Page 1 of Heir of Autumn
1
The rhythmof my footsteps filled my ears as I stepped from sunbeam to sunbeam, as I traversed the hallowed halls of the Wispwood. Every window cast another splash of sunlight on the moss-covered floor, a golden pathway for me and my companions to follow.
In that most ancient of places, where the ghostly motes of the Wispwell danced through the corridors and nature itself grew out of secret cracks in the stone, I should have felt closer than ever to the greatest practitioners of my art. The grand summoners of old, masters of monsters and magic. Me, a true summoner at last, flanked by my familiar and the most powerful of my eidolons.
Instead I felt like a man herding cats.
Satchel, my pixie familiar, flitted from window to window, oohing and aahing at anything and everything he spotted in the world outside. Sylvain, my eidolon and most adored fae prince, fidgeted with his hooded jacket, no doubt waiting for me to compliment how it hugged his physique before he’d stop pretending to struggle with the notion of clothing.
And me? I just wanted to get to the damn library.
“I’m not much of a reader myself, you know,” Satchel said absently, hands pressed up against the glass as he peered out of the next window. The scenery had hardly changed in the few feet we’d passed — mostly greenery, as was the case at the Wispwood — but maybe this boundless energy was a pixie thing. “Or maybe I am, and I just haven’t found the right book.”
“Reading is a horrible and fruitless pastime,” Sylvain said, feigning a yawn. “I can think of a hundred things more interesting and productive than reading. No, a thousand.”
“Quit lying,” I said, throwing him a suspicious look. “You read every book in my bedchambers within the first week of moving in. I know you only stick your gossip magazines between the pages to throw me off the scent. You’re way smarter than you let on, Sylvain. Satchel. He’s way smarter than he lets on.”
Sylvain glared back at me, like this was some major secret we were supposed to keep. Maybe from our enemies, sure, though I still didn’t quite understand why he wanted everyone to keep thinking of him as a preening himbo when he was obviously so well spoken and well read.
I wondered if it was a way for him to fade into the background at court. If he seemed duller, and not as attentive, the other courtiers might be less likely to keep their lips sealed in his presence. It made sense, and yet it felt as if I was giving him too much credit.
Too many layers at play there, and I was convinced more than ever that Sylvain was the cleverest of them all. Or maybe I just liked him so much that I couldn’t think of him as anything less than a secret, if incredibly muscular genius.
“Whatever you say, oh summoner,” Sylvain said, placing his hands behind the back of his head, relishing the stretch in his muscles. “I still say that burning our waking hours in a graveyard for books is a pitiful waste of daylight.”
He glanced yearningly out the next window, echoing Satchel’s tiny, plaintive sigh. Something equally tiny twinged in my chest. It felt like guilt, for keeping my boys indoors on such a lovely day. But I steeled myself, straightened my spine. We had work to do. Important work.
“We’ll have plenty of time to enjoy the sunshine later, you two. Right now we have to focus. We have to enter the Oriel of Water, find a way to strengthen the Wispwell. And before any of that can happen, we’re going to need a water-breathing spell.”
Sylvain’s lower lip curled upward. “This wouldn’t be such a problem if you — ”
“Don’t say it, Sylvain. No. I cannot just get Namirah to teach me how to grow gills. Her art takes years to master. And besides, how would that help you, or Satchel?”
Satchel nodded. “He’s got a point, Sylvain. I like breathing. I also like being alive.”
“Exactly,” I said. “That was why we entered the Oriel of Air first, to retrieve an elemental gemstone from a guardian. The Breath of the Wind is the key, but we still need to find the right spell to activate it.”
Sylvain stuck his hands in his pockets, frowning. One of them rustled with the telltale crinkle of plastic, and maybe some wax paper, too, depending on what the confectioners had used to wrap his baggie of sweet treats. An assortment of fine hard candies from the Wispwood’s commercial district, because of course it had its own commercial district, very much like a college campus on Earth.
Unlike Earth universities, though, our shops covered more than just the basics. There was an expansive stationery store, of course, and several restaurants and cafés that offered fast food. But we had accredited members of Mother Dough on the premises, too, the arcane underground’s largest and most respected guild of bakers. A Mother Dough baker could craft creations that rivaled even the delights that the imps whipped up in the kitchens, themselves tiny devils who hailed from the prime hell of Gluttony.
Keeping my favorite eidolon’s sweet tooth in check turned out to be more easily accomplished than expected. Sylvain was happy with everything from honey tarts to the aforementioned hard candy, and Satchel’s tastes were also relatively easy to temper, as someone who favored creamier confections like mousses and cheesecakes.
The most important thing about the hard candy, though, was how well it worked at keeping Sylvain quiet. Not that I didn’t enjoy bantering and bickering with him. Far from it. But we were in a library, after all, a sanctuary of learning and knowledge that absolutely called for silence. The rule was something that Sylvain naturally considered himself above.
He’d been all huffy on the way to the library, grumbling about how the caretakers of the grand repositories of the Verdance had never so much as shushed him. “They were very generous, in fact,” he said, chest puffed up, nose in the air like a cockerel’s beak. “Answered any question I asked them, no matter how silly or small.”
I didn’t have the heart to tell him that it was probably because no one would dare shush a prince. And besides, even knowing nothing about the presumably elfin, elegant caretakers of the fae realm’s libraries, I could already guess that they were nothing compared to Mr. Brittle.
“Hey, look,” Satchel said, flitting up toward the brass plaque next to the double doors leading into the library. “Your name’s on this thing. Well, your last name, at least.”
“Right,” I said, fidgeting with my backpack. “Father paid to renovate the entire thing, making sure that the Wispwood library would always be equipped to preserve all its rare and valuable tomes.”
“Why, that sounds quite charitable,” Sylvain said, a man with little understanding of how money worked.
I adored him to pieces, but knew enough that his courtly upbringing had skewed his understanding of currency and the value of things. For example, when he asked me to pay for his candy in gemstones. Imagine me, paying for my sugar daddy’s sugar.
“Charitable, yes,” I said, unable to hide the bitter twist in my mouth. “Very charitable of Grand Summoner Baylor Wilde to plaster his name all over the place as a constant reminder of his very charitable contributions. Oh, before we enter. Do you have your bag of candy with you?”
