Cobweb Forest (Cobweb Bride Trilogy)

  Percy nodded.

  “So be it,” Hades said, bathed in the unnatural wind, and his voice was that of a serpent. “Close your eyes, all three of you.”

  “Wait!” Faeline exclaimed, and then hurried to stand next to Catrine. “Me too, please, to Letheburg—since I got nowhere else to go, and Chidair Keep and the whole town is all full of dead soldiers, an’ besides, I never seen the fancy town Palace there!”

  Meanwhile Lord Beltain Chidair shook his head. “You have the whole world to go to, and you choose Letheburg?” he remarked, for the first time in minor amusement. “Why not southern France? Italy? The green isles of Great Britain? Arabia? Imperial China? Anywhere else but this sorry Kingdom of Lethe!”

  But the girls were all standing together, some of them clutching hands, and their eyes were squeezed shut.

  “Goodbye, Percy! We’ll see you some time!” Catrine cried out at the last moment, and her voice was suddenly a fading echo, because Hades snapped his fingers, and all of the girls were gone.

  Except for the gods, only Percy and Beltain remained in the Hall—and behind Beltain was his warhorse Jack, which the black knight held on a lead.

  “And now, you, My Champion. And you, mortal man—take good care of her, or you will answer to me.”

  At which Lord Beltain Chidair looked directly into the eyes of Hades and said, “I will answer to none but myself, if anything were to happen to her. For I follow her unto the end of the world, and neither you nor all of Heaven could judge me more harshly than I would judge myself, were I to fail her. Fear not, Lord Hades, I will be with her always.”

  In reply, Hades smiled.

  Percy felt a sudden pang of warmth at the black knight’s words and the sound of his rich baritone timbre. The sweet warmth poured through her like honey, her breath quickened, the sound of her pulse beginning to race in the temples, and she now looked at the God of the Underworld, ready to proceed. And then she turned to glance at the disembodied death shadow of the Cobweb Bride.

  “Yes, call to it,” Hades said. “For now I will send you all to the place where the maiden Leonora hides from the world. Bring her back to me together with this pitiful death of hers so that I might unite them at last—but take care not to perform the deed yourself, for it must be done properly by me. You may travel through the twilight shadows from anywhere in the mortal world. Merely think of this Hall, and the twilight will return you to me.”

  Percy nodded. She reached out to Beltain who instinctively reached for her also, and her fingers were encased tightly in his large warm hand.

  “Close your eyes now,” said the Lord of the Underworld. At his side, Demeter stood now, right next to the Pale Throne, and her golden aura was permeating the wind and the bones. . . .

  But Percy faltered. “Before I go to do your will, My Lord,” she whispered, “if it is possible, I would know one thing. Why have the three of you drunk the water of Lethe? What have Persephone, Demeter, and Lord Hades wanted to forget so much that you took away your own memories of all things? Why are you in mourning?”

  There was a pause. Even the funnel wind seemed to slow down its circular constant motion behind the throne. The gods regarded her.

  “We wanted to forget one child,” Hades replied after a heartbeat of silence. “Melinoë, our daughter.”

  And then Percy blinked, and the world went dark.

  Chapter 2

  Claere Liguon, the Infanta and Grand Princess of the Imperial Realm, stood before the tall arched window of the opulent chamber allocated to her on the upper floor of the Winter Palace of Lethe.

  She was slim and fragile—a young girl of sixteen fixed into permanence by untimely death which rendered her into a doll of porcelain and spun glass. Her pale bloodless skin now bore a ghostly hint of a strange, grayish-green patina, and her great smoky eyes sunken in dark hollows imbued her face with ethereal pathos.

  She was dead and yet she was animate. She was undead, for in this broken world there was no death to grant anyone the final oblivion. And thus the dead girl gazed with fixed, unblinking, apathetic eyes at the busy scene in the square below.

  Outside was dreary winter . . . and war.

