by I might be becoming an old hand at travelling by the Ways, but this was something else.
We were whirled up, up and away into the aether; so far, so ordinary. After that, we were leaves on the wind, and not in a cute way. Ever watched a coppery autumn leaf tossing and turning in the currents, sailing with airy serenity from gust to gust? It looks like the epitome of freedom.
It feels like crap.
As if the Winds themselves weren’t “playful” enough (as Jay had euphemistically put it), invisible hands snatched at my clothes, my limbs, my hair, and sent me tumbling in dizzying spirals. After half a miserable minute of this, I was longing for solid ground beneath my feet and praying, otherwise, to die.
When at last the whirl of winds ceased, and I felt approximately stationary again, the first words to pass my lips were: ‘A pox on all sprites. One of the really bad ones, too.’
‘Smallpox,’ said my mother.
‘Too… small.’
‘The Black Death,’ said Jay.
‘Might do.’
‘Actually,’ came a new and unfamiliar voice, ‘they’re sylphs.’
I opened my eyes.
Considering the starting point and our mode of transport, I’d expected to end up somewhere else improbably beautiful, even if it ended up being another clone of Hansel and Gretel’s forest.
Instead, we’d landed in somebody’s living room. I felt carpet under my hands — reasonably plush, not cheap — and the ceiling I was staring at was white plaster, with fussy ornaments in the corners. A huge bookcase monopolised the far wall, and tucked into the corner was a standard lamp with a kingfisher-blue shade, and a deep, luxurious armchair.
In the armchair sat a man of, maybe, sixty. His hair was grey, his face rather tanned, his eyes extraordinary: a kind of silvery-blue colour. He looked unassuming, in his wine-coloured jumper and dark trousers, with a large book open on his lap. His stare, though, was penetrating.
‘I appear to be horizontal,’ I said.
‘It’s rare to encounter the sylphs and come out standing,’ said the man.
I looked around, wincing around a pain in my neck. Jay had already made it to his feet, and stood with his back to the window, looking rather… trapped.
Mother had dragged herself into a corner, like a wounded animal, and sat scowling at the person we’d inadvertently gate-crashed upon.
‘Have I changed that much?’ she growled.
The man closed his book and turned a thoughtful stare upon Mother. ‘When a trio of hitch-hikers wash up without warning in my living room, it’s rather too much to expect to know them as well.’
‘Just one,’ said Mother. ‘Just me.’
I sat up, and peered at the man with unabashed scepticism. This was the gorgeous lyre-player? He looked ready to become somebody’s kindly grandfather about now, or he would if it wasn’t for that steely stare.
‘Mum,’ I said. ‘This can’t be him.’
‘It is,’ she said.
‘It can’t be.’
‘I know, but it is.’
‘Mother. He’s either under the best fae glamour I’ve ever heard of, or he’s human.’
‘You’ve come from the rath?’ said the man, ignoring this exchange.
‘The what?’ said Mother.
‘The fort. Is my effigy still there?’
I stared. ‘Your effigy?’ I blurted.
‘I’ll take that as a yes.’ He smiled, faint and wintry.
I clutched, involuntarily, at my pipes, which proved to be a poor move. His eyes zoned in on them immediately, and if I thought he’d looked intimidating before… ‘You took my pipes?’ he said.
‘These aren’t your pipes,’ I said hastily. ‘At least, they might be, but they’re not the ones from the rath. And anyway those aren’t your pipes either, they can’t be, because they’re the king’s pipes and you aren’t the king.’
He endured my babbling with enviable serenity and only said: ‘Am I not?’
‘You’re human.’
‘What’s that got to do with anything?’
I blinked. ‘Who ever heard of a human faerie king?’
‘Every man, woman and child in Yllanfalen, more’s the pity.’ The man opened his book again, and went back to reading.
A glance at my mother’s face suggested she was as impressed with this conduct as I was.
