It waited for her. It waited to take her below the water, to a fate unknown. She had no doubt that she would be the one pulled out of the stage first. She would see the water first.
Would she come out of the water to the same reality? Or to a different, more horrible one?
“He wouldn’t dare leave you below the water longer than you’re allowed,” Vaughn whispered. “The dunkers would bring you up after thirty seconds regardless.”
“I know. That’s not what scares me, though.”
She probably should have worried about just that, though. Johnny was at a level of anger she’d never seen in him. She knew what he was capable of. She had seen it… in the eyes and the fists of Jameson Kent.
The same anger now burned in her former fiancé’s eyes.
Still, that wasn’t what scared her.
“It’s not that likely to happen again, Sam,” Vaughn said. He could always read her mind. “We were both in one form of water or another during both time changes.”
He was right. Still… “If I come out of the water and you’re Puck, I’m going to be pissed at you.” They both laughed.
Johnny finished his speech. He himself walked across the stage and pulled the cage door open. He grabbed Sammie’s arm.
Vaughn grabbed the other. “I love you,” he said. But not in desperation. A smile spread across his lips.
She wouldn’t wait until she was in the chair to say it this time. “I love you too.” She smiled, and let Johnny plop her roughly into the chair.
As soon as she’d touched down, the dunking crew lifted her into the air and swung her over the center of the pond.
“My Lady Anne Halloway,” Johnny said, resuming his role as the Lord High Sheriff Jameson Kent. Not that it was a big stretch anymore. “What hast thee to say to thy most wanton charges?” It was the nicest way he could call her a whore in front of a hundred people.
Sammie took a deep breath. She’d been trained to pull answers out of thin air. But no matter what she said, she knew the water waited for her. The audience never let anyone leave the pond dry.
“My Lord High Sheriff,” she said as the strong willed Lady Anne. “A Lady shouldst choose her the man that she doth love.”
It was a dig straight at Johnny’s heart. It was unavoidable. There was nothing else to say after Johnny had spent so much time building up her crime of debauching herself with Puck. She had no choice but to play it up.
Johnny didn’t send her to his briny deep immediately. He went to the jury like he was supposed to.
The jury, of course, sealed her fate for him.
She fell through the air, hitting the water like a bullet. She stopped moving. She started to count in her head.
Ten came quickly. At ten, she was pulled back up to the air. So far, so good.
“My Lady Halloway,” Johnny said. “What hast thee to say now?”
She pulled herself up to her full sitting height. “My Lord High Sheriff,” she said through her shaking breath. “Mayhap if thee sought not to dabble with the gypsies, thou wouldst have found me not in the arms of a beggar.”
The audience oohed and ahhed. And then they sent her back down.
The chair rose once she reached twenty in her head. She took a deep breath, relishing in every bit of air that she could.
The third dunke was next. What would happen when she went down a third time?
“What hast thou to say, Lady Anne, now that thou hast seen the water twice?” Johnny paced around the edge of the stage.
Sammie took a deep breath. She stared at Vaughn. She took in every detail of the face she’d known her whole life. She wanted to remember things as they were now.
Just in case.
“A woman has the right to follow her own heart,” she said so quietly she doubted anyone beyond Johnny could hear her.
She took a deep breath as the jury cast their verdict. She disappeared beneath the water.
And counted to thirty.
She didn’t move.
Oh God. This was bad. This was really, really bad. Johnny was going to do it. He was going to leave her down here on purpose. She was going to di…
At thirty two, the chair rose. She squinted against the brightness of the sun.
Get a grip, Sammie, she told herself. Slowly she opened her eyes. She looked at the cage on the far end of the stage.
Vaughn smiled at her. His hands gripped the bars so tightly that his knuckles had gone white. He had worried, too.
But, on his pinky, the sun glinted off of her claddaugh ring.
Sammie smiled. Things hadn’t changed. Not much at all.
Chapter 28
She ran a brush through her hair one last time and threw it back into her locker.
It felt so good to be free of her dresses for another day. To be free of her Court gown and its unbearably scratchy lace ruff, and to be free of her dunking gown. She felt like another person entirely in a pair of denim capris, with a flowery tank top and her hair pulled back into a ponytail. She slipped into a pair of white cushioned sandals, glad to give up her festival shoes for the day. She felt like she’d had them on for two days straight.
She left the locker room, situated just outside the walls of the festival on the edge of the parking lot. Had the building been there when the parking lot had changed to a never ending sea of white tents? She didn’t remember seeing it.
Then again, she didn’t remembering registering anything that wasn’t completely horrible at the time, either.
Vaughn waited for her outside, looking sexy and comfortable in jeans and running shoes, wearing a pinstriped jersey from his favorite baseball team. A navy two would be on the back of it.
Sammie smiled at him. “What do we do now?” she asked.
“Is your asthma up for a walk?”
“Unlike my gowns, these come with pockets.” She pulled her inhaler from her front pocket and smiled.
A smile played on his delicious lips. “I thought we might take one last walk through the grounds before we leave for the day.”
Before we leave for the day. We. There was never a word that sent such happy shivers through her spine. “All right,” she said, and took his hand.
