Quatrain (29 page)

Because, of course, I had been in love with Orlain for years.

If there were landmarks to be seen along our journey, none of them was visible to me. I couldn’t tell how Jaxon was finding his way through the untracked acres of forest, and I couldn’t believe Orlain would ever be able to retrace our route. But now and then Jaxon would point to something—a tree with a particular bend, perhaps, or a vine hung with brilliant red blossoms—and Orlain would nod and we would all keep walking.

We had been hiking through the forest for about an hour when Jaxon came to an abrupt halt. “What most men don’t understand about Alora is how changeable its boundaries are,” he said. “They are not defined with a river or a chasm or a stone fence, as human borders are. You cannot measure them precisely with a surveyor’s tools or find them with a compass. They shift. At some point you are within them and at some point without. But here is where that moving line begins.”

Orlain looked around, as if impressing on his memory the precise placement of the trees, the peculiar slant of the sun, at this very spot. “Then this is where I will come when I have news to share with Zara,” he said. He handed my saddlebags to Jaxon, who slung them over his left shoulder.

I risked a quick look at Orlain. I felt suddenly shy with him, which infuriated me and made me awkward at the same time. “When will you be back?” I asked.

“I will try to come ten days from now,” he said.

“You’ll lose a couple of days each way just on travel,” Jaxon observed.

Orlain nodded. “I know. Otherwise I would come back once a week. If I am here every ten days, I will be able to spend a week at the castle before I set out again.”

“I’ll look for you then,” I said. I resumed my soulful expression and held out my hand to him, a sweet, brave princess bestowing her favor on a faithful knight. “Thank you so much for your care in bringing me here to Alora.”

He took my hand in one of his. He made a fist with his other hand and touched it gently to his forehead, a mark of great respect. “Don’t cause your uncle any trouble,” he said with a grin. “Don’t make him sorry he took you in.”

I was so annoyed I jerked my hand away. “Don’t get lost on your way back home,” I huffed.

Orlain nodded a farewell at Jaxon, then turned on his heel and strode back through the forest toward the river. I only watched him from the corner of my eye, but I saw that he did not once look back.

“Interesting young man,” Jaxon commented.

I hunched a shoulder. “Do you think so? I find him very ordinary.”

Jaxon laughed. “Well, there are a few young men in Alora who might help you forget him.”

“I don’t need help
forgetting
him,” I said. I was tired of talking about Orlain. “So where’s Alora? How do we get in?”

Jaxon resettled the strap over his shoulder and took my hand. “We step this way—we wait for a strange shiver across our skin. No? Then we take a few steps in this direction, and wait a moment. Nothing. Then we walk forward with our eyes half shut, as if waiting to feel spiderwebs brush across our cheeks.”

He moved slowly but determinedly in each direction as he spoke, tugging me behind him. I had to admit my whole body was tingling with anticipation, but apparently it wasn’t quite the sensation I would feel when we finally did cross into Alora.

“Then you look around to see if the air seems to hold a sparkle. Look—see? That patch of sunlight sifting down. It’s brighter than it should be, don’t you think?”

Indeed, it was almost incandescent. Jaxon increased his pace as he pulled me toward the eerily glowing shaft of sun; I approached with a touch of trepidation. It was so vivid, so alive with color, I thought it might sear my skin. But Jaxon and I stepped together through the dazzle, and I suffered no ill effect except a sudden wash of warmth across my bare cheeks.

“And now we are in Alora,” he said.

Impossible to describe Alora.

It was not a town or a village the way I knew them, yet there were clusters of buildings marking either side of what could have been a road. But these were not houses or castles or other familiar structures, not like the buildings of men. There was a room, perhaps, set out under a wide fanning branch of some exotic tree. Perhaps there was a ladder of sorts, straight bars of wood tied to a broad trunk, and twenty feet above the ground a low platform nestled in the branches. Now and then I saw freestanding structures, haphazard piles of wood and stone that might be divided into two levels—but they had few walls and nothing that resembled a roof. I could peer into most rooms as we passed and gather an impression of soft pillows, wide mats, transparent curtains fluttering around open bowers.

Aliora were everywhere.

They gathered at the side of the road to watch us pass, hung down from the tree branches to stare as we went by. They were all narrow-faced and spindly-thin, with unnervingly long arms and legs. Their faces were gentle, curious, smiling, and everywhere they stood, an evanescent glow built up around them. It was as if moonlight had mated with a weeping willow and tried to produce a human shape.

And they hummed. Or sang. Or chattered. Some kind of low, joyous sound bubbled out of them, not any kind of speech that I could understand, but surely a form of communication. It leapt ahead of us on the road, a kind of anticipation, and buzzed behind us once we’d passed, no doubt in speculation.
A human girl has come to visit us in Alora,
they might have been saying.
How strange she looks. And yet how familiar . . .

I pressed closer to Jaxon. He glanced down with a grin.

“Nothing quite like it, hey?” he said. “I’ve been to all eight provinces and traveled some distance across the ocean and never come across any place that filled me with the shivers the way Alora does.”

“Everybody’s staring at me,” I said in a low voice.

“It’s not often they’ve seen a human woman. All of the hunters who have stumbled across Alora have been men.”

