Post by Liessel on Apr 2, 2024 10:01:42 GMT -5
She had been told to be there before dusk, but she had arrived much earlier at The Bells than she had been told to. The first reason was so that she could spend some time with her father before she had to go. The second was a note that lived, folded and frayed, between the pages of the notebook she carried in her Flynn kit from the weight of Waymaker, and its other contents.
Liessel had left the fine skirts and confining corsets of a girl her age at home for this trip. She came to The Bells wearing a well-tailored waistcoat of a red so dark it might have been called burgundy, or wine, and grey pants that were the same color as the pinstriping that ran the length of her well cut waistcoat. She wore no hat this time, either, and her Flynn kit hung heavy off of her shoulder.
Eli knew where she was going. Cog knew, as well. She made certain that she'd given them her whereabouts before leaving the house -- just in case. She also made it known, when she reached The Bells that she needed to talk to one of the Ashbrooms before she and the Greatmother got underway.
That's where she was, then, her time waiting spent by her father's side as they talked quietly in the space that had been set aside for him, her hand held in his.
Just where exactly did the Ashbrooms live?
There were private rooms in the guild hall, but it was not clear in fact that any of them were permanently occupied. Whatever the case, when Liessel arrived and found her father either in the main hall, in his room in the back, or on the hill, neither Ashbroom was there. The sun was halfway disappeared in the west, in fact, before up the hill came two figures. The shorter one was the Dame. The taller one was not tall enough to be Temmis. They came up through the twilight, walking close, their pace thoughtful as they spoke lowly, and the figure speaking with Dame Ashbroom wore an eyepatch and his sleeves rolled to his elbows.
The Dame wore a skirt with a hem of short fringe, the color happening to match that of Liessel's waistcoat. She wore a loose blouse, untucked, and a light summer shawl about her shoulders that was creamy white and also fringed. Her silver-white hair was loose and glorious, curling well past her shoulders, a few tiny, half-hidden braids poking out from underneath here and there.
Adam Larrow had probably arrived in the clothing he'd worked all day in. His brown waistcoat was half-buttoned, and his trousers were a beige with faint pinstriping. Everything about him, from his own dark curls to the tips of his shoes, looked a little worn. He was tidy--or at least could tidy up--but he was not a rich man. At least at his own waist there hung his leather pack from his belt, where he carried a deck of tarot cards as he often had in the past.
"Dove," Her father broke away from what he had been saying, that small shift coming with a nod of his head down the hill toward where Amrilaine was walking with Adam.
They had been talking about Gerold. They had been talking about many things. But the shift in her father was enough to cause her to turn where she sat at the foot of his chair and cast her gaze down the way he had nodded.
"Go ahead," She also heard him say, his hand slipping from hers. He was doing considerably better in The Bells, far better than she thought he would. It made her reluctant to leave his side, but he urged her on once more.
She took that gentle urging and pushed herself to her feet while checking the weight of her bag to keep it from becoming ungainly as she stood. "I love you, Poppa," Liessel said, leaning in to give him a kiss to his cheek before she turned and headed down the hill to meet Adam and Amrilaine as they came up the hill.
Liessel Erphale's frequent visits had by now made her presence part of the Bells' normalcy. She'd brushed elbows with the regulars, and learned names, and seen many of the odder Folk who had gradually recovered from shame or injury to return to this beloved hill after Esteban's machinations had led to the wholesale theft of their wills. One person who had not been on the hill or in the hall so frequently--or at all, in fact, while she'd been there after her father had arrived--was Adam, but he saw her coming down the slope as he and the Dame went up. His expression was somber, and he did not right away smile hello, because Amrilaine was murmuring something to him.
So it was Dame Ashbroom's smile that came first when she lifted her head and finished speaking. It was a shift of modes, and she hailed Liessel with a hand. "Adam has asked to join us," she said, "though his business there differs from yours."
Adam's shift from seriousness took a second longer and followed a nod of greeting to Liessel. He loosened himself up and did find a smile. "Good evening--I hope you don't mind."
It was not a look she had become accustomed to on Adam's face. His smile always seemed so easy in these days after Esteban, at least they did when he was in good company. She did have to admit to herself that she did not really know him that well, still, so what basis did she really have to go on? Just those few visits after the fact, and that was all.
Her gaze, as she came in close enough to speak with the two of them, swept from Amrilaine toward Adam and then back again, "No, that's fine. I do not mind at all. Is everything alright?"
She answered, and while she did Liessel was already reaching into her Flynn kit for her notebook.
"As well as anything," Adam said--and then quietly added: "These are days of confusion and questions. Hunts for information for more than a few of us." The smile widened into something tinged with a little apology.
Liessel's answering smile was small and came as she drew her notebook out and shifted it into her left hand so she could reach out with her right and lay it lightly against Adam's arm, "I hope that your hunt bears some fruit, Mister Larrow. But on the note of hunting for information," Her hand left Adam's arm lightly, but fell heavily to hang against the strap of the bag she kept her Flynn kit supplies in while she looked toward Lady Ashbroom, "I have news from Aurelia regarding Mother Blackthorn."
The Dame's attention sharpened, and the Once-Warden asked, "What news?"
Mother Blackthorn--the entire cosmos of topics surrounding the Dark Mother of the Woods and her odd intervention (non-intervention?) during the crisis--had been the subject of no small amount of activity afterward, here at the Bells, and outward from it. Hope and interest sparked a light in the ancient woman's eyes.
Liessel's next breath was shallow, and uneasy, "She said that Cyrus sent left word for her in The Fens. Mother Blackthorn and Missus White are working together, speaking together about how to reshape things into the way they were -- the old ways. The pact we were pushed into-- the Wardens, Warriors and Witnesses -- Mother Blackthorn believes that we are now bound to carry this through, even though we did not know what the pact was at the time and we still do not know now. They are looking for Mister Veleith, with the hope that he can help them get their hands on Esteban's ashes."
Dame Ashbroom didn't move for a long moment. When she did, her expression pinched in dismay or confusion or both. "I'm not sure I follow. The way they were--in what sense? The old ways in what sense?" Just to start there.
Adam, who remembered well Missus White, and Aurelia's reaction to her, and what had happened to him at her hands--even if he'd let it happen, didn't look any less stunned than the Dame.
Liessel's hands moved, her right hand falling to rest around her left wrist where she had a piece of string tied. She rarely wore it around the house, or around Flynn and Flynn anymore, but when out or around those she did not know very well, she tended to rely on the little strand of enchanted fiber to fill the gaps that others might mind where she knew her friends didn't.
It was still there she could feel it beneath the fabric of the white shirt she wore. "I cannot say, though my translation of it might be off. Aurelia told me, and her words were: "shaping things back into the ways of the old."
Adam looked to the Dame at that, but the Dame herself frowned just as far from comprehension as before. "Well, I shall ask her when we arrive just what this business is about."
"I am sorry I cannot be more clear than that." Liessel said before casting a look back up the hill toward where her father was perched in his chair. He was just a blot to her where they were standing, all definition of him aside from the shape of him was taken up into the shadow of the falling night, and through the distance. She drew a breath, and looked back toward Adam and Amrilaine, "But I am ready to go when you are."
The Dame nodded and did not quite smile, though all the makings of a smile were hinted at in the way she held her face. "Do you know the way? Did they tell you, Aurelia and Adeline?"
"No, Aurelia and I had little time left between us when she told me the news. She, and the Flynns, left right afterward. And its been a few days since I spoke to Miss Webber." Her right hand relaxed away from her left wrist, her idle checking brought enough piece of mind to her that the string was still there and intact. It allowed her go from grasping at her wrist to wrapping her hand around the strap of her Flynn kit once more.
