Page 73 of Fortune's Blade

And then he danced even faster, whirling me around until the fire all flowed together and I could see nothing else.

Chapter Twenty-Four

“Come in here before you set the trees on fire,” someone said, almost as soon as we made it through the door.

We’d used the smaller one that was inset into the massive one, slipping through once Ray’s boys provided a distraction by spilling drinks on the guards protecting it and then running like hell. The guards had chased them and we’d passed on through, with no one else seeming to care. It helped that the party had reached the sloppy drunk stage and I doubted that anyone could still see well enough to notice.

The only problem was that my light hadn’t faded entirely. It was dimmer than it had been earlier, more of a vague flicker around my form, but still bright enough to cast moving shadows on the forest of trees growing out of the floor in the next room. I stopped to look at them in surprise.

The large space had the same construction as the room outside, or rather, it had started out that way. But mature oak and ash trees had scrawled their roots everywhere, not only underfoot, but also climbing up the walls like bark-covered vines. Creating a wooden obstacle course and giving the whole place the ambiance of an ancient temple lost in the jungle.

“How?” Ray called, answering back. “All I see is a forest!”

“There’s a path around to the left,” the voice said. “Look for the curtains.”

We gazed around, but the room was quite dim, with the only light coming from me and a scattering of tiny lanterns in the tree limbs. And the occasional miniature doorway or window that had been set into their trunks. I blinked at that realization and looked closer, but no, I wasn’t imagining things.

The nearest little door on the trunk of a fat oak was closed, although painted a pretty blue with white scrollwork. But the nearby window was open and it was the most exquisite thing, with bits of flattened horn for the panes, scraped thin to let in light when there was any, and a window box planted with flowers. The flowers were the product of a tiny weed that the dark fey called forest snow, because from any distance at all, the multitude of miniscule blossoms just looked like frost. But here, they seemed huge, as big as a pixie’s two fists put together, and spilling in riotous profusion down to the trunk below.

Inside the small dwelling was something even more delightful: a woven rug, in reds and blues and green. It was the kind known as a rag rug on Earth, which utilized scraps of old material to make a new creation in a multitude of colors. It couldn’t have been much bigger than the size of my palm, but it covered a good deal of the floor.

The rest was taken up by a table and two chairs, which would have struggled to accommodate a Barbie doll; a tiny candle in a wooden base with a flame kept equally small by the size of its diminutive wick; a wooden bench seat covered with several cushions embroidered with tiny scenes; a portrait on the wall, which was too small for me to make out many details; a kitchen off to the right with a bunch of bright copper cookware; and an archway that had some stairs inside it, leading further inside the trunk.

And an outraged pixie face, staring out at me, and all but shooting daggers from his eyes.

The trees must be where they slept, I realized. And in my fascination, I had bent so close that my eye must have been taking up most of the space in his window. Before I could apologize for disturbing him, tiny shutters slammed closed in my face, cutting off my view, and leaving me feeling like a gigantic Peeping Tom.

I looked back at Ray. “I didn’t—I wasn’t trying to—”

He took my hand. “Come on. We’ve been summoned.”

We made our way through the trees with me refusing to so much as glance at any more of the interesting views offered by tiny balconies and open windows. That was despite some miniscule faces peering out at me, because my light was enough to paint shadows on the trunks as we passed. Finally, we found a route that hugged the wall, cutting a path through the mass of roots and giving us space to walk.

“Do you think the witch lit me up on purpose?” I asked Ray quietly. “So that I couldn’t skulk about?”

“I don’t care,” he said, a thread of defiance in his voice. “And why should we have to skulk? They kidnapped us, tried to have their champion squash us, and didn’t even invite us to dinner!”

“I didn’t have anything I thought you might like,” the voice rang out again. “Not for a vampire, that is. Although I’ve heard that the dhampir eats like a troll!”

“Thank you,” I said, and the voice laughed. It was a woman’s, and it tinkled like bells.

“Come, come. Join us for dessert. It’s one thing both our cultures can agree on.”

There were curtains at the end of the path, filmy things in dark green that blended in with the trees and were barely visible in the shadows. They cut the pixie’s sleeping quarters off from whatever lay beyond and should have muffled the voice, only I was fairly sure that it was being magically enhanced. Ray held the curtains out of the way for me, so I wouldn’t set something ablaze and get us into even more trouble.

The other side was more of the same, but I didn’t see any dwellings among the branches of the much sparser number of trees. The walls were also the same, although the ceiling was even higher than the one outside, and the place was vast, instead of smaller and more intimate as I had expected. I decided that I should stop expecting things in Faerie, and we moved forward.

The trees cut down the echoing void somewhat, but it was still a very large space with very little in it. Except for four huge banners hanging on the wall at the far end of the room, made of crimson silk and bright enough to cut through the gloom. They each had a large, gold and white flower in the center that flashed in what little light there was, beckoning to us like a beacon.

There was also something under them, at the far end of the space, where dim light flickered at us from among the trees. It finally resolved itself into a long table on a dais lit by standing candelabras on either end and smaller lights that were nestled into patches of greenery in between. So much for lurking about, hoping to overhear something, I thought.

When we’d started this excursion, I had had some vague idea of a situation like the one at the consul’s court, where there was always a crowd and some of them weren’t as discrete as they might have been. Lurking about there was often an education, drifting from group to group in the noisy mass, following tidbits about the room like a detective trying to put things together. Which was especially easy when the detective was an invisible spirit.

Ray had come along as my base, a familiar body that I could go back to if I needed to rest, or if I was summarily excised as I had been by the guard earlier. But that idea was out of the window now, and Ray must have been thinking the same. Because he sighed and headed into the echoing cavern of a dining room.

I followed, splashing the floor with light.

“Ha!” The voice laughed. “I like this new form, although not as much as the other.”

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