Prologue: Stellan
Stellan Topajak had carried out dozens of quiet arrests and interceptions, throughout the spring court, since he began serving Queen Elphame. None of them had ever felt quite like this. Arrests usually took place well within the borders, in lovely warm weather, so the snow that currently surrounded him and his party was anomalous. But it wasn’t the snow alone that made this one strange; the environment here was strongly eldritch, the result of two opposing magics clashing.
The plan was simple: intercept the hand off, seize the contraband, and arrest the smugglers. They intended to preserve all alive, but now that they were here, Stellan had a feeling it wasn’t going to be that simple. For one thing, the instability of the border magic was worse than had been described to him. A settled threshold could be crossed in a few steps, but this one stretched wide enough to lose a man in. The two neighboring sovereigns hated each other, and the border was where the conversation stopped pretending to be civilized. With Silverfall ahead of them and Stavarjak behind, the closer they drew to the former, the worse the argument grew.
“Remind Elphame to offend fewer queens,” Haminay muttered under his breath, stamping some warmth back into his feet.
“Careful soldier,” said Nyx, blinking as a skiff of snow blew into her eyes. She brushed a mittened hand over them. “It’s Sylifke who offends Elphame, not the other way around.”
Stellan and Nyx had walked the ground earlier in the day, tracing the land with their eyes and the quiet reach of their familiars: Nyx’s polar fox Slip, and his inky raven Noctra.
Nyx, who he’d known since childhood, had been Stellan’s choice—there was no other soldier among the spring court’s ranks he’d rather go into danger with—but the rest had simply been available.
Snow drifted in slanted sheets, then loosened and lifted again, as if the air kept choosing a new direction. It gathered in the hollows between roots and stones, filled them, then peeled away in veils to expose the ground. The trees stood close and crooked along the ridge, their branches crusted with ice that caught what little light the sky allowed. Known as greenbones, though today there was nothing green about them, the border was the only place Stellan had ever seen them.
Stellan stood beside one, its bark split and dark with sap that had frozen into blackened tears. His cloak, stiff with frost, hung heavily from his shoulders, and the fur lining at his collar crackled faintly when he turned his head. Behind him, half-lost among stone and shadow, his soldiers held their positions—four humans and four fae in all, including him and Nyx. Beneath their cloaks, their boiled leather was dulled by damp; their shoulders were piled with little mounds of snow and exhalations puffed from their lips then vanished. As planned, they had spaced themselves wide, a net rather than a wall.
A low voice carried over to Stellan’s ears.
“Reckon they froze on the way,” one soldier murmured. “Turned into statues. We’ll be here all night waiting for them to thaw so they can walk again.”
“Statues can’t carry contraband,” came an answer. “And if they do, I’m going home.”
A faint breath of laughter followed.
Then another voice, this one drier. “If they don’t come, we arrest this unholy storm. I’m certain it’s involved.”
“Permission to say I don’t like this, sir?” asked another. “I’ve had worse postings. I just can’t remember where.”
Stellan let the exchanges pass without comment. The words settled the line, kept hands from stiffening and minds from wandering too far inward.
He could feel Noctra’s presence like a second heartbeat as she ranged along the ridge and beyond, gliding through the storm where sight faltered and sound dissolved. Her awareness brushed him at intervals, each contact brief and precise. She would let him know when the smugglers drew near.
Nyx stood several paces downslope, her cloak drawn closed, her gaze angling upward through the branches. Snow gathered along the pale braid that emerged from under her hood, as pale as Silverfae hair, only Nyx hadn’t a drop of Silverfae blood in her. Her hair changed color with the temperature, just like her familiar’s did, no shedding required. Slip’s pelt was white in cold weather, and tawny with black paws in warm. Stellan caught sight of the fox as he moved past Nyx’s feet, just a flicker of an impossibly fat tail that vanished and reappeared between drifts, too quick for the eye to track.
The storm thickened, then thinned again. The ridge revealed itself in pieces: a jag of stone here, a leaning trunk there, the suggestion of a path worn into the earth.
Noctra touched his mind. They come.
Stellan gave a low signal. The soldiers melted into their hiding places. He pressed back into his own, but kept a view of the meeting point.
Minutes passed where only the storm spoke.
The first figures moved through the trees with a fluid grace that confirmed what Stellan expected: Silverfae. All male. Strong for carrying heavy contraband, assuming it was heavy. No one knew for sure what they were smuggling, only that it was valuable, rare, and unsanctioned. Traitors to their kingdom, not that Stellan cared. Queen Sylifke wasn’t known for inspiring love, so who was he to judge?
