Chapter 1 - Field of Flowers

 
     They were four years old, and they were bored. It was two months until festival time and that was, of course, forever. They were still too young to start magic lessons, and they had to be five to begin fighting lessons. They couldn’t summon Partners yet, or battle monsters, or go to other worlds. Life was an unconditional snore.
   “Let’s have a pillow fight,” suggested Lirael. She had very long, black, shining hair, almost to her knees, and equally black eyes.
   “And bash the pillows to splintereens!” Alanis added enthusiastically. She was the youngest by a month and had straight, shoulder-length hair so blonde it was almost white. Her most striking features were her glowing amber eyes.
   “No, last time we did that, we got into huge trouble,” Rana cautioned. Her hair and eyes were a very dark blue, nearly black, like dark sapphires. She was the calmest of all three.
   “Mother exaggerated things,” Lirael said dismissively. “It only took three days and four sets of spells to clean everything up.”
   The others burst into laughter, remembering the event. Mother had gone nearly purple with rage when she had seen the mess that her daughter Lirael and her two friends had made.
   “Let’s go play Pearls with Miss Lena,” suggested Rana when their mirth subsided.
   “But we did that the day before yesterday,” Lirael complained.
   “Well, what else is there to do?”
   The grim truth had to be admitted—there was nothing else to do. They straightened their dresses, checked their sashes, and piled down the stairs to set off towards Miss Lena’s house.
   “Don’t you dare get into trouble!” Mother yelled from the kitchen, hearing the door open.
   “We’re going to visit Miss Lena,” Lirael yelled back.
   “Mind your manners around her, or I’ll hang you by your toenails in the well,” Mother threatened.
   This was an oft-repeated threat, and the girls ignored it. They were never bad to Miss Lena anyway—she might forbid them to come back, and playing Pearls against her was their only distraction around festival time.
   The day was hot and windy, the dancing breeze providing the only relief from the sun as it beat down overhead. The garden-lined streets of the town were nearly deserted, most people having prudently decided to stay indoors to escape the heat. The girls passed only old Mr. Magiselt, working in his garden—he tipped his wide-brimmed hat in return to their shouted greeting as he worked on weeding out pristeras from among his jamastren blossoms.
   They left the heat of the road and ambled through the shady coolness of the woods, taking the long road towards Miss Lena’s house. This way passed through the Woods of Yord, along the Wind Canyon, past the Festival Stage, and around the Plateau of Ribbons, where they were forbidden to go. However, they didn’t have to go through it; from the edge of the canyon, they could simply walk around the Plateau and head over the fields to come into Miss Lena’s backyard.
   The Woods of Yord were named after the Throne of Yord, something that they knew next to nothing about. They knew the basics—the Throne sustained all magic in the Guardian World, the Throne was a painting, the Festival of Wind was held in honor of the Throne—but, in truth, nobody really knew anything else about it. Even when Rana, the most studious (in truth, the only studious), had perused the library for information, she had found nothing.
   Despite the heat, it was a nice day. The sun shone greenly through the canopy of leaves overhead, and new starflowers speckled the emerald grass. The breeze ruffled the grass and teased their skirts, and birds sang sweetly from the branches above.
   For some odd reason, the forest ended abruptly and the canyon began. It was like somebody had drawn a line that decreed the end of the forest. Maybe somebody had—they didn’t know. It was another thing that nobody told them about.
   The canyon was a spectacular sight. The raining sunlight touched the rocky walls with glowing redness and summoned sparkles in the red dust swirling in the breeze. Ribbons tied to spires of rock projecting from all sides streamed like banners in the dusty wind, and one could see the Festival Stage at the bottom of the canyon. It was a large, circular stage surrounded by ascending seats built into the sides of the canyon itself and watched over by a huge wooden eye, bedecked by more ribbons. This was the biggest occasion of the year, the time all children waited for with bated breath, and the time that was two months away, or forever, whichever came first.
   The girls strode along the very edges of the canyon, daring each other to move closer still to the breathtaking drop. Mother always flipped out whenever they did that, swearing to Yord that they were going to fall in at any second. The girls considered this pointless exaggeration on Mother’s part—before any of them could work up the courage to get close enough to the canyon’s lip (it was unusual thinking of canyons as having lips, but everyone said they did, so it must be true) that they might fall in, the canyon’s floor rose up, towering into a tall plateau.
