by Baroness Tremayne lived between the echoes, as she had once put it. Then again, did she in fact live? Her insubstantial shadow world bore little resemblance to the vivid reality I knew. She’d pulled me sideways, as she had done before, and landed me in the middle of it, with all its darkness and distracting, flickery lights. I was still in the vaulted hall, but in some blurred, altered version. Between the echoes. I still did not understand quite what that meant.
The baroness, unchanged, regarded me gravely. She wore the same wide-skirted silk gown, ruffled with lace; the same artfully piled and curled arrangement graced her white hair. ‘How curious a mind,’ she said. ‘Why do you return here? Did I not already satisfy your needs?’
‘Oh! Yes,’ I said, watching Jay out of the corner of my eye. He was prowling the hall, searching for me, his form shadowed and his movements jerky in my vision. ‘May we invite my companion to join the conversation?’
The baroness did not even blink, but in the next moment Jay stood beside me.
‘Jay, this is Baroness Tremayne,’ I said. ‘The lady who gave us the cure. Baroness, my colleague from the Society, Jay Patel.’
It felt a touch peculiar, making so mundane an introduction under such unusual circumstances. But Jay took it with aplomb. He made the baroness a bow, and flashed one of his more charming smiles. ‘You saved many lives, ma’am.’
‘I could not have done so without you to carry my aid to the afflicted, hence I suffer your presence now.’ She spoke coldly. ‘But you trespass, and you steal. What is it you now want from my poor Farringale?’
‘We are here by royal command,’ I said quickly. ‘Their Majesties at the newer court, Mandridore, seek to learn more of the fate of Farringale, and sent us to discover what we could.’ I opted to keep the other part of their vision, the restoration of the city, to myself for the time being. First things first, and how might the prickly baroness react to the idea?
‘And what is your success?’
Any hopes she might be eager to tell all evaporated on the spot. ‘Well, we have some theories—’
‘As I heard.’
‘Are they… accurate?’
The baroness just looked at me. At last she said: ‘What will become of this knowledge, if ‘tis given to you?’
‘Ah… that would be up to Their Majesties,’ I said tactfully.
Baroness Tremayne said nothing. I could not even tell if she was thinking it over. Her face was impassive.
‘If I may ask,’ Jay stepped in. ‘Why do you linger, Baroness? By whose will, or order?’
‘And, how?’ I added.
The baroness drew herself up. ‘I remain by order of Her Majesty, Queen Hrruna, and His Majesty King Torvaston.’
I exchanged a look with Jay, my heart leaping with excitement. I saw the same hope reflected in his face. But gently, gently; the baroness was wary. ‘Are you here to care for the place?’ I suggested.
Her lips quirked. ‘Care for a dead land? What would be the use, pray?’
‘It isn’t dead, though, is it?’ said Jay. ‘Its people are gone, but the city goes on. The magickal surges. The griffins. The Sweeping Symphony — is that your doing? Everything has changed, and yet, nothing.’
‘And nothing has aged,’ I said. ‘Nothing. Including you.’
‘Requires life, to grow older,’ said she. ‘The life poured out of Farringale long ago, and from me.’
‘You’re an echo,’ I said. ‘Are you? Though we might term it a shade.’
‘Matters the word so greatly?’
Fair point.
‘Baroness,’ said Jay. ‘Please. Tell us what happened when Their Majesties left Farringale.’
‘Her Majesty required a promise of me, and I will keep it. I shall not tell.’
‘Was it Torvaston, the king?’ I probed. ‘He was… ill, wasn’t he? He and many of the Court. Magick-drowned, like Farringale itself.’
Her eyes flicked to me, but still she did not speak. I thought she grew more still and silent with every word I spoke.
Jay said, ‘If Farringale lives on, it is Their Majesties’ doing, and by Their will. It must be. Who else could wield such influence over this place? And they set you and others like you to watch over it all the long ages through. Why? It is because they did not want it to pass out of existence forever. They were trying to preserve it, Baroness, weren’t they? For the future. And we come here by order of Their Majesties’ descendants. They want to restore it to the world. If that day comes, your long vigil will be over and you may rest. Knowing this, will you not help us?’
