Chapter Five

When her eyes opened, but the darkness still gaped before her, she rubbed her eyes and wiped her brow, and the bunched-up shoulder of her gown pulled at her back, the fabric stuck to sweat and pinned by the harsh, needly soil under Berenia. When the pins and needles dug deeper, finding the soft spots under her shoulderblades, she rolled up on one arm, and saw the eerie sky above, a sparkling, shining darkness glinting on the craggy hillside, but before she could put words to what she saw,

or call for her retinue, the seconds were yanked, stretched to hours, as she was clamped in the body-wracking crush and diabolical squeeze of contractions, and the queasy stamp of the impatient child,

its rampant pulse reined to hers, and dragging her through this blood-roaring, mind-scraping moment,

as if she was just a gigantic flap attached to its body, a vestigial appendage it would soon dislodge,

like a salamander snapping off its own tail to escape a manticore.

Tiny hands clutched and shook Berenia. "Dwarak! Cusham! Get this godforesaken jester off me." With her eyes closed, she guessed they were the presumptuous ministrations of her fool, the dwarf Chalin, who had the effrontery once too often to lay his jesting finger or jovial palm upon her in delivering an intimate punch line, once dipping her hand in icy wine when he asked if she would like a slice of winter. Being Gerolk's newlywed wife, not only naive but overly spoiled, she believed the king's dwarf must have magic powers, not the mad, foolish cunning by which he slid an icicle into the ice box, and by long ministration, kept it frozen and sharp as the first, crisp frost that etched the windowpanes. Unprepared for his malevolent prank, her hand was soaked to the wrist in icy wine, and the shock burst out in one, humiliating gush, darkening the front of her dress, and producing such a prodigious laugh from the King that her scowl settled in and took residence there, burning a dark crescent into her face that soon consumed her kindness, and from the ashes of her innocence arose the smoky regard by which she condescended to the kingdom. It was the longest, darkest scowl in the history of Ephremia, and while it should have roosted on a wicked queen, like Suvani, she soon grew into her new face, finding her staff quicker to bow, lower their eyes, and make way. She was quick to forgive the jester, realizing she should be grateful that he showed her who she was. It was like she had cut the horns from the king's ram and grafted them to her locust throne, for the wide berth everyone gave her was like being preceded by a stabby unicorn wherever she went.

When the conraction wracked her body, it shattered this scowling mask, so that she quivered back to her softer, younger face, as if the unborn baby rippling through her had peeled back years of rage and unburied that kind, overindulged child, whose fingers now recoiled from her fool's sliver of winter. While the icicle had pierced her soul, and she could no more turn back the years than drag the chill from her heart, she eased into the warm face and kind eyes of her youth and felt cleaner than she had since her hand had drowned in the icy wine.

As she rolled from her side onto all fours, Berenia staggered to her feet, then looked over this alien landscape with her softened eyes. Peering into the ethereal illumination which trickled through the glinting night, and tracing no ordinary sky, but strange, filmy clouds which seemed flung there like seaweed strands, not drifting so much as dangling in the heavy air. Above these, a subtle disc was so flat and void of light, that at first she thought it another world suffering its own dark night, until she noticed the sparking, glistening trails streaming from this hole in the heavens. It was no world, but a black sun, soaking this strange land with subtle, overshadowing light, glinting on viscous, shimmering pools, which did not undulate like Alsantian seas, but rippled as they slithered.

Berenia's upper lip drew up in horror and nausea, baring her teeth--was this strange place peopled not by humans, dwarves, or talking animals, but pools?

Her next realization was the first logical one--she was no longer in Teriana, nor anywhere else in Alsantia--but it was ripped to pieces when her contractions struck hammer and tongs, ringing such an excruciating, intoxicating pain that she rippled with giddy laughter. When the strange world blurred, her cheeks damp, she choked back the sob behind her gritted teeth. If she had never loved Gerolk, his absence roared like a wind-blown chasm, an echo that doubled her tautly strung contractions.

When she opened her eyes, and wiped away her tears, there were Dwarak, Cusham, and another guard crumpled beside her on the craggy hillside. Perhaps her eyes had taken time to get accustomed to the darkness, or perhaps gazing at the black sun had filled her eyes with this world's darkling illumination, but she had believed herself lost in darkness.

