by Sara Hanover
Goldie slid her hand out and patted Evie’s wrist. “I’m just going up today to pick up some odds and ends from the estate. A melancholy trip, at best.”
“Oh.” Evelyn dropped her gaze to the table where she was drawing tiny circles with one index finger.
He leaned forward. “How about this weekend or the next? Even the Broadstone family has Saturdays off, and we can meet everyone properly. Tessa could bring her mother and we’d have a grand time. Might even be a bit of snow in the forests awaiting us. It would be beautiful to host you then.” His slight Dwarven accent showed. I could never decide whether it was Scots or Gaelic, though definitely a brogue of some sort, and a little old-fashioned.
“Oh!” Evelyn’s expression glowed. “That would be wonderful. I guess I’ll phone my driver and have him circle back. I should be home helping plan Dad’s event if I’m not off with you.”
Disaster was averted, at least for now, and we all sat and talked amiably until her driver knocked politely at the front door and swept her away. I expected Hiram to turn on me and bellow, his color still high, but he just brushed past me with a low grumble.
“Not my idea,” I offered by way of apology.
“That I know,” he answered slowly. “Lass has a mind of her own. She can be a bit hasty.”
Goldie simply lifted her mug to her lips, obviously realizing it might be wiser to say nothing at all. I decided that, due to his culture, any of us might be considered hasty and didn’t attempt to defend Evelyn.
He let me make coffee for him and accepted the last of the biscuits, without saying much one way or another until he wiped his hands on a napkin and stood up. “We should be leaving.”
Goldie smiled at him. “I’ll be right out as soon as I use the facilities. Tessa, care to show me where they are?” and she stood in the hallway, waiting for me as he went outdoors.
I started to show her the downstairs bathroom, which was little more than a closet, but she stopped me. “I needed a moment.”
I waited.
“Remember that I told you there was a traitor among the dwarves? That someone betrayed me as the keeper of the Eye of Nimora so that it could be taken?”
“And we determined it wasn’t Hiram.”
“True, but despite his words to Evelyn, I imagine we will have quite a welcoming committee today. Those four remaining suspects should be among them. I’m not expecting a welcoming. The marriage between me and Morty was extremely unpopular.”
That I had learned over the last few months. I didn’t want to say it, but Goldie deserved my cooperation. “Should we not go?”
“Oh, no. This was a victory too hard won. But you should be wary and careful.”
I certainly hadn’t expected this but nodded. “And you, too.”
Goldie gave me a wry look. “I always am when surrounded by enemies.” She added, “And friends. These are chancy days. You’d do well to remember that.”
I could hardly forget it. Way back when I was early into magic, a sorceress named Remy had warned of the exact same thing. She hadn’t been wrong, either.
We caught up our coats and rain slickers and then I walked out with her to Hiram’s SUV, misgivings unsettling me. Scout watched me dolefully from a corner of the living room window, unhappy at being left behind. I leaned forward in my seat. “Maybe I should bring Scout.”
“Not this trip,” Hiram responded as he started the vehicle, put it in gear and pulled away. That was when he pulled the blindfolds out of the center console. “And you’ll be needing to wear these when I advise you to.”
CHAPTER THREE
FAMILY KNOTS
I KNOW. FAMILIES should have ties, but in Hiram and Goldie’s case, they tangled almost beyond repair. The blindfolds seemed a bit extreme, however. I opened my mouth to protest, but Goldie stopped me. “He’s right. We’re going into old forest, beyond a kind of veil, and the trip can be very disorienting.”
I shut my mouth. Thought about it. Iron Dwarves and other clans stayed as hidden as any of the other magical races and it stood to reason they had their own sanctuaries. I wasn’t certain about what kind of veil Goldie might mean, but I’d seen through an elven gateway not long ago, and the landscape on the other side certainly had been different in strange and awkward ways. I stretched the blindfold across my lap. “Ready when you are.”
