Chapter 9: Lake of a Hundred Swans
Kingdom of Cymdros, off the coast of Nefynmor. Present. October.
"Give our regards to the ghosts, Master Fletcher!"
Derek caught the boatswain's farewell a few minutes after entering the dinghy, when he was still within shouting distance of the larger ship. Apart from the captain and the boatswain, the rest of the crew had avoided Derek's gaze when he disembarked. He didn't blame them. None of them expected him to leave this island alive.
Captain Ilyich had kept his promise: The dinghy was as sturdy as Derek could have hoped for. But the sea was choppy, and the bitter autumn wind sloshed almost as much water into the rowboat as the waves themselves. By the time Derek reached the shore, his clothes were soaked and his arm and upper leg muscles were screaming. The beach was rocky, but Derek laid down and plastered his face against the dark pebbles anyway. Cursed or not, he'd never been so happy to touch land in his life.
As he lay on the beach catching his breath, he pulled out Odette's last letter. He reread, once again, the paragraph with what he thought were the most critical clues. They had to be, or else his entire journey to get here had been a waste.
Do you remember our argument two winters ago, when the eldritch mine detonated on Nefynmor? What I told you Cymdros would never allow has come to pass. Take my hand. Find my pen and you'll find me.
The eldritch landmine had gone off on the island of Serenys, not Nefynmor. But Derek suspected Odette had deliberately changed the name, to lead him here. As for what Cymdros would never allow…the obvious answer was magic. But magic was everywhere on Nefynmor now. No, he knew Odette had been referring to something more specific.
A portal. They had argued about creating a magical portal on Cymdros, so healer mages could arrive almost instantaneously. Somewhere on this island, a portal must have actually appeared. But what had it let in, and where did it lead?
Take my hand. Derek had laughed to himself the second time he'd read that sentence. Tucked beneath her note and King William's, Odette had slipped in three playing cards: an ace of clubs, a four of diamonds and a two of spades. Card games were one of the few activities they could both tolerate doing together as teenagers, back when they were just trying to kill the forced time in each other's company. But thanks to that, they both knew the four suits of cards could also refer to the four points on a compass. Odette had given him directions.
The ace of clubs he suspected pointed to a landmark: the Shamrock, a rock formation of three giant boulders on Nefynmor's eastern side. The four of diamonds and two of spades must be directions away from the Shamrock. Four miles north and two miles west. Roughly four and a half miles of hiking northwest once he reached the Shamrock, if he was lucky enough to be able to walk in a straight line.
As he ventured further inland, the depths of Nefynmor's blight began to sink in. Neither Odette nor her father had been exaggerating. Nearly every tree Derek passed was an unearthly white, from their leaves to their roots. More than once, he nearly stepped on rotten apples that looked like dark, moldy tomatoes. A sticky black liquid oozed out of their squished bodies, and strange spores were erupting from them where seeds should have been.
The forest was unnaturally quiet. Had any animals been able to survive in this poisoned terrain?
Derek looked closer at the trees, wondering if he would see the faces King William had mentioned. Most were blank. But after a mile or so of walking, his eyes fell on a cherry tree. In the white bark, he saw etchings of an elongated face, the jaw dropped open—a scream or a cry? Black sap was dripping from the eyes, giving it the appearance of someone weeping. Above the face, he saw the three-pronged symbol King William had sketched in his journal. A bird's foot. He wondered if Odette had seen the same mark on herself, and when it had reappeared. Without thinking, his fingers reached out and nearly touched it.
This was the impossible thing she said she had to do in her letter. The great wrong that needed to be made right, Derek thought. She wanted to find them all. All twelve of the king's lost swans. He withdrew his fingers. For all their petty arguments and genuine disagreements, they were kindred spirits. Odette was just as reckless and wishful as he was. And he would have helped her, had he known.
When he finally reached the Shamrock's boulders, the moss that should have been green looked white as snow. Looking down from the outcrop, his heart sank. A spidery green mist stretched out before him on the northern slope. He remembered the last time he'd plunged recklessly into an eldritch mist spawned from the Forbidden Arts. This one wasn't nearly as thick as the mist from the landmine, but would that matter? An eldritch mist could cloud his mind just as much as his vision.
There was nothing for it. If he was going to follow Odette's directions, he had to go through. Derek made his way cautiously down the slope. As he stepped into the fog, another thought crossed his mind.