Her eyes fell on the nameless guard, who might remain forever anonymous, for where his head and neck had been, a crumpled piece of iron was embedded between his shoulders. Seeing him sparked a memory of what happened--the witch-child had opened a black gulf in midair which inhaled not only her, and these three, but another face, the face of a now-despised traitor--and as she staggered to her feet, urgency inflamed her woozy stagger to circle where they had fallen, hoping to find the priceless traitor before Berenia was struck again by--

At this constriction, her eyes rolled into the back of her head, drool rolled down her chin, and her fingernails bit her palm. As these deep gouges welled with blood, she had a lucid moment, a tiny, crystal clear bead of consciousness unpopped among the stream of pain and noise, and she seized this bubble, and batted at her drool with the back of her hand, then eyed the unmoving soldiers. Her lips numbed from the force of her back hand, then throbbed, and then, just as that moment unclasped, and her screech joined the pain shrieking through her veins, she saw Kiera.

While Kiera had also collapsed to the hillside, unlike the soldiers, she was already recovering.

While her eyelids were closed, and her lips tight around a groan that squeaked out one side of her mouth, she rolled on hands and knees and fumbled at a sword.

As the pain receded, and consciousness washed back into her brain, Berenia knew the sword was not Kiera's, having conferred the honor blade upon Kiera for her service, loyalty, and distinction.

While this was a masterclass blade, it was standard issue for the royal guard.

"Dwarak!" Berenia hissed. "Cusham! Get up!" As their queen screeched, their eyelids lolled open, and Kiera groped her wobbling knees groggily as she struggled to regain her footing. "A traitor is among us. Seize her!"

Cusham only rolled over and tucked his head in the crook of his neck, until it was turtled so near his armpit that he resembled the headless soldier. Dwarak launched himself onto his feet,

clawed at his vacant scabbard, swished the air with his empty hand, then leveled an outstretched finger at Kiera, as if he might run her down with his ugly, split hangnail.

Kiera crouched, raised her sword en garde, then backpedaled slowly. "Whether we've found ourselves here or lost ourselves here, I don't know where we are, but I do remember saving you."

"Did you?" sniffed Berenia. "Perhaps you only latched on like a bit of driftwood. Our ship was coming apart at the time."

"Do you think so little of my honor?"

Berenia snorted. "You were betraying me at the time. Even so, every honor and distinction you've received was at my pleasure."

"Having put in the time for it, and defended the princess on two worlds, I deserve my glory."

"I think AAAGGGGGGGHHHH!"

When Kiera backpedaled from Berenia's overpowering bellow, she dropped her sword in startlement, but snatched it before it hit the ground.

Cusham grunted, snorted, and kicked behind him, his front half still flat and snoring, giving the impression of a pig trying to run in its sleep. While Dwarak was pricked forward by this disconcerting shout, when he barreled toward Kiera, she clipped his helm with the flat of her blade--his blade, Berenia realized in indignation--and he staggered sideways, lurching like a crab nearly twenty feet

before his crossed, punchdrunk eyes righted to glare at Kiera.

Just as he took up a rock, and hefted it two-handed for a makeshift club, Berenia snatched his forearm. "Put it down, lieutenant."

"Your majestty..."

"See my hand? Being in the throes of labor, should I be holding on when my next contraction comes, you might be one-handed the rest of your life." She looked down her nose scornfully at Kiera.

Of her three available servants, only the treasonous one could be trusted to be resourceful in a crisis. Typical. "Kiera. If you mean to help, get fresh waAAAGGHHHHHHH!"

The screech died before Kiera answered in a hushed voice. "Water, your majesty?"

"Yes, water!" Berenia's eardrums roared with her own shout.

Kiera looked to the sliding, misshapen pools. "Water isn't meant to be on the hoof, your majesty."

At this pathetic attempt at a joke, Berenia managed a wan smile, fanning her face as she steeled herself for the next contraction. "Should you find water, I won't say all is forgiven, but I might forgive a lot."

"If those slithering pools aren't water, in these crags we might find a cave."

"Here." Cusham clutched the strap of a dangling, rust-spotted canteen. "drink this, my queen."

"Is it water?"

"Only the best for her majesty." Cusham's proud smile was crushed by her scornful glare.

"Even if I was thirsty, I wouldn't drink the grog my grunts drink! Have you seen a birth, Cusham?" When he shook his head, she favored Dwarak with her heated smile. "You? No? Not even a calf or a kid? There's going to be blood, Cusham. Gobs of it, and other filth, and we want a clean baby, breathing not filth but air." She snapped her fingers. "Go with Kiera. Don't give me that sheephound stare, Cusham. Dwarak can fend off any roaming pools."

"He'll only slow me down, your majesty," said Kiera. "And if he stays here, later he'll be fresh enough to carry you to the cave."

"Why should I move from this spot," panted the Queen, feeling the tightening of her oncoming contraction.

"We'll want not only water, your majesty, but privacy from these creatures."

"What about lighAAHHHHHHHHT!" Dwarak's knees buckled as Berenia's white-knuckled grip clenched his forearm like a vise. "GOOOOOO!" she screeched at Kiera.

