Herbie Brennan: The Faeman Quest

‘We have a what? ’ Henry exploded.

‘We have a daughter,’ Blue repeated. ‘She’s fifteen years old, nearly sixteen. Her name is Mella.’

They were together in the Throne Room of the Purple Palace. Blue, annoyingly, had perched herself on the edge of the Consort’s Chair, and since Henry wasn’t allowed to sit on the Imperial Throne, he was squatting near her feet on the third step of the dais. The little physician seated beside him was scratching at his arm with an instrument that looked much like a wire-headed toothbrush. Henry pushed his hand away impatiently and frowned at him.

‘What are you doing? ’

‘Preparing your veins for an infusion of elementals, Consort Majesty.’ The physician held up a writhing leather pouch. One of the elementals almost clawed its way out before he jerked the drawstring to trap it. The creature glared at Henry malevolently.

‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ Henry said to Blue. ‘Of course we haven’t got a daughter.’ A sudden thought occurred to him. ‘Unless…?’

Blue shook her head. ‘No, I’m not. One faeman child is quite enough, thank you.’ She sighed. ‘She used a lethe cone on us.’

Henry felt his jaw muscles slacken as he stared at her. ‘We have a daughter called – what was her name?’

‘Mella.’

‘We have a daughter called Mella who used a lethe cone on us?’

The little physician was attaching a flexible transparent tube to his arm, but Henry ignored him. They couldn’t have a fifteen-year-old daughter. They didn’t have a fifteen-year-old daughter. They didn’t have any children. Although they had been married sixteen years now, and he vaguely recalled wanting children. And even though they’d have been very young, it was a royal faerie custom to produce an heir as quickly as possible…

‘You always do that,’ Blue said crossly. ‘Repeat things I say as a question. You have no idea how irritating it is.’

Henry brushed the physician’s hand away again and frowned. ‘I have no idea how -?’

But Blue cut him short. ‘Leave the doctor alone, Henry. He has to get those elementals into your bloodstream otherwise you’ll never remember.’

Her words brought him up short. Lethe spells made you forget things: specific, precise things like people or events. A good magician could craft one that would blank out all knowledge of your own mother. Was it possible he really did have a daughter? The physician rubbed some salve on his skin that caused it to tear open, then pushed the transparent tube inside.

‘Ow!’ Henry said. ‘That hurts!’

‘Won’t be long now, Consort Majesty,’ the physician told him cheerfully. He clipped a funnel on to the open end of the tube and tipped his pouch of elementals into it. The creatures slid down the sides, changing texture as they moved, then slipped like smoke into the transparent tube.

Henry opened his mouth to protest again and discovered he could not speak. There was a weird slithery sensation as the elementals entered his bloodstream, then a moment of utter confusion when they reached his brain and began to dismantle the crystalline structures left by the lethe. After that came the nausea, a gut-wrenching, toss-your-cookies- now sort of nausea as the debris dropped into his stomach. Then the elementals were streaming out of his ear into the physician’s waiting pouch. Henry’s head cleared at once.

‘Oh my God,’ he said.

‘You remember now?’ Blue asked.

Henry placed his head in his hands. ‘Oh my God,’ he said again. He looked back up at Blue. ‘She’s run off, hasn’t she?’

Blue nodded. ‘Yes.’

‘Where?’

Blue shook her head and shrugged grimly. ‘Who knows?’

‘When?’

‘Three days ago.’

‘Three days? ’ Henry stared at her in enraged disbelief. ‘Why did nobody tell us?’

‘She put it about that we were sending her to Haleklind to further her education.’

The little physician had packed up his equipment and was backing out of the Throne Room, bowing as he went. Henry scarcely registered his departure. ‘Didn’t anyone go with her?’

Blue shook her head again. ‘She took a personal flyer.’

‘She doesn’t have a flying licence!’

‘She’s a Princess of the Realm, Henry. Do you honestly think anyone was going to stop her?’

After a moment, Henry said, ‘I don’t suppose she actually went to Haleklind?’

‘No. No record of her flyer moving in or out of their airspace, no record of her at a border crossing, no breaches of security involving anyone of her description – and you know how careful the Table of Seven are about that sort of thing.’

The Table of Seven was Haleklind’s ruling council. Haleklind’s paranoid ruling council. Henry stared at her bleakly. ‘So she could be anywhere. ’

Then Blue was beside him, clutching him, demanding comfort. He could feel she was trembling. ‘Henry,’ Blue said, ‘Mella could be dead! ’

‘I want the girl dead,’ said the severed head of Lord Hairstreak. It stared – glared, really – at Jasper Chalkhill, a Faerie of the Night who had undergone dramatic changes in the past decade. He’d lost weight, for one thing – hadn’t we all? – and a great deal of it. Did he still have a wangaramus up his bottom, Hairstreak wondered. The worms had their benefits, but they did leech nourishment. Their hosts all tended to get thinner by the month: it was almost the standard way of spotting them. Chalkhill was positively wraith-like. He was showing cheekbones for the first time in years. But that wasn’t the only change. He’d abandoned his camp act, thank Darkness, and he spoke very little. He was no longer anybody’s spy, not Madame Cardui’s, not Hairstreak’s own. He was an assassin now, perhaps the best assassin in the Realm. Which was just what Hairstreak needed.

Chalkhill glared back. There was a time when he’d been very afraid of Lord Hairstreak. But it was difficult to take the little turd seriously now he was just a severed head supported by an onyx cube. You could see the veins and sinews trailing from the stump of neck if you looked hard enough. All the same, Chalkhill had to admit His Lordship had made a miraculous – if highly secret – comeback. Working with extreme cunning through a network of proxies, he was almost as powerful as he’d ever been and a great deal richer. More than rich enough to pay Chalkhill’s outrageous fees.

‘Not possible,’ Chalkhill said. ‘The security arrangements in the Purple Palace are impregnable.’

The lips of the severed head began to writhe. It took a moment for Chalkhill to realise the contortions meant Hairstreak was trying to smile. It was a creepy sight.

‘She is no longer in the Purple Palace,’ Hairstreak said at length.

An interesting development, Chalkhill thought. The faeman child’s condition meant she only ever left the Palace on State occasions – once, perhaps twice a year at most. And there were no State occasions scheduled for the next six months.

‘Where is she?’ Chalkhill asked.

The energies generated by the onyx cube were erratic and sometimes caused one of Hairstreak’s eyes to roll without reference to the other. It did so now, turning momentarily white in the process, before coming to rest focused disconcertingly on a spot beyond Chalkhill’s left ear. ‘No one knows,’ Hairstreak said.

There was a discreet Body in a Box sticker on the cube beneath the intertwined CMS logo of Consolidated Magical Services. The cube itself and the head resting on it were both protected by a military-grade spell field, which meant Hairstreak – what was left of him – had become indestructible and virtually immortal. The cube drew its power directly from the sun, so you couldn’t even shut him down – an ironical outcome for a botched suicide attempt.