Baroness Tremayne, caught between a promise to a long-dead queen and a command from the current one, grew hostile. ‘You come from Their Majesties, in sooth? How do I know it to be so? You are mere adventurers. Already you divest Farringale of its treasures.’
I thought guiltily of the jade-coloured book and the jewelled scroll case. ‘We carry some part of those treasures back to the new Court,’ I said. ‘And we are no adventurers. How, if so, do we come to be here at all? There is but one door to Farringale that ever opens now, and there are three keys to open it. Two remain with the Court, as I think you know well, Baroness. How came we to get those keys — not once, but twice — without the Court’s approval? You must know how impossible it must be to take them without it.’
‘And that door is significant, too,’ said Jay. ‘Why leave a way back at all, unless someone, someday, was supposed to use it?’
The mystery of the third key flitted, once more, across my mind. Why did House have the third key? How was it that the Baroness Tremayne knew our House well, as she’d previously claimed? Had someone, so long ago, foreseen the Society, and intended that it should be involved in the ultimate saving of Farringale?
That was absurd, wasn’t it? How could it possibly be so?
I gave my head a shake to clear it. One problem at a time, Ves. (Or, more accurately, seven or eight).
To my intense disappointment, the baroness did not speak again. She looked from Jay to me, visibly torn — and then, with a thin, whispering sigh, faded away. Jay and I found ourselves blinking in the bright light of the hall, the shadowed echoes dissolved around us.
‘Damn,’ said Jay softly.
I was inclined to agree — until I noticed Rob, standing in the middle of the hall with a huge tome in his hands. Another lay at his feet. Both were bound in dark leather, with polished silver hinges.
‘Ouch,’ he said.
‘Ouch?’ I echoed.
‘Came looking for you. Fell over these. We can add “books appearing out of nowhere” to the list of Farringale’s oddities.’
As one, Jay and I rushed over there to look.
The title page of the book Rob held read as follows:
A Treatise Upon Magicke: Its Sources and Histories, penned by Torvaston Brandilowe.
‘From before he became king?’ said Jay. ‘He was a scholar?’
‘Not just any scholar,’ said Rob, holding the book steady as I carefully turned pages. ‘This is about ebbs and flows — what we’re calling surges, is my guess.’
‘And the whole question of Dells and their sources or fonts,’ I added, speedily scanning pages. ‘We have nothing like this.’
Jay squatted down to examine the second book. Smaller than the first, it had a shabbier look about it, as though it had been more regularly used: the leather of its bindings was worn in places, and some of the page edges ragged. ‘Looks like a journal,’ Jay reported. ‘The author doesn’t identify him or herself, but the handwriting’s the same.’
Torvaston’s own diary. My heart beat quick with excitement. What a prize! ‘Written in Court Algatish,’ I said. ‘Archaic usage, naturally. Val and I would need a few weeks alone with these to wring the sense out of them.’
Indira dropped lightly down beside me, descended from somewhere above, and her hands weren’t empty either. She carried a heavy crown, wrought from some metal I did not recognise: it looked coppery, but brighter, and also vivid gold, and somehow silvery as well. Plus, like any good royal crown, it positively blazed with jewels.
‘How did you get that?’ I gasped.
‘I… didn’t? It fell into my hands.’
We all turned to look up at the distant walls where Indira had lately flitted. One of the glass compartments was empty, its glass front not so much broken as absent.
‘Our thanks, Baroness,’ said Jay, echoed quickly by me.
‘Right,’ I said. ‘I think we’ve got enough, for the time being. Let’s go home.’
As may be imagined, the crown in particular caused a sensation back at Mandridore, though I think its effects upon Alban were mixed. Like his adoptive parents, Their Majesties the Royals, he gazed at it with the starry-eyed awe one cannot help feeling in the presence of something so fabulously beautiful and expensive — and, in this case, significant. But in him I detected a trace of dismay, too. Would this ornament, heavy with precious metals and duty alike, someday adorn his head?
Upon our arrival at Their Majesties’ retreat house, we’d been greeted with rapture. By the time we’d arrived, the hour was far advanced and night long since fallen; but if we had turfed our royal employers out of bed, they made no sign of it.
