“Is he gone?” I asked Ibolya when she slipped into the darkened room.
“For the moment, Your Highness. But he’ll be back before long. Conrí was most distraught.”
“I heard.”
“When he returns, as he undoubtedly will, if Your Highness still wishes to keep him out, I might have to use power to deflect him.”
“You have My permission.”
“Truly, Your Highness? This is Conrí.” She carried her lit candle to light one on a far table, then moved to the lanterns. “He simply wishes to see You.”
Well, I couldn’t bear to see him. Couldn’t bear to see him worry for me and be unable to do anything to help. No one could. “No, don’t light the lamps. And blow out that candle. I prefer the dark.”
“Yes, Your Highness. Can I bring You anything?”
“No. Leave Me.”
Ibolya poured a glass of water anyway, setting it within reach, and replaced the cooled teapot with a warm one. Then she slipped out the doors, finally leaving me in blessed silence.
Except for Calanthe. As much as I tried to block out Her rage and savage hunger, the din of it roared through my mind, my heart frantically beating to keep up. In the dark, I listened to the raging storm. It only seemed to be growing wilder, tearing at my palace, my island and ripping pieces away. Once it had been second nature for me to steer storms around Calanthe. Though I tried to send this storm out to sea, I had as little strength to do that as to lift my own arm. Ibolya had sponged me clean and assisted me into a fresh sleeping gown, but I was weak as a babe, needing help to use the toilet. And what had come out of me …
I didn’t know what all the wizards had added to my blood, but it was gone now. I hoped. Expelling it all had left me shuddering in a cold sweat, and dizzy to the point of fainting.
All I could do was stare at the shrouded ceiling. My twig fingers caressed the skin of my good hand, tickling and not like a part of myself. I’d never been a person to dwell on death. I’d certainly never longed for death until those last moments on the wizards’ sacrificial altar, but when I’d resigned myself to the inevitability of it, when I’d actively embraced death and welcomed Her in … I couldn’t seem to stop. There might be no coming back from that.
It could be that was one invitation I couldn’t rescind, and those final thoughts clung to everything else I tried to consider, a cobwebbing of death that cast a shroud over my soul. Perhaps my body had only seemed to come back to life—animated by a ghost of my former self.
Unable to summon the will to fight it, I succumbed to the drugging sleep—and the nightmares that awaited me.
“What’s wrong with Lia?” I demanded.
Ambrose raised an eyebrow. He wore the robes that Lia had given him as court wizard of Calanthe, the dark velvety material studded with constellations of jeweled stars. “Drink your tea, Con, and consider phrasing your questions better. Cookie?”
“No,” I bit out, but I drained the teacup and set it aside. Ambrose never could be rushed along. I fed a cookie to Vesno who’d lifted his tufted ears at the invitation. Sondra stood at the open window, gazing out at something, unflinching though cold rain spattered her face and the fierce wind tore at her clothing. Ambrose reclined on a wine-red sofa with gold tassels. That was new. In fact, everything was new since we’d unwillingly stayed in that tower, the room much larger than seemed possible. It had been divided into work areas, some screened off, others openly cluttered, some I couldn’t seem to get my eyes to focus on. A large bed poked out from behind a curtain, while chairs and more fancy sofas clustered in conversational groupings like a ladies’ salon.
How Ambrose had gotten everything in there defied rational explanation. Which shouldn’t surprise me, as everything about Ambrose defied rational explanation. I raked my hands through my hair, digging my fingers into my scalp. It didn’t help dredge up better questions, whatever the fuck that meant.
“Sondra,” Ambrose called, “would you like a cookie? They’re excellent.”
She waved a hand in dismissal without turning. Ambrose sighed, then fed a cookie to Vesno, who took it with delicate precision, munching happily.
“She’s locked me out,” I said. Not a question, but it helped to think it through. “Literally, by having Ibolya bar my way, but effectively before that. At first she seemed to be talking to me—” Pretending to care, but maybe she’d been trying to say goodbye? “—but all along she was edging me out the door. She’s messed up, not like she was before. I mean, I don’t expect her to be magically better, but…” But that would be useful magic. I lifted my head to stare at Ambrose. “I think she’s dying. Or not fully alive. I don’t know. What can I do to help her?”
