AUDIENCE

As Rain was helped off in another direction, I was ushered through one last set of service tunnels by two young men in some kind of uniform: black pants, long-sleeved Nehru-collared shirts of forest green, and sharp, asymmetrically tailored black vests. However haute-couture their clothing, their bearing was unmistakably martial as they brought me to a dingy, unfurnished room without any opening but the door we’d come through. I feared it was some kind of jail cell until we came to a halt facing one of its blank walls, and the fellow on my right reached forward to seize a previously invisible handle attached to a tall, previously invisible wooden door, on which was carved another elaborate tree. I nearly smiled at the now-familiar trick. One becomes blasé so quickly in fairyland—especially after being assaulted with fire and lightning in a subway tunnel. They could have flown me to Olympus on the back of a swan at that moment; I was too shell-shocked to care anymore.

Beyond this entrance, we entered a long, high-ceilinged arcade, elegantly paneled in some fine, dusky wood, with parquet floors in elaborate geometric patterns. A row of high French windows to our left looked out on lovely, sunlit, formal gardens—though we hadn’t climbed a single stair that I could recall from the subway tunnel.

“Aren’t we still underground?” I asked one of my two guards.

He smiled politely, but didn’t answer.

Before I could press him further, a very attractive young woman appeared from a doorway ahead of us. She wore a tasteful cotton summer dress, a single string of pearls, and carried a tumbler of clear water, invitingly frosted with beads of condensation. She came toward us smiling down at me as sweetly as Doris Day, and said, “You must be very thirsty.”

And, you know, suddenly, I was.

“Drink this,” she said, handing me the tumbler.

And, being an idiot, I did.

I came to on my feet, who knows how much later, still flanked by the same young men, but standing now before the most impressive door I’d seen that day. It was carved of black glass, or obsidian perhaps, with stars in it: a veritable Milky Way twinkling from depths that must have been illusory, even if the door were several feet thick. The tree I’d seen on so many other doors that morning was elegantly carved on this one too.

“What is it with you people and trees?” I asked unsteadily, still feeling queasy and disoriented.

Neither man so much as glanced at me in response. The one to my right just leaned forward to press a hand against the starry door, which swung inward, apparently without assistance. Then I was walked through it, straight into a forest.

I gaped up at the towering evergreens around us, wondering just how long I’d actually been ‘asleep on my feet.’ Not only were we definitely above ground now, I doubted there could be trees of this sort—or of this tremendous age—anywhere within the state, much less within the city I had come here from. “Where are we?” I asked. “How did we get here?”

“Your questions will be answered shortly,” said the man to my right, beckoning me to follow as he started down the narrow, winding path before us.

“Where are we going?” I pressed, all too aware of how easily an inconvenient person might be ‘misplaced’ here.

“The Lady has asked to see you,” said the man to my left, turning to look directly at me for the first time since we’d left the tunnels. “A great honor, and a sign of exceptional trust.”

I didn’t wish to undercut their ostensible goodwill by asking why The Lady was meeting me in a forest, but I still feared that I was being hoodwinked again—and wondered where I might ‘wake up’ next—if I woke at all.

For all my anxiety, the woods were astonishingly lovely. Immense tree trunks lined our gently rolling path like cathedral pillars. Pale sunlight dappled the forest floor through a silver mist of shredding fog. Trillium and fern, forget-me-not and tiny yellow violets, columbine and spikes of foxglove bobbed on a playful breeze, cool and damp and green. Bursts of birdsong issued from the trees, and spring peepers croaked in the high ferns bordering a chuckling brook that crossed our route several times. The way was speckled with mushrooms: some large and solitary, red or white or yellow, others shelving tree trunks, or forming rings and clusters of orange, brown, or violet in the thick carpet of moss.

As we came around a sharp bend, two startled deer bounded off into the foliage. I watched them disappear, then looked back at our path as it emerged into a clearing, and stumbled to an astonished halt. Rising within a stand of four massive cedars at the clearing’s center was a soaring structure so lovely and strange that I wondered if this could be even the same world I had awakened in that morning.

It seemed arranged more like an ascending raft of oyster mushrooms than a ‘building.’ Its architectural style was unknown to me: some mix of Asian, Scandinavian, and…Craftsman perhaps, constructed entirely of what might have been living wood, bark, moss and branches. The harder I looked, the less certain I became about whether it had been ‘built’ at all, or simply grown there.

The closer we came, the larger, lovelier, and more impossible it seemed. By the time we halted before a double doorway twice our height, covered in the most meticulously carved rendering of their ubiquitous tree that I’d yet seen, I could see that what I’d taken from farther off for rough and irregular, natural textures was actually an unbroken lattice of beautifully carved vine and leaf motifs, punctuated with fabulous wooden flowers and creatures. I stared up, open-mouthed, at this impossible mansion soaring above us like the womb from which all of ‘Art Nouveau’ had originally sprung.

