by Chanda Hahn
It was the first time I had seen such a look, and I realized that he was as good as Dorian at hiding his emotions. I only ever saw the calm and amiable side of Evander. He didn’t usually lose this temper like this.
“Is something wrong?” I asked.
His anger was consuming him, and he stormed through the cages and kicked the nearest one.
“Evander, stop!” I warned as he was about to topple over a nixies tank.
He looked up at me and realized what he was doing. He quickly cleared his throat and ran his hand through his hair, and I watched as his princely composure slid back into place. “I’m sorry. I just received some disturbing news. I… I….” He trailed off and looked at me with a curious expression. “Actually, I may be able to turn the situation around and use it to my advantage. I have to go and take care of it. Will you be okay on your own?”
I nodded.
He leaned forward and gave me a kiss on the cheek. I was surprised at the show of affection and blushed.
When Prince Evander headed back and was out of sight, I stood holding the puca’s cage and tried to gather the courage to do what I had been avoiding.
I turned and marched over to Bravado’s wagon and rapped on the door loudly. The wagon swayed under his weight when he moved. I waited impatiently as the puca’s cage began to get heavy. When the door opened, I looked at Bravado carefully, studying his profile, his coloring, and took a deep breath.
“Hello, Father,” I said.
His face crumpled as tears began to fall. “Hello, daughter. It is so very good to see you again.”
Chapter Twenty-Three
“You knew I would be coming,” I said. “You were in the tent and told the dwarf to give me this.” I held the cage up so he could see the puca. I carried it inside the wagon and placed it gently on the table next to me as I took a seat on the padded bench.
“Y-yes, I did,” he stammered.
“Why?” I asked.
“Did I give you the puca?” he asked confused.
“No, why did you give me up at all? What happened?”
Bravado’s shoulders dropped. “How did you figure it out?”
“I didn’t. Not at first. Then it was hard to miss all of the hints. My mother told me I just needed a little bravado. I thought she had misspoken, but she was telling me to find you. Then my ring—my simple topaz ring that I had since I was a child, a gift from my mother—I saw you wearing the same one and thought you wore it to throw it in my face that I gave it up. But there’s no way my ring would fit on your finger. Then I remembered what finger you wore it on. The ring finger, which meant it wasn’t the same ring. Probably a matching set at one time.”
He nodded. “You’re right. It was her ring.”
“Then there’s the windchimes and the shoes.”
“Shoes?”
“Glass shoes that Lorelai Eville led me to. Told me where they were buried. Hidden in a fae resting ground. I thought it was just to amplify my powers, but something about my gifts…. It’s not just glamour. I can shift into someone, become them when I possess an item of theirs. When I looked in the mirror, I saw—”
“Your mother,” Bravado answered.
I nodded. “An older version of myself.” I fidgeted with the tassel on the pillow and looked around at all of the glass figurines. “You made them for her, didn’t you?”
Bravado answered. “Yes, I crafted them with magic for our wedding day. They brought us lots of luck and love.”
“I see. Just not enough love for me.” I dropped my head and stared at my hands in my lap. The puca in the cage rattled around and transformed into a mist and then reformed into a squirrel, chattering away at me angrily, trying to gnaw at the bars.
“Ach!” Bravado fell to his knees before me, tears pouring from his eyes. “No, no. Never believe that. We loved you dearly. We have always loved you! Do you see this?” He pointed to the glass windchimes that hung in the window. “Look closer.”
I didn’t want to look. Couldn’t bring myself to stand and see. I wanted to wallow in the truth that he gave me away. But that would be wrong. I stood up, and walked over to the windchimes. Each of the colored glass pieces shimmered as the light streamed through. At night I couldn’t see it, but during the day, I could see the magic within. The reflections of myself. As a baby sleeping. One when I was a toddler. Another as I was older and learning to ride Jasper. Another one where I’m holding up a sunflower and smiling. The larger stone had a picture of me and my sister Meri, our faces pressed together grinning. It was a moving picture collage of my life.
