“Nightshade!” she hissed in fury. She shrank from him, and her smooth face contorted with despair and recognition. Holiday, what have you done to us? What have you done tome ?”
Ben shook his head. “We have done it to ourselves, each of us in turn. This place has made it possible. Magic stole our memories when we were sent here from the Heart. Do you remember? There was a man with a box. There were notes purportedly sent by each of us to the other, bait for the trap that was used to ensnare us. Some sort of spell rapped us about and sent us here, into the box . . .”
“Yes, I remember now!” Strabo growled, who in spite of having his identity uncovered still did not look like the dragon. “I remember the man and his box and the magic netting us like fish! Such power! But why was it done? look at me! How could I have been changed so?”
Ben knelt before him. The clearing was hushed and closed about. It was as if their world had stopped moving.
“We are in the fairy mists,” he said quietly. “Think about how we appear. We have become the things we most fear we might really be. You are a monster, loathed and despised, an outcast that no one wishes to look upon, hunted by all, blamed for everything that cannot otherwise be explained. And you cannot fly, can you? Your wings have been stripped away. Haven’t you always feared being earthbound? Flying has always provided you with a form of escape, no matter how terrible things were. Here, you have been cheated even of that.”
He paused. “And look at me. I am what I feared most to become. I am the King’s Champion, his handpicked destroyer, his butcher of enemies, nameless and empty of everything but my fighting skills and my desire to use them. Even my armor has become a weapon, a monstrous apparition called the Haze that eliminates any enemy who threatens. I fear killing more than anything, and so for me it comes to pass.”
He stopped himself, unwilling to say more. They did not know he was the Paladin, only that the Paladin served the King. He would not have them know more.
“Nightshade,” he said softly, turning back to her again. She crouched down like a cornered beast. “What is it you fear most? What frightens you? Loss of your magic, certainly. You have said as much. But something more …”
“Silence!” she screamed.
“Being human,” Strabo snapped. “She loses power when she acknowledges her humanness. Her emotions make her weak; they steal away her strength. She must not let herself feel. She must not be tender or soft or give love …”
Nightshade flew at him, nails raking at his face, but Ben pushed her aside, bore her to the ground, and pinned her there while she spit and screamed like a madwoman. Nightshade had been changed in more ways than one, he thought as he held her. He would never have been able to do this in Landover, for Nightshade had ten times his strength. She was indeed without her power.
She went quiet finally and turned her head aside from him, tears coursing down her pale face. “I will hate you forever,” she whispered, the words barely audible. “For what you have done to me, for what you have made me feel—all of it a lie, a monstrous deceit! That I could care for you, could love you, could have you as a woman would a man—how could I have been so stupid? I will hate you forever, Holiday. I will never forget.”
He stood up and left her lying there, still turned away. There was nothing he could say to her that would help. That she had been made to feel something for him was unpardonable; that she had been deceived into thinking him her lover unforgivable. It did not matter what she had felt before. The chasm that had opened between them would never be bridged now.
“The Labyrinth is a part of the fairy mists.” He straightened his cloak, knocked askew in his struggle. “It was Willow who called to me in my dream. She called from another part of the mists. When I went to her, I could sense that where she was and where I was were joined. I was reminded how the mists work on those who are human or have left that world. They use fear against us, to change who we are, to make us over, to confront us with that which will drive us mad. Where there is no reality but that which we create, imagination plays havoc with our emotions. Particularly fear. We are lost when that happens. We cannot control it as the fairy people do. They told me so once. They warned me against it.”