“Ah. That’s a better question.” He wagged a cookie at me, then popped it in his mouth, munching thoughtfully. I waited while he chewed, swallowed. When he reached for another cookie, my hand shot out of its own accord to seize the wizard’s wrist.
“And the answer?” I prompted.
He smiled sadly, then was no longer in my grasp, instead sitting back some distance, cookie in hand. “A better question helps to elicit a useful answer, but is no guarantee of one,” he remarked. “I might return the question to you. What can you do to help Lia?”
Sondra might have made a snorting sound, but she didn’t turn around. No help there. I set my teeth. “This is what I’m trying to find out.”
“Or, to put it another way, can you give Her what She needs?”
“Yes.” I’d give Lia anything, whatever she needed. “If I know what it is,” I amended.
“Ah, and that can be the sticking point. Very often we need the people who love us to give us what we need before we know what that is ourselves.”
“Which means those of us with no one to love us are pretty much fucked,” Sondra muttered darkly.
“How do I figure out what Lia needs if she can’t tell me herself?” I asked. I agreed with Sondra, in theory, but I couldn’t dwell just then on the painful truth that Lia didn’t love me in return. I’d gone over half my life with no one loving me—I could hardly start dwelling on it now.
Ambrose sat up, poured tea into a fresh cup, handed it to me, then reclined again. “You are a man of action, Conrí, which is your strength and your weakness.”
“Yeah. And?”
“You can’t force Lia into full health. You can’t make Her want to live. Some things are beyond even your might.”
“This is what I’ve been trying to tell him,” Sondra muttered.
“Of course Lia wants to live,” I said, ignoring Sondra.
“Does she?” Ambrose asked Sondra, who shrugged but looked grim.
“So what are you saying?” I looked between them. “I should do nothing?”
“Oh.” Ambrose waved a hand vaguely. “Did I say that? I really don’t think I did.”
“Lia is a woman driven by duty and responsibility,” I explained carefully, reining in my temper. “She wants to live, if only to protect Calanthe.” I knew that much about her. But … did I? Calanthe is crumbling, out of control—it will not be fine. I dropped my face in my hands, groaning. What if she couldn’t repair Calanthe? She’d never forgive herself. “I need her, and so do her people. Calanthe is coming apart at the seams, just as she warned us.”
“Oh, I know,” Ambrose said. “The situation is probably even worse than you realize.”
Wonderful. Just fantastic. Never go to a wizard for reassurance.
“Did you find Merle?” Sondra asked. She’d turned around, finally, and leaned against the sill, apparently uncaring of the cold rain blowing against her back.
“It’s never been a question of finding Merle, so much,” Ambrose replied with a rare frown. “That’s where I was when you dropped by to visit. But Merle is the only thing holding Calanthe back right now—and will be unless and until Her Highness can take over.” He shook his head. “I’m afraid his strength won’t hold much longer. And that’s not including other complications.”
“How much longer?”
“That’s difficult to put in human terms,” Ambrose mused. “You see, Calanthe exists in several dimensions of reality at once. In some, She is a goddess; in others, a monster; in others, a landmass.”
Sondra and I exchanged glances, and she shrugged in her confusion. That left me to take a stab at it. “I’m going to say Calanthe is a landmass in this reality.”
Ambrose wagged a finger in the air. “Aha! Not so fast. These realities are not separated by impermeable barriers. They’re more like … colors in a rainbow, ever shifting, leaking into one another, blurring the lines.”
“Sounds like magic—dragging stuff from one reality into the other.”
Ambrose turned his head and smiled at me, beaming as if I were a prize pupil. “Conrí! At last you begin to understand how magic works. I’d rather despaired of you.”
I decided not to touch that one. “So: How long do we have before this goddess-monster-landmass sinks into the sea?”
“From the tales I’ve studied and what Her Highness confided, it might be more of an erupting and rampaging than a sinking,” Ambrose corrected. When I growled, he hastened to continue. “Regardless, we’re talking about a combination of metaphysical and geologic time scales, which have very different linear functions than time as humans understand it. Putting it in terms you’ll understand is an approximation, at best.”
“Try,” I said drily.
“Minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, years, centuries, eons. They’re all arbitrary measures.” Ambrose sat up, warming to his subject. “If you theorize that metaphysical time operates on a logarithmic scale, then—”
“Ambrose,” I interrupted, “from what we’re seeing out in human reality, it’s looking closer to weeks than eons. Can we narrow it to one end of the spectrum or the other?”
“Did you know,” Ambrose said, tapping his oddly long fingers together, eyes bright, “that some propose that we should think of time as a circle, rather than as a spectrum? So eons would at some point merge into nanoseconds, which means—”
“Ambrose.” This time Sondra interrupted him, a wary eye on my twitching fingers, which I’d seriously been considering wrapping around the wizard’s throat, if only to stop the flow of words making my brain ache.
“Point taken,” Ambrose conceded. “It helps to have Her Highness present on the island, so things aren’t progressing as fast as when She was gone. I’d say days. No more than a week.”
There. Was that so fucking difficult? I throttled back the accusation, however. “Can you do anything?” I asked bluntly.
“Not with Merle in between, no.”
For some reason I imagined the raven stuck between two giant wheels, holding them back with his wings—and they would crush him if anyone tried to shoulder in to help.
“Close enough,” Ambrose said, nodding at me, as if he’d plucked the thought from my head.
“What about Anure’s wizards?”
Ambrose poured himself more tea. “What about them?”
“You said they’re worsening the situation, so is there anything we can do to stop them?”
“‘We’? Oh no. You shouldn’t take that on yourself, Conrí,” Ambrose assured me. “More tea?” The tower trembled slightly, the ground shifting far below, and Ambrose cocked his head at the ripples in his tea. “Definitely a sign,” he announced, “that you should focus on the immediate problem, which is Calanthe.”
“If you can’t do anything about Calanthe,” I replied, “then we need Lia. And we need her healthy and strong.”
“Conrí,” Sondra said, “you can’t just—”
I held up a hand to stop her, concentrating on Ambrose. “You can’t save Calanthe. Merle can’t keep doing whatever he’s doing, which isn’t enough anyway. Is there anybody else who can save Calanthe and all the people on it, besides Lia? Yes or no, Ambrose.”
He met my gaze soberly. “If you insist on a dichotomy, then no.”
Good enough. By eliminating options, we at least narrowed our focus. “Your elixir seemed to help Lia. Is there anything else you can do for her?”
“Oh, I’m sure there is.” He looked vaguely toward one of the workbenches I couldn’t quite make out, as if it remained in shadow, though parts of the room next to and beyond it were well lit by lanterns. “The death part is tricky, but in general what a wizard has done, a wizard may undo. That’s not a hard-and-fast rule, but it gets the point across.”
“What?” Sondra burst out, advancing a step, hand going to her sword. “You can help Her Highness and you haven’t done it?”
Ambrose didn’t even look at her, still focused on the shadowy work area. “She hasn’t asked.”
“She isn’t even strong enough to get out of bed, you numbskull!” Sondra shouted. Vesno jumped to his feet and barked in agreement.
Giving the two of us a hurt and puzzled frown, Ambrose fed Vesno a cookie. “Well, why didn’t you say so? I’ve never brought anyone back from the dead before, so I can’t know these things. Really, Conrí, I don’t know why you didn’t ask me that in the first place.”
Sondra threw up her hands and paced away, muttering how she should’ve let me pitch him out the window. Ambrose wandered over to the bench, disappearing into the shadows, even the lamplight glittering off the stars and jewels on his wizard’s robes dimming. “Of course what I do depends on what She asks for,” he called out, sounding as if he stood at the bottom of a well. “It won’t do anyone any good to give Her something She hasn’t asked for.”
Giving me a look, Sondra circled her hand with impatient prompting, wanting me to say something. Wonderful. What had Lia actually asked for? “She wants to be stronger. And she says her mind isn’t sharp. Her memory is full of holes and she says she can’t think.”
“No?” Ambrose stuck his head out of the gloom, his face a floating bright spot. “That’s not good. Not good at all. Brains rot first, you know.”
Sondra shot up a finger in vindication, leveling a grim look at me, as Ambrose vanished again. Then we waited. Sondra paced while I ate cookies, which felt like throwing crumbs into an empty pit. Maybe feeling hungry for real food was a good sign. Finally Ambrose emerged, arms full of jugs, vials, and various other implements—all piled up so that it seemed impossible they’d stayed balanced this long, let along another second.
