A ring edged in red flame appears ahead of them. He has to assume someone sliced it open. The other side of it, he can see upside down, is a broad, flat expanse of intricately placed stones or tiles forming some kind of a design wider than his view allows. Everything appears to have a reddish cast to it, the light almost as dull as it is here in the woods.
Straightaway they carry him through the red portal, but not before he watches three of the mounted knights turn from the road, leaving the Queen, to ride off into the darkness of the Þagalwood. No vines or roots rise up to clutch at the legs of their pale skeletal mounts the way they did Gallorini. The wood doesn’t perceive them as intruders; the white polished torsos of the beasts are identical to the trees, would seem to be carved from them.
Then he has passed through the portal and is hanging above the mosaic of stones, which proves to be a great circular plaza surrounded by a low wall and, here and there, steps leading to a higher plain that seems to shimmer with heat—all of it, everywhere bathed in sanguine light. It’s like the dying embers of a fire rippling the air even in the darkness. Ugly fae sprites swarm the air around the opening like gnats clustered above a wound.
In the center of the plaza stands another, smaller circular structure perhaps waist-high; the base seems to be constructed of marble and gems. Seeing it he can’t help being reminded of that baptismal font in the abbazia di Santa Maria di Lucedio where he buried Waldroup’s ördstones. But this font, this well, is capped by a brilliant, molten line of white-hot fire, its glow rising straight up into the night, a horizontal ring so bright it hurts to stare straight at it.
“Alpin?” he whispers in his head. The only answer he gets is a strap across his belly. His Yvag minder says something harsh. Did they hear the name in his mind? Or sense Alpin’s ghost? He can’t tell if the creature heard or is just enjoying itself by whipping the hanging ram. But the Queen heard him, didn’t she? Thomas the Ram is carried roughly across the plaza toward the well. Now the knights, as if weary of supporting him, let his back drag across the rough stones, and when he bleats out at the scraping of his wooly hide, he’s whipped again.
They come to a halt beside the well. The Queen dismounts her ivory white creature. Ađalbrandr assists her, and has let go of the lead attached to Janet. Thomas suspects she’s spelled. She doesn’t move, makes no attempt to run away—and where would she run if she could? With that sack over her head, she can’t even see. Exhausted, Thomas dangles from the pole, his head lolling, overcome with despair, still asking how he gave himself away and to whom. Now these creatures are going to destroy his wife and he can’t do anything to stop them. He wishes they would untie his wrists and change him back first. Give him his voice. At least he might die on his feet.
Across the plaza, another knight seals up the portal, turns, and kneels, drawing a spear as if from out of the ground. It has a bodkin head on it, four-sided and needle sharp. The knight climbs to its feet on the wall and takes its position, a wide-legged stance that Thomas recognizes from every military encampment in which he’s dwelled. The edge of this plaza is a perimeter of some kind.
The tiny sprites flit about in every direction.
The Queen approaches Thomas, her voice in his head once more, though her fanged mouth doesn’t move. At a signal from her his back is lowered to the ground and the pole slid from his bound limbs. The ropes are cut. His furry legs flop limp and useless. She pulls the air as she did before, and once more he experiences lancing pain as if knives have slipped into his joints to dismember him. He howls; the sound of it transforms with him from ram to man.
When it’s over, he lies naked, trembling, worn to rawness by the pain, his wrists and ankles abraded and bleeding. He sprawls on the cold stones, passive, helpless. Breathing is difficult. The air here seems to be thick, almost viscid, and hot as if he’s inhaling the air from an oven. He clears his throat. Above him is a blue-black panoply of stars and nebulae like a dome of almost-night, an impression reinforced by nearly invisible crisscrossing lines across that sky as gossamer as spiderwebs, describing something like the tracery of cells in a honeycomb, each offering a slightly different view of the cosmos. It’s as though he’s staring up at the night sky through the largest Catherine window in the world; in its center hangs a huge pulsing red-orange oculus, the obvious source of the dim light bathing this place. He absorbs it all, and under his breath thoughtlessly tallies the cells: “Nine thousand, seven hundred and sixty,” he wheezes.
Nicnevin glances up at the sky. “You perceive the tesselation? That is remarkable,” the Queen comments. “We shall be most entertained by your mathematical feats. For a brief time at least. Get up now, mayfly.”
He stares up at her, wants to say that she is the one with the eyes of an insect. What he glimpses in her expression for one instant is fatigue. Has changing him worn her out? Then it’s gone.