   This was the Plateau of Ribbons. The only way up was a thin rocky trail which spiraled up to the top of the plateau, guarded by Living Robes. Living Robes were once-ordinary robes that had been animated by magic and directed to perform a specific task. They could survive for thousands of years, since they had no mortal lifespan. These Living Robes had been instructed to let nobody without reason to pass through to the top of the plateau. The girls, of course, had a reason—curiosity—but they had tried that and it seemed that the Robes didn’t take that as an answer.
   So instead, they went around the Plateau and into the fields.
   The fields had whiled away many an hour, and the girls now felt the familiar urge to simply fall down and sleep amid the flowers. The fields were simply long, endless fields of blossoms, always smelling sweet and almost always warm and sunny. It was rumored that a peace spell had been cast over it, which would explain the lethargy that always came over those who walked into it. It was an ideal picnic place, and a nice place for playing Pearls, if you didn’t fall asleep before the game was over.
   “Remember the Pearls game, everyone,” Alanis panted as they crested another gently rolling hill. “We don’t want to fall asleep yet.”
   Finally, they were back in sight of the forest. They had defeated the peace spell again.
   “First one there gets first game!” Lirael yelled, suddenly breaking into a run.
   Rana and Alanis ran after her. “Unfair! Head start!” Rana yelled playfully. She hoisted up her skirts and charged ahead, leaving Alanis behind. Rana was faster than Lirael, and was soon running beside her while Alanis puffed gamely behind them.
   Suddenly Alanis screamed. Her friends whirled around, expecting to see Alanis tumbling head-over-feet down a grassy slope, balance lost due to a piece of slippery grass, or perhaps a capricious pebble, or even an overly violent gust of wind.
   They couldn’t have been more wrong.
   Pale hair fluttering like a banner, Alanis was being suspended in midair by a dark red tentacle. The tentacle attached to a blob-like scarlet monster with an amber eye glaring in its center. It was a piece of rogue magic! Princesses dedicated most of their lives to finding and sealing these monsters with their powers. But how were two four-year old girls without a single spell or any weapons training supposed to deal with such magic? Even as they stood dumbstruck, the magic hauled its tentacle back in to examine its catch.
   Contrary to first instincts, none of the three girls went into hysterics. Living with magic for four years could do wonders for your nerves, even when you were faced with a crimson blob.
   “Plan SA!” Lirael cried.
   Rana pulled a spindle out of her sash. Lirael snatched a comb from her own sash. Alanis yanked a round mirror from her sash. The girls had planned this out once, idly wondering what they would do if magic ever attacked one of them, just in case. That just-in-case had happened. They had called it Plan SA, for Plan Surprising-Attack. The plan had been messy and disorganized, but that was when they were three. Now they were four. They could handle this monster.
   As the rogue magic brought Alanis closer to its toothy maw, Alanis clapped her mirror over its eye.
   Rana yanked a loop of thread from her spindle—Lirael’s spinning was lumpy and Alanis’ fell apart as soon as you looked at it, but Rana’s was finer and more regular than that of most girls twice her age—threw it over the magic, and hauled on it. The thread constricted and cut into the blob. Rana ran around it and pulled tighter on her impromptu garrote. The magic was soon tied up tightly, and seemed unable to escape. Or maybe it was trying to find a way to escape that didn’t involve losing its prey.
   Then Lirael raked the teeth of her comb brutally across its back.
   Abruptly the magic vanished into red smoke and a yelp of pain. Alanis crashed to the ground, and Rana quickly ran back to help up her fallen friend. Lirael stood in front of them, brandishing her comb menacingly in front of her. The monster coalesced a few feet away, took one look at the unexpectedly resourceful girls, and fled, jumping high into the air and soaring into the forest.
   “What was that?” Lirael gasped, her legs wobbling like pasta.
   “Rene…rene…” Alanis tried.
   “Renegade,” Rana supplied.
   “Renegade magic,” Alanis finished. “We need to tell Miss Lena.”
   “ASAP,” Lirael added. ASAP was an expression from another world that meant “now.”
   The full enormity of the situation broke over the girls abruptly, and without another word they whirled around and ran for Miss Lena’s backyard.
 
      *  *  *
 
   To their surprise, Miss Lena was already in the backyard, and she had a friend with her. They weren’t too sure who the buttery-yellow haired lady was, but it didn’t exactly matter.
   “MISS LENA!!!” Alanis screamed.
