Gossamyr Part 1

Gossamyr MICHELE HAUF.

For all who Believe.

Enchantment is Faery's raison d'etre. Many moons ago-during a blue moon's reign-a rift wascleaved between Faery and the Otherside.No one-man, beast, or fee-can say how or why,Only, the act decimated a great source of Enchantment.The curtain between Faery and the Otherside has become transparent;fee travel back and forth with ease;mortals, once banned from Faery after one visit, find return less difficult.It is a challenge to keep that which should not be in Faery out. And viceversa.Time wends forward, widders.h.i.+ns, and thus.Such conditions shall remain until a championcan restore the Enchantment complete.

PROLOGUE.

Faery-betwixt and between.

The revenant swooped down from out of nowhere. Wide gaping maws, fanged and stretched to maul, loosed a shrill cry, shaking Gossamyr de Winters.h.i.+nn from her petrified stance. She stumbled backward and landed atop the blue marble floor of the circular castle tower. Eyes fixed to the danger, Gossamyr groped blindly at her side, slapping the stone, in seek of her fighting staff.

The very flesh had been stripped from her attacker's bones. Swathes of tattered muscle clung to the skeleton. Red glowed within the skull's eyes, molten and dripping, as if blood. The pellicle wings, void of l.u.s.trous color, were but a ghostly mesh of flight flapping madly between the shoulder bones. It looked like a winged one-a fee-but it could not possibly be. Never before had she seen the like.

Be this one of the relentless creatures that had been tormenting Faery for a summer of moons?

Tattered wings siphoned the air in foul hisses. The wraithlike thing lunged. A skeletal arm slashed out. Claws cut the air-and flesh.

Gossamyr stroked a finger across her cheek; slippery blood flowed from the cut.

Whence came this creature? 'Twas full sun. She had been tending her own pleasures, looking over the muster of peac.o.c.ks trampling the wild rose garden below that hugged the inner curtain wall. Why did it attack her?

Shuffling backward, her hand slapped upon something-her fighting staff.

With a hue and cry to strip the senses, the creature again struck. Gossamyr dived to the right. Gripping the applewood staff and, facing down, she kicked back and up. Her bare toes connected with bone. The creature shrieked as it spun into the crystal-white sky.

Pus.h.i.+ng up and landing a ready stance, Gossamyr swung the longstaff to mark her periphery-the applewood sang a battle cry-then prepared for a return attack. Keenly, she marked her surroundings for additional threat.

Skeletal arms slashed the air. Bone fingers curled into claws as the creature rushed her. She swung hard, using the force of the staff and counterweighting her body into the defense. The end of her weapon cracked skull. Bits of the creature's head scattered like a harvest gourd cleaved by elf-shot.

Landing the swing, she steadied her bearing. No time to think, only react. Deft twists of her fingers spun the weapon in a hissing figure of eight as she turned to challenge the opponent. Now headless, the creature hung before her, arms spread-yet the wings flapped. Still alive. If bones could harbor life.

"Remarkable." Gossamyr stepped back. How to defeat the thing? "Can I kill it?"

"Either that or be killed!" came the unbidden answer.

The stiff barbs of a feathered cape stroked her cheek. The s.h.i.+ng of an obsidian blade drawn from a hip sheath sliced the air. One slash of the fire-forged sabre sectioned the creature at the waist, dropping the leg bones to the tower floor in a clatter.

"s.h.i.+nn-"

"Stand back!" s.h.i.+nn swung and hacked through the rib cage of the creature. "These things don't know how to die!"

Frayed wings-severed from the skeletal body-furiously beat the air above s.h.i.+nn, her father. The dauntless fee lifted his blade up under the left wing, cleaving it asunder, and brought the blade down through the right wing. He spun toward Gossamyr and shouted, "There!"

Pulled from her awestruck stare, Gossamyr jumped as a foot trimmed with muscle shreds stamped her toes. Together, the legs of the creature attacked. Sweeping her staff low, she dashed it across the anklebones, sending them cras.h.i.+ng against the marble embrasures. Reduced to dust on impact, the shattered bone glinted as it floated to the tower floor.

"What in all of Faery is it?" Gossamyr called as she swung and caught a disembodied arm with the tip. Fingers clenched the end of her staff. Shake as she might, the evil fist clung. "s.h.i.+nn?"

Residue from the crushed creature glimmered in a mist about s.h.i.+nn as his sabre obliterated the wings. "A revenant!" the implacable fee called.