Take my hand, Odette had written. Were the cards enchanted? If he held them up, would they show him the way through the mist? Impulsively, Derek grabbed all three cards and held them in front of him like a fan. No such luck. They were, in the end, just cards.
He walked deeper into the mist.
He didn't hear the voices right away. They took their time—perhaps they knew he was doomed to wander this mist for miles. They were, as King William had said, patient. But they came just the same, melodious and mocking. When Derek had walked for what felt like nearly an hour, trying to follow his compass northwest but starting to think he couldn't trust that either, the invisible voices began.
So you're back, prince of shadow and fog. Back to grope in the dark, as you always do and you always will. This first voice sounded old, high-pitched and raspy. The next two sounded younger.
Did you lose something, little prince? Did you fumble and break a heart the moment you captured it?
Be kind, sister. This little prince is not so ignorant anymore. He knows why he heard weeping the last time he entered our domain. He knows the crying child in the mist was no illusion. Would you like to know the child's name? Would you like to know if he cried for his mama or his papa? Or is your noble fiancée the only lost creature that matters to you?
Derek winced. The last words stung. They stung because they were true.
The asylum papers. The papers he'd promised Odette he would give Captain Josiah and Lady Anisha, if they ever needed them. He should have given them to Lady Anisha at King William's funeral. They would have helped her at least, even though her husband was already dead. But he'd left them behind in a locked drawer in his desk in Chamberg. And by the time he'd remembered weeks later, Lady Anisha had vanished too. Had the Council of Cymdros gotten to her? Or had the same nefarious forces that had snatched Odette away taken her mentor as well? Why the hell hadn't Lady Anisha just asked him for asylum at the funeral, when she had the chance?
Blind, selfish little prince. Too blind to notice us chipping your world away, while you were playing the noble, questing hero. That voice sounded like the old sorcerer who had taunted him in Luthedain. Was the old man somehow in the mist too? Or was he going mad?
A cry pierced the mist. A high, wordless warble. Derek looked up. He couldn't see what made the sound—the mist was too thick for him to see even the tops of the trees. But he recognized it immediately. The cry had come from a swan.
The cry came again, twice now. It was clear and cutting, like an icy wind waking him from a dream. With his mind suddenly clear, Derek could hear the whistling of powerful wings beating above him. Odette had found him, just as she had two years earlier. She had come to lead him out of the mist to the island's hidden portal.
Derek walked faster. The voices continued, but they were curiously muffled. The call of the swan had weakened their power. As his confidence returned, Derek began to jog.
He jogged for another mile, and another. He should have been getting more exhausted, not less, especially after the grueling row ashore. But a new energy pulsed through his veins. Whenever he began to feel disoriented or veered off course, the swan's call returned to his left or his right, guiding him back to the correct path.
The last mile seemed to disappear beneath his feet. When the mist finally thinned, Derek slowed to a stop.
He had arrived at a lake surrounded by oaks and maples. The water sparkled in the midafternoon sun. To his right, a fortress of black stone lay in ruins. This must be the stronghold where Baron Von Rothbart had launched his failed coup over eighteen years ago. So King William destroyed it after all, he thought.
Derek searched for the swan that had led him here. But to his shock, an entire flock of white swans awaited him on the lake. For a moment his heart leapt—had Odette done it? Had she somehow brought all the lost swans back to Cymdros? But just as quickly, his hopes died. There were far more than thirteen swans here. There were dozens. And when he set foot in the lake, all the swans turned to him in unison.
"Odette?" he said. In response, half the swans lifted their necks and cried out. The dozen nearest to him flocked eagerly to his side. Then, at last, he understood.
It's a riddle, he thought. It's a riddle created by the portal. Derek knew, as anyone who knew anything about magic knew, that most magical portals weren't open to everyone. Some required a password, or an answer to a test—and that test could vary by person as well as by portal. This was the final test he had to pass, if he wanted to open whatever portal led off this cursed island. He had to find Odette among a hundred other swans.
Feeling rather silly, Derek held up the golden necklace he had taken from Chamberg—the one item of Odette's he still carried with him. When half a dozen swans tried to snatch it from his hand with their orange beaks, he put it away.
He closed his eyes. None of Odette's clues had prepared him for this. How was he to know how Odette would look or behave as a swan? She was fierce, kind, loyal and reckless, but none of those traits were easily displayed here.
