Andrea Höst - The Towers, the Moon

The floor tilted.

Drunk in the street, and weeping. Ashamed by the hurt wine failed to drown, by the fool she had been. Martine, an arm around her waist, guiding her back to the hotel, and reminding her that she was alive, and survival was a victory when your lover had tried to have you erased.

Memory receded, divided, and a scarlet thread led Rian back to that street in Lutèce, long ago.

Clinging to a lamp post, shouting at Martine. Words born of hurt, cruel sneers. Martine’s white face, marked by the red outline of a hand. A disjointed maze of shadowed streets. A step behind her, a blow. Then…chiming. The high voices of la clochettes, and she among them, in the Court of the Moon’s Otherworld.

She had always known Martine had saved her life that night. Struggling to separate herself from a memory of something that had never been, Rian tried to orient herself among a maze of ribbons and threads. Vivid, dull, faded, brilliant. They pulled at her, and she fell down the nearest, glittering and strawberry-ripe.

Floating in a forest of shivering trees. Hide-and-seek, one of dozens in gowns of silk and nothing. A woman with dark hair, a swan’s face, and wings of ice shared a conspiratorial glance with Rian as they dodged the eyes of hunters.

A game of Forfeit? Rian shook herself free and immediately lost herself to a plum-dark thread.

Hands dragged her down, while the winds hauled her up, and Rian cried out, torn between death and the Night Breezes. And then Aerinndís Gwyn Lynn was there, lifting her free, and for a moment Rian had her arms wrapped…

The thread twisted, split.

Rian cried out, torn between death and the Night Breezes. A bone parted, and she screamed. The Night Breezes scattered…

A thick scarlet shimmer caught her.

She stood on tip-toe, bare feet planted on one of his thighs, and bit delicately into his long throat.

A glimpse only, before a mulberry thread caught her.

Lying at his feet in a pool of her own waste and vomit, wondering what Martine would do now.

Rian squeezed her eyes shut, blocking ribbons and threads. She was on the floor, but not ill. And she clutched…not a lamp post. The rhythmic pulse of his blood steadied her. She listened to it, ear pressed to cloth, until most of the dizziness had gone, and then she risked opening her eyes.

The ribbons and threads were all still there, but less dominant, and they no longer dragged her into them. This, then, was the power of the Tower of Balance. She had not known that their ability to follow the lines of consequence meant they could see possible pasts as well.

Should she be glad she hadn’t seen anything of import? Only confirmation of her probable return, in a century’s time, to bite him. And that she’d had her hair cut short, and was not so terribly dressed, the next time.

That was useful to know, but she had to focus on the current century. One hand at a time, she let go of the Duke of Balance’s leg.

"How long have I been sitting like this?"

A thrumming told her: "A little under an hour."

She looked up, finding it uncommonly dark, but it was only when he shifted them that she realised that he’d had his wings folded forward and around them both. Their movement was like the night sky tidying itself away.

"Do you see the world like that all the time?"

"When I exert myself. I wished to know how much you could endure."

Her current view was of leg and leg. So much leg. Rian stood, taking stock of herself. The straps of the tissue dress were askew, and she’d lost one of her soft dancing shoes, but she did not feel ill, and the dizziness was almost entirely gone.

"And now you know," she said, finding her shoe. "Do you consider it a successful experiment?"

"Yes."

She felt more than heard the word. Rian’s ability to sense emotion rarely worked with beings of considerable power, but she was suddenly sure that this mattered to the Duke of Balance. Not because he had taken a step toward bringing some complex scheme to fruition, but on a deeply emotional level. She took a step away from him, but only so she could properly see his face. This was inscrutable, but she had expected nothing else.

"Well, since I don’t know what you hope to gain by having the person I’ll be drink from you, I won’t wish you luck. But I hope circumstances arrange themselves to the point where you can tell me."

"Thank you," he said, simply. "Alexandrine will take you to the halls."

Accepting dismissal, Rian offered him a sketch of a curtsey, and collected her mask and veil. This last was heavy, and she counted ten night-dark teardrops hanging from its edge. She put it on without comment, settled her mask in place, and left.

The Court member with champagne-coloured hair was sitting on the edge of the circular outer balcony, dangling her legs over the enormous chamber of coloured light. A single red thread and two ribbons phased into Rian’s view above the woman, but Rian resisted any impulse to try to follow them.

"Is your name Alexandrine?"

The woman glanced up at her, and nodded.

"Mine’s Rian. Do you ever find it difficult not to talk about all the things you see and hear during the competitions of the Court?"

"Not at all," Alexandrine said. "Most of it is very dull. The interesting matters are those that it would be sheer stupidity to discuss." She stood up, still more than a foot taller than Rian, but no longer seeming so formidable.

"Do you ever wish you could participate?"

Alexandrine’s smooth features twisted with lively amusement. "For every thing I might envy, there are ten I am glad to avoid. Fashion, for instance."

Rian laughed, and allowed herself be picked up by the armpits once again. But instead of launching into the shifting light below, they changed location with abrupt, unsettling immediacy, to an alcove in a curving corridor.

The slope told Rian they’d left the area around the Tower of Balance, and she was not surprised when a few lazy beats of Alexandrine’s wings brought them to the entrance of a completely different open room. The upper assembly hall of the Gilded Tower.

Rian’s first impression was of space and music. The place was enormous – larger even than the antechamber of the Hall of Balance – and even an orchestra should have been swallowed up by it, but instead sound filled the entrance where Rian and Alexandrine stood. Delicate, fluting melody, but with an underlying beat.

Like the hall on the lower tier, the room sat at a conjunction in the curving filigree of the dome, and sloped grandly. One side rose in tiers, while the curving ceiling also provided a far wall, and was studded with wide balconies. The flattest area rested in between these two points, like a stage within a particularly vertical amphitheatre. Rian could not track the number of people – the vast majority winged – walking and flitting and dancing. One thousand? Two? And every one of them complicated by a halo of ribbons and threads.

"The Dukes," Alexandrine said, indicating the balconies. "And the Sun Court."

The five largest balconies, best positioned to watch the wide central part of the room, stood out for the height of most of the occupants. Four Dukes, for the four ruling towers, each as attenuated as the Duke of Balance. Around their great chairs stood figures that were small only by comparison.

The fifth balcony belonged to a collection of miniatures. No wings, no long spindly limbs. The Sun Court. A dozen humans, all of them veiled and masked, but doubtless the five seated would be the Royal Family. Even the Dauphin’s young son was present – presumably for a ceremonial appearance, since the revels of the Gilded Tower hardly seemed suitable for a boy of eight.