Ill clad for battle, s.h.i.+nn's everyday vestments of flowing arachnagoss tunic and elaborately st.i.tched hosen would not protect him from injury. But he did not waver, instead standing proud and defying the thing with a swing of his sabre. He dived to avoid the other arm as it sailed toward him, fingers fisted.

"Let me to it!" Gossamyr cried. An audacious smile crooked her mouth. She had trained for this sort of challenge. Opportunity had finally fallen to her. "I've been craving some fight."

She rushed the attacking arm and connected wood to bone in a hollow crack. "Yes!"

The return swing of her staff proved the attack had not jarred the creepy pa.s.senger. Gossamyr slammed the carved applewood upon the tower floor. Finger bones gave loose, but as quickly, scrambled across her toes and gripped her ankle, shaking her off balance.

She landed the marble floor with a jaw-loosening dumpf. A skeletal hand scurried up her leg and over her hip moving farther.

Wheezing breaths gasped from her mouth. Dropping her staff, Gossamyr clutched the hand that squeezed about her throat. Probing fingertips threatened to pierce her flesh. She struggled to wrestle the thing off, but it possessed strength immeasurable. It was futile to fight, to kick at the air and pray she connected with some part of an attacker that just wasn't there.

A murky blackness muddied her thoughts. s.h.i.+nn-where was he? Needles of numbness loosened her grip on the hand. Her shoulders dropped. She could see nothing, smell not the scent of fresh morning dew and lush rose oil, nor sense the smooth polish of the marble beneath her fingers. An angry peac.o.c.k mewl echoed Gossamyr's longing to cry out.

As death crept closer one final sound summoned her audacious smile. The shrill of finely honed obsidian cutting through bone.

ONE.

High above the lush cypress and laburnum treetops that encircled the curtain wall, Gossamyr followed her father through the carved marble loggia. The castle she had lived in all her life nested at the peak of the Spiral forest as if a bloom upon a verdant bouquet. Pendulous yellow flowers hung heavily on the laburnum that grew only at the top of the forest, contrasting marvelously with the castle. The blue marble was deeply veined with streaks of midnight and palest sky; it mimicked both day and night and s.h.i.+mmered with a fee dust of the ages.

The village of Glamoursiege fit like a twist about the marble screw of the Spiral. Blue marble segued to granite and finally to sand at its lowest where it met the grounds in a mire of marsh and reticulated tree roots. For the entirety was laced with the roots of cypress, ash and hornbeam. The Edge-very few places where the trees did not grow-was ever to be avoided, at least by the un-winged ones.

"I can do this, s.h.i.+nn! You cannot deny I am the only one able."

s.h.i.+nn moved swiftly toward the south tower, speaking his impatience with his strides. "Many are capable," he called back to Gossamyr.

"Capable, yes," Gossamyr had to agree.

Faery worked counter to the Otherside, and a war of almost one hundred mortal years had been keeping the mortals to blood and wrath, while Faery enjoyed fellows.h.i.+p and peace. Tribe Glamoursiege had been formed of trooping warriors before the great Peace, a Peace that had existed since long before Gossamyr's birth.

How long? Time indeterminable, s.h.i.+nn often answered when Gossamyr would question, for Time was of no concern to the fee.

Though Faery claimed Peace there were still the occasional rises amongst the various tribes. s.h.i.+nn's troops were indeed capable and, with the recent arrival of the revenants, increasingly vigilant.

Gossamyr picked up her pace, as well as her confidence. "If not for this very challenge, what then has all my training been for? Naught? I am as skilled as any in your troop, male or female."

"Child of mine, you know well you have been groomed to sit the Glamoursiege throne," s.h.i.+nn said over his shoulder. "It is not an idle, benevolent woman who can rule in my absence, but one who possesses all the martial skills I have taught you, and the mind for diplomacy, honor and valor."

"I will not neglect my duties to Glamoursiege, but...I want this, s.h.i.+nn. It is such an opportunity!" She hurried up beside him. Where did he go in such a hurry?

"Convince me it wise to send my daughter on such a singular and dangerous quest."

Ah, there, he had not given an unequivocal no. This gave Gossamyr hope.

"Your fee warriors will not survive the Red Lady's seductive allure. As you've told me, she seduces Disenchanted fee into her clutches. They have not the fort.i.tude to resist!"

