by L. K. Rigel
Why hadn’t he come?
She let out a huge sigh. A few seconds later, she noticed the utter silence in the throne room. Everyone was looking at her.
“What can I get you, my queen?” said her sergeant-at-arms. He was a brownie. Always super solicitous. It was enough to drive her batty. She was about to tell him to go jump in the lake when a disturbance broke out at the back of the throne room.
Cissa sat up straight, hardly believing her eyes. “And to what do we owe this great honor?” As if on a mission, Beverly, Dandelion, Cade, Lily, Goldy, Violet, and Morning Glory all marched through the courtiers toward her, all talking at once until Dandelion broke out of the pack.
“Cissa, have you seen Lexi?” he said. “Is she here?”
Her sergeant-at-arms stepped forward. “That’s your majesty, or Queen Narcissus to you.”
Dandelion extended his wings to full span, puffed up his chest, and glared. “Are you new here?”
“Eep!” The brownie backed away so fast he tripped over his own shoes.
“Don’t mind him. He is new.” Cissa stood up and clapped her hands. “That’s it, everybody. We’re done for today. Go play!”
She set the moonstick crown on the throne and finger-combed her hair. “So what’s going on? How did you lose my grandniece?”
“I think she’s run away,” Lily said. “Beverly said she had been reading Lydia Pengrith’s journal, and I found a glimmer glass in Lexi’s room when Cade and I were searching Faeview for her. She’s obviously been practicing without any of us knowing about it.”
The pixies were leaving the defense docket, but the way they hesitated and looked back over their shoulders made Cissa suspicious. She pointed at them. “You pixies, wait. Come here for a moment.”
They floated over to join the group, all smiles and eagerness.
“Yes, my liege.”
“We’re here to please.”
“Ugh, don’t say that.” Cissa had once loved to hear it—the first five thousand times. Now it drove her up the wall. “You both had looks on your faces.”
“Looks on our faces?”
“They’re in the right places!”
“What do you know?” Cissa huffed. “Where is my grandniece?”
“Last night in the dancing”
“With you and Max prancing.”
“We both saw your heir.”
“With the gobs, she was there.”
Cissa frowned. “It’s true, I was there. But I didn’t see Lexi. Max hadn’t seen her either, I’m sure, or he would have told me.”
“You weren’t her thang.”
“She wanted Drang.”
“Sun and moon, that’s a horrible rhyme,” Cissa said. “It hurt my brain. Be gone!”
The pixies popped out.
“Oops,” Cissa said. “Maybe I sent them away too soon.”
“You think?” Beverly said.
“There’s only one thing for it,” Dandelion said. “I’m going to the Blue Vale to talk to Drang.”
II. Max
Max and Morander were working at Vulsier’s cottage, using the forge in his back workshop to heat a sheet of copper Morander wanted to turn into a stock pot.
“Practical objects are good,” Max said. “Very good. And any respectable gob wants a plentiful store for the wedding trunk. But I get the impression, Morander, that you’re of a mind to impress a lady. Am I mistaken there?”
The young gob flushed, but didn’t deny it. Max grunted. He could always tell. Well, more power to the lad. At least someone was making progress in the business of living. With all the betrothals happening in the Blue Vale of late, Max would soon be the only gob left without a mate.
“Look Morander, I don’t mean to tell you your business, but a lady likes a dainty present now and then. Something the opposite of practical.”
“But… that makes no sense.”
“Well, there you go,” Drang said.
“Since when do the ladies make sense?” Sturm finished his brother’s idea. The two were sitting at opposite ends of the low stone wall that surrounded Vulsier’s workspace, tossing a head of cabbage back and forth.
“My lady makes a lot of sense,” Morander said. But his brow wrinkled and he rubbed his jaw. “Except when she doesn’t.”
“There you go!” Sturm and Drang said together, laughing.
“I thought as much,” Max said. As a matter of interest, it would be nice to know who the lad had fixed on for a bride. He’d like to do what he could to help move the courtship along. But he wasn’t about to pry. It would be the height of bad manners to ask.
