3. Travel to Calendar, Kneel Upon the Painted Court
Chapter 3
Travel to Calendar, Kneel Upon the Painted Court
T he next morning, a grand procession of carriages arrived from Calendar. Each one bore the banner of the Lords of Calendar.
Riders and guards in finery stepped forth with long pikes. Their armor was polished, their skin and faces covered in soft black cloth. No one heard them arrive. No one saw where they came from. In the bleakness of their own world, these visitors from a realm of magic and gods were almost too bright to look upon. Too real, and unreal.
No one would have ever dared attack the Tithing except in these days. Celestine wondered what the price would be if the desperate men of the Painted Realm attacked the caravan.
The many guards of Calendar in their mirrored masks did not look worried. Calendar was a place only they could guide one to. Many grieving parents and siblings often looked for it, hoping to find their missing sisters and daughters after the Tithing and bride hunt. None could ever lay eyes upon that place where the Lords of Season met once each year.
Four carriages arrived for each season. The colors of each Lord of Season painted on the carriage.Celestine gazed at the vehicles. In all her life, the people of the Painted Realm called the demigods who met at Calendar Seasons, or referred to them as Lords of Summer or Spring. No one knew their names. But now, staring at the carriages, she saw their grouping and remarked on the twelve. Could she convince twelve ethereal princes of another realm to cease their conflict to spare her people?
“Grouped in threes…” she whispered, staring at the procession. Calendar had seemed a faraway thing once, and now it was going to be her very future.
Red, Blue, and Yellow for Summer.
Amber, Brown, and Gold for Autumn
Green, Brass, and Scarlet for Spring
White, Silver, and Black for Winter.
The attendant captain of the procession came to her and spoke from behind his mirrored mask.
“Now begins the Tithing,” his voice was calm, shadowed. There was a tone of ritual here. Celestine wondered how many times he had carted maidens of age to Calendar? She could not see eyes nor a face behind his mirrored mask. Only black cloth. It was said the attendants of the Painted Court wore mirrors to reflect whichever lord they spoke to so as to honor them. Or to not cause their fury.
Lord Mirrortower did not bow, not this year. Her father’s deep resentment kept his back straight. It was the only time she had seen him be anything but deferential to the Mirrored.
“Here is our tithe for your grand court.”
The Mirrored Captain gazed at her.
“You will serve the Seasons?”
Celestine’s heart hammered. Nausea crept into her gullet. Her life was here, in the Painted Realm. How could she leave them to bear calamity alone?
Now, I stray from them, alone at last. Who am I? What reflects upon that mirrored mask? Even I do not know. Just fear.
“I will serve.”
“So be it,” the Captain of Calendar nodded. If he was surprised, impressed, or dismayed, he showed nothing. Celestine felt it would not have mattered whether it was a thousand or one woman.
The shadowy voice bade her, “Choose your hopeful carriage.”
“I am Unbannered and seek no favor from one Season or another,” Celestine said. She was shaking. But she spoke on, “I will ride the carriage of the Painted Realm of my people.”
Lord Mirrortower raised his hand, and the Captain turned towards the plain wooden carriage
“As you wish,” the Captain spoke.“You will not need provisions.”
She turned to her father, hugging him tightly.
“A year,” her father spoke. “I will come for you in a year.”
“Don’t,” Celestine whispered. “Even if you find it, they’ll kill you.”
Her father hugged her tighter. “They already have.”
Celestine broke from her father and turned towards the carriage. The guilt of leaving him alone felt like a stone in her heart. She took a step towards the carriage, towards Calendar. If death awaited, or a depraved end, she hoped she would die with her nails in the face of her slayer.
I finally have my own life, and I am about to cast it like an offering onto an altar of death.
She stepped into the carriage, before the dizziness that invaded her senses caused her to collapse. This wasn’t real. This couldn’t be real.
The Captain of the Mirrored Guard shut the carriage door and climbed slowly into the driver’s seat. He signaled to the men or women at arms under his command—it was impossible to tell. The other carriages left, empty of passengers.
When the wheels turned, carrying her away from home, she let out a choked sob. It wasn’t a carriage, it was a cage. A plate, delivering a morsel of food. No one came back from Calendar, and if they did they never spoke or smiled again. The need to turn around, to stay home and weep in her fathers arms was overwhelming.
