Wait a minute. Why is that a good sign?
“What do you want?” I asked.
“So that is the question you want to ask me?” The Dark Lord gave a smile that reminded me of maggots swarming carrion.
I realized what was wrong—aside from everything else.
I took a deep, steadying breath and straightened my spine, and I stared directly at the Dark Lord Nâtlac despite the effort making my eyes want to rebel and crawl back into my skull to escape.
“Up to now,” I said quietly, “you’ve been a lot more direct.”
“You think you know me?”
“Yes,” I whispered. “I don’t want to. But I do.” I glanced around at the pulsing, ruddy landscape and added, “Or, I should say, I know the Dark Lord Nâtlac.”
I looked back at the disturbing eidolon before me and said, “You? Not so much.”
He laughed and it was like a thousand undead kittens digging gangrenous needle-claws into the flesh of my ears. “You don’t know me?”
“Who are you?”
The agonizing laugh continued.
“What are you?”
He wheezed and shook his head. “You believe who or what I am matters at the moment? You think that is the question?”
“What’s the right question?”
“Don’t you already know?”
I shook my head in frustration. “What’s the point of this if you don’t tell me anything?”
“Why don’t you tell me? Isn’t this your conversation?”
“You came to me.”
Whoever, whatever it was, stepped up uncomfortably close and whispered into my ear, lips brushing my cheek so lightly that I could feel something squirming that wasn’t anything close to human flesh. “Wasn’t I already here?”
• • •
I woke up screaming.
Krys and Rabbit ran to my side instantly as I sat up on my bedroll hyperventilating. I felt my own face reddening, half in terror, half in embarrassment.
“Frank?” Krys asked, kneeling next to me. “Are you all right?”
I nodded involuntarily and said, “Nightmare.”
I reached up to rub my eyes and my head jerked away from my own touch.
What?
I stared at my own right hand and I had an uneasy feeling that I wasn’t doing the staring.
“Frank?” Krys asked.
My head shook by itself, eyes never leaving my hand, frozen in place before my face. “No,” Lucille’s mouth whispered without me.
At least you’re still here. I mentally sighed in relief.
From beyond Krys, I heard Robin’s voice. “Is something the matter?”
“No! Nothing!” Lucille snapped at him, shifting so our body faced away from the half-elf. She looked over at Krys.
“What?” Krys whispered.
“I can’t move my right arm,” Lucille whispered back.
What?
Her right hand still hung where it had stopped while I’d tried to rub our eyes.
While I had tried to rub our eyes.
I experimentally tried to wriggle our fingers.
Lucille jumped back as if her own hand was a broadsword swinging at her face.
“I didn’t do that.” Her words came out in a strangled gasp, a shout she only managed to restrain at the last minute. “What’s going on? I didn’t move—”
I felt the tide of panic rise in our voice, in our heartbeat, in the copper taste of our breath. I did the only thing I could think of. I raised my finger and gently pressed it against our lips.
“Wha—” came Lucille’s half-hidden voice.
Krys stared at us with wide eyes. She glanced back at Robin, who was getting to his feet. Krys leaned in with a conspiratorial whisper. “Your Highness? Could that be Frank?”
“I don’t . . .” Lucille trailed off, because I had swung her hand up between us and Krys and gave them both an enthusiastic thumbs-up gesture.
“I guess so,” Lucille finished.
I reached up and patted her gently on our cheek.
CHAPTER 13
It was a good thing I only had control of an arm. While she tried to get up from the bedroll I unconsciously reached over and “helped” to push her upright. Apparently my timing was off, because I sent her off balance and almost toppled her back over.
If I had been controlling a leg, we’d have had some mobility issues.
Even walking around a couple of paces felt strange. Our arm fell into a natural swinging motion—which was fine, I guess—but it was my natural swinging motion, which seemed slightly out of phase with hers. I felt it as a weird jerking sensation in our shoulders. I know she felt it, too, same body and all, and she’d simply come to a halt every dozen steps or so, and shake her head.
When we got to her horse she put her left hand up on the saddle and stood there a moment.
“Frank?” she whispered in a voice so low that only we heard us.
Oh, right . . .
I lifted our right arm so I could grip next to her left and briefly distracted myself by pondering how the current situation had made the pronoun confusion around my life even worse.
She cleared her throat, and I realized that she actually wanted both hands to help pull herself into the saddle.
Sorry, I thought at her, even though she still apparently couldn’t hear me.
We vaulted, somewhat unsteadily, into the saddle.
Our hands fumbled at cross-purposes, taking up the reins before we managed to coordinate our grip left and right.
Oh, this is going to be fun.
Lucille must have had similar thoughts, because she subvocalized, “Please don’t get us killed.”
I rotated our right hand slightly, careful not to jerk the reins, so I could give her a thumbs-up.
She let out an exasperated sigh.
What do you want? My communication skills are somewhat limited at the moment.
