Chapter Text
“No screaming,” young Althea Altair warned, as she dragged aside one of the gate-doors to her temple. “And no hugs.”
Princess Irene exhaled out her nose, loudly and at length, and let her arms drop to hanging at her sides.
Beside her, Althea’s sister took a moment to fold the sleeves of the similarly blue and hooded garment that she wore, by each hand up to the elbows of the opposite arm. Together, they pushed aside the other gate-door, which sounded as low and smooth a rumble as the first. Lilibell asked, “And why shouldn’t I show my longing relieved, when I’ve been so long apart from my beloved twin?” Although she said ‘twin’, Lilibell appeared in the bloom of her youth whereas Althea appeared to still be in the bud. If Irene hadn’t known better, she thought there ought to still be a hint of the truth in the Oracle’s milky and unfocused gaze, the wisdom of lifetimes weighed every syllable of her voice.
“I’m training sphinxes,” Althea answered. “Giant housecats with wings, anyway, we don’t know what else to call them yet. They respond to noise with more noise. Come in and I’ll show you—but quietly.”
They entered, and Lilibell helped to close the gates behind them. “Why no hugs?”
“Because you both smell like swamp.” Althea turned her gaze from Lilibell, to Irene, then back to Lilibell. “All right, I’ll take one.”
Lilibell fell to her knees and pulled Althea towards her, giving out a sort of keening purr.
“Not so loud,” Althea warned her, one eye closed tight against Lilibell’s hair. The other examined Irene up and down—or, level and up and more up, because young Althea was a petite figure. “You’ve cut your hair. Again.”
Irene signed that she had committed to cultivating views of virtues and values during her self-imposed exile to the Wastes, and considered personal power a distraction at best and fated for corruption at worst.
“That is the worst idea you have ever gone through with,” Althea remarked.
Irene signed, reluctantly, that she remembered attacking the Firebird in his own nest once.
“The worst,” the Oracle repeated, with emphasis.
Lilibell released her, arose and said, “You’re only saying that because you’re afraid of what Alynah will do come Hell Month.”
Althea gave a momentary, childish, sneer and turned to lead them down the path through the courtyard.
To Lilibell, Irene furtively signed her enquiries as to what their daughter could possibly be planning.
“Nobody knows if she even plans anything, ever,” Lilibell replied. “But our cardinal gods will be away, the ordinal ones still being very young, and among the rest of us…Well, Alynah remains the most powerful Western spirit known—second only maybe to the unknown.” Lilibell reached out to scuffle Irene’s short hair.
Irene frowned and signed: Now you’re both just making fun of me.
Althea had made her way ahead, and called behind her without turning around. “After all we’ve been through, she still thinks I have a sense of humor!”
Oh, no, that’s just eerie! Irene signed. I forgot to type on the grid when you first asked me, but you still understood the language—even though I spent all this time in the Wastes learning and you’ve stayed here. How can you know what I’m saying when you don’t even look at me?
Still without turning around, Althea tapped her own head and called the reply, “Oracle!”
Irene halted, turned a weary look to Lilibell, and signed: Please tell me that preparing to battle your daughter is not what I’m here for.
Lilibell laughed and walked ahead, pulling Irene by the hand after her. They followed Althea through the archway of a red brick wall. “Still such an old world faery! Nobody does classical conquest anymore, at least not here. Were you planning to take a stand amongst dozens or hundreds of ancient alliances and enmities, and their flags or…something? We can be more civilized than that, you know.” As they reached the first bend of the labyrinth, Lilibell turned abruptly—her face and voice solemn. “Alynah has the Blakes with her, though we can’t get them to admit it. The size of her troupe now rivals the flower maidens. Think about it. At least think about it.”
Irene, leaning away awkwardly, craned her own neck to peer at the wall behind Lilibell through which Althea had vanished. After Lilibell had stared enough in silence that she’d (evidently) felt that the gravity of the proposal had impressed itself upon Irene, they both followed.
They passed through the wall and into a vast plane of what appeared to be a single sandstone. In the far distance stood a mountain range made of red brick, or a red brick wall that had crumbled at the top. In the middle distance, two small girls had caught Althea in a cruel sort of game. They spun slacks of rope by the handles, and the Oracle hopped between them to prevent being struck by the ropes or tripped. The rope-wranglers, familiar to Irene as the Laetha Ava and Laetha Alma, chorused: “Red flame! Yellow flame! Warm flame, burn! Green flame! Purple flame! Wild flame, turn! Black flame! Cold flame! Tame flame, wonder! White flame, shame flame, blame game—sunder!”
Althea hopped out of the oblong tunnel of tripping-rope, turned, and dipped a cautious bow to the Laethas. With an ominous lack of interest, the Laethas exchanged rope handles, so that each held both ends of a single rope instead.
Althea told the two other spirits swathed in swamp-smelling ofelian blues, “They’ll agree to forget you were here, when you’re not meant to be.”
Ava leaned against Alma and covered her own mouth and her twin’s ear with a hand. After a moment of muffled conversation on Ava’s side, the two parted, giggling, and set off skipping over their ropes.
Althea led them towards the red-brick mountain range, and up the elevator to a peak that she called a tower, even though it was much wider than it was tall.
