“Sweet memories are a priceless treasure, lass. Better than money in the bank.” Grandpap gave me a wink. “If ye’ve set a good store of those up along the way, ye’ll have done the very best job of livin’ a person can do. That’s my philosophy.”
Colin pushed his chair back from the table. “Well said, Socrates, but speakin’ fer meself that’s all the wisdom I can absorb in one sittin’. I’ll show Morgan to her room now. Leave the dishes, Paps, I’ll get ’em when I come back.”
“Five minutes, Colin!” Grandpap wagged a finger playfully. “Yer allowed five minutes and then I’m comin’ in after ye.”
Colin rolled his eyes. “Paps, I’m twenty years old.”
“Sure ye are, but she isn’t.”
“I’m seventeen!” I piped up. “That’s old enough to—” They were both staring at me. “Drive,” I finished lamely.
Colin snorted and got up. “Use the egg timer, then. I don’t want to be shortchanged.” Then he picked up my suitcase from the foot of the stairs and carried it up the tiny staircase to the cottage’s attic bedroom.
“Trust me, lass, I know what I’m doin’,” Grandpap stage-whispered to me as I rose from the table to follow. “A few obstacles here and there never did true love any harm. In fact, it’s the best thing fer it.”
the upstairs bedroom was tiny, with a ceiling that peaked in the middle and sloped gently down on each side. This wasn’t much of a problem for me, but Colin could only stand straight up as long as he was in the absolute center of the room. And in the center of the room was the bed—a fact we both realized at the same moment.
I started to giggle.
“I’d say it’s either the bed, or a trip to the chiropractor,” Colin observed. He held out a hand, and together we toppled onto the covers.
It must have made a mighty thump down below, because Grandpap felt it necessary to bellow, “Four minutes!” from the bottom of the stairs.
We wasted another thirty seconds laughing at that. Then Colin touched my face, and suddenly it was all I could do not to cry. I’d missed him so much, and now that we were together I didn’t know whether to make out—only three minutes left!—or pepper him with questions: What was the “weird” thing had happened here at Castell Cyfareddol that caused him so much concern? Where did he think that e-mail could have come from? Most important, had he been seeing anybody else while he was at school in Dublin, and did he still love me like he did before, and what was going to happen with this relationship anyway?
But I didn’t ask. Not yet. This perfect moment of us lying snuggled in each other’s arms was too sweet to interrupt with anything but a kiss.
Somewhere downstairs a cuckoo clock went off. Cuckoo—cuckoo—cuckoo—
“We’re running out of time,” I whispered, only half-kidding. My fingers crept under the bottom of his rugby shirt. His skin was impossibly, deliciously warm.
He kissed me again, the kind of careful kiss that said, Let’s not get too crazy right now.
“I know yer probably wonderin’ what I was talkin’ about earlier,” he said softly. “And I want to take a look at this mysterious e-mail that pretends to be from me. But the Q&A portion of our program can wait until after yer nap is complete.”
I lifted myself up on one elbow. “Colin, I’m fine. There’s so much I really want to know—”
“Eh, no arguments!” he said, placing a finger on my lips. “It’s fer yer own good, darlin’. Ye’ve been up all night. What if I told ye something that made it hard for ye to sleep?”
“What does that mean?”
“Time’s up!” Grandpap yelled from downstairs.
“On my way, Admiral!” Colin yelled back. Then he kissed me on the forehead and slipped out the door.
the attic room was too small to be crammed full of fish tchotchkes like the rest of the house, but there was a small painting hanging above the dresser. It caught my eye when I rolled over in the bed. Something about it made me get up and take a closer look.
The painting was of a mermaid, but not your typical Disney mermaid with a flipper instead of legs and a pink clamshell bra. This was more what I would call an accurate depiction—two strong legs, webbed toes, seaweed hair, a little red cap on her head. It was a merrow, the kind of Irish mermaid I’d actually met once. I recognized her face, in fact—
“Fek!” I yelled without thinking.
“What?” Colin stuck his head in so fast it was as if he’d been sitting outside guarding the door.
I turned, instinctively blocking the painting from his view. “I just realized, I-I-I forgot my—toothbrush.” I flashed a weak smile.
