“Larch—would the dragonfly girls know who gave me which tributes?”
He screwed up one side of his face in thought. “Might be. Most of ’em are pretty silly though.”
“You don’t know, right?”
“No, Lady Gwynn. I have no head for accounting.”
“When you’re done eating, would you find me one who might—wait, Larch, when you’re done—” But he’d already trotted off.
“Where did you go just now?” Starling eyed me with suspicious curiosity.
“Call of nature.”
“Hmph. I needed to go too.”
“Something I feel confident you can do entirely on your own.”
“Mean.”
“That’s me,” I agreed in a cheerful tone. Hopefully she wouldn’t be miffed that I’d sent Sean packing. In an ideal world, she’d be so glad not to see him about that she wouldn’t care why he wasn’t. Even if she did find out and get annoyed, I didn’t regret the move for an instant. Life was too short to risk conversations with boneheads.
Larch returned with the blue-ringletted dragonfly girl. Her round lavender eyes dominated her heart-shaped pixie face. With anxiety giving them a dewy sheen and pinching her little bow-shaped lips, she could be right out of anime. She crumpled into a heap at my knee, begging to know how she’d displeased me.
“What did you say to the poor thing?” I asked Larch and he sighed, stoic as ever.
“That you wanted to ask her some questions, my lady sorceress—nothing more than that.”
“Why did you pick this one?” I peered dubiously at the pile of shivering ringlets and ostentatious weeping.
“Do you doubt my judgment, my lady?”
Frankly, at the moment, I did. But he had a point. I tugged one of the long powder-blue curls. “You haven’t displeased me, girlie. Sit up. I just want to ask you some things about the tributes.”
She obeyed immediately, tucking her slim little legs together and shaking her head so her hair tumbled around her girlish frame, Thumbelina come to life. I caught a flash of calculation from her, before she opened her eyes wider—more lilac than lavender—and gazed at me soulfully. Something about the deliberate guilelessness of her expression reminded me of Rogue when he worked to sucker me into one of his tricky bargains. A subtle flavor of his magic about her too. What had he said? That my magic had marked Starling as mine.
“What’s your name?”
“What you called me is fine, your magical powerful highness.”
“Yeah...not so much. How come none of you girls have names?”
“We don’t really need them until we serve a grand person like yourself. Until then we’re like blossoms in the field—all more or less alike.”
An astute explanation for a brainless blossom. Surely this was the one I’d pointed to, who Rogue and I had wished smarter. And now, as if one of his by-blows had come looking for him, here she sat, looking at me with much-too-canny lilac eyes and talking like me.
“So, Thumbelina, what do you know about my tribute collection? I’m looking to find out the origin of particular items.”
She slid a sideways look at Larch, who remained impassive. “I would never take anything, Lady Sorceress.” She said this with the tone of a vow, with a titch of guilt.
“Thank you, Larch. I think she’ll do nicely,” I told Larch, who bowed and discreetly withdrew. “You’ve been through it, haven’t you? There’s a reason Larch thought you might know where things came from.”
“I like to look. To see the pretty things. I always put them back.”
I caught an image from her mind, of looking through all the strange things and dreaming about their origins, while the other dragonfly girls giggled and danced. It had been a disservice, to make her smarter than the others. I’d thought improvement couldn’t cause too much harm, but our whim had yanked her, a lily of the field, from a life of blissful idiocy to one where a newly restless mind sought stimulation.
“Do you have a way of knowing where the things come from?”
“How would I?” She looked down, cagey.
“Starling—would you mind getting my grimoire from the carriage?”
Starling, who’d been listening to the conversation with great interest, jumped up much too quickly. “Sure! Actually I have to answer the call of nature—” she gave the phrase great significance, “—and will fetch it on my way back.” She walked off slowly, making a great show of whistling as if she had all the time in the world.
“Okay,” I told the petite fairy, “spill.”
