Chantress Fury (20 page)

My stupidity, indeed. It was a mistake I hadn’t even known I was making.

Melisande’s voice sank low, becoming again for a moment distressingly like Nat’s. “I told you already: I have my own magic, a magic that was old before Chantresses ever existed. Like all my kind, I have gone down to the water every month and offered myself to the Mothers. For centuries your wall has stood in the way, but last month I slipped through.” The voice was swollen with pride. “It was Pressina herself who greeted me. She needed my help. We made a pact, and she started to teach me magic—and once I was master of illusion, I took your mother’s stone.”

She was moving closer. Fearful of making even the smallest stir, I held my breath.

“And how do you think I did it, Chantress?” She laughed. “Why, by turning myself into you. The Mothers couldn’t do it; there’s always something a little off when they try to look human, even in these realms. But I could make myself look and sound exactly like you.”

Just as she’d made herself look and sound exactly like Nat.

“I went to your mother and told her I’d sung myself here by mistake,” Melisande said. “I sobbed because I had no way to protect myself from Pressina, and she gave me her stone then and there. She hung it around my neck with her own fair hands. Anything to protect her daughter! And then we had her, Pressina and I.”

I went cold. So that was how they had broken my mother. It was her love for me that had betrayed her. A love she’d kept alive through so many long years.

Was that love still locked away somewhere inside her? Some­where in pockets where Pressina couldn’t reach? Or was that love something that Pressina and Melisande had taken from her too?

“Once the stone was gone, Pressina took full possession of your mother,” Melisande said triumphantly. “She was Pressina’s voice from that moment on—the Chantress voice that we needed to undo the old Chantresses’ work. But we didn’t stop there. Once the wall between the worlds was restored to its old state, Pressina had your mother sing new holes in it, so that the Mothers could pass at will. Under the guise of mermaids and sea monsters, they started to attack your world. And then Pressina taught your mother the songs that make the waters rise, and the song that calls up a great wave and sends it crashing into the land.

“Those songs come at a price, of course. Do you know what it is, Chantress?” Melisande’s voice rose, taunting me. “Those who sing them waste away. Even now your mother is withering. She won’t last long enough to flood the whole world and make our victory complete. That’s why we went after you. The Mothers must stay in the water—their power fades quickly on land—so Pressina sent me to lure you down here. You gave us more trouble than we expected, but now we’ve got you.”

Oh, no, you don’t,
I thought.

I shifted ever so slightly, trying to see if she’d left the entrance unguarded. Under my feet, pebbles at the base of the pillar crackled.

A tiny sound, but Melisande heard it.

“Ah, there you are.” Her steps quickened, coming my way.

I had no magic to fight her. All I had were my wits—but that would have to do. Knowing it didn’t matter how much sound I made now, I scraped up a handful of pebbles and sand. I waited till the last possible second, then flung them at Melisande’s face and dashed for the entrance.

I must have gotten her right in the eyes, because it took her some moments to come after me. By then, I was shooting straight back down the tunnel again.

I took the other turn at the fork. This time, thankfully, there was no dead end, but soon the path curved, and the light dimmed. Another bend, and the light disappeared entirely. I faltered. I couldn’t run full tilt into oblivion. And yet the footsteps were coming closer.

“Over here,” a voice hummed on my left.

I froze. Was that Pressina?

“Over here,” it insisted. “Come, or she’ll get you.”

Behind me I heard a shout: “I’ve trapped her in here!”

It was Melisande, calling out to an ally. My heart pounded.

“You must come
now,
” the voice breathed.

I followed it, touching my hand to the rock wall for guidance. There was a gap there.

“Yesssss,” said the voice.

I pressed myself into the gap—and a tentacle wrapped around my wrist.

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

RESISTANCE

As I opened my lips to scream, another tentacle closed over my mouth—a slippery, sticky gag pressing against my lips.

Pressina.

I thrashed as wildly as a fish caught in a net. Panic drove every rational thought from my brain.

“Be still,” the voice hummed. “We will not hurt you. But you must not scream, or they will find us.”

There was something deeply reassuring about that hum. I stopped thrashing. Whoever this was, it wasn’t Pressina.

The tentacles tugged at me, pulling me deeper into the gap. But now that my mind was calmer, I noticed that in addition to being sticky, the tentacles were velvet-soft, and their hold on me was a gentle one. My wrist wasn’t sore, and I was able to breathe.

We rushed downward through the darkness. My feet didn’t touch the ground. After many twists and turns, we slowed, then stopped.

“Success?” a voice murmured from above.

“Yes,” my rescuer said.

The tentacles thrust me forward and released me. I fell to the ground, and something rattled behind me. I put out my arms and felt the hard and bony outlines of a latticework cage.

Panic surged again. I was a prisoner once more.

Before I could get to my feet, my captors seized the cage and whisked me down through the ether with them. I clung for dear life to the latticework, completely disoriented in the darkness. No longer caring who heard me, I shouted, “Let me go!”

“We can’t,” one of my captors hummed anxiously. “Sorry. Sorry.”

Sorry?

