by Molly Ringle
Did this pointless gesture have anything to do with the fact that he found Larkin attractive? Or that he felt a strange reluctance to leave him and go back through the portal and close it, even though he would have to? Now that he knew how to get into Larkin’s Bower, what was he going to do with that information? All he had meant to do was search for more of Rosamund’s forgotten magic, not meddle with the most famous resting place on the island. Still, he stayed, lingering over his peculiar task.
As he stroked the handkerchief across the indentation on Larkin’s upper lip, feeling the warmth and suppleness of flesh through the cloth, the string holding the lava-flower bead slipped down his wrist. The wooden flower touched the prince’s mouth.
Larkin twitched, gasped, and began coughing in an explosion of dust.
Merrick yelped and skittered backward.
Panic flashed through his veins. Swear words jammed together in his throat.
Larkin sat up, still coughing, eyes screwed shut as he wiped at them with both hands. Merrick hopped forward and touched his face with the bead again, but this time it did nothing.
Larkin blinked and turned his watering eyes upon Merrick. His brows furrowed. “Who are you?”
“Shh.” Merrick waved his hands back and forth, looking at the dark glass door. “They’ll hear us. They’ll—they’ll put you back into the sleep.”
A cheap tactic, considering Merrick had just tried to do the same, but it made Larkin’s lips snap shut, and Larkin glanced at the glass door too.
Then he drew the iron sword in a lethal-sounding scrape of metal and swung the blade to point it at Merrick’s throat.
Merrick squeaked, but lifted his hands and went perfectly still.
The cold metal touched his Adam’s apple. Being half fae meant he disliked the touch of iron on his bare skin, though it didn’t hurt as much as it would for someone full-fae. He endured it.
Larkin kept the blade there, his gaze locked onto Merrick even as he slid his legs off the bier and dropped to the floor. He wobbled, seizing the edge of the bier with his other hand, then straightened. “Who are you, and what do you intend by entering here?”
His accent was strange. Irish was the closest thing Merrick could compare it to. Merrick had never thought much about it before, what English on a Pacific island would have sounded like in the late 1700s.
“I’m Merrick Highvalley. I kind of … got here by accident.”
“Highvalley, oh, indeed. Kin of Rosamund, I imagine.”
“Distant. Far distant. I never knew her.”
“Where is she?” The sword prodded harder. It wasn’t particularly sharp, but Merrick had little doubt the prince was adept at using it to beat someone to death. “Did she send you?”
“No, no. She’s dead. Disappeared, a long time ago. I found her records, that’s all, that’s how I got here.”
“She’s gone?” Larkin advanced, dust wafting off him with each movement, and Merrick retreated. “Are you certain?”
“Oh yes. Very certain.”
“She enchanted me without my consent. Did you know?”
“I wasn’t aware until today, when I found her journal. No one knew. At least, I don’t think anyone did.”
Larkin kept pushing Merrick backward. The vines touched his back and he halted.
Larkin’s circlet came loose and slid sideways on his head. Scowling, he pulled it off and tossed it into the corner of the room—all without lowering the sword from Merrick’s neck. The circlet clinked against the tiles, then fell still.
“Why did you wake me?” Larkin said.
“I didn’t mean to.”
“Then what did you mean? To take me hostage, I suppose; ransom me for gold from the national treasury.” The sword’s cold edge leaned harder on his throat.
“No! I—can we please go in there and talk?” Merrick waved his hand toward the portal above his head. “If the guards outside the door hear us, well, I don’t know what they’d do to you, but I would be in huge trouble.”
“And what is that to me? I belong here. You are an intruder.”
“I was trying to help you. Look, I freed you. Everyone’s left you enchanted for two hundred and twenty years, but I woke you up. You want to be awake, don’t you?”
Larkin’s eyes widened, and the sword’s pressure fell slack. “For how many years?”
Oh shit.
