Volume Two: UNCONNECTED
IV.
Grand Gathering

"Aramis, after a journey into Lorraine, disappeared all at once, and ceased to write to his friends…"
— Alexandre Dumas, The Three Musketeers

The condition of the sky and city upon DG's arrival was decidedly unfavourable. In a word: wretched. Drenched with rain and drowning in a melange of fear and regret, DG swooped from her tired horse, the hems of her trousers doused in splashes of mud, the hem of her cloak frayed and old. Witches wear such clothes, she reasoned with the twang of conscience.

Family did not come for her right away, though, with the cross-court cameras, the voice anomaly transmissions, Mother could not be in doubt of her second daughter's presence. Who should step into the deluge but honourable Sir Clyde, fair-headed, curly-haired, smiling till the dimples glistened above his greying beard. He called her 'my lady' and took the reins, saluted and, to himself, thought her pretty though altered, perhaps for the better.

Inside, DG expunged all unwanted tales from her head. Imaginations soar, she decided, and dreaded each inch the undisciplined mind traversed. Again, the rear foyer, nearly as grand as the formal front entrance, lacked persons. The electrical lights were off, the gaslights set to dim. An eerie sensation whelmed her. The inevitable had happened, as she'd known it would, back in the day when she'd left them for her own adventure. Something more had changed.

She wasted no other moment but went straight to her father's first-floor study. A small, unnoticed room crammed with shelves holding trinkets, shelves holding books, tables holding maps in disarray, tables covered in sheaves of unfinished memoirs and other unfinished business. She entered after the invitation, and Dad rose from behind his desk, careered round it, embraced her. Her name landed softly on the hair between temple and ear. When his arms drifted and held her outward, she smiled shakily beneath his gentle scrutiny.

'Your tower agrees with you, I think.'

How grateful she was to hear such words, ample kindness given when he didn't propose thoughts of espousal, to live so far away from home with but a fix-it factotum and a grotesque. A different, roughened version of home, left to create her spells as she was to find magic in a paintbrush. It hadn't been so long since she'd crossed the plains, the hills, the mountains, to Central City, the restored castle, the hugs of parents, the love of a sister and brother.

She answered about the fine state of her health, brushing it aside to discover the meaning of their calling for her. 'A telegram came, but it did not say very much.'

'Ah,' Ahamo loosed his demeanour in one way, lifted defences in another, 'yes, the infamous and quickly approaching state dinner. A triumph of the delegation. Functionaries from all over the O.Z., and ambassadors from other countries. This will not be the first time you have been to the Grand Gathering: You went four years ago.'

'I can hardly remember four years ago,' DG admitted, softly snickering, picking at her riding gloves removed from her hands. She remembered four years ago. Mother's brief pregnancy, which DG had latched to ferociously, adoring the idea, with monstrous tenacity, of being a middle sibling. She would've loved so much having a little brother. There was no doubt in her, even then, that it would've been a boy, as magic seemed to have decided it for all of them. But then catastrophe, and DG had fled to her other home, to Wyatt and Glitch, the companionship too of Chessa, Wyatt's no-nonsense niece, and the ring of Wyatt's off-the-wall marshal friends. She'd returned only to attend the state dinner, otherwise known as the Grand Gathering, although Glitch called it the Golden Ball, and wasn't sure why Wyatt had laughed so hard hearing the old moniker.

She sidled uneasily about the room. Tired from the journey—twelve hours on horseback. It was half after nine in the evening, the bonging tall clock told. A hand scraped along her hair. She stopped by the window with a view of the rose garden, the fountain where the lilies grew, where she first knew she loved Glitch and Glitch loved her. Almost eight years removed from the present.

But it was monumentally unimportant. She swerved to her father. Soft and sweet, sure of himself. He hadn't Queen Faunatasia's sharpened tongue or quick action. But he had gumption and willpower, patience, depth of understanding, though his foresight was lacking, as though he hadn't yet grown into the wisdom of knowing people well. A distorted gurgling within DG's conscience struggled against the current.

'Why bother me about this, anyway? What am I? The little princess. If the Grand Gathering isn't for another—whenever it is—then why have me here so soon? It is too late now for you to tell me something terrible has happened. You would have mentioned it first. Sir Clyde would not have looked so cheerful when I met him in the courtyard. Well?'