Moving in a tight foursome, they stepped over the rough terrain, hardly disturbing the snow. They were as at home here in this strange mashup of winter and spring as Stellan was in a garden full of blooms. Two of them balanced a trunk between them, carried on staves: wood banded with iron, the corners reinforced, and a latch with an iron padlock. A third fae walked beside the trunk, keeping it steady with a hand, while a fourth moved ahead, scanning their surroundings. They reached the choke point where the sale would take place: a small clearing set between two outcroppings of stone. Roots thrust up through the snow where the trees clung to the edges, looking like subterranean serpents that had breached then frozen in place, their exposed scales glazed with ice. Stellan noted how gently and soundlessly the Silverfae set the trunk down. Whatever was inside was likely fragile.
Noctra brushed his mind again. The buyers approach.
Her message came with a sense of a direction: a craggy pass, from which they would spill out into the same opening, but from the opposite side. Stellan received an overhead snapshot looking down through tight branches. The approaching party were cloaked as well, but lacking the graceful movements of the fae. Their cloaks caught the wind, revealing they wore weapons but carried nothing in their hands. One of the humans kept glancing over his shoulder.
Humans, Stellan thought. Five of them.
Not this one, Noctra replied, sending him a closer visual of the taller, slighter one who traveled at the back.
Wrapped head to toe in dark cloth and a cloak that stopped at his ankles, his face was completely obscured. His movements were smooth despite the terrain. He wore no visible weapon and wasted no motion, moving as fluidly as any fae.
The Silverfae with the trunk waited as the other group climbed down through the pass, one of them sending rocks tumbling down through the snow. In short order, the two groups stood facing one another, the trunk sitting on the snow between them, their world reduced to the small clearing they occupied. The hooded figure passed through his companions and came to stand in the center of the clearing, not far from the trunk.
Noctra materialized silently on a branch, keeping her smoke contained and tight. Noctra’s talent, rather than the duplication of so many other familiars, was that she could become smoke and reform as feathered flesh at will. If she’d landed like the typical Terran raven, with noisy flaps, she’d have drawn attention. A raven was not out of the ordinary in any setting in Ivryndi, but where fae met in secret, a corvid was likely to spark suspicion. Even Elphame’s favorite messenger was a crow.
No greeting passed between the groups. The lead Silverfae stepped away from the trunk, while the one at the front held out a fist to the lead smuggler, who moved forward and took something from the fae’s hand.
The key, whispered Noctra.
Definitely the leader, Stellan noted. If this goes poorly, we must take that one alive.
The lead buyer knelt and worked at the lock. Metal slid against metal with a muted click. He lifted the lid with a creak, and Noctra sent Stellan a snapshot of what she could see: fabric laid neatly over the contents of the trunk. Noctra sent another visual as the fabric was peeled back: small amber glass bottles, uniform in shape, packed tightly together and cushioned with straw. The glass itself was dark, reflecting a muted glow, and giving no hint of the contents, but it had to be some kind of liquid given the shape of the bottles.
The lead smuggler set the trunk back in the state he’d found it, fingers lingering as though on something precious. He refastened the lock before getting to his feet, then produced a sack from an inner pocket. The pouch clinked as it changed hands. Payment.
That was their cue.
Stellan let the moment stretch a breath longer, marking the positions of each figure, the distance between them, the line of retreat each might take. The four humans held their places, waiting for the command to take the trunk.
Stellan lifted his hand, and his soldiers moved.
Moving down the ridge in a coordinated sweep, they closed in from both sides, angling to cut off any escape. Weapons came out in a practiced motions.
“It’s a trap!” someone barked.
Everything happened fast.
The first contact came clean. A Silverfae twisted away, reaching for his blade, only to be driven back against a stone by one of Stellan’s. The other Silverfae scattered, all three of them vanishing into the storm. A human was seized from behind, arms pinned. The trunk was clumsily carried clear by two others, then dropped, thudding hard on the frozen ground. Stellan winced at the muffled sound of glass breaking. They turned to run, but were brought down before they cleared the narrow space, one taken at the knee, the other driven face-first into the snow. The rest were hemmed in by Stellan’s soldiers closing from the flanks.
The operation unfolded as Stellan had expected… except for the lead buyer. The cloaked and hooded figure had stepped back, drawing darkness around him, like it belonged to him. One moment he was visible, and next… he was not.
Noctra, track him, Stellan commanded, his heart giving a lurch at the evidence of sorcery. The informer had reported that the buyer at this exchange was a mundane—human citizens were generally less loyal to Elphame, so it was a reasonable assumption. That was clearly wrong.
Stellan felt Noctra’s presence narrow in on the place where the sorcerer had vanished.
He’s not running, Noctra returned. He’s hiding.
