They ended up staying a little over a week at what Emily insisted on calling “the monastery.” Nobody mentioned the raven-headed man, though Emily thought she saw him crossing a hall a few days later, wearing bandages and a loose tunic. He waved but kept walking.
Unlike Dry-Eyes’ village, which was a pretty normal-looking place once you disregarded the scale and everybody’s wings, the monastery reeked of magic and wonder. The percentage of human-shaped Folk was about equal to the chimeras, monsters, and full-blooded animals, so Emily quickly lost the last of her uneasiness about talking people who weren’t bipedal. After getting spectacularly lost one afternoon, she begged a ball of string from a horrifying but sweet spider with a woman’s face who lived down the hall.
Emily never got direct answers to anything she asked. She was still in the dark on who her parents were and if being in the Sidhe did anything for her beyond removing the necessity of eating and using the bathroom, but she was getting good at weaselling out information obliquely. Her working theory was that it wasn’t so much that fairies wanted to confuse people as they were locked by habit into an eternal cycle of being total dicks to each other.
The Polaroid camera was a general hit. While talking with the siren, who’d introduced herself as Devora by writing on a slate she carried around, Emily showed her the photograph she’d taken of her room. At Devora’s emphatically underlined insistence, Emily snapped a picture of the siren that developed with a faint blue aura shining around the siren’s silent mouth. The two women decided that the photos must show the true nature of things; the runes in Emily’s room were protective spells built into the walls of the monastery; the aura, Devora’s muted siren song.
Emily showed her how to use the camera and waited outside the siren’s sound-proofed room while she took a picture of herself singing. The resulting image was beautiful: Devora’s eyes closed in bliss, a blue and green spectrum spilling from her open mouth.
They brought the photographs to a room Emily decided was some sort of scrying lab. A motley assortment of Folk demanded the camera and would have shot all of her film if Emily hadn’t more or less thrown a tantrum. Limiting them to the last six shots in the loaded pack, she watched as they tested the camera’s abilities with surprisingly scientific precision. A hare, larger than any Emily had ever seen, with ears that brought him over knee height, bossed his way into leading the experiment.
“This is so much more modern than a mirror.” The hare blinked thoughtfully. “Though being limited by the quantity of film is a notable drawback.” He talked over his shoulder, trying to keep the current test subject properly centred in an inky, ornate hand mirror. An assistant floated over, gingerly holding a freshly shot photo by the edges. Emily peered between them, comparing the picture to the reflected image. In both, a seven-tailed fox perched on a stool, paws cradling a porcelain jar. Emily glanced back at the human model, who was pretty, but unremarkable and clearly bored of sitting still so long. The fox in the mirror looked equally bored. But, in the photograph, sparks of purple surrounded the fox and the jar had an angry red shimmer that reflected on itself into apparent infinity, like two mirrors facing each other.
The hare shivered with excitement, ears twitching. “These photographs give you so much more information than the mirror! A person’s specific abilities displayed as coloured auras—I really wish you’d give us enough film to attempt properly cataloguing what the colours and forms indicate—you can even see hints of the infinite space folded within the djinn’s jar!” The hare shook his head and lowered the mirror. “Thank you Kitty, make sure you sign that thing back in at Archives.”
The slim woman on the stool rolled her eyes. “You think I want to haul this jerk around more than I have to?” She walked over to look at the photograph. “Not a bad likeness.”
The hare nodded, handing the photo to his assistant to file. He sighed, “Yes, and the last one for now. When you get more tails I’d love to document it, your increased perceptive abilities should present as a more complex series of auras. I wonder what colour and form they’ll take?” He looked at Emily. “Are you sure you can’t spare us more film?”
“Yes. And it wouldn’t do you any good without the camera and I’m keeping that.” She waved goodbye to Kitty, who was having a one-sided conversation with the bottle as she left. “Maybe when I’m done with this quest I’ll bring you back a camera and film of your own.”
“That would be nice.” The hare’s face grew serious. “Of course, that’s if you finish this quest of yours in a shape to do so.”
“It’s not my quest, it’s a quest I’m doing.” She leaned down to pat the hare’s shoulder. “And I was made for it, practically literally, so stop worrying.”
Emily had been glad to find the majority of the monastery supportive of her plans, though she had the feeling that a good part of their interest was in how the laws and her self had been manipulated. They were all scientists and scholars first. “Seriously though, it’ll work out. Anyway, what do you make of this?” She handed him the snapshot she’d taken in the grasshopper field.
