by ‘A game?’ Jay echoed. Released from my mental grip, he took a quick step back from me, shaking his head.
I felt a stab of guilt, and tried an apologetic smile. Jay didn’t smile back.
Note to self, Ves: don’t push your friends around. Ever.
I set the thought aside. ‘A game,’ I repeated. It was a gamble, I admit, but at least maybe we could all get out of this without bloodshed. Or defeat. ‘Winner takes all,’ I added, recklessly.
The fae often like games. I don’t mean cute parlour games like Charades, or a round of Cluedo. The fae — some of them — enjoy risky games with difficult win conditions and high stakes. Beating them at any game they’d consent to play wouldn’t be easy.
But they also tended to be sticklers for honour. If we could pull it off, they’d fulfil any win conditions set.
I certainly had the attention of the glaistigs, though they didn’t speak. All four of them watched me with their pallid eyes, still and focused as a predator stalking defenceless prey…
Jay’s face clearly said: I hope you know what you’re doing, Ves.
I hoped so, too. But I thought of the tricks and stratagems they’d displayed so far — waltzing, for heaven’s sake — and thought that maybe I was on the right track.
They seemed to like playing games.
‘If we win,’ I went on, ‘You consent to let us leave without further interference, and we’re permitted to test our device in the village before we go home.’
The glaistigs didn’t move.
‘If you win,’ I continued, ‘You can do with us whatever you like.’
‘Ves.’ Emellana uttered my name low, warningly. Too late. I could only shrug. I’d committed us, and I’d done so with the fullest confidence that my team could beat these creatures at any conceivable game. There hadn’t really been the option to talk it over first.
And it was still better than a pitched battle. Right?
‘One more thing,’ I added, as the glaistigs stirred. ‘In any duel of honour, the challenged party gets to choose the method of combat. And since we were subjected to an unprovoked attack, and have yet to level any harm whatsoever in return, that privilege is ours.’
Zareen folded her arms. Her expression was hard, unreadable, but her attention was focused on the glaistigs. Emellana had closed up, too, hiding any further thoughts she was experiencing as to my reckless gambit.
Indira and Jay were stoic. I chose to interpret this as support.
‘Not so,’ said the glaistig, the chatty one. ‘You trespassed.’
‘Unknowingly,’ I said quickly. ‘We thought the house empty, because you hid yourselves from us.’
They muttered at this, and a chill wind wafted past my face. I tried not to let my deepening unease show on my face.
‘You trespassed,’ said the glaistig again.
‘Fine. Then there shall be two events, one to be chosen by each party.’
More muttering. More rage.
I stood my ground, and waited.
‘We agree,’ said the glaistig at last.
‘Excellent.’ I beamed, trying not to imagine what they might like to do with us if we lost. ‘What, then, is your choice?’
‘A contest of wits,’ came the answer, though it was not the same glaistig who spoke. This one stood to my right, and came drifting nearer, smiling in ominous fashion. The expression stretched her face too wide.
‘Then our choice shall be a contest of physical valour,’ I countered.
‘Done.’
‘What if it’s a draw?’ asked Jay. ‘We each lose one and win one.’
‘It won’t be a draw.’ I smiled with as much palpable confidence as I could muster. It couldn’t be a draw. We needed to win, decisively enough to leave no doubt in the minds of these ghostly ladies that we’d bested them fair and square. Or there’d be complications, and I hate that.
Jay only sighed.
‘Well then, shall we begin?’ I directed my smile at the more talkative of the glaistigs, and waited.
She did not immediately answer. Instead, she drew herself up to her full height — rather more considerable than mine, though she was shorter than Emellana. I mean, who isn’t?
Something was changing about her. She grew, steadily, less ethereal; more solid; the tattery blue gown mended its rips and rents before my eyes, and knitted itself back into the semblance of a whole, respectable garment. Her hair ceased to toss in an invisible breeze, hanging straight and black around a face no longer withered and weathered with time.
Before me stood a woman who was, unmistakeably, Yllanfalen.
The same transformation took place among her companions, and I mentally rearranged my ideas as to the nature of Silvessen. It had been an Yllanfalen town. Interesting.
Lucky I hadn’t declared a musical contest, although we did have Jay…
‘A contest of wits,’ said the tall Yllanfalen. Her voice had ceased to hiss and slither; now it was ringing and clear. ‘Questions, then.’
By which she meant: riddles. Inevitably. I suppressed a sigh. Fae and their riddles.
‘To win, you must answer three questions to our satisfaction,’ she continued. ‘If you fail to answer all three, the contest is forfeit.’
‘We accept,’ came the answer, though for once it wasn’t from me. It was Indira who spoke, and she uttered the words with every bit as much confidence as our challenger. She’d drawn herself up, too, even if her height wasn’t so imposing, and stood with her chin high.
