Issue #333 • July 1, 2021

“For the World’s More Full of Weeping,” by Andrew Dykstal

“The Witness Brûska Lai,” by Aaron Perry

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FOR THE WORLD’S MORE FULL OF WEEPING

by Andrew Dykstal

        The most beautiful tree on the road up to Limhill was the old oak they used for hangings, and it knew it. Its trunk was six feet across, its canopy well-formed, and it dropped acorns the size of a child’s fist. Dispute persisted about the source of its good health; some called it coincidence that the hanging tree should be so healthy. Tarrow did not.

        She knew the power in a hanging: the fear, the sorrow, the anger. Never mind the power inherent in sacrifice, and if there was a vestige of human sacrifice left in the mortal world, it was public executions. The Limhill hanging tree was old, and they’d been hanging men, or mostly men, from it for the better part of four centuries. When she looked closely, she could see where branches had needed trimming or where a split had endured correction. But never on the heavy horizontal limb jutting from the trunk at just the right height for a noose. That branch had always been perfect, as though the tree was always mindful to care for it.

        It was a tree that knew which side of the bread got buttered.

        Given where they’d put the nearby sign, Tarrow guessed that the good people of Limhill knew it too. They hadn’t dared nail it to the tree; they’d raised a signpost a few feet off the road and tacked it up, a crude drawing of a child’s face over a barely legible caption:

        Jon Shellstone Cooper

        Reward for Safe Return

        The boy had dark hair, dark eyes, soft features. He looked twelve, maybe thirteen. Children grew restless around that age, ran off, bought unfortunate tattoos, joined the bluewater navy, did all manner of foolish things. Jon had probably tired of provincial life and made for one of the cities to the south. Even with the letter from Jon’s mother in Tarrow’s pocket, even with the reports of lights and disembodied voices across the county, Tarrow could have believed that he was the ordinary sort of runaway and irrelevant to her vocation.

        Except that the hanging branch pointed straight down the road, back the way she’d come. The last time she’d passed through, eighty years previous and under a different name, it had pointed across the road. When she studied the ground around the trunk, she found the roots bent in a gentle spiral, as though the oak were turning counterclockwise very, very slowly. It probably was. Sometimes, at least, the tree offered a path out of this world that wasn’t circumscribed by a noose.

        How had the crossing happened? A parade of fairy lights and laughing voices dancing in time and leading Jon Cooper through the stepping walk, drawing him widdershins around the tree until he was dancing through the strangeness of Faerie? Had it been panicked flight, the boy running flat-out through a night of wind and rain and driving screams, his course curving past the tree as he lost the road in the dark? Or outright abduction, the boy bound by a geas or a promise given without due care?

        The manner of crossing would matter. So, she thought grimly, would the tree’s adopted purpose.

        She scowled and laid a hand on the trunk. A whisper of power raised gooseflesh despite the warmth of the spring day. “They say the road to the lands of the dead runs through Faerie,” she murmured. “They say a lot of daft things, and they say them often enough that sometimes they start turning true. What say you, grandpa oak? Do you want to save me my time? You seen a human boy, looks like trouble, about yea high, three weeks back?”

        Leaves rustled, though there was no wind. She was fairly sure the tree was laughing at her.

        Away down the road to the south, dust was rising. A moment later, still distant, came the sounds of plodding hooves and wagon wheels. She knew only one stepper that traveled with a retinue: Sean Whitesmith. A bored son of a boring lord. Any fool could take up cold iron and learn the stepping walk to Faerie lands. The case could be made that only fools ever did. But this one knew what she was, would work for free, would make an idealism-seasoned hash of everything and likely return from Faerie with a new collection of Fae artifacts and, optimistically, one of Jon’s ears.

        She hefted her walking stick, flipped the uncapped end downward, and drew a line through the dust and clotting mud, negotiating a spell with the road—a small one, nothing showy, nothing that would drain her. Just enough to delay Whitesmith for an hour or three.

        When she pressed on toward Limhill, she shut the hanging tree from her mind and focused instead on imagining Whitesmith’s expression when wheels started popping off his wagons eight miles short of town. For all his faults, he was a canvas fit for painting all manner of mischief, and however much Tarrow had embraced the world of iron and time, she was still half-Fae, and she’d never gotten the mischief out of her blood.

* * *

        It was late afternoon when she came to Limhill, a town of several thousands clustered around a pair of sequential falls in the Mede River, one powering a flour mill, the other a foundry. Dogs howled, the sound greeting her even before the wardens at the gate. They carried matchlocks of crude construction; local make, as likely to be bombs as firearms. They inspected her gear and let her pass but not before handing her an iron chit to keep in her cheek should she fear night callers from Faerie, and not before seeing her accept it barehanded.

        Within the gates, life ran on in a frantic hush beneath the howling dogs and clamor of the foundry. Barges circulated above and below the two fall lines: grains and raw ores upstream, flour and cast ingots downstream. The foundry was new—at least, less than eighty years old. More iron for the cities and farms, less down in the bones of the earth. She wondered, as she set to work getting prospective informants thoroughly drunk, whether that shift would have consequences.

        The first thing she learned was that people were frightened:

        “You’ll touch iron first, yeah?”

        “Pick a coin off the counter.”

        “Well, sure, it tastes rough, but a sprig of rue in the ale’s a local delicacy, it is.”

        Most of the tests they imposed wouldn’t have worked. All were excessive; the power of the Fae in the mortal world was limited. They could deceive by omission, trade violence for violence, and commit minor mischiefs, but the true nightmare fodder was reserved for their own realm—or for mortals foolish enough to enter into bargains with them. The fair folk needed the excuse of mortal will to loose any significant power outside their own domain. Limhill’s bar rats were indulging in paranoia, and useless paranoia at that.

        But in public house after public house, alcohol dissolved their distrust of strangers. Besides, Tarrow looked like a reasonably attractive young woman. Loosening tongues was easy enough. With luck, she would be long gone before the townsfolk realized that they’d all seen a slightly different attractive young woman. Bit by bit, the truth began to spill out:

        “Not to say he’s not missed, not to say that, you understand, but that Jon boy was trouble—you heard about his father? No, no; his real father, Percival Shellstone, his blood father. His mother, Eileen, she remarried about two months after they hanged Percival for a murderer, and she married up, I’ll tell you that—”

        “Eileen Cooper always was a beauty. You wouldn’t know it now. She’s been pulling her own hair out. Serves her right. Used to carry on, you know? Anybody with a calendar could tell you that, assuming he could count nine moons.”

        “My Laurie heard voices on the moor. She said they were singing about... she knew how to put it. I can’t remember. I heard them too, when I was her age. I know I did. Funny thing, how hard it is to remember.”

        “The man you ought to be asking is Tom Cooper. Eileen married him after the hanging and all. He was right honorable, taking in Jon like his own, not that the boy did him any good turn. That was, what, six years ago? Seven? Gods, I feel old some days. You’re still buying?”

        “Percival dumped the body in the river. Stands to reason. Never found it, did they?”

        “And then there are the lights. Dancing lights. I saw them with my own eyes, I swear, two months back. Moving against the dark like—like—I saw an emerald once, an emerald like a pheasant’s egg. It burned. These were bright like that, and they moved like the hands of women dancing, like the dancers at a wedding feast.”

        That one drew her up short. She studied her drinking companion more carefully. He was short, balding, middle-aged, and had the ruddy complexion of the professional drinker. He’d shaken her hand with more ease than his companions, all of whom had drifted off to a corner table. His right hand had been soft.

        “Let me see your left hand,” she said.

        He held it out, a bit shyly. “Why?”

        She took it, felt the calluses on his fingertips and the softness of his palm. Now that she was listening, she could pick out the traces of magic in his voice. Her own mother’s work, or something like it. Her mother had always had an affinity for artists. “Because I’ve got only the one myself. You’re a musician?”

        “Since I was a boy.” He drew back his hand, suddenly uncomfortable. “Ah, miss—?”

        “Since you followed the lights, you mean. Not two months ago—thirty-five years? Or just thirty? The drinking’s tacked on some age, from the glow in your nose. Burning like a ruby, if you like.”

        He shook his head. “I don’t remember.”

        She pressed on anyway. “Did they lead you to the hanging tree?”

        A shiver ran through him. “I—I don’t remember.”

        But he did. She could taste the lie in the air. “Tell me where Tom Cooper lives.”

* * *

        Sean Whitesmith’s retinue was at the gates when she cut across Limhall to Tom Cooper’s aspiring manor. Whitesmith led the procession, mounted on a pale gray gelding and clad in iron-studded leather with a shortbow across his shoulder. Even in the failing light of evening, she could make out the artfully maintained blue stubble on his jaw—the affectation of a man who needed the world to know he could grow a beard if he wanted one, dammit. He was a fourth son in a time of peace, and without a war in which to die honorably, he’d turned to the study and defiance of the fair folk. He was in his prime, laugh lines just starting to crease the corners of his eyes, and he had the serious, open face of an inveterate liar.

        But she thought she saw the faintest hint of a smile in his eyes, even in this light, even at this distance, as he offered the gatekeepers reams of papers proving his right to entry. None of the wardens could read, she’d wager, and he was placing the same bet. From the sheepish then overconfident way they waved his column through, he’d won.

        Most of his retainers were walking, and their clothes were dusty and mud-stained. Several—the scholars, the minor gentry, the spinsters out for amusement—looked worn down by half a day’s easy walk. He had only a single coach left in his train, and she allowed herself a grin as she ducked into a shadow. He’d badger and cadge his way to Tom Cooper and the local mayor in less than an hour, but she already had an edge: the unpleasant little truths that Cooper wouldn’t be quick to surrender but that the rest of the town had spilled like last week’s slops. Whitesmith might spend a full day figuring out that Jon had crossed over at the hanging tree. She merely had to confirm why and negotiate her payment.

        With that happy thought, she knocked at the door of Cooper’s house: a two-story study in ostentation, right down to the hedges and oversized glazed windows. By the wagging tongues of the local busybodies, he’d risen from almost nothing through his shares in the foundry and several canny investments in downriver manufactories. He was so nouveau riche she half-expected to find his front hall floored in coin.

        What she found instead was a world of iron. The entryway was a museum of ingots, castings, and scale models of foundry equipment. A glass case showed a succession of iron and steel bars, each neatly labeled by grade. Tarrow’s memory stuttered, and for an instant she was kneeling again by the bank of a laughing creek, holding her sister slack and sightless and devoid of glamour. An iron crossbow bolt, standing like a gnomon above the blackened ruin of her chest. The scales of her own soul tipping, tipping.

        Then she was back, facing down a succession of domestic functionaries, memory locked away again. She had to brandish her letter in three different faces before she won through to Cooper’s den. His wife was there too, pale and hollow-eyed, slouched in a leather armchair. The ghost of beauty still clung to Eileen Cooper: long dark hair, strong cheekbones, a languorous grace of gesture. She was younger than Tarrow might have guessed—thirty, perhaps—and wore a black, long-sleeved gown with a high neck. It was her signature that footed the letter that had brought Tarrow to Limhill. Most likely, Eileen had also written to Whitesmith and every other stepper she’d ever heard of.

        Tom Cooper stood to greet Tarrow formally. This took a moment. He was well over six feet tall, fairly glowing with health, blond and graying smoothly from the temples. He sketched a short bow in the modern style, one foot forward, then tossed an iron nail at her head.

        She caught it barehanded and held it. Once, her skin would have bubbled and run like wax. Once, she’d have been bound to return the nail or offer an equal exchange. Which would have left her a choice, depending on how she chose to construe the nail. She could have given him a copper penny or cut off two of his fingers: a gift for a gift or an injury for an injury.

        Now, with that part of herself long since bartered away, she tucked the nail into a pocket. “A free sample of your wares, ironmonger?” she asked easily, dropping without invitation into a chair.

        A muscle worked in his jaw as he stared down at her. “These are perilous times,” he said at last. “I am responsible for what I allow in my home.”

        She held up the letter. “Truer than you know. I’m an invited guest, Tom. Had I been of the fair folk, you’d have offered me both deadly insult and assaulted me against the laws of hospitality. Your life would have been forfeit.” She let her eyes drift across the portraits on the walls. Several of Cooper and his wife, three of their daughters, and one—a small one—of Jon Shellstone Cooper. Also a dozen of various large, heavy-jowled dogs. Gods, she thought, this man had portraits made of his hounds. That was a new trick. “Your life and more besides,” she added. She pointed to the painting of the eldest of their daughters. “She’s lovely. Seven years old, if I had to guess? That is, the length of your marriage minus about six months.”

        A flush began to climb Cooper’s neck. “Insulting a host is also against the laws of hospitality,” he said.

        “If the truth displeases you, change it. They say the best time to plant a tree is twenty years ago.” She held up the letter. “Mrs. Cooper—Eileen—you’ve requested my aid. Here I am. What say you?”

        Eileen Cooper’s head swiveled between her husband and her guest, the motion mechanical. She licked her lips. “I... want my son back. The fair folk took him. I know it.”

        Tarrow nodded. “Possibly. And you, Tom Cooper? Do you want him back?”

        He resumed his seat, still red-faced. “Of course. I’ve been a father to the boy for half his life. I put out word of a reward, posted signs for miles—”

        And who would heed those signs? she didn’t say. No one saw a sign by a roadside and abandoned their business to track down a lost child. No, the signs had been a gesture, a face-saving measure.

        “—and while I’ve not the faith in charlatans that my wife has shown, I will confess that I am willing to try anything to see Jon safely home.” His flush was fading as he recovered control. He was bargaining now, and it seemed more natural territory. “If you bring him back to us, the promised reward will be yours. A year’s good wages, in these parts.”

        Eileen stirred, about to speak, but flinched at a glance from Cooper and said nothing.

        “I have no interest in your posted reward,” Tarrow said evenly. “I bring back the child. Then you make an offer—one offer—and I take either the payment or the child. So I suggest you weigh his worth carefully.”

        Cooper leaned forward, eyes hard, ready to take offense again. “You would attempt extortion in my own home? You would try to take our Jon from us all over again?”

        She let herself smile then. Her glamour painted her as a young woman, but different eyes perceived the guise differently. To some she might have black hair; to others red. A lean face or a broad one. Pale skin or dark. That blessing was mixed, as everything in her nature was mixed. Only half of her was still Fae. She couldn’t be sure what Cooper was seeing, but more than one of her lovers had mentioned that when she smiled just so, there seemed to be something the matter with her teeth.

        Slowly, Cooper settled back.

        “If I return your Jon,” Tarrow murmured, “I’ll have wrested him from Faerie and all its hosts. Do you suppose you could keep him from me, should I choose to deny you?”

        Silence.

        “Well then,” she said, “are we agreed?”

        Downstairs, a bell rang. Muffled voices. Sean Whitesmith in full form, ready to breeze through the servants’ blockade on sheer bluff.

        “Yes,” Eileen said. “Yes.” She sounded breathless.

        Cooper sucked air between his teeth. Then: “Yes. We are agreed.” He offered a hand.

        Tarrow took it, and she went on smiling through his attempt to crush her fingers. For good or ill, most humans understood pain too poorly to inflict it in meaningful measure.

* * *

        Leaving, Tarrow passed Whitesmith on the stairs. “Sean,” she said, her voice flat. He smelled as he always did: of horseflesh, sweat, old parchment. He wore a fine silk shirt under his leathers, and he was, as usual, smiling faintly, unsurprised at their meeting.

        “Miss Tarrow. Knocking the wheels off? Really? I’d expected more creativity from you.”

        “Maybe you’ll go back the way you came and find trees bearing wheels like fruits. No coach falls idly by my hand.”

        He laughed and clapped her shoulder, then bent close and whispered, “Here I thought you couldn’t lie.”

        “I can offer a hypothetical. All things are possible, after all.” She shrugged off his hand and looked him up and down. “Most things.”

        He winked, but his air of cheer had thinned. “I wish you hadn’t hampered me. A boy’s life is at stake.”

        “Exactly. I made allowance for your excellent jawline and the capacious emptiness above it. Poor Eileen would rather have her son back alive than an epic tale of heroic failure.”

        His smile returned, lightning-quick: “And what do you want, Miss Tarrow? I should be happy to lend you my jawline—strictly as a model, you understand.”

        She snorted, forced her way past both him and the pair of attendants following like sheep, and set out into the streets of Limhill at night. Doors and windows were already barred, and the damned dogs would not stop howling.

* * *

        The story was plain enough. Perhaps Percival Shellstone, Jon’s father, had committed the murder for which they’d hanged him. Perhaps not. It hardly mattered. What mattered was that Eileen had already been a guest in Tom Cooper’s bed, and they’d wed soon after Shellstone’s execution. The eldest daughter had Cooper’s fair hair, which made the quick marriage the correct gamble. Then came six years of life as a stepson for Jon Shellstone Cooper, all with his father’s alleged crime hanging, as it were, over his head. As for Cooper’s love of his stepson, Tarrow guessed it worth no more than the iron nail in her pocket. A look around the house had been enough to mark Cooper as a man who loved his possessions and nothing else. He could possess his wife, could call his daughters his own flesh, but what to do with the dark-haired boy who wore a dead rival’s face?

        And so, she suspected, the fair folk had offered Jon a way out of his misery, and he’d accepted it. They’d have made promises, every one true, and led him dancing around the tree. Then he’d have found himself in Faerie without the faintest idea of how to protect himself.

        Three weeks here, she thought as she strode south down the road back to the hanging tree. Maybe three weeks there, or a thousand years, or ten minutes, or the same day repeated a few hundred times. And however rarely the fair folk outright stole human children, they were above all else a predatory species. They’d have already begun trading for pieces of the boy’s reason, his soul, his memories, his aspirations. She might have to buy him back a piece at a time. That he was there willingly only complicated matters; she might have to talk him into wanting to return to the mortal world at all.

        It was a clear night, the moon waxing gibbous, and the hanging tree was a plume of rustling shadow against the sky. Wind stirred the grasses and raised the fine hairs on her neck. Two wrecked coaches and a wagon still stood by the roadside, one half-repaired. A deep, centering breath. A final check of the iron cap at one end of her staff. She had the nail in her pocket, a pouch of iron filings, a handful of copper trinkets and a few duodecimo books for trade, and a canteen and satchel of pemmican for herself. She loathed the taste, but it would keep her alive and active for weeks, and she’d be damned before she accepted food from the fair folk.

