The Drowned Tomb (The Changeling Series Book 2) (9 page)

The cylinder of dark wood lay on the table top. The odd tube they had found the dead Undine holding so tightly. Irene reached out and picked it up, turning it over in her hands.

“It is quite safe,” she assured him. “Calypso feared it may be cursed, or protected, but it was merely … hidden. Whoever placed it there clearly thought that Erlking was protection enough.”

She passed it to him. It was surprisingly light. Clearly hollow.

“What is it?” he asked, turning it over in his hands. It was intricately carved with stylised waves, and what looked like swirling lettering worked into the design.

“It is a scroll case,” his aunt replied quietly. He was aware that she was watching him carefully, studying him. She frowned a little. “I have not been able to open it,” she admitted. “I believe there is a trick to it, most likely it is enchanted and there may be a clue in the casing.”

Robin traced the odd lettering with his fingertips. The rain outside was heavier now, and although the flickering firelight made the room feel snug and safe, a tingle of goose bumps ran up his arms nonetheless. There was a brief, silent flash of lightning in the sky, far off on the moors.

“Can you read it, Robin?” his aunt asked him, leaning forward in her chair with interest.

Robin shook his head. “I don’t think so, but…”

“Your mana stone,” she suggested. “You found this artefact. Perhaps only you were meant to.”

He glanced up at her. His aunt looked very solemn and serious. Robin rolled the cylinder in his hands.

“It’s important, isn’t it?” he understood.

She nodded. “Yes, I believe so. Extremely important, if it is what I think it may be. I will tell you what I know, my nephew. Erlking herself may well be full of secrets, but I endeavour to keep as few from you as possible.” She raised a finger. “But first, show me what you can see.”

Robin, holding the cylinder in one hand, slipped his other down the neck of his t-shirt and pulled out his mana stone on its leather cord. The seraphinite stone felt hot in his hand, flickering softly and silently like the intermittent lightning outside. He concentrated, trying to focus his mana, willing the carved shapes and decorative squiggles to resolve into legibility as the runes at the grave had done.

As he peered at the casing, a peal of thunder came, louder and rolling over Erlking’s hill. In the sudden flash of lightening which followed it, Robin felt his mana stone pulse, almost burning his fingers. The lightning seemed not just outside, but also within his head, a mixture of air and rain, shot with white fire. He was blinded for a second in the flash of it, and although, when the instant passed, the wooden tube still held unknown carvings, in the after image burned into his retinas, he saw a ghost of the shape, and clear writing in the hovering image.

Quickly, before the image could fade, he spoke, reading the words out loud for his aunt:

“Tritea’s Tomb, the frozen gates, opens after triple states.” His voice was a little shaky.

Thunder grumbled again outside, and Robin sat back in the chair, his hand shaking a little.

Irene reached out and gently took the cylinder from him. He blinked up at her. Still gripping his mana stone, which was already cooling and no longer felt alive in his hand.

She repeated the words softly, with a tiny frown.

“Well done,” she said to him, after a moment. “How did you…” She glanced up, clearly noticing how ashen her nephew had become. He felt drained suddenly. “Never mind,” she finished. “‘How’ is not always the important question, Robin. I have to say, though, I am most impressed.”

“What, what does it mean?” he asked. “Those words I saw?”

“What does it mean? Why, it’s a riddle, naturally.” She set the wooden tube back down on the table, as though it were of no further consequence for now. “The answer to the riddle will open the case, clearly. It will break the sealing enchantment. And no, before you ask, as I can see the question already forming on your lips, I have no idea what the answer is. It is something we must muse on.”

It had been a very strange day altogether.

“Aunt Irene,” Robin asked, tucking his mana stone away again. “What’s going on?”

The old woman sighed, sitting back in her chair and folding her hands in her lap. “I will tell you,” she said. “Of course I will. Perhaps I should have told you sooner, but you have been without a tutor for guidance and since your returned in January, I wished to give you a little time to rest, to be a normal boy for a while, whatever one of those is.”

Irene drummed her fingers on the arm of the chair, making the plush throw which covered the arms bristle and hiss softly. “Since your incident at the Air shrine back in December, when you woke the Shard of Air, the other Shards, six in all, one assumes, have…” She searched for the right word. “ … Quickened, I suppose. They want to be found, Robin. They want to be reunited and made whole once more. And in their own way, each of them, wherever they may be, are shining out like beacons. Prizes to be claimed, and powerful ones at that.”

“And the sudden training in the Tower of Water?” he prompted.

