Autumn Rose

‘Light, very light. Too wide for a rapier, yet too long for a small sword.’ In my hands I did the same with his sword, though I refrained from speaking my thoughts aloud. Too heavy and stout for my liking. Rapier, though sharpened entirely along both edges, much like my own. ‘Swept hilt, very intricate. The grip is engraved with your coat of arms. Your grandmother’s sword, I presume?

A familiar fire started to flicker into life along my breastbone. I swallowed. ‘Yes.’

‘I thought it must be. It was transferred to you on the day of her funeral, wasn’t it? I remember it being blessed atop her coffin.’

I didn’t pause to consider the stupidity of what I was doing as I found myself raising his sword to rest under the curvature of his jaw, my breathing shaky; my hand steady. His look turned to complete confusion, as though he could not work out what he had said to offend, before it returned to one of calm assuredness.

‘I suggest you lower that.’

I did not move. His voice was soft, yet the authority clear as he spoke again. ‘Remember who I am, Duchess. Lower it.’

I know you know.

‘That’s an order!’

Behind him I could see the breeze stirring the uppermost petals of the blossom tree, snatching them from the branches to the ground, to be trampled beneath the feet of the students aware that the bell had rung.

Beyond that tree there was a sea of black; rough, weathered stone slotted in at odd angles between them. Amongst those dark pillars, motionless, was a girl, caught in the transition between child and adult, wrapped in a black shift and veil, concealing the tears that would not fall. Behind her was the family tomb that would not shelter her grandmother’s corpse, because she was afforded the honour of being laid to rest in the Athenean cathedral. Instead, the oak coffin stood atop the plinth in front of the tomb’s entrance, draped in Death’s Touch and a royal blue velvet cloth bearing the Al-Summers’ coat of arms; the late duchess’ sword and dagger there too, alongside some of the prettier tokens left by mourners during her lying in state.

‘Is there a death? The light of day at eventide shall fade away; from out the sod’s eternal gloom the flowers, in their season, bloom; bud, bloom and fade, and soon the spot whereon they flourished knows them not; blighted by chill, autumnal frost; “Ashes to ashes, dust to dust!”’

The blessing called and the mourners swayed in the light breeze, the faintest trace of water in the wind, as the clouds angered at the slow service, so endless for those whom it hurt the most.

‘Come, Autumn, you must sprinkle the earth now. Step up, that’s it, so they may see you.’

With trembling knees and a lip clenched between her teeth, the girl stepped forward, taking a handful of dirt from a silver bowl and letting it drift onto the roses, and then repeating the gesture twice more as the master of ceremonies called.

‘Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust. Earthern carn earthern, ashen carn ashen, peltarn carn peltarn!’

With those words, the pallbearers came forward as the girl gave a final deep curtsey, the late duchess’ son and five of the elder Sagean princes lifting the coffin high into the air and beginning the slow procession through the fallen fields to the cathedral, just visible beyond the treetops. As it passed, the onlookers, hundreds in total, bowed, King Ll’iriad Athenea joining them in a show of unity that only a state funeral could bring.

Behind her veil, the young duchess let a tear slide down her scarred cheek.

‘Autumn?’

The sound of my name snapped me from my trance. My eyes refocused, finding the glinting tip of the sword pressed to the crimson scars of his upper jaw.

‘Autumn, don’t force me to hurt you.’

He didn’t need to worry, as my rigid arm was already slackening; he took the opportunity to raise his left arm and tentatively, like I was a wild animal that might pounce at any moment, to press his fingertips to the blade and push it away from his neck. I didn’t resist.

‘Autumn, I didn’t mean to offend—’

I cut him off as I forced his lowered sword into his hands and took back my own, sliding it into its sheath. I tried to mumble something resembling an apology, but the words would not come and instead, I fled, humiliated and desperate to work out why I had let my emotions get the better of me.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Fallon

She didn’t say a word to me throughout tutorial. It was as though she was making every attempt to blot my very existence from her mind. Why?

