“Just scoping things out,” Emily said with a shrug. “I thought I might pick up some intel on the impostor queen for Sophie.”
“Do you think that’s wise?” Athena asked.
“I’m all better, really. Whatever Sophie or Michael told you about my condition, it ended this morning, like that.” She snapped her fingers for emphasis.
“We’ll discuss this later,” Amelia said, returning her attention to the chaos at the market.
From the safety of the enchantresses’ magical bubble, Emily watched the intruders. “They seem to be looking for someone—or maybe something,” she mused aloud. The violence and destruction were more focused than if they were merely trying to intimidate people, she thought.
“But who, or what?” Amelia asked.
“Sophie?” Emily suggested. “If they work for the impostor, they might want to get the real queen out of the way.”
“We should do something,” Athena said. “They’re talking about the Hunt.”
“The Hunt?” Eamon asked, his eyes darkening to the color of tarnished silver.
Amelia listened for a moment. Emily strained her ears, trying to make out words in the intruders’ song. Soon, she did pick up on a boast about the Hunt riding. She wasn’t sure what that was, but it didn’t sound like it was going to be a happy, fun time.
“If they’re associated with the Hunt, that could threaten our world, which puts this in our jurisdiction,” Amelia said firmly. “Come, Athena. You two, stay out of the way.”
When she first went to work in the sisters’ antique shop, Emily never would have imagined the two eccentric old women as formidable, but she’d learned that they kicked some serious ass. Now they threw magical fireballs that drove the attackers away from their prey and herded them all together in the middle of the market. Once the other market attendees noticed that their tormenters were under attack, they joined in. Emily couldn’t help but wish she had a bit of Sophie’s power so she could take part in the battle.
Either the thugs had accomplished what they came to do or hadn’t anticipated this much resistance, because soon they’d fled the market, some running up the stairs and others heading down the tunnel under the park road. When they were all gone, Emily and Eamon joined the enchantresses. Athena was grinning in triumph, but Amelia looked worried. “This is not a good sign,” she said.
“What’s this Hunt, anyway?” Emily asked.
“It’s a legend,” Athena said.
“It is no legend,” Eamon said somberly. “But it has been a very long time since the Hunt has ridden.”
“The legend tells of a great procession of fae, usually on Halloween night, and it was considered misfortune to cross their path,” Amelia explained.
“Supposedly, thunder was the sound of their horses’ hooves,” Athena added. “Some legends say they’re ghosts.”
“They are fae,” Eamon said, “but no fae you would want to encounter.”
“And now this is going to happen here?” Emily asked.
“If it happens, it may happen everywhere,” Amelia said. “They could ride in and out of the Realm, all over the world.”
“Why now? Does this have anything to do with the impostor?”
“It is possible, if this is something the impostor suggests or allows,” Eamon said. Emily could tell just how serious this was from the look on his face. He was scared, and fairies didn’t scare easily.
“So we need Sophie,” Emily concluded. Getting Jen Murray back was important, but the fate of the world could be at stake. She scanned the marketplace, which now looked like nothing had happened. The magical merchants had managed to clean up quickly and had returned to business as usual. She didn’t see any sign of her sister or Michael. “Where is Sophie?”
The sisters joined hands and closed their eyes. “She isn’t here,” Amelia reported.
“She went home?” Emily asked.
“I don’t think she’s in this sphere,” Athena said.
Emily’s heart leapt into her throat. “They took her! And I guess they got Michael, too.” She clutched at Eamon’s arm. “They’ve got my dog!”
Fourteen
The Realm—Outside the Palace
Soon Afterward
“You aren’t going to have to win the throne again, are you?” Michael asked Sophie as the two of them stared at the vine-covered walls of the palace. “At least you know how to do that.”
“No, I don’t think so,” she said absently, sounding like she’d barely heard his question. Abruptly, she turned to him. “May I have your keychain, please?”
Under other circumstances, Michael might have questioned such an odd request, but Sophie wasn’t the capricious type. If she asked for something, she had a good reason, so he handed it over.
“Now what do you see?” she asked him.
He was about to say that nothing had changed, but when he turned to Sophie to say so, out of the corner of his eye he saw the palace without its veil of vines. When he looked straight at the palace, it looked as vine-covered as ever, but whenever he started to look away, it shifted. “I don’t think the vines are really there,” he said hesitantly.
“That’s what I thought,” she said with a satisfied nod, handing his keychain back to him. “It’s a glamour aimed at fairies. It still affects you a little because you were elf shot, but I was hoping that without the four-leaf clover, you might see past it.”
“Someone’s trying to hide the palace from people in the Realm,” he concluded. “Why?”
“We’ve got a false queen out there who won’t be able to sit on the throne or wear the crown. She’d want to hide the real things to make the scheme work. But that’s not our priority right now.” She took off walking toward the palace, striding so rapidly that he had to hurry to catch up with her, even though she was nearly a foot shorter than he was.
He almost ran into her when she stopped abruptly. “Oh, that is not right,” she muttered.
“What is it?” he asked. Instead of answering, she put her hand out, and a faint glow appeared around it. She pushed like she was testing an invisible barrier, and the glow pulsed.