        A final deep breath drawn beneath the tree. She concentrated on her need to reach Faerie, to leave this place behind, to seek out a life beyond a misshapen family. Then she began the stepping walk, feeling for the right rhythm, letting it draw her widdershins around the tree, closing her eyes as the ground came alive beneath her feet.

        The power of the place was a greasy chill sliding over her skin. Beneath the rhythm of the dance she could hear the crack of breaking necks and the creak of rope, feel the lurch and shudder of the condemned, smell the hot rank fetor of death. All around her the crowds were gathered, centuries of them, mingled in sorrow or rage or fevered anticipation. Torches burned in her mind’s eye. Snippets of last words, most little more than ineffectual pleas for mercy or protestations of innocence. Only one caught her, made her smile, added a little flutter to her step: I didn’t practice, but I hope I get this right!

        She was whirling now, laughing, crying, staff held away from her like a partner in a country dance, stepping, stepping—

        —she felt the crucial step, she took it—

        —and slammed into a wall.

        She sat down hard in the grass, stunned. The demi-real faded, leaving her alone with a bloody nose and bruised shoulder. Her first thought was that the Fae had raised a ward against travelers, but that made about as much sense as a spider posting cautions around its web.

        Her second thought was that she must have misconstrued the circumstances under which Jon had walked the stepping walk. She had the fundamental why of it, but she was missing some detail, some piece of the how or the conditions that had opened the crossing....  

        Her third was that, despite the warmth of late spring and the pressures of contemporary style, Eileen Cooper had worn long sleeves and a high collar and had seemed just a little too afraid.

        “Hellfire,” she mumbled, rubbing her shoulder. She rolled to her feet and fetched the trunk a kick. “You knew this wouldn’t work, didn’t you?” It was obvious in hindsight. None of the men who’d crossed over into death at this tree had wanted to make the crossing. Coercion had seeped into the place, and it shaped the crossing into Faerie. You had to be driven through—forced, tricked, pursued.

        She collected her staff and what dignity she could find and stalked back to the road, pausing to wipe the blood from her nose. “Hellfire,” she said again. This meant she would need help, and while no one in Limhill was qualified to give it, she could name one person who might—might—be less unqualified than the rest.

* * *

        Sean Whitesmith and his retainers had taken rooms in the best inn Limhill had to offer. Then, infuriatingly, he’d left with a small contingent, obliging Tarrow to sit up in the common room and wait as his itinerant scholars transcribed progressively taller tales of Fae encounters and the local storytellers traded coins under the tables. A game was on: who could tell the grandest lie before doubt began to creep in. If Whitesmith wasn’t back by first light, he’d be facing an entire new history of the county.

        The innkeeper had been loathe to tell her when Whitesmith might return, but he hadn’t tried to throw her out. He just kept giving her nervous looks.

        She took a chair near the fire, propped her staff against the mantel, and let herself drowse. The common room was warm and close. Ancient wood gleamed with good care and the polish of generations of sleeves. It was a comfortable place, and besides, tracking Whitesmith down would be a waste of energy. He might have gone to survey townspeople at random. He might have attempted a circuit of less savory establishments than public houses. He might even have gone out on the moors to find one of her kin, in which case he’d find himself running a merry chase until dawn. Or until that chase dumped him into a sinkhole, fine clothes and all.

        That made her smile, and she slept.

        When she woke, gray light was leaning against the eastern windows and the common room was nearly deserted. Whitesmith had claimed a low table by the fire and was pouring hot spiced wine into a pair of clay mugs. Two of his retinue stood just out of earshot, visibly armed and unhappy.

        “A long night, Miss Tarrow?” he asked, offering a mug.

        She accepted, sipped, and laughed as heat spread down her throat and filled her nose. “You remembered the pepper. But that’s a winter drink, Sean. You know what they call sophistication out of season?”

        “Avant garde,” he said mildly. “If you’re here, I’ll take this mess for a bad one. Unless, of course, you’ve sought me out for my own sake, wearing either silks or one of those devilishly sharp stone knives you people favor.” He sipped at his own drink, made an approving noise, and set it aside. “It all depends on what sort of dream I might be having, you see.”

        “I use steel like everybody else. Merely with less provocation.”

        “Fascinating. You’re looking particularly lovely this morning, by the by. The dried blood on your chin is new. Have you been out drinking?”

        She ignored the question and wiped at her mouth. “I propose a trade.”

        “Oh? The last time we traded, I won your secret.”

        “And I won a favor of like value. You have a choice: trade with me, or I call in my favor, and by earth and oak, you’ll not care for it.” She poured herself another mug. Alcohol had little effect on her, though the history of change in a well-aged bottle might start to addle the Fae half of her head. Time had never sat well with the fair folk. But this wine was young—four or five years—and diluted besides. “The trade is fair. I’ll tell you all I know of the circumstances behind Jon Cooper’s disappearance and how he crossed into Faerie, and in return, you will do the same.”

        “A fair trade? A blind trade, I should say. Did you bring blindfolds, Miss Tarrow? No? Well, I’m sure we’ll figure something out.”

        “Are we agreed?” She held out a hand.

        He kissed it with an air of exaggerated decorum. “We are. Shall the lady go first?”

        “It happens rarely enough,” she said, but her heart wasn’t in the banter. The sky was brightening beyond the windows. She couldn’t know with certainty, but instinct said that time was passing in Faerie. No less dangerous, time was passing here. She related what she’d learned: the timeline of the relationship between Tom and Eileen Cooper, Jon’s likely discontent, the way to Faerie that led through the oak where his father had been hanged. “One open question,” she said in closing, “is whether Percival Shellstone earned his hanging, or Eileen and Cooper just wanted him removed. It might matter. It might not.”

        Whitesmith drew a knife and set to cleaning his fingernails. “All this is very interesting,” he said in a tone that belied the sentiment, “but I concentrated my energies on the night of young Jon’s disappearance. It was twenty-two nights ago, with a full moon obscured by fog and stormclouds, and with various unpropitious signs in the heavens. A cat birthed a two-headed kitten. Attentive eyes observed grasses moving against the wind, and the dogs were restless.” He paused, expectant. Dogs traded howls now in the distance, faintly audible even indoors.

        She shivered. Perhaps Whitesmith wasn’t a fool. He’d had a few years to improve since their last meeting. “You don’t mean that the dogs wouldn’t shut up, because unless that wine is better than it lets on, the dogs here never shut up.”

        “No. Hunting on the moors seems to be the gentleman’s pastime of choice in Limhill, and thus the pastime of the, ah, merchant class. I never understood the appeal, myself. I’m quite content to have my meat come from the kitchens. On the night in question, several experienced hunters attested the sounds of hounds in full bay. Has anyone ever attempted to set hounds on the fair folk?”

        “Yes,” she said absently, thinking about the portraits in Cooper’s den. “It ends poorly. The traditional response is to turn the hounds on their masters, but without the benefit of long experience, you all feel much the same to the fair folk. Collateral damage tends to result. There was a case four, five hundred years ago....” A spasm of memory, and she was back in that homestead, kneeling in gore, the surviving hounds lapping at her hands. The huntsman’s wife had killed one with a hatchet before the others bore her down and mauled her. Tarrow had counted the corpses, some of them very small, and found them equal in number to her brothers and sisters slain in the surrounding woods over the previous fortnight. And there the matter had ended, the scales in perfect balance.

        “Miss Tarrow?”

        She met his eyes. “Come for one of my kin,” she said softly, “and you’d best come correct, with iron and fire. No, Sean Whitesmith; had it been the fair folk Cooper set his hounds on that night, his wife would have had to bury him in a bucket.”

        They sat unspeaking for a while, listening to the crackle of the fire and sounds of the town waking. “What was the charge against the boy’s father?” Whitesmith asked at last.

        “Murder. They say he killed a mill worker in a drunken rage. No body was ever found, but he was a drunk, right enough, and violent one. Eileen pleaded for leniency at his trial with both her eyes still blacked. Her face said more than her mouth, I think.”

        “That open question you mentioned? It doesn’t sound open to me.” He gave his wine a distasteful look and set it aside. “Do you suppose they both framed Shellstone? It may have been Cooper alone. Seven years ago, I suspect Eileen was simply ravishing.”

        “If you were any shallower, you could ride under your saddle.” She took his mug, drained it. “The boy might have found proof of his father’s innocence on his own. Or he may have asked the wrong question. It’s even possible that the fair folk told him the truth and offered proofs. Likely, even; the timing is otherwise far too convenient. There was a confrontation with Cooper. Jon ran. And Cooper set the hounds on him. Either he reached the tree in time, or he didn’t. But if he didn’t, I think we’d both be hearing different stories. The absence of a body suggests a successful crossing, albeit under circumstances both unpleasant and difficult to replicate.”

        Now came her turn to wait expectantly, watching faint puzzlement blossom into comprehension.

        “No,” he said. “No—absolutely not.”

        “I’d do it alone, but I might not be able to charm an entire hunting pack, and I’d sooner not have to kill any of them. Besides, if they were all charmed, they couldn’t chase me to the tree, now could they?”

        “This is all predicated on making enough of Limhill want to murder you. If it works, you’ll find enemies waiting when you come back. I brought a few men-at-arms, not an army. In the best case, you’d have a hostage Cooper does not value.” But he seemed contemplative. Wheels were turning behind his eyes. The effect was unsettling. In all their fifteen years of professional rivalry, she’d never seen Whitesmith turn so damned thoughtful. Then again, fifteen years was a long time. Perhaps he was finally learning.

        “Out with it,” she said, “before you sprain something.”

        “Why Jon? Why take him?”

        Her optimism crumpled. “He’s a child. A vulnerable one. It’s what they do.” She shook her head. “You still don’t understand—over a decade at this, and you still don’t see. You can walk the stepping walk. Fine. But if you want to make yourself a knight errant against the Fae, you’d best learn that very, very few of the children who leave with them are kidnapped. Most want to go. Most have excellent reasons. Did you see Eileen’s sleeves? How she kept her neck covered? The look on her face? Stop asking about the weather and think on what Jon had to be afraid of.” And, she didn’t add, what he might ask of a race of beings whose only morality lay in the law of equal exchange. Succor? Truth? Revenge?

        “Fair enough,” he said quietly. “Allow the boy his motivations. But allow the Fae theirs, too.”

        “My kin don’t have motivations. They are what they are. That’s all.”

        “I think I’ve spent more time with them than you have, over the last few years.”

        “No doubt. You have a fetish.” She’d meant to give the word a twist, but it came out flat. Bitter. “But mostly in this world. There... it’s different.”

        “What were you afraid of, Miss Tarrow? Why did you leave?”

        She rose and took up her staff. “Give me until sunset. Then rile the villagers for me. I’ll be at the Saints’ Key, south side of town.”

        He sat in silence, face unreadable, fingers white on the arms of his chair. At last, he sighed. “You’d try this without me, too, wouldn’t you?”

        She had to smile, just a little. “Yes.”

        “Fine, fine. My men and I will do what we can. I’ll need something of yours for the hounds to scent. I don’t suppose—?”

        She pulled out a handkerchief and threw it at him. “Don’t do anything unseemly with it, understand?”

        He gave a small bow, and for once there was no trace of mockery in it. “As you will.”

* * *

        The Saints’ Key was cheap. Cheap rooms, cheap and mostly pickled food, cheap wine. It didn’t serve its own ale, and the pair of brewing vats growing a coat of black mold in the street out front suggested why. If the inn had other virtues, Tarrow couldn’t see them. She took a room, laid down a charm against bedbugs and anything else that might came crawling out of the mattress, and then set her bedroll on the floor anyway.

        When she woke, Eileen Cooper was sitting in the room’s only chair, watching her.

        “Neat trick,” Tarrow said, sitting up and stretching. Her bruised shoulder ached, and she idly wondered whether her swollen nose was showing through her glamour. The room lacked a mirror, and she seldom bothered with them anyway; they gave back a different face every time, a constant reminder that she no longer had a real one. “Bribing, breaking, or climbing?”

        Eileen held up a key. “I used to work here. They still know me.”

        Interesting. “Well, aren’t you an upwardly mobile one. Up from on your back, I gather?”

        She nodded, face tight. She’d dressed simply, in a rough tunic and skirt, but she’d looped a light linen scarf around her throat. “Lord Whitesmith said I might find you here.”

        “He’s not a lord. Not yet, anyway. His father’s the one with a title: Samuel Whitesmith, styled Lord Torvale, which is an etymological offense to gods and men.” The light through the window told her noon had arrived. She’d had a bare four hours of sleep. “Believe it or not, I’m hard at work. Better to try the crossing at nightfall, and I need to be fresh.”

        Eileen sat and fidgeted in silence. It was a positive force, that silence, like the suction of a deep-river whirlpool.

        Tarrow sighed and let it draw her in. “You’re here to ask for something else, yes? I suppose you finally got around to asking what happens if you get your Jon back. Could be your man tries to kill him again. Could be he doesn’t, and Jon goes and peels the old scabs off what you and Cooper did to your last man. Right now, there’s room for denial. But the fair folk could give him proofs. Maybe they already have. There goes your fancy house, your silk drawers, your servants.” She shrugged, made a so-it-goes gesture. “If you end up back working here, stick to this room. The charm on the bed should hold for a few months. At least you won’t get bitten by anything with more than two legs.”

        Eileen’s lips pressed into a single white line before she spoke: “I saved him. I saved us both, doing what I did about Percival. He was getting worse.”

        Tarrow rose and flicked out a hand, tugging aside the scarf to expose the purpling bruise at the base of Eileen’s neck. “Traded up, did you?”

        “There’s always a price.”

        “Now you sound like the Fae. A price for this, a trade for that. Hell, you’re all starting to sound like them.”

        Eileen didn’t seem to hear. “He loves me, in his way.”

        Against her better judgment, Tarrow sat on the edge of the bed. “They always say that.”

        “Men?”

        “Yes. And then the women repeat it. There are times it’s easier to go on believing a lie. Most of the time, really. It’s why this whole city pretends your Percival killed a man. So now I suppose you’ll ask me to take Jon with me when I go—maybe ask what you can do to be sure you bid me too low for him. You’ll have something trite to say about how he’ll have a better life, and you’ll say it from the best house in town. Through a bruised larynx, too, but hell, a human being can grow used to anything. Or maybe you were going to ask me to put Cooper in the ground. Even if you can’t inherit everything, you’ll be kept comfortable. Maintained, that’s the word, in a certain style. No. I’ll tell you now, I’m not a murderer.” Not anymore, at least. “And don’t make a case for justice or any other damned fool thing. I’m not a judge, either.”

        “I wasn’t thinking,” Eileen murmured. “I wanted my son back. But when I sent the letters... did I make a mistake?”

        Tarrow raised a hand, tilted it. Maybe and maybe not.

        “He was angry last night. I could see it. He’s... less sure that you’re a fraud. He knows Jon might come back.” She drew a deep, shuddering breath. “What if Jon... stayed in Faerie? Could he have a life there?”

        The question caught strangely in her mind, like a bone swallowed crosswise. No one, as far as she could remember, had ever asked it before. When she answered, she spoke slowly. “There’s a coral reef,” she said, “far, far south of here. It’s... beautiful in its way. Dangerous, too. It encloses a harbor, and there are safe channels through it. But accidents still happen. If you swim out there, you can see hundreds of years of shipwrecks—they gut themselves on the reef, then sink down the slope of it for dozens of fathoms, then fetch up and lie there. That’s what Faerie is like. I lived there, once. Everything there has always been a ruin. The cities all half-fallen down, the monuments broken or unfinished. There’s a black stone henge that looks like it’s stood in wind and weather for ten thousand years. But you can’t say how old it is. Hell, you can’t ask how old it is. There’s no time there, not the way you think of it. When a mortal crosses into Faerie, she can bring a little time with her, a little eventuality, but the entire realm is like the reef and the wrecks. Nothing happens. It’s where bits of finished things fetch up. It’s the leftovers, the detritus none want to remember when the shipwreck survivors are telling their stories. You can go there; you can even stay, as long as you’ve drawn a deep breath of the real world... but it isn’t a place for the living. That’s what mortal means, by the way. It means you’ll die, which means you’re alive now. Being unto death, if you like. The fair folk don’t understand death, for all that it’s possible to kill them. They don’t see it as inevitable. They’re as immortal as the mountains... or maybe they’re all stillborn. All born underwater, staring up at diluted sunlight that won’t ever be theirs, not truly, and undrowning.”

        Eileen began to cry silently.

        “No, there’s no living there,” Tarrow said, more gently. “Not for anyone who wants to be human. They’re fascinated by life, just like humans are fascinated by death and raise up doctors to fight it and gods to preside over it. But that fascination doesn’t make the fair folk alive. It merely makes them cruel.” She rose, took Eileen’s hands, and drew her up. A thought struck her: “That reef is dying, by the way. Some say the waters have warmed. Some blame the effluvia of the port city. I don’t know whether it matters. It just came to mind.”

        “What will they do to him?” Eileen whispered as Tarrow ushered her out the door.

        Sometimes, deceit still came to Tarrow with all the speed of reflex. Sometimes it failed her utterly. “Ever seen a child fascinated by a pendulum clock? The first thing she’ll do is pull it apart to find the tick. Now go. I mean to sit and drink while Sean turns the wheels of the rumor mill.” She hesitated, sighed, and added, “The Lord Torvale might want a skilled laborer. That would put your son over a hundred miles away. I can ask. Sean, fool that he is, gives a damn for things like justice and mercy. It’s why he does this, when he isn’t merely bored of dressage and chasing girls he doesn’t want to catch.”

        Eileen paused too, a question in her face.

        Tarrow snorted. “All right. I’ll tell you: I do it to keep ships off the godsdamned reef.”

* * *

        Whitesmith outdid himself, and it almost got her killed.

        She’d asked the inn’s barkeep for peppers. He had only brined ones, but they would do. She was sitting at the bar with a mortar and pestle, grinding the last of them into paste, when the watchmen entered. All wore steel plate, and two of the three were carrying iron-sheathed clubs. They paused in the doorway, painfully awkward, and held a hushed conversation.

        She sighed, scraped the paste into a small glass jar of oil, corked it, and shook the contents. “Looking for someone, boys?”

        The unarmed one took a few cautious steps forward and removed his helmet. “We are, miss. Maybe you’d care to tell us why we look at you and see three different women?”

        She mulled the question over. “Drinking on duty? Lunching on the special mushrooms?”

