Forbidden Ansidia

Chapters IV, V, VI

IV - Approaching

Queen Lirium stood at the high archway that framed the Castle gates. Her arms, sheathed in black fishnet, curved above her head. Upon her thinly lined face was a mixture of surprise and utter condescension. The only feature that connected her to her son, Prince Nac, was her eyes, which shone orange with far more vibrancy than his.

“I worried about you,” she said as the buggies stopped beside her. The Prince leaned to kiss her cheek before disembarking. The girl levered down after him, coughing amid a cloud of steam. She felt her arm grabbed.

“Mother, we found the disturbance on a farm close to the plains,” said Nac. “She’s just a girl. I don’t understand why the Magisters were alarmed, but perhaps you will.”

The Queen looked down at her son. “Let go of her,” she told him. As she spoke she pried his fingers from the girl—he couldn’t be trusted to follow orders at will. Lirium wore dainty gloves made of black lace, which she placed on the girl’s shoulders. Her fingertips bit down on skin. The girl’s lip twitched but she didn’t wince. She allowed the woman to get a good look at her.

“What’s this?” wondered Lirium. Her right glove reached down to the girl’s left hand. Holding it up, the Queen traced designs of dried blood with her thumb. “Your palm is hurt.”

“I don’t know where it came from,” the girl said and snapped her hand away.

A raised brow was the Queen’s only reaction, but to Nac and the other buggy drivers it told much. “We will get you cleaned up,” she said brusquely. Her curt nod prompted two members of the guard to escort the girl into the Castle. Others from the steam-buggy entourage followed, leaving the Queen alone with her son.

He was watching the movement of the girl’s gown across her thighs, and the way her hair gathered in the small of her back. His mother watched him. She adjusted her own gown of black and indigo that spilled out over petticoats, and said nothing. It was best to let him make his own mistakes. One day he would learn to control whom he coveted, and to choose those who would be happy to take him.

“She came through one of the portals,” said the Prince. “One that led to another world. That’s why the Magisters are coming.”

“I know,” Lirium replied. “I can tell. There are strange things about her. I feared that the Magisters would cross your path…it’s dangerous to travel when they are afoot. Yet here you are, safe and sound.” She didn’t sound particularly relieved.

“Will you perform the usual ritual?”

Her eyes flicked out past the river. “I have no choice. They will be expecting it.” She thought she could see them approaching, though she could not hear or feel their footfalls. White-grey shapes were discernible in the restless evening, like bathwater draining slowly around pumice. Queen Lirium alone felt no alarm at their presence. They would bow to her command.

“Mother?” Nac was impatient.

“Go inside and change out of those wet clothes. We’re having a feast for our new guest. Perhaps she will tell us about her homeland.” There was a quality in her tone that negated the “perhaps.” The Queen’s face turned to old cherry wood backed by steel: an elegant antique that would never give.

“Of course, Mother.” The rain eased to a drizzle as Nac passed through the Castle courtyard. He was glad to get inside where the piping scent of cooking fires belied the mediocrity of the food. But Lirium remained in the open for several minutes. She was whispering into the air, refreshing herself with the words of the great Command. And she was looking in the direction of the vassal villages. Somehow—not at her own behest—a prayer left her mind for the all-potent God. A prayer to protect her people.

V - Entertainment

“Tell us where you are from,” said the Queen, lifting a frosted glass. Everyone around the table grew quiet—thirty or forty dignitaries clad in crisp cotton and flowing lace. The feast had drawn on nearly an hour without any mention of its purpose from Lirium. Now, the entertainment was about to begin.

The girl pushed her chair back noisily and stood. Her hair was done up in braids that pulsated in the lantern light. Her eyes were blue with coronas of bright green, the color of new buds on a spring pine. Bright, innocent, they shone across the spread of food to rest on the Queen’s seat.

“I live here,” she affirmed to the crowd, “…don’t I?”

People chuckled and nodded. It was obvious they didn’t understand. The Queen narrowed her gaze, unamused. “That may come to pass if we cannot determine your true home. You come from beyond the plains, do you not?” Her words returned the room to utter silence.

“I thought I must live here, since this is where you brought me.”

“No,” interjected the Prince. “We found you half-dead on a farm. We fed you pork broth to get your heart beating. We could think of no other way.”

She felt the raw area around her lips; they had been forced open while she slept. “I see I was right not to trust you,” she said to him without thinking. This elicited more laughter, and an unattractive flush to Nac’s pale cheeks.

“Do you have a name?” asked Lirium to urge on the interrogation.

“If I do, I can’t recall it.”

“Then we will name you Malta, after the patron spirit of strange things.” She frowned meaningfully at the newcomer, who simply bowed and thanked her. The guests took this as an end to the civilities and they resumed their conversations. As the clamor of tongues and plates began to rise, Queen Lirium rapped her heel five times on the marble floor. “We are not done!”

Once more she raised her glass in toast fashion. But Lirium never gave toasts.

“Esteemed lords and ladies, you realize that tonight is unusual for several reasons. A young woman has come to us from the plains. Fate brought her here and she will undoubtedly serve us all one day, so we must treat her well. I am granting her a chamber in the Castle under my care. From now on, Malta is one of you. She is high-born.”

She cleared her throat for a prolonged moment. The guests waited.

“Also, we are receiving other guests. The Magisters.”

Silence gave way to an anxious rustling of gowns and waistcoats. Their eyes showed that this did not come as news, but confirmation from the Queen worried them all the more.

