by Nina Smith
Three drops of blood fell on it. The Lord of the Gourd smeared the blood and the dirt into the shrivels and wrinkles, her eyes slowly closing while she mumbled under her breath.
Then she stopped. The silence went on for a full five minutes, until Flower couldn’t stand it anymore.
The Lord of the Gourd let out a long snore.
“What does it say?” Pumpkinhead yelled.
She started awake, drew herself to her full three feet and raised her head. She was the most regal thing Flower had ever seen while she looked over her people. “Gourd says we go with the Great Clip Clop,” she said. “Make new village and new crops in Dream.”
Then she sat down, curled her blankets around her, put her head down and resumed snoring.
Moving the Bloomin Fairies on for the rest of the day was no easy task, but Fitz did it. Flower secretly marvelled at how he recovered from his exhaustion and gently, patiently herded them all through the endless carrot fields, but she was determined not to admit to it. He was still an enemy of the king.
She stayed around the edges of the group and kept fairies from straying off, or getting distracted, or stopping for too long to dig carrots. She checked the sky every three minutes for signs of another attack, but no shadows fell. Even so, as the day wore on she grew anxious about the coming of nightfall. Moon Troopers must surely be on the march in search of them all by now.
It was late evening before she got the chance to tackle Fitz with the barrage of questions plaguing her. When he dropped into step beside her she started before he could even open his mouth to speak. “Where are we going to hide the fairies for the night?”
“I know a safe place.” He sounded tired.
“How are we going to get them to Dream? The longer we’re here the harder the Guild is going to look for them.”
“I’m afraid that’s the difficult part.”
“How? How is it difficult? Aren’t you going to use your sorcery?”
He shook his head. “Cutting a door into Dream is easy. The trick is getting it to go to the right part of Dream, because that world is enormous compared to ours. If we end up in the wrong place with a whole clan of Bloomin Fairies, they could be in more trouble than they ever dreamed.”
“I just hope you know what you’re doing.”
“I do. Listen Flower.” He lowered his voice. “Your key acts as a conduit between the worlds, yes?”
Flower closed a protective hand around the key. “Why do you want to know?”
“I need to know if it is possible somebody else could be using it to find you. Perhaps to haunt you and Nikifor, for want of a better word.”
“Certainly not!” Flower couldn’t even find the words to express her outrage. “The very idea.” She turned her back on him and walked away before he could ask any more awkward questions. The king would be very angry with her if she gave muse secrets away to his enemy. Of that she was quite sure.
Fitz led them unerringly into the corridor of rocky country between Quicksilver Forest and the carrot fields. The path looked so shabby and treacherous Flower never would have thought of going down it; but when they set their feet between the thorn bushes on one side and the pink-streaked boulders on the other, the track turned out to be perfectly respectable and well-trodden. It sloped down so gradually she hardly realised the rocks were getting higher until savage cliff faces loomed right overhead.
Fitz veered off the path and took them right through the centre of a loose, snarly bramble that scratched her face and hands. The Lord of the Gourd woke up and told Pumpkinhead off when a branch almost knocked her off her litter.
One the other side of the bramble yawned a big, dark cave mouth. The Bloomin Fairies streamed in without a second’s hesitation, already talking about food and passing the carrots they’d picked along the way between each other.
Flower followed them all inside, to find the cavern was big enough to fit them all in with space to spare. Better still, it was high enough for her and Nikifor to stand up straight.
Several women set to work lighting a fire in the centre. Once they were all in, Fitz and Nikifor rolled a huge wooden board made for the purpose across the doorway.
Flower tried not to be jealous that Nikifor had taken so quickly to Fitz. Enemy of the king or not, Fitz was a good influence on him. She would remind him later where his loyalties really lay.
She had no desire to talk to anyone right now, so she retired to the edge of the noisy mob to watch in silence. The day had been too long, and too intense, and Mudface’s insistence on being so–so different–had left her unsettled.