“What’s that, then?” Drang said.
From the other side of the cottage came the chatter of several people all talking at once. Then, behind Max, a single voice much easier to identify said, “Oh. My. Gods.” A familiar, irritated fairy. “In the name of the highest heaven, what is that caterwauling?”
“Aubrey?” Max said.
The prodigal fairy’s hair appeared behind the patio’s low stone wall, then his body seemed to push the straw-colored mess up… up… up until he stood at full height.
“Yes, campers, it is I.” He yawned and stretched. “A fairy can’t catch a nap in peace anywhere these days.”
Practically a troop of fairies spilled into their workspace, including the queen. Max caught Cissa as she stumbled and almost fell against the hot forge.
“Beware of the heat, majesty.”
“Thank you, Max,” Cissa said. She looked up at him with those sparkling green eyes, and he felt a burning need to keep her trapped there, enveloped in his arms, and kiss her. But he let her go and instead picked up the hammer and gave Morander’s sheet of copper a few hard whacks.
Cissa, Dandelion, Beverly, Lily and Cade, Morning Glory, Goldy, and Violet—this could only be about Lexi.
“Er… was there something in particular that brings you all to the Blue Vale?” Max said.
“Drang’s uncle said he was back here at the forge,” Dandelion said.
“Hi, Dandelion.” Drang jumped down from the wall. “Is this about Lexi?”
“It is,” Cade jumped in. “Have you seen my daughter?”
“Yeah,” Drang said. “Morander and I spoke with her at the dancing last night.”
Max grunted. He knew Morander wasn’t much of a talker, but it was ridiculous to keep that piece of information so close to the chest. “You’re forgetting something,” he said. “Anzlyn’s time tether. Even if Lexi had been in the fae realm, she would have returned to the human realm seven seconds after she left.”
“Maybe the time tether didn’t work,” Lily said.
“Or maybe it did,” Max said. “But it’s a time tether only. She might return to the same time, but not necessarily to the same place.”
“I have to find her, wherever she is.” Lily woman looked terrified, on the verge of a breakdown.
“What is it, Lily?” Beverly said. “Is there something you haven’t told us?”
“I… oh, gods. Yes, there is.” Lily leaned against Cade for support. “When I was searching for her at the house, I found more than the glimmer glass. In my room, the secretary was unlocked and the compartment”—she looked at Beverly pointedly—“the compartment was open. The oracle ring was gone.”
“Great gods.” Beverly paled. “No.”
“Where did she go?” Cade said to Drang. “Did she tell you?”
“Some place I’ve never heard of,” Drang said. “She said she was going to find the island.”
“Avalos?” Max said.
“That’s it.” Drang brightened. “She said she had to speak to the abbess of Avalos.”
“That’s not a problem then,” Cissa said. “It’s impossible to get to Avalos unless the high gods allow it. She’s probably at the cliffs even now, standing beside Igdrasil and frustrated as hell.”
It felt as if Cissa had been there and done that herself. Max had the urge to touch her, somehow reassure her… of what?
&nbs
p; “But what if they do allow it?” Lily said.
“I have a feeling they will,” Max said. Everyone looked at him with varying expressions of horror and accusation. “What? If she has the oracle ring, I believe she’ll be allowed to see the abbess.”
Lily held on to Cade’s arms. “I don’t know how to get back,” she said. “I’ve tried. I’ve called for the Redux, but Velyn never comes.”
“I can go,” Max said.
“That’s right. I remember,” Lily said. “You and Mavis took me and Kaelyn to Avalos in the wagon when I was Igraine. We can all go in the wagon!”
“We can try,” Max said. “But I can never be sure who the island will allow in, even through my portal. We’d better limit it to Lily and Cade.”
“Sturm, Drang,” Morander said. “Help me unload the wagon and hitch Mavis up.”
“No, me. Me. I have to go.” Cissa’s eyes were wild. She stomped her foot and clasped Max’s arm, her fingernails digging into his rough skin. “I have to!”
The poor fairy was distracted beyond belief; it tore at his heart to see her so upset. “What is it, Cissa?”