The elevator doors opened to a giant winged housecat that sat like a sphinx and refused to move.
Althea warned, “If you try to climb over the kitty, it’ll think you’re playing and bite you. Give them a riddle they don’t know the answer to, though, and they’ll go away to think about it. They’ll hunt you down later, to annoy you with all the possible answers they could think up.”
Lilibell chirruped, “Why is a raven like a writing desk?”
The riddle-cat yawned and replied, with a whiskery voice, “They both produce very flat notes.”
At that, Lilibell pouted. “Alice told me that riddle didn’t have a real answer.”
Irene began to sign her own attempt at a riddle, although it had been a riddle she caught from the human world. In a spoken or written human language, the riddle would have gone: “In marble walls as white as milk, lined with a skin as soft as silk, within a fountain crystal clear, a golden apple doth appear. No doors there are to this stronghold, yet thieves break in and steal the gold.” In the Ophelian language of Sign, much of the rhyme and metaphor was lost. Irene, not yet fluent enough to translate, instead transliterated: A white eggshell contains an egg membrane, egg whites, and egg yolk. The eggshell has no natural openings, so egg-breakers break the eggshell of the egg and take the egg yolk out of the egg. What is the item described in this riddle? This is the mystery. The riddle-cat understood enough to consider the riddle unanswerable, and grudgingly stood to leave. Ey pawed at the only window in the only—otherwise dungeonlike—room beyond the elevator doors, until the window swung open and the riddle-cat took flight.
Althea strode to the wall opposite the entrance. Lilibell jumped up to gently shut the window, and less gently peered out from the corner of it—with such a sudden suspicion and hostility that Irene’s hand involuntarily twitched towards the weapon holstered at her own hip.
The Oracle pressed at a series of bricks in the wall as though they were buttons, then stepped back as an arch-shaped section of the wall turned on an axis. A shimmering flag hung from the wall’s secret, hidden side.
Althea turned to Irene and signed, clumsily: This is what we called you here for. At the gates of the West await a troop of faeries from the old world. If you would recognize the symbols on the flag, we can be better prepared to negotiate with them.
Irene signed: The old world was another life I can barely remember.
Althea nodded behind Irene, where Lilibell had signed a reply. Lily is correct, we can at least make the effort. Lily said the main symbol resembles an Aletheian heart, symmetrical, mirroring curves to a point, and a bolt of lightning contained within it—?
Irene signed, more decisively: No, definitely wrong. She turned to Lilibell and signed, That is a heart. But. The jagged lines don’t represent lightning, but a fissure. It means the person which the heart represents is empty and broken.
Lilibell rolled her eyes and signed: Whatever, you glum puddle.
Irene signed objections that her family had a heraldry exactly like that—then she halted her signing and widened her eyes, blood freezing with the realization that her family had heraldry exactly like that.
At that moment, a ringtone filled the room. Althea turned a weary and accusing glance at Irene, then to Lilibell, until she realized it was her own cellular phone ringing.
“Secret meeting in the secret tower!” Althea grumbled as she checked the screen. “I told everyone about it so they would know not to call me during—Oh, it’s the Laetha Alaria,” she explained, “I’ve got to take this. Hello?” She pressed the celphone to her ear. After a long pause in which tinny almost-syllables barely moved the air of the room, occasionally interrupted by a hum or uh-huh from Althea, the Oracle said, “But that’s well outside our bailiwick and completely unnecessary.” After another long pause, Althea added, “I meant, she’s here—both are. Not in the Waste. I’ll put you on speaker, you can explain it to them. Terrible timing, by the way.”
“…same about you,” Alaria’s voice sounded through the room. After a pause, the god continued, “Irene, if you’re really there, umm…Remember that time I erased everybody’s memories?”
Irene tore her gaze away from the flag and frowned, signing: The fuck kind of question is that?
The twins chorused a more diplomatic, “She remembers.”
“Unfortunately, so do all the Aletheia androids, when they’re not supposed to. And they do not appreciate the role you played in the destruction of unit three.”
Althea balked. “Alaria, they weren’t even there. Princess Irene was trying to help. The Ophelene herself will testify to this! Aletheia double-oh three wasn’t only repaired, but upgraded! What does he have to say about this?”
Irene pulled the flag from the wall (the flag rustled) and signed at Lilibell.
“They wouldn’t listen to him even if he were speaking up,” Alaria replied, “That means you stay out of this, too, Althea. Keep Irene out of the city. Keep Irene in the tower, even in the temple—it’s the last place they’ll look, and even if they had the means or circumspection to tap this call they won’t tear their own temple apart to get to her. I’ll call you back when my team has subdued them. Understand?”
“No,” Althea said. “I’ll do it, but it doesn’t make sense to me why they suddenly would have—”
“That was not a suggestion, that was a command. Do not allow Irene to leave the premises.”
“Fine!” Althea snapped, then jabbed the button to end the call. She glanced up in time to catch Lilibell boosting Irene out the open window. “Lili!”
Lilibell squeaked out the corner of her mouth: “Fly!” Irene tumbled out the window in the form of a bird—some bird of prey, perhaps a shade too soft for it, and with a streaming crest of bright yellow. With a flag corner pinched in her beak, she beat her wings towards the gates of the West.