   “We saw a monster!!” Lirael cried, managing double exclamation points.
   “In the fields!” Rana ejaculated.
   “It grabbed me!”
   “But we fought it off!”
   “And it got away!”
   Miss Lena stayed remarkably calm. Her hazel eyes took in the panting girls; Lirael with her black hair flung all around her, Rana with her spindle trailing a goo-covered thread, and Alanis with red and yellow ooze on her mirror, which she had not put away yet. Her friend was not so calm.
   “A monster?” she asked quickly, standing up so fast that she knocked her chair over. She was dressed in scarlet leather, with a short skirt and high red boots. Her hair was done up in two fluffy ponytails and tied with purple ribbons.
   Miss Lena continued to act relatively serene. “Girls, allow me to introduce you to Miss Tiara. Tiara, these are Lirael, Rana, and Alanis.”
   The three small friends flushed brilliantly red. Miss Tiara? She was the youngest Princess ever to take on a Partner. She had begun training when she was eight, summoned her first partner at eleven, and visited her first world when she was twelve. Then her friend Mr. Kagetsu had stolen the Throne of Yord, when she was eighteen. Miss Tiara had gotten the Throne back, but somewhere along the line, her best friend, Miss Sarah, had disappeared. Nobody would say why. Everybody seemed to know why, especially Miss Lena, but they of course remained in the dark. Miss Tiara was now engaged to Mr. Kagetsu (this didn’t make sense to them, as she had gone after him with orders to kill him if he wouldn’t give up the Throne of Yord, which he hadn’t).
   “Miss Tiara?” Rana asked, trying vainly to straighten Lirael’s hair.
   “Very nice to meet you!” stammered Alanis, attempting to straighten her own.
   Miss Tiara did not seem to hold with many common customs of greeting.
   “Enough of that, girls. Where was the monster? Where did it go?”
   “Tiara, we’ll need the Elder’s permission to exterminate it.” Miss Lena stood up without knocking her chair over. Miss Lena had long blue hair like Rana’s, and was wearing a ankle-length white dress with a frill along the bottom and a red sash around the waist. She was always dressed decorously, while Miss Tiara, it was well known, was quite flamboyant in her tastes. Whatever that meant.
   “Not for this,” Tiara retorted. “It attacked…which one of you?” she added, her green eyes flickering over the girls.
   “Me,” Alanis said.
   “Alanis,” Lirael added, correctly interpreting Miss Tiara’s pause as a request for the girl’s name.
   “It attacked Alanis, and is running amok. It’s clearly in our right to seal it, not to mention the harm it might cause if we leave it alone. I’ll take care of it myself if I have to,” Tiara added, as Miss Lena did not seem convinced. “And you know I will.”
   “I suppose,” Miss Lena sighed, picking a blue flute off a small table by her chair. The young girls watched wide-eyed. Was Miss Lena going to do some magic?
   She was. With a few low trills on the flute, green magic wrapped up around the five girls.
   There was a whirling, spinning, wet feeling, and cool currents—most soothing after the exertion of running in the heat of a hot sunny day—flowed over them. Then the dark greenness dissolved into nothing, revealing the fields. And not far off, a mere twenty feet away, an ugly crimson blot upon the tranquil sea of the earth—
   “THERE IT IS!!” Alanis screamed.
   Miss Tiara wasted no time. She leapt into the air, and a ribbon of gray wind exploded from the ground and wrapped around her feet. Something black materialized from her hands, and the Princess flew at the monster like an arrow.
   The two collided. The monster was cleaved in half as the blackness coalesced into a spear and Miss Tiara swung it viciously downward. It recovered quickly, however, and managed to squish out of the way of the next swing.
   Miss Tiara backed off slightly on her wind pillar, then rushed forward again. Her spear stabbed straight for the thing’s eye, but before she hit it, it burst like a bubble. Miss Tiara flung her hands out in front of her to block it, but it reformed its substance around her, forming a rigid red cocoon.
   “Miss Tiara!” Lirael shrieked.
   But Miss Lena was dragging them away.
   “But what about Miss—?”
   Lirael was interrupted by a loud but definitely muffled bang from inside of the monster, and it suddenly exploded again, each piece surrounded by magical fire. Miss Tiara had her arm outstretched, palm pressed against where the monster had been. Her spear had disappeared, and in her palm, surrounded by mystic symbols, had opened a wide, golden eye.
   Alanis squeaked and hid behind Miss Lena.