Any fee who left Faery for the Otherside risked Disenchantment. Necessary trips to the mortal realm were swift, coached in the knowledge that glamour dissipates quickly and Time could not be trusted. A risky venture for a fee warrior.

A risk chosen by some.

There were those rogue fee, who, seduced by the lure of the mortal, and that intricate city called Paris, chose to remain on the Otherside. To stay meant sure Disenchantment; a condition that saw the fee completely drained of glamour, and often they lost their wings to a shriveling malady attributed to the baneful touch from a mortal. Enchantment gone, they became nothing more than a sh.e.l.l that survived as any mortal. Return to Faery was difficult but not impossible. But never again could the Disenchanted regain Enchantment whole.

Of course, one did not have to be fee to fall under the seductive spell of the Otherside. Gossamyr had lost her mother to the mortal pa.s.sion ten midsummers earlier. The lure of the unknown was ever beguiling, but Veridienne de Winters.h.i.+nn had always known the Otherside, for she had been mortal complete.

s.h.i.+nn stopped abruptly, causing his daughter to collide against his back. Savoring the faintest scent of hyacinth that marked her father, Gossamyr stepped back.

The south tower overlooked a riot of white roses and speckled foxglove in the gardens below. Overhead, the carved marble openwork cast a lattice of shadows across s.h.i.+nn's tightened jaw. His blazon, an iridescent tribal marking, curled down his chin and neck and across his upper chest, and s.h.i.+mmered in the blocked patches of sunlight. Glamoursiege blazons showed on neck and upper extremities; placement varied from tribe to tribe.

For all his stern posture and commanding demeanor-even the recent announcement that his marshal at arms should marry Gossamyr-s.h.i.+nn would ever occupy a soft place in Gossamyr's heart. All planes and hard slopes his face, only in his eyes could she ever find compa.s.sion. And such a find was a rarity to be h.o.a.rded. s.h.i.+nn's manner switched from cool to disinterested, and then suddenly to genuine concern with such ease. One moment he was gentle and attentive, the next, the battle commander wore a fierce mien. Gossamyr had not known him to be any other way. Attribute to his trying history, she could only a.s.sume. They had both loved and lost. Love being one of those mutable words the fee toyed with in exchange for l.u.s.t, hunger or envy.

"I listened last night to the council's discussion," she said. s.h.i.+nn required she sit as a silent member at council, for her future demanded she take an active role in Glamoursiege matters. "The revenants' presence in Faery increases. But I was surprised to learn about the rift." She bent to meet s.h.i.+nn's straying gaze. "It has never before been discussed by council. Why did you not tell me of it sooner?"

"It is just something that is...known. The rift has existed since before your birth."

"That long? And all this time you haven't once thought to-"

"It has never been in my mind, Gossamyr. Until recently. There are none who can name the reason for the rift cleaved between Faery and the Otherside; only we know it exists. Such a tear in the fabric that separates our worlds allows the revenants to return with ease. I am sure I mentioned it when I explained the revenants to you."

"You did not." Hand to her hip, she paced in short turns, pointing the floor with the tip of her staff. s.h.i.+nn had explained the revenants two midsummers earlier when she had witnessed a natural fee death. Normally the fee essence leaves the body and experiences the final twinclian. But there are those fee-those of darker natures-who do not twinclian to the Celestial. Instead, their essence merely pops, and the revenant follows, its destination-the Infernal. It is a rarity.

The sudden appearance of revenants in Faery-not newly emerged from a natural fee death-had given clue someone on the Otherside was stealing the essences. And so was discovered the Red Lady.

As frustrated as Gossamyr was to just now learn something she should have known about, she took it all in. Knowledge was required for a successful mission. "Still, I do not understand why, or how, those skeleton creatures return to Faery. Are they not dead?"

"Did that creature look dead?"

Actually, yes. However, not if death implied stillness. "So it was alive, yet... I don't understand."

"That thing I killed-"

"We killed."

"Yes. We." A nod verified her partic.i.p.ation in the event. But too brief, s.h.i.+nn's rea.s.suring smile. "The Red Lady stole its essence, leaving the revenant in limbo. Somehow she can feed off the essence of another-the essence holds the former body's glamour-delaying her Disenchantment interminably. The revenant is a shade of the fee that cannot find final rest without the essence, so it returns to Faery in seek of a new essence."

"But why Faery? Can it not locate a fee on the Otherside?"

"It is compelled back to Faery. The rift literally sucks them back home. I don't believe it could remain in the Otherside if it wished."

