by Emma Savant
Instead, the waterfall of white that still poured from his hands began to move silently backward. The white energy leapt up from the goblet and streamed back into Haidar.
The magic fritzed and sputtered on his hands and up his arms. Haidar winced in pain. I flexed my toes, feeling my connection with the glowing ground, and forced myself to stay where I was. Whatever magic Haidar couldn’t consume dissipated in the air around him, and still, it kept pouring up. The pool of light that surrounded her began to fade.
The Oracle wrenched up one foot.
“Isabelle,” Haidar shouted. Her name tore from his lips like the cry of a desperate animal.
But Isabelle was busy flinging enchantments toward the sky. A tall sprite with white hair hovered in the air above her like a menacing angel. He darted away and then flew toward her again.
I had been so focused on Kelda that I hadn’t noticed the sprites that had come with her. One lay motionless on the ground by the mansion, her pale light faded to almost nothing and her white tunic and leggings smudged with mud. Another lay on the ground beside Daniel. My brother loomed over the sprite, sending down the last of a spell with his wand. The sprite twitched and then stilled. I couldn’t tell if she was still alive. Her blue light faded until only a faint afterglow remained.
Isabelle jumped aside as her sprite flung an enchantment toward her head.
“Isabelle,” Haidar gasped.
He was on all fours on the ground now, clutching the goblet’s stem with both hands. My heart thudded in my chest.
Stay still, I ordered myself.
I couldn’t watch him. In front of me, Kelda was moving. She raised her hand toward me.
I yanked my wand from my hair and swooshed it through the air. A humming shield sprang up around me. I shoved the wand back into my hair and kept pushing with my hands, mirroring Amani as we strained to hold Kelda where she stood.
In the corner of my eye, Isabelle’s sprite leapt toward her. And then I saw a blur run behind Amani, and Daniel was there, pointing his wand at the sprite and sending a solid stream of orange light toward it. The light hit the sprite in the back. He stiffened and crumpled. His long white hair fell across his face and his light, too, faded to almost nothing.
“Go,” Daniel shouted.
In two steps, Isabelle was down the stairs and in the garden. She threw herself down in front of Haidar.
“I can’t,” Haidar said.
Kelda twisted again. I felt our hold on her begin to slip.
Haidar pushed the cup toward Isabelle.
“You’ve got this,” she said, voice crisp. “Focus.”
“Belle—”
“Focus,” she ordered.
His knuckles were white on the goblet. She put her hands over his and bent down so she could see his eyes.
“This is your home,” she said. “Your goblet. Your magic.”
His shoulders shook with the effort. But slowly, in sputters and jerks, the white light began to reverse itself again, pouring into the goblet and through it to the earth. New white veins began to push out again, and the circle of light around Kelda intensified.
Kelda threw her hands up toward Amani. But a light I recognized had kindled in the queen’s eyes.
She was no longer Amani. She was the Faerie Queen, and the fury of a thousand generations of our race prickled down her arms and made her hair stand on end.
“Now,” Amani ordered.
Lightning sparked down my arms and through my fingertips. Together, the three of us slammed our energy toward Kelda, Haidar hardest of all.
Thick green ropes sprang from the ground and threw themselves together above Kelda’s head, forming a thick cage. Sharp, thorn-covered branches spread out until the Oracle was completely enclosed. Here and there, blood-red roses bloomed.
Kelda threw a spell against the cage of rose bushes that surrounded her. The magic rattled the stems, but the cage held. Instead of flying out toward one of us, the curse crackled and sparked along the branches and leaves until it wore itself out and dissolved.
I expected Kelda to scream, or panic, or do anything that matched the frantic hysteria in my head.
But Kelda wasn’t some third-rate teenage godmother. She was one of the leaders of our world, second only to the queen.
Instead of screaming, she put a hand on her hip and stared at Amani.
The queen lowered her hands. I saw her chest rise and fall, but she, too, held it together.
“Kelda,” Amani said coolly.
“Sycophantic bureaucrat,” Kelda replied, matching her tone.
I raised my eyebrows. My frantic heartbeat slowed.
This was not what I’d expected.
“How’s it going?” Kelda said.
Her voice sounded normal, not the low echo I’d always heard at the Fountain. All I could see from here was her back, but she came across as nothing more than a tall, thin woman in a long white gown. Her black hair was streaked with silver and tumbled down her back; despite the silver, it was clear she was young, or at least not much older than Amani.
The queen walked up to the cage.
“I keep busy,” Amani said. “Thanks for making sure of that.”
“Happy to help,” Kelda said. “That does seem to be my job, doesn’t it? Helping you?”
Amani actually rolled her eyes.
“Give it a rest, Kel,” she said. “No one’s ever made you do anything you didn’t want to do.”
“No one ever gave me the opportunities to do things I did want to do,” Kelda said.
Amani sighed.
“We need to talk,” she said. “Really talk.”
I stepped toward the cage and took a couple of careful steps to the side so I could see Kelda’s face. Every other time we’d met, she’d been hidden behind the rippling waters of the Oracle’s Fountain. Her round face seemed slightly at odds with her tall, slender body, but she was stunningly pretty. Her faerie aura, as electric blue as Amani’s was gold, fell around her in a constant trickle of light. It shifted across her face like reflections from the bottom of a pool.