Interestingly, her dress had also mended itself.
I shot a look at Jay, containing a question. Is she good at riddles?
The tiny smirk I received in reply proved answer enough.
A little of my tension eased.
‘Very well. Then: listen.’ Our challenger looked at each of us in turn. ‘Your first question. Which door leads outside?’
I opened my mouth, foolishly; the answer seemed obvious, therefore it must be anything but.
Even as I framed the thought, the single door set into the far wall became two, then three, then more… the only thing I could feel certain of was: the original door was no longer the exit.
‘I suppose we can’t answer that by just trying them,’ I hazarded.
‘The first door you touch is your chosen answer,’ she replied.
‘Right.’
Indira spoke up. ‘Do you mean outside as in, out of this room? Or outside as in, out of the building?’
‘The latter.’ The words emerged snappishly; our questions were irritating our challenger.
‘Your second question,’ continued the glaistig. ‘How did Silvessen die?’
Not a riddle, then, but a question. A mystery. Unexpected.
‘Your third question: what am I thinking?’
Impossible to answer. The triumphant glint in our opponent’s eyes told me she knew it, too.
I looked at Indira. Her confidence hadn’t flickered.
I took heart.
‘We will require time to confer,’ I said.
‘You have one hour.’ With these words, the glaistig faded away, together with her companions.
We were left alone in the ballroom.
The silence lengthened.
‘Ves,’ Zareen said at last. ‘I’d ask if you’re sure about this, but it’s a bit late, isn’t it?’
‘I am sure,’ I said anyway. ‘We’ve got this.’
‘Might’ve been easier to just leave and pick a new ghost town.’
‘Might have,’ I agreed. ‘But probably not. Couple of hours, and we’ll be out of here.’
She answered only with a sour look, which I decided to interpret as concurrence.
‘So,’ I said, mostly to Indira. ‘We have a history quest, which we like.’
‘I do like history quests,’ she allowed.
‘To solve question two, we first need to get out of here, which means solving question one.’ I smiled hopefully.
‘And question three?’ Emellana put in. ‘That’s the deal-breaker.’
‘I’ll handle question three,’ I answered.
‘How?’
‘By wily means.’
‘In other words, cheating,’ said Jay.
‘Probably. But they cheated by giving us an unanswerable question, so I’d say all’s fair.’
Indira ignored the conversation. Her quick gaze was busy with the doors, all twelve of them.
‘The problem,’ she observed, ‘is: there aren’t any clues.’
True. Each door was identical to all the others: tall, wrought from dark wooden boards and set into stone frames with rounded arches. They all bore a heavy iron handle on the left side.
‘Hang on,’ I said. ‘I’ll ask.’
That won me a mystified look from more than just Indira, but we didn’t have time for a long conversation about it just then. I closed my eyes, tuned out my esteemed colleagues, and focused on the house.
I tried asking directly. Which door would take us outside? I layered the question with visions of fresh air, mud underfoot, and the scents of grass and leaf-mould.
Either the house didn’t understand me, or it didn’t choose to answer. Maybe it favoured the glaistigs. They’d been living here a while, presumably.
So I listened, instead. Go deep, Ves, Ophelia had said, and it had worked before.
I sat down, and dived deep into the stones of the haunted house. The air curled in sluggish gusts, stale; no one had opened a window in many a year. No one had needed to.
I drifted along with it, wafting past door after door. Did I detect a fresher note somewhere? A hint of a brisk breeze streaming under the boards…
No. It wasn’t going to be that simple, either.
Words pierced my awareness. Indira. ‘The first door you touch is your choice,’ she was saying. ‘Can we open them without touching them?’
A thought. A good one.
I caught up a current of air and fashioned it into a shape of my liking: a beguiling tendril, a flexible tool in my hands.
Away drifted my tendril, and tackled the nearest door. The latch clicked open.
I caught up all the air in the room, and sent it sailing after.
The door groaned as it slowly swung open.
I did not pause to survey the effects of my efforts; I still had eleven doors to open. No easy task, this. My focus fractured after the sixth, and only by ferocious effort of will could I bring my mind back to bear.
Five more, then three…
When I opened my eyes, all twelve doors stood open, and my four companions were staring at me with some perplexity.
‘How did you do that?’ Emellana asked.
‘I magicked it up out of thin air,’ I answered. Literally true.
This meant something to Em, though. She nodded, studying my face with interest. ‘You look a little different,’ said she.
‘I… do?’ I patted my hair, looked down at my clothes. No discernible change.
‘Your skin looks…’
Jay finished the sentence for her. ‘Stony.’
Stony? Had I become one with the house so thoroughly that I was starting to meld with it?
Hideous thought. Also, considering what had happened with the Fairy Stone, interesting.
