The Drowned Tomb (The Changeling Series Book 2) (12 page)

“Well, maybe if she’d actually tell us anything at all about herself, she wouldn’t have to be so prickly all the time,” Henry muttered. “She’s so secretive.”

“She’s not secretive, she’s just private,” Robin replied, tossing the book down onto a table. “If and when she wants to talk about her past, that’s her business.”

“I just know if she was living under my roof, I’d want to know a lot more about her, that’s all,” Henry said.

“It’s not my roof.”

“Rob mate, you’re the son of one of the original seven Fae Guard, you’re basically royalty. And this is Erlking, home of the big cheeses themselves,” his friend argued. “If you ask me, that makes it more your roof than anyone else’s, even dotty old Aunt Irene.”

Robin smirked. “I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone less ‘dotty’ than Irene in my life,” he said.

“All I’m saying, and I’ve said it before to you…” Henry got to his feet and stretched like a lazy cat. “Is that you shouldn’t just go around trusting everyone you meet, here or in the Netherworlde. I think Karya’s probably a good enough egg and all, but still. I mean, you’ve already told me she used to work for Lady Eris, right?”

A voice spoke from the corner of the study, light and quiet, and completely unexpected. “Many people, human boy, used to work for Lady Eris.”

Henry almost jumped out of his skin.

Seated in an armchair, ensconced in the corner of the room, a slim paperback in hand, sat Robin’s tutor. Neither of them had noticed her in the dim candlelight.

“When did you come in?” Robin stuttered, as Henry’s face turned crimson. The nymph, who had her legs tucked up under her, placed her book, a battered old edition of ‘Mrs Dalloway’, down gently on her lap.

“I was reading in here when you and your friends arrived,” she told them.

“But … but we didn’t see you,” Robin said. Had she been sitting with them the whole time?

“No, you wouldn’t have,” she said simply, with no great concern. She stood up, her pale dress falling in whispering perfect folds around her. “That housekeeper of yours doesn’t seem very fond of me.” She shrugged a shoulder, as if to indicate that this fact was neither here nor there to her. “I can be still and quiet when I wish. As silent and invisible as a clear millpond in shadows. I had no desire to encounter the tiresome woman, or to interrupt you and your companions, and your … debate.”

Henry was looking very flustered. “Sorry about that Eris comment,” he spluttered, looking at his feet. “I only meant…”

“I know exactly what you meant, mortal boy,” she replied, walking across the room. Her long finger trailed on the back of a sofa idly. “It is a fact. Many Panthea support Eris. Irene and her supporters are mostly in the minority.”

She looked directly at them both in turn, her deep eyes clear. “But believe me when I tell you this. You can trust more in those who once served her and have left her service, than in those who never did.” She glanced at Robin with her distant liquid stare. “The people of the Netherworlde who opposed Eris from the very beginning are her foes, yes. But those, like myself, who once served loyally and have now betrayed her?” She gave a small smile. “Well, we are her deepest enemies. Eris is devoid of mercy, and forgiveness is a thing alien to her. She hates deserters and betrayers more even I think than she hates the Fae.”

“Of course,” Robin said, chagrined.

“You gave the girl sanctuary here, Scion,” his tutor said. “That is no small gift to give, not to an enemy of Eris. You both…” She glanced a little sharply at Henry. “ … Should trust her.”

Henry nodded eagerly.

“She is no Panthea like myself, but she is forever in your debt.” Calypso looked thoughtful. “I imagine this fact irks her somewhat. She strikes me as fiercely independent. Freed slaves often are.”

“I’d … I’d better get off,” Henry said, shuffling uncomfortably. “Dad will be heading home soon now that it’s dark, and it’s school tomorrow for us boring humans.”

“I’ll see you out,” Robin said, nodding a goodnight to his tutor, who still stood in the candlelight of the now dark purple room with one hand resting on the sofa, looking thoughtful. But as the two boys reached the door, she called out, “Robin Fellows. A word, if I may, in private.”

Robin closed the door behind Henry as he left, his face a Greek mask of tragedy, and turned to face his tutor. She crossed to the table and picked up the large black book.

“This history…” She stroked the cover with a small frown, her long fingers trailing. “ … From a time before my people’s own history, before the Panthea came into the Netherworlde.” She turned the book over slowly. “I understand why you wanted to know about it. About your parents.”

Robin shuffled uncomfortably. He didn’t know how to reply.

“I lost my family too,” she said. "The nymphs and the Undine of Hiernarbos. When I sided with Eris, when I made the wrong choice. Then, later on, I lost that new dark family too, when I ran from Eris and came here.” She glanced up from the book to him. “We are all of us searching, are we not? Trying to fill a hole within us somehow.”

