by Emma Savant
“I’ve got to go somewhere,” I said suddenly. “Haidar, do you have a car I can borrow?”
Everyone turned to look at me. Lucas’ face got even tighter.
“What the devil makes you think I’d let you take one of my cars?” he said.
“I’ve got to go,” I said. “It’s important.”
“You’re on lockdown,” he said.
I looked at him, waiting for his eyes to connect with mine. “Apparently,” I said, stressing each word, “I don’t give a damn. There’s a faerie I need to talk to. Can I take your car?”
He looked back at me, calculations and guesses ticking up behind his shadowed eyes.
“Everyone, sit tight,” he said. “Olivia has somewhere to be.”
Chapter Twenty
Haidar led me up the stairs.
“This isn’t the garage,” I said.
“You’re not taking my car,” he said over his shoulder. Ahead of me, he lumbered up the steps like a hulking animal. “Kelda’s sprites are swarming the freeways. But I can do you one better.”
He led me past the bedrooms where Lucas, Daniel, and I had been staying, then up another flight of stairs. At the top of that one, he turned and went through a door. I felt instantly uncomfortable when I followed him in.
The four-poster bed and forest green wallpaper were as pretentious as the rest of the house, but this room was strewn with stray papers and dirty clothes he hadn’t bothered to put in a hamper. An old remote-control quadcopter sat on a shelf, one of its propellers broken. A flat-screen TV was mounted on the wall across from his bed.
I picked my way over a wadded-up T-shirt and followed Haidar across the room. On his nightstand, I caught a glimpse of a sketch: Isabelle’s face, her eyes luminous and her hair blowing across her face in the breeze. He saw me looking and snapped his fingers.
“This way, nosy,” he said. He disappeared into a closet.
But it wasn’t a closet. The moment I walked in, the racks of clothes and shoes shimmered and disappeared. In front of me, in the otherwise empty space, sat a tall wooden dresser. It looked ancient and worn, but ordinary. A faint trace of magic rose from it, a quiet thing like the smell of aging fabric.
Haidar opened the second drawer down. Inside was a shallow tray, fitted with dozens of tiny square compartments. Inside each square of polished wood sat a ring. Dozens of them winked up at me, each slightly different from the last.
“You’ll want this one,” Haidar said.
He pulled out a wide silver ring carved with undulating ripples that wove around the band. He pressed it in my palm.
“Put this on,” he said. “Turn it three times clockwise. You’ll find yourself at the entrance to the Waterfall Palace.”
I closed my hand around the ring. The other bands glinted at me, each one promising something completely different.
“Where do all these go?” I said.
Haidar shut the drawer.
“Farthest one will take you to Egypt,” he said. “But you might have a headache when you get there. That one won’t hurt you. Probably not, anyway. To get back here, turn it three times counter-clockwise. You’ll land back in the closet. Don’t go poking around my room.”
“Wouldn’t dream of it,” I said. I lifted the ring to examine it more closely. “You sure she’ll be there?”
“This is your adventure, not mine,” he said. “If she’s not there, come back. I’m not heading into the forest to look for you.”
“Thanks,” I said.
He looked down at me, searching my face like he was trying to figure out whether to say something. He seemed to decide against it. He gave me a brisk nod, then backed out of the closet and shut the door.
The ring slid onto my finger like it had been made for me. I took a deep breath and turned it once.
This had better work.
I turned it again, then a third time. The moment it nestled back into place against my skin, the closet began to close in around me. The closet darkened and turned to blackness.
An instant later, with the whooshing sound of wind filling a vacuum, the world rushed back in on me, thick and heavy with trees. Cool air and the smell of moss and decomposing pine needles rose up around me. The thundering rush of hundreds of gallons of water filled my ears, and a gentle spray of mist kissed my face.
Directly ahead, a mossy rock face glistened in the gray afternoon light. Not far away, a handful of Humdrums stood on the bridge over Multnomah Falls. One of them raised a camera to her face and took a shot of the waterfall plunging from hundreds of feet above our heads. None of them had noticed me. None of them would.
I pulled my wand out of my hair. The bun it had been holding together fell apart, and my always-frazzled curls fell around my shoulders. I pressed the wand’s tip gently to the rock face and wrote my name: Olivia Feye.
Moss grew along the lines I drew, following my wand like green paint.
The last time I had been here, I had been invited right in, through the rock face and straight into Amani’s palace built into the hill.
Now I had to wait.
I felt something examining me. It might have been the rock wall. It might have been the trees. I couldn’t tell. I stood up straighter. Behind me, a Humdrum woman shepherded three young children along the path that led down the hillside and to the viewing platform at the bottom of the falls. They didn’t notice me—the glamour in the cliff made sure of that.
“I don’t have an appointment,” I said in a low voice.
Whatever presence was there seemed to consider this. Then, from inside my own head, a soft voice whispered Proceed.
I pressed my hand to the rock. It felt wet and alive beneath my palm as it gave way and allowed me to step through. Chunks of earth fell around me in a soft cascade, but they were gone the moment I stepped into Queen Amani’s entrance hall.
The room was still the most beautiful I had ever seen, a dozen textures in shades of silver. In front of me, a glittering waterfall fell from the ceiling into a silver and blue tiled pool. Behind it, a curtain of hanging crystals illuminated the room.
There wasn’t time to admire. I glanced around the room, taking in the four silver doors that led out. I knew which one I’d taken last time. I didn’t know which one would lead me to Amani now. The white moth that had been my guide before was gone. The hall felt empty.
Underneath my shirt, the silver ring Amani had given me hung heavy and still. I hadn’t used it in a while. I pulled it out from under my shirt, and the chain it hung from radiated warmth from my skin. I put the delicate ring on my smallest finger, where it glittered next to the thick one that had brought me here.
“Queen Amani,” I said. My voice echoed around the silver room as though it were being reflected back to me by all the polished surfaces. The enchanted mirror set into the ring stayed clear, showing my own tiny face back at me.
I waited.
“Queen Amani,” I said. I raised my voice. “I need to talk to you. Are you here? I need your help.”
Nothing. The ring stayed clear. Within the mirror, I saw my eyebrows push together and my mouth tighten into a hard line.
“Amani,” I said.
The farthest silver door on my left swung open. I looked down, expecting her face, but the ring stayed clear and silent.
The moment I stepped through the door, it swung shut behind me. I felt a frisson of magic and turned in time to see the edges of the door glow white. I didn’t have to test the spell to know I’d been locked in.
The last time I’d been here, I’d been led to a hallway covered in pictures of Oregon. That hall had been tidy and proper, the photographs meant to highlight the region’s beauty for the benefit of visiting dignitaries.
This corridor was something else entirely. Here, I felt as though I really was walking through a tunnel in the cliff face that surrounded Multnomah Falls. Roughly carved rock stretched up above my head, disappearing into shadows above. The air smelled of damp earth, and cool air hung heavily ar
ound me and clung to my skin.
No lights lit the way. Instead, tiny glittering particles sparkled in the stone walls like shards of starlight. They cast a pale, eerie glow in the tunnel, barely enough to let me know that the ground beneath my feet was smooth and polished.
My wand was still in my hand. Creating a light wouldn’t be hard. But I clenched my fingers around the wand’s handle and held it still. Something about this corridor felt heavy and old. This wasn’t a place for my magic.
Above me, something rustled. I looked up. It was impossible to make out anything clearly, but it seemed as though a white patch of something grew on the rock, maybe a lichen or another fungus. I mentally ran through my Oregon plants field guide, but no plants I knew rustled and shifted like that.
