When Eurilda glimpsed the city's wall, she waved to Leitara. "From here our tactic changes."
"I agree. Did you see your wayward Alfyrian?"
Intoxicated not only by their lightened foot race, but by freedom from the geas, and the good health and good faith of Otoka, Eurilda forgot all about the elf. Though love was overrated, she was happy with her master's trust. She had the sudden sense of forgetting something more important, but in the excitement of their eighty-foot gait, she was impatient of anything not immediately graspable by her hands or her eyes. Understanding was nothing in her hurtling frame of mind, and footing was everything.
"Aside from safe landings, the elf is my chief thought," Eurilda lied, then continued with "and I never laid eyes on him," which was true. "Now that we're here, how do we enter Wywynanoir?"
"Since they will not believe us friendly, arrows and stones discourage leaping over, and they will watch at night for ropes and ladders, there is only one way: the Qucuri River's sluice gate has a maintenance shaft we might enter if the water isn't too high."
"We could also fly, though we would be a target to both armies."
"We could have flown? That would have been safer."
"Sorcerous flight is too slow to be strategic. Most magic is too conspicuous or risky for a siege. If I weaved an illusion of a colossal spectacle, the unintelligent might be fooled, but the discerning would glimpse the design. If at rodent size, or in the form of mice, we scurried up a drain, we could find real vermin in the pipe. Our best bet is the sluice gate; with luck, it connects to the catacombs."
"The maintenance tunnel may be locked, barred, and watched by forward sentries."
"But it's a smaller stage than the gates, and I can ply my magic subtly."
As Leitara led them through the deserted outskirts, she told Eurilda that while the Tree Mothers were once content for Tree-Women to play house, few homes were occupied now, though they kept up the houses for future play. Even mills and factories, staffed only to satisfy the handful of trade agreements maintained with other worlds, looked as if production was on strike, with doors and windows wide open, and packaging and products strewn in plain view, as if the workers dropped their tools mid-swing. The besieging army also ignored the structures, as wrecking abandoned residences would have little effect on morale. It bore little resemblance to a human city that had become a battleground. Even the defeated lay more like broken toys than the dead, showing no signs of ill-treatment other than the killing. Dryads neither looted nor raped their own kind, though it was less from moral culture than the Tree Mothers' sense that it would be bad form to abuse another side's pieces in the long game.
They traversed the outskirts to the other side of Wywynanoir, where the river Qucuri raged against the drawn sluice gate, and threatened to flood the banks. While the locks only admitted a trickle, it was a sufficient ration of water for the besieged dryads.
Above the river's gate, a covered walkway ran east and west between lighted gate houses. When Eurilda did not notice the walkway, Leitara pointed it out. "That leads to the maintenance tunnel. While there are access points in the gatehouses, that entrance is the easiest."
"Can we access the walkway without entering the gatehouse?"
"We might risk shrinking and climbing up a drain, as due to their closing the sluice gate, the pipes are nearly dry, and vermin have not had time to make nests."
"Speaking of which, how is denying yourself water strategic?" asked Eurilda.
"It makes the Qucuri difficult to ford near the north gate, where high water levels restrict our troop movements. And if we attacked, not only would the waters barricade our troops, but our defenders could drop the sluice gate at will, the pent-up torrent would drown many enemies, and the few survivors would lose their footing and become easy quarry for the defenders."
"Or become crushed between the flood and the gate house. In this case, though, their shrewd defense provides an opportunity. Show me the pipes."
Eurilda followed Leitara through a rocky gully to the north gate. Embedded in the layers of red, flaky shale were craggy boulders and smaller, rounder stones that told a story of an ancient stream that once flowed through this pass to the Qucuri, though construction of the north gate cut it from the source.
Hearing the heavy tread of kiuvathi hooves above, they pressed against the ravine wall, slid along the stone, and shuffled into a small concavity. When the giantess crunched stacked, dry wood under heel, campfire ashes caked the toes of her boots.
"What's that?"
When a tiny scrape shimmied down the gully wall to echo like a drum-tap in the cave, shadows scampered on the ravine floor and pebbles trickled near their hiding place. After a drawn-out, breathless wait, there was a mellow order, then the loud trot of kiuvathi, which gradually became faint.
Eurilda examined the cooking fire. "The ashes are warm."
"And there are only one pair of boots. This was no Tree-Woman, but your Alfyrian friend. Hurry." They stepped out of the cave to jog down the gully.
"How can you know?" asked Eurilda. "Tree-Women wear boots—you wear boots!"