She tilted her head and gave me that innocent wide-eyed look, then, assessing me, she cast it off like a mask. Her expression sharpened. Gone was the sweet waif, replaced by a shrewd and sharp miniature woman. Fluffy kitten to spitting alley cat in an imperceptible, instantaneous shift.
“I hold things in my hands and I just know.” She said it quietly for my ears only.
“Have you always been able to do this?”
“No. My kind—we don’t do magic like that.”
“How did you find out you could?”
“The other night, I got tired of dancing. It’s just the same thing over and over, you know? And the singing—kill me now.” She shook her head, as if perplexed by these thoughts. “So I wandered around, but that was boring too. I started looking through the tribute wagon, just for something to do and...”
She trailed off and I finished for her. “And you found something you liked and played with it for a while.” So were juvenile delinquents made—restless energy plus curiosity and a dollop of bored rebellion.
“I wasn’t going to keep it!” She threw the words at me defiantly.
I shrugged. Most of that stuff held such abstract value to me that I didn’t really care. Still, I imagined stealing from a noble carried a pretty serious penalty. “So how did Larch find out?”
She grimaced. “I was an idiot. The first time that thing—and it was just a glass apple, you have twenty-two of them—reached out and showed me where it came from, well...I screamed.”
I snorted out a laugh, more at how much she hated admitting her stereotypical dragonfly girl behavior than anything else. “Can’t say as how I blame you. That must have been startling as all hell.”
She looked pissed, a funny expression on her lovely face. “Yes. Larch gave me a set-down and told me I could stay if I put it back. I really thought he’d never tell you.”
“He only did because I asked him who could tell me where some of the stuff comes from. And because he knew I’d be more interested in your help than in punishing you. I need an inventory. Do you know what I mean?”
Pushing the tumbling ringlets back with impatience, she thought about it. “Like, list out everything that’s there.”
“Yes. Can you do that? Look at each thing and say who gave it to me.”
She shrugged and started counting off on her fingers. “One gray wolf hide, Lord Bristleberry. Twenty-two glass apples, Lord Ming. One monster harness, Lady Strawberry. Fourteen...”
“Wait,” I interrupted. “You already identified and memorized everything?”
“No. Just some.”
“I thought you said it frightened you when the glass apple told you where it came from.”
She flushed, the pink a pretty contrast to her hair. “I wanted to practice. Seems stupid to be able to do something and not, you know, figure it out.”
“Good thinking. You think you can remember everything?”
“I don’t know. I never remembered things before, but now I do. It’s kind of creepy.”
I considered telling her the truth. Normally I’d said that I’d want to know, but the worry that something had changed in my own mind ate at me. I might have been happier not knowing after all. I could always tell her later. The magical ability must have come sideways from one of us too. Or we had awakened something dormant in her. Since her unexpected gift just happened to fit exactly what I needed, it was likely my fault.
“I don’t rememb
er everything so I’m going to write down what you tell me.”
Right on cue, Starling ambled up and put the grimoire in my lap. Thumbelina watched with fascination as I pulled a pen from my pocket, flipped to a few pages from the end and titled it “Inventory.” I filled in the items she had recited. “...wolf hide...” I muttered to myself.
“Gray wolf,” Thumbelina corrected. I frowned at her. “Do you want it to be right or not?” She asked in a sweet tone that didn’t fool me for a second.
“Fine, fine,” I added gray with a caret between 1 and wolf. “Glass apples...guess I get to decide how to spell people’s names—not like anyone is going to correct me. Is a monster harness what I think it is? To hitch up the monsters I don’t have?” I blinked at them in sudden alarm. “Tell me I don’t have any pet monsters!”
Thumbelina snickered and Starling gave me one of her mother’s exasperated looks. “A monster would never fit in a wagon. And who takes monsters on a sailing journey?”
“Who takes wagonloads of glass apples and gray wolf hides everywhere they go?”
Starling sighed and rolled her eyes. “I don’t know how you were planning to buy a ship—they’re expensive, you know.”