Merrick swallowed. He spoke with delicacy. “I’m going to go back in there. It’s Highvalley House, near Sevinee, where my sibling and I live. You can come if you want, and I’ll tell you what happened. Or you can stay, and bang on the glass door and get the guards’ attention, and see what the palace does. But I do know that if you tell them my name, they’ll come and arrest me. I’ll go to prison. They’ll shackle me so I can’t use magic. My sweet ten-year-old niece will be devastated. I’m begging you, please, don’t do that to me.”
Larkin lowered the sword. He wore a look of blank distress, and breathed shallowly through parted lips. His gaze moved past Merrick to the shimmering portal, then down to the mosaic tiles, then over to the glass door.
“I … will come speak with you.” He met Merrick’s gaze again. “But I demand my freedom throughout. I must be allowed to leave, to go where I wish, whether it be the palace or anywhere else.”
“Of course. Just come hear me out.”
After deciding Larkin wasn’t likely to strike him in the back with the sword, Merrick turned and pushed through the vines and scrambled up onto the mattress of the canopy bed. Beside him, a newly awakened historical figure climbed up too, and paused on hands and knees, looking around.
CHAPTER 7
LARKIN HARDLY DARED BELIEVE HE WAS AWAKE. How often, after all, had he fancied he had escaped, only to loop back to another nonsense dream scenario?
This occasion, however, felt startlingly real. The aches and tingles in his body as he moved, the unfamiliar eau de toilette this stranger wore, the raw sensation of dust shooting into his lungs when he had first inhaled—the feeling of inhaling at all! If he were indeed awake, and free at last of Rosamund’s magic, then he should feel joy.
However, if this were real, then it also meant more time had passed than Larkin could begin to comprehend. Two centuries?
Thus he followed the one available person who offered an explanation: this slender and disheveled Merrick Highvalley, who at least did not seem inclined to kidnap him, and appeared in fact as bewildered as Larkin.
Upon climbing through the vines into the next room, he could not tell with certainty whether this was indeed Highvalley House. Larkin had visited Rosamund’s country estate near Sevinee on a formal occasion or two, as had the rest of the royal family, but he remembered little about it.
Merrick clicked a bracelet bead against the nearest post, and the portal closed itself up into a headboard. They crouched side by side on the mattress, each reaching out to lay a hand on the wood.
“Do you think they’ll be able to tell from the other side where this goes?” Merrick asked. “I’m terrified they’ll track me down.”
“If Rosamund designed it, they shan’t even know a portal exists there.” Larkin’s tone was sour.
“I suppose if no one knew it was here all these years … ”
“Two hundred and twenty years.” The panic threw itself about within him, a creature with slicing wings. “That was the figure, was it not?”
Merrick drew a rectangular black object out of his pocket and nodded. He stayed upon his knees on the mattress like one seeking forgiveness. “A little longer, in fact. Today is March eighteenth, 2020.”
Twenty twenty. Larkin tried to say the numbers. His tongue failed after the first consonant.
Merrick touched the black rectangle, and it lit up. Was he a matter-witch, then? He touched the glow a few more times, then turned the illuminated side to show Larkin.
It appeared to be a tiny picture of the front of a newspaper, so bright it stung Larkin’s pupils. Eidolonian Mirror was the newspaper’s titl
e, with lettering about a political scandal below it, but Larkin soon noticed what Merrick meant to show him: Mar. 18, 2020, it read at the top of the page.
“Well,” Larkin whispered. “As you say, then.”
“I’m sorry. I don’t know what to tell you. When I read what Rosamund had done to you, I thought someone should rescue you, but … ”
“How is … how am I to … ”
“The modern royals are still your family, if that helps. I mean, they’ve been descended from the same line all this time.”
“But I will not know them anymore. I will not know anyone.”
Larkin slid his legs off the bed and stumbled to the window. Some miles distant, at the bottom of the forested hill upon which Highvalley House stood, a city glowed in the night, sparkling like unearthly jewels. Larkin rubbed the glass with his sleeve, sure he was seeing some illusion. “No lantern glows so brightly. Only the lights of fae or witches, but surely there would never be so many at once. What is it?”
