Floryana rounds the corner at the top of the seventh-floor stairs and notices a large man, clad in armor, standing outside her door; because of his height, she recognizes him as Dyder Dornytter, the Captain of the Queen’s Guards—one of the few guards who can meet her at eye level when she is in boots—and realizes he should not be outside her quarters, but with Gekaryna, who should be preparing for to-morrow’s coronation.

  “Why are you here?” Floryana says.

  Dyder is, at first, taken aback by Franheska’s interrogatory tone, but he brushes it off—the fae-child has always been like this, and she will never change. “Gekaryna has been waiting for you.”

  “Why?”

  “Ask her yourself.”

  Dyder opens the door.

  Floryana removes her hat and walks into her room, placing her bag on its hook, the ring and gloves on her nightstand, her hat back upon its stand atop the wardrobe, and begins to cross toward the room’s built-in bookshelf, but pauses when she notices that Gekaryna’s cigarette box is open; she closes it carefully, not wanting the wood to make a sound, and continues to the shelf—more specifically, to the paludarium stored upon it—which is now, rather queerly, clean, and she stares at it, confused, blinking, the small muscles in her face twitching, for whoever has cleaned the glass, relaid the substrate, replanted the botanicals, and refilled the water has done an excellent job, leaving it exactly as it should be for the Froudh?lyudh Wylbloux, and she wants to be pleased that the task was done for her, and to such an exacting standard—but the gods seem determined to forbid her from keeping a schedule to-day, and so the discovery serves only to irritate her further.

  “I had that disgusting tank cleaned for you, Fran.” ?nnywella says. She pushes through the heavy black velvet curtains separating the balcony from Fran’s room, pausing to blow a cloud of smoke over her shoulder before drawing them closed; Fran, wide-eyed, before the bookshelf, stares at her the way one does at sudden morning light after being rudely woken, and ?nnywella, as she always has since they were children, finds the shocked and confused expression faintly amusing.

  “Why? I was going to do it.”

  “Well, I was walking to your room this morning to get my cigarettes and the dispenser when you stormed out; I tried getting your attention, but you seemed to be ignoring me—repeating something under your breath. I caught a part about cleaning something called a ‘paludarium,’ so I had it cleaned.” ?nnywella takes a drag on her cigarette.

  “You cleaned the paludarium?” Floryana removes the lid of the paludarium, places the wooden travel crate inside, and removes the wooden gate, allowing Sampson XV to survey his new home, but he does not; instead, he peers at her through the slats in the crate with thoughtless black eyes and a wide smug mouth, the curls at the edges of his lips making it appear that he is enjoying the crate, but she knows the anuran feels nothing but a fervent hunger—she might need to find a mouse somewhere to coax him out; Ladech should have at least one in his traps in the kitchen—will it matter to Sampson if the mouse is alive or dead? probably not; as long as the mouse is tangible and edible, he will be happy.

  “Oh, why yes, Fran, I cleaned the disgusting frog tank, of course, I, the queen, cleaned the tank.” Cigarette dangling from the side of her mouth, ?nnywella gesticulates her disgust with the hypothetical, waving and shaking them dismissively.

  “You are not the queen; you are the queen to-morrow, to-day you are still the queen-designate, so the queen did not clean the paludarium.” Floryana walks back to her desk and sits down, crossing her arms, “It is also not a tank; a tank is a large storage chamber—the glass housing is a tank, but as it is now, it is not a tank because of the way it is set up—in this case, it is set up specifically for the Froudh?lyudh Wylbloux, so it is made to replicate the lentic ecosystems the Froudh?lyudh Wylbloux traditionally inhabits in the Grand Northern forests—it is a paludarium.”

  Support the creativity of authors by visiting the original site for this novel and more.

  “Well, the queen-designate did not clean the paludarium; your brothers did. I went to them and said that you were mumbling about a paludarium needing to be cleaned, and I told them to do it. Anyways, I really do not have time to learn about how sticks, water, and dirt affect the classification of a tank.” ?nnywella hikes the right side of her burgundy day dress and removes a gilded cigarette case from the garter on her right thigh, tosses it to Fran, who flails her lanky arms in a pathetic attempt to catch it—she fails miserably, and it lands in her lap. “Please fill this as we talk. I have some questions for the ritual tomorrow. Firstly, you have never made this potion I am supposed to drink—have you?”

