She pinches thumb to her first two fingers and he clutches at his throat, unable to breathe. “Careful of the tone you take with me, mayfly.” She releases the hold upon him and he gasps for breath. “I know all of this, half of it plucked from your own mind. And by your description alone, her child rightfully belongs to us. We had taken over the lich. So what is there to discuss?”
Now he’s too tired, too furious to care what she does. “There really is no cruel act you can’t justify, is there?”
With one swift gesture, she robs him of his speech again. Coldly tells him, “We are done now. You would do well to remember how small and fragile your position here is before displaying such contumacy again. You continue to exist entirely by my whim, and my patience wears thin.”
He tries to plead, and she shakes her head. Nicnevin gets to her feet, so tall and steel-gray and muscled. She wraps herself in one of her black-and-gold robes, turns away, but stops and comes back.
She says, “This kindness you think you deserve is not within my powers. I do not sort one changeling from any other—who are they to me? They arrive here as human, male or female, and through ritual of cellular recomposition they become Yvag, of which there are four variant genders, including Queen”—she smiles slyly—“of which you have been three now. However, if so much time has passed—how many years has it been in your world, more than a few?—then the ritual has long since taken place, and he is now we. His own mother would fail to recognize him.” She studies him coldly. “Did you ever even set eyes on it? On the meat, not the changeling.”
He shakes his head.
She mocks him with a laugh. “Perhaps you’d like me to bring its mother here, to see if she can pick him out. What was her name, your sister?”
He knows she knows the name already.
“Innes. Shall we bring her? What say you?”
He shakes his head vigorously.
“Giving you voice is like keeping you from your bath for an extra day. It benefits no one.”
Then she is gone. He is left with the poison of her lust still flowing through his veins.
“Wasn’t wise to goad her,” whispers Alpin. Then, “Felt good, though, didn’t it? For a few moments were you free of her sorcery. Well, you’d best start planning an escape now, little brother, no matter the odds. Because between your ire and hers, you’ll not much longer be in her company.”
Whatever Alpin is, he’s undoubtedly right about this. “Start planning your death, Thomas Rimor,” he mutters, and lies back down upon the bed.
XXIV. The Royal Hunt
Now he is abandoned in his cell. Days, perhaps weeks pass—he can’t be certain. Nobody hauls him to the pond. Nobody interacts with him at all. Without whatever substance was in the pond, his beard has begun to grow out, and he’s aware of his own stink returning. There seem to be times when he is suddenly sleepy for no good reason, and each time he dozes he wakes to find a new platter of food has been left. It seems he is not to be given another opportunity to witness the Þagalwood servant that delivers and removes the food. Something puts him to sleep to ensure this. His time can only be measured by these meals. Is there one a day? Or two? How long is a day in perpetual twilight? He’s given nothing to go by. When he stares up through the roof at those strange, incongruous swirls of stars, he feels as if he’s melting into them. There is no escape. No windows in the little garderobe, and no way to scale the smooth, polished ribs to the transparent vault, assuming he could by some means penetrate it and climb out if he did. What’s the likelihood the choker wouldn’t respond if he got out that way? In this complete isolation he can’t help imagining the worst—that any time now, the doors will be flung open and he’ll be dragged out to the well between worlds, where he’ll be ceremoniously glamoured and flung in. Probably they’re just biding their time until the next teind is due. He has served his purpose (or failed to, he suspects), and Nicnevin is finished with him. Why not let go and escape into madness? What better place to elude her? Her sorcery can’t pursue him there.
Then he awakens from one of these manufactured dozes, unable to recall when he fell asleep. Instead of a meal he finds a pile of clothing beside him. A shiny material of their design, a loose-fitting gray article of clothing with sleeves and leggings, split halfway down the front. He steps into it, and the material comes to life. In a panic he tries to tear it off before realizing that, like the uniforms of the Yvag knights, it is simply adjusting itself to him. The sleeves flare, the shoulders extend out from his own into soft points. The gray shades into a blue-green with a diagonal stripe of violet. The leggings grow into soft boots that swirl themselves around his calves, ankles, and under his feet, which forces him to pull up each foot as the “growing” material pinches together. Around his throat and at the ends of the sleeves are bands of gold trim. The material grows up the back of his head, forming a hood. Thomas reaches up to feel it, fingers following it to a point behind him. He pushes the hood back off his head. The nondescript clothing has become a belted tunic above dark leggings and black boots.
This is strange; nothing like being the teind. Would they dress him up just to strip and glamour him?
Shortly, an unhelmed Yvag knight opens his door, gestures for him to come. Whatever awaits, he has no choice but to follow.
He walks the curving labyrinth, for the first time clothed and under his own power. Side chambers that have always been empty before are bustling with more of the elven than he’s seen since he arrived, all costumed elaborately in lustrous, shimmering fabrics, in jackets and gowns, sashes and jeweled regalia, their silver hair coiffured, a hundred different styles, colors, patterns. Compared to their elaborate costumes, his own looks drab. His head fills with their buzzing, chirping conversations; all of them sound giddy. It’s not about him—hardly any of them pay him the slightest attention as he passes by.