The fairies cooked up a huge vegetable soup in a pot produced from Shadow knew where. It must have been left in the cave. She ate just enough to keep her hunger at bay before curling up on the cold sand in a corner and allowing herself to drift into the familiar trance. She must not neglect her humans.
No. She was honest with herself in the moment before her eyes closed. She couldn’t resist the lure of the Freakin Fairy’s daughter who was not a fairy.
Just like that she stood on a staircase, right next to her pink-haired charge.
Hockey stick balanced on one shoulder and a backpack in her hand, Krysta looked remarkably pleased with herself. She leaned over the railings. “What’s that?” she called.
“I said, did you win?”
Flower leaned over the railings too, trying to see who the voice belonged to. The sound of it gave her the oddest sensation. She knew that voice.
“Yeah, we killed them!” Krysta called.
“You did what?” The voice rose an octave and came closer, but still nobody appeared.
Krysta sighed and dropped her head on her hands. “My mother,” she muttered, then raised her voice again. “It’s a euphemism, Mum. I just meant we trampled all over the other team. They didn’t even score a goal.”
“That’s great, sweetie!” The voice was much calmer this time.
“Crazy as a coconut.” Krysta clattered up the stairs.
Flower went in the opposite direction. She couldn’t help herself, even though she was supposed to stay with Krysta and see if she was writing yet. She had to find out who the voice belonged to.
She walked from the staircase to the nearest door, where an electric light burned and the smells of hot, savoury food drifted temptingly, reminding her of long forgotten pleasures. A proper home. A family.
Flower went into the kitchen. Krysta’s mother was in the far corner, by the stove, humming to herself. She was about five foot tall. Several long plaits swung down her back, almost to her knees, with shorter dreadlocks alongside them. She wore a long red skirt and a singlet, just like a human, but every movement was purposeful. Even the way she lifted the lid on a pot to sniff the steam coming out held the underlying controlled violence you only saw in a Bloody Fairy.
Flower’s breathing was shallow. Her heart thudded and she didn’t know why. She moved closer.
Something long and green and sinuous moved over the fairy’s shoulder. Flower flinched, thinking the woman was being attacked, but she didn’t seem to mind at all. Instead she put a hand under the snake’s head and lifted it carefully off her shoulders. “There now Sparkles,” she crooned. “I need to get this cooking done. You go play.” She gently placed the snake on the floor.
The snake slithered around Flower’s feet and disappeared.
Flower barely noticed, because she was staring at a smooth, pretty face she knew as well as she knew her own. Sure, the years had sunk lines around her eyes and sprinkled the tiniest bit of grey near her temples, but that face retained the same combination of innocence and violence she’d once found fascinating in the little Bloody Fairy, the one who was different, the one who’d fallen pregnant to the muse king, then died killing the vampire king.
Flower doubled over. The pain of the returning memories stabbed like a knife in her gut. Her entire brain threatened to go into meltdown. How could she have forgotten? How could she have forgotten so much? The Vampire Wars,
the rivers of blood, the Bloody Fairies ranged against the might of the vampire king, the camp, Nikifor holding off the hordes every night while they all waited for the return of the king with Hippy Ishtar, the fairy who defied her tribe to run away in search of–in search of–
Everything stopped there. Nothing. There was nothing. She let out a sound, what kind of sound she wasn’t sure. Supremely oblivious to her presence, Hippy hummed under her breath.
Flower clutched her head, took several deep breaths and righted herself. She had to get a grip. This was huge. Hippy Ishtar, alive. Her own memories flooding back. But why had they gone in the first place?
That was when she lost her grip on Dream. Instead she stood amongst ragged purple tents on a battlefield. She looked up into a pair of dark brown eyes so powerful, so deep they mesmerised her. A cold hand brushed the hair from her face and then rested on her cheek. The voice pierced the very depths of her mind.
“Go back to Shadow City. Stay there until I call you. Forget this unpleasant little war, my dear. And forget our little fairy friend. Forget.”
