The Immortal Realm Page 4

  “I will not leave my child in this forsaken place!” cried one woman, running to a nearby crib and snatching up her baby. Holding her daughter tight to her breast, the woman hurried to leave. Many other women and men snatched up their babies and children, their departure accompanied by the sound of newly awoken infants crying out in fear and alarm. The rest of the folk slowly filtered out of the tent until only a few people remained.

  Mary Palmer put her hand on Titania’s arm. “The baby had a fever,” she said. “I would have paid it more attention, but…but it came on so quickly.” She looked into the Queen’s eyes and Tania was suddenly aware of how strong a bond had formed between her two mothers. “Has this really never happened before?”

  “Never,” said Titania.

  One of the nurses threw herself forward, coming down on her knees in front of the Queen, her face filled with dread. “Save us, your grace,” she cried. “Do not let our children die!”

  “Get you up, Alma,” said the Queen, lifting the woman to her feet. Titania looked at the other nurses. “Go to, good women,” she said, her voice calm and clear. “Go now and make sure all is well with those of your charges who remain.”

  “By what signs will the sickness show itself, your grace?” asked one of the nurses.

  Titania paused as though uncertain what to tell them. Tania looked at her for a moment then stepped in.

  “Look for flushed cheeks,” she said. “Put your hands flat on their foreheads. If they feel hot, let us know.”

  The nurses moved away, gliding from crib to crib, stooping low over the babies and children, their hands resting softly on foreheads.

  Tania called one of them back. “We need to make sure there’s no chance of it spreading,” she said to the woman. “Guard the entrance to the tent. Keep everyone else out of here. Tell them how dangerous it could be for them!”

  Titania’s eyes narrowed as if with a sudden pain. “Is there not fear enough already in Faerie?” she said in a harsh undertone.

  “Nothing compared to the fear they’ll feel if this illness spreads any further,” Tania replied.

  She looked into her Faerie mother’s emerald eyes—into the face that was a mirror of her own. She’s as terrified as everyone else, Tania realized with a shock.

  Mary Palmer rested her hand on Titania’s arm. “What would usually happen now?” she asked.

  Titania stared hollowly at her. “Usually? There is no usually, Mary. Spirits of Love, but do you not understand that yet?”

  Mary Palmer nodded, her voice soft but firm. “Yes, I understand. But even here people die sometimes, Titania. There must be the occasional fatal accident, surely? A fall from a horse or someone drowned in a river? Tania told me about the funeral rites you held after the battle. Do we need to prepare something like that? Or is this kind of death treated differently?”

  “When a child is killed by mischance,” Titania began, “the mother wraps the lost one in white satin and bears the burden to one of the boundaries of the world, to a high hilltop or to the seashore or to the banks of a river—to a place where the elements mingle and merge. There she must wait for the time between time, when it is neither day nor night. The child will be taken then.”

  “The seashore is but a brief distance from here,” said Eden. “Mallory should take her child to the ocean and await the dawn.”

  “But that’s hours away,” said Tania. “Does she have to sit there all on her own with…with…” She couldn’t bring herself to say with her dead child.

  “Not alone, if she will allow the comfort of another,” said Hopie. “A father, a brother, a sister, or a friend.”

  Mallory still held the child clasped in her arms. “My husband is in the north, in Caer Rivor at the court of Lady Mornamere,” she said quietly. “I came south with our child to pay my last respects to my brother, who was slain in the battle of Salisoc Heath.” She looked up at the others, her voice breaking. “I am alone here. Entirely alone.”

  Tania swallowed hard, a determination growing in her. “I’ll go with her, then,” she said. She crouched in front of Mallory. “If you’ll allow me to, that is,” she asked.

  Mallory lifted her face, her eyes filled with grief.

  Tania touched her knee. “Will you let me go with you?” she whispered.

  Mallory gave a single, silent nod of her head.

  The valley of Leiderdale was eerily silent as Tania and Mallory came out of the tent. A great crowd stood waiting. The faces turned to them were filled with fear and shock and disbelief.

