time. "Bring the panoply and garb." The words were like notes struck from a flute. Caewen couldn't tell if it was the one who had originally fetched her—they all looked eerily the same—but she thought it might have been.
Clothing was indeed produced out of chests and strongboxes, wardrobes and drawers. Caewen took the items and covered herself, rapidly, without paying much attention to the new outfit. The clothing turned out to be cut for a man, jerkin and trousers, a sark of mail too, all of it made light and slender. It fitted well. Despite it clearly being a man's outfit, Caewen had the disconcerting feeling that the clothing had somehow been tailored precisely to fit her alone.
They tried to stop her taking the bronze sword and her satchel containing the eye-ointment and flute-pipe Mannagarm had given her, but she insisted. They kept resisting her trying to take the objects away until she eventually said firmly, "I’ve come to slay a monster. Well, in old sagas, monstrous things arrive during feasts and then they catch warriors unaware or drunk or asleep. Everyone knows that. It’s practically their favourite time to attack. Clearly, I should have my sword." Though as she said this she pushed down another thought: though I have no notion how to use the thing…
Did they agree or did they give up? It was difficult to know. The faces of the Wisht were inscrutable and their foxish eyes held no emotion past the same kind of emotion that starlight has.
Once dressed, Caewen followed the maids out of the room and through a series of new corridors that bore no resemblance to the way they had come. It was as if the twisting white roots the walls were made from had silently reformed and grown themselves into a whole new set of hallways while Caewen had been in the dressing room. And yet each twisted root was massive with age and heavily caked with moss. It must have been some trick of light or magic, decided Caewen. The Wisht-Folk might be powerful magicians but it seemed more likely they would use simple illusions rather than grow whole new wings of a castle in a few moments.
Their destination turned out to be a vast feasting hall where pillars upheld a ceiling carved with a riot of gold and green leaves. Perched in the wrought branches were at least a hundred rooks, like black and swollen fruit. The birds had gilded the fine beams with their white droppings. Below this ornate canopy was a large crowd of the Wisht-Folk that was growing larger. Light flooded in a twilight pall through the many arched windows that lined the hall stained early autumnal colours by green and russet-gold glass.
It was all so spectacular to look at that Caewen's breath caught in her throat. The temptation was to look around at all the magnificence at once and she had to keep her mind on her feet just to remember to walk without tripping.
Caewen was led to a seat at the high dais and found herself settled beside a throne made of silver and the bones of some large creature. The throne was empty so Caewen turned her attention to the hall. The Wisht were arranging themselves at lower tables. They were rapidly served by creatures that brought out food and drink on platters. The serving creatures were short, pinch-faced and pale—they appeared to be a servant people that neither spoke nor met eyes with any of the Wisht and Caewen wondered if they were not merely servants but slaves.
One of these strange little servant people ran up to the high table and set down a bowl full of ripe apples, strawberries and rarer fruits that Caewen could not name. Honeyed cakes arrived soon after, steaming jugs of a hot wine as dark as the sky on the minute of sunset, strange brightly coloured sweatmeats. It seemed endless. Caewen picked up an eating knife and looked at it. She'd never seen anything so large made of something so precious, and here she was surrounded by opulence.
"What are you thinking, dear?"
She had not noticed the woman move into the throne beside her. There had been not a sound. Caewen found herself without ready words. "I was thinking," said Caewen, choosing honesty over mute stupidity, "that a knife of silver, such as this, could feed my family for two or three months over winter. I was wondering how you can have such wealth, while in my village just across the twilight border, we have so little."
"We are long lived. We acquire things over time. But if you like our knife, you may have our knife. We do have so very many." The Queen—for Caewen was sure that this was who the enthroned woman must be—then lost interest and said softly, "We are pleased that you are here. The matter of the Goule has been troubling for us. We have been troubled over it." She then turned to talk to someone in lordly dress on the other side of her.
Caewen hadn’t mentioned the Goule. No-one had. She prodded at the food with the knife she'd picked up, uncomfortable now. The Wisht at the gate had just assumed... the Queen had just assumed... Caewen looked at the Queen again, this time out of the corner of her eye. Why were they all so certain she was here to kill this night-terror? She felt as if everything was far too anticipated.
