The Tales of Aylfenhame Compendium

Chapter Seventeen-1

Chapter Seventeen

Aubranael was a child again.

He had gone to the aid of the sleeping girl because something in her hopeless, helpless posture had touched him deeply. As he approached he had noticed something odd about the thin brown arms that lay splayed across the table top: the sleeves of her dress barely extended past her elbows, and their cuffs were frayed to ribbons. The dress itself had once been white, he judged, with roses or some other bloom printed across it; now it was grey with age and dirt. In places, the fabric appeared to be rotting away.

As he had helped her to sit—instinctively lending her an arm of support when she wavered—he had found himself looking into large, sad golden eyes.

He had seen those eyes before.

At once, a flood of memory bore him away from the scene of the mad tea-party and back more than twenty years. He saw the soaring white walls of the Royal Palace once more in his mind’s eye, and the heavily fragranced gardens he had run through as a boy. He had been no one of any eminence, merely the son of one of the many gardeners; but the little princess, Lihyaen, was similar in age and temperament and they had long been the greatest of friends.

Until the day she had vanished during a game of hide-and-seek. He had spent hours searching the gardens for her, running through the low-hanging trees and fragrant bushes until he was tired and footsore—and increasingly frightened. At last he had gone indoors and crept up the long, long flights of stairs to her nursery—a room he was never allowed to go into. But he found no guards at the door to prevent him, and none of her nurses waited there to shoo him away. Lihyaen’s pretty chamber was silent and empty, and something about the circumstance felt mightily wrong to him in a way he would have been hard-put to describe.

Heart pounding, he had crept into every corner of her room, searching through cupboards and chests and under chairs in case she had hidden herself away in any one of them.

She had not; but the door to her bedchamber stood ajar…

The little princess lay in her bed, her dark hair strewn across her pale silken pillows and her face turned towards the window. Had she grown tired, and returned to rest without informing him? But a glance at her face had told him that she was not resting. Her eyes—large and golden like her mother’s—were wide open, staring sightlessly at the failing daylight beyond the cool glass panes. She made no movement of any kind; not even when, sobbing with fright, he had shaken her arms and touched her face and put his cheek against hers.

So absorbed was he that he failed to notice the other person in the room. A soft footstep alerted him, and a faint swish of fabric. He looked up to see a tall, white-cloaked figure disappearing through the open door into Lihyaen’s nursery.

He had felt rage for the first time in his young life. Shaking with it, he had torn through the doorway in pursuit, with no clear idea in mind as to what he intended to do with the mysterious intruder should be succeed in catching them. His young brain only wished to rend and claw and howl his fury until the cloaked one reversed whatever he had done to Lihyaen.

He did not receive the opportunity, of course. He had hurled himself, howling, at the intruder’s legs—and received a face-full of something that burned as his reward. The memory of that blinding agony could still make him shudder, more than twenty years later.

His face had never been the same, and of course Lihyaen had never come back. The princess was given a ceremonious burial; a mere few months later her mother, Queen Anthelaena, had died—of grief for her daughter, many said.

And then King Edironal had disappeared; walked out of his palace one day, and never returned. So the kingdom of Aylfenhame had drifted on, year after year, with no liege lords and no one with a clear claim to the throne.

Except, perhaps, his daughter. And as Aubranael stared into the strange girl’s face, a wild hope built in his heart. She looked young; too young. But perhaps—perhaps she had not died. Perhaps the dearest friend of his youth and heart had survived after all…

‘Lihyaen?’ he whispered.

And her dreamy, vacant eyes had sharpened and fixed full upon his face, her own full of wonder. ‘How is it that you know my name?’ she said.

He could have wept. He was weeping, he realised, as a warm tear ran down his cheek. ‘Because I am Aubranael,’ he said softly.

At first, she could not see it. Her eyes tracked over his face, pull of puzzlement and doubt. ‘But you… your face?’

He smiled sadly. ‘Since the night you died,’ he said.

She lifted one spindly arm, shaky with the effort, and touched the soft skin beneath his left eye. She stared into his eyes for a long time, and at length a dawning recognition swept over her face.

‘It is you,’ she whispered.

Then she began to cry. He held her while she wept, aghast at her skeletal frame, the way her thin, weak body shook with the effort.

‘But how…?’ he said at last, when the storm of weeping had abated a little.

‘A changeling,’ she sobbed. ‘Fairy stock. It was not me that you saw.’

Aubranael began, inwardly, to curse himself. There had been rumours at the time; some had whispered that the princess was not dead, that the corpse left behind was a mere seeming fabricated from ill wishes and nightmares. But mere common wisdom told him that no stock could be so perfect; there was always some little detail amiss, something to tell the observant onlooker that this seeming was not their loved one.

Lihyaen’s had been perfect.

He did not realise he was whispering broken apologies, over and over, until Lihyaen silenced him with a hand to his lips. ‘It is not of your doing,’ she said wearily.

‘But how came you to be here?’ he asked, his awareness returning at last to the peculiar tea-party going on around them.

‘This was my reward,’ she said, her weariness giving way to a momentary bitterness. ‘Because I had been such a good girl, I was to receive a party all of my own.’

Aubranael stared, aghast, at the rotting dress she wore; at her too-thin frame, her lack of strength even to hold herself upright. ‘Have you been here ever since?’ he cried.

