Pierrot's Song

Chapter 7 - Council Business-1

Chapter 7 Council BusinessDrifting in and out of memories and sorrows, Mina was oblivious to the passing of time until something snagged at her awareness, jolting her awareness back to her cage of stone. Only when she saw the cell door was open did she grasp at a fading memory of its scraping sound.

Someone stood in the doorway. The cell was completely black, but a flicker of light in the hall illuminated a silhouette of a cloaked figure. Whoever it was, they were about her height, and moved with absolute silence, beckoning her to come with them. Mina shrunk against the cell wall and shook her head. The figure padded into the room, their outline fading in the darkness. Without speaking they beckoned again.

Mina fumbled to her feet. Her legs shook. She nearly twisted her ankle on the uneven floor as she crossed the room. Before she reached the visitor, they turned and passed through the cell door. She followed.

Six cloaked figures crowded the hallway. Two carried flaming torches, which gave Mina enough light to see each cloak was a different colour, forming the dark, muted rainbow she had seen in the Council chambers and at the Festival of Light. These were the ceremonial robes of the Council of Muses, each colour representing a different muse and guild of artisans. A wave of nausea seized her. They had come to complete their sentence.

One of the Council gestured for her to walk behind them, and another fell into place at Mina’s back. The ominous parade led her in silence through the dungeon and into the palace proper. With three of the Council ahead of her and three behind, Mina could see no chance of escape, but she tried to remain alert to any possibility. Exhausted, barely awake and desperately cold, she stumbled along, unable to think of a way out. She had escaped capture once before by turning into a dove using Tarya, but right now she barely had the energy to walk, let alone transform her very being. All she would need would be an unguarded door though.

They walked through small, unadorned servants’ passages, and after a time they reached a doorway with an empty sconce on either side. The Council members with torches placed these in the sconces, then the parade of cloaked figures led Mina through the door. She stopped abruptly when she saw where they were. It was the palace divina, with its wall of windows and great tapestries. They had come in from the opposite end to the great glass doors. The wonderful sweet smell she remembered from the Festival of Lights lingered in the air.

Being underground, Mina had lost all sense of time. Now she could see it was night. The divina was dark, and only the faintest of light flickered behind the circular windows from the black sky outside. Her life had never felt so shadowed and without hope, yet she had spent so many hours in divinas lately, as a storyteller and healer, simply coming here made her feel less fearful. She turned to her captors, who were now arrayed in a semi-circle before her.

‘Well. Here we are,’ she said. Her voice carried in the vast space. ‘Do your worst.’

The moment that followed was the length of a breath, yet stretched into eternity. Mina wondered what it would feel like once her golden thread was broken. Perhaps it would not be so bad. Paolo had seemed happy, all his cares gone. Such a state held great temptation. For too long now the burden she felt had been growing. Heal the dreamers. Stop the players. Find Mourini. Too much for one person, newly come to her powers, to carry. At the same time, the burden was hers, and part of her welcomed it. With every healing she knew she had made someone’s life whole. Now, when it was all about to be taken away from her, she realised her healings had given her a place in the world. She was no longer Papa’s daughter, or Paolo’s little sister. What she did mattered. And now it was going to end.

The figure in an orange cloak took a step toward her, sleeves falling to reveal slim, olive-skinned arms that reached for the hood, flicking it backward with a swift twist. Black hair tumbled free as Mina found herself staring into the green eyes of Miranda, Uberto’s daughter.

‘You … you’re on the Council of Muses?’

Miranda’s eyes widened, then she let out a low chuckle. One of the other cloaked figures moved forward. She raised a hand, signalling them to step back.

‘I didn’t like you when we met in Aurea,’ she murmured. ‘You abandoned the troupe. It didn’t just cause trouble for my parents. The queen was most unhappy. I nearly lost my job. But then you helped my father.’

Mina remembered the horror of seeing Uberto age after their last confrontation in Tarya. Minutes had become years, transforming his face and limbs so he lost his youthful air and looked his true age. Or older. She struggled to see how she had helped him.

‘How is he?’

‘As well as can be expected for someone who had the life force sucked from him.’

‘I didn’t mean …’

‘Neither did I. Forget I said that. You freed him, Mina. There are some things worth more than youth and power. He hadn’t been free in a long time.’

She lunged and seized Mina’s wrist. ‘Let’s do this thing.’

‘What?’ Mina struggled to free herself, but Miranda’s grasp was unflinching. She was dragged to the Creator’s chair, an intricately carved U-shaped seat. Miranda released her, shoving her toward the seat, and Mina had to catch herself on one of its arms to stop herself falling across it. Last time she was here, she had been too far away to see the carvings. Up close, even the briefest glance told her the seat depicted the seven muses, or lost princesses as she now knew them to be, each wearing a tunic of simple cut but lavish decoration, and each absorbed in her creative art.

Miranda gestured to the chair.

‘I’m not going to sit there,’ Mina responded.

The other Council members were silently forming a circle around the chair.

‘Do what you want to do but I’m not going to just sit down and accept it.’

‘Fine!’ Miranda snapped, and dropped into the chair herself, spinning sideways and draping her legs over one of the arms.

‘You know,’ she continued, eyes sweeping over the walls as if she were just here to sightsee, ‘I get the feeling you don’t really like me.’

‘Why should I?’ Mina pushed Miranda’s legs off the chair’s arms. ‘You stole my brother, you tried to stop me leaving Aurea, and now you’re going to break my thread …’

‘What?’ One of the Council members standing behind Mina blurted the word. She spun around. ‘What?’