The tourists were gone for the day. The long paths were emptying. Artisans closed up their shops and vendors closed up their food and drynke stands. Cleaning crews stabbed plastic cups and paper food containers with long, pointed sticks.
Sammie and Vaughn turned down Caravan Way. The soap seller and her husband were getting ready to leave Sundries Corner. Did the woman know how much she’d helped them almost five hundred years ago? Could she even imagine such a thing?
They walked past Boleyn Stage and Seymour Stage. Just beyond was the building with the break room. So many things had happened there. Good things. Bad things.
Nearly the last thing Sammie ever knew.
It was strange… The thing that had almost been her undoing was her asthma. Not the beatings. Not spending so much time below water. It was her asthma that had almost killed her.
They turned down Hill Street. It was much easier going down than up. It was much easier going her own pace rather than following the pace of a murderous freak.
In the end, they ended up exactly where she thought they might. Exactly where she hoped they might. They stood next to the mud stage and looked over the tall grass to the pond. The water glistened like crystal as the sun moved slowly towards the horizon.
How safe had this sanctuary really been? From their vantage point, Sammie could see everything. The point where they’d had their picnic. Where they’d slept overnight. All it would have taken was one person at the stage to turn around, to look away from the festival, to see them.
They hadn’t really been all that safe.
“It’s a beautiful sight, isn’t it?”
Robert Hastings, the director of the Players, came up next to Sammie. “It is beautiful,” she agreed.
“I like coming here before I leave for the night,” Robert sa
id. “Sometimes I come in the mornings, too. Would you believe that somebody left a pile of blankets behind the stage? I think some teenagers must have been fooling around behind here.” He chuckled.
Sammie and Vaughn looked at each other. “That is just so wrong,” Vaughn said.
“So what happened with you and Johnny, Sammie?” Robert asked.
She sighed. It figured. Of course that baby Johnny would have to go crying to the boss. “It’s complicated,” she said. She prayed he wouldn’t press any further.
Thankfully he didn’t. “Well, I’m going to make things less complicated. You’ve always wanted to be a faery.”
Oh my God. Oh my God. Oh my God. This was the moment she’d waited for. This was what she wanted since she joined the festival. “Absolutely,” she said, her voice an octave higher than normal.
“Nymph came to me after closing and begged me to add you as a faery now. She really loved it when you sang with her.” Robert smiled. “You are always one for surprises. Never has a noble even interacted with the faery before. Anyways, your costume is waiting for you in the locker room, and the faery are returning on Monday to practice with you.” He leaned forward and kissed Sammie on the cheek. “I know how much you wanted this.”
She was so happy that she felt drunk. So she had no idea what brought the next words to her mouth. “What about the Noble Ladies?” She bit her tongue in time to keep from asking about Johnny. The Lord High Sheriff would do well enough without a betrothed to hold him back.
“Everything’s already been taken care of. I’ve already engaged one Lady Emily Montgomery to replace you, though she doesn’t have the same heavenly voice you do.” Robert laughed. “You’re not having second thoughts?”
“What! Bloody hell no!” Her heart beat a thousand times a second. If Vaughn wasn’t holding her hand, she would float right up into the clouds.
Robert laughed and walked away.
Vaughn wrapped his arms around her. “Good for you, love. Now you won’t have to deal with him at all.”
Sammie giggled herself silly. Everything that happened… All the beatings, the chasings, the death sentences… Everything had led to her having everything she’d ever wanted. It was crazy. Manic. Refreshing.
Vaughn just let her laugh.
<>
It was Vaughn who remembered their mysterious friend T.
Gypsy Way was just as empty as the rest of the festival. The tents stood like strange sentinels, waiting for a nightly mist to come before breaking into dance.
A strange cloud hung near one tent, one so faded and worn it hardly looked red anymore. The cloud… was made up of moths. Pure white moths floated in a perfect ball. In its center, amazingly easy to see, was their queen. A white moth with a silver lightning bolt shooting down one wing.
The faded tent was not empty. A young blond, this time in jeans and a silver sequined tank top, came out of it. It was the same gypsy who gave Sammie her reading.
It was the same gypsy they had both seen standing at the end of the Dead Road.
She saw Sammie and Vaughn and smiled. “Well, I see you two made it back in one piece.” The moth with the lightning bolt wing alighted on her shoulder.
“You’re her,” Sammie said quietly. “You’re T.”
It all made sense now. How many times she saw the moth, before and during the time change… Everything was making sense.
The gypsy nodded. “My name is Tacyn.”
“You were the one helping us. Sending us all the notes,” Vaughn said, and she nodded again. “Were you transported back in time, too?”
“Ah, the time change.” Tacyn ran a hand through her hair. “I am sorry about that. But it was the only way I could show you the kind of man you were marrying.” She looked straight at Sammie.
“The only way…”
“Johnny started hitting on me four, five years ago,” Tacyn said before Sammie could fully comprehend what was being said. “It was a fling, nothing more. Even after he met you he still sought me out. He said that it was your relationship that was a fling, and while I didn’t believe him, I was powerless to resist his looks. I didn’t find out that you were engaged, that you were going to marry him at the end of the season, until last week. It was then that I knew I had to show you who he really is.”