   The monster recollected dizzily only fifteen feet away from them. Miss Tiara did not charge at it this time—she laced her fingers together, flung them outward at the monster and then crossed her arms in front of her.
   A cross of flame burst from her arms and span at the monster. The cross hit the thing and exploded, sending flames everywhere. The fields caught on fire.
   Miss Lena raised her flute. Ribbons of water wrapped around the instrument, around her fingers, down her arms, over her shoulders, off into the air. But this was very bizarre water, more like water turned into a solid while retaining its liquid properties. It coalesced in the air, forming a sheet of water that grew and grew and grew. Arms like snakes peeled off from the sides. Almond-shaped eyes opened near the top of the sheet, glowing violet in its dark blue body. White foam glistened over its snake-like hands and at the bottom of its wave-like body. Shadows swam about in its depths.
   The girls clustered close. This was a Water Elemental, a being of pure water shaped like the waves of the sea. Such things were capricious, fierce, and dangerous to deal with. An Ancient Elemental of Water could easily decimate an entire city in the Guardian World if it so desired, and if you had recently angered such an elemental, it was wise to stay away from all water travel and to drink nothing but milk for a week. Why would Miss Lena summon such a thing?
   Miss Lena said not a word, but the Elemental seemed to be reacting to some type of command. It rose up, growing higher and higher on the water fed to it from Miss Lena’s flute. At first ten feet, then twenty, then thirty, then forty…
   When it had reached fifty feet and stretched behind them like a wall of pure water (which, technically, it was) Miss Lena seemed to give it another command. It curled like a breaking wave, and just as the little girls realized what it was going to do, it crashed down upon them.
   There was not even time to scream. Ten thousand tons of seawater, complete with salt, seaweed, and even fish, crashed down on top of them. Foam crashed. The fires were all instantly extinguished. Instantly, a circular area of forty feet was submerged beneath ten feet of water.
   Then Rana realized that they weren’t dead.
   They weren’t even wet. Lirael, Alanis, Miss Lena, and herself were surrounded by what looked like a half-globe of air. No water or anything else passed into their small sphere. Miss Tiara was inside of another such sphere. However, the monster was in much more trouble. It had no sphere.
   A black, bat-like thing swam at the monster, tagging it with its long, thin tail. Rana searched her memory and came up with a name. “That’s a manta ray.”
   “A what?”
   “It has a poisonous tail,” Miss Lena agreed, nodding. “Very good, Rana. It’s common on a planet called Earth.”
   “I don’t want to visit Earth,” Alanis decided. “What’s that?”
   “An octopus. It has a big beak in the middle of all of those arms, and it can eject a cloud of ink to make a quick getaway if it’s threatened. See, look…”
   The monster had just tried to attack the weird-looking octopus. Instantly it had vanished in a black cloud. The girls watched, amazed.
   “I thought Earth didn’t have any magic.”
   “That wasn’t magic. It was ink, spread into the water.”
   Rana, Alanis, and Lirael exchanged glances. Miss Lena had it wrong. The octopus clearly had the magic ability to create darkness.
   But other, more familiar creatures were also attacking. A swarm of sharp-toothed fish native to the Guardian World called ariko chewed at the monster’s tentacle. Multiple tiny silvery fish schooled in a tight, dizzyingly complex pattern in front of the monster’s eye. Four smallish sharks and seven barracudas took evasive action, swimming quickly about and chomping what they could.
   However, it seemed that not even Miss Lena could sustain a Water Elemental for long. The submerged area grew shallow and shrank as water and fish flowed back into Miss Lena’s flute, returning to wherever they had come from. The flowers and grass of the fields were not even wet—not one drop of water had been left behind.
   The monster was a sorry mess. Black goo oozed glutinously from dozens of teethmarks. Greenish ooze came from a couple of clean cuts, presumably from the manta ray’s poisoned tail. Its golden eye had dulled and clouded over. In fact, it was not in very good condition.
   Miss Tiara’s hands flashed in the gesture of a spell, tracing out complicated lines that her shamanic powers guided her along.
   “Guardian spirit, ye who hast rebelled against our law. By the power of my spell, I seal thee! Ye shall be imprisoned for all of eternity! I cast thee into oblivion, until the day when ye shall be summoned forth again by my powers. Know thy mistress, Tiara! Recognize my power! The power of the Throne of Yord! I Seal Thee! ealThe!”
