The Flute Keeper's Promise (The Flute Keeper Saga) (29 page)

I finished. Valory sat for a long
time, staring silently into the fire. Her usual hearty aura was muted by the
swell of emotions that I knew she must be feeling. My heart broke for her. Valory
had trusted Almyra implicitly.

I still bristled with anger whenever
I thought of the old Gnome, but I began to understand why Almyra might have
tricked Marafae. It must have been lonely for the old woman alone in the woods.
Maybe she’d figured that a wayward teenage Slaugh would not make a good mother.

“So,” Valory said in a hollow
voice, “You’re telling me that my daddy was the king of all the Slaugh and my
mother was his crazy mistress?”

“Yes,” I said, trying not to sound
nervous. I couldn’t gauge yet if Valory still wanted to hurt me or not.

“And my half brother—”

“Hugo.”

“Right. Hugo has taken over as king
and is up to no good.”

“Precisely,” I said.

Valory puffed out her cheeks and
pushed her hat off her forehead. “Geez. Why would Almyra lie like that? If she’d
just let me be, maybe my mom wouldn’t have gone off her gourd and killed all
those folks. Maybe she never would have brought back that demon thingy.”

Now that I was calmer I considered
the other side. “Or maybe you would have died as a baby and she still would
have gone crazy. We’ll never know exactly why Almyra lied to Marafae, but maybe
she thought she was doing her a favor. That’s probably how I’d feel if a
teenage girl came to me in Marafae’s condition. She had no home and no family.”

Valory raised an eyebrow. “Changed
your tune now, have you?”

I squirmed. “That was really dumb
of me to freak out like that. But it’s like you said: I was only thinking of
all the deaths Marafae was responsible for…all the deaths that might not have
been.” I thought longingly of my father and sighed.

Valory fell silent again. The fire
popped and crackled. Outside the wind howled. Fine snow snuck in under the old
wooden door. The little hut suddenly felt much too tiny for the two of us.

I wrestled with guilt over
revealing everything to Valory. The girl was a simple mountain dweller. She
could have lived her whole life happily not knowing about her true origin. Then
again, I could have, too. For all the pain and sorrow, for all the broken bones
and broken hearts, I still didn’t regret coming to Faylinn. I knew exactly who
I was, where I came from and what I had to do. Even with the blizzard howling
outside I suddenly felt the pang of inactivity. I’d put my journey on hold too
long.

“I’m leaving tomorrow if the snow
stops,” I said.

The firelight’s reflection
glimmered in Valory’s eyes. Her wings twitched and she asked, “Where will you
go?”

I shrugged. “Anywhere I want, I
suppose. Everyone who was looking for me must think I’m dead by now—enemies and
friends.” I thought regretfully of the Larues.

“The nearest town is called
Feegman’s Boot,” Valory said. “It’s two days north of here. I’ve never been,
but the fur traders I’ve dealt with from there say they’ve got excellent pubs.”

“Feegman’s Boot it is,” I said.

An icy gust howled in the chimney.
I shivered, dreading the two-day trek ahead of me. “What will you do?” I asked.

“What I’ve always done,” Valory
said. “Fish. Hunt. What difference does it make? It’s all I know how to do.”

I wasn’t sure how safe it was to
press the point, but I had been thinking of something. “You do realize that you’re
the rightful heir to the Slaugh throne, don’t you? You’re Hagan’s oldest child.
Maybe if you came forward, Hugo would step down.”

“What would I do with a bloody
throne?” Valory asked irately. “If that Hugo brat wants it, he can have it.”

“But you’d be a good ruler…the
rightful ruler.”

Valory stood up abruptly and shoved
her chair back. It made a loud scraping noise that caused my scalp to crinkle.
For a second she seemed to fill up the entire hut with her stomping strides and
her agitated wing flaps. She snatched up her coat, pulled it on and opened the
door. Wind and snow roared inside, extinguishing the fire.

“Where are you going?” I asked.

Valory didn’t answer. She walked
out and slammed the door so hard that the whole hut shook.

