by Lucy Tempest
“We only assumed that from Master Farouk’s fear. I believe she wouldn’t have killed her even if she was capable of killing, because it would have alienated father and I irrevocably.”
And I yelled, “She tossed you into the Land of No Return!”
He raised placating hands. “It was you she meant to send there, not me. And I don’t believe she understands the depth of my feelings for you, or she wouldn’t have done even that.”
“And you think it’s okay for her to try to kill me?”
“Maybe she only meant to scare you for a while? Maybe use you to coerce me?”
“Argh!” I pressed my knuckles against my head, to contain the pressure before it burst. “Since you have a theory for everything, why do you think my mother ran and left me? Why do you think she died?”
“What if she didn’t? Did they bring back a body to bury?”
And I cried out, “If she didn’t die, where has she been all these years?
He was about to respond, but the passion waned from his face, only to be replaced by rapt concentration. “If Peristan can be reached from here, probably so can the rest of Faerie, perhaps even the part your island borders.”
I blinked, my train of thought derailed. “What does that have to do with anything?”
He pointed behind me.
In the direction of his gaze, two windows alternated two scenes.
The first was on top of a purple-grass hill, where glass butterflies reflecting the sunlight glinted over a girl in a dark cloak. She was cradling a jar that held something blue that looked like a rose in one arm, with a dagger in a shaky hand. She reminded me of Bonnie, but she was the wrong height, almost as tall as I am.
The scene faded only for the other window’s to sharpen. A different but unmistakable part of Faerie, with the peculiar color scheme of bluish purple fields and golden clouds. A glass castle was amidst the landscape and it was doing—something I could barely grasp.
The castle was—spinning, slowly.
When its front faced us, the drawbridge dropped across a shimmering moat and a group of knights charged out on silver steeds that built up speed and launched into the sky.
The scene blipped out and the first window flared into life again.
Something was crawling up the hill on all fours behind the girl, but before it could fully enter our view three men ran up the other side. Two confronted the creature, and one tried to carry her off.
The scene faded and the other window took over.
A man with long, hibiscus-red hair, an eye patch and pointed ears walked across the drawbridge. He wore a crown of interlocking bird bones and led his steed, a beautiful mare with a coat like straw-colored satin, by the reins.
The first scene returned, this time without the second one disappearing, snaring my focus.
The jar was knocked from the girl’s grip and she yelled as it hit the grass. The creature launched itself at the men with a lion-like roar. She fell from the man’s grasp, crawled towards the jar, screaming.
I jolted as if with a bolt of lightning. I’d know that voice anywhere.
Bonnie!
All the caution I’d showered Cyrus with evaporated. I had to reach her, come what may.
The scene blinked out before I could reach the window.
I stumbled to a halt, shrieking in frustration.
Had this been a past event, too? Was it really her? Or was it a trick? It could be, since she looked different. If it wasn’t, was that really Faerie? How could she have possibly ended there?
Cyrus pulled me back, lips against my ear. “These windows are showing us people that concern us, but I believe these two weren’t memories.”
“What makes you think that?” If Bonnie’s had been a present event, then she had been right in front of me. I could have reached in and gotten her!
“Because it can’t seem to decide what to show us. I think it’s because both events are still happening. Look…”
I snapped back, thinking Bonnie’s scene had returned, but it was still gone. In the second window the fairy lord now had a woman walking by him, with her thick, black hair bundled in a bun and loose locks framing her exhausted face. Thin bandages wrapped her forehead, and she wore a bell-sleeved, lilac dress and had dark circles under her eyes, their blue-grey color becoming clearer as she came closer.
I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t remember how.
Mother. Mother!
“Thank you for taking me in, Prince Guidion,” the woman said, her voice painfully familiar after all these years. “ I don’t know what might have happened to me if your men haven’t found me. When I woke up an hour ago—I think, your—uh—physician told me I was unconscious for a while. How long is a while here?”