Blackness. Blackness so complete it seemed no light would ever pierce her eyes again.
Flower gasped like a swimmer breaking water and fought her way up from the blackness until she came awake in the cave, breathing hard. She scrambled to her feet.
The dying campfire shed just enough light to show the forms of slumbering fairies littered like pebbles around the fire. Flower picked her way through them until she found Nikifor stretched out near Fitz, fast asleep. She shook him awake. “Nikifor. Nikifor!”
He sat up, bleary and confused. “What is it? Are we being attacked?”
“No, no, I’ve just found out the most amazing thing! It’s Hippy Ishtar, she’s–”
Flower didn’t manage to get another word out. Fitz, moving much faster than someone his age should have been able to, leaped over to her, clapped one hand over her mouth and with the other, snapped the chain that held her key.
“Mudface,” he said.
Mudface scrambled over to them.
Fitz thrust the key at her. “Take this to Pumpkinhead. Don’t give it to him, just let him sleep talk near it. And don’t think about your book.”
Mudface took the key and hurried away.
Flower gave a squeal of outrage behind Fitz’s hand. The fairies around them stirred and sat up.
“Go back to sleep,” Fitz whispered. “Everything’s okay.”
“No it’s not okay!” Flower hissed. “What are you doing?”
Fitz put a finger to his lips. “Follow me,” he said. “Both of you. No talking.” He took a flaming branch from the fire and headed for the back of the cave.
Flower glanced at Nikifor, who just gave a sleepy shrug. They followed him.
At the back of the cave was a tunnel that led to another, smaller cave. Fitz crouched in there with his torch, his eyes never leaving Flower.
She sat across from him on the dirt floor, even though she was so mad she’d rather have kicked him. Nikifor yawned so hard his jaw cracked.
“Why did you take my key?” she hissed. “What are you thinking?”
Shadows played across Fitz’s grim face in the torchlight. “Hippy Ishtar is what?” his voice was hard.
“What?”
“You were about to tell Nikifor something. Tell him now.”
Flower swallowed hard, suddenly nervous. “Hippy Ishtar is alive.”
The colour drained from Nikifor’s face. “But how?”
“I don’t know! I’ve been working closely with one of my writers because she’s causing such a dreadful disturbance by not writing. I went to visit her tonight and I saw Hippy Ishtar. She’s Hippy’s daughter!”
Flower thought she heard Fitz give a tiny sigh. “I feared this might happen,” he said.
“But how is she alive?” Nikifor burst out.
“She was poisoned before she ever fought Rustam Badora that day,” Fitz said. “It was a slow poison. She fought and killed the vampire king, but by the time her sister reached her she appeared to be dead. The Bloody Fairies cured her by washing the poison from the wound, but she still slept like she was dead. After she awoke in her own tomb she decided to leave her tribe and take her child into hiding in Dream. It was the only way. Her secret must be kept.”
“But why?” Flower said. “Who is she hiding from?”
Fitz turned an inscrutable stare on her. “What happened when you saw her?”
Flower looked away from him. She didn’t want to admit he might be right about things, but there was no hiding from that fierce look. “I–I remembered things. I remembered her.”
“Why did you forget?”
“Somebody made me.” The words were like bitter, bitter barbs in her throat. “I remembered that too. He touched my face, here-” she pointed to her cheek “-and made me forget everything.”
“The Tormentor,” Nikifor whispered.
Flower gave him a look. “This was real.”
“So is his Tormentor,” Fitz said. “And it is this same man from whom Hippy Ishtar hides her daughter.”
“But-” Shock brought Flower to her feet. “But Hippy fell pregnant to the king! That is the king’s daughter! Our Princess! He will protect her!”
Fitz shook his head. “No,” he said. “He won’t.” He fixed Flower with jaded eyes that were both tired and implacable. “This secret is worth more than both of your lives combined. The entire future of Shadow, Muse, is now dependent on your absolute and complete silence. Nobody must know of the existence of Hippy and Krysta Ishtar.”
