Hope dropped her arms to her sides, hands clenched into little fists, and walked past the line of guards. They looked at me and I shrugged. When she reached the steps leading up to the castle, she stopped and turned, folding her arms again, and glared.
By nature, I was a gentle person, despite my recent tendencies towards anger. Right now, I was mad but at the same time a little in awe. My first trip to the Behindbeyond had employed borrowed power too. The power for a portal didn’t need to come from someone’s internal reservoir and Hope had been clever to figure that out. Stinker.
I told myself to be calm. Then I noticed Wince, who was staring first at Hope and then at Fauxpe and then back to Hope.
“Twin sisters?” he asked.
“You’ve never seen twins before?” I asked.
“No.”
You still haven’t.
“It’s amazing.” Wince was captivated.
It made sense. For the Fae, a single birth was rare so twins were practically impossible.
I wasn’t prepared to reveal our deception to anyone outside our inner circle. “We’re going to need a minute. Sir Siorradh, can we delay our departure?”
Siorradh nodded. “Briefly.”
“All right.” I pointed at Oz. “Come with the ladies and me.”
Wince piped up. “May I help with anything?”
“Are you familiar with the mortal realm? Twins? Prenuptial agreements? Toad the Wet Sprocket? Any of those things?”
“Well, no.”
“That’s what we need help with. The twins aren’t supposed to both be here because one of them has a prenuptial agreement with a large and scary toad who sometimes sleeps in a wheelchair. And how, exactly, is a sprocket supposed to work properly when its wet? Do you have any suggestions there? Anything that might help? If you do, please, let us know. We don’t have a lot of time.”
Wince squinted for a long moment. He was actually trying to think of something that would help. “Does the wet sprocket help keep the toad damp?” he offered.
“Not as much as you’d think. Anything else?”
Another long, tedious moment. “I suppose not,” he said.
“Then the rest of this conversation will just be confusing. If you’ll excuse us.”
Fauxpe, Oz, Hope and I took refuge in a small barn next to the stables. The barn smelled of leather from the saddles stored there and silver tack gleamed from hanging posts on the wall. I eased the door closed.
Hope scowled. “Why were you so mean to that guy?”
“Was I?” I replied.
“You hurt his feelings.”
Her eyes were warm and starting to fill with tears and I had the impression we weren’t talking about Wince anymore. I took a deep breath and looked up at the ceiling, which was kept very clean. No hornet’s nests. No grime. Not even a cobweb.
Another deep breath. What’s done is done and can’t be undone. I met Hope’s eyes. “You’re right. Seeing you here was a shock and maybe I should have listened to you better before we came here. And I guess I’m taking my feelings out on Wince, which is wrong.”
Hope nodded and looked sideways. “Okay.” She sounded surprised at my reasonableness. I wasn’t surprised at all.
I went on. “Since you’re here, you should know my father wants me to exchange gifts with a queen called the Máithrín. Our phony Hope would have pretended to stay in the castle while we were gone. The trip will take three days there and three days back so I don’t know if you want to be away for that long. However, now that we have the real you—and I need to consider your feelings—do you want to take Erin’s place and stay here? Or do you want to go?”
Hope looked ready to hit me. Her eyes hot and red as coals. “When are you going to get it, Got? I don’t care where you go. I don’t care how dangerous it is. You’re a thick-skulled lunkhead but I’m coming with you.”
Lunkhead?
A deep breath didn’t make me feel better. Having Hope along was exactly what I’d been trying to avoid. I fumed. “Well, our plan survived almost a whole hour before it fell apart.”
“Our plan? This is your plan. You came up with the whole thing. And I’m sorry if your plan fell apart. Maybe you should have done more to consider everyone else.”
Hope spun around and didn’t bother slamming the door as she left.
Pretending nothing was wrong had worked for Hope for a while. Maybe it would work for me. “So Fauxpe, I could use your help. What would you like to do? Once you’re just Fáidh again?”