“I… I can’t tell you,” she said. “I’m sorry. But I have to go.”
Max took her elbow and gently guided her to the wagon. “Then you’d better get in.” He handed her into the back where she joined Cade and Lily. Fleetingly, he thought how nice it would be if she sat up on the bench with him. But no matter.
After whispering in Mavis’s ear and promising her a treat of Avalos apples when they reached their destination, they were off. Cade and Cissa would likely not be accepted, but if rejected, they’d find themselves blown back to their homes, no harm done.
Lily, on the other hand, had been to Avalos once before in this life, and had lived there as Igraine. He was confident she’d make it through. If Lexi was on Avalos, at least one of her parents would be able to bring her home.
He guided Mavis to the closest goblin tunnel, and when the air was cool and smelled of the clean dirt and they were far beyond all sound or sign of above-ground activity, he gave the pony rein, and the world began to spin.
Soon he smelled the warm, apple-scented breezes that marked the island. Mavis brought them to a stop on the dirt road between Avalos’s freshwater lake and the main abbey, and Max turned around to check on his passengers.
“Are we here? Did we make it?”
The only one in the wagon bed was the red-haired queen of the Dumnos fae.
« Chapter 14 »
The Island
I. Lexi
“You are the Oracle now, my dear girl.” The abbess indicated the ring on Lexi’s hand. “And you will be the Oracle for the rest of your days.”
“It seems right, and what I was born to be,” Lexi said. “But why must the Oracle die when the ring comes off?”
“No one knows,” the abbess said. “In the time of the Pendragons, Merlyn created that ring to enhance his powers. He was self-important and delusional. He must have had his reasons, but as far as we know he never told anyone.” Then she laughed. “I do have a theory, however.”
“Tell me!”
“I think he meant to enchant the ring to die if ever it was stolen from his hand, but he got the wyrd backwards, the nincompoop.”
“That actually makes sense to me.” Lexi sat in a sort of hanging couch, her feet dangling. She faced the abbess who lay on her side in a duplicate contraption, propped up by pillows.
The chairs hung from the ceiling of a veranda that looked out on lush green lawns that rolled down to a small freshwater lake. The air was fresh, warm, and scented with flowers. Lexi was pretty sure this wasn’t heaven, but how could heaven possibly be any better?
The abbess, Fraelyn, bit into a slice of apple from a plate of fruits and scones on the cushion before her. Her long hair, a salt-and-pepper mix of coal-black and steel gray, was kept in place by a circlet of a silver and gold apple blossoms. She wore a pale green silk tunic. Her arms were bare, and though her skin was firm enough and her biceps were well defined, it was clear she was on the older side of age.
“There is no king in Dumnos for the Oracle to serve anymore,” Fraelyn said, “and the mundane world can’t see the mystic as well as it once did. You may find it hard to live there. But there will always be Avalos. You’ll have a home on the island whenever you want it. It’s my great hope that one day you’ll take your place here as abbess.”
“Do I have any special powers?” Lexi asked. “Now that I’m the Oracle?”
“Quite a few, I’m sure.” Fraelyn shrugged. “Can you turn yourself into a goose?”
“I never thought about it. But not likely.”
The abbess smiled indulgently, and Lexi knew she’d sounded childish. Not what she’d intended—though what had she meant by coming here? Nothing in particular, she realized now. She hadn’t been drawn to Avalos by a question but by raw need. She had read the word in Lydia Pengrith’s journal, and the very idea of the island had hooked her imagination and sparked a frisson of desire.
Avalos… A secret island, a safe haven to the persecuted wyrd in medieval times, yet forbidden to most—irresistible.
After leaving the love potion with Morander, Drang had taken her to a portal which led to a place near Mudcastle. There she’d used the lilac portal to get to Igdrasil and Tintagos Bay. She’d absently leaned against the world tree, and—independent of her intention or will—a bolt of pure energy had surged through the tree, coming from both heaven above and hell below, and infused her, body and soul, with… power? The life force? The energy that informs all things? She didn’t know.