“Who are you?” I demanded.

Another few darts to the left, and a shaft of malachite light gave me my answer. My cage was held by a lemon-yellow creature with twenty octopus-like arms. Nearby was a spotted starfish with a dozen eyes, all of which were fixed watchfully on me.

What on earth were these creatures?

My fear only deepened as the octopus-like one tugged me down toward the source of the light into a cavern full of beings even stranger than the ones I’d already seen: giant sea horses with fronded tails, striped fish with hundreds of fins, scaly eels with rows of jagged shark teeth. What unnerved me most of all, however, was the way they kept changing, moment by moment—shifting color, shifting size, shifting shape. Deep purple slid into black-and-white stripes and cherry-red dots. Fins stretched and compressed. Eyes widened, then disappeared—then reappeared, looking straight at me.

Pretending a calm I didn’t feel, I looked right back at them. “What do you want with me?”

As one, the creatures began to babble. With a wave of its arms, the yellow octopus creature silenced them and put its single giant eye level with mine.

“We want your help,” it said.

I looked at it warily. “And that’s why you put me in a cage?”

A ripple like fear moved through the whole company, and they shifted even faster.

“It is necessary,” the creature assured me, sounding regretful. “At least for now.”

For now? “Who
are
you?” I asked again.

The octopus creature answered, seemingly for them all. “You have many names for us, I think. The fae, the faeries, the Others, the naiads, the good folk, and dozens more. You humans like names, do you not? If you must have one for me, you may call me . . . oh, shall we say . . . Odo. But do not let names get in the way of understanding. What matters is that all of us here—including you—are on the same side.” To the others, Odo explained, “This is Viviane’s daughter. The Chantress Lucy.”

There was a collective sigh, falling away into a sound somewhere between a hiss and a drone. “Chantressssssssssssss . . .”

Fins and tails flapped, and I felt a wave of affection wafting toward me.

“I—I thought you hated Chantresses,” I said.

“Pressina does,” Odo replied. “And those who follow her. But most of us do not.”

“But we walled you in.”

“You walled
Pressina
in,” Odo said. “And we know why. Most of us don’t blame you.”

A murmur came from some of the other creatures. The wave of affection diminished, and grief floated toward me. Was this why they’d caged me?

“But of course the magic you Chantresses worked on the wall had terrible consequences for us,” Odo said.

“I—I don’t understand,” I said.

“When you walled Pressina in, she turned on us,” Odo said. “She wanted revenge, she wanted power—and we were the only ones within reach. Oh, she made alliances, of course. She couldn’t have risen in any other way, and there were always creatures who admired her cunning. But most of us hated her. We were always free and easy here in the Depths, but she’d seen the human world, and she wanted to set herself up as an empress. Many have died opposing her. Many of us”—Odo nodded at the other creatures—“have dedicated our existence to over­throwing her.”

So there really was a civil war here. I’d thought that was just another one of Melisande’s lies.

“Since the day she was born, she has tried to use us to feed her own appetites,” a sea horse said in a voice like a dirge. “And once the Chantresses sealed us off she was insatiable. She drained most of us of what magic we had left. But it wasn’t enough to destroy the wall. Nothing was, until your mother sang it down.”

“But you must know all about that already,” Odo said.

“I know something about it. Melisande said Pressina took my mother prisoner, but for a long while Pressina couldn’t make her sing—”

“That’s right,” said Odo. “Pressina caged her, just as she caged you. But of course she couldn’t touch her, not while Viviane had her stone.”

“Why?”

Odo’s eye enlarged to three times its previous size. “You mean you don’t know?”

“No.” My hand went to my stone.

The creatures scuttled back. “Don’t tell her,” one of them cried out.

“Tell me what?” I asked.

“I must,” Odo said to the others. “We cannot have her help unless I do.”

The creatures pulled back even farther.

Odo turned to me. “Chantress stones are made of a substance that repels our own magic.” A tentacle waved, forestalling my next question. “No, no. Don’t ask me what it is. No one here knows. But as long as you keep it around your neck, our magic can’t destroy you, or even gravely harm you. We can cage you, we can set guards around you, but we can’t do serious damage to your body or mind.”

“I’m not sure mine works properly, then,” I said, fingering the edges of my stone. “I’ve been burned by Pressina’s fire.”

“Burned? Chantress, a human would be incinerated by the bolts she hurls. On you, they don’t even leave a scar.”

Oh.

“And that’s not all.” Odo pulled well back from my latticework cage. “Your stone can destroy us.”

“
Destroy
you?”

“Yes.”

If they thought that, no wonder they’d caged me. “But when you grabbed me, you weren’t hurt.”

“Only because I was careful not to touch your stone.”

“How could you tell, in the dark?”

“It wasn’t so dark for me, Chantress. Your eyes are not like mine. And it was worth the risk.”

I looked out at Odo, and at the multitude of sea creatures ringed around us. “And now you’re keeping me in this cage because you’re worried that I might kill you?”

“Err . . . yes,” Odo said. “We’d much prefer it if you killed Pressina.”