It was just Jay and me again, too. Rob had elected to take Indira home, somewhat to her irritation, but he was right. We weren’t justified in hauling Indira (or Rob either) across the country at three in the morning.
‘Successful venture then, Ves?’ Alban had said when he had collected us from Farringale’s doorstep. I’d fallen into his car, bruised and laden with loot, and groaned.
‘Fabulously,’ I grinned, thrilled despite the bruises. Jay was right behind me, carrying the larger of the two tomes Rob had fallen over, with the crown set atop.
The baron’s — prince’s — brows rose into his hairline at that.
An hour or so later, we’d been plied with refreshments (to my relief), and sat ensconced with Their Majesties in their favourite parlour, our acquisitions set carefully upon a low walnut table nearby. Their Majesties, for a time lost for words, were beginning to rally.
‘We haven’t had chance to read the books closely yet,’ I said. ‘You might do so more speedily than we. And that one — the little green one — is still indecipherable. I think it’s magick-drunk. As is the scroll case, which inexplicably contains zero scrolls because it’s occupied by a silver fork, a gilded pocket-watch and a snuff box with a picture of a rather sexy troll lady enamelled into its lid.’ I’d had some time to work on the sealed ends during the drive back to Mandridore, and had at last prised them off.
‘We will have them studied and deciphered,’ King Naldran assured me, politely glossing over the snuff box.
‘These are wondrous finds,’ said Her Majesty Ysurra, her usually rather dull eyes shining with excitement. ‘This is Torvaston’s crown, is it not? I believe it must be. My husband’s is said to be the very same once worn at Farringale, but I have always thought that to be false. It has not the look of such an heirloom. A replica.’
‘I begin to suspect that everything contained in that hall belonged to Torvaston or Hrruna, or was of some importance at Court,’ I said.
‘It does have the air of a museum,’ Jay agreed. ‘They knew they would have to leave a little before the final crisis, of course — what we know of Farringale’s fall always said its decline took place over several months. So they prepared a sort of memorial hall. It’s another item in support of our theory that they were trying to save something for the future. I think they hoped someone would someday find the way back.’
‘Though,’ I put in thoughtfully, ‘why put Torvaston’s crown there? Even if Torvaston himself wasn’t to join his wife at Mandridore, the crown could have been passed on to the next heir.’
‘A salient question,’ said King Naldran. ‘And there are so many.’
‘Why did they not destroy the griffins?’ said Queen Ysurra. ‘If, as you propose, they are the source of these magickal surges?’
I tried to imagine the stone heart that could destroy so much majesty, and failed. ‘I believe it was an arrangement that worked well for the city, for many years,’ I said. ‘They celebrated the surges, and made use of them. Only at the end did it… get out of hand, and the ortherex descended. We still do not know quite what happened.’
King Naldran nodded. ‘And who would not wish for such a magickal surplus, from time to time, if it could be harnessed in some way?’ He paused, but not in thought. He surveyed me, and subsequently Jay, with a speculative air.
Alban — seated, I had noted, much farther away from me than might previously have been his wont — smiled faintly at his father. ‘You had better tell them,’ he said.
The king nodded, but it was the queen who spoke. ‘We hoped you would be successful, though you have far exceeded our expectations,’ she said. ‘We have a proposition for you, if you will hear it.’
‘Say on,’ said Jay, and I nodded.
The queen hesitated. ‘We understand you to be without fixed employment at present. But, it has also become apparent that your ties with the Society remain strong. Perhaps we have been misinformed?’
Tricky question. ‘It’s complicated,’ I said.
‘Ah. Our idea was predicated upon the former, and it is thus: if you indeed seek to begin anew as your own entity, the Court would like to fund your enterprise, and bring it under our aegis.’
I was too surprised to speak. Whatever I might have anticipated by way of reward (if that’s what it was), this wasn’t it.
‘Forgive me,’ said Jay, more astute than I was. ‘May I ask why?’
Queen Ysurra inclined her stately head. ‘We have long admired the Society’s work, and its… unusual methods. And it is apparent that the Court could benefit greatly from a similar force, particularly if we wish to pursue the question of Farringale. Since our various goals may be fulfilled by the same means, I propose this solution for us both.’