“Who he really is?”
“We all created our characters out of who we really are inside,” Tacyn said.
“So the shockwave… The time changes… That was you?” Sammie asked.
“They tried to kill us. Sammie almost died. Twice,” Vaughn said.
“Three times,” Sammie said. If her wrist had been cut any deeper by that shackle she would have died. She held up her arm…
The scar was gone.
Tacyn smiled. “Your scar lasted only to give Johnny proof of who he really is inside. You no longer have need of it, just as you no longer had need of your bruises once you left the pond.” She looked at Vaughn. “And neither of you would have died. If anything fatal had occurred, if there was anything that I could not have prevented… You would have woken up safely in the break room and thought you had fallen asleep there during a break. But you both would have remembered.” She turned back to Sammie. “You would have still known in your heart, SamanthaAn Hallows, that it is Vaughn and not Johnny that you are meant to be with.”
Was that the reason for everything? To find out that she loved Vaughn, and that Johnny wasn’t a person worth being with? If that was the truth… Well, Sammie could accept that. It was worth it, if that was the case. She squeezed Vaughn’s hand. But something still bothered her. “How did you send us back into time?”
Tacyn just smiled. “Is love not the most powerful magic in existence? Is there not magic in the very water? Is the Renaissance Faire not a place where reality merges with fantasy?” She turned to walk away. “Oh, by the way… He’s waiting for you at Justice Pond.”
The gypsy and her magical moth disappeared without another word.
<>
He stood on the bottom level of the stage, holding the ring in two fingers. In the glint of the diamond, he had laid all of his hopes and dreams for the future. In reality, it was nothing more than a reminder of the shattering of those hopes and dreams.
The pond lay below him. He saw it twice a day. Every day. Never had he thought it a horrible place. A place of darkness and danger and horribleness. Not until it killed his fiancée.
He didn’t know when she’d found out about Tacyn. That bastard Vaughn must have found time to talk to her before the trial and dunke. But it didn’t matter. A fling couldn’t compare to an affair.
Sammie had gone into the water a loving, faithful fiancée. She’d come out of it a lying, cheating bitch.
“Johnny? What are you doing?”
He didn’t have to look up to know she stood on the grass just below the cage. He didn’t have to look up to know what she wasn’t alone.
It was probably a good thing. For her sake.
He threw the ring into the pond. He hoped she knew just how much money he’d wasted on her. “Just paying homage,” he said as he marched off the stage. “I don’t know if you heard, but the pond murdered my fiancée.” He stopped in front of her. He glared at her. This was all her fault. “Jameson Kent no longer has a betrothed, either.”
“I heard,” she said with all the emotion of a stone.
“I’ll make sure you can get your shit from my place when the season’s over.” He walked away from the pond without another word.
<>
“Are you okay?” Vaughn asked.
“The man I fell in love with didn’t really exist, so… Yeah. I am.” She turned around and threw her arms around Vaughn’s neck. “What do you think the chances are of a faery being allowed to fall in love with a mud beggar?”
“I’m guessing pretty good,” Vaughn said. He kissed her.
Yesterday, that morning really, Sammie knew that her dunke would lead to something special. To a great day.
; And she was right.
Chapter 29
The many paths of Sherwood Village, in the Shire of Nottingham, were abuzz with activity.
Half of England had gathered in the golden dappled village hidden away deep in the depths of Sherwood Forest. People flowed down the paths, as liquid as the heat shimmering silver in the air.
Wandering minstrels played lively tunes on their lutes and pipes. Mad capped stilted performers in garishly colored costumes told silly stories, making young men erupt in laughter and even the most proper of Courtly Ladies blush bright crimson.
The people of Nottingham and the Court mingled together on the paths, ignoring the differences in statuses and manners of birth as they moved from the top level of the grounds to the bottom. Together they sampled stage shows and delicious foods and drynke. They watched artisans create wondrous crafts and beautiful pieces of art.
At one end of the festival, on a stage overlooking an ominously green pond, Nottingham’s own Lord High Sheriff Jameson Kent presided over the morning’s trial and dunke. People whispered amongst each other that the Lord High Sheriff had lost his sanity, and what little compassion he had, with the death of his betrothed. The Lady Anne Halloway’s ship had sunk as she travelled to her exile in France. It was unknown as to why the once noble Lady had been banished, but Jameson now dunked a noble Lady, a member of the Queen’s own retinue besides, for bearing a slight resemblance to Lady Anne, and for showing affection in a public manner to her own betrothed.
On the opposite end of the grounds, three motley beggars performed the story of Heracles in a waist deep pit of mud. Puck, the mud beggars’ leader, played the historic hero, and threw the other two into the depths of the pit. People in the first six rows of the audience screeched as they became splattered with mud.
On the lush Village Green, the meadow in the center of the festival, a flight of faery danced in a circle to the sounds of a faery flute. A newly born faery, dressed in the yellows and oranges of autumn, stood in the center of the circle and sang about faery wings.
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