So I threw my pipes at him.
Okay, not at him, quite. They landed harmlessly in his lap.
‘All right,’ said his rudeness, the purported faerie king. ‘Why are you here?’ He picked up the pipes and subjected them to close scrutiny. I saw his eyes widen a fraction, though he quickly hid his reaction.
‘We came looking for you,’ said Mother.
‘I gathered that. Why?’
‘I told you. I know you.’
He played a few notes on my pipes, just enough to instantly lay my pride in the dust. With ten years of practice, I thought I had got pretty good at the art.
If I was pretty good, he was a maestro. Under his hands, my little pipes produced a sound of such aching beauty, I felt tears spring to my eyes.
I hate emotionally manipulative music.
As he played, he stared unblinking at my mother’s face, and slowly shook his head.
‘Does this help?’ said my mother. She withdrew the lyre from under her arm, held it up, and let its full radiance shine.
And, oh, shine it did. It shone like the moon.
The king-who-might-not-be dropped the pipes, and silence reigned.
Then, he put his face in his hands. The muffled words, ‘Oh gods, no,’ emerged.
‘Not the response I was hoping for,’ muttered Mother.
‘Thirty years,’ said he, without removing his hands. ‘Thirty years, and no one’s been foolish enough to remove that thing.’
The thing in question was busy being so indescribably beautiful, I was wounded on its behalf at so unflattering an epithet. I sat and watched it shine, entranced. The strings really were water. They rippled, and they were faintly pearly, like moonlight on the river…
‘Ves,’ snapped Jay, and interposed himself between me and the lyre. He snapped his fingers in front of my face. ‘Your eyes are changing again. Focus.’
‘Fine, I’ll put it away,’ said Mother.
‘Best do, or I’ll feed it to the nearest sewer-grate.’
‘At last, someone with sense,’ said the maybe-king. He narrowed his eyes at Mother. ‘You were there, weren’t you. That night at the halls.’
Mother rolled her eyes. ‘Yes, I was present.’
‘Delia.’
She went quiet, and finally said, ‘You do remember.’
‘Yes.’ He didn’t entirely look pleased about it.
‘But you weren’t human, that night,’ said Mother.
‘Glamoured. My own face, only better. More beautiful… you know how it works,’ he finished with a scowl.
‘Mhm.’ Mother apparently went into an appreciative reverie.
‘Are you the king of the Yllanfalen or are you not?’ said Jay, in tones of exasperation.
‘No,’ said the man.
‘Then what have you been talking about?’
He threw aside his book. ‘I was, until I managed to get rid of that damned lyre.’
‘What’s the lyre got to do with it?’ I said.
‘Everything.’
I looked from him to Mother, deeply confused. Nobody had even touched on the topic of his possible fatherhood, yet, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to. I saw nothing in his face that reminded me of my own, but what did that signify?
I detected a shade of uncertainty in my mother’s eyes.
‘Perhaps you’d be good enough to explain,’ said Jay, with a politeness that seemed a trifle forced.
‘I will do that,’ said the erstwhile faerie king, ‘once I understand what you are doing in my living room.’
No one spoke. Jay and I were waiting for Mother to explain, but she sat cradling that mischievous lyre in silence, her face impassive.
I sighed. ‘We came looking for… the lyre. Or you. Or both.’ I waved a hand at my silent parent. ‘All her idea. Jay and I are still catching up.’
‘Great girl, my daughter,’ said Mother, placing a slight emphasis on the last word.
‘I’m not a girl, mother. Hit womanhood quite a while ago.’
‘This is your girl, hm?’ said the not-king.
I gave up the point. ‘Mum, if you’re waiting for him to figure it out on his own, we could be here a while. Could we maybe save some time?’
Mother rolled her eyes, and strummed her fingers lightly over the lyre’s watery strings. ‘Cordelia was born about eight and a half months after that night,’ she said.
