Page 24 of Queen's Gambit

“I’m gonna need another drink,” Ray said, and took back the canteen.

I let him have it. I had the impression that I had had enough in any case. My tongue felt numb and the rock underneath me had started to feel oddly floaty, as if it was rising and falling along with the waves.

Yet I felt good, too, and strangely lighter for having finally told someone my story. I had never given Dory most of the details that Ray now knew. I wasn’t sure why; perhaps because it seemed like a burden that she shouldn’t have to bear. Ray blamed Mircea; Dory had a tendency to blame herself. In reality, it wasn’t anyone’s fault.

It simply was.

Mircea could have let the dhampir nature rip our minds apart, and we would both be dead now. Or, he could have done what he did, and saved us. It was all he knew how to do; I could not fault him for that. I did fault him for not releasing me later, once Dory and I were both adults and the reason for the fits had passed. But if he really believed me to be a malevolent spirit . . .

Would I have taken that chance, in his place?

I honestly did not know.

There was one thing I would ask him, if I thought there was any chance of a reply: why had he left the memories with me? He had erased them from her side of the mind, but hadn’t touched them on mine. Why?

Had he wanted her to have those sun-drenched days again? Those happy, laughing faces, those friends, those firsts? Otherwise, her first glimpse of Venice—gone. Her first birthday celebration—gone. Her first new clothes, her first taste of candy, her first kiss—from a flirtatious boy who had worked in the pigment shop where we bought our colors, when she was fifteen . . .

Could he not bear to erase them all, with no hope of redemption? Did he think that I could protect them? That no one would be able to find them in my mind, as it was no longer the dominant one?

Or had he been afraid to battle me again, after I was older? Long decades had passed since our last confrontation. Was he worried that another clash might undo his previous work, and release me?

Or perhaps, just perhaps, did he think that, one day, there might be a way for Dory and I to be whole again?

“Then why did he try to persuade her to lock you away a second time?” Ray asked, his voice slurring slightly.

I frowned at him. His face was slightly flushed and his eyes were glassy. He looked half asleep, yet he clearly was not.

“How are you able to read me so easily?”

“Maybe ‘cause we’re both drunk.” He turned the bottle over and I watched a couple of droplets splash onto the stone. It appeared that we had consumed the whole thing. I blinked at it in surprise.

“What?” he asked.

“I have never been drunk before.”

He cocked his head. “Whaddya think?”

“I think I like it.”

“Wait until tomorrow,” he said ominously.

He tossed the empty onto our supplies and added the remaining driftwood to the fire, turning the undersides of the stone fingers above us a bright gold with reflected light. It actually became quite warm in our small camp after a time, a little too warm. I pulled off the blanket, yet still was not comfortable.

A moment later, I realized why.

“Perhaps you could help me down to the river?” I asked Ray.

“We’re already by the river.”

“I meant . . . further off?”

“Why? It’s cold away from the fire and—” He stopped. “Oh. Sure.”

He scooped me up and carried me to an outcropping of rocks a few dozen yards upstream from our camp, but fairly near to the shoreline. Then he walked off, to give me some privacy, I supposed. The rocks kept me out of the stream, except for my feet and lower legs, which didn’t feel it anyway.

And while the wind was cold, the view was worth it.

There was a moon, a huge thing, orange as flame, rising up behind the trees. I hadn’t seen it as it had been behind us, and now appeared perfectly balanced in the palm of the hand of stone. Our firelight was almost the same color, making it look as if the moon was melting and dripping down through the fingers to puddle below. While behind it, the dark treetops met the thickly, star strewn sky.

Faerie never failed to impress, I thought, just staring for a moment.

Then I did my business, washed off, and waited for Ray to come back.

There was a surprising amount of wildlife for the middle of the night. There were a few birds, brown or gray and vaguely owl-like, swooping about, chasing small animals or darting after fish. They had huge eyes that reflected the moon when the angle was just right, making them flash orange from time to time, like feathered fireflies.

The water was as active as the air. Once in a while, a silver fishtail would emerge to splash the surface before disappearing again. A large turtle slid off the embankment and into the current, like a slow-moving rock. And a small, green frog with long, red toes jumped into the spray from a nearby perch, evading one of the birds.

But nothing jumped at me.

For the first time, it felt peaceful here, in this strange new world. I realized that I did not have many memories of peace that were not also lonely. Dory needed sleep, so I could not be active for the whole of the night, and when I was awake, there was no one to talk to. Horatiu and I had had chats from time to time, but they made him feel bad. Reminded him of things he did not agree with, but could not change. I had gradually let them fall off over the years, like with so many things . . .