        “I don’t think so, miss. I think it’d be best if you kept your hands flat on the bar and didn’t speak. We’d like to do this with all courtesy.”

        She laughed. “What comes after the courtesy? A bonfire? Burial with an iron spike in my heart? Now, now. If Whitesmith told you what I am, he should have told you that iron won’t work.”

        “Thing of it is, miss, a couple feet of heavy oak wrapped in iron works on just about anybody.”

        She tied the jar to her belt and laid a hand on her staff. “Just about, yes. Just about.”

        The watchman took a half-step backward. “We just want to know where the boy is. That’s all.”

        That question alleviated any guilt she might have felt for what she was about to do to these men. Besides, her talk with Eileen had left her in a foul mood. “You never really believed the bit with the fair folk. Not until now. It was just an easy way around admitting that Cooper might’ve murdered the boy. ‘Oh, there’s no body; the fair folk took him, what a shame, we’ll put up signs.’ Back when it was Percival Shellstone, lack of a body meant it was murder certain sure, but Shellstone was a violent, drunk, penny-poor son of a bitch, while your Tom Cooper is a violent, sober, foundry-wealthy son of a bitch.

        “That’s all the fair folk are these days to you people: stories to go with swamp gas and drunks singing in the woods at night. Lies you can all agree on when the truth starts burning. Now and then, they’re more than that. Now and then, the lies turn out to be true.” She packed centuries of derision into her voice. “I’ve been doing this for two hundred years. Bringing your children back to you, talking you down from idiot choices, freeing you from bargains you never should have made. Keeping the ships off the reef. And what do I get in return? Iron.”

        The other patrons were edging away now. The watchmen fanned out, their stances fairly screaming that they’d rather be anywhere else.

        “And only three of you? Insulting. No—wait. The rest are outside, aren’t they? What, did you draw straws?”

        The nearest watchman nodded and pulled a sap from his belt.

        The bartender, his back to his shelves, stammered, “But—you drank the beer with rue.”

        “Yeah. Tasted awful. That stuff will give a human tumors, by the way. Stick to cold iron, barkeep.” She rose and bounced on the balls of her feet, gaze flicking between the watchmen. “Who’s first?”

        They all tried to go at once, which simply wasn’t sporting. One went down with a broken knee as she ducked his swing and lashed out with a foot. The spokesman crumpled as she deflected his descending sap with her staff and slammed the free end into his groin. The last landed a glancing blow on her shoulder, but she was already spinning away, and her counterstroke struck his upper arm with an audible crack of breaking bone. When she drove the end of the staff into his gut, he sat down heavily and folded around his broken arm.

        She worked her bruised shoulder through a circle. “Dammit, that’s the same one the tree got. No, no, don’t get up on my account.”

        Amber torchlight filled the windows. A dozen voices shouted questions from the street.

        “The hell with that,” she murmured. “Barkeep? Back door?”

        He pointed, hand shaking.

        “Thanks.”

        She’d expected an angry mob, maybe even a reasonably well-organized watch response.

        She hadn’t expected competent archers.

        The first arrow hummed past her head and sank into the still-open door. She ducked aside, and the second drew a line of fire across her hip. The third punched through her left arm. Strange, silvery pain filled her as she tried to trace the arrows to their sources. Three different rooftops. She couldn’t clear their range, not fast enough, but she could break the lines of sight.

        She cursed and ran, trying to ignore the yard of shaft sunk halfway through her bicep. The hounds wouldn’t need her handkerchief. They’d have her blood.

        Another arrow flashed before her eyes, dark on dark, the air vibrating in its wake. But she was running flat-out now, swerving through alleys, ducking to slide under closed market stalls, kicking herself up a brick wall to gain the rooftops and send an archer screaming over the edge. Somewhere far behind, a matchlock fired, then another, then a third with an altogether different sound and the scream of a man whose weapon had blown up in his face. Adrenaline sang in her blood, mingling with something older and more fundamental. The chase and the joy of it, the smell of blood, the bright clean line where everything—everything—stood at stake. She laughed as she ran and gave a single high, musical cry, the old hunting call, and turned south, leaping from roof to roof as the arrows fell around her and then fell behind.

        She was over the city wall and almost a mile south before she heard the baying of the hounds.

* * *

        It was eight miles to the hanging tree. Jon had made it. Admittedly, he’d known the lay of the land, but he’d also been twelve. She was in her prime. Hell, she’d been in her prime for centuries, and she was still inhumanly fast, born to run like mad in the moonlight, alive with fear and delight.

        She pulled every dirty trick she’d ever learned as the hounds drew closer. She forded a tributary stream and left a few dead-end trails from the southern bank. A hundred yards along the second, she shattered the jar of peppers and oil. She tore strips from her clothing and pitched them upwind as she ran. She charmed the grass to tangle her pursuers’ feet and the wind to throw dust in their eyes.

        Light rose up and danced around her. Fairy lights. She cursed them, but they persisted, sweeping in wild patterns and rushing away into the night. They meant her no kindness, but her kin would never decline a game like this, and their apparition would slow the hunt.

        The wound in her arm burned. She didn’t dare pull the arrow; the shaft might be all that kept her from bleeding out. The pain faded with time, receding into a distant ache. If they’d bothered with archers on the roofs, Whitesmith might have oversold her abilities and undersold the need to take her alive. No surprise there; to err was human, and for all his obsession with the fair folk—maybe because of his obsession with the fair folk—he was still the most human person she knew.

        Half an hour into her flight, she crested a low rise and saw the road, a pale ribbon bright in the moonlight less than a mile away. She’d kept a good pace, for all that her breathing was coming in ragged gasps. The hanging tree was a shadow against that ribbon, and she could feel its power tugging at her, drawing her onward.

        The hounds behind her changed their pitch. Of course there were sighthounds in the hunting pack, and she’d stood silhouetted like a novice. Bugles joined the call.

        “Really?” she wheezed. “Kind of festive, don’t you think?”

        Silvery laughter rang sourceless from the darkness all around her.

        “Oh, go to hell.”

        She set off again, bearing straight for the tree. The pain in her arm was almost gone, which was probably a bad sign. So was the stitch growing in her side. She could hear hoofbeats now, and excited shouts.

        The tree was a hundred yards away when the first of the hounds caught up. She whirled and dealt it a killing blow from the staff: a straight lunge that took it through the open mouth and snapped its neck. She sprang back from the next pair and crippled one with a stroke to the leg. Her left arm wasn’t working properly, though, and when she swung at the other hound, her blow went wide. It backed off, wary and circling out of reach, but it didn’t flee. Others joined it: five, seven, ten. Excited, snapping, closing in a ring.

        Horsemen were coming over the hill. She spun the staff one-handed, screaming at the hounds, and let the sound rise into mad laughter as their ears went back and they shied like spooked horses. “Come on,” she snarled. “I thought you liked sticks, you sons of bitches.”

        A familiar voice shouted a command. Cooper’s voice. A hound leapt—

        —and an arrow punched through its throat in a spray of blood. The others dispersed.

        Whitesmith crossed before her at full gallop, standing in his stirrups and nocking another arrow. Three other men rode with him in Whitesmith colors, bows raised, checking and wheeling their horses to face down Cooper and the mounted watchmen. “Go!” he shouted over his shoulder.

        She blew him a kiss—Gods, but I’ll regret that, she thought—and half-staggered the rest of the way to the hanging tree. The stepping walk seized her then, rising effortlessly. Cold swirled around her, a riot of emotion and history, and she stumbled through the motions, widdershins, always widdershins, and then she was beneath the fatal limb—

        —and then she was falling to her hands and knees in brilliant sunlight. She stayed that way for a long moment, panting. The air smelled of dry leaves and smoke, and the chill of damp earth seeped into her hands. When she raised her eyes, she found the hanging tree perfectly reproduced in full autumn glory, hung with red and gold. Leaves fluttered in a gentle breeze and spun away, falling away upward in a lazy column that might have been butterflies caught at the onset of migration. Other trees dotted the open moor, scattered too widely to call a forest. All wore fall foliage, and all were shedding it. Everywhere she looked, plumes of leaves rose and vanished into blue-gray distance overhead.

        She knew the place. It wore a different skin, but it had the same feel, the same subsurface hum of ill-contained delight.

        “It wouldn’t be Faerie,” she said with a sigh, “if it weren’t weird.” She braced her wounded arm against the hanging tree and broke off the shaft above and below, leaving a few inches protruding. She prodded the wound lightly, winced, and fumbled for her canteen. A fast rinse was the best she could do for now, and the arm might fester anyway.

        “Looks nasty, Miss Tarrow.”

        She twisted. Sean Whitesmith was kneeling in the grass, broken bow in one hand and dagger in the other. Blood dripped from a bite on his right forearm, but he was grinning.

        “Cooper just about had me,” he went on. “I had to shoot him in the leg, and he still took a swing at me with an axe. You should’ve seen him hobbling after me. You think you know the phrase ‘hopping mad?’ You surely don’t.” He pushed himself upright, ambled over, and dropped down beside her. “We’re each an arm down. Trade?”

        “I don’t think yours would suit. If I wouldn’t be seen on your arm, why would I suffer to wear it?” The rush was subsiding, and a hundred minor pains made themselves known. “You shouldn’t have come.”

        “I shouldn’t have done a great many things. But here I am. Mutual assistance pact? Until our return to less exotic climes?”

        “So be it. Be quick. We have a walk ahead of us.”

        “Where?”

        “Look around.” She pointed to the southern horizon, where a low band of gray grounded a series of irregular towers. “That’s Lodestone. It’s always had an affinity for connections to the mortal world. Hence the name. If Jon crossed here, he went there next. His... host would have insisted.”

        Whitesmith unslung a bandolier and began unpacking lengths of bandage. “His host?”

        Lodestone. Why did it have to be Lodestone? She laid her head back against the trunk as Whitesmith began to cut away her sleeve. “We’ve known each other for fifteen years, Sean. I’d say it’s high time you met my mother.”

* * *

        Lodestone had always been a city in ruins: broken towers, crumbling walls, inscrutable and half-eroded glyphs from some older, stranger race. The fair folk’s own legends about its origin conflicted with one another, but all could be summarized as Well, it was just there, you know? So we moved in.

        A pair of fair folk intercepted Tarrow and Whitesmith a hundred yards from the stone wall that encircled the city. Both wore hides and had feathers and animal hair worked through their braids. One had an obsidian-edged weapon belted to his waist: three feet of heavy wood with stone chips set in grooves along its length. The other wore a brace of more conventional stone knives. They were vaguely masculine and wore no glamour, and they stood tall and gray-skinned, their wide eyes black from corner to corner and glistening.

        “I met a man and a half today,” the swordbearer said to his companion, “and found the heart of a riddle. Now all I need are the pretty bits: rhyme and meter and artful misdirection. Do you suppose we’d find them inside? If we rummaged?”

        “They have four feet between them,” the other said, “which does for a child’s meter. Being a man and a half, they ought to have three, don’t you think?” He smiled at them, exposing two rows of pointed teeth. “A gift for you? A small correction?”

        Tarrow grinned back. Fresh, she might have been a match for either of them. Exhausted, wounded, and facing both, she would die bloody in the first exchange, iron or no iron. Whitesmith would be no help at all. But this was an old game: stay entertaining, stay alive. “You might not like where you find the fourth. Nightshade would like it even less.”

        The smiles widened, and they spoke together. “It knows Nightshade?”

        “And it carries iron.” She planted her staff in the ground, iron-down. Thin black veins wandered outward from the point of contact, questing, grass and weeds charring as the sickness spread. Both fair folk flinched backward, ever so slightly. She winked and lifted the staff. “Don’t you want to know how this ends?”

        They traded looks, then, as one, sketched elaborate bows. When they spoke, they alternated in a rapid auctioneer’s cadence: “An escort through the city—”

        “—to keep you from molestation—”

        “—and see you safe to the house of Nightshade, travelers?”

        Tarrow shrugged dismissal, threading a path between insouciance and outright insult. “It would be more impressive if I couldn’t tell you’ve practiced. But no. We’ll have no escort and pay you no price.”

        Whitesmith coughed quietly and leaned forward to whisper in her ear. “If these two waylaid us outside, don’t we need an escort to avoid, ah, needless repetition in the city itself?”

        “No. Because these two will follow us, and the rest will be dying to find out why. When a cat sees another cat playing with a mouse, does it go for the prey? Or for the rival?”

        “That’s... not reassuring at all.”

        She scowled at him. “You’ve been here before. You know it works.”

        “Never to a city. Is... is this Nightshade your mother? Is she a Faerie queen?”

        “No such thing. Come along. Our jokers are looking bored. If they lose interest, they’ll kill us.”

* * *

        They met no further opposition, not as they passed through the broken gates, nor as they ascended stone tiers and wound through narrow streets. Gray faces peered at them, a few leering, most simply speculative. Armed figures closed around them in a loose cordon, moving with easy grace. All wore leather jerkins of identical cut, a detail that nearly made Tarrow stumble as she stared. The armor looked like part of a uniform, and she’d have bet on seeing the moon fall before seeing fair folk pressed into any brand of uniformity. A few even had what looked like rank insignia. Stranger still, she saw mortared stone walls. Someone had been repairing parts of Lodestone.

        An image flickered in her mind: an overambitious shipwright sending divers down to the reef with tools in hand and heads full of lies about what could be made with rotten wood.

        When they reached the house of Nightshade, Tarrow swore with a sudden violence that made Whitesmith leap back and grab for his knife.

        The last time she’d seen it, the house had been a stone slab construct, expanded here and there with magic to include an inverted labyrinth and the glassless aquarium in which Nightshade periodically drowned things. Now, it looked like a low-walled manor, with wooden outbuildings, fresh paint, glazed windows, and a gravel walk. Trimmed grass grew thick and blue-green, and where once there had been tangles of wildflowers, a few late-bloomers added dashes of color to mulched and tended beds.

        “It’s all confused,” one of their companions said. “See? The thoughts have gone all knotted.”

        She suppressed an impulse to dash a handful of iron filings in his face and stalked through the open gate, glaring at the gardeners—gods, what kind of Fae consented to be a gardener?—until they backed away, either under sheer force of will or growing recognition. Whitesmith followed. In the brief backward glances she risked, he looked like a child with a new and sharp-edged toy. Some of his enthusiasm faded when he saw the figure staked out on the lawn, its entrails hauled forth and composed in elaborate geometric patterns. It was still alive, and glamour flickered over its face and ruined body: young, old, male, female, androgynously elegant, stately, voluptuous. All its faces wore expressions of agonized fascination.

        Nightshade received them in an upper room carpeted in skins and sparsely furnished. She looked as she always had: a glamour of sharp, maternal aspect, black hair shot with silver framing narrow golden eyes. She stood taller than Whitesmith, and her slender arms were bloody to the elbow. The cause, if there was one, was not in evidence, but both self-proclaimed escorts looked at her, faltered, and fled.

        She swooped down on Tarrow, embraced her, took her face in stained hands, and kissed her firmly on the forehead, nose, and mouth. “Hello, Mule,” she said. Her voice was a perfect contralto, rippling with submerged delight.

        “Mother. It’s Tarrow these days, by the by.”

        But Nightshade had already lost interest and was walking a slow circle around Whitesmith. “Is this one taken?”

        To his credit, Whitesmith met her eyes and kept a hand on his knife. “No,” he said, “and he won’t be. Madam. We’ve come for Jon Shellstone Cooper.”

        Tarrow kept her face neutral and managed, with difficulty, not to kick him in the shin. “Among other things, mayhap,” she added smoothly. Telling Nightshade what you wanted was a fine way to ensure that you wouldn’t get it—or that by the time she gave it to you, you wouldn’t want it anymore. “A small trade for now: a word with me for a word with the boy.”

        “The boy?” Nightshade cocked her head in mock puzzlement.

        In the quiet of her mind, Tarrow swore again. The opening of a distinction between Jon Shellstone Cooper and the boy couldn’t bode well. Unbidden, Whitesmith’s question returned to her: why Jon? And here were signs of change in a changeless world....

        “It’s a lovely little army you’ve been assembling, Mother,” she said. “Uniforms, ranks. Do you march them up and down and wave at them from balconies? I told the human that there are no Faerie queens. Don’t say you’ve made a liar of me.”

        Nightshade laughed. It was like music, the sort that played right before an on-stage stabbing. “A queen? Donning a silly hat and then demanding to be taken seriously? Oh Mule of mine, even I might tire of that game. We’ve found for ourselves a warrior prince.”

        Whitesmith let out a sharp hiss of breath. “Mortal will,” he said. “If the fair folk are following Jon’s wishes, they can act in the mortal world.”

        “A word for a word,” Nightshade said, ignoring him and taking Tarrow’s arm—the injured one, of course. “Your proposal is acceptable. Let’s go see our dear Jon, and on the way, you will fill my ear with the finest decantation of mortal gossip. Do they still eat potatoes? But they’re so ugly!” She winked at Whitesmith. “The potatoes, too.”

        And what do you eat, Mother? Tarrow thought. But the answer would be what it had always been: Nightshade fed on whatever amused her. Whatever failed to amuse her, she merely discarded.

* * *

        Nightshade did, as it happened, have a balcony, and on the grounds beyond, Jon Shellstone Cooper was drilling the troops. He took after his mother: dark of hair, pale beneath an even tan, tall and graceful as he led a series of spear forms. He wore deerhide breeches and had stripped to the waist. Muscles shifted and glistened with sweat.

        “Well, he came out well, no denying that,” Tarrow said. “How long has he been here—no, wrong question. How many years has he aged?”

        Nightshade gestured, and a wicker couch appeared on the balcony. She pushed Whitesmith into it one-handed and settled in beside him, effortlessly draping his bandaged arm across her shoulders. “Oh, twenty, twenty-five. Time. Such a funny thing. He’s just dripping with it, and I do believe I’ve put it to good use.” She lapped at a drop of blood seeping from under Whitesmith’s bandage. “Oh, a Donshire hound? Very good. If one must be bitten, one must demand the best.”

        Whitesmith disengaged his arm and pulled away. “So he’s spent twenty years brooding over his stepfather, and you just happen to have the means to offer him revenge. And destroy an iron foundry along the way, I assume.”

        Tarrow sat down between them, gently slapping away her mother’s hand and then laying the iron-clad staff like a barrier across her own shoulder. “It’s thin. To act in the mortal world, your soldiers would have to surrender their wills to his. Completely. Do you think they can?”