She saw me, and turned away from Amani to take me in. Her black eyes drew me toward her, and her rosy mouth drew down in a pout.
“Olivia,” she said. “Good to see you. I want to talk to you.”
“I’m just here to help Queen Amani,” I said.
I didn’t want her looking at me. I didn’t want her to know I’d been involved in all of this. How was I supposed to ever sleep again, having wronged the second most powerful being in our entire world?
“Yes, well, Queen Amani is useless and obsolete,” Kelda said. She tossed her hair, sending silver tendrils flying over her shoulder. “She’s not worth bothering with. You’d know that if you ever thought for yourself.”
I looked to Amani for guidance. Her mouth quirked downward, but she nodded at me.
I stepped forward again until I could have reached out and touched the thorny cage.
“What am I doing here?” Kelda said.
She glanced sideways at Amani and gave her a quick up-and-down. It was exactly the look I’d seen girls give other girls in the halls of my high school, usually right before they muttered something to their friends like, “Hairdo? Looks like a hair don’t” or “Control your whoremones, slut.”
It didn’t warm me to her one bit.
What was more, it made me realize what I was dealing with.
The Oracle, as a role, was a leader of our world. But Kelda? As far as I could see from here, Kelda was nothing more than a nasty, insecure girl who lashed out when things didn’t go right for her. Sure, she couched her spite in nice platitudes about uniting our worlds or letting Glims be freely themselves. But I’d seen the creek where she’d hidden her wand. She was sticky with lies, and I wasn’t about to let her take over Portland or look at my queen that way.
“Let’s get one thing real clear, right now,” I said.
My voice came out clear and strong, and so loud that it shocked me. I wante
d to step back at the assertiveness in my own tone. Instead, I stepped forward.
“You’ve been pulling a lot of crap lately,” I said. “You’ve been breaking our laws and doing everything in your power to screw our community over. You want to reveal Glims to the world? Fine. You do that. But you do it with the support of your people, not by bullying the best of them and bribing the worst with special favors or gold coins or whatever you’ve been offering.”
One of Kelda’s dark arched eyebrows went up.
“Your pet has teeth,” she called to Amani.
“Kel?” Amani said. “Shut up.”
I turned to her in surprise. She was looking at Kelda with the most fed-up expression I’d ever seen on a face that wasn’t my own. She glanced at me, shook her head, and went to sit on the stone steps leading down to the clearing.
“I’m going to let you in on a secret,” I said, lowering my voice. “I think you’re onto something, or at least your public message is. I think maybe there is something to be said for letting Glims be themselves in public. Maybe it’s time to explore that.”
I leaned in.
“But you do not get to make that decision for everyone.”
She folded her arms and stared at me. She was trying to intimidate me, trying to quash me with the same “ooh, look at the skank’s off-brand jeans” expression she’d been giving Amani.
But I’d survived Imogen’s disdain. And unlike Imogen, at the end of the day, Kelda meant nothing to me. Not anymore.
“Call off your minions,” I said.
It was stupid that I even had to have this conversation. Who had minions? Seriously?
“No,” Kelda said.
“You can’t just chase people out who don’t agree with you,” I said. “You can’t just kidnap their kids, or unleash fairy swarms on them. That’s not how grownups solve their problems.”
She grabbed the edge of the rose cage and leaned toward me. A tiny spot of blood ran down from her white hand onto the branch.
“I’m not a grownup,” she hissed. “I’m the Oracle.”
“And I’m a craptastic faerie godmother,” I said. “Yay. We both have jobs. Aren’t we special.”
Somewhere beyond this little conversation, I heard Daniel snort.
“You’re annoying me, Kelda,” I said. “You have interfered in my life for months, and I am sick of it. So don’t try and get all high and mighty, because I can’t even begin to explain to you the number of shits I don’t give.”
Imogen’s face flashed into my head, as it had every single day since we’d stopped talking. We’d been friends once. And sure, I’d messed up by not telling her about Amani’s offer to make me her heir. But Kelda had taken that mistake—a mistake that should have remained between Imogen and me—and turned it into a weapon. She’d turned Lucas into a weapon, too—taken a sweet guy who had nothing to do with our world and thrown him in the middle of it, just to play with Imogen and me.
And now, she was interfering in hundreds of lives like mine all through this city.
If I hadn’t wanted to leave this all for my nice Humdrum college before, she’d have sealed the deal.
“You know nothing,” Kelda said. “You’re as arrogant as she is.”
She glared at Amani. I felt the anger and hate roll off her.
Her hostility felt familiar. It was the same as the emotions coming off Imogen at Gilt.
I forced the memory away. I couldn’t stand to keep thinking about Imogen. Kelda had broken a lot of things in the past few days. Out of all the broken things, though, Imogen and my friendship had been the first.
I swallowed the frustrated scream that was building in my throat. Instead, I mimicked the two rulers in this garden with me and kept my cool.
“You’re going to call off your sprites,” I said. “You’re going to tell them to go home, and you’re going to announce to our entire world that you were wrong.”
