The Fisherman's Daughter (4 page)

He… they could kill me,
Meiri realizes. She relaxes in surrender. “You’re kind. I may be simple, but I’m not stupid. I’m at your mercy.”

Desdemona turns to her daughter and kneels beside her, hugging her. “Not too much longer,” she says. “We’ll get you a real home soon.”

“And you’ll visit me there like you do now?” Leera asks.

Desdemona doesn’t answer more than to squeeze Leera’s hand. “Tal, it’s time they go.”

Tal Harun raises his wand once more, and the sliver of light appears in the air and widens. “Our sanctuary home,” he says. “Go with Pedgeley and Leera and hide there. I’ll pull you out when we leave the city. It may be a few days.”

Leera skips over to Meiri and takes her hand. “I like visits!” she says. “This’ll be fun!”

The goblin, presumably Pedgeley, gestures for her to enter with a look in his eyes that says,
If you try anything untoward, it will go very badly for you.
Of this, Meiri has no doubt. She’s at the mercy of wizards, and magic, and she knows she’s in over her head.

Leera guides her and Pedgeley through the floating rift, and Meiri looks back at the two wizards, catching one last glimpse as the rift snaps shut behind the goblin.

Meiri looks around and gasps. This is not at all what she expected.

She stands in a room filled with tables and shelves holding piles and piles of lacquered ceramic and wooden dolls, stacked so high that for the most part all she can see are faces upon faces staring at her. The dolls might have been endearing individually, but something about the way they surround her on all sides makes her hair stand on edge.

Leera runs over to the dolls and pulls two from the pile. “Play with me,” she says. Then she pauses. She drops one. “Oh, Elsey’s bleeding again. Maybe another one can play.” She goes to a corner of the room and starts fussing through a different stack.

Pedgeley eyes Meiri. His round golden eyes stare out from a long, stretched face, with twigs and leafs growing out of his cheeks and eyebrows. His lips purse as he studies Meiri’s reaction. He stands between mounds of staring dolls, in front of a window looking out to a sickly blue sky. For a moment, his eyes dart to the discarded doll on the floor.

Meiri approaches the thing. She stares down at the painted white face lying at her feet, discarded like an innocent children’s toy. “Bleeding?” she murmurs aloud.

“Pick it up and see,” Pedgeley whispers.

She bends down and takes the doll in hand. Its eyes are painted, and the doll smiles at her. The pupils seem to recede into darkness, and she wonders if they’re painted or hollowed. She slowly moves the doll closer, caught in its gaze. She holds it closer, inch by inch, until it seems she’s swimming in those pupils. Somewhere deep within, it almost looks as if there are floating rubies, spinning and glinting with the dimmest of wicked light. It must be hollow, but what trick of light makes it so difficult to determine?

She peers closer, her gazed fixed in an unblinking stare. She can’t pull away, and it seems as if the whites of the eyes start to waver and float ever so slightly back and forth past their edges over the doll’s face. They ooze smears of blood, pooling from the rims of her eyes as the white edges shimmer. The blood trickles and falls down the dress over Meiri’s fingers.

The doll blinks and giggles.

Meiri shrieks and drops it to the ground. The toy thuds on her foot and rolls to the side. It lies lifeless, its eyes once again simply painted. There’s no strange depth to the pupils, and the whites are solid and still.
My mind is playing tricks on me?
The doll’s dress is clean, free of blood, but red stains smear its cheeks, proving what she just saw was not her imagination. Meiri steps away, but no matter which way she moves she stands closer to one of the surrounding piles of staring, grinning faces. She clenches her fists, fighting a rising panic, and feels stickiness on her fingers. She looks down and sees blood smearing her hands.

Pedgeley grins at her discomfort. “This is why we must find a home for Leera. A real home.”

“What is this place?” she gasps. “Is
this
the home they built for her daughter?”

“It wasn’t always this way,” the goblin answers. “Sanctuary gives the occupant what they need to comfort them. Food. Drink. Even toys for a child.”

“But…
this
?!”