"We cook and eat, too, but not alone. A dryad is no slave to hunger that dines in a cave; she will finish her lonely business, then feast with her sisters."
"Can you enjoy food," asked Eurilda, "if you do not hunger? Can one savor without hungering?"
Rivulets of condensation trickled down the gate house, though it was a dry, cloudless day. Nearing the titanic walls, they heard the river's massive shudder in the stone.
"Although Tree-Women only live six or seven Abyssal precessions, and our taste buds are ever new, good taste is our prison, as our Tree-Mother not only remembers enjoyment but reinforces her preferences in consecutive incarnations. Consequently, we don't indulge many acquired tastes and enjoy foods you think simple."
"The grains and greens you prepared were excellent."
"The cuisine served in hospitality cities is an exotic fiction cultivated to please offworlders. Though the culinary art that went into these recipes is a source of pride, no Tree-Woman would eat them. Here we are." 'Here' was a drain pipe running up the north gate wall. While it wasn't completely dry, only a slow drip muddied the ground, and when Eurilda stabbed the dryad in the back, green blood darkened the puddle.
Leitara fell forward in the muck, her limbs already still. Only her whisper quivered. "You said I was real."
"Said the apostate to the traitor, though both fear shadows. You should have lived when you had the chance." When Leitara expired, Eurilda's voice trailed off as she followed through with the lecture. "Though your Tree-Mother might have learned the value of suffering in perpetuating this degrading memory, be grateful you died an independent mind."
Eurilda was glad Otoka removed the geas, which would have viewed his expectation that she work with Leitara as a command. As any meaningful intelligence of the siege might harm Khyte, or worse, bring another in striking distance of Inglefras, the lieutenant was a hindrance to her twofold satisfaction.
Although Eurilda quickly ruled out diminishment in favor of shape-shifting, she couldn't decide between slithering up, scampering up, or flitting up. Choosing between snake, mouse, and bird was definitely a choice of the lesser of three evils to the sorcerous; while she was by no means so fastidious as to dislike these verminous shapes, or the thought of traipsing through the dirty, rain-wet pipe interior, she was squeamish about having the distasteful mouth, nose, tongue, and stomach, of these beasts, for as the Tree-Woman had pointed out, bad taste can contaminate the strongest minds.
"I disapprove." At the sardonic voice, Eurilda turned to raise her sword, which was so wet with vegetal gore that she was splattered when Frellyx smacked it from her hand.
"I wouldn't release your diminishment," said the elf. "While you've been lucky, a giant will likely be spotted."
"How did you get here?"
"Said the dog to the flea."
"What do you mean?"
"Don't be thick. I used one of your tricks. The one you used in Merculo's bordello."
"You shrunk."
"And rode piggyback. I admit, your mode of travel has much to recommend it."
"How long?"
"Since the stockade, where I relieved the boredom of your captivity by sleeping in the folds of your garment."
"Not so out of practice, then?"
"Oh, I am," said the Alfyrian, "but some things you never forget. The early lessons, the primers, the spells I researched and authored, the spells I taught the first giant sorcerers."
"Why hold me at sword point? We're on the same side."
"We're barely on the same world," said Frellyx. "I disapprove of killing Leitara, who did her best to be your friend. That said, while you're unsuited to be my friend, this may show you're suited to be Khyte's."
"What if I'm here to kill him?"
"I'm not blind. Though your thirst for delusion matches your ability to brew illusions, you will never stop caring for Khyte. Fortunately, he has need of that subterfuge."
"You see nothing," scoffed Eurilda.
"You chose Wywynanoir over Ssyrnas. You killed Leitara to stop her tongue. You deceive your beloved master. This is not purpose, but love."
Eurilda didn't answer. She didn't know how she felt, and didn't feel like discussing it with Frellyx.
"Through the drain pipe," said Frellyx. "I wish that awful thought wasn't our best bet, as shimmying up a dank drain pipe is something to forget, not experience."
Eurilda decided that she would henceforth ignore the long-winded elf, whose thoughts were not only impractical, but drowned in useless erudition.
While skinchanging was eerie to observe, it was invasive and more unsettling to the enchanted. Eurilda shuddered as arms, legs, and clothes folded and refolded into sinuous scales. She slinked several yards up the drain pipe before Frellyx came after, also a serpent.