“Gran was my family,” Robin said thickly. “When she … when she died, my whole life changed. I keep thinking if I can find out about the Fae, about my mum and dad, it might help things make sense, help me … I don’t know.”

“Fill the void,” she finished for him. She walked over and placed the book in his hands.

“The hearts of humans and the hearts of the Fae are so very similar,” she said, as he took it. “Nymphs feel differently. We are simpler creatures, and in some ways, stronger for it. But there is truly perhaps no greater magic, or no more fatal curse, Robin Fellows, than a mortal heart. You miss your grandmother.”

It wasn’t a question. Robin nodded.

“But you like your life.” She smiled a tiny smile. “And there is your conflict. Guilt.”

Robin swallowed. He couldn’t meet his tutor’s eyes. She was altogether too perceptive. “It’s … weird,” he said quietly. “I don’t think about it for ages, and then I’ll find myself having a laugh with Woad playing checkers upstairs, or lazing out in the sun with Henry, or listening to everyone bicker and argue over dinner, and I’ll be happy as anything, then it kind of hits me. That I’m only here at all because Gran died.” He sniffed. “And I feel terrible, like I shouldn’t be happy, that I’ve no right to be. It’s like I’m being disrespectful to Gran if I am.”

To his surprise, Calypso reached out and took his chin in her cupped hand, tilting his face up until he was looking into her eyes. She still looked distant and a little aloof, but not unkind.

“Listen well, Scion. People misunderstand grief,” she told him. “They imagine it is like being made of glass, cold and hollow always, with a roaring wind racing through you, endless and desolate.” She shook her head. “But that is not the way of it. Grief is not a constant wind to be borne. It is an ocean, and it falls upon you only in waves.”

Robin swallowed, still gripping the book with both hands.

“When the waves come, they can be unexpected, Robin, and they can be brutal, and they wash away every castle of sand you have built since the last wave.”

He didn’t meet her eyes.

“But know this. The wave recedes. It will come again. It will always come, but in the meanwhile, while the tide is out, you build new castles of sand in the sun. And your friends, they help you. Do you understand this?”

Robin nodded silently. The candles in the softly lit red room flickered and guttered.

Calypso stared at him a moment longer. “It is no sin against the dead to be happy, Scion,” she whispered, releasing his face from her gentle grip. “It is an insult to them not to be.”

She stepped past him and opened the door. “Build your castles strong, Robin,” she advised. “And let your friends help you build them high. Goodnight, my student. Your face is leaking.”

Robin sniffed and rubbed his eyes with the sleeve of his sweater as she closed the door behind her, holding the book tightly.

NYMPHS AND NEEDLEPOINT

Karya and Henry were perfectly civil to one another the following day when Henry appeared after school, and Robin, eager to keep the peace, made no further mention of the book about the Fae Guard.

However busy and preoccupied she may appear, not much that happened under Erlking’s roof escaped Aunt Irene’s notice. She had clearly noticed that he seemed preoccupied with the riddle of the Fae Guard and the mysterious cylinder which she and Karya were working to open.

Over dinner, between a course of devilled eggs, she lightly suggested that he put the business out of his mind for now. Answers would come when they came, she said. It was no good having every mind in the household fretting about the same things. Not when, as she stated, there was plenty of other, unattended fret to go around, which was in danger of being horribly neglected.

Buttering toast with a silver knife and peering at Robin in rather a firm way, she told him that no matter how impressive his Featherbreath had been at the lake, even he couldn’t turn over every stone in the past at once. Answers have a habit of appearing on their own, and until such time, Robin needed to focus instead on improving his studies.

Life fell into routine at Erlking for the next few weeks. Sultry July slid eventually into baking August. There was a hosepipe ban all across Britain as newspapers announced with feverish glee that it was the hottest summer on record in the last hundred years. Even at Erlking, a place far removed from the goings-on of the wider world, Mr Drover had stopped the fountains, and almost every window in the vast house was left open day and night, desperate for a cooling breeze.

Robin, taking both his tutor’s advice and his guardian’s instructions to heart, knuckled down to his lessons with Calypso.

On Mondays and Wednesdays, they met at the edge of the lake, just beyond the totems that marked the edge of Erlking’s influence. Calypso was teaching him combat and defensive magic during these classes. He soon found he could master Whippersnapper, which drew a thin whip of water from any nearby source, which one could wield as a weapon. This liquid whip was held in the hand but directed, he found, not with your muscles, but with your mana. He almost lost an eye more than once in the process of learning this, a development about which his tutor seemed typically unconcerned.

He also began to form basic ice spears, like the one she had shown to him on that first day. This was a cantrip Calypso called Needlepoint. Hers were uniformly delicate and deadly, formed in the hand in seconds and thrown with grace and expert precision, several of them able to pierce rather alarmingly through the entire trunk of a lakeside tree.

