I narrowed my eyes at him. “It’s not like that. We’ll talk when I have time.” I didn’t wait to see what he would say back, because it was probably going to be whiny, and I had no patience. Instead I let the Fae lead me away from the crowd into another wing of the castle.
The Fae led me into an empty parlor away from the Court’s hubbub and finally stopped, dropping my hands from his arm. “Okay, Dandelion, do you want to tell me what all of this is about?”
He cocked his head to one side. “Dandelion? I haven’t gone by that name in months. You’re supposed to ask what to call me—”
I sighed and rolled my eyes. “Look, I don’t have time for games right now. I promised Count Duncan and the rest of the Court that I wouldn’t get involved in any further investigations or tell anything that I know, so they could get suspicious if I disappear with you for a long time. Do you know where Mom and Akasha are?”
He blinked rapidly in total confusion, then shook his head. “I’m sorry, Rosa, I haven’t had time to look for them.”
“You were supposed to be helping me!” I burst out, angrier than I’d intended, but I was getting tired of everyone telling me no. That was why I had taken matters into my own hands and gotten into this mess in the first place.
Dandelion stared down at me. “I said I’m sorry. I’ve had other things on my mind. But if you’d told me that she was planning on opening a gate through the Veil, then I would have made finding her my top priority.”
“Oh.” I looked down at the floor. “Well, I didn’t know what she was doing, at first. Actually, I might have given her the idea myself. But I didn’t think she’d actually go through with it. And—” I knew my excuses were getting weaker and weaker, but I kept trying to explain to everyone else. “I thought I could stop her in time. Which Glen did after I told him, so I kinda take credit for that. But I never feel like I can trust anyone, so I don’t want to tell anyone the truth, and it just gets complicated. Besides, you were barely around.”
Dandelion swept me up into a tight hug and held me there for several long minutes. When he spoke again, his voice was much more gentle and sympathetic.
“I know it’s been hard on you. I’m sorry that I haven’t been around.” He pulled back a little to look at me. “I did tell you that I was looking for the dragon scale, though. The one that was stolen from the guardian. How could you not come to me with this?”
I groaned. “You never told me what the guardian’s scale could do, so I didn’t realize that the two were connected. Glen explained that to me just last week. Maybe if you weren’t so cryptic and vague all of the time, it would be easier for me to tell you things.”
He embraced me tighter. “Oh, my dear witchling, I’ve made an awful mess of things.” He let me go and looked down at the floor like an embarrassed child. “I didn’t think I would explain any of this to you until you were older. I just wasn’t sure that you would be ready.”
It was my turn to tilt my head to one side and stare at him. “Ready for you to explain what?”
He waved his hand vaguely. “I always forget how little you humans know when you’re young. I don’t think you gave the idea of opening the gate to your mother, Rosa. If what I understand of the timeline is correct, the Unseelie stole the dragon scale before you ever contacted them. They must have been planning this all along, and just used you as a tool to get what they wanted.”
I folded my arms. “No one ever mentioned a dragon scale or the guardian or a gate to me. I came up with that when I found the book. And Glen’s questioned everyone and searched everywhere for that scale, and hasn’t found a trace of it. I don’t think the Unseelie are the ones who have it.”
“Who else would steal it?” Dandelion leaned closer and took both of my hands in his. “Kaorinix is going mad trying to find her scale, and it’s distracting her from her role as Guardian of the Veil in this region. The barrier between our worlds has never been so vulnerable before. I need your help. I’ve been waiting for the day that I could train you to be my partner in this world, but I’m afraid that I can’t put it off any longer.”
I gripped his hands in terror. “Train me? As your partner? For what?” I’d never heard him talk so seriously before. He was supposed to be just a friend, a little bit of a mentor, the source of my power through our pact, but mostly just the goofy guy who showed up at parties to tease me. Hearing him talk like I was going to save the world with him scared me. “Who are you?”
