“Right.” Rachel inclined her head briskly. “Let’s go!”
• • •
This time, she did fly to the hexagonal tower. It took a bit of maneuvering to get them both in through the window. Upon entering the room, the difference in temperature from outside made her suddenly feel the chill. Her whole body shivered violently. As she shut the window, however, she began to enjoy the heat and sighed in delight.
Dismounting, Gaius made a beeline for the sofa and wrapped himself in the peach and cream comforter. Rachel propped Vroomie against the wall and then turned toward her boyfriend. He lifted the quilt and gestured for her to climb under it with him. Rachel did not need to be asked twice. Throwing off her red wool coat, she ran to the sofa and scooted up beside him. He pulled her onto his lap, his arms wrapping tightly around her waist.
“It’s important to be under here—for the body heat. Because it’s so cold,” said Gaius. Leaning forward, he whispered in her ear, “It has nothing to do with my wanting to snuggle up to my ridiculously cute girlfriend.”
Rachel giggled happily. She curled up against him, her head on his shoulder. It felt so warm, so pleasant, to be in his arms, surrounded by his warmth and a faint scent of lavender from the quilt. There was something illicit about breaking into a closed room she technically had no right to be in and snuggling under a blanket with an older boy. It made their closeness all the more deliciously intimate.
Gaius kissed her cheek, his lips brushing across that spot, close to her ear, that caused tingling tremors to tremble throughout her body. Rachel drew in a breath. It was the most sweet and marvelous sensation, but it scared her, too. There were things that she was not ready for yet, and this strange, grown-up tingly sensation teetered dangerously close to being one of them. And yet, at the same time, she could not help wondering why he never tried to take things further, snogging her properly, or even running his hand down her back. Why he did not at least try? In the back of her mind, she was still haunted by Claus Andrew’s mocking words, suggesting that she was too young and too flat-chested to be attractive to an older boy like Gaius.
“That was cold! Brrr!” Gaius shivered once more time, still hugging her tightly. “Okay. So…Um. That…went rather badly, didn’t it? With your father, I mean.”
Rachel nodded her head against his shoulder, her eyes half closed. “Yes. He got in trouble for doing whatever he did to the bricks. That’s why he lost his memory.”
“Yeah. That was weird. What…was that?”
“I don’t know, but the princess has seen those red lines. Our Elf told her that the Raven put them there to bring her home or something. Maybe…the lines were trying to keep Father from piercing the Wall?”
“Could that be what the Wall looks like?”
“Oh!” Rachel was silent a moment. “Maybe. I always assumed the Wall was black.”
“Hmm.” His hand came to rest on her shoulder. “Something to look into.”
His fingers gently stroked her upper arm. Rachel caught her breath. With a sigh, she leaned against his shoulder.
“So, tell me what happened,” he said.
“You saw.”
“I did.” He frowned, still stroking her arm. “But…there are things I don’t understand.”
“Like what?”
“Well…” He paused, as if choosing his words carefully. “Rachel, why didn’t you just do what your father asked?”
Rachel’s head jerked up from his shoulder. “What?”
“He wanted you to promise to be careful, right? Why didn’t you just agree?”
“I-I can’t do that.”
“Why not?”
“Because…” Rachel drew away from him, to clear her head. This was not the way that she had envisioned this conversation going. Sliding farther away, she waved one hand outside the comforter, as if gesturing all around her. “I could not do any of the things I do, if I agreed.”
“But did you ever think, maybe you shouldn’t?”
“What do you mean?” she cried.
“You’re thirteen, Rachel. Not rushing into danger seems like a perfectly reasonable thing for a father to ask of his young daughter, doesn’t it?”
That stung like a stubbed toe. If she did nothing, how would she be able to impress him and Vlad? If she were the kind of person who could do what he suggested, Gaius would ever have even come to know her.
Gaius pushed the blanket off and rose. Wandering around the hexagonal room, he tugged at the curtains and stomped on the rug a few times, making a hollow thud.
“When did you find this place?” he asked.
