The Flute Keeper's Promise (The Flute Keeper Saga) (42 page)

Valory alerted Lord Finbarr and the
others. She had to help carry a few people because they were too exhausted to
conjure their wings. Lord Finbarr was one of them. I caught the look of sadness
on his face as Valory helped him up to the treetops.

The mist had become a thick spray.
It stuck in my hair with the scent of decay from the ocean floor. The forest
trembled as the water made its assault. The wave slowed. The biggest trees were
no longer falling to it, but their lower branches were being stripped away. It
gave me a little peace of mind for my comrades taking shelter above. As for
Woodman’s Hall, it was doomed.

“Time to go!” Valory shouted next
to me.

I looked over at her in surprise. I
hadn’t realized that she was back. The wall was crumbling under my feet.
No,
I thought.
It doesn’t end like this. It can’t. Where will we go? What will
we do?

I knew what I had to try. A
familiar power stirred in my blood, made much stronger by the desperation of
all those watching from above.

“Come on!” Valory said, grabbing my
arm.

I pulled away from her. “I can’t.
You get to safety.”

Valory stayed rooted in place. “Hey
Em, your eyes look funny.”

I barely heard her between the roar
of the water and the rising hum of my own magical energy. My arms and legs
trembled. My blood felt like hot magma flowing through my veins. I had to save
Woodman’s Hall. It was home now. If I couldn’t save it, I might as well drown. With
that thought burning in my mind I summoned up all my power into a force strong
enough to withstand the wave. It was only water, after all. I wasn’t about to
give up to plain old water.

I screamed, unable to contain the
power any longer. The wave collided with the dam. The little wall held up for
but an instant before it buckled. Rivers raced to pound the sides of Woodman’s
Hall, but they didn’t touch it. A wall of shimmering blue energy held them at
bay.

The remains of the wall
disintegrated beneath my feet. Valory held me aloft, flapping her wings
furiously. I held on until the very last second, willing my barrier to stay in
place. The wave began to recede, threatening Woodman’s Hall from the other
direction. I focused my magic there, reinforcing the barrier so that no water
got past the drawbridge.

With the wave receding, people flew
down from the treetops to help. Master Casters froze the stream in front of the
hall solid so that the floodwaters that swelled it couldn’t escape its banks.

The wave slid back to the ocean,
leaving an alien landscape behind. All the trees between the shore and
Woodman’s Hall had been knocked flat. Most of the fallen trunks were swept out
with the receding waters. Halfway up the shore and past Woodman’s Hall the
trees survived, but they were bare and covered in mud high up on their trunks.
Only the tallest green branches remained unscathed.

Valory lowered me gently onto the
waterlogged ground. My legs didn’t work. My last reserves of energy were gone.
I felt empty but I was also jubilant. I’d saved the hideout.

“You did it! You did it!” Valory
cheered. She jumped around excitedly in the mud. “I wish you coulda seen
yourself! You looked all glowy like Commander Larue did! I was scared, Em. I thought
you were gonna die!”

“Well, I didn’t,” I said weakly.
“Help me out of this mud.”

Valory threw my arm over her
shoulders and pulled me to firmer ground. My vision was hazy. Everything was
ocurring in slow motion. Lord Finbarr appeared and said something to me. His
face was a blur. The others joined him. A crowd of blurry people carried me
into the hall.

“That was amazing!”

“Spectacular!”

“You saved us!”

“…and without a source crystal.”

I fought the urge to slip under. I’d
fallen asleep after big bursts of magic before, but this time I vowed not to.
What if another wave came? The more I fought it the more I realized how
pitifully weak I was—and
ravenous
. I felt as though I could eat five
hearty meals and it wouldn’t be enough.

Somehow I ended up in the main
sitting room. I sank gratefully into a plush armchair. Valory’s worried face
hovered into my vision.

“Is there anything we can get you?”

“Food,” I croaked.

“Right on it,” said Anouk from
somewhere in the hazy distance.

After a big helping yams and rice I
grew more cognizant. I noticed for the first time that I was covered in mud.

“Don’t worry about that,” Anouk
said as I tried to wipe some of the muck off the armchair. “We’ll clean up
later. It’s going to be dirty around here for a while yet. I only hope the
animals return to the forest soon. It’s okay, though. We’ve got plenty of food
stores in the pantry and they’re all intact thanks to you.”