“Oh, it’ll be a bit,” Hiram told me. “It’s a drive.”
I understood a little more why he hadn’t wanted Evelyn along. Explaining the blindfold might have been a little difficult. Although, for all I knew, she might think it delightfully kinky.
That light rain increased to a wintry, dark storm that grew heavier as we motored outside the city. A chill hung over the car until the heater kicked in while I pondered what Goldie had meant by old forest. North America is, compared to many of the other continents, a relatively new world. There are the redwoods and sequoias that negate that thought, but the rest of the area . . . well, I haven’t met a tree over five hundred years old that I know of. Admittedly, I hadn’t even thought of introducing myself to a tree until lately. But where magic users are concerned, I had the feeling even five hundred years wasn’t considered ancient. I tried to watch through the windshield to see which direction we were headed, but Hiram had turned almost immediately onto a thoroughfare I didn’t recognize, and there weren’t that many in and out of Richmond. After listening to the windshield wipers slap back and forth for about fifteen minutes, Hiram said, “Blindfolds, please.”
I caught Goldie giving him a look, but the Iron Dwarf said firmly, “Even you,” so she reached up with her hands and began to fasten it over her eyes. I slipped mine on then, too.
I could feel it the moment the SUV slipped away from modern-day Virginia and into . . . what, I didn’t know. The pelting rain stopped and might have turned into a light snowfall, I couldn’t see to tell, but it wasn’t the heavy kind of snow that muffles the immediate world. The windshield wipers slowed to a more deliberate rhythm, and the tires and bumps told me that the road of asphalt had turned into something else. Hard-packed dirt, possibly. I didn’t hear the occasional slippage or ping of gravel coming loose, so we didn’t drive over that. I really, really wanted to see what we headed into, but then the Veil hit.
A feeling shivered through me, and for a moment I felt as if I were doing a somersault. It wasn’t awful, but I really hated having my eyes covered so I could deal with gravity and the lack of it. It got worse. My stomach turned inside out, and the breakfast I’d pushed into my throat demanded an automatic eject. I swallowed convulsively, determined not to embarrass myself by spewing all over Hiram’s backseat, but my stomach fought back. I pushed my hands to my mouth and must have let out a moan as my ears went wild and my brain reeled. I could barely hear Goldie say, “Steady.”
But there was nothing steady about what happened to my body. Had Hiram driven onto a roller coaster track and were we now hurtling along at seventy miles an hour upside down??? Because that’s what my brain told me. And then it said sharply, reverse! And we did the whole course backward. My stomach ran for another exit, and I held onto the seat belt then, with both hands, certain my knuckles had gone white.
My ears popped and then—it all stopped. Well, the SUV kept moving but in a normal, orderly fashion; my stomach promptly gave a last spasm before settling down. My brain stopped whirling in circles and the whole, terrible, sensation faded away. I sat back weakly in the car, muscles limp. I hadn’t embarrassed myself—barely. I could feel a drop of sweat trickle down my face from my temple and blotted it away once I unclenched my hands. If passing the Veil were this difficult every single time, I seriously doubted that they would have any trespassers to worry about.
After a few long moments, during which my senses convinced themselves that everything had turned out all right, Hiram said, “You can take off the blindfolds now.”
With slightly sha
ky hands, I reached up, unsure if I even wanted to take it off. What if we’d just driven into, I don’t know, Jurassic Park? Was I prepared to see a stegosaurus stumbling through the foliage? On the other hand, that might be rather neat until it charged the vehicle.
I pushed the silk scarf off as Hiram turned down the heat setting on the dashboard and saw that I’d been right about a light snowfall. Huge flakes twirled down from the clouds, melting almost before they landed on the grass or road, their fall slow and deliberate against a vast, green forest the likes of which I had never seen before and likely would not see again, unless invited and escorted in. I began to realize what old forest meant.
