In a grand chamber was a great library, one that made the small library in Camille’s suite look to be no more than a shelf or two by comparison. Books abounded, along with scrolls and pamphlets and journals and other printings and writings. Camille studied the spines of several books, finding poetry, legends, fables, histories, and much more ere Blanche dragged her away, saying, “My lady, there will be time in years to come to learn all, and I would have you see a great deal of this manse.” And so onward they went.
A game room they visited: in the center of the room sat a small table with facing chairs and holding an elegant echecs set of carven jade-pale yellow for one player, translucent green for the other-the pieces arrayed on an onyx-and-marble board. Tears welled in Camille’s eyes as she remembered the wooden set her pere had carved, the set she and Giles had used.
“Do you play?” asked Camille, taking up a spearman.
“Oh, no, I think not, my lady, at least I do not remember ever having done so.” Her voice trembled as if in some distress.
Camille frowned. How could one not know whether they had ever played echecs? But she merely said, “Someday I will teach you, then.”
There were other echecs tables scattered about, though the sets were not quite as elegant.
In one corner sat a large, round table with several chairs about, and thereon were a scatter of small, flat, very stiff paper rectangles. Camille took up several and studied the various depictions of vices, virtues, and elemental forces, and nobility and peasantry thereon. “What are these, Blanche?” asked Camille.
With her fingers interlocked and clasped tightly, Blanche said, “I only know they are used in a game called taroc, my lady, though some say there are arcane uses for such as well.”
On other tables sat games of dames, twelve red and twelve black pieces on alternating squares of the damiers, the boards like those of the ones for echecs, though the playing pieces were round disks all.
Camille looked up from the games and found hanging above a broad fireplace the portrait of a slender young man dressed all in blue and standing on a grassy hill, the wind blowing his cloak about and ruffling his dark hair. He was quite handsome, with a long, straight nose and regular features; across his body he held a walking stick in his two hands, almost as one would hold a quarterstaff low. He seemed to be looking out of the portrait and straight across the room. Camille turned, and on the opposite wall above a white marble table was a second portrait, this one of a striking woman in green, standing on another windy hilltop, her black hair loose and blowing, her cloak and gown billowing in the wind; she was dressed as if for riding horse-back, a crop in her hand. She faced the image opposite. It was as if they stood on adjacent hills in the same gusty blow, looking at one another across a vale between.
“Who are they?” asked Camille.
“Prince Alain’s sire and dam,” replied Blanche, her face quite pale. “They say this is how they met-him out for a walk, she out for a ride.”
“Does Alain look like his pere… or mere?”
“Oh, my lady, please don’t ask. I am pledged not to say aught of the prince. It is his wish, for he would tell you himself.”
Camille took a deep breath, and then asked, “Where are they now, pere and mere, that is?”
“No one knows, my lady. They vanished sometime back, and all the hunters and trackers in Faery couldn’t seem to find them. ’Tis a sad thing for his brother and sisters and himself, their parents gone missing.”
“Prince Borel, and Ladies Celeste and Liaze?”
Blanche nodded, and in a pleading voice said, “Oh, let us go from this room, for tragedy is like to overwhelm me.” And so they went onward.
Through hallways they trod, and here and there in the walls were panels, and when asked, Blanche opened one and pulled on a rope in the space behind, pulleys squeaking somewhere above; a wooden box, open on the front, came into view. “It is used to convey food or other goods from one floor to another,” said Blanche, smiling. “It is called a sourd-muet serveur.”
“Oh, but how clever,” said Camille. “It must save many a footstep bearing loads up and down stairs.”
“Indeed, my lady,” replied Blanche, closing the panel and then moving on.
They came to a chamber with a hardwood floor; at the far end there was nought but a great oaken desk and chair facing toward the door, with other chairs ranged about the walls. Blanche had no knowledge as to the use of this room, though Camille deemed it was for conducting the landowner’s business; meetings with smallholders, mayhap.
Still in another room sat a huge table of many shallow drawers running from board to floor, and therein lay maps and charts of lands both within Faery and without, some sections marked with warnings of dire creatures therein, other whole sections completely blank.
And thus did go the day, Blanche leading Camille thither and yon as they explored the whole of the house, all, that is, but for one floor of one wing, there where the prince did dwell. Camille was quite astonished at the size of it all, as well as o’erwhelmed by its opulence.
That evening, again she dined alone at the foot of a very long mahogany table, servants hovering in the candlelight and watching her every move like owls ready to pounce on a vole, even though they stood quite motionless with their backs to the wall and their eyes seeming elsewhere… more or less.
The next day Blanche took her out on a tour of the grounds, and they followed along white-stone pathways wending among the many gardens, with their chrysanthemums and roses and violets and tulips and entire spectrums of flowers that Camille could not name, their blossoms all nodding in a gentle summer breeze. They strolled past ornamental grasses alongside ponds of still water with flowering lily pads afloat. In some, golden-scaled fish swam lazily; in others, the fish seemed bedecked in many-colored calico. Streams burbled across the estate, lucid in their clearness, singing their songs as they tumbled over rocks. One stream was quite broad and fairly deep, and here did Camille see the black swans aswimming. She and Blanche passed by deliberate arrangements of large and small boulders sitting here and there, with vines growing between and spiralling up and ’round the rocks. And now and again to Camille’s wonder, they came across stone sculptings and metal castings and various other imaginative placements: small figures of toads and frogs sat on the banks of ponds; stone mice and voles peeked out from ’neath the bases of boulders; here and there were scattered burbling fountains and slow-flowing basins in which birds bathed and mayhap other diminutive beings as well; small footbridges crossed over rills, stanchions for lanterns along the rail, and in places only large, flat stones spanned the running streams.
Everywhere they went, gardeners and groundskeepers and other such bowed or tipped their hats to the Lady Camille. As she had been instructed by Blanche, Camille responded with a nod, though she also added a smile.
They passed by a long queue of empty stables to come to a smithy, where a fairly young and portly man with grey eyes peering out through a hanging-down shock of dark hair stepped forth and bowed low. “This is Renaud, my lady,” said Blanche, “blacksmith and farrier.”
“Smith I may be, Blanche, or at least I think so, for in these last several years, I have learned much about the blending and heating and hammering and shaping and molding and quenching of metals, bronze and brass in particular.”
“Bronze and brass and not iron?” said Camille.
“Oh, no, my lady, not iron,” answered Renaud. “There are those in Faery who cannot abide iron, and so we keep it out.”
“No iron whatsoever? Not even for nails or horseshoes?”
“Wooden pegs make splendid nails… likewise brass. Brass for shoeing horses, too-shoes and nails alike-not that I am much of a farrier these days, for there are no horses at all in the stables.”
Camille laughed and said, “Horses or no, it matters not, for I know not how to ride.”