Evanescent (7 page)

He straightened and let a smirk curl his lip. “There are always other means of moving between worlds. Dark magic you can’t even imagine. So remember, do things my way or you just might find yourself an orphan. Or even better still—replaced. You do have an aunt who can take your throne if I need her to.”

“What is it you really want? Why are you here now?”

“To offer you a deal. To give you a chance to save your pathetic land and its people. To save your own life. In three days I’ll be back here…with an army. If you want your people to live you’ll come out and bow to me. Then, as a show of good faith, you’ll bring me the tear.”

“The tear? What’s the tear?”

“The Dragon’s Tear. I know you’ve found it. The cat hid the relics from me but she made sure you would have them. If you want this kingdom to survive you’ll bring it to me.”

“Esmeralda didn’t give me anything, let alone a powerful relic.” It wasn’t entirely a lie. She told me they were in the palace, but not where they were or what they were. “And even if I did have it, which I don’t, why would I give it to you?”

“Three days,” he hissed. “You, on your knees, pledging allegiance to me and giving me the tear, or this entire land will burn.”

“I’m telling you, I don’t even know what it is!”

He turned to look around the room. “Then find it. Now, I think it’s time for me to go. It’s been lovely chatting with you, my dear, but the hour is late and I do have an invasion to begin.”

“One of these days,” I called out as he started to walk away from me, “I’m going to kill you.”

“No, you won’t.” He snapped his fingers and I felt the magical bonds tying me to the throne fall away as time started again. People screamed, and then Rhys rushed forward, his sword drawn, pushing through the now stampeding crowd toward us.

“This world will be mine. No matter who I have to kill to possess it,” the Fate Maker said with a snarl. He lifted a hand and Rhys and two burly guards who’d been flanking him froze with their swords lifted to attack.

“We’ll see each other soon, my dearest one. So very, very soon.” The Fate Maker turned to smile at me, his eyes glittering with hate. There was another brilliant burst of light and I flinched as three swords sliced through the air in front of me.

Rhys’s blade stopped an inch from the tip of my nose and quivered there. I sat, looking cross-eyed at the steel blade and sighed. To think, back in the real world my biggest hassle had been gym class. At least there no one had tried to kill me.

I looked around. The Fate Maker’s light show had gotten everyone’s attention, and now, instead of rushing the doors, they were all standing there, dumbfounded, staring as Rhys shoved a razor-sharp sword in my face.

“I think you missed him.” I shook my head and tried not to look terrified. Right now the last thing I needed was for my people to think that I was afraid. Even though I was totally terrified.

“I can see that.” He pulled his sword back with a quick jerk and sheathed it. “How long was he here?”

“A minute, maybe two.” I stood as the other two guards put their swords away, and then I began to pace, clenching my hands into fists to keep them from shaking. “He froze all of you and the next thing I knew I was trapped on the throne so he could rant at me.”

“He put a spell on you?” Winston pushed forward, past Rhys’s guards, and grabbed my hands. “Did he hurt you?”

“No, but he wants some sort of magical relic—the Dragon’s Tear. It’s supposed to be like the mirror. Something that lets him move between this world and the World That Is.”

“Or what?” Rhys asked.

“Oh you know, the usual bad-guy stuff,” I said and huffed out a panicky laugh. “He has an army and they’re marching toward Neris. When they get here I can either give him the tear or he’s going to invade, kill all of you, kill my mom at my feet, torture me, kill me, and then let my aunt have the throne. I may not have all of that in the right order but I think that’s the basic idea.”

“Did he hurt you?” Rhys repeated. “Or was it just threats?”

“He just threatened me.” I closed my eyes and swallowed, trying to keep from losing it in front of everyone. “Just empty words about how he could hurt my mom. How he could go through to our world and kill her. That he’d bring her back here so that I could watch her die.”

“Allie.”

“He can’t do it. Not really. We’re here, and she’s on the other side of reality, beyond our reach. The mirror is gone and there’s no way that he can get to her. There’s no way between this world and that one. It’s all just threats. Isn’t it?”

“Of course it is,” Rhys said softly. “Your mom is safe on the other side of the Bleak. He can’t get to her.”

“Are you okay?” Winston asked softly. “You? Allie? Not Queen Alicia. Not your mother.
You
.”

“I don’t know.” I shook my head and tried not to cry. “I always have my sword on me but tonight, tonight was a ball and so I was unarmed, and even if I had had my sword it wouldn’t have mattered.” I could hear the panic seeping into my own voice. “He used magic to tie me to my chair, and I was helpless. You were frozen and I was unarmed, and there was nothing I could do. I was alone and I was trapped and there was nothing I could do.”

