The Weight of Dreams

by Molly Lavenza

  The change in subject must have caught Lantis’s attention. He turned to face me, his lips downturned, his eyes heavy-lidded. He hadn’t denied his upcoming nuptials when I used the word girlfriend, but he hadn’t seemed too happy about it either.

  Was it one of those arranged royal marriages? Princess Brielle had sounded more than a little interested in him when she asked if he was going to be at dinner. More than a girl being forced into a political alliance should.

  “I’m not sure. It’s a poison, and it grows worse, and more prominent, in Faerie by the day.”

  My concern for my own dermatologic predicament may have been selfish, but I was still working with little answers to my original questions, and more worries by the moment. The sunlight flickered through the room again, and I imagined Declan here, thumbing through the pages of these books.

  The lake was poisoned. The fairies, or at least some of them, might have been poisoned.

  Declan had been in Castle Heights for much longer than he had told me.

  Or had he told me? All he said was that he had been searching for me.

  He never said when it had been, exactly, that he found me.

  What else did I know?

  Princess Brielle was me, and I was her. She didn’t know this, but obviously Lantis did.

  So did Declan.

  So did my mother. Who was, incidentally and not the least of my concerns, the queen of Faerie, and not a kind one at that.

  Did she intend to tell Brielle the truth? Brielle didn’t look very healthy, and I suspected that she had the same problem I had dealt with in the human realm, in reverse. Could she physically thrive in the human world just as I was doing now in Faerie?

  My stomach gurgled, which was a welcome sound after all the heaving and contracting it had been doing since my close encounter with the shark creature came to an end.

  “Is there an antidote?”

  I stared at Lantis, hoping that he would have something positive to say, since he hadn’t during this entire conversation. For someone who liked to chatter more than my mother’s hair stylist, he was frighteningly withdrawn.

  His pupils shifted again, growing larger. Even though I knew that everyone’s pupils changed for a variety of reasons, the obviousness of it with those white eyes of his was disconcerting.

  “For that racket coming from your belly? I imagine this celebratory dinner ought to do the trick.”

  I sighed and rubbed my hands over my arms. Something in this room wasn’t right, aside from the gloomy, sad atmosphere. Lantis’s joke wasn’t helpful.

  Choosing to ignore him rather than give him any sort of attention for his refusal to answer me, I turned away, squinting a little as if it might allow me to see better. Books, blankets . . . was there anything else, maybe something that would give me a clue about Declan’s motivation for not telling me that he had been in Castle Heights.

  Had he been following me, watching me? For how long? If he had been sent to find me and bring me back to Faerie, why had he waited?

  And why had the Faerie queen wanted me back? She sure didn’t act like she was happy to see me, feast plans aside.

  “Only the queen knows how to alleviate the effects of the poison,” Lantis offered, his tone a little apologetic. My back was to him, so I couldn’t see his expression, but I didn’t hear any sarcasm or disdain, just a tinge of sadness.

  I bent down to take a closer look at a small book on the floor by itself, my thoughts spinning as my next question was forming.

  Why is the queen the only who knows, and if she is, why hasn’t she already given it to the faeries, or added it to the lake?

  The soft cover of the tiny, square book in my hand reminded me of something from several years ago. In middle school, I had a diary in this same unique shape, and I poured my horrific visions as well as my emotional torment at the hands of my classmates into it, primarily in purple gel pen ink.

  On my first day of high school, I stuffed it into the big blue plastic trash cart in the garage, under a couple of full trash bags so my parents couldn’t see it. Determined to keep my distance from my classmates and my mouth shut about everything from then on, I didn’t want reminders of what my unexplained ability had done to my self-esteem.

  I stood up, holding my find close to my eyes as I sucked in a breath.

  Declan had taken my diary out of the trash, three years ago.

  “Did she tell you anything? You know, after hauling you away on that dragon of hers?”

  When I looked over at Lantis, he was staring at the book in my hand, just as I was. I wasn’t about to tell him anything that he didn’t need to know, so I let me arm fall to my side, the book firmly grasped in my hand.

  Where was Astrafael? Was there a stable, or lair, for him? Was he the only dragon here?

  I sighed. More questions, but right then, the question was how much to reveal to Lantis, who had wanted to be the one to bring me to his queen.

  Had wanted to be the one who married whoever it was who was heir to the queen. And now, that would be me.

  I shook my head to clear it before any sort of visual images crept in of that situation. Not happening. Not in my thoughts or in real life.

  “Yes, she did. And now, you’re going to tell me something.”

  Lantis lifted his chin, but his haughtiness had dimmed since the queen had arrived and disrupted the three of us on our travels, and I wondered again at her effect on him, both then and now.

  “Where is Declan?”

  Chapter Twenty Three

  Lantis’s gaze rose to the tiny stream of light that struggled through the thin crack in the rock above us. I held tight to my diary, the weight of all those memories, the dreams and nightmares along with the cruelty visited upon me by my classmates all poured into the small square that fit into the palm of my hand.

  “I don’t know.”

  His last word ended on a sigh, and I felt every muscle in my body tighten as I held myself back from reaching out to slap him. If he hadn’t interfered in the first place, would Declan and I still be together?