Like one becoming accustomed to the dark, Eurilda adjusted to the serpentine senses as she snaked through the narrow pipe. While her visual world was constricted, her world opened on a many-textured and animated territory of scents, completely unlike the singular, invisible mass that air seemed to those reliant on sight, but a war of airs and vapors writhing in the airflow: rusty, wormy rainwater; the resinous chitin of bugs bottling salty guts; a mouse's damp fur shivering in a bend; the scent of verminous fear, as these pests skittered and slithered from her path; and the sweet, sticky scent of Tree-Woman sweat.
At the top of the drain pipe, she curled and waited, and when Frellyx slithered beside her, two things stopped her from speaking. First, she was still a snake and did not know their manner of speech; second, a bug wriggled in her mouth. Violently, Eurilda spat out the insect, not knowing how it got there, unless she snapped it up by instinct. Not for the first time, Eurilda resented her need to cast the treacherous shape-shifting magic, which was as much a betrayal of identity as an assumption of animal abilities.
The two snakes dropped to the roof, shimmied under the stairwell door, then slithered back into their own shapes. As Eurilda's sense of scale was restored, and the dimension of scents evaporated, the world seemed to retract into a moment of anxiety, which passed, along with the serpent's poor taste in food.
At the bottom of the stairs was the covered walkway, which overlooked water so low that the docks loomed over patches of bedraggled lake grass jutting through the riverbed. The quaggy bottom stretched from the inside walls to the north gate.
"Must we sneak around? Don't you have pull with Inglefras?"
"Unless all her eyes are on Khyte, Inglefras has too many faces to be trusted."
"She doesn't like you?" said Eurilda. "How improbable." The giantess snickered to light the lie on fire. At the end of the creaky walkway, they entered the maintenance tunnel door.
"If we are captured, I'll appeal to Inglefras, but you must attempt escape to rendezvous with Khyte."
"I'd like to have words with Inglefras. Although by 'have words with' I mean murder, with the pleasant twist that I can do it again and again to all her faces, until I burn her tree."
"Maybe I'll leave you here and deny everything," said Frellyx.
"It sounds like you," said Eurilda.
As they walked over thick windows inset in the maintenance tunnel floor, they peered into the murky waters.
"While they have no reason to raise the sluice gate now," said Frellyx, "it would be sensible to move quickly."
As they jogged the maintenance tunnel, Eurilda was glad to perceive the dank air as a silent whole, and not like a serpent, as a cocktail of repellent airs, but she was not so happy to hear the tinkling of water trickling down the walls. When they reached a locked grate, their boots were sodden wet from traipsing through pooling water, and the pits of Eurida's robe clung heavy with damp sweat.
Eurilda shrunk to three inches high, stepped through the grate, then perched on the lip of the entranceway. The riverbed glistened, its waters gelatinous with mud. Frellyx likewise diminished, then stood by her side.
Eurilda said, "We should enlarge before the jump or during the fall if we don't want to drown."
"I thought the same, but to avoid sticking in the mud."
"Too late for you." Eurilda snickered.
As Frellyx leaped from the tunnel mouth, he partially dismissed his diminishment spell and dived at half his natural height, causing a small churn in the surface. After the agitation dispersed, Eurilda's foaming impact clove to the shallow bottom of an over-sized puddle. When mud squished in her fingertips, a tendril of muck lashed at the tender wound near her eye, and though she blinked, a droplet seeped through the squeezed eyelid. She clawed water so fast that when she broke through, a half-dozen spear-armed Tree-Women waded towards her turbulent eddies..including a face, which through the eddies of the puddle, her turbulent anger, and her eye knotted with mud and itching tears, she recognized.
"Inglefras!" When Eurilda's sudden gigantification displaced cascading mud on the onrushing Tree-Women, two slipped, the others staggered, and a befouled wave submerged Frellyx. Up to her ankles in the dark riverbed, the twenty-two foot giantess stooped, plucked Inglefras from the muck and snatched her up to her face, as if Eurilda only intended to stop and smell the flower princess, and not weed her enemy from the naive soil of Khyte's heart.
Though squeezed cruelly in the giant grip, Inglefras rasped "the locks! Release the locks!" While Eurilda didn't know a dam from an aqueduct, sea locks were used to harvest sea vegetables on Uenarak, so when the giantess heard this gasp, she scrounged for Frellyx with her other hand, then dashed across the drained river bottom towards the city wall. The mud tugged at her boots until she lost one, so that her five foot boot seemed to flower from the riverbed before the suede flopped left.