“Rhys,” John of Leavenwald said. He’d slipped into the area closest to the throne. “We need to give everyone a task. We need to keep them calm.”

“Calm.” I nodded. “Yes, that’s what we need to do. Everyone needs to remain calm.”

“Right.” John moved forward, blocking me from the view of the rest of the nobles while I got control of myself.

“We need to prepare,” he said to the crowd. “If the Fate Maker has dared to come here it must mean he’s planned something.”

Yeah,
I thought to myself.
He’s planning on murdering us all. And he intended to start with me.
Probably something I didn’t want to fill my nobles on just yet, though.

“Where do we go?” one of the noblemen shouted.

“We’ll send out dragon messengers as Queen Alicia had suggested earlier. They’re quickest. They’ll go to each of your lands, stop in all the villages. If the Fate Maker’s army is two days away, we must be quick to raise an army and march them here. There is no time to waste.”

“We can’t fight an army headed by a wizard. Not again,” Lady Arianne said. “Think of the warriors we lost last time. My son, my heir, was wounded. If someone as brave as Gunter can be brought down then none of us are safe. Our army isn’t prepared for this.”

“So what do we do?” another man called out.

“We’ll fight back,” I said, ignoring Arianne’s whining and my own fears about taking our weakened army into battle. “And we’ll keep fighting back until he realizes that this land isn’t his for the taking. If he wants a war, we’ll give him a war to make the Pleiades tremble.”

“To war!” a young dragon on the far side of the room, near the windows, yelled.

“To war!” someone else joined in.

And suddenly the mood shifted from panic to something else. Something bloodthirsty. Angry.

“To war,” hundreds of voices replied, the windows in the ballroom shaking from the noise.

“Allie?” Winston looked at me, and I stepped forward, pushing my way between John and Rhys so that I could face my subjects, hoping that they couldn’t tell how badly I was shaking.

“To war,” I said, trying to ignore the way my knees were trembling and keep from vomiting on the throne room floor.

Chapter Seven

“All but the last of the dragon messengers have returned, Your Majesty,” one of the red-jacketed soldiers said. He handed me a glass of ember fruit juice and a stack of paperwork as the sun rose over the horizon, and two house fairies flitted over to us, balancing a plate of toast that I didn’t really want to eat between them. “These are the estimates of how many weapons we have below in the armory.”

“Will it be enough?” I asked, setting the documents aside and staring at the soldier instead. The estimates wouldn’t mean anything to me. They were just numbers until someone told me if the number of weapons we had was greater than or equal to the number of soldiers who needed them. I had never been that great at algebra but even I could figure out that was how the math of warfare worked.

“You’ll have to ask the lord general,” the young soldier said, his blue eyes dark. “But even if it’s not, we’re prepared to fight with rocks and our bare hands if need be.” The soldier slipped back into his place, silently guarding the formal dining room where we’d all spread out to start planning our war.

“Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that.” I took a drink of my juice and turned to the dryad sitting quietly beside me. “Darinda?”

“Yes, Your Majesty?” The head of the Dryad Order looked up at me from the parchment she was poring over with Mercedes.

“The Fate Maker said that if we didn’t cooperate he would bring my mother here and kill her. Then he’d find another girl to take my place as the Golden Rose. Can he actually do it? Can he travel between the World That Is and the World of Dreams?”

“It’s a threat, Your Majesty,” Aquella, Great Wave of the Naiads, said from her place at the far end of the table where she’d been having a hushed conversation with Boreas, king of the Aurae and the third member of the Nymphiad. “Just something he said to scare you.”

“Not if he can actually do it,” I said. “Is there
any
way that he can get from this realm to another without using the Mirror of Nerissette? Is there some other magic that he can cast to threaten the former queen?”

“There are other relics,” Darinda said, her silver eyes troubled. The fairies carefully flew her a mug of tea from the side table. “Other objects of magic that give their users unimaginable power.”

“I know,” I said. “Esmeralda told me about the Great Relics. She said that she had cast a spell to hide them inside the palace walls, to keep them away from the Fate Maker so he couldn’t use them. What I want to know is if any of these other relics are portals like the mirror? Can he use them to travel between worlds? Specifically this Tear that he’s asking for—can he use that to get to my mother?”

“I’m not sure,” Darinda said and then glanced at the other two members of the Nymphiad.

“Not a lot is known about the relics, Your Majesty,” Boreas said. “They are a powerful magic that none besides the queen and her handmaiden have ever been allowed to touch. A magic the queen and her handmaiden kept secret between themselves.”

“Just so we’re on the same page, you don’t know what these are, what they look like, what they’re capable of?” I asked. “You don’t know anything about them except that somehow my mother and Esmeralda used them?”

