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ON THE OTHER SIDE OF the beech hedge was the centre of the garden, or nearly.
The path finished at another grass circle, this one girding a large and nearly perfectly spherical shrub.
We all looked at it and then at each other, the incongruity of the topiary breaking through the embarrassment of our various confessions, and then Hal started to laugh. “A box of uncommon girth, indeed! Your riddle-master was fond of her horticultural puns, Jemis. What was the next line? We’re supposed to find something in the box?”
Violet dug around in her bag and pulled out the piece of paper with the riddle on it. “On the island there is a garden neither of romance nor of wonder, but in a box of uncommon girth will you find both.”
“In a box ... You’re sure of the preposition, Jemis?”
Unravelling the poem felt a hundred years and a lifetime ago. It was hard to think back across the unexpected revelation that Mr. Dart was jealous of me to the mad heights of ecstasy of the wireweed burning up my magic nearly to the bitter end.
“I think so,” I said hesitantly. “I wonder ... I hope I didn’t miss anything ...”
“The rest of your interpretation was correct,” Violet said, but absently; she was frowning down at the paper, and soon added, in a lower voice, “Ask the one who knows darkness without end for the means of light, and the one cast outside for the secret that lies within, and the one cursed for a blessing. Be courteous, and accept what doom you are offered. You are clever enough to have deciphered this, and foolish enough to have needed to: by any door, you will find wisdom, though it be your death.”
“Perhaps I missed something,” I said helplessly. Hal studied the box sphere and then, with an actual spoken apology to the plant, pressed forward into it.
“My brother was born blind,” Violet said, even as Hal managed to wriggle his way between the branches.
I was watching Hal’s progress, but said, “Irany was noted to be a very eccentric wizard, but that’s well beyond eccentricity and into the stuff of legend.”
The leaves sprang back with a concerted rustle, making it look disturbingly as if the topiary had eaten him.
“Er, Hal,” I began, only to be interrupted by his exclamation.
“The Emperor!” Then, in a much different voice, Hal said, “I do beg your pardon. Er, may I call my friends?”
We were already hastening to follow him into the shrub, which rustled in seeming aggravation before letting us pass. I realized even as I pushed branches aside that I was ascribing sentience and sapience to a topiary, but could not but believe it to be the case.
The topiary had seemed perhaps twenty feet in diameter when we were on the outside. Once through the clutching branches I burst into a dim green space, very still and solemn, with grey-brown branches curving out and upwards overhead to form a hollow centre much, much larger than twenty feet.
At the exact centre of the hollow four trunks rose up, gnarled in their bark but straight in their direction, until they forked overhead to cross into a four-way arch and then fork again to form the understructure of the sphere. I wondered for a brief moment whether there were three other paths leading to three other bridges, but my attention was soon absorbed, as Hal’s had been and so too the others’, by the gryphon that lay couchant under the arches.
It had a falcon’s head, with dark streaks under its golden eyes. It was slate-blue and fawn, like a peregrine, the feathers shading smoothly into soft dun fur at the withers. A tufted tail curled neatly around the lion’s hind legs, the tuft flicking every now and again as it regarded us.
“This wasn’t in your riddle,” Mr. Dart murmured to me.
“Perhaps it is the guardian of the way, who will offer us our doom?” I returned as quietly.
Violet stepped forward and curtsied deeply to the gryphon, with a grace I remembered from Morrowlea but an inflection to the gesture that I had not before seen.
“Lady,” said the gryphon, inclining its head to her. Its voice was smooth, alto, ambiguously gendered. Did gryphons have genders? They were as mythical, as legendary, I had thought, as a dragon or a giant or a mermaid. Well, I had yet to meet a giant.
Violet said, “We seek my brother, captive in the Oubliette of the prison of Orio City, and safe passage through to the building known as the hunting lodge of the King of Lind.”
The gryphon considered this, tilting its head back and forth to regard us with first one eye and then the other. Its tail twitched a little more vigorously.
