Chapter Twelve
“They intercepted a pigeon fairy heading to the mountain at the edge of the realm.” Derran explained what his raven fairies had found. “Flying alone. Odd look on him. Absent. Fixed. Like he was obeying a command he’d lost the mental fortitude to question.”
He pulled out a scrap of marsh silk and unwrapped it. Two large diamonds lay there.
“He had these?” Ina breathed.
Derran nodded. “In his satchel.”
“He stole them?”
“I doubt it,” Derran said, shaking his head now. “He didn’t fight the ravens. He didn’t even seem guilty. Only… confused, they said. And, when they pressed him, he said that Prince Lugomir himself had given him the stones and told him to carry them into the cavern.”
“The cavern?” Ina raised an eyebrow.
Derran did not meet her eyes. “Yes, the cavern. It’s a place of legend, though we fairies know it well enough in tale and warning as a place we don’t visit. Well, unless we’ve lost our senses entirely. Or been driven there at knife-point.”
He muttered something else under his breath, and Ina thought she heard a curse in it, though could not be sure. She did not bother asking him to repeat himself while more pressing questions awaited.
“He said Lugo gave them to him?”
Derran nodded. “With perfect certainty.”
“That makes no sense.”
“None at all,” agreed Karai.
The three of them stood around the table.
The two diamonds lay between them, bright and innocent-looking and wholly out of place on the plain wood.
They were unmistakably part of the necklace.
The cut matched. The size matched. Even to Ina’s untrained eye they belonged to Jasenka’s gift and nowhere else.
“The pigeon fairy remembered nothing odd about it?” she asked.
Derran shook his head. “Nothing. Not the cavern. Not the necklace. Not that a marsh prince would hand him jewels meant for his bride and send him off alone.”
Karai looked at the stones, then said, “Mirage magic.”
Derran’s eyes lifted to him. He gave one short nod. “Must be. Though I haven’t heard of anything so powerful in a long time.”
“Nor I,” murmured Karai. “Not for many years. There was only one fairy I knew, long ago, who could do that magic well enough to take on another’s form entirely.”
Ina looked from one to the other. “What are you talking about?”
Karai rested his fingertips on the edge of the table. “Mirage magic is arcane work. Difficult work. More difficult than transformation, than healing, than just about anything in most hands.”
“That sounds grim,” said Ina, raising her eyebrows.
“It should,” Derran weighed in. “It lets the wielder alter appearances. Not reality itself, but what another person sees of it. A face, an object, a path, a message. Even a feeling. Enough to mislead, enough to command trust if used well.
Enough to destroy a person’s every sense if used with evil intent.”
Ina looked again at the diamonds. “So it cannot have been Lugo.”
“No,” said Karai. “Someone made the pigeon believe it was Lugo. To show you,” he added, and lifted one hand.
For a moment nothing happened. Then the air around his hand gave a faint tremor.
The shape of it blurred and altered. Where his fingers had been, five leaves appeared instead, springing from what looked like a short length of tree branch.
The bark texture was good enough to fool the eye at first glance.
Even knowing it was his hand, Ina’s mind took half a breath to argue with what it saw, as though it desperately wanted to believe wood truly grew out of Karai’s arm.
The image held.
One second. Two. Three. Four. Five.
Then the branch broke apart into shimmer and the hand was only a hand again.
Ina stared. “You can do mirage magic, then?”
“Barely,” said Karai. “And only for moments.”
Derran looked impressed in spite of himself. “That was more than barely.”
Karai let his hand fall. “It’s a poor trick beside the real thing.”
“I can’t do any of it,” Derran muttered, leaning to Ina. Then he turned back to Karai, a sudden thought or memory hitting him. “What fairy did you know who could?” He paused. “Was it Emmie?”
Karai’s expression shifted into something close to embarrassment, which was rare enough in him to catch Ina’s full attention.
“No,” he said. “Not Emmie, though she had a little of the power. But the one who knew the magic well, she was...” He glanced once at Ina before continuing. “A friend. A former friend. She took many lives. She has long since been imprisoned in stone.”
Ina frowned. “Imprisoned in stone?”
Derran nodded. “Actual fairy prisons are more involved than the rooms you saw in the marsh court.”
“That wasn’t a prison?” Her voice was doubtful.
“It was more like… a holding room,” said Derran. “Enchanted, yes. Meant for short confinement and lesser offenders. Those without enough magical skill to be troublesome.”
He glanced at her, and Ina caught the care in that glance before he dressed it in anything else.
“No insult intended,” he said.
“You’re saying I was a weaker prisoner,” Ina said, a hint of teasing in the flat look she gave him.
