Chapter 4
KERIK
Kerik stares at the strange door inside the flaming ring. He swallows any trepidation he feels. His mother always ensured he trained as a warrior. He has learned how to be brave. She would be proud of his noble bearing in the face of this strange situation.
Perl gestures to the sparkling door. “These doors only work for mortals if they are taken through by a fae.”
Kerik looks at the door. He is not surprised that this method of travel is only for the faeriekind. He is unsure how he, a mortal man, is meant to even reach it, inside a ring of flame. “You are not concerned I will be set alight by your magical fire.”
“Not greatly,” says Perl. As he speaks he grabs Kerik by the forearm and with a surprising strength, pulls him through the fire and then through the door.
Kerik yelps in shock but he is not burned. The fire feels like nothing at all.
The door is a different matter. It does not feel like nothing.
As they step through it air seems to rush all around them, like the strongest winds Kerik has ever felt.
They are outdoors, quite distinctly. The freezing night air is all around them.
The bare skin on Kerik’s upper body is instantly frozen cold.
His nipples pinch tight. There is snow in the air, flurries of it that hit Kerik's skin like needles.
He yells out at the sensation and blinks against the rushing wind and then it is day.
It is day and the sky is lit by a weak winter sun.
Kerik looks down. He is sure they are outdoors still but his bare feet rest on a marble floor, a marble floor that is cool and white but also seems to glitter with a thousand different colours as if it is made from snow packed tight and polished smooth.
Before them is a huge set of doors that also glitter as if they are made of ice and snow.
The sun may be weak, half hidden in high white cloud, but everything seems so bright.
Kerik screws up his eyes. When he looks away from the ice door, they seem to be standing on a snowy mountainside.
But somehow, they are also standing in a small antechamber.
In the distance, Kerik can see the sea. The wild and choppy Starlight sea that separates Ismagaar from the isle of Ulla.
He can see the white falling tips of the waves.
But he is sure they are inside a room. As if that room has invisible walls.
He can see the snowflakes just beyond where they stand, but the snow no longer hits his skin.
Perl says, “You see? You travelled through the door with ease.”
Kerik lifts an eyebrow. “Then the most difficult part is over.”
Kerik had hoped to break the tension with a little joke, but Perl just stares at him. He looks nervous. “Far from it,” he says.
“At least you are home.”
“At least.”
Kerik looks at the door of ice. Perl is making no move to step towards it. “How long since you have been here?”
“A hundred years," Perl says, still looking at nothing but the door. “I have been putting this off. For too long.”
“A hundred years! How old are you?” Kerik had assumed, from Perl’s appearance, that they were of similar age. But that cannot be true.
“The fae live much longer than mortals. Many of us live for centuries.”
“How old are you?”
“I am…,” Perl pauses to think. “I believe I am a little more than two hundred years old. But it can be hard to measure time in Faerie. As with many things the rules are different. But I was certainly born more than two hundred years ago.”
“The rules are different? How can the rules of time be different? Time is time, the same everywhere.”
Perl shakes his head. He is still staring at the door. He hasn’t looked away from it. “Time can pass differently in Faerie than it does in the mortal realm. It may have also been a hundred years here since I left, or it may not have. It is hard to tell exactly.”
“Will they be surprised to see you back?”
Perl raises an eyebrow so pale the gesture is more of a movement of his face. “Oh, yes.”
As Perl says that, the door starts to open and Kerik realises Perl was not simply waiting nervously for the courage to open the door, this is not a door that one simply opens. This is a door that one has to wait for.
Perl says, “We shall have to see what we are met with. You know what to do?”
“You still doubt me?” Kerik says.
“Walk behind me. Keep your eyes down and do not speak. Can you do that?”
“It doesn’t sound too difficult.”
Perl finally looks from the door to Kerik. “I know. Can you do it?”
Kerik makes a huffing noise as the doors keep on opening. Some warmer air wafts through. It smells quite sweet. Like some kind of expensive spice Kerik cannot name.