“While flying around.”
“It’s nice. Out of the way. I like it.”
“Thanks.” She brightened up a bit at that.
She had been looking forward to sharing her secret place with him. She did feel a slight qualm that another human being now knew the location of her most secret room, but he was her boyfriend. She was supposed to share her secrets with him.
Crossing back to where she sat, he fingered the peach damask slipcover. “This is rather fine quality for an abandoned school attic. It’s much nicer than even our best sofa at the farm.”
“I brought that from home,” Rachel admitted. “The sofa underneath was rather worn.”
She bounced up and down, so he could hear the rusty twang of the old springs. Gaius grinned at her and mussed her already flyaway hair. Dark strands went everywhere. This made him smile. She ducked her head, embarrassed but happy.
The sting of the mental toe-stubbing was fading. She should not be angry with him for asking questions. Wasn’t that what boyfriends and girlfriends did—help each other examine and analyze their experiences?
He tapped the low coffee table with his toe. “Looks like the kind of table where ladies drink tea. Maybe with scones and clotted cream with jam on top.”
“Jam on top?” Rachel straightened up. Her voice sounded particularly British, even to her ear. “Jam comes first. The Double Devon Cream goes on top.”
“Ah, the age old rivalry between Cornwall and Devon,” drawled Gaius. “Double Devon or Cornish Clotted? Jam on the bottom or jam on top?”
Rachel’s back was now ramrod straight. Her Victorian grandmother would have been proud. “I’ll have you know that milk from cows from our tenant farmers goes to make Double Devon Cream.”
“Well, I will have you know,” Gaius leaned against the wall next to Vroomie, “that the best clotted cream of all is made by Trewithen Dairy. They only use the milk of Cornish cows—from a twenty-five mile radius around their facility, to make sure that the milk stays fresh. And,” he gestured at himself, “we are one of their suppliers. Trewithen Dairy is family owned,” he drawled. “The wife’s name happens to be Rachel.”
That made Rachel laugh.
“I’ve heard of Trewithen Dairy,” she said, “but I’ve never tried their clotted cream.”
“You’re in for a treat!”
Rachel smiled at him. “You’ve convinced me to give it a shot…but,” she crossed her arms, “on the matter of where the jam goes, I shall not be budged.”
Gaius came over and sat on the arm of the sofa, gesturing airily, “On that, we shall have to agree to disagree.”
As they sat there, grinning at each other, Rachel’s mind wandered, daydreaming. She pictured herself and Gaius married and surrounded by their six children—five great wizards and a librarian—still arguing over where the jam goes. She imagined their disagreements over tea and crumpets, with the whole family taking sides, ending with jam everywhere and cream on the tip of her nose. She imagined Gaius leaning over to wipe it off, or…kiss it off.
Rachel smiled up at him, and then the smile slipped from her face.
“Gaius…I don’t know what to do?” she whispered, a note of fear creeping into her voice.
He crossed and squatted before her, taking her hands. “Don’t lose heart, Rach. We’ll figure it out.”
She swallowed, unconvinced. It must have sh
own on her face.
“Hey, there,” he said comfortingly. “It’ll be all right, sweetie. We’ll find a way to get your father’s memory back. Vlad has amazing resources. And, as for William, O.I.’s already working on memory issues—to help Blackie. They are sure to have a breakthrough soon. Was just your father’s memory changed? What about your mother?”
“Sandra thought Father had suffered an accident. That would suggest that Mummy wasn’t affected, but I don’t know what she knew to begin with.” Rachel sighed.
“Look, I know you feel hanging about the whole thing—”
“Hanging?” asked Rachel.
“Bad,” he waved a hand. “Exhausted.”
“Oh, you mean like the farmers say.” Rachel nodded. She knew West Country farmers who spoke that way.
Gaius’s face grew red.
When he spoke again, his whole accent had changed, returning to the crisp English sounds he normally made. Rachel realized that ever since they had spoken about farms and cream, a West Country lilt had been creeping into his voice.