The five of us rode the final few miles to Fell Green without any incident. Rabbit led Robin’s horse from her own, but Robin got to ride upright this time. Lucille rode up front with Krys, mostly I think to avoid interacting with Robin. It was clear that the half-elf sensed something strange was going on, and Lucille probably didn’t want to damage the fiction that she was Princess Frank.
Along the way Krys found a dozen ways to quietly ask what was happening and Lucille found an equal number of ways to say she didn’t know. For myself, I would have thought that having a small measure of physical control, a means to confirm my presence and interact with the world, would have been a good thing.
But it didn’t feel like it. If anything, my random control of Lucille’s right hand and arm felt ominous, as if the rules were changing before we knew what they actually were.
We managed to reach the Fell River and the bridge to Fell Green without me inadvertently asking the horse beneath us to do anything inconvenient.
The entrance to the wizard town wasn’t much to look at.
Literally.
As we approached, all that was visible was an old stone bridge arcing over the Fell River connecting Lendowyn to its neighbor Dermonica. Despite a relationship that had thawed a bit over the past year—largely due to a war I accidentally started—this particular crossing appeared ill-traveled. Any town of any significance was, pointedly, inconveniently far away.
The bridge also had a reputation for moving around so that, unless you had our particular destination in mind at the outset, you would never find this particular bridge regardless of what any maps might tell you.
Of course finding the lonely old bridge was only halfway to Fell Green.
“Heads up, Frank.” Lucille whispered.
She placed her left hand, tensed her leg muscles, and hesitated a moment for me to catch up to the dismount. I was ju
st a hair’s breadth behind her, and the only sign of uncoordination was a slightly unbalanced landing that caused her to take an extra step to the right. I don’t even think the horse noticed.
She took a step forward, toward the bridge. She stopped suddenly and looked over her right shoulder. Then she took a backward step and cleared her throat, tilting her head slightly where the horse stood.
Oh, yeah.
I reached out and took the reins where they arced under the horse’s neck so Lucille could lead the animal on foot. I marveled at how the universe had found something more annoying than locking me powerless and silent in Lucille’s skull.
We walked up to where the stone bridge met the shore and a familiar old beggar stepped out from behind one of the pillars flanking the entrance to the bridge proper. He was bald, as ancient as any man I had ever seen, and wore a ragged robe the same shade of milky gray as his clouded eyes. In one hand he leaned on a staff, and in the other hand he held a cracked wooden bowl. He held out the bowl and started to say, “Alms.”
Then, as he fully rounded the pillar, he stopped, straightened his spine, and a sour expression crossed his face.
“You two again?” He harrumphed and held out the bowl.
Lucille reached into her pouch one-handed and took out a gold crown for each of us. Four coins rattled into the bowl, and he tilted his head slightly, bowl still held out.
I could feel a puzzled expression cross our face, and the not-so-blind gatekeeper looked annoyed. Slowly, enunciating each word as if speaking to someone who didn’t quite grasp the language, he said, “Both. Of. You.”
After a moment, Lucille said, “Oh,” and tossed one more coin into the bowl. Only then did the wizard city of Fell Green deign to show itself.
The moment the last coin clattered into the bowl, the opposite shore suddenly appeared much closer. That was because a dagger-shaped island had appeared in the middle of a suddenly much wider Fell River. The bridge before us now led to a stone-cobbled highway that bisected the island before continuing on to another bridge that continued the passage to Dermonica. To one side of the highway, a great walled city rose up, claiming half the island until no crag or stray stone was left unworked. It seemed quite possible that there might be no actual island beneath the stones on that side of the highway, only the city itself plunging deep beneath the rapids of the Fell River.
On the opposite side of the highway was a wood, deep green and primeval. The greenery was a bit too lush and a bit too vibrant, as innocent of any artifice as the city side was innocent of any sign of nature.
I thought of the dream-vision Lysea again, where I stood between the elf city and the elf woods, with armored fae emerging from both.
Lucille grunted, disrupting my thoughts. I realized that we had started walking forward, and our right arm trailed behind us, still limply holding the horse’s reins.
Yeah, right.
I gently pulled our arm forward, leading the horse to walk up next to us. We led our small party over the bridge and between the city walls on one side, and the dense forest on the other. We walked between worlds now, elven and mortal as well as city and forest. It wasn’t the only way between, but it was the easiest. I suspected that our half-elf highwayman was right when he speculated that the prince had come this way. Had trod upon the same road we walked now.
I realized that it wasn’t coincidence that this place resembled my vision with Lysea. I suspected that, if we could see beyond the veil between this place and elfland, I might see the same city and the same wood, and the same army of fae massing at the mound between city and wood.
That was not reassuring.
I felt better when we passed through the city gates and left the road and the brooding forest behind us.
Once inside the city proper, Lucille paused a moment to check the bauble around her neck to assure herself that the apocalypse wasn’t imminent. It didn’t seem to be.
She put the pendant back, paused, then picked it up again.