I didn’t point out that this had never been my plan at all. Rogue had set it all up and I’d cruised along for the ride. Now my sugar daddy had left me high and dry. “I’m buying a whole ship? We can’t just...hitch a ride?”
“No. And it’s time to go.”
“Ride with us, Thumbelina? That way I can get down what you’ve seen so far.”
She sprang to her feet with a little hip swing and a cocky attitude. “Want me to carry the thing?”
“Lady Sorceress.” Starling reminded her.
“I know who she is.”
I laughed, handing her the grimoire and she walked toward the carriage, flipping through the pages.
“She should show you more respect,” Starling fumed.
“Oh, she’s fine.”
“I hope she’s sitting on your side,” Starling muttered. “I don’t think I should have to share.”
“Jealous?”
“No. I just don’t see why you need her when you have me. Plus she’s impertinent.”
“Because she can tell me what all is in the tribute wagons and you can’t.”
“I don’t see why you need to know that.”
“I’m chasing a clue.”
“Oh!” Starling seized my arm. “That’s so exciting!” Thumbelina glanced over her shoulder at us in startlement at the squeal. “What is it?”
I didn’t really want to tell her about Rogue’s message. Why had he left it with Liam, of all people? Starling would have told me immediately.
Maybe that was the point.
“Gwynn—you said I could help and here you are thinking up how to put me off.”
She was right.
“That’s the thing. I don’t know yet. So I want Thumbelina to tell me what all tributes I’ve received and from whom, and maybe something will jump out at me.”
“You want something that jumps?” Starling shook her head, blond hair shimmering in the sun, the same color as the leaves in the grove nearby. Fall colors.
“Sorry. Bad phrasing. I want to listen for something significant. You listen too.”
“Ah.” Starling nodded, assuming a wise expression. Then yawned.
Sure enough, once she sprawled on her bench in the carriage—since I asked Thumbelina to sit next to me—Starling started nodding off again. I didn’t blame her really. The recitation of bizarre items and even odder names became a monotonous drone. Mainly I hoped the little fairy would mention the dragon’s eggs, since I suspected that was what Rogue had referenced.
After fifty-three items on my list, Thumbelina stopped. “That’s all so far. I can look more when we stop tonight.”
No dragon’s eggs. Dammit.
I considered showing her the one in my pocket, but that would bias the experiment. So we rode on from then in silence. I busied myself with transferring names to the Flora and Fauna section. Some of them were people I’d met, if only glancingly. On those I added notes of what I could remember about them and my guess as to their position in fae society. Most I had no idea who they were. The light-up pillows I’d invented continued to sell like hotcakes, providing me with a tidy income. If one liked having seventeen vials of crushed alabaster shell.
“If you don’t mind, that would be great.”
“No. It’s good to have...something to do.”
When I asked Thumbelina who some of the people were, she said she didn’t know necessarily—the names just came to her. Starling wasn’t much more help. When she snuffled awake, I grilled her, but she claimed ignorance on most.
“My mother’s the one who knows all that. Besides that’s her job as your seneschal anyway. Not mine.”
“Just what is your job, Starling?” I teased her.
“Stalwart companion and best friend,” she replied, prim, giving Thumbelina the hairy eyeball. The blue-haired fairy didn’t notice, entranced as she was in studying the characters I’d written on the pages. She ran her fingers over them, as if they might grow out of the page they were written on.
We camped that night, with me on my own in my travel tent on the futon bed I’d made, which Rogue so disdained. Anxiety for him plagued me like a tooth with a cavity. Sometimes the ache faded into the background, but then flared with unexpected pain when I carelessly bit down. It didn’t help that I missed him more than ever. The earrings swinging in my lobes reminded me of his touch on my skin, part comfort, part torment.
When I finally fell asleep—alone, since Darling had gone off hunting—I found myself searching in my dreams. I walked along the beach. The sand shifted under my bare feet, sliding away so I sank into it up to my knees, my skirts snarling around my thighs and dragging wet. I tried wishing them away, but nothing happened.