   As Tiara finished the sealing spell, a line of light opened underneath the monster, turning into a shining eye. The eye blinked, and golden sparkles began to circle around the creature. The monster keened horribly, but despite its frantic efforts, it seemed unable to escape the whirlpool of sparkles. The tiny golden lights whirled faster and faster into a cone of golden brilliance, which shrank into the eye and was gone. The monster went with it, leaving behind one last, despairing cry. Then the eye blinked shut…and it was over.
   The field was completely undisturbed after the battle. Not a drop of water or goo remained. Miss Tiara was as unruffled as the field—she tossed one ponytail airily over her shoulder and turned to Miss Lena.
   “Shall we return?” Miss Lena asked quietly. “Girls, you came to play Pearls, didn’t you?”
   “Um…y…yes,” Lirael managed.
   “Oh dear,” Miss Tiara sighed. “I’m awful at Pearls. Lena, Kagetsu, and S—”
   She paused, then said, sounding slightly forced, “Lena and Kagetsu used to beat me all of the time.”
   The three exchanged glances. S? Surely Miss Tiara had been talking about Miss Sarah…There was only one way to find out. Maybe they would finally find out what had happened to her.
   “Excuse me, Miss Tiara,” Rana said shyly, “but were you about to say Miss Sarah?”
   Miss Tiara looked quickly at Rana, something behind her eyes burning like fire. Was it anger? “Tell me, Rana, what do you know about Sarah and…the three of us, including Kagetsu?”
   “Not much,” Rana admitted. “It’s not in any books, you see, Miss Tiara. I read in an old, old, dusty book in a back corner of the library that Miss Sarah grew up with you and Miss Lena, and that she’s Mr. Kagetsu’s brother. I even found a picture of her when she was our age. But after she’s about thirteen there’s only one sentence about her. I memorized it—it said, ‘Sarah became a guard of the Throne of Yord when she was sixteen, and has rarely been seen since.’ Everything else about Mikadzuki—that is her last name, isn’t it, Miss Tiara?” Miss Tiara nodded absentmindedly—“is about Mr. Kagetsu, and there’s not much about the three of you when you were eighteen—when Mr. Kagetsu took the Throne of Yord.”
   Miss Tiara and Miss Lena looked at each other, and something flashed between them. Lirael gave Rana a Good work look, but Rana barely noticed. “Miss Tiara, what was it that happened to Miss Sarah? She should still see people, even if she is a guardian of the Throne.”
   Miss Lena looked down at the girls, as if suddenly realizing that they were all there. “Come now, you three. We should get back to my house. Maybe you can teach Miss Tiara how to play Pearls better.”
   Rana knew when to stop pushing. The greeny darkness wrapped around them and again the whirling wetness washed over them. When it had dissolved, they were back in Miss Lena’s backyard.
 
      *  *  *
 
   “So how did your Pearls games go?” Mother asked when they returned.
   “We were attacked by a monster!” Alanis said proudly. “In the fields! And it grabbed me, but we fought it off, all by ourselves!”
   “Then we went to get Miss Lena, and she was talking to Miss Tiara,” Rana added. “And we all went back to the fields.”
   “And we got to watch Miss Tiara and Miss Lena fight and seal the monster,” Lirael concluded. “I can’t wait until I’m old enough to do that!”
   Mother half-exploded. “You met Miss Tiara?! You had better have been polite! Oh my goodness…and a monster? Are you girls all right?”
   “Of course we were, with Miss Lena to protect us,” Rana said loyally.
   “And of course we were polite, Mother,” Lirael said, exasperated. “This was Miss Tiara, for Yord’s sake! I mean, she could have fried us!”
   “We asked about Miss Sarah,” Alanis said, a shade too innocently. “What happened to her?”
   Mother’s mouth opened and closed a few times, but nothing came out.
   “Miss Tiara wouldn’t tell us anything about her either,” Alanis said. “Oh well. I should be getting home.”
   Lirael, Rana, and Alanis escaped quickly, before Mother could explode with her other half.
   “I’m coming over again tomorrow,” Rana said quietly. “We’re gonna find out about Miss Sarah. I don’t know exactly how, but we will.”
   “Me too!” Alanis added.
   “Then we swear not to rest until Miss Sarah has been revealed!” Lirael said solemnly and without the faintest clue what she was actually saying.
   “Right!” Rana and Alanis said, with barely any more of a clue.
 

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