“I realize you had a rather bad day, Rachel, I do.”
“Don’t you like sounding Cornish?” she asked.
Thinking back, she could think of other times that his Cornish accent had snuck in. She wondered why she had never realized before that he was deliberately hiding it.
“Nobody wants to be taken for a farmer,” Gaius spat bitterly.
“Oh,” murmured Rachel, who thought farmers were quite romantic.
They were both quiet for almost a minute.
“Rachel, you know…” Gaius began. Then he shook his head. “It’s not my place to criticize.”
At the word ‘criticize’ her whole system went on alert. She looked up at him, eager to show how open she was to his counsel. What might he feel she had done wrong? She was very curious.
“No. Please!” she insisted. “I want to know what you think.”
“It’s just that,” Gaius looked very serious, “Vlad’s always lecturing us about being loyal to our fathers. How that’s the most important thing. Are you sure that showing preference for the Guardian over your own father was a good idea? I think it might have really hurt him—seeing you hug that…whatever that thing is. It was inconsiderate of you, Rachel. I’m rather surprised at you, really.”
Rachel sucked in her breath, exactly the way she might have had she been punched in the solar plexus. Why had he picked that, of all things? The Raven had already shown her how her father felt. She already felt bad about that mistake. She had hoped that Gaius, of all people, would understand why the Raven was so important to her. She wanted to explain how lost she had felt, how terribly her father had embarrassed her, but she found herself tongue tied.
As to why she felt the way she felt toward the Raven and her father, it really did not seem like any of Gaius’s business, anyway.
“You rather brought all this on yourself, Rachel,” Gaius added. “If you’d shared more information with him—if you had answered him more quickly—this would not have happened.”
“Oh.” Rachel sat on the couch feeling unusually small for a mouse.
Gaius rose again and began pacing around the six-sided room. “I’ll be totally honest, Rach, it was in part because Vlad thought that a contact in the Shadow Agency would be valuable to us that I spoke to you in the first place. Do you remember, the first few times we talked…I wanted to get a message to your father? About the new geas? And now, that connection…is lost.”
“Oh,” she mouthed again.
She and her friends had joked about the idea that Gaius’s main interest in her had been her father. She had worried about it for a time, but then she had dismissed this concern as foolish. The revelation that there had been a grain of truth to it was disorienting.
And painful. His disapproval hurt much more than she could explain. Of course, she had asked him to speak, so she could not complain. She had been so certain that whatever he said would not bother her. But then, he had never been anything but supportive before, so how could she have foreseen how much his words would hurt her?
“But…wait,” objected Rachel, haltingly. “What about Vlad and Sandra? Isn’t Sandra all the connection you need to Father? She even works for the Wisecraft.”
Gaius made a wide airy gesture. “Sandra is a riddle smothered in the clotted cream of enigma and slathered with the jam of mystery.”
Rachel laughed in spite of herself. Her heart ached as if Gaius had taken a hacksaw to it, but she refused to let her boyfriend see that his words had cruelly pierced her. With grim determination, she swept these latest lacerations to her heart beneath her mask of calm, along with the rest of her emotional injuries.
She gave him her most arch look. “Sandra, being from Devonshire, would most definitely put her enigma cream on top of her mysterious jam!”
He leaned back, stroking his chin. “You make a good point.”
They grinned at each other, a happy moment of camaraderie. Then Rachel’s expression faltered. She looked down, smoothing the blanket across her lap.
“The whole thing is quite disturbing,” she whispered. “I wish I was a real Griffin and not from some other world.”
“From another world?” Gaius frowned thoughtfully, as if straining to remember what he had seen in the Watch Tower. “You were born here, right? Or the princess would have seen a vision of you when she first touched you. Did your father say you were not from this world? Or are you assuming it is the case, because he knew what the Guardian was?”
Rachel matched her father’s intonation: “He said, ‘You know why I am here, and you know why my wife is here. We cannot raise our family if you are interfering with them.’ I think that means that I am from here. But I don’t think we’re actually from the Griffin family of England—the one that goes back sixty-four generations. I don’t even know,” her voice caught, “if Grandfather was my real grandfather.”