He manages to roll delicately onto one hip, expecting more pain, but there’s none beyond the rope burns and the abrading of his back. Sensation trickles into his extremities, the sharp tingling as if a thousand of those little green hobs are biting him. He rolls to his hands and knees, brings up one foot, tests the knee as he rises, puts weight on it. It holds. Then he stands upright on both feet, unstable, swaying. Takes one lurching step to the side to better see his wife behind the Yvag entourage, but one of the knights steps forward, blocking his view, coming right up to him. Slender gray-green hands hold two jewels glowing blue the way the smaller dots in an ördstone do. One jewel the Yvag sets just above his collarbone in the center of his throat, while the other hand reaches around the back of his neck. There’s a soft snick, and a strange force both circles his throat and pierces straight through to his spine, not quite painful but impossible to ignore.
The Yvag turns him to face the Queen again. He’s too exhausted to care that he’s naked before her. Too exhausted to run at her, strangle her, and not sure if in this heavy air he wouldn’t collapse anyway.
But she gestures for him to come to her, and as if the blue jewels upon his neck are attached to an invisible lead, he staggers forward against his will, until he’s close enough that he can watch the multiple pupils of her irises widen into single rings. Instantly she is in his head, and just as abruptly he beholds a world that’s been invisible to him till now. Her voice: Ailfion, I believe you’ve called this. And Yvagddu, which is fitting I suppose, as we do thrive in the eternal darkness of our red sun.
The sparkling, shimmering welkin vanishes like a curtain pulled aside, revealing a plateau that seems to abound in colossal structures—glittering buildings the like of which he’s never seen: great thin needles that might be made of solid air and stand tall enough to puncture the sky, next to helicoid spirals; obelisks of dark green jasper pressed beside complex stepped structures with some sort of foliage flowing out over their sides. Pathways through the air connect many of the structures. Here and there strange metallic tubes snake out of the ground only to curve back into it again elsewhere like the humps of sea monsters, in an interconnected pattern all the way to the horizon.
He thinks of puny Ercildoun in comparison to this vast and mighty conurbation, a town against an empire. The Queen turns toward the well; her gold-and-black robe streams above the stones. The incandescence that tops it is shot through with strands of red, blue, purple, and orange, all swirling. The bright rim makes his eyes water. Its flowing light bathes everyone in the plaza, makes their uniforms sparkle. Now that he’s standing, Thomas can see that it’s a ring hovering above the curved platform of marble and gems. The Queen’s long gray-green fingers gesture at it and the bright fire winks out. The afterimage of the light stays with him.
What he’s looking at seems to be the side of a well, if one were as wide as an oxgoad. He could leap into its center with arms and legs outstretched and not touch the sides. “Come,” she insists, as if he has a choice. He follows her until he stands against the base, peering over the lip. It’s depthless, but the emptiness is shot with more streaks of purple and orange, which seem to leap like lightning across the vastness of it. Far, far below, so far that he could cover it with his thumb, is what looks like a slaughtered side of beef afloat among the colors. There’s something odd and asymmetric about it, though, and only after he’s stared and stared does he realize it’s a human torso that’s been broken apart, extremities half-shattered into particles and spreading away from the center, the head looking like crumbs sprinkled out from it, an abstraction of a human head with long hair. He can only think of the girl from Carterhaugh who they took while he watched . . . and yet it looks like the pale-green torso of an Yvag.
“The mouth of Hel,” says the Queen. “Few of your kind have ever beheld it. With few exceptions, only those taken as teind who feed it. I did once show it to a group of you creatures as a warning not to interfere in our business. If you thought yourself the first, you are not.
“I sent that group home—all but the one we threw in as an example. The next thing we knew, the fools had named a goddess after it and insisted that various caverns in your world led directly into her. They completely misinterpreted what they were shown, but that hardly surprises. Still, so long as she warns them off us, they can worship as they like.”
He recollects caves where faeries, ciuthachs, and other hardly-ever-seen creatures are said to dwell, and a story about a girl and a frog and just such a well as this.
“The well of all worlds?” he hazards.
“Aren’t you the clever boy? Correct after a fashion.” She smiles to him, flashing those needlelike teeth. “For you, though, it is the answer to a question you have been asking awhile now.”
“A question?” He steps back, no longer wanting to watch the body disintegrating far below.
“What is the purpose of the teind?” She glances past him, and he senses that someone has come near. He finds that his naked wife has finally been brought up close to him. Except—
“Remove her hood,” the Queen orders.
He pleads, “No, stop, please, don’t do this, what can I do to make you change your mind? I’ll take her place, let me, please. She’s innocent of this that’s between us!”
Ađalbrandr, sneering, snatches the sack from her head. An explosion of dark hair cascades past her shoulders, and Thomas sucks in his breath, conflicted and trapped, unable to beg further and instead doing all in his power to wall off his thoughts.