Robin, despite his best attempt, could not seem to grasp the shape at first. Drawing and bending his mana, he often found his hands filled either with sorry looking and crumbling slush, or delightfully cute and fluffy batons of compacted snow, which were universally acknowledged as being adorable, but which crumbled in mid-flight.

“Your problem, Scion…” Calypso said lightly one breezeless afternoon, when Robin was a panting heap standing ankle deep in a hill of grey snow. “ … Is that you are still trying to think your way around the Needlepoint. These are not your practical lessons in the atrium. We are not moving water from cup to cup with emotional focus and freedom. Such things are mindful tasks. They require an artistic song in the heart. Combat casting on the other hand calls for quick wits, quick reflexes and quicker decisions.”

The nymph had assured him at the end of the previous day’s lesson that he was well below age for the more aggressive spells. They would be starting out slow in the first few weeks of combat, with the basics. But standing here in the baking sunshine, his feet like ice in his own mini-snowdrift, Robin didn’t find this very comforting. His tutor seemed suddenly less like an elegant and serene water-spirit, and much more like a dangerously unhinged sociopath with no regard for personal safety. And she had instructed him this morning that they would be sparring. She would imminently be pelting Robin with dangerous magics.

“If you are ready,” she said, standing roughly ten paces from him along the shore. Her pale hair toyed around her shoulders, despite the lack of wind. “I think your advancement may come less from repeated drills, and more from instinct.” She curtsied. The gesture was old fashioned and odd. Robin hadn’t been very good at duelling with Phorbas, and he didn’t feel much better about this either.

“I’m ready … I think,” Robin said, returning a bow self-consciously.

“Very well,” Calypso smiled distantly. “We shall begin simply. I shall attempt to attack you. And you shall attempt to defend. To begin with, I shall tell you what I am going to cast. In a month’s time, I shall expect you to be proficient enough to anticipate my moves. Is this understood?”

Robin nodded nervously, trying to remember one of the defensive magics from his fervent last-minute study. To his silent horror, not only could he not remember the slightest inkling of the various counters to Needlepoint which she had told him of during previous lessons, but for some reason he found he had the jingle to some inane children’s nursery rhyme stuck in his head. ‘Round and round the garden, like a teddy bear. One step, two step … bury me under there’.

“I shall begin with a small Needlepoint attack,” she announced. “Not enough to kill, of course. Just enough to smart. How shall you defend yourself?”

“I’d duck if it was me,” called Henry with a grin from the safety of the nearby trees. Woad chuckled beside him. The boy and the faun had attended every lesson they could so far, in theory at least to ‘cheer Robin on’ although he secretly thought they just found it entertaining. They were both sitting well out of the line of fire. Henry eating a bag of crisps without a care in the world. Calypso frowned at them, as though she had forgotten they existed.

Robin tried to remember what she had told him about Needlepoint. It was quick and hard to dodge. These were the basics?

Calypso noticed his hesitation to answer.

“I see,” she said. “Well, the best way to learn is to show. Prepare yourself!”

Before Robin had time to ask how exactly to do that, his tutor turned and flicked her hand at him, as though shooing a fly away. The hot summer air between them chilled swiftly, and Robin was immediately hit solidly by a sharp jab of ice. It felt like a very strong, extremely cold finger slapping against his chest. He made an ungainly ‘oughhhha!’ noise and flew backwards, lifted off his feet, to land some distance back, sprawled on the pebbles of the shore.

Henry whooped and punched the air, unable to contain himself, but he had the decency to look abashed when Robin glared at him hotly.

“Hmm,” Calypso said thoughtfully, narrowing her eyes as Robin picked himself up off the ground, rubbing at the front of his T shirt painfully. He brushed ice crystals off it. His chest was numb with cold.

“Perhaps we need to start off a little slower still,” she mused. “That’s a little disappointing.”

“Perhaps?!” Robin wheezed, standing shakily, staring wide-eyed across at her. He could feel his cheeks burning with embarrassment.

“Needlepoint,” the nymph explained, “ … can vary in strength and shape. Had I thrown a larger one at you, it would have felt as though the entire front of your body had been hit with a javelin. As it is, I aimed a rather small Needlepoint at your chest, to test your resistance.”

“Thanks for that,” Robin huffed. Henry had stopped grinning and was now standing with his arms folded, waiting to see what would happen next.

“This time,” Calypso said helpfully. “Don’t fall down.”

Before Robin could argue, she span like a dervish, pale silks billowing and arm outthrust, her hair whipping out behind her. Once more, a slim lightning flash of ice whipped across the shore with a whoosh towards Robin.

It hit him hard in the right thigh, sending him spinning off balance and tumbling over once again to the ground heavily in a clatter of pebbles.

“Strike two!” observed Henry, eyebrows raised. “Bad luck!”

