Page 7 of The Summer War
She couldn’t see her way, or any path through the trees and vines; she almost couldn’t see Gorthan ahead of her at the length of her arm and his. She kept following him, feeling a little like she was in a dream, and more of one with every step, until suddenly she was alongside him and he was lifting aside a final curtain of vines to let them into a clearing that seemed bigger than the entire grove had been, and all around on every side nothing but solid walls of trees. And in the middle of the grove waiting for them stood a man, only it wasn’t a man at all. It was a summerling.
Celia had never seen a summerling before, except in pictures, and pictures weren’t anything like. He was tall and impossibly beautiful, like a statue someone had worked on for a long time, his skin a burnished deep bronze and his long hair going from the same bronze at the roots to palest white-gold at the ends, and wrapped with spiraling bands of gold. His eyes were brilliant green and painted with a darker green all around. He wore a suit of golden armor with a green cape that wasn’t made of cloth but of leaves, and instead of a helm he wore a crown. He fit so well into the grove that it didn’t seem like a surprise to see him at first, and Celia only slowly turned her head to look at Gorthan.
He was looking straight on at the summerling, in a way that was somehow deliberately avoiding looking at her, and he said, “Hail, Elithyon. This is Celia, descended of Selina and of Sherdan the Betrayer, and she has come of her own free will to be married to you, as my father promised, when next a sorceress was born in his line.”
“No, I haven’t,” Celia said. “I came to be married toyou.”
But it was like speaking in a dream, trying to tell the other dream-people in it that something was wrong; neither Gorthan nor Elithyon paid any attention to her, and she couldn’t seem to even try to pull her hand away. Even as she spoke, she was walking along with Gorthan towards the Summer Prince, and then she was in front of him, and she just watched him taking her hand from Gorthan as easily as if she’d given it to him.
“No,” she said again, protesting.
“Your pledge was given before the sacred grove before you entered; too late now to try and draw it back,” Elithyon said, his eyes on her with a poisonous gleam, and she realized too late how careful they’d been, the whole time, only to saythe prince.She couldn’t seem to do anything—she couldn’t seem todecideto do anything—as Elithyon lifted up her hand. And with his own hand gloved in thick leather and shining golden mail and scales of gold, he put a thin ring of coal-dark metal onto her finger that burned as he slid it on, and she jerked back out of the dream in agasp, cold water thrown in her face. It seemed suddenly ridiculous that she had justgone along,but when she tried to wrench her hand loose, Elithyon was holding her in a grip she couldn’t break, and when she reached for her sorcery, it felt as if her fingers were scrabbling on a sheet of the same smooth metal of that ring, refusing to get a hold. She had never spent her power except on little things, but she’d gotten used tofeelingit within her, a river that she could dip her hand into as she liked, and now instead the river was running somewhere too deep for her to reach, sunk beneath the earth.
“You gave your word,” Gorthan was saying to Elithyon. “No torment, no torture—”
“The oath I gave to your father I will keep: nothing more to be done to her than was done to my own sister,” Elithyon said, a savage note. “As you cherishedher,so shall I cherishyourtreasure.”
“What are youdoing?” Celia said to Gorthan in rising desperation; he darted a sideways look over at her as if he didn’t want to, something ashamed in the movement. “Just handing me and my sorcery to them? Listen to me, they haven’t really made peace! The terms are just a lie, they’ll start the war again—”
“Thesewerethe peace terms,” Gorthan said stiffly, not quite meeting her eyes. “The next sorceress of Sherdan’s line, a princess of Prosper, to be the wife of the Summer Prince, the way they gave Princess Eislaing to be the wifeof King Sherdan. That’s what Elithyon demanded, to make peace.”
“Why did yougivethose terms?” Celia said. “You could just have let my father kill him! You can do itnow! He’ll do it; he did it before, without sorcery. I’llhelp—Please!” she added, a cry of fear, because even though she wasn’t moving, Elithyon was drawing her away with him, and she couldn’t stop it. The clearing was stretching around them like a thread being drawn taut. In a moment it would reach a snapping point, and she’d begone.She felt with horrible certainty that the only thing keeping her here at all, in this halfway place, was Gorthan—her only tie back to the mortal world. “Please, don’t let him take me!Why?”
Gorthan’s face moved a little with guilt, and she had an instant of hope: the pulling sensation paused for a moment, as if hecouldchoose to keep her here—which he could, surely. He was also a prince, the prince she’d agreed to marry, and more so than Elithyon. And he knew it, too. But then he looked away and said, each word prying her desperate fingers off him, “We know your father’s a traitor. When I was born, a soothsayer told my father that a fox would snatch the line of sorcery from our house, and take my throne as well.”
“He’s not!” Celia said. “I’mnot! I came tomarryyou!” but he had already let her go. The trees at the other end of the grove were sweeping towards them like a tide, andeven as Gorthan said, “I’m sorry,” he was vanishing out of view, and the world slipped out from under her feet. She stumbled, just one step, and she was in the Summer Lands, with the Summer Prince holding her hand, gripped hard and tight in his own mailed fist.
She’d been planning to gointo the Summer Lands. She’d read a thousand stories, heard a thousand songs, seen a thousand pictures drawn, even though she’d felt, the more of them she’d read, that all of them were at least half wrong, as if they were darts that had only landed at the edges of the truth. But she’d learned enough to know that what you brought into the Summer Lands shaped what you found there; back home she had a carefully chosen basket packed with useful, sensible things, which she’d meant to take with her. She’d tried to imagine the journey strongly enough to make herself brave, when she went.