“No worries, luv, I’ll find ye a spare.” Colin looked at me quizzically. “Why so jumpy? Are ye all right?”
“I’m fine. Just tired.”
“Morgan’s nap, take two.” He smiled and pulled the door almost shut, but not all the way. “Sweet dreams.”
Sweet dreams? Not likely, with Queen Titania’s cold, snarky face staring down at me from the wall.
She made an ugly mermaid, I had to admit. Before I got back in the bed I dumped out my suitcase and found a gray sweatshirt hoodie to throw over the picture frame. It helped, a little. And it gave me real satisfaction to drape such an unflattering garment over the vain and fashion-conscious queen.
Morgan’s nap, take two. The bed had two pillows on it. I put my head on one, and hugged the other one close to my chest. It smelled faintly of Colin’s aftershave. Yum.
If I’m lucky I’ll have no dreams at all, I thought, as I sank into an exhausted sleep. If Titania was anywhere close by, any dreams I’d have would probably be extremely unpleasant.
i came to hours later, completely disoriented. was I in my room in Connecticut? Or dozing on an Irish beach?
Or was I waking up in a tidy Oxford dorm room, just in time to get ready for my campus tour?
Oxford. My parents. Mr. Phineas—
That’s all it took to snap me wide awake.
I sat up. The merrow painting was still covered by my hoodie, and the door to the bedroom was fully shut. Colin must have closed it after I’d fallen asleep. It was sweet that he’d been checking on me. But why had he been so worried?
My room had its own “lavatory,” a tiny room with a toilet and sink, but no tub. I grabbed my toiletry bag from my suitcase and went in, brushed my teeth and washed my face. I ran my damp fingers through my hair, but it was still a post-nap mess.
“Mor?” Colin cracked open the bedroom door. “Are ye awake?”
“In the bathroom, I mean the lav,” I called.
“I brought ye a toothbrush. I heard the water running, so I figured ye might need it.”
Right, the toothbrush. As he handed it through the bathroom door I sucked in my breath so he couldn’t smell that it was already minty.
“Perfect timing, thanks.” I left the bathroom door open and made a big to-do about brushing my teeth, even though I’d just done it. When I came out, I saw Colin staring at the hoodie-covered painting.
“Not a big fan of art, then, are ye?”
“It has spooky eyeballs,” I said sheepishly. “It made me feel like I was being watched.”
I held my breath as he peeked underneath the hoodie.
“Whoa! I see yer point; that’s bloody hideous.” He let the hoodie drop. “But those spooky eyeballs are nothin’ compared to Grandpap’s ears. The man’s a medical miracle; four score and two with perfect hearing on both sides of his thick Irish head. And not one ounce o’ shame about lis tenin’ to other people’s conversations, either.”
“Are ye talkin’ about me, lad?” Grandpap yelled from downstairs. “Speak up! The kettle’s on, I can barely hear ye over the whistlin’ of me tea water!”
“No trouble, Paps!” Colin shouted back. “I was just tellin’ Morgan how ye’re much too much of a busybody to go deaf; think of all the scuttlebutt ye’d miss.”
Then Colin lowered his voice to a whisper. “Up for a walk? I thought we could take a stroll t
o the beach. This way we can talk in private. Bring that e-mail with ye too, I want to have a look at it.”
I just nodded. Between Titania’s eyes and Grandpap’s ears, I was afraid to say a word.
nine
the path from the cottage to the sea led us gently downhill the whole way, but I hadn’t realized how far down we’d gone until we were on the beach and I looked back. We stood on a crescent of sand at sea level. The water glittered in front of us, while far above and behind a steep curved bluff perched the wacky skyline of Castell Cyfareddol, like a theme park tottering on the edge of a cliff.
I saw the fairy-tale castle turrets of the hotel, the pastel-colored cottages, the Greek temples, the Swiss chalets, the domed igloos, the tropical gardens and the desert palms. Near the horizon the approaching sunset streaked the sky with colors out of Tammy’s favorite cartoons: Powerpuff Girl pink, SpongeBob yellow and Barney the dinosaur purple.