  If we were together, would Declan have brought me here, to the queen?

  And how differently would this have ended?

  I didn’t want to think about the realistic answer to that, preferring to route all of my anger towards Lantis.

  Anger, fear, frustration . . . my complete lack of control over my life, both in the human realm and now, here in Faerie, had boiled down to a collection of negative emotions that had been waiting to bubble over.

  The ray of light flickered, distracting me for a second as I heard a familiar voice in my head.

  Your friend is here.

  Astrafael! He must be flying over the cave, crossing paths with the sun’s reach into the dark little room, I thought excitedly.

  I ran over the blanket covering the doorway and pushed the blanket aside.

  A firm hand stopped me and I stumbled back a few steps, stunned. The blanket lay heavily over my shoulders, reminding me of the thick, uncomfortable cloak the queen had made me wear downstairs.

  I shifted a little so the blanket fell, and looked into the face of the one who had cut me off.

  “Declan!”

  My first impulse was to throw my arms around him, but his eyes, as beautiful ice blue as the moment I first saw them, weren’t shining, but lackluster like a faded gem.

  “You shouldn’t be wandering around the cave alone. It’s very dangerous.”

  I felt Lantis moving behind me, his breathing uneven and strangely enough, maybe even fearful.

  “Brother,” he said deferentially, the calm in his tone masking something more intense.

  Declan shook his head.

  “I don’t know what happened after we were separated, but I’ve been told that you know who you are now, and why you’re here.”

  I shook my head, watching his lips move and wanting to press mine to his to silence him, to take even a brief moment to ourselves to make that physical connection.
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  “Why am I here? That’s what I don’t know, not specifically.”

  Lantis’s hand was on my arm, but I didn’t pull away. There was something comforting in his touch, even as I knew that I couldn’t trust him.

  But could I trust Declan?

  “I’ve explained the poison, or at least that the only cure for it can come from the queen.”

  I held out my hand and turned my palm to face Declan as Lantis spoke.

  “Why am I the only one of us with green skin? We all fell into that lake.”

  Declan’s gaze shifted to the space behind me where I felt Lantis standing close, then flickered back to me, glancing down quickly. What had just passed between him and his brother, and why was he about to lie to me about it?

  “Lantis and I are immune. We’re from a different part of Faerie, a smaller area south of here.”

  He sighed, then bared his teeth in a creepy, awkward smile. If it was meant to reassure me, he was doing anything but. I almost stepped back, wanting a little more distance between myself and the boy I had been longing to kiss only moments earlier.

  “The queen here has been trying to forge an alliance between the two parts for a long time,” he continued, but he didn’t look at me as he spoke.

  Lantis hissed, his breath warm on my neck.

  “An alliance. More like she wants to rule over all of Faerie, single-handed.”

  Declan frowned, and I felt his fingers on my wrist. When I looked down, I remembered that I held my diary, and now he was staring at it.

  I waited for him to say something, to offer to explain why he had it. Why he had all of these books about fairy tales. Books from my own hometown library.

  But he was silent.

  “How does she plan to do this?”

  I took the initiative to return to our conversation, hoping that at least I would get more information about the queen. Anything I could learn about her would inevitably be information about me.

  Since she was my mother.

  That was not going to sink in for a long time, and if I let myself start wandering down that path I would be lost before I learned anything more.

  “Marriage, and then . . .”

  Declan’s eyes were focused on my diary, as if he hadn’t heard my question, and Lantis’s answer didn’t bring about any reaction from him.

  “And then?” I dared to ask when the silence grew long and my skin began to prickle. There was a chill in this sad little room, but my body wasn’t susceptible to those small annoyances as it would have been back home.

  This was home now, and the shudder than raced through me like an electrical current had nothing to do with my body’s weakness, or the air temperature.

  Lantis still held my arm in his hand, and I turned to face him. His white eyes were wide, his pupils barely visible, reminding me of how Declan’s eyes had been.

  Why were they different now, as they had been in the human realm? As brothers, would they not share something as definitive as these milky eyes?

  “You aren’t safe here.”

  Somehow Lantis’s revelation wasn’t a surprise. Maybe it was the obviously fake pleasure the queen had exhibited over my arrival in Faerie, or Brielle’s passive hostility. Or perhaps that I nearly became dinner for a bizarre lake animal that had teeth the size of baseball bats. Declan’s weird transformation that he couldn’t remember now?

  Or these two boys’ refusal to tell me what and then entailed.

  I shook my head as if I could scatter my mental list aside.

  “But if I’m not safe here, why were you both so eager to bring me to the queen? What about my destiny, my place of belonging?”

  Lantis looked over my shoulder at Declan, just as Declan had done to see Lantis’s reponse before.

  “Stop that! Both of you. If you just tell me the truth, you won’t have to keep looking at each other to get your story straight, or whatever it is you’re doing.”

  Declan finally broke his gaze and his silence, his eyes finally returning to the shine I remembered from that first time I saw him and dared to look at the face that had caused the girls in my class to loudly whisper their appreciation.

  “We need you to convince the queen to bestow the antidote before Faerie is ruined.”

