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“But who knows?” Bone said. “He may be having the time of his life.”

CHAPTER 2

OTHERFOLK

Innocence had only just stoked the stove in the dark of the morning when the beautiful girls with cow’s tails came out of nowhere. Groggy, he had trouble understanding where they’d come from or resisting them when they, giggling, dragged him toward the crack in the wall behind the stove.

There had been a few women in the Pickled Rat the night before, but he would have remembered these, surely? He was starting to notice girls in a manner that made his breathing go strange, and a few of the village beauties were haunting his head in a way that made him feel a little giddy, and guilty. These, now, seemed a few years older than him. Their golden tresses framed bright, mischievous eyes and swirled above colorful rustic costumes he hadn’t seen since the cold weather came, long vests of red or blue stretched over tight blouses of white, short dark skirts with floral or checkered patterns that swished above graceful legs. (Were there no stockings? Weren’t these young ladies cold? What did he see swishing back there, not quite in sight?)

“Um,” he said, “I . . . well, it’s just . . . perhaps . . . so . . .”

“Shh,” said one girl, two fingers landing on his lips for a moment like a butterfly seeking nectar. “Don’t spoil it by talking.” She instantly seemed the wisest person that had ever lived. Innocence could not help but think these tight-fitting, short-skirted versions of the village costumes were more fetching than those he’d seen previously. He could not help grinning as the fingertips left his lips. He could not help thinking it was a foolish grin. The thought didn’t wipe the grin away. Hands were starting to touch him in interesting ways, retreating suddenly with redoubled laughter, returning with mock shyness.

But always they moved toward the wall.

Now the Very Wise Girl’s fingers were back, this time with a bit of bread between them. He hadn’t seen where it had come from. She pushed it into his mouth and pressed her lips against his ear. “A little morsel,” she purred, “before dessert.” Innocence ate, even as some internal voice warned him this all might be too good to be true. The bread tasted like flatbread at first but then became sweet, like one of those potato pancakes all rolled up with sugar or jam; what were they called, lefse? He felt like he was falling. In love? Down a well? Were the sensations similar?

Now he realized the warning voice wasn’t internal at all, it was Freidar, with Nan beside him, and the first was armed with a sword and the second with a book and, oddly enough, a small fragment of steel.

The girls were yanking him now and shrieking in a way that wasn’t laughter, and he saw that they had cow’s tails. He remembered from Peersdatter and Jorgensdatter’s
Eventyr
that this was worrisome.

“Um—” He tried resisting, but something in the sweetness of the bread was making him drowsy. And he still felt enrapt by the girls’ beauty. It was as if his whole boyish existence, all his pride and learning and struggles, had at last been granted meaning. And the meaning was simply to please girls in every way he could.

“Shut up,” said Very Wise Girl, who now sounded Very Cross. “You’re ours now, fair and square. They can’t save you.”

It was cold water on a fire. He blinked and understood his danger. He struggled, but his body was drugged and weak. Yet Innocence thought for a moment that she was wrong, for Freidar and Nan looked menacing and gigantic. Suddenly the moment passed, as he realized that the stove looked gigantic too, and the chairs and tables, and the vast wooden cliff of the wall.

It was he and the girls who were now mouse-sized, and the crack behind the stove assumed the proportions of a cavern entrance as they dragged him into the dark.

They were underground, moving through blackness; they were tiny, scuffling through a tunnel fit for rats. But that was not the whole story. The world felt strange. The deeper down they traveled, the more squeezed Innocence felt. There was a sense of disorientation that was strangely familiar, though he could not place it. Then as they emerged into a realm of eerie lights of many colors, Innocence’s memory returned to him with such force that he almost spoke of it to his captors.

But when he looked at his nearest captors in the bizarre lighting, hit by blues and reds and yellows flashing from all directions, he did not see young women. He beheld great spherical tangles of yarn comparable to his own size, taking on whatever primary color was lighting them most strongly, their ends flayed in several directions like those of many-armed sea creatures. Only Very Wise Cross Girl still appeared human.

The tentacles that touched him still felt like hands, and indeed the points of contact split into five smaller tendrils resembling fingers. It was that small detail, after everything else, that finally made Innocence yelp and close his eyes. His screech was unbecoming for either a bold man of Kantenjord’s tales or a superior man of Qiangguo’s classics.

When he opened his eyes again, all the girls were girls again, though Innocence eyed their swishing cow’s tails with fresh alarm. Only Very Wise Cross Girl lacked one. Her companions giggled at his discomfort, while she said, “Now you’ve spied the uldra-girls sideways, as we entered our world.”

“Your world? Are we beyond Earthe?” For he’d remembered the sensation that reminded him of the feeling of moments before. It had been somewhat like the transition between the Scroll of Years and the world of his parents.

“Not outside, but it’s a good guess. We’re more inside, you see. Not just under the ground but between the folds of reality’s skein. Welcome to the steading of Sølvlyss.”

By now Innocence’s eyes had adjusted enough that he could appreciate the cavern before them. He couldn’t trust his conceptions of size anymore, but it appeared to be a space miles across, with a jagged ceiling thousands of feet overhead, misty with small clouds. That he could appreciate the view at all was the work of immense outcroppings of crystal scattered upon walls and ceiling, each shining region blazing with its own primary color. Where the colors met in proximity, mixed hues appeared, and thus the cavern seemed painted by an exuberant artist obsessed with rainbows.

Under his feet was not stone but soil, covered in golden grass. The meadow filled the cavern, interrupted by hills of the shining crystal, by several shimmering streams, and by a rocky hill in the distance, rising beside the cavern’s far wall. Upon these heights stood a turreted castle whose construction seemed to be all of silver, giving an impression of gigantic cups, coins, and blades. A drawbridge shaped like a vast dagger jabbed across from a tunnel in the rock, crossing a turbulent stream.

