listen to her with as fair a hearing as she had given him, he shook his head vehemently. “Lady, surely not. I was there when the Caul was forged—every precaution was taken, only the mortal handled it—”
“But think of it, my lord—” She raised her chin, refusing to back down. “All these turning years, it’s lain, untouched, unlooked at—no one goes near it—and there it just sits on that green globe. The most poisonous thing in all of Faerie. What if—what if it’s the Caul that’s poisoning the land? If it’s the Caul that’s weakening Alemandine? Is that not possible?”
Timias backed away, her words tumbling in his mind as a new vision occurred to him—one so monstrous it defied comprehension. Could it be that the Caul—deemed so necessary, so perfect a solution to the problem of both silver and goblin—was in reality slowly leaching poison into the fabric of Faerie over the years? Alemandine had indeed appeared sickly, even to his untrained eye. The Queen was bound to the land more intimately than the Caul to the Globe. Could it be that her growing weakness was due to the very thing they thought protected them all? Could it be that they had erred? He shook his head. It was difficult to even wrap his mind around the idea. It was too terrible to consider, but he was forced to confront the possibility of truth in Delphinea’s words. He sank down onto a chair, and even as the plush cushioning relieved the ache in his back, he felt the enormity of the potential problem as a physical pang in his chest. He must simply find a way to prove Delphinea wrong. For the first time he actually feared he might not make it into the West. If he weren’t careful, a true death might yet claim him.
For Delphinea was continuing, pressing her point on with a passion almost mortal in intensity. “I know you based the making of the Caul in that most elementary of magic—the law of Similiars. But the amount used in such undertakings is critical—the amount that determines whether it heals or kills—”
“Do not lecture me, my lady!” He raised one gnarled hand to his forehead, feeling every one of his thirteen hundred mortal years. They stared at each other in a shocked silence, and then he said: “Forgive me, my lady. I should not have spoken to you in that tone. The tension of the times affects us all. Soon we will all be squabbling like mortals.”
“My lord Timias,” she replied, her eyes dark with pity. “I don’t mean to imply you and Gloriana and the mortal deliberately did wrong. It was made with the best of intentions—surely that’s why the Caul’s magic has prevailed for so long. But what if too much silver was used in its making? This was something no one ever tried before—how could you or anyone else have been sure what was too much?”
Timias stared up at her. Backlit by the window, she stood poised before him like a harbinger of doom made more terrible by its beauty. “Have you told anyone this?”
“I’ve tried. They think it’s nonsense. I can’t get into the Caul Chamber alone, but I can’t convince any of the lords or the knights to come with me. Even that sot Berillian—he fawns all over my bosom in a manner most unseemly, but can’t bestir himself to help me open the doors.”
He rubbed his head. In Faerie, where the progression of years was experienced as a never-ending circle rather than a linear march into some indeterminate future, shifting accepted thought was as difficult as shifting the calendar in the mortal world. The sidhe understood that what was materialized around them was an expression of their collective thought. An idea such as the Caul, which had worked for mortal centuries, would not easily be abandoned. “And is that what you suggest we should do, my lady?”
She smiled, and knelt at his feet, covering his spotted hands with her own like new-milked cream. “My mother said I should come to you. All I ask is that you come with me—we can go through the mirrors and no one need see us. How could it hurt to look? Maybe these are only the fancies everyone says they are. After all, when was the last time the doors were even opened?”
He shook his head, gazing past her face at some spot outside the window. She was right about one thing. There could be no harm in looking at the Caul. The spell which held the doors of the Caul Chamber was a relatively easy one to overcome—it required a simultaneous touch of the combined polarity of male and female energy. “To my knowledge—never. For once it was done, it has never seemed that there was a need—” He broke off and took a deep breath. “That’s not to say that no one has ever gone to look.”
She gave him a reproving look and he was forced to admit to himself she was correct about that. Once done, the sidhe would not return to it, because they would not expect it to change. It was the fundamental difference between the mortals and the sidhe. It would simply not occur to anyone in Faerie to enter the Caul Chamber. He lowered his eyes to the bubbling fountain, where the finches hopped from rim to ground to shrub, reminding him of the courtiers who leapt so lightly through the days, as if the gravest danger they’d faced in ages was not at hand.
He remembered the night the Caul was forged, the ring of the hammer as it slammed down on the soft metal, fixing it with that raw energy that had crackled through the air like bolts of lightning. What if that energy had not been sufficient to bind forever the relentless poison of the silver? He turned to face her and held out his hand. “Come. You must lead me, lady—’tis an age or more since I have used the mirror magic.”
With a look of gratitude, she took his hand and he led her to stand before another mirror. He placed one hand on her shoulder, the other clutched his staff. For a moment they stood poised, reflected in the polished surface of the glass, and Timias felt his heart contract when he stared at the perfect beauty of her face. It was the color of her eyes, he decided, that gave her appearance such a compelling quality, one that was as fascinating as it was apparent. Or was it? he mused, murmuring aloud to cover for his moment of hesitation, “When I look at you, my lady, I see how foolish I am to waste any time at all in Shadow.”
Despite the cast of worry in her dark blue eyes, a delicate pink stained her cheeks, and her lips quirked up in a fleeting smile. “I’m glad you came back when you did, my lord Timias.” Despite the guileless innocence of her reply, he felt a fleeting throb of warning. There was more to this girl-sidhe than met the eye. Far more. She pressed his hand against her shoulder, then stepped into the glass. Together they walked through the weirdly refracted world behind the mirrors, through twisting corridors and winding staircases lit by intermittent shards of splintered light, until at last they stood behind the mirror which hung opposite the chamber deep within the very heart of the palace.
As she attempted to step through glass, for the first time that Timias had ever experienced, the surface of the mirror seemed to impede her progress, as though it were covered in some sticky, translucent film. She backed away, fine strands of some sticky white fiber clinging to her hand. “What is this?” she murmured.
She pushed through the film with more determination and it gave way with a slight puff. She forced her way through it. As they stepped into the vestibule, they looked back and Timias saw the surface of the mirror was covered with a fine sheen of what he recognized at once as dust. “What is this stuff?” she whispered, more to herself than to him.
Dust, he realized. But did she even know the word? Dust did not exist in Faerie. “It’s dust,” he said aloud.
“Dust,” she echoed, shaking out her skirts. “It’s all over the place.” But there was no more time to wonder about its presence, for she gripped his hand, and pointed at the floor. It was covered with the same sheen of fine white dust as the mirror. And clearly, just as their outlines were visible in the dust of the mirror, the outline of a single set of footsteps led from the set of doors in the left wall, directly to the high bronze doors opposite the mirror.
“Someone else has been here. Not that long ago.” Her voice was flat in the stillness.
“And we cannot ask the guards on the other side of that door, can we?”
“Why would something that cannot be touched need a guard?” Her lips quirked up for a moment in a satirical little smile.
The footsteps led directly to the door, and both Delphinea and Timias were careful not to disturb them. “I wonder who it was.”
“A