by Emma Savant
“I keep seeing you,” she said. “In my divination pool. Every time I try to find my heir, you’re still there. And you shouldn’t be, because you made a choice not to be my heir, and your choice should have affected the future. I was hoping maybe you weren’t fully committed.”
Maybe saying it aloud in a firm voice would help. “I’m fully committed,” I said.
I willed the garden around me to listen. And I willed Queen Amani to listen. Despite the fact that my mom was apparently brilliant at it, I didn’t really get how divination worked. Maybe Amani nurtured subconscious hopes that I’d accept, and that was why she kept seeing me in her pool?
Because the queen of the Glimmering world was totally wasting her valuable time pining about the career choice of the great Olivia Feye. I wished Imogen was there to kick me under the table.
Not that Imogen knew about any of this.
I had to find a way to tell her.
The urge to get up and run consumed me in an instant. I squeezed my toes inside my shoes and forced myself to stay still.
“I don’t blame you,” Amani said. “I was never going to choose this.”
I frowned at her. I wasn’t sure if I believed her. She was too in her element here.
“No sane person would. But this work chooses you,” she said. A soft smile tugged at her lips. “I don’t regret it. It’s a hell of an adventure.”
“Not my kind of adventure,” I said.
But Queen Amani already knew that. She pushed back from the table. “Oh well,” she said. “You want to walk around, since you’re here?” she said. I shot to my feet.
The garden was even bigger than it had seemed at first glance. I couldn’t tell if the glamour draped over the space like a net made the garden seem bigger than it was, or if the glamour was actually on the walls around us, making the buildings seem smaller on the outside than they were in here.
The stately buildings I’d seen when I’d arrived were a complete façade; even the windows, which seemed so convincing from the street, were gone here. Instead, crumbling red brick rose around us on every side, the same kind of brick that seemed to make up half of Portland. Laced over the brick were ivy, roses, faerie lace, clematis, wizard’s blood, and other climbing plants I didn’t recognize. They stretched above us, creeping higher up the walls than I would have thought possible.
Amani let me walk in silence for a while. I forced myself to breathe, filling my lungs and focusing on the plants and the way my belly rose and fell with each breath.
“Maybe it’s not about you,” she said at last.
She sounded like my dad might, if he knew about any of this. Not everything is about you, Olivia, I could practically hear him saying. Have you even considered your responsibility to your community? This world has gifted you with privilege, Olivia, and I will not see you waste it.
“Maybe you’re just supposed to give me a clue,” Amani said.
She smiled at me, and I remembered exactly how unlike my dad she actually was.
It was weird to consider that maybe all powerful Glims weren’t as uptight and demanding as my dad was. From his stories of Council meetings and the kind of people he brought home for schmalzy dinners, I’d assumed that everyone who was anyone in the Glimmering world was pretentious and boring. Amani was neither.
Queen Amani kicked off her shoes and sat cross-legged on the edge of another koi pond. She trailed her fingers in the water and started making kissy faces at the fish.
“Titania, they’re cute,” she said. “I never would have thought fish could be cute, but look at their little faces.”
It was impossible not to laugh. The fish seemed to be trying to kiss her back. They nuzzled at her fingers with their tiny round mouths.
She waved her free hand in lazy circles in the air. A moment later, two balls of watermelon shimmered into being in her palm. She held one out to me. The juice dripped down between my fingers.
“Hold it right at the surface,” she instructed.
I did, and the fish swam up to me and devoured the melon, their mouths making sucking noises at the surface of the water. I stared, transfixed, and she handed me another.
She was right. They were adorable. The fish churned the water below me. I could barely make out my reflection in all the ripples.
“I don’t know why I’m still showing up in your divinations,” I said. “Do I need to, like, write an official letter of refusal or something?”
“Maybe,” she said, and laughed.
She pushed her hand up through her dark hair, making the tangle of curls move as one big mass. I caught a glint of a golden earring before her hair fell back to cover it.
“I think it’s more that I still have something to learn from you,” she said. “You’re going to tell me something that helps me figure out who the next queen is going to be.”
“Like what?”
She shrugged and tossed a piece of watermelon out into the water. The fish were on it before I had a chance to see whether it would sink or float.
“If you had to pick one thing you wanted in a queen, one thing you would choose to focus on if you were to take the job, what would it be?”
I splashed my fingers in the water. “I don’t know.”
“Another melon ball says you do,” she said, holding one up.
“Fine,” I said.
I took the fruit from her and held it out for the fish. I didn’t know, so I spoke without thinking, hoping my mouth would be smarter than my brain.
“I think… I think the next queen needs to have a strong plan for how we’re going to handle the relationship between our community and the Humdrums,” I said. “This person who keeps attacking them? I’m not making excuses for them, but maybe their actions are a symptom of a bigger issue? There aren’t a lot of guidelines on how to be a Glim in a Humdrum world. Sometimes I feel isolated from the Hum world. Maybe… Maybe other Glims feel stifled.”
She tilted her head and stared at me, her greenish eyes wide. They looked too green against the warm brown of her skin, like the dappled sunlight was coming through her.
“You’d rather be a Hum, wouldn’t you?”