In frustration, I yanked at them, trying to climb out of the sand, but only sinking deeper in. The surf pounded up and a mermaid missing a piece of her tail pointed and laughed. I begged her for help, but she flipped her long powder-blue ringlets over her shoulder, giggling like a madwoman. The waves reached me and poured, icy cold into the sandy hole around me. I’d sunk up to my waist now, but I kept trying to struggle forward.
Down the coast, a sailing ship waited, flags flying. Rogue waited for me on that ship. I needed to get to him, but the water and sand filled my nose, suffocating me, drowning me.
“Rogue!” I cried, though the ship was too impossibly far. He’d never hear me, even without sand pouring down my throat. Yet I kept calling for him.
The ship set sail without me, serenely cutting through the waves, leaving me behind as the sand closed over my head.
I woke with a choking sound to the still-dark tent. Outside firelight glowed while the fae sang and danced. Some never seemed to sleep, like sharks that swam in endless circles to keep oxygen moving through their bodies. Thumbelina might be crawling through the tribute wagons even now, her restless mind and magical gift recording it all. A whiff of sandalwood and Stargazer lilies drifted past.
“Rogue?” I whispered, afraid to hope. My throat felt raw and I wondered if I had been screaming aloud.
“Stop looking for me.”
The thought ran weak and pale in the back of my mind. I stilled, listening. Was that him and not me? Nothing more.
“I’m not looking,” I thought back. “I got your message.”
“Stop looking for me. Save yourself.”
“I can’t not dream.”
But the voice—Rogue—did not reply.
When I dreamed again, there sat the sailing ship at the dock in the distance. The soft sand sucked at my bare feet. With renewed determination, I started walking. Maybe this time, I’d get there before it sailed.
* * *
In the morning, I asked Blackbird to ride in the carriage with us, so I could quiz her on the people and politics. With the barest hesitation, she agreed
.
Thumbelina and Starling waited in the carriage, arguing with each other about something. They snapped their mouths closed when we approached and I decided I didn’t want to know. Blackbird raised a perfectly arched eyebrow at me, sizing Thumbelina up and down.
“Really, Lady Gwynn?” She asked softly.
“She’s helping me with a project.”
“It’s not seemly to have such as she in your company.”
I turned so my back was to the carriage, speaking only for Blackbird’s ears. “‘Such as she’—all the dragonfly girls or what? And why not?”
“Her kind are for service. Not companionship. Surely you’ve noticed they’re not much for conversation.”
“That doesn’t mean they’re not people too.”
“Well, dear—actually they’re not. They’re more like...barely intelligent fruit.”
I laughed, but her serious expression didn’t change. Here I’d wondered if Rogue had grown on a vine. “Give Thumbelina a chance. You’ll see. She’s special.”
Once we got rolling, Thumbelina got over her reticence at having Blackbird present, and regaled us with the list of her overnight findings. Feeling flirtatious, Darling decided to join us inside the carriage, making a nuisance of himself playing with Thumbelina’s ringlets. She fussed over him, calling him a handsome young man, which he loved. He finally abandoned himself to a nap, completely overflowing her tiny lap while she scratched his furry belly and I took notes.
Despite herself, Blackbird became fascinated by the list of tributes and the people who’d given them to me—and in the magic of me recording the information into the grimoire. I caught her more than once eyeing Thumbelina with speculation. Intelligent fruit, indeed. She added in bits of information here and there, but was unable to tell me as much as I’d hoped.
The fae upper echelons seemed to be more or less flat. The nobles—and so far I’d recorded about a hundred names—all held equivalent titles. Tributes came from more than those people, however. I’d received gifts from Brownie tribes other than Larch’s and from heads of various fae groups. There also seemed to be a group of second-tier lordlings, to which Blackbird belonged, for reasons that escaped me.
Rogue’s Possession Page 20