Adam began softly: "I think she meant--"
"I meant, did they share the tale with you of how we reach the Tor without a train," the Dame interrupted, "but it matters not. Come with me, my friends. We go by water."
Adam slowed a little, waiting for Liessel, falling back, so that he could softly ask, "Are they all well?"
The answer was still no, and Liessel was left shaking her head just as Amrilaine said it mattered not.
As Lady Ashbroom began moving, Liessel fell into step and found herself walking beside Adam.
"They are," Liessel said, giving Adam a small smile that she had found somewhere beneath the weight of the news she had brought with her, "Aurelia and the Flynns have gone on a much needed holiday, but they are alright. As is Miss Webber, at least as far I know."
The young man nodded and looked ahead.
Ahead meant below: they were descending the hill toward the cool and defining embrace of the trees. Not long ago, many hurried and bloodied feet had descended here where usually it was only Dame Ashbroom and her chosen few who were allowed to pass. "We lost her in there," he muttered, because down there a singular and personal loss and fright had joined all the broader losses and frights of that night.
"Lost--" Liessel felt her awareness of where they were heading sharpen. It would be the first time she'd set foot down this far on the hill, and there was much about the place she didn't know yet. But, at the same time, a piece of her softened as she turned her head to catch Adam in her gaze, "The Dame?"
The question came quietly, lending to the heaviness of Adam's revelation a respect for what had happened before.
"Adeline," Adam said, looking around them. The trees were still a distance below. "This was all a battleground, but we had some iron, and the soldiers that had come had guns. Aurelia by that time had her gifts"--his nod toward the Dame dubbed her the 'her' in question this time--"and we left the Dame behind because she said she needed to hold the hill."
If the Dame could hear them, and she was well ahead now, she did not turn her head or interject.
"One moment I knew where we all were, and then, down in there, Adeline was gone, and we didn't learn until later what had become of her. This spring is ours, but maybe it doesn't know that." Adam narrowed his eyes. One a real eye, and one that had been among those "gifts" borne away by Aurelia that night.
Liessel still clutched at the strap to her Flynn kit, keeping it from swaying too heavily as they walked, and as she listened. Her eyes searched the trees ahead of them, as if ghosts of that day might still be lurking within the shadows down there. "That must have been shortly before Mister McDowell and I found you in that garden-space."
She drew a breath and glanced his way as they walked, "What happened to her -- Adeline? When I met her, she had come off that ship -- the Drake -- with Singh, clad in iron armor."
Adam looked at her. It was only with a painful gradualness that he had come in his life come to understand what it meant to have holes in knowledge. And more than that, holes in knowledge to which he'd been naively oblivious because of a great fabric of assumptions that he himself had no habits of challenging. He liked to believe that he was learning, but every now and then a topic or a fact appeared before him that reminded him that there were still stories he thought he knew very well, that he couldn't have recounted to another person for the life of him. "He took her through it, somehow. --Or the dragon ghost did. Tianjur. They'd been looking for her. I don't know by what magic a spring told them where she was, but that seems to be what happened."
Liessel's head shifted in a small nod, her eyes finding the tree line again. How Cyrus could have been capable of it, or how Tianjur could have been the one to do it, Liessel had no idea herself. What she could offer seemed like a silly thing to say. It sounded like something a child would offer to a conversation they barely understood, but those types of things often held the purest crystal of truth within them. "Water speaks," She told Adam, "It babbles. Perhaps Cyrus had the ears to hear, if it was him. If it was Tianjur -- that dragon was capable a great deal beyond my scope of understanding, so that would not surprise me either. In any case, I am glad to hear that they, one of them at least, had been the one to find her. I'm glad it didn't end with the soldiers getting their hands on her."
Nodding, the young man with a pearl for an eye thought about that. "I say it to you because we are about to cross through the same way, and I trust the Dame to safeguard us, but I wanted you warned." He wrestled with something--there was some skin of quiet fight about him--and then added softly to her: "... in case no one else should think to warn you."
"Thank you, Adam," Liessel was looking back his way for a moment, " The question of how we were going to get there hadn't occurred to me. I appreciate your warning." The small smile she gave him didn't last for long because her attention was shifting. Liessel turned it toward her bag and made quick work of securing the flap that covered the opening of the bag. She cinched it down tight as they walked, balancing the contents, or shifting them as needed, in order to make the pack tight enough so that nothing within, nothing precious to her, would be lost should the means be bumpier than it sounded.
The Dame's back grew smaller as she left them behind, not slowing down as they had. Adam had no doubt that she would wait for them, but he watched her now. "She's always been kind," he said aloud, glancing at Liessel as she finished her preparations. "She's always been good. I trust her still. But take my hand if you need to. No insult to her that I think that, even with her kindness and goodness, folk like us need to look out for each other."
Another glance was shot Adam's way, the weight of her bag falling heavily against her shoulder again as she let it go. Waymaker was the heaviest thing she was carrying, the haft of the weapon snugged up against one corner of the bag and situated so that it sat to the outside of the strap.
Liessel was then considering the faint form of Amrilaine as the distance between them got bigger. It wasn't the woman, exactly, that Liessel was considering, though. It was what was yet to come, "I appreciate that, as well," She told the pearl-eyed man, "and I just might need to. I -- don't think I need to tell you that I've never done anything like this before."
He smiled a little. "I'm a novice, too. When Aurelia took us through, she had half of the Starstone. I don't know how the Dame does it without that rock."
The ancient Once-Warden disappeared into the shade that hugged the foot of the hill.
Soon enough, Liessel would see through the brush there, and along the first gentle curve of a footpath. Sunset had put the world into a patchwork of shadow and dark and rich, wine colors that were as much of the mind as of the eye. The shadows ahead of them crowded in, gentle hands along the last stretch of the hill, and when they passed into the corridor of cool between the leaning trunks, the air changed.
It moved only lazily in here, a soft living breath. Here was a place of ancient footfalls. This was a sacredness. What for Adam had been a traumatic, panting flight from friends turned foes, was on this day a soft sense of age and settled contentment. Only as they went along might she begin to pick out shapes along the ground, like overgrown nuts or odd pinecones. Offerings. Some broken, some whole. Many furred with moss or beflowered by lichen.
She could have made some guesses as to how the Dame did it. But they, too, seemed like the type of thing a child would come up with and had no place on her lips as they came upon the footpath. The gentle stretch of shadows had her eye, the rich color had her breath.
She thought she knew places similar to this, she thought she had seen something close to this before, and then the air changed as they passed beneath the passage of leaning trunks and offerings made to the land. She took in a breath, trying to not let the air fill her too deeply. It was not fear that controlled how she breathed. It was reverence. Her right hand was there, releasing the strap of her bag so that it could settle over her heart the way a Catholic might cross themselves upon entering a church.
Liessel took it all in as they passed, and found herself whispering, "It is beautiful, Adam." on a breath so soft that it barely shook her when she spoke.
Surprised, he looked at her and then looked around again himself. Apprehension--and memory--had him wary and unobservant, too tense to see even out of his good eye. Liessel's wonder struck him. Suddenly, he remembered what the Adam Larrow of so recently as late July would have thought had he at last been given permission to come this way. That Adam Larrow would have been bundled in awe. Untainted awe, and a sense of accomplishment, of elevation and an invitation to share the secrets.
Up ahead, the Dame could be seen in the thicker purples, banded by dark from above, and a sense of a glow that was not really there from below. She was waiting after all, now.
The offerings were mostly very small, and were there in ranks and bunches around the feet of the trees and could be seen poking up everywhere through years of leaf fall. Only the path was clear of them.
That path was traveled by feet who knew well how to be careful in their passing. Not even her boots made her steps feel clumsy in the thick of those trees as she traveled along that path with Adam toward where Lady Ashbroom waited.