“Depends,” said Prince Guidion in a low brogue that brought to mind foggy marshlands and blackwater moors. “It’s over a week of our time since my hunters found you. Can’t say how long you were in that river, maybe another one. But I’d say in your world months have passed.”
She stopped, eyes bulging. “Months?”
“Or more. Can’t say for sure. You could ask the castle astronomer to chart the time for you, but in your world at most it has been a few years.”
She slapped her hands onto her face, gripping it in despair. “Years!”
Prince Guidion reached down from his prodigious height to pat her on the back. “Even if you age by that much when you return home, it’s not that long, especially for a witch. Your sort ages slower than regular folk, don’t you?”
“It’s not my age I’m worried about. It’s my daughter’s!”
“Is she here? We can send out a search party,” he offered, oblivious to her soaring panic. “What does she look like?”
“No, she’s not here! I left her alone! I left her alone for-for—years!”
“Mother! I’m here!” I shrieked as I fought against Cyrus’s grip, desperate to throw myself into the window, to snatch her out, chase after Bonnie, bring them both out. Back to me.
Marzeya’s dire warnings blared in my head, stronger than chains. But with everything in me, I wanted to rip free of their restraints.
“That’s my mother,” I croaked breathlessly, thrashing in his hold. “My mother! She’s not dead. I have to get her, have to get my friend. They’re there. Nariman must have thrown them both in there like she threw us in Alabasta!”
His grip became inescapable. “Ada, like you convinced me to leave the past in the past, I have to insist we can’t go in there. Even if this is happening now, with the time difference between realms, if we go in, we might emerge after everyone we know is dead.”
Frustration burned beneath my skin. I struggled, with his restraint, with my logic.
If this was some other time that didn’t align with that of the Folkshore or with Barzakh’s and I threw myself in, I could end up somewhere or sometime without my mother, without Bonnie, while abandoning Cyrus.
I had to stay on my path, like Marzeya warned. But I couldn’t walk away from my mother or Bonnie.
Conflicting emotions were about to tear me down the middle when my mother relinquished her frantic grip on her face. Then shaking, she started to wave, creating a wide circle of golden sparks in the air. A portal!
But no scene formed within as it always had. It only started crackling and distorting before it fizzled out and disappeared.
My mother cried out, “Why isn’t this working?”
“It appears you don’t know what you’re seeking,” the prince said.
“I’m seeking my daughter!”
He nodded. “Then it seems she’s no longer where you left her.”
Panic shook her whole frame. “Where could she have gone?”
“She could be anywhere by now. It might also mean she crossed into another realm as you did.”
“B-but my daughter doesn’t know magic.”
“That’s the daughter you knew. Maybe she does now. Try seeking her, not where you think she should be, so you can reac
h her wherever she is.”
Her stricken eyes widened with something like hope. “I’ll try to send her a dream message, and if I focus hard enough, an opening in the in-between might call to her where I can find her, where we can communicate.”
“What would you do if you do find her?”
A look of steely determination entered my mother’s eyes. “I’ll find a way to get us both back home.”
She closed her eyes, pressed fingertips to her temple and a shuddering gasp rattled through me as the haunting, silent dream I’d had months ago slammed into my mind all over again. Standing in line in our first Bride Search test, behind Jumana and her witches, with my mother among them, mouthing a message.
In the dream, I’d only lip-read Sorry. Left. Lead. Away. Find. The final word had been too foreign for me to guess. Now I knew it to be Barzakh.
My mother staggered back, clutching her head and moaning in agony, a pulsing blue glow sputtering around her hands. It seemed it had taken everything she had to send even those few words all over the realms in hope they’d home in on me.
After long moments of silence, the prince sighed. “It pains me to say that, but you must consider that your message won’t reach her. That she might be nowhere to be reached again.”
“No. She has to be still somewhere.”
“I’m right here!” I yelled, voice shaking out of control, its fractured echoes ringing off the mountain. “I’m HERE!”
Before I could hurl myself at the window, Cyrus yanked me behind him and reached a hand to touch it himself.
