The Immortal Realm (4 page)

They came to the spot where Tania and Edric had stood just a few brief hours ago.

Night shadows mantled the land, but the Faerie starlight was bright enough for Tania to see a pathway that led down the cliffs. “I'll go first,” she said. “Please be careful.”

As she began to descend, she turned her head back so that she could keep Mallory in sight. It was tricky, especially in the half-light, and the occasional loose stone went rolling away under her foot.

Mallory gave a sharp cry as she almost lost her footing, her arms tightening around her swaddled child.

Tania stepped up toward her. “May I carry him for you?”

“No, my lady Princess,” Mallory murmured, holding him closer.

“Call me Tania.”

Mallory gave her a bleak look. “No, Tania, thank you. He will be taken from me soon enough; I would hold him in my arms a while longer.”

“Of course,” Tania said, her heart aching for the poor, brave woman.

At last they came down onto a narrow shingle beach
confined within the broken teeth of black surf-washed rocks. The waves came hissing in over the shingle, white foam boiling among the stones.

They sat together in the shingle, the tall cliffs at their backs and the restless sea in front of them.

 

The night went on forever. There was the pitiless darkness. There was the black cliff at their backs. There was the chill salt wind off the sea and the cold light of stars, far away and uncaring.

But above all there was Mallory's agony.

Sometimes the bereaved young mother was so silent and still that Tania felt the need to check that she was still breathing. At other times sobs wracked Mallory's body and Tania held her until the tears soaked through her gown. She would forlornly shift the dead child on her lap as if making sure he was comfortable, tucking the satin in around his small body, caressing his cheeks with her fingertips.

But slowly Tania saw that the tide was receding, the waves falling back to reveal a beach of rippled gray sand beyond the shingle banks.

“It is time,” Mallory said softly.

Tania felt it, too. Although the sky was as dark as ever, she sensed that a change had come, as if a stifling veil had been drawn away to allow clean, fresh air into the world.

Mallory walked a little way down the beach then stooped and laid her satin-swaddled child in the sand.

Tania shivered as she saw the baby lying there, but it was not the cold that made her tremble, it was the thought that such a beautiful spirit, such a
new life
, should have been so mercilessly snuffed out.

Mallory stepped back, reaching her hand out to Tania.

Together, clasping hands, they stood in silence, looking down at the rounded satin bundle.

Tania could not have said when it started, but she was suddenly aware that the air was filled with the soft singing of a high-pitched voice.

Away across the sea to the west the long line of the horizon glowed with a pure white light.

The small voice sang an aching bittersweet melody that climbed and climbed until it reached a pitch that Tania could no longer hear. She was aware of a shimmering all around her, a tingling on her skin, as though the air still vibrated with the inaudible refrain.

Mallory let out a soft sigh.

Tania looked down.

The baby was gone, his satin coverings lying in flattened folds in the sand.

Dawn had arrived. Gyvan had been called to Avalon.

Mallory looked into Tania's face. “Thank you,” she said. “I could not have borne this night alone.” She picked up the empty satin bundle, holding it to her face and breathing in the scent of it. “He is gone—gone to the Long Home of the fallen. Mayhap the Princess Zara will watch over him for me.”

“She will,” Tania said, her throat thick with emotion. “I know she will.”

Mallory began to weep again, pressing her face into the folds of white satin. Tania touched her shoulder, waiting for the sobs to fade.

“Would you like to go back now?” she asked at last. “Or would you rather stay here for a while?”

“I will stay for a little while longer, but you must go.”

Tania gave Mallory a final brief hug then made her way up the shingle to the cracked face of the cliff, looking for the path that had brought them down.

She began to climb. She felt strangely calm, as
though the dawn had washed her clean of the desolation that she had felt all through the long night. And, strangest of all, she didn't feel in the least bit tired. She ought to have been exhausted.

A cloaked figure was awaiting her on the cliff top.

It was Rathina, her beautiful, dark-haired sister, her red gown swathed in a cloak of midnight blue. “This was a night as long as aeons,” Rathina said heavily. “How fares the sorrowful lady?”

Tania looked back down to the beach. Mallory was a small forlorn figure, sitting now in the shingle with the satin cloth bundled in her arms.

“I'm not sure,” she said. She looked into Rathina's wide hazel eyes. “I thought we'd got rid of everything horrible when the Sorcerer King was killed.”

“As did we all,” Rathina replied. “It is fearful indeed to think that the Hag-Queen can sit in her foul castle and cast evil upon us over so many a wide league of ocean. And who shall she ensnare next with her witchery?” She held her cloak open. “But come, Tania, you look chilled to the bone.”

Tania stepped into the warming shelter of her sister's arm. “Can Father do anything to stop her?” she asked.

“Let us hope so,” Rathina replied. “Our mother and father are mighty in power, Tania. They must prevail, surely? Fie! 'Tis unthinkable that they will not!”

“I hope you're right.”

They turned and walked arm-in-arm along the grassy hilltop, the light growing around them, washing
the world with fresh color.