  It was late afternoon, and the overcast sky was the color of thinned milk streaked with silver. Already the daylight was being leached from the panorama of snow-covered rooftops far beyond the boundary of the square, and gradually replaced with early bluish shadows.

  It was the fifth day of the siege of Letheburg. Endless columns of weary soldiers and carts filled with artillery supplies populated Lethe Square. Infantry ranks of pikemen with torches instead of their usual pole arms, and musketeers in cobalt blue colors of Lethe lingered in formation while waiting for orders, before being told to march to the city walls in order to relieve those who have been fighting upon the lofty battlements for hours, holding back the attacks from below, as the endless army of dead men assaulted Letheburg.

  They were thus defending the city for two days now, in shifts—two days straight, around the clock, for unlike the living soldiers, the dead took no breaks and needed no sleep.

  The first attack started in complete darkness, with the moon hidden behind a deep overcast, a few hours after midnight of the third day of the siege—just like that, with no warning, and no meaningful reason to explain the timing. The city soldiers patrolling up on the battlements—who had spent the last two nights in a heightened state of alert and had grown somewhat slack and weary of waiting—had the surprise and then shock thrust upon them.

  Dark silent shapes started to pour over the parapet walls and immediately there was chaos. Torches and beacons flared into life, fire of every sort was brought out, and a fierce senseless melee commenced, during which the defenders barely managed to beat off the first wave, when the next began. . . .

  The city garrison soldiers burned the dead or hacked off their limbs—the only two means of halting their relentless approach. They rained fire and dropped burning bales of straw, poured boiling oil, which they then lit with arrows, and managed somehow to maintain their line of defense.

  Yet for how long?

  The city resources were limited, and their incendiary resources even more so, because the arsenals were stocked with supplies intended to be used against normal living enemy soldiers—men who could be killed in regular combat and did not require so much flammable material as did these things of winter-frozen flesh and bone. . . .

  By the second day of this, the King of Lethe, Roland Osenni, was in despair. He hand sent carrier birds with messages to the Emperor of the Realm and to anyone he could think of, requesting assistance. And so far, no one had responded.

  And now, Claere, the Emperor’s dead daughter, stood witness to yet another closing day of bitter relentless drudgery for these poor soldiers—for war was drudgery of the worst sort, and this war was even more dire. “Normal” war was the kind where one went through the motions and turned off the human portion of the self so that one could cut up, pierce, dismember, shoot, or otherwise end other living beings, sometimes with the ease of accident, and if one was lucky enough, then from a distance, without “getting one’s hands dirty.” This war involved methodical precise butchery, a series of intimate and up-close actions that had to be taken—a precise removal of limbs, one after another, or a thorough immolation in flames—in short, a complete eradication of the enemy to the point that the enemy no longer had a recognizable, much less human form.

  This was physically intensive, brutal work. The soldiers of Letheburg were not only tired of fighting, they were tired of the unspeakable acts they had to perform simply to stop each undead enemy from repeatedly coming at them. They had put away, for the most part, their normal weapons—arquebuses and muskets, bludgeoning maces, pikes and other pole arms—and instead wielded bladed weapons for cutting and oil-soaked torches. And this was only the end of their second day.

  Claere watched from the window with her stilled glassy eyes, and she could see the dejected movements of the tiny
figures far below in the square, the imperfect formations, the filthy rattling carts that were getting refilled for the hundredth time at the city arsenals and had been driven back and forth through the freezing and melting slush of the city roads to the walls and back.

  It was impossible to feel anything but slow malingering despair.

  And yet, because she was a thing of stillness herself, a sad, quiet, dead thing, Claere was almost fascinated by the fact that the world still went on around her, and all this was happening, this slow massive engine of war. . . .

  War against her own kind.

  What makes me any different from those other dead? The ones who stand outside the walls and climb it like ants, relentlessly, united by a single purpose? They come and do not care that they burn or they become stumps without limbs. They just keep coming.

  And she thought yet again, for what immeasurable time, What then is my own purpose? Why am I still here? Is it to stand thus, looking through the window, like an effigy? Why am I here?