“They were not always such. Nor so many. But Sanctuary has been kept solid too long. It stretches thin. When a doll grows sick, no longer fit to comfort a child, the spell produces a new one, trying to meet Leera’s need.” He gestures to the piles of the things. “This is a place of magic. It’s not
real.
Not in the way you would think.”

“It’s more real than us,” Leera says. She sits in the corner with two of her dolls, making up conversations between them. She’s not focused on Meiri or Pedgeley, but shakes one doll as if it speaks to the other. “It’s sad because Daddy’s sad.”

Meiri tries not to stare too long lest she make eye contact with one of the toys. The idea of them coming to life and blinking—and
giggling
—sends chills down her spine and raises the hairs on her arms.

“Come to the window,” the goblin says.

Meiri does as he says, taking care to not step too close to any of the dolls. She sees grass, thick and browning, stretching to the horizon. The sky is blue close to the house, but it stretches forward into darkness. At the horizon, even though farther than she should be able to see, she can make out a castle of black bone, with pale blue light seeping from its seams.

“Sanctuary gives the guests what they need,” the goblin repeats, “but this spell has been sustained too long. This sort of magic also reflects the soul of its creator, and a knot of guilt festers at the center of Tal Harun’s soul.”

“Guilt? Over—?”

Pedgeley’s eyes flicker to Leera.

“Oh.”

“It spreads and grows over time and has crept into the fabric of this place. The dolls hide it less and less, and sometimes I think too much magic pools within them.” Pedgeley stretches and holds his hands up, fingers resting on the windowsill next to his nose as he peers out towards the bone castle. “At first, there was only this place, in the Void. A house, and a beach with cool breezes. It reflected their love for each other. He called it
a
sanctuary, but for me, Sanctuary has become its name. One day he will release me from service, and I can return to Ahmbren.” The goblin then murmurs, “Or maybe journey to the Otherworld…”

“What will happen if he doesn’t find Leera a home?” Meiri asks.

“He will. This place…” The goblin trails off for a moment, and then his voice scratches deeper, losing its wistful tone. “This place grows sour, and I fear it will endure long beyond Tal Harun’s need of it. He has attracted the attention of a dark power in the Void.” He points to the castle of bone. “An ancient evil sits on a dark throne. Corruption crystalizes around Sanctuary, and I fear a new land is born here. There is a tension born between Sanctuary and that throne, and it will only grow and rot. I fear that through this place, whatever sits on that throne may even learn of Ahmbren. The greater its influence spreads around Sanctuary, the closer we draw to that throne, the more time here warps and stretches.”

“What is that throne? Who sits there?”

The goblin shakes his head.

Leera comes up beside them. “The Dark Citadel. That’s the bad place.” She stands on her tiptoes and peeks out alongside Pedgeley. “I don’t ever want to go there, but sometimes I dream there’s a man with wings and shadows, and he wants me.”

“Guilt festers here,” the goblin says again. “Remember that, when you find your new life. Choice has a price to it.”

Meiri stares in silence at the bone castle that looms in the distance.

The fissure of light reopens in the air behind them. Tal Harun calls out, “Come, it is time.”

Meiri needs no prompting to get away from the sinister dolls. She steps through the rift and out into a warm, sunny day a few miles outside the city.

“You too,” Tal Harun prompts. Leera and Pedgeley follow into the daylight. The rift closes behind them with a whisper.

Meiri tenses. Tal Harun is not alone. He stands with a score of others, foreigners by the looks of them. They remind her of Desdemona, carrying the same air of confident curiosity. They must be Artalonians.

“The ministers for the new school,” Tal Harun explains, seeing her look.

“Already?”

The wizard chuckles. “You’ve been gone for weeks. Time passes differently in the sanctuary spell.”

The goblin snorts. “He won’t call it Sanctuary yet. It’s still temporary to him.”

Tal Harun regards the twiggy fae. “
You
give it permanence by naming it, and I do not. We are done with that place. Leera will go with them to the school, and you are released.”

Pedgeley shoots Meiri a glance. A grin spreads across his face, replacing the look that says,
He is blind to his own folly,
and the goblin vanishes.

Meiri doesn’t want to wait with these people any longer. She’s had about enough of magic to last a lifetime.