Beyond the door is a huge hall, glittering and bright, that same icy quality of being pure white and every colour all at once. There are sounds of chatter, light and musical as bells.
Perl gives Kerik a glance before he steps forward. He looks quite petrified.
Kerik follows a pace behind Perl as instructed, but whispers, "Just tell me when I need to get on my knees and serve you.”
“I have already instructed you not to speak,” Perl says under his breath.
“As you wish, Master,“ Kerik replies playfully as he follows Perl into the hall.
They are in a huge, grand receiving hall.
A place with dimensions beyond anything Kerik could imagine, a white space, impossibly vast, like something from a dream.
The ceiling feels as distant as the sky.
The air is cool, but not so cold it chills Kerik’s bare flesh.
The sweet scents are strong, now more familiar: cinnamon, lemon, lavender, rose, drifting and changing like swirling colours.
The light is soft as moonlight, but bright as the midday sun.
Everything caught by that light seems to glitter like jewels.
Music plays, airy, soft bells moved by the wind.
The impossible hall is edged with crowds of faeries, real faeries, staring, pointing and giggling like fools.
Kerik tries to keep looking down at the floor, but he cannot help snatching glances.
In some ways, this great hall is no different from the Hall of Twelve in the Rose Palace.
Excepting how strangely bright and cold it is and how it sparkles.
And in the same way, the faeries in their finery with servants attending them, even in all their strangeness, look quite like the kind of courtiers Kerik has seen before on countless occasions during state business in Attar.
But in the same way as the hall, as the floor, the faeries are different.
Brighter, lighter, they seem to sparkle.
Every one of them is eerily, unnervingly beautiful.
Some of them have white birds perched on their shoulders, like tame pets. Others have clouds of butterflies dancing around them. And many of them have wings, greatly sized wings, arcing over their heads in glittering pale colours.
Some have gowns that leave their breasts exposed or no clothing on their upper bodies at all.
Some wear instead, complicated straps cupping breasts or enhancing chests.
He sees one who wears a dress with skirts made of a fine mesh that is entirely transparent, revealing her legs and sex, and another with a gown that is nothing but golden chains.
As Perl had explained many of the lewdly dressed courtiers have thralls, attendants in hip cloths and collars, kneeling beside them or prostrate on the floor.
Their hip cloths are the shortest hip cloths Kerik thinks he has ever seen.
Are these thralls humans like Kerik? How did they come to be in this strange place?
It is hard to tell where the bright, cool light in the room comes from.
Kerik can see no candles or fires. There are no windows either, just white walls curving up to meet in a high domed ceiling.
He thinks there is something dangling, high above them at the ceiling’s apex, a decoration of some kind, but he cannot tell what it is.
And he cannot look directly above him as subtly as he can steal glances at the rest of the hall.
Perl’s boot heels click on the white floor.
Kerik’s bare feet make no sound. It’s that, the absence of sound from his own feet that feels like the most distinct marker of his status.
Not the collar, nor his lack of clothing on his upper body, not the command that he walk behind Perl with his eyes cast down.
It is the way his feet are silent on this beautiful floor that seems designed to make a satisfactory sound as one strutted across it in elegant boots, footfalls announcing the presence of anyone crossing it.
But Kerik is a thrall. His feet make no sound; his presence is of no importance.
If only these faeries knew the truth.
It seems like a long walk through the hall, behind Perl to a high dais at the far end.
But whenever he feels a lick of trepidation, Kerik reminds himself that he is a prince of Azuria.
He is the rightful heir to the Duchy of Fanost. He might be half-naked and collared, but these faeries cannot take away who he is at his core.
As Kerik walks he can hear muttering, soft words of Magaar. The comments seem quite approving. He is sure he hears the phrase, ‘a fine mortal’, but most of the faerie courtiers simply stare at Perl.
It’s not until they get near the dais that Kerik can see it without raising his eyes too obviously. When he does so, he sees a grand looking faerie sitting on a huge glittering throne at its centre. She seems to be brighter than everyone else in the hall.