“I’m not wrong,” Kelda said.
She looked down at me like I was a child.
Technically, I almost was. But I was not being the most childish person in this garden. That had to count for something.
“You don’t even want to be here,” Kelda said. “You’re a Humdrum, Olivia. All the magic in the world isn’t going to change that. You’ve always wanted to be a Hum. Don’t you understand? My plan would let you really be one.”
“By wiping out the Hums?” I said. “How exactly is that supposed to work?”
“I never intended to wipe them out,” she said.
She blinked a few times at me. Each blink was like watching a lunar eclipse: The pale moon of her eyelids appeared for a moment, and then they were gone again, replaced by her deep black eyes.
“I just wanted them out of Portland,” she said. “Portland is a Glim hub. You know that. It makes sense for the city to only consist of Glims and the Hums who truly respect us. I don’t want to destroy the Hums; I just want to push them out of the city, into towns where they’ll be happier surrounded by their own kind. Haven’t you wondered why almost no one’s died these past few days? This change could have been so much more violent.”
I’d been so busy with the prospect of things happening to the people I cared about that it hadn’t occurred to me to worry about the actual death toll.
I glanced across the clearing. Isabelle looked as caught off guard as I was.
“When you go to school, don’t you want it to be at a college entirely full of Hums?” Kelda said. “You’ll be happier surrounded by people who think and believe as you do. And those of us who prefer to live magically can be surrounded by people who respect that choice.”
“You’ve been rewarding Glims who show themselves to the Hums,” I said.
She let go of the cage and clenched her hand into a fist. It wasn’t enough to stop the blood from trickling down her hand. A single drop landed on her white gown.
“This will only work if we know about each other,” she said.
“Our entire world is based on them not knowing about us,” I said.
“Only because of fear,” she snarled. “Fear is not befitting to Glimmers. You’ve been fed a steady diet of lies since you were a child, Olivia. The Hums won’t get to catch us and experiment on us, much as they like to poke and prod at anything that doesn’t protest loudly enough. By the time Portland is ours, we’ll have made it perfectly clear that we’re too powerful to be harassed. As long as they respect us, we’ll be happy to keep to our own cities and leave them alone. It’s an equitable arrangement.”
“You just want to separate us,” I said.
It didn’t make any sense. We’d been preparing for war. We’d been sending Glims to protect the Hums we cared about. We’d been doing everything we could to slow this Dark Forest movement, because the Humdrum world knowing about us would lead to nothing good.
And yet, everything Kelda said made the past year fall into place.
Every move she and the sprites had made had been carefully calculated. The hauntings, the rumors—they were designed to scare Hums into moving out of the city, not to hurt them. No one had died until these past few days. And even those instances had clearly been the result of people who’d gotten too excited, not sprites acting under Kelda’s orders.
“I want to give you the world you’ve always dreamed about,” Kelda said. “Would you really have been able to enjoy college knowing that you could run into a Glim in any class you walked into? And that Glim might not be there because they want to escape to the Humdrum world, like you. I’m offering you freedom, Olivia. Freedom to escape to somewhere full of people like you, who love and respect the same things you do. Why have you imprisoned me in a cage for that?”
I took a few steps back.
What was I doing here? Why was I the one having this conversation?
I wanted to go. This garden was so full of magic it made my skin throb. Without my glasses, everywhere I looked crackled with the light of spells and enchantments. My own green aura flowed around me,
clinging to me like a mist I could never escape.
What if I could peel it off and leave it behind?
What if there really was a place full of people like me, people who didn’t want the strain of magic constantly weighing on them and creating expectations they were bound to fall short of?
I heard Amani shift on the stairs behind me, but she didn’t run to my rescue.
Kelda leaned forward until her nose was almost touching the cage. Her gaze bored into me.
“You could find new friends in a place like that, Olivia. Friends who won’t betray you.”
Her eyes flickered up to look behind me, to where Amani waited in the gathering dusk.
With a snap, the spell of her words broke. The beautiful illusion of a world where I belonged crashed around my ears like shards of glass, leaving only the truth.
“You helped her betray me,” I said. “You fed us stories about each other. I didn’t know how to tell her about Amani, but that was none of your business. You had no right to turn us against each other.”
My hand twitched. I itched to grab my wand and throw something, anything, at Kelda’s pale, wide-eyed face.
“And Lucas? He’s not even supposed to be here. This hasn’t been easy for him, but you don’t care. Maybe you liked it better that way.”
I heard my voice rising to a yell and tried to rein it in, to keep all my anger and my magic inside me where it belonged. But some anger wasn’t meant to sit inside forever.
“You will call off your sprites,” I said.
My voice trembled, and instead of fighting to force my fury to sit inside me and fester, I let it flow toward her.
She was a faerie. She was welcome to my emotions, all of them. Let her sort it out.
“You will call off all your Glim supporters,” I said. “You will make a public and formal announcement to the entire Glimmering world that you no longer support the Dark Forest movement. If you want to change the way our world works, you will go through the appropriate channels and not resort to threats and bribes to get your way. These are the rules now. You have exactly one choice: You will agree to them or you will deal with Queen Amani.”