“They will be arriving in the next fifteen minutes.”

At last she got the reaction she had been expecting: gasps and shouts of outrage, unable to be repressed. One very tall man rose to his feet and demanded to be shown out. He was joined by his wife and a few others.

Instantly, movements around the room indicated the presence of guards at each door. “You may not leave before the feast is finished,” said the Queen.

“Yes, such bad etiquette,” added Prince Nac. He was generally ignored. He’d lost face and it hadn’t been recovered.

Slowly, the guests sat down. “What is the meaning of this?” one called out, and he heard the question echoed left and right. Lirium laced her fingers together in a gesture of calmness.

“I have decided that this year you should all witness the ritual. I won’t live forever. Someone will have to take over my duty when I pass on into the Ether.” She didn’t look at her son, who sat up taller and prouder in his chair. “Do not be afraid…the Magisters are great and powerful, but they are bound to me. They have never disobeyed a command and never will.”

Nobody was reassured except Malta. She massaged the fabric of her new copper-colored gown, smiling to herself. It seemed she had arrived on quite a special night.

VI - Renewed

The warning bell tolled, shaking the Castle rafters. The sound was followed by a series of quakes in the floor under the table. Dishes rattled; the guests cried out and picked up their feet as if they could somehow float into the air and be safe.

Lirium’s marble floor had withstood many encounters with the Magisters. However, the servant’s rooms and some of the guest quarters had wooden floorboards that would take some damage. It didn’t seem prudent to mention this. “Why don’t we all retire to the Sanctum?” She rose from her chair and bid the double doors behind her be opened. Thirty-nine ruffled peacocks trailed her out of the dining hall, leaving their meals only half-finished.

The Sanctum was not a small living area as the name implied, but spanned the size of a ballroom and had a high, sloping roof. One corner was furnished with armchairs, black bear rugs and a roaring fireplace. Queen Lirium adjusted her stride to the booming of the Magisters’ footsteps, and made her way to a tall-backed chair with a plush cushion.

“It won’t be much longer until they arrive,” she assured as she settled herself down. “Wine?”

Malta took a seat in the chair opposite the Queen. “Thank you, I’d love a glass.”

Nac quickly pulled up an armchair next to her, nodding to his mother. Most everyone else preferred to stand, or pushed their seats adjacent to the wall—it was made of rough granite and seemed to rival the strength of the stone guardians.

A maid served cordial that swished blackly in glasses shaped like candlesticks. The people sipped and waited. They listened, transfixed, to the crashes that grew louder and nearer. Every once in a while a crash would sound muffled and splintery—the destruction of a house beneath a house-sized foot.

Then the warning bell rang once more. The Magisters had stopped at the Castle gates.

Lirium tipped back her wine and gestured for the guests to follow her. Everyone moved out of the Sanctum and through the vestibule where the entrance stood wide open.

Outside, the purple sheen of evening was blackened by five humongous bodies.

The Magisters were two-thirds the height of the Castle itself, and half that much in width. They rested like hillocks before the archway. Each had a boulder for a head, with eyes like pools of rainwater, clear and fluid. They shimmered eerily, the only moving parts in a desert of motionless stone.

They faced downward as Lirium cleared her throat. “Thank you for coming to me,” she began, and bowed deep. Everyone else besides Malta had knelt to the ground before the Queen even spoke, as if the damp after-rain air weighed down on their backs. A band of crows cackled jauntily at them from a parapet.

Lirium began. Words of the Primal Language came out like song, twining themselves into lyrical sentences. She reached into each Magister’s solid skin and grabbed hold of its essence—something unknown, like the meaning or origin of the guardians, but something that answered to the language of ancient royalty.

“Maintain the peace between the people of Zara and of Lir,” she commanded. Her voice bounced up and down octaves with ease, stitching instructions into the guardians’ souls. “There shall be no fighting or war, no crime or treachery in this land or the other. This is the decree of Lirium. Your duty has been renewed.”

A low but loud keening rose up from one of the Magisters, somewhere between its head and the peak of its mountainous torso. The Queen cocked her head and listened. Her brow furrowed; none of them had ever talked back to her before. But she could not make any sense of its cry.

“You!” shouted Malta from just behind her. “I know you!”

She stretched both her arms over Lirium’s head at the Magister. In response it craned its head down, and the shrill keening amplified threefold. The other onlookers gasped and shuddered at the girl’s brashness. Their cautious, plaintive voices begged her to stop.

“They’re going to want an exchange,” Malta told the monument of stone.

Its eyes seemed to flash for an instant in understanding. Then the Magister lifted its arms in a spread-eagle motion, and backed away from the gate, forcing its companions to retreat as well. Lirium watched them leave slowly, ponderously, whipping up a sharp wind that separated from the breezes of the night, that rolled along the folds of her gown and whistled through the lines in her tight face.

Malta crossed her arms against the chill. She stepped away from the Queen as she sensed the woman’s discontent. She found herself leaning against Nac’s chest. “Off of me!” she yapped. He simply wrapped his arms around hers, a gesture either to protect or imprison her.

Everything gave way to a thickening silence. The threat was gone and the guests could cluster comfortingly around each other. Without any signal from Lirium, they trickled out the gates in twos and threes. They curved around the Castle wall toward the wings that contained their personal chambers. The feast was over, and it was time to become lost in the night.

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...a mountainous toe stirred on a rock outcropping. It made thunder. The sparrows perching there flapped up like a stream of gas, then settled once more like warm mist...

--Forbidden Ansidia, Part I

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