I walked over to another windchime and found more of the same. Over a hundred pieces of glass had moving images of me trapped inside.
“How? I mean, how is this possible? I thought you didn’t care.”
“I did. That was part of the deal with Lorelai. I would send her the glass pieces, and she would enchant them with her memories of you to send back to me.”
“The windchime in my room at home,” I added. “That was you? You gave that to me, didn’t you?”
Bravado rubbed his chest proudly. “Yes, yes. My memories are in there as well. If you only unlocked the spell to show you.”
“All this time, and I didn’t know.”
“You weren’t supposed to know. It was safer that way.”
“Why? Why was it safer?”
“Because the prophecy.”
“The prophecy that you and Mother Eville knew because she worked here for years. She was the one who spoke the prophecy into existence.”
“She’s never been wrong.” He shrugged. “In all the years I’ve known her, she’s never been wrong.”
“Well, I’m ready now. I wasn’t ready before. It was too soon. Too much that I was struggling to come to terms with, but I’m ready to know the truth and to know how Mom died.”
Bravado’s chin quivered as he kept back his tears. “And I’m ready to answer your questions.”
“Start at the beginning.”
Bravado nodded. “Uh, then this will require tea.” He got up and wandered over to the counter where he had a metal pot and began to warm it up on the small pot belly stove. He took down a tin of tea and began to set up a serving tray.
The puca had stopped gnawing at the cage and had turned into a cat and curled up asleep on the bottom of the cage.
“I grew up here in the magical menagerie troupe. Eight generations we have been the caretakers of the fae creatures we come across. We call ourselves a traveling menagerie, but really we are a mobile rehabilitation unit and are part of the U.F.A.”
“U.F.A.?”
“United Fae Alliance. Having the magical menagerie allows us across all kingdoms borders because we are a traveling troupe. We spend one year in a kingdom traveling from city to city before we move on to the next. We never cross back until seven years later, or so the kingdoms believe. Our information travels back and forth. We are trying to show that fae are equal, nothing to be feared, and more than just house pets.”
“You haven’t been to Baist lately, have you?” I asked. “They’re hardly any fae there anymore.”
“We are trying to rectify that. The last time we passed through, we planted trees and coaxed dryads to live within the woods, but something kept chasing them away. But, yes, that is our goal. My family has the gift of crafting magic and glass. While your mother was the strongest at glamour. Her tent was always packed as she worked her magic. She could make it snow within the tent or make you believe you were sitting on a desert island with your feet in the sand. She performed for kings, making them believe they were sitting in piles of gold or at long banquet tables filled with never-ending wine and food. If she could imagine it, she could make you believe it. And my glass charms only amplified her gifts. Like the shoes.”
“But what happened?” I asked.
“Your mother, Amaryllis, kept having nightmares. Horrible nightmares about the future, and it scared her. She went to Lorelai to have her future read, to find the
answers to her dreams. But they did not give us any peace. Lorelai predicted that our future child would become a catalyst in bringing about peace to the fae and humans of Candor.”
“That doesn’t seem so terrible.”
“No, not a first. It seemed like great news. Then Amaryllis became pregnant,” Bravado said.
“And that was bad?”
“No, not at first. We were so excited. Everyone in the troupe was. It is always a joyous occasion when we are going to add to our numbers. But the dreams didn’t subside, and Amaryllis knew there must be more to the prophecy, for she dreamed of blood and death, not crowns or kingdoms.”
“That does seem terrible.”
“Yes, so by then, Lorelai was no longer with us. She had retired to a small town in a rundown tower. We went back to Lorelai and demanded to know the whole truth. And she told us, ‘A child born during Nochtember’s light would kill the prince on his wedding night.’”
“It rhymes,” I said sarcastically, while trying to hide my panic.