He smiled impassively, studying her as she set her hands to her hips. 'You look like your mother when you're ready to curse me. Please don't curse me, little witch.'

'Dad, come on, I'm serious,' she whined and her feet shuffled to give in. 'Why do you want me here? You called me into the rain. You said it was important. Come quickly, DG, I believe is what you said. I know Chessa's out of town and everything, but is that a reason to make me leave the tower? I'm in the middle of something very important, you know!' She lied, and he started to smile again, hooking the end of the lie with his wit.

'You have a multitude of harangues, DG.'

'Well,' she loved sparring with her father, it was as gratifying with him as it was with Zero, who had something of a coarse, dry humour, 'I keep it loaded and ready, a six-shooter at the hip, like Wyatt's.'

'Where's Chessa? I knew she was gone, but I don't know where she's gone.'

DG smashed her lips and pressed them forward, temper fading, wondering at the cause of his delay. Maybe Mother was on her way. 'She's in Goyne Rus Fyrros. She was among those selected to refurbish Fernlach Castle. It's a great honour for her.'

'Yes,' he tapped his chin with a finger, staring into the patterns of the old rug, 'yes, I remember. Fernlach Castle. Beautiful place.'

'It will be, when it's finished. Right now it looks like a midden and some rock. Sea birds perch there and shit all over it. Dad, come on, quit your delaying. The Grand Gathering, what do you want me to do? Put a sleeping spell on them?'

'No, ha, ha,' Ahamo's laugh was high, unexpected, genuine. 'If I wanted them to sleep, I would just stand up and give a five-minute speech on the expectations of the monarchy and how that is going to fulfill their impression of royalty. I'm waiting for your mother.' He slid the sentences together on a single string, words following words, dancing with them. He could do that, such was his power, when he willed it to happen.

What he willed did happen, for the door opened. Faunatasia's sweeping dress robes swirled and ruffled behind her as she hurried to embrace her daughter. DG smelled of rain and rosemary, as Aunt Mellabris once did. She inhaled deeply, a stroke of calm and happiness. DG was as good at fixing things as Chessa Cain was at fixing broken mortar and cracked chandelier chains.

'You're here alone?' Faunatasia searched her daughter for signs of a second presence. 'I heard you arrive, but—where's Chessa?'

'I told you,' DG said, flat and bland, 'she's in Goyne Rus—'

'Good stars, I forgot,' Faunatasia suffered momentarily, placing a palm against her careworn face, 'Goyne Rus Fyrros, Fernlach Castle.' But then she brightened. 'Beautiful place.'

DG's lids narrowed to catch conspiracy's fading scent, of something worse that they didn't wish to speak. 'What do you want me to do? In point of fact, it seems as though you really had Chessa in mind for this—this—this whatever it is!' She flung an arm, letting it go akimbo, to indicate the unpredictability of this wayward Thing.

'Oh, it isn't an enormous deal, DG,' Faunatasia began sweetly. 'Your father has told you about the Grand Gathering? The state dinner?'

'Yes,' DG replied as tartly as she'd spoken before. Placations and platitudes annoyed her after too much use.

'Did your father tell you that Lord Grimpergreetz is planning to be there?'

'Lord Grimpergreetz?' At this point, DG could do nothing but repeat like a parrot and stare.

'Yes,' false blitheness festooned the single word, sending Faunatasia to smile gently, pet her daughter's wrist in her hand. 'He's a distant relation of ours. Third cousin once removed, or some such—you would have to ask Lady Chichester if you wish to know exactly how we are related.'

'Mother, you do realise that I am unavailable for solicitous behaviour towards potential suitors any more, don't you?'

'What?' Faunatasia turned blank, seemed to go back a page, read the message left there, and return to the present in a state of laughter. 'Oh, yes, DG. I am not hoping that you and Lord Grimpergreetz will become a matched pair, good stars, my angel, no! Already, his behaviour is not the sort that will win him friends or influence court. Here.' She angled to her spouse, waiting for an object he had readied beneath one of his favourite maps. 'Here, DG.'