At the thunderous gush of the Qucuri, Eurilda ran faster, muttered arcane words, and leaped for the top of the lock. While her lightening spell and giant thews carried her far over the deafening churn, she fell into the vastness of the reclaimed river. Roiling foam sprayed then submerged her face, but by standing on tiptoe and tilting her head, her mouth broke the surface to suck down a breath.
When Eurilda's squirming fistfuls became even more spasmodic, she raised the elf aloft, but shook the Tree-Woman underwater. Inglefras thrashed back, biting and scratching her thick giant skin, and pounding her knees against the base of the gigantic palm, until a hiccuping in Eurilda's hand marked the fatal breath of water. When Eurilda let go, the Tree-Woman floated face down in the eddying river.
"Frellyx! I'm going to throw you."
Frellyx gasped through chattering teeth, but his words were lost in the waves fluttering over her ears and the too-tight pinch of her fingers, which prevented the elf from supplying air to his speech. With just that moment for him to prepare, she lobbed the elf to the south lock, then grabbed its edges to pull herself from the Qucuri.
When her head and shoulders were above the wall, spear points and drawn arrows stared back from a phalanx of Tree-Women. Frellyx was on his belly and two spears touched his back.
Water poured from Eurilda's hair and robes in such volumes that the stones were blasted and the dryads staggered under their shields. When the drizzle cleared the mud from her eye, she counted two more with the face of Inglefras.
Although Eurilda dearly wanted to bull rush the tree-women and throttle the plant princess twice more, she nearly died facing half this many Tree-Women. "Do not shoot. I bear a message from Otoka the Wise."
As she held herself over the ledge, a dull pain in her lower back faded as quickly as it came.
"Stay where you are!" shouted an Inglefras.
The pain migrated to Eurilda's guts. "I can't hold myself much longer. Should I wait in the river or pull myself to the ledge?"
"Shed your size, pull yourself up, and remove your weapons." As Eurilda worked her spell, the dryad's next words were so strident that they broke her concentration: "Any other spell will be your last."
Eurilda restarted her enchantment, dwindled, then hauled herself up, and when she grasped her sword hilt, a rush of Tree-Women stripped away not only the blade, but her robes and undertunic, and in their rage, looked like they wanted to peel a few more layers, though the giantess was now naked, crossing her arms over her breasts and swollen belly.
When the breeze rippled over the cold river, goosebumps bubbled on her back, shoulders, and chest, a prickling that made her more conscious of her nakedness, so that her downcast eyes saw blood trickling on her thigh.
"Help," Eurilda whispered, frightened to realize she meant it. If Otoka had removed the geas, why was her first fear on seeing the blood not of the gestating unknown, which had already hatched a horrifying swarm of hybrids in her imagination, but of losing what she contemplated with dread?
The new Inglefras shouted,"Stop! You have done too much; get dry robes, prepare a bed for this heathen, and summon my medicine chest and Eotua. As for this elf, take him in chains to my consort for safekeeping." Four took Frellyx away at spear point, and another walked briskly away to follow the prior order.
Then Inglefras turned on Eurilda. "Whose is it?" The loud tone was not quite a shout.
"You know." Over her shaking chin and shivering, goose-pimpled flesh, Eurilda stared insolently. When Inglefras stared back—her green face flushed with cherry undertones and her eyes shining—the giantess turned and backpedaled, as if to shelter the unborn child. Then the wall of Tree-Women closed around her, and more warriors exited the gatehouse.
"Fear not, I will save Khyte's child. Bring her," Inglefras commanded. Although Eurilda wished to crush them underfoot, or dissolve to a dust-mote and drift through the crannies, she could not do either. Her unwilling inaction confused her, as if the moral paralysis of the geas still slithered inside. How long had the blood lain there? Did it spill fleeing the assassins, dry on her skin, then get slicked by the river? Perhaps embryos cannot pass the otherworldly hymen of the Doorways, and her child died when Eurilda stepped through the Abyss to the Oasis?
Eurilda allowed them to lead her through the bustling gatehouse and into Wywynanoir, where the hospitality city was mainly shuttered, although here and there some buildings were lit, such as guardhouses, cafes repurposed for rationing water, and their destination, an immense, orange-painted building with a plaque lettered The Orange Hotel.
They forced her up three flights, turned down a hallway, and entered a bright white door, its whiteness coming not from paint but the natural hue of the wood. The room's coziness also stemmed from its simplicity: a large bed thick with comforters, a dresser with three drawers, and an end table.
