Silverdun's body wanted sleep, but his mind wouldn't allow it. He lay in bed, tossing and turning, the details of the meeting replaying themselves in his head.
What had he gotten himself into? Could Everess and Paet have been serious? Would they truly toss him back into Crete Sulace if he tried to back out now? When Mauritane was recruiting allies to take with him on his mad mission across Faerie at the queen's behest, he'd told Silverdun more or less the same thing: Go with me or I will kill you. How many of Silverdun's great life choices had been made at knifepoint?
And Sela. She was beautiful, to be sure. And alluring. There was something almost mystical about her, something mysterious and primal. But there was also something very wrong about her, a hardness, something dark that suggested she'd seen things that no one should see. The look in her eyes, at the same time keen and confused, as if she were from another world entirely.
She had gotten inside his head somehow, using the Gift of Empathy. Silverdun had experienced Empathy; the counselors at Nyelcu all had a bit of it. But this was something different altogether. She hadn't just read his mind; she'd somehow become one with it. When she reached into him, something of her was there with it; they mingled somehow. And what he'd felt of her had been deep and dark, the Inland Sea at night, an endless abyss. The water of her was pure and clear, but what swam beneath its surface chilled him.
One of the things that Mauritane had taught him during the long weeks of their trek across the kingdom was how to guard himself from Empathy. What a typically Mauritane skill, Silverdun realized.
Still, Sela was beautiful. He was pulled to her. He wanted her.
He began to drift off to sleep, dreaming of kissing her, but as his mind wandered toward dreaming, her face became Faella's in his mind, and it was Faella's name he whispered just before he lost consciousness.
The difficulty of the fool's errand is that it is typically the fool who undertakes it.
-Master jedron
he first day of the month of Hawk dawned sunny and bright, but despite the weather, Blackstone House was still as oppressive and imposing as it had been on their first visit. The inside of the house was, perhaps, bleaker than it had been then; the early-morning light that eked its way past the heavy shutters cast a pall on the empty rooms. Silverdun climbed the stairs and stepped into the closet in the back bedroom. He paused with his key in the lock, hesitating the way one would before jumping into a cold pond. The disorientation was of the kind that one never got used to.
The instant Silverdun stepped into the turn, the house came alive with sound. Copyists and amanuenses hurried through the office carrying scrolls and bound documents, and a pair of message sprites were brawling in one of the corners, fighting over a scrap of pink silk fabric. In the main office, every desk was occupied, the intelligence officers preparing briefings or translating intercepted documents or whatever it was that they did. A few heads turned when Silverdun entered, then went back to whatever they'd been doing. Silverdun went downstairs feeling oddly light and at ease.
Ironfoot and Paet were waiting in Paet's office, sipping tea in awkward silence. Paet glanced with practiced accusatory subtlety at the clock on his desk, showing ten minutes past the hour. Silverdun ignored him.
'No Sela this morning?' Silverdun asked, as innocently as possible.
'She's on another assignment,' said Paet, expressionless.
'Of no concern to me, I take it?' asked Silverdun.
'Not at this time.'
Silverdun sighed and sat. This was going to be the way of things. Well. Information had a way of getting around. At court, as in politics, as in most everything else, information was always the most precious commodity.
'I'm sending the two of you to Annwn,' said Paet, handing each of them a leather binder holding unpleasantly thick sheaves of documents. Ironfoot reached out eagerly for his, but Silverdun wavered, experiencing again the strange, embarrassing shame at taking orders from his social inferior. This had, of course, become a pattern with him since his days as a prisoner at Crete Sulace, but he'd never quite gotten used to it. If there were a medal for least respected nobleman in all of Faerie, he'd have won it hands down. Maybe it was a good thing. 'Humility is the soul's sustenance,' Estiane had told him once. Smug bastard.
Silverdun took the binder and opened it. It contained dossiers on a number of government officials, a briefing on the political situation, the names and addresses of friendly contacts among the populace, and a brief mission document, written in Paet's tidy scrawl, a bit blurred by a copyist who was either harried or incompetent.
'Obviously you can't travel directly, so we'll be sending you via Mag Mell. The ambassador in Isle Cureid will provide you with the documentation you'll need to cross into Annwn.' The Port-Auvris Lock, the gateway connecting the Seelie Kingdom directly to Annwn, had been closed five years