Well, that got Dad’s attention. He reeled back as though she’d thrown something at him, and stared at me in dawning horror.
‘Hallo, Father,’ I said, casually tossing back my hair.
My show of nonchalance did not fool Jay, at least. He drew nearer to me, as though closing ranks against the parental complications. I appreciated that.
‘That’s impossible,’ my maybe-father gasped.
‘Biologically speaking, it’s highly probable,’ said Mother.
‘But not definite?’ I disliked how quick the wretched man was to leap on that point.
Mother studiously avoided my eye. ‘The other alternative is rather less likely.’
So much for Richard Rosser. No wonder he’d never contacted me.
‘So you brought her here to meet me.’ There still wasn’t a trace of welcome or joy discernible in his face, and I developed a sudden, fervent desire to tear my mother’s other hand off with my teeth.
One’s ego can only take so much in the way of a beating.
‘Yes…’ said Mother, and you can bet all three of us caught the hesitation in the word.
Finding three pairs of eyes fixed upon her, Mother gave up all in a rush. She lifted the lyre, waved it at me — at me — and said: ‘It’s about Cordelia meeting her father, but it’s also about this. If she is your daughter, then… then this, and everything it signifies, is her birth right.’
I gritted my teeth. ‘And what does the lyre signify, Mother?’
‘Ohgod.’ That was Jay. He looked like he wanted to copy my father’s fine example, and put his face in his hands. ‘You said the lyre had everything to do with the monarchy. It’s not that the king gets the instruments as some kind of perk, is it? Whoever owns the instruments is the king.’
‘Or the queen, in this case,’ said Mother, with a smug quirk of her lips.
I backed up so fast, and so far, that my back hit the wall with a thud. ‘Oh, no. No way, absolutely definitely not, you have got to be joking…’ I shook my head vigorously. ‘No. You said anyone can play the lyre on festival days! Anybody!’
‘Anyone can play it,’ said Mother inflexibly. ‘I also said, no one else could play it like that.’
I hadn’t heard my father play the lyre, but if he played it the way he’d played my pipes, then fair enough.
‘But I can’t play the pipes half so well,’ I objected. ‘If musical talent is an indicator of royalty then I’m out.’
‘Because they haven’t chosen yet,’ said Mother placidly. ‘It’s not about musical talent at all. It’s about— oh, you explain.’ She cast an irritable glance at my father.
He sat back, wide-eyed with amazement. Or amusement, damn him. ‘These instruments were made by King Evelaern himself, long ages ago,’ he said. ‘Your mother is right: it is an ancient ritual and an ancient spell. When one monarch is ready to pass on the crown, the instruments choose another. No one knows how.’ His lips twisted. ‘It hasn’t always been that simple.’
‘Why then didn’t you just let me pick up the lyre, if this has been the plan all along?’ I said to Mother.
‘I wanted to make sure your father was ready to hand on the crown, first.’
‘But— but—’ I was floundering. ‘But what do bloodlines have to do with any of this?’
‘Nothing,’ said Father flatly.
‘It’s passed down family lines before,’ said Mother stubbornly.
Father raised a brow at her. ‘Has it?’
‘I’ve researched the matter.’
He grimaced. ‘Done your homework. Very good.’
‘Why, Mother?’ I said. ‘Why by all the giddy gods would you want to install me as queen of some damned faerie kingdom?’
She looked at me like I was crazy. ‘Cordelia. You spent fully half your childhood playing at being the Faerie Queene.’
‘Just games! I was a child!’
‘But were they? Maybe it was your heritage speaking.’
‘Have you been planning this ever since?’
‘No. Only for the last half a dozen years.’
Having run out of words, I could only stare at her, flabbergasted.
Father held up a hand. ‘I feel I ought to enlighten you on one or two points.’
Jay said, ‘You mentioned it isn’t always simple.’
Father nodded. ‘Never less so than when I was chosen. I’d better tell you the story.’