        “My soldiers?” She looked affronted. “They are his, entirely, and all have freely traded their service for, oh, this and that. My part in all this was merely one of introductions, the extension of hospitality, a proxy trade here and there, and counsel in exchange for certain favors. What he does with his power is altogether by his will and according to his list. He rather dislikes his stepfather, you see, and that hideous enterprise which gave his stepfather such power.”

        “Sure,” Tarrow said grimly. “We’re supposed to believe a twelve-year-old had the foresight, patience, and knowledge to build up this little army. And that he’d conflate a man he hates with a damned industry.”

        Whitesmith, to Tarrow’s horror, was smiling. Just a little. “It’s a very human thing you’re doing, my lady,” he said. “I believe the term is ‘strategic warfare.’ I’d always wondered why the fair folk didn’t try to hinder human access to iron.” He shook his head. “They’ll all die, of course. If they can each fight like Tarrow, they’ll wipe out half the city, but they’ll die all the same. There’s too much iron in Limhill. There’s too much iron everywhere.”

        Nightshade gave him a lofty look. “We shall see. That is what an experiment is all about. You passed Derindal on the front lawn? You can’t have missed him; he must be taking up a quarter acre. Our Jon says that humans sometimes try to read the future in one another’s insides. Derindal is an experiment, too. Do you know the future I read inside him? No? I read that tomorrow—and there will be a tomorrow, even here—there will be one less of my kind.” She bent forward, abruptly intense, and her glamour shifted, leaving her gray and lean and—what? Old? “There is a shape to history. It is pressing through into our world, Mule and man, like a body buried shallow.” She rose. “I promised you a word with Jon. Take it. Then go. I tire of you—just as you tired of me, Mule.”

        The words stung. She hadn’t tired of her mother; she’d been exhausted by her. The force of Nightshade’s full regard had emptied her. Hollowed her out. But that was an old, familiar pain, and it engendered little more than an inchoate anxiety that her mother, no less than Tarrow herself, had chosen to lose herself in the mortal world.

* * *

        Jon had little more than a child’s mind. Tarrow and Whitesmith argued him in circles, but the crux of the matter remained: he had been hurt, and all else was beside the point. “They’ve been good to me,” he said of the fair folk, “and Limhill killed my father. They all did.”

        “Your father,” Tarrow snapped, “was a bastard. Your mother was a whore. Your stepfather was, is, and shall remain a son of a bitch. But they’re all human. They’re more like you than Nightshade will ever be. They’re your family. Kill them, and what happens next? Somebody else goes after you, and now you’re alone. It has to stop somewhere. It might as well stop with you refusing to slaughter a city because Nightshade wants to see what will happen.”

        He stuck out his jaw and said nothing.

        “You could come back alone,” Whitesmith said. “You’re a man now. You could challenge Cooper. I know a few gentry who still allow it. A compromise—you fight him alone in a formal duel. Leave Limhill and your mother out of it.”

        Jon sneered at him. “I have an army, and you want me to fight alone?”

        “You have two hundred and sixteen Fae with stone-tipped spears and leather armor,” Whitesmith corrected him. “And they’ll all die if pierced with iron. How do you think this will end?”

        Silence. Tarrow broke it with a curse. “So be it. Sean, pull this damned arrow out of my arm and sew me up properly. We’re going home.”

        “What about—?”

        “Leave it,” she said sharply. “We came here to save a child from himself. We failed. There’s no child here. Just another in a long chain of consequences.”

        “After all this, you’re just going to give up? What about the mother? Dammit, Tarrow, what about Limhill?”

        She locked eyes with Jon, tried to find some trace of fear or doubt. Nothing. “Sometimes,” she said, “you can save people. Sometimes all you can do is map the choices they’ve already made. This history was written years ago. We’re only passing through.”

        Nightshade appeared as though conjured. “Come, Mule, don’t be so dramatic. Surely you have sympathy for one who would choose against his own kind?”

        “I didn’t choose to be human. I chose to be neither.”

        Nightshade smiled, and had Tarrow not known better, she might have believed she saw genuine sadness. “And has that made you happy?”

        “I... don’t know. It’s made me better, I think.”

        Nightshade reached out and brushed a strand of hair back from Tarrow’s face. Then, briefly, she touched the iron cap of Tarrow’s staff, and she took no hurt from it. “Perhaps it has. May I keep this, in trade for your safe passage back to your realm? I should like to watch it rust....” Her gaze slid to Jon, who still stood in petulant silence. “Isn’t it strange, daughter mine, that death drives continuation? That, no less than birth, it is the impulse at the turn of the cycle? A point to think on.”

        Unwillingly, as she laid the staff in her mother’s hands, Tarrow realized that she would do just that.

* * *

        They returned without incident to the oak. It wore the livery of early spring now, buds giving way to the first scattering of leaves. Ribbons hung from its branches, white and yellow and silver.

        “Where’d they get the paper for ribbons?” Whitesmith asked.

        “Don’t ask. The answer won’t make sense.”

        Far away, a bird gave a high, warbling call. Another answered. Whitesmith cocked an ear, listening, then sighed. “This was all very disappointing.”

        “It usually is. The human parts are always sordid, and the Fae....” She’d meant to say are just the Fae, but it felt untrue, and the words died in her throat.

        He tipped water from a canteen into his handkerchief and pressed it into her hand. “There’s still blood on your face. It’s getting to be a habit. Your mother is... formidable.”

        She dabbed at her cheeks. “Yes.”

        “She touched iron.”

        “I know.”

        “Does that mean iron doesn’t work on them anymore? Or did she... do what you did? What did you do, exactly?”

        She shrugged, ignoring the twinge in her arm. “There are older things in the worlds than humanity or the fair folk. I made a trade. I don’t know whether Nightshade did the same. It seems... likely. She was showing us two futures, I think. They can wage war on iron, or they can all become like me. Either way, it’s the end, and she can see it coming. I hadn’t thought it possible.” She sat down at the base of the tree and idly wound a bit of ribbon around her hand. “Being unto death. Whatever they choose, they’ve become... a bit human. Already, I mean.”

        He sat beside her. “Them becoming like you wouldn’t be so bad, if I may be forward. Admittedly, a whole society of you would be rather frightening, but—”

        “Why do you think she calls me Mule, Sean? It isn’t my stubbornness.”

        “Oh. I see.”

        “Yes. It would be the last generation.”

        Silence for a while, broken now and then by birdsong. Clouds drifted overhead, moving without wind, colliding and parting in fantastic patterns. He slipped an arm around her. She allowed it, then laid her head on his shoulder. She was exhausted. Besides, it felt pleasant.

        “You know, there might be a lot of angry villagers with pitchforks waiting for us on the other side,” she said.

        “Maybe. We should have borrowed some of Jon’s army.”

        “I don’t know what I’m going to tell his mother. To run like mad, probably.”

        “What about Cooper?”

        “To hell with Cooper.” She stood and hauled him upright with her good arm. “It’s time to go.”

        “Ah—how? We weren’t chased here. I kept expecting you to insult someone, or do something to force a pursuit.”

        A bit of mischief woke in her blood. “Look around, Sean. Here, now, this isn’t a hanging tree. Ribbon, fair waking weather, level ground around.” She slid her arms around his neck. “For the moment, it’s a May tree.”

        He gave her a wary look. “So—”

        “Oh, don’t get your hopes up. A dance will do. So dance with me.”

        He did, and the stepping walk took them, all rising blood and delight in the turning of the season, and they crossed together back into the world of iron and time.

* * *

        No hounds or archers awaited them. From the state of the three bodies hanging from the tree, a week had passed. Black flies swarmed through the reek.

        “I told them to withdraw after I reached you,” Whitesmith said tonelessly. “I was very clear.”

        All three corpses wore Whitesmith colors. The three riders who had balked Cooper’s pursuit, she realized. The hangings might have been legal, but they were a grave provocation against Lord Torvale.

        “Do you think they let the rest of my people leave?” he asked in the same voice.

        “Most likely. We killed two or three hounds. You lamed Cooper. They’d probably call this an even trade.” She turned and spat on the tree. “An even trade—they’re becoming more like the fair folk, too, I think. I might be out of work soon, with the Fae turning human and the humans turning Fae. Gods. I swear, there are some humans who could even up a haircut until their heads fit through an arrow slit.” She caught his look and winced. “I’m sorry.”

        “We don’t have to warn them. Jon might come tomorrow. He might come in a week. But it’ll be soon, I think.” His jaw tightened. “It would be fair. If there’s one thing we can’t call that boy, it’s unjust. We can let him have his revenge.”

        “And yours.”

        He looked away. “Yes. And mine, Miss Tarrow.”

        She cupped his cheek, turned him to face her. “I can’t set foot in Limhill. They’d kill me outright. They won’t touch you. For your men, your father will make complaints, perhaps demand weregild. For you... he’d raze this city, and they have to know that.” She let a mirthless little laugh slip out. “An utterly disproportionate response. I like it better than measuring out blood by the pint. Love is a finer thing than justice.”

        “Fine. I’ll tell them, but I’d be lying if I say I hope they believe me. What about you?”

        She knelt and pressed her hands into the grass. The earth began to shiver and crack a dozen yards from the tree. “I’ll be making graves,” she said. “I offer them freely—a gift without obligation, or in thanks for my own life, if you like.”

        “Thank you.” He turned to go, then paused. “Will you still be here when I come back?”

        She nodded. There was no moment of decision, then or in memory. She just knew that she would be waiting for him. “Under a new name, I think. Oh, and bring a saw.”

        He seemed puzzled. Then he glanced at the heavy limb that held the ropes. “Will it stop Jon from crossing back over?”

        “I don’t know. I don’t know whether I even care. But it feels like the right thing to do.”

        “Yes, I suppose it does.” He touched one of the hanging men, heedless of the flies and decomposition. “You know why so many of my people travel with me? A few my father sends as bodyguards, but most are just curious. We all grow up on Faerie stories. They come with me because they want to see. The brighter ones are afraid, but they still want to see. I have to turn many away, actually....” He shook his head, drew a deep breath, and pitched his knife into the ground. It stuck blade-down. “Mostly, we see things like this. Mostly, but not always.”

        He walked back to the road, head down, and turned north towards Limhill. He did not look back.

        She finished opening the graves, then broke up the roadside sign for markers. Whitesmith would have to supply the names. Only when she could delay no longer did she take his knife in hand and begin to climb the tree.

Copyright © 2021 Andrew Dykstal

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Andrew Dykstal lives in Arlington, Virginia, where he writes across all manner of speculative genres. In 2003, long before the associated meme, he took an arrow to the knee, which was about as much fun as it sounds. His fiction has appeared in Daily Science Fiction, Galaxy’s Edge, and Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and his novelette “Thanatos Drive” won the 35th Writers of the Future contest. Find him online at andrewdykstal.com.

Read more Beneath Ceaseless Skies

THE WITNESS BRÛSKA LAI

by Aaron Perry

        Brûska Lai was not particularly tall or short, wide or thin. Aside from her name, there was nothing distinctive about her—except her ability to look into the eyes of the dead and note their time of death down to the minute.

        This second sight made her a professional witness of uncanny capability, although deaths were not the only thing she witnessed. Her eyebrow-raising signature graced almost half of the marriage licenses from the Second District Courthouse and one in twenty of the birth certificates. With a practiced flick of the pen she notarized joy and sorrow alike, and it was never anything but business to Brû.

        Which wasn’t to say she had no professional aspirations; Brû hoped to one day attend the wedding of a naïve princess or the execution of a corrupt king. The closest she had ever come to this goal was the wedding of a royal handmaiden and, more recently, the execution of a murderous duke. The events had been tangled up in one another, which made them memorable, so when Brû answered a knock at the door one rainy afternoon, the first words out of her mouth were, “Oh. You.”

        A woman stood in the rain, drenched through, blonde hair clinging to her face like ivy to a garden wall. A garrote scar cut across her windpipe. It had gone silvery with age but remained glaring and violent just the same.

        “Dahlia, isn’t it?” Brû said.

        “Yes.” Dahlia’s voice barely rose above the sighing of the rain. “You witnessed my wedding.”

        That had been five years previous, and Brû had much more recently witnessed the execution of her husband’s murderer, but she could understand why Dahlia might not want to mention that.

        “It would be hard to forget,” Brû said. “Most brides pick summer, but yours was in autumn. It was lovely.”

        They stared at one another, Brû waiting for her to explain her appearance on the doorstep. Dahlia’s jaw flexed with words unspoken, held back by fear or anger or sorrow. The lull was broken by Brû’s two-year-old daughter, who attached herself to Brû’s leg and stared up at Dahlia.

        Brû hoisted her onto one hip and opened the door a little wider. “Please, come in and dry off.”

        She did not normally make a habit of inviting strangers into her home, but she would not leave a survivor of the Votive Duke’s murderous rampage standing in the rain. Dahlia pushed back her hair and wrung it out before she stepped across the threshold. Brû left her dripping in the foyer while she fetched a towel, and once Dahlia was merely damp instead of soaking, Brû led her through the dining room into a small reading room. A cheery fire crackled in the hearth, and Brû dragged another chair in from the dining room so they could sit face to face.

        “Your daughter is lovely,” Dahlia said, watching the girl play with wooden blocks in the corner. “What’s her name?”

        Brû smiled to herself. Both her name and second sight ran in the family, and they ran together. Until she could confirm that her daughter did not share her second sight, she would not have a name, either.

        “She’s called Lai,” Brû said. What that was short for could be anything. She turned to a small tray-table beside her chair and began measuring tea leaves into a sieve. “So what’s the business?”

        Dahlia sat forward, elbows braced on her knees as she stared into the fire. “I work at the palace.”

        “I wouldn’t expect them to throw you out after that whole ordeal last year.”

        “No. The other palace.”

        Brû paused in the middle of pouring tea. The scent of orange peel and cinnamon curled through the air, along with Dahlia’s statement. The Palace of Confluence. Now there was something Brû hadn’t been expecting. The Confluence was the heartbeat of the city, constant but hidden and oft forgotten.

        “You know,” Brû said, “I did wonder why you weren’t at the execution. You had returned to the Confluence by then?”

        “No, I was still in the city, but the trial was all that mattered. I didn’t need to see the rest. I returned to the Confluence more recently.” She paused, her next words dammed up by hesitation, and then they broke through. “Since then, Princess Clairvoyance has been missing. I need your help to find her.”

        “My help?”

        Princess Clairvoyance was one of the most famous royals in residence at the Palace of Confluence. City parliament had known of her existence for centuries, but she had yet to be born. Brû had a difficult time imagining what good the skills of a professional witness would be in a search and rescue mission, especially within a place such as the Confluence.

        Dahlia accepted a mug of dark red tea, a special blend which the shop next door affectionately sold as ‘Brû’s Brew’. Slowly, thoughtfully, she said, “Outside the Confluence, you’re the only one who’s seen the princess, aside from me. That makes you the only person who can search for her inside the Confluence. It shouldn’t take more than a few hours.”

        Brû’s curiosity shifted to wariness. She didn’t know much about the Palace of Confluence, except that whatever strange tales came from within its walls were probably not strange enough. The ghost monarchy, some called it.

        “There aren’t other staff who can help you?”

        Dahlia shook her head. “Palace politics. That’s all I can say for now.”

        Brû took a sip of her own tea. She saw many odd things as a professional witness, and it had been an odd wedding, almost five years earlier. Brû had been the only guest.

        “Princess Clairvoyance was the woman who officiated your ceremony?”

        “Do you remember her?”

        “I wouldn’t be a very good witness if I didn’t. But if palace politics has you gagged, why are you allowed to tell me this much? And a ‘missing royal’, what does that even mean?”

        “I came to you for the same reason you were allowed to attend the wedding: your record as a witness speaks for you, and Her Highness trusted your discretion then. I do now. As for missing royals...” She wrapped both hands around her mug and stared into the fire. “I wish I knew. This has never happened before, and Clairvoyance is special. I need to find her.”

        Dahlia kept saying things for which Brû had no frame of reference. Royals were special by definition, and as she understood it, they couldn’t go missing because they didn’t technically exist. At least not the ones in the Confluence.

        “Special how?” she asked.

        “She’s—” Dahlia glanced away from the fire, then back into the flames. “She’s going to be the next one born into the city.”

        Brû made her living watching condemned souls during their final days in court and final moments on the gallows; she knew liars very well, as well as desperation. She sensed both of those things in Dahlia now. Dahlia was holding something back, which Brû didn’t begrudge her. Lies were never as interesting as the reasons for them in the first place.

        “She’s next?” Brû said. “Parliament never knows who’s next.”

        Now Dahlia held her gaze. “Parliament might not know, but we in the Confluence have at least some idea. With Clairvoyance missing, there will be no royal after Queen Verity. Can you imagine it?”

        Brû couldn’t, and there was something in that inconceivable future that she found more alarming than any mortal danger. The royals of the Confluence touched all aspects of life, political, social, economic. To lose one would thrust the city into chaos.

        “But if I’m going to the palace,” she said, “we’ll need permission from the council, won’t we?”

        “I have it already, provisionally. You’ll have to meet them.”

        Brû leaned back in her chair. She removed an orange from the bowl on her reading stand and rolled it between her palms, inhaling the citrus scent. Winter was a slow time to be a witness, dreary and cold, with few executions and even fewer weddings. There were always bodies at the mortuary that needed a confirmed time of death, but Brû had been down only yesterday. The constabulary could do without her insight for a day or two.

        “I have always been curious about the Confluence,” she said with a smile, “and I suppose safeguarding the future of the city is a good enough cause. Let’s wait until you’re dry, then I can hand the little one off my husband and we’ll be away. Why did you come without an umbrella, anyway?”

        “I had forgotten it was raining when I was last here. It usually doesn’t rain in winter.”

        Brû frowned. The execution had been that past summer, following more than a year of litigation and an ugly, public trial. “Surely you’ve been back in the Confluence for months now.”

        “As I said, I stayed in the city to take care of some business. I only departed for the Confluence at eleven o’ clock this morning.”

        “And in the past two hours you forgot the weather?”

        “Two hours for you.” Dahlia stared through the steam rising off her tea. “For me, it’s been almost a year.”

        “A year?”

        Dahlia shook her head. “I should have come back as soon as I realized Clairvoyance was missing, but I didn’t. I waited, uncertain what to do. Looking back, that was a mistake. I only hope I haven’t waited too long.”