“Oh crap,” she whispered, sounding almost like me. She stared into the depths of the hourglass and I tried to see what she saw.
Oh crap.
“What’s the matter?” Krys asked.
“The sand’s moving faster now.”
Of course it was. We had just taken a journey halfway under the hill by entering this city. If the pendant ran on the elves’ time, we were much closer to it here.
“What do we do?” Krys asked.
“Act quickly and leave,” Lucille said. “That’s all we can do.”
From behind us, Robin spoke up, “Is there a problem, Your Highness? Perhaps I can be of some assistance.”
She let the pendant drop and said, “It’s none of your concern.”
• • •
Lucille had a better memory for the city layout than I did. She navigated us through the streets without pausing.
The city we walked through wasn’t particularly different from any other large city full of shops, merchants, and travelers. If it weren’t for three things, we may have been in any other comparably sized town.
The first, and most obvious difference between here and, say, the capital of Lendowyn—other than appearing less threadbare and poverty-stricken—was the large numbers of folks that would have counted as tiny minorities elsewhere. The streets were filled with all manner of inhuman creatures: dwarves, trolls, goblins, pixies, ogres, and beings less familiar to me, all mixing with a humanity that bore more than its share of rich robes bearing arcane symbols. All these different populations mixed freely in a crowd remarkably absent of sounds of terror or breaking bones. Everyone carried on with their business with a notable lack of violence and bloodshed.
Less violence and bloodshed than on a typical street in Lendowyn’s capital, now that I thought about it.
The second difference was in the kind of wares and services being provided. Elsewhere practitioners of the wizardly arts, black, white, and gray, tended to carry on their business well out of sight of the general public. There was a good reason for this. Wizards and such tended to use supplies that just weren’t pleasant. The objects that weren’t horrifying to look at tended to have an odor that threatened to turn your sinus cavity inside out. Here those wares were spread out on blankets, or filled carts, in full view of the nauseated passerby.
The remaining difference was the fact that no one showed any particular interest in the bound prisoner we led along with us. There were few enough places where anyone would intervene with an armed trio on behalf of a tall dark stranger—maybe in a capital city one of the city guard might stop us and inquire what was going on—but almost anywhere the public would have at least eyed our group warily, if only to avoid us.
Here in Fell Green, no one spared us a second glance.
Before I realized it, Lucille stopped us in front of an inn called The Talking Eye.
I don’t know why I should have been surprised at her choice of lodgings. Our unceremonious departure from Fell Green last time had nothing to do with the inn or its management, and more to do with the armies that had converged on the town. If another war hadn’t yet broken out, I supposed we didn’t have a problem.
Like the street vendors and the rest of the general public, the innkeep at The Talking Eye was unperturbed at Robin’s bound presence. The vaguely goatlike old man didn’t spare any words for Robin, and only briefly acknowledged his presence with a glance while quoting a price for lodgings.
Lucille paid it without haggling.
The old goat gave us another serious look and told us, “House rules—no rituals.” He glanced at Robin. “Don’t like cleaning up blood.”
“No problem,” Krys said back to him as Lucille led us to our room.
• • •
Once in our room Lucille stared at the lone bed and sighed.
“What now, Your Highness?” Robin asked in
a slightly amused tone.
“Sit down,” Lucille told him. She glanced down at her right arm, then pointed at a chair with her left. She gestured with that hand at Rabbit and Krys and said, “Keep an eye on him.”
She turned away and lifted the pendant again. The very slow hourglass was closing on half full now. Were it just from our travel here, that would leave us with only three days. But Lucile watched the sand move, and I knew that she was trying to gauge how much of that had come from our brief time at Fell Green.
She dropped it and reached into her belt and pulled out the scroll that the elven prince had been reading. To my relief, she didn’t unroll the parchment to look at the uncomfortable script lining the page. She simply glanced at it as if reassuring herself that it was still there.
“Is it truly necessary for me to remain bound?”
“Yes,” Lucille said simply.
“Ahh, ever the gracious hostess.”
Lucille swung around, pointing a clumsy accusation at him with the scroll in her left hand. Before any words left her mouth, Robin added, “I don’t suppose you noticed?”
“Noticed?” While she spoke I reached up and placed her right hand on her wrist and gently eased her arm downward until the scroll pointed at the floor. I didn’t know if the thing was still loaded.
“The streets. The city. You have been here before, have you not?”
“And?”
“Did you notice what is missing?” Robin asked.
Lucille stared at him, and Krys filled the silence. “No elves.”
“What?” Lucille turned to her.
“Last time we were here,” Krys said, “there were plenty of elves around.”
Robin nodded. “Here we are as close to Timoras’s realm as one can get without traveling under the hill.”
“And the elves?” Lucille asked.
“I suspect they suffered from a prior commitment,” he said.
Lucille snorted. “I would have expected at least some of them around laying odds on the outcome.”
“I’m sure they are,” Robin said, “but a sane bookmaker does not take wagers while standing in the middle of the field of honor.”