“So what do we do?” a white-skinned nymph on the right called out. “What will the allies of the Aurae do to stop these attacks?”
“Aquella?” I searched for her in the crowd, and the blue-skinned naiad stepped forward from the cluster of nymphs near the windows on the left side of the room.
“Yes, Your Majesty?”
“Can you stop the fires? If we send you out with dragon scouts, can you stop the fire in the White Mountains and make it safe for our army to travel?”
“We can bring storms that will make the Pleiades tremble,” Aquella said, her pale blue eyes fixed on mine. “Darinda and her Order will feel the rains we bring here even inside the Summer Lands.”
The Summer Lands. The nymph version of Heaven. The place where the souls of those we lost were said to wait for us to come and find them again at the end of our own time in this realm.
“How long until it’s safe for the army to move through the forests and into the White Mountains?”
“Give us three days,” Aquella said cautiously. I could see the fear in her eyes at sending her people out to face a fire that had already killed all but one of the dryads.
“When will the army be ready, Rhys? Not just here, but ready to march. How long?” I asked.
He looked thoughtful for a moment. “Five days, a week at most. In one week we can make you an army the likes of which this world has never seen, an army that would make our own world tremble.”
“Do you think we can spare a week?” I asked. I could hear everyone in the room draw in a breath, waiting for his answer. Did we have seven more days before war came to Nerissette?
“If we can find a way to stall Bavasama from taking more action, it may give us enough time.” Winston cleared his throat. “Send her a message. Ask for terms. Apologize for how you treated her.”
“No. I’m not apologizing to that woman. She killed Darinda.” I turned and narrowed my eyes at him, gripping the handles of my chair. He had to be insane if he thought I was just going to send someone to her and try to negotiate more peace after what she’d done.
“We lie,” Winston said. “We send a fake ambassador to Bavasama and let her think we’re trying to prevent a war while, in reality, we’re preparing to march an army over her border.”
“If we send an ambassador, there’s a very good chance she would kill said ambassador. In fact, I’d expect her to. I won’t throw away someone’s life that way.”
“I’ll do it,” Gunter of the Veldt said from the back of the hall. Everyone fell silent, turning to look at the next Steward of the Veldt, his blond hair cropped short and the left sleeve of his jacket pinned up where his hand had once been. “I’ll go.”
His mother, Arianna—Stewardess of the Veldt—reached for his arm, tears in her eyes. “You can’t. You’re still wounded. If something—“
He pulled away from her and lifted his chin higher. “I can do this, Your Majesty.”
“No.” I shook my head. He’d already lost enough in battle last time. I couldn’t ask him to risk his life in a fake-out plan.
“Your Majesty.” He came forward, his chin held high, and kept his eyes fixed on me.
“I said, no. She’ll kill you.”
“My life is a worthy sacrifice if it keeps you safe for even a minute longer. I can no longer fight, but I can do this. I can do my part to keep our home safe—to protect my queen, my lands, my people.”
“Gunter.” I swallowed.
“Let me act as your messenger, my queen,” he said quietly. “Let me do my part and buy you the time you need to raise an army.”
“Your Majesty—” John started.
“Fine.” I couldn’t meet Gunter’s eyes. “Stall her as much as you can while still staying safe. We’ll bring the army to you.”
“Yes, Your Majesty,” Gunter said and then stepped back.
“Meanwhile, the rest of you, start preparing your troops. Plus, anyone who needs to evacuate the Borderlands, tell them to go to the keeps of their nearest noble. I’ll expect all of your households to make the refugees welcome.”
“Your Majesty, the cost,” Arianna said, her eyes wide.
“Keep track of it. I’ll deduct it from your taxes. Now, we’re done talking about expenses and negotiations and fake ambassadors. From here on out the only thing I want to hear is how we’re going to go about conquering Bathune. Everything else is on hold until that’s over.”
“Your Majesty,” a high-pitched voice called out, and I watched as an older woman in blue silk hobbled forward. “The army is not the way to solve this. We have angered the Pleiades by rejecting the will of Fate. We must make amends. We must make offerings and beg for their forgiveness.”
“I intend to make amends. I mean to make amends to every person who gave their lives to keep us safe. Everyone who died today.” I narrowed my eyes at her before turning to look at all the other people in the room, my knees knocking together even though I was sitting down. What if they refused to fight? What if they wanted to surrender instead? What if they wanted to go back to letting the wizards run their lives for them?
Stop, I reminded myself. You’re the queen of this land. You are the Golden Rose of Nerissette, Queen Alicia, First of Her Name. That makes you responsible for these people—all of them. You’re the royal version of a parent, and like Mom always used to say, “Sometimes as your mom I get to ask what you think, but sometimes I have to tell you what to do, and then it’s just going to have to be my way, whether you like it or not.”
Today was going to be one of those days where they were going to have to do things my way—even if none of them—or even I—liked where it was going to take us.
“Forget the dead. How are we going to make amends to Fate when you’ve locked her own wizard inside the terrors of the Bleak?” a man shouted from somewhere in the middle of the crowd. “How will we rectify our mistakes?”