“So it’s more than just imaginary vines,” he concluded.
“Someone’s locked me out of my own palace,” she said, indignation competing with shock in her voice. “They put up their own shield outside whatever spell was already there.”
He didn’t think that sounded good for Jen, but refrained from saying so because he was pretty sure she was well aware of that fact. He also resisted the impulse to ask what she was going to do about it because he knew she’d do it if she knew.
She studied the barrier for a moment, frowning, then turned and walked in a different direction—along the barrier, Michael assumed. Beau paused to lift his leg against it, and that was when Michael could see for a fact that there was something invisible keeping them out. He followed Sophie as she tracked the circumference of the barrier.
“I have an idea,” she said. “It’s folklore-appropriate, so it just might work.”
They’d walked almost all the way around the castle when they reached a wall that wasn’t covered in vines. Sophie reached out a tentative hand and was able to turn the handle of a door set into the wall. She let the door swing all the way open so they could see inside what looked like a kitchen yard. There was a well, a small herb garden, a vegetable patch, and a few outbuildings. Some chickens roamed, but there weren’t any people, fae or otherwise. At the back of the yard loomed the palace.
“Okay, it looks like they did leave this part unguarded,” Sophie said, leading the way into the kitchen yard and toward a door in the palace. “They must not have expected a queen to know how to get to the kitchen.”
The door was shut, but Sophie opened it with a touch. As they entered the kitchen in the bowels of the palace, Michael couldn’t help but wonder why they bothered to even have a kitchen in a world where everyone could just conjure up what they wanted. He supposed it was the appearance of it all. W
hat was the point of being a ruler without servants?
Not that there were any servants here. The place seemed deserted. “This is odd,” Sophie said. “Normally, there are at least a few brownies here.” Raising her voice, she called out, “Hello?”
“You obviously aren’t the kind of queen who avoids the kitchen,” Michael remarked.
“I’ve explored the palace,” she said with a shrug. “You never know when you’ll need to know your way around.”
There was a rustling sound, and Michael looked down, expecting to see mice scurrying across the floor. Instead, several small, wizened creatures were crawling out of cracks in the walls. They bowed when they saw Sophie. “Your majesty!” one of them said. “You are safe.”
“Why wouldn’t I be?” Sophie asked, pulling back on the leash when Beau tried to sniff at the creatures, who cowered away from him.
“Something happened here, and we hid,” another of the creatures said. “Now everyone is gone.”
“Everyone?” Michael asked, alarmed.
“What happened?” Sophie asked.
“There was noise. And it got dark. And we hid.” The little thing was shivering now, and it huddled with its colleagues.
“We’d better check upstairs,” Sophie said. “Keep yourselves safe.”
“We could prepare you a meal, your majesty,” one of the creatures offered, but not very enthusiastically.
“That won’t be necessary,” Sophie said as she headed toward the door.
Michael lost count of how many flights of stairs they went up before Sophie opened a door and they emerged in a long, seemingly endless corridor. Sophie went straight to one of the hundreds of doors on the corridor and knocked sharply. “Jennifer? It’s Sophie,” she called out. When there was no response, she shrugged and said, “Well, it is my palace,” before doing something to the doorknob that made the door slowly open. She pushed the door open wider, then paused to look back at Michael. “Brace yourself. She might be a bit resistant to your presence.”
Unfortunately, he was used to that. So far, Jen had generally refused to admit that she knew him. Even so, he steeled himself and took a deep breath before following Sophie into the room.
It was the kind of bedroom he expected to find in a palace, with a canopied bed, wing-backed chairs in front of a carved marble fireplace, and a dressing table fit for a princess. It was also uninhabited, unless Jen was hiding under the bed. “Jennifer?” Sophie called out. Michael bit his tongue to keep himself from calling out, as well. That might just drive her away.
When there was no response, Sophie handed Beau’s leash to Michael, knelt by the bed, raised the bedskirt, and peered underneath. “I had to be sure,” she remarked as she stood and brushed off her skirt.
He glanced around the room. It looked to him like the sort of room Jen would like. In fact, if they’d had the space, this was exactly how she’d have wanted to decorate their bedroom. The familiar wedding photo sitting on a table was like a punch to the solar plexus, taking his breath away. “Is there anywhere else she might be? Somewhere else in the palace?” he asked.
“Let’s find out.” And she was off, leaving the room and heading down the corridor. Before following her, Michael grabbed the photo and stuffed it in his bag, then jogged to catch up, Beau puffing at his heels.
“Are you going to order a search party?” he asked when he came alongside her.
“Something like that,” she said vaguely.
The corridor led to the throne room, which he remembered from his last visit. The vast room was almost entirely empty. The sole occupant was a woman scrubbing the floor. “What are you doing, playing Cinderella?” he whispered to Sophie. “I never pictured you as the wicked stepmother type.”
“Before you get too sympathetic to her plight, that’s Maeve, the one who kidnapped your wife and held her all these years, even though Jen wasn’t the person she wanted. And I didn’t trap her. She trapped herself.”
“Oh, well, in that case, scrubbing floors is too good for her,” he muttered.