“And who,” it said at last, “is your clever riddle-master?”
I stepped forward to perform the bow I had been taught to use before great lords. “I deciphered the riddle, but it was all five of us who unravelled its sense and made our way here. I could not have done it alone.”
“And so you seek to find your way together. What offering do you bring?”
Mr. Dart said, “We cleansed ourselves in water that did not touch the ground, and garbed ourselves in threads unspun by human hands. We crowned ourselves with honesty and thrift, and bring to you fine white bread made without yeast, water that has never seen the sun, and a fruit of next year’s crop.”
Violet laid down the scone in its napkin. Jullanar Maebh had been carrying the silver ewer this whole time, and now, with a curtsey of her own, she placed it on the grass next to the scone. Hal placed the unripe figs of the breba crop next to the scone, and that left me.
I said, “The coin that is never minted and everywhere accepted is a secret, which we have disburdened to those who met us at each of the gates through the hedges coming here.”
The gryphon’s front talons, which were more a falcon’s foot than a lion’s, dug deep into the grass. We watched it warily, knowing that that beak and those claws could do untold damage to us; though of course it didn’t need physical violence to leave us trapped here as long as it pleased.
It said, “Your offerings are acceptable to me. You may pass by the fourfold gate into the places that you seek.”
And with that it disappeared and our offerings with it.
We stared at the empty space where it had been, and then at the natural arches of the fourfold gate. “How do you think we pass through?” Jullanar Maebh asked at last.
“I think we should hold hands,” Hal said. “We don’t want to get separated at this point.”
“Good idea,” Violet decided, and so we spent a few moments arranging ourselves. Mr. Dart, having only one good arm, had to be at the end. He held Jullanar Maebh’s right hand with his left; she held mine, and I Violet’s, and then came Hal at the forefront.
“Well?” said Hal, looking at the scuffed ground, bare of growth but scattered with dead leaves from the great box sphere around us.
“In the box you will find both romance and wonder,” I paraphrased from my riddle, hoping desperately I had not missed something important, sure that neither romance nor wonder were the only meanings of those particular Old Shaian words.
“To the Oubliette and the Hunting Lodge of the King of Lind!” he cried, and walked through the arch that faced us, disappearing before Violet had more than begun to move herself.
***
WE FOUND OURSELVES in darkness, in close quarters, and back in the mortal world, but that was all I knew at first as a roiling wave of pain started somewhere near my toes and rolled inexorably up my body to crest in my head.
I cried out despite myself, gripping Jullanar Maebh’s and Violet’s hands convulsively. They gripped back, and with that comfort I was eventually able to focus on my breathing. At last I was able to relax my grip somewhat, though I did not let go. Neither did they.
It was still dark, and still close quarters. The pain subsided to a bearable steady state, but thin shivers of anxiety at the darkness and suffocating closeness started to run up and down my body. I was conscious of a deep shame, but it felt distant, far removed from the physical panic.
“Who comes?” a voice said out of the darkness. I was not the only one who jumped, each motion rippling through our linked hands.
After a moment Mr. Dart whispered, “What did he say? Did anyone understand it?”
I turned my head towards the sound of his voice. “He said, ‘Who comes?’” I said, my voice cracking. I coughed, turning my head into my shoulder, and took a long time to realize the voice had spoken in Old Shaian, not modern.
This must be the one who knows darkness without end, the guardian of our doom. I tried to capture the other parts of the riddle’s end, the questions we were supposed to ask, but every time my thoughts were scattered by the sensation of the dark pressing ever closer. The tremors were constant now, and my heart beat high and rapidly in my throat. My hands were clammy and cold; Violet’s were, too, but Jullanar Maebh’s seemed burning-hot.
Hal said, “Violet? Jemis? Can you ask him our questions?”
“I don’t remember them,” I confessed, my voice only a step up from a whimper. I bit my tongue in humiliation, but could not do anything but stand there. Where was the familiar courage? Where was the cool, clear, world of mortal danger? Surely we were in great peril; but all I could feel was panic fear.