  “I have made it as a transdermal salve, but not as a potion.”

  “Secondly, I am going to assume you know nothing about the ritual itself, but can you tell me what you know about what happens after I drink this ‘concoction’?”

  “Do you recall when you and Sorynn made tea with—” Floryana plucks her bag off the hook, removes her purchases from Walth’s, and holds up the bag of mushrooms for Gekaryna to see. “The Swamlyudh Bloukhfwlehwym—the ‘moonspot’ mushrooms?”

  “Verily.”

  “When this will be similar at the start, but magnitudes more potent, and because you will be fasted before consumption, near instantaneous. You will also lose consciousness as aela’Luhnylla [1]—”

  The wind blows the velvet curtains inwards and apart; a silhouette of a woman is briefly perceivable on the balcony.

  ?nnywella quickly turns to focus on the balcony, but the curtains have already returned to rest.

  Floryana had seen it out of the corner of her eye but ignored it, continuing to talk—she has a thought to finish, and not even aela’Luhnylla would prevent it. “sends your mind into the realm of her subconscious flows [2] in order to show you an abstract representation of the minds of others.”

  ?nnywella opens the door to Fran’s room, poking her head out just enough to be able to ask Dyder to check the balcony but still being able to listen to Fran’s lecture.

  Dyder walks over to the curtain, armor clinking as he pushes it aside and walks out on the balcony; he sees nothing out of the ordinary.

  Floryana continues to fill the cigarette case. “But based on the placement of K?spyra [3] at the ‘tower lookout’ [4] below aela’Luhnylla—”

  The silver bell on the crown of Floryana’s hat rings as if someone had flicked it.

  ?nnywella, wishing Fran would stop saying Luhnylla’s name, turns to see nothing there.

  Floryana, unphased, continues.

  “So the ‘vision’ or hallucination could... could, be more accurate than it would usually be because of the alignment between the full moons, but this is up to aela’Luhnylla—”

  Dyder returns from the balcony and inspects Franheska’s hat but is distracted by the door to the room slamming shut.

  “But I would not doubt her, as she has always been partial to assisting the Hersts.”

  Dyder opens the door and looks down the hall; seeing nothing, he closes it and turns to Gekaryna, shrugging, “It is just us in here...”

  “Did you not notice any of that?” ?nnywella asks Fran.

  “The supernatural activity? yes, that happens when you say a deity’s name—if I had a full-copper for every time that happened to-day, I would have two full-coppers; one for saying ael—”

  “I know what it is; I was just asking if you noticed it.” ?nnywella says, interrupting Fran.

  “And I did.” Floryana throws the cigarette case back to Gekaryna.

  “Thank you for your help; I shall see you to-morrow night,” ?nnywella says, noting that Fran’s tangent had answered most of her questions—astrology and cosmology had never been her strong suit, nor had they really interested her—she prefers more tangible, pragmatic solutions to problems; so with that she heads for the door, pausing at her cigarette dispenser and running her hand over the lid and down the back, briefly resting on an engraved S.U 1055 and taking a moment to feel it beneath her fingers; she carefully pulls the plunger, the whittled wooden bridge swallow leans in, removing a cigarette from the tray with its beak, and returns to rest, and she plucks the cigarette from the wooden songbird, presses the end against her sigil-signate ring, lights it, and places it between her lips, taking a long drag and exhaling smoke out the corners of her mouth; feeling like a dragon in the books she used to read as a girl, a forlorn dragon with nothing but mounds of gold, silver, and treasures lining her coffers, though she knows she will not be lonely forever—is that not correct, Sorynn?—she returns a hand to the cigarette dispenser and drums her fingers along it; she looks back to Fran: “Actually, I will return for this in two hours.”

  Dyder opens the door for ?nnywella, they both exit Floryana’s room, and she gets back to work.

  [1] The Goddess of the Moon. Her flows are intuition (e.g. dreams, emotions, and the subconscious), mysteries (e.g. secrets, shadows, and all that lies unseen in the night), and fertility.

  [2] One of the three aspects of a deity; the other two are the ego and the canvas.

  [3] The Tenth Maiden. She is believed to guide those towards what they seek.

  [4] Astrological term, used interchangeably with full moon, when talking about the Pale Maiden.

  patreon.com/Ephemerae