“So I’m the
only
girl who’s ever been here?”

“I wouldn’t say that,” Jaxon replied a little vaguely. I remembered the stories of human babies stolen by the aliora and raised here among their fey brethren. If the tales were true, might I encounter some of those kidnapped children? Would they even look human to me after years of captivity?

I wanted to take Jaxon’s hand again, but I didn’t. “My mother says they might invite me to stay with them,” I said. “Forever.”

His laugh boomed out. “No doubt they will. The aliora will be delighted with you.”

“But they won’t
make
me stay,” I added, trying to keep the anxiety out of my voice.

He glanced down again. “No aliora ever held a human against his or her will,” he said firmly. “Men and women who settle in Alora stay because they want to.”

“That’s all right, then,” I said, relieved.

He grinned once more. “But after a few days here, you might want to.”

“No,” I said. “I’ll be going home. As soon as it’s safe.”

We had been strolling through the unconventional dwellings of Alora for about thirty minutes when Jaxon finally pointed. “Rowena’s place,” he said.

It was more like a building than anything we had passed so far, but even so it was less like a house than a gazebo, albeit a very large one. It was round and many-storied, and some portions had walls of stone and some portions had walls of wood, and some portions had no walls at all. The bottom floor seemed to be one big atrium decorated with living greenery. In the very center, a simple fountain sent up a spray of water that fell back into a shallow pool. Unlike the great fountain in the courtyard at Castle Auburn, this one did not appear to run through any kind of pumping mechanism, but to feed directly from some underground spring.

A handful of aliora bustled across this open floor, exchanging news and murmuring to each other in that strange, melodic language. A winding stairway gathered strength on the bottom level, then twisted upward toward leafy lofts overhead, growing thinner and less reliable as it rose. I could not tell how many stories were piled above this one. It seemed likely that the roof, if there was one, would be woven of starlight and netting and a few plaited leaves. I hoped my bedroom was not too close to the top.

“This doesn’t seem like the kind of place people
live
,” I said to Jaxon in a low voice.

“Not people,” he said. “Aliora.”

We had barely stepped inside the house—if you could say you were
inside
such an open place—when Rowena herself came sweeping up to us. The few times I had seen her outside Alora, I had been struck by her beauty, for she had pearl-white skin and crow-black hair and such elegance of movement that her smallest gesture seemed choreographed. But here in Alora, she was astonishingly lovely, rich with radiance, bewitching.

“Zara!” she called, floating toward us with her hands outstretched. “It is so good to see you here.”

Without thinking about it, I started forward to fling myself into her arms. But Jaxon caught me hard and hauled me back. “You cannot touch her,” he said gruffly in my ear. “Not while your hands are covered with gold.”

“Oh!” I said. I knew that, of course. It was why I was wearing the bracelets, after all. But such was the welcome on Rowena’s face, such was the sudden desire to be enfolded in the embrace of an aliora, that I had forgotten. I stood awkwardly before the queen of the aliora, twisting my hands together.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “My mother made me promise I would not remove any of my jewelry.”

Rowena’s returning smile was full of warmth and forgiveness. “It was the correct promise for her to require,” she assured me. “I love Alora and cannot understand why anyone would choose to live anywhere else, but you have a home and responsibilities elsewhere. You must resist us with all your might.” She was laughing when she said this, as if joking, but I rather thought she was speaking the truth.

“I wish I could hug you,” I said truthfully.

Very carefully, making sure no part of her hand made contact with my necklace or my earrings, Rowena reached out and brushed her fingertips across my cheeks. It felt as though raindrops or perhaps honey-suckle nectar made a fresh track along my skin. “I feel as if I am hugging you,” she said in a soft voice. “I cannot express how deeply I want to welcome you to my home.”

“Let’s get her settled in,” Jaxon said practically. “Are you hungry, Zara? It’s been a long journey, I know.”

“Starving,” I said. “But then, I usually am.”

“I’ll see about lunch,” Rowena said. She laid one hand quickly on Jaxon’s arm, as if she couldn’t help herself; one quick possessive touch, and then she turned away. “You take her up to her room.”

I followed Jaxon up those haphazard stairs. They started out as stone, and gradually gave way to wood, and then eventually it seemed as if we were just stepping from one springy tree branch to another, still winding upward. I would guess I was on what corresponded to the third story before Jaxon led me down something you could hardly call a hallway—it was more like a rope bridge stretched above the ground, and it swayed when we put our weight on it. I was relieved when the room he showed me to actually seemed to deserve that designation. It had a floor of wooden planking, a couple of real walls, and something that looked enough like a bed to probably
be
a bed, though it was low to the floor and covered with moss instead of a blanket. Or something very similar to moss, at any rate.

“Oh, this is so charming!” I exclaimed.

“A little different from the castle,” he said. “You’ll find all the washing up is done down on the ground level in a little area built around a pool. But once you’re used to everything, it all makes sense. I hope you’ll be comfortable here. It’s strange, but it’s wonderful.”

I smiled at him. “That’s how it seems so far.”

“And the longer you’re here,” he added, “the less strange it will feel, and the more wonderful.”