What to say? It was a generous offer, and would have been perfect — if it weren’t for the fact that our secession from the Society had only ever been a sham.
Alban knew that, of course, or he’d guessed. I looked for a moment at him, but he gazed blandly back, giving me nothing. What was he up to?
‘I think we couldn’t accept,’ said Jay. ‘As you say, our ties with the Society remain strong…’ He, no more than I, could find a simple way of explaining that we’d been lying through our teeth.
Alban’s tiny, cynical smile appeared. ‘They’re still Society folk, mother. I did tell you.’
The queen sighed. ‘Unfortunate.’
‘Perhaps not,’ I said. ‘We have no real desire to set up independently, but that doesn’t mean we can’t help each other here. Why not form a partnership with the Society? You may assemble a joint force to work on the Farringale problem, of which we could conceivably be a part. And,’ I added, with a wry smile of my own, ‘I think we’d need their help anyway. After all, they’ve got the third key.’
Queen Ysurra did not look entirely happy about that last part, which intrigued me. ‘So they do. We will think upon your suggestion, Miss Vesper.’
‘With,’ put in Alban, ‘the firm intention of finding it an exceptionally good idea.’
‘Though I’ll add this: any restoration plan involving the destruction of those griffins is unlikely to find favour, either with us or with the rest of the Society.’
The queen looked down her royal nose at me, but she nodded.
So, that was that. I made a private resolve to pump Milady for information about that third key, next time I got the chance. How was it that the Society came to have it — and why had Baroness Tremayne claimed to know our House so well? Problems to pursue later.
Course, it also turned out later that the pocket-watch was Torvaston’s and served a more complicated purpose than merely telling the time; the snuff box contained a signet ring, though not a royal one; and the inside of the scroll case was etched with a map of the Seas of Segorne on one half and the Vales of Wonder on the other. The plot, as they say, promptly thickened.
But that’s a story for later, because what happened next was the one thing guaranteed to derail the Life of Ves in pretty short order.
My phone rang.
This may seem like a disappointingly mundane occurrence considering the build-up I’ve just given it, but it all comes down to who was on the other end.
‘Ves,’ I said crisply. I don’t usually answer my phone that way, but this was a number I didn’t recognise.
‘Cordelia?’
It was a woman’s voice, one I hadn’t heard in years.
‘I do not know why you insist on calling yourself by that peculiar abbreviation,’ continued the voice. ‘I gave you the most beautiful name I could think of.’
‘…Mother?’ I croaked.
‘Hello, dear.’
Dear? Since when was I dear? ‘How did you get this number?’ I said, turning my back on Jay, whose expression of incredulity was just too much to be borne.
‘I have spoken to Milady.’
‘Milady gave you my number?’
‘I needed to speak to you.’
‘Wait. How do you know Milady?’
‘Honestly, Cordelia. Everyone knows Milady. Now, listen. I need you to come here at once, and bring those pipes of yours.’
‘My…’ I paused to breathe. ‘My pipes? How do you know about my pipes?’
‘I consulted the register of known Great Treasures and their present owners. Imagine my surprise to find your name on the list! And it couldn’t be more perfect. Bring the pipes, and the Waymaster. I’ll see you soon.’
‘Mother—’ I began, using what has sometimes been termed my dangerous voice. For one thing, that list is privileged access only, it’s not like you can just Google it or something. For another, how dare she call me out of the blue and propose to haul me off to goodness-knew-where?
And what was Milady doing enabling her?
But she’d ended the call. I uttered a few choice expletives, and ended up glowering darkly at Jay.
‘Your mother doesn’t have your number?’ He could’ve said, you’ve got five lungs and a double spleen? in approximately the same tone.
‘It’s complicated.’
‘I see that.’
I took a deep breath. ‘We appear to have a change of plans.’
***
Next stop: a “fun” outing with Ves’s family. I’ll tell you, it’s not going to be pretty…
First though, permit me to introduce you to this episode’s shiny ebook edition, in case you’d like your own copy (paperback to come!). And since it’s a tradition now, let me also discreetly put this nice Patreon thing here for a second, in all its extra-stories and advance-release-episodes glory.
That done… on with the Ves&Jay show!