  A knock sounded at the outside door of her chamber. It was soft but somehow determined, familiar, and Claere thought she knew exactly who it was, who it would always be.

  “Come in,” she said, forcibly drawing a breath into her stopped lungs, reviving them momentarily for speech, and it sounded like a wound clockwork mechanism of subtle gears.

  He opened the door and came into the room. She heard his footsteps, knowing them without having to turn around. If she had a heartbeat, it would have been racing by now, restarted in the same manner as she activated her lungs. But her heart was stilled—stilled by his hand, oh-so many days ago now—and there was nothing that could make it quicken ever again, not even the agitated fluttering of living thought in the flesh prison of her mind.

  Her thoughts—they were the last and only things alive.

  He stood behind her, not quite near her, yet close enough that she could sense him somehow, maybe his breathing, maybe the sound of his own living, pounding heart.

  For there it was, yes; she could almost hear its constant rhythm.

  “I thought you might want some company,” he said. His voice was soft, but cold somehow, or possibly very much under control.

  It was always the same words. For some reason he never knew what else to say, in those initial moments when he entered her room. And he came so often now, it seemed. . . . Indeed, he spent most of the dreary siege days in this room of hers, and frequently a portion of the night or dawn hours—for he slept very little, and she, being dead, slept not at all.

  “It is good to see you, Marquis Fiomarre,” said Claere, without looking around to actually see him, but “seeing” him nevertheless with every fiber of her stilled, lifeless, cotton-thick, insensate being.

  He was silent.

  Long moments passed, the late afternoon outside turned blue, and it was she, the dead one who had to move first, to turn around slowly, with a creak of her delicate limbs, and be faced at last with his presence.

  He was dark, fiercely handsome in the swarthy way of the olive-skinned southerner, with wavy raven hair, black eyes and black brows, a chiseled nose and a pleasing jaw line. There was some residual bruising along the planes of his face from the heavy beating and punishment he had sustained in the Imperial prison many days ago now, immediately after he had struck that dagger through her heart—just as death had stopped, which kept her in the world of the living.

  He was her murderer. And now, in a strangest twist of fate, he was also her loyal companion.

  “What news?” she said. Not because she really cared, but because she wanted to hear his voice, more of his cold-yet-intimate voice, in the hollow silence of the darkened chamber.

  Soon, there would be no more daylight, and the royal servants would come in to light the fireplace and offer her candlelight, which she often refused. But with his presence here, she might allow it . . . a single candle.

  “Nothing new, I am afraid,” he replied. “The shift has changed again, and the soldiers from the walls go to collapse and sleep, while the evening shift takes their place.”

  “How many casualties?”

  He sighed. “No one is counting.”

  “What—what do they do?” she said softly. “What do they do once they die? Do they change sides immediately and fight their own regimental brothers? Or do they continue to fight for the city?”

  The Marquis Vlau Fiomarre was looking at her with his very dark, very liquid eyes. “I believe it is different with every man. Some turn and become the enemy. Many others do not. I’ve heard that quite a few Letheburg soldiers, who are slain, bravely stay on the walls to fight. Being dead, they are very useful, for they can stand up on the battlements with no fear of arrows or musket balls striking them, and they can shoot flaming arrows with less haste and hence better aim. Others yet, once dead, retreat from the fighting altogether, and return to the city to their families. Some merely sit in the snow. . . .”

  “I am glad,” she said, “that they retain humanity—those that do.”

  “Yes,” he replied, never taking his gaze off her.

  Another lengthy pause. The servants arrived as expected, and the fireplace was soon turned into a reddish-gold source of warmth. Before they exited, a candelabra was lit in the corner.

  “What of the King?” Vlau Fiomarre asked. “Has he been to visit you today?”

  “No, only you.” Her answer came in a soft measured creak of her lungs.

  And suddenly Fiomarre’s face turned a shade of red that appeared to be a kind of darkness against his olive skin.

  “I—” he said woodenly, as though he were the one dead, “thought you might want some company. . . .”