The knight and he walk the path through the field of waist-high grass and emerge above the plaza where he’s been bathed so many times, but today the pool is not in use, and the plaza is full of gray-skinned, spiked and fanged Yvags, as if all the elves in creation have turned out, which may be the case. Overhead, goggle-eyed sprites flit to and fro, sweeping across the whole plaza like bats attracted by the light or the intense murmur. He’s lost, almost invisible amidst this crowd. If anything, their costumes are more elaborate than what he’s seen so far: high collars, puffy sleeves, multicolored leathers, and embroidered cloaks adorned with faces that change expression as they move and appear to be conversing with other pieces of clothing; a swallow-tailed coat covered with eyes that follow him with their gaze although their owners pass by without so much as a glance; elaborate metal breastplates carved into profiles of strange beasts that snarl; one cluster of elves sporting grotesque, lurid codpieces some of which represent, to his experiential horror, attributes of the three Yvag sexes. The chatter and buzz of the plaza fills his head so completely that their words must be spilling from his ears. A few do turn to observe him candidly as he passes among them; most look amused by his presence, or maybe by the knowledge of how he’s being put to use. He recalls the name his mother called elves when he was small: the Sluagh. She insisted it was bad luck to speak their true name the way Waldroup so blithely says “Yvag” (You’re dead, Alpin, and I’m a prisoner here, so was she wrong to think so?). Beholding all of this crowded grandeur, calling them the Sluagh now seems fitting: a host, a multitude. Was it someone else brought here against their will, beholding this spectacle, who first applied it? There are stories, but how many humans have ever set eyes on this impossible landscape and lived to describe it?
Mixed in among the colorful costumes are others like his, the same color, stripe, form, a dozen or so mingling. The others are all young elves—younger in appearance than he is anyway. Might they all be changelings, his nephew in among them? They each regard him in his costume with a look of disdain. Around the perimeter, some knights sit upon their pale-boned beasts, which are also adorned in a spangling panoply of caparisons and chanfrons and crinieres like horses decorated for a pageant. The knights look bored. The one who led him here joins them, climbing aboard its mount. He looks for Ađalbrandr, who despises him, but does not see that one.
Shrubberies surrounding the plaza sparkle, the berries in them throwing off light somehow. The pool where he has bathed glows from within as if filled with liquid fire.
On the far side of the plaza, the Queen sits upon a throne with a towering and elaborately carved back and a golden canopy at its top. For a moment, Thomas watches her and all of the others. Nobody is watching him, and he speculates how easy it would be to wander off between the various spires and towers, wonders how difficult it would be to escape from Ailfion entirely and vanish beyond the spire and tower landscape. The trouble is, he has no idea which direction, where to run once he has slipped away, or if he can get far enough from here that the choker becomes inactive rather than lethal.
Even as he considers this, the choker exerts a sudden strong pull, tugging him in the direction of the high throne. Although she has given no indication even of noticing him, Nicnevin commands his presence.
Stumbling his way through the crowd, he is drawn not to the throne but to a strange exhibit—a tall, circular containment as clear as fresh water but hard, solid. In the center of it, as far from all sides as possible, a strange creature in a threadbare brown cloak hunches low and watches them all. It is stocky, more strange beast than human. Black hair falls in thick braids from its scalp. The gray eyes are larger than his, and wider apart, with a broad, protuberant nose not unlike some of the Yvag codpieces styled as faces. Coincidence? He doubts it. He wonders was this the “monk” he saw chained up however long ago that was—weeks or months?
The creature’s gray gaze fastens upon him, and it rises up on thick legs, treads heavily toward him until only the clear wall separates them. There is intelligence in the eyes, and something else: rancor. Whether it is aimed at the elves or at him, he can’t tell; but it seems utterly disinterested in its Yvag captors, having come straight to him, the only other non-elven creature in the plaza.
The creature babbles something, words he can’t comprehend. Thick, knobby hands press to the wall, smearing sweaty handprints on it.
Behind him, Nicnevin’s voice intrudes. “She’s asked you to intercede on her behalf.” The Queen has left her throne, drawing a flock of opulent elves like a wake trailing her, including the huge and surly Ađalbrandr. Her costume is unlike anyone else’s: A blue crinkled fan surrounds her throat. Her head, adorned with a circlet of gems, seems to balance in the center of the fan, above a lighter blue and luminous bodice sewn from diamond-shaped panels edged in a deeper midnight blue. The high-backed robe she wears gathers at her waist, so whatever she wears below it is hidden in the folds of that black and gold cloak.
Me?
“You. She would have you take her place. Wants you to know how many children she has if you’d care to listen.”
I don’t understand. Take her place in what? In there?
“No, no, fool. In the Royal Hunt. First, I shouldn’t believe her about the children. Trolls almost never tell the truth, and you are a human, famously gullible. Pots of gold, secret treasures, brief liaisons with faeries—you’re notoriously easy to lead astray.”
She . . . She’s a troll. They’re real.
“Tediously so. This was their world once, before we arrived. They were the dominant species, although no more advanced than your ancestors who dwelled in caves. I suppose most of the world still is theirs, however many of them remain. We have not reengineered it for their comfort, have we?
“You might recall my mentioning those foolish members of your kind who named Hel as their goddess? We were returning them to your world when the trolls made a rare bold move and stormed through the cut that had been opened. Cunning of them, distracting everyone as they did, stealing ördstones—a more coordinated effort than we gave them credit for. By the time we could seal off the portal, hundreds of them had jumped to your world. We’re not certain quite how many; they are subterranean by nature—or have been since we remade the surface here for us. And they opened many portals, so probably spilled into other worlds as well.”
She closes her eyes, smiling, as if recalling something wicked.
“Your sun, however, proved deadlier to them than our atmosphere. They quickly calcify in its light, becoming stone. If you didn’t know what you were seeing, you would think you beheld a natural if strange formation of rock. Some, I think, managed to survive in your world by descending into deep caverns before the sun could torpefy them—we know this because one of our Yvagvoja heard and brought back some of the stories being told. Undoubtedly you’ve heard similar stories but have never met one before this.” Then she quotes from something: “Hvat’s troll nema þat?” Laughs quietly.
He looks off beyond her, recalling tales that some warriors recounted, that he and Waldroup thought were ridiculous and told by credulous men. Trolls.
