III. Jeu de Mail
“Who?” asks Nicnevin just before she whacks the hard wooden ball. “What mortal hand and eye is so well set against us? Against me?”
The Queen’s buzzing thoughts blare across the tableland of shorn blue grass encircling her domed summer house—a peculiar distinction in a location where it is always summer, the outer world manipulated and controlled by subterranean forces greater than even she comprehends. The Unseelie grant the Yvags pleasant environs. It’s one more reason that owed tithes must be paid on time.
Nicnevin’s elaborate, paneled gown is sheer where it isn’t transparent, and beaded with pearls that seem to wave and flutter on wisps around her. She dresses to parody the ostentation of the latest mortal Queen.
Her taloned feet are bare as she strides the stone walkway through the grass. Trailing her are some of her advisors, counselors, and assets. Everyone carries a long-handled mallet. The counselors are glamoured as if in costumes representing other species they have known. One is even shaped as a troll. The assets on hand are the disturbing Bragrender, and transforming Zhanedd, who struts about without armor, naked from the waist up to display the long and vicious scar that runs from throat to belly, a pure white badge of honor so far as she seems concerned, a reminder of what’s been endured for Ailfion. Most any changeling would have succumbed to such a wound, but Zhanedd refused to die—in fact, throughout her long recovery spoke only of pursuing and killing, as she put it, “the changeling going by Robyn Hoode.” He who had opened her up.
It was a near thing: The wound was too severe for Yvag regenerative powers alone to overcome. The changeling—if indeed he was a changeling—had inflicted what should have been a mortal wound. Bragrender brought her back from the priory. Someone needed to be blamed for the failure to take Robyn Hoode, and it wasn’t going to be him.
Instead, Nicnevin had him hand the dying Zhanedd to the subterranean Þagalwood beings as a last resort. Those entities then performed their abstruse surgeries on Zhanedd, opened her up further and filled the damaged part of her with a harvested segment of the same material that comprised them. They are creatures or machines whose parts seem to know instinctively what they are to do, and join together accordingly.
The white segment in her flowed into place. Its bourn immediately sprouted thousands of connections finer than hairs, plugging intricately into her, each tiny connection an agonizing jolt, until the electric pain of being joined to the Þagalene symbiont engulfed her.
And then, as suddenly as it began, the agony stopped.
Zhanedd is become part-Þagalwood. Between the two vertical rows of breathing holes down her torso, the whiteness flows like some amorphous parasite, binding the changeling together. Symbiotic, transformed, but in any case alive.
By the time the subterranean organisms completed their repairs of her and she recovered, many years had passed in the World-to-Be, and the one called Robyn Hoode was either long dead or had moved on without a trace. However, others embracing variants upon that name turned up repeatedly as if to replace him. While Queen Nicnevin sealed off Sherwood Forest as a source of further teinds, a whole gaggle of “Robyn Hoods” arose there. The name became synonymous with outlaws.
Initially, recovered and remade Zhanedd took some small satisfaction in eliminating the imitators at every opportunity. She ran across none of the original Sherwood outlaws who had stood against them. None remained alive outside the ballads and tales.
And yet someone continues to interfere arbitrarily with the selection of their teinds. Either more than one enemy is involved, or else this nemesis is unaccountably long-lived, which would again seem to support Zhanedd’s original notion of a rogue changeling. Evidence suggests that the current one is yet another archer—it seems to be a requirement for the rôle—and like his predecessors, he tends to take his arrows with him. However, the latest incarnation of the archer has somehow laid hands upon kanerva poison. Now victims of the unknown assailant cannot be reanimated. Nicnevin has three Yvag knights too dead to recover; the sacrifice they were escorting has vanished; and it’s too late for the Queen to contact her various Yvagvojas—her skinwalkers—to select another candidate: this enemy would force her to pick one of their own as sacrifice, reducing their number further. The addition of the poison makes it seem as if the enemy lives in Þagalwood.
Bragrender strikes his ball too hard. It flies over the Queen’s ball and clouts one of the court counselors squarely on the side of the head. Two of the others drop their mallets and catch him as he falls, his glamour extinguished. Bragrender laughs at them. Outraged as they are, they can hardly make themselves look his way, so disturbing is he with his flickering, warping form.
Nicnevin tsks. “I did not request you to take off their heads, Bragrender.”
Her offspring frowns.
Zhanedd speaks up then. She proposes they change their pattern and start collecting teinds ahead of schedule. “We could keep them in the septenary prison, so there is always someone held at the ready, impossible to rescue. Any attempt to do so would trap our nemesis in the prison, too.”
Nicnevin considers that as she lines up her next shot. “An expedient solution,” she buzzes, “going forward.” Then she knocks her bright blue ball through the grass. A hole opens up in the ground ahead and the ball drops in. She has won, of course.
Bragrender throws his mallet, just managing to hit no one. Still, all eyes turn to him, if only peripherally. With a disdainful air, he takes out his large ördstone and casually cuts a slice in the air as if it were nothing. The other side of the fire-edged ring is dark, lit by torches, an interior of stone and wood, bars and shackles. A foul, choking reek pours out of the portal.
The grotesque Bragrender ducks through the ring. Shrill screams of horror echo from the far side. A moment later he tosses a small human back out, who tumbles and sprawls; Bragrender steps out after, turns and seals up the portal. The man he’s ejected through the gate is filthy. He has raw wounds on his ankles from wearing shackles. His clothing is in tatters, his hair and beard greasy, teeth almost green. He looks up at them all in terror. “Use this one,” Bragrender advises, his voice harsh and unpleasant.