But she couldn’t be brave now; she didn’t have her sorcery, and she didn’t have the help of anyone who loved her, and she was in the hands of a summerling prince who would gladly have slaughtered every living person in all of Prosper to get his revenge, and who now meant to satisfy himself by wringing it out ofher,instead. She was terrified, and so she was walking on a narrow, root-choked trailthrough a dark and brooding wood, full of shadows and half-seen looming creatures peering out of them with malicious and hungry eyes. And Elithyon saw her fear and smiled, cruel and pleased, and walked slower, so she’d be in among them for longer.
But that helped her, because seeing his pleasure made her angry, and it was easier to think when she was angry than afraid. “Did King Sherdan make Eislaing walk a mile to her wedding feast?” she said, to Elithyon.
Elithyon glared down at her. “You dare to speak her name? She who should have been your golden queen?”
“And wouldn’tshehave had the right to complain?” Celia said, grateful for everything she’d gleaned out of her half-true stories. Elithyon had sworn an oath that had tied her story up to Eislaing’s; anything he did to her now needed to be bound up with something that had been done to his own sister.
“For Eislaing, the paths would have made themselves smooth and short, and bloomed for joy with flowers to have her tread upon them,” Elithyon said, and Celia could hear fresh agony in every word.
We’re the same people who killed his sister, and it happened the day before yesterday,Father had said.
Celia couldn’t remember that kind of feeling; it had slipped out of her fingers, carried away by the river of flowing time, but she knew she’d felt it, once. If she tried, she could be back in that musty stable corridor, cold anddamp with the early days of autumn, strangling tears in her throat while she listened to the one person in the world she loved the most leaving her forever, and her belly full of misery and a monstrous, devouring rage.
As that terrible memory woke in her, the trees all around her shuddered back, drawing away branches that were heavy and thick with the greenery of their endless summer that had never been touched by a hint of fall. Even Elithyon stiffened, and looked at her hand, as if to make sure that the ring he’d put upon it was still there. Celia followed his eyes, and when she looked up again, there was a short path ahead leading to a wide stone courtyard before a palace with a great feasting arranged, like a mirror of the one she’d seen being prepared on the other bank of the river. But the tables here were filled with summerlings who were glaring at her, all their faces savage with shared hate.
The courtyard of the Summer Palace didn’t have a hard edge; the great flagstones of creamy-brown stone dwindled into smaller rough-edged shapes like the stones of a path, which in their turn dwindled down into little chips like the pieces of a mosaic before they at last ebbed out into dirt, and seven narrow channels of running water cut across it in flowing lines, joining into small pools that moved to new places every time she looked at them.
The palace itself surrounded the courtyard on all three other sides. The buildings were only one story, raisedup off the ground on platforms, and mostly stood wide open to catch every breeze, not unlike the summer porch of a castle in Prosper. But all the pillars were the trunks of living trees, and the rafters were their branches, full of their own leaves and vines and other living plants like green starbursts clinging on wherever they could; full of the soft humming song of gleambugs darting jewel-bright among the leaves, glowing in brief spangles of green and blue. The floor she could see inside was the floor of a forest, carpeted thickly in shining deep-green moss, and here and there a hanging curtain of thread-thin vines like fine mesh hung down to shield a chamber from view.
A host of servants were coming from inside, carrying platters out to the feast tables arranged in the courtyard. There were at least fifty of them, and not more than a thousand, and that was all that Celia could be sure of. She had to stumble along with Elithyon and sit at the high table next to him, when he thrust her into the chair next to his. She was afraid to eat. Summerling food was often enchanted in the stories, and it seemed to her that every plate was full of horrible writhing shapes as it was being set in front of her, even though when she looked straight down, the dishes were beautiful and appetizing. So instead she took anything that looked like bread from the table: summerlings didn’t grow wheat or grind their own flour, so it would have come from Prosper instead. She slipped it intoher pockets through the slits in her skirts, and hoped to eat it later, if it still looked like bread when she took it out again.
As the feasting ended, the lower tables cleared themselves away. They too were made of living vines and branches that simply unwound from one another and rolled back into the forest dark, leaving the courtyard half empty before the high table. The summerlings had been drinking only cool sweet water until then, out of cups made of wood and leaves, which never ran dry. But now servants came around with golden flagons, filling glass drinking horns with a gush of a sweet-smelling drink whose color changed like a sunrise, swirling pink and golden and pale blue, with a pale golden froth at the top, and then a second row of servants came around with smaller silver flagons, and poured a stream of strong rich midnight-blue liquor into each horn for as long as it was held out to them, and many of the summerlings laughing held theirs out for a pour that made the whole drink darken into sunset colors instead.
After everyone had been served and all the horns filled a second time, two great drums were rolled out of the woods into the courtyard, made of huge hollow tree trunks wider across than a man’s height. Braces were brought out to hold them balanced on their sides, with two players climbing up onto low stands on either side to play eachone, and musicians with strange two-stringed lutes played thin high melodies while the other summerlings began to clap and shout along.
Some summerlings began to come forward to take a turn dancing facing the high table, sometimes just one, or in pairs or threes moving in perfect time with one another, with long silken sleeves and skirts rippling through the air like ribbons, and their fingers leaving sparkling traces of glowing phosphorescence like gleambugs themselves, making pictures out of the trails that lingered in the air behind them. Each new dancer picked up the pattern as they moved up to the front, keeping the trails unbroken, sometimes bringing two trails together to mingle them, or using their hands like a knife to cut apart one of the light-trails into two separate curving paths instead.
Celia forgot to be afraid for a little while, caught up in the beauty and grace, the drums echoing through the ground and into her body like heavy thunderstorms in the mountains. A new dancer came forward to the front: a beautiful summerling man with dark hair and pale grey skin, wearing red silk and silver. He followed a trio, and he moved with such speed and grace that he managed to keep all six of the light-trails they left behind them going smoothly, and suddenly Elithyon got up and left her at the table to go into the courtyard with him.
