When I finally set foot on the enchanted path to Duke Skyhollow’s estate under a blushing peach sky on the afternoon of February 15, I received a mostly pleasant surprise.
The road’s enchantment was meant to work by advancing each bipedal traveler a thousand steps for every step taken. We’d assumed I’d be immune to it, as I was to every other somatic enchantment, but that my boots would insulate the path enough that I at least wouldn’t destroy it. What we didn’t bargain for was that the enchantment worked perfectly well on my boots, and that apparently my boots had no intention of leaving my body behind.
First step I took, my body got yanked almost half a mile.
On Earth, the physics would have killed me, but here in Arcadia those kinds of laws were more relaxed. All the same, since my body wasn’t fully enveloped by the spell, the effect was alarming and sickening; I ended up leaning on my knees and moaning, forehead drenched in sweat.
“That was . . . unexpected,” said Caryl, appearing beside me belatedly once she took her own first step along the road. Despite the warm climate, she wore a long brown coat, dressing for Daystrike rather than Skyhollow. From her serene demeanor, and the similar attitudes of Elliott and Claybriar when they appeared nearby, I quickly figured out that I was not experiencing the enchantment quite as intended.
“Rest here for a moment,” said Caryl. “Look around at the landscape, reorient yourself. It will take your mind a little while to accept what is happening, and then your body will stop rebelling.”
After the first dozen steps or so, one at a time, gazing miserably at the scenery in between, my consciousness began to adjust to the idea. After a dozen more, I was left with nothing but a mild dizziness.
If all of us walked in step, we were able to stay next to each other on the road. Sometimes one of us would fall out of rhythm, and then there’d be confusion as we tried to figure out who was ahead and who was behind. Some small figure would wave pitifully from far behind or ahead on the glittering path, and we’d take a step in whatever direction was necessary.
The view was worth stopping to look at now and then. The wind picked up little eddies of sand; they glittered as they swirled over the tops of the dunes. Great arches and columns of red and golden rock were scattered over the landscape like ancient ruins, but they looked as though they’d been sculpted by weather and not by deliberate hands. There were signs of wildlife, too, but living creatures were harder to spot at the pace we were moving.
About halfway to the estate, I spotted something marring the horizon to my right. I stopped and turned toward it, letting out an involuntary sound of dismay.
I felt as though I had a bruise on my eye, a hole in my mind. The inside of a Gate was the closest thing I could compare the sight to, but even that was more bearable because of the way it was bound, controlled, by the inner circumference of the arch. This blot of darkness was smeared across a patch of sand, its edges unclean. The whole thing was about the size of a decent duck pond, at least so far as I could judge from this distance.
“What the hell is that?” I said.
“Union Station,” said Caryl. “Or its equivalent. That is the hole that Viscount Rivenholt tore in Arcadia when he shed Claybriar’s blood last June.”
“That can’t be right,” I said.
“Have you lost your sense of direction?”
I shook my head. “Never had one to start with. But I mean I saw the bloodstains on the tracks myself. You could have covered the whole thing with a bath mat.”
“It is only by luck,” said Caryl, “or perhaps careful aim, that the damage was not greater. Where norium touched the earth in our reality, it acted as though a plug were pulled in this one, and Arcadia drained away toward the other dimension. Luckily, the iron in the train tracks took the power away from the metamorphosis on that side, and greatly reduced the damage on this side.”
“Is it . . . spreading?”
“No, that is done now. But nor will it heal. That part of this reality is lost forever.”
I stared at it, or near it; it was hard to look at directly. “So that—that mess over there—that’s what Vivian wanted to replace every sidhe estate with.”
Caryl nodded, her expression grave. “That many holes in reality might well have caused this entire realm to collapse into the void, like a house eaten through by termites. She was not what one would call a conservative planner.”
I shuddered but felt a surge of pride at what I’d managed to help undo. And I hadn’t even had a very good plan then, or any idea of what I was doing. Surely this time my chances were better.
“Okay,” I said. “Rest stop’s over. Let’s get to the estate.”
• • •
Duke Skyhollow’s estate was a magnificent oasis, a startling patch of rain forest in the midst of the desert. What appeared from a distance to be towers and spires were not built of stone but somehow grown from astounding, impossibly huge living trees whose tapering tops soared above the main canopy. The entire oasis was shrouded in an apricot-colored haze that smelled of Christmas oranges stuffed with cloves. The haze hung so heavily that I expected it to choke me as we approached, but instead I found myself refreshed, invigorated, and many times lighter.
This change in the function of gravity wasn’t exactly beneficial to someone who’d only recently relearned to walk. Caryl and Claybriar took turns steadying me as I careened back and forth, pushing too hard off the ground and making unintentional leaps. I soon learned the reason for this bizarre ward on the property; all guests were expected to scale the trees like little monkeys to get inside.
