Book 7, Chapter Twenty-four – Hare-raising Housework

Pandy walked through memories of Avington House. She’d started in the recent past, seeing Empress Glory and Eleanor bent over some book, with the Empress speaking in a low voice, looking more serious than Pandy had ever seen her. Then Eleanor and Isidor and an angry turtle were served suspiciously fuchsia biscuits by a very small dragon. Pandy herself, hopping down the hall, checking on the children before she returned to school. That was early on, before Isidor started at Kestrel, because Pandy went out the kitchen door, and there was no Soot.

From there, the memories became progressively less clear. The house itself went from its current semi-repaired state, back to the way Pandy had found it. It was dark and silent, filled with dirt, cobwebs, and broken furniture shrouded in cloth.

Rarely, very rarely, someone would flicker through the space, in no particularly linear fashion. A person with a fiery elemental, smothered in water. A young man fighting Dark and Water with Water of his own, flood against flood, only to fall to a poisoned dart. Each time, their bodies were fed to the house, blood and bone and magic sustaining the existence of the elementals tied to it, while also degrading those very elementals, until they were little more than cutting edges and voices on nonexistent wind.

Eventually, a young man survived to flee the house. He slipped out into the depths of night, his arms full of books. His clothes were threadbare and worn, but he looked both determined and hopeful. Time rewound, allowing Pandy only a few more glimpses of him, scribbling madly, crouched over the desk in the office, then back down to the Secret Lab, horror on his face. Finally, but also first, he stood in the front hall, two suitcases at his feet, staring around in wonder.

Back, back she went, the images becoming noticeably sharper now, the faces clearer, most of them showing the hallmark green eyes of the Avingtons or some other family resemblance. After a few dozen, Pandy thought she could have picked an Avington out of a room of a hundred people. Which caused an uncomfortable feeling in her possibly nonexistent gut, because those eyes really were Very Familiar, but it was one that she would have to examine later.

Slower and slower the years crept by. The family shrank and swelled. Sometimes the house was filled with children and laughter, and sometimes it was just a few, often angry, people. There was a woman, her expression bitter and hateful, and two old servants in the rooms Glory now occupied. Pandy only caught glimpses of the woman and the servants as they became progressively younger, bitterness fading into something that wasn’t happiness and wasn’t beautiful, but also wasn’t yet terrible to behold.  The woman became a child, and more people joined her, parents perhaps, and her father snuck down to the secret lab, scribbling in the book there as he did things that Pandy didn’t even want to glimpse.

Generations passed. Passed. Paused. A man stepped up beside her, and Pandy didn’t need to look to know that it was Preston Avington, though his voice was overlaid with another, deeper and more hollow – Nox. “After Pierce… I knew none of the others could be trusted with the stone. I held my country above my family, and in so doing, failed both.”

A sword rose and fell. Blood soaked the chair in which the victim sat. A corporeal General Avington, thinner and more weary than he had seemed when seen through his son’s eyes, sobbed.

“I promised my queen that I would keep the stone safe,” the Apparition of Preston Avington said as his dead son rose and walked, pacing and shouting in his so-comfortable cell. “And what could possibly be safer than my own home, protected by both me and Nox? How could I not know that my son would find it? That it would call to him, as it calls to all of us, whispering of power and glory?”

Pierce grew younger, his hair less gray, his face less lined. The room was torn down around him, becoming the storage area Pandy would have expected, complete with empty wine racks beside his bed. Then he was gone, and the space was just a stone-walled room. Then the stones beneath her feet fell away, lifting up like dominos being removed from a table, revealing the dirt beneath. That dirt was dense with carved symbols, vining and thick, filling the space from wall to wall.

Turning to Pandy, General Avington’s dark form merged with another, more solid one. A much, much younger Preston stared at Pandy, his face tired, as it always seemed to be, but no older than Pandy was. “Wait and watch,” he said, and the door opened behind him.

Someone entered, moving forward for the first time since this bizarre experience began. She was tall for a woman – almost as tall as General Avington, who was probably somewhere around five foot ten – with the pale blonde hair Pandy instantly recognized from Eleanor. Her eyes were a rich, warm brown, rather than the ubiquitous royal blue, however, and there was a faintly olive undertone to her skin, contrasting with the light color of her hair. That, combined with a square jaw and eyes that tilted up at the outer corners, combined to make her fierce and exotic, rather than beautiful.

General Avington instantly fell to one knee, his head bowed as he murmured, “My queen.”

Nora’s wide mouth curved as she gave a throaty laugh. “Get up, Preston. There’s no one around for you to impress with all of that.”

Preston stayed where he was, and when he spoke again, his voice was choked with emotion. “You honor me, Your Majesty. I came to you a supplicant, a kin-killer, a thief, and you have raised me to-”

Now Nora actually looked slightly irritated. “Get up, Preston. I’m the daughter of a landless lordling, and you’re a bloody prince. It’s embarrassing when you do this.”

Preston stilled, then looked up. “Embarrassing for whom?”

