Midwinter

Queen Mab reclined on a floating platform overlooking the construction site of her new city. The platform was covered and decorated with flowers; a hundred different varieties. She plucked a purple foxglove from its stem and chewed it thoughtfully. Behind the chaise where she lay a servant fanned her in a steady rhythm.

The scene below pleased her. The new city of Mab would be larger than the last. Her architects had arrived at a design that was both pleasing to the eye and also more imposing, better to send forth into battle and easier to defend. Her apartments were now being installed over the superstructure. From them she could peer over the battlements, calling out orders to her troops below, the clouds near enough to touch.

All was on schedule; the base of the city would be finished before the summer quakes came to topple it. She would fly again soon.

Some of her ministers could still not understand why she preferred her flying cities. They were children; they whispered behind her back as if she could not hear every word spoken and they plotted as if their schemes were not as transparent as gossamer. But they were easy to manipulate and that was all that mattered.

They prattled on and on about finding new lands on which they could settle and build their staid villas. They wanted metropolises that would stand for millennia, never moving, testaments to the builders. Long ago she had tried to explain to them that nothing was ever built that did not one day fall to ruin. They pointed to the Great Seelie Keep in response and she only smiled behind her hand. That too, she told them, would one day fall, and the sound of its falling would be heard across many worlds. She would see to it.

But she was a gracious empress, was she not? She allowed them their invasion of Avalon, let them see for themselves what a trouble it was. She sent only the worst commanders, certainly, and purposefully gave them conflicting orders so that it all came to nothing. It had taken many years and many lives for them to see their folly, but that was so often what was required. It was a lesson that every generation needed to learn.

She'd come to understand that there was no idea so foolish that each new age could not revive it.

Soon the Chambers of Elements and Motion would come to life again. She had cast her net far and wide across her empire for the best masters and this new crop was every bit the equal of the one she'd lost to the Seelie. This time the Chambers would be better protected; she would not be beaten the same way twice. And in the Secret City, high in the clouds, so high that land could not even be seen from its decks, her Magi were turning out Hy Pezho's weapons by the scores. Building them required blood and death and innocence, but it was worth the price. That which would bring Regina Titania to her knees was worth whatever she paid for it. In the end, humbling the Stone Queen was all that truly mattered. Everything else fell away; everything else was transient. Only She remained, and only Her abasement would be meaningful.

As for Hy Pezho himself, well, he had been a piece of work. So much like his father. And he had come to the same end. This was another cycle that repeated across the centuries; the men who believed they could best her. Had any of them bothered to lift their noses from their red-inked books of thaumatics and instead perused a work of history, they would have discovered that there were reasons that Mab had ruled for as long as she had. But they never learned. It grew so very, very tiresome.

Ah, but there was something else coming, wasn't there? For the first time in many, many years, Mab had begun to have those special dreams, the dreams of foretelling. As always with powerful things, the dreams were both insistent and vague. Someone was coming. Someone would come to her.

And everything would change.

But that was later; there was no use putting this in the hands of her court seers. They would only equivocate and argue and pen endless discourses that amounted to nothing. She'd once split a prophet down the middle with a wave of her finger to alleviate the boredom of him. The others had been more careful after that, but not for long enough. Never anything for long enough!

But this city before her would last awhile, and that was good. And beyond it another, and another, and another.

One Year Later

The road Mauritane walked along was lined with wild strawberries and raspberry bushes. He stopped from time to time and picked a few of the tart, pink strawberries and washed them down with water from the stream beyond. Up the road, a tiny village stood at the bank of a wide river, smoke from their cooking fires rising from the houses and disappearing into the blue sky.

He shifted his pack to his left shoulder and continued walking, conscious of the absence of the military sword at his waist. He closed his eyes and smelled the honeysuckle, opened them and looked up again at the potent blue of the sky.