“Sevinee.” Merrick came to join him. “That’s how it always looks at night.”
“Sevinee is but a village, not more than five hundred inhabitants.”
“It’s more like fifteen thousand now. And those are electric lights. Technology—inventions—not magic. Listen, um, it’s really important you don’t tell anyone I was responsible for waking you. Please.”
“Fifteen thousand? ‘Technology’?” The scientists had spoken of harnessing electricity, though he scarcely thought they would succeed.
A droning buzz brought his glance up. A red light blinked in the sky, marking the passage of some flying creature or device. His hand flew to his side to grip his sword.
“It’s all right,” Merrick said. “Just a plane. Airplane. It can’t hurt us. They can’t even see us.”
“Not fae?” The light pulsed on and off as it moved across the night sky. Sweat had broken out all over him.
“Not fae. A machine.”
The light continued on its way, the droning noise fading. Larkin made his fingers release the sword. “Air conveyance have … become more advanced, then.”
“Very much so. I guess in your time you had air surreys? We still have those too, for the island. But even if it were fae, it wouldn’t be anything to worry about.”
“No indeed? Do they not still attack?”
“Oh, no, nothing like they did in the 1700s. Just the occasional person who gets enchanted or disappears if they cross the verge. Nothing worse. The truce has … held.” Merrick’s tone wobbled into uncertainty.
Chills raced across Larkin’s body once more. “The truce established through my sleeping spell.”
“Yeah.” Merrick gazed out the window, his eyes wide.
“Sacred Spirit. Is Ula Kana then awakened as well?”
“Shit. I hope not. She’s been asleep in the fae realm since 1799. I only woke you up. But … ”
“But the agreement, the binding of the spell, ensured that neither of us could be awakened without waking the other. Or so I was told.”
Upon absorbing that notion, both men looked outward, searching the forest and sky, but nothing stirred in the darkness. All the same, Larkin put his hand upon his hilt again.
“Well,” Merrick said, “I’ll see if there’s any news.” He sounded shaken.
As well he should. None who had seen Ula Kana, nor even heard of her actions, could feel otherwise.
While Merrick lit up the black object he held, Larkin examined a dark thing that rested in front of the house, with four squat wheels and a metal shell shining under a porch light. A carriage? He had seen these in his dreams, trundling down eerily smooth roads under their own power, no horses to pull them.
This machine-lit world might as well have been an alien planet. It horrified him even if one put aside the question of Ula Kana, which one couldn’t. The edges of his vision began filling with gray sparks. The glow of Sevinee tilted.
Merrick Highvalley took hold of his arm, impertinently. Larkin glared at him. Merrick let go and asked, “Are you all right?”
Larkin blinked to clear the gray sparks, then reached out to seize Merrick’s wrist, not near as gently. “Are you a witch, like Rosamund? How did you do this?”
“Only an endo-witch. Not like Rosamund, not as powerful as that.”
“Yet you had the power to wake me. Can you not correct this, undo what you’ve done? Send me back!”
“To sleep?”
“No, to 1799!”
“I can’t. That’s … time travel’s impossible. I could only wake you up using the charm she made, and I can’t even undo that.”
“You mean to tell me I must simply make do in a world two centuries past my own?” Larkin tightened his grip till Merrick cringed. “You shall restore me to where I belong.”
“I can’t!” Merrick yanked his wrist free. “I’m sorry. Really. I had no idea any of this would happen. I just—found the portal and went in, then I realized it was you, and I was … ” He bowed his head and fidgeted. “Wiping the dust off your face, because it seemed like a nice thing to do, and the bead touched you … ”
“Wiping the dust off my face?” Larkin repeated in incredulity.
“Sorry.”
Larkin’s legs felt weak, his mouth dry, his body neglected. Every time he moved, furthermore, a seam ripped somewhere in his clothing. He leaned against the wall and examined his decaying sleeve. When he lifted his foot, he found his shoe falling apart into moldering scraps—shoes of the finest deerskin, sturdily made and expertly stitched when he had put them on in 1799. He ran a hand over his face, felt sweat and grime, and grimaced at the dirt that came off on his fingers.