“Sister, are we friends again now?” Rathina asked quietly. “Am I forgiven my madness?”

Tania looked compassionately at her.

For sure there was a lot to forgive Rathina for. Stupefied by her unrequited love for the treacherous Gabriel Drake, she had unleashed the Sorcerer King of Lyonesse and set events in motion that had culminated in mayhem and warfare and the death of many innocent folk, including that of their own sister Zara. Some amends had been made when Rathina had cut Gabriel Drake down in the great battle, but it was still hard for people not to look at her with judgmental eyes.

Tania was one of the few who truly understood Rathina's agony. She also had gazed into Drake's hypnotic eyes, and she had felt the power of his mind tightening like a venomous snake around her will. And Tania also knew the self-loathing that was gnawing away at Rathina. To live with the knowledge of what she had done was terribly hard.

She squeezed Rathina's arm. “You are completely forgiven,” she said. “By me, at least.”

“But not by others?”

Tania gave a rueful smile. “Give them time.”

Rathina sighed.

They came to the crest of the hill and walked on toward a final ridge, beyond which the land fell sharply away into the valley of Leiderdale.

“Do you not have news for me to lighten the burden of this sad day?” Rathina asked.

Tania frowned at her. “I'm sorry?”

“Voices whisper it abroad that Edric Chanticleer asked for your hand in marriage yestereve.” She squeezed Tania's arm. “A bold knave to act so without seeking permission of the King and Queen—but mayhap the time he spent in the Mortal World addled his sense of propriety.”

“People are
talking
about that?” Tania asked uneasily. “Oh,
great
! That's all I needed.”

“It is good tidings, Tania.”

“No, actually, it isn't.”

“How so?”

“I turned him down.” The sun climbed out of the ocean as they walked along, its light sending their shadows streaming away over the olive hills.

Rathina turned, her eyes narrowed against the bright dawn. “Sweet sister, I strive to understand your strange modes of speech,” she said. “But I confess I do not know what you mean. What is ‘turned him down'?”

“I said no.”

Rathina stopped in her tracks and gasped. “You refused him? Why would you do such a thing, Tania? I thought him the love of your life.”

“He
is
,” Tania said. “Of course he is.”

“And yet you would not wed him? What perversity of your nature is this, to love and yet to refute wedlock?”

“Not you, too!” Tania exclaimed, walking on so quickly that Rathina had difficulty keeping up with
her. “I'm not
refuting
anything. I'm sure that in a few years time I'll be totally up for it, but right now getting married is the last thing on my mind. I'm too
young
, Rathina.”

“But you were betrothed to…to
another
,” Rathina said, her voice faltering over the name of Gabriel Drake. “You were to be wed on your sixteenth birthday.”

“That wasn't
me
,” Tania said. “Well, it
was
me, but not the me that I am now. I don't remember the girl who agreed to marry Drake. I hardly know anything about her.” She touched her hand to her forehead. “Part of me in here is still a sixteen-year-old girl from West London. Where I grew up, people don't usually get married that young.”

“Do Mortals not experience love in youth, then?” Rathina asked.

On a better day Tania could almost have laughed at that. “They experience plenty of love,” she said. “People my age fall in and out of love all the time. If everyone married the first person they were crazy about, the divorce rate would skyrocket!”

“Tania! Use language properly, for pity's sake!”

“If teenagers married the first person they fell in love with, most relationships would be guaranteed to break down,” Tania explained. “Don't people in Faerie fall out of love?”

Rathina gave her a long, slow look. “No, Tania, they do not.”

“You're kidding me!”

“I speak nothing but the truth.”

“Wow! That's incredible.” Tania stared at her sister as a sudden awful thought struck her. “But that would mean…” She stopped. What she had been about to say was too dreadful even to consider. If the people of Faerie never stopped loving, then Rathina must surely still love Gabriel Drake—despite all the harm he had done to her and to Faerie and despite the fact that she had ended his life with a thrust of her sword.

Rathina's eyes burned with a deep agony. “Love never dies in Faerie, Tania,” she said. “Never.”

“Oh,
Rathina
…” Tania couldn't bear to think that her sister would be trapped in such misery for all eternity. “You'll fall in love again. I know you will. You must.”

Rathina lifted her fingers to Tania's lips. “Hush, now.” She turned, hiding her face from Tania, but her cracking voice betrayed her desolation. “We will not speak of it.”

Below them, silent and sad, lay the valley of Leiderdale with its clusters of tents.

“Look now,” Rathina said. “We are come to the brink of Leiderdale. Let us attend upon our mother and father in the Royal Pavilion. Mayhap it will be that the King has good tidings for us. Mayhap he has already conceived a method to throw back the ill-wishes of Lyonesse.”

 

The Royal Pavilion was full of ivory light—more light than could be explained by the rising sun, invisible
still beyond the western hills. The canvas walls of the great tent were hung with tapestries, the intricate needlework depicting beautiful Faerie landscapes: mountains, waterfalls, rivers, and rolling downs, flowered meadows, forests, and heather-clad heaths—peaceful scenes that seemed to Tania to be cruelly at odds with the somber gathering.