  The people parted as Tania and Mallory stepped forward, shrinking away from the two of them as if they were contaminated with some unspeakable evil.

  Among the watching faces Tania saw Edric. He had the same look on his face as all the others, but there was something else there, too—something that looked to Tania like suspicion. He looked away as soon as she met his glance.

  Why suspicious? Suspicious of what?

  Two people stepped out of the crowd. Cordelia and Bryn moved toward Tania and Mallory, their faces grief-stricken.

  “That such a thing should happen on such a glad day burns my heart,” Cordelia said, resting her hand on Mallory’s shoulder. “I grieve for you, truly I do.”

  “All our thoughts go with you, lady,” Bryn added.

  Mallory paused and bowed her head but she did not reply.

  Cordelia looked at Tania. “’Tis bravely done, sister,” she said. “May you give the lady good comfort.”

  Tania nodded, walking at Mallory’s side as the young Faerie mother bore her tragic burden in her arms, her dead child wrapped tight in white satin. They passed through the somber crowds and made their way up the hillside.

  They came to the spot where Tania and Edric had stood just a few brief hours ago.

  Night shadows mantled the land, but the Faerie starlight was bright enough for Tania to see a pathway that led down the cliffs. “I’ll go first,” she said. “Please be careful.”

  As she began to descend, she turned her head back so that she could keep Mallory in sight. It was tricky, especially in the half-light, and the occasional loose stone went rolling away under her foot.

  Mallory gave a sharp cry as she almost lost her footing, her arms tightening around her swaddled child.

  Tania stepped up toward her. “May I carry him for you?”

  “No, my lady Princess,” Mallory murmured, holding him closer.

  “Call me Tania.”

  Mallory gave her a bleak look. “No, Tania, thank you. He will be taken from me soon enough; I would hold him in my arms a while longer.”

  “Of course,” Tania said, her heart aching for the poor, brave woman.

  At last they came down onto a narrow shingle beach confined within the broken teeth of black surf-washed rocks. The waves came hissing in over the shingle, white foam boiling among the stones.

  They sat together in the shingle, the tall cliffs at their backs and the restless sea in front of them.

  The night went on forever. There was the pitiless darkness. There was the black cliff at their backs. There was the chill salt wind off the sea and the cold light of stars, far away and uncaring.

  But above all there was Mallory’s agony.

  Sometimes the bereaved young mother was so silent and still that Tania felt the need to check that she was still breathing. At other times sobs wracked Mallory’s body and Tania held her until the tears soaked through her gown. She would forlornly shift the dead child on her lap as if making sure he was comfortable, tucking the satin in around his small body, caressing his cheeks with her fingertips.

  But slowly Tania saw that the tide was receding, the waves falling back to reveal a beach of rippled gray sand beyond the shingle banks.

  “It is time,” Mallory said softly.

  Tania felt it, too. Although the sky was as dark as ever, she sensed that a change had come, as if a stifling veil had been drawn away to allow clean, fresh air into the world.

  Mallory w
alked a little way down the beach then stooped and laid her satin-swaddled child in the sand.

  Tania shivered as she saw the baby lying there, but it was not the cold that made her tremble, it was the thought that such a beautiful spirit, such a new life, should have been so mercilessly snuffed out.

  Mallory stepped back, reaching her hand out to Tania.

  Together, clasping hands, they stood in silence, looking down at the rounded satin bundle.

  Tania could not have said when it started, but she was suddenly aware that the air was filled with the soft singing of a high-pitched voice.

  Away across the sea to the west the long line of the horizon glowed with a pure white light.

  The small voice sang an aching bittersweet melody that climbed and climbed until it reached a pitch that Tania could no longer hear. She was aware of a shimmering all around her, a tingling on her skin, as though the air still vibrated with the inaudible refrain.

  Mallory let out a soft sigh.

  Tania looked down.

  The baby was gone, his satin coverings lying in flattened folds in the sand.

  Dawn had arrived. Gyvan had been called to Avalon.

