It had been, as I said, a quiet couple of weeks. The black slowly leached out of the rubble pile that had once been a castle, the sun was warm and bright, and the village people became more talkative. Meara worked on her dagger and sundry other ironmongery, Conner made Meara a sweater and cheerfully submitted to humiliation by the sea serpent, and Llweder performed the rituals in the grove—which seemed to be very much in favor of the returned sunlight. I pondered the rubble pile and found myself thinking that it really was a very, very nice place for a castle. Shame not to have one there.... I found myself sketching plans in idle moments.
    
    Meara knew she was dreaming. She saw Wynn, much younger and oddly stylized-looking, in dark armor and clothing, riding a dark horse under the banner of a black rose. Behind and above him were his.... parents? His mother was perfect High Court Seelie, blonde, inhumanly beautiful, in diaphanous clothing. Beside her was a dark, short man, physically twisted; Low Court Unseelie with a fair amount of knocker blood in him, dressed as a smith. She knew, somehow, they were both dead.
    The next scene was a council chamber in a castle, empty but for Wynn, in court garb, talking with a nondescript person in mage's robes, although the colors and patterns on them were meaningless. She realized that the second man had the painted features of a puppet.
    Then the puppet stood at the forge under the mountain. Behind everything stood a tower, silhouetted against a dark sky by the flames pouring from the windows and the lightning that struck it every time the hammer rang against the anvil.
    Wynn stood at the center of a maze of red and white roses, blood flowing toward him from the right and the left and pooling around his feet. Behind and to one side, hiding in the maze, was a crow with green eyes.
    The puppet fed black and white bones into the forge fire and worked the bellows. Then Meara saw him smelting ore. The crow was again hidden in the back of the scene, watching. While the puppet drew off pure ore to make steel, Wynn gathered the dross where the puppet could not see.
    Wynn collected a silver Fae crown and a black sword, and hung them with chains of pig iron and the black roses that were his own blood. Again, the crow watched from hiding.
    The puppet drew a white-hot blade—Hunger—from the forge with a set of tongs and handed it off to Wynn for the final quenching. He took the blade, turned toward the trough, turned back and drove it through the puppet. The crow, still hanging about in the background, snuck out.
    Wynn sat a throne in an empty hall of black marble, brooding for a long time, Hunger in its place above. On the wall behind him his shadow wielded the sword, fighting off a cloud of puppet strings.
    An old king sat on a white marble throne over the sea. A crow with green eyes whispered in his ear.
    Wynn again, no longer brooding but calling up troops, fighting off an encroaching army of demons wearing dead men. There were fewer puppet strings attempting to attack Wynn; the now-cadaverous king had gathered them up and was weaving something out of them.
    The king was dead. The puppet strings were a giant tangled mass, moving vaguely in Wynn's direction, and Wynn's expression suggested that he had a plan.
    She woke up, emerged into the main room and announced, "Oh God, we're doomed."
    "Just catching on, huh? What's your sleeve length?" Conner held up the half-completed sweater, checking the size. "Thank you."
    "Does anyone want to know the sequence of Wynn's general monstrosity?"
    "Oh, sure," I invited. "I would love to know more about the mind of our enemy."
    "I don't think he has one, but he just recently developed a cunning plan. Regretfully this is prophecy, so I have no idea what the cunning plan is."
    "We just know that there is one?" Conner looked unhappy. No surprise.
    "Yep. Basically what it boils down to is, evidently Wynn's mother was High Court Seelie, and his father was Low Court Unseelie, and a smith."
    "She spending time with the servents?" Conner theorized.
    "I don't know.... that part wasn't explained to me, and it's probably just as well."
    "So this is all class warfare?" Llweder offered.
    "I wouldn't be at all surprised that a certain amount of snobbery is the reason why Wynn decided to go overboard on making sure that he is the biggest kid in the sandbox, but evidently somebody wearing the robes of a mage—but the robes made absolutely totally no sense magewise, just they're what you would expect to see if the person was an actual mage—and I got the impression, well in my dream basically he was a puppet."
    "Marionette, puppet?" Conner asked.
    "Yes."
    "Balor's, presumably," I suggested.
    "Presumably," she agreed, and went on, "or somebody else, actually, because the crow that we saw in most of these scenes, watching. Maybe it was Balor's puppet, maybe it was someone else's puppet."
    She continued giving us the details, kind of jumbled in some places and the whole of it not making very much sense to me, at least, although if they really had used the bones of the dead to fire the forge for Hunger's creation, at least we knew where the bodies of those Wynn had slain had gone. The king was Emer, the demons the army he had raised to attack Wynn.
    "There's some mysteries in all of this," she concluded. "Like I'd really love to know where that silver crown and black sword went off to....."
     "There's some mysteries in this?" I repeated. "Meara, Queen of Understatement."
    "But the thing that really worries me is that we probably by tangling up the mess of puppet strings and tossing His Nibs back into the thing and messing up Emer's plans, have perhaps now given Wynn breathing room. Regretfully the dream didn't tell me where to find the asshole."
    Conner was giving her that look he often did. "I'm amazed by the fact that you were able to narrow it down to just one thing that troubled you out of this, but that's not a bad thing to be troubled by, come to think of it. I mean it's fairly broad, covers a lot of territory."
    "Mind you, I find a number of things in the background bothersome, but they're in the past," she conceded with a shrug.
    "I don't necessarily mind Wynn having breathing room if it's breathing room from being taken over by something even worse than he is," I remarked.
    "There is that, it's just that he has shown such....."
    "Calm self-restraint?" Conner offered.
    "And the ability to think, and plan ahead. He's, y'know, at least Emer had his 267 well-thought-out steps to world domination."
    "Wynn does kind of have the whole, 'oh yeah?!' attitude about him sometimes," Conner agreed.
    I nodded. "He's a few sticks short of a house, definitely."
    "I don't know, guys," Meara shrugged, unusually uncertain.
    "Well, we checked out his place a couple times, he doesn't seem to be home," I shrugged myself. "Unless there's somewhere else he could be; I don't know anything about Fae geography."
    
         

| Top |