The hare nibbled at his lip. “This doesn’t fall in with anything we’ve encountered yet. Why didn’t you show me this earlier?”
“I forgot, I guess.” Emily shrugged. “Point being, how about I put in a fresh pack of film and let you use the first shot on me to see if you can make sense of it.”
She loaded the camera and sat patiently on the stool in front of a dark sheet the hare had hung so the monastery’s protective spells wouldn’t influence the photographs. “Do I need to smile?”
He shook his head no, so Emily let her face relax into the neutral expression she’d used while getting her state permit. The camera click-whirred out a sheet of film and the hare looked at Emily through the mirror while it developed.
“I’m not picking up anything here.” He handed the mirror to his assistant and looked at the photograph. “You should come look at this.”
Emily slid off the stool and peered at the photo, comparing it with the earlier shot. There was the same obscuring, undeveloped blur, but now it was cluttered with rainbow flecks.
“It looks like a TV tuned between stations.”
“What?”
Emily shook her head. “It’s not worth explaining. Anyway, weird.” She took the camera and returned to her room, thinking.
The writing desk’s magic was much simpler than the camera’s.
“The other end of the letter slot connects to the mundane world somewhere, most likely around your aunt’s home. It’s like the jumps, but only big enough for a letter.” Dry-Eyes buzzed over a branch that Emily had to duck.
Emily had guessed as much about the desk. She tried to remember to write home every other day, even just a short note. She hadn’t felt homesick at all, but Janice was probably worrying. “So the next jump will be easy?”
“Yes, thank goodness. And we’ll arrive just a day’s walk from the castle.” Dry-Eyes landed on the arm of a bench and Emily stood next to her.
They hadn’t seen much of each other during their stay. Emily figured it was probably nice for Dry-Eyes to take a break from playing guide and Emily was glad the sprite didn’t feel obligated to hang around while she explored the complex or bummed around the scrying lab. Since they were due to leave the next day, the two had met in the summer garden to hash out plans.
“Do you know the process for going to see the king?”
“Yes, and I’ll tell you if you sit down. You’re looming.”
Emily sat and listened. Like any storybook old-timey kingdom, it was possible to petition the king, though it helped to have some sort of influence. That Emily was a chosen one on a quest was good, but they needed an extra angle.
“The king could, if he chose, leave you mired in bureaucracy for ages. You’re going to be confronting him with an embarrassing bit of his past and he’s not necessarily going to want to look at it.”
Emily narrowed her eyes. “But you have an idea?”
“Not at all. I’m a guide, not your advisor.”
Taking advantage of the strong, cloudless sun that shone just for this garden, the two stretched out on the prickly grass. Dry-Eyes lay close to Emily’s head so she wouldn’t have to yell. Emily rolled a cigarette.
“Remind me of your plan again.”
“Get to the castle, claim my birthright, petition the king.” The sun glared red through Emily’s eyelids. If she had any say in the matter she’d spend years here studying and hanging around the gardens. But she didn’t have any say and never had. “I know it’s a shitty plan.”
“It’s strange that your people sent you here so unprepared. With all this time to plan they gave you nearly nothing to go on.”
“I like to think it was a combination spending their time of trying to meet the rules for the chosen one clause and thinking the plan wouldn’t work. In books the hero knows nothing about the strange land he’s deposited in, his origins are murky—maybe it’s all part of the game.” Emily turned on her side, looking at Dry-Eyes half buried by the grass. “They told me the theory was that things would fall into place naturally.”
“That’s very confident of them.”
“I wonder what my birthright is.”
Dry-Eyes flopped a copper-brown arm across her eyes, blocking the sun. “Child, I have no idea. History is written by the victorious and whoever your parents were wasn’t something I could find in the libraries here.”
“You looked for me?”
“Of course. You got me curious. It doesn’t matter anyway; if all goes according to this tenuous plan then your birthright should become glaringly obvious after we reach the castle.”
This post is part of The Audacity Gambit – Serialised. Learn more about when the book was first published here, see the archive and overall content warnings here, and find more of my writing here. I’m over on both Comradery and Patreon, if you feel like supporting my creative endeavours. If you’d like to subscribe to this story, here’s a handy email box for you: