclamation, echoing despite his quiet tone. Strangest of all was that Soren understood
it, for the words had not been spoken in Darien. There was no immediate result, but both
Aristide and Strake reacted as if to a sudden, distant noise. Then the seeds grew.

The four outermost were
lorams
,
slender trunks of black stretching up clean and clear for over thirty feet
before curving inward, reaching out branches to twine into an amber-gold
roof. The two planted facing each other
seemed to be some kind of maple, their smooth brown bark twisting into wide,
high-backed forms, garlanded with triple-lobed leaves shading from vivid red to
dried rust. Living chairs. Thrones of fire and blood.

It took no more than a count of ten for
Vostal
Hill to assume its crown, and in that time the Court of the Fair came to
Darest. Not aloft in a winged ship or
stepping through a portal blazing with magic, but simply there. They dwarfed the
Dariens
as even the trees did not, sheer height becoming secondary to the weight of
their numbers. There were surely more
than could be held within the area Tzel Damaris had circumscribed. Some seemed to be occupying exactly the same spot,
yet there was not the tangled intersection of form which should result.

Every one of them, Soren realised as she struggled with awe,
was standing in their own pavilion of
loram
. Not in Darest at all, but somewhere balanced
between a dozen different hills and meadows and forest glades. She could see those places, fragments of
elsewhere past people who weren't really on
Vostal
Hill. Straight ahead she could see a
city of lakes and bridges, arches and vaults of white stone dripping with
foliage in every Autumn hue.
Celoras
, the Heart of The Deeping, fabled and
forbidden. And yet, she could still see
the Bay of Diamonds, the images laid on top of each other and lent an air of
complete unreality by some property of the light, which had a sharp, blue-washed
quality.

A tiny bell chimed, just once. Small as it was, the sound rang clarion-clear
and parted the crowd like reeds in the wind, a corridor opening down the centre
of the pavilion. And as the note died it
brought with it awareness that it was the only sound, that the rush of Autumn
breeze and distant surf and any incidental clatter from a living city had been
sealed outside the
loram
frame as solidly as if
behind stone. In this hush stood
Desteret
, Queen of the Fair, one hand raised to touch the wrought
maple arm-rest of the other throne.

Soren had expected the Deeping Queen to be haughty, but
instead she stood looking over the small group of humans with calm interest:
unsmiling, but not cold. That
intelligent regard was the first thing Soren took in, even before the typical
Fae height, the smooth beauty of her oval face, and the long black hair,
elaborately dressed. Her gown was in the
eastern style, fine linen of elegant cut, the pale cream cloth embroidered with
white thread in scarcely visible patterns.

The bells were in her hair, great strings of them, each no
larger than the nail of Soren's smallest finger. Suspended on combs, silver ropes of them
framed her face. Others were wound about
the thin braids which weighted the mass of hair allowed to flow down her back,
and there was a single chain about the wrist of the hand which rested on the
throne.

As she folded into her best courtesy, Soren watched Strake
from the corner of her eye and saw him incline his head, the greeting of one
monarch to another. The Fae Queen had
such a singular presence that Soren could scarcely believe it when she returned
the gesture. It was like a mountain had
noticed the capering of ants.
Desteret
Saw them.

The silver ropes, so perfectly still a moment ago, swayed
but did not give tongue. Then she moved,
seated herself, still without sound. It
was grace underlined. Soren felt the
very ground should tremble.

Strake was stiff in contrast, the suspicions stressed by
Lady Arista perhaps playing in his mind, but he took the seat provided. Rearranging themselves so that Aristide stood
on one side of their throne and Soren and
Vereck
the
other gave Soren the chance to look away from
Desteret
. She needed that somehow – to look away, to
rest her eyes, as if she had been gazing at the sun.

Groups emerged to her eye, each clustered around some
central figure just as the
Dariens
bracketed Strake
on his blazing throne. Each of these
would be a Deeping lord, owing fealty to their Queen as Strake's barons did
him. Except these 'barons' held dominion
over lands as large as Darest itself.