“Because Eris, my boy, is not the only one who has spies,” his aunt replied darkly. “I have my sources also, and of late they have revealed to me that Eris and her forces are searching for what may well be the last known resting place of the Shard of Water. I cannot stress enough that it would be disastrous should she succeed.” Irene sniffed a little. “And so I have been doing some detective work of my own. The servants of Eris are convinced that this Shard is held in the home of the Undine, a sacred place known as Hiernarbos. As your tutor has already told you, the Undine were fiercely against Eris in the war she waged. Their leader, the greatest of all the Undine, and master over all her kind, and over all lesser forms like nymphs and sirens, was named Tritea.”

“So Strife is looking for this Undine’s place? He found the Isle of Winds easy enough.”

“Not Mr Strife, no.” Irene shook her head. “At least, not directly I don’t think. He is engaged in the Netherworlde on other dark business as far as I know. Eris has sent other Grimms, and from what I gather, they have yet to pin down the location of Hiernarbos, though they are searching desperately for it. Undine are powerful, and their sanctuary, the last place in the Netherworlde where they are safe, is well hidden and closely guarded. What is important for you to know are the following facts.”

Irene spread her hands. “Tritea, first above all Undine, is dead. This we know for sure. So much else is lost to us from the chaos of the war. Many of the records were destroyed by Eris’ order. But I have managed to piece some information together. It is believed that Tritea, the Great Undine was in the closest counsel of Oberon and Titania, a trusted friend to the Lord and Lady of the Fae before their disappearance. Rumours abound that when the Arcania shattered, and its pieces were scattered, one Shard, the Shard of Water, was entrusted to Tritea herself, and that she protected it for the remainder of her life, short as that was, and took it with her to the grave.”

“But the Undine are Panthea aren’t they?” Robin asked, a little confused. “I know there were plenty of Panthea who were against the war, but do you really think Oberon and Titania would trust an actual Shard to one?”

Irene held up a finger, begging patience. “I have my reasons for believing so,” she said.

“How did this Tritea die?” Robin asked. Talk of the war which had torn apart the Netherworlde was rare at Erlking. His aunt usually encouraged him to focus on his studies instead. Robin secretly suspected that she avoided talking about it in an attempt to shield him from his own parents’ deaths.

If she was taking him into her confidence this way, it must be important.

“I don’t know how she died,” Irene admitted. “No one does.”

Robin frowned. “So, where is she buried then?”

“I don’t know.” Irene copied his frown with her arched brows. “No one does. You begin to see the pattern we face, my young ward.”

Robin sat back in his chair, thinking. “Well, I suppose it would make sense for her to have been buried at this hidden sanctuary, right? This Hiernarbos place?”

“Possibly,” his aunt conceded. “That is certainly what Eris and her Grimms seem to believe. But as I have said, wherever the sanctuary is, it is well guarded, from Fae as well as Panthea. Hiernarbos, and the valley in which it can be found, if it can be found, is accessible only one way. Through a Janus station.”

Robin had encountered Janus stations before. They were pathways, portals between the human world and the Netherworlde, or sometime between two different Netherworlde points. They were usually, though not exclusively, stone circles of one kind or another.

“There are loads of Janus Stations though, aren’t there?” he asked.

“This is a very specific Janus station,” his aunt said. “A closed line, if you will. One way into the sanctuary of the Undine, and hopefully Tritea’s tomb and the Shard she guarded in life, and one way only.”

Robin nodded. “So this is what the Grimms are searching for? This Janus station? Let me guess, it’s off the grid?”

Irene reached over and patted his knee once. “Bright boy. Yes. Much like Erlking’s own Janus station, this particular pathway between the human world and the Netherworlde is not linked to the greater network. A private network, as it were, arranged, as Erlking was, by Oberon and Titania themselves. A great boon to offer such safety to any Panthea opposing Eris in times of war. Tritea would have been honoured to have her sanctuary and her kin protected so.”

“And this riddle on the cylinder? ‘Tritea’s Tomb, the frozen gates, opens after triple states’, you think the frozen gates are this Janus station.”

“Indeed,” his aunt replied. “That was my thinking just now. I suspect that the contents of this cylinder, once we solve the riddle to open it, will point us to the location of Tritea’s own gateway. If we can open it, that is. Your timely discovery is of no small consequence. It puts us a step ahead of Eris. They have no such clue. They are following other trails it seems.”

Robin was still unsure. “But why would Oberon and Titania be so trusting of a Panthea? I mean, to give a Shard of the actual Arcania to her, then to create a hidden place she could live in peace? What did she do to earn their trust so much?” It seemed unlikely to him.

Irene pursed her lips a little. “Careful, Robin,” she said. “You forget that I am Panthea also, and Oberon and Titania saw fit to grant me custody of Erlking, seat of all things Fae in their … absence.”