“Can I help you carry some of that?” Sondra asked him, starting forward, hands outstretched.
“No, child, no,” he answered vaguely as he juggled. “These things aren’t for you to touch.”
She dropped her hands helplessly, exchanging a glance with me. “But how will you get down the ladder?”
“Oh, I’ll meet you there in a bit. After all, you two still have to figure out how to gain an audience with Her Highness. It is quite late, and—”
“Oh, I’ll get in to see her,” I said. It was my own bedroom, too. I wasn’t relinquishing that hard-won territory without a fight. “It’s for her own dammed good.”
“The queen has to ask for help,” Ambrose cautioned me, no longer vague at all. “Especially mine. That’s a critical point, for very good reasons.”
I waited, but he didn’t explain. “I’ll see to it,” I promised. When they both looked dubious, I headed for the trapdoor and opened it. “I’m a man of action, right? I might not be able to force Lia into full health or make her want to live, but I can make her listen to me.” Maybe.
When Sondra, Vesno, and I reached the royal chambers, the guards admitted us—though I’d been braced for a refusal there—and Ibolya rose gracefully, gliding to intercept me as I strode purposefully for Lia’s private chambers.
“Welcome back, Conrí. I’ve ordered food for you, if you’d care to—”
“Later.” I reached the door and put my hand on the knob.
Ibolya put her slender hand on mine, staying me. I might’ve imagined the light prickle, like a static spark, but continuous. Probably not, as her pretty dark eyes took on a determined gleam. “I’m sorry, Conrí, but Her Highness’s orders have not changed. I cannot admit you.”
“You don’t have to admit me. I’m going into my rooms on my own.”
“Please, Conrí. I don’t wish to harm you.” The prickle increased in clear warning.
“Have you been in to see her since I was here last?”
“I checked on Her Highness several times. She’s sleeping.” Though her serene face didn’t so much as twitch the wrong way, she didn’t quite meet my eye.
“I smell a lie,” I said softly enough that it came out like a low growl.
Her eyes widened slightly. “I’m not lying. Her Highness is…” Ibolya sagged ever so slightly. “She is not well. I wish the other ladies were here. I don’t know what to do for Her.”
“I’ll take the responsibility,” I told her gently, but adding the firmness of command. “I know what to do for Lia. She’s not in her right mind. Let me help her.”
Ibolya searched my face for an endless moment. “If you harm Her, or if She calls for me, I will take action to remove you, Conrí. I can do it.”
“I love Lia. I’m trying to save her life.”
With one last searching look, Ibolya nodded in decision. Stepping back, she decorously folded her hands. “I’ll keep Vesno,” Sondra said. “Good luck.”
I opened the door and went to confront Lia.
“Your Highness, I do hope You will pay attention. I have no doubt You’ll find this as instructive as we do.” The red wizard lowered the knife, sliding it deftly through the space between my ribs. The cold metal poked uncomfortably inside my empty chest cavity, not painful but disconcerting. What had happened to my heart? “You must understand, Your Highness, Your kind aren’t truly human at all, thus You lack the capability to feel emotion. Otherwise, You wouldn’t be so heartless, if You’ll pardon the word play.” He smiled, gentle and dispassionate.
“I have a heart,” I protested weakly, then wondered at my lapse. I’d resolved not to speak to the wizards, not to give them the least thing. Anything they took from me had to be wrested away. It didn’t stop them, but at least I had pride to cling to.
He began prying my ribs apart with the blade. “Allow me to demonstrate. I know Your Highness is a student of sciences, and thus fond of empirical evidence.” With a crack! my ribs gave. The wizard clucked in satisfaction. The smell of fetid swamp water rose up, tinged with algal bitterness. “If You will observe.”
The red wizard gestured, and the wizard in black stepped up, bowing to me. “Your Highness is looking most lovely today.” He held up a mirror the height of a man, with an ornate frame and a perfectly liquid silver reflective surface. My ladies used to do that—hold up the full-length mirror so I could approve my appearance for court.