“There are prices to pay for the many you’ve harmed in opposing us. This is the first, hardly the last. Bid your wife farewell, Thomas of fables.”
He moans in a twisted agony while he suppresses as hard as he can even the awareness of her name, thinking “Janet, Innes, Sìleas” and more names lest the Queen hear it by itself. She is watching him, savoring his distress, not looking at the teind. “Oh, God, forgive me!” he shouts. Closes his eyes, puts his arms around her, and hugs her to him, flesh against flesh. She is compliant, insensible, and he whispers in her ear, “I’m sorry, so sorry.” Then, as a hand falls upon her shoulder, he shouts again, loudly, “No, no, no!” Turns and swings wildly at Ađalbrandr, who knocks him backward hard. He flies through the air, tumbles on the mosaic, almost passes out gasping, but shakes the sparks out of his head and starts to get up again. The blue jewels light up and nearly cut right through his spine to crush his throat. He drops to his knees, choking, crawls forward to throw his arms around her legs. “Please!” he gasps. “Take me. Let her go.”
“Now, Ađalbrandr,” orders the Queen.
Sìleas Lusk is torn from his grasp.
Pulled back, she just stands there, slack-faced in her insentience. Ađalbrandr passes his long hands over and around her. Within moments she is no longer his neighbor’s daughter. Sìleas has been glamoured into an Yvag, her skin that same scaly greenish hue, her ears pointed where they show through her hair that’s now white as Carrara marble, her fingers and toes elongated, taloned, and everywhere—knuckles, shoulders, face—barbed with tiny spicules. Beneath the skin, however, is something other than ribs, other than bone; seemingly it’s something tightly wound, as if her skin has become nothing more than a sheath, reminding him of the spun wire of the little homunculi sprites. It’s an illusion, he knows—this is reverse-glamouring—underneath she’s still Sìleas, still spelled.
Once the transformation is complete, she is lifted and stood upon the lip of the great well by two of the Yvag. For a moment she totters there. “Ađalbrandr,” says the Queen. The knight simply pokes one finger against her back. She does not scream, does not struggle, but flies outward in slow motion as if the air above that wide stone maw is thick as porridge. With arms wide, she sinks as slowly as the heaviest drop of treacle, as if eternity buoys her there. Then a jagged line of violet fire arcs across the opening and through her. Her body spasms once, and something like pebbles of her new gray flesh float out from her side, her fingertips, the tips of her toes, leaving behind ragged spots of red tissue.
He watches, repelled, horrified, doubling over to retch, filled with self-loathing to have hidden her identity from them. She’s not Janet. They have kidnapped the wrong woman, but he mustn’t even acknowledge that thought, must not allow the Queen to hear it in his mind. The guilt knots and squeezes him. On his account Sìleas is doomed. Even if he were to reveal their error, they wouldn’t have let her go. They needed their teind now, and would still have sicced more fiends on Janet and Morven for the next sacrifice, or else they would have tossed his wife and daughter in amongst the Þagalwood. But at the moment he doesn’t even let himself think these thoughts, clinging instead to his real and wrenching guilt, fans its flames, screams “Janet!” in his head and aloud to drown out the rest of what he knows, thinks. Folds his wife’s name into his self-hatred that someone else has paid a price for his actions. Repeats it, sears his thoughts with it. His wife. Janet.
Why did you come back, foolish girl, why of all nights didn’t you stay away from the house? But what if she hadn’t? What would they have done?
He can’t stop himself from thinking of his daughter. Where is Morven? But stops the thought from blossoming into being, pushing the words She’s gone, she’s gone, she’s gone! around it, a shield to seal off his real thoughts. The grief for this girl who did nothing at all but is dying for him, cracks him finally. Tumbling Sìleas—Janet!—disguised as one of the elven, will be slowly, torturously torn apart, and he can’t bear it. He collapses with one arm over the lip of the well as if he might reach her to bring her back. The hungry forces within it grab hold of his arm to drag him in after her. His hand stings. He snatches it back to find blood from a tiny hole through the edge of it.
Ađalbrandr laughs, grabs him by the hair, and hauls him back from the well as if anticipating that he’ll jump in, flings him down. The Queen reignites the incandescence around the top of the well, a whirling St. Elmo’s fire.
He senses what’s coming next; either the pain or the misery of what he’s caused has triggered the pressure. He dashes his forehead against the stones of the well in an attempt to knock himself unconscious before the fit overtakes him. The Queen yells, “Stop him!” and someone kicks him, but by then the lightning is ripping through him, blackness has swallowed his senses, and the pressure of the seizure rolls in like a storm. The riddle spills as if from some other’s lips.
“I connect the here and unhere
