Chapter Eighteen: Frenemies No More?

Dill was busy feasting with the rest of the upper servantry - those servants important enough to see to their employer's coaches, possessions, and safety while the VIPs rubbed elbows on the Ancient Green. The Servant's Feast was held in the little indoor concert hall just off of the green. It wasn't half as fancy as the masquerade, but it was as fine as any of the officer's balls I'd peeked in on when I was enlisted - a big banquet table of loud, happily feasting servants with another big table with a top-notch food buffet (some of them the same delicacies the nobles got) and bottle after bottle of decent wine and mead - not top-notch stuff, but I imagine it went down pretty smoothly. Dill was happily hanging off of a dashing coachman, sipping mead and apparently engaged in a contest of who could tolerate the hottest hot pepper. Apparently, she was handily winning. I hated to disrupt her fun, but this was important.

"Dill… sorry…" I whispered.

"Oh! Princess!"

Almost immediately, everything went silent and half the people in the hall knelt or bowed in deference. As quickly as I could, I grabbed a glass of mead and raised it high above my head. "Your princess orders you to drink!" I shouted.

The servants cheered and drank - so I hadn't ruined their party. Well… I guess I ruined Dill's, but I'd make it up to her. I led her out into the cool night air, explaining the situation to her. I explained my whole plan to her, and she understood her role well enough.

"Do you think it will work, my lady?"

"I sure hope so."

I returned with Dill in tow. She ooh'ed and aah'ed as we passed through the sculpted topiary garden and I didn't have the heart to tell her that the gardener had cut down to that shape and hadn't used the woodsong to grow them that way. We walked over little brick walkways and under vine- and flower-strewn awnings and soon arrived back at the main courtyard, where the other guests had all been corralled. All of the staff, guests, guards, and two human teenagers in fae guise who'd confessed to their shenanigans immediately when they when discovered elsewhere in the hedge maze, engaged in heavy petting.

"Well, daughter, what's this brilliant scheme of yours?" Fostolas asked.

I took Dill's hand and brought her before the group. We took a good, dramatic walk back and forth, surveying all of the assembled folk. Dill whispered to me - she whispered that she was nervous about my plan, but I nodded as if she'd just said something sage and insightful. I stopped next to the king and squared off against the assembled group.

"Those of you at the opening day of the Vernal Court will have seen my handmaiden and myself performing a bit of what's called 'woodsong'. In reality, I am still a beginner at the art, but Dylthonouo is an advanced practitioner…"

"I'm not that advanced," Dill said.

"You're being humble, but let's be frank - our performance was seventy-five percent your effort with pretty little flourishes from the princess. Being part-sylvast, Dylthonouo's affinity for plants is great to the point that she can detect very small amounts of plant residues on somebody. If, for instance, they had been mixing or handling an accursed poison, she would be able to sense that. It will take just a few minutes for her to survey the assembled crowd to see who's been in contact with the poison used to kill Myrwaeli. First off, Dill, do you detect any poisons on me?"

Dill bit her lip. She looked back to Fostolas, who indicated that she should speak her mind. "Yes, my princess…"

I feigned surprise and checked the palms of my hands - sure enough, there was a tiny aquamarine streak there intermingled with Myrwaeli's blood. I'd touched near her wound when handling the body and had got a bit on my skin. Suddenly, everybody was looking at me with renewed interest - had I killed Myrwaeli? I'm sure they were all wondering that. She and I had nearly traded blows earlier over a wardrobe mishap, but we'd mended things over. But maybe we hadn't?

"Continue, Miss Dylthonouo," the king said.

Dill curtsied to him and continued, first stopping at Morwen, the queen's alchemist. She looked the green-haired fae up and down, gesturing to the little belt she wore around her slender waist, a leather holster belt sporting a number of small pouches and holstered phials.

"My alchemicals are all medicinal or prophylactic," Morwen stated. "But I will gladly submit them for inspection."

The king, who knew enough about alchemy to tell a potion from a poison, accepted the eight or nine samples, uncorking them one at a time and giving them a shake and a sniff - no poisons present. "She speaks the truth," he declared.

Dill continued down the line, next stopping at Hurbarra, the wizard Surburrus's wife, a half-faun woman with a lacy gown and a daring neckline. With a bit of a blush, Dill gestured to the woman's cleavage. With a sigh, Hurbarra reached into the fur patch between her bosoms and produced a half-full phial of lime green stuff.

"My husband mixed me this to help me with spicy foods… they don't appeal to faun digestion."

"I've heard as much," Fostolas said. "This doesn't appear to be poison, either. Thus far, only my daughter is suspect, I'm afraid."

We continued toward the middle of the line, nearly half of the guests cleared of wrongdoing and only me on the chopping block. Proverbial chopping block - they wouldn't kill a princess for murdering somebody, though you can bet I'd be locked away in a remote nunnery for many decades if the crime was pinned on me. Dill stopped again, this time in front of a fae woman, a woman with moss-green hair in a dark green gown… a gown vaguely similar to mine. Dill reached toward the woman's hip.

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Fear flashed in the woman's eyes, and an instant later she lunged past Dill and right at me. She held a small knife, retrieved from a hidden sheath, its blade glistening aquamarine with the accursed poison. Its potency had probably waned, but I wasn't about to risk death. I skipped back, let her lunge again, and dodged. As she stumbled, I tripped her and then stomped on her knife hand, loosing the blade. She rolled to her feet, but I spun to her side and tossed her over my hip, locking her arm and pinning her to the ground with my knee against her back. She screamed the high, keening wail of a dancer as her body convoluted and stretched beneath me, losing its faux-fae form, but I held her fast until the guards got there to haul her off. Before Master Dhyr's fighting lessons, that outcome might have been quite different.