When the A level English class started she stuck her hand out for the sheets that had arrived on the desk, just as I did the same. When our hands brushed, I thought for a moment that a flint of fire from my fingertips had caught her knuckles and that I had burnt her – there was a spark of a very different sort travelling the length of my arm – because she nursed her hand to the deep V of her blouse like I had hurt her. Yet there was no expression of pain in her face – not the physical kind, anyway. Instead, her lips parted into an O, her eyes widening.

She turned away quickly, and I thought she breathed, ‘Idiot.’

I recoiled in shock but didn’t say anything. I just couldn’t reconcile the image of the emerging woman with that of the twelve-year-old girl who, even then, had managed to stun the court with her looks and stage-managed character.

Where is the granddaughter of the old duchess who would never even speak against a superior, let alone press a sword to their throat?

‘In pairs, I want you to analyze the soliloquy I have assigned to your table. Off you go,’ Mr Sylaeia said.

I turned my attention away from her and to the sheet.

‘To be, or not to be, that is the question …’

I groaned as I read through Hamlet’s dramatic contemplation of the pros and cons of suicide, before my gaze returned to her. Her gaze flicked towards me.

‘What?’ she snapped. ‘Why do you keep looking at me?’

Fates above, is it illegal to look at her now?!

I thought fast and scanned the sheet. ‘Disease imagery.’ My pen hovered above the paper. ‘There.’

‘I don’t need help,’ she insisted, despite her blank-looking page.

My eyebrows lowered a fraction. ‘He said analyze in pairs.’

She bowed her head and hid behind a curtain of hair and began scribbling across the page.

So she’s not going to share, then? Fine.

I adopted the same tactic.

She said very little once we had finished with the soliloquies, only answering questions when she was picked on. As the bell sounded, she repeated her ritual of slowly, even sluggishly, packing her bag, as though very tired – or in the hope I would leave before her. But I did not leave (I did not fancy throwing myself to the hordes), hovering beside the door as Mr. Sylaeia called her over to his desk. She dragged her feet, hand clutched so tightly around the strap of her bag that her knuckles whitened. She seemed to know what was coming.

‘Precocious. Presumptuous. Insulting.’ He handed her back what looked like an essay. Her head drooped. ‘Not to mention the fact it was far below your usual standard.’ He glanced towards me, still hanging beside the door of the classroom that was now empty except for us. I pretended to become very interested in an explanation of adverbs on the wall. ‘Autumn, I’m disappointed. I’m the one person in this school that can truly understand your predicament – do you really think it is any different amongst the staff? – yet you repay me with such rudeness.’ I raised my eyebrows to the wall, wondering what on earth that essay contained to affect him to such a degree.

‘Sorry, sir,’ I heard her mumble.

‘You will be sorry after a detention on Thursday evening.’

She inhaled sharply and I thought it safe enough to turn back. ‘No, sir, please! I have work that evening and that’s following a twilight textiles lesson anyway.’ Her face was aghast and panicky, her eyes wide and shaped like almonds. I was aghast for a different reason. She has a job?!

‘Then your detention will take place after textiles, and you will have to miss work.’

‘Please, sir, any other evening, lunchtime even. Please, they are already threatening to sack me!’

‘Because of poor attendance?’

Her head drooped again.

‘As I thought. I wonder, Fallon, would you mind staying behind on Thursday, too? There’s a lot of summer work for you to catch up on, and Autumn will very quickly get you up to speed.’

I didn’t answer immediately. She wanted to protest, that much was clear, but her manners prevented her mouth from ruining the perfect straight line her lips created. I felt a tiny pang of resentment – what have I done? – but nodded. ‘Sure.’

That resentment increased a notch when the room went silent as they conversed with their minds, leaving me out. Yet it shattered when I caught a glimpse of her lips quivering as she turned away, her hand rushing to her face.

‘Fallon, would you mind stepping out of the room for a moment, please?’

I didn’t want to. But then I remembered the pained expression she had worn when holding the sword to my neck. I did as I was told.

Outside the door, which slammed on its self-closing hinge, I tried to demystify what had happened that morning. Yet the deeper I dug, the less it seemed to make sense. We had been friends as children! We played kiss chase and staged play weddings and bossed each other about. Now it seemed like she hated me?