“At the time!” Derran protested. “You had no training and no control of your magic. It mattered!”
Karai leaned one hip against the table, getting back to the point. “Most fairies can eventually work their way out of ordinary cells if given enough time and cause. So when a criminal is truly dangerous, the courts have to become inventive.”
“Stone,” Ina repeated.
Karai nodded. “In this case, yes.”
She studied him. “How was she your friend?”
That should have been an easy question. Karai usually answered her directly, even when the answer was uncomfortable. This time he did not. He looked at the diamonds. Then at the map. Then anywhere but at her.
“It was long ago,” he tried weakly.
“Karai. That was not my question.”
He opened his mouth, closed it, and seemed for once to have found no words at all for an answer, much less an honest one.
Derran rolled his eyes. “A lover, clearly.”
Karai rounded on him. “How could you possibly know that?”
Derran gave him a flat look. “Because if it were anything else, you’d have already said it.”
Karai had no answer to that.
Ina, despite everything on the table, found herself amused at the shade of pink lighting faintly across Karai’s cheeks. “You know, I am aware you both had long lives before me.”
Derran made a small acknowledging bow from where he stood. “Two hundred and twelve years, at your service.” He smirked at Karai. “Two hundred fifty-three for old faithful here, if I recall correctly.”
Ina giggled. “Right. It would be silly to imagine you sprang into being five minutes before I met you.”
Karai still looked faintly put upon, which only made the matter clearer. Ina let him off the hook after that.
Instead she asked, “Are you sure she’s still imprisoned?”
“Yes,” he said, with much more confidence now that the subject had shifted away from old lovers and old ages. “We can go check, of course. But the prison wasn’t casual magic. All the courts joined in binding it. She shouldn’t be able to leave.”
“Shouldn’t,” said Ina.
Karai hesitated just the briefest moment. “Yes. Shouldn’t.”
That word settled badly over the room.
She turned back to the earlier problem. “This cavern, where the pigeon fairy was heading. How bad can it be?”
Derran answered first. “Very.”
That was not encouraging. She raised an eyebrow, expecting greater detail.
He crossed his arms. “It’s an entire realm of monsters. Or close enough to one that fairies have stopped arguing over the distinction. The mouth of it is guarded and cursed. So is each chamber beyond, if the old accounts are right. The deeper you go, the worse the things become.”
Ina stared at him. “Each chamber?”
“Yes.”
“As in, multiple chambers?”
“Yes.”
“And every chamber has its own monster?”
“That’s… what I said.”
She looked at Karai in case Derran was exaggerating for effect.
Karai only shrugged. “I’ve read very little on it. That about sums up what I know too.”
“Why would anyone want the diamonds taken there?” she asked.
Both men gave small, identical shrugs, which irritated her because they rarely agreed so neatly on anything.
“It could be a distraction,” said Derran.
“It could be a lure,” said Karai.
“It could be both,” Derran added.
“Or… it could be the true hiding place,” said Karai, reluctantly. “Somewhere fearsome enough that few would dare follow.”
Ina let out a breath, thinking. After a moment, she said, “Then… I suppose we have no choice but to follow.”
The two princes glanced at each other. Not in fear. The look in their eyes was something warier. More practical than fear.
She saw it and asked anyway, “Don’t tell me you’re both afraid?”
Derran answered a little too quickly. “No.” Then, after a beat, he added, “But we do need to prepare. The magic in our hands alone won’t be enough for this sort of trip.”
Karai nodded, evidently reluctant to be agreeing with the sky court prince again. “He’s right.”
Without further discussion he turned and led them out of the library.
They went down three corridors Ina did not usually use, then a narrow stair cut into the deeper part of the burrow court, then another passage lined in root-work so old it had darkened almost to black. At the end of it stood a heavy door banded in iron.
Karai opened it.
Ina had expected an armory. She had expected it in the dull human sense, what she had read about in books of knights and warriors. Racks of swords. Perhaps bows. Perhaps knives. Instead, the room looked like the private hoard of some extremely dangerous magpie.
Armor, yes. Weapons, yes, but fairy weapons.
Not large. Not obvious. Everything in the room had been made with their scale and their kind of fighting in mind.
Shelves ran from floor to ceiling. Drawers stood half open.
Velvet-lined trays held objects so small a human would have mistaken them for beads, game pieces, or bits of ornament.
Oddly shaped glasses of potions glowed in a corner, and a faint buzzing surrounded the room.
Derran went in first, already reaching for supplies with the ease of someone who had done this before.
Ina followed more slowly.