* * *

        Brû had been offered a home across from the Second District Courthouse, since she was so often there, but convenience hadn’t stood a chance against her little townhouse. Crammed between a coffee roaster and a tea shop, for the last decade it had been like living in the eye of a cultural hurricane. The war that raged between coffee and tea was one of the greatest the city had ever known, albeit one of the quietest. When the first coffee beans had been imported by a seneschal of foreign affairs and gifted to the prime minister, most people thought the odd beverage was done for after the prime minister declared it ‘peculiarly strong for his taste’, but it had gained popularity among the working class, and then the academia, and finally the social elite. Ten years after one prime minister snubbed it, another signed the Economic Verity Accords—the most important document of the century—in a coffeehouse. Now there were almost as many coffeehouses as tea shops.

        All this to say, before departing for the council Brû bought a pound of medium-roast coffee and a set of three different teas; there was no telling which would be preferred as a gift. Fruit was the usual offering, but the cultural back and forth over beverages was the weft and warp of the city itself, and the council loved their city. Brû was confident at least one of her gifts would strike a chord.

        She tucked the paper bag inside the front of her blue pea coat, doing her best to shelter herself and Dahlia with a single umbrella. Dahlia had the habit of drifting back to walk a half-step behind her, and after the third time this happened Brû snaked her arm through Dahlia’s elbow and pressed on.

        “How long have you worked at the palace?” she asked.

        “Can’t say.”

        “Do you like it?”

        “Can’t say.”

        “Do you call Her Highness ‘Clair’ in private?”

        Dahlia paused, smiled, and said, “Can’t say.”

        Brû continued to pepper her with questions she could not answer, following a lane that meandered through the cramped residential sector of the third district before taking a detour along the riverside foundries. The smog from the metalworks hung thick and bitter in the air, and Dahlia spat into the shimmering oil-slicked river.

        “Why are we going this way?” she asked.

        “Avoiding the Anti-Verity protests outside the third district counting houses,” Brû said.

        “I didn’t see any this afternoon.”

        “You caught them in a lull, but I guarantee the protests will have resumed now that it’s closing time—all the better to catch the honchos as they try to slip away—and you don’t want to be there. Show your face anywhere near the counting houses and you’re either with them or against them.”

        Dahlia’s sigh turned into a violent cough, and she nodded her understanding. Brû led her through a hole in a wooden fence that dumped them into the end of a cul-de-sac. The street grew livelier and less industrial until finally they arrived at the Plaza of the Council’s Chamber.

        The Council’s Chamber was a vast pavilion, with pillars running around the perimeter and a circular skylight cut in the center of the roof, beneath which sat a ringed table. Through rain or shine the council kept vigil there, where they could observe their patch of sky from the dead center of the city. They were always in view a stone’s throw away from the plaza’s foot traffic, and yet so distant, too. No one entered the pavilion without permission, although no security measures prevented it.

        As Brû and Dahlia stepped up from the flagstones of the city’s central square, Brû could not shake the sense of a curtain parting, of passing into a space behind the plane where reality played out. The pillars muffled the sound of rain too well, the ceiling retreated ever farther the longer she gazed at it, and the council seemed a mirage; not quite seen but sensed, until in an instant she and Dahlia stood before their table. The rain came down in a drizzle through the skylight, a microcosm of the outside world, and out of respect for the eleven weather-beaten skeletons dressed in gray robes, Brû folded her umbrella, allowing the rain to fall on her as well.

        Dahlia addressed the council. “This is Brûska Lai, professional witness. She will be accompanying me back to the palace.”

        Dahlia nodded to Brû, whose attention shifted minutely between the skeletons slumped in their chairs before she stepped into the center of the ringed table. A dais jutted up from the marble flooring, unshaped and rough, poorly leveled. Gifts from previous supplicants were piled there in an uneven heap, but it must have been some time since the last request was made; the freshest item was what appeared to be a branch of persimmons, their flesh long consumed by mold, their seeds and shriveled four-leaf stems all that remained.

        Brû took a penknife from her pocket, which she used to sign the occasional blood witnessing, and slit the sack of coffee. She scattered it across the hump of the dais, then she opened the tins one by one and poured out the tea leaves as well. The rain mixed it together in a brown and red slurry, which ran down the sides of the dais to diffuse through the puddles of rainwater at her feet.

        She stood at patient attention, waiting, thinking. As time stretched out, she feared she had made a mistake. Gifts for the council were meant to be healthful; fruits and vegetables were popular, as was dried meat. Certain holy days called for sweets. But what of the soul? The council must grow bored of the same gifts over the long years. Variety must spark their delight.

        She leaned slightly forward, watching the dais closely, and before her eyes the mold on the persimmon branch rippled. Like hoarfrost on a window pane it crept down and along the tea leaves. Brû made a mental note: The council preferred tea.

        “Is that all right?” Brû asked. “They didn’t like the coffee.”

        “It’s fine. I’ve seen them take grapes one week and refuse them the next when offered alongside something else. The council has taste. We can go.”

        She joined Brû in the center of the ringed table, and together they looked up at the circle of sky. Brû squinted through the falling rain. The edges of the skylight faded, the overcast skies swelling to consume her vision. Sensation blurred, up and down lost meaning as she floated through endless billowing sheets of gray.

        She blinked as a raindrop fell into her eye, and silence rang throughout the pavilion—the absence of rain. The sun shone in cloudless blue. From the edges of the skylight, nets of ivy trailed down to the table below, growing so thickly around the council members that they could not be seen within.

        The snarled, green curtain shook and shuddered in a way that Brû found discomfiting, and a children’s rhyme came unbidden to her lips. “Flesh to ivy, mold to ash, the council’s order first to last.”

        She looked to Dahlia, who said, “The council used to approve requests with words, and then a creeping of ivy. In the city at the moment, it’s mold. Someday it will be ash.”

        “And after that?”

        “Not even the council is eternal.”

        She led Brû out of the pavilion, which no longer sat in a city square but within a vast pond of water lilies. The sun had set, and fireflies blinked lazily in the twilight. Brû looked back at the pavilion. She had seen a noon sky through the skylight.

        “This is going to take some getting used to,” she muttered.

        Dahlia laughed sympathetically. “Oh, you won’t have the time to get used to it—just remember to keep breathing.”

        She led the way along a series of arched bridges, vermilion paint brilliant in the dying light. At the edge of the lily pond the ground sloped down to a valley cast in deep shadow, and cradled between the slopes was the Palace of Confluence.

        Brû paused to gaze down at the strange, unnatural architecture. Artistic depictions always portrayed it as elegant, classic in design. In truth it was a shambolic heap of towers and domes, like a child’s castle of mud and sticks smashed together with sheer inventiveness and no restraint.

        “Living in the city,” Brû said, “you know it’s real, but you never expect to see it. Sometimes you wonder.”

        Dahlia’s expression was distant as she said, “I can hardly remember the first time I saw it.”

        Brû tilted her chin to the purpling skies, and a chill crept over her as she recognized none of the emerging constellations. “Is it true time doesn’t pass within the palace?”

        “It does, but in a disjointed way.”

        It was generally known that the residents of the palace and those loved ones they left behind experienced the flow of time normally from their own perspective, but when they met again, those experiences did not match up. The question, then, was from whose or what’s perspective was this passage of time normal? Some thought the palace itself, some thought it was the council, and still others thought it was King Blasphemy, waiting to be born in a distant future, the hope of all nations.

        They followed a lonely, winding road to the Unguarded Gate, which stood perpetually open. At the threshold, Dahlia put out a hand, stopping Brû before they entered the portcullis.

        “Here.” She reached into her coat and handed Brû a narrow case of supple leather. “Wear these.”

        Brû unbuttoned the front flap and removed a pair of dark spectacles. She held them up in the wan light, tilting them back and forth, watching refractions play through the thick lenses. “What are they?”

        “A roadmap,” Dahlia said, “and mandatory for anyone entering service. You’re the first visitor we’ve had in an age, but the rules apply to you, too. Some of them, at least.”

        Brû slipped them on and blinked rapidly as the world around her shifted. Color bled from the surroundings, everything gone ashen gray, with the exception of the palace itself. It shone in clearly delineated hues, a patchwork of rainbow masonry.

        “What I’m about to tell you is not to be shared with anyone,” Dahlia said. “The royals who haven’t been born into the city live in the future, here in the palace, but they come from different futures. None of them know the others exist, and they all believe they are the sole sovereign of the nation, sole resident of the palace. Furthermore, they all come from different versions of the palace, which can cause problems. I’ll explain more once we’re inside, but for the time being, stay close and do not leave the blue sections of the palace.”

        They passed through the portcullis and across an abandoned courtyard. A narrow, towering doorway led into the domed structure of the palace proper. Brû was agog at the vastness of the reception hall, which was crisscrossed with staircases of all colors like a divine game of cat’s cradle. Some of them were built right above one another, following the same paths so anyone on a lower staircase would nearly brush their head on the underside of the stairs above. Members of staff moved about in gray robes, trailing behind members of the palace royalty who appeared wholly ignorant of one another.

        Brû cocked her head. “Well now. That’s interesting.”

        She was surrounded by ghosts, but then she also was not. At a glance, the royals looked as real as their attendants, but in the same way Brû could look a dead man in the eyes and know when he had died, she could tell which of the royals had passed on and which were yet to come. Which, she supposed, grappling with the implications of the Confluence, made sense. If the palace was a place of time made weird, then the past must be there as well, for future and past were mere perspective.

        And then, through the tangle of stairways and royals barely avoiding collision, Brû glimpsed a man in profile: a face she would never forget.

        “Council’s bones.” She gaped. “That’s him.”

        Three levels up, walking through the shadows of a columned balustrade, was the Votive Duke. Even from a distance, Brû could see he was one of the dead royals, death evident across his eyes in a violent smear of matte black, the rest of him cast in soft and natural shadow.

        “It’s no wonder you said the execution didn’t matter,” Brû breathed. “You have to live with him still.”

        Dahlia watched him coolly. “Our sections aren’t anywhere near one another. I can ignore him quite easily. But yes. It feels like justice only half carried out. Seeing him publicly shamed and damned was all I had been hoping for.”

        “Does he know?”

        “No. There is no difference between the ghosts of royals past and those to come. We keep extensive records to ensure royals who were born centuries ago don’t mistakenly end up on the list of royals-expectant.” She looked away and closed her eyes. “I know it’s all fascinating at first, but we do need to move quickly.”

        Brû followed Dahlia, who was still dressed for her trip outside the Confluence. Casting about for anything to change the subject, she asked, “No robes for you?”

        “Normally yes, but not now. Blue sections are for Princess Clairvoyance, and she’s not around to see me so improperly dressed.”

        “But the other royals surely mind?”

        “They can’t see us, can’t hear us, do not even know we exist so long as we are not in their section. There’s Prince Folly right now.”

        Dahlia nodded to a middle-aged man in a well-tailored suit. He strode with purpose through the scarlet section of the flooring, and as he passed by, Dahlia put her fingers to her lips and gave a shrill whistle. He remained oblivious.

        “From their perspective,” she said, “they live in the present, ignorant of everything else.”

        “But with so many conflicting versions of the present, whose perspective is real?” Brû briefly tried to work it out temporally, logically, before taking a stab in the dark. “None of them?”

        Dahlia gave her a small smile. “Correct. The only perspective that matters here is the council’s. This is their present; they created the Confluence long ago, and therefore all the royals live in the future, even the ones we would consider to be living in the past. Now come on, it’s just through here.”

        Concealed beneath one of the many staircases was a small door. It admitted them into a warren of claustrophobic, twisting passages which eventually emerged into a cozy study. A wardrobe stood against the far wall, and a fire burned in the hearth. A few books sat on a table in the center of the room. With a start, Brû realized the stonework was uncolored, or rather, normally colored.

        “Some kind of staff quarters?” she asked.

        “Just mine. This is a liminal place, technically beyond the bounds of the Confluence but isolated from the rest of the outside world by the Confluence, if that makes sense.”

        “Like the shrine where you were married?”

        Dahlia paused in sorting through the wardrobe. “What do you mean?”

        “Just something I’ve been pondering,” Brû said. “If Princess Clairvoyance officiated your wedding, that would mean the shrine was inside the Confluence. But if one needs permission from the council to enter the Confluence, and I never got such permission to attend the wedding, then the shrine was outside the Confluence. Which is to say, the shrine seems to be both inside and outside the Confluence. As you said, a liminal sort of place.”

        Dahlia nodded slowly. “Yes, well, that’s all tied up in the reason I brought you here in the first place.”

        Brû sank into one of the chairs around the table. This had been equal parts overwhelming and fascinating so far, and she couldn’t imagine what the rest entailed. If Clairvoyance only lived in the blue section, then Dahlia had probably already scoured it top to bottom for any sign of her missing royal.

        “What will I be doing, exactly?” she asked.

        Dahlia removed a gray robe and draped it across one end of the table. She took a seat opposite Brû, her gaze focused on the worn tabletop. “The things I have already revealed put you in the tiny minority of those who know the inner workings of the government. What I’m about to say will elevate you even further. To an echelon of two.”

        Brû remained silent, her attention wholly on Dahlia.

        “The council has a proper name,” Dahlia said. “You could find it, out there in the mundane world, if you knew where to look. It used to be called the Council of Twelve.”

        The council, past and present, had always been eleven. “Why the misnomer?”

        “Because Princess Clairvoyance is the twelfth member. The others hold the palace in place, hold time at bay—filter it, change it—so Clairvoyance can do her work. It is she who finds the other royals, collates them within the Confluence. She was the first resident of the palace, and she will be the last, aside from King Blasphemy. She is not like the other royals, not a royal at all, in some sense.”

        Brû leaned one elbow on the table. There was the lie she had sensed earlier. “So Clairvoyance isn’t going to be next born into the city.”

        Dahlia gave a tired laugh. “No, she’s not. I’m sorry. But I wasn’t lying when I said that without Clairvoyance, there will be no new royal born after Verity. That is my very real fear.”

        Brû recalled her scant knowledge of the palace, cobbled together from dimly remembered school lessons and politics she paid attention to half as often as she should. The current royal, Queen Verity, had made the passage from palace to mundane reality—been born— when Brû was still a girl. Brû remembered riotous celebrations; photographs in the newspaper of the Votive Duke holding the infant who had been identified as Queen Verity.

        Even then, the duke had not been able to keep the bitterness from his smile as he left the limelight to make room for the new foundation of government. The royals didn’t do anything in particular, wiling away their lives as each of them waited for their unique and momentous epiphany that would justify their status as a royal of the Confluence: their apotheosis. It did not matter if they were the child of a chandler or a shrine priest or an actual blue-blood from the defunct monarchies of ages past—when they were recognized as a royal of the Confluence, they were elevated.

        Each time this happened, a list of the known royals still to come was published. A complete list was never possible, usually never more than a dozen royals were known at a given time, and every so often new ones were discovered within the Confluence, churned up and appearing as if from nowhere. But Princess Clairvoyance and King Blasphemy had always been on that list. Now Brû wondered why that had never seemed strange.

        King Blasphemy was the far-flung hope of the Confluence, the one who would eventually lead humanity into a new age, and all the other royals were stepping stones to reach him. For Clairvoyance to remain constant while other royals came and went should have made it clear something about her was different.

        “And you work for her?” Brû said. “A council member and founder of the palace?”

        “Yes.”

        “You must be close, for her to preside over your wedding.”

        “It was she who directed me to get married in the first place. Normally that is not allowed among palace staff. We are effectively non-entities.” Dahlia added, “It’s not as bad as it sounds. We all come from difficult lives in the city; the palace is a relief.”

        “And it wasn’t difficult marrying a man you didn’t know?”

        Dahlia’s smile was distant. “I did know him; I’m the one who found him. Clairvoyance never told me who to marry. She just said do it. It was the hardest thing I’d ever done, but not because I didn’t love him. I spent years away from the Confluence, living in the city. It was thrilling... and terrifying. It can be hard to understand the consequences that come with a command from Princess Clairvoyance, but it wasn’t then. Then I knew.”

        Brû waited for her to continue, waited for her to say it, but Dahlia was lost in her own memories. Brû brought her back to the present as she asked, “You knew your husband would die?”

        “I knew it was possible. Clairvoyance told me my marriage would safeguard the future of the palace. She told me one of us—he or I—would die, but she did not know who. Sometimes I think it would be better if she had known; she had foreseen almost everything else, even the day of the wedding, but not which of us would die.”

        She cupped her chin in one hand, tracing a figure eight on the tabletop with her finger. The silence felt like a physical weight that Brû had to carefully shift aside before she asked, “And did he know?”

        “No.” Dahlia looked up, and her mask fell half free. There was a tired, long-carried guilt in those eyes. “The only thing that made it better was that he tutored in the Hall of the Manifest Royal. He had taught Queen Verity for years, and he took his job seriously. I knew from the moment I met him that he wouldn’t hesitate to die for the sake of the Confluence. I just wish it hadn’t been because of me.”

        “It wasn’t. It was because of the Votive Duke.” And arguably Princess Clairvoyance.

        Dahlia shrugged, as if to say wherever the blame might lie, it mattered little when compared to the guilt that remained. “With Clairvoyance missing, I am afraid it all will be for nothing. What I need of you is to search the palace—all of it, except for King Blasphemy’s chambers.”

        An unexpected sense of disappointment curled itself around Brû’s heart. She had been rather looking forward to meeting the future paragon of humankind. “Why not his?”

        “Because you can’t. I don’t know where his chambers are. No one but his caretaker does.”

        That seemed backward. “He’s the entire reason for the Confluence. Why hide him?”

        Dahlia shook her head. “Even as privileged as I am, there are politics that are beyond me. I can only speculate that as the final end of the Confluence, Clairvoyance does not want him tampered with in any way. There have been... incidents, in the past, with royals seeing things they should not. Hence the strict precautions.”

        She gestured to a little indexed catalogue on the table beside the spectacles and gray robe. Brû picked it up and leafed through the pages, color coded, each bearing detailed but clearly arranged instructions for behavior within the various sections. Slowly she stood and donned the robe, fastening the wooden toggles down the front and rolling back the sleeves. She unfolded the spectacles and rested them lightly on her nose before finally dropping the book in her pocket.

        “What if I can’t find Clairvoyance?”

        “I don’t know, and that’s what I’m afraid of. I have no idea how long she’s been gone—the last time I saw her was at my wedding. But I suspect that without her as the last living council member, the Confluence’s very foundation would begin to fall apart, so that it hasn’t already gives me hope she’s still here.”