As they got closer, Liessel's hand fell to the flap of her bag as if to make sure that it was, in fact, as secure as it could be made. The canvas-like fabric did not bunch or move so much as a hair beneath her touch.
There was a spiderweb of something in the air. The skin knew it was there; the eye couldn't find it. This little footpath breathed power. That reverence that Liessel sensed had seeped into the very earth and made holy even this place's shadows and decay.
As they neared, the Dame smiled at them and eyed Adam sidelong for a few more of their strides before she said in a hushed voice, "I'm sorry you first saw this in flight, Adam. Not even in the old days was blood shed here. Not by enemies of all kinds. For all, this was not to be touched."
Adam tried to remember if any blood had been actively shed along this path when he and so many others had carried Temmis this way, and found that he simply could not recall. Had the fae--Folk whose names he knew--Folk, some of whom he again associated with now--fallen back against the power of the breath of this place? It was all a blur to him. Maybe Aurelia would remember more clearly.
To the Dame, he asked in the same warm kind of whisper: "Has this always been here?"
"For as long as I've known of this hill," Amrilaine told him, and inclined her head to Liessel. "We go through the water of a spring up ahead. We'll join hands, and you will follow me without fear."
There wasn't really a weight to what she was aware of. But there was presence, and it was powerful. It radiated from everything around them. If she had felt the heartbeat of the land that The Bells was settled on, that hill beyond the great hall, then this was like being aware of an entire being and not just its heartbeat.
Even within the temple of The Guardians had she not felt something like this. It was close, her sense of that temple versus her sense of this, but the latter was still not on the same level. It felt wrong to breathe in this place, it felt wrong to carry her steps forward no matter how the ground might welcome it.
Liessel found herself focusing on the feeling as Adam and Amrilaine spoke, feeling as if she should have not come in a waistcoat and pants, but wrapped in the vestments of her order with a gift of her own to offer to the ancient land across which they traveled.
We go through the water --
Liessel blinked, bringing herself back into the conversation and gave a small nod to the Once-Warden, "I understand." She said, not daring to say more than that. To speak more felt as if it might cause her words to whither and fade like flowers at the end of their bloom. They were too dull, too out of place for a place like this.
Dame Ashbroom turned and moved on, her own footfalls as soft as if she were barefoot. Adam let Liessel precede him on the narrow path, but stayed close.
Ahead, the notion of a glow was traded for the certainty of one. A soft, warm blue-green that brushed the edges of trunks and the undersides of leaves.
The path turned to pale sand, like washed river silt left here long ago. Ahead, across where the path widened to a forgotten and dry bank, and beyond where the sense of space opened and canopy was higher above them, lay the source.
A spring.
A small, crystal clear basin of a spring, with a few leaves floating in it, and some hints of washed in soil. It was no grand expanse. One person could wash their feet in it at a time.
Her appreciation for the place she had been brought to only seemed to deepen as they continued onward. Every step seemed to strengthen the idea of what she was feeling until they reached the spring and Liessel felt her breath catch.
It was small, the spring itself, but size had nothing to do with anything at all just then. She found herself looking around, first, to see the trees that surrounded while their limbs stretched up and made a cathedral of the space.
And then a thought hit her, strange as strange could be in a place like this: at least it wasn't a dark hole in the ground.
Adam did not remember the tiny spring as clear. He did not recall it as looking like this, but of course he'd been chased, and then desperate to find Adeline, and just now it was Liessel, and him, and the Dame, and no one else. The peace of a mere three visitors made all the difference.
Every breath brought in the scent of water, the taste.
The spring was very shallow, and from it ran a trickle.
Dame Ashbroom left prints in the pale sand as she crossed toward it. When she was near, but not so near as to disturb the water's edge, she held out her left hand over it, palm down. The ancient woman closed her eyes. Her other hand went from her side and closed, strangely, as if she gripped a staff. She held nothing, but Adam saw that even with only a near fist, her knuckles whitened as if there was something there that affected the pressure on her flesh.
"You and I know and love each other well," she said. "There is no spell now, until a new one is born. As agreed, my friend, we will use a memory instead."
Amrilaine stepped closer to the water's edge, and Liessel's steps slowed to a stop. There was no way to not stand too heavily in this place simply by virtue of being present. She'd leave her mark behind; her covered feet were the stamp that would make the mark.
Another strange thought came to her then, as she watched the Dame at work. If she had been barefoot, then her mark made would be lighter. If she had only known that this is what she was going to encounter.
Her right hand rose again, touching to her forehead and then her heart as Ashbroom spoke. Liessel didn't pray. Not here. Not in this place where the breath of the world brushed against her skin as if it were the only thing driving the breeze. But she made the motion, and then glanced Adam's way as if finally remembering that he was there with her.
Today he wore the eyepatch Liessel had made for him, and did not seem now to notice any longer the subtle turn of his head that gave his human eye the broadest forward scope. He'd quieted. He stood there watching, and breathing this in. Whatever else he was now, not long ago he had been a student of Amrilaine. A disciple, even. And this place... As with Liessel, it seemed in harmony with something visceral and also something lighter than air. Unlike with Liessel, he felt pressure from the presence of the place against a new seed of skepticism within him. The pressure showed him just where his wounds lay.
No voice answered the Dame, but she nodded as if she'd heard one. "The last hand here upon that spell was that of my successor, whose name is Aurelia, who passed this way with many, friend and foe, and that is the memory I choose. A remembered guide. A remembered spell. A remembered stone."
Stepping back, she turned and reached out her hand for those behind her. Her fingers made a flick, and the unseen rod or staff that Adam thought might have been there was discarded or vanished, so that, as she had told them, they could join hands.
Small, quiet Liessel, with touch that rivaled the brush of a feather, took in a breath that lifted her shoulders which was then released slowly as Amrilaine turned toward where she stood next to Adam.
In The Garden, she had held his hand to help steady him. In this place, it was her hand he'd be holding for the same. Lightly, gently, Liessel's hand found his. Her fingers would lace with his own if he allowed it, and she would wait for confirmation from him before starting forward.
Adam took Liessel's hand without looking, but when she moved to interlace their fingers, he had to see what she was doing and glanced to her face. He'd not known what to say to her at the Garden, though he'd felt some measure of what she had from Arthur. After, he'd been useful, because the Pearl was with him, but his impressions of her as quiet and a little removed had kept his impression of her limned in the same sort of soft respect that he still found himself feeling from the Dame and some of the Folk. He let their fingers form a snug bond.
The Dame did not step forward.
It was the little spring, with its tiny trickle, that changed first.
Someone who was not there cast a shadow that was unseen. Sensed, it moved. It did so with a compact echo of substance. Without color and without so much as a haziness to show any dimension or feature, for those present, who knew Aurelia, it was clearly some reverberation of her. That knowledge simply arrived, full-thought, in the mind.
Aurelia.
And something else: an equally shapeless but heavy sense. Something with a gravitational pull.
The bespelled Starstone.
Her hand clasped against Adam's, Liessel found herself braced against the want to look around. It was like walking into a room to know that Aurelia was there, but her head had to turn in order to see the lovely redhead.
Liessel did not look around. She didn't let her mind tell her which shadow she might find her friend in because she knew that Aurelia wasn't there. Aurelia had left the evening before in the company of the best magicians a person could ever know.
And then, along with that sense of her roommate and sister, Liessel was also aware of something else. It had confounded Aurelia for a great portion of the day, that half of a stone. It had helped pull them from the trap that Esteban had sprung in the depths of Kilkare, yanking them free from the maze of magic and illusion that had taken years of her life in the matter of five minutes. It had hung in the sky, bright as any sun that she had ever seen.
Are you alone?
London Bridge is falling down --
We will find a way. Make it stick.
On the count of three --
Liessel went forward, moving to meet where Amrilaine stood, leading gently so as not to tug Adam along with her.