  Claere’s face was blank. But her thoughts, oh, her thoughts fluttered and beat against the dense walls of her body’s prison. She could almost feel it then, a living response that she once knew how to make with the muscles of her face . . . a smile. It hovered at the corners of her fixed pale lips. “Yes, I know,” she replied. “And I appreciate it.”

  In another part of Letheburg, on a small cobblestone-paved street called Rollins Way, snuggled between other houses with overhangs, was a little brown building with a shingle up on top. The words “Grial’s Health & Fortune Chest” were painted on the shingle in large red and black letters, and it swung somewhat crookedly above a friendly storefront window with lacy chintz curtains.

  The first hues of twilight started to fill the streets with deeper shadows when the freshly painted red wooden door of the house opened, and out came Grial herself. She was a middle aged but youthful woman, with an extraordinary frizzy head of dark hair that was at present covered up with a large winter hat with a wide brim and scarf flaps wrapped under her chin. Her shapely and buxom figure—usually clad in a stained patchwork housedress with a dingy apron over it—was hidden by a coat. Her face, with its very dark eyes, was handsome, and its expression energetic.

  “Well, who would’ve guessed? Looks like another chilly evening before a chilly night!” Grial said in a sonorous voice that rang brightly and echoed along the street.

  Behind her, three girls came out of the house one by one, all dressed for winter in coats, hats or shawls, and mittens. They were all holding large loaded baskets and unlit torches.

  “Wait here, dumplings, while I’ll come around with Betsy.” Grial locked the red door behind them and headed around the corner into the tiny alley and to the back.

  Lizabette, Marie, and Niosta nodded, and stood waiting, stomping their feet against the sludge-stained and slippery cobblestones.

  “Say, ’Bette, you got a red nose already!” Niosta said teasingly, looking at the somewhat sharp-nosed older girl dressed in a reasonably nice coat with buttons and a stylish hat. Niosta herself was a permanently grimy-looking skinny urchin with a streetwise expression and freckles spotting her nose and cheeks, wearing a ragged hand-me-down coat and a relatively new borrowed shawl from Grial.

  “Don’t call me ’Bette, rude child,” responded Lizabette with
minor irritation that was mostly for show and dignity. And then she involuntarily brought her gloved hand up to her face and drew it against her nose, while the white vapor from her breath curled around the glove fabric. “Br-r-r, it is rather chilly already,” she observed. “I dread to think how nasty it will be when it gets dark. Especially out there near the walls where the wind really blows.”

  Next to her, the third girl, Marie, olive-skinned with very black doe-eyes, was small, dark and mousy, dressed in a much-darned old coat, and at present shivering already from the bitter freezing air. “Very cold, yes,” Marie responded, speaking with an awkward accent—for she was originally from the Kingdom of Serenoa, a foreigner from the Domain.

  Moments later, Betsy, a large creamy-pale draft horse, emerged from the alley, pulling behind it the familiar cart, with Grial in the driver’s seat.

  “Whoa, Betsy!” Grial said cheerfully, then stopped the cart in front of her house. “All right, ladies, pile in! Be sure to set the baskets down carefully. We don’t want anything falling out and landing on those icy cobblestones.”

  The girls started to bustle and loaded the cart, then climbed in from the back.

  “Is everyone ready? Let’s get moving then!” Grial struck a flint and then lit two of the torches, placing one at each corner of the cart in the front near the driver’s area, to illuminate their way in the darkening city. The torches sprang to life, golden-orange beacons that colored their faces with honey warmth and immediately dispelled the blue and indigo shadows.

  And then Grial loosened the reins and Betsy moved forward in a steady and confident walk, on their way to the city walls.

  The torches flickered merrily on both sides as they moved through the shadowy streets, and it was a time when city lanterns started to bloom also, as the lamp keepers climbed up to check the oil and trim the wicks then add the flames with long matches.

  “Look there!” Marie marveled often. “Oh, how pretty! Such round glass shades around those lanterns! And that one is long and square and all frosty!”