Either I had shrunk, or these trees belonged to a species of giant evergreen unknown to me, every one of them rivaling the legendary sequoias. Clouds threaded through the tops of them, shredding where the pointed crowns struck through, almost as if the clouds themselves were merely white puffs decorating the dark green branches. Saplings pushed through here and there, stretching nearly as tall, though thin and supple, and the older trees that canopied them allowed just enough view of the sky that sunlight could nurture them. I thought of owls winging through, like a slalom course on a ski slope, moving in and out for the sheer joy of it. Below, grasses still held a slight green despite the snowfall, and I wondered what animals might pad through to crop at them. Would there be a wide and commanding river or fast-moving brooks somewhere beyond? And what about mountains? The Broadstones were miners of legend. Where did their veins of gold and gemstones hide? I had my nose to the window glass as tightly as Scout would have, if he’d come along, and I felt no shame in it.
“What do you think?” Goldie asked.
I breathed out slowly. “Awesome.” I worried, then, about Evelyn. She’s got a sharp mind, and I knew that she would see this forest as being somewhere outside of the world we’d both grown up in. There would be no explaining this. Not even an outright lie such as “Protected Forest” would justify what I viewed now.
Hiram looked over his shoulder briefly as if alerted by my thoughts. “Tessa?”
“What will you tell Evelyn?”
He paused. “I have a nice home in town. I won’t need to tell her anything, for a while.”
That made sense. When he came by or answered a distress call from me, he was never more than fifteen minutes away or so, and we’d been on the road this morning for at least an hour. I pondered a moment. “That might be a good idea,” I answered. “Although she should see this someday. It’s amazing.”
“We think so.”
“So . . . how far out of time are we? And could this survive a nuclear blast?”
“Out of time?”
“Like Wakanda.”
He laughed. “It is a wedge,” he told me. “In time but not quite out of it, either. And we think it might survive a disaster, but we’re not willing to test that theory—and we certainly wouldn’t want to risk the outside world. As for the Wakanda reference, you’re probably right. We do have it shielded although not in the marvelous way the movies would have it. This ward took a heavy toll when it was put in place.”
“Blood, sweat, and tears.”
“Precisely.” He guided the car about a big sweeping curve, and the rooftops of homes could be seen. Immense and sprawling roofs, but not close together in the valley opening up.
I undid my seat belt so I could scoot closer to the front seat. “I take it back. That’s not Wakanda, that’s Rivendell.”
Goldie admonished me. “I wouldn’t repeat that here. Rivendell is the legendary home of elves.”
“You mean Tolkien got it right?”
“I mean that one never associates one ethnicity with another ignorantly, even using literary license.”
Hiram grunted. “We prefer to call it simply Old Home.”
“So are you American dwarves or European dwarves or what?”
I sat back quickly as Goldie twisted in her seat as though she might slap my hands. But she merely glared at me over her shoulder. “Mind your manners.”
I’d seen battle harpies angry and decided to retreat, even though I wasn’t quite sure what I’d done to offend. “Yes, ma’am.”
The road twisted about again and again, avoiding huge monoliths of rock that interrupted its pathway here and there, and I stared at each as we passed it. I noted the resemblance to Stonehenge and other similar monuments, wondering if the dwarves had had a hand in placing them. As for these . . . Had the road been carved around them, or had they been placed there to mark the passage? If they had been placed, what did they signify? Did the ward surrounding them expand over the years as the population flourished? I stared at them as we passed and saw tiny mosses and lichen covering the surface, weathering, and erosion marks, and—could I be wrong?—runes etched here and there. I wondered what they said. My breath fogged the passenger window, and I sat back with a slight laugh.
Again, I caught a look from Goldie, and saw the tension in her body. She’d lost the Eye of Nimora and most of her nest to traitors; I realized she must be wondering what she might lose this time. She had vowed to Hiram that she would not start a battle, but that did not mean she would head into trouble with her hands tied. Not that battle harpy.