Woad grimaced, peeking through laced fingers. “Pinky got grazed,” he muttered darkly to himself. “A grazed butt is a shameful wound for a warrior.”

Robin glared at Calypso as pins and needles coursed through his leg. He had the feeling he was going to be covered with bruises before the morning was out. He had thought his last tutor had gone hard on him, but the nymph seemed positively intent on maiming him.

“How am I supposed to dodge it if it’s too fast to even see it?” he growled, picking himself up unsteadily. He glowered at Henry and Woad. “And you two can give it a rest as well!” he snapped, burning with embarrassment.

“One cannot ‘dodge’ a Needlepoint, Scion of the Arcania,” Calypso said mildly. “They move far too fast.”

“Well then, what am I supposed to do?” Robin snapped, rubbing gritty mud off his hands. The sun was baking the back of his neck, making him feel all hot and bothered.

“Well, there are various defences,” she replied, rolling a hand in the air speculatively. “It all depends on your proficiency. If you were skilled in the Tower of Earth for example, you could use earth magic and root yourself in the ground as solidly as an oak, but you are not. I am not wholly convinced you are even yet sufficiently trained in air. You must see the attack coming, and split the frozen current, as a rock divides a stream, so that the Needlepoint is shattered and flows around you, not through you. Observe.”

The nymph held her arms straight before her, palms pressed tightly together, as though she were praying, then she tilted her wrists so her fingertips were pointing towards Robin, then she flung his arms wide, her sleeves fluttering.

“You see?” she said. “You have to feel your mana focus. Use your stone.”

Robin repeated the move, feeling a little self-consciously, as though he were doing early morning tai-chi. The lake glittered in the sunlight behind him.

“How can I see it coming though?” he asked. “It’s too quick. Your ice moves like bullets from a gun.”

“You are looking with mortal eyes still, a lifetime’s habit. That will never do,” Calypso said breezily. “Humans go around with their eyes half closed all their lives. It’s a wonder they ever get anything done. Your problem, young Fae, is that you still think like a human.”

“I’ve only got these eyes, though!” Robin said in exasperation.

“Nonsense,” his tutor argued. “You were born in the Netherworlde, Robin Fellows, and so were those eyes in your head. You may have forgotten how to see, but remember this. Open your eyes, inside and out, and see as a Fae sees.”

They assumed fighting stances once again. Henry looked eagerly from one to the other. It was odd that of the two combatants poised before the glittering summer lake, the delicate, pale and willowy woman seemed by far the more dangerous.

Calypso cast another swift Needlepoint. The air between them parted with a whoosh of ice crystals.

Robin stared, focusing on his mana stone and his heart beating fast against it. He thrust his arms out and opened them wide, determined to stop the spear of ice …

… and welcomed it instead like a friendly hug.

Under the full force of it, he cannoned backwards, skittering down the pebbly beach, performing a swift and graceless backwards somersault, and coming to a breathless halt with a tremendous splash in the shallows of the lake.

Henry peered across at the prone figure lying spluttering in the water, a look of pained sympathy on his face.

“Three strikes … And you’re out, lad,” he said, wincing to himself. “Should I go get you some … ice?”

“What went wrong there do you imagine?” Calypso asked conversationally as Robin disentangled his limbs and fought shakily back to his feet, gasping. He was red in the face with frustration and anger. His clothes soaked and his blonde hair plastered to his face. The water was shockingly cold.

“I don’t know, do I?” he said ferociously. “I don’t have a clue what I’m doing, remember? There are no books on water magic. There’s nothing for me to study.” He spat water out of his mouth angrily. “At least with air magic there was some slim sense to it. This? I can’t even see your attacks.”

“You can,” Calypso said calmly to the drenched boy.

“I can’t!” Robin insisted. “I’m trying! Maybe you lot got the wrong changeling, I don’t know, but I am looking!” He was almost shouting.

“Steady on, Rob,” Henry said. Woad was looking a little concerned. He had taken a step behind Henry.

Robin knew it was bad form, and that he shouldn’t shout, especially not at his teacher, but he couldn’t help it. The anger was rising in him. Why on earth did everyone expect him to just be such a natural at these things?

“Don’t look for it,” Calypso snapped, a sudden gleam in her eyes. “See it!” Without warning she dropped into fighting stance again.

Robin’s anger flared. He was not going to be flattened again. Enough was enough. He hadn’t ever asked for any of this. He was about to open his mouth to shout something to the demented nymph, to make her stop, when suddenly he saw … something … leave his tutor’s hands. It was a spear of ice, white and insubstantial, but clearly visible against the morning light. The javelin of pale glittering light, no thicker or longer than a broom handle, left the woman’s hands and flashed across the pebbles, spinning rapidly towards him.