Robin flushed. “Oh! No, no!” he said hastily, cursing himself inwardly. “I didn’t mean...that is, well, they didn’t give you a Shard did they? They didn’t even tell you where they were hidden, or what happened to them afterwards?”

Irene nodded, granting him this. “No, no, they didn’t,” she allowed. “That is the problem. They took no one into their full counsel. None that I know of anyway. I was as far from Eris as it is possible for a Panthea to be in thought and feeling, and still am, and so perhaps I was ultimately the only choice to watch over Erlking. But you are quite right, Robin. They did not entrust me with a Shard.”

She polished her glasses with the corner of her shawl. “I believe the reason that Tritea was granted custody of one is simple. She was the lover of one of the Fae Guard. The knights of Oberon, most highly regarded and beloved of all the King and Queen’s subjects.”

Robin wrinkled his nose. “A Panthea, in love with a Fae? I didn’t know that ever happened.”

“Probably more often that you realise,” Irene shrugged. “ … In times before the war, before Eris tore the races apart and set them at one another’s throats. If Tritea was the partner of one of these knights, all now … lost to us … then there would be no one better placed to take a Shard for safekeeping.”

Robin had read something in his book, ‘A Concise Genealogy of the Fae’, about the Fae Guard. There had been nine of them, if he remembered correctly. Kind of like King Arthur’s knights of the round table, only with horns and stranger names. “Do you know which one of them?” he asked. “Which of the Fae Guard Tritea was, you know, in love with?”

His aunt peered over his shoulder and out into the rainy night, her eyes narrowed and her face thoughtful. “That, dear boy, is something I am trying to discover as well. It is of utmost importance. And for all we know…” She glanced at him thoughtfully, her eyes sharp and unreadable. “ … It may have been your own father.”

BURYING THE PAST

The following day, the refreshing rains had passed and by mid-morning, the wet earth had baked dry again in the relentless heatwave, stealing any respite the night-time deluge had brought. Mr Drover was occupied with mending the broken dreamcatchers in the trees by the west gates. They had been torn to shreds by the heavy rains, and dreamcatchers, he explained, needle and thread in hand as he left the hall, were an essential ward against roaming revenants.

Henry was in school down in the village, and Robin, who didn’t have a lesson with his new tutor scheduled until the following day, leaned out of his bedroom window, watching the steam rise from the forests and up into the cloudless blue of the sky above. Behind him, Karya sat at his writing desk, scribbling away, the surface of the desk covered in papers and scrolls. Three different linguistic textbooks lay open around her: large, leather-bound things, each looking more arcane and complex than the last.

“You don’t really think this Tritea, this Undine who had a Shard of the Arcania, was in love with my dad, do you?” he asked her, without turning around. He was leaning out on the sill, his chin cupped in his hands as he peered across the landscape. Swallows whirled and dived above the trees. Darting in and out of the thin mist baking off the treetops like fleet spirits.

“I doubt it very much, Scion,” Karya replied, sounding a little distracted and not remotely concerned. She didn’t look up from her scribblings. “Of all the Fae Guard, Wolfsbane Truefellow was probably the least likely to stray. Your mother was, by all accounts, a remarkably beautiful woman.”

“Yeah,” Robin murmured. “I suppose. I’ve seen the painting. I just—I wish we knew more about them, I suppose.”

“I shouldn’t worry about it if I were you,” Karya replied, dipping the nib of her pen into an ink jar on the desk. She didn’t seem very sympathetic to Robin’s lack of living parents. It was a fairly well known fact that Karya didn’t think much of parents on the whole as a rule. “There’s a lot of broken history from before the wars. It’s always the way, especially when those who win said war take complete control of the history books.” She sighed. “Lady Eris has obliterated so many records in her quest for control. Tarnishing the true history of the Netherworlde, and especially your people.” She beetled her brows. “It’s extremely annoying trying to piece together what happened and who did what, when, and how.” She tutted under her breath, flipping a few pages and then underlining her own scrawl. “Which is why we only have scraps like this translation to go on.”

Robin turned from the window and leaned against it on his elbows, peering at the tangle-haired girl. She hadn’t even touched the plate of Banshee cakes he had managed to secure from Hestia as a snack. They were a delicious favourite, if you could endure the wailing when you bit into one. “You’re still working on that thing for Aunt Irene?” he asked.

She nodded absently, clearly not really listening.

“Not that I mind, but how come you’re doing it in my room, of all places?”