The spring's edge expanded outward in all directions. The tiny heart of it, a deep blue, began to dilate too. The mere memory of a spell now dead, bound to a rock now shattered, called forth, directed by Amrilaine the Once-Warden and whoever it was on the other side of her quiet conversation.
When Liessel joined her more closely, she'd find her lips moving now. The whispered edges of words were there, and they were not English.
Adam was there, too, either remembering or taking in this more peaceful experience--or both. He reached up once, but arrested the motion. As if he'd felt the urge to lift the eyepatch.
It had remained, even as more than just the powerful presence of the place began to exist, that feeling of any step being too heavy of a step. Barely any sound came from her boots as she carefully stepped up closer to Amrilaine, Adam at her side.
Her mouth, Liessel shut tightly to forbid the gasp that she wanted to take as the heart of the spring began to open, the edge of the water expanding. It was not fear that wanted to carry her breath. The color of the thing had to be the purest shade of blue she'd ever seen!
The soft, barely there words from the Once-Warden were the reason for her holding back on her gasp. Whatever spell work this was, whatever those words meant, it seemed disrespectful to let her wonder have its way.
This had been a rush--a run for many lives--hope of answers--hope of cures, and bandages, and rest--
The Tor had been a place that Adam had believed could provide respite. Salvation. Just as the Bells had before the Bells had proven vulnerable. Adam Larrow had simply moved his faith westward when this beloved spot had failed to be invincible. Then the Tor, too, had shown itself to be more complicated than a shining beacon of refuge.
The quiet now--he suspected that this was the quiet of centuries. That this glow and this gentle reverence were how a thousand years of travelers had understood this hidden hollow.
The water pushed across the sand, seeping in, the volume growing. It was the exhale of something enormous and at peace. It washed first against the toes of Dame Ashbroom's boots, but a mere second later Liessel's too, and then Adam's. It spread and spread, reflections at the edges, clarity where it deepened, the light a glory that never intensified to hurt the eyes.
It rushed between roots and pushed leaves along. With a swirling sound of splashing and currents finding their paths, it would soon be up to their ankles, and would keep going. But even by the eye, they stood now in what would always be the shadows. The depths fell down before them, that dark jewel blue marking where the earth fell away into a spiral-edged deepness and away.
Liessel watched, her young hazel eyes keen on taking in the changes of the water as it spread, seeping out of the confines of the small basin that had contained it when they'd arrived just moments ago. Like a gentle wave pushing outward, a light lap at the earth, the water expanded.
It moved not as if it had a mind of its own, but as if it were being directed, she thought. The gentle expansion coming on in not a gush of water, but a push that had a sense of its own timing. Its own need to fill in the edges of where they stood, its own need to find the edges of their shoes and rise from there.
Watching this happen did not prepare Liessel for the feeling of the cool water against her skin. The gasp she had wanted to make earlier forced itself out of her lungs as water seeped in over the tops of her boots where it touched and cooled the warmth of her ankles.
That gasp felt like it was swallowed up by what happened after. The water kept coming. It kept rising, and then the edges of the world fell away, the earth beneath them fell away, and Liessel found herself gently squeezing the hands that held hers, Adam and Amrilaine.
It would not take them. The throat of the spring did not eat the ground away so far as that.
No, they would have to walk into the deeps themselves, or dive.
The Dame's lips stopped moving, and she turned her head to meet Liessel's eyes, and Adam's eye, and then she did move forward, making glassy ripples. She would pull Liessel along if need be, but this was how it was done.
No great dragon-headed boat out of the mist; no flight. The water was the way.
This is how it was done. Aurelia would have warned her if there was something she needed to know, something that was striking than the means of travel itself. Adam, too, had said it was safe. Amrilaine, herself --
Liessel met the Dame's gaze, swallowing her trepidation of the unknown. Then she blinked, and lifted one foot and then the other to follow Lady Ashbroom through the waters.
She remembered something, then, about the day she had met Ashbroom and Larrow. Larrow's cards had been waterlogged, washed out and made imperfect by the heavy touch of water. Had this been how it happened? She, also, thought she remembered stories of washing up in The Tor but the details were fuzzy, tinged with the heavier memory of the Kingsboon and what it did for her focus on the world around her and those within it.
Something had been missing, but Adam only realized that when it suddenly arrived.
A jitter in the air. A buzz.
A hum.
It seemed to come up into the air from the water itself.
The Dame's clothes began to fan sluggishly along the surface of the water as she moved, and some small pockets of air billowed up. "Do you see the sky?" she asked softly--not looking at Liessel or Adam, so perhaps she was speaking to both, or even without full realization. "Do you see that orange line along the clouds?"
The spring was still blue blue. A deep sapphire below them as their movements stirred the fine silt.
The surface was full of their ripples, and full of the twilight silhouettes of the trees.
Widdershins--
That hint of Aurelia again, as if she'd passed and one was left with the aroma of her perfume.
“Widdershins turn I, singing it low...."
Every now and then, when the surface ripples met just right, there was a fiery, broken scattering of orange.
Liessel's own clothes were too tightly fitting, too well tailored, to float in the water. Instead, the fabric she wore hung from her, sticking and moving like a second skin as the water soaked into the fibers.
Amrilaine's question got a glance from Liessel, breaking her away from watching the water, and that beautiful deep blue.
And Aurelia, there again, as if she'd come and gone. Liessel's first instincts were to look and see if she could find her friend there among the shadows, but those instincts she knew were wrong. It was her mind tripping up against sensations that didn't exist. Aurelia was not there with them.
What was, what caught Liessel's attention as she looked back toward the water and its ripples and shadows of trees, was that scattering of broken orange, the firey color setting in deeply against that perfect blue.
From somewhere, Liessel found her voice. "Yes." She felt herself whisper in answer to Lady Ashbroom's question.
Adam's nod came without words to draw attention to it.
"Sunset is just past there, too," the Dame told them. Though she went slow, she had not stopped, and now her buoyancy made the steps lighter, more bounding. One stride pulled her arm and Liessel's out straight, but she did not let go. "We go under, my dears. Don't think: DO."
She took in a breath and pushed up, so that when she came down she was entirely submerged.
Don't think.
Just do.
Don't think.
Just do.
Her own steps were more floaty than actual steps, more of a glide through the water than the push of feet against solid ground.
With her hands held, Liessel closed her eyes for a brief second while drawing in as deep a breath as she could make her lungs take, and then she was plunging herself down into the water after Amrilaine.
It was like the Fens.
It might have been exactly the same, the same riding energy. It had begun along the offering-filled path, but once submerged it rushed in on all of them. A crispening of the outlines of bodies that loomed with the threat that that which was crisp might be brittle, and that which was brittle could blow apart. Adam's hand tightened on Liessel's in the churning bubbles and sparkling clouds of stirred-up silt.
If her eyes were open, it would seem as if there had to be sunlight shining down into this crystal spring, making all around them a shining blue-green. If her eyes were open, and she looked up--
Her own reflection might stare down at her for a lightning flash of a moment, before in the waves she would see not the leaning trees and twilight shadows of the wood, but that orange-ribboned sky, already darkening through a shaded rose.
She hadn't really been aware of it while they were approaching the spring, her mind had been too preoccupied with taking everything in. Once in the water, though, with those bubbles and that silt churning around her, Liessel had no choice but to shut her eyes against the churning.
Her head felt light, as if it might disconnect itself from her shoulders. The hand that Adam clamped onto felt as if it were someone else's, connected to her by some odd length of feeling that wasn't completely her own. Even with that feeling, her hand tightened around Adam's in return.
