Andrea Höst: The Towers, the Moon

They’d taken the under-layer, which was a clever trick indeed, and left Rian in a knee-high dress. The loss at least allowed Rian to concentrate on speed and searching, since the rules allowed only one capture by hunters in each of the three segments of the challenge.

The deep note of a gong warned her that the three-quarter mark had passed, and she decided to move on, searching for the meeting point. Even though the sky forest was full of seekers, Rian could hear only the song of her own sweet-singer above the rattle of disturbed leaves. It was fortunately close. Yes, there to the right the trees opened up. Not to a space large enough to hold five hundred, but still a solid crowd.

Rian was stopped by a pair of members of the Gilded Tower, and handed over dragon mask’s ten-Tear as payment for passing the stage before the gong sounded a second time. This, along with any ten-Tears not discovered among the leaves, would go to make up the challenge’s prize.

One ten-Tear down, with two increasingly expensive stages to go, Rian briefly entertained the shining vision of winning that bounty, but knew her chances were minimal. She had, thankfully, enough to complete the entire challenge without risking Tears of the Sun, and only felt a faint pang at spending them. The Tears of the Night did not represent her own money, though she was still not entirely certain how much she had paid the Duke of Balance for them.

Her sweet-singer landed lightly on her shoulder, tiny claws pricking bare skin. It piped, as if in greeting, and she stroked its head delicately, wondering why she was so sure it was the same one.

The piping multiplied, as other sweet-singers returned to their chosen, and their voices merged into another recognisable tune. The players responded: finding partners, linking hands. Rian found two members of the Court, and placed her right hand on top of theirs, sharing their faint laughter at how far up she had to reach. Then they danced.

A spiral of three, a pattern of nine, of twenty-seven, of seventy-one, all in a slow circular promenade. Dancers were exchanged from group to group, clasping hands and considering each other, deciding whose ten-Tears they hoped to capture.

Rian could feel marked interest among those whose hands she briefly clasped, and also the general growing anticipation of the crowd. She saw D’Argent and watched him moving, swift and elegant, but the exchanges gave her no chance to talk or dance with him, and the next stage of the challenge began immediately after the end of the song, with each sweet-singer flitting off with two ten-Tears.

The crowd followed into twilight, for the walls, ceiling, floor and forest beyond the clearing lacked the full-moon brilliance of the areas already passed, blurring detail without truly confusing the path.

The vague shadows were easy enough for a not-quite-vampire to navigate, and Rian found her first ten-Tear almost immediately. She held it up to consider a human woman in a tiger mask. Attaching the Tear to her veil, she moved on quickly, shivering a little, for the sky forest seemed to have developed a cool mist.

With the chill came a hush, muffling even the rattle of disturbed leaves, and seeming to add distance to the sweet-singer. And there was more scent, sharp notes of pine and loam…

Rian stopped short. There was dirt underneath her soft slippers. Stars above. Wind touched her. These were not things of the Towers of the Moon, of the strange sky forest that grew but perhaps did not live. This was the Great Forest, the world-spanning Otherworld tied by vows of allegiance to her soul.

And she was hunted.

Rian did not question that certainty, immediately abandoning her search for ten-Tears and concentrating on finding her way out. This was part of the price she paid for her allegiance to Cernunnos: the Horned King was hunter and hunted. But it was the forest itself that judged and tested her, and she did not care to learn what failure would mean.

There were no paths. Behind spread the silence that came to forests when tooth and claw moved with purpose. Rian, in three layers of nothing much, and slippers that let her feel every stone, did not run. Her only hope was to move as quietly and smoothly as possible, to try to keep ahead of what stalked her so that it could not properly discover her location.

The sweet-singer’s call pulled at her, and Rian struggled to maintain a smooth pace, watching her feet and doing her best to avoid fallen twigs and dry leaves. She did not run: she danced a secret course along twisting tree roots, skipped to stone, to dirt, to the gnarled skirts of another wooden partner. She did not run.

She. Did. Not. Run.

The call of the sweet-singer swelled, piercing, encouraging. A twig snapped behind her. Close! So close! Rian bit her lip, but did not break the dance, did not rush, not even when she saw the edge of a clearing ahead of her. She kept her pace, stepped lightly, and emerged.

A clearing in the sky forest, large enough for five hundred chosen. Rian was obviously on the trailing edge, arriving past the time limit, though she had not heard the gong. A cluster of la clochettes whirled around her in a cascade of sound, and when they departed she wore a hip-length dress.

Rian was past caring. She paid over the cost of completing the stage, saw there were places to sit and things to drink, and took a glass before sinking thankfully into the nearest chair. Her feet throbbed, though the bruises were already hurting less. That was the vampiric symbiont, hard at work.

Her sweet-singer found her almost immediately, and nestled against her throat, tail curled around her neck. It took much longer for Rian to spot the silver lion among the crowd, but eventually the sweep of the dance brought D’Argent into view. He’d lost his coat, but otherwise seemed in fine fettle as he was passed between partners.

It was a dance of pairs, and an opportunity that might not come again, so Rian climbed to reluctant feet and was ready for the next exchange.

D’Argent murmured politely as she stepped into the flow of the dance, and regarded her with a straightforward attraction, combined with deep wariness.

"You have been watching me, Mademoiselle Serpent."

An observant man, then. "Yes," she agreed, simply.

"Perhaps I have something on my face?"

Rian laughed. "You do. I was wondering if you would bargain for it."

His mild surprise came through to her clearly, then curiosity and a thread of anger. She wondered if she’d ever met him, for she knew many French actors. He did not feel familiar, and mask and veil together made it extremely difficult discern his face. Dark eyes, behind the mask.

"You recognise it, then? A thing out of place. Are you, then, a friend of a faded star?"

This wasn’t good. He’d recognised not only the mask, but the one he’d won it from.

"No," she said, not allowing herself to examine how disastrous such knowledge could be to Martine. "In this matter, I am a friend of things being returned to their right and proper place."

"But me, I like it where it is." He was entertained, but not particularly sympathetic. "Try to win it, if you will." He glanced down at her two tissue layers. "I think you will not succeed."

The sweet-singers brought dance and conversation to an end, reaching forward to take three ten-Tears from their veils. Rian watched D’Argent’s fly into the forest, since that would at least give her a starting direction.

"I think I will talk to you later, Monsieur," she said, and set out into a forest quite as large as the Gilded Tower’s assembly hall, but barely lit: the blackness relieved only by the glimmering of countless leaves, and by dim, occasional points of light on floor, walls and ceiling. In the bare gravity of the tower, it was like swimming into the stars.