Silver Hollow (19 page)
The moon had replaced the sun by now and the stars glowed wherever the quilt of clouds did not cover them. Brushing Periwinkle’s odd departure aside, she noticed he had left his sack of goods behind and stood to fetch them. Her fingers trembled from a day bursting with too many surprises, yet she found there was more waiting inside the sack
. And it was then she
spotted a vacant burrow at last. In the hollow of the shortest tree what was once a grand staircase climbing against the inner wall of the small hollow had fallen in. Altogether it looked abandoned. Amie wondered why Periwinkle had not dressed it like the others.
So she borrowed a nearby lantern from its coop, set it inside
,
then laid out the freshly made square bed, dress and clothes fashioned from petals, leaves and gossamer thread thin as spiders
’
silk. On the table she placed a silken hankie and used another to hang from naturally jutting hooks framing the hole.
Drawing her cloak tightly over her shivering form, Amie settled down on the carpet of cloves in the abandoned corner of the wild faery garden, leaned against the moss
-
covered rock and waited.
She pulled her father’s ring out from beneath her dress and turned it over in her hands. Silver inlaid with a green stone she did not recognize, the letter
W
carved with tangled vines and forming the odd spiraling symbol
which
haunted her dreams and steps. The metal was cool to the touch, unlike the burning in her chest or the damp cold air
making
her shiver. Slowly she slid the hollowed metal onto her right ring finger, watched it dwarf her knuckle and smiled as she felt the better for it. It reminded her she
had been
Amie Wentworth once, willing to tackle the world long as she had her parents behind her. Her eyes misted over in their new annoying habit.
Turning her attention to the gathering clouds above, Amie tried to find the
E
vening
S
tar. It was something she and her father
had
often
done
when she was still young. Some people might call twenty-seven still very young and she supposed it was all relative. But ever since her parent
s
’ car wreck she’d felt ages old, clinging to vestiges of her childhood to keep up the illusion of normal
ity
.
When the clouds began to break and the stars began to fall from the sky and hover closer, she frowned. Rubbing her eyes furiously
,
Amie sat up and realized the strange pale lights weren’t stars at all. Her mind grasped at a stray memory from her long journey to her new home,
of the strange
-
looking fireflies she had watched in the forest. Yet Amie had grown up catching fireflies with the twins in their back field in Kansas and none of them were bigger than the size of her pinky nail.
Feeling trapped in the headlights, all Amie knew to do was to wait and watch the lights cluster and slowly descend into Periwinkle’s garden. The closer they hovered, the greater variation of colors she saw shifting around their solid iridescent core. With the north wind sang the echo of a song, a whisper of voices and lutes
that
could
have
easily been her imagination, like straining to hear voices in the dark. There was no finding logic in this, Amie reasoned. Something akin to faith and forgotten dreams made her
want
to believe this wasn’t her imagination. Perhaps because she had not felt this free since her father stopped telling her stories of Silver Hollow.
Once her vision cleared Amie saw a single golden light limp on air closest to her. Alone, it flickered unsteady as if in danger of snuffing out completely. Amie didn’t want it to die. It looked warm and she wanted it to keep coming closer. The nearer it drew, the more Amie realized it was indeed dimmer than the others she had
seen. Hesitantly the luminous
wings struck up and the tiny person attached to them stumbled to its knees before staring amazedly at its new home. Slowly it dragged itself inside the hollow, ran its hands over everything, leaving a trail of golden dust in its wake.
Her heart raced, mind disbelieving what was in front of her eyes. She froze the moment the tiny creature turned and its beady eyes found hers. It jumped off the edge of the hollow, wings pulling it from a deathly plunge. Amie drew her knees closer to her chest the closer it hovered.
When its wings lifted and it tumbled onto her knee, scrambled to its feet to inspect her closer, Amie gasped to find a strikingly almost-human face greeting her. Its tiny body burned hot as a candle flame, yet never seared through the fabric of her dress. Instead the warmth spread through her legs all through to her fingertips and somewhere deep in her soul. Once it recognized the emerald eyes staring back at it, a wide smile split its tiny face nearly in two, revealing its sharp row of teeth.
She reached out to touch it, felt the chain round her neck tug as the ring still bound to both metal and finger refused to give. So the creature reached with its own hand to hers. A light grew between them, encompassing their corner of the garden and growing still until Amie could
see the hundreds of other lights
and hear their songs, like
the rush of waterfalls and clash of bluebells.
Her vision went black and she did not awaken till much later to the sound of grumbling and the sight of familiar dark eyes boring down into hers. He picked her up with too much ease, clutched her to his chest while the midnight mist showered over them. “…meddlesome faeries…should never have left you into the garden alone, senile old gnome.”
She thought to ask his name, but couldn’t keep her thoughts straight. She only knew they weren’t coated with rain anymore and candlesticks flashed by them in blurry rapid succession. All the while his eyes bore into hers. Had she been more aware she might have wondered how he knew where to step as his gaze never wavered. Or how he knew what room she slept, how he was able to pass into it without propping the door and set her onto the nearby chair.