A few minutes later, the door opened and a blonde blur passed without pausing. She had already shot past before I had prised myself away from the wall I was leaning on. I hurried after her down the stairs. She glanced back towards me and her pace doubled, as she half-jumped the remaining steps.

‘Autumn!’ She didn’t stop. ‘Autumn, I was just wondering if you want a lift home on Thursday? It’ll be late—’

I never got to finish my sentence as she whirled around, mouth agape; lips rolled back slightly; red, puffy eyes narrowed so that they slanted. She didn’t say a word, but her expression said more than words could. She remained like that for a few seconds before she turned back around and left; her movements slow and sluggish once more.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Autumn

How all occasions do inform against me indeed.

Fallon appeared in my history class. The whole A2 class appeared in my history class. The explanation was simple: the usual history teacher was off on maternity leave, and the current unit for our class and the A2 class was Sagean history, so Mr. Sylaeia would teach both classes together in addition to English. I knew that my look when he entered the room was one of stewed fury and betrayal, firm in the belief that he could not have thought of a crueller punishment than detention with the prince. When the latter entered I urged Christy and Tammy to sit either side of me, walling me in. They didn’t seem too pleased that we had used up all the seats in our row, leaving no room for the prince, but it didn’t matter. He chose to sit on the other side of the room, squeezing in at the far corner of a desk with some of the other A2 students. I was surprised, but relieved. Yet the horseshoe arrangement of the desks still meant that we faced him. I inched my chair around to the left, to face the board.

It would be an understatement to say that Sagean history was not a popular topic. A groan circulated the room when it was announced and I felt my cheeks flare up in shame. Even the prince’s cheeks tinted pink. He hid it well, resting his head in his hands, his elbows on the desk.

My eyes bounced back towards the desk, cursing myself for looking. There they rested until a textbook arrived. I flicked it open, finding paragraphs dedicated to customs that were second nature to me, yet so alien to those around the room. I closed it, knowing that as a child, I had studied books at my previous school that mirrored these in every way, except that they were about humanity. Looking up, the Prince caught my eye, a grin on his lips as his eyes darted down to the book and back up. He thought it amusing. I thought it a tragedy.

Mr. Sylaeia started with the same rhetoric about the prince as he had used in registration, and when he talked about the Extermino, he was greeted with the same fearful silence … and my heart went just as cold.

Mr. Sylaeia wrote three words on the board: ‘The Dark-Beings’. ‘I know you all hate this topic, but it’s compulsory! So let’s start with something simple. Can anybody explain a little about the dimensions, and name the nine different types of dark-beings and the powers they possess?’ Mr. Sylaeia asked.

Even though everybody had to know the answer, nobody spoke up until tentatively, I lifted my hand.

‘There are nine dimensions, and humans in every one. Each dimension is a rough parallel of the rest. We all share a cultural memory, because whatever happens to the humans in one dimension happens in another, because the nine parallels of a country are one state, not nine different states. The humans and dark-beings co-operate through the Inter-Dimensional council …’

I trailed off to seek approval from Mr. Sylaeia, unsure whether I was explaining it clearly. Even though I was trying to ignore him, I glanced back to the prince, suddenly embarrassed that I was explaining something he probably understood better than me.

Mr. Sylaeia nodded for me to continue.

‘We live in the first dimension, and it is the domain of the Sage. There isn’t a hierarchy amongst the beings, but we have the strongest, most versatile magic. There isn’t much we can’t do, so long as it doesn’t drain nature too much, which is where we take our magic from if we need more than what is in our blood. We’re ruled by … by the Athenea, from a small country of the same name, at the northern end of Vancouver Island.’

Now I really was blushing. He should be explaining this!

‘Then there are the vampires in the second dimension, ruled by the Varns in England. And yes, they are the ones who kidnapped Violet Lee. The vampires rely on consuming blood for energy and to top up their magic, which is what keeps them alive. The Damned in the third dimension are magic users too, but they have to make a blood sacrifice to use it … but by returning blood to the earth, they can use very powerful magic.’

Finally, the prince chipped in. ‘The fourth dimension is host to the shifters, who can shift between their human forms and spirit animals. They look a lot like ghosts when they do, and they live mostly in the mountains of central Asia … before they revealed themselves a few centuries ago, people used to think they were demons.’ His eyes lit up as people turned their attention to him and his more exciting explanation.

‘The fifth and sixth dimensions are very similar, because more forests have been preserved compared to here. That’s where the winged people and the elven fae live … they are both very beautiful beings, and nomadic. They don’t have a monarchy, and they don’t use modern technology. They are so at one with nature they don’t need it.’

‘The wolves in the seventh dimension can transform into human-like creatures at will, and the maengu in the eighth are water creatures, who can also transform to come onto land. And then in the ninth … well, we call them the phoenixes, and they can only take on a human form for one month in every nine.’

He left it at that.

Like actors in a play, the prince and I only spoke when directed by Mr. Sylaeia. The rest of the class was infuriatingly silent. They knew nothing, even when Mr. Sylaeia asked them for the basics that would have been obvious to any human elsewhere.

Eventually, he gave up, turning to me, his tone much softened now. ‘The fas, or basic principles, if you will, Autumn.’

‘The wielding of energy, preservation of the balance of nature, courtesy in respect to rank, loyalty to Athenea, and strict adherence to the Terra Treaties.’

Though Sagean was a tongue stifled beneath the other, it still felt strange to speak those words in English, when I had repeated them as a mantra in my native language as a child. They did not belong in this language. This tongue could not convey the beauty and binding power of those words.

Mr. Sylaeia pulled out the board marker that lived in his shirt pocket, scribbling out each of the fas. ‘The first four are quite self-explanatory: magic; a respect for nature, especially concerning diet and more recently, climate change; etiquette; and loyalty to the Sagean royalty. Does anybody know what the Terra Treaties are?’

I could see Fallon perk up, gazing around the room as his eyes became wider and wider. His lips parted.

‘Nobody?’ Mr. Sylaeia clicked the lid of his pen shut with the palm of his hand. ‘Nobody at all?’

A chill passed up my spine at the disturbed silence. I knew there were many things they didn’t know. I knew that beyond how hot the nobility was, and who was dating who, there was no interest in my people. Yet to not know what the treaties were …

Mr. Sylaiea answered his own question. ‘The Terra is the name given to a group of treaties signed universally by all dimensions and humanity in the early nineteenth century, formalising what had previously been a set of uncoordinated laws. The Terra Treaties are the reason Autumn and Fallon are sitting in this room as guardians, here to protect the school. The Terra Treaties are what binds a dark-being, under penalty of death, to never harm a human unless lives are threatened, with the exemption of the vampires – who wouldn’t be able to survive without this exception. The Terra Treaties are what essentially keep the peace that you enjoy.’

Nobody spoke. It was not a stunned silence; the quiet of a class in awe. It was bored silence. This was not achievement to them, or reassurance, it was politics: boring, mind-numbing politics that – beyond the hot prince – did not touch upon their closeted lives. I shivered at those words; I could still remember the whispered utterance that came with their mention in the classes at St. Sapphire’s, the pride that our race had negotiated stability for all dark-beings. The treaties did not bring stability now. They didn’t bring anything.

‘They won’t hold us in peace much longer, will they?’ I said before I could hold my tongue. But I decided I wanted to continue. Why lull in a false sense of safety? ‘Humans are in conflict with dark-beings everywhere. And situations like what has happened with Violet Lee only make things worse! Meanwhile, enemies of us all take advantage of the conflict to try and make the Terra fall apart, and cause war … enemies I am trying to protect you from,’ I finished quietly, eyes bowed to my book.

The class finally broke their silence and erupted into murmurs, followed by protests about how it wasn’t the humans’ fault. Mr. Sylaeia’s eyes widened and it didn’t matter how much he rapped on the board, the room wouldn’t quieten.