“Ask the one in endless darkness for the means of light,” Mr. Dart said softly.
“Ask the one cast outside for the joy that lies within,” Jullanar Maebh added.
“And the one cursed for a blessing,” Hal finished.
Violet’s hand clenched harder on mine. I stood there, trembling, unable to bring forth words in Shaian whether old or modern. My mind felt as if it were roaring like the Magarran Strid at the Turning of the Waters.
Wherever we were was quiet but for a faint whispering sound, like a distant watercourse. The air was cool and stale: indoor air, which did not make me feel any better about the situation. We were in the Oubliette of the prison-palace of Orio City, potentially in a magically folded space somehow bridging the hundred or more miles between Orio City and the hunting lodge of the Kings of Lind, trapped in the end of a riddle.
A slow shuffling noise came towards us. The echoes made it seem as if it came from everywhere at once. The hairs on the back of my neck rose. It sounded like something dragging, and my mind filled with images of serpents and hideous monsters out of fairy tales. We had just encountered a gryphon: what might await us here?
The same voice as before spoke, this time in modern Shaian: “You are not from the far past! But you do not come by the door my captors use. Who are you? How did you come here? Are you here to kill me?”
The eagerness with which he asked this last question was perhaps the most horrifying thing I had ever heard. Mr. Dart cried a wordless denial, and Hal exclaimed, “No! We are—I think we are—Violet?”
“Violet,” murmured the voice, and the shuffling came closer. “I ... I seem to know that name ... From long ago ... It was a ... a joke, a nickname ... from the summer ...”
Nên Corovel, the Rainbow-Girt Isle, the Summer Country.
Violet spoke barely above a whisper. “Ru ... Rory ...”
I clung desperately to their words, refusing to let the dark swallow me up no matter how much I trembled or sweated or lost my breath. Something about the way she said Rory was odd. Jullanar Maebh stirred next to me, her hand clenching mine almost as hard as Violet’s for a moment, and I thought of her name and the idiosyncratic spellings of Outer Reaches names. Ru could well be short for Ruaridh.
Ruaridh. Ruaridh of Nên Corovel, where Hal had gone as a child to meet the Lady.
Ruaridh, as everyone had been taught at the kingschool, was the name of the son and heir of the Lady of Alinor.
***
THE REVELATIONS CAME crowding fast, almost as fast as the crashing waves of the headache. I couldn’t see anything clearly, the forms of my friends and our captive-to-be-rescued haloed in strange colours like the ones you see when your eyes are closed. Mr. Dart and Ruaridh wavered brightest, then Hal, then Jullanar Maebh, then Violet. Each time one of them shifted position my eyes stabbed into my head.
“Jemis,” Hal said in an urgent whisper, even as Violet kept speaking to her brother, her voice shifting accents to something at once more upper-class, like Hal’s, and more of a brogue, like Jullanar Maebh’s.
I shook my head, gripping whoever’s hands I was holding tight.
“I can’t,” I said, my voice hoarse. “I can’t ...”
Mr. Dart cleared his throat as if that would help mine. “Jemis, we need you to think. How do we get away from here?”
I turned my eyes to the brightest of the two haloes. One green backlit with gold, the other a kind of dim orange. Somehow I knew that the dimness was not how it should be; that the years a captive had broken something fundamental about Ruaridh’s magic.
“On the island there is a garden neither of romance nor of wonder, but in a box of uncommon girth will you find both,” I said in a near-whimper, for I remembered that niggling sense that I’d missed something, and knew that it had to do with that word for wonder, vhailor, which in Old Shaian meant wonder, yes, but also poetry, and a sacred altar, and sacrifice, and a certain sort of death.
As for heür, which was usually translated as romance, its primary meaning was actually path, with the connotation of wilderness; and thus adventure; and, more oddly, the kind of high-hearted chivalry that was understood in the ancient days to be a form of charity.