She proved it by showing Stellan a visual: he was blurry and hard to make out, but holding very still within his pocket of shadow. Stellan would have to draw him out, but he had to be careful. He didn’t know what magic this fae possessed.
“Secure them.”
His voice carried through the press of bodies and the scrape of boots, as he moved toward the trunk. His soldiers stood waiting, the smugglers—four humans and one Silverfae—on their knees before them. Stellan crouched beside the trunk, but before he could even test its weight or get a better look at the lock, the air changed: a crackle of magic along his jaw and in his hair.
He comes at you, Noctra sent, sharp and urgent.
The figure stepped out of his self-created obscurity, with smoke a little darker than Noctra’s seeping from beneath the hem of his cloak. It spread outward in a layer that slid along the ground and climbed the stones, thickening as it rose. Shiny surfaces reflected the smoke as it crawled: along the blade of a sword, in the slick surface of ice that coated a stone, in the wet sheen of bark where snow had melted and refrozen. Each surface took on a sense depth it had not had a moment before, a suggestion of a secret world within.
Stellan took a defensive stance, lifting his blade.
The shrouded figure lifted gloved hands and the smoke thickened, obscuring his entire lower half, and still billowing out of his cloak. One of Stellan’s soldiers turned toward a threatening shape that emerged from the smoke. He stabbed at it, only to find it was empty air. Another swung at a second smoky figure that split itself in two, then three, each one dissolving then reforming as steel passed through them. The sound of the forest changed. Voices came from places where no one stood, a shout began at Stellan’s left that finished at his right. The ground underfoot was obscured by dark fog. It was like wading in a marsh made of night.
Slip flashed through the chaos, a streak of white low to the ground, parting the smoke. He darted between Nyx’s boots, around a root, and toward a coating of ice. The surface gleamed, a thin sheet over stone, the reflection deep enough for him to use. He dove at it and the ice took him. One instant he was there, the next he was within, his form clear beneath the surface for a second before vanishing. Slip, like Noctra, didn’t have duplication; he was able to use mirror realms as a place to hide or to cover ground. No one could touch Slip after he’d disappeared, and no one knew where he would pop out again. It had proven a handy skill on many missions.
Noctra swooped low, aiming to get Stellan a better visual of the sorcerer. She diffused into smoke on a wingbeat, her form briefly the suggestion of a raven before dispersing into even less, a mere hint that something was there. Stellan expected a visual from her, but nothing came.
The sorcerous fog thickened and climbed, until it swallowed Stellan’s chest, then head, then his vision. His eyes stretched wide as he swung around in a circle, sword up, anticipating an attack, but none came. He heard things, like bodies collapsing, distant and distorted screams—too far away to have come from this patch of forsaken border. And then, almost as soon as it started, it was over. The fog cleared as rapidly as a mist under direct sunlight, even though there was no sun. It burned away, leaving a scene that made Stellan’s jaw sag.
Bodies lay in the snow: all of the smugglers and two of Stellan’s own men. Nyx was on her feet, her sword up, her eyes wild, as was Haminay. All others were motionless on the ground. The sorcerer was nowhere in sight.
Stellan dashed to the nearest body. Yanking off his glove, he thrust his fingers under the jaw. No pulse.
“Check them, quickly,” Stellan commanded.
Look for the sorcerer, he sent to Noctra. He can’t have gone far.
Nyx, Haminay and Stellan went from body to body, checking for heartbeats. There were no wounds on the bodies, no crushed windpipes, no obvious causes of death. They were just… gone.
“Oh, this is bad.” Haminay straightened from where he’d failed to find the last pulse, his face leached of color.
Noctra? Stellan sought his familiar. Anything?
Nyx’s voice cut through Stellan’s shock.
“Slip!”
She was on her knees at the edge of an ice-coated rock, hands pressed against the surface, fingers splayed. Slip was inside looking out. Slip’s jaws opened and closed, like he was barking, but nothing could be heard. He reared up on his hind legs and put his paws where her hands met the surface, his own pressing from within.
Stellan crossed to her, skirting a body, and knelt at her side.
Nyx’s pale irises—her cold weather ones, the color of champagne quartz—edged on tears.
“He can’t get out. He’s trapped!”
Stellan felt his heart beat like a fist squeezing and releasing. Something was very, very wrong.
“Give him a minute,” Stellan told her.
He looked away from their distress, working through the disastrous outcome of the mission they had so carefully planned. He tried to shake off the terrible feeling creeping over him like a shadow. It was worse than a failure. They’d lost men, not only their own, but the smuggler’s men, from whom they might have gleaned information. Already Stellan was compiling the report in his head which he would have to deliver to his commander, and maybe to Queen Elphame herself. She got involved when things went terribly wrong the way this had. He was in charge, which meant… this was his fault.