  IV

  Mallory looked into Tania’s face. “Thank you,” she said. “I could not have borne this night alone.” She picked up the empty satin bundle, holding it to her face and breathing in the scent of it. “He is gone—gone to the Long Home of the fallen. Mayhap the Princess Zara will watch over him for me.”

  “She will,” Tania said, her throat thick with emotion. “I know she will.”

  Mallory began to weep again, pressing her face into the folds of white satin. Tania touched her shoulder, waiting for the sobs to fade.

  “Would you like to go back now?” she asked at last. “Or would you rather stay here for a while?”

  “I will stay for a little while longer, but you must go.”

  Tania gave Mallory a final brief hug then made her way up the shingle to the cracked face of the cliff, looking for the path that had brought them down.

  She began to climb. She felt strangely calm, as though the dawn had washed her clean of the desolation that she had felt all through the long night. And, strangest of all, she didn’t feel in the least bit tired. She ought to have been exhausted.

  A cloaked figure was awaiting her on the cliff top.

  It was Rathina, her beautiful, dark-haired sister, her red gown swathed in a cloak of midnight blue. “This was a night as long as aeons,” Rathina said heavily. “How fares the sorrowful lady?”

  Tania looked back down to the beach. Mallory was a small forlorn figure, sitting now in the shingle with the satin cloth bundled in her arms.

  “I’m not sure,” she said. She looked into Rathina’s wide hazel eyes. “I thought we’d got rid of everything horrible when the Sorcerer King was killed.”

  “As did we all,” Rathina replied. “It is fearful indeed to think that the Hag-Queen can sit in her foul castle and cast evil upon us over so many a wide league of ocean. And who shall she ensnare next with her witchery?” She held her cloak open. “But come, Tania, you look chilled to the bone.”

  Tania stepped into the warming shelter of her sister’s arm. “Can Father do anything to stop her?” she asked.

  “Let us hope so,” Rathina replied. “Our mother and father are mighty in power, Tania. They must prevail, surely? Fie! ’Tis unthinkable that they will not!”

  “I hope you’re right.”

  They turned and walked arm-in-arm along the grassy hilltop, the light growing around them, washing the world with fresh color.

  “Sister, are we friends again now?” Rathina asked quietly. “Am I forgiven my madness?”

  Tania looked compassionately at her.

  For sure there was a lot to forgive Rathina for. Stupefied by her unrequited love for the treacherous Gabriel Drake, she had unleashed the Sorcerer King of Lyonesse and set events in motion that had culminated in mayhem and warfare and the death of many innocent folk, including that of their own sister Zara. Some amends had been made when Rathina had cut Gabriel Drake down in the great battle, but it was still hard for people not to look at her with judgmental eyes.

  Tania was one of the few who truly understood Rathina’s agony. She also had gazed into Drake’s hypnotic eyes, and she had felt the power of his mind tightening like a venomous snake around her will. And Tania also knew the self-loathing that was gnawing away at Rathina. To live with the knowledge of what she had done was terribly hard.

  She squeezed Rathina’s arm. “You are completely forgiven,” she said. “By me, at least.”

  “But not by others?”

  Tania gave a rueful smile. “Give them time.”

  Rathina sighed.

  They came to the crest of the hill and walked on toward a final ridge, beyond which the land fell sharply away into the valley of Leiderdale.

  “Do you not have news for me to lighten the burden of this sad day?” Rathina asked.

  Tania frowned at her. “I’m sorry?”

  “Voices whisper it abroad that Edric Chanticleer asked for your hand in marriage yestereve.” She squeezed Tania’s arm. “A bold knave to act so without seeking permission of the King and Queen—but mayhap the time he spent in the Mortal World addled his sense of propriety.”

  “People are talking about that?” Tania asked uneasily. “Oh, great! That’s all I needed.”

  “It is good tidings, Tania.”

  “No, actually, it isn’t.”

  “How so?”

  “I turned him down.” The sun climbed out of the ocean as they walked along, its light sending their shadows streaming away over the olive hills.

  Rathina turned, her eyes narrowed against the bright dawn. “Sweet sister, I strive to understand your strange modes of speech,” she said. “But I confess I do not know what you mean. What is ‘turned him down’?”