I tossed and turned in the short
bed that had belonged to Almyra. The blizzard still raged, but Valory did not
return. I alternated between angry and guilty. It was mean of Valory to make me
worry by staying out all night, but I knew I should have kept my mouth shut
about the whole royalty thing. Valory was already dealing with an identity
crisis. I berated myself for making it worse.

Sometime in the wee hours I finally
fell asleep. I woke stiff and cold in the morning to an empty hut. The wind no
longer howled. Winter sunlight glimmered through the snow caked against the
window.

I took my time packing. Throughout
the days we’d been trapped indoors, Valory had shown me how to work with leather
and furs so that now I had a nice collection of warm clothes. I rolled up as
much as I could and placed it in a leather bag. I kept looking expectantly at
the door. Every time a shadow passed by the window my heart jumped only to
realize that it was just blackbirds pecking around for scraps.

After two mugs of tea and a
breakfast of dried berries, there was little to do but be on my way. With a
last look at Valory’s empty hammock, I sighed and left the hut. It took a lot
of effort for me not to look back as I struggled through the fresh layer of
snow.

The sun climbed high. It beat down
on the snow, causing all the ice crystals to glitter like a million diamonds. I
squinted in the glare. I felt confident enough of my directions to know I was
heading north. The unknowns haunted me, though. I had no money, so shelter was
going to be a tricky proposition even after I reached town. The weather could
turn sour at any moment, forcing me off track. I could navigate by the sun and
stars, but if I lost sight of those I might as well be blindfolded. I thought
of using the flute to call Tuari, but I didn’t want to risk being spotted.
Hopefully the duke thought I was dead. I wanted to keep it that way. Plus, I
didn’t want to become too reliant on the flute. It was the reason for the
curse, after all.

Still, the idea was very tempting
after a few miles of struggling through knee-deep snow. Exhausted, I sat down
on a tree stump and glared at the expanse of white wilderness that lay ahead.
My fingers crept towards the shortsword in my new fur belt.

“No,” I resolved. “I’m not going to
do this the easy way. I deserve to freeze my legs off in this godforsaken
backcountry.”

“Bein’ a little hard on yourself,
aren’t ya?”

My head snapped up. There stood
Valory with strings of fresh game in both hands. She grinned from under her
hat.

I scooped up and handful of snow
and threw it at her face.

“Phleh!” Valory spit out a mouthful
of the stuff. “What was that for?”

“For making me worry all night! What
on earth were you doing?”

Valory lifted the fetches of game.
“Getting supplies for the trip. We can trade the furs for food and lodging in
Feegman’s Boot. And, you know, we might want to eat sometime. Just a thought.”

“
We
?” I said incredulously.

“Yeah,
we
. See, I did some
thinkin’ last night after I got all riled up. Got to thinkin’ about how I never
done nothing or gone nowhere, and how out of the blue one day falls this girl.
Somehow she knows things about me I never knew myself, and it gets me to
wondering: is it some kind of sign?  Like maybe my whole life was leading up to
now and I’ve got a choice: I can go on doing what I always done, not making no
ripple in nobody’s pond, or I can go with this hard-headed girl who believes in
her life’s purpose so strongly that she’d walk two days in the snow without
asking for directions. Well, I thought long and hard about all of that, and I
made up my mind. I’m going with you.”

Relieved, I smiled. “Really? That’s
great! You know how terrible I am at catching food.”

“I do have one or two conditions,”
Valory said.

“Let’s hear them.”

Valory put down her catch and
lifted a finger. “Number one: you’ve got to call me Your Highness.”

I grinned. “Sure thing. What else?”

“Number two: be patient with me. I
like to do things my way and as you saw last night, I sometimes have a temper.
Don’t think too badly of me when it flares up.”

I just kept grinning.

“What is it?” Valory asked.

“That whole bit about your temper?”

“Yeah?”

“I think it runs in the family.”

CHAPTER
SEVENTEEN

Chloe pushed aside the ugly,
floral-print curtains and gave a scowl to the littered sidewalk outside. A row
of vehicles looked back at her. She didn’t like the things. They were noisy and
smelly and they moved so frighteningly fast on the hard, black roadways that
covered the city in every direction.

