by Brindi Quinn
“I should ask the same of you, Rafe,” I said. “Why aren’t you patrolling or sleeping?”
Rafe’s amber eyes skimmed the dark wood beyond. Per usual, he looked like it cost him great effort to converse. “I am on patrol,” he said, “but it’s quiet out there.”
Having been by my side three years or more, Rafe was nevertheless the least acquainted of my guardians. He kept to himself, often nose-deep in a book and playing at his wavy hair in the courtyard of ivies. Often, he had a lost, soulless look about him that I didn’t quite understand.
“So you just decided to not patrol?” I mused.
“No.” He clenched his jaw and sighed. “I drew a circle around the perimeter so that I will know if anyone crosses it. You are safe, Your Majesty. The wood is silent, and I won’t be long. Sir Albie said I could come up and get a charge. The night’s good for it.”
A charge? In-ter-est-ing. I had heard Rafe mention it, but never had I seen one in person. “May I watch?” I said.
Glad to be free of further questions, the guard nodded silently and raised his sword in the direction of the moon. As he did, he used his will to dull the blade’s luminescence until it was faint and fluttering—nothing more than an ember’s glow. The moon, by contrast, was brimming and bright. Rafe aligned himself so that the tip of his sword pierced at the orb’s center. He closed his eyes, and when he opened them again, they too were aglow with moonlight.
Rafe’s enchants were powered by lunar energy. In this moment, his whole body was, it seemed.
He opened his mouth to speak a series of shapeless whispers, pale light emitting from deep within his throat. Like the most unenthused sorcerer magic could conjure, Rafe’s incantation lasted a minute or more, and when he was finished, he cradled the middle of his blade before landing a gentleman’s kiss upon the steel. When he blinked his eyes once more, the light was gone from them; he was his old lackluster self.
Rafe’s clan was the only one left in the world able to impregnate metal with such magics. It was for this reason my procurers had recruited him.
“Rafe, that was extraordinary.”
He shrugged.
“Is it done?” I asked.
“For now,” he said. “I’ll do it again shortly. I need to rest in between.” His bored eyes flicked to the dark-quilted wood. “And then I’ll return to patrol.”
“Thank you.” I held my hand up to the moon before setting it to the top rung of the ladder. “Wish I could harvest lunar energy. Bet it feels warm.”
“You’d be wrong.” I heard him say as I started my descent. “Luna is colder than the coldest frost.”
That was because each time he wielded her, she froze a little more of his heart.
But we didn’t know that yet.
I had been distracted by midnight magic, and as I made it to the lower level, I realized my folly. Beau was still nowhere to be found, and it was getting to the point where I really should alert someone. But how stupid I would look, popping my head back into the belvedere. No, one more sweep through the fort first, this time checking under tables and behind settees—all the places we hid as children. Beau was a good hider, but her gowns always gave her away. I shuffled through the treehouse rooms in search of a slip of silk spilling out from somewhere, even going so far as to poke my head into the room where Saxon and one of Beau’s guards lay resting. No Beau.
Desperate, I made my way to the front of the hideaway and hung my head into the crispness of night, over the side of the balcony where Beau had welcomed us earlier. No sign of Albie or Windley, who were down in the night somewhere keeping us safe.
No sign of the lost queen, either.
I resigned to go alert Rafe for real this time, but as I passed Beau’s door for the third time that night, I noticed the light was no longer stealing out from beneath her door.
I didn’t knock. “Beau?”
She was there this time, alone in an orderly chamber fit for a queen. The dark of night tasted thicker in her room, somehow.
She tried to muffle herself but to no avail; I had already heard her sorrow.
“What happened, Beau? Why are you crying?”
She was sitting with her knees to her chest in a velvet chair, raven hair loose around her shoulders and scented like one of her many perfumes. Though she tried to hide it, I took her face in my hands and saw the shimmer of tears through the dark. Even she cried prettily.