“You’re worried about how I’m going to explain to Fate that we’ve got a war going on?” I looked around the room, scanning the faces of the nobles who were stunned by what they saw as blasphemy against the creature they stubbornly still believed ruled their lives. Once I reached them, I let my eyes linger on Mercedes and Kitsuna, two of my closest friend who their make-believe deity “Fate” had not been kind to.
“Allie,” Winston said, his voice filled with warning.
“I’m not,” I said, my voice flat. “I’m not explaining myself to anyone. Especially some made up fairy-tale witch.”
Another voice called out, “Then what will we do?”
“Lord Sullivan is going to build Nerissette an army, and we’re going to take it over the mountains to fight. Then, when we’re done, no one, and I mean absolutely no one, will ever attack our homes and our families again.
“That is how we’re going to honor those who have died and how we’re going to please the stars. Not by begging for mercy or making sacrifices but by making sure that the sacrifices that have already been made are the last. No more men in this country will die from invaders trying to take our land. Not while I’m queen.”
“The will of the Pleiades—” someone shouted.
“Isn’t my problem. If your gods don’t like the fact that we’re going to save ourselves, then they can come down out of the sky and defend us themselves. They can stop letting people die for no good reason because, you know what?”
I watched as they all froze and stared at me, mouths open. Apparently, no one had ever seen a Golden Rose at the end of her rope before. Too bad. It was time they learned what a ticked-off queen looked like.
“I’m sick of waiting around and watching good people die while we wait for the Pleiades to give us a sign that it’s okay to quit getting the crap kicked out of us by every bully who can put together an army.”
“Your Majesty,” Lady Arianna said, her eyes wide with astonishment. “That’s—”
“Tomorrow, I’ll be appointing a regent to handle the day-to-day running of Nerissette, and then you and I will
be joining Lord Sullivan and the Crown Prince as we take an army to go visit the neighbors. Let them see what an invasion feels like for once. Anyone got a problem with that?”
The room was silent as everyone stared at me, still stunned.
“Good. War Council dismissed.” I stood up and looked around once more before stomping down the steps and leaving. Let the rest of them figure out how they were going to deal with the stars and Fate and all the stupid superstitions that kept getting my people into these predicaments.
I hurried across the hall and into the library, closing the door behind me and locking it before I sank down in one of the comfy wingback chairs near the fireplace, my head in my hands.
Chapter Eight
“Would you like to talk about it?”
I looked up to find John had appeared next to one of the bookcases, and I grimaced. “How did you get in here? The door is locked.”
“There’s a hidden door in the back corridor—the painting of the man in the blue armor who’s riding the gold dragon. It comes out here.”
“Great.” I waved my hand at him and sighed before turning back to the empty fireplace. “Make sure you lock it behind you when you go.”
“Allie.”
“John.” I rolled my eyes at him. How could he not be getting that I really didn’t want to talk right then?
“You could try calling me Dad,” he said.
I looked up at him, glaring. He had not actually just suggested that, had he? The guy had been part of my life less than three months, and suddenly he wanted to be “Dad” like nothing had ever happened? He wanted me to call him Dad after I’d been dumped in foster care for years? I mean, sure, I’d gotten lucky with Gran Mosely, but that didn’t change the fact I’d been alone, with a mother in a coma, while he was off running around the woods like an overgrown leprechaun. What sort of mushrooms had he been eating?
“Or not.” He held his hands up as he moved to sit in the chair across from mine. “But I’d really like to talk to you about what happened tonight.”
“What about it?”
“You can’t discount the Pleiades. The people here believe—”
“You’re telling me that the people here believe that it’s the design of some invisible goddess for us to get the crap kicked out of us by everyone we meet? They believe that people are dead because Fate decided she was having a bad day?”
“Allie—”
“No, John. You know what? This idea of Fate as a goddess? It sucks.”
“People here believe she’s real. You may not believe it but they—”
“Well, if they’re right and I’m wrong, then Fate sucks and I’m sick of dealing with her brand of crazy, and you should be, too. From now on, Nerissette decides its own future.”
He tried to take my hand in his.
“No.” I pulled back from him. “You don’t get to do that. That’s not something you have earned the right to do. For all you talk about us being family and being worried about me like you were today, you don’t get to do that. You don’t get to sit here and pretend you care.”
“I know that things between us are strained right now, Alicia, but I am your father.”
“No, you’re not.” I stood up and stormed over to the other side of the library, grabbing books off the shelves and tossing them on one of the tables. “You lost that right a long time ago, and any chance you had of getting that relationship back ended when you took off on me for almost a year.”
“I know you’re upset with me, but I did what I had to do. Besides Allie, I loved—”
“No!” I grabbed a heavy green book and turned on my heel, flinging it at him like a baseball. “I don’t want to hear it. I don’t want to hear about how you loved Mom! You left us there—alone.”
“Alicia, I never meant—”
“My name is Allie! Not Alicia. No one calls me Alicia. No one ever has and don’t tell me what you meant to do. What you meant doesn’t matter. We were trapped there, and then I lost Mom, and we were alone. You left us there alone. You abandoned us. You abandoned me.”