Four of Inglefras's warriors remained in the room, two propped the door with their backs, and the others waited in the hallway. "Dim the room," bade Inglefras, and one closed the curtains. When she ordered Eurilda to "lay down," the giantess obeyed, but stiffly, placing her head on a pillow, crossing her arms, and staring at the dryad princess, so that she looked less like a patient than a critic or a jaded audience.
The dispatched Tree-Women soon arrived: one carried dry robes of soft hide, and the other wheeled in a chest of dark wood inlaid with a galaxy of blue gems circling a diamond. Inglefras's rummaging produced a metal flagon and a copper-ringed lens larger than a salad plate.
"What will you do?" asked Eurilda.
"If she speaks again, gag her," said Inglefras.
Eurilda sat up in the bed. "I could destroy this building, and you in it."
"You wouldn't. Not before you know."
"I could return to Otoka the Wise." Eurilda heard the hollowness of her threat even as it was voiced. Otoka was renowned as a mighty wizard, not a doctor.
Inglefras stepped over to Eurilda and gazed through the copper ring, first shifting the lens from left to right over the giantess, then reversing the motion, but pausing over her loins, then her chest, then her head.
"Where is Khyte?" asked Eurilda.
"Aren't you curious about this device?"
"I will speak to him."
"Don't you have a message for me?"
"I lied. My master does not know I am here." The giantess offered a new lie to the pile even as she owned up to one.
"I doubt that."
"That's because doubt is in your nature, you unbelievable creature. Just tell me about the device."
"I'll allow your evasions, as I want you to understand. This lens undresses your bones. By concentrating, I have skimmed skin, veins, bone, and now your vitals to lay eyes on your offspring. Proving that the most hardened soil is not impregnable to the seed of love." She laughed in her tinkling way.
"Tell me."
"While I hoped for something new, you might be pleased that they're not monsters."
"Wait—what?"
"Twins. One takes after his mother, but the other seems a human girl. While common sense and nature insist both are half and half, there was nothing common about your joining, and when the boy's growth consumes the girl, the birth will be far from natural. If your exertions continued, you would have discharged not only blood, but the whole monstrous horror, your life included. Even by staying in bed, both might die in the violence of birth. If you miscarry the girl, the boy might go full term, and the reverse is also true; saving the girl may miscarry the boy."
Eurilda was speechless at this horrid diagnosis, though a few tears leaked unbidden. Many moments slipped away. "Can your medicine not save both babies?"
"By studying their growth in your womb, I might invent a new, ameliorative procedure. While our knowledge of your reproduction is substantial, it is second hand, as dryads do not give birth in this fashion. Not unlike the primitive animal medicine practiced on other worlds, that science here encompasses not only our acephalous fauna, but your beasts, including the two-legged ones—humans, goblins, elves, and giants."
"You're a doctor?"
"No. Nor a scientist, though I dabble, for royalty must be conversant in many disciplines. No, we wait for Eotua. She isn't my best doctor, but my oddest one, with the most comprehensive knowledge of the beasts of the Abyss."
InInglefras poured from the metal flagon, then handed the wooden cup to the giantess, who contemplated its thick pink liquid, which might be medicine, poison, or kiuvathi milk, and thereby conceal cruel purposes, her dissolution, or a joke in bad taste, and in any event, make of Eurilda a new toy for the dryad's tea party. "I don't think so."
"I thought you might say that, but you'll change your mind."
"Not until I see Khyte."
"He might come. While we wait for my consort and the doctor, I am curious of your opinion."
"About what?"
"Girl or boy? Human or giant?"
"You expect me to choose?"
"No, you don't get to choose," sneered Inglefras. "I'm saving the girl. I wondered where your sympathies lie."
"So you'd kill the boy."
"A human girl will please my consort, and if her hair or eyes take after you, to hear a little you call me mother would be amusing."
"Why tell me this? I'll kill you!"
"You don't know where I am," said Inglefras. "Don't kill this humble seed."
"You mean vainglorious weed," said Eurilda. "Tell me—why would I drink this poison?"
"If nature takes its course, the girl will miscarry, and the violence of that stillbirth will likely kill the boy. The drink is a calmative, to prepare you for what is to come."
"For that matter, why tell me I carry twins? You should have lied, and told me only of the girl, if you wanted my cooperation."
"Don't think my seed-sisters stabbing you was payment enough for my ill treatment at your hands. If one of your whelps die, you will suffer not just the knowledge of it, but foreknowledge will poison your hindsight with the thought that you might have done something."
Eurilda's retort was interrupted when a tall and slender Tree-Woman in a black gown flooded with crimson dryad letters and tied with a silver sash pushed in a wheeled wooden sphere. When Inglefras handed the doctor the copper circlet, she stared through the lens, and more dryad gibberish flowed as the glass passed over Eurilda.