Then, as I watched, a tiny piece of white detached. It fluttered down and flapped its wings until it found a new spot on the side of the tunnel. As if called, a string of more papery moths followed it. They flitted together in a loose, quivering cloud and landed on the wall. I stepped to the side to give them room as they lazily beat their wings in place and settled in.
After what felt like minutes of silent walking, I reached the end of the tunnel. A silver door gleamed faintly in the glittering light. It had no handle, but when I pressed my hand against it, the door dissolved into mist.
What lay behind it was not a room.
It wasn’t anything, as far as I could tell. Below, above, and off to every side, I was met only with swirling white fog.
The fog was deadly silent.
This looked like the inside of a cloud, or like the mist churning at the bottom of Multnomah Falls magnified a hundred times over. I bent down and waved my hand, trying to find a floor, but there was none.
Only the slightest shadows between curls of mist broke up the relentless whiteness. I felt my eyes focus and refocus as they tried to make sense of the senseless nothing that seethed before me.
Step through, said Amani’s voice in my head.
I looked down. There was nothing below me. If I stepped over this doorway, I could land anywhere.
Or maybe I wouldn’t land at all.
I stepped.
The ground materialized beneath me. I couldn’t see it, but I felt it, firm and flat beneath my shoe.
Tension that I hadn’t noticed building in my arms and between my eyes rushed away with a tingle. I let out the breath I’d been holding and walked deeper in. On the third step, something shifted. The air in the room grew warmer, and the fog seemed to shift. A moment later, I could make out shapes and colors. In another breath, the mist was gone.
“Olivia,” Amani breathed.
Chapter Twenty-One
Her appearance sent a chill down my spine.
“Are you okay?” I said.
Her face seemed thinner than usual, and the glazed exhaustion behind her eyes was impossible to miss or to hide. Her always-luminous skin seemed flat now. Everything about her seemed tired, from her limp hair to her mouth, set in a thin line.
But she smiled and beckoned me forward into the strangest room I’d ever seen.
A round moon so big I couldn’t have wrapped my arms around it hung above us in the center of the circular room, rotating as if suspended from an invisible string. As I watched, it shifted from a sliver to a crescent, then from crescent to gibbous. Once it waxed full, it began melting, back to gibbous and then to a tiny sliver before growing again.
My eyes scanned the space. The room was broken into concentric circles, each one lower than the last, like steps in an amphitheater.
The outermost circle, the one that met the deep blue walls, was a slender gold flowerbed filled with dark soil. The scent of cedar rose into the air. From the soil grew pale mushrooms that ringed the room like sentinels. Behind them, on the walls, seven-pointed gold stars glittered in the luminous light of the moon.
In the next circle, half a foot down, the white mist that had filled the room hovered over a floor of silver tiles. The mist seemed contained, locked into the shape of a ring. Below that, a pool circled the room like a moat. The water inside it shone with vivid aqua light. Inside that, down another half-foot, tongues of orange fire licked up from a bed of blue crystals.
And there, in the heart of the room, surrounded by flames, Amani knelt on a silver floor engraved with a seven-pointed star.
She reached out a hand to me.
“It’s okay,” she said. “Come on down.”
The stairs that led from the doorway were the only way in or out. I walked down the gleaming black steps, careful to place my feet in the center of each step so I wouldn’t risk touching anything I shouldn’t. On either side, I felt the magic creeping out toward me. In the corners of my vision, past the edges of my glasses, magic swirled thick and gold.
The center of the floor was bigger than I’d expected. I knelt across from Amani. The heat from the fires warmed my skin and lit hers up with a faint orange glow.
“I’m glad you’re in one piece,” she said.
“Someone was watching out for me.”
Her face relaxed. “Haidar,” she said. “I asked him to keep an eye on you as soon as you started going to the Rose Garden.”
“You knew I was going,” I said.
I couldn’t stop it from sounding like a question. The Faerie Queen knew everything; it was well within her power to find out what I’d been doing. I just hadn’t thought she’d cared.
She put a hand on my knee. Her skin burned through the fabric of my jeans.