The topsy-turvy sensation was inescapable. It came on in a rush, filling her so fast that had she not been trying to desperately to hold her air in her lungs, Liessel would have gasped. Had she been on land, she might have collapsed to the ground for fear of falling over from the fullness of it. In the water, all she could do was close her eyes, try not to let her breath escape her, and hold on as tightly as she could until the trip was over.
Liessel had left the fine skirts and confining corsets of a girl her age at home for this trip. She came to The Bells wearing a well-tailored waistcoat of a red so dark it might have been called burgundy, or wine, and grey pants that were the same color as the pinstriping that ran the length of her well cut waistcoat. She wore no hat this time, either, and her Flynn kit hung heavy off of her shoulder.
Eli knew where she was going. Cog knew, as well. She made certain that she'd given them her whereabouts before leaving the house -- just in case. She also made it known, when she reached The Bells that she needed to talk to one of the Ashbrooms before she and the Greatmother got underway.
That's where she was, then, her time waiting spent by her father's side as they talked quietly in the space that had been set aside for him, her hand held in his.
Just where exactly did the Ashbrooms live?
There were private rooms in the guild hall, but it was not clear in fact that any of them were permanently occupied. Whatever the case, when Liessel arrived and found her father either in the main hall, in his room in the back, or on the hill, neither Ashbroom was there. The sun was halfway disappeared in the west, in fact, before up the hill came two figures. The shorter one was the Dame. The taller one was not tall enough to be Temmis. They came up through the twilight, walking close, their pace thoughtful as they spoke lowly, and the figure speaking with Dame Ashbroom wore an eyepatch and his sleeves rolled to his elbows.
The Dame wore a skirt with a hem of short fringe, the color happening to match that of Liessel's waistcoat. She wore a loose blouse, untucked, and a light summer shawl about her shoulders that was creamy white and also fringed. Her silver-white hair was loose and glorious, curling well past her shoulders, a few tiny, half-hidden braids poking out from underneath here and there.
Adam Larrow had probably arrived in the clothing he'd worked all day in. His brown waistcoat was half-buttoned, and his trousers were a beige with faint pinstriping. Everything about him, from his own dark curls to the tips of his shoes, looked a little worn. He was tidy--or at least could tidy up--but he was not a rich man. At least at his own waist there hung his leather pack from his belt, where he carried a deck of tarot cards as he often had in the past.
"Dove," Her father broke away from what he had been saying, that small shift coming with a nod of his head down the hill toward where Amrilaine was walking with Adam.
They had been talking about Gerold. They had been talking about many things. But the shift in her father was enough to cause her to turn where she sat at the foot of his chair and cast her gaze down the way he had nodded.
"Go ahead," She also heard him say, his hand slipping from hers. He was doing considerably better in The Bells, far better than she thought he would. It made her reluctant to leave his side, but he urged her on once more.
She took that gentle urging and pushed herself to her feet while checking the weight of her bag to keep it from becoming ungainly as she stood. "I love you, Poppa," Liessel said, leaning in to give him a kiss to his cheek before she turned and headed down the hill to meet Adam and Amrilaine as they came up the hill.
Liessel Erphale's frequent visits had by now made her presence part of the Bells' normalcy. She'd brushed elbows with the regulars, and learned names, and seen many of the odder Folk who had gradually recovered from shame or injury to return to this beloved hill after Esteban's machinations had led to the wholesale theft of their wills. One person who had not been on the hill or in the hall so frequently--or at all, in fact, while she'd been there after her father had arrived--was Adam, but he saw her coming down the slope as he and the Dame went up. His expression was somber, and he did not right away smile hello, because Amrilaine was murmuring something to him.
So it was Dame Ashbroom's smile that came first when she lifted her head and finished speaking. It was a shift of modes, and she hailed Liessel with a hand. "Adam has asked to join us," she said, "though his business there differs from yours."
Adam's shift from seriousness took a second longer and followed a nod of greeting to Liessel. He loosened himself up and did find a smile. "Good evening--I hope you don't mind."
It was not a look she had become accustomed to on Adam's face. His smile always seemed so easy in these days after Esteban, at least they did when he was in good company. She did have to admit to herself that she did not really know him that well, still, so what basis did she really have to go on? Just those few visits after the fact, and that was all.
Her gaze, as she came in close enough to speak with the two of them, swept from Amrilaine toward Adam and then back again, "No, that's fine. I do not mind at all. Is everything alright?"
She answered, and while she did Liessel was already reaching into her Flynn kit for her notebook.
"As well as anything," Adam said--and then quietly added: "These are days of confusion and questions. Hunts for information for more than a few of us." The smile widened into something tinged with a little apology.
Liessel's answering smile was small and came as she drew her notebook out and shifted it into her left hand so she could reach out with her right and lay it lightly against Adam's arm, "I hope that your hunt bears some fruit, Mister Larrow. But on the note of hunting for information," Her hand left Adam's arm lightly, but fell heavily to hang against the strap of the bag she kept her Flynn kit supplies in while she looked toward Lady Ashbroom, "I have news from Aurelia regarding Mother Blackthorn."
The Dame's attention sharpened, and the Once-Warden asked, "What news?"
Mother Blackthorn--the entire cosmos of topics surrounding the Dark Mother of the Woods and her odd intervention (non-intervention?) during the crisis--had been the subject of no small amount of activity afterward, here at the Bells, and outward from it. Hope and interest sparked a light in the ancient woman's eyes.
Liessel's next breath was shallow, and uneasy, "She said that Cyrus sent left word for her in The Fens. Mother Blackthorn and Missus White are working together, speaking together about how to reshape things into the way they were -- the old ways. The pact we were pushed into-- the Wardens, Warriors and Witnesses -- Mother Blackthorn believes that we are now bound to carry this through, even though we did not know what the pact was at the time and we still do not know now. They are looking for Mister Veleith, with the hope that he can help them get their hands on Esteban's ashes."
Dame Ashbroom didn't move for a long moment. When she did, her expression pinched in dismay or confusion or both. "I'm not sure I follow. The way they were--in what sense? The old ways in what sense?" Just to start there.
Adam, who remembered well Missus White, and Aurelia's reaction to her, and what had happened to him at her hands--even if he'd let it happen, didn't look any less stunned than the Dame.
Liessel's hands moved, her right hand falling to rest around her left wrist where she had a piece of string tied. She rarely wore it around the house, or around Flynn and Flynn anymore, but when out or around those she did not know very well, she tended to rely on the little strand of enchanted fiber to fill the gaps that others might mind where she knew her friends didn't.
It was still there she could feel it beneath the fabric of the white shirt she wore. "I cannot say, though my translation of it might be off. Aurelia told me, and her words were: "shaping things back into the ways of the old."
Adam looked to the Dame at that, but the Dame herself frowned just as far from comprehension as before. "Well, I shall ask her when we arrive just what this business is about."
"I am sorry I cannot be more clear than that." Liessel said before casting a look back up the hill toward where her father was perched in his chair. He was just a blot to her where they were standing, all definition of him aside from the shape of him was taken up into the shadow of the falling night, and through the distance. She drew a breath, and looked back toward Adam and Amrilaine, "But I am ready to go when you are."
The Dame nodded and did not quite smile, though all the makings of a smile were hinted at in the way she held her face. "Do you know the way? Did they tell you, Aurelia and Adeline?"
"No, Aurelia and I had little time left between us when she told me the news. She, and the Flynns, left right afterward. And its been a few days since I spoke to Miss Webber." Her right hand relaxed away from her left wrist, her idle checking brought enough piece of mind to her that the string was still there and intact. It allowed her go from grasping at her wrist to wrapping her hand around the strap of her Flynn kit once more.
Adam began softly: "I think she meant--"
"I meant, did they share the tale with you of how we reach the Tor without a train," the Dame interrupted, "but it matters not. Come with me, my friends. We go by water."
Adam slowed a little, waiting for Liessel, falling back, so that he could softly ask, "Are they all well?"