Inglefras replied in dryad before turning to Eurilda. "Eotua agrees. One lives, or both die."
"Ask if she can save both," said Eurilda.
After mulling over the request, Inglefras discussed it with Eotua, tittering often during the doctor's continuously branching exposition. While Eurilda understood every fifth word, her eyes were not on their lips but their necks, flickering occasionally to the guards and their blades. Inglefras said, "after delivering the girl, Eotua will close your womb. If you remain in bed during your pregnancy, the boy might live."
"Close my womb? How will you open it? And even if she takes after her human father, can such a small baby live outside of me? Giants carry their offspring for two years—speaking of which, how could I lie in bed that long?"
"You will be cut," said Inglefras. "Humans and goblins use this procedure when babies are born breech, though we do it with less blood. This ciupla will provide air and nourishment until the girl breathes and eats on her own."
"What about me?"
"We would sew you up, so the boy might continue his development."
"Or you would let me die, and the boy with me."
"Could I be so easily satisfied?" Inglefras smirked, and used a tone of such delicate ambiguity that Eurilda believed she considered that outcome.
"You're no sophisticate, no matter how much you pretend," said Eurilda. "So you will do precisely that. Bring Khyte to me, or we will see how much of Wywynanoir crumbles under one giant."
"You're deceived if you think Khyte cares whether you live or die."
The giantess wished to taunt Inglefras that he wearied of her as well, but with a supreme effort focused on Khyte. "Though you study the beasts of other worlds, you observe only anatomy and behavior, not their true nature. Whether the boy is half-human or half-giant, Khyte will care whether his son lives or dies. Having never clung to his natural mother or father, holding his son will be important. Not that I dignify our lover by noting this compassion, who is a beast despite his virtues. On the contrary, it is a defect in me to succumb to the higher qualities of an animal. No doubt I am guilty of personifying him, of projecting qualities that are in truth inherent to me. That said, I am his slave; bring me Khyte, and I will drink your medicine and submit to your doctor."
"Truth," sneered Inglefras. "As usual, you are constrained by your tautologies." After Inglefras spoke to one of her warriors, who departed from the room, she turned to Eurilda. "If Khyte never existed, could we have been friends?"
"I despise dryads. It's not personal. I hate elves and goblins as well."
"But not humans."
"Humans make better pets," said the giantess. "Elves have too many bad behaviors to unlearn and goblins are too greedy to be satisfied in captivity."
"And what of dryads?"
"Dryads break too easily, because they do not bend."
"Have you known many dryads?", asked Inglefras.
"Just the one," Eurilda replied. "And one was enough."
"So in hating me, you learned to hate us all."
"It was an inevitability. I'm hateful by nature. I even feel a little joy when the right giant dies."
"You're broken."
"Will you fix me with your medicine chest?"
"You mock, but it may be possible."
"You lie," sneered Eurilda. "If you fixed me, I would not be myself. Imperfection is reality and fury my destiny"
"Call it not fixing, but doctoring the disease that curbs the true expression of your personality. Being you is punishment," said Inglefras. "Wouldn't you rather be happy?"
When Eurilda did not answer, Inglefras continued: "Your loathing would do me honor if I had not lived too many cycles to be taken in by your performance. You are an interesting creature, no doubt an oddity even on your own world."
"You are an oddity in your own mind," said Eurilda. "Charmed, besotted, and disenamored of your self, all at the same time. Rejected by your own soul, this alienated ego clings to Khyte's offspring as your own. How many centuries did you totter listlessly before discovering a fuller life in the orbit of Khyte's magnetism? To perpetuate the lie that the reflection of his existence illuminates your own, you crave my daughter as a satellite."
When Inglefras staggered like one struck, her warriors responded like mirror images, advancing in a wave until subsiding at her gesture. "I see it now."
"What do you see?"
"Why Khyte chose me. Not that you are wrong; before Khyte, my passions were mute and my life lived by rote. I savored the radiance of his unquenchable spark without knowing it was love, and as he kindled emotions forsaken when his tribe was in its antiquity, I clutched him with all my hands, relearned how to live, and dreaded your return, when he might leave my diluted centuries for your human beauty, flood of desires, and younger mind."
Eurilda laughed. "So many cuts. You're falling on my sword."
"When he wouldn't talk about you, and my guesses became suspicions, I only tortured myself; even now, you're too exhausting for him to remember."