Not feeling any hunger, Caewen gave up even pretending to be interested in the food and turned her attention to the scene before her instead.
It was a strange feast.
The air was not heated, and although Caewen wouldn't have described it as chill—not quite—it was all the same uncomfortably cold. More from boredom than hunger she tried some of the lavish feast. The food, though it looked delicious, tasted the way spiced ash might taste. It had no aroma. In fact, nothing did. The air was as sterile as a dry cave.
But the spectacle of the banquet was unlike anything that Caewen had ever seen. There was a juggler who kept twelve fiery skulls in the air, tumblers and jesters, and the music—it was unearthly—at first the tune wandered, as if from the harp of an arthritic man as he remembered youth—and then other musicians joined—and then more and more—and it became a waterfall of noise, a surge of melody. Wisht stepped out onto the dance-floor when the music reached its peak. Throughout all this Caewen found herself increasingly dizzy. The flash of a gem-crust circlet. The flicker of shifting twilight shadows on silver thread. The glowing of grey eyes. The beautiful, beautiful deathlessness in every face.
And all of it was over-watched by the rooks above.
It was becoming too much for her. Just as Caewen was feeling that she must either leap up and join the dance or run from the hall screaming and clutching her skull, she remembered Mannagarm’s leech-ointment.
No one noticed or cared as she found the jar, worked loose the stopper and breathed in a rush of the bitter air that escaped. When Caewen daubed the ointment into her eyes she did it too quickly to think about how much it stung. Thankfully, when she pushed the stuff into her ears the sludge felt merely warm. Over a few seconds the burning in her eyes diminished. She blinked until clarity returned.
The music had changed, or had it? It seemed different, more raucous and less skilful—there was no delight in it any more. Rote notes followed tired voices. Caewen looked around and she stared. The Wisht-Folk were no longer deathless and beautiful, but deathly. Their skin was sunken and veiny, their eyes not a smouldering silver-grey but a pond-water murk; hair, thin and ragged; fingers, bony as chicken legs; voices, harsh as the rooks.
She looked up. The rooks at least were real. They remained themselves.
All was illusion? No truth stood here at all? She searched everything more carefully. No. The building was still grand, the gold still gold, the silver still silver, and the clothing still richly worked. It was only the Wisht themselves that were now hideous and disfigured.
"What is wrong, dear? You look pale."
The Queen was leaning attentively towards Caewen. It was much like receiving the gentle attentiveness of some white-skinned corpse. Velmand Ina was worse than all the others of the misshapen things in the room put together. She was older and more ruinous than every last one of her subjects. Her face showed no sign of life at all except for the wetness of her eyes.
"Nothing," said Caewen. "No trouble. Nothing wrong."
Velmand Ina nodded and turned to the floor and the cavorting pallid creatures. "Are not the jugglers and tumblers wonderful? You could cut a merry reel, I wager? Why not join them? We a
re not bothered by station or decorum."
The juggler nearest the high dais had become shrunken and humpbacked. He was perhaps some strange half-breed of an animal-thing for he had hair thick as hedgehog spines and he dragged a tail behind him.
"Your jugglers are very fine. The music, too. But I am too tired to dance and perhaps I ought to save my strength for the Goule?"
"Very fine? Why they are the grandest creatures to ever draw the cold air of twilight into their lungs. Look at Gaoth." She motioned towards the spiky haired creature. "See how he keeps twelve goblets of wine in the air with such ease and never spilling a drop?"
They were not goblets, but withered apples and not twelve but just three, and besides which Goath had just dropped one and was stooping to pick it up. Without thinking, Caewen said so, her voice a whisper.
The world did not stop, the music did not end and the hundred Wisht-Folk in the hall did not turn as one to stare at the young mortal woman who had just contradicted their queen. But it felt to Caewen as if all those things and worse happened. The sudden cold feeling she had from the queen made her shiver much worse than the air of the hall could have. Velmand Ina stared at Caewen a long time in silence. She uttered not a word and twitched not a muscle of her