She quickly succumbed, throwing herself into my chest and letting out a congested heave.
Okay, maybe not so pretty after all.
I encased her frail shoulders and waited for her to calm, when at last she lifted her head, lip still aquiver and said, “M-Merrin?”
“Was it Windley? Tell me, Beau. Did he say something mean? I’ll kill him.”
“Can you keep a secret?” she whispered, eyes wide and moist.
I was taken aback by the look of her. Fear caressed her.
“Always,” I whispered back.
To understand the gravity of her next proclamation, it is important you know more about Beau’s legacy. As I mentioned before, Beau was a special queen—an oracle with the power to commune with nature. Like her foremothers, Beau could hear the intentions of the Scarlet Wood. She called them echoes, though she said there was no way to describe what they sounded like and told me to try imagining a color I had never seen before.
Beau’s job was to insert her own echoes into the echoes of the forest. As she described it, nature had no fondness for humanity, but inserting her own intentions into those of the Scarlet Wood meant keeping calamity from befalling us all. The royal women of the Clearing had done so as far back as written history.
“Tell me, Beau,” I urged. “You don’t have to tell anyone else, but tell me.”
Beau took in a deep breath and looked away, ashamed. “I can’t hear them anymore,” she said. “The Scarlet Wood has gone silent.”
The fear that had caressed Beau made its way to me, coiling through me like a serpent. “Since when?”
“Just tonight,” she said. “For the first time, there’s nothing out there. As if the air itself is dead. It happened right after…”
“Right after what?”
But she refused to elaborate, lost in hysterics.
“I’m sure it’s nothing Beau. Maybe the wood’s just being moody.”
Somehow, even then I knew that wasn’t true.
“Maybe,” she lied.
Was it my imagination, or had I felt disquiet all along? Had it been the ‘dead air’ that had kept me awake in the first place?
We spent that night together in Beau’s bed with cool sheets and fluffed pillows. It had been years since we had done so, but my body melted into the down just the same. Already, I could feel that something was coming, like the swell of a wave about to crash, but I spent the night holding Beau until at last, she drifted off into queenly sleep.
I thought of my people, back home plucking leaves from vines to pestle into remedies. The children, the grandmothers… the other queens in their sparkling cities watching over their flocks.
Sleep evaded me long into the night and when at last it came for me, I thought I saw it watching from the corner of the room with gleaming eyes and a devilish smile.
Chapter 3
A Midnight Visitor
Over the coming weeks, I watched the forest carefully for signs of betrayal, but despite Beau’s confession, it acted much as forests do—standing tall and releasing leaves of blood red and gold into the Queendom of the Crag. While the forest behaved calmly, the sea on the opposite side of the city thrashed and crashed and sprayed saltwater droplets into the air. Not so abnormal for this time of year. The sea didn’t care for the dying of summer.
In my city, life went on, none knowing the secret of the Clearing’s queen.
I suppose this would be a good time to tell you more about my empire. After all, once we leave, we won’t be returning again. That sea water that misted the air of the Crag was in constant batt
le against the stone architecture of the city, giving the metropolis a worn and rustic character. The farther you moved from the coast, however, the less blemished the stone became, and as the salt thinned, the ivy thickened. The thickest parts were my favorite. Nothing bad ever happened in cottages covered in green.
Situated directly in the center of the city, my palace had vines crawling up only the half shielded from the sea. It was the best of two worlds. When feeling somber, I could gaze out to the ornery waves; when content, the serene forest.
Ever since departing the fort that day, I had sided with the sea. Beau’s confession rang in my ears as I tried to perform my queenly duties without suspect. I oversaw a shipment of curatives to the Queendom of the Cacti in the far west, where plant life was sparse. I entertained visitors from a neighboring realm. And I mediated the disagreement between two northern cities. Beau and I were both considered neutral queendoms, but tawdry political matters were often left to my court, as Beau’s was busy with appeasing the forest.