"Are you saying I bored Khyte?"
"Boredom is never exhausting; he fled excitement. You're too full of yourself to comprehend the toll your magnetic personality exerts. Skirting your monolithic egotism exhausted Khyte. Like your master, you're only equipped to entertain an audience of one—you."
"Are you finished?" said Eurilda.
"Yes, I wondered the same thing, my love."
While not given to flamboyant shows of emotion, Eurilda felt a joyous upswell upon seeing Khyte as vital as ever. Despite taking her dagger in his side, he now looked larger than life, or perhaps only larger than he once lived, as the kept man had added a few pounds, softening his stony face and making his muscles sleeker and more imposing.
Whether it was her rejoicing heart, his frilly white furs that were too ridiculous for words, or to relieve the tension of craving escape or murder while twins choked each other in her womb, Eurilda laughed long and hard
Inglefras frowned and embraced Khyte. "Did you hear my foolish words?"
Khyte embraced Inglefras back, while giving the slightest of looks to Eurilda. "Dammed thoughts will flow." This gave Eurilda a slight start, for the proverb was not native to his tribe, but to Uenarak. While it was relevant to what he overheard, she wondered if it was a warning.
"Such thoughts are unworthy of your ears," said the princess.
"Thoughts that do not become deeds are unworthy," said Khyte, "which does not stop us speaking our minds. We are small-minded mortals, not gods. Do not fret; no mere words could alter my desires."
The giantess was still giggling, and at this point did not know why. Was Khyte's fluffy cloak that ostentatious, that subconsciously hilarious? Was she only frightened out of her skin? Had Ingelfras's princess tantrum irreparably cracked her self-image? Or had the revelation of the choking lives inside of her broken her sanity? The laugh seemed to lay bare truth in all of these things.
"Why does she laugh?" said Inglefras. "Make her stop."
"Ignore her," said Khyte. "Why am I here? And why is my friend in chains?"
"We have nothing to bind a giant..."
"Frellyx. Why is Frellyx in chains?"
"Did he not tell you?"
"When your guards brought him, he asked for brandy and fell asleep upon drinking it."
"He was with me," said Eurilda.
"You lie," said Khyte so fiercely that Eurilda might have believed his performance was she not also coached by Frellyx.
"Though she is a liar by nature," said Inglefras, "in this she does not lie."
"Why?" demanded Khyte.
"I convinced him your wound was accidental," Eurilda said, "and I wanted to show you what our union had wrought."
"Our union? More lies!" Khyte exclaimed, though he took a flinching step back before rushing to the foot of the bed and gripping the baseboard.
Inglefras choked back a sob. "She bears your child."
Khyte's short scoffing laugh was too cutting to be rehearsed. "Tell me then. Not only the when, but the how, the why, and the why now, as in why now should the union of giantess and man bear fruit? Were you the first magician to indulge her giant imagination?"
"Don't mock me," said Eurilda. "And don't ask why, unless you would shame me more than I am, naked in your betrothed's bed, with warring monsters in my womb, and their father dead to me."
"See for yourself before embarrassing us any further," Inglefras handed Khyte the copper circlet. When he held the lens up to the window, she added, "at the giantess. Khyte, look to Eurilda."
As Khyte peered through the lens, he said, "I'd say they were bones, but they're black...covered with ghostly threads and reddish webs." Once Inglefras corrected the angle of his grip and turned him toward Eurilda's womb, Khyte said, "Those two tiny shadows? They look more like goblins."
"While they're not goblins, they're neither humans nor giants either, but a mixture of the parents. They're something new"
Khyte pulled the lens back to scrutinize both sides. "How can you be so sure? This glass seems clouded with guesswork, like giant runes."
"He does not remember," said Eurilda.
"Remember what?" said Khyte. "There's nothing to remember. Our last tryst is long gone."
"Remember when I rescued you from the guards in Kreona? Unable to run on my wounded leg, I shrank smaller than a rag doll so that you could carry me to Huiln's estate, where you bound my wound and we slept on the veranda."
"I remember."
"What happened next, Khyte?"
"We had an enormous breakfast."
"Just before that."
"I undressed your wound, expecting to redress it, but it had healed. You said Otoka enchants his errand runners to shrug off injuries."
"When did you check my wound?"
"Don't ask me the hour. It was dark. Early morning."
"We ate breakfast at that early hour?"
"No," said Khyte. "The red rays of the Abyss had risen." He began to look affrighted as he followed her reasoning.
"What happened between the darkness and the red Abyss-rise?"