“No, we don’t,” Aquella muttered. “Until Esmeralda used the mirror to bring you from the World That Is to Nerissette, most of us didn’t actually believe the relics truly existed. We thought they were legend. As far as anyone knew the mirror in the Fate Maker’s tower was just that—a mirror—and nothing more.”

“But my mother used them,” I said. “Esmeralda said that she helped my mother use the relics to move between worlds. How else did you think she managed it? Did you think she could just magically hop there and back whenever she felt like it?”

“We—” Darinda coughed.

“You what?”

“When we were told the Last Rose had been lost we assumed that she’d been killed, and the Fate Maker was trying to cover it up with this idea of the relics.” The admission came out of her quietly, and I could feel my face reddening.

“So, you thought he had murdered my mother, and you let him stay on the throne?”

“The prophesies said the Last Great Rose would come—” Aquella started.

I stood, slamming my hands on the table and glaring at them all. “I don’t care about the prophesies. I don’t care about the legends. I don’t even care that you followed someone who you thought assassinated my mother. What I want to know, right now, right this second, is if any of you, any single one of you, actually knows something useful about this Tear.”

Boreas shook his head. “No. We don’t know anything definite.”

“Right. Okay. So what do you think you know?” I asked.

“All we have to go on are the stories, the legends as you call them, and they are incomplete,” Darinda said.

“Hit me with it, then. What do your stories say these relics are?”

“I don’t know,” Darinda said.

“What do you mean you don’t know?” I asked, a bite to my voice. “You’re head of the Dryad Order—you know everything. Come on. Think. What do the stories say the Tear can do?”

“They are legend, Your Majesty.” Darinda bowed her head. “The stuff of myth. Stories. I can tell you how the Dragon’s Tear was formed, from the tears of a Great Rose who watched her dragon consort die. I can tell you that the prophesies say that to hold the tear is to hold in your hand the fate of a thousand worlds. I can tell you that you are the only one with the power to destroy it. But I can’t tell you what it is or what it looks like. ”

“So what you’re telling me,” I said, “is that we have an army marching toward us that wants a relic that we supposedly have, and all we know is that it’s a bad idea for the wizard at the front of the army to have it, and somehow I have to destroy it.
But you don’t know what it actually is?
”

“And we’re not exactly sure how you should go about destroying it,” Aquella added.

“Great. This is perfect. Just perfect.” I sighed.

“Wait, let’s think about this. There has to be something we can do. Some mention of them in a book,” Mercedes said. “A picture, a description. Something that tells us what we’re looking for. Otherwise how are you meant to find them?”

“I’m not following.” I stared at her, my eyes narrowed, as I tried to work out where she was going with this.

“Who has the biggest, most complete library in Nerissette at her fingertips?” Mercedes pointed at me. “
Ding, ding, ding,
if your guess is the Golden Rose.”

“The library?” I asked, embarrassed that I hadn’t thought of it myself now that she’d said it out loud.

“Yes, the library. We find the book about the legends of the relics, figure out what they are, then we find the relics, use them to get everyone home, and call it a day. You can take them back to our world, destroy them, and we’ll all be safe.”

“And locked on the other side of the portal,” I said. “If the relics can even do that. We don’t know if they are portals like the mirror.”

“That’s okay, though,” Mercedes said, ignoring my comment about the relics even being portals. “John and the army and everyone else can defeat the Fate Maker, the relics will be destroyed and everyone gets a happy ending. Yay for books.”

“Except we would have an empty throne and no Golden Rose to sit back down upon it,” Boreas said slowly.

“Elect someone.” Mercedes turned to me. “You said it yourself. Queenship isn’t your idea of good government. They could elect someone instead, form a government. They don’t need us here to run their country for them.”

“No.” I felt my chest clench in disappointment. I knew she wanted to go home, but I didn’t expect my best friend to want us to run like a bunch of cowards. “We can’t just leave them here to face the Fate Maker alone while we hide in the World That Is.”

“But—” Mercedes started to protest.

“Look.” I held my hands up. “Right now we’ve got nothing more than talk. This Dragon’s Tear may be another portal or it may not be. It could be a weapon or a way of casting spells or, I don’t know, a way to keep people from crying when they chop onions. But we don’t actually know what it is.”

“If it’s another portal—” Mercedes started.

“Then it’s a threat we need to worry about.” I had to weigh the importance of backing my best friend against doing what had to be done for the good of everyone else. “And it’s a threat we’ll have to destroy because no matter what, we can’t allow him to travel from this world to another.”

“Like I said, we could destroy it from our side,” Mercedes said. “We could use it to go home and then destroy it there.”