The answer was still no, and Liessel was left shaking her head just as Amrilaine said it mattered not.
As Lady Ashbroom began moving, Liessel fell into step and found herself walking beside Adam.
"They are," Liessel said, giving Adam a small smile that she had found somewhere beneath the weight of the news she had brought with her, "Aurelia and the Flynns have gone on a much needed holiday, but they are alright. As is Miss Webber, at least as far I know."
The young man nodded and looked ahead.
Ahead meant below: they were descending the hill toward the cool and defining embrace of the trees. Not long ago, many hurried and bloodied feet had descended here where usually it was only Dame Ashbroom and her chosen few who were allowed to pass. "We lost her in there," he muttered, because down there a singular and personal loss and fright had joined all the broader losses and frights of that night.
"Lost--" Liessel felt her awareness of where they were heading sharpen. It would be the first time she'd set foot down this far on the hill, and there was much about the place she didn't know yet. But, at the same time, a piece of her softened as she turned her head to catch Adam in her gaze, "The Dame?"
The question came quietly, lending to the heaviness of Adam's revelation a respect for what had happened before.
"Adeline," Adam said, looking around them. The trees were still a distance below. "This was all a battleground, but we had some iron, and the soldiers that had come had guns. Aurelia by that time had her gifts"--his nod toward the Dame dubbed her the 'her' in question this time--"and we left the Dame behind because she said she needed to hold the hill."
If the Dame could hear them, and she was well ahead now, she did not turn her head or interject.
"One moment I knew where we all were, and then, down in there, Adeline was gone, and we didn't learn until later what had become of her. This spring is ours, but maybe it doesn't know that." Adam narrowed his eyes. One a real eye, and one that had been among those "gifts" borne away by Aurelia that night.
Liessel still clutched at the strap to her Flynn kit, keeping it from swaying too heavily as they walked, and as she listened. Her eyes searched the trees ahead of them, as if ghosts of that day might still be lurking within the shadows down there. "That must have been shortly before Mister McDowell and I found you in that garden-space."
She drew a breath and glanced his way as they walked, "What happened to her -- Adeline? When I met her, she had come off that ship -- the Drake -- with Singh, clad in iron armor."
Adam looked at her. It was only with a painful gradualness that he had come in his life come to understand what it meant to have holes in knowledge. And more than that, holes in knowledge to which he'd been naively oblivious because of a great fabric of assumptions that he himself had no habits of challenging. He liked to believe that he was learning, but every now and then a topic or a fact appeared before him that reminded him that there were still stories he thought he knew very well, that he couldn't have recounted to another person for the life of him. "He took her through it, somehow. --Or the dragon ghost did. Tianjur. They'd been looking for her. I don't know by what magic a spring told them where she was, but that seems to be what happened."
Liessel's head shifted in a small nod, her eyes finding the tree line again. How Cyrus could have been capable of it, or how Tianjur could have been the one to do it, Liessel had no idea herself. What she could offer seemed like a silly thing to say. It sounded like something a child would offer to a conversation they barely understood, but those types of things often held the purest crystal of truth within them. "Water speaks," She told Adam, "It babbles. Perhaps Cyrus had the ears to hear, if it was him. If it was Tianjur -- that dragon was capable a great deal beyond my scope of understanding, so that would not surprise me either. In any case, I am glad to hear that they, one of them at least, had been the one to find her. I'm glad it didn't end with the soldiers getting their hands on her."
Nodding, the young man with a pearl for an eye thought about that. "I say it to you because we are about to cross through the same way, and I trust the Dame to safeguard us, but I wanted you warned." He wrestled with something--there was some skin of quiet fight about him--and then added softly to her: "... in case no one else should think to warn you."
"Thank you, Adam," Liessel was looking back his way for a moment, " The question of how we were going to get there hadn't occurred to me. I appreciate your warning." The small smile she gave him didn't last for long because her attention was shifting. Liessel turned it toward her bag and made quick work of securing the flap that covered the opening of the bag. She cinched it down tight as they walked, balancing the contents, or shifting them as needed, in order to make the pack tight enough so that nothing within, nothing precious to her, would be lost should the means be bumpier than it sounded.
The Dame's back grew smaller as she left them behind, not slowing down as they had. Adam had no doubt that she would wait for them, but he watched her now. "She's always been kind," he said aloud, glancing at Liessel as she finished her preparations. "She's always been good. I trust her still. But take my hand if you need to. No insult to her that I think that, even with her kindness and goodness, folk like us need to look out for each other."
Another glance was shot Adam's way, the weight of her bag falling heavily against her shoulder again as she let it go. Waymaker was the heaviest thing she was carrying, the haft of the weapon snugged up against one corner of the bag and situated so that it sat to the outside of the strap.
Liessel was then considering the faint form of Amrilaine as the distance between them got bigger. It wasn't the woman, exactly, that Liessel was considering, though. It was what was yet to come, "I appreciate that, as well," She told the pearl-eyed man, "and I just might need to. I -- don't think I need to tell you that I've never done anything like this before."
He smiled a little. "I'm a novice, too. When Aurelia took us through, she had half of the Starstone. I don't know how the Dame does it without that rock."
The ancient Once-Warden disappeared into the shade that hugged the foot of the hill.
Soon enough, Liessel would see through the brush there, and along the first gentle curve of a footpath. Sunset had put the world into a patchwork of shadow and dark and rich, wine colors that were as much of the mind as of the eye. The shadows ahead of them crowded in, gentle hands along the last stretch of the hill, and when they passed into the corridor of cool between the leaning trunks, the air changed.
It moved only lazily in here, a soft living breath. Here was a place of ancient footfalls. This was a sacredness. What for Adam had been a traumatic, panting flight from friends turned foes, was on this day a soft sense of age and settled contentment. Only as they went along might she begin to pick out shapes along the ground, like overgrown nuts or odd pinecones. Offerings. Some broken, some whole. Many furred with moss or beflowered by lichen.
She could have made some guesses as to how the Dame did it. But they, too, seemed like the type of thing a child would come up with and had no place on her lips as they came upon the footpath. The gentle stretch of shadows had her eye, the rich color had her breath.
She thought she knew places similar to this, she thought she had seen something close to this before, and then the air changed as they passed beneath the passage of leaning trunks and offerings made to the land. She took in a breath, trying to not let the air fill her too deeply. It was not fear that controlled how she breathed. It was reverence. Her right hand was there, releasing the strap of her bag so that it could settle over her heart the way a Catholic might cross themselves upon entering a church.
Liessel took it all in as they passed, and found herself whispering, "It is beautiful, Adam." on a breath so soft that it barely shook her when she spoke.
Surprised, he looked at her and then looked around again himself. Apprehension--and memory--had him wary and unobservant, too tense to see even out of his good eye. Liessel's wonder struck him. Suddenly, he remembered what the Adam Larrow of so recently as late July would have thought had he at last been given permission to come this way. That Adam Larrow would have been bundled in awe. Untainted awe, and a sense of accomplishment, of elevation and an invitation to share the secrets.
Up ahead, the Dame could be seen in the thicker purples, banded by dark from above, and a sense of a glow that was not really there from below. She was waiting after all, now.
The offerings were mostly very small, and were there in ranks and bunches around the feet of the trees and could be seen poking up everywhere through years of leaf fall. Only the path was clear of them.
That path was traveled by feet who knew well how to be careful in their passing. Not even her boots made her steps feel clumsy in the thick of those trees as she traveled along that path with Adam toward where Lady Ashbroom waited.
As they got closer, Liessel's hand fell to the flap of her bag as if to make sure that it was, in fact, as secure as it could be made. The canvas-like fabric did not bunch or move so much as a hair beneath her touch.