I mumbled something agreeable and bit
into a chunk of bread. Warmth returned to my insides. I still didn’t feel
strong enough to get up and dance or anything, but I was no longer on the verge
of passing out.

Lord Finbarr came whistling into
the room. His hands were in his vest pockets and he looked quite jolly. He gave
me a big grin.

“I hate to say I told you so,” he
said.

“Go ahead,” I mumbled through a
mouthful of bread.

“Fine. I told you so. What would we
have done without you here tonight?”

I wiped my mouth. Instead of
clearing away bread crumbs I smeared mud across the whole lower half of my
face. “Thank Valory. She’s the one who spotted the wave. Any idea what caused
it?”

“Not a clue,” Lord Finbarr said. “There
haven’t been any such cataclysms in recent history, though most fishing
villages have legends of such things. We’ll send a search party to the shore to
see if they turn up anything.”

Anouk returned to take my plate
away. She laughed at me. “If I didn’t know it was you under all that grime I’d
think you were a mud sprite! Come on, let’s get you a bath.”

I was happy that Anouk seemed in
better spirits than earlier that evening. Woodman’s Hall hadn’t been destroyed.
Everyone was safe and I’d saved the day. I should have been content. Why then,
was there a gnawing sensation in my gut? The air felt charged. Maybe it was
just an echo of my barrier. After all, I’d just released enough magic to power
Ivywild for a week.

The feeling stayed with me all
through my bath. Even as vigor returned slowly to my muscles, I sensed the
approach of something dangerous. It was like some part of me had been vaporized
into the atmosphere along with my magic and now it was traveling on unseen
channels, sensing things I normally could not have known. Strange as it was, I
couldn’t help but think that whatever had caused the wave was connected to me
somehow. Perhaps these were the threads of destiny that High priestess Grimmoix
had warned me about. The wave was but a hint of some cosmic disturbance. I
wondered fearfully what might wash ashore from the ripples.

It was very late. I wondered where
Valory had gone until I went upstairs and found the lanky Slaugh passed out in
bed, still in her muddy clothes. I imagined what Mrs. Larue would say when she
came in and saw the filthy sheets in the morning. Valory deserved her rest,
though. I couldn’t imagine how difficult it was for her to hold me aloft along
as she had.

Finally, blissfully, I fell into my
own bed. Sleep pulled me under far, far down where nothing could invade my
mind.

Valory woke me again in the
morning.

This time she didn’t shake me. She
merely leaned over my bed, grinning from ear to ear. I blinked a few times,
then sat up and rubbed my eyes. Valory watched me carefully like a matador
gauging the mood of a bull.

“How did you sleep?” she asked.

“Like the dead,” I said. “You
bathed.”

Valory popped the collar on her
clean shirt. “Mrs. Larue insisted.” She clasped her hands behind her back and
seemed to wait for me to ask something.

Despite Valory’s perplexing
behavior, I had plenty of other things on my mind. First off, I wanted to get a
good look at the surrounding forest in the daylight and see how much cover we’d
lost.

“We need to check this place for
cracks,” I said to Valory as I reached for a comb and my shoes. “All that
shaking last night might have done some damage.”

“Lord Finbarr’s already got
somebody on it,” Valory said, bouncing on the balls of her feet.

“Oh.” I put on my boots and stared
through the window at the mud-covered landscape. “What about wildlife? How big
of an area did the wave affect?”

“I can find that out quickly
enough.”

“Were there any injuries?” I asked.

“Some kid bumped his head because
he flew into a branch. Nothing much worse than that.” She was still bouncing on
the balls of her feet and her wings twitched in impatience.

I headed for the kitchen. “Did Lord
Finbarr send some people out to inspect the shoreline? He mentioned something
about it last night.”  

Valory dogged my every step. “Yep!
And guess what? You remember that thing I saw on the wave?”

“Yeah.”

“I was a ship! It got tangled up in
some trees down the coast.”

I paused in the kitchen doorway.
“Really? Was there anyone on board?”