Then the contractions wrung her strong and hard, and her face flushed, and her brow wept rivulets of sweat, draining so fast into her eyes that she couldn't wipe away the sweat and tears fast enough, until the damp, smelly cloth rubbed her brow and eyes. Seeing Cusham wiping her face,

Berenia wrinkled her nose scornfully, then nauseously, as her woozy mind and queasy guts sunk to where her knuckle-dragging, nose-picking, drooling henchman got moisture on this bizarre world, with its roaming waters. She could only hope it was spit, not something foul and unspeakable, but in any case, speculation could only hurt her dignity.

The contraction pulled tauter, a plucked wire running from skull through spine to groin, and just as it quivered to a rest, the wire was struck harder. They came every minute now.

She didn't see Kiera leave so much as hear her scuffle away, and when she could open her eyes,

the alien world was so out of focus that Dwarak and Cusham had become giant, lumbering blurs.

Time no longer passed; it stretched, groaned, and roared, as if the world cracked, hissed, and vented steam. When this terrifying shriek dwindled to a faraway scream, as if another queen suffered birth on a barren world, Berenia realized it was her, a splitting of her voice and mind that made less and more of her than she could master.

When a ghostly moaning joined in, and scratched glass sent shivers down her tightly wound spine, her eyes cracked to see Cusham and Dwrak silently laughing like clowns,and when she shrieked, these grating mutters dropped to a murmur, then a meow, then again to a caterwaul which brought Berenia's hands to her ears.

"I found it, your majesty." Kiera's crystal clear voice cut through the groaning world and the garbled bellowing of her guards.

While the callused hands were hardly gentle, their strong but timid grasp lifted her up, then plodded so slowly that her ponderous belly swayed with each careful step uphill.She was no longer a queen but a pendulum.

Now she barely had a minute between contractions. Just as one ended, she squinted through sweat-beaded eyelids at Kiera, who stooped forward to wipe her sweat-tears with the glove underside of her gauntlet. "Tell me."

"At the back of long, winding, and flurorescent caves is a shallow pool, flashing and frothing with glimmering bubbles."

"A natural mineral spring."

"I thought it might be a toxic spring, seeing neither fish, bugs, nor any other life."

"And?"

"And I steeled myself, and took a drink."

When Berenia laughed, the next contraction savaged her laugh, mashing it with tears of pain.

Over long moments, Berenia reined in the runaway pain, and grew conscious of the long pause in Kiera's story. Words had become not only something to latch onto, but so realthat Kiera's pause punched a hole in the world. When the contraction relented, Berenia felt stretched a mile wide,

like she was giving birth not to a child, but a city block.

"You're back."

"Why would I leave you hanging?"

"You wouldn't, Kiera. You're a good person. Good at everything except treason or storytelling. A good traitor would leave me hanging and escape. A good storyteller would not have left me hanging,

or rather, dangling between two oafs, while I suffered the labors of birth."

"Forgive me, your majesty."

"I expect you'll grow into treason and storytelling. To that end, from here on in, keep talking, no matter how I cry out."

"There isn't much to tell."

"Then make stuff up. It's unbearable, Kiera. It's all coming back, too, the pain by which I brought Berangere into the world. Why should I forget until now? Why not remember?"

"Then you might not have had a son."

"I understand that love makes us stupid and forgetful, but why should childbirth make me mindful?" She snickered. "Should I only be mindful a few hours of my life? Or is it better to forget?

Until now, I forgot I love Gerolk. I would rather not know I love my power-hungry husband, as in sharing power it is better to be at an advantage. But should I deny our love the rest of my days?" Her attention was so preoccupied that a contraction had came and went, and not derailed her train of thought, but only gritted her teeth, so that she hissed most of this through clenched teeth.

"Whether or not childbirth makes you smarter, I cannot deny it has made you wiser. Until Vemulus stood against us, I did not know I still loved your majesty." Kiera bowed her head low.

She had to give Cusham one thing--he was surer of foot and stronger of grip than Dwarak, who nearly dropped her more than once, being thin as a ibis bird. Moreover, his watchful, side-shuffling scuttle around the large rocks seemed absurdly out of place in this dark world compared to Cusham's graceful, brainless drift over the crags and slopes, no matter how shallow or steep.