The trunk lay where it had been dropped.
Stellan crossed to it, his hands moving to the fastenings. The boards that made up the lid had cracked enough to get fingers inside. Stellan snapped a board upward, splintering it. Soon he had the lid half torn to pieces.
Inside, the bottles lay shattered.
Amber glass was fractured into jagged pieces, the cloth and straw soaked through. The liquid had spread, leaving no pool, no residue that gathered. Gingerly, not knowing what the substance had been or whether it was dangerous, Stellan pulled out material and broken bottles. Surely one must have survived, even half a bottle upright with some of the liquid preserved. That at least, would be a small victory. But as he lifted out what he could touch without slicing himself open or getting the substance on his skin, despair came over him. Nothing remained that could be taken back as evidence. How could this be? How could every single bottle have smashed, and every bit of the substance been swallowed up?
Stellan let the broken lid fall closed. He closed his eyes and tilted his head back.
What now?
He rose, his motions slow, his body feeling heavy. He reached for Noctra again.
Where are you?
He waited for a breath. Then another.
He drew in air that burned cold through his chest and held it, listening for the faintest echo of her presence, the slightest pull along the bond that had always tied them.
Nothing came.
“Stellan.”
Nyx remained beside that ice-coated wall of rock, her gaze lifted to meet his. In her eyes was more fear than he’d ever seen before. He returned to kneel beside her. Slip appeared inside the reflection, his sly face and black eyes peered out from behind a wall that had never been able to contain him before today.
“What do we do?”
The look on her face pierced his heart. He hated this helpless feeling. He always knew what to do, that’s why he’d been made captain. He shook his head, at a loss.
Nyx put her hands over her face. She sat like that for a while before looking up again, her eyes red. She put a hand against the ice, where Slip’s form blurred, then steadied. He turned to the side, his body sliding along the plane of the ice, flickering out of view and reappearing as he reached another reflective surface, a thin sheen along a root. Then he came back, moving between them, the transitions quick and precise.
“He can still travel,” Stellan said. He stood and drew his sword, turning the flat of the blade up to catch what light there was. He looked at Slip, and gestured at the blade. The fox understood, and left the rock to appear in the metal, as white fur close to the surface.
“The queen will know how to draw him out.”
Nyx’s shoulders eased a fraction. “Yes. Alright.”
Slip appeared in the ice near her again. He licked, his pink tongue pressed flat in the reflection.
She rose, brushing snow from her knees.
“We can’t carry all these bodies back ourselves.” Haminay spoke for the first time since he’d checked the last victim for a pulse.
“Noctra can go for help,” suggested Nyx. “Have them meet us with wagons.”
“She could,” said Stellan. “Only, she’s not here.”
Nyx stared. “What do you mean? Where is she?”
“I don’t know. I haven’t heard anything from her since the smoke. She smoldered out, and hasn’t come back yet.”
Nyx and Haminay considered this. It was not normal for any familiar to depart without communicating their whereabouts to their fae. Worse, Noctra was their only able messenger. Slip could travel a mile or two from Nyx in the mirror realm, but no further. He wouldn’t make it as far as the castle on his own. Even if he could, no one would understand what his sudden appearance inside a mirror meant.
“Stellan,” Nyx breathed. “Slip is stuck inside the mirror realm. What if—”
Stellan shook his head. “She will return.”
“Okay, but the storm is getting worse,” muttered Haminay, “and we can’t wait here for night to fall. We’ll have to come back with wagons.”
“Should one of us guard the bodies?” Nyx asked.
“We stay together,” said Stellan, looking once more to the place where the cloaked figure had stood. There was nothing unusual now, beyond the weather itself. He turned away, feeling faintly nauseous.
They moved from the choke point, altered by the absence of those who had fallen. The storm was already starting to cover the evidence, snow drifting over limbs and faces. As they hiked back to the horses, the narrow space where the exchange had taken place disappeared beneath the shifting white. They climbed the ridge with measured steps.
Slowly, the air warmed and the smell of life came to their nostrils. The cloud cover lifted, and a spectacular night sky opened overhead.
Stellan felt for Noctra again as they mounted the horses, solidly inside the spring court border, where crickets and night insects chirped. He listened, closed his eyes and reached for the tether that he’d been able to feel for as long as he could remember.
Noctra did not answer.
A pit opened in Stellan’s stomach as they rode away, along with a quietly desperate chant: Come back to me. Where are you. Answer me. What’s happened?
But his raven did not return that night.
Nor the next.
Nor any day that followed.
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