Nine #2
I tilted my head back, looking higher. The smoky golden flame atop the torch was beginning to burn steadily whiter and whiter, the color bleeding away as the flame from my candle crept up the wood to join it. In a matter of seconds, the whole torch was burning white as frost or rime.
I pulled my candle back, anxiously checking to be sure that its flame hadn’t changed. It was still white and steady, unwavering. I looked up again. The torch continued burning white.
“Tybalt,” I said, voice hushed. “Get the next one.”
He nodded and moved briskly to the next torch, repeating my impulsive action with more-considered care. Again, the white flame from the candle crept up the torch until it had consumed the fire at the top, leaving it burning steady as snowfall.
The two torches crackled. And the wood between them groaned.
It bowed inward, and for a moment, I thought the wall was collapsing.
The groaning continued, and I realized it was doing anything but.
It wasn’t collapsing. It was opening, a previously concealed door swinging inward and ripping away what seemed like years of moss and weathering in the process, tearing them out by the roots when necessary.
The white-flamed torches leapt ever higher, straining toward the moonless sky, and the wall swung open, revealing a darkened passage into the unknown.
I looked at Tybalt, and shrugged. “This seems normal,” I said, and resumed walking, moving forward into the dark. After a momentary pause, no doubt to question why he had married a madwoman to begin with, Tybalt followed.
The wall, with uncommon consideration for something this inanimate, waited until we were safely on the other side before it started swinging shut again.
The dark beyond proved to be more of the same, hardpacked earth leading off into the distance, but now surrounded by scrubby grass and low-slung bushes rather than thorns.
The wall sealed itself with a loud thump, and we kept walking, cresting a low ridge to see the trees spread out ahead of us, still thorn-free, dense with leaves and blocking out all light beneath them.
They looked nothing like they had the first time I’d seen them, but I still shuddered, remembering them bare and skeletal and clawing at the sky.
I had almost become a part of that forest, once, skin roughening into bark and feet lengthening into roots, and I’m not a fan of being transformed against my will.
Still, I got better, freed by the Lady of these woods, and it was her we’d come to see.
Tybalt, who had never actually been in Blind Michael’s lands before, strange as that was to contemplate, pressed closer to me as we walked, eyes darting uneasily around the blackened landscape. “Where are we?” he asked.
“You know where we are,” I said, as far in the distance, a hunting horn rang out.
The sound rolled across the landscape with unnatural ease, growing louder as it echoed on, and only seemed to fade when it had filled every inch of the world.
It was an unsettling noise, and it made the hair on my arms and the back of my neck stand on end, reminding me of what it had been like to stumble into this skerry as nothing more than prey for the man who ruled here, whose hunters would happily run me to ground.
“Am I a fool if I say I had hoped that his lady might brighten the place up a bit in his absence?” asked Tybalt.
“Oh, she has,” I said. “They have actual sheets in the bedrooms now, and everything. Come on.”
We kept walking, reaching and passing the edge of the forest, so that we were surrounded on all sides by trees. Paradoxically, that made me feel better. If we could see the trees, the trees could see us, and if the trees could see us, Acacia could see us. She knew we were here.
The hunting horn sounded again, closer this time, although it was hard to say for sure how close, with the way the landscape was designed to refract and distort sounds. Blind Michael missed a lucrative career as a groundskeeper, is what I’m saying.
Things rustled in the underbrush and high in the branches. Tybalt narrowed his eyes, tracking the sounds.
“These aren’t normal woodland creatures,” he said finally.
“In a skerry constructed by a furious and grieving Firstborn? You don’t say.”
He stopped walking and sighed, forcing me to turn if I didn’t want to lose sight of him.
“I know you’re stressed right now,” he said. “I’m not happy either. But if you could refrain from responding to everything I say with sarcasm, I would appreciate it. I’ve had my own dealings with the Firstborn, many of them before your birth. I’m not a kitten lost in the woods here.”
“No, you’re not, and I don’t mean to treat you like one,” I said, and took a deep breath, trying to unruffle my own nerves. “I know you’ve done your own share of shit, I promise I do. I’m just anxious as all hell, and I’m dealing with it the way I always do.”