My two guards stepped to the double door, each laying a hand on one of its panels. They bowed their heads, closed their eyes, and waited until the doors swung inward—once again without visible assistance—then waved me through into the loveliest room—or garden, perhaps—that I had ever seen.

The wide, curving space was defined by walls of amber-colored, finely finished wood, crisscrossed in elaborate designs of some darker polished trim. Artfully paned and leaded windows framed lush forest views, while above us hung the mere implication of a ceiling. Delicately curving wooden beams angled upward, supporting irregular swaths of ivory-colored plaster overhanging the edges of the room, sheltering a few clusters of gracefully curved and polished furniture. Most of the space directly overhead was open, allowing cascades of lush vegetation to tumble in. Higher still, back-lit in misty sunlight, soaring trunks supported a swaying canopy of rustling leaves—or, for just an instant, from the corner of my eye, perhaps just further columns, beams, studs and rafters artfully contoured to convey the sense of great leafy treetops. I thought again of the impossibly beautiful room that had appeared from nowhere earlier that day—if it had actually been ‘that day’—and wondered if all of this could be just more illusion?

I couldn’t quite bring myself to believe that an entire forest could be so convincingly fabricated and maintained by sheer mental power. But neither could I fully trust my senses any longer. Concepts like ‘possible’ had become extremely fluid abstractions.

As we crossed the chamber’s patterned slate floors toward a small arched inner wooden door, I heard songbirds and the distant tumbling of water, increasingly unsure whether we were inside yet, or still outside, or whether any such distinction mattered here. The scene was so surreal that I began to wonder how much of this might even be just some lingering product of whatever they had given me to drink. Whenever that had been.

The inner door was opened just before we reached it by a solemn, fair-haired boy who looked six or seven years old at most, dressed, as everyone seemed to be here, in black and green. His tousled head poked up through an odd, oversized green collar that hung down around his shoulders, plunging to a point at his waist. He bowed with innocent gravity and swept an arm back to invite me through.

My guards remained ‘outside’ as I walked forward and the door was closed again behind me by the lad, who led me into another chamber, also open to the sky and draped in vegetation. Beyond even larger, grander windows, a distant waterfall plunged into a forest pool. The polished wooden furnishings were, once again, of some style almost but not quite Art Nouveau, including several lovely glassed cabinets, and a large round central table of polished burl, at which an astonishing woman sat playing some kind of solitaire with painted cards like none I’d ever seen. She laid down the card she had been holding and looked up at me, her welcoming smile echoed somewhere high above us in a perfectly timed trill of birdsong.

The solemn little boy went to stand beside her, and stared back at me with unnerving intensity for a moment before gazing up at the woman as if awaiting an answer to some question still unasked. She smiled sadly back at him, then reached out to ruffle his hair. “You may go now, Jordan. All will be well here. Find Father Trout, and tell me what he has to say when you return, alright?”

He bowed slightly to her, glanced back uncertainly at me, then left the room with stately calm that seemed unnaturally beyond his age. Both I and the lovely woman followed him with our eyes until the door had closed behind him. Only then did she look back at me and smile again.

Her simple but elegantly ruffled dress of black flared slightly from the waist to just below her knees. Her slightest movement made it sparkle much as the obsidian doorway had; as if she were clothed in a moonless alpine night. Her thick white silver hair was swept back and up in a burnished tumble, unadorned but for two gleaming silver pins. Her face, sculpted by age but virtually unwrinkled, was more regal than any I had ever imagined. Now I understand how much of this must have been ‘broadcast,’ but then I had hardly even started to understand their ability to ‘sing,’ as they call it. I just thought she was lovelier than any woman of any age that I had ever seen. Realizing that my mouth had fallen open, I snapped it shut, and tried to think of anything to say. I had expected to find Piper’s mother here, and had no idea who this woman was, or whether I should bow, or speak at all before I had been asked to.

“So, Matthew, is it?” said the woman. “How goes your charmed new life? Still hope to rule the world by twenty-five?”

Though her question should perhaps have seemed mocking, it conveyed something closer to commiseration; as if we’d both been learning painful lessons lately.

“Pardon me, ma’am, but… are you… The Lady?” I asked timidly.

She nodded gravely.

“Then, I’m confused. The woman who…changed me into this said she was Piper’s mother. But I thought Piper’s mother was The Lady.”

Her smile became chagrined. “Ah. Yes. I should have thought.” She reached up and drew the pins from her hair, which curled and darkened as it fell around her shoulders and suddenly far more weathered face. As she stood, her starry black dress tumbled into tattered layers of faded color, lengthening nearly to the floor. Her shoulders sagged, making her seem shorter than she’d been. In the twinkling of an eye, she was the woman I remembered.

“I could hardly have sat just outside Anselm’s house that night undisguised,” she said, even as she shrugged back into her regal siren’s form.

“Oh,” I said quietly, awed at the nonchalance of what she had just done. “But…if he was there watching, how come he didn’t see what happened?”