But I did not feel lonely here. I had talked and talked. And Ray had listened, and seemed interested, or at least entertained. It had felt strange, to open up to someone like that, like so much lately. It was exciting, almost dizzily so. I could not remember the last time I had looked at the future and not had any idea what it might hold.

That was why, as frightening as Faerie was, it was thrilling, too. And without Dory to worry about, I could . . . I could do anything. Just anything at all!

Well, anything that my body would allow. But even worry over my legs did not weigh me down that much. For the first time in memory, I felt free.

I almost did not want to sleep for the joy of it.

The wind picked up, and gooseflesh prickled my arms. I felt myself shiver, and drew further into my thick tunic, which was remarkably warm. I saw Ray start back this way, ostentatiously looking at the sky, giving me a chance to notice him.

“Dorina,” he called out. “Are you ready to—”

His voice cut off abruptly, I did not know why. Then a cascade of mental images hit me, too many and too fast to even try to process, like bubbles foaming up from the surf. And something huge stirred in the depths of the water.

Oh, I thought blankly.

That was why.

And then Ray started to run.

He was coming this way, and coming fast, or so it would have appeared to anyone looking at a photo of him. His feet were digging into the soft sand near the shoreline, his arms were in the classic running pose, and his face was snarling enough to show fang. But despite the fact that vampire speed should have had him beside me in an instant, he was barely moving.

I did not think that was his fault, however.

The disturbance in the water became more pronounced, and for a moment, I thought that the fey had found us. That one of their wooden ships was pushing up through the waves, and that we were caught or soon to be. But if it was one of their vessels, it was larger than any I had yet seen.

Quite a bit larger.

Ray was still running, but had yet to complete a single stride. Whatever was boiling toward the surface, however, was moving quickly. It broke through the waves a moment later, in a furious surge of water and a mass of spray worthy of a Yellowstone geyser.

I sank back against the rocks, hoping that they would hide me. They weren’t that much darker than the gray tunic I was wearing, especially now that it was wet again. Perhaps, if I was very still, the Svarestri would pass on by and—

That was not the Svarestri.

The water had fountained up, far into the sky, and was now coming back down again, raining hard on me and half the river. But not so much so that I could not make out what sat in the middle of the stream, threatening to turn my mind inside out. I looked at it for a moment in consternation, because that . . . could not be what I thought it was.

Yet it continued to sit there, disturbing the currents. And displacing enough water that a tide had washed up, soaking our camp and the riverbank in both directions. It was as if a ship the size of a submarine had somehow surfaced in the middle of our quiet mountain stream, only it wasn’t a submarine.

It was . . . a seahorse.

It was bluish-gray, with great, translucent fins crowning its head and wafting along its sides, and a long, delicate snout. It had jewel-like scales that caught and reflected the moonlight, giving it what appeared to be an orange racing stripe down its side. I stared at it for a moment longer, and then I frowned.

Like the tide, the racing stripe was quite advanced for an illusion, which often ignored the lighting in an area entirely. It was one of the easiest ways of spotting a cheap spell, in fact, if distortions around the edges didn’t already give it away. But this had no such distortions. It was simply a huge, ridiculously pretty seahorse that my mind persisted in telling me was real when it quite obviously wasn’t.

After all, we were in fresh water here, not salt, and in any case, seahorses were not the size of school buses!

And then it spoke.

“Here! You, girl. What are you?”

The question was in English, which was also absurd, as there would be no way for any randomly passing seahorse to know what language I used. I started to say something to that effect, and about the fact that illusions didn’t work on me and that I was going to see through this one any minute. But I didn’t.

Instead, I just stopped and stared again, because the seahorse hadn’t been the one speaking, after all. Its rider had. And this illusion was even better than the last. This illusion was—

“Beautiful,” I whispered.

It was a completely inadequate word. Completely. It wasn’t even accurate because beauty was supposed to delight and please the senses, but this beauty . . .

Hurt.

It was so overwhelming that it bent the mind, resulting in a sensation very much like pain. I gasped at the creature who had just leaned over the side of the great beast, feeling as if I had been struck in the solar plexus and left breathless and disarmed. And enchanted, possibly literally, although I wasn’t sure that I cared any more.

The rider was a woman, but not like any I had ever seen. She was framed against the huge, orange moon as if haloed by it, but she didn’t need the help. The moon paled into insignificance in comparison.

Virtually anything would have.

