Open the gate! Let us out!
They were his ancestors, Earl Ferox thought as he lay and gasped for air upon his sickbed. The cold of autumn nights penetrated the heavy curtains of his great bed like icy, ghostly fingers pressing through to caress his gray cheeks. His breath steamed the air before his face no matter how high they piled the fur rugs across his wasted frame, no matter how bright his servant kept the blaze on his hearth. But while his face burned with cold, his insides burned with fire.
Let us out!
They would come for him, he thought. If any fool heeded their voices and opened the crypt door, all the spirits of the great lords who had mastered Gaheris earldom before him would pour from the darkness, sweep up the stone stairs of the castle, and come for him as he lay helpless upon his bed. They knew his sin. They would not be forgiving.
Open the gate!
The curtain near his head moved. The dying earl drew a strangled breath and struggled to push himself upright. He saw long, gnarled fingers grasping and pulling back the heavy brocade. “Who is it?” the earl cried, though his voice was so thin his own ears could scarcely hear it.
“No one at all,” said the old scrubber, leaning over the earl’s bed.
“Ah,” said the earl as he fell back upon his pillows, his face sagging with weakness. But his eyes were relieved. “Ah, but you aren’t no one, are you?” he said, shaking his head slowly.
“I am no one anymore.” The scrubber sat on the edge of the bed, sighed, and bent over to rub his sore feet. “I’ve been no one for such a long time.”
The earl coughed—small, spasmodic puffs from his once powerful chest. “Tell me,” he said when at last the spasm passed. “When will the House of Lights be reopened?”
“When your son is king,” the scrubber replied with a shrug.
The earl frowned, drawing several painful breaths before he could find more words. “I have no son,” he said.
The scrubber shrugged again. Then he stood, creaking, and carefully rearranged the warm rugs across the earl’s body, tucking them in about him as gently as any nursemaid might. “Too bad,” he said with a sad smile. “In that case, I suppose the House of Lights will never be reopened.”
3
SO FOLLOWED DAY AFTER DAY. Always the Twelve returned to make Cren Cru’s vicious demand. Always Citlalu, King of Etalpalli, refused to comply. Every morning I woke with dread, afraid that Tlanextu would disobey our parents, would go with the Twelve and vanish into the Mound like the hundreds upon hundreds of others I saw vanishing every day. This fear was so great that at first I did not see what was becoming of Citlalu and Mahuizoa. Not until near the end did I realize.
They were dying. Every day, more life fled from their shining faces. Cren Cru clung to the ground of Etalpalli, and I could almost see the fingerlike roots clutching into the soil, draining the demesne of life. Draining my father, my mother.
Faerie lords and ladies are gifted with three lives. Twice they may be killed, and only a third death will send them down to the Final Water, never to return. But as I watched my parents deny Cren Cru, I saw all of their lives at once slowly drawn from their bodies.
The blue star shone above Gaheris Castle.
Mouse, the kitchen drudge, moved as quietly as his namesake across the inner courtyard, escaping the confines of the castle kitchens. The air was cold, and the cobblestones bruised his feet. The only shoes he had acquired were thin soled, and he might as well have been barefoot.
But he wasn’t used to the cramped, closed-in spaces where he had worked this last frozen month. He was used to open vistas and warm, dry breezes. So he sought the courtyard and, under cover of evening shadows, climbed a narrow stairway to the top of the wall. He passed a sentry, but the man took little notice of a lowly scrubber boy, not even bothering to jostle him, though Mouse prepared for as much.
In recent weeks he had experienced more jostling and shoving and rough use than in all his prior life combined. The kitchen was an isolated world with its own masters and rules shouted in a language Mouse couldn’t hope to understand. The quiet loneliness of the castle walls was by far preferable to a pallet by the kitchen hearth, however warm, surrounded by pale faces and foreign babble.
Mouse shivered uncontrollably, teeth chattering in his skull. But he sought the solitude of the wall in this hour before dawn, eager for what little privacy he could steal.