Forest of Glass by John Tristan

Author:John Tristan [Tristan, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Amazon: B008KFC5ZA
Publisher: Loose Id LLC
Published: 2012-07-09T12:00:00+00:00

Chapter Fourteen

The Blossom Gallery

The coming feast of spring had turned the world upside down. The Citadel shifted and changed all around us, and we were obliged to change with it. No longer did we sleep through the lengthening days, and no longer did our chambers turn dark with the rising sun. At night, the walls still allowed the moonlight in—subtler now, filtered as if through smoke—but in the day, instead of darkening to the color of old wood and folding in on itself like a sleeping flower, the Citadel bloomed.

Where Castle Calish would lay down new carpets, the boughs of the Citadel grew fresh grass, and the walls sprouted white and yellow flowers. The leafy windows were open to the wind; some of it might be caught in the great translucent domes that covered the canopies, but the air still tasted almost fresh in my lungs. The walls turned translucent to the sun now as well as the moon, like gauzy green curtains fixed with the whorls and patterns of wood.

We slept with the sun and rose with it now. So it would be, Alessa told me, until late in the summer when the nights began lengthening once again. I adjusted swiftly enough to the new rhythm—after all, I was long used to waking by day. Alessa and Ranwell had a harder time of it for the first few days, but then they fell into it well enough.

Somehow a bit of sun must have slipped through the half-wood walls, because my skin began slowly but surely to turn a deeper bronze. Ranwell began to brown as well, going almost darker than me; as for Alessa, only a few sparse freckles appeared across the pale bridge of her nose.

When the morning of the spring feast arrived, a week or so after Orias had come with the masks, we were finally presented with our costumes. He sent a changeling tailor up to make the final adjustments; Alessa, at least, needed to be sewed into her costume, so carefully did it cling to every curve.

She had chosen a red snake’s mask, and the costume fit her like a snakeskin, every scale shimmering like fire. That was another thing that had changed: the black and silver clothes of winter had given way to spring colors, to green and gold—and now and then a fiery portent of summer, a scarlet flash of silk or a garnet on a velvet cord.

Ranwell still wore silver, but that suited his costume well enough. A mummery knight, in armor of silk and silver, his weapons of young wood padded with velvet. On me, it would look ridiculous. Of course, most southern duelists found the northern style ridiculous. Men dressed up like metal lobsters, awkward and half-blind; we scorned it in favor of grace and a quick blade. Ranwell wore it well enough, though; his broad chest and brawny legs filled out the false armor and made it seem almost real.

Not that I had any right to call a man ridiculous—not while wearing what Orias’s changeling tailor had made for me.

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