“There’s more. She also said, ‘That same girl with powers unseen would, by his death, be made queen.’ ”
That was a whole lot to digest. No wonder the king wanted to kill me.
“Of course, one cannot keep this kind of news quiet. There’s always more than one for it to be a prophecy. If Lorelai foretold it correctly, then another in the land would also speak it. For true prophecies come by twos. Eventually word got back to the king. He became paranoid, erratic, and desperate. You were a few weeks old and sleeping in that cupboard—” He pointed to the bench seat I was sitting on. “—when they came for your mother and you. She hid you away, gave you her ring, and glamoured you to look like a stuffed toy.”
“When they couldn’t find you, she told them you had died of the plague that tore through the land earlier that month.”
“There was no plague, was there?”
Bravado shook his head. “No, any girl child born under a Nochtember moon was taken by force under the guise of the plague and killed. It was genocide.”
My hands trembled as I remembered my dream of my mother standing over the grave. My grave. Of all the tombstones of girls born the same month I was. My dream was trying to tell me something.
“So, I did the only thing I knew of to keep you safe. I took you to Lorelai. She was the only one powerful enough to keep you safe from the king’s wrath, for he dared not touch you while you were under her care.”
“What happened to my real mother?” I asked. “She is here. I can tell. I recognize the scent of her glamour. It is all over the troupe. I smell the caramel popping corn.”
“She is here,” Bravado confirmed.
“I knew it. But Lorelai said the king cut her life short, so at first I thought she was dead.”
“Not exactly,” Bravado said. “Although, she might as well be. That night when they came looking for you and we told them you had died, they took your mother. My men fought bravely, but they brought a sorcerer with them, and they captured and tortured us and when I would not give up your location. The sorcerer imprisoned your mother as punishment.”
He didn’t need to say anything. I knew who it was. “Allemar,” I whispered.
I surprised my father. “Wait, how did you know? You haven’t met him, have you? If you did, Eden, you need to run. Run far away.”
“I have, and Rosalie and I sent him to another realm… for now. But where is she?” I asked excitedly. “I want to meet her.”
“Uh, she is closer than you realize.” Bravado chuckled and glanced at the cage next to me.
I reached out and put my hand on the puca’s cage. My hand hit it and disturbed the sleeping puca who shifted and turned into a black parrot. “Are you saying this is not a puca?”
“No, no it’s not,” Bravado answered.
“What is it?” I asked, already knowing the answer because I’d seen the same band once before on my sister, Rosalie, in Florin.
“It’s your mother.”
The cage rattled as the parrot called out loudly, “Your mother. Your mother.”
Chapter Twenty-Four
After the shock of learning about my mother, that she wasn’t dead after all, just entrapped in a puca’s body. I imagined having this conversation with Mother Eville at home. She would just wave her hand and say, “Her life was cut short. She might as well be dead because of being trapped in a puca form. Details. Details.”
The cage was getting heavy, and I had to stop midway and put it down on the ground. My mother inside squawked at me. “Sorry,” I muttered. “But you’re heavy.” Bravado wanted me to take the cage and see if I could figure out how to free her. But she would have to return with the troupe when they left the palace in the morning.
She squawked her displeasure, and I knew what she was saying. “I’m not saying you’re heavy. But the cage is heavy, and I can’t just spell your cage with a lighter-than-air charm, because I might just blow you up instead.” She puffed up and ruffled her feathers at me in response.
I took the trip back to the palace in stages, taking breaks in between, and by the time I made it up to the hall and to my door, Harmony rushed out.
“Is everything okay? I tried to keep him away, but then I ran out of things to talk about, can you believe it? Me, of all people. But it was because I was lying, and I don’t do well lying to people, especially the prince. I just clam up. Oh, what’s that?” She stopped talking when she noticed the black puff of cloud, as my mother decided to show off just then and reappear as a poisonous Sion adder. Its hood opened threateningly. She was trying to scare the girl away.
“It’s my mo—pet,” I corrected myself.