"This essence..." Gossamyr leaned against a blue machicolation, tapping the cool marble with a thumb. "When I witnessed the fee death something blue rose from the body. Is it something the Red Lady can draw out and...possess?"

"Yes and no. Inside the body it is our very being. Outside the body, well, it either twinclians or it pops." The elegant fee lord tilted his head to look upon his daughter. A sigh hung in the air between them, a resolute pause. "The essence is akin to...a mortal soul."

"Ah."

There was so little Gossamyr understood about mortals. About that part of herself.

Her mother had been mortal, but Veridienne's sickness-the mortal pa.s.sion-had kept her focus from her family and eventually lured her home to the Otherside, leaving Gossamyr alone to comfort her heartbroken fee father. And to ever wonder. Why had not her mother taken her daughter with her? Surely she might have wished to raise her own child? Had it been so easy to leave her family behind for the mortal world? She had once begged to stay in Faery-but that desire hadn't lasted long.

Of course, in terms of emotional distance, Veridienne had much over s.h.i.+nn. Likely, she had not seen beyond her own self-satisfying desires.

Following her mother's abrupt departure, Gossamyr had vowed not to become mired in her own selfish wants. And what better way to prove it than to track the Red Lady and protect Faery from further torment?

So this sought-after essence was like a mortal soul. What did it mean to have a soul? And mortal, at that. Gossamyr had known no other way but of the fee. Fathered by s.h.i.+nn, would she possess both a soul and an essence?

"There are things I would have liked to give you," s.h.i.+nn said, looking off into the sky, avoiding her gaze. "Truths."

"I don't understand."

"There is no time for confessions. The revenant is single-minded," s.h.i.+nn said, "focused on obtaining that which was stolen from it. So much so, it will kill to obtain the final twinclian." He focused briefly on her cut cheek, but gave her injury no verbal regard. The fee were not so emotionally delicate as mere mortals. "They are becoming more frequent, the encounters. Streklwood was attacked last eve."

"The cook?"

s.h.i.+nn nodded.

A lump the size of an uncooked goose egg formed in Gossamyr's throat at memory of this morning's still-sh.e.l.led offering. She'd thought to complain, to send her maid, Mince, marching down to the kitchen...

"The revenant must be reduced to a fine glimmer," s.h.i.+nn continued. "For to leave a single bone intact will not defeat the creature's quest for wholeness. They are difficult to kill."

"I noticed. But it felt good, the challenge."

Avoiding his daughter's enthusiastic declaration s.h.i.+nn strode the curve of the tower, hands akimbo, his raven-feather cape flitting gently above the length of his folded wings.

This demesne of Faery was not so much ruled by s.h.i.+nn as protected and guided-a position Gossamyr knew she would one day fill. Descended from a long line of trooping fee, s.h.i.+nn had once commanded the Glamoursiege musters. He'd become lord over Glamoursiege following his father's death. And he'd trained his only daughter to follow in his footsteps, should he cease to stand upon the Glamoursiege throne.

Much as she did not like to consider that fate, Gossamyr realized it would happen some day. And she was prepared to take s.h.i.+nn's place, physically. Mentally, she wondered if her lack of battle experience would make her a weaker ruler. She could sit council and talk politics with the best. But would they respect one without time spent in the musters?

Pressing her palms to a cool marble crenel cut into the tower, Gossamyr leaned forward. A swirl of white cottonwood kites billowed out from the dense forest spiraling the castle. Laughter smaller than a bird's tweedle glittered in the air like suns.h.i.+ne upon purling waters-a few skyclad piskies clung to the tails of the seed-kites, stealing a ride.

Despite the fees' frustrating lack of regard for Time, she did know it governed the Otherside. Veridienne had been the one to explain to her how the mortal realm used Time to measure everything. During that conversation, she'd told Gossamyr she was eight years in measurement, and that a year could be marked once every mortal midsummer. Which meant Gossamyr was twenty-one mortal years now. It filled her with pride to know that one mortal measurement, but she did not mention it to s.h.i.+nn. The fee did not measure a lifetime with tangible numbers of years. Once on the Otherside, the fee struggled against Time, Veridienne had said. Time stole Enchantment.

To race against Time would afford a challenge.

Faery needed a champion to defeat this vicious succubus.

A thump to her chest thudded against the arachnagoss-stuffed pourpoint Gossamyr wore when practicing-which was more often than not. "You know I am fit for this mission," she said with conviction.