He removed his hood.

‘Paolo? You’re on the Council too?’

Behind her, Mina heard a rustling sound as Miranda stood. Her mocking laugh came from close to Mina’s ear.

‘I stole your brother? That’s what you think?’

At the same time Paolo’s face brightened with understanding. ‘You think we’re the real Council!’ He hurried forward, cloak dropping to the floor, and hugged Mina. Around them the other cloaked figures disrobed. Sofia, Luka, Lisette, and Jal all rushed to her.

‘You thought we were going to break your thread!’ Lisette exclaimed. ‘Oh Mina! We should have told you who we were sooner.’

‘We needed the disguise to get through the palace,’ Jal added.

Mina was trembling. One minute she had been in a dungeon, certain her life was about to be destroyed. Now she was in a divina, a place where she always felt safe, surrounded by those she loved. Luka stepped in and embraced her, his arms firm. His soft whisper brushed her ear. ‘Sorry.’ He took a step back.

‘It’s not very safe to be an artisan at the moment,’ Sofia said softly. ‘The palace meeting we went to had two purposes. One was to declare there has been a rise in Arcani, and the Council of Muses is deeply concerned.’

‘“Monitoring the situation” was the term used,’ Jal interjected bitterly. ‘No mention that “monitoring” means false accusations and robbing the accused of their gifts and lives.’

Taking a step back, Mina stumbled against the Creator’s chair. ‘They’re going to keep breaking artisans. And the king supports this?’

Sofia shook her head. ‘I don’t think so. The Council were running the meeting, hovering around with their faces hidden.’

‘Which can be very intimidating,’ Mina said dryly.

Luka glanced at the pile of cloaks discarded on the floor. ‘Sorry!’

Sofia continued. ‘I suspect the summons came from the king because it would be impossible to say no to.’

‘But does that mean he knows what the Council are doing?’

Miranda’s sharp voice broke through their discussion. ‘There’s no point debating something we don’t have any way of knowing, and it won’t help us anyway. We need to get on with it. This is our only chance. Someone will realise I still have keys to the palace soon, and they might even remember Uberto is my father and work out I know where the leader of the Gazini players is hiding.’

Everyone murmured agreement and reformed the circle around Mina. Sofia placed herself directly in front of her. She took her hands, her deep voice soft and reassuring.

‘The princesses created this ritual. Eulalia writes about it in The Tale of Tarya. After their mother died, they thought they would combine their powers and try to speak to her. Eulalia says they felt like Tarya was just a breath away.’

‘Did it work?’

‘Not in the way they expected. They didn’t reach their mother, but they caught a glimpse of the heavenly realms. Or at least they thought they did. I didn’t think the ritual itself was in the book, but there was an accident when some men came to take the masks …’

A cold hand clutched Mina’s heart.

‘Roberto had the gold mask. But I didn’t see Uberto’s key mask. Did they get them both?’

Sofia nodded. Mina barely breathed as she spoke again. ‘You said the meeting had two purposes. What was the second?’

Luka took her hand. ‘They took all the player masks.’

‘What? No! We need them.’ Mina’s knees buckled beneath her and she sunk into the Creator’s chair. ‘That’s it. We can’t win. We needed the masks.’

Sofia kneeled in front of her, placing a hand on Mina’s knee. ‘Let’s just see what happens with this ritual, shall we? The princesses understood Tarya in ways we’re just beginning to see. Maybe we don’t need the masks.’

Mina stood. Sofia took her place in the circle around the Creator’s chair, indicating for Mina to stay at the centre.

Luka began by singing the melody they had discovered in the hidden cave of the lost princesses. At first, he kept his voice soft, the song a gentle piping. As he began to repeat it, Mina felt Tarya beckoning her and gave in to the call immediately. She and Luka stood opposite each other in the Place of Dreams, the glowing, pastel landscape shifting constantly. Silver orbs drifted and bobbed, the waiting dreams of the world. Even now, when she knew parts of Tarya as well as her own home, she couldn’t help but be struck by its beauty. As the song continued, images rose and fell around them, forming then dissolving almost too quick to see. Mina caught a glimpse of herself and Luka standing, hands clasped, dressed in ornate garb, but the dream blew away faster than a thought.

Luka sang in full voice now, his exquisite tenor soaring and swooping around them like a winged creature. As he began another repeat, Lisette appeared in the Place of Dreams, a wooden flute to her lips, weaving a gentle descant through the music. As though blown away by a cheeky zephyr, the Place of Dreams dissolved around her, and the three of them stood near the Waterfall, crystal drops brightening the air around them.

Out of nowhere Miranda appeared, emerging from a pirouette to glide into an elegant pose, limbs extended. She danced around them, a living embodiment of the melody, stepping, gliding, leaping, her every step filled with emotion and beauty. Once again their surroundings changed. They stood now at the Gateway, the great arch linking Tarya to the waking world, and Mina could see a vast dream landscape spread out before her. Then Paolo appeared. In each hand he held a stick to which was attached a silk ribbon of myriad hues, which he twisted and twirled. The ribbons twined around Miranda, never close enough to catch her limbs, their movements slow as if underwater, in perfect time to the music. And now it seemed they stood again in the divina, but Mina knew, from the glowing auras that surrounded her companions, they stood at the Horizon, the etheric realm close enough to the real world that echoes of place survived.