D’Argent murmured politely as she stepped into the flow of the dance, and regarded her with a straightforward attraction, combined with deep wariness.
"You have been watching me, Mademoiselle Serpent."
An observant man, then. "Yes," she agreed, simply.
"Perhaps I have something on my face?"
Rian laughed. "You do. I was wondering if you would bargain for it."
His mild surprise came through to her clearly, then curiosity and a thread of anger. She wondered if she’d ever met him, for she knew many French actors. He did not feel familiar, and mask and veil together made it extremely difficult discern his face. Dark eyes, behind the mask.
"You recognise it, then? A thing out of place. Are you, then, a friend of a faded star?"
This wasn’t good. He’d recognised not only the mask, but the one he’d won it from.
"No," she said, not allowing herself to examine how disastrous such knowledge could be to Martine. "In this matter, I am a friend of things being returned to their right and proper place."
"But me, I like it where it is." He was entertained, but not particularly sympathetic. "Try to win it, if you will." He glanced down at her two tissue layers. "I think you will not succeed."
The sweet-singers brought dance and conversation to an end, reaching forward to take three ten-Tears from their veils. Rian watched D’Argent’s fly into the forest, since that would at least give her a starting direction.
"I think I will talk to you later, Monsieur," she said, and set out into a forest quite as large as the Gilded Tower’s assembly hall, but barely lit: the blackness relieved only by the glimmering of countless leaves, and by dim, occasional points of light on floor, walls and ceiling. In the bare gravity of the tower, it was like swimming into the stars.
Despite their dark colour, the Tears of the Night stood out particularly well among the motes, glowing with a purple radiance that transformed them into small moons. Able to see the branches and trunks tolerably well thanks to her symbiont, Rian skipped toward the nearest moon, but changed direction as several partially-clad figures also converged. Here on the fringes there would be too much competition: best to try to push ahead.
The path she followed seemed to be sloping upward, and she realised that there were wide, spiralling ramps in the forest, allowing the wingless to access the upper reaches, and ensuring the centre of the sprawling chamber was not left empty. Rian bounced quickly forward until she was at least a third of the way into this part of the forest, and then she slowed, oriented on the nearest luminous purple bauble, and headed toward it.
After barely a glance at the image of a mouse-masked owner, Rian attached the ten-Tear to her veil. This round was her chance to regain some losses, for her night vision gave her an immense advantage, allowing her to move through the sky forest at relative speed – and forewarning her of this round’s hunters.
Three lithe shapes were moving down the slope ahead. They resembled stoats or weasels, but banded black and white, and as long as Rian was tall. Each was ridden by one of the la clochettes, but the tiny sprites were silent, clutching the ears of the furred hunters, straining to see through the glimmering dark.
Any movement risked drawing their attention, so Rian stood her ground. But she could not hide her scent, and the three coursed toward her…then shied away, flinching almost, and disappearing over the side of the broad, curving slope.
Rian stood in the Great Forest, in the sky forest, in a place of night and shivering leaves. Around her slid long bodies: not of the gargouille, or the striped weasels, but of the golden-horned amasen of Cernunnos, the great snakes of good fortune. She no longer wore the mask of the snake, but of the stag, and she strode unimpeded, all barriers falling from her path as she took into her hands droplets of night. Bear. Dove. Silver lion.
The stag mask vanished when Rian took up D’Argent’s ten-Tear. Panting faintly, she looked about and saw she had been brought to the brink of a pool of light spilling through a vast doorway. That had been a new experience. Cernunnos himself had walked with her. Were the night’s events his doing, after all? Or was he simply lending his power because of the bond of allegiance between them, and because the challenge triggered his own circumstances? The hunter became the hunted. The hunted, in turn, would hunt.
She had arrived well ahead of the pack, and paid over a mouse and a bear and a dove to complete the round, then passed through the doorway into a sumptuously appointed star-shaped hall.
Among the provisions for comfort and further gaming were a generous scattering of members of the Tower of Balance, ready to oversee the payment of forfeits, and Rian was not in the least surprised to find Alexandrine standing at her elbow. Cernunnos was not the only power pulling her strings this night, whether the Duke of Balance called himself a god or not.
"Are these games always so elaborate?" she asked Alexandrine.
"This is one of the major challenges," Alexandrine said. "To honour the sweet-singers."
"It’s something they enjoy?" Her sweet-singer had not wafted down to join her, though she could still make out its voice, clear in the growing chorus above.
"In a manner, they are competing as you have done. As if with a race of horses."
The black-winged woman looked amused, but did not outright suggest Rian represented a poorly-chosen outlier at long odds. As was to be expected with any wild gamble, Rian had not performed well. She had achieved her primary goal, but the game had cost her eight of her own ten-Tears, which ironically – or as a matter of suspicious coincidence – left her with Tears equal to the cost she had paid for double entry to the Towers in the first place. And one more.
"I have a forfeit I would like to claim," she told Alexandrine, raising D’Argent’s ten-Tear. "Whenever that is possible."
Entirely unsurprised, Alexandrine nodded, and touched Rian’s shoulder. The world shifted, and Rian found herself alone in a room where shimmering curtains wavered in not-very-vertical directions, as if they were reaching out to the single table and two chairs set in the room’s centre.
Rian sat down, and briefly inspected her feet. The bruises no longer hurt, though small purple circles marked where she’d found particularly sharp stones or gnarled roots. She wondered if she’d get the rest of her dress back, when all of this was done. The rules hadn’t been clear on that point, and it would be awkward travelling even the short distance to the special Towers train in only two layers of gossamer shimmer.
"I compliment you, Mademoiselle."
Rian glanced up from contemplation of her clothing, and found that Alexandrine had returned with D’Argent – who thankfully still wore the Mask of Léon. At last. Time to finish this.
(xi)
From the count of the ten-Tears hanging from his veil, D’Argent had been a little more successful in the challenge than Rian, but her last fear – that he had obtained one of her ten-Tears, and thus could cancel out her forfeit through exchange – was quickly assuaged, and so she said briskly:
"My forfeit is the custody of the mask of a silver lion."
Alexandrine nodded briefly, and D’Argent’s ten-Tear rose from the table, and split into two fragments, one of which vanished. The man promptly unlaced his mask and handed it to Rian.
"Thank you," she said, interested to see that the ribbons and threads that surrounded him so thickly had shifted when he gave up the mask. Some had grown more prominent, and others had receded.
With the veil concealing only his lower face, D’Argent was revealed to be quite a young man, with fine black eyes, lightly-marked brows, and dark brown hair.