“I’m so glad you’ve been pursuing your plants,” she said.
I searched her face. This wasn’t the time to be talking about my career goals. And anyway, the roses had been the least of it.
“The Oracle,” I said.
A shadow passed over her face.
“She’s strong,” Amani said. “Does she know you’re here?”
“I don’t think so,” I said. “I came straight from Haidar’s house.”
Amani’s shoulders relaxed. She shifted from her knees to a cross-legged position and allowed herself to slouch.
She was wearing yoga pants, I noticed, and a sequined purple tank top. They both looked completely wrong in this room.
“Good,” she breathed. “I’ve gone to so much trouble to make her think we were no longer associated.” She gestured vaguely at me.
“I thought you just didn’t want my help anymore,” I said.
“I hope she thinks so, too,” Amani said. “She’s been collecting her strength for months, but even I had no idea how far she was willing to go.” She stretched her arms out in front of her, like she was warming up before exercising. “Of course, I’ve always had a blind spot when it comes to Kelda.”
She pressed her lips tight together and sighed sharply out through her nose. I recognized her expression. It was pure annoyance, directed entirely inward. It was impossible to be sure, but I had a feeling I wore that face a lot.
Amani snapped a hair tie on her wrist a few times. Despite the exhaustion that hung from her body, her movements were quick and restless. She put her hair up in a ponytail. Her normally wild curls seemed as tired and frazzled as the rest of her.
Suddenly, Amani’s face changed. Her jaw grew tight and her eyes flashed. On instinct, I pushed myself back and away from her.
I was just in time.
She whipped both hands up between us. They sliced through the air, exactly where my face had been a moment earlier. Her eyes focused on something far in the distance, and I knew she couldn’t see me anymore.
She rolled up to a crouch, then sprang to her feet and slammed both hands forward.
A blinding ball of gold fire shot out of her hands. It crashed against the blue walls. Around the impact, the gold stars on the walls burned hot and white. They seemed to diffuse the fire and absorb it into themselves. Around us, the ring of flames flared up. Amani’s face shone gold in the light.
A tremor ran through me.
Her eyes blazed with a power I’d never s
een in the face of a living being. Beneath her pale brown skin and mossy green eyes, Amani was a swirling inferno of magic and rage.
Our legends said the power of the Faerie Queen made the sea storm and the crops grow. When she was glad, our world floated on the power of her smile. When she was angry, we all paid the price.
Someone was paying the price now.
She threw out a hand. A bolt of blue lightning crackled from her fingertips, tracing a sparking line of electricity up to the sky. The moon crackled with the heat. She threw out another hand, and I crouched low to the floor to avoid the worst of a gust of wind so icy it made my hair freeze. The ring of fog spun like an out-of-control carousel around us, causing the flames on the lowest ring to flicker.
Then, as suddenly as it had started, everything stopped. Amani deflated. She crumpled to the ground and pressed her palms against the engraved silver floor.
When she looked up, she was just Amani again: a tired woman in yoga pants who looked like she could use a hug.
“What the hell was that?” I said. The icicles that had formed around my hair clinked gently by my ears.
She reached out toward me and touched a lock of my frozen hair. A moment later, it was soft and warm and dry again.
“Are you okay?”
“I moved in time,” I said.
She pressed her hands flat to the floor again. “This is my studio.”
I looked up, from the ring of fire to the glowing pool to the fog to the mushrooms, each layer like a stair leading up to the white door. Above us, the moon silently melted from full to waning.
“You’re the only person who’s ever been in here,” she said. “Apart from Queen Phoebe, of course.”
“Why?” I said. “What do you do here?”
A “studio” implied that this might be where she practiced her magic. But whatever had just happened, that hadn’t been practicing.
“I fight off Kelda’s sprites, lately,” Amani said. “I can’t get to her and she won’t talk to me. We could fix this if she would just have a conversation like a normal adult.”