Karya glanced up and allowed a small smile. “Because Woad is in mine,” she explained, in an indulgent but world-weary tone. “He’s building something, and says my room is a bigger workspace.”

“Building something?” The thought of Woad in charge of tools was a faintly alarming one.

“It looks like a glass tank. Though there’s quite a lot of timber involved too. He says he’s got a pet now, and it’s very important that it has a ‘nice’ home.” She shrugged. “Needless to say, the little blue terror has completely trashed my room, so it was easier just to leave him to it.” She returned to her scribblings, the quill scratching across her parchment busily.

Karya had been invited to stay at Erlking indefinitely, following the events of the previous year. She had, at the time of Robin’s offer, made a show of utter nonchalance, as though she would be doing everyone involved a huge favour by agreeing to stay.

But when Henry’s father and Hestia had shown her to the room set aside for her, she had surprised everyone by standing for a few moments in the doorway. Not entering, just quietly taking in the room in silence, her face unreadable. At the time, given her reaction, Mr Drover had mistakenly thought she hadn’t liked it, and had gently assured her that it was only a small room, yes, certainly not Buckingham Palace or anything, really just one of the old storerooms in the attic space, but it had a bed, places to store her belongings, and there was actually a small balcony leading off from the tall glass windows which overlooked the lavender garden below. It smelled quite nice in summer, when the wind was right.

She’d shook her head, still staring into the chamber. “Oh no, the room is … fine. I don’t have any belongings to store. I don’t really own anything. Except myself … now. It’s just that, well … I’ve never had a room before. Not anywhere. Not … ever.”

Robin knew very little about Karya’s past. He knew she had been involved with Lady Eris at some point, although he had no idea in what capacity and it was almost impossible to find a way to bring the subject up naturally. What he did know was that the relentless Mr Strife, one of Eris’ chief henchmen, had been chasing the young girl across the human world and the Netherworlde for more than a year to ‘bring her home’. Somewhere she clearly didn’t want to go. She had been sleeping rough for a long time, never in the same place twice. Hunted and alone in the world. And for all her own troubles, she had been more concerned with Robin.

Karya had made little fuss about her new room at Erlking the time, simply saying it would do. But on her first few days living here, she had barely left it, and had mainly slept, long and deep, more than anyone would have imagined possible, with quiet but strict orders from Aunt Irene that she be left alone and not be bothered. Even by Woad. Robin imagined it had probably been the first deep, untroubled and safe sleep she’d had in an awfully long time.

The idea that Woad was now currently trashing the bedroom she clearly, if stoically, treasured, and that she was allowing him to do so, was an indication of both her fondness for the faun and her determination to solve this scribbled puzzle.

“What kind of pet?” Robin asked her now. “He’s not been bringing squirrels back into the house again, has he? You know Hestia goes off her nut about that. She keeps finding them everywhere. Tucked in drawers, under bed pillows. I think he smuggles them into the house in his trousers. You’ve seen how he walks sometimes. And that innocent whistling, like he’s fooling any of us.”

Karya shook her head, setting down her pen on Robin’s desk and finally taking a distracted bite out of one of Hestia’s cakes. A faint wail filled the room for a moment, despondent, haunting, and with a hint of cinnamon.

“I didn’t like to ask to be honest,” she said around a mouthful of crumbs. She gave Robin a lopsided smile. “I’ve learned over time, and often the hard way, that that’s more often than not the safest course of action with Woad.”

She could tell that Robin was still brooding over his parents. “Anyway, I need to take a break from this, and you need to stop worrying about your mother and father. No one was ever more in love than those two. We’ll check out the library, see if that gives any more information on the old boys’ club of the Fae Guard. If there’s anywhere in either of the worlds where there might still be books which Eris hasn’t managed to destroy or mangle, it’s a safe bet Erlking will be the place.” She rubbed the bridge of her nose, leaving an ink smudge that made Robin smirk.

“It’s too hot in here, even for me,” she admitted. “There hasn’t been a midsummer’s like this since the day Oberon married Titania. That was hot enough for the sun to crack the window glass.”

Robin frowned as the girl got to her feet, stretching.

“How on earth would you know that?” he asked. “You’re what, eleven? You were hardly there were you? Or are weather records the one thing that miraculously escaped Lady Eris’ purge of Netherworlde history?”

She shot him a withering look, which was only slightly watered down by the ink smudge. “Never you mind how I know what I know,” she said tartly. “I remember more things that even your Aunt Irene’s ever forgotten.” She sighed. “Though not always useful things, unfortunately. Let’s go down to the kitchens and bully some drinks out of that delightful housekeeper of yours. These cakes do leave you with a dry mouth, don’t they? I think it’s the ginger, or the gravesoil. And for your information, I’ll be thirteen soon, you’re only a year older than me, o great and noble Scion.” She performed a mock-curtsy and headed for the door.