‘It is such a lovely party,’ she said expressionlessly. ‘Twould be such a pity to break it up, do you not think?’

She spoke in a wooden tone, and he realised she was quoting somebody. ‘Who did this?’ he hissed. ‘They will pay for it!’

She shook her head, swaying slightly in her seat. ‘I do not know who it is, so you cannot make him pay.’

He became aware of a tumultuous crashing sound. It bore in upon his rage-filled reflections with inexorable determination, and he looked down the length of the table for the first time in some half-an-hour.

All the tea-party guests—and Sophy, and Mary, and Thundigle and even Balligumph—were smashing crockery. They were doing so with gusto and every appearance of high enjoyment.

Smashing things did seem like a wonderful idea to him at that moment. It did not occur to him to question why his friends were destroying the tea-things; he merely gathered an armful of his own and began flinging them into the trees. They made such a satisfying, splintering noise as they hit the trunks and exploded into shards. He continued throwing things until there was nothing left to throw.

Silence descended, a brief one; then a roar of noise erupted as every member of the assembled company began talking at once. They were saying nothing of any import and Aubranael quickly lost interest in the proceedings. He turned his attention back to Lihyaen, who had slid forward onto her elbows in the absence of his aid.

There followed a painful conversation. She began to question him in turn, and he was obliged to relate to her the pattern of his life since her apparent death. Her eyes kept returning to the twisted mess of his face, and he read guilt as well as horror in her stricken expression. Heartsick, he did his utmost to soften the misery of the past twenty years as he spoke, and represent a balanced picture of his life. But she was not fooled. She read his every look and gesture, and her eyes told him that she understood perfectly.

Now it was her turn to make apologies, and his to dismiss them. In the midst of this ritual, an insistent noise began to intrude itself upon Aubranael’s inner world, and he frowned.

‘AUBRANAEL! CRAZY LADY! I’M WANTIN’ AN ANSWER HERE!’

He looked up, noticing absently that night had fallen. Balligumph stood some way down the table, waving his arms and roaring in his direction.

‘I beg your pardon?’ he said.

‘I said,’ the troll repeated in a more reasonable tone, ‘does one of ye two crazies have any notion at all what in the blazes is goin’ on here?’

It fell to Aubranael to repeat Lihyaen’s story, and his own; Lihyaen was patently exhausted by the unaccustomed exertions of the afternoon, and lay motionless against his chest. He kept his eyes averted from those of his audience as he spoke: he could not bear the shock, horror, revulsion and pity he knew he would see there.

At length he reached the end of his tale. Nobody spoke; silence stretched on, broken only by the rustling of the leaves in the night breeze.

Aubranael noticed two things.

Firstly, Felebre sat beside Lihyaen, leaning against the princess’s legs.

Secondly, Hidenory—restored to her youth and beauty now that night had fallen—had approached during his tale, and now stood only a few feet away. She was staring at Lihyaen, her beautiful face twisted with a horror far beyond that of her companions. And Aubranael would have sworn that he saw remorse somewhere in her eyes.

His own narrowed as he watched her. ‘Hidenory,’ he said softly, ‘is something amiss?’ His arms tightened around Lihyaen in a protective gesture: he did not trust Hidenory anywhere near his princess.

But Lihyaen straightened in his arms, her thin body turning rigid. ‘Hidenory?’ she repeated, her eyes searching the witch’s face. ‘Nurse Hidey?’

Hidenory said nothing, only stared impassively down at Lihyaen.

‘No, no,’ said Lihyaen, slumping down over the table once more. ‘You cannot be: you are nothing like her.’

Hidenory smiled sadly, and as Aubranael watched her pale, blonde beauty slowly vanished. Her skin darkened until it was similar in shade to his own; her hair darkened to almost black; and though her eyes remained blue, her features began to change. At length the slow transformation was complete, and Aubranael saw before him an Ayliri woman of middle years, her face and figure pleasing but by no means so stunning as the enchantment she usually wore.

‘Hidey,’ said Lihyaen in wonder. ‘How…?’

At the same time, Aubranael said: ‘Hidey? What is your involvement with this tale?’

Hidenory groaned and covered her face with her hands. ‘I was in charge of Lihyaen that day,’ she said in a muffled voice. ‘And I… I agreed to be absent, if—if he would—’ She sighed and removed her hands, her fingernails leaving red marks on her skin as she drew them away. ‘I made a bargain,’ she said, straightening her spine and lifting her chin. ‘For Glamour! I wanted it so badly! And he gave it to me, in exchange for a half hour’s absence—no more. I swear,’ she said sadly, ‘I had no idea of the extent of his plans… though it can be no defence. I knew he could have no good purpose in seeking the bargain.’

Lihyaen was staring at her former nurse, her face a mixture of stricken dismay and confusion. She made to speak, but Hidenory held up a hand and said: ‘It can be of no use to apologise: I can never express to you the extent of my regret, nor will I ever be able to repay the debt I owe you.

‘Besides,’ she added quietly, ‘I have been punished in my turn.’ She passed a hand over her face, and in its wake her hag-like visage was restored.

Aubranael struggled with himself. His rage was building again, and he suffered a strong desire to lay all of his sufferings and Lihyaen’s at her door, and take his revenge accordingly. But to do so would serve no purpose at all; and in spite of his attempts to harden his heart, the pain and remorse in Nurse Hidey’s face touched his soul and dampened the flow of his anger.