He was swatted back as if by the hand of an offended god. He rolled on the ground with a pained hiss, before he jumped to his feet, massaging his wrist. “Good thing I didn’t let you throw yourself at it if it reacted that badly to a mere touch.”
This couldn’t be it! Not after all these years! Fate couldn’t have put her before me, alive and well, and so close, just to taunt me. To not reunite us.
“Don’t tell me to move on, Cyrus,” I wailed. “I can’t go on knowing she’s alive, and desperate to reach me.”
He held me by the shoulders, as if trying to keep me from breaking apart. “We can’t cross that barrier, even if we wanted to. But now we know she’s alive and in Faerie, after we’re done with our quest, we’ll find a way to bring her back to you.”
This sounded like the logical thing to do—the only thing to do. It made no difference to my melting sanity. I mashed my face into his chest and sobbed my torn heart out. “I-I only wish she could h-hear me, see me—I wish I can reassure her.”
Red light erupted between us, and the barrier went from an invisible force to what looked like thick, green-tinted glass.
The ring subsided to a steady blast of light. I had to believe it was answering my wish.
Before Cyrus could stop me, I reached to touch the window, found it cold and solid. It didn’t blast me back as it had him, but a charge buzzed through me the moment my fingertips neared it, cracking like a whip.
I shouted again. “Mother, I’m here!”
My mother whipped her head in our direction. “Did you hear that?”
The prince’s pointed ears wiggled like a horse’s. “It sounded like it was far yet near. A call that spans dimensions.”
I yelled again and she jumped, fully facing us now. “I can hear it again.”
“It’s coming from right over…” The prince pointed in our direction. “There.”
Blue light still dancing between her fingers, my mother bolted off the drawbridge and downhill towards us. She came to stop right before me. She still couldn’t see me.
Then she raised both hands.
Hope and dread bubbled in my blood, the ring’s red light covering my arm as I set both hands against her own, trying to push through the barrier to reach her with all my might, arms shaking with desperation and exhaustion. “Mother, please”
A gasp escaped her as the blue glow reached her eyes. “Adelaide?”
A crack exploded between us, and the barrier shattered to a thousand pieces.
Elation flooded me as I lunged for her hands. Eyes wide in shock, she went limp in my hold as I yanked at her with all my strength. But I couldn’t budge her, as if she weighed a ton. My feet were being dragged across the seemingly empty doorway.
I couldn’t get her out. I was being pulled in instead.
I was almost over the threshold when Cyrus’s arms grabbed me around the waist, stopping me from slipping into the other realm. “Don’t let go of her!”
Arms shaking with strain, midsection squashing against his inexorable hold, I closed my eyes and poured everything I had in clinging to her. With a roar, Cyrus heaved me back with impossible strength and I felt the resistance shatter
Cyrus’s suddenly unopposed momentum sent him crashing back on the ground. I impacted his prone body just as my mother flew into my arms.
Chapter Twenty-Four
I lay stunned, crushed between the two people I loved most in the world.
The thought flitted in my mind, that if I died at this moment, I’d leave life content.
Cyrus stirred beneath me, and my mother above me. Soon I found myself back on my feet, still clinging to my mother, panting and shaking and bawling.
My mother was alive. My mother was in my arms. And I was never letting her go again.
She finally pulled back to gape up at me.
My memory of her face had grown inaccurate, retaining only our differences, what I now knew was Azal’s legacy. Now I remembered everything about her, and she looked as if all those years hadn’t passed. And they hadn’t, not to her. But to me, much had changed, and I could see my changes in her confusion. For starters, the last time we’d hugged I’d been a child nearing her height, but now I was a strange young woman who towered over her.
“Adelaide?” she choked, covering her working mouth. “H-how much time…?”
I could tell her how much down to the hour. I settled for, “Almost six years.”