‘It’ll get better,’ I said, with a confidence I had no reason to feel. Now wasn’t the time either to explore that idea or to panic about it. My skin would have to remember what a Ves looks like on its own.
‘Merlin stuff?’ Zareen asked.
‘Presumably. It’s hard to tell.’ Which was true. It’s not like Merlin’s borrowed powers had awarded me some kind of a magickal toolbox I could draw from at will. I could no longer tell where my magickal efforts were coming from; I was just doing different things. Sometimes.
My peculiar efforts had paid off, this time: one of the dozen doors opened onto a barren field of scrubby grass, and in the near distance, the houses of Silvessen.
‘One question down,’ I said, satisfied. ‘Next.’
‘How did Silvessen die.’ Emellana shook her head. ‘There’s so rarely a single reason why a settlement, or a civilisation, fails. The contributing factors are usually myriad, and complex. Understanding them requires far more research than we can accomplish in an hour.’
‘Another unanswerable question, then,’ said Zareen. ‘I think we’ve been tricked.’
‘Probably,’ I said. ‘I mean, there is probably a trick in there somewhere.’
Silence fell. We were all looking at Indira.
‘I have an idea about that,’ she said. ‘But nothing to suggest it might be correct. Did anyone find a library anywhere?’
Jay rolled his eyes. ‘You mean while we were wandering around stewing in our own fears? No.’
‘I did,’ said Emellana. ‘If you could call it that. Only a few volumes survive, and they’re mostly rotted away.’
I thought about consulting Mauf, but discarded the idea. He’d already been consulted, and had uncovered barely anything about Silvessen. Only Sumla of Witheridge’s account of it as ‘a deathly place’, which sounded accurate to me. Plus something about a wand-wright.
‘No library,’ I mused aloud. ‘And no help from Mauf. How do we solve a mystery without books, team?’
‘I hope that isn’t just a hypothetical question,’ said Jay.
‘It’s not. It’s time for a thrilling exercise in impromptu field archaeology.’ I marched towards the door showing us the view of Silvessen; it was probably only ten minutes’ walk from here. Maybe less.
‘We don’t have time for a lot of digging,’ Jay pointed out, but he did follow me.
‘No, true. We’ll have to rely on what we can see above ground.’
‘We do have me,’ Emellana remarked.
Right. Em and her capacity to sense traces of past magicks. ‘You think there might be some magickal reason why Silvessen died?’ I asked.
‘It’s a recurring theme lately.’
‘True,’ I allowed. She was referring to Farringale, plus a few other troll Enclaves that had been choked out by the parasitical ortherex. ‘But this isn’t a troll settlement.’ We could be certain of that. The houses we’d passed in the village were nowhere near large enough, nor did they exhibit any recognisable features of troll architecture.
‘Nonetheless, it’s a possibility,’ Em replied, which was true.
‘Zar,’ I said, as we set off across the rough, half-frozen earth between us and Silvessen. ‘Let us know if you can sense any more lingering spirits somewhere out here.’
‘Didn’t before, but I can try.’
Indira said nothing, which wasn’t unusual. I didn’t press her about the idea she’d mentioned. she didn’t like to hazard guesses unless they were likely to prove correct; I’d noticed this before. Perfectionism, of a sort. She’d tell us when she had evidence, and that had to be good enough.
Back in Silvessen, we gathered in a ragged knot in the middle of the main street, glancing uncertainly at the still and silent houses in their dejected, tumble-down rows. I checked the time. Twenty-two minutes had passed since the challenge began, and we’d need ten minutes to get back to the house. Less than half an hour to investigate.
‘Okay,’ I said. ‘This is one time when it makes sense to split up.’
Jay didn’t oppose me, for once. ‘We’ll go this way,’ he announced, drawing Indira towards the tallest building in the street: a cottage of two complete storeys, the roof mostly fallen in.
Zareen set off in the opposite direction, and Emellana chose to stay where she was. Her eyes were closed. I figured she was communing with the remains of long-faded magicks, and let her be.
I picked a little house with crooked oak beams and gaping windows like lachrymose eyes, and headed for the doorway. Less than half of the door remained, hanging limply from rusted hinges. I stepped over it, and went inside.
I was immediately struck by the strangeness of the place. The remains of furniture were in evidence, albeit of a simple kind: plain oak construction, any upholstery long rotted away. A low table took pride of place in the single chamber, a pair of chairs accompanying it. One of these was pushed back, as if someone had but lately risen from it. But the quantity of dust and mould everywhere told me that couldn’t be the case.
At the rear of the room, an oaken frame suggested the erstwhile presence of a simple bed. Time had reduced the mattress and blankets to a decayed and indeterminate mass; in the gloom, I could distinguish little clearly.
It took me a long moment before I realised, with a thrill of horror, that the bed’s long-dead occupant was still in it.