While Gerolk was right that loyalty was priceless, Berenia had selected for her personal guard those with an even more invaluable characteristic. For if loyalty was priceless, stupidity was its gold standard, as such immense dunces as Cusham and Dwarak would likely never question where they were, and even after realizing they stood on another world, would not realize the full consequences of such a fact, such as that without an Ephremia to legitimize her crown, Berenia was scarcely a queen here. They bore their landless queen a good half mile over the arid, barren landscape, not only bottling her venomous complaints and scorn, but without any hope of reward or remuneration. The fools worked without pay and without love. If she fondly pitied their devotion, their idiotic names were so much bramble cluttering her beautiful mind, which she had carefully cultivated with literature, law, religion, song, and history. Cusham and Dwarak clanged in her brain like two brass gongs.

By the time they reached the shadowed lee of the lean, spur-studded mountain, her gasping guards' arms were shaking, and her contractions were less than a minute apart. The cave was such a horrific gash in the stone that it seemed any minute it might give birth to another mountain. "Put me down." She twisted in their grip. "Just lean me against that stone. Why won't you put me down?"

"Ignore her," said Kiera. "It's not far. Follow me." Berenia soon lost sight of the small warrior.

As they descended into the cave, the tunnel rock darkened, then glimmered, then shimmered. The left wall was splashed with sky blue, then daubed with indigo, each smear seeming a different planet, as if in the brush trail could be distinguished the trace of continents and oceans.

"What am I looking at? Accident or art?"

"Good question. All the more so if it distracts you from what is happening to you."

"You mean who is happening to me."

"That reminds me," said Kiera. "Do you have a name?"

"You know my name!" Berenia yelled, feeling the awful twinge that preceeded each contraction.

"No, I mean have you picked a name?"

Berenia glared at her treacherous, insufferably kind servant, who was, no doubt, doing her best to take her mind off the excruciating contractions, and ardently interested to know her prince by name. "Colam. AGGHHHH!" When Berenia's hands balled in fists, and she drew her legs tight, Dwarak lost his balance and lurched forward. "I can't wait any longer."

"The pool is just over there."

"The baby is here and now!"

"I don't hear water." When Cusham had the audacity to look over Berenia, as if his queen was so much dead wood, she growled and twisted until he staggered, and nearly knocked helmets with Dwarak.

"Why should you? They're still waters." Kiera turned a reassuring look to Berenia. "Not stagnant, but sweet water, and crystal clear."

"You'll have to drag me there." Berenia continued to strain hard against her guards.

"You'll be carried. If not by them, then by me." Taking Berenia in a fireman's carry over her back, Kiera raced for the pool. Though the pregnant queen was much larger, Kiera's breathing was even, her grip strong and gentle, and her step surefooted. Kiera ran over the hill like a two-legged goat. The doughty warrior was certainly stubborn as one, another quality the queen prized, for she had found that obstinacy and brute force, through sheer persistence, solved more problems than intelligence and study. And if Kiera had crammed her share of square pegs in round holes, and used her head for the hammer, it was so decisively and gracefully done that none were the wiser.

When Kiera did stumble, and fell groaning to one knee, Berenia jarred down, triggering her most excruciating wave yet, radiating from pelvis to toes and the nape of her neck, and winding her head to her chin in an awful tightening that shook her arms, quivered her knees, and rattled an agonized screech until Kiera lunged upright and sprinted the rest of the way to the pool.

At first, Berenia thought it a lighted glass, a lens or bulb embedded in the cavefloor, holding not water but rippling illumination scaling down and down in a diminshment of crystalline purity, from its glassy surface clarity through shades of blue. It was not unlike gazing into a beautiful eye, its blue depths the central iris, its perfect circle an aqueous membrane which goggled up, unnerving her worthiness to be bathed in the pool.

"What is this?"

Kiera laid the Queen gently by the scintillating disc of water, then scooped one palm by its silver cusp, so that it drizzled back into the rippling surface, which quivered gelatinously, so thick and still was the water. Berenia could feel the chill from where she lay, and when Kiera laid her icy palm on Berenia's raging hot brow, the coldness seized her like, she imagined, her own royal displeasure must take Kiera.

For a brisk moment, these three ladies--Berenia, Kiera, and the virgin cave--made a circuit of cool regard. While Kiera averted her eyes from the stern, agonized queen, the pool's eye was aloof,

despite how it watered around Kiera's gentle ministrations.

"Rams and locusts," Berenia wept in one jagged cry, then sobbed, then screeched as the twisted pain straightened out within, bending her nearly backwards to flop on one side and clasp just under her bulging girth. "It's starting, you traitor, rams and locusts it's starting."

Kiera whistled shrilly to Cusham and Dwarak. "Stop dawdling."

"We're guarding the tunnel," said Dwarak.

"Nothing is coming except her fears and echoes," said Kiera. "You swore to stand by your Queen. Well, come stand by her."

"I'm no nurse," said Cusham. "I'm a guard."