Fauxpe tried to get the shocked expression off her face before she replied. “Well, uh, Blake’s camping all weekend. So, I—um—if you need me, I’ll go.”
“Really? That’d be great. Oz? Do you want to come along?”
Oz looked at the floor, having more success ignoring the argument I’d had with Hope. “Do I have to go?”
“Nobody has to go, Oz.” I pondered ramifications, then said, “Especially since there’s no reason to keep to our plan. My plan. Everyone stay here for a second.”
I went to the courtyard and spoke to Sir Siorradh and Wince. The men followed me into the barn. I looked at Wince. “We want to bring you into our confidence.”
Wince stood perceptibly straighter, flattered to be included.
“If Vapeman’s spies are nearby, they have a good story now. Oz, drop the spell.”
Oz nodded. Seconds passed. Hope’s face dissolved to reveal Fáidh’s darker features.
“Oh my!” Wince said.
Fauxpe, we bid thee adieu.
“We tried to protect Hope by making it seem she’d come to the Behindbeyond, but events have changed and she’s actually here now. Please help us by keeping our secret. We don’t want word of our deception to spread. Can we trust you?”
“Certainly,” said Siorradh.
“Of course, sire,” said Wince. I swear he was three inches taller.
I caught Siorradh humming a tune and realized it was the melody from the song “All I Want” by none other than Toad the Wet Sprocket.
Of course. A song about lies. And he knows it..
I needed to ask Siorradh how he knew so much about the mortal realm soon. For now, it felt all right letting Siorradh and Wince know our secret and I hoped it wouldn’t come back to bite us in the backside.
Outside, Hope watched from the steps. It would be best, I knew, to talk to her right away.
The only way out is through.
Fáidh more or less knocked on Siorradh’s armor. “Sir Knight? I’ll need to make a few arrangements before I can leave. Where will you be going? I’ll meet up with you.”
“Certainly, milady. We’ll be at the Palisade by nightfall, in the borderlands.”
“I know where that is.”
“Let me get an escort for you.”
They passed Hope and I on the steps.
Hope spoke first. “That guy you were mean to had a smile. What did you tell him?”
“I told him I needed his help and he was the only person I trusted to do it. I asked him to have a thousand posters hung throughout the kingdom with my face on them, saying, ‘Wanted: Dead or Alive for making a plan that sucked.”
The twitch at the corner of Hope’s mouth may have been imaginary. “Do you always charm your way out of an argument?”
“Yep. Always. So it would be really good if you could forgive me. I don’t want to break my streak.”
Hope still didn’t smile. “I’ll think about it.”
She’ll think about it? “We should ask the guy to get you some riding clothes,” I said. At least I can keep an eye on her.
Wince was happy to help and took Hope into the castle. I stayed outside, watching the stable master prepare another horse and checking the trunk holding the message and the Book of Stains given to me by my father, to make sure everything was strapped securely in place.
Sir Siorradh emerged and gave me a nod. Hope came out shortly after, wearing a sky-blue riding outfit with a goldenrod doublet under a silver haube
rk. She’d tied her blond hair back with a sky-blue bow. Wince trailed behind her, his hands fussing together like they wanted to adjust Hope’s clothing but didn’t know where to begin.
“This is most unseemly,” said Wince. He looked at me with desperation. “Please, milord, wilt thou do something?”
“About what?”
Wince cleared his throat. “She’s wearing . . .” He drew close and lowered his voice as if the word he was about to say was contemptible. “Breeches!”
“Mortal women are independent.” Some more than others. “They also discovered it’s easier to ride like a man.”
“What of keeping appearances?” Wince seemed personally wounded.
“We’ll do everything we need to do to keep any scandal from tainting your reputation. Or the throne’s.”
Wince half-wrinkled his nose, unmollified.
“Shall we get as far from the castle as quickly as we can?”
Wince nodded vigorously. “Splendid idea.”