But above all things she was a woman, and she stuffed the urge down. With a clenched fist she rocked back and forth, refusing to let her tears flow, refusing to show any fear to her people as she left them in the final Tithing.
The Captain steered the vehicle, he stared straight ahead, driving the team of horses in silence.
Time shifted as they traveled. They left her homeland and traveled towards the center of the Painted Realm. A place many had looked for, but none had ever found. Outside of her window they traversed impossible lengths. She saw the coastlines of the Yellow Bannered lands. On the other side of the coach, somehow, were the mountains of Cedarhall. The large pristine lake of Toyne Hollow came into view next, even though it was across the realm, and in the distance across the water she could see the bastion of Grimclaw’s school of higher learning.
Places she had seen, visited, some she had only heard of went by. The riders never slowed. The coach never ceased its stead pace, the speed of it like an inevitable falling object, carrying her. They passed by people of every banner, and none looked at her.
They don’t see me.
She was entering another world. It felt like an hour, it felt like a week, a lifetime. The air was warm, thick almost—as if she were underwater. Celestine knew she was traveling to the place between two worlds, a knife in reality staked through both of them.
She saw winter, and autumn, and spring and summer. There was no cadence to anything. Shadows grew and fell with a quickness that denied logic.
The riders galloped slowly next to her in their mirrored masks. Their cloaks were soft silver, and they reflected the melting world around them. They held long halberds pointed at the sky.
A strange calmness fell over her. She sat back into the cushions on her seat. There was no thirst, no hunger. There was no ailment or ache from the journey. At nineteen years old, she had seen much in life. Men screaming in agony, the elder alone in their hovel, unable to lift their own firewood. She had not seen the capitol of every banner, but she had seen most of their people. Seen them in their harvest celebrations, their infidelities.
Yet now it all seemed so far away. A world away. They weren’t traveling to anywhere, they were traveling through something.
Her life and crest would likely fall when this ride ended. Would she be chased in the bride hunt? Or she might be slain for the impudence of the realms meager offering.
Were the Seasons sized as men? Were there really twelve Lords of Calendar? All these questions felt subtle in her mind as she was lulled into a trance by the gliding carriage. It never buckled, it never jumped. She was coaxed into a blissful trance, faintly aware she was likely being calmed before slaughter.
I will not despair. Even broken glass glitters when faced with the sun.
A bump jarred her from her dazed thinking. She sat forward, looking around.
Not a bump, a crackling sensation. The air is different now.
She stuck her hand out the window to feel the air between her fingers. But she didn’t feel anything. It didn’t move. It was still.
The other carriages had long faded away as if slipping into mist. Celestine looked out over the carriage. They were cresting the top of a very tall hill. Forests, mountains, and even deserts lay ahead of her. But sectioned, orderly, like pieces of a pie.
It was Calendar. The central pinpoint of seasons and time and their pull upon one another.
Whatever calmness had held her in the carriage abandoned her when she stuck her head out the window. Down the long vast road was a grand castle at the center of four different climates. Above the castle, both the sun and moon hovered directly above, as if here they were so much closer to the world.
Celestine blinked, trying to will her eyes to see the truth.
The air above the castle was snowing, but only from one-quarter of the land. The snow blew into rays of sunshine that melted it with brutal heat. Above another quarter, pollen rose in great bays, so thick it looked like they were underwater. Above another, leaves fell and tumbled in great swirls as if dancing above a burnt golden world of brown and bronze.
“Is this Calendar?” Celestine asked the rider next to her as the cart slowed. Her stomach churned with the steep descent. The manicured road, the forest, and the desert on either side of the pathway defied any reasoning.
There was no response from the masked rider. Were they real? Were they people?
Calendar loomed closer. A dazzling display of craftsmanship. Celestine had seen one or two keeps in her time and had even seen a real castle in the Silver Bannered Realm. But nothing had ever approached this magnificence.
The carriage slowed as it entered the gates of Calendar. On either side of her, tall pillars showed the sigil of each Lord from their four respective seasons.
There are twelve. That much is certain.
She saw a red pillar made of leather, swords, and spears, as if someone had collected a ruined battlefield and smelted it into a monument.
