An Artificial Night

The knowe stretched out around me in an array of ponds and flatlands, all connected by narrow bridges. Lily, Tybalt, and Karen were gone. “Tybalt?” No one answered. I stood, automatically reaching up to shove my hair back, and stopped as my fingers encountered a tight interweave of knots and hairpins. I pulled one of the hairpins free and glared at it before shoving it back into place. Jade and dragonflies. Cute.

My frown deepened as I looked down at myself and took in the whole picture. Lily apparently extended her services to healing my fashion sense as well as my hands: my T-shirt and jeans were gone, replaced by a steel-gray gown cut in a vaguely traditional Japanese style and embroidered with black and silver dragonflies. A black velvet obi was tied around my waist, my knife concealed underneath a fold of fabric. It wouldn’t be easy to draw, but at least she hadn’t left me unarmed. Pulling up the hem of the gown exposed one battered brown sneaker—she’d left my shoes alone.

“Not funny,” I muttered and started down the nearest path. We were going to have words if she’d vaporized my clothes.

Finding your way out of Lily’s knowe is easy, as long as you don’t mind walking. The boundaries of her lands are flexible—sometimes there are miles between landmarks, at others it’s only a few feet—but all paths eventually lead to the moon bridge. I’d gone about a quarter of a mile, grumbling all the way, when a throat was discreetly cleared behind me.

“Yes?” I said, turning.

A silver-skinned man was standing on the water, the gills at the bottom of his jaw fluttering with barely concealed anxiety. He was wearing Lily’s livery, with slits cut down the sleeves and in the legs of his pants to allow the fins running down his calves and forearms the freedom to move. “My lady has . . . sent me?” he said, uncertainly.

“I can see that. What did she send you to say?”

“She wishes me to tell you she is . . . waiting in the pavilion? With . . . the King of Cats and . . . your niece?”

“Good to know,” I said, bobbing my head. “Which way to the pavilion?”

“Go as you are and turn . . . left . . . at the . . . sundial?”

That seemed to be the end of his instructions. I was turning when he spoke again, asking, “Lady?”

I glanced back over my shoulder. “Yes?”

“May I . . . go?”

“Yes, you may,” I said. He smiled and dissolved into mist, drifting away across the water. I shook my head and resumed walking. Naiads. If there’s a way to make them smarter than your average rock, nobody’s found it yet.

The rest of the walk was uneventful. A flock of pixies crossed my path at one point, laughing as they tried to knock each other out of the air. I stopped to let them pass. Pixies are small, but they can be vicious when provoked. Several flocks inhabit the park and are currently at war with the flock in the Safeway where I used to work. I’ve been known to supply the store pixies with weaponry—usually in the form of toothpicks or broken pencils—and I didn’t need a flock of park pixies descending on me seeking retribution. I started again after they passed, crossing several more small islands and mossy outcroppings before I reached a sundial in the middle of an otherwise featureless patch of ground. It cast no shadow. I rolled my eyes, wondering why Lily bothered, and turned left.

There was no pavilion before I turned. As soon as I finished turning, it was there: a huge white silk pavilion decorated with a dozen coats of arms I didn’t recognize and anchored to a raised hardwood platform by golden ropes. Its banners and pennants drifted in a breeze I couldn’t feel. Apparently, “turn left” didn’t mean “keep walking.”