Think, boy! Lord Rogers' voice now rang his head, as though he could bash Derek's brains out with sheer sarcasm—as his counselor had no doubt often wanted to do. Would Odette leave something like this up to chance? Look for a swan that's not acting like a swan.
Derek looked more closely. A handful of swans were behaving erratically. A group of four were spinning in circles with their wings outstretched, carving miniature whirlpools above the water. Another trio were doing backwards somersaults, their webbed feet kicking ridiculously in the air. And one was knocking its beak against a tree like woodpecker. Unlike the others, its wings looked dirty and mottled, as though patches of feathers had fallen out.
Of course, Derek thought. A wounded swan. Like a breaking wave, Derek realized he had seen Odette as a swan before—in the night sky above Luthedain, a white swan battling a black one. As he waded closer to the tree, he heard a rhythm to the knocking of her beak. Four quick. Two slow. Four quick. Two slow. The same numbers on the cards she had left him. She hadn't left this up to chance.
Drawing nearer, he saw her wings were flecked with dried blood where clumps of feathers had been ripped out. The swan stopped knocking the tree and turned to stare directly into his face. Derek reached out carefully and brushed his fingers against her feathers.
"I'm sorry I took so long," he said.
He never found out whether his words or his deliberate touch broke the illusion. But every other swan vanished then, leaving the two of them alone on the lake. A yawning golden oval emerged suddenly beside her. Derek experienced just a moment's confusion—every other magical portal he'd seen in his life was blue—before the princess-turned-swan swam away from him toward the portal. When she reached the edge, she turned back and tilted her head. He didn't think swans could make facial expressions. But just then he would have sworn he saw a familiar glint of mischief in her eyes, as though she were teasing him. Come on, Your Highness. You're not scared of a magical glowing door that just appeared out of nowhere, are you?
Derek followed her through—
and froze. The portal forked. Derek had never heard of a portal that could lead to two different destinations, but somehow this one did. To make matters worse, the swan he'd been so certain was Odette split into two identical swans before his eyes. Both swans took off down opposite paths. Which was real, and which was the illusion? Would the riddles never end?
To his left, he saw one swan flying down a moonlit corridor made of stone. To his right, he saw the other swan swimming on a lake beside a weeping willow. The lake looked very similar to the one he'd left behind, except for a fully formed black fortress in the distance.
As he watched, a pearlescent whirlpool enveloped the swan on the lake. When it fell away, a woman stood in her place with her back to him. She looked exactly like Odette as he had last seen her, right down to her ivory and green gown, radiant in the sunlight.
He wanted to follow her. His feet started to carry him to the right, and he tried to shake the feeling that something was off. He'd come so far; she was right there. What was he waiting for? The openings to both pathways were beginning to narrow. So was the entrance behind him. What would happen if the portal closed before he had chosen a path? Would he be trapped indefinitely in a dark limbo?
In that moment of terrifying indecision, Derek remembered the very first clue, spoken by a king gasping out his last breaths in the rain: It's not what it seems.
Without thinking further, Derek turned away from the woman on the lake and bolted down the corridor to the left.
As he ran down the stone hallway, he felt as though he had plunged into another eldritch mist. There were windows, and yet the path ahead seemed to grow dimmer the further he ran. It was almost like a malevolent darkness was chasing him, flooding his ears, his eyes, his brain.
Muffled noises pierced through the pounding in his ears. He heard something like a large splash of water, followed by a sharp gasp and a woman's voice echoing sharply, "Hurry, before he gets lost." A loud scuffling followed. Finally, when the darkness was so thorough Derek could barely see two feet in front of him, a familiar voice called out,
"Take my hand! Derek, take my hand!"
His arm outstretched, their fingers fumbled in the dark until finally her hand closed around his forearm. The moment she grasped his arm, the darkness disappeared. They were facing each other in a corridor of grey stone. Cool beams of moonlight pierced through the enormous stained-glass windows on his left. Odette was drenched from the waist up, wearing a simple white blouse and a blue cotton skirt. They stared at each other for several seconds before Odette threw her arms around him.
"It worked! It finally worked!" she said.
Author's Note: If you made it this far into the story, thanks for reading! Starting in the next chapter, we'll finally begin to see what the last four months have looked like from Odette's perspective. Another footnote: There is some disagreement in the tarot world about whether spades (swords) refers to east or west. I used "A Guide to Tarot Card Meanings" by Mark McElroy, cited on the site tarotmysterium.