“I’m sort of like an assistant to the guardian.” His eyes slid away from me with a guilty expression. “Kaorinix stands over the gate, trapped between the two worlds, and stops those who should not be crossing. But she’s like the last defense. I travel in both worlds, keeping an eye out for potential problems and stopping them before they happen.”
I stiffened as I remembered what I’d learned from the Unseelie. The Seelie didn’t just keep humans from going into the Otherworld, they kept magikin from coming into the mortal world with very strict immigration laws that kept those with Fae blood in political power and all of the other races at a disadvantage. Those who wanted the Fae to rule over all were called Seelie, and the Unseelie like my mother may have had harsh methods, but they wanted to give other magikin a fair chance.
I frowned up at him suspiciously. “Do you agree with the Seelie laws, then? You help them keep the other magikin from living in our world?”
Dandelion scowled. “That’s not the whole truth of it. I think you’ve been misinformed.”
I shook my head. “You’re the one who confirmed it for me, when you took me into the Otherworld and showed me the kitsune living there. Everyone else told me that magikin couldn’t even live on the other side of the Veil. Why would they lie about that?”
“I don’t follow politics,” he said with a shrug. “What story they tell these days is no matter to me. I only care about protecting the integrity of the two worlds. Letting people march back and forth across the Veil willy-nilly just gets things mixed up. If too much magic bleeds from my world into yours, or if too much of your logical reality intrudes on my world, then things start to go very, very wrong.” He leaned closer as he emphasized the last few words in a low whisper.
I took a step back and tried to pull my hands away, but he kept holding them fast. “Are you trying to hit on me?”
Then he let go of me and moved away. “No, no. I’ve joked about it before, but you’re way too young for me.” He winked.
I let out a sigh of relief. “You mean that you’re too old for me.” I tilted my head to one side. “But if you do this incredibly important job of protecting both worlds, then why does no one else seem to even know who you are?”
“Ah.” He put his hand dramatically on his chest. “You think that I would appreciate the attention?” He dropped the affected pose. “I told you, I don’t do politics. I take my orders from the Faerie Queen herself and I don’t let anyone else influence me. That means I stay on the sidelines, except when I’m recruiting a potential human partner.” He pointed at me.
I stopped short as what he’d said earlier finally started to sink in. “Wait, how long have you been planning on this? And why would you pick me?”
He grinned. “Why not? I noticed you before you ever qualified to become a witch, so I made sure I was the first to offer a pact to you. You’ve got talent with magic. You get along with humans, faeriekin, and everyone in between. And I enjoy spending time with you,” he added with another wink.
There were chairs in the parlor where we stood, and I sat down heavily in one of them, not trusting myself to stand any longer. My head spun with all of this new information. The Fae who I’d known since childhood was more than just a foolish prankster, and he was grooming me to work with him. Who would possibly pick me to do something this important? I could barely handle the stress of my own family’s drama. I couldn’t be relied on to help protect all of Golden Forest County. I hadn’t even been to most of the County; I’d lived in Madrone all my life, and only drove to other towns out o
f necessity. And I’d barely been to the Otherworld, too.
I looked up at Dandelion with a start. “You said that the Unseelie used me as a tool to further their plans. And my mother is still working with them. She knows how to manipulate me better than anyone else, according to my friends.” I was still upset about Glen’s words, and I turned them over in my head every night, trying to determine if they were true. “If you give me this kind of responsibility, won’t they just use me even more?”
His grin faded a little into a sad smile. He sat down in the chair next to me, instead of looming over me like a lecturing parent, and took my hand again. “I think you’re stronger from what you’ve learned from your experiences,” he said gently. “I don’t think you’ll make the same mistake twice, do you?”
I shook my head angrily. “I have no idea. I keep telling myself that I’m not going to fall for my mother’s tricks, but I failed when I faced her again. You can’t trust me with this. I would just ruin everything.”
“You’re capable of more than you know.” He took my hand and pulled me back to my feet. “Come with me and talk to the guardian. Maybe she can convince you.”