She saw a pillar of Amber, sculpted by crystalized honey, and bees circled it in a swirling dance. The Brown pillar was a myriad of pelts and ferocious beasts and a long axe with twin leather straps encircling it. A wolf with a mighty snarl and eyes that seemed too alive for a statue seemed to follow her with his predatory gaze.
On and on they went, pillars of declaration, or beauty, of macabre promises. The Scarlet pillar made her look away, as it seemed to be the deep purple of blood at night, with blades rising from it.
The Black pillar—she dared not look. When she passed it, a feeling of such great love and then a hollowness and despair made her grip the sides of the carriage to steady herself. It was as if she was falling into a grave.
The carriage pulled around the grand circle of the majestic estate that was both lordly, wondrous, hideous, and morose.
I am here. Oh, father, I am here, and I wish, dearly, I wasn’t.
“You may depart, Bride.” The Captain who had steered her carriage opened her door. How long ago had they left? Weeks? Days?
“A moment, please.” Celestine breathed and shut her eyes. If she asked, would they take her back? Is that what the Silent had done? Had they seen the enormity of this place and refused to learn what awaited within?
I am in the den of hungry beasts and am only a morsel compared to the feasts we used to provide in the Tithing. I have never been this alone until now. Always among the people of the Painted Realm. Among my father, among the warring of the seasons.
The Captain opened her carriage door and held a gloved hand out, waiting.
Celestine chewed her cheek, a habit she had tried many times to cease. The attendants of her father’s court had always scolded her for it, saying she imitated the cattle instead of ladies of the realm. She knew people prayed to these Seasons, even without knowing their names. But she had only prayed to one person her entire life.
Mother guide me, please.
“You may depart,” The Captain repeated, his gloved hand never wavering.
She was more than an offering. Her journey here was not to sate hungers alone, it was to deliver a message. She thought of the people in her land without hope. They could not even depend on what the sky wrought. Winters that lasted three days. Summers that lasted a week. Seeds planted only to be frozen over. Crops grown and then flooded before the scythe could even find them.
And the wars. The rolling mobs of men following warlords and upstarts. Women weren’t the only scarcity. It was a world of barren women and skinny children, of men dying in wars to fight over the little amounts of food and the scarcity of women they wanted to possess but only destroyed.
If I do not leave this carriage, they will grow skinnier, and women will view the world through bars of cages to protect themselves from monsters.
Celestine opened her eyes and took the Captain’s hand. It was strong like iron.
“The court awaits,” the Captain said as she stepped down. The protection of the carriage gone, her shoulders felt the strange air of this place. Celestine gazed into his mirrored face. Who stared at her behind it?
I, too, have always been a mirror, a mirror of what the realm needed and would not answer. It was easier to be everything than to be some single thing. Are you and I the same, Captain?
"Thank you, Captain. May I have your name?” In the tumultuous cliff of this universe, she grasped for a morsel of nicety. Of another human.
The Captain bowed slightly. “It is no longer used, my lady. The Mirrored are here to serve and to assist in the service.”
“Perhaps you might indulge a young maiden if only to thank her protector on a perilous road.”
Did his eyes move? Or was it a trick of the light? Celestine stood on the cobbled driveway, a manicured garden of lovely and wicked design. Everything here clashed. Everything here gave way to another idea, another season.
“I was called Aidric in my time, lady.”
“Thank you, Captain Aidric.”
The Captain stared at her for a moment, black cloth covering his eyes under the silver mask. It was as if she had stunned him. Then he turned away and shut the carriage door.
The rumbling sound of two gigantic doors, taller than her father’s keep, swung open slowly. Mirrored attendants pushed them, and the light from within the castle of Calendar was so golden it almost beckoned her forth.
Some predators lure their prey within.
Twin doors to Calendar opened, taller and grander than any she had seen, and the glow from within beckoned her. Mirrored guards and attendants appeared suddenly, drenching the staircase with tall halberds of mirrored silver.
Stone staircases awaited.
Celestine stepped forth, moving one foot in front of another. Every step felt like a choice. Above her, the sky swirled in leaves, pollen, sunlight, and a blizzard, all whirling together like some great spiral that spun and spun, clashing and riposting. As she walked within Calendar, it felt like a great focal point coming together.
Centered on her.