“What, then?” said Mr. Dart. “We have entered the box of uncommon girth.”
I swallowed, feeling the motion shudder through all through my body. My extremities were tingling, fingers and toes as full of pins-and-needles as the mermaid who had given up the sea. The haloes brightened, until I could feel them on my skin, thrumming louder than my heartbeat.
One dose, perhaps two, away from the final sleep, Lark had said, and I had had how many?
“Ruaridh,” I said once I thought I could speak calmly.
“Yes?” came the strange voice, shuffling closer. I closed my eyes but the haloes still burned in my vision.
Ask the one who knows darkness without end for the means of light
And the one cast outside for the secret that lies within
And the one cursed for a blessing.
Three questions, it sounded like, and three answers. Except that was never how these things worked.
Be courteous, and accept what doom you are offered. You are clever enough to have deciphered this, and foolish enough to have needed to: by any door, you will find wisdom, though it be your death.
“Did you have a question for me?” came the voice, eager, doubting, hopeful, anxious. He sounded much younger than he must be.
I hesitated, images and allusions chiming off each other in my mind without quite sounding out clearly.
“Hold our hands, so we form a circle,” I said at last.
“Jemis,” said Mr. Dart, even as we all shuffled around until Hal, on one end, and Mr. Dart, on the other, bracketed the blazing but broken halo that was Ruaridh of Nên Corovel.
But Ruaridh said nothing but a murmured, “Ah, there is your hand, and yours as well,” and something snicked into place inside my mind.
Nine drops of blood offered to the everlasting fire had been our means of leaving the Hearth and finding the great fig tree in its courtyard. Seven tears dropped into a silent pool within the uncut stone of a cliff had given us a bridge through thin air to an island beyond the world’s end. Five secrets had given us access to the Oubliette, last and most terrible of the prison cells of the palace.
Three questions to form a doorway, and one true sacrifice to open it.
I opened my eyes to the endless darkness and the bright haloes, facing inwards to a circle I would not get to stay within, body failing me from the cruelty and carelessness of someone I had once loved.
Vhailor sae heür: wonder and romance, poetry and adventure, altar and path, sacrifice and chivalry.
We did not have to move to find the doorway, any more than we had in order to enter the Hearth, the heart of the prison.
I called up my magic, as Hal had taught me, and I thought of my mother dancing with the bees, and my father coming home no matter how far and how hard the journey, and how much I wanted to see Mr. Dart come into his power, and then I said, in a clear and confident voice:
“Norima,” and there was the first slash of light, a vertical line drawn in fire the colour of a candle flame;
“Norimai,” and there was the second slash, three feet from the first; and
“Enorimaso,” and there was the third, a horizontal slash above our heads.
The space between was black as anything. I looked at it, and gripped my friends’ hands tightly. Jullanar Maebh was on my left, and Violet on my right.
A wind began to blow from the doorway I had created, a soft and welcome zephyr. I could hear a sound like thousands of wings rustling along it, as if invisible birds flew past us. They were scented of something sweet and wild and fragrant.
Ruaridh said softly, “Norima. Hope. Be hopeful. I had forgotten what it was like.”
The wind blew, the thousands of invisible birds flew past, the scent grew stronger and stronger, and my heart swelled with all the possible futures that doorway could give me.
Be courteous, and accept what doom you are offered. You are clever enough to have deciphered this, and foolish enough to have needed to: by any door, you will find wisdom, though it be your death.
The wind moved our hair, tugged at our makeshift silk tunics, scoured away the grime, presented image after image of potential lives only to whirl them away again after the merest glimpse.
I grasped one, where Violet and I sat next to each other, reading, a cat on her lap and a child on mine, my father lying back in a chair beside us, happily asleep, a sense of coziness and protection and freedom encircling us with a wild green wind no less peaceful for its wildness.
“Malaso,” I whispered, the ancient word for abnegation, for abdication, for loss.
All the lights went out at once.