“I should think so.” I tucked the stone far down inside my bodice and eyed them all through the latticework holes. “Look, it’s safe to let me out now. We’re on the same side. And I’ll keep the stone well away from you, I promise.”

The sea creatures murmured uneasily.

“If we’re going to accomplish anything, we have to trust her,” Odo said to them. “She is our ally, not our enemy—and she cannot help us if she is caged.”

A sighing sound of acceptance came from some of the creatures, but others continued to show signs of agitation.

“You can hide from her if you feel the need to,” Odo said patiently.

Here and there, creatures scuttled for safety, holing up in cracks and fissures or leaving the cave entirely. Most, however, held their ground.

“All right, then. I’m going to let her out now.” Odo probed at the cage with delicate, fingerlike tentacles until an opening appeared.

I stepped through it, taking care not to move too hastily, lest I alarm anyone. “Thank you.”

Odo’s giant eye surveyed me with satisfaction. “Now we can make plans.”

“Yes.” As a few of the hidden creatures peered out at me, dozens of questions crowded my mind. “But before we start, I think you’d better tell me more about how my stone works here. It used to be cracked, before I came here. Why isn’t it now?”

“Whenever you Chantresses come to our world, your magic grows stronger,” Odo said. “It has always been like that. Some say it is our blood thickening and renewing in you. And since the stones are part of your magic, they grow more powerful too. It has been so long since Chantresses came here that we were surprised that there were any left with power. The wall weakened all of us, including you.”

“If I took off my stone, would I hear Wild Magic?”

“Yes, but not as you know it,” Odo said, waving several arms to emphasize the point. “Do not be hasty. Our Wild Magic is far richer and stronger than anything you can hear on Earth—so powerful that even when your stone is on, you can’t help but hear the thrum of it. Sometimes you even can discern the outlines of a tune, if the singer is close enough. You can heard something of the song your mother is singing, can’t you? And a deep humming in the ether, like an undertow beneath everything?”

I nodded.

“That is only a faint echo of the Wild Magic you would hear if your stone were not protecting you,” Odo told me. “Your Chantress songs are merely the tiniest part of it. The ether here allows every bit of Wild Magic to reach us, while your own world blocks most of it. That is part of what undid your mother when she took off her stone. It was as if she had lived all her life in the murky depths of the sea, only to find herself suddenly on the surface, in the full glare of the blinding sun. And in that moment, Pressina attacked and took possession of her.”

“I see.” I swallowed hard. “And if I took off my stone, I would be blinded too?”

“You would. After the first shock, you might find that you could start to work with the Wild Magic here. You have our blood, so it ought to be possible. But in practice, you would be unlikely to get the opportunity. And even if you did, as a novice you would be very vulnerable. If I were you, I would not take the risk; I would keep the stone on. My best advice is to ambush Pressina and attack her with the stone while you are still wearing it.”

I shuddered. That would mean getting very close indeed to that horrible eel-haired head and the gelatinous mass beneath and around it. But I didn’t want to end up like my mother either, becoming nothing more than Pressina’s voice.

“I wish I had attacked her when I first saw her,” I said. “Or that my mother had.”

“You didn’t know. And I doubt your mother did either. In any case, she never had a chance,” Odo said sadly. “She was so weak when she arrived, almost drained of power. Pressina took her prisoner right away. Your mother was desperate to get back to you, but Pressina told her she would never see you again unless she sang the wall down. Viviane refused to do that, so Pressina kept her locked away for years.”

“Did you try to help her?”

Odo looked down at my feet, as if abashed. “Not for a very long time, I’m sorry to say. We were afraid of that stone, you see. But the longer your mother held out against Pressina, the more some of us began to wonder if we might be able to make an alliance with her. So we started to try to devise a plan to put ourselves in touch with her, which was itself a great challenge. For years we struggled to find our way to her. And then Melisande came, and everything became much more urgent.”

“Did Pressina take possession of her?”

“Not in the way she took your mother, no. She needed two things from Melisande, and both required that Melisande stay alive and intact. One was her ability to impersonate other humans in a convincing manner.”

That I already knew about. “And the other?”

“Her magic. Once a Chantress surrenders her stone, Melisande knows how to destroy it—something we ourselves cannot do, since contact with it kills us.” The great eye rose and fixed on me. “At the time, we didn’t know exactly what bargain Pressina and Melisande were making, but we could see they were hatching a plan. The one benefit was that Pressina was distracted, and that gave us the chance to reach Viviane. I was the one chosen to approach her. She was doubtful at first, but she didn’t try to kill me. She listened. And then she chose to trust me. We talked about you. It was how she endured everything, she said—by thinking about you.”

My throat tightened.

“We made plans then,” Odo said. “And we almost got her out. But we were too late. Melisande came to her and tricked her—”

“I know,” I said. “She told me.” I burned, remembering her glee in the telling:
She hung it around my neck with her own fair hands. Anything to protect her daughter!

The great head shook sadly from side to side. “We felt Pressina’s power grow as she took possession of your mother. And we saw the stone destroyed with our own eyes, in a pool of blue fire.”