Was this place real, or make-believe? It was hard to say. Maybe I should tell him, I thought impulsively. Maybe this is my chance to come clean about the whole me-being-a-half-goddess thing. Here it might actually seem normal.
“Sit or walk?” Colin asked.
“Let’s sit for a while.”
We found a quiet spot, as close to the water as we could get without the sand being too wet to sit on. Colin turned to me. Before he spoke he looked in my eyes, hard and searching—what was he trying to find? He took a deep breath and exhaled slowly, like he was trying to work up the nerve to do something scary.
“Before you start,” I said, squeezing his hand, “let me ask you a very important question: What the fek are you doing in Wales?”
That broke the tension and made him laugh, which was what I’d hoped for. “Well, that’s a lot easier to explain than what comes next, so I might as well start there. It was all Grandpap’s doing, the troublemaker.”
Then his mood changed. He looked out at the water and spoke quietly, just loud enough for me to hear him over the surf. “I wish ye could’ve met Granny, Mor. She’d have thought the world of you.”
“I wish I’d met her too,” I said, remembering how close I’d come, once. But that was in the faery realm. Yet another adventure I’d never told Colin about. “Grandpap must miss her so much.”
Colin sighed. “Poor old bloke. After she passed he didn’t know which end was up. Mopin’ around, talking to himself, not eatin’. Can’t blame him, really. The two of them’d been together since—well, since they were our ages, I suppose.”
The sudden, stark image of Colin and me as wrinkled old people, with only one of us left alive to mourn the other at the end of a whole happy lifetime together, flashed through my mind so vividly I had to blink away tears.
He went on. “Then, just last week, clear out of the blue, he announces that there’s nothin’ he’d rather do than come back to Cyfareddol fer their anniversary. Well, I wasn’t wild about the notion. For one thing, the bike tour was supposed to start this week—and I need all the work I can get to earn me tuition fer next year at DCU.”
DCU was Dublin City University, where Colin was putting himself through school. He was studying computer science, of course. Something nice and rational.
“I’m ashamed to say I tried to talk the old boy out of it.” Colin smiled ruefully. “I warned him how it was short notice and this place gets booked up months in advance, but he wouldn’t take no fer an answer. And the idea of comin’ here seemed to perk up his spirits no end. Against me better judgment I rang up the hotel. I figgered they’d say they were full up and that’d be the end of it, but it turned out the Seahorse was available—the very cottage Grandpap and Granny had stayed in on their honeymoon. Last-minute cancellation or some such thing. Lucky, eh?”
“Very,” I agreed, though I wasn’t yet sure that it was.
“Well, now I had to take him, didn’t I? So I sucked it up and told Patty at the tour company I’d be startin’ a week or two late. You can imagine the colorful language that ensued! But she’s got a good heart, does Pat, and she understood. Grandpap and I packed our bags, and here we are.”
I drizzled sand on his bare feet, and smiled at the way his toes flexed and curled in answer. “That makes sense,” I said. “Now let me hear the part that doesn’t.”
“Eager for the good stuff, eh?” He gave a wry smile. “From the minute we arrived, Grandpap was happy as a lark. Sometimes I heard him havin’ conversations when I knew he was alone in his room. But I didn’t think much of it; he’s gettin’ on in years, after all. Even so, I was reluctant to leave him alone fer any length o’ time. But then he befriended that Devyn McAlister fellow. Their card playin’ seemed to boost the old boy’s mood even more.
“Anyway, a couple of days ago, while Paps and Devyn were safely occupied playing Forty-fives, I finally decided to take a walk by meself. It was a relief, to be honest. I love Paps like anything, but I was gettin’ bored playing eldercare nurse, and the pub scene at the hotel is a bit tame for my taste. Ye should hear the bands they book! Barry bleedin’ Manilow impersonators! Abba lite, to put it kindly. I’d take the three Irish tenors over that lot any day; they’ve got more edge.”
“Colin—”
“Right. Anyway, I thought it would be good fun to go explorin’, so I headed down the boardwalk to the far end. To where the forest begins. You noticed it yerself when we arrived.”
I nodded.