"You swore to protect her majesty," Kiera growled. "Right now, nurses are what will save not only your queen, but Ephremia's heir."

Reluctantly, Cusham and Dwarak moseyed to her side.

"Grab her legs."

When Cusham stooped to grab Berenia's foot, Kiera smacked his hand. "Not from up there. Get down here." When Cusham knelt by one knee, and Cusham by the other, each grasped one of Berenia's legs, which now slid, twisted, kicked, and stamped, like beasts with their own minds. When her heel clapped Cusham's chin, she only had the breath for a weak snicker, but when her chest flared, and her ears filled with a bloodcurdling roar, it drowned out her trickle of laughter, and in its dying echoes, she recognized her own angry and pained shout.

When her eyes squeezed shut, Kiera hollered "wait!" but Berenia could not tamp it down anymore, and it was like the squeeze of her clenched eyes kept furrowing, bearing down until she was creased down the middle, where her mashing, squelching body was pushing out its burden, and crushing her to pieces which fell away from this new life. The pain made her so raw, grinding down everything but the pain, as if the birth was unwinding in reverse, and she was growing from the baby,

all thirsty roots and trembling branches.

This blackness was so much darker than the cave, illuminated only by the silvery moon at her feet. When the hands dropped away, her wings flexed, and she ascended from night into blackest day,

the watery moon drifting in her wake. Aiming for the dead, godly quiet, she glided over a shadowy hall,

peopled only by gleaming figures, their skin the same wet silver as the moon.

Alighting in this causeway, she was whirled from one dancer to another. In the eyes of one she glimpsed silence, and in another's steely blues, she escaped through his point of view, and soared over another world, crawling with metal insects and piled stone nests, in which shadows swarmed and people lived breathlessly, more dead than alive.

As she dragged her wings in and out, she circled these squalid cities, her eyes embracing not only the big picture, but the strange scenes in the windows, the Others gazing through more glass,

flickering with other faces and other places.

While her capacious wings held not only wind, but clouds and stars, she was blown by a feathery breeze to an enormous cloud, and she fluttered into its vapors to find a milling flock of winged visitors. As she slipped in and out, looking for a friendly face, she froze: while each winged being flashed a bright, shimmering look, they were not smiles, but glints from the shining mirrors masking their faces. Were they masks, or their faces? She shuddered. Their heads and the mirrors facing the darkness were seamlessly joined. When her attention drifted to the reflections, which like a hall of mirrors, circled her with countless fluttering images, she realized they were her own swooping wings,

her own clawed hands, and her own mirrored face, and as the shock widened her eyes, the light beaming between their mirror-faces strobed blindingly, and she cried out.

Only it wasn't her own cry, but a baby's. As her wings contracted, she wafted, then drifted, then felt the lurch in her guts as the web of gravity stretched to its breaking point, when she would fall back into her heavy, straining body, flutter into the sluggish glove of her own senses as if her skin was a butterfly net, ready to snare, distort, and deaden the subtle, silvery intricacies of her wakened mind. On the verge of crashing into her own limits, sensory boundaries which had defined her entire life, she felt the claustrophobia of inrushing memory. What she had thought of as freedom and experience was only a suffocating tunnel, a cave network of limited opportunities. As she fluttered, her wings dripped wax, and as she kicked, her feet caught fire, sparking like comets. Just as she was about to rush back into her life, she heard the voices.

Something has fluttered into the highest. The voice was scornful, as if she was only an insect that had darted through an open window.

If she had forgotten her name in the first flashing glimpse of her facelessness, she yet remembered she was a queen. Who dared speak to her in that way? Then she remembered she was alone amongst many. She opened her mouth, and nothing came out. Are we not the same? Am I not just like you? From her brow, the words rang out, so that she heard her words before the echo of her inner voice. Having become a being of pure action, the causal chain between thought and action had reversed, so that thought now followed deed. The repercussions of this flip-flop panicked her, for she had been a cruel person, but hardly a brave one. She feared flitting headfirst into danger.

We have ranged far and wide. Perhaps it is native to this region?

It is alien not only to our world, but to our state of mind.

While her feet smoldered like sparking embers, the nameless queen felt no pain, only irritation that they watched her struggle in the coagulating blackness, her wings feeling dragged through stiffening tar, as the dream dissolved into the hot blood of reality, and her mind gelled, transparent to her name.

Just as she tipped the apogee of her flight, she shouted, "I am Queen Berenia of Ephremia. If you have the power to help, and do nothing, you have made an enemy this day."

As she became more and more corporeal, her wings flaked to ash, the shining night dissolved to the tunnel, and the mirror-masks contracted into contemptuous glowers, which flickered into the faces of Kiera, Cusham, and Dwarak.