        “How long do I have? Earlier you said only a few hours?”

        “I said it would only take a few hours. You have a lifetime.” Dahlia let the statement hang for a moment before she said, “Time doesn’t pass in the city unless a new royal is born. It’s likely that no time at all will have passed when you return, even if you stay here for years.”

        “But if the next royal is born?”

        Dahlia’s voice grew quiet. “Then it will be you who has passed no time at all, and the city will have leapt forward decades through Queen Verity’s life, even if you’re here for no more than a day. It’s a peculiar sort of worry—so strange that it’s best not to think about it. Act as though time is not a factor here.”

        Brû’s grip tightened on her armrest. Her friends and family dead, her business in ruins, all because she had spent a day in the Confluence—the thought of it made her heady with a barely suppressed panic. A shade of anger bled into her voice as she asked, “Can you give me one good reason why I shouldn’t leave right now?”

        Dahlia had the sense to avert her gaze, her cheeks flushed. “Because the damage is done. You’ve crossed the threshold, the Confluence has you now, and time is forfeit. I’m sorry. There was no one in the palace for me to ask, and outside the palace, only you. If it were any other royal, I could have gone to parliament, but to them Clairvoyance is no one special, and it must remain that way. Would you have come if I told you beforehand?”

        “No.”

        “I wouldn’t have asked if I thought it was at all likely you would return to a city any different than the one you left.” She looked up now. “I’ve lived here a long time. I know this place better than I know anything out there in the real world. I won’t let you stay overlong. I know what it’s like to lose family.”

        Brû found her anger short-lived. The thought of Dahlia stuck in this uncanny place with her husband’s murderer left Brû with a deflated sense of outrage. More gently she said, “I can’t promise to search this place top to bottom, but I suppose as long as I’m here I may as well take a look. Anything else I need to know?”

        “Be careful no one sees you crossing borders, especially the attendants.”

        “What if they recognize me while I’m in a neighboring section?”

        “Just don’t let them actually see it happening. Otherwise, ignore them and they’ll ignore you.” She stood and fastened a pin on Brû’s lapel: the abstracted shape of an eye. “This will keep the palace staff eager to please. It indicates you’re a member of the oversight committee, here to determine who might be in need of time in the mundane world, which, to be clear, none of them actually want.”

        “So from a distance pretend I’m one of them, but up close pretend I’m their superior?”

        “Correct. I’ll be here,” she said, and then with a sigh, “waiting. Thank you.”

        As Brû opened the door, a damp chill seeped in from the corridor. The place was a truly dizzying configuration, and it felt as if infinity itself lay before her. She was a mote upon a moebius curve. She glanced back at Dahlia and asked, “Where do I begin?”

        “Start with Prince Folly. He’s expected to be born into the city next. The Confluence is a fluid space—it erodes and shifts, always in flux, but I have a rudimentary method of divining who will be born next based on how close their section is to Clairvoyance. It’s not always correct, but Folly has been her neighbor for ages. If her disappearance has destabilized the Confluence, I suspect signs of it will show there first.”

        “Right.” Brû adjusted her spectacles. “See you in a few hours. Or an eternity.”

        She stepped into the hallway and closed the door. As she headed back down the length of the winding corridor, the stonework gradually shifted from gray to lapis blue, and soon she emerged into the crisscrossed reception hall. She milled about there for a while, drinking in the bizarre architecture. A dozen different shades of a dozen different hues were splashed across the room, some of them no more than a swatch of color on a wall seen through a high window.

        She stood with her toes on the border between blue and scarlet, a moment’s pause before the plunge. She was still safe here, unseen and unheard. A single step would carry her out of that safety. It felt absurd. She removed the notebook and checked the pages coded in hues of pink and red until she came to Prince Folly. He was expected to be born within the next century and succeed Queen Verity. He had a fondness for board games and bathed twice a day, owing to a hatred of most natural scents. Brû pulled her collar away from her neck and took a sniff. Acceptable.

        She stepped across the threshold. The sensation was faint, although perceptible. Like pushing through a veil of cobwebs, filaments of overlapping time enveloping her. She resisted the urge to brush them away as she waited for the sensation to fade, then headed for the nearest scarlet staircase. She walked quickly, projecting an air of purpose that did not quite spill over into urgency.

        The staircase was sandwiched between nearly identical stairways of burnt umber above and indigo beneath. She could hear footsteps thudding on the stairs above, and an impish part of her, gleeful at so much novelty, entertained the idea of cracking a joke to see just how selective the attendants’ hearing could be. Instead she settled for eavesdropping and felt unexpectedly transgressive as the attendants above muttered something about evening candles.

        The scarlet stairway brought her to a door, and no sooner had she opened it than a pair of robed staff members looked up from a table where they were preparing tea. A third sat with Prince Folly, playing a game of backgammon.

        The pair at the table exchanged a silent glance before one of them approached Brû and asked in hushed but stern tones, “Who are you?”

        Brû glanced back down the staircase, and then, realizing that made her seem uncertain, stepped into the room and closed the door. As far as she had seen, there were no other routes into the scarlet section aside from that single staircase, which she really hadn’t been expecting to lead to a tea room—a tea room off the central reception hall? Maybe it made more sense from Folly’s perspective.

        “The Auditor.” Brû pushed her spectacles farther up her nose and narrowed her eyes. “Who are you?”

        The man’s attention flickered to her lapel pin, his face momentarily slack as if he did not know what sort of expression to adopt, before finally he settled on confusion. “I’m His Highness’s valet. Is it—has that much time passed already, out there?”

        “It has, so don’t mind me. I’ll be hanging about.”

        None of them bothered her for the rest of her time in the scarlet section, although it was a nuisance having to tag along with them, as she was ostensibly there to audit their performance. She searched for signs of Clairvoyance as they passed from room to room, ignoring their sidelong glances when they thought she wouldn’t notice. A feverish sort of dread filled their eyes, and for the first time Brû wondered what Dahlia had meant when she said none of them wanted to leave. Brû hoped she would be able to avoid staff in the next section.

        The most difficult part was not acknowledging other royals when they happened to cross paths. After Prince Folly’s backgammon game, a brief scouring of the section as he looked for a mislaid book, and a lengthy bath, he led them down to a wine cellar as the dinner hour neared—although the twilight outside had not shifted in the slightest—and in the cellar they found the Contrived Judge and the Duchess of Shame.

        The two stood in the burnt umber section, along with an attendant. The Duchess was a girl of perhaps fourteen, and the Judge looked more like a butler than an adjudicator. From Brû’s brief skimming of the guidebook, they were the only two royals to exist as a pair. She found them terribly fascinating.

        While Prince Folly perused his section of the wine cellar, the Duchess was going through hers like each bottle had personally wronged her. She stalked through the aisles, glaring at the dusty vintages, and every so often she would snap her fingers and the Judge would remove a bottle for her examination. At one point the Duchess stood across from Brû, on the opposite side of a wine rack, and it felt as though her focus had fallen on Brû alone. Something in that girl’s burning gaze pierced her, as though all Brû’s aspirations, good deeds, and sins—her very life—had been seen. She could not stand it.

        Driven by an impulse to escape the Duchess’s ignorant yet unsettling gaze, Brû grabbed a bottle from the shelf and turned to Prince Folly. “How about this one, Your Highness?”

        Folly looked up from the end of the row, a wine bottle in each hand. Behind him, his three staff members gaped at Brû as though she’d smashed the bottle against the stones and challenged him to a fight.

        Folly put his wine back and drew near. He smelled pungently floral, and Brû swallowed a cough.

        “Hm, yes,” he said. “You have a good eye. This vintage is one of my favorites. I intended to save it for something special, but then, every day is a good day to indulge, no?”

        He took the bottle and strode past. Brû made hard eye contact with each staff member as they passed by, and each of them looked away, perhaps thinking this was a test of their reactions. She dearly wished they would stop looking at her like she held their beating hearts in her hand.

        The Duchess made her own selection, and together the two parties left the wine cellar by staggered staircases, so close but never once intermingling. They parted ways in a shared corridor that overlooked the reception hall, and Folly took them to a dining room where he triumphantly held his selection aloft.

        “Indeed,” he said, “an excellent day to indulge.”

        Brû got the feeling Folly was rather one-note and his name rather fitting. After dinner, he pushed his plate away and said, “Delicious. I think I will retire early tonight. It’s been a good day; no need to push one’s luck, eh?”

        “Very wise,” said his valet, and together they rose and left the dining room.

        The other attendants began to clear the table, and, still seeing no way to escape their company, Brû pitched in. They flinched as she began stacking plates.

        “Thank you,” one of them said, and then looked flustered, as though maybe that had been the wrong thing to say.

        “No trouble. Is he always like that?”

        The two exchanged glances. “Like what?”

        “Indulgent.”

        The palace was meant to be a place of glory and mystique, the mysteries of time and space. It probably varied with each royal, but Folly was underwhelming.

        The attendants said nothing and began working faster, hands flying across the table as they piled silverware onto a tray, lips pursed tight. Brû berated herself. Dahlia surely would not have come to her if she’d known what a ham-fisted investigator Brû would turn out to be.

        Brû looked up from the table as the valet returned. He took the plates from her, set them on the dinner service cart, and shooed both of his subordinates out of the room.

        “That’s enough, the both of you. I’ll take over from here,” he said, and then to her once they had gone, “I’m sorry, they’ve never been audited before, but they are good workers. I’m happy to have them.”

        Again Brû found herself reassuring him over something she couldn’t understand. “No trouble.”

        “I mean no disrespect, but you ask more questions than I’ve come to expect from an auditor. Rather different questions.”

        “I like speaking directly.”

        “In that case,” he said, stepping between Brû and the door that his subordinates had exited through, “please allow me to answer any further questions.”

        She stared at him. Perhaps he thought she was trying to entrap his subordinates, make them say something that would get them removed.

        “I’m not here with an agenda, aside from my job as impartial observer,” she said. That, at least, wasn’t entirely a lie. “So all right then, why don’t you tell me how it is here?”

        “Wonderful. Fulfilling. Yes, there are things about living in the Confluence that are strange, that take some getting used to, but that is true wherever you go. The Confluence must be acclimated to.”

        “And there’s nothing you miss out there?”

        He gave her a look of forbearance. “Please. I understand what you’re looking for, the doubts you have to weed out among the newer attendants, but I’ve been Prince Folly’s valet since he was a child. My purpose is firmly grounded here, in this. The same is true for my subordinates—once His Highness is born and I retire, they hope to become valets themselves.” He laid a hand on the table. “We are anchored here. All that out there, the city, it’s not for us, and that’s fine.”

        Brû feigned thoughtfulness, as though mulling over what he had said compared to what she knew of life as an attendant, which was nothing but what Dahlia had spoken of earlier. “Fair enough.”

        He leaned a little closer. “Although I will admit I get curious about the current manifest-royal from time to time. Can you tell me what is happening out there?”

        Brû blinked uncertainly, recalling current events she usually paid little mind to. “Her Majesty concluded finishing school a few years ago. She showed an aptitude for economics. We think that’s where her apotheosis will arise.”

        “Her Majesty...?” he said, inquisitive, expectant.

        “Her Majesty Queen Verity.”

        With a delighted laugh, he pounded a fist against his palm. “I knew it! I thought it must have been, when she disappeared, but you never know. People are always coming and going.”

        Brû perked up at this. “What do you mean coming and going?”

        “Oh, you know, the palace is a fluid place. Sometimes you wake up and your section is no longer next to burnt umber but to saffron or indigo or ultramarine. You wonder if your neighbor was born into the city or just shuffled by the council’s dreaming.”

        “I see.” Brû did not see, except that what he meant by coming and going probably had nothing to do with Clairvoyance’s disappearance.

        “So, economics, you said?” He took on an air of familiarity and handed her a cup of coffee poured from Folly’s personal flask.

        Brû sipped, finding herself at an impasse. Posing as an auditor, she should know more about the royalty than she did. She hardly paid attention at all. The only reason she knew Queen Verity was taking an interest in economics was because the city was in an uproar protesting the Verity Tax, which had been the first actual change in legislation since the Economic Verity Accords had been signed a few years prior.

        The tax had been a stumble for the young queen, and many argued that if her interest in economics wasn’t related to her apotheosis, then it was little more than meddling. The goodwill she had gained after the Votive Duke’s attempt on her life the previous year was swiftly fading.

        “Specifically, tax reform,” Brû said, which was possibly true and possibly utter nonsense. A royal’s apotheosis could be anything. There had been royals who spent their lives studying the history of war only to have an apotheosis related to animal husbandry.

        “Fascinating,” said the valet. “Such an unassuming apotheosis.”

        Brû laughed, recalling the detour she and Dahlia had taken to avoid the protests outside the counting houses and the mercenary measures that the counting houses had taken to defend themselves. If the weather weren’t so damp and repressive, if the protests had been happening in the summer, the city would be a tinderbox ready to flare.

        “Taxation might be dry and impenetrable, yes,” she said, “but unassuming, no.”

        He looked confused. “What do you mean?”

        “Her work isn’t as well received as one might hope, that’s all. Anti-royal sentiment has been on the rise and—”

        “Anti-royal sentiment? What do you mean?”

        “I mean the Hall of the Manifest Royal takes a hands-off approach in raising the city royals, which has led to some... interesting policy. People are afraid Verity is trying to horn in on parliament, and the royals before her behaved, well, erratically.”

        That was putting it mildly. The Votive Duke had been a perennial favorite in the gossip rags before and after his apotheosis, a horror once his narcissism transformed into sociopathic rage after the birth of Queen Verity. Of the two royals before him, one had been remembered as frustrating, the other alarmingly eccentric.

        “And their apotheoses?” asked the valet.

        “Fine, as always.”

        But then that was the problem, wasn’t it—anti-royalists never took issue with apotheoses but with the lifestyles that surrounded those moments of greatness. At least Verity was inexperienced and overconfident rather than completely unhinged.

        The valet took a seat at the table, shaking his head. “How strange. ‘Anti-royal sentiment’—never would I have thought to hear such a phrase in my life. What of the Votive Duke?”

        Brû sidestepped a complete answer, paraphrasing a hodgepodge of primary school history books she still remembered. “His apotheosis was brilliant. It came upon him one day in the public baths, and he wrote it on a fogged mirror. After it was transcribed for study, it led to groundbreaking scientific advancement.”

        An image from one of those childhood textbooks arose in her mind: the Votive Duke in a bathrobe standing before a mirror, an exclamation point above his head as he wrote out his apotheosis with his forefinger. The iconic image had been widely parodied after his arrest, redrawn to show him transcribing the names of everyone he would murder before he had been caught.

        The valet perked up. “Oh? What was his apotheosis?”

        “Hard to explain really, but it harnessed the power of lightning—called it electrical current. Changed everything: economics, law enforcement, public health and safety, other branches of science. You’d hardly recognize the city now, I suppose.”

        He gave a heavy sigh, part relief, part longing. “I’m glad.”

        He looked so wistful, Brû could not help asking again, “And you really never want to see any of that for yourself?”

        “No no, I would be out of sorts. I once entertained the thought of city life when I retire, but I don’t think I will. Better to remain here and dream of utopia than to leave and understand all that we’ve lost.”

        He was talking around something, something he assumed Brû understood and therefore didn’t need saying.

        “If you don’t mind my asking,” she said, “when did you enter service?”

        He waved his hand vaguely. “Sometime after the Earl of Benevolence was born.”

        That had been centuries ago. Benevolence had been responsible for the creation of parliament. Brû had known that servants of the palace aged differently, experienced time itself differently, but she had not realized it was so extreme. There was no telling which royal would be born next. It had been centuries since Folly’s valet came into service, and could be centuries more before Folly was born and he was free.

        “And your... your family?”

        He smiled sadly and looked down at his hands, folded in his lap. “Long dead now, and I was no good to them anyway. I was a broken man when I received my call to join the Confluence, and I think of this as penance, hopefully redemption—pacing these long, dusty corridors of time to create a better future for everyone.”

        Even if he never got to witness that future himself. Brû could not imagine what that was like. She had spent her life hearing of the Palace of Confluence with no sense of what it actually was, always a far-off storybook feeling. To be a servant here, to live the mirror of that feeling and know reality was out there, shaped by the everyday work done in the Confluence but to never see it—was it bizarre? Cruel? Another kind of normal?

        “What do you intend to do after service?” she asked.

        “The shrine.”

        “The shrine?”

        “Yes, living in the city is too depressing, and you need a special dispensation.”

        “Why?”

        He was looking at her strangely now; she was clearly asking questions she should know the answer to. “Not everyone readjusts to life in the city. There’s a profound sense of ennui associated with seeing centuries pass in an instant, everything from your life before the palace become uncelebrated history, completely forgotten. There’s no coming back if we leave, and at least here we mean something...

        “At any rate,” he said, his tone taking a cheerful turn to indicate that he had enjoyed their discussion but really must be going, “we enjoy our work here.”

        Brû had balled her hands into fists, and now she flattened them on her lap. “I’ll be sure to note that. Thank you for being so forthcoming.”

        He waved a hand, a sad little gesture, as though letting a bird free from the palm. “We’re drenched in secrets here. Sometimes it’s liberating to let the walls down and speak openly. Thank you, Auditor.”

        He left Brû alone in the dining room, where she remained for longer than she should have. She wanted to sit and think about what she had learned. But that wasn’t what she was here for.

        She left the room and made her way back to the wine cellar that Folly shared with the Duchess, reasonably sure it would be deserted, a place to cross over without the risk of being seen. She did not want to be stuck ‘auditing’ another set of nervous attendants.

        In the cellar she checked all the shadowy corners to be sure she was alone, then stepped into the burnt umber section. Again it felt like breaking through cobwebs and into a new space, air of a different kind. She removed Dahlia’s guidebook and flipped to burnt umber, home of the Duchess of Shame and the Contrived Judge. She scanned the entry quickly, but the more she read the slower she turned the pages, until eventually she stopped and went back to the beginning.

        Occupant(s): The Duchess of Shame and the Contrived Judge

        Hue: Burnt umber

        Current neighbor(s): Prince Folly (scarlet) and Her Holiness of Infinities (onyx)

        Advent prediction: Unknown

        Apotheosis prediction: Unknown

        Notes: The Duchess of Shame is the only royal to exist with a partner. It is speculated that this is because she is mentally disturbed not only in the Confluence but in city-time as well.