I helped Hope into her saddle and swung up onto Peachfuzz. Still clumsy. We followed Sir Siorradh to the road with Wince behind us.
There was no fanfare to celebrate our departure but people had gathered along the side of the road anyway. Farmers and craftsmen with broad shoulders and sunbaked faces, the women waving handkerchiefs and the men holding their hats in their hands.
“Safe travels, Prince Luck,” said a boy with pants that were too small and boots that were too big. I nodded to him with a smile. He couldn’t know that I didn’t feel at all ready for the journey ahead and I hoped for safe travel as well, for all of us.
Chapter Twenty-One: Riding Lessons
Hope rode better than I, by far. Some of the credit had to go to her breeches.
We had ground to make up. Sir Siorradh let the horses walk for a mile to warm up then shifted us into second gear.
Peachfuzz didn’t need me to tell her what to do, which was good, because I had no idea if kicking her would make her walk or gallop or something in between. She had no trouble trotting with the rest, but the gait set me bouncing awkwardly in the saddle and I felt my insides rattling loose. Hope, on the other hand, kept the rhythm of her horse’s pace and proceeded smoothly down the road with enviable grace.
She literally rode circles around me, smiling like she’d told the first part of a joke but was waiting to deliver the punchline. I still felt irked she hadn’t followed my plan but at least her sunshine had found a way out of the storm.
“Can I give you some advice?” She drew up alongside me. Her mount was a white mare smaller and more streamlined than mine.
“No,” I replied. Grumpy.
Hope ignored me. She pointed at my foot and drew an imaginary line up the side of my leg. “Imagine a steel cable going all the way from your heel, through your hip and shoulder to your ear. Let the cable pull you straight up with your balance centered over the horse.”
Worth a try.
I imagined a sterling silver cable, because steel would be painful, running the length of my body. I had been hunched forward in the saddle and sitting up straight made it easier to ride.
“Good,” Hope said. “Now turn your feet in and your toes up and use your legs to grip her body. Not too hard. If you squeeze, you’ll tell her you want to go faster. Just hug her like she’s your favorite aunt who you only see once a year.”
That advice was odd, but it helped a lot. Turning my feet in made my legs curve to fit the barrel of Peachfuzz’s body and a little pressure kept me in the saddle instead of feeling like a piston in a cheap engine.
“Better, right?” Hope asked. “Now follow her head with the reins. Her head moves as she does, and you don’t want to pull on the bit in her mouth. It could hurt her.”
I kept the reins from pulling which also meant the reins weren’t pulling me. Bonus.
Hope went on. “Stay deep in the saddle and use your legs like shock absorbers. If you watch her shoulder, you can rise when she shifts and sit again in rhythm. It’s called ‘posting.’ You won’t get bounced around so much.”
It took a minute but I got the timing down better. I was still only half as graceful as Hope, but my insides had started finding their way back to their previous locations. Unfortunately, while I’d been working on the bouncing, I’d returned to hunching over and pulling on the reins.
“How am I supposed to remember all this?” I asked.
Hope grinned some more, bright as brass. “Do what I did. Beg your daddy for riding lessons, then practice till you can’t walk straight.”
“Already there. I’ll never walk straight again.”
Peachfuzz tossed her head up and down twice and nickered as if she agreed with me.
Good horse.
Hope was less sympathetic.
“Gotta pay the price, Got,” she said. She rode ahead like meringue on a cloud, leaving me to my own devices.
I squinted and tried sitting straight, turning my toes in, gently following the reins, and using my legs to post. I felt like a juggler trying to keep four chainsaws in the air.
“Congratulations.”
Looking at the person addressing me meant I wasn’t looking at Peachfuzz and I started bouncing again.
Sir Siorradh’s voice sounded strangely hollow in the open air.
“Congratulations? For what?” I refocused on the Peachfuzzy shoulders in front of me, trying to post again.
“We’ve passed our first league. You’re doing well.”
“If you say so,” I said. The bones in my backside felt bruised. “How many more leagues to go? And please don’t say 20,000.”