As Cusham and Dwarak exchanged startled and bemused looks, Kiera's brow knitted in concern. "What did you say, your majesty?"

"Where is he?"

"That's not what she said..." Cusham grumbled.

"She? Have you forgotten who I am?"

"No," Cusham said with a surly tone. "Nor have I forgotten where we are."

"What are you doing?" A note of panic tinged Dwarak's voice. "What do you mean?"

"You may be queen of Ephremia, but we're a world away from there."

Berenia ignored Cusham. Perhaps her silence had emboldened him, but treason had already infected her staff. She glared at Kiera. "Where is he?"

"Who do you mean?"

"My boy!"

Kiera looked flustered, as if she had no idea where to begin. "I apologize if I misled you, your majesty. This is just the beginning." Kiera flinched at what was no doubt a woeful look on Berenia's face.

"But I felt...something passed from me..." With a shock, not unlike a cold slap of rainy wind,

she realized her own body had fallen from her winged spirit, not her child.

"Just talk to me. Tell me anything. Tell me about Berengere's birth." If Kiera was aiming at a soothing tone, Berenia found it flagrantly patronizing, but soothing nonetheless. Having been groomed from birth for a princess, then a queen, she had always liked to be patronized by her wet nurses, nannies, tutors, weapon masters, and suitors, and she found it immensely relaxing that Kiera took that tone now.

"It was easy. Not like this."

"You were younger and stronger. Still in training, weren't you? When did you last hold a spear?"

"If it will make this any quicker, bring me one now." Her laugh was shredded by the oncoming violence of her contractions, which felt freshly sharpened, as if they had also rested as she dreamed.

"Forgive my asking, your majesty..."

"I'll forgive you asking, but not you dangling a question like that in front of my face. Sitting on a throne gives you perspective, but it doesn't make you any less curious."

"Are you so sure you're carrying a boy?"

Berenia realized how strange it must sound to demand her boy be brought to her when the child was so very reluctant to show their face, and there was no guarantee that she carried a boy or a girl. Ephremia had instruments to determine an unborn child's gender, but Berenia wouldn't hear of using one, being happy to have either a boy or a girl, and wanting the pleasure of the surprise. It was so rare to be surprised when her spies gave advance warning of the king's slightest intent, and she had used this inside knowledge to anticipate, and even manipulate, her anniversary gifts.

If she was being honest, she would prefer another girl, having bought so many dresses for her absent daughter out of sheer wistfulness and self-delusion, without even knowing what size her daughter had grown into, and while she hadn't the heart to go through them, she had amassed a heap of fabulous princess gowns, still boxed, wrapped, and lined with dust in Berengere's never slept-in nursery, which now seemed the site of the mother lode of all baby showers, a windfall of enough clothing for an entire childhood.

She first comissioned Berangere's bedroom twelve years ago, when the queasiness had started,

which she kept secret by roaming the enormous palace, and throwing up each time in a different vase,

so no servant would ever see a pattern to the nausea worth gossiping to the staff. When she had finally bore the news, Gerolk favored her with a wan smile and a peck on the cheek, then returned to his monthly report on Ephremian economy. Deciding to take a long overdue tour of the crown coffers,

Berenia came away with a quantity of golden obirlunes--thin golden coins the size of a salad plate,

each worth a choice karik or a thousand yards of silk--and paid the palace builders to develop the late astrologer's quarters into a nursery, which she stocked not only with a crib, wardrobes, shelves, chests, and a scroll rack, but clever figurines of posable silver wrought by her finest smiths, and an intricate brass and tin mobile, in which sun, stars, and moons shone on an Ephremia painted on a carved wooden disc with a sanded handhold for the infant to tug, which made the glinting stars whirl, the moons spark and flash, and the glittery sun spin and gleam.

As her bittersweet rememberance of unfulfilled motherhood unfolded, she no doubt embellished her memory, for surely the stars and moons did not whirl this dizzily, fragmenting her thoughts in churning memories, bowed faces, clutching hands, the gleaming moon embedded in the cave floor, and the shards of her name, which she clutched to her chest as she flitted through the highest.

Having escaped that mind-obliterating contraction, the largest one yet, Berenia soared, too fearful to take joy in the splendor of her silvery wings, fluttering over barren, rocky continents and glittering oceans, and feeling a strange nostalgia for the faceless, nameless part of her, who lived and died only minutes ago. Now knowing who she was, Berenia could no longer think as freely and effortlessly as the nameless one.

