Vidar
Istare at the tiny woven globe in my hand and sigh. I have avoided this for as long as I can, but I can avoid it no longer. I must seek the Mayfly Seer. If she is still there.
I have spent over a century holding back the Court of Madness with every trick and scheme I can cobble together. We are losing ground. Four courts have fallen to them. I should have killed their queen that day when I had the chance. I thought the problem I was solving was to keep them out of Iceheim. I didn’t realize it was to keep them from devouring the world. But devour it they do, and like grasshoppers, they leave nothing in their paths.
The tiny sprites of the Court of Daydreams came to us as fast as their wings could carry them pleading for a bargain to save them. My King gave them good terms and I set out with the rest of my Court to fight under the command of Precatore, Lord of the Sun, Knight of the Bright, Iceheim’s Prize.
It was to be my first time fighting in the open under his banner – even masked as I was, it felt strange to be seen.
But we were too late. And my heart hurts as I sit here in the middle of the wreckage of what was once thousands of lives, staring at one buzzing bee. I stare so I do not need to see the rubble of the court or the burning bodies. I stare so I do not need to see a whole nation consumed by madness.
We have an army. We have allies. But we are always two steps behind.
This is not the only battle I’ve fought against them – bloody and grim – but it’s the first that ended before it even began.
“Would that I was as powerful a mage as Fernacius,” I say and Precatore laughs from where he sits on his charger beside me.
“Would that you were as fair as me, kinsman,” he replies. “But you are the shadow to my light, the sinister to my strength. He relishes this, keen to take on the role of bright morning star. And so it is right and fitting that it be.”
“We are always two steps behind,” I grumble.
“King Rowan understands that you can’t know everything, Vidar. He knows you will fail sometimes.”
“I do not read futures,” I growl, pushed to fury. “I can’t know what’s coming before it happens.”
Before the words are out of my mouth, I regret them. I do not want him to remember the secret we share.
“On a grim note, kin of mine,” he says, and his voice is very hard. “There is a rumor your mother carries a trinket to give to you. Some heart-shaped bauble.”
I do not respond. I have learned that listening to their stories about my exiled mother brings only agony. Why he would bring this up now, in this charnel house, I do not know. At least he has not remembered the seer. His mind is on other things.
“They also said she is dying – though from what I do not know. Maybe the King of Iceheim made her mortal,” he continues, his eyes seeking mine. I will not meet his gaze. What is this? Kindness? Or a trap? “If you wish to bid her farewell, she has but a month at most. They say you can find her at the World’s Rim.”
If my mother was mortal, she would have died long ago. It has been more than a century since I have seen her, and she was not young even then. Though the thought of her at the rim of the world makes my stomach twist, I show none of that on my face.
“Well,” he says with a waiting look as if he might still read how I have heard his news in the look on my face. “I have delivered the message. We must turn our attentions to what is at hand.”
“Gladly,” I say with a bite to my tone.
He looks around us at the devastation as if just again remembering it is there. “If we only knew which court would be struck next, we could stop them, trap them, deal them a crippling blow. But they morph like shadows. I cannot move my army here and there guessing. The King knows this. You must redouble your efforts, Vidar. You must spy out where they will strike. No more failures.”
He’s right. Of course, he’s right. And I am glad to be thinking of anything other than my ruined mother.
But this means I must go to my Seer and lay my tamed heart at her feet and beg to see the future and she will know I have fallen so deeply under her spell that I have spent decades thinking of her face until no other face enchants me. I have had her on my mind so much that my wings have fledged her mayfly shape and my heart has fledged this painful loyalty that never lets me near another.
It’s possible I have lost my mind. Who hasn’t among the fae courts in these troubled times? But if I have, then I know no sweeter way to slip into madness than this.
I have spent nigh on a century wondering what would happen if she stepped from that cage – would her mortality hit her all at once and turn her to dust now that she has lived past her mortal span? Would she come out the age she is and be gone in a mere fifty or sixty years – mayfly in truth as well as in name? And where would that leave me? Would I bend and break then under the ravages of the Court of Nightmares?
I must lay all this before her, and it sickens me to be so vulnerable. It makes me ill to wonder what she will do to me when she sees I have fledged her sign. I will be utterly at her mercy as I have been at no one’s mercy in so very long. The idea is both thrilling and full of horror.
I bit my lip and turn to Precatore.
“I will go and find where they will strike,” I say, meeting his calculated gaze.
“See that you do,” Precatore says. “Fail one more time, and King Rowan has said I may take your head. I don’t know what I’ll do with it, sorry thing that it is, but even the dogs need something to play with.”