I took a deep breath and let it out slowly. He could be very persuasive, and it was hard to say no. “One more thing,” I said, holding up my free hand. “You say that you don’t have a title, then, because you stay out of Court politics. But what’s your real name? It’s confusing how you change it every time I see you.”
He looked off into the distance. “You know, I’ve lived for such a long time that I don’t remember my real name anymore. I guess I keep changing it because I don’t know what would suit me.”
That was the saddest thing that I’d heard all day. How could he forget his own name? I squeezed his hand reassuringly. “You know what I like best? I think of you as Dandelion.”
“Named after a flower, just like Rosa?” He looked down at me with a smile and a wink. “Okay, then. Just for you, I can be Dandelion.”
6
Visit the Guardian
Rosamunde
I followed Dandelion out of the parlor. He steered me down a side hallway, avoiding the main crowd near the Court Hall, but Glen somehow managed to spot us and called out before we were able to make it outside.
“Hold up, Rosa!”
I turned and saw him jogging toward us. Heather and Ashleigh hovered nearby, but Kai had already given up and left.
I flashed my friends an easy smile, as if I hadn’t just heard earth-shattering news from my mentor. “Hey, thanks for waiting for me, guys. Turns out I won’t be needing a ride home right now, though, so go on without me.”
Glen stopped short and looked up at Dandelion suspiciously. “Why, where are you going?”
Dandelion glanced at the boy and shrugged. “Off to see a friend. Don’t worry, she’ll be with me.”
“That’s exactly why I’m worried,” Glen said with a frown. He tried to grab my arm and pull me away. “I don’t think you should go anywhere with him, Rosa.”
I stepped out of his grasp with a shake of my head. “No, it really is okay. Just chill.”
He looked down at me with wide eyes. “What’s going on? I don’t know if I can trust you with any more secrets. I’m sorry, but you know why.”
That got me. I froze in my tracks and grabbed Dandelion’s arm, silently begging him to explain. I knew he didn’t want to get involved in politics or let people know what he was doing, but these were my friends. I didn’t want to lie to them anymore.
The Fae’s casual smile faded at my fear. He sighed and shook my head. “This will take all day if I have to explain everything to everyone in the whole castle,” he grumbled.
Dandelion stepped closer to Glen, leaned down, and said in a voice so low that I could barely hear it even right next to him, “When the Veil is lifted, Truth shines a lamp into our darkest shadows.”
I had no idea what that meant, but Glen recognized it with a start. He backed up and blinked at Dandelion in shock. “I—I’m sorry,” he stammered. “I had no idea.” He looked over at me. “And you’re sure that you need Rosa?”
Dandelion held up one finger. “I can’t answer any questions right now. If it’s important that you know, then we’ll tell you later.”
Glen nodded. He gave my hand a reassuring squeeze and gave me a strained smile. “Good luck.”
“Thanks,” I said, but I still wasn’t sure what was going on. I glanced back at my other friends, but the girls were standing there looking just as confused as me.
Dandelion took me by the arm and led me back down the hallway to the door.
When we stepped outside into the cold, I shivered and buttoned up my coat. “What did you say to him back there?”
“An old code phrase that I hoped he would know,” the Fae said with a half-smirk. “I stay out of the Court’s affairs, as I said, but sometimes we need to get their cooperation for something. So that phrase lets them know that we’re on official business from the Queen herself and they have to do whatever we tell them, no questions asked.”
I’d never met the Queen before, but I’d heard the way that Glen and other faeriekin talked about her with complete respect and a little fear. “It sounds like you could abuse that kind of power, or anyone else who knew to use it could, too. All you have to do is say the code phrase?”
“Well, and there’s magic behind it if the right person says the words.” Dandelion had been hurrying me up the hill, past the castle gardens and up to the Grove at the summit—a circle of rowan trees that marked the boundary of the gate between the mortal realm and the Otherworld. Now he stopped just outside of the trees and looked down at me. “I’ll teach you the codes and the magic later, if you take the job. Are you ready?”