“Will I get arrested for treason if I say yes?”
“No.” She laughed. “Those are good points. You haven’t heard more about that person, have you?”
“The one attacking the Hums?”
“Mmhm.”
I shook my head. “I would have told you if I did,” I said. “I haven’t heard anything new.”
She sighed. “Well, that’s something. I’m calling them Eris, by the way. They’re being melodramatic enough that I decided they needed a stupid code name. Eris is the Greek deity of chaos.”
Irritation edged her voice like poison on a knife. She took a deep breath and shook her head.
“Okay, what else?” she said, changing tone completely. “If you had to choose two things for the next queen to focus on—”
“You’re just going to keep going with this, aren’t you?” I said.
She shrugged, and I chewed on the inside of my cheek.
“Okay, another thing that I think the next queen should focus on is…”
I trailed off. My life already felt so suffocated with magic that I’d never tried to figure out what was going on in our wider world. I just wanted to escape it. I wanted this conversation, and the person attacking the Humdrums, and the issue of Amani’s heir all to be settled so I could focus on college applications and be done with all these questions.
“I really don’t know,” I said. “I haven’t been paying attention.”
“Maybe that’s it, then,” she said. “Maybe the point is that I’m supposed to find someone who doesn’t care what’s going on in our world.”
That sounded like a recipe for disaster. “No,” I said. “What you probably want is someone like my best friend, Imogen. She knows everything that’s going on and then some. She’d be a much better queen than I would.”
The ever-present guilt at not telling Imoge
n about any of this flared.
“Imogen,” Amani said, like she was tasting the name. “Tell me about her.”
I met her gaze. She was twice as interested all of a sudden. Imogen’s name had sparked something. Maybe it was hope. Maybe Amani’s divination skills had finally picked up on why I was supposed to be in the picture.
I wished the divination could have just made Imogen appear in the first place and left me out of it.
“She works at Wishes Fulfilled with me,” I said. “She’s my age, but she’s a much better faerie. She’s a Proctor with Wishes Fulfilled’s Department of Tests and Quests and she just aced her Proctor Exam. She’s really good at glamours and she’s going to Institut Glänzen after she graduates.”
I couldn’t have invented a better resumé for a possible Faerie Queen. It had taken the words leaving my mouth to realize how obvious it all was. Of course Imogen was meant to for this job.
“She’d be an amazing queen,” I said. “She’s smart, she’s driven, she’s obsessed with being a good faerie. And she’s got leadership abilities, too. I’d follow her just about anywhere. She’s the kind of person who does things with purpose, you know?”
This morning, I had not imagined I would be spending the afternoon in a secret garden trying to convince the Faerie Queen to basically adopt my best friend.
Then again, things usually didn’t end up how I imagined them.
Maybe I wouldn’t have to tell Imogen about Amani’s offer. Maybe she’d get an offer of her own.
“She sounds interesting,” Amani said. “Institute Glänzen is a competitive school.”
“It’s been her plan since we were kids,” I said.
“And what about you?” Amani said. “You’re planning on studying biology, right?”
“Or horticulture,” I said. “Or permaculture, or agriculture, or ecology. I’m not sure yet. It will definitely be at a Humdrum school, though.”
“Yes, I remember,” she said.
A fish swam up and started suckling on her fingers, which still dangled in the water. She started and pulled her hand away.
She stood up. “Come check out the rest of the garden,” she said.
The path seemed to wind back on itself until I was lost. Amani parted the drifting branches of a weeping willow and I stopped to examine some button-like purple flowers that grew near its base. She explained that they were called Knots of Concord and had to be carefully cultivated by skilled faeries, as they were too delicate to survive most environments.
“The shelter of the tree is good for them,” she said.
“The enchantment doesn’t hurt, either.”
“You can feel that?” she said.
“Nope,” I said. I pulled down my glasses a little, and the pearly shimmer of magic that surrounded the flowers like mist filled my view. “I’m not great at feeling magic. But I can see it. Hereditary thing. I got it from my grandma.”
“That must be useful,” Amani said. She leaned against the willow like it was a friend. “The only hereditary magic I got was a knack for creating charms.”
“It’s kind of annoying, honestly,” I said. “I have to wear glasses to block it or it’s too distracting.”
She held out a hand, and I handed my glasses to her. Instantly, my vision was clouded with the flowers’ enchantment and Amani’s own sparkling gold vortex of energy. She examined the lenses.
“Elf-made,” she said. I nodded.
It was a relief to get them back on my face.
“Tell me more about Imogen,” Amani said, turning and walking out of the shelter of the willow canopy.
Without being able to say why, I felt myself flush. I was glad Amani was ahead of me and couldn’t see my face, though she could probably feel my emotions just as well as I could.
Not that I could quite pin down what I was feeling.
“We’ve been friends since we were little,” I said. “We both had to go to faerie camp every summer. I hated it, but she loved it. Once I was with her, I started to love it too.”
“And you think she’d make a good queen?”
Again, a feeling I didn’t quite have a name for stirred in the pit of my stomach. If I were younger and Imogen wasn’t my best friend, I might have called it jealousy. But that was impossible. For one thing, it was about being the Faerie Queen. For another, it was Imogen.