“I would have come for you and your mother if—”
“If what?” I threw my hands up. “If you weren’t too busy getting bullied by the Fate Maker?”
“One of these days, I would have—”
“Would have what? Left the woods and found a way to save us? That’s great. Really. But the thing is, you left us alone, and when the Fate Maker tried to murder Mom, she was alone. All alone.”
“Sweetheart,” John started.
“No. She was alone. I wasn’t even there with her—I was at swim practice, and right now she’s still alone. If we die—if I die—then she’ll be trapped in that hospital, in a coma, all alone. No one will be there to take care of her.”
“You’re not going to die. I won’t allow it.”
“Why should I believe you? You left me alone. All on my own, Dad.” I spat the last word out hatefully. “Do you get that? I had no one but some stranger who agreed to take me in off the street. Where were you then? Where were you when I had nowhere else to go?”
“I thought your mother had left to protect you. To keep you safe. I didn’t know she’d been forced through the Mirror of Nerissette.” His shoulders slumped.
“Then you should have fought to make this world safe so that she could come back. So that I could come back instead of being trapped in the World That Is.”
“I never thought you would lose her over there, that you would end up alone. I never wanted to let you go, but I wanted you to be safe more. I know that I’ll never make up for all those years I missed but—”
“Don’t. Don’t tell me you want to make this right. If you wanted to make it right, you wouldn’t have taken off on me for the past ten months. You’d have been here, trying to be my dad instead of hiding in the Borderlands.”
“Allie—”
“You couldn’t leave the sieges and the peace negotiations to someone else?” I asked. “You didn’t think that I would need you? That I would need my father while I was trapped in the middle of a war in a world that isn’t even supposed to exist?”
“I was trying to secure you a kingdom,” he protested.
“Yeah? Well, great job with that. Turns out you suck just as much at negotiating a peace treaty as you do with getting to know your only daughter.”
I saw the latch on the painting he’d been talking about before and pressed it, watching as it swung open. Instead of waiting for him to say anything else, I slipped out of the library and closed the hidden door behind me.
I spotted the rune carved into the brick at the end of the hall and stomped toward it, my shoulders tense. All I wanted to do was use it to transport back to my room, so I could sleep and try to forget about the fact that this wasn’t a really bad dream.
I knelt down and brushed my finger over the portal key. “All I want is my bed,” I said. A curl of smoke enveloped me, and I felt myself being taken apart.
The world reassembled itself just outside my only half-finished tower, and I took a deep breath in, trying to shake off the sloshiness that came from being ripped apart at a cellular level and then being put back together somewhere else a split second later. Right. Time to find my pallet and try to pretend that this day hadn’t happened.
I made my way into the bedroom and wound through the various clusters of stuff that had been stored there during the renovations as I made my way to the small area in the back that we’d sectioned off. I needed some privacy while the goblins were still rebuilding the rest of the tower. I pushed the curtain back and stepped into the tiny cubby, my eyes focusing on the low fire in the fireplace and my two best girlfriends curled up in front of it, Kitsuna’s arms wrapped around Mercedes’s shoulders.
“I think she may finally be sleeping. She didn’t think she would, but she was so exhausted she couldn’t keep her eyes open,” Kitsuna said as she sat up and untangled herself from the dryad next to her. “Then again, the sleeping powder I gave her m
ay have helped a bit.”
“You drugged her?”
“She needs to sleep.” Kitsuna stood and brushed her hands against the legs of her pants as I moved to the window, staring out at the back garden and the aerie beyond.
“Do you think she’ll ever be able to do it on her own? Sleep, I mean? Sleep and not remember?”
“No, she’ll always remember what happened this morning. Every day she’ll feel the loss of her sisters, but every day it will get easier for her to cope.”
“You think so?” I swallowed and then turned to look at Mercedes sleeping on a tattered blue cushion next to the fire. “That it will get better eventually?”
“We’ll win this war.” Kitsuna came over and grabbed my hand, squeezing it tight. “Then the fighting will stop. You’ll rule everything that both day and night touches, and we’ll have peace. Once that happens, she’ll cry and she’ll feel alone, but she’ll go on. And then one day it won’t be so bad and every day after that will get better.”
“How do you know?”
“Because that’s the way it has to be. None of us could keep fighting if we didn’t believe that somehow, one day, it’s going to start getting better. That’s what the dragons believe the Pleiades are for, to remind us that things get better. That Fate doesn’t control our destinies.”
“The dragons don’t believe in Fate?”
“No, we believe in Fate, but we don’t give her as much power as the others do.”
“Why?”
“Because the Pleiades don’t always shine constantly. They move and they shift, and sometimes they change. Stars are born, and then they die. And sometimes, if you’re very lucky, your stars will change.”
I turned to look back out the window at the very stars she was telling me about. The place where the people of Nerissette—my people—believed paradise resided. The stars were supposed to be the home of godlike watchers who would come to keep us safe. Not that any of them had ever bothered with that, except for Esmeralda. Then again, who knows what a sorceress turned into a cat was good for except catching mice and trapping us here in this alternate universe with no idea what we were supposed to do.
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