“It’s a funny walk. Looks like the forest is miles away, but the distance is an illusion, really. Ye just keep walkin’, the boardwalk comes to an end, and the forest begins, just like that. There’s maybe a dozen different trails into the woods, all marked with signs pointin’ every which way: ‘The Road Not Taken.’ ‘The Path of Least Resistance.’ ‘The Lesser of Two Evils.’ ”
I laughed. “Which one did you choose?”
I could have sworn he blushed, but maybe it was the way the light grew rosier as the sun finally touched the horizon.
“Don’t mock me, darlin’, but there was one sign that read ‘This Way to the Faery Glen.’” He smiled, embarrassed. “It made me think of Granny. She used to love them faery stories, I heard ’em over and over as a wee lad. Ye’ve heard me complain about it, I’m sure!”
“Wait—so you chose the path to the ‘Faery Glen,’” I repeated stupidly. “On purpose?”
“Yes, Officer, I did.” He smoothed the sand with his fingers, an idle, nervous gesture. “The path went straight into the woods. It was one of them tall, shadowy forests that looks like it’s been growin’ there since the dawn of time. I walked and walked, and soon I started hearin’ somethin’, a deep and constant sound, like water rushin’ through a gorge. I thought I must be gettin’ near the glen.”
Then he paused. “But it wasn’t water. It was hoofbeats. There was a herd of wild horses in the distance, runnin’ through the forest, weavin’ in and out o’ the trees. At least that’s what I thought they were, until they got a wee bit closer.”
Colin hugged his knees and stared out at the sunset. I knew better than to rush him. Finally he spoke, his voice quiet and firm.
“They looked like unicorns, Mor. Beautiful creatures, silver colored. Each with a long, spiral horn stickin’ right out of its noggin’. ’Twas all dim and shadowy in the woods, but the horns were aglow, like they were lit from within.” He turned to me. “Like those light-up thingamabubs yer sister likes to run around with at night.”
“Glow sticks,” I said blankly, while thinking, Fek! Unicorns? Leprechauns, gnomes, mermaids, faeries—these were old news to me. But even I had never laid eyes on a unicorn.
“What did you do?” I said finally.
He laughed darkly. “Well, to say I was gobsmacked would be an understatement. I figured I’d burst a brain artery and slipped off the beam somehow. I pictured meself droolin’ in a chair for the rest of me days! But ye know me—I wasn’t givin’ up without a fight, so I made an effort to pull meself together. ‘Reason it out, Colin, ye dumb ox,’ I told meself. ‘Yer men
tal operating system has crashed, so use yer brain and troubleshoot it like ye’ve been taught.’
“And then yer man had a brain flash: These aren’t unicorns, fer St. Patrick’s sake! It’s Castell bloody Cyfareddol havin’ some fun, that’s all. The decorating committee probably leased a herd of costumed ponies from a circus and let ’em loose in the woods for effect. Another piece of whimsy to add to the carnival atmosphere.”
“That makes sense,” I agreed, while thinking, If only it were that simple.
“It does make sense.” He angled his body back toward the water and looked at me. “In fact, I’d have no trouble at all acceptin’ that explanation, if it weren’t for what happened next.”
Whoosh. Whoosh. Whoosh. The waves crashed and retreated. They seemed to be offering explanations of their own, but in a language I couldn’t understand. Colin went on. “So, just as I’m convincin’ meself that I’ve stumbled upon some poor circus ponies spray-painted silver and wearing illuminated headgear, one of the creatures trotted up to me. It looked me straight in the eye.”
“Oh my God—did it say something?” I blurted.
“A talkin’ horse? Even I’m not that daft, darlin’!” He laughed at his own joke. “But it did do a bit of a dance, ye could call it, stompin’ its hooves and wavin’ its tail. Then it pointed down at the dirt with its horn before runnin’ off. Apparently there was somethin’ on the ground it wanted me to see.” He took out his cell phone. “Here, ye can read it yerself.”
He flipped the phone open and pressed a few buttons. Then he showed me the screen.
The photo was small, but I could make it out quite clearly. Six words, scratched into the green moss of the forest floor. The letters were sharp and angular—as if they’d been scratched with the tip of a horn:
What I Wore to Save the World Page 7