Siorradh laughed and the sound rolled up as if from a deep place inside his armor. I imagined a smile on his face, assuming he had a face.
“We’ll be covering nearly one-hundred-forty leagues over the next three days,” Siorradh said. My heart sank into a deeper place. “But we shall technically be riding for only another seven by day’s end.”
Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad.
“How far is a league?”
“About three miles.”
Oh. My. Butt.
Twenty-one more miles on Peachfuzz today.
I must have groaned because Siorradh put his gauntleted hand on my shoulder. “Fear not, milord. Four more leagues and we’ll stop for lunch.”
Mercifully, we approached a circle of liagán stones. I relaxed into the saddle and indulged in some hunching. It changed my balance, but felt so good. Peachfuzz bucked a little and I got the hint.
“All right, girl, all right. I’ll sit up straight.”
She’s worse than the Mama.
“I’ll eat my vegetables too.”
Peachfuzz twitched an ear.
At the circle of stones, Wince opened a portal and we took turns riding through. Siorradh went first, so tall in the saddle he had to bend into the side of Trident’s neck to pass. Several of our retinue went through, then Wince motioned for me to go next. I probably didn’t need to bow my head to fit, but I did.
Liagán circles were generally within twenty miles of each other and could often be seen on distant hilltops. I admired the trees and mountains in the distance and spied a small castle on top of a cliff. It sat proudly on its promontory and I could see it clearly even though it was more than fifteen miles away.
I know where we are.
The castle was constructed of pink stone. A woman I knew, an Eternal named Béil, lived there with a boy named Laoch and I realized I hadn’t seen either of them for a couple of months. At one time, Béil had offered to form an alliance with me but I’d found her price too high. As punishment, she’d sabotaged my relationship with Fáidh by helping Blake find his way back from some distant corner of the universe.
That’s what I believed anyway.
I’d grown closer to Laoch in the weeks after we’d met. Our connection was unique, to say the least, and he had been reluctant to engage with me on my visits at first. But we were family, in our own way, and the time we spent together was
important to me.
Béil was another kind of connection altogether.
After completing my father’s task, I’d have to check in at the pink castle. I had some new questions about Blake and it would be fun to take a root beer float to Laoch.
As soon as the rest of our party had emerged from the liagán, Siorradh opened another for us to ride through, jumping another twenty miles. At every stop, the landscape was different. Traveling by liagán circles was like traveling by old Polaroid snapshots. A pretty meadow, then twenty miles in an instant, and the meadow was replaced by a stand of beech trees or a quiet village. Each snapshot was a photo in an album we turned, page by page. We continued like that, using the stone circles as waypoints a total of eighteen times.
Emerging from the last stone, Sir Siorradh said, “We have traveled more than three-hundred and seventy-five miles now and we’re close to the borderlands. From this point, the ride gets real. Over the next forty-eight hours, we’ll traverse the last fifty miles the hard way.”
Siorradh headed down a short hill toward another road.
Fifty miles?
“Hey.” I caught the attention of the nearest rider, a boy who appeared to be about sixteen years-old. “Aren’t there any more stone circles?”
The boy blanched, blood draining from his face so fast he went pale like a lamp switching on. “Milord?” he asked.
Why was he afraid of me? Were all the people so intimidated by royalty? I wasn’t even fully Fae. I tried to calm the boy with a smile. “Just wondering why we can’t use stone circles to get closer to our destination. To save the, uh, horses.”
“Oh, I see, milord,” the boy stammered. “‘Tis for the security of the kingdom.”
It made sense. “Because portals go both ways, quick travel to the borderlands means quick travel to the heart of the kingdom. An army could be on our doorstep before we noticed. Right?”
“Just so, milord.” The boy seemed relieved to have survived to what might be the conclusion of our conversation. I let him off the hook.
“Your help has been invaluable,” I said.
The color returned to the boy’s face and he nodded in gratitude.
Got Hope Page 19