I buried my head in my hands and dug my nails into my scalp. Why couldn’t I keep my mouth shut?! Now everybody would think I hated them, and they hated me enough already …

I didn’t even notice the prince had stood up until I heard his voice over the hushing room.

‘Autumn is right. The Terra won’t last much longer. The world has changed, and we don’t see eye-to-eye anymore. It could lead to war. But it won’t. Fate won’t let it get that far. What do you think the Prophecy of the Heroines is for?’

I pushed down so hard on the desk to stand up that the table moved with a groan and my chair nearly toppled over. I felt silly standing but it was an old ritual from my Sagean school, and sitting made me feel small compared to the prince. ‘And how can a few dark-beings rebuild the Terra and stop a war? What if they don’t appear in time? What if they fail?’

‘They won’t,’ he insisted, and for the first time I actually met his gaze. His forehead was set in a single line of frustration and I could feel my magic beginning to warm up my veins with anger.

‘No Heroines have appeared yet. If the vampires killed Violet Lee tomorrow, there would be no stopping a war. What happens there affects us all!’

I waited, holding my breath and almost hoping he would try and deny my logic. I knew I was right, I had seen the threat with my own eyes: the hate of the humans, the Extermino … and Violet Lee, the peculiar girl I couldn’t get out of my dreams.

‘You’re wrong—’

It was still early enough in the term for the coming of the bell to be something of a shock: as the shrill, uneven wail cut through the quiet, everybody jumped.

I packed up my things as quickly as I could and rounded the end of the horseshoe, wishing my feet would move a little faster so that I could get out before the prince finished what he had to say. All the courage that I had possessed when angry had fled, just like I was fleeing outside.

‘Autumn!’

Turn for Pete’s sake! I could feel him closing in on me, the rest of the class not far behind, never breaking from their packs.

‘Duchess!’

Then came the call that stopped me, that turned me on the spot. It was a call that summoned from the unnatural earth roots that held me in place, prisoner to hear what I knew was coming.

‘Why do you keep calling her duchess?’ It was an innocent question. Tee, joining her cousin in the ranks of the class, could not have known how much I had dreaded that very question and prayed in the last twenty-four hours that nobody would notice how the prince addressed me.

I pleaded with my lips, mouthing no, no, over and over, but when he turned to look at the younger girl and back at me, I could see in his bright cobalt eyes – they always said you could mark noble blood by the eyes – that he would not oblige.

‘Don’t you know? She is the duchess of England.’

I did not wait to hear the gasps, or the questions, because I could not bear to hear them. Instead, I turned and walked six measured paces, then took to the air.

Remember who you will one day be, child!

I do not want to think of that day, Grandmother. I do not want to think of it.

Why do that? Why be so wilfully cruel? Why deny me my choice like that? At least I could run. If it had not been the end of the day I wouldn’t have been able to escape his revelation like this. Escape him.

Though the sun created a patchwork of light and shadows below me on the town, the air was cold. The wind from the sea was caught in the jaws of the concave river mouth, funnelled along the increasingly narrow valley, stirring the masts of a tall ship moored on the Dartmouth embankment. The rigging made a soft chime that the wind carried with it, an underlying melody to the beating of water that the old paddle ferry produced and the shrill whistle of the steam train weaving along the embankment towards Kingswear. It was a small village, standing in proud opposition to Dartmouth on the other side of the river, its multi-coloured cottages rising in uneven terraces much like the larger houses of the larger town did. Over bridges, past creeks and below the village school, where the old-fashioned bell tolled to announce the end of the day, the train passed, eventually coming to a halt beside the smaller, lower ferry.

It was a world perfectly preserved, continuing on in its own isolated sphere, relying on its unquestionable beauty to bring in the tourists. Yet its isolation was why I suffered.

Finally, as time in my angst seemed to move much slower, I reached the other side of the river, the trees lining its bank broken and falling into the silt. It was a pity that the leaves had fallen so early – it was barely Septembe; empty bottles, sandwich papers and silk handkerchiefs testimony to the summer nights whose mark had not yet been erased. But that was what they got for perching on the riverbank. They were rotting. They were dying.