        The Contrived Judge is her anchor in reality during mental breaks. Should she experience an episode, the Judge is the one who must be appealed to, and he will in turn convince the Duchess.

        She has displayed signs of both auditory and visual hallucinations, and not always in conjunction. During an episode, it is important to understand which she is experiencing before interacting with her to— (cont.)

        Brû stared at the page. This book was not conveying the information that Dahlia had intended it to. As far as Brû remembered, the Duchess was not on the list of royals-expectant, yet she wasn’t among the dead, either. Flicking through the pages, Brû found no other royals with a similar discrepancy; they were all either dead or names she recognized from the lists. What that meant, she could not begin to guess, but it left her feeling unsettled. She scanned the Duchess’s instructions once more, wondering what exactly she was getting into, and crept up the stairs, alert for approaching footfalls.

        The umber section of the palace was mostly confined to the eastern wing, at least relative to Folly’s scarlet. The longer she spent in the palace, the more her sense of direction eroded. While a perpetual twilight lay outside most of the windows, she had seen sunrise and sunset from certain perspectives—never in the room she occupied, but always a glimpse through half-open doors. She understood why it would be easy to ignore the other sections, as everything outside her current area seemed to be in flux. As the valet had described it, wandering the palace felt like inhabiting a dream.

        She followed a staircase up to the second floor, and as she ascended she felt tight with time’s passage as she moved farther from the central reception hall with its many ways, farther into the Duchess of Shame’s domain.

        A hollow decrepitude blanketed the section. The carpets here were threadbare, the doors dilapidated, the stonework chipped and effaced by time. Great cracks split the flagstones, through which weeds sprouted and insects crawled. Even by the standards of the Confluence, this place was old.

        Many of the wall sconces were missing, the remainder casting uneven light down the shadowy halls. At a junction she stopped, squinting through her spectacles in either direction. One carpeted hallway led to what looked like a dining room, the other to another darkened crossway, its few wall sconces unlit.

        She took the darker way, checking each door she came to. On one side of the hall, a parade of empty chambers greeted her: a reading room bereft of books, a moldering bath suite, and a bedchamber draped in dust sheets drifting on air currents from windows askew in their casements.

        The other side of the hall was comprised of a single, long chamber that took her breath away. Birdcages, strung from the rafters, hung at eye level, and each contained a doll, brought to life with eerie verisimilitude. Brû stepped farther into the silent, shadowy space, moving across a floor of woodchips, staring through a forest of cages. Some of the dolls sat in repose, some appeared to be dancing, some lay staring at the ceiling of their cage. Their tiny joints showed only the faintest signs of woodworking, joinery so expertly done that the thread-fine lines deceived the eye.

        On the far side of the room was a carpentry suite. Chunks of wood lay in a haphazard pile in one corner, behind a planer and a workbench, and pushed up against one wall was a desk covered with paints and brushes. Atop the desk was a half-painted doll reclined in a tiny chair. Even with one half of the face missing color, the wood grain bare in the faint light, it looked more like a tiny marble sculpture—a man with expertly styled hair and a slack expression beneath vacant blue eyes. The detail was unsettling, for it was unmistakably Prince Folly.

        “Ah. Out from the walls and come to me.”

        Brû whirled to find the Duchess of Shame standing behind her, face obscured by the shadows of birdcages. Brû’s hand fell on the guidebook in her pocket, which she didn’t dare remove. She mentally leafed through the pages, recalling its advice for the Duchess.

        “Why are you here?” the Duchess asked. “I didn’t expect that.”

        “Just admiring the woodwork. My name is Brûska Lai.”

        Usually that earned a raised eyebrow or a confused pause. The Duchess smiled wanly. “So is mine. How strange.”

        “I’m sorry? Your name is—” Brû faltered. She had never before been on the opposite side of this interaction, and it was bizarre to feel the words on her lips that she had heard so many times from other people. “I mean, you have a name?”

        “Why wouldn’t I? And you didn’t answer my question. Why are you here?”

        This was already far outside the bounds of expectation. The Duchess wasn’t supposed to be anywhere alone, not without her attendants, not to mention the Judge.

        “I’m here about your staff.”

        “What about them?”

        “I’m their superior.”

        The bar of shadow across the Duchess’s face hid everything but the furrowing of her brow. “And what sort of superior do my servants answer to, aside from me?”

        “I’m here to make sure they’re doing their job properly. I represent the Servant’s Guild.”

        The Duchess stepped closer, navigating between the cages. She stared at the dolls inside with an intensity Brû understood intimately, even though she had never personally seen it before; it was the face Brû wore when she watched a man on the gallows walk. Narrow eyes, lips a flat line, an expression galvanized against what was happening, what was about to happen, determined to do nothing but not look away.

        In a voice so low Brû nearly couldn’t hear it, the Duchess said, “I don’t believe you.”

        Brû took on the tone of indulgent amusement every adult used with children convinced of something outlandish. “Oh? And why is that?”

        “Because I know you. Because I hear and see everyone—including you. But you were elsewhere, and now you’re here... You’re searching for something.”

        Based on the Duchess’s description in the guidebook, Brû had not been expecting pinpoint accuracy from her notions. “What do you mean, you see everyone?”

        The Duchess indicated the multitude of cages.

        Brû feigned ignorance. “Who are they?”

        “Ghosts.”

        To this Brû had no answer. She didn’t want to say anything to confirm that the Duchess was, very obviously, not having hallucinations. At least not the usual kind. So she changed the subject.

        “And you’ve seen me?”

        “Oh yes.” A small smile crept along the Duchess’s face, her eyes bright as she watched Brû with that unflinching gaze. “In the walls of the wine cellar. Talking to him.” She pointed to Folly’s doll.

        Brû’s breath caught, and the Duchess’s smile widened.

        “You were there,” the Duchess said, “and now you’re here. Usually your kind doesn’t travel like that.”

        “My kind?”

        The Duchess indicated the floor.

        Brû squinted in the dim light. The floor was not covered in sawdust and wood shavings as she had thought but the splintered remains of a thousand dolls. Fragmented heads, hands, and limbs were scattered so thick the floorboards couldn’t be seen beneath. None of the faces had features, the discarded hands and feet little more than crude wooden knobs.

        “My kind, are they?” Brû said. “Why don’t we have faces?”

        “Because you’re always the same. Because your face isn’t important. Not like them.” The Duchess cast a hand toward the caged royals. “Who they are and what they do is important, but the faceless ones... only what they see is important. Or pretend not to see.”

        “Who are they?”

        “You. Me. Us.”

        “Us?”

        “Oh yes. I’m down here, too.” She knelt and sifted her fingers through the wooden dross. “My purpose is to do nothing more than wait and witness. We are the observers—which brings me back to my original question: what are you doing here? Why aren’t you out there, seeing what needs seeing? Watch Folly at his foolishness, watch it all and give her the reassurance that none of this is in vain, Brûska Lai. Don’t worry. I’ll be here, waiting to burn it all down.”

        “Her?”

        “Clairvoyance.”

        Brû was clearly out of her depth. Time to put her attempt at deception out of its misery. “If you must know, Clairvoyance is the reason I’m here. I’m a researcher, of sorts. I’m just not supposed to be here, so I snuck in.”

        “Liar.” The word split the stuffy, quiet room, and then just as quickly the Duchess’s sweet smile sewed it back up. “But a terrible one. And a lie that everyone knows is a lie isn’t really a lie, now is it? So tell me what you’re researching exactly.”

        “Anything, really,” Brû said.

        “I have her.” The Duchess spun toward a lantern-hanger’s pole that stood in a corner. She hefted it and deftly reached up to a cage that hung before a high rose-window, its shadow cast large over the rest of the room, and hooked the pole through the cage’s handle. As she brought it down, Brû could see the tiny figure inside was dressed in a gown of pressed violets, still emanating a dusty sweetness. The doll stood with its back to a velvet curtain that bisected the cage interior. Her round, soft features contrasted sharply with her keen gaze.

        “Have you seen her recently?” Brû asked.

        “I see her all the time—walking on air through the grand ballroom with the others, staring into the stargazing pools... but not recently. And not that it matters. She’s a bore. If you want someone interesting, he’s the one you should research.”

        She turned the cage around to reveal the other side, which housed the doll of a man dressed in black with threads of gold. He stood slumped against the bars, hands at his sides and a haunted stare in his eyes.

        “Who is this?”

        “Blasphemy. He and Clairvoyance are always together, although they don’t know it. Like opposite sides on a coin, ever present, ever searching, spinning after one another over and over.”

        “You’ve actually seen him?”

        “Of course. I see everything. That is my curse.”

        Brû ran a finger along the cage bars, focused on the doll within, and the Duchess inhaled sharply. She reached out toward Brû’s cheek, but before she could touch her, Brû caught the Duchess by the wrist. “What are you doing?”

        “Not a ghost,” the Duchess whispered. “And yet I saw you in the walls.” Her voice was rapidly rising, her pitch growing frantic. “What are you?”

        Brû took a step back, her attention flickering from the Duchess to the forest of cages, looking for a clear path to the door. “I am here, flesh and blood. Why do you keep calling me a ghost?”

        The Duchess stabbed a finger in the direction of the corridor Brû had avoided. “They lie to me too, but not so poorly. Sometimes they almost make me believe... but not you. I see everyone this place has elevated, everyone this place has ground to dust, but this is the first time one has come to speak with me. You are a ghost because you carry the shade of death like a banner, as everyone does in this damned fabrication! I see it in your eyes that you’ve been dead since a cold day in late autumn, beneath the oarsman star sign. Dead, and yet here you stand with me, an undead riddle that will not explain itself. Are you not real?” She pressed her fingers into Brû’s shoulder, then slowly brought her hand to her own cheek. “Am I not real? Is that why I possess the desire to destroy this place but not the power to do so? Why I can only watch and scream to no one that it’s utterly broken?”

        It was time to go. Brû had already made a mess when she was supposed to be discreet. She stepped away, bumping into cages, setting them asway as she backed toward the door.

        The Duchess followed, her voice growing louder. “I see the sins of this place. I see its shame. Why can no one else? Tell me!”

        In the hall, Brû followed the darkened corridor until she came to the nearest intersection of colors, but the Duchess was still behind her. Brû whirled, her back to an unfamiliar onyx section, and the Duchess advanced with longing in her eyes.

        “Tell me you see it, too, ghost! Tell me I’m not madly scrawling on the walls of my brain for nothing. They take everything from me, every scrap of paper I use to remember, but I know what I see, I know what it means. This house is as dead as you are, a sepulcher bleached so white you cannot recognize the decay it came from.”

        Voices from down the hallway, around the corner. Echoing but growing louder. The flickering light of hand lamps. Brû would be caught soon, and this time there would be no hiding behind her false auditor’s badge.

        “Your attendants,” she said, gesturing pathetically behind the Duchess.

        The Duchess remained focused on her. “Tell me.” She stepped forward, fingers seeking a hold on Brû’s robes. “Just tell me you see as I do.”

        Brû held her breath and stepped backward into the onyx section. The Duchess’s fingers met solidity, splayed flat against an unseen wall.

        Not an inch from Brû’s nose, the Duchess pressed her cheek to the wall, eyes closed, her voice a breathy whisper. “Please. This inkling, this suspicion, it grows poisonous in me. I want to know.”

        Brû took another step back and whispered, “I’m sorry. That’s not why I’m here.”

        The Duchess broke down into silent tears, turned her back to the wall, and slid to the ground. Two attendants came running down the hall, lanterns in hand. The Judge strode between them, studying the Duchess with a gaze that was concerned yet calculating.

        “There you are,” he said. “What did you see?”

        The attendants at his side held themselves as though braced for a storm, but the tension bled from them like water as the Duchess wiped her eyes and stood. With a wavering laugh she said, “Nothing. I’m crying with laughter, can’t you see? Because life is so strange. So amusing.”

        The Judge draped an arm protectively around her shoulders, and the three ushered her away. As they disappeared down the hallway, the Duchess glanced once more over her shoulder, her expression full of bitter sorrow.

        Brû ducked into the shadows of an alcove, to hide while she ruminated on what the Duchess had said. It was difficult to think over the thrum of blood pounding in her head, through the Duchess’s accusations and half-conveyed revelations, but one thought came clear: the Duchess was not a royal in the typical sense.

        Brû was beginning to feel that something more than chance had brought her to the Confluence. Or perhaps it had started even farther back, a sequence of connections too perfect for coincidence. Nearly a thousand professional witnesses were employed by the city, and Brû had been chosen for Dahlia’s wedding? Brû, who shared a family name and a second sight with a royal, a fact which Clairvoyance certainly must have known? No, some days there was no such thing as coincidence. The Duchess could be nothing other than Brû’s progeny. She considered returning to Dahlia, demanding an explanation, but something told her Dahlia had no more answers to give. The only way forward was to find Clairvoyance.

        The Duchess had said Princess Clairvoyance and King Blasphemy were always together. To find one, perhaps she would have to find the other.

        She furtively made her way through the onyx section, crouched low, pausing to listen at corridor crossways, no longer pretending to be anything other than what she was: an intruder who had only the barest grasp of this place.

        The onyx section was an opalescent labyrinth—entirely crafted of polished black stone, no rooms to speak of. Brû crept through the hallways, jumping at every dim reflection in the shimmering walls—herself, redoubled a thousand thousand times, a shadowy doppelganger stalking after her along the floors and walls and ceilings. It seemed clear why Her Holiness of Infinities resided here.

        At last she came to a staircase that spiraled down and spilled out into the central reception hall. There, instead of choosing a new color, she marched back into Clairvoyance’s lapis blue. As she wandered through the blue corridors, a mingling of relief and trepidation settled over her; there was no one to discover her here. Yet something else hung in the air as well. A sinister expectation, and the Duchess’s words chasing after her: what the royals did mattered, but what Brû saw, that was the important thing.

        The Confluence, brilliant and blinding in its strangeness, made it difficult to assign meaning to what she saw. She made her way through countless drawing rooms and lounges, each with the unshakable feeling of having just been vacated. A lingering presence clung to these spaces. She worked her way higher into Clairvoyance’s section of the palace, the labyrinthine hallways growing less complex and less sprawling until the only path that remained was a single spiral staircase leading ever higher. Each floor was little more than a single room filled with clutter and cobwebs, the view out the windows a panorama of empty twilight lands as she climbed to soaring heights, until at last she came to a tapestry that hung floor to ceiling. It looked like it was hanging against a wall at the end of the stairway, but Brû thought of the wall the Duchess had come up against, and she swept the tapestry aside.

        Beyond the tapestry were stairs checkered blue-and-black, rising past another window before the staircase abruptly dead-ended in a wall. Yet the air beyond the tapestry was different, pungent and warm.

        As she stepped onto the blue-and-black stonework, she felt nothing of that infinitesimal tug that accompanied her passage between other areas of the palace. This was still Clairvoyance but mixed with something else—that inarticulate presence yet again. The incongruous sound of birdsong drifted through the tower’s final window, which now that she examined it was different from the others. Crudely cut from the stonework, it had not even been set with glass. Drooping vines grew thick across its opening, ivy creeping along the stonework and obscuring what lay beyond.

        She pushed the leafy fronds away and stared out into a tranquil forest glade. Early autumn sunshine cut through an aspen grove, the canopy mottled orange and red, the weather balmy. She climbed up to sit on the window sill, legs dangling out into this new space. Slowly she stretched out, reaching for the ground that was disorientingly near. Solid earth thick with moss and leaves met her toes, and her stomach lurched as though she had fallen a great distance. A moment ago she had been in the heights of the palace. Now she did not know where she was.

        She moved farther into the glade, the warm air heavy with the scent of loam. She passed through a sunbeam, squinted, and in that instant a tiny cabin appeared, nestled among the thick aspen trunks, their boughs hanging protectively over its roof. Brû glanced back at the tower, but it was gone, in its place a stone hump not much taller than she was, with a single slit to climb back inside. Brû had seen such structures before on temple grounds or standing alone on heathery moors. They were called cameras of thought, hollowed out by hand as a resting place for monks in their final meditation. To find one here, in the heart of the Confluence, carried an undeniable significance. There was only one person she could imagine it might be intended for, and yet within was not the self-mummified corpse of Clairvoyance but the entirety of the palace.

        She turned back to the cabin in the glade. With care she approached and placed her ear against the wooden door. Silence, and then after a moment, a faint scratching. Feeling absurd, she knocked.

        The scratching ceased. A long silence followed, and then, “Enter.”

        Brû pushed open the door and stepped into the cramped single-room cabin. The man from the Duchess’s two-sided cage stood on the far side of the room, his head nearly touching the ceiling. His sable jacket with thread of gold hung over the back of a chair, and in his hand he held a single carpenter’s nail. All around him the walls were covered with writing, scratched into the surface of the wood.

        His eyes were cold and imperious, but as Brû studied that face, she saw there was something else in those eyes, too. An aura of death clouded his gaze, like an eclipse across the sun—but weathered and faded, a mere shadow of what she had seen on the Votive Duke. He was long dead. She folded her hands in front of her, one hand locked tight around the wrist of the other. Of the dead ghosts she had seen in the palace, King Blasphemy should not be one of them.

        His silence did not invite conversation as he examined her. At last he said, “Who are you?”

        “My name is Brûska Lai.” He stared at her blankly, and she added, “Your Majesty.”

        Upon hearing the title, his fingers curled into a fist at his side, the worn nail disappearing into his closed hand. “I don’t need an attendant. I am not a child who needs his laundering and cooking done for him. You tell her that on your way out.”

        Brû had the presence of mind to look embarrassed as she bowed. “Certainly, it’s just—I can’t find her.” And then, to be sure they were talking about the same person, “Clairvoyance said she would pay for my journey here, and it cost nearly everything I had.”

        Blasphemy dug into the front pocket of his vest and came up with an unfamiliar silver coin. At least, Brû assumed it was a coin; it was hexagonal, and as he handed it over she saw that instead of a noble, it was stamped with the image of curling ivy.

        “That will see you home. Now leave me be.”

        He turned back to the wall and began to scratch again. Scattered around his feet were nails worn down to the head.

        Brû did not leave but remained quiet as she examined the walls. There was no telling where it started, all in a language she did not understand but recognized well enough: First Monastic, a dead language that graced the plaques outside parliament and the Hall of the Manifest Royal, as well as some of the oldest streets in the city.