There was a spiderweb of something in the air. The skin knew it was there; the eye couldn't find it. This little footpath breathed power. That reverence that Liessel sensed had seeped into the very earth and made holy even this place's shadows and decay.
As they neared, the Dame smiled at them and eyed Adam sidelong for a few more of their strides before she said in a hushed voice, "I'm sorry you first saw this in flight, Adam. Not even in the old days was blood shed here. Not by enemies of all kinds. For all, this was not to be touched."
Adam tried to remember if any blood had been actively shed along this path when he and so many others had carried Temmis this way, and found that he simply could not recall. Had the fae--Folk whose names he knew--Folk, some of whom he again associated with now--fallen back against the power of the breath of this place? It was all a blur to him. Maybe Aurelia would remember more clearly.
To the Dame, he asked in the same warm kind of whisper: "Has this always been here?"
"For as long as I've known of this hill," Amrilaine told him, and inclined her head to Liessel. "We go through the water of a spring up ahead. We'll join hands, and you will follow me without fear."
There wasn't really a weight to what she was aware of. But there was presence, and it was powerful. It radiated from everything around them. If she had felt the heartbeat of the land that The Bells was settled on, that hill beyond the great hall, then this was like being aware of an entire being and not just its heartbeat.
Even within the temple of The Guardians had she not felt something like this. It was close, her sense of that temple versus her sense of this, but the latter was still not on the same level. It felt wrong to breathe in this place, it felt wrong to carry her steps forward no matter how the ground might welcome it.
Liessel found herself focusing on the feeling as Adam and Amrilaine spoke, feeling as if she should have not come in a waistcoat and pants, but wrapped in the vestments of her order with a gift of her own to offer to the ancient land across which they traveled.
We go through the water --
Liessel blinked, bringing herself back into the conversation and gave a small nod to the Once-Warden, "I understand." She said, not daring to say more than that. To speak more felt as if it might cause her words to whither and fade like flowers at the end of their bloom. They were too dull, too out of place for a place like this.
Dame Ashbroom turned and moved on, her own footfalls as soft as if she were barefoot. Adam let Liessel precede him on the narrow path, but stayed close.
Ahead, the notion of a glow was traded for the certainty of one. A soft, warm blue-green that brushed the edges of trunks and the undersides of leaves.
The path turned to pale sand, like washed river silt left here long ago. Ahead, across where the path widened to a forgotten and dry bank, and beyond where the sense of space opened and canopy was higher above them, lay the source.
A spring.
A small, crystal clear basin of a spring, with a few leaves floating in it, and some hints of washed in soil. It was no grand expanse. One person could wash their feet in it at a time.
Her appreciation for the place she had been brought to only seemed to deepen as they continued onward. Every step seemed to strengthen the idea of what she was feeling until they reached the spring and Liessel felt her breath catch.
It was small, the spring itself, but size had nothing to do with anything at all just then. She found herself looking around, first, to see the trees that surrounded while their limbs stretched up and made a cathedral of the space.
And then a thought hit her, strange as strange could be in a place like this: at least it wasn't a dark hole in the ground.
Adam did not remember the tiny spring as clear. He did not recall it as looking like this, but of course he'd been chased, and then desperate to find Adeline, and just now it was Liessel, and him, and the Dame, and no one else. The peace of a mere three visitors made all the difference.
Every breath brought in the scent of water, the taste.
The spring was very shallow, and from it ran a trickle.
Dame Ashbroom left prints in the pale sand as she crossed toward it. When she was near, but not so near as to disturb the water's edge, she held out her left hand over it, palm down. The ancient woman closed her eyes. Her other hand went from her side and closed, strangely, as if she gripped a staff. She held nothing, but Adam saw that even with only a near fist, her knuckles whitened as if there was something there that affected the pressure on her flesh.
"You and I know and love each other well," she said. "There is no spell now, until a new one is born. As agreed, my friend, we will use a memory instead."
Amrilaine stepped closer to the water's edge, and Liessel's steps slowed to a stop. There was no way to not stand too heavily in this place simply by virtue of being present. She'd leave her mark behind; her covered feet were the stamp that would make the mark.
Another strange thought came to her then, as she watched the Dame at work. If she had been barefoot, then her mark made would be lighter. If she had only known that this is what she was going to encounter.
Her right hand rose again, touching to her forehead and then her heart as Ashbroom spoke. Liessel didn't pray. Not here. Not in this place where the breath of the world brushed against her skin as if it were the only thing driving the breeze. But she made the motion, and then glanced Adam's way as if finally remembering that he was there with her.
Today he wore the eyepatch Liessel had made for him, and did not seem now to notice any longer the subtle turn of his head that gave his human eye the broadest forward scope. He'd quieted. He stood there watching, and breathing this in. Whatever else he was now, not long ago he had been a student of Amrilaine. A disciple, even. And this place... As with Liessel, it seemed in harmony with something visceral and also something lighter than air. Unlike with Liessel, he felt pressure from the presence of the place against a new seed of skepticism within him. The pressure showed him just where his wounds lay.
No voice answered the Dame, but she nodded as if she'd heard one. "The last hand here upon that spell was that of my successor, whose name is Aurelia, who passed this way with many, friend and foe, and that is the memory I choose. A remembered guide. A remembered spell. A remembered stone."
Stepping back, she turned and reached out her hand for those behind her. Her fingers made a flick, and the unseen rod or staff that Adam thought might have been there was discarded or vanished, so that, as she had told them, they could join hands.
Small, quiet Liessel, with touch that rivaled the brush of a feather, took in a breath that lifted her shoulders which was then released slowly as Amrilaine turned toward where she stood next to Adam.
In The Garden, she had held his hand to help steady him. In this place, it was her hand he'd be holding for the same. Lightly, gently, Liessel's hand found his. Her fingers would lace with his own if he allowed it, and she would wait for confirmation from him before starting forward.
Adam took Liessel's hand without looking, but when she moved to interlace their fingers, he had to see what she was doing and glanced to her face. He'd not known what to say to her at the Garden, though he'd felt some measure of what she had from Arthur. After, he'd been useful, because the Pearl was with him, but his impressions of her as quiet and a little removed had kept his impression of her limned in the same sort of soft respect that he still found himself feeling from the Dame and some of the Folk. He let their fingers form a snug bond.
The Dame did not step forward.
It was the little spring, with its tiny trickle, that changed first.
Someone who was not there cast a shadow that was unseen. Sensed, it moved. It did so with a compact echo of substance. Without color and without so much as a haziness to show any dimension or feature, for those present, who knew Aurelia, it was clearly some reverberation of her. That knowledge simply arrived, full-thought, in the mind.
Aurelia.
And something else: an equally shapeless but heavy sense. Something with a gravitational pull.
The bespelled Starstone.
Her hand clasped against Adam's, Liessel found herself braced against the want to look around. It was like walking into a room to know that Aurelia was there, but her head had to turn in order to see the lovely redhead.
Liessel did not look around. She didn't let her mind tell her which shadow she might find her friend in because she knew that Aurelia wasn't there. Aurelia had left the evening before in the company of the best magicians a person could ever know.
And then, along with that sense of her roommate and sister, Liessel was also aware of something else. It had confounded Aurelia for a great portion of the day, that half of a stone. It had helped pull them from the trap that Esteban had sprung in the depths of Kilkare, yanking them free from the maze of magic and illusion that had taken years of her life in the matter of five minutes. It had hung in the sky, bright as any sun that she had ever seen.
Are you alone?
London Bridge is falling down --
We will find a way. Make it stick.
On the count of three --
Liessel went forward, moving to meet where Amrilaine stood, leading gently so as not to tug Adam along with her.
The spring's edge expanded outward in all directions. The tiny heart of it, a deep blue, began to dilate too. The mere memory of a spell now dead, bound to a rock now shattered, called forth, directed by Amrilaine the Once-Warden and whoever it was on the other side of her quiet conversation.
