A Knight Of The Word

A demon, she had replied.

She rose and walled to the window and looked down at the street. Same street as last night, only brighter and more populated in the daylight. She watched the people and cars for a few minutes, organizing her scattered thoughts and gathering up the shards of confusion and uncertainty that littered her mind. Then she went into the bathroom and showered. She stood beneath the hot stream of water for a long time, eves closed, thinking. She was a long way from home, and she was still uncertain of her purpose in coming to find John Ross. She wished she had a better idea of what she was going to do when she found him. She wished she knew what she was going to say. She wished she were better prepared.

She toweled dry and dressed, thinking once again of the demon. She would tell Ross of last night; she knew that much, at least. She would tell him of the Lady’s concern, of her warning to him. She would try to convince him of his danger. But what else could she do? What did she really know about all this, after all? She knew what Ariel had told her, but she couldn’t say for certain that it was the truth. If Pick’s response was any measure of things, it probably wasn’t. The truth wasn’t something you got whole cloth from the Word anyway; it came in bits and pieces, riddles and questions, and self-examination and deductive reasoning that, if you were lucky, eventually led to some sort of revelation. She had learned that much from her father. The truth wasn’t simple; it was complex. Worse, it wasn’t easily decipherable, and it was often difficult to accept.

She sighed, looking about the room, as if the answer to her dilemma might be hidden there. It wasn’t, of course. There were no answers here; the answers all lay with John Ross.

She went down to the lobby for her breakfast, pausing to stare out through large plate-glass doors at the busy city streets. Although the day was bright and sunny, people out walking were bundled up in coats and scarves, so she knew it must be cold. She continued on to the dining room and ate alone at a table near the back, sipping at her coffee and nibbling on her toast and scrambled eggs as she formulated her plan for the day.

She would have preferred to talk things over with Ariel, but there was no sign of the tatterdemalion. Nor was there likely to be.

She remembered Ariel saying to her last night, just before she went back into the hotel, “Don’t worry. I’ll be close to you. You wont see me, but I’ll be there when you need me.”

Reassuring, but not particularly satisfactory. It made her wish Pick was with her. Pick would have appeared whether she needed him or not. Pick would have talked everything over with her. She still missed him. She found herself comparing the sylvan and the tatterdemalion and decided that, given the choice, she still preferred Pick’s incessant chatter to Ariel’s wraithlike presence.

She tried to remember the rest of what Pick had told her about tatterdemalions. It wasn’t much. Like sylvans they were born fully formed, but unlike sylvans they lived only a short time and didn’t age. Both were forest creatures, but sylvans never went beyond the territory for which they were given responsibility, while tatterdemalions rode everywhere on the back of the wind and went all over the world. Sylvans worked at managing the magic, at its practical application, at keeping the balance in check. Tatterdemalions did none of that, eared nothing for the magic, were as insubstantial in their work as they were in their forms. They served the Word, but their service was less carefully defined and more subject to change than that of sylvans. Tatterdemalions were like ghosts.

Nest finished the last of her orange juice and stood up. Tatterdemalions were strange, even as fairy creatures went. She tried to imagine what it must be like to be Ariel, to have lived without experiencing a childhood anal with no expectation of ever becoming an adult, to know you would be alive only a short time and then be gone again. She supposed the concept of time was a relative one, and some creatures had no concept of time at all. Maybe that was the way it was with tatterdemalions. But what would it be like to live your entire life with the memories of dead children, of lives come and gone before your own, to have only their memories and none of your own?

She gave it up. She would never be able to put herself in Ariel’s place, not even in the most abstract sense, because she had no reference point to help her gain any real insight. They were as different as night and day. And yet they both served the Word, and they were both, in some sense, creatures of magic.