        This was meant to be the future of the realm written upon the walls, and yet it did not feel that way. The breeze through the window felt like the air of an open grave.

        “Am I in there?” she asked.

        He paused, his face still to the wall. “What?”

        “How much detail goes into this? Am I in there—well I suppose not, since you didn’t know my name. But perhaps a maid you once had, for the span of the breath it took to dismiss her?”

        The nail fell from his grasp, and he spun. “You know what I’m doing?”

        The question stunned her. “I’m sorry?”

        He took a step closer, his eyes no less frigid, but his voice had dropped to a whisper. “You know what I’m doing? She told you?”

        Brû did not see how the two were related, and so she stalled. “Why wouldn’t she?”

        Blasphemy traced his thumb along his lips in thought. To himself more than Brû, he said, “Because she’s never believed me. Why would she explain my foresight, when she prefers her own... What did she say this was?”

        “How you bring us all to glory. Your apotheosis.”

        “Apotheosis.” He laughed and bowed his head. “That’s her word. Her vision. My sister and I, our foresight has always been entwined, dual visions of what might come to pass, and always at odds with one another. My vision—all this scrawling—is how I bring us to ruin.”

        His voice had grown soft with reflection, his mind miles away. Brû stared at him. “A counterpart foresight with your... sister?”

        He did not catch her confusion, and there was no reason he should have. Brû was beginning to put the pieces together. If she was right, then who she was and why she was there would be lost on Blasphemy.

        His free hand grasped at air as though collecting his thoughts. “Where Clairvoyance sees sunshine, I see shadow. When we were young, when we only saw small things in those hazy futures, which of us was right didn’t matter. But this idea of hers—me on a throne—this is everything. She thinks I will be a paragon, but I ask you: what makes a paragon?”

        Brû looked around the room again, only half paying attention. There was ancient writing on the walls and an ancient coin in her pocket. Blasphemy hidden, brother to the woman who founded the Confluence. A pall of death over his eyes, so old Brû had almost not noticed it.

        “Uncompromising morality,” she answered.

        “No. Blind luck is what separates a good king from a bad one. She can’t know I won’t be the thing that destroys us. But then, I can’t know that I will, so I do as she wishes. But if she’s wrong, I won’t have history make me out as a willing tyrant, butcher, or madman. Whatever I become, this will tell them that I knew all the potential I held, for good or ill.” He fell silent, reached out and ran his fingers across the cramped etchings.

        “But if you can see the future,” Brû asked, “can’t you avert it?”

        In a singsong voice he said, “Death met a man on the road and said, ‘Child, I have plans for your end,’ but the man only laughed and said, ‘That may be true, but not if I first come to you.’” His gaze became distant and calm but belied turmoil beneath. “Taking actions to avoid a future can just as easily bring it to pass. There is only one way to avert a certain fate, and I wouldn’t... I wouldn’t.”

        Brû’s mind bent, stretched thin over a leviathan thought about to breach. She did not understand this place, neither its residents nor its nature, but the shroud she saw over Blasphemy’s eyes should not be. He should not be among the dead roaming these halls. And yet, he was. The Confluence was built upon a lie. In that moment, she knew where Clairvoyance was.

        “I’m sorry,” she said, excusing herself with another bow, “I’ll leave you to your work.”

        He merely stared at the floor as she backed out and closed the door behind her.

        She hurried back through the glade and into the camera of thought, down the stairways, through Clairvoyance’s section and into the servants’ quarters. Dahlia looked up from a ledger in her lap as Brû slipped in and shut the door behind her.

        “Did you find anything?” Dahlia’s voice was tight, hesitant.

        Brû sagged against the doorframe, tired yet too jittery with nerves to sit. “Yes, but not Clairvoyance. When we first arrived, you said there was too much to explain about the palace, and we were in a hurry, so I didn’t say anything, but...” She trailed off, her mind racing through the tangle of only half-conscious connections between the Duchess, Blasphemy, and Clairvoyance. “What’s the difference between the royals?”

        Dahlia slowly closed her book. “There isn’t much difference—in fact you might say there is no difference at all.”

        “But there must be some difference; I can tell which of the royals have passed and which are yet to come.”

        Dahlia’s voice held an edge of panic. “And what does that have to do with Clairvoyance?”

        Brû was afraid to say. She had seen more than Dahlia expected—down to the core of the Confluence itself. Brû had always been mystified by her second sight but had always assumed there was no reason for it beyond the inscrutable conveyance of bloodlines. Now, in this place where time was unmade, where it could unite past and future in an amalgam present, she saw that she did not have her sight because of her ancestors but because of her farthest progeny. The Duchess was meant to see something, and if she could, so could Brû.

        “Dahlia, do the royals have names? Real ones?”

        Dahlia faltered, thrown by the shift in topic. “Yes. It’s one of the key ways to identify them once they’re born, by the name their parents give them. But in here, only their attendants know those names; they wouldn’t be listed in the guidebook. They’re very personal, both in the Confluence and in the city.”

        They must be personal indeed, for as far as Brû was aware, the given name of a manifest-royal had never once been leaked, nor the concept even discussed. She had not considered the idea before.

        Brû collected herself and started again. “When I came here, I instantly knew which of the royals were already dead. With the way time is folded in the Confluence, I didn’t think anything of it. Not until I found Blasphemy.”

        Dahlia rose from her chair, the book in her lap tumbling to the floor. “You went looking for King Blasphemy? Why?”

        “He was where I expected to find Clairvoyance, only... I found something else. Tell me this: you said Clairvoyance was the first resident of the palace. Doesn’t that mean she’s not in the future but the past? And if so, then isn’t she already long dead outside the Confluence?”

        “No.” Dahlia said it without conviction. “She came to my wedding.”

        Brû was gaining momentum. “The Confluence was everything to her, but only because the present—the present, in the city—wasn’t something she could control. It’s too much to grasp. She couldn’t pull the universe into her perspective. So she made her own version of the present in the Confluence.

        “She had all the time in the world here, but it was all to change what’s out there, and to do that she needed to be out there. But even if she spent just a day outside the Confluence each time she left, there had to be a final departure, a time she left the Confluence and never came back.”

        “What do you mean a final departure?”

        “The day of your wedding. She left the Confluence that day and never returned. Clairvoyance is dead, Dahlia.”

        Dahlia shook her head in negation, but what she said was, “Why?”

        “Because Blasphemy is.”

        Dahlia flinched. “You actually saw him? Where?”

        “At the top of Clairvoyance’s section. He was in a—a little cabin, carving words in First Monastic onto the walls.”

        “There’s nothing that high in the tower.”

        “It wasn’t in the tower. It was outside, somehow.”

        The more Brû thought about it, the more that space had felt like another Confluence within the Confluence. The council held Clairvoyance, Clairvoyance held the Confluence, and the Confluence held Blasphemy. Worlds within worlds, all to buy time. All to buy the dreams of the dead.

        “Dahlia, if the royals are kept from seeing other parts of the palace, isn’t it possible that the attendants are as well? You said Blasphemy was hidden, but you didn’t know why. It’s because he’s dead. The Confluence will never reach him. It never could in the first place.” Brû removed the coin Blasphemy had given her and held it out, shining on her palm. “Do you know what this is?”

        Dahlia had fallen silent, but there was no missing the recognition in her eyes. As Brû had expected. If Folly’s valet was old beyond belief, then Dahlia was ancient.

        “Where did you get that?” Dahlia asked.

        Brû replied with a question in return. “You’re almost as old as the palace itself, aren’t you? Every time a new royal is discovered, they need attendants as well, and you’ve been with Clairvoyance since very near the beginning. That’s why living in the city was so terrifying for you.”

        “There was no city back then.” Dahlia spoke softly. “When she brought me into the Confluence, Clairvoyance was just a woman beyond time. She picks all the attendants herself, you know. She comes to us in dreams, sits heavy upon them, so we know she’s real. I was the only one who ever knew who she was, though.”

        “Did you ever see Clairvoyance leave the Confluence?”

        “Never.” Dahlia’s gaze was lost in the middle distance, the face of one searching through memory. “Only for my wedding... and even then, the shrine is a special place.”

        “So you said, as did Folly’s valet. He told me he planned on retiring there.”

        Dahlia nodded. “The attendants who’ve been in the Confluence for too long, who feel they have no place in the world anymore, they go there to live out the rest of their days.”

        “Show me.”

* * *

        When Brû had gone to the shrine for the wedding, she had not traveled there via the council’s chamber. Had she done so, maybe she would have realized sooner that it was a place of significance.

        From the Unguarded Gate they traveled through the eternal twilight beneath a foreign star field and a familiar moon. They followed the valley floor through knee-high silvergrass until it came to the mouth that spilled out into an aspen grove. Fireflies winked in the shadows, a lazy incandescence to light the way. The trees grew sparse the farther they traveled into the grove, until finally they arrived at a five-story pagoda that reached up into the autumn foliage. This time, Brû recognized not only the pagoda but the forest, the very lay of the land. The shrine stood where Blasphemy’s cabin had been.

        “This is a very old place,” Brû said.

        “Older than the Confluence itself,” Dahlia said. “I joined Clairvoyance shortly after the first royals were pulled into the Confluence and the palace was being expanded. The shrine was already here.”

        “...was the Duchess of Shame one of those first royals?”

        Dahlia brought one hand to her brow, eyes closed. “Yes, I suppose she was. Why?”

        Because for any created thing to have meaning, it needed both a beginning and an end. Brû was starting to understand why a distant child of hers might be sequestered within the Confluence, where she could do nothing but wait and watch, forever straining to tell someone what she saw from her vantage in the far reaches of time.

        “Just a thought,” Brû said. “Do you know what this shrine is dedicated to?”

        Dahlia shook her head, and they approached the towering structure. The first floor had no walls, no doors, open to the balmy evening air. Brû stepped up onto the wooden floorboards and felt that same parting of the veil that had accompanied her passage through the council’s chamber and every section of the palace thereafter.

        She turned, and the palace in the distance was gone, timeless twilight replaced with true night. The oarsman star sign hung high overhead, and the city shone in the distance, visible as a lattice of artificial light between the ridge of one valley slope and the other. The shrine was visible from the city but impossible to travel to without an invitation.

        So what was it, really? Merely a place for weary attendants to observe what they had a hand in creating, without getting too close? No.

        Brû turned back to the interior of the first floor, which she still thought of as the wedding hall. Here she had stood with Dahlia and her husband-to-be, the sole witness of a wedding carried out for more than the sake of those involved. She walked out the back of the pagoda, where the aspen trees had been cleared away to make room for a graveyard and a gardener’s shed.

        Headstones marched out in neat rows, etched with names but no dates. Some stuck up at odd angles, others were meticulously leveled. They were all crude, even ugly. Brû got the impression they had been made by the very people who lay beneath them.

        “How many attendants live here at the moment?” she asked.

        “Now?” Dahlia asked. “No one. There are never many at any given time, usually no more than two.”

        “Not an attractive option.”

        “You’d be surprised. The city is at its most terrifying close up, a dream turned into a nightmare.”

        “Why?”

        “Because we entered into service to make something beautiful, something perfect. Going back to see the same problems among different people in a different time... It makes you afraid that everything important was what you left behind. Most of us end up here.”

        “And you know all of them,” Brû said, gesturing to the headstones. “Because you were the first attendant.”

        Dahlia walked among the graves, trailing her fingers across the rough surfaces of the markers until she came to one with no epitaph. “All but this one. This one’s been here as long as I can remember.”

        “And you never wondered about that? There shouldn’t be anyone before you.”

        Dahlia said nothing, not even when Brû went to the shed, grabbed a spade, and began digging through the grassy earth. It did not take long before she scratched the top of a shallow grave, two feet deep with nothing but a stone slab over the top to keep animals from digging. Brû levered the slab up until she could get her fingers underneath, then slowly raised it higher, clumps of soil raining down on the grass around the headstone.

        A skeleton lay beneath, grave clothes long rotted away, but threads of gold filament crisscrossed the bones like spider silk. Two hexagonal coins lay in the eye sockets, corroded but still recognizable. Brû did not need her second sight to know who this was or when he had died.

        Quietly she said, “The royals are ensnared by the Confluence, held against the day humanity needs their brilliant apotheoses, but afterwards they are still trapped. Even in death. This is His Majesty King Blasphemy.” Brû spun slowly, searching the aspen grove by moonlight. “Clairvoyance will be here, too. She’s been here the whole time.”

        Dahlia stared at the mottled bones. Again, as though it might be a talisman against the painful truth, she said, “But she attended my wedding. She could not be both dead and alive.”

        “You said the shrine is a special place, connected to both the Confluence and the city, a place where attendants can admire their work from afar. I don’t think Clairvoyance was dead when she came here for the wedding—but I think that the wedding was, for her, a long time ago. The Confluence allowed her to walk through time, but even as a ghost in her own Confluence, she didn’t have an eternity. She had to know this would come to an end eventually, and the best plans also account for their own failure.”

        Dahlia turned away from the open grave, her gaze lingering briefly on the shrine before she looked up at the moon. “That would be like her. But I don’t know that plan.”

        “I do.”

        Brû found what she’d been searching for. Obscured by thick aspen trunks, a moss-covered mound humped up from the earth, slightly taller than Brû, where within the Confluence the camera of thought had been. She hefted her spade and made her way through the trees.

        Dahlia followed, a fearful silence clinging to her. Brû circled the mound, envisioning it as it had been. She gently pushed the spade against it, probing centuries of accreted soil and moss. When she found a spot with more give, she worked the spade back and forth, widening a gap until she had revealed the slit that gave the structure its name: the camera of thought.

        She pulled away the stringy moss that clung to the aperture, focused on her work, ignoring the scent of ancient death that seeped out from within, ignoring the swatch of blackness that indicated something solid rested within the lesser, immaterial darkness of the interior.

        At last she finished and stepped back. The clouds shifted, and a moonbeam caught the narrow opening full on. A mummified corpse sat erect in the center of the camera of thought, legs folded, hands balanced palm up on its desiccated thighs: Clairvoyance, dead all along, but casting her mind through the long centuries like a thread unwound from its tapestry. Tenuous, but enough to snare the minds of others and pull them into the Confluence with her.

        “It would make sense,” Brû said, “that if the council is dead and Clairvoyance is a member of the council, then she should be dead, too.”

        Dahlia stared into the camera of thought with a look of horror. Brû turned back to the valley, the palace unseen but still a weight on her mind. It was such a quiet place, concealing depths of misery over centuries gone by. A place of death, striving against the future, trying to wrench it back into the shape of a lost past.

        A sepulcher bleached so white you could not recognize the decay it came from.

        “Blasphemy told me that Clairvoyance thought he was the savior of humankind, and he thought he was its destruction. In the end, he took what he saw as the only way out and ended his life before it could come to great misfortune.

        “Clairvoyance made the Confluence not to reach Blasphemy but to recreate his potential through people who contained some aspect of what she had foreseen in him. No idea or impulse is original, after all. She knew that somewhere out there in the future were Blasphemy’s ideas, not distilled into one person but spread out among many. She had to assemble piecemeal what she had expected from Blasphemy, pulling in the royals one by one as she found them in their time and place.

        “But I think Clairvoyance knew that if she was going to enter into her own foresight and meddle with it, she would no longer have the perspective to see it properly. She would never know if she was actually bringing about the destruction that Blasphemy killed himself to avoid. In the end, she would need someone to see with clear eyes. A witness.”

        “But why?”

        “To see that the palace is finished.” She let the statement hang in the stillness, and then said, “She sold the Confluence to the people as a vision for the future, one with an eventual end, but that was a lie to get what she wanted. And without an end, the only fate left for the Confluence is the fate that all things suffer.”

        “Decay.”

        Brû nodded. “I think Clairvoyance always had a failsafe in mind. The Duchess of Shame: a royal at the Confluence’s end, meant to judge it for what it was. But as the Confluence grew, Clairvoyance became afraid she had already gone too far. So she sent you out into the city. Not just to get married, but to find me. So I could see what the Duchess has seen, and say what she will not be able to say until it’s too late: the Confluence is no longer accomplishing what Clairvoyance wanted it to. It hasn’t been for a long time now, although I didn’t know enough to see that when I first came here. The attendants of the Confluence are yanked from their own time, spent and burned up in their service to royals who are no longer effective. But I don’t think I need to tell you that the royals aren’t what they should be.”

        Dahlia brought a hand to the scar on her throat and retreated into silence. Brû took that as resignation. The palace had reached a tipping point, the cost outweighing royal apotheosis. In resurrecting Blasphemy’s strengths, Clairvoyance has resurrected his faults, too—the entire spectrum of his possible futures—and she hadn’t been able to see it.

        Brû offered Dahlia the crook of her elbow, which she accepted with the shocked, flat expression of the recently bereaved. Brû led her past the pagoda and back through the aspen grove. The nighttime canopy obscured the moon and stars, and when they emerged onto the valley floor the distant city was gone, the palace once more dominating a bleak twilight landscape. They passed the Unguarded Gate, over the vermilion bridges and back into the council’s ivy-clad chamber.

        There they stood at the edge of time. Dahlia removed herself from Brû and spoke at last.

        “I can’t leave. Not yet.” Again Dahlia’s fingers played across her scar. “If you’re right... if you’re right, then I have time to wait a little longer and see. But if you’re wrong, then Clairvoyance is coming back.” She took a step away, toward the vermillion bridges. “I need to stay until I’m sure.”

        “Don’t take too long. I’ve given you the Duchess’s apotheosis far ahead of schedule but no less true. It would be a tragedy if you had to wait until the end of time to realize I was right.”

        Dahlia only seemed to shrink further into reticence. Brû turned to the council chamber.

        At the center of the ringed table, she gazed up into a well of cloudless blue sky. It felt as though she had been gone for an age, but as the city faded in, with the scent and sound of gentle rain all around her, everything was as it had been when she left.

        The time was five minutes past the sixth hour, nightfall in the city. The Palace of Confluence was dead.

Copyright © 2021 Aaron Perry

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Aaron Perry is a full-time writer living in Japan. His work has been published in Deep Magic, Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine, and Kzine. He occasionally tweets from @KnownSequitur.

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COVER ART

“Rabbit House,” by Avant Choi

Avant Choi is a concept artist and illustrator based in South Korea, working in the gaming industry. View more of his artwork at his gallery on Art Station.

Beneath Ceaseless Skies

ISSN: 1946-1076

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