A page in the tome, with thick, cloth-like pages, was marked by a ribbon and opened there. On it, an image covered in tissue paper, that peeled away slowly, with crinkles, a dried layer of adherent second skin. Behind it, a picture familiar, a set of quaint little slippers that a tiny girl with tiny feet, though not quite Thumbelina herself, might have worn, danced in—flown to her escape in.

'The shoes of the Greatest-Great?' repeated DG, the parrot, the enraptured daughter of Gales.

'Yes,' Faunatasia became stern, stubborn, slamming the book with angry flair. 'They were designed by a relative of Lord Grimpergreetz, and now he wants them back.'

'But,' it caught her, abruptly, why this was so bad, 'we don't have them.'

'Of course we don't. Yet Grimpergreetz wants them. If he doesn't have them by the last night of the state dinner, he'll run his army into our country.'

After the declaration, DG shook her head, swaying drying hair, rolling tender, tired eyes. Agape, she glanced once at father, huffing as she looked at mother. 'This is the silliest thing I've ever heard of! Ask Ambrose to make you a new pair. It's unlikely Grimpergreetz will know the difference. I heard they only flew once—once, and the magic was taken out of them. It's true, too. I'm a witch, Mother; I understand how spells work. Ask Ambrose to make you another pair, and end this silliness of shoes. Ambrose could even make Grimpergreetz a pair that will fit.'

Ahamo snickered conspicuously behind his cupped hands. He sat comfortably still to absorb Faunatasia's silent reprimand. The serious-minded queen continued.

'Grimpergreetz is not a man I should like to cross—however he wishes to dress in his private life, in magical shoes or belts or—or ermine pelts! He has one of the strongest armies at his disposal, not to mention a formidable alliance with many surrounding nations. And while it has been eight years since the end of our civil war, the strife remains. The people are tired, blistered, and haven't forgotten yet what the fight was, what it was like. I cannot ask them to go through such an ordeal another time. Never again, not while there's still a breath in my body and magic in my soul.'

'You take his threat to heart,' DG surmised. The corner of her sight guided her to fling into the nearest chair. 'I understand your concern, Mother, if you feel that Grimpergreetz will follow through with his threat, leading the army into the O.Z. Have you informed Ambrose about this? He knew Grimpergreetz. They were friends.'

'That bond was broken long ago,' Faunatasia claimed, sidetracked into remembrances. She paced, folding arms, touching her neck. A whorl of grey-brown hair bobbed behind a glittering earring. 'Ambrose and Wyatt are still on sabbatical in Far Corners. They will be here for the state dinner. Ambrose assured me of that before they went on their way. But the problem is here, now—and I want you to do something for me, DG.'

DG lifted her gaze, not her head, a bored, nonchalant manoeuvre that Ahamo dreaded, but that Faunatasia had conveniently forgotten the imprecations of.

'It isn't an action I wouldn't normally ask my child to do.'

'Then ask Zero,' DG interrupted. She frowned as her father opened his mouth to speak, shoving words back in when he saw his inappropriateness. 'Oh, he's busy preparing security for the event, I suppose. Dammit.' She picked at the end of the chair's arm, with flat nails broken and chipped after poring over spell books of the wicked and old witches from all the Outer Zone directions. She had hoped, idly, to pass the task along to someone else. Zero was her closest doppelgänger, the one most ready to take action, to risk his life for it. He was less inclined to leave since his last birthday, since marrying Azkadellia, since he took on the curing of Headcases. He did the latter so profoundly, unbrokenly, that throughout the realm they sang of the duty as Zero's Lament. As though he was to blame for broken Headcases everywhere. Like Glitch.

She sighed and slid her sight around the room. Comfortable, lived-in, masculine, yet it felt oddly foreign to her. She had shifted too much, mislaid something of herself, the night she realised Glitch and she had to love Wyatt if they were going to save him, and the months and months she'd stayed in Issilthrush, and a life unexpectedly brilliant atop an old, ragged, craggy hill at the base of the Andlermiel mountains. What was this but another adventure along the way?

'All right,' DG rubbed down an eyebrow, a signature of understanding, a key to her parents' relaxation, 'what do you want me to do?'

Faunatasia breathed relief. 'You need to find your Great Uncle.'