Gaius frowned.
“You don’t understand.” She wet her suddenly dry lips. “I was given false memories, too. Only, I don’t know what I’m supposed to do about them! In my new memories, nothing strange happened this fall…Nothing! Not even the attack of Dr. Mordeau, which everyone else remembers! If I comment on these fake memories, my friends will know something is wrong. But what if something bad happens if I let on that I remember the real version?”
“Wait.” Gaius ran a hand over his chestnut hair, ending by smoothing back his short ponytail. “Let me make sure I understand. You have fake memories, but, because of your secret—you still remember the real version, too?”
“Yes.”
“Huh.” He blinked. “That is…”
“Yeah,” murmured Rachel.
“Wait. You said something bad…if who finds out? Is it the Raven who is attacking you? Can’t you trust your secret to your friends?”
“No!” Rachel squeaked. “I mean the Raven is not my enemy. But Nastasia never puts me before her other contacts. I can’t trust her with something I don’t want all a whole parcel of adults to know.”
“Can’t you ask her to keep your secret?”
“I’ll say not!” Rachel said angrily. “She’s betrayed me repeatedly, Gaius. She has no loyalty to me. If I told her, she’d run home and report. And it’s her family we need to hide from.”
“From Magical Australia?” Gaius gave her a skeptical look. “Are emus out to get you?”
Rachel almost laughed, but the truth was too awful. “The Romanov family is in charge. Of the Earth. They can order the Guardian around.”
Gaius stared, as if he were having trouble comprehending what she was saying.
“They’re in charge? Why? Wait, but they’re in Australia!” He seemed stuck on repeat.
Sitting down beside her, he hugged her tightly.
“Do you think Vlad knows?” Rachel asked intently. “About the Romanovs? I doubt it, or he would not have touched the princess and angered her family. Should we tell him?”
Gaius sho
ok his head. “I am not going to tell him. It might get him mind blanked. We can’t afford to lose him. Also, we only know the rather convoluted things your father said—some random comment to the Guardian about him not being Romanov. I am not sure it made sense. There’s definitely information missing. Maybe left out on purpose.”
“No! We know a lot more than that,” Rachel said slowly. “He came in my room…the other Romanov. The one the princess had forgotten, until she was under the influence of the Spell of True Recitation. I don’t know his name, but I call him the Master of the World. He…” Her voice dropped to a whisper. “The Raven had to pretend to change my memories. That’s why I have a fake set. Jariel did promise to keep protecting you, though, so I could talk to you.”
Rachel watched his face hopefully, waiting for the significance of all this sank in, for him to be impressed with the magnitude of what she had discovered, but Gaius just looked stunned.
“That’s good. I think,” he murmured, blinking. “I hope he can keep his word. Otherwise, we’ll all end up without our memories. We’ll probably forget about magic entirely and take up knitting those crazy jumpers for chickens.”
“Is knitting chicken jumpers something that’s done?”
“In Cornwall. I used to think the idea was bonkers. After our flight to the Watch Tower, though…Well, if I was a chicken, I think I might want a jumper on a day like today!”
Rachel pictured a chicken yard, such as those kept by her family’s tenant farmers, but with a dozen hens in brightly-colored sweaters.
“Are you going to knit jumpers for your chickens?” she asked.
“I live on a commercial farm,” drawled Gaius. “We raise ninety-six thousand chicks at a time.”
“Oh. That would take a lot of yarn!”
“Yes. Yes, it would.”
Rachel gave him a wan smile. “There is one good thing. I don’t think Father remembers the fake argument from the fake memory chain. That means that he and I still haven’t argued about you. We spoke about me having a boyfriend very briefly, but not long enough for it to be considered an argument.”
“There is that positive side,” said Gaius, but she could tell he was not paying attention.
The Awful Truth About Forgetting (Books of Unexpected Enlightenment Book 4) Page 33