Robin followed amiably, hands thrust in the pockets of his jeans. “Well, I’m still older, so I rank far above you, don’t I?” he grinned, teasing. “I am the great and one and only Scion after all, saviour of the Netherworlde or … whatever.”

“Whatever indeed, saviour,” she called over her shoulder sarcastically. “You’ve rubbed your elbow in bird poo on the window ledge.”

The planned trip to the library didn’t happen for three days. Life at Erlking, Robin had discovered, had a way of eating up your time. After lunch, which Hestia had indeed already prepared for the children, Karya and Robin sat on the stone lid of the covered well outside, watching the heat haze shimmer across the cobbles of the courtyard. The stone was warm under Robin’s legs, and once out in the open, it seemed too pleasant to go indoors in search of a book. He talked Karya instead into wandering off into the grassy slopes beyond the formal gardens, where she drilled him on his Air Tower combat manoeuvres. It wasn’t the same without Phorbas to guide them, but he had decided to try and keep up his studies as best he could, and he had brought his knife from his room, which he propped up thoughtfully on a rock so Phorbas could at least ‘watch’.

Henry didn’t come to Erlking that day – he had football club after school – and Karya had disappeared after supper to dive back into her translation, refreshed but already feeling guilty for taking the afternoon off.

Robin, exhausted after combat training in the heat all afternoon and unable to find even Woad to distract him (the sounds of hammering and sawing from the third floor were a little alarming), had elected to curled up in bed with a copy of Ethercraft, learning how to fine-tune his Galestrikes, though his mana stone had been so dull and heavy by nightfall, that despite his best intentions, he’d fallen asleep with it on his chest.

The following day, his new tutor summoned him to the atrium, a large domed space high in Erlking’s upper floors. Robin had enjoyed his very first practical lesson in the Arcania here and the room was much the same as ever, except that in place of a goat-legged man with a cheery face, there stood a willowy woman with a strangely distant look in her eyes. The nymph regarded him across the table set in the middle of the room, her head to one side.

“I have been talking with your aunt, Scion of the Arcania,” she said. “She instructs me that in light of your recent near-death plunge, we are to continue your training in the Tower of Water in more of a…” She glanced around at the sunlit stone walls, her displeasure evident. “ … Controlled environment. How dull. But there it is anyway.”

A silky sleeved arm swept across the table gracefully. “Here before you, you see six goblets.”

Robin did indeed. They were large, silver and crusted with jewels. Set in a neat, evenly spaced row.

“The cantrip we will master today is known as Silverstream,” she told him. “The movement of a body of water from one place to another. A simple focus and manipulation of molecules, shaped and guided through space. A baby could do it.”

“Simple?” Robin asked dubiously, as the nymph peered at him intently with her limpid eyes.

Without breaking eye contact, Calypso flicked her wrist. The clear, watery contents of the goblet on the far left leapt up out of its container and soared in a bubbling arc across the table, landing in the goblet at the other end without spilling a drop.

“Simple,” she said. “You do it.”

Robin stared at the goblets. “Um, I haven’t been given any homework … you know, reading? Books, theory? About water magic?”

Calypso came around the table, shaking her head softly, her skirts whispering on the flagstones. “Books? Words? Fixed things. Ideas stapled to paper like dead butterflies, mouldering and stale. There are no books on the Tower of Water, Scion. Water is an element of emotion, of feeling, not thought. There are no calculations, no graphs and charts and tiresome discussions.” With a pale fingertip she tapped the middle of his forehead lightly. “Here? Here is air. Thought and reason and logic. But here is water.” She slapped him on the stomach, making him actually leap back in surprise. “In your gut. This is water. Feeling, emotion, instinct.” She glanced back at the line of goblets. “Now, you. Silverstream the water back to the other goblet. You need not go from end to end, one goblet along at a time will be sufficient to start with.”

Robin stared at the table full of cups in alarm. “But how do I…”

“Feel it,” she suggested lightly, which he didn’t think was very helpful.

“But I don’t know how to…”

“Feel it,” she insisted, a little sharper. “From your guts, Scion, if you please. You are too mild. You overthink everything. Stop thinking about it, and simply do it.”

Robin closed his eyes, trusting to the familiar weight of his mana stone around his neck. He held out his hand at arm’s length towards the table before him, and tried to envision the water leaping majestically from cup to cup like liquid trout. He strained to feel it happening, to allow whatever strange Zen approach his tutor was expecting from him to miraculously appear.