When a winged visitor droned near, bowed its silvery head, and took her hand, their wings seemed to duel, the way they buzzed louder as his darted in and out of her fluttering, and her wings sliced the air as if his weren't there. As they flew, she seemed to shrink, ebbing by the second until she felt barely larger than the cold clutch of their hands. It was as if they had formed one joint person, and their joined heart was the numb clasp of their fingers. Without breath, pulse, or heartbeat, they flew and flew, until they flitted to a shadowed promontory.

When he gestured to the ledge, she alighted, folding her legs under her, and he bowed, and sat alongside Berenia.

"Where are we now?"

"First things first. Who are we now?"

He had seen right through her, and knew she was no longer a nameless one, flocking with the rest of the winged visitors. "I am Berenia."

"Here you are even less than that." He stood again stiffly, and bowed at the hip. "Hail the Queen of Ephremia. I'm no locust, but don't mind giving you your due, your majesty."

"And what of you? Who--no, what--are you?"

"By the what, you mean my material, my body, my corporeal form. None of those are who I am, not in truth, whether here in the highest or along the plain."

"What is the highest?"

"The highest is here."

"And the plains are there, meaning the real world,"

"How is it real?" The winged visitor's puzzlement showed in his voice but not his expressionless mirror-face. "There is nothing to me there."

"Here there is nothing but mist."'

"The highest is as clear and distinct as your mind." Berenia resented his saintly, condescending tone. "Clear your mind. and it will manifest in the here and now."

"What are you out there?" The nape of her neck pricked with an eerie realization: if the winged visitor idealized this ephemeral realm, the reality was too bleak to face. She could see why, given wings, the roaming pools would escape their barren world into this fantastic dream. Facing this reality,

with an exquisite otherworld a thought away, was self-annihilation, or so she might think, if she was a wandering pool scouring a lifeless landscape.

He had not answered her question, but only cocked his head and contemplated Berenia.

"Why so quiet?"

"Even in this mere fringe of the highest, I can glimpse the mirror of your mind."

"You know what I was thinking."

"I saw what you were thinking. Knowledge is more intimate than seeing. To know what you were thinking, I would have to know you. And before that, I must care to know you." His wings preened high overhead as he stretched his back and arms. The winged visitor was even more arrogant than Berenia. She had not felt so small since the rude badger took Berangere.

"How can you be sore when yours is an imaginary body?"

"Even a subtle body is a corporeal one."

"Even one of pure imagination?"

He yawned. "Forgive me, it's only that you are so boring. You waste time with child's play when you're lucky we can talk at all. As I said, this is the merest fringe of the highest, and as we ascend, the song will drown us out."

"I'm not coming with you."

"Of course you are."

"How would I find my way back? Can one return from the highest?"

The winged visitor laughed. "It's hardly the afterlife. The highest is only the highest we can conceive. Even so, you're unworthy to go there." As he spread his wings, and lifted from the outcrop,

the stone dissolved in upwelling darkness that now seeped back into the void.

Berenia tilted, then spun topsy-turvy in the abyss, before testing the darkness with a twitch of her wings. Whether her imaginary body had rested since her previous visit, or whether the darkness lent her an updraft, she soared after him at a bewildering, mind-bending speed, a chilled breeze coursing over her sleek, mirrored face. She flew so fast that what lay ahead stretched into her peripheral vision, giving her the disconcerting sensation of being poured into a cup, of splashing into her goal.

"We're only passing through on our way to the stars." His voice warbled in the shimmering blackness.

"The stars? Surely we're not traveling so far?"

"We're hardly leaving Orom." Orom: this strange, musical word repeated itself in a melodious refrain, as if not the name of their world, but a song. When the melody trailed off, the winged visitor continued his thought. "The stars are our word for the other side of our world." When he faced Berenia,

again seeming to meditate upon her, he chuckled. "Don't forget I see your thoughts. Our world may be unlike yours, but we hardly think it flat."

"You see all that in my mind?"

"It's hardly a spotless mirror, cluttered by too many preoccupations: your throne, your people, your daughter, and your war. Like the rest of your kind, you see your world as something to overrun.

While your world turns, ours only creeps, making a more or less hard line between the day side you arrived on, and our night side, which enjoys the cold light of the stars."

"That black void was the day?"

"The darkling illumination of our black sun drowns out starlight, blots out our moons,

and casts its bleak rays to deaden the shine of life, while on the starry side, starshine mingles with our crystal mountains, which sharpen and brighten the light."

"Sounds wonderful." When her tone was still bitter from being called boring by this impertinent snob, Berenia tried to sweeten her voice, but only thickened it to bittersweet. "While I am grateful that you wish to show me the splendors of your world, must we go there?"

"The outcast becomes the usurper, the scion of the black sun, who returns to honor his promise,

to darken the crystal lights, to rekindle the black fires of war, and to consume the worlds."