"Nothing!" shouted Khyte. He turned to Inglefras. "I swear, my love, nothing."
"It is easy to swear nothing when you know nothing," said Eurilda. "Though a strict application of that adage to a brain so uncluttered would mean you have a saint's mouth." While the giantess immediately regretted this insult, having been the cause of the void in his memory, the force of Khyte's delusion signified not only ignorance, but abhorrence, and revived the pain of her rejection in a way that was too much to bear. "Do you remember anything I taught you? That illusion covers not only sense, but matter?"
"While I have tried to forget your dark mind, I remember the law of illusion: change seeming; change being. The lesson came home in the high tower of the Alfyrian embassy. when I wanted to cut through your image to force my own will on the world. I wish Inglefras had not stayed my hand."
"Did Inglefras stay your hand," asked Eurilda, "or did you heed a forgotten suggestion? One thing I withheld from you was my knowledge of deep illusions. Just as illusion covers matter or sense, the surface seeming of things, so deep illusions alter memory or desire, our bottomless feeling of things. Though Otoka forbade them, he lectured on their potential risk and power. A deep illusion of epic scale could alter not only history, but existence: the master spinner Lyspera embedded The Five Worlds in a deep illusion."
"Say no more," said Khyte. "No one would do what you are suggesting."
"Why not, when I might satisfy my desire, leaving you none the wiser? Moreover, if we share the moment, but not the memory, I possess and cherish that part of you as my own. Why share what you wouldn't appreciate, what you'd go on to regret—as you do now."
"I would kill you if I could. But these children..."
"They are yours."
During this bitter exchange, Inglefras's face became more and more wooden, almost mask-like in its failure to betray an emotion. "Regardless how you own this dark deed, the upshot is your joint progeny. Khyte is here. If you are a creature of your word, drink this." She handed Eurilda the wooden cup.
"That may be the fairest definition of myself I will hear from your lips," said Eurilda. "A creature of words—spell-user and phrase-turner. If I die, use it for my epitaph." The pink liquid was as nauseating as it looked, coiling up the metallic taste of blood and the sweetness of milk in one serpentine slurp that went down her gullet in one mass, like a thing alive.
"If you die?" asked Inglefras. "You speak as if you can prevent it."
"Beloved," said Khyte. "Though I despise her, I beg mercy for Eurilda."
"Mercy?" asked the dryad.
The giantess smiled, less because the wooden-headed Tree-Woman's flustered parroting amused her than because the concoction spread numbing warmth to her belly, limbs, and back, so that the coarse sheets now seemed the finest Ielnaronan silk.
Inglefras continued, "I meant it philosophically, that all things die, and no magic could delay her fatal hour. I meant no threat. But if I did, why defend this brazen beast that one day took your free will, and the next, nearly took your life?"
"I never knew my birth mother. I was taken as the spoils of war by my father. His wife, the mother of my youth, had one daughter twelve years older than me, and many stillborn daughters and sons. While another woman might resent a reminder of what she could not give her husband, that lived when so many of her own were born cold, she doted on me. Though I was spoiled rotten, I never had a wicked thought about my parents until I asked why I looked so different from the other children. Why was I darker than iron? Though not my first time asking, it was the first time my mother answered. While the others were born in the blood of the womb, I was born in the blood of war. They treasured me because I was treasure—my father's first share of the booty from conquest, a hard-won prize that appreciated in value when I grew into a son in whom they took pride. From that day my own love was mixed with not only contempt and spite but nightmare, as I had horrible, recurring dreams of my parents killing a faceless woman." Khyte paused, and his eyes shut, as if he recalled the dream. "I would give new life to that nightmare if my children feel this way of me." Eurilda felt her own eyelids slipping when the dryad liquor clouded her mind with drowsiness.
"Could we not agree never to tell them?" asked Inglefras.
Khyte shook his head. "No, that would be as heinous a crime as the deep illusion in which they were begotten. We would be the architects of a lifelong lie, spinning untruths daily, and taking not only Eurilda, but the Spider-God, as our models."
"You would prefer to keep her prisoner?"
"So they discover their natural mother in a cell, and her crime was begetting them? We must let her go."
"Go free? Never. Though I'll make this world their garden to please you, better to kill all the weeds at once then let the monster mother her spawn."
"Did I say go free? No, I did not."
When Eurilda succumbed then to the drug, it was not the dreamless void she hoped but a net of nightmares, in which her mind—its consciousness not erased, but only cobwebbed—struggled in the web.