The road dipped downward and headed into a final stretch, passing the lanes of manor and estate houses, aimed at the grandest one of all at the far end of the valley. The sun broke through, the snowflakes melting into glittering diamonds of dew before slowly disappearing altogether.
And, as Goldie had predicted, it looked like most of the clans had turned out to wait for us. I saw Hiram’s construction crew buddies who had come to work on repairing/replacing our old cellar and breathed a faint sigh of relief because none of their names had been on Goldie’s very short list of possible traitors. Of the others, I hadn’t been at all sure who I would meet. I knew the Iron Dwarves but had never met one of the Sylvans or Timber men or even one of the Watermen as I knew. I could see by the colors of their shirts that they wore them just as a Scot might wear his tartan: there were blues and greens and redwood fabrics, and they tended to stand in bunches rather than stirred about to blend and almost every one of them had arms crossed over their broad chests or fists resting on their hips. Talk about defensive posture!
Very few of them were female, but they dressed in pants and shirts alike, only their luxurious hair and flashing eyes to tell them apart. Unlike female dwarves in old tales, these ladies did not have beards and looked very feminine as well as determined.
Goldie made a slight sound at the back of her throat, though whether it was fear or dismay I couldn’t guess. She had warned me about the reception, but—even so—I got the feeling she hadn’t expected this. The excitement filling me at meeting so many of the dwarven clans receded as I realized she watched for trouble. I gritted my teeth shut. I was so close to getting some idea of what happened to my father, and it looked as if we were going to come away empty-handed.
Then I spotted a gleaming crimson ray as the sun struck something brilliant and altogether marvelous. One of the Broadstone clan wore the Eye of Nimora upon his brow.
I touched Goldie’s shoulder. “Wow. Looks like they brought out the big guns.”
She nodded. “They want retribution against me however they can get it. Well, I’ve nothing to hide.” Almost before the SUV stopped, she unclipped her seatbelt and swiveled in her seat to step out.
I waited for Hiram to extend his hand, a little cowardly I knew, but I wanted the crowd to know I was on his side. Or maybe that he was on mine. I could hear the rumble and grumble of voices as we all appeared.
A bent old man, wrapped in green, lifted his bewhiskered chin and shouted out, “By what right are you even here, Goldie Germanigold! You brought death to Mortimer Broadstone.”
“Perhaps that is true, but before that, I brought him many years of love and regard. I’m here because I asked to retrieve
what few things are mine from Morty’s holdings and to give my respect at his headstone.”
Headstone? They had a grave for Morty? The last I had seen of him had been a ghostly whirlwind of metallic elements and gems spinning away from the sidewalk where he’d died in New York City. No body, just a cloud of debris that represented his life. I’d have to visit that grave myself. I owed him for a few things.
No one standing there answered her.
Goldie inclined her head. “If you won’t allow me that last, I have already asked for and received permission for the former from his heir.”
It didn’t look as if the crowd would let us through. “Hiram,” I whispered in desperation. “I have to get that journal. Please.”
The merest wave of his hand indicated he heard me. I didn’t know what he could do, and I couldn’t see us having a brawl on the steps of his ancestral home. I stood very still, with the stone warming itself in my hand as if preparing for action.
“And I,” Hiram spoke up, “have permission from the elders. She did help retrieve the Eye of Nimora.”
“Her fault it was stolen!” came a shout from the back of the crowd. Goldie swung her sharp gaze over everyone, identifying faces she knew, no doubt, as Hiram held up his palm.
“Let it go,” he said. “She is a guest.”
He shouldered his way through those blocking the entrance to the estate, an impressive building built of river stone and redwood from the looks of it, and split logs I didn’t recognize, but Hiram touched them in passing and said, “Chestnut. The old trees are gone, killed by a fungus. New resistant trees have been created, but those who fear science will not let them be planted.” He stopped and rubbed the beautiful wood stud again. “At one time they covered this coast. I would like to see that growth again.”