I worried for my sister queen and sent her coded letters by widowbird—creatures of flight long used by the royal families to communicate with one another, for they had a keen ability to locate royal blood. Her responses were assuring yet hollow. Her handwriting was as charming as ever, but there was no soul behind her prose. She admitted that the echoes hadn’t returned to her ears—not even after two weeks had passed. I invited her to meet again at the fort, or even to come all the way out to the Crag, but she declined, insisting that she needed to stay and try to muster something from the Scarlet Wood.
I patted the head of the long-tailed bird that had delivered Beau’s most recent letter. The messenger helped itself to seed and water while I unrolled the parchment. Funny, it lacked the scarlet seal Beau’s letters usually held.
Wouldn’t you love to see the southern mountain someday?
The first line was odd. We didn’t have anything in our code about mountains. Maybe she meant so literally? Other than that, the letter held nothing new. Beau pretended to be cheerful but hadn’t regained her power and had no leads. I fed the parchment to the fire at the side of my throne room. It was with good reason that the message be immediately destroyed. We couldn’t let anyone else know the truth of Beau’s lost echoes.
That didn’t mean I couldn’t try to help from afar.
“Saxon.” I turned to the on-duty guard who had been talking at the window with one of my prettiest handmaids.
Saxon smoothed her short hair. “Queen Merrin?”
“Fetch Mother Poppy and then clear the room, please.”
The brawny guard looked glad to be put to use and scampered to comply.
If Albie had stories stored in his wrinkles, Poppy, royal tome-keeper, had archives in hers. The diminutive woman, who had been old my entire life, was nevertheless plucky and always had at least two books tucked somewhere within her robe. These concealed treasures had fallen out of the timeworn woman’s sleeves on more than one occasion—even landing into a crock of roast beets during last year’s winterfeast. Fine by me, no one but the cook liked root vegetables anyway.
Poppy appeared even shorter than usual beneath the high ceilings of my throne room. She tutted across the hall, humming, before settling into the ornate chair beside mine. The coast ravaged through the seaboard windows. All the better to mask us with.
“I’ve been dying to know, Mother Poppy. Did you find anything?”
I had sent the advisor on a top-secret mission through the court records two days earlier.
“Afraid not, My Queen.” Her eyes were storm gray behind her gemmed spectacles. “Nothing in any of the annals suggests the bond between nature and oracle has ever been broken.”
“Nothing?”
She shook her head. “Not in written history.”
As suspected, though I hoped she might have uncovered a hidden journal in a wall somewhere with instructions on what to do in such a case.
“And in unwritten history?” I pressed.
Poppy had served enough queens to know the importance of discretion. She didn’t ask why I wanted to know; rather, she leaned back into her chair and folded her wizened hands. “Well, that’s another matter entirely.”
Ah-ha!
“I did recall one tale you may find useful,” she started.
“Wait!” I gathered my skirt. “Let’s move closer to the fire.” Because stories were best told by firelight.
Poppy understood this and obliged with a long smile that satisfied the lines at the corners of her eyes. Once properly transitioned to the fireside sitting area, the aged woman resumed her storytelling posture. “Mind you, this was a tale told only in the dark when snooping ears lay in rest. A story told not in truth but in fable,” she said. “And the only one ever to speak of it was not of good repute.”
Basically, she was saying not to get my hopes up. “Understood,” I said.
She continued, “Before the time of the Clearing, when the moon traveled slower and the wind howled colder, not one but two crowns were lost with ears turned deaf to the cry of the wood. And before the time of the Clearing, when the stars twinkled bolder and the night stretched longer, not one but two crowns were found with ears turned flush to the song of the wood.”
Be damned, my hopes were up. For the first time in weeks, I had something to grasp. Not meant as fact? Not from a reputable source?
Not important.
“Details?” I said.
Mother Poppy strained her memory before shaking her head. “That was a long time ago.”