Innocence didn’t feel drugged any longer and thus lacked that explanation for what he saw. He lurched away from the girls’ clutches, and they let him go, evidently feeling he was thoroughly trapped. Looking back, he had to agree: the tunnel behind them had disappeared.

“Very well,” he said, in what he hoped was a firm, proud voice. “You’ve got me. What do you want with me?”

There commenced more of the discomfiting giggling, but “Earl Morksol wants you,” said the tail-less girl, the only one who’d yet spoken any words.

“I suppose he’s in the castle?” Innocence managed to say. “Lead on.”

They laughed at that too. He forced a smile on his face and walked along with false merriment.

Here and there the girls waved at farmers and shepherds. A few were cow’s-tailed women, but most were different varieties of the hidden folk. The majority were slight, slender humanoids with translucent skin, through which could be viewed peculiar organs resembling many-faceted jewels, as if in murky specimen jars. This type of folk took on the dominant color of their surroundings, and it was as though living fragments of rainbow waved them on. There were less common varieties, such as gray, wizened beings who looked as though all color had been drained away, leaving a cold core of purpose; these nodded gravely when Innocence’s escorts passed. And there were others who looked like human adults but with a child’s stature, with hair like lichen, bramble, or moss peeking from underneath conical hats of red, yellow, or blue.

And sometimes he apparently saw some of the inhabitants “sideways,” for he spotted balls of living yarn of variable stature, from pebble-sized to boulder-sized to a hazy shape in the distance that rivaled the castle, and from which he quickly averted his eyes. When he nerved himself to look again it was gone.

Now they neared the fortress, guarded by a stream that surged and retreated and expanded again like the edge of an ocean, for all that it was but twenty feet across. Upon the dagger-shaped drawbridge stood two warriors in strange armor that appeared to be tinted glass. As they were the transparent sort of denizen, Innocence could almost see right through them. The guards asked for no explanation but pointed toward the open gate with swords embossed with swirling geometric designs, each gleaming in the land’s wealth of colors.

The castle itself was filled with servants clad in the richest of silks waiting upon a handful of nobles dressed in peasant clothes. The girls greeted these latter, and soon they had an entourage escorting them into a throne room. The throne was carved from an immense dead tree, twisting in designs recalling dragons, wolves, sea serpents, and beasts harder to identify. Upon it sat one of the wizened gray folk. He wore a simple brown robe tied with a golden rope, and a wide-brimmed straw hat.

“So this is him?”

“Yes, Father,” said the tail-less girl.

“Let’s see his hands.” Innocence’s captors spread his fingers and lifted his palms for the old fellow to see. There seemed little point in resisting.

“Hm. Very well, release him.” Freed, Innocence stretched his arms and clenched his fists. “So, daughter, would you have him?” said the fellow on the throne.

The girl smiled. Innocence felt conflicted feelings. “He’s too young yet,” she said. “He should plow a field for a while first. Four years, I think. But we could get engaged right now.”

“Wise,” said the lord. “Boy, what is your name?”

“I am Askelad,” Innocence managed to say, bowing in the manner of Qiangguo. “What is this place? Who are you people?”

“You are in Sølvlyss, and I am Earl Morksol. We are called by the Kantenings the uldra, and by the Swanlanders and Eldshoren the delven, though on the Spiral Sea we are often the fata. Yet many will simply say ‘the hidden folk.’”

On impulse, Innocence asked, “Do your people live in Qiangguo? Do some of your girls resemble foxes?”

“Qiangguo, Qiangguo . . .” The earl scratched his chin. “It seems to me we do have relations in such a land, though we are long out of touch. As for foxes . . . in adolescence we have some in-betweenness about our forms, as with my daughter’s friends the dairymaids. Perhaps in the land you name, our youth are fond of foxes. We are quite variable. Once we were nearly as limited as you, when we dwelled on the opposite side of the coin that is the Earthe. But when a great catastrophe drove us into the underground places, we wandered far in darkness and learned strange talents. Bereft of light and open air, we opened passageways into realms that had both, though we had to change ourselves to suit the new environments. Even when we reached your side of the Earthe, many of us still preferred the hidden places under the skin of reality. We still have cousins who live much as you do, in singular forms, out in the open. We call them sky-delven, and they in turn call us the deep-delven, though in these isles we prefer to say ‘uldra,’ as the Kantenings do.”

Innocence was regaining his composure. It was easier to find his words while speaking with the earl; he was free of the stammering that seemed to plague him around every young woman but A-Girl-Is-A-Joy. “But if that’s all true then what do you want with me? I am human. I do not belong in these strange spaces.”

“From time to time in our long existence, we become untethered from reality. Uldra and whole uldra-realms can flit into the cosmic void, and what becomes of them, none can say. Adding human presences to our lands helps guard against this. Adding human blood to our lines is effective too. It also guards against a difficulty we have with metal; the more human blood in our lineage, the better we can cope with the poison metal brings to us. You are quite mundane.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, future son-in-law, that you are both ordinary, and that you are ‘of the world,’ tying us more thoroughly to the here and now.”

“Future son-in-law. So . . . I am supposed to . . . marry . . . um, her.” There were squeaks of suppressed hilarity nearby. “Because I’m . . . mundane.”

“You both are! My adopted daughter here is a changeling, human in form, though uldra in mind. Together you can make many princes and princesses to give our realm many sources of human blood. But that’s not all there is to it, boy. You have a power within you, something we’ve not seen in generations. Power that could wake dragons. Maybe you are the Runemarked King. Maybe not. But you will remain our guest. Alfhild, do you plight your troth with this lad?”

“Yes,” said the earl’s daughter.