I gazed unwillingly at the image of myself. A gnarled oak tree, bark knobbed and ancient, limbs broken and leaves wilted, stood cleaved nearly in two with a vertical hole running down the center of its trunk. A gaping cavity oozed blood and entrails, green water gushing out, leaving the interior hollow and depthless.
“That’s not Me,” I protested, but my voice was small. I tried to make it louder. “That’s not Me. I have a heart.”
“But it is You. Demonstrably so.” The wizard in the blue robe stepped up beside the large mirror. Using a slender wand, he indicated the leaking hollow of the tree. “Observe the rotting interior, the lack of turgor pressure in the limbs. Death lingers at the core.”
The black wizard took the wand. “Death is merely a transition. By removing the vestigial flesh and other animal artifacts such as blood from Your Highness’s corporeal form, we’ve revealed a refined, more pristine version of Your true self.”
“No. I have a heart. I’ve felt it.”
“But have You?” The wizard in purple robes came into view, Merle perched on his shoulder. The raven croaked a hello at me, bobbing his head in greeting. “If Your Highness had a heart, then people would actually love You. And You would be capable of love, which You clearly are not.”
“Tertulyn could never have betrayed Your Highness, in that case.”
“Con couldn’t have sacrificed a woman he truly loved simply to win a battle.”
“It was all a lie.”
“Do You see now?”
“I have a heart!” I protested, forcing the words past my numb lips. “I do! I’m not dead. That isn’t Me.”
The oak tree in the mirror flailed, wilted orchids falling like rain to shower onto the swirling green water that rose around the base of the trunk. The tree began to lean to one side, the orchids a sodden mass of dying petals, pale rose and violet, sinking into the current that swirled in a huge whirlpool of ravening hunger.
“No, please—that isn’t Me.” The dark maw of the starving sea drowned my words. “That isn’t Me…”
“Lia.” The whirlpool called my name, night-dark voice hoarse as the growl of a wolf. “Lia. Come to me.”
“I won’t.” I pushed at it. “I won’t go!”
“Lia!” The sea lashed waves of black, unyielding, demanding. “You come back to me right now. Wake up.”
“No no no no…”
“Do it, Lia. I’m not giving up on you.”
A sharp pain made me gasp. Flesh and blood. I had a body, a living, flesh-and-blood one. Furious golden eyes pierced me, Con’s pitted face contorted with blazing anger. I lifted a hand to my stinging cheek, the twig fingers tapping a light pattern against my skin. Not flesh, not entirely. “You slapped me.” I meant to sound imperious, indignant, but it came out a soft cry of distress.
Con gripped my shoulders, searching my face, then his fierce expression relaxed, and he pulled me into his arms, wrapping his strength around me. “I know. I’m sorry, Lia, please forgive me.” He buried his face into the crook of my neck and shoulder. “You were raving in your sleep. Then you stopped breathing and I couldn’t get you to wake up. I didn’t know what else to do.”
“The wizards had Me again.”
“No, Lia. No. It was only a dream. A nightmare.”
“They were … experimenting on Me.”
“No.” Con said it firmly, lifting his head and cupping my face in his hands. “They weren’t. They’ll never have you again. I promise you that. It was a dream, nothing more.”
A dream? Scraps of images came back. The hollow tree. The rain of dying orchids. My dreams had always been of the future, not the past. “Some promises you can’t keep, no matter how hard you try,” I whispered, the heart I didn’t have feeling like it might crack apart at the haunted look on his face.
“I failed you before, Lia,” he replied, voice creaking like old floorboards, “but I will keep this promise. Believe that, if nothing else.”
“Where is Ibolya? I distinctly recall commanding her to keep you out.”
“Yeah, she tried. No luck there. We’ll discuss that later. Right now I’m here and I’m not letting you die again, no matter how much you might think you want to.”
I gazed back at him, aghast. “I don’t want to die.” I might not want to die, but death was reaching for me. The orchid lay limp on my arm, like the sodden orchids falling from the dying oak tree.
“Good.” He let me go and went to the lantern on the bedside table, lighting it with the clicker there. I hissed at the sudden brightness and he glanced at me, assessing, then continued on, lighting all the lamps until the room blazed with light. He paused, surveying the table laden with food, all untouched. “Here’s an easy place to start. You need to eat, Lia.”