“I know she would,” I said.
“What are her goals?” Amani asked.
We passed a thin waterfall that tumbled from the top of the brick wall and down into a sparkling emerald pool. I stopped and watched the water for a moment, its clear streams turning to white froth as the waterfall ran over irregularities in the brick.
“She’s going to become a Proctor after school,” I said. “She’ll be a good one. I don’t know if she’s planning on staying with Wishes Fulfilled, but whatever she does, she’s going to be great at it.”
She was great at everything. She was beautiful, her magic was strong, and she cared about our world in a way I didn’t understand.
I kicked a pebble on the path ahead of me, refusing to meet Amani’s curious gaze.
“Seriously,” I said, trying to calm the unease that clawed at my insides. “She’d make an amazing queen.”
Chapter Seven
I hadn’t been sitting at my desk two minutes when a blur of white swooped above me. A soggy scroll dropped on my desk. I looked up to see a seagull fluttering down to land on the edge of my cubicle. It turned its head and stared at me with a wide yellow eye.
I pulled apart the seaweed that held the paper together. Words crawled across the page in glistening green ink:
Dear Faerie Godmother,
I write to inform you that I will need to postpone our meeting. As I believe you have been informed, my father is strongly opposed to my seeking your services, and has engaged me for several royal functions this week for purposes of creating a scheduling conflict. I offer my sincere apologies and assure you this will not happen again.
Please review the enclosed calendar and select the date that would be most convenient for you. You may send the note back with my bird.
I hope this will not delay us too long. I am anxious to begin the next stage of my life!
Regards,
Princess Lily Pacifica, Pearl of the Pacific and Duchess of the Willamette River
I was itching to meet the princess, so I scanned the calendar, marked the earliest day that would work, and tied the note to the bird’s leg. With some concentration and a couple of extra jabs of my wand, I managed to turn a pencil into a beetle. The bird plucked the wriggling bug up, nodded to me in thanks, and flew away.
Princess Lily was a hard mermaid to meet. Fortunately, her Humdrum crush, Evan Costner, was much easier to track down.
I couldn’t shoo Lily away from Evan without at least knowing something about the guy, so I’d spent most of the morning studying him online until my eyes felt like sandpaper.
Evan was a successful photographer, which meant he had accounts on just about every major social media and photo-sharing site out there. His personal website showed image after image of Portland. Crumbling brick buildings, gray skies heavy with clouds, and the riverfront busy with boats scrolled above a black background. At the top of the page, a minimalist header said A SENSE OF PLACE in thin, mint-green letters. From there, a tab labeled Humanity led to a few series featuring attractive models.
In the first series, a girl with high cheekbones and long legs posed on park benches and against parking meters, wearing a rainy-day ensemble of matching raincoat, galoshes, and floppy-brimmed hat. The clothes were too curated to belong to a real person. The next set showed a dark-haired girl with windswept hair and a white sundress, slouching around a yacht.
His photos were beautiful—a little too beautiful. The models exuded a self-conscious hippie vibe that felt like advertisement instead of art. Maybe that could count as “superficial and materialistic” when I talked to Lily? I made a mental note.
&nbs
p; Information on the man himself, though, was hard to find. My Wishes Fulfilled logins gave me unlimited access to almost every social media page out there. If someone posted something, I could find it, no matter what their privacy settings. But Evan didn’t talk much. His posts were all photos, and the photos didn’t tell me anything except that he’d had a brief love affair with sepia tones last year, preferred models with big eyes, and had recently become interested in the way the lights of the city played on the river.
Taking river photos was how he’d met Lily, of course. I still wasn’t sure how she’d managed to make that seem normal. He was a Humdrum, after all, and a tail seemed like a hard thing to hide.
I was about to leave his professional photography page when a comment on one of his latest pictures caught my eye. The profile picture attached to the comment was of a pretty girl with long dark hair—the same one, I realized, who’d been in the slouchy yacht photos.
Isabelle Sheridan: Gorgeous series, love. So proud & can’t wait to be your Mrs. Costner! <3
The comment was dated a week ago.
My eyes widened and I read the comment again.
Mrs. Costner?
Not only was he a Hum and wildly ineligible to be the consort of a sea princess, but he was also engaged.
I wanted to high-five this girl. A fiancée would scare Lily off even better than I could.
I clicked out of the browser, set the computer to hibernate and grabbed my purse off the floor. I liked morning shifts—even when they felt long, like this one had, I was out in time for lunch and had the rest of the day to myself.
It had been a long week, and an afternoon at the community garden where I volunteered was just what I needed to get myself right-side up again. The squash plants were overloaded and I couldn’t wait to harvest a whole bag of them, then spend the rest of the afternoon gathering heirloom hollyhock seeds for next year.
Nerd, I could practically hear Imogen say in my head.
She still hadn’t texted me back about my date with Lucas. I hoped it was a date, anyway. If nothing else, Imogen would be the person who could pick a movie that would turn it into one. But in between Maia’s wedding prep and some advanced Proctor training, she’d somehow managed to wiggle out of school for three days. I didn’t expect to get any real conversation from her until things calmed down.