Page 9 of Sons of Sorrow
I shook my head. “Green is just a color, isn’t it? I mean, surely some leaves don’t turn orange or brown in autumn. Evergreens. Right?”
Aphrodite smirked and shrugged.
“As for the guardians, well, I always thought it was your medallion that was doing most of the work. Whatever aptitude I have for controlling them is amplified because of this gift from you and Hephaestus.”
The goddess laughed. “Amplified? Doing most of the work? Sapling, starling, little darling. This thing is nothing more than a trinket, a device for keeping the gemstones all in one place. It may bear the traces of my husband’s touch, of my power, but this influence over the guardians?”
Her finger pressed deeper. My heart skipped, as if jolted by a whisper-light touch, an electrical current. I gasped.
“This power belongs to you, and you alone. The question remains. Where did it come from, and why?”
I looked down at the medallion, at my empty hands, finding I had no answers. I looked up again, wanting to demand an explanation, knowing that she knew. But Aphrodite was already gone.
Then it wasn’t the medallion all along. Why could I control the guardians? What made me so special? Who was I, really?
Whatwas I?
4
The dazzlingreds and golds of the Court of Autumn should have reminded me of the cozy comforts of the season. Instead, the blazing colors of the leaves made the trees so regal, every section of forest like the inside of a velvet-lined jewelry box.
Even the acorns and pinecones Sylvain picked up from the ground sparkled like valuable ornaments, gleaming and golden. Yet I knew that they would crunch and splinter if trampled underfoot. It was part of the glamor of the Verdance, how every sensation seemed so heightened.
I breathed in, the chill air entering my lungs faintly scented of distant spice, a familiar yet unnamable fragrance. I bundled my jacket around myself, wondering how Sylvain could amble around shirtless the way he did, how Satchel never had any complaints despite his relatively skimpier attire, a simple sleeveless vest and cropped pixie-sized trousers.
“Over there,” Sylvain said, pointing at another cluster of trees. “Do you see?”
I shook my head. “No, I really don’t. Satchel? Are you getting any of this?”
“Kind of, I think,” Satchel said, speeding ahead, alighting on a pile of leaves at the base of one of the trees. “You know Grand Summoner Baylor trained me to detect guardians? The principle is the same for arcane objects. You’re looking for something that stands out. Something that contains unusual levels of magic.”
“That’s correct,” Sylvain said. “It’s a matter of perceiving with your senses, only you’re looking for something extra. Or maybe you’re drawing on an extra set of senses beyond what is normal, using them to perceive what isn’t readily perceived otherwise. A perception that is extrasensory. Hmm. You know, it’s a wonder you humans don’t have a word for it. You have a word for bloody everything else.”
I tried not to laugh, or to roll my eyes. I didn’t have the heart to tell Sylvain that extrasensory perception had already been invented for him.
Satchel kicked at the leaves, then bent over, sifting through the pile. He raised something above his head with both hands, a triumphant discovery.
“There! I found one. Oh, it’s cold and all. Is this one of them, Sylvain?”
He fluttered on his little gauzy wings, bringing them up to Sylvain’s eye level.
“Excellent work, Satchel. That is indeed an autumn bauble. We should look for more before we head to Mother’s palace.”
Autumn baubles, those metallic acorns and pinecones that Sylvain and Satchel were so focused on collecting. These inherently magical little trinkets were exactly what Sylvain was talking about back in Dr. Fang’s office. The baubles were naturally-occurring objects that had absorbed a greater concentration of the magic of the Verdance.
In some ways his explanation was parallel to how elemental creatures in the four oriels grew stronger because of their exposure to those raw elements. That colossal Venus flytrap we fought in the Oriel of Earth, for example, fattened and nourished by the dimension’s pure essence.
But here in the Court of Autumn, the realm’s magic was expressed in a far less dangerous way, infused and compacted into pretty things like flowers, toadstools, pinecones. These baubles contained the ambient chill of Autumn, not the painful, freezing cold of Winter.
With a little tweaking, an extra infusion of arcane essence from a mage — me, for example — they could be just the ticket for keeping us from bursting into flames the very moment we stepped into the Oriel of Fire.
I tapped Sylvain on the shoulder. “Not that I’m accusing you of forgetting about these wondrous objects when they could have been useful to us, but how come we didn’t just swing by for a whole bagful of these back when we had to fight the dragon?”
The one waiting in the bank vault back at the Black Market, the dragon that had allegedly been hired by my father to separate me from his riches.
Sylvain shook his head. “No, little human. You could festoon your entire body in these trinkets and they still wouldn’t be enough to protect you from dragonfire. These are meant for coating you in a mantle of air cold enough to stave off the ill effects of heat. Perfect for a desert excursion, and, one hopes, for at least partially resisting the ravages of the Oriel of Fire.”
“Yeah, Locke,” Satchel grunted, flying up with a pinecone under each arm. “You can’t — huff — you can’t expect these to protect you from — ”