There were perhaps a dozen groups, and in some she found the
chill she'd been expecting, in most a kind of tolerant attention which left
Soren feeling like a stripling urged upon a stage. The Queen had half a dozen about her,
including two of the small
eisel
or 'lesser folk' more common in the eastern reaches of
The Deeping. Only the Tzel Aviar stood
alone, and it was to him that the Fae Queen turned now, those strings of bells
again swaying but not sounding.

"You have called Council, Damaris of the
Wryve
."
Desteret's
words were in the Fae language, yet again
somehow comprehensible. And the air
trembled with the effort of carrying them: they resonated in Soren's bones, as
if that soft, measured voice carried with it the weight of the very earth. "Open the matter."

Tzel Damaris had placed the case of seeds at his feet and
stood upright and alone in the very centre of the pavilion. Among his own kind he looked diminutive, but
that composure was unassailable, his voice without ripple as he lifted it and
said:

"A child of the People has been Shaped."

Chapter Twenty-Five

No race was more closely linked to Shaping than the
Fair. Their jealously guarded fields and
vast forests were populated by plants and animals found nowhere else in the
world, to their immeasurable profit. On
occasion they undertook specific commissions for lesser realms, and produced a
crop suited to adverse conditions or an animal to combat a seemingly incurable
local trouble. The best grains, whose
high yields allowed all
Sumica
to keep famine at bay,
were said to have been an ancient gift of The Deeping.

With their long lives and comely features, it was widely
assumed that the Fair had practiced their skills on their own kind, with
notable success. But the reaction to
Tzel Damaris' statement made it clear that if this had ever been the case, it
was no longer. It was as if every member
of the Court of the Fair stopped mid-breath. Their eyes widened in disbelief and anger, and beneath that there was a
dismay which trembled on the verge of something more.

Soren's own first moment of reaction had been an ambiguous
irritation, thinking that Aristide's machinations would go nowhere if the Fair
were more interested in the condition of the killer than his purpose in
Darest. To see them so palpably shaken
left her reliving her own scrawling horror, particularly that lonely ordeal in
the Tongue. Was this boy something so
dreadful even the Fair could not deal with him?

During the initial shock, the Queen had shown as much
reaction as the Sun. And when the Court
turned to her in a body, instinctive need not put to words but made abundantly
clear, that mountain's regard had a quality which brought nothing so much to
Soren's mind as an impending avalanche. When the Queen of the Fair said: "Base your claim," Soren
found herself sure that if the Tzel Aviar did not, he would fall far. This was an accusation with consequences.

Tzel Damaris lifted one hand. There was no other warning before the
pavilion was gone and Soren, her eyes dazzled and blurred, was seeing a beach
at night. There were guards running
toward her and, as the vision flickered, a brief image of Strake close by,
sword in hand. Her sight flickered again
– Damaris blinking, she realised – and then she was looking past the guards,
beyond the figure of Aristide to a dark-haired woman in a black surcoat worked
with silver and gold. She was holding a
sword out at nothing and despite the distance her face was clear, an illustration
of paralysed fright, the effort of taking a breath. The sword shook.

Then he was there, a figure in black blocking that of the
woman. Damaris had started to move, not
running but rapid strides which had him perhaps forty feet away when the woman
turned her head sharply and looked up the nearby hill. The figure in black followed her gaze, and
Damaris had focused on the profile of a boy, young and startled. Then a quick glance up the hill, but rocks
blocked more than a glimpse of the archer. Damaris had looked back in time to catch the boy vanishing too
late. Sand kicked up, and then it was
the pavilion once again, that flat blue light, the many-layered view.

"There was no discernible use of reserve or trigger, no
time at all for structuring force," Damaris continued, ever
unwavering. "I judge his abilities
to be [innate-constructed-not external]."

Soren, angrily trying to push aside the resurrection of
disabling terror, had to blink at the final word, which her ear heard as
coralith
, but
which compounded itself on her mind as three different things at once. The enchantment translating for them could
not provide a single expression in Darien which would fully encompass its
meaning.