A human walked by chatting on one
of those dinky little rectangular devices that they all carried. The woman
jabbered into her little machine, oblivious to anything around her. Chloe stuck
out her tongue but the woman never noticed.

“Stop that!” Othella scolded.

Chloe closed the curtain and
groaned. “I don’t like the humans here. They’re all clueless dullards.”

Violet glared at her from the hotel
bed. A mountain of papers and brochures surrounded her. “They’re not dullards,
Chloe. They just pay attention to different things.”

Chloe peered out the window again.
“Well they should pay more attention to their surroundings. That woman just
walked out in front of one of those car thingies.”

“Okay,
some
of them really
are dullards,” Violet admitted.

Chloe sighed. “I’m tired of being
here. When can we go home?”

Othella didn’t answer. She sat in
her wheelchair at the hotel room’s badly lit vanity. A collection of tools was
spread out next to the Pyxis Charm on the vanity top. She’d been tinkering
feverishly with the Pyxis Charm for over an hour. Her blonde hair hung limp her
on back. She’d hocked all her jewels for human money. Nobody who saw her would
have guessed she was royalty.

Chloe and Violet had been forced to
hide their identity as well. Both wore denim blue jeans and hats to cover their
pointy ears. Chloe hated the clothes. The pants made her feel like a boy and
the hat squished down her gorgeous purple curls. Nothing about the human world
suited her.

They’d been jumping around cities
for what felt like ages. The Pyxis Charm showed wear and tear from all the
abuse. It was not meant to leap between places so haphazardly. Despite
Othella’s best efforts it was beginning to malfunction. She didn’t say it, and
neither Chloe nor Violet dared to ask, but getting back home to Faylinn could
cause a problem.

Why all the city-jumping? Chloe
asked that question on a daily basis and only got half answers as a response. She
suspected a big part of it was safety. Her mother was nothing if not
over-cautious, even if there was no way for enemies to reach them in the human
world. Othella’s official excuse was that she was searching for something. She
checked into big, musty buildings with stained books lining all the walls—nothing
like the castle library at Ivywild. She scanned newspapers and watched the
flickering vision boxes that sat in every hotel room.

Violet absorbed herself in research
of the human culture while Chloe tagged along and tried not to set anything on
fire. For months they’d traveled among the stinky vehicles and hidden in the
human cities. They watched the vision box and ate human food and felt terribly
lonely in a world that was bursting at the seams with people.

Chloe wriggled her legs in the
scratchy jeans. She longed for her old watered silks, sequined gowns and
feathered slippers. She craved the familiar sight of faces with pointed ears.
More than that, she worried. What had become of her kingdom? She felt like she
was running away when all she really wanted to do was go back immediately and
push the duke off the top of Ivywild’s highest spire.

“AAAAAAGHHHHH!” she yelled,
clutching the sides of her head. “I can’t take it anymore!”

The brochure Violet was holding
burst into flames. Violet dropped it onto the bed and snuffed it out with a
pillow. “Chloe! You can’t do that here!”

“I just did!” Chloe said, giving
her sister a challenging frown. “What are you going to do about it?”

“Girls!” Othella exclaimed. She
looked up from the Pyxis Charm. There were dark circles under her eyes.

Chloe and Violet stared at the
floor.

“Sorry, Mother,” Violet said.

Othella sighed and spun her
wheelchair to face them. She pulled the satchel out of her pocket where she
kept the human money. “I think you two have been inside too long,” she said
wearily. She handed Chloe a roll of thin, green papers.

Chloe detested the grittiness of
the human money. She much preferred the smooth, pretty gems that Fay used for
currency. “What’s this for?”

“There’s a market down the street,”
Othella said. “A mall, they call it. A whole collection of little stores all in
one building. Go entertain yourselves there. Be back by sundown. And remember
our rules.”

“No magic,” Violet recited. “No
talking to strangers. No talking about home. No taking off our hats.”

“Good girl,” Othella said. “Oh, and
don’t forget the room key.”

Chloe picked up the funny little
card off the nightstand. It was one of the few things here that fascinated her.
On their first night in a hotel, she’d spent hours swiping the card in the door
just to hear the lock pop open.