“Where is he from?”
“Newgate Prison in their city of London.” Bragrender bends down to wipe his hand clean in the grass. “Matters not if they saw me in there. They’re all adjudged mad or worthless. No one listens and no one will think on him as anything but an escaped lunatic, if they think on him at all. This one was due to be hanged tomorrow so none will hunt for him very hard.”
“And how is it you can cut a gate into this prison?”
Bragrender, or one aspect of him, smiles deviously. “Oh, I visit it now and then to terrify them. It’s fun.” He sneers at Zhanedd as if to say See how vastly superior is my idea?
Approaching the small captured man, the Queen covers her nose. She nudges him with her mallet. “Why must they all stink thus?” She tries glamouring their captive. For the most part he transforms into an Yvag knight, though there are gaps in the image due to his extreme filth. “I would reshape him, but it would certainly turn him inside out. Still, I suppose he’ll do.” She gestures at two of her guards. “Take him, strip and bathe him. Then we’ll see how well he glamours and give him to Hel immediately. Go.” The Yvag knights stride forward and drag the terrified man away.
Nicnevin thrums. “Your solution is a good one, even more expedient than Zhanedd’s, Bragrender.”
“Hers is stupid. We would have to feed her teinds.” What mote of camaraderie might have existed between them in the brief aftermath of their battles with Robyn Hoode, it burnt out long before she even recovered.
Zhanedd for her part ignores his taunts. She seems to have learned patience since she gave up hunting Robyn Hoodes, just as she is becoming ever more noticeably pale. Some transformation is occurring within her, about which she says nothing.
“We still have an enemy who glides in and out of Þagalwood, kills our knights, and knows our world well enough to know its poisons, and so may have even consorted with trolls. Is there an unhinged changeling in the wood who fled Ailfion and now, misguided, attacks us when we pass through? This I would know.”
Zhanedd steps forward to steal the attention from Bragrender. “I have set traps for such a one. I would meet him.”
Bragrender chortles. “And yet have caught nothing.”
“Then for the moment that is settled,” says Nicnevin. “Zhanedd will hunt our marauder, and Bragrender will try not to infuriate me further. These are less significant matters than that which continues to irritate: the elimination of this violent queen they have placed upon their throne. She promised tolerance following the abbreviated reign of the Mary creature, but obviously dissembled as any worthy monarch might. In the wake of her strict anti-Catholic laws, we’ve already lost half a dozen deeply invested skinwalkers to the axe and the scaffold cage. She is as merciless as her father proved to be when he didn’t get his way. Too many of our voja have gone to ground and are unable to put any agenda in play. Some hide in sympathetic houses near and in the city of London. Most, however, have sailed to safe havens such as Brugge and Leyden, hiding among and instructing others who would gladly eliminate this Elizabeth.”
“And what about her witchcraft ruling?” asks one of the advisors. The question, notes Nicnevin, is aimed at pale Zhanedd, but she seems preoccupied, her thoughts elsewhere.
Bragrender harrumphs. “Goes against us to be sure, but we have already infiltrated the witchfinders’ ranks. They’re as intolerable and ignorant as the inquisitors of Spain and France, therefore easily worked. Maneuver them just a little, and we can keep investigations pointed where and at whom we like. They will do our bidding and never suspect.”
“So-o-o,” begins another counselor, glamoured as a sea creature and sporting a tentacled headpiece, who glances around, seeking at least some looks of support. “Eliminating a powerful monarch—we have discussed before the ways this could inadvertently reveal us to the mortals if we are incautious.”
“Oh, yes, yes, Panguramin, but you worry far too much of invasion,” says Nicnevin.
“It happened before. The Unseelie—”
“Tush, humans pose no threat anywhere comparable to the Unseelie. We’ll make no bargains with them before any universes collide or collapse.”
“Very well, Majesty. How do we eliminate this interfering queen?”
Nicnevin smiles broadly. “Assassination is the natural course. Enable the humans to do everything for us. We stir the pot and our voja report on the conspiracies that take shape on the isle and in the so-called Low Countries across the water and elsewhere. So many of them want her eliminated, we have to do hardly anything other than encourage the right ones, guide them to connect. Plots will manifest, and out of half a dozen or so, we need but one success. This is what I mean, Panguramin. Humans see whatever we wish them to, and are led to perform as we instruct. Never will they gain dominance over us.”
“Majesty.” A tall counselor glamoured as a pink, long-necked bird bows before her and gives a silencing glance at rotund Panguramin, whose tentacles appear to warp and writhe in frustration.
“Yes?”
“I am far more concerned regarding the protracted wait for each new dight in our armaments. We need to scour some of these Protestant leaders in order to control both sides in this back-and-forth, as it seems to be the dynamic we must anticipate going forward. That which was steady—”
“Until the queen dies,” Bragrender interrupts. It’s difficult to be sure, given his ever-shifting visage, but he seems to be wide-eyed with delight at the idea. To which queen he refers is as opaque as he is unsettling.
“Well, and to that desired end,” replies Nicnevin, “our voja who inhabits the lich called Mortimer is at work on a simple scheme that should soon enough bear fruit.”
She hands away her mallet now that she has won the game.
To Bragrender as she passes him, she whispers, “Find me Ritarenda. Do it now.”