"I'm sorry to hear that. You have my deepest sympathies. But what does that have to do with Ephremia?"

"He was sent here the same way you were."

"That might be true." Berenia suddenly found the sweet riches of her royal voice. "But if he was once the outcast, that means he was cast out from here. So even if your problem was most recently our problem, originally he was your problem--wasn't he?"

"And you've become our problem too, haven't you?"

"You wouldn't begrudge me a little water and a cave nobody's using, would you?"

"Why concern ourselves with your material needs, when ours is a culture of immaterial things?

Not that we have no cares, but our bodies are entirely mutable, not only here in the highest, but in Orom. You won't be so presumptuous once your eyes are opened by the starry side. Here we sleep long; there we dream big."

As they flew, the light clarified, becoming less and less a darkling brilliance and more and more a crystalline darkness, glinting with starlight. Where they soared, starlight blazed from faceted, gemlike mountains, so that between the starry skies and the star-crusted mountains, Berenia felt like a celestial body drifting through a galaxy. Berenia began to adore her sleek, silvery form, not just her wings, but the abstraction of her expressionless face, which reflected innumerable stars from the countless mirrors embedded in the slopes and ridges.

"Is it a city of ghosts, then?"

"Don't be silly. It's a city of dreams."

Berenia's flash of a smile had just dimpled her mirror-face when laughter rippled through it.

"Why dream of human bodies?"

"Human? Such a strange word. Mythological. Pathological. A lie embodied." At Berenia's indignation, he waved his hand to shoo away any criticism. "To be fair, I have only heard whispers of humanity. Perhaps it's only what you see?"

"Isn't that just like a philosopher to suggest we don't see a common world."

"Or perhaps you only dream your ideal bodies, just as we do? Perhaps the truth of the human is a beast even more ignoble than our pitiful herds."

"Don't be ridiculous," said Berenia. "As those strange flickers called dreams leave little trace in our memory, we have no consciousness of another life."

"Life is what dreams strive to forget. Do you blame your dreams for being so ashamed of your mortifying, mortal flesh as to deny it the instant you close your eyes?"

"If so, what's the hurry? If the material world is only a mist passing through the dream world, live and let live. Even the Stranger."

"You can't get past your preconceptions, Queen of Ephremia. You presume he's limited to the real, when he overshadows every imagining. The Stranger is much more than the real, being every possibility, imagined and inconceivable, the fire of the void."

"Then he concerns not only you and me, but all life. But what good does our knowing do me or you? Without my armies, and delirious with labor pains, how can I help?"

"There is no teaching you, Ephremian queen." The winged visitor sighed. "While you can do little in the material world, in the highest there are wonders."

"Why me? Why not Kiera?"

"I do not see this Kiera. Having no skin in the game, could she possibly be more motivated than you?"

"She knows weapons, and the science of battle."

"Here she has neither arms nor armor, having no embodiment to do her will. Her ambitions are mired in your world. You are the one who arrived."

"By no intent or will of mine, being rattled out of my skull, and stealing these wings to fly from the pain of childbirth." Berenia snickered. "Despite how real these clouded happenings are, I am not yet persuaded they are not phantasms."

"You presume yourself the author of our skies?" A glimmer crinkled the blank but shining mask of the winged visitor, flickering there like a haughty smile.

"If I believe myself deranged, it scarcely makes me god."

"If you dream, and think yourself false, you demean your mind and degrade your soul. A barren tree, a dry riverbed, a sunless sky."

"I've always liked solitaire. I'd rather play a few rounds with myself than read what lies in my cards."

"Nothing waits." His wings furled as he crouched. "Time, death and mind hurtle on, despite your ready protestations and reluctant dreams."

When a spasm fluttered through Berenia, her wings drew tight, ascending steeply in a full-blown updraft, then diving down like a slain dove, her long-buried cares for Berangere, the sanded and finished but unused crib, the desolate nursery, the hollow heart of her king, and the unheard whispers and growls of the Ephremian people, flitting past, the faces upturned to her own in a shimmering loop of mirrors, their blank, buzzing heads now a locust cloud consuming this shadow world from the fringe inward, like a tapestry on fire.

"AAAAGHHHH!" As Berenia's burning scream torched her fears, then the careful and careless thoughts which fed these cares, she clenched her fists, and the scream fanned higher, doubling to a bonfire of pain which burnt not only her words but Kiera's, whose hand knotted in her fists, now squeezed so tight she couldn't tell her fingers from Kiera's.

She panted, but couldn't breathe; ranted, but couldn't speak; held on, but couldn't let go her balled-up wings, a being shed by inches, at last sliding out to be gulped down by the faceless mirror world.