'Oh,' she was not perplexed by this, 'him. Decide to lob him out of exile, have you?'

'That is his decision.'

'Mother, he was sent into nothing less than Purgatory!'

'We've not the time to argue this! Take your uncle's case to the High District Court, if you feel so strongly about it! But, as of now, DG, he is the only one who might have the slightest idea where those slippers are.'

'Only because he's been around so long! He was probably here when they were worn!'

Ahamo cut the thickness of the air, puncturing the tension further by another crooked smile. He adored the wily, unpredictable motions of DG's mind, partly possessed now by asymmetrical Cain cynicism. 'He wasn't, DG, honestly—he wasn't. Your mother speaks the truth, and I have consulted other mythology experts. He really might know where they are. We need you to find him, talk to him, see if he can help.'

'He'll laugh in my face,' DG intoned blandly. The task, however, filled her with no reluctance. Against her wishes, she was curious about her famous great-times-several uncle. She'd come across his tale in one of the leather-bound books lodged in the library, on a dusty rack. The pages had fluttered out as she opened it, so great was its age, so flawed was its spine, closed for a hundred or more years. The chronicles of her uncle's sordid history, lodged in a story unending, the man so adored that time folded and obliterated itself for him.

'Fine,' she muttered, disgusted with herself, unable to look at her mother's pleased face. 'How do I find him?'

'There's a path you have to follow. Your father has the map. Ahamo, please, the map.'

'I'm working on it—let me find—' He pottered about, tabletop to tabletop, spectacles slipping from the bridge to the ball of his nose. Papers shifted, slipped together in the sibilants of old lovers; he moved them aside, moved books, periodicals, newspapers, other maps momentarily regarded and soon disregarded—until finally a triumphal 'Ah!' more than a clearing of his throat.

DG took the map, three creases in yellowed canvas, and unwound it to find a small image. It had the look of an abstract. Was it a painting of a modernist O.Z. painter, or a map? 'I don't get it. It's a squiggly line and some sort of—'

'Just take it,' Ahamo insisted. 'It's a changing map. Have you heard of them?'

'A changing map?'

Faunatasia found the word less likely to roll from Ahamo's undisciplined tongue, but pronounced in DG's mind where everything was a spell. 'A prirganna amana diosi.'

'Oh.'

DG recalled the near past. Chessa, golden hair leaping over her shoulders, the ends touching the sheaves of an old book found at an antiquarian shop in Rhodonne, south and far from everywhere. The book was handily A Dictionary of Spell Casting Terms. At night, they each read from it, slowly pronouncing the names, or trying to, laughing, and forming tales from the definitions indited as riddles. Inevitably, they would laugh till tears shone in their eyes, and fall asleep with happy dreams in the weave of their thoughts, the enormous book between them. It had been seventy plat, but very worth it, worth twice that.

'I've heard of those. It's an unfolding map without folds. It creates itself according to the possessor. So,' she traced a forefinger along the line—and when she had finished, the line had changed, moved. It showed a little childish drawing of a castle, merely a tall, machicolated tower with a pennant at the roof pinnacle. And from the centre of this tower ran the representation of the Old Route, the Yellow Road, into the Wilderness of the West Which Was Formerly East. Now she knew where to go, but—but already knew where to go. The line would shift, the castle would leave, as soon as she left it. The map would, as Ahamo said, grow the longer she wandered the open road.

'Where will the path take me? Where is the endless path into his exile?'

Now the task lay in the capable hands of her daughter, Faunatasia doubted its necessity. How silly it was, sending her daughter after a distant relation unseen for years, who might begrudge Princess DG all her rights as a member of royalty—who might hurt her, who might be locked in a hell of demons, wherever the writers shoved him. She lost strength, wilted, saddened by the loss, the hopelessness, the indistinct cause. 'He used to write letters… But, one day, the letters stopped coming. We had to assume he was all right.'

'Mother, where am I going?' When DG saw her mother's eyes, tears glittered in them, like lavender sand covered in lost diamonds. A faraway glare within the gaze made her homesick, unsure what for. 'Mother?'

'The letters were marked with the stamp from Woodshire.'

'Then I'm going to Woodshire,' she lifted the map as she started to rise, 'if the prirganna amana diosi takes me there.'