When Liessel joined her more closely, she'd find her lips moving now. The whispered edges of words were there, and they were not English.
Adam was there, too, either remembering or taking in this more peaceful experience--or both. He reached up once, but arrested the motion. As if he'd felt the urge to lift the eyepatch.
It had remained, even as more than just the powerful presence of the place began to exist, that feeling of any step being too heavy of a step. Barely any sound came from her boots as she carefully stepped up closer to Amrilaine, Adam at her side.
Her mouth, Liessel shut tightly to forbid the gasp that she wanted to take as the heart of the spring began to open, the edge of the water expanding. It was not fear that wanted to carry her breath. The color of the thing had to be the purest shade of blue she'd ever seen!
The soft, barely there words from the Once-Warden were the reason for her holding back on her gasp. Whatever spell work this was, whatever those words meant, it seemed disrespectful to let her wonder have its way.
This had been a rush--a run for many lives--hope of answers--hope of cures, and bandages, and rest--
The Tor had been a place that Adam had believed could provide respite. Salvation. Just as the Bells had before the Bells had proven vulnerable. Adam Larrow had simply moved his faith westward when this beloved spot had failed to be invincible. Then the Tor, too, had shown itself to be more complicated than a shining beacon of refuge.
The quiet now--he suspected that this was the quiet of centuries. That this glow and this gentle reverence were how a thousand years of travelers had understood this hidden hollow.
The water pushed across the sand, seeping in, the volume growing. It was the exhale of something enormous and at peace. It washed first against the toes of Dame Ashbroom's boots, but a mere second later Liessel's too, and then Adam's. It spread and spread, reflections at the edges, clarity where it deepened, the light a glory that never intensified to hurt the eyes.
It rushed between roots and pushed leaves along. With a swirling sound of splashing and currents finding their paths, it would soon be up to their ankles, and would keep going. But even by the eye, they stood now in what would always be the shadows. The depths fell down before them, that dark jewel blue marking where the earth fell away into a spiral-edged deepness and away.
Liessel watched, her young hazel eyes keen on taking in the changes of the water as it spread, seeping out of the confines of the small basin that had contained it when they'd arrived just moments ago. Like a gentle wave pushing outward, a light lap at the earth, the water expanded.
It moved not as if it had a mind of its own, but as if it were being directed, she thought. The gentle expansion coming on in not a gush of water, but a push that had a sense of its own timing. Its own need to fill in the edges of where they stood, its own need to find the edges of their shoes and rise from there.
Watching this happen did not prepare Liessel for the feeling of the cool water against her skin. The gasp she had wanted to make earlier forced itself out of her lungs as water seeped in over the tops of her boots where it touched and cooled the warmth of her ankles.
That gasp felt like it was swallowed up by what happened after. The water kept coming. It kept rising, and then the edges of the world fell away, the earth beneath them fell away, and Liessel found herself gently squeezing the hands that held hers, Adam and Amrilaine.
It would not take them. The throat of the spring did not eat the ground away so far as that.
No, they would have to walk into the deeps themselves, or dive.
The Dame's lips stopped moving, and she turned her head to meet Liessel's eyes, and Adam's eye, and then she did move forward, making glassy ripples. She would pull Liessel along if need be, but this was how it was done.
No great dragon-headed boat out of the mist; no flight. The water was the way.
This is how it was done. Aurelia would have warned her if there was something she needed to know, something that was striking than the means of travel itself. Adam, too, had said it was safe. Amrilaine, herself --
Liessel met the Dame's gaze, swallowing her trepidation of the unknown. Then she blinked, and lifted one foot and then the other to follow Lady Ashbroom through the waters.
She remembered something, then, about the day she had met Ashbroom and Larrow. Larrow's cards had been waterlogged, washed out and made imperfect by the heavy touch of water. Had this been how it happened? She, also, thought she remembered stories of washing up in The Tor but the details were fuzzy, tinged with the heavier memory of the Kingsboon and what it did for her focus on the world around her and those within it.
Something had been missing, but Adam only realized that when it suddenly arrived.
A jitter in the air. A buzz.
A hum.
It seemed to come up into the air from the water itself.
The Dame's clothes began to fan sluggishly along the surface of the water as she moved, and some small pockets of air billowed up. "Do you see the sky?" she asked softly--not looking at Liessel or Adam, so perhaps she was speaking to both, or even without full realization. "Do you see that orange line along the clouds?"
The spring was still blue blue. A deep sapphire below them as their movements stirred the fine silt.
The surface was full of their ripples, and full of the twilight silhouettes of the trees.
Widdershins--
That hint of Aurelia again, as if she'd passed and one was left with the aroma of her perfume.
“Widdershins turn I, singing it low...."
Every now and then, when the surface ripples met just right, there was a fiery, broken scattering of orange.
Liessel's own clothes were too tightly fitting, too well tailored, to float in the water. Instead, the fabric she wore hung from her, sticking and moving like a second skin as the water soaked into the fibers.
Amrilaine's question got a glance from Liessel, breaking her away from watching the water, and that beautiful deep blue.
And Aurelia, there again, as if she'd come and gone. Liessel's first instincts were to look and see if she could find her friend there among the shadows, but those instincts she knew were wrong. It was her mind tripping up against sensations that didn't exist. Aurelia was not there with them.
What was, what caught Liessel's attention as she looked back toward the water and its ripples and shadows of trees, was that scattering of broken orange, the firey color setting in deeply against that perfect blue.
From somewhere, Liessel found her voice. "Yes." She felt herself whisper in answer to Lady Ashbroom's question.
Adam's nod came without words to draw attention to it.
"Sunset is just past there, too," the Dame told them. Though she went slow, she had not stopped, and now her buoyancy made the steps lighter, more bounding. One stride pulled her arm and Liessel's out straight, but she did not let go. "We go under, my dears. Don't think: DO."
She took in a breath and pushed up, so that when she came down she was entirely submerged.
Don't think.
Just do.
Don't think.
Just do.
Her own steps were more floaty than actual steps, more of a glide through the water than the push of feet against solid ground.
With her hands held, Liessel closed her eyes for a brief second while drawing in as deep a breath as she could make her lungs take, and then she was plunging herself down into the water after Amrilaine.
It was like the Fens.
It might have been exactly the same, the same riding energy. It had begun along the offering-filled path, but once submerged it rushed in on all of them. A crispening of the outlines of bodies that loomed with the threat that that which was crisp might be brittle, and that which was brittle could blow apart. Adam's hand tightened on Liessel's in the churning bubbles and sparkling clouds of stirred-up silt.
If her eyes were open, it would seem as if there had to be sunlight shining down into this crystal spring, making all around them a shining blue-green. If her eyes were open, and she looked up--
Her own reflection might stare down at her for a lightning flash of a moment, before in the waves she would see not the leaning trees and twilight shadows of the wood, but that orange-ribboned sky, already darkening through a shaded rose.
She hadn't really been aware of it while they were approaching the spring, her mind had been too preoccupied with taking everything in. Once in the water, though, with those bubbles and that silt churning around her, Liessel had no choice but to shut her eyes against the churning.
Her head felt light, as if it might disconnect itself from her shoulders. The hand that Adam clamped onto felt as if it were someone else's, connected to her by some odd length of feeling that wasn't completely her own. Even with that feeling, her hand tightened around Adam's in return.
The topsy-turvy sensation was inescapable. It came on in a rush, filling her so fast that had she not been trying to desperately to hold her air in her lungs, Liessel would have gasped. Had she been on land, she might have collapsed to the ground for fear of falling over from the fullness of it. In the water, all she could do was close her eyes, try not to let her breath escape her, and hold on as tightly as she could until the trip was over.