  “I said no.”

  Rathina stopped in her tracks and gasped. “You refused him? Why would you do such a thing, Tania? I thought him the love of your life.”

  “He is,” Tania said. “Of course he is.”

  “And yet you would not wed him? What perversity of your nature is this, to love and yet to refute wedlock?”

  “Not you, too!” Tania exclaimed, walking on so quickly that Rathina had difficulty keeping up with her. “I’m not refuting anything. I’m sure that in a few years time I’ll be totally up for it, but right now getting married is the last thing on my mind. I’m too young, Rathina.”

  “But you were betrothed to…to another,” Rathina said, her voice faltering over the name of Gabriel Drake. “You were to be wed on your sixteenth birthday.”

  “That wasn’t me,” Tania said. “Well, it was me, but not the me that I am now. I don’t remember the girl who agreed to marry Drake. I hardly know anything about her.” She touched her hand to her forehead. “Part of me in here is still a sixteen-year-old girl from West London. Where I grew up, people don’t usually get married that young.”

  “Do Mortals not experience love in youth, then?” Rathina asked.

  On a better day Tania could almost have laughed at that. “They experience plenty of love,” she said. “People my age fall in and out of love all the time. If everyone married the first person they were crazy about, the divorce rate would skyrocket!”

  “Tania! Use language properly, for pity’s sake!”

  “If teenagers married the first person they fell in love with, most relationships would be guaranteed to break down,” Tania explained. “Don’t people in Faerie fall out of love?”

  Rathina gave her a long, slow look. “No, Tania, they do not.”

  “You’re kidding me!”

  “I speak nothing but the truth.”

  “Wow! That’s incredible.” Tania stared at her sister as a sudden awful thought struck her. “But that would mean…” She stopped. What she had been about to say was too dreadful even to consider. If the people of Faerie never stopped loving, then Rathina mu
st surely still love Gabriel Drake—despite all the harm he had done to her and to Faerie and despite the fact that she had ended his life with a thrust of her sword.

  Rathina’s eyes burned with a deep agony. “Love never dies in Faerie, Tania,” she said. “Never.”

  “Oh, Rathina…” Tania couldn’t bear to think that her sister would be trapped in such misery for all eternity. “You’ll fall in love again. I know you will. You must.”

  Rathina lifted her fingers to Tania’s lips. “Hush, now.” She turned, hiding her face from Tania, but her cracking voice betrayed her desolation. “We will not speak of it.”

  Below them, silent and sad, lay the valley of Leiderdale with its clusters of tents.

  “Look now,” Rathina said. “We are come to the brink of Leiderdale. Let us attend upon our mother and father in the Royal Pavilion. Mayhap it will be that the King has good tidings for us. Mayhap he has already conceived a method to throw back the ill-wishes of Lyonesse.”

  The Royal Pavilion was full of ivory light—more light than could be explained by the rising sun, invisible still beyond the western hills. The canvas walls of the great tent were hung with tapestries, the intricate needlework depicting beautiful Faerie landscapes: mountains, waterfalls, rivers, and rolling downs, flowered meadows, forests, and heather-clad heaths—peaceful scenes that seemed to Tania to be cruelly at odds with the somber gathering.

  The floor was strewn with cushions set in a wide ring, and at the end of the pavilion farthest from the entrance, three low wooden chairs were set up. On two of these chairs sat King Oberon and Queen Titania. Earl Valentyne of Mynwy Clun sat in the third, a slender crystal stick gripped in one hand, his wife, the Princess Eden, standing at his side. Next to them were the King’s brother, Earl Marshal Cornelius, with his wife, Marchioness Lucina, and his two stepsons.

  All of Tania’s sisters were there: Hopie with her tall, bearded husband, Lord Brython; slender, bookish Sancha; Cordelia with her new husband at her side; and Rathina, of course, seated close beside Tania.

  “The news is both good and ill,” Oberon began. “The earl and I have spent a burdensome night of endeavor upon the high hills, and we have discerned no trace of the sorceries of Lyonesse.”