Sophie went up to Maeve and loomed over her. The fairy woman looked up, brushing a stray strand of golden hair off her face. “Your majesty,” she said, injecting a tiny dose of arrogance even into her deference.
“What happened here?” Sophie asked, gesturing around her at the empty room. “Where did everyone go?”
“How am I to know, since I can’t go with them?” Maeve said. “They simply left.”
Sophie opened her mouth as if to issue a retort, but paused and apparently thought better of it. She whirled and returned to Michael. He refrained from asking what they’d do next, since that was pretty obvious, and Sophie had a dark look on her face that made him want to stay on her good side.
“Well, apparently the impostor has also stolen my courtiers,” she said, glowering. “Not that I wanted or needed them, but I would have liked to keep Jennifer safe.”
“Where do you think she is?”
“I don’t know if I can locate her from here, but I may be able to see who she left with.” She spun and strode rapidly toward the dais. Michael gave a little tug on Beau’s leash as he moved to follow her. The dog grunted once before getting back to his feet and coming along.
The ornate crown of the fairy realm sat on the seat of the throne, the throne and crown encased in a shimmering, translucent dome. Sophie stood in front of the throne, facing the room, and held out her hands. Michael took an involuntary step backward when the room filled with ghostly figures.
“This is what it usually looks like,” Sophie said. “Though the people are somewhat more substantial.” With a sidelong glance and a slight smirk, she added, “But not much.”
“There’s Jen!” he said, pointing. He wanted more than anything to go to her, but he reminded himself that it wasn’t real. Even in this ghostly form, she looked more like the wife he remembered than the woman he’d seen on his last visit to the Realm. Whatever Sophie had been doing, it must have been working.
“She’s there with her usual friend,” Sophie remarked. “I think she’ll be safe as long as she’s with him.”
He nodded even as he felt like he was being stabbed in the gut at the sight of his wife with another man. “How long ago was this?” he asked.
“I don’t know. Time is funny here, and it doesn’t correspond to our time. But it was the last occasion when there were people in this room. This is a kind of echo of their psychic energy, for lack of a better term.”
“And you can do this how?”
She sighed. “To be honest, I’m not entirely sure. I just do it. I didn’t even know I knew how to do it until it came to me, so I’m assuming it came with the crown. I don’t even know if I can do it anywhere else.” She waved a hand, and the people moved in double time, like a film being fast forwarded. She slowed the image back to real time when all the people clustered in front of the dais, listening to someone speaking.
Both Michael and Sophie turned to see an image of a tall, white-haired woman standing beside them, clearly orating. “Can you get sound on this thing?” Michael asked.
“Unfortunately, I don’t think so.”
The woman, apparently having finished her speech, moved down the dais steps and through the crowd toward the front doors of the palace. The crowd, including Jennifer, streamed after her like a wake. “Hmm, I guess Maeve was the only one who fell into the trap of the feast,” Sophie remarked.
“What do you mean?”
“Remember the banquet table laid out here? Eating or drinking would trap someone in the palace, just as eating or drinking in the Realm traps you here. I know Maeve dug into the feast, but I didn’t see whether anyone else did. It’s a pretty common trap in stories. I thought most of the courtiers stayed because they had to, but apparently they wanted to.”
“What about that woman in the image? Do you think she’s the impostor?”
“I think that’s Niamh. She and her consort, Fiontan, have their own court. It’s as good a place as any
to start looking for Jen.” She headed down the steps, but he called her back.
“Won’t you need your crown?”
“I’m probably better off staying incognito.”
“But to defeat the impostor, won’t you need to prove you’re the queen?”
“I’m not worried about that at the moment. It’ll be easier to sneak in and get Jen without drawing attention to myself.”
He hated himself for what he was about to say, but he knew he’d hate himself even worse if he didn’t say it. “I think this impostor queen is a bigger priority. You saw those lunatics at the market. If she’s stirring up something like this Hunt, that could threaten our world. We have to stop it.”
“The deadline for Jen is tighter. I can deal with the impostor once Jen is safely out of the way.”
“If this impostor is kicking people out of the Realm, Jen might be sent out, and I’ve seen what that looks like. It’s not pretty. I’d rather her be safe here than losing her mind out there. Once everything’s okay, we can get her home.”
She regarded him for a long moment, and he thought her eyes might have grown just a little brighter—with tears, or magic? Then she gave him a tiny smile. “It might not be an either/or situation. We could find Jen and the impostor in the same place. At any rate, I don’t know that bringing the crown to the impostor would be a good idea. It’s safe here, but if someone vanquishes me and takes it, they might become the rightful wearer, and then we really would have a mess. I’ve got the power of the queen, whether or not I have the crown, and here no one can get to it. Even if someone manages to vanquish me, they’d have to find the palace, get inside, and break the barrier to get the crown.”
“Okay, then, you know what you’re doing. Lead on.”
He and Beau followed Sophie down the dais steps. It seemed like a mile between them and the doors, but finally they were there. Sophie gestured at the giant doors, but nothing happened. Scowling, she stepped forward, put her hand on the handle, and leapt backward with a yelp. She tried again, and shook her head when the doors remained shut.
To Catch a Queen Page 8