Even without much in the way of gravity, I was a piss-poor climber. Claybriar stayed beneath me so that he could ease me back on course when I slipped, and with his help it became strangely fun. Eventually we reached a great window in one of the tree-towers and climbed through it into what passed for the duke’s entrance hall. There were saplings inside the hall: trees planted inside a tree, growing toward a magical source of golden light that dangled from the top of the hollowed space. On the far side was a path that led through the greater tree’s branches to other hollowed-out trees, all shaded by green leaves and wreathed in orange fog.
The duke awaited us in the entrance hall. As he strode toward us, the picture of willowy grace, I recognized him from that day at Residence One last summer. I was pierced by a pang of nostalgia for a more innocent time. He had a green mask-marking across his liquid silver eyes, four fingers on each hand, and a mouth that made you feel kissed just to look at. His pale green wings were nearly invisible, narrow and folded limply against his back.
“Allies, I greeting yours!” he intoned as he approached.
“Fantastic,” I muttered. “His English has gotten even worse.”
“He is very proud of it,” Caryl whispered to me. “It’s quite astonishing, for a fey without an Echo. Don’t be rude.”
“Please to remember thy names to?” the duke said.
“I am Marchioness Caryl Vallo,” Caryl said smoothly, as though he’d made a lick of sense. “With me are the Baronesses Millicent Roper and Alondra Serrano.”
Caryl gestured to me and to Elliott. The real Alondra was . . . somewhere in the room, I assumed, cloaked by Caveat. Caryl could see her; I could not. It would have made more sense to cloak Elliott and let Alondra introduce herself to all the fey, but Elliott’s facade, like me, was impossible to physically enchant. Elliott was, however, casting a subtle look-elsewhere spell outward from inside her at all times, not only to protect her from close examination, but to keep himself safely locked down inside spellwork.
“And of course,” Caryl continued, “you are familiar with His Majesty, King Claybriar, Champion of Queen Dawnrowan, Beloved of the Beast Folk.”
“Beast Folk?” I said, wrinkling my nose. Caryl made a curt shushing gesture, even as the Beloved of the Beast Folk let out his own annoyed grunt.
Duke Skyhollow stepped forward and greeted Claybriar, his supple body draping itself against the faun’s in a familiar embrace. Clay bent his head and kissed the half-swooning sidhe full on the mouth, a shameless display of kingly dominance, which I found intensely, embarrassingly arousing. Caryl gaped; Elliott averted his gaze. I could only imagine what Alondra was doing.
When they were finished kissing (this seemed to take way longer than necessary), Skyhollow gave us a bright smile and then started in on a bit of a tour. It was a nice gesture, but I couldn’t understand a word he said. He threw “beauteous” in there a lot; everything he gestured to was beauteous, apparently. Beauteous hall, beauteous trees, beauteous table.
“We thank you for your hospitality,” Caryl said when it became obvious that the tour had no clear conclusion in mind. “We are on our way to meet with Her Majesty, hoping to either reconcile her with King Claybriar or else find a more appropriate ruler to honor the Third Accord.”
“Excellous!” Duke Skyhollow said. “Many luck to your meet.”
“We came here in hopes of using your portal to shorten our travel time,” said Caryl.
Duke Skyhollow stared at her blankly.
“I’m going to tell him he can use me to translate,” Claybriar cut in gently. “Let’s see if I can manage this without insulting him.”
For a moment Claybriar and Skyhollow gazed at each other. I was envisioning a slow circular pan and some seventies-style porn music about the time Skyhollow finally seemed to experience a lightbulb moment and turn back to Caryl.
“Of course!” the duke said. “But I could never let His Majesty pass through without paying my respects. You will all stay to dine with us and avail yourselves of our comfortable accommodations.”
Judging by where his eyes went at the word “accommodations,” he was planning to accommodate himself comfortably on Claybriar’s lap.
What could we do? As one of the few sidhe who was considered an ally of both Queen Dawnrowan and King Claybriar, he was too important to piss off, particularly given that he controlled the territory on the flip side of our Gate.
So we stayed the night, and we whored out my Echo. The duke’s vassals showed us all to our own separate chambers, but the rooms were all just a little too close to each other for comfort.
My weird round little tree-bubble of a chamber had a window open to the purple deepness of the night, a window that was also, incidentally, convenient for emptying a portable toilet out of (sorry to anyone below). I’d brought my powder and lotion, so I felt safe removing my prosthetic legs for the night and doing my routine check for bumps and scratches. After I lay down in the dark, I listened to Claybriar and the duke making sounds like I’d never heard.
There’s no ignoring the sounds of sex under any circumstances, and this was no anonymous couple in a motel. I could picture both of those guys. Knew what one of them kissed like. Every groan, every gasp, felt like someone had lit a fuse leading straight to my crotch. I wasn’t jealous in the possessive sense—Clay and I had long since established that sex was a sort of constant pastime of his, with whomever—but intensely jealous in the sense that I wanted to be in there with them, getting some of whatever the hell was going on.
It went on for much longer than I thought anyone could physically endure, long enough for me to relieve the horrible, awkward, urgent tension twice myself before the racket finally died down. I lay there shaken and shocked in the silence, but also so boneless from exhaustion that before I could ruminate too much on the complexities of the situation, I was already asleep like the dead.