Ferimon was her first visitor after the funeral. At the time, she had no wish to see him or anyone else, but Varna nagged and nagged until she’d persuaded Tiolani that she couldn’t shut herself away forever - and besides, how could she refuse her brother’s best friend? When he arrived, she was sitting in the window embrasure, looking out at the city and the forest beyond as they slowly faded in the gathering dusk. It was as though all the colour had been leached out of the world, leaving only stark black, chill white and sombre shades of grey. Snow had begun to fall thickly out of a bleak sky and was already lying on the iron-hard ground, the roofs of the buildings and the skeletal branches of the trees.
The evening was a perfect foil for Tiolani’s mood. Everything seemed desolate and dead, as though the whole of nature shared her loss of Arvain. Ferimon’s appearance, however, was enough to jolt her out of her preoccupation. One look at his face told her that she was not the only one who had suffered deeply over her brother’s death. At least she’d had Varna to take care of her while she had been laid low by grief, but she could see at a glance that Ferimon had allowed no one near him since Arvain’s funeral rites. He was still wearing the same red robes, now wrinkled and stained, and his normally immaculate blond curls were matted and uncombed. By the looks of the deep, black hollows beneath his tear-swollen eyes, he hadn’t slept, and judging from his white, drawn face and his shaking hands, she suspected that he hadn’t eaten, either.
Tiolani’s heart went out to him. She had barely tasted food herself since she had sent Arvain to his rest, but Varna had managed to coax the odd morsel into her despite her resistance. (She guiltily glanced at the scars on her door and the stains on the blue carpet, mute evidence of the bowl of soup she had thrown at her lady-in-waiting the previous day.) Stoically, Varna had borne the brunt of her anger at the unfairness of it all; had bathed her sore red eyes with cold water; had brushed her hair and, only that morning, had coaxed, badgered and finally ordered her into a bath and some clean, fresh clothes. And though, at the time, Tiolani had wished her a million miles away, she now felt a rush of gratitude towards her patient companion. Without Varna and her pestering, she, too, would have been in the same dreadful state as Ferimon.
Varna hadn’t managed to improve Tiolani’s manners, however. With a stab of remorse, she realised that Ferimon was still kneeling in front of her, waiting, as protocol demanded, for his ruler to speak first. She summoned him to sit with her in the window embrasure, and poured him a goblet of wine. ‘My dear Ferimon,’ she began, ‘please forgive my abstraction. These last few days have been difficult for us all, but as my brother’s best friend, you deserve better from me. What can I do for you?’
‘My thanks for your courtesy, Lady Tiolani,’ he replied, ‘but in truth, I came to do something for you. On the day before your first Wild Hunt, Arvain asked me to perform an errand for him. He had commissioned a special gift for you to mark the occasion, and he asked me to go down into the city and collect it for him, as he was busy with your father, and had no time to go himself.’ In a shaking voice he went on: ‘He died before I had a chance to give it to him. Please forgive me for not bringing it to you sooner, but my own grief . . .’ He swallowed hard and began again. ‘Arvain would be angry if he knew how long I had delayed. I know how much he wanted you to have this.’
He handed her a small golden box with her name inlaid on the lid in tiny, coloured gems. ‘Oh,’ she gasped. ‘It’s beautiful.’
‘Your pardon, Lady, but the box itself is not the gift. Look inside.’
With fumbling fingers, she found the catch and opened the little box. Inside, nestling on a bed of white velvet, was a single pale-green gem cut in the shape of a faceted teardrop that hung from a simple chain of white gold. Tiolani’s eyes blurred with tears. ‘It’s perfect,’ she whispered.
Ferimon nodded. ‘How like Arvain, to find exactly the right thing. He loved you very deeply.’ Now both of them were weeping. Afterwards, Tiolani never remembered how they came to be sharing an embrace - it seemed to flow naturally out of their mutual grief and love for her brother. Certainly, at that point, they were simply comforting one another, and when the comforting turned into something deeper, it felt like the most natural thing in the world. And as Ferimon swept her up in his arms and carried her away from her cold window embrasure and into the glowing warmth of the lamplit bedchamber, she suddenly found her grief a little easier to bear.
Firmly, Tiolani pushed away the thought of her father’s disapproval. He need never know. How could he? Frozen outside time, stranded in unconsciousness as he was, he might as well be in another world. Wrapped in Ferimon’s embrace, she was unaware of just how close she had come to the truth. A mortal, or even a Wizard taken out of time as Hellorin had been, would truly be lost in oblivion. For a Phaerie with the Forest Lord’s vast powers, there was another option.
When Hellorin fell, the last thing in his darkening vision had been the face of his dead son. When he opened his eyes again, Arvain’s features were still before him. Seared into his memory, they seemed to fill his world as far as the horizon. Grief and pain struck at him like cold serpents, wrapping him in coils of agony and rage that constricted his breathing and sent his blood hammering through his head until he cried aloud and pounded his fists on the uncaring ground. But it was as though that cry had roused him from confusion. Suddenly it came to him that Arvain’s beloved face had only been etched upon his mind’s eye. It was no longer there in actuality.
The reality was far different. Though he was still sprawled in the same unnatural position in which he had fallen, he no longer lay on the damp, muddy leaves of the forest clearing. Silence had replaced the harrowing sounds of battle, and there was no sign of friends or foes, living or dead. The dreadful pain of his wounds had vanished, and his body had been made whole once more.
He was lying in a vast chamber on a shining floor that possessed the blue-white smoothness of a frozen lake. The distant walls and ceiling, elegantly carved and supported by slender pillars and graceful, springing buttresses, were constructed from a similar material. The roof was so high that wisps and skeins of cloud had gathered, drifting lazily between the pillars and spreading like veils across the open stretches. Far, far above, snow appeared to be falling from the ceiling: a fine, crystallised shower that drifted gently down, glittering as it fell and vanishing just before it reached the ground.
A clawed fist of ice, which had nothing to do with the frigid air of the chamber, clenched itself around Hellorin’s guts. He was no stranger to this place. He had been here before. And he had never expected to be back. There was a world, a dimension, another reality beyond the boundaries of the mundane world which the Magefolk and mortals - and now the Phaerie - inhabited. A mysterious Elsewhere governed by the Old Magic, where elemental beings of great power held sway, and nothing was as it seemed. They had dwelt here, once, he and his people. The Phaerie had been denizens of this land for an eternity, until Hellorin had decided that the mundane world held richer pickings. It had been a long and difficult struggle to release the Phaerie from the bonds of the Elsewhere, and to do so he had been forced to give up one of the greatest heirlooms of his race. So why had he been pulled back into this place? Who had brought him here? His heart plummeted at the thought of being trapped here once again.