The floor was strewn with cushions set in a wide ring, and at the end of the pavilion farthest from the entrance, three low wooden chairs were set up. On two of these chairs sat King Oberon and Queen Titania. Earl Valentyne of Mynwy Clun sat in the third, a slender crystal stick gripped in one hand, his wife, the Princess Eden, standing at his side. Next to them were the King's brother, Earl Marshal Cornelius, with his wife, Marchioness Lucina, and his two stepsons.

All of Tania's sisters were there: Hopie with her tall, bearded husband, Lord Brython; slender, bookish Sancha; Cordelia with her new husband at her side; and Rathina, of course, seated close beside Tania.

“The news is both good and ill,” Oberon began. “The earl and I have spent a burdensome night of endeavor upon the high hills, and we have discerned no trace of the sorceries of Lyonesse.”

“Not Lyonesse, then?” said Sancha, her face pale and her dark eyes anxious between the eaves of her long chestnut hair. “But then, who?”

“Who indeed,” came Valentyne's timeworn voice. “What other enemies have we? I know of none.”

“Your pardon, my lords and ladies,” Bryn said
awkwardly as he stood up. “Have you considered that the evil might come from Weir? We have it from Princess Tania's own lips that the Great Traitor Drake visited his father in Caer Liel in the days when the Sorcerer King was in the ascendancy—and that Lord Aldritch agreed to do nothing to aid the House of Aurealis in the coming battle. Might Weir have sent this deadly bane upon us as revenge for the death of his only son?”

“Lord Aldritch is no sorcerer,” said Eden. “And even had he the Arts to do this, I do not believe that he would stoop to such devices.”

“Weir is not a traitor,” said the Queen, leaning forward in her chair. “I have spoken with him in a water-mirror; he repents his son's deeds and curses the day he first became embroiled in the Dark Arts.”

“Indeed, all who dabble in that sinister brume are lost,” Hopie agreed. “But we must not blame the father for the deeds of the son.”

“Excuse me,” Tania said, lifting her hand. “I remember so little about this world, but is it really
impossible
that the child simply got a fever and died of it?”

Earl Valentyne frowned deeply. The King and Queen shook their heads, and there were murmurs and furrowed brows from the others.

“Such a thing has not happened since the Great Awakening,” said Earl Valentyne, his knuckles whitening as he gripped his stick. “Yes, I believe that it is impossible.”

“That's the second time I've heard a reference to the Great Awakening,” Tania said. “I know I'm supposed to understand what it means, but I don't. What is it?”

Eden stepped forward and rested her hand on Tania's head. “I shall show it to you,” she said. “Open your mind and behold the nativity of our land.”

 

For a few disorienting moments Tania felt as though she had been plunged into the heart of a whirlwind. Gasping for breath, she spun through oceans of gyrating air.

Then, quite suddenly, she found herself standing on a wooden quay overlooking a flat blue ocean. She turned and saw that she was among a great crowd of Faerie folk all gathered on the quayside and gazing out to sea. Behind the crowd stood long walls, and beyond them were towers and steeples of red brickwork decorated in cream-colored stone and pierced by a hundred shining windows.

The high battlements and great buildings stretched away into the distance, following the line of a wide river that wound its way deep into the land.

It's the Royal Palace! And I know exactly where I am. I'm on Fortrenn Quay at the estuary of the River Tamesis.

But everything seemed brighter and fresher than she remembered—as if the palace had only just been built, as though the long boards of the quay had only recently been put down, as if the sea was washing up against the land for the very first time, as if everything
around her was brand-new.

There was something unreal about her surroundings. She felt dislocated from them, as if she was watching events through a thin veil. Although she was standing on the wooden boards of the quay, she had the sensation of floating; she could feel nothing under her feet.

“The white ship!” came a voice. “The white ship comes!”

Tania gazed out over the shining sea.

A shape on the very edge of sight: a swan riding the distant waves. No, not a swan. A ship: a galleon in full sail, a galleon that shone like the moon.

“The
Cloud Scudder
,” Tania murmured.

She knew the Royal Galleon well, with its spars and masts and rigging of shining silver and with decks and rails of pearly white. She had been aboard the
Cloud Scudder
on a night when Zara had whistled up a fine wind to fill the sails and when Oberon and Eden had sung a song that had set them sailing into the sky to the enchanted island of Logris.

And more recently it had been the
Cloud Scudder
that had brought her and her sisters to Leiderdale for Cordelia's wedding.

But the
Cloud Scudder
looked different: newer, brighter than she remembered. As bright as if its keel had only just been laid and as if its sails were unfurling for the very first time.

The galleon moved with a stately grace but so quickly that it might have been driven by storm winds.
It was soon gliding alongside the quay, pouring its silver light on the upturned faces of the people who lined the waterside.

Tania noticed that the ship had no visible crew. There was no one on the decks, no sailors in the rigging, no hand at the wheel. And yet the phantom ship came gently to rest with hardly a bump against the quay, and a few moments later a long gangplank slid from the high bulwarks.