“Both of us. Come on. I haven’t got all day. Otto’s expecting me back in time to help with the kids.” She held out her hand, and Preston took it, allowing her to ‘help’ him to his feet, though he was easily twice as broad as she was. Queen Nora might be tall, but she was willowy. Honestly, she probably would have been called gangly if she hadn’t been a queen. Pandy had seen a lot of statues and paintings of her, and her more feminine attributes had definitely been exaggerated in those depictions. In Pandy’s world, she would have been scouted to be a haute couture model.

Once Preston was up, Queen Nora stepped back, cracking her knuckles as if getting ready for a hard day’s work. She looked around approvingly, carefully walking around the room as she examined the marks carved into the dirt floor. Or, now that Pandy was looking at them, not carved exactly, but more like they’d grown there of their own volition, without any tool marks.

Becoming more serious, Nora turned back to Preston. “Are you certain about this? Remember, this will tie your family to this house so long as your bloodline persists.”

Preston nodded. “I know. I don’t-” His fists clenched at his side. “If we had had a house like this before, we wouldn’t have had to flee.”

“Or you wouldn’t have been able to flee,” Nora said dryly, and there was something of Augustus in the tilt of her brows as she looked at the general. The coloring was different, certainly, but the shape of the jaw, the slope of the brows, the way her hair curled where it was escaping from her tidy updo; even after all the intervening generations, Pandy could see the resemblance.

Preston pretended not to have heard her gentle chiding, walking to the very center of the room, where all of the in-ground designs came together. “Nox. Nyssa,” he said, and the two elementals materialized beside him, forming in rising ribbons that wrapped round and round into representations of humanity. Nox looked much as he had when Pandy saw him last, but Nyssa was taller, slimmer, younger and more… wild? She wore shadows like regalia, her hair little more than a suggestion surrounding a surprisingly pretty face.

Nora looked at them, and for just a moment, sadness flickered through her expression. Then she shook it off, and reached up to grasp at a slim golden chain that hung around her throat, dipping down beneath the neckline of her dress. With a tug, she revealed a small, oval stone caught in a filigree cage. Closing her eyes, she murmured, “Ismara,” and the stone flooded the room with glory.

Nox and Nyssa barely held onto themselves beneath the full force of the Light, and when the figure of a woman stepped out as if passing through a door, they flinched. Nox lost most of his shape, flattening back to the natural form of an Apparition, while Nyssa simply melted, her substance entering the channels that had been created on the floor, like a small black river.

“Nora,” Ismara said, her voice unlike any Pandy had ever heard before. It was bells and breeze and wind whistling through stones and the raw call of a bird of prey, but Nora stood straight beneath it and smiled like someone who had just met a friend after too long apart.

“Ismara,” the queen said, then gestured around. “We have one last foundation to fill.”

“Then your city will be done?” the goddess asked, and Nora chuckled.

“Not for a long time, I’m afraid,” the queen said. “But just like we’re making the foundation of a house, these houses are the foundation of the city.”

Ismara nodded, then turned to look at Nox, who had managed to gather himself enough to form a generally man-shaped figure again. She held out one hand, opened her mouth, then paused, her brows drawing together as her gaze traveled past the elemental and landed on… Pandy. To Pandy’s surprise, however, the goddess didn’t say anything, just nodded and returned her attention to Nox.

What followed was an artisan plying their craft. Like the cobbler in Lanthorne Court, who had turned wood and leather and nails and glue into a perfectly fitted boot, Ismara grasped something in Preston, and Pandy released a silent gasp as she recognized it as the same kind of essence she’d seen when she was slightly more demonic than usual, after she abandoned her bunny body.

Like what she’d seen inside Bryan, this was a deep purple-black that ate the Light, but unlike Bryan’s, this magic flowed readily, though it twisted and turned uneasily within the goddess’s grasp. Ismara ignored it and Preston’s clear distress, twisting a single strand out of the mass and tugging on it. Nox began to unravel. Ismara laid that raveled thread down into the foundation of the house, and it filled the sections of runes that Nyssa’s lesser power had been unable to reach. Nyssa wasn’t left out, either, it was just that her thread was already where it needed to be, so Ismara simply plucked it and nodded in satisfaction.

Not all of Nox was used up in filling the runes in the floor, but Ismara wound his thread around her fingers, a cat’s cradle of magic, and drew it out until the elemental was nothing but thread, pulled taut, and his string and Nyssa’s tugged on Preston, unwinding his power into the spell too. Then, without a word, Ismara reached out and caught at something within Pandy as well, that thing that had felt like a barbed hook had just dug into something essential within her, and Pandy spooled out into a skein of string – wound up, looped into, part of something much, much larger, and she couldn’t breathe, but she didn’t really need to breathe and it hurt but also finally felt like she was complete, part of something she’d lost before she knew she had it in the first place.

The world went white.

Augustus removed the lid from her coffin, and Pandy gasped, her heart pounding in her throat as she looked into worried gray eyes set in a face so similar to the one belonging to a queen who’d died at least a hundred and fifty years ago. She could feel the house around her. Every gap, every scarred board and broken pipe, and she stumbled out of the coffin and into Augustus’s arms and she was home.