their wings.
They shone with a pale, silvery light too weak to illuminate anything around them. But hundreds of them, dancing between the boles of trees, showed the silhouette of our surroundings. Some of them lit on trees or the ground. A few landed on Felurian, and though I still could not see more than a few inches of her pale skin, I could use the moving light of them to follow her.
We walked a long while after that, Felurian leading between the trunks of ancient trees. Once I felt grass soft beneath my bare feet instead of moss, then there was soft soil, as if we were crossing a farmer’s fresh-tilled field. For a time we followed a twisting path of smooth paved stone that led us over the arch of a high bridge. All the while the moths followed us, giving me only the dimmest impression of our surroundings.
Eventually Felurian stopped. By now the darkness was so thick I could almost feel it like a warm blanket around me. I could tell by the sound of the wind in the trees and the motion of the moths that we were standing in an open space.
There were no stars above us. If we were in a clearing, the trees must be vast for their branches to meet overhead. But for all I knew we could just as easily be deep underground. Or perhaps the sky was black and empty in this portion of the Fae. It was a strangely unsettling thought.
The subtle feeling of sleeping alertness was stronger here. If the rest of the Fae felt like it was sleeping, this place felt like it had stirred half a moment ago and hovered on the verge of waking. It was disconcerting.
Felurian gently pressed the flat of her hand against my chest, then a finger against my lips. I watched as she moved away from me, softly humming a little snatch of the song I had made for her. But even this piece of flattery couldn’t distract me from the fact that I was in the center of the Fae realm, blind, stark naked, and without the slightest idea of what was going on.
A handful of moths had landed on Felurian, resting on her wrist, hip, shoulder and thigh. Watching them gave me a vague impression of her movements. If I had to guess, I would have said she was picking things out of the trees, from behind or beneath bushes or stones. A warm breeze sighed through the clearing, and I felt strangely comforted as it brushed my bare skin.
After about ten minutes, Felurian came back and kissed me. She held something soft and warm in her arms.
We walked back the way we had come. The moths gradually lost interest in us, leaving us with less and less of an impression of our surroundings. After what seemed an interminable amount of time I saw light filtering through a break in the trees ahead. It was only faint starlight, but at that moment it seemed bright as a curtain of burning diamonds.
I started to walk through it, but Felurian took hold of my arm to stop me. Without a word she sat me down where the first faint beams of starlight lanced through the trees to touch the ground.
Carefully she stepped between the rays of starlight, avoiding them as if they might burn her. When she stood in the center of them, she lowered herself to the ground and sat cross-legged, facing me. She held whatever she had collected in her lap, but other than the fact that it was shapeless and dark I could tell nothing about it.
Then Felurian reached out a hand, took hold of one of the thin beams of starlight, and pulled it toward the dark shape in her lap.
I might have been more surprised if Felurian’s manner hadn’t been so casual. In the dim light, I saw her hands make a familiar motion. A second later she reached out again, almost absentmindedly, and grasped another narrow strand of starlight between her thumb and forefinger.
She drew it in as easily as the first and manipulated it in the same way. Again the motion struck me as familiar, but it was nothing I could press my finger to.
Felurian started to hum quietly to herself as she gathered in the next beam of starlight, brightening things an imperceptible amount. The shape in her lap looked like thick, dark cloth. Seeing this I realized what she reminded me of: my father sewing. Was she sewing by starlight?
Sewing with starlight. Realization came to me in a flood. Shaed meant shadow. She had somehow brought back an armful of shadow and was sewing it with starlight. Sewing me a cloak of shadow.
Sound absurd? It did to me. But regardless of my ignorant opinion, Felurian took hold of another strand of starlight and brought it to her lap. I brushed any doubt aside. Only a fool disbelieves what he sees with his own eyes.
Besides, the stars above me were bright and strange. I was sitting next to a creature out of a storybook. She had been young and beautiful for a thousand years. She could stop my heart with a kiss and talk to butterflies. Was I going to start quibbling now?
After a while I moved closer so I could watch more carefully. She smiled as I sat next to her, favoring me with a hasty kiss.
I asked a couple questions, but her answers either made no sense or were hopelessly nonchalant. She didn’t know the first thing about the laws of sympathy, or sygaldry, or the Alar. She simply didn’t think there was anything odd about sitting in the forest holding a handful of shadow. First I was offended, then I was terribly jealous.
I remembered when I’d found the name of the wind in her pavilion. It had felt as if I were truly awake for the first time, true knowledge running like ice in my blood.
The memory exhilarated me for a moment, then left me with a broken chord of loss. My sleeping mind was slumbering again. I turned my attention back to Felurian and tried to understand.
Before too long, Felurian stood in a fluid motion and helped me to my feet. She hummed happily and took my arm as we strolled back the way we had come, chatting of little things. She held the dark shape of the shaed draped easily over her arm.
Then, just as the first faint hint of twilight began to touch the sky, she hung it invisibly in the dark branches of a nearby tree. “sometimes slow seduction is the only way,” she said. “the gentle shadow fears the candleflame. how could your fledgling shaed not feel the same?”
CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED ONE
Close Enough to Touch
After our shadow-gathering expedition, I asked more pointed questions about Felurian’s magic. Most of her answers continued to be hopelessly matter-of-fact. How do you take hold of a shadow? She motioned with one hand, as if reaching for a piece of fruit. That was how, apparently.
Other answers were nearly incomprehensible, filled with Fae words I didn’t understand. When she tried to describe those terms, our conversations became hopeless rhetorical tangles. At times I felt like I’d found myself a quieter, more attractive version of Elodin.
Still, I learned a few scraps. What she was doing with the shadow was called grammarie. When I asked, she said it was “the art of making things be.” This was distinct from glamourie, which was “the art of making things seem.”
I also learned that there aren’t directions of the usual sort in the Fae. Your trifoil compass is useless as a tin codpiece there. North does not exist. And when the sky is endless twilight, you cannot watch the sun rise in the east.
But if you look closely at the sky, one piece of the horizon will be a shade brighter, in the opposite direction a shade darker. If you walk toward the brighter horizon, eventually it will become daytime. The other way leads to darker night. If you keep walking in one direction long enough, you will eventually see a whole “day” pass and end up in the same place you began. That’s the theory, at any rate.
Felurian described those two points of the Fae compass as Day and Night. The other two points she referred to at different times as Dark and Light, Summer and Winter, or Forward and Backward. Once she even referred to them as Grimward and Grinning, but something about the way she said it made me suspect it was a joke.
I have a good memory. That, perhaps more than anything else, sits in the center of what I am. It is the talent upon which so many of my other skills depend.
I can only guess how I came by my memory. My early stage training, perhaps. The games my parents used to help me remember my lines. Perhaps it was the mental exercises Abenthy taught me to prepare me for the
