Pileaus by Max Gladstone

Author:Max Gladstone
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Outland Entertainment
Published: 2021-04-15T00:00:00+00:00

— MARCH —

Max Gladstone

It took months for Aelfric to find his way back to the Dreaming Lands. The twilight paths and standing-stone gates were closed to him, rosebud doors and vine curtains alike shut tight. Even the secret passwords whispered to elephant-ear ferns did not yield him passage. Of course not: he was a traitor now.

Why had he tried to save Lydia? One human was near as good as another. They bloomed for an instant and vanished into time. When Schwarzalbe arrived to take Lydia to Lord Nightmare’s court, Aelfric should have let her go, yet the girl’s song had caught him like a fish hook in the mouth.

He had to rescue her, and hear her sing again.

So, though the traitor’s mark was on him and all the gates he knew into the Dreaming barred, he wandered with grim purpose through the Dying Lands. He booked passage on a ferry from Brailee’s Steps to the mainland where he forsook the dirty port cities for deep country, traveling alone down winding roads from town to town, asking a few questions at each hamlet before leaving at the next dawn.

After months he found the object of his search, a seventh son of a seventh son, a cobbler on his deathbed in a place called Farnham’s Crossing. Children, grandchildren, nieces, nephews gathered round the old man’s bed like rabbits in a warren. Aelfric watched through the window from his perch in a nearby tree, disguised by magic as a crow.

The old man died and was buried the next day, by local custom, in a plot of earth beside his predeceased kin. One of his children, a mason, chiseled a headstone. Words were said. In the crowd of mourners, Aelfric concealed himself and tried to feel sorrow. Lydia felt pain and joy as these creatures did, all the subtle range of their emotions, so he should feel them, too. It should have been no harder than learning their base tongue, but such mutable passions were harder to grasp even than their contorted grammar. One moment they mourned, the next rejoiced, retiring from the burial ground to wake the dead.

All this was to Aelfric’s advantage. A seventh son of a seventh son was a powerful conjunction, made more powerful still as the villagers dwelt upon his passing. Such a man’s death must have meaning and significance as a third son’s second son did not, they said. As they drank they turned the dead man’s life inside out and upside down and shook it for truths as though it were a garment with coins concealed within. Their collective attention pressed against the world they thought they knew, and made it fragile.

Setting sun and rising Diun cast a double shadow from the gravestone. The Aiemer resonated with drunken songs and stories. A rose lay upon the grave, the parting gift of a bereaved grandchild.

Aelfric could not return to the Dreaming by the regular gates and paths, but some doors opened only once, or never opened at all unless you knocked.

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