She smiled impishly, and sat down again. “Merely hiding my appearance would have accomplished nothing if Anselm or his household had overheard our talk that night. I made very sure they saw nothing but your battered corpse and an old bag lady debating with herself about whether she dared strip it clean before some other opportunist beat her to it. Trading on unexamined expectations often works just as well on our kind as it does on yours.”

Well, yes. Of course. After everything I’d already seen, how had I failed to anticipate her answer? But this begged a second question. “If he pays so much attention to that alleyway, wouldn’t he have seen the paramedics take a boy next morning from where his troll had left a dying man the night before?” Her smiled faltered, making me fearful that I’d said something wrong. “I mean…everyone seems pretty concerned about…making sure he doesn’t know…”

“Whatever happened the next morning,” she said quietly, “was no more my doing, or my concern, than was what came of your wish.”

“Meaning…what, exactly?” I asked, surprised at my own temerity. “Are you saying someone else did this to me?”

She gazed at me without expression for a moment. “My chancellor informs me that he chose to share certain speculations of his own with you, regarding matters I declined to share with him.” The remark seemed a touch petulant. “I wonder sometimes if the man is not too clever for his own safety.”

“Are you saying he was right?” I asked, wondering again what time, or day, this might really be, if she and Rain had already debriefed such things. “Some god did this?”

“I am saying nothing of the kind,” she replied. “All I am saying is that if Anselm and his retainers somehow failed to notice what was happening in their own courtyard the next morning, that was none of my doing.” Her expression became pleasant again. “Will you not sit down and make yourself comfortable, Matthew?” She gestured at a chair across the table from her own, and I did as asked. “You have many other questions, I am told.”

She was right, of course. I’d gained even more of them since entering her chambers. But, now that I was finally here in front of her, I could not think of any way to ask the most important ones without sounding unthinkably rude and ungrateful—just as Rain had warned.

“I’m sorry,” I found myself saying instead. “For all the trouble I’ve caused. None of this was Piper’s fault. I was just so unprepared. I had no idea…anything like…” This was not at all the encounter I’d imagined when Piper had found me railing at the unfairness of it all. So much had happened in so few hours. So much in me had changed. As she sat listening to me now, The Lady’s gaze seemed more compassionate than any I had ever seen, even on my own mother’s face. “I have…no idea what to do now,” I said, mortified to find myself near tears. “I didn’t mean to seem ungrateful, or get anyone in trouble. I just don’t know how…to live…this way.”

She nodded sympathetically, without any hint of even a withheld I told you so. “My chancellor is on his way to join us. We will discuss what can be done to help everyone navigate this trying passage. My daughter has been summoned as well.”

“She’s okay then?” I was further embarrassed to have forgotten that Piper had been left to get past Anselm’s thugs alone. “Are you still being attacked by those…people?”

“The so-called attack was over, I believe, before you’d even been admitted here.” Her voice betrayed the first real displeasure I had heard since my arrival. “It should never have happened, and will doubtless make all of this much more complicated. But that is not your worry, Matthew. You are quite safe here now, as is my daughter, who arrived more quietly not long after you did.”

“I’m relieved to hear that,” I said, realizing that if anything had happened to Piper, I’d have felt responsible. “Is she in a lot of trouble?”

The Lady laughed. “Oh, always! But not as much as she may think—on this occasion, anyway. You did leave her very little choice this morning.” Even this was said as if my disastrous tantrum had been almost endearing somehow.

“So…that was just this morning?” I asked.

She looked puzzled. “Your encounter with my daughter?”

I nodded.

“Well…of course it was.” She studied me with visible concern. “Are you feeling well?”

 “Yes. But…they, uh…gave me something earlier. And then…I woke up here. Wherever this is. I wasn’t sure how long I’d—”

“Oh, that.” she looked distressed. “I hope you will forgive us. That would never have been contemplated had we not thought ourselves under attack with no clear understanding yet of who you were, or what you were doing here. It is not every day that one of the Andinalloi drops in on us. The last one was…at least a century ago, I’m fairly sure.” She seemed momentarily lost in memory. “Half dead of exposure, poor man. He did not stay long.” Her gaze returned to me from whatever she had been recalling. “But how rude of me not to have offered you refreshment.” She waved her hand, and somewhere I heard a small cascade of lovely chimes. “They’ll bring something in a moment. Food and drink should revive you.” She grinned. “And I will sample some of everything first, of course, to reassure you.”

Embarrassed yet again, I looked up at the forest canopy where her ceiling should have been, trying to find the chimes I’d heard. “So, is any of this real?” I asked. “Or just…”

“Real…” she mused, more as if puzzled by my meaning than in answer to my question. “I have always preferred open air to ceilings. Does it bother you?”

“Oh! No, it’s lovely! All of it.” My face was warmed by a new wave of embarrassment. “I just…am still not sure where this is…or how I got here.”

“Ah. Well, that is a very large question, isn’t it,” she said, as if agreeing with some point of mine. “Perhaps we should wait to address it until everyone’s arrived.”