Valory’s eyes lit up. She took a
deep breath and opened her mouth to answer, but she didn’t need to. At that
precise moment I walked into the kitchen and saw a group of Slaugh seated around
the nearest table. When I saw who was sitting at the head of the table I nearly
choked.

“It’s my people,” Valory said. “I
tried to tell them that I was their queen, but
he
won’t listen so they
won’t either.

I had locked eyes with King Hugo.

There he sat, in the flesh. I
wasn’t prepared for it at all. His sudden appearance at Woodman’s Hall was so
jarring that I thought I was seeing things. I wanted to shake my head from side
to side to clear out what was obviously an illusion, but I couldn’t take my
eyes from his. They made me feel small and wretched.

Hugo broke off the soul-withering
gaze and returned to his meal. He looked my direction no more. Now I felt worse
than small and wretched. I felt invisible.

Unable to collect myself, I spun,
pushed Valory out of my way and ran upstairs. I couldn’t see, couldn’t think—couldn’t
even breathe. I could deal with forces of nature. I could deal with bad guys
and monsters. I couldn’t deal with the person who had ripped my heart to shreds
and who I’d repaid in kind.

“Emma!” Valory called as she
thudded up the stairs after me. “Don’t you want to hear their story?”

I kept running until I was safely
in a secluded room far away from the kitchen. Valory ran in after me.

“Emma? What’s wrong?”

I rounded on her and pointed a
finger. “Why didn’t you warn me?”

“I tried. Sort of. I didn’t want to
jump right out with it when you first woke up because I thought you wouldn’t
believe me. But you’ve got to come back downstairs, Emma. They’re going to tell
us everything that happened. He knows all about the wave. I heard him telling
Lord Finbarr about it!”

“He hates me,” I said. “He hates
me. Didn’t you see it? Couldn’t you
feel
it?”

Valory shrugged. “He gave me the
same look, like I wasn’t nothing more than a smudge of dirt on his shoe. I
suspect he looks at most folks that way, seein’ as he had some great royal upbringing.”

“Not me!” I said. “He never…he
was…we were…”

“
Was
and
were
,”
Valory said. “What’s done is done. Right now you’ve got to chock it up to good
fortune for bringing that boatload of Slaugh to us because they’re the only
ones in this whole messed up place that knows what’s going on. By the way, it
wasn’t just Slaugh on that ship. Some blind Hobgoblin lady was asking about
you.”           

This news surprised me enough to
take my mind momentarily off of Hugo. “That sounds like Captain Sandrine.”

Valory relaxed a little. “I didn’t
catch her name. She’s real neat, though. She’s got this crew of Gremlins and
Brownies. There’s a Fay guy with her, too. Tall guy. Looks like somebody left
him out in the sun too long.”

I realized she was talking about
Bayard Barrie and a little more of my anger went away. I wasn’t mad at Valory
for not warning me. I wasn’t angry at Hugo, either. I was mad at myself. Hugo
hated me and I deserved it.

“Well?” Valory asked.

I glanced up at her.

“Aren’t you going to come
downstairs and hear what they have to say?” she asked.

The answer was yes, of course. I
was dying to know what had caused the freak wave. I also wanted to know what
the Slaugh had been up to all these months.

Unfortunately it meant being in the
same room with Hugo again and I wasn’t ready for
that
yet. I put my back
to the wall and slid down it until I sat on the floor.

“For mercy’s sake!” Valory said,
crossing her arms. “I can’t believe you’re the same girl who saved our skins
last night! I don’t know the whole story on you and my half-brother, but you’re
acting like that silly sourpuss Larue girl. Now get up before I drag your tail
downstairs myself!”

Offended, I rose to my feet. “I AM
NOT acting like Beth! She’s pining over some stupid little crush. Lev, I mean, Hugo
and I were like best friends until he lied to me, and I basically told him I’d
kill him if I ever saw him again.”

Valory was not impressed. “So what?
Just go tell him you’re sorry.”

The very notion of apologizing was
ludicrous. “No! It’s his fault as much as mine. He wronged me first.”

Valory groaned. “Well fine. Stay up
here and sulk if you want, but I’m going down there. Hugo can look down his
nose at me all day long if he wants and it won’t bother ME a bit! If I went
around looking grumpy like him all the time I’d have to punch myself in the
face.”