"Well done, my dear!" Fostolas said. "We should have you giving lessons to the boys in the guard. And thank you, Miss Dylthonouo, for your uncanny plant abilities."

"It was Princess Laeanna's idea," Dill said.

"Oh? What do you mean?"

"Dill can sense plants and plant liquids - that's true enough. But we've all drunk enough that we're soused in plant extracts," I said. "After all, isn't that what wine is? So her ability here isn't very useful. But I knew Morwen would have alchemicals on her. She is the royal alchemist, after all. And I'd spotted Hurbarra taking a sip from her little phial earlier in the evening. And that dancer woman was disguised as Madame Cruzhe's alchemist, whom we couldn't find earlier… because she was busy mixing up a poison."

"So we've caught one culprit… I suppose the other got away?"

"He'd like us to think that," I said.

"He?"

"Him," I said, pointing to one of the event waiters - a half-fae, half-human man.

He tried to bolt, but the guards quickly caught him. "I haven't done anything! It's not me! I've been here the whole time!"

"Have you?" I said. "I notice you haven't got a burgundy serving cloth like the other waitstaff have… why is that?"

"I… I left it in the kitchen. I'm sure of it!"

"Lady Morwen, is this one of the men responsible for sending your husband and children to Elysheim?"

"It… yes, it looks rather like him, my princess, if he dyed his hair and shaved his mustache."

I nodded. "The stubble on his neck is coming in darker. And I imagine we'll find his serving cloth near the fountain and that it will have something like the earl's crest pinned on it - somebody go and check. While we're waiting…" I borrowed a cloth from one of the other waiters and folded it in half. I walked up to the man, still restrained by the guards, and draped it across his chest. "It looks a lot like the earl's sash, don't you think? In fact, if we gave you a mask and a fancy evening jacket, you'd practically be a dead ringer for the man. Close enough to fool a drunk girl. One assassin to lure the mark out into the hedges and another to prepare the poison and stab her. Only you got the wrong fae, didn't you?"

"That seems like a serious oversight," Fostolas allowed.

"It does, but the only one of the two who'd ever seen me was the dancer and, if I'm not mistaken, most of that race is red-green colorblind. My opalescent hair dye would have looked a lot like Myrwaeli's shimmering pink hair treatment. Our masks were similar if you ignore the flowers on mine, and our gowns were very similar, too. Given how she and I have comported ourselves recently, it would be pretty easy to mistake who was the princess."

Prince Valda chuckled. "The hair colors do appear virtually identical. We dancers can see colors that humans and fae cannot, but red and green look virtually the same to us. So… the assassins got the two of you confused and went after the wrong fae noble."

"A diabolical plot and a case of mistaken identity. I'm glad we caught these two - I've been worrying about them for months. But Myrwaeli… I wish my safety hadn't come at the cost of her life."

"And time is of the essence if we don't want that loss to be permanent," Morwen stated. "I suggest we proceed quickly, my lords and ladies."

+++++

"I've administered the cleansing potion to Myrwaeli's body," Morwen said.

The site of the masquerade was practically empty. A few servants were busy moving the tables out of the way, but most of the cleanup would have to wait until the light of day. The five of us - Morwen, Dill, Meliswe, me, and Myrwaeli's grimkey - sat at a little stone table in the old temple atop the hill. One by one, the paper lanterns winked out in the darkness beyond, their little alchemical burners flickering as they exhausted themselves. Not too far off, Lord Aerylar paced back and forth, sniffling back tears and telling the clerics how to do their job of tending to his daughter's body.

"She must be preserved and beautiful," he stated. "There will be flowers in her hair when we put her on the pyre."

The fae call the death of the body 'little death', since it usually isn't permanent for us. In anything between four and eight years, the dead return from Elysheim to return to their lives. But, as long-lived as fae are, four to eight years can be a long time not to see a child, spouse, parent, or close friend. So such deaths are marked with a mourning ritual and a sort of funeral called an 'expectation' where the body is burned on a pyre. As in: there's an expectation that you'll see your loved one again, but it will be a while and you're sad that you didn't get to wish them farewell on their journey. The bodies are burned because it's considered unseemly that you might return to Alfheim knowing that your own mouldering body exists out there somewhere, decaying worm food six feet under. Meliswe explained it to me, and (in my opinion) it makes a lot of sense.

Meliswe stroked the grimkey that held her sister's soul. It was already chipped and cracked in parts. It was a good enough vessel for a beginning mage to summon lesser spirits and practice with them, but a person's soul was simply too big for it, and any real exertion on Myrwaeli's part degraded the vessel. If it had been fourth-rate rather than third-rate, it probably would have crumbled before Morwen had a chance to get her cleansing potion mixed and administered and we'd have lost Myrwaeli forever despite our efforts.

"I'm sorry you got the little death," Meliswe said.

To my surprise, Myrwaeli's voice echoed out: "I'm not. It showed me how much people care about me. When I got killed, it disrupted a whole royal masquerade!" And, if I started to think she was just as conceited as ever, I quickly changed my mind. "Mostly, it showed me how much you care about me, Meliswe. And you too, my princess." The skull chipped again, two little monkey teeth clattering to the table.

"I know we're not exactly friends, but I've never hated you," I said. "Maybe we can be friends some day."

"We're already friends," she said.

"Can… Myrwaeli, can you feel Elysheim pulling you?" Meliswe asked. "Tell me you can feel it… tell me the potion worked."

"I've never died before… but, yes… I think it feels different. It feels like I'm being pulled home."

"Then you should follow it, sister. You should go home."

Meliswe kissed the forehead of the little cracked skull and the whole thing crumbled into dust. And we all felt something change in the air about us, a sudden loss in the vitality of the place. But, before it left us completely, I heard Myrwaeli whisper:

"Thank you, my sisters."