“You’re saying the bond between nature and oracle has been lost twice, and that twice, that bond has been repaired?”
Poppy adjusted her glasses sternly. “According to fable, My Queen.”
A little specific for a mere fable. But I knew I was reaching.
“If it’s a fable, what’s the moral of it?” I asked.
Again, she smiled widely, firelight bouncing on her cheeks. A favorite part of any taleteller’s tale was the moral. “That one must stop listening to sorrow in order to find joy,” she said. “But as you can imagine, it was a controversial parable which has since been replaced with the tale of the otter and the crane. You’ve heard that one, haven’t you?”
Only about a million times.
Make that a million and one, for Poppy retold it anyway.
The tale of the lost crowns wasn’t much, but it was something, and I wanted to share it with Beau in person. Maybe a little optimism was all Beau needed to regain her power. Maybe the tome-keeper of the Clearing would know more about the tale if prompted in the right direction. We should be able to figure it out now that we had a spark. After all, a spark was all it took to set a wood ablaze.
I asked Poppy to keep me appraised if she remembered anything else about the fable. Then, I summoned Rafe to begin building a guard, in hopes of setting off for the Clearing the following morning.
I had never been one for letting matters unfold on their own, so I would peel back the corner of whatever was going on with Beau and help her flush her ears to the song of the wood.
Little did I know that as Rafe raced to prepare for a departure that had yet to come, another guard was racing to atone for a departure that had already passed.
I retired to my bedchamber hopeful that night, imagining the look on Beau’s face when I offered her a snippet of reassurance. A traveling pack had already been readied at the foot of my bed, courtesy of Albie and my handmaids. I swapped out two of the gowns for britches and threw in an extra wrap for my hair, lest I be caught in the wild without one.
My quarters were far less orderly than Beau’s, with sashes thrown over furniture and books left lying in half-read positions. I liked them like that, for I could always pick up wherever I left off in whichever genre most fitting for the day. I had a system, okay? The mess drove Albie crazy, but I always insisted the castle staff spend their time on more important matters than tidying up a room that visitors never even entered. Albie still made them clean i
t, but he did so in small increments he thought I wouldn’t notice. It was a game we had been playing my whole life.
I left the windows open, as there wouldn’t be many more nights for it left in the season. The scent of eve was a lovely mix of sea and greenery. Outside, the city sounds waned as night fell, while the sea crashed all the same. Eventually, the waters calmed with the rising of the moon, and all was still.
There was nothing out there to suggest that nature was starting its savage revolt.
I drifted into a dream in which Beau and I stood in the thick of the Scarlet Wood as unhuman echoes reverberated through the bleached bark. The crimson leaves on the ground were wet and sticky and clung to the bottom of Beau’s gown. How had I never noticed the scarlet of the wood was from actual blood? In the darkest corner of the wood, a set of eyes gleamed, familiar and dangerous.
“Queen Merrin?”
A voice broke my dream and sweat. I shuffled into sitting and wiped the hair matted to my brow. By the look of the sheets, I had been tossing. By the look of the room, it was the dead of night. The face materializing before me was that of the pretty handmaid Saxon had been speaking with earlier—much more kempt than I was at the moment. Chrysanthemum was her name and she usually kept her distance.
“Queen Merrin, you have a visitor. He insisted it was urgent and Sir Rafe said to let him in.” The pretty girl appeared nervous. “I-I hope that’s okay.”
“Who is it?”
But the visitor didn’t wait for an introduction. A cloaked figure swept into the room, lantern in hand, and threw down his hood. Pointed ears, pointed corner teeth, and a mouth that looked unnatural when it wasn’t smirking.
“Windley?!” I gathered up my blankets to hide my nasty appearance from him. “What the hell?!”
Chrysanthemum appeared like she had made a grave mistake.
“It’s fine,” I reassured her. “One of Queen Beau’s guards. Go fetch Sir Albie.”