“I don’t know. All I do know, all any of us know, is that the Fate Maker will be here, outside the gates of Neris, in less than three days. He’s coming for blood and a relic that we don’t know anything about. We do know is that it’s magical and he wants it, and that’s enough reason for me to make sure he doesn’t get it.”

“What would you have us do, Your Majesty?” Darinda asked, her voice soft.

“Rhys, Winston, and Eamon of Leavenwald are out in the courtyard, figuring out how to barricade the walls and where to put the army and the dragon version of the air force so that we actually have a fighting chance against the Fate Maker’s army. Sir John has started trying to evacuate the people of Neris, but most of them are refusing to leave—they say that they’re staying to fight. That means when the battle comes, we’re going to have a lot of people here, and it’ll be chaos. That means we need to be prepared. Hospital tents. Food.”

“But—”

I ignored whoever had tried to chime in. We had too much to get done for me to listen to everyone bicker and second-guess one another now. We were running out of time.

“Timbago.” I motioned for him to come forward. “You’re in charge of making sure the palace is ready. You know what to do.”

“I will not fail you, Your Majesty.” The goblin nodded once and then turned on his heel to stalk away. He snapped his fingers and the house fairies that had been flitting about the room hurried after him.

“Right.” I turned to look first at Darinda, then at Aquella and Boreas. “While he’s preparing the palace and the others are getting the warriors ready we need to focus on finding these relics, and we need to do it now.”

“The relics are lost,” Boreas protested. “They’ve been lost for almost seventeen years. How are we supposed to find them in less than three days?”

“I have no idea.” I shook my head. “But we aren’t going to do it sitting around here yelling at each other. I know that.” I drank the last of my juice and then took a quick bite of the dry toast that the fairies had brought me. “So, as Mercedes said, our best bet is to hit the books. Let’s go to the library and get to work.”

The nymphs all stood as one and started toward the doors, already quietly talking among themselves.

I watched them go, fear causing my stomach to tie itself into knots. What if I was wrong? What if there was some way to negotiate with the Fate Maker? What if there was a better way than war? I couldn’t see another way, though. He was coming and he was bringing an army with him; he wasn’t going to want to talk it out. And even if he did, I didn’t think there was any way we were going to compromise.

I stood and smoothed my hands over the green linen tunic and brown trousers I’d changed into after the ball. I made my way out of the dining room and a strong hand shot out, grabbing my arm and dragging me into the shadows of the hallway.

Winston pulled me into a hug. We hadn’t had a moment alone since the ball, and even though I had a war to plan, I couldn’t resist the idea of leaning against his chest for a few seconds. Right now, I just wanted to hug my boyfriend and pretend that all of this was a very bad dream.

“How’s the planning going on your end?” I asked quietly. “Will the walls hold if he attacks?”

“Forget about that,” Winston said, his voice rough. His eyes were like deep, dark pools that I could lose myself in as he stared down at me. “He could have killed you last night.”

“He didn’t.”

“He could have,” Winston repeated. “We were all in the room, and there was nothing any of us could have done.”

“But he didn’t. He didn’t kill me.”

“He got to you,” Winston whispered, and I could see that his face was filled with fear, his dark eyes wide.

“It—”

He pressed his lips to mine, silencing me. “You’re not allowed to let him kill you,” Winston whispered as he pulled away from me.

“I won’t.” I rested my head against his broad chest for a moment longer.

“I don’t know what I’d do if something happened to you.”

“You’ll find a way to get you and Mercedes home. Rhys, too, if you can convince him to go.” I pressed forward on my tiptoes so that we were eye to eye. “If something happens to me, you make Darinda find you a portal, and you use it. That’s an order.”

“You can’t order me to leave you behind.”

“If I die, you have to find a way to get yourselves home. You get home and let the portal close off the gate between this world and the World That Is. Forget this place and me and everything else.”

“I can’t forget you,” he said and tugged me closer. “I won’t.”

“Yes, you can. Forget me, and go live a fabulous life.”

“How about you just promise not to die and we can work on finding a portal out of here together?”

“I’ll do my best,” I said, melting into his arms a bit.

“I know.” He smiled for a brief moment before dropping his cheek onto the crown of my head. “Just be careful. Please.”

“I will.”

“And I want you to keep Kitsuna with you from now on. Let her stay and have a sleepover with you and Mercedes in your room.”

“Why?” Not that I minded hanging out with the red-haired wryen. But why did Winston want her staying with me now? Was there some threat he wasn’t telling me about? “I know you can take care of yourself,” Winston said. “But I’d like to make sure that if you need it, you’ve got someone to guard your back. Someone else who can use a sword.”

“Someone besides the dryad archer,” Kitsuna said, her voice low. She came toward us, her feet silent against the stone floor. “In case a more stabby, iron-loving approach is needed.”