“I am indeed filthy,” he said. “And thirsty. And everything I’m wearing is falling to pieces.”
“How about I let you wash and have something to drink, and I’ll find you some clothes, and then … we need to talk about what to do.”
“Indeed.” Larkin pulled a bit of leaf out of his hair. “For in the morning, the guards will open the curtain upon the bower and see that I’m gone, and what then?”
“What then. What I’m hoping is to avoid jail. What you’re hoping, I don’t know.”
“I? I only wished to be free. Of all of this. Witches, magic, fae, the entire cursed island.” But to lead a free life in this century … how? He dragged his attention back to Merrick. “I shall at least attempt to keep you out of jail, as recompense for saving me. On that you have my word.”
“Thank you.” Merrick spoke it on an exhalation of relief, but worry still tightened his face. “The bathroom’s down here. Just please keep quiet so we don’t wake up my sibling and niece.”
Larkin followed him out of the bedroom and into a grand although untidy library. A rabbit twice the size of a terrier was browsing along the floor, and Larkin shot it an alarmed look on his way past, but made no comment. Of all the strange things happening to him tonight, that hardly rated among the strangest.
Indeed, he could only conclude he had woken from one nightmare to find himself inside a worse one.
CHAPTER 8
MERRICK REFRESHED THE EIDOLONIAN Mirror’s page as they approached the bathroom. “There’s nothing here so far about you being awake, or about Ula Kana.” He spoke in a near-whisper to avoid waking up Cassidy and Elemi. “But I guess it’s only been, what, ten minutes. We’ll wait and see.”
He flicked on the bathroom light and turned to Larkin. No longer brandishing his sword, the prince looked haunted and lost, with his dirt-streaked face and faded tatters.
Larkin’s gaze took in the tub, sink, toilet, towels. “I shall wash. And a change of clothing would be much appreciated, if you have it.”
“I’ll find something. Now, um … few things to explain.”
Someone from 1799 would have little clue, Merrick guessed, regarding many of the workings of indoor plumbing. He led Larkin into the bathroom, took a deep breath, and launched into a three-minute introduction to hot and cold running water, flush toilets,
toilet paper, shampoo, liquid soap, dental floss, light switches, toothbrushes (he found a fresh one for Larkin), and deodorant (plenty in the cabinet, since their perfume company made some). Larkin listened with his lips shut, his gaze moving from each item to Merrick’s face, absorbing the information as if this were a crucially important diplomatic briefing.
“I believe I understand,” he said after Merrick’s explanation. He nodded toward the door. Merrick was clearly being dismissed.
Merrick stepped into the hall. “I’ll bring some clothes.”
“Thank you, Highvalley.” His accent spun it into Hoi-valley, making the name sound strangely ancient. Larkin shut the door softly. A few seconds of silence, then the water in the sink turned on. Then off, then on again—a test of what Merrick had instructed, perhaps.
Staring at the line of light beneath the door, Merrick staggered backward until he bumped against the balcony railing.
He had awakened Prince Larkin. Prince Larkin was in his house, was his responsibility for the night, was going to be sitting down for a serious talk with him.
He had possibly also awakened Ula Kana, which was too horrible to process. He wouldn’t even know until she showed up to start setting cities on fire, or until word arrived from the fae realm—both of which could happen any moment. Or it could take a month. Time moved unpredictably in the fae realm. There were no newspapers or phones or other media over there either; and though the various territories each had leaders, there was no central government or infrastructure. The fae visited each other and found things out, if they cared to know. Humans had to send in ambassadors if they wanted to learn something from the other side of the verge, an unsafe trip best undertaken by government-authorized individuals.
But if you had fae friends, they could ask acquaintances for news through the grapevine.
He texted Sal.
Merrick: Hi Sal – can you please call me as soon as you’re awake? I have something important to ask. Has to do with magic and some of the things we were talking about yesterday. All safe here though, don’t worry. Thanks