She rocked back on her feet and I lunged to hold her up. Her eyes, the one thing I constantly remembered, now reddened and streaming with tears, looked up at me with a world of pain and regret. “I’m so sorry I left. I-I had no choice. I thought I’d be gone for a day.”
“I know.” I squashed her to my chest again. “I know.”
A sob tore through her as she struggled away, bewilderment deepening. “But how are you here?”
I didn’t know where to begin. I looked to Cyrus for help, and her eyes followed mine only to widen with shock.
“Darius?”
His face a swirl of conflicted emotions, Cyrus said, “That’s my father.” He held out a hand to her with a bow. “Delighted to finally meet you, Lady Dorreya. I am, Cyrus, your daughter’s betrothed.”
Setting her hand in his automatically, she blinked up between us in an almost comical double take. “Betrothed! How did you two even meet?”
“It’s a very long story.” I squeezed her to my side, afraid she might vanish again. “Possibly as long as yours, but I believe we know most of it.”
Her mouth fell open. “How could you possibly know any of it?”
“That’s a part of the long story,” Cyrus said with a touch of melancholy in his smile. “Though you might need to fill in some gaps. It would be a great way to help us pass the time until we reach our destination. We’re heading to the Cave of Wonders.”
I thought I’d had my fill of surprises and shocks. But my mother managed to stun me all over again as she seemed to take that declaration in stride with an easy nod.
Then, gripping my arm back, she said, “We best get going then. Where would you like me to start?”
I wouldn’t budge from what Cyrus had dubbed The Valley of Memories until I’d given up on Bonnie’s window opening again.
Cyrus had told me the same thing he had before we’d pulled my mother out. We’d finish our quest then we’d find a way to go after Bonnie, maybe using one of the simurgh’s feathers.
&n
bsp; As we’d walked on, he’d advised we didn’t look into more windows, or else we’d get sucked into watching, or provoked into interfering.
Thankfully, they only displayed nonsensical scenes from past lives of those peripheral to ours. I wondered if that was because we were paying them no attention as my mother told us of her life in Almaskham. After over a decade of telling me nothing, it seemed she couldn’t stop talking about it.
She was the only daughter of a Lord Adel Johar, who managed the princely family’s bank, and Lolua, a healer witch, and she had two older brothers, Akram and Anwar, through which I had cousins. The only ones she’d known of before her flight to Ericura were a niece called Karima and a nephew called Mounir.
It was one thing to have nebulous fantasies about finding lost family, yet another to know about the grandparents, uncles and cousins I truly had.
“As a little girl, I apprenticed in a temple, where commencement requires a brief stint as a priestess.” Her gaze softened over what seemed like fond memories. “It was an interesting job, practicing our magic in rituals, and in service of whoever came to me for help.”
“Is that how you met Nariman?” Cyrus asked her.
Nariman’s mention made her face darken, but she still smiled up at Cyrus. “Indeed, her mother Lamia, a witch from Zhadugar, was our teacher.”
I couldn’t help asking, “How did you meet my father?”
Her reaction to his mention was unmistakable in the tightening of her grip. “Have you met him as well?” When I shook my head, she gave a tight nod. “What do you know of him?”
The glimpse of the past we’d witnessed, the terrible moments when he’d let Loujaïne down. He’d basically stood aside and let his father abuse his wife and kill his child.
“Nothing good,” I mumbled.
“Oh.” Was all she said before she reached into her dress, taking out a thin gold chain that held a white-gold ring with two small pearls bordering a round diamond, an inversion of Jumana’s ring, what Cyrus wore. I’d never seen it before, on her finger or otherwise.
A sad sigh escaped her. “Azal was a student of my father’s, learning trade and accounting to become the treasurer for his royal family. He was only four years older, but behaved like a man, treated me kindly and attentively, always sending me thoughtful gifts for my birthday and in many holidays. I thought it was to appease my father who was an exacting taskmaster, but later realized he was courting me. But after he began working for the princely bank at seventeen, his family expected him to marry a higher noble, if not a princess, primarily Jumana.”