I looked up at the cloudy sky. It was still early in the afternoon, and the moon wouldn’t even be half full for another two nights. By everything that I knew, it should be impossible to cross over into the Otherworld. Yet Dandelion had crossed easily at so many impossible times—his presence there today said that he could do as much.
I had to trust him.
“I’m ready.”
He pressed something into the palm of my hand. I looked down and saw something sparkle, almost too bright to look at, although there was no sunlight to make it glow so bright. It was a little round disk, hanging from a golden chain, but the brilliance of the little disk made the regular gold seem dull by comparison. At first I thought it was smooth, but when I rubbed it with my thumb, I felt grooves running lengthwise across the surface.
Dandelion took it from me again and lifted it to my neck. I held still as he fastened the clasp and let it fall onto my chest.
It was too small to have much weight, yet as it hit my skin, I sensed something settle over me like a mantle, and it made me tingle from the top of my head down to my toes.
Dandelion smiled. “It’s from one of her scales,” he answered my questioning look. “As long as you wear it, then you can cross over at any time, too.”
He put a hand to his own neck and held up a thin golden chain that I’d never seen hiding underneath the collar of his bright blue shirt. So he had one, too. It seemed simple now that I knew about it, so I almost laughed aloud—and then I realized that somewhere out there, another scale was still missing, and someone could use this power for something much worse.
The seriousness of the situation hit me hard, and I looked down, biting my lip.
But he didn’t give me time to absorb the situation. Dandelion grabbed my hand and pulled me after him into the Grove. “Okay, let’s go!”
The few times that I’d been in the Otherworld before, it had felt like stepping through a thick fog or mist into a place that was totally strange and disconnected from everything that I knew before. Going through the Grove at Doe’s Rest Castle had always landed me in a reflection of the same place on the other side—surrounded by rowan trees, with unmarked paths branching off into the bizarrely twisted forest.
But this time, I fe
lt my skin tingle just at the border, and then I saw the shimmer of the change in location around me. When I turned around to look behind me, I saw the mortal realm slipping away through the gate. The Veil stretched before me like a sparkling crystal tunnel. Deep inside, I felt that if I stepped in different directions, I could arrive at my choice of landmark in the Otherworld—the rowan Grove if I wanted, but also Dandelion’s house, one of the many Fae or magikin communities, or even the castle of the Queen herself. I could feel the directions of the many areas tugging at me as if they were places in my own hometown that I instinctively knew how to reach, even though I’d never visited most of them before.
And when I looked back over my shoulder, I felt a similar pull of many gates back into the mortal world. If I chose I could step out into the middle of Golden Gate Park in San Francisco, or a cornfield behind a little farmhouse in Pennsylvania, or an English garden outside of London. With just a wish and a few steps, I could go anywhere on the planet where the Otherworld overlapped with the mortal one. The power rushed through me and left me breathless.
I faced forward in the crystal tunnel and took a deep breath. After being trapped in a small rural town my whole life, it was tempting to explore all of those foreign places and everything they had to offer. But I knew where we had to go, and I didn’t need Dandelion to tell me how to step sideways so the tunnel widened into a cave between the worlds. He came with me through the opening, and together we faced the immense golden dragon who waited for us.
Kaorinix lowered her head when we entered, and her lips pulled back from her curved teeth, each one as long as my arm. Her breath was hot and acrid as she spoke. “Welcome back, Rosamunde. I’d hoped you would return.”
I wasn’t sure how to respond to that greeting coming out of such a predatory mouth. “Um, thank you?”
She chuckled low in her throat, a sound that made the ground rumble under my feet. Then she shimmered, and suddenly a tall woman stood before us. She had the ageless beauty of a Fae, with chocolate skin and golden hair falling down her back in waves, and a flowing silk dress in rosy pink like the dawn. But when she smiled, I could see the same wickedly sharp teeth in her mouth. She was smaller now, but no less dangerous.
Fae of Calaveras Trilogy Box Set Page 55