“Oh, I love adders.” Harmony leaned down undaunted, and my respect for her grew tenfold. “Well, you better put it away. Those are poisonous, you know. And dinner was sent to our room. We are supposed to dress and meet Prince Evander down in the ballroom for another surprise. I’m so excited. I wonder what it will be.”
“Thank you.” I opened my door and rushed inside, using my foot to close the door behind me, and dropped the cage on the floor.
My eyes searched my room carefully, looking for signs of Dorian. He was gone. He must have slipped out, but yet Harmony never mentioned him leaving. I shook my head. He wasn’t my concern right now.
I carried my mother over to the table and looked at her cage and the spell on it. She couldn’t shift into anything bigger than the cage or small enough to get out.
“Do you mind?” I asked. She turned into a bird and tried to hold her foot out for me to look at. The symbols were different than on the restraints that were put on Rosalie. It seemed that Allemar studied each sorceress and then made a band specifically for them to bind their powers. For my mother, it was to bind her glamour and shifting ability. And with Rosalie’s, there was a counterspell that Aspen had to do to release the band.
“I’m sorry, Mother. I don’t think I can break your bonds without the key, and Allemar is locked in another plane. Unless…?” I sighed at the impossible thought. What if I broke him out? Then maybe he would give me the key to free my mother?
It was a thought. A slim hope. After all, I wanted to save my mother.
A knock at the door came, and Cristin entered, her face pale with worry. “Miss Eden!”
“Yes?” I stood up and turned to look her way.
“It’s time. All the ladies are being summoned downstairs.”
“Okay.” I took a shawl and tossed it over the cage and followed Cristin down, being careful to change my outfit little by little as we walked so Cristin didn’t notice my bright red gown turning into a more modest plum that covered more of my neck.
When we came to the ballroom, I was surprised to see King Ferdinand and his wife Giselle sitting on the throne, and there were only five girls left—Adelle, Harmony, Tess, Nessa, and me.
Where was Evander? I looked for him but couldn’t find him, and my heart dropped. This might not be a good omen.
“Welcome,
ladies,” King Ferdinand said. “You are the final five that Evander has chosen, but it has come to our attention that we need to move the process along a little quicker. So we are going to speak to each of you and narrow it down to three. Then, by tomorrow, he will have to choose who he is going to walk down the aisle with, and one of you will be made his wife and future queen.”
I heard the gasps of the girls at the announcement.
“So soon?” Harmony said. “I can’t believe it.”
“Finally,” Adelle muttered.
Harmony even reached over to give my hand a squeeze, but I couldn’t rejoice with her. I found myself staring daggers at the king. I couldn’t hide my hate and resentment and decided that a crown wasn’t worth it. I would take my revenge right now. Kill the king. Wipe the slate clean for Evander. Give him a chance to rule a nation and screw the prophecy.
I stepped forward, my hand curling as I began to draw power. One blast of magic, and that would be it. It would be over. Someone appeared between the thrones. It was Prince Evander as he leaned over to surprise his mother with a quick kiss. He came and sat next to his father on the lower throne on his right, and my hand fell to my side.
Do it! my subconscious yelled at me. Finish the prophecy. Kill them both with one blow. Then you’ll have your revenge. The prince is killed and you will be queen.
I could feel the darkness, the voice in my head yelling at me, but I couldn’t do it. “No,” I breathed out.
“What was that?” Harmony asked.
I shook my head. “Nothing.”
Queen Giselle stood up. “We will now speak with each of you privately in our parlor. Miss Harmony.” The king and queen stepped off the dais and moved to a waiting room a few feet behind the throne.
Prince Evander came down to speak with the remaining ladies. Tess looked extremely nervous, as she would soon run out of glamoured items to fool the king into thinking they had money. She was avoiding Nessa. In fact, the sisters were on opposite sides of the room and kept giving each other odd glances. Something was up, but I was distracted by the sudden arrival of Dorian.