She’d called for Velyn and the Redux. And he came. The boat had emerged from the mist, the beautiful man with tattooed crosses on his arms at its helm and six strong women at the oars. She’d transported instantly from Igdrasil down to the rocky shore and taken Velyn’s outstretched hand.
It had all felt so natural. It had never occurred to her that Avalos might reject her.
“In the usual things, your power will be enhanced,” Fraelyn said now. “Spells such those as I’m sure you read of in Lydia Pengrith’s journal—which, it must be said, the countess took much of her material from Kaelyn’s writings and all the credit too. Anyway, in addition to trifles like spells—”
“Do you call the Great Wyrding a trifle?” Lexi said.
“Great Wyrding!” The abbess scoffed. “My stinky right foot. For all the bother it brought to Dumnos, and might bring to the world, you may call it great. But yes, I do call it a bothersome trifle.”
“My dad is having a bear of a time with the Clad,” Lexi said. “I don’t understand much about it, but it’s to do with the wyrded iron.”
“Exactly,” the abbess said. “The Sarumen want to exploit that iron for the profit they can get out of it, no matter the harm they may do others. It was a sad day when the Bausineys lost control of the Clad.”
“I wish I could help,” Lexi said.
“Perhaps one day you might. But let me suggest a more contemplative way of life. For millennia, wyrding women, and men, have lived quiet, meditative lives here, away from the world. I see you wrinkle your nose. You’re young. You need to live first. Perhaps life on Avalos will better appeal in fifty years’ time.”
“Perhaps.” Lexi hadn’t lived one year. She couldn’t imagine fifty.
“I will admit being the abbess is mostly administrative. Not a lot of glory in it but necessary for the greater good. But the island is lovely, the weather always perfect, with fresh fruits and vegetables produced year round.”
True, it was lovely here. Lexi looked out at the grounds and the lake beyond. On the bridge to the lake, a hunched figure shuffled toward the center island, and she could swear it was Max. Without thinking, she pulled the scoping glass from her hidey pouch for a better look. It was him. But why?
“I see you have Igraine’s scoping glass,” the abbess said. “It was given to her by her teacher and guardian, Kaelyn, right here in this room. Another sig
n you belong on Avalos, perhaps.”
Lexi slipped the glass back into her hidey pouch, not wanting to explain that she’d pretty much stolen it. The ring was different. She knew it belonged on her hand. But just as surely, she knew the glass belonged to her mother, and she was ashamed for having taken it.
She changed the subject. “Tell me something about being abbess that’s fun.”
“Fun. Hm. Let me think. The abbess can communicate with the high gods.”
“You mean I could talk to Brother Sun and Sister Moon?”
“Exactly. You could intercede on behalf of all humanity, high and low, the important and powerful and, more importantly, the obscure and powerless.”
“Can you? Can you talk with Brother Son and Sister Moon? Could you ask them for a favor now?”
“I could,” said the abbess. “What do you have in mind? Don’t you already have everything your heart could desire?”
“Far from it,” Lexi said. “But this isn’t for me. This is for Max, the goblin. You know him. He’s the one who made the sword that’s held in the stone on the little island in the middle of the lake here.”
“Yes, I know the one.”
“He always does everything for everybody, and he never asks anything for himself. But inside Max is very sad. Even a goblin, and especially a goblin who is so good, deserves a little happiness.”
“And what is it that you want to ask of the high gods?”
“Only this. I want them to lift the goblin curse. I want them to make Max—and all the goblins—beautiful again.”
“You don’t ask much, do you, my dear?”
II. Cissa
Cissa followed an acolyte into the main abbey at Avalos and down the corridor. The judgment rolled off the acolyte in waves, but Cissa just lifted her chin high and said hmph. The last time she was here she’d met with the same prejudice against the fae. She hadn’t let it get in the way of her goal then, to find the fairy cup, and she wouldn’t let it now.
“It is a great pleasure to see you again, my dear Cissa.” The abbess was so kind, her smile so genuine, that Cissa believed her.