He was speaking harshly over her
.
“...had enough sense not to play with things you don’t understand
,
Jessamiene
,
you wouldn’t be half dead now. Curse those fools and their muddled methods. Iudicael should have known better than leave you in
their
charge…” His fingers fumbled as he untied her cloak and threw it beside the hearth, then continued to strip her of her soaked outer layers.
She might have
missed the soft expression on his face
were she
not on the cusp of a bad case of hypothermia
, as he lifted her again, closer now and tucked her beneath a mountain of covers. . For now she was too grateful to the stranger to argue with him and her lazy smile took him off guard.
His hands swept back the hair from her brow and Amie, feeling the many strange calluses and grooved scars, absently wondered aloud, “How did you get so many scars?”
Rather than laugh as she expected,
he
froze as she reached out feebly for him. Taking his hand in hers
,
she turned his fingers over with her own and traced each painful mark. For a long moment where he could not speak, Amie felt
a
thrilling surge of
feeling
pulse from her skin to his and back again, the sensation stronger than any other she had felt before. Within seconds she gasped for air
and
he too dragged in a haggard breath before flinching away from her touch. Link broken, Amie’s inner fire cooled.
He leaned in closer, lips slightly apart and eyes bleeding with something she did not understand, but took her by surprise when he pulled her hand from the edge of the covers. The
ring on her right ring finger burned brightly against the firelight. “Where did you get this?” His words were a harsh whisper. His grip tightened. “
Where
did you get this
,
Jessamiene?”
His features blurred as warmth returned to her body and his voice turned to something sweet as musical strings and harsh as rock. She thought for a second a shadow grew like a
trembling halo around him and
his eyes changed colors too rapidly to catch. Again he pressed, leaned in closer and his skin turned dark as the earth and faded to cool gray. “Jessamiene? Who nixed the ring to fit? Do you know what this means?”
She knew by now, of course, this was the ghost from
this
morning. Vaguely her mind sought to connect the missing puzzle pieces, but she felt so warm now she wanted him to stop talking and to stop thinking.
His
words were too roughly sweet to listen to now, not when she wanted to sleep. “Father’s ring…put it on tonight and then couldn’t touch the faerie so it touched me…”
“They did not know you had it
. O
nly explanation.”
“Why are you here? Thought you only haunted the hall?” Her eyelids drooped shut.
His
s
ilence
was
soon
replaced with rich laughter. “So much you do not understand
,
little girl. But now you wear this you have no choice.” He traced her brow and lingered over the high cheekbones, square angle of her jaw and hesitated just below her lips.
Her lids parted the following morning to the reflection of the sun shining through the glass vials on her bedside table. Everything ached like she had just come out of a hundred
-
year sleep, not unlike the morning she
had
woke
n
from this bed the first time. Stiff
-
necked
,
she pushed aside the covers and slid into her slippers while trying to make sense of everything that
had
happened the night before.
One thing Amie was certain of, her dreams
last night
we
re
relatively normal. She had gone to the garden because she missed Uncle Henry and things got really weird after
ward
. The gnome statue wasn’t a statue at all and had led her into a secret faery garden. Of course, he disappeared and she met one of the little winged beasts. After passing out she was being brought to bed by the castle ghost and he kept rambling on about her father’s ring.
“What a nightmare
,
” she mumbled in a hoarse voice.
Amie frowned,
twisting
the cool metal
resting against her pointer finger with her thumb
,
and suddenly froze. Jerking her hand from beneath the covers with a gasp, Amie stared at the Wenderdowne crest
on the ring
encircling her finger. Grasping for her chain
,
she discovered her neck was bare and the ring
missing from its chain
.
Not gone…nixed.
Gripping the metal
,
she tried tugging it off,
but
quickly realiz
ed
she’d have to lose a finger before that happened. Her eyes widened as she
touched
the
ring
and
images from the night before fl
a
shed back into her mind.
It wasn’t a dream!
…
A
s she lay in
a bubble
-
soaked tub soon after,
she recalled her ghost’s scarred hands and maelstrom eyes.
Definitely too sol
id for a ghost.
Her eyes darted to the ring snugly fit round her right
-
hand finger and
she
wondered at the strange things the ghost had said of it. The bubbles faded quickly after.
In a daze she slipped into the clothes Underhill laid out for her, thankful not to be dressed like a doll for once. Rummaging through her wardrobe
,
she found a sturdier pair of heeled boots and began the tedious task of looping them. Tying her hair back with a green ribbon Amie stared back at her reflection and tried to smile.
She had never been one for keeping up appearances, but she hardly recognized the woman staring back at her this morning. The emerald eyes framed with their curling black lashes were the same, her full expressive eyebrows still quirked in relation to her curiosity. Her dark curls still refused to be tamed, but now gleamed silvery blue in certain slants of light. The most start
ling of all revelations was how
the top of her head met the high end of her mirror. With the heels on
,
she had to duck to find her eyes again and while her form was equal in proportion her limbs moved more gracefully.