“Farewell,” she says, and walks off the road into the southern woodlands of Sutonia. Tal Harun doesn’t chase after her. He made good on his promise, and she wants to get off roads that might carry more slavers from Fairholm. They won’t be wandering the woods in search of quarry, and she decides she’d rather risk stepping into elven realms than go back into bondage or death…

…even if the shaman’s whisperings seem to follow her.

Meiri walks for days. The woods are bountiful and she grew up here, so she has no problem finding food. Berries, roots, and nuts won’t satisfy her long, though, and she cautiously enters one of the riverside villages. Like hers, it’s been burned and clouds of flies frenetically circle around dead bodies strewn over the ground. The fire didn’t take everything, and there is enough untouched that she can rummage for tools. Now armed with a water skin, spear, and fishing net, she steps back into the woods and continues north.

She’s not sure where she’s going. With each passing village razed, she realizes she won’t be able to build a life here. The human community is destroyed, and she’ll need to journey far to find another. But where is safe? And she can’t leave without looking on her home one last time.

After more than ten days, she returns to the familiar nooks and crannies of shoreline she grew up with. She’s strangely numb as she walks through the cold ash of her village. Bodies have rotted and been picked clean. She wonders how long it’s been since she was here, for she lost track of time in her months as a slave. She stays for three days before deciding to move on.

North. She knows she goes farther away from human lands and risks intruding on elven territory, but if she stays close to the shore she won’t enter their forest. She remembers tales that if she travels to the northernmost reaches of Fair Lake, and then keeps going even farther, she’ll find another shore. And then if she follows that shore even father until she’s past even the northern reaches of the Sutonian Woods, she’ll come to an expanse of plains, and beyond them there will be mountains. It is said that there are free human settlements there, far removed from the reach of any city or its army.

She passes the old temple, giving it a wide berth. That night she dreams again of the mud-caked shaman, with his white face paint, whispering…
You are meant for the fair folk.

She wakes suddenly. It is still night. The moon peeks down through the thin canopy of leaves. Then she smells it. Incense and something else, a sweet scent she recognizes.
Faerie’s Breath
. The mountain flower that produces the white nectar called Malahkma’s Milk, a poison that rules the lives of those who taste it. And ghostfish liver.
The ghost trance is the only way to safely meet them.

She sits up and looks around. She’s still alone, and her sleep site has not been disturbed as far as she can tell.

The woods are strangely silent, and then she hears it. Soft chanting, not too far away. And then she sees lights.

It’s not the glow of fire that she might expect. Green and purple, gentle hues that swell through the foliage and cast dancing shadows over her clearing.

You are meant for the fair folk.

Run away!

But she can’t. She’s fascinated by the light, and the chanting… and the echoes of faraway music that rise and stirs a longing in her soul.

No one has seen an elf.
Have the shamans been truthful in their claims? Have they been communing with the sidhe?
The ghost trance is the only way to safely meet them.
A peek can’t hurt.

She can’t help herself. She creeps forward, towards the sound and light, wanting to see the fabled beauty that few humans ever have.

Four shamans sit together in a circle, cross-legged, and each face is twisted in a rictus of ecstasy. Their eyes are milky, and she can tell they’re in the throes of a ghostfish-induced trance.

All four shamans open their eyes and snap their heads towards her, hissing in unison,
“Tresssspasssserrrrr!”

She bolts upright and then stumbles to the ground, tripping over something behind her. She pushes herself to her feet again, ready to run, but stops breathless at the sight of the two most deliciously gorgeous men she’s ever seen, dressed in purple robes, sleeveless with flowing skirts. They must be gods.

Both have long, straight hair, one brown, the other red. Fair of skin, with porcelain features and long ears sweeping twice the length of their heads into soft points, they stare at her in surprise.

The red-haired one’s eyes seize upon her. The brown-haired one sucks in a quick breath, eyes wide in fear, and his countenance darkens. He looks as if he’s about to strike her when the other leaps forward and seizes her shoulders. “She’s mine!” the red-haired one declares. “I must have her!”

The shamans grow silent and watch.

She tries to resist but he’s too strong. Or her heart’s not in the struggle. She can’t tell which. “Let me go,” she breathes.