  That didn’t make sense. Why would Queen Acanthe destroy her own realm? True, she had seemed a bit of a control freak, but what would harming her subjects, poisoning lake water, causing fairies to become violent - what would she gain from all of that?

  “Fear is a powerful weapon, and you have been our only hope. Literally, and while I want to say figuratively, it’s still very literal.”

  Lantis still had his sense of humor, which made me laugh a little in spite of my utter confusion. I was no more an Obi Wan Kenobi than I was a fairy princess.

  But there I was anyway.

  “I hate to break this to you, but my social skills are sadly lacking, and the queen doesn’t even like me. How am I supposed to convince her to stop what she’s doing?”

  Declan’s gaze shifted, but before he had a chance to make eye contact with Lantis, I stepped sideways, blocking the two boys from each other.

  “I just told you to stop that! You’re both so annoying!”

  I stomped my foot before I realized what I was doing, and Declan frowned before his lips curved into a barely discernible smile.

  “Lady Hope? Where are you?”

  A female voice I didn’t recognize called out from farther down the hall, and I closed my eyes.

  Lady Hope?

  I shook my head.

  “Brielle has no idea what’s going on. All she cares about is whether or not Lantis is going to be at this dinner.”

  Lantis let go of my arm and I looked at him. Obviously he didn’t have the same feelings about his future bride as she harbored for him.

  “She’s been raised to think a certain way about her life and her purpose, and doesn’t consider that anything else is possible.”

  In other words, her mother, my mother, had brainwashed her.

  What was going to happen to Brielle, now that I was there?

  Chapter Twenty Four

  I remembered how pale and thin Brielle was, her naked body covered in a thin, purplish skin that hardly covered the shadows of her internal organs. Had she always been that way, or had she deteriorated gradually over time, sort of how I had in the human realm?

  “Will we both turn eighteen on the same day?”

  Without a second thought for the woman who was in the hall, I voiced my concerns, hoping that the boys would be able to answer at least a few questions before I had to go out to meet her.

  Somehow, I thought that the queen wouldn’t be too happy about the three of us talking together like this.

  Declan nodded immediately.

  “You were born on the same day, almost at the same time. I was sent on my mission to find you not long after the switch was made, not long after . . .”

  He frowned as he trailed off, then shrugged.

  “My memory. I don’t have much of one before the queen charged me with . . .”

  Lantis stepped between us as Declan struggled again, and I tried to push him away. Why couldn’t Declan remember?

  The queen had done something to him back in the field where she had landed Astrafael and taken me away, and I had no doubt she was responsible for the memories he lacked.

  Did he need those memories to help me, or was the pressure to regain them more of a price that he needed to pay?

  “Lady Hope! Oh, I hope I can find her. There’s no telling what our queen will do to me if I don’t!”

  The woman sounded closer to us now, and as she mumbled to herself, I worried that my refusal to go with her would cause her difficulty. It wasn’t her fault, and I needed to face the queen and go along with this dinner business.

  It was the only way to find out what she was up to, and to figure out how to help Brielle, if I could at all.

  I nodded to Lantis, not waiting for his
response or for permission to go, and stepped into the hall as confidently as I could manage.

  My head held high as I imagined a princess might, I turned in the direction I believed the voice had come from.

  “There you are!”

  Of course, the woman was behind me, and I had to turn again to face her, a smile plastered on my face with a sincerity I truly felt for her. What was it like to be at the queen’s beck and call, or Brielle’s?

  Brielle had already proven herself no slouch in the snob department.

  “Hello. I’m sorry, but I got lost.”

  She shook her head. The tight bun that held her dark hair at the nape of her neck didn’t move an inch as she stepped closer to me hesitantly.

  “No trouble at all, my lady. The queen would like you to be prepared for the feast as soon as possible, and I’ve been instructed to assist you.”

  Her head dipped in a small bow, and I noticed a faint green tinge to her skin, much like my own. Was everyone here tainted in the same way? It was hard to tell in the way the light shifted in the cave, and especially in the areas where the jewels glittered so blindingly against the cave walls.

  “Please follow me, my lady.”

  I wanted to tell her to stop calling me that, but if the queen had told her to do so, my attempts to get her to stop just because it sounded weird weren’t going to be successful. Besides, if the queen or someone else heard her fail to use those words, she might get into trouble.

  And supposedly I was here to help Faerie, not get anyone reprimanded because I was uncomfortable with their unnecessary politeness.

  She moved so fast that it took me a moment to realize that she had even turned away from me, and I shuffled behind her.

  My diary was still in my hand, and I wondered if it might be a good idea to hide it. I couldn’t keep carrying it around with me, and it wasn’t small enough to fit into my jeans pocket.

  Whatever I was going to be wearing probably wouldn’t have anywhere to tuck it away, especially if it was a dress

  Ugh. It was probably a dress. Wasn’t that what faerie princesses always wore?

  The last time I had worn a dress was in fourth grade. During a particularly horrible vision that involved two of my classmates who were later killed when they ran in front of a school bus, I fell into a muddy area of the playground. My dress flipped up, revealing My Little Pony underwear.