Her thick, dark hair, which appeared to be as long or longer than her body, seemed to have a life of its own. It spread out wildly, blocking half of the moon’s light, like the branches of a very strange tree. It appeared to move on the wind the way hair usually does in water, wafting about as if on unseen currents.

Her face was almost too beautiful to look upon. Her eyes were a turbulent blue-gray that nearly matched the color of her strange steed, and her lips appeared to be greenish-blue as did the blush on her cheeks. Although perhaps that was due to cosmetics or to the strange light she seemed to give off.

She was wearing some kind of diaphanous, blue-gray-green robes that boiled around her like chiffon or, more accurately, like waves of seafoam. Only I had never seen anyone wear seafoam before. I did not know that I was seeing it now, but I was no longer annoyed.

I was grateful to see this, even as an illusion.

I was grateful.

“What?” she called down. “Speak up!”

“I said that you are beautiful!” I shouted, wondering if I had gone mad.

“Yes, I know.” She sounded peevish. “That is not what I asked.”

And, suddenly, without warning, I found myself rising off of the rocks, but not under my own power. And not to my feet. My useless legs dangled beneath me as my dripping form was levitated into the air, until I was roughly even with the astounding creature sitting on a coral saddle.

It appeared to have grown organically around the seahorses’ giant belly, then upward, before smoothing out to provide her with a delicate orange perch. There were no reins, but then, I doubted that she needed them. Her mount seemed perfectly in tune with the wishes of its mistress, moving one of its great fins aside so that her power could bring me closer, for inspection.

“What are you?” she demanded again, as I stared into the loveliest face I had ever seen.

“I . . . am Dorina,” I whispered.

“And what is that?”

“It is . . . my name?”

This answer did not seem to satisfy her. “I did not ask for your name; I asked what you are.” But, this time, she did not give me a chance to answer. Her beautiful brow knit. “Not human, although you speak their tongue. Not fey, not demon—”

“I am not a demon?” I asked hopefully.

The beautiful eyes narrowed. “You do not know?”

I shook my head.

“Well, you are not,” she said, frowning. “I know their stench, and it is not upon you.”

My body began slowly rotating, giving me a view of the flooded embankment and of Ray’s frozen, screaming face. I hoped that she would not remember him, as I did not yet know if she was a threat or not, and she did not seem to. Instead, she was glaring at me when I came back around again.

“You are in my waters—”

“I am very sorry—”

“Do not interrupt me!”

“I’m sorry—”

“That is an interruption!”

I closed my mouth.

“You have come here without permission, invading my lands, you and that vampire of yours!”

She looked at me challengingly.

I looked back. She was truly amazing to gaze upon. There appeared to be tiny, jeweled crabs in her hair that caught the light, twinkling like orange diamonds.

One moved slightly, adjusting its grip on a tendril.

Jewel-like, I corrected myself.

“Well?” she demanded. “Do you have nothing to say for yourself?”

“I . . . did not wish to interrupt.”

The waves around us became agitated enough to wet my feet again. “Do you mock me?”

“No, I—” I stopped myself, because this was not going well. Possibly because I couldn’t seem to think and look at her at the same time. “I beg forgiveness,” I said, and bowed my head.

“Hmmph.” And then something reached out and poked my dangling legs. It was almost without color, although prismatic, flashing with fire like a giant diamond.

Perhaps, I realized slowly, because it had been carved from a giant diamond.

I blinked at it.

“Do you want a fish tail?” the creature asked.

I looked up. I did not know how to respond to that. “I . . . have had dinner?”

She stared at me. It lasted a long time. Then, very slowly and very deliberately, she poked my legs again. “Would you . . .”

She paused and waited. “Yes?” I finally asked.

“Like to have . . .” she poked my legs again.

“Yes?”

“A fish’s tail.”

Poke.

I looked down. I looked up. “No?”

She frowned. “Are you sure? These things,” she prodded my legs again, “do not appear to function.”

“I . . . not at present, no.”

“The present is all we have! You could be dead by tomorrow!”

“Yes, but . . . I would still prefer to have all of my original parts.”

She did not seem to think much of that answer, but at least she did not poke me again.

“I do not know how you think to live through what awaits you with half a body,” she said.

“What awaits me?”

She ignored that. “But if you are what I think, you will manage. And if not . . . then you should not have come here at all, should you?”

“I did not trespass willingly,” I said. “I was brought by—”

“I know who brought you.” She smiled suddenly, but it was not very nice. There were some . . . very unusual teeth in that lovely mouth. “Yes, I know. Make them pay for it.”

Then she was gone.