“But the king-”
“Swear to me on your loyalty to your king that you will say nothing to anybody of this, not even speak of it, or I swear to you on the memory of my own sister that you will not see morning.”
Flower stared at him, shocked to the core. The ferocity in the old man’s voice made her believe every word he said. If she made that oath, she’d have to keep it. Loyalty to the king was a muse’s very heartbeat.
Fitz’s voice gentled. “Swear this oath, Flower, and in time you will discover all. Perhaps you will even play a part in reuniting father and daughter.”
There was a touch of cynicism in the last few words, but Flower decided it was probably better to see where this took her than to risk having a sorcerer deciding he wanted her dead. Even if it did feel like she was wading deeper and deeper into someplace a muse simply should not go. “Fine. I swear on my loyalty to the king I won’t tell. Your secret is safe with me.”
“You too, Nikifor.”
“I swear on the life of my king I shall never tell.” He spoke without looking at either of them, wrapped up in some weary cynicism of his own.
Flower frowned, discomforted by her companion’s choice of oath. “May I have my key back now?”
“Of course.” Fitz gestured toward the tunnel. “Mudface will return it to you. But take care with it. You never know who’s watching you.”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Morning sunlight and cold, crisp forest air embraced the flight of the fugitives. Nikifor’s long legs took him far ahead of the Bloomin Fairies and their incessant noise to scout for danger, but no matter how hard he tried to keep busy, nothing could drown out the phantoms of his mind. Every bird call sounded like the crank of gears. When he came to a waterfall, he saw only a pipe pouring quicksilver into a huge funnel. Once he passed the skeleton of a rabbit and it made him think of the keys fusing the machine of death together like the bones of the muses.
He stumbled on a rock and fell. Alone in the forest, Nikifor buried his face in the wet grass. Tiny pebbles pressed into his skin. He dug his fingers into sandy soil and listened to birds screech in the canopy and insects scuttle past his hair. He tried to clear his mind. Think. He must think now, while the Tormentor was not with him, but his head was so full of the machine he couldn’t. It meant something bad, something terrible, but–but wait.
Nikifor grew still. He opened his eyes and looked through blades of gr
ass at the road ahead. The prisoners in the Freakin Fairy mines. The fetch guards. The Moon Troopers’ paranoia over missing quicksilver. That funnel into which poured a steady stream of the substance. A piece of the puzzle fell into place.
The ground under his face shivered, making the grass tremble. He pushed himself onto his elbows and looked down the road, but there was nothing there.
The Bloomin Fairies were still a ways behind with Flower and Fitz, so he crawled up the short slope near the forest path and found it cut away in a steep granite incline. At the base was a road made from the same pink-veined white rock he and Flower had followed out of Freakin Fairy country. Grass and paddocks rolled away to the horizon, green and warm under the morning sun. Oblivious blue butterflies flitted amongst the tiny white flowers.
The ground trembled like a gathering storm.
Nikifor leaned over the edge of the incline as far as he dared. A cloud of dust far back in the direction of the Freakin Fairy forest could only mean trouble. He settled down to watch, and wait for the Bloomin Fairies to catch up.
Mudface, who had somehow made her slow dark trudge through the forest outpace the rest of the pack by at least a league, stopped by his shoulder and sat down to rest. “What are you looking at?”
Nikifor pointed at the dust cloud, which had already doubled in size.
Mudface leaned over and looked. Then she crawled back to the road. Her running footsteps faded in the direction she’d come.
He watched until he could make out a few small shapes flying in the midst of the dust. No matter how many he killed, there were always more fetches.
Mudface returned with Fitz. They dropped down on either side of him and watched more shapes appear out of the dust; whatever was coming was big and heavy. It hit him all at once. “Quicksilver wagons by Shadow!” he yelled.
Mudface and Fitz both clapped their hands over his mouth, just moments too late.
“Sorry,” Nikifor whispered when they released him.