“Sarcasm and sniping at your allies?” asked Tybalt. “I begin to understand why so much of the nobility is eternally annoyed with you.”
I shot him a sharp look. “Hey. I’m trying.”
“I know you are,” he said. “And I knew who you were when I married you. I simply wish you would try to remember that we’re a team in this, and we want the same things.”
“I know,” I said. “I guess it’s just a little strange to me that you’ve never been here before.”
“And I would that you had never been here, either,” he said fervently. “This is no place for a hero.”
“Who else is going to do the job?” I asked, with a shrug.
“Even so,” he said.
“Blind Michael’s gone, but that doesn’t undo the harm he did,” I said, and started walking again.
This time, Tybalt moved with me, the two of us proceeding once more through the darkness.
“It never does. So hey. I know you knew the frozen lady, and I know you know Mom. What other Firstborn have you been holding out on me?”
He hesitated before he said, “Most are no longer any true concern, having gone to ground eternally, and others may have been like our Captain Pete, masquerading as other than they are. Not every tale is mine to tell.”
“Still. If you’ve known so many Firstborn, there must be one you’re not afraid to name.
” Names have power. We call the Firstborn by titles, call them “Rose of Winter” or “Last Among the First” or “Mother of Sharks,” all so we can avoid attracting their direct attention.
Sometimes, like with Eira, we’re afraid enough of them that even the titles carry too much risk.
Tybalt sighed again, this time with resignation, and said, with surprising fondness, “Her name was Hirsent. She was called the Following Fire, and she was—”
“The First among the Reynard,” I said, surprised. “Even Chelsea knows that. You met her?”
“More than met her,” he said. “I did her a service, once, and tricked her into doing me another. She promised after our second meeting that I would direly regret a third. I took her at her word, and have not sought her since. If we’ve met since then, she wore another face at the time, and she has not yet taken her revenge upon me.
But she was a creature of wilds and fen, and spoke fondly of Blind Michael in his younger days, before he suffered as so many of Maeve’s children did, and turned himself to a monster for the sake of Titania’s machinations. ”
“Wow,” I said. “I never heard anyone say Hirsent was still alive.”
“But did you hear them say that she had died?”
I had to shake my head at that. “No. No one ever seemed to know much of anything about her, and I thought I’d be able to live a normal life, with no Firstborn in it at all, so I didn’t go asking a lot of unnecessary questions. This was before I knew about Mom, obviously.”
“Obviously,” he agreed.
“But most people don’t need to worry about opening the door and finding a Firstborn child of the Three on their porch. It’s not supposed to be a risk anymore.”
“No. But alas, it seems we must live in unsupposed times.”
I eyed him. “Is that a word?”
“As once William, so now shall I.”
I rolled my eyes, and kept on walking.
The trees didn’t thin so much as they abruptly stopped, leaving us standing at the wood’s edge looking out upon a vast clearing filled with buildings like the giant wooden blocks of a child.
They were scattered wildly around the area, with no rational spacing or placement to speak of.
Most were low to the ground, with thatched roofs: the stables.
A few were taller, solid stone from foundation to eaves, and those were the living spaces for the bipedal members of the court.
At the center of it all was a broken stone courtyard, surrounded by the shattered walls of some larger hall, standing in irregular ranks, where a vast bonfire burned.
I paused to survey the space, looking for signs of a struggle—or possibly an ambush; this was Blind Michael’s territory, after all, and while the man was gone, the magic still remained.
Nothing moved or caught my eye, and so I started walking again, heading for the fire.
“Are you so sure she’ll see us?” asked Tybalt, hurrying to keep up with me.
“She knows we’re here,” I said, with a conviction I didn’t fully feel. “She’ll either be here waiting, or she’ll have sent word for whoever’s tending the fire to help us with whatever it is we need. Trust me.”
“I do hate it when you say such confident things,” he said. “It always reminds me of how quickly things can go entirely wrong.”
“I love you too,” I said. “I’m glad you have such faith in me.”
He didn’t say anything, but if he’d been feline enough to flatten his ears, I had the distinct impression that he would have done precisely that.