“It won’t hold,” a voice said behind us. Merlin appeared in the doorway, then stepped out onto the lawn to join us. He seemed too calm, but then again, he would probably just reincarnate as soon as the robots destroyed the Mansion. “In fact, a hundred years of work will probably only buy us a few minutes.”
“And then what?” Sara Lee asked.
“We die.”
Die. The word seemed to echo with every shot. The robots fired again, and this time, a small piece of the protection spell fell from its place and careened to the ground where we stood. Like a falling star, it blazed its glory all the way to the lawn and then, sputtering, went out. In a minute, the robots would create a hole large enough to fly a ship through, and then everything would end. Die. Die. Die.
Whatever stubborn, furious thing that had awoken when Sara Lee told me she loved me suddenly disappeared. If I was about to die, then nothing I did now mattered.
Not caring anymore about being a princess or a Dramanian or even a girl, I took Sara Lee’s hand. The minute we touched, I knew I’d been trying not to touch her for so long that I’d convinced myself I didn’t want to. She turned to me, surprised, but she didn’t pull her hand away.
“What about duty and dishonor and all of that stuff you said earlier?” she asked.
“A bunch of nonsense.”
“Really? You’re not just saying that because we’re about to die?”
“Of course I’m only saying that because we’re about to die. But that doesn’t mean it’s not true.”
A second piece of the spell fell, and then another, and then another. Soon they littered the front yard, and Merlin, Sara Lee, and I were surrounded with the sputtering remains of spells.
“Wait a minute.” Sara Lee dropped my hand and pulled out some kind of round, egg-shaped stone. At the sight of the object, Merlin’s eyes grew wide and hopeful.
“What is that?” I asked as Merlin took the stone in his palm.
“It belongs to the Mother,” Merlin said, practically whispering. Over the drone of robot ships and fired shots, I could barely hear him. “How did you get this?” he asked Sara Lee.
She rubbed her forehead. “I barely remember it now. I entered her cave, and she told me something about being a Secret Keeper, and then I fell face-forward into the water. A bunch of images appeared, but now I can’t remember them.”
“Oh yes you can,” Merlin said as he stepped toward her. Pressing one palm on her forehead and one on the back of her head, he closed his eyes and hummed some kind of spell. Soft blue light haloed her head and began to spin.
“Yes,” Merlin whispered. “I understand now.”
“Understand what?” I asked, but they both ignored me.
“The secret was a message for you,” Sara Lee told Merlin without opening her eyes. “I understand now too.”
“What are you talking about? Someone tell me what’s going on—”
“There’s no time,” Merlin hushed me. “I must send you back now, before the robots break through. Who knows what they could do with such powers.”
“Send us back where?”
“Close your eyes and put your hand over the stone,” Merlin ordered. “You will understand what you must do when you arrive.”
I followed his orders, albeit angrily.
“Good. Now close your eyes, and don’t be afraid when things start to… change. You may be sick on arrival, but the feeling will pass. When you’re ready to return, find one of the Mother’s Secret Keepers. They will know how to send you back.”
Blood pumped through my body. I could not see Merlin performing the spell, but I could feel the fingers of it wrapping themselves around my body and squeezing tightly. The world spun, and I grew dizzy. Somewhere above me, I heard a robot ship break through the spell with a crash, and pieces of the spell showered the ground around us.
“One thing before you go,” Merlin whispered, and I could hear him despite all of the noise above us. “Tell my mothers that I love them.”
The next second, we were somewhere else.
Chapter SEVENTEEN
SKELLY
I REACHED the lawn where Merlin stood just after Sara Lee and Nimue disappeared. One minute they were there, with Merlin humming an enchantment and casting a blue light over them; the next minute, they were gone.
“Where did you send them?” I asked frantically. “Are they going to be okay?”
“Yes, child. I’ve never trusted anyone with a task as much as I trust those two.”
He took my hand in his wrinkly one, and together we looked up at the pieces of spell falling from the sky, soon to bury us under their weight.
“You’re not going to run?” I asked, my voice cracking. “Time jump or space jump or whatever you do to get away from these machines?”
“There’s no point,” Merlin said. Unlike mine, his voice was calm. “Eventually, they will find me again. I’m old now, and tired of running. Let the robots have their victory today; yesterday, they will fall.”
I was too tired to protest any longer or make sense of his mysterious words. The air was hot from the robots’ lasers, and dusty from falling debris. Wanting the last thing I saw before death to be anything but my people falling from the Mansion, I removed the Uncanny Tree leaves from my pocket and basked in their purple light one last time.
“The ones who cannot lie nor grow will find their answers in myrddin and the leaves of the Uncanny Trees.” I whispered the words to myself, but when Merlin heard me, he turned and looked at what I had in my hand. His eyes glowed purple, and then he startled me by emitting a full-belly laugh.
“Why are you laughing?” I asked, finding the energy to be affronted. “I saw the runes in the Cave of the Mother, and I’m trying to piece together the part about myrddin—”
Merlin cut me off with another laugh. Maybe he’s going crazy from the stress of the end of the world, I thought. Maybe I am.
“This explains everything,” he said, more to himself than to me. “Why you refused to pick a robe, even at such a young, impressionable age. How you found the Cave of the Mother. The coincidence of all of us ending up on Balu together to make a united stand.”
“What explains everything?” I demanded, too angry to care about the giant piece of sky that fell only a few feet away from us.
“Don’t you see? The runes weren’t saying myrddin; they were saying Myrddin. As in Merlin. As in me.”
“You? But why would the runes lead someone who can’t lie or grow to you?”
Merlin knelt down so that he could look me squarely in the eye, which took a great deal of time considering the age of his knees. “So that I can tell them what they probably, deep down, already know. You, my little Skelly, are a fairy.”
A fairy. The idea was preposterous, and yet I knew it to be true. I had guided our ship the way fairies guided travelers in the woods, or saved their goddaughters, or advised good kings—by changing their destiny.
Another piece of the spell crashed to the ground, and then another, and another. There was no time to ask more questions; in a minute, we would be buried alive.
“Please,” I begged Merlin, “if Sara Lee and Nimue do change what happened and we never go to the Cave of the Mother, I don’t want to forget this. I don’t want to live my whole life wondering why I am the way I am.”
“Don’t worry,” Merlin said as he touched his hand to my forehead the way he had to Sara Lee. “You won’t.”
My eyes closed involuntarily. The last thing I remember, before the spell fell and everything went dark, was the sound of the humming of the Uncanny Trees.
PART TWO
Chapter EIGHTEEN
SARA LEE
WHEN I opened my eyes, I was in a place much like Draman. The nighttime landscape contained desert, cacti, and the rare animal scurrying in the brush, and no one could be seen for miles in all directions. Above us, the stars shone in uncorrupted glory.
“What is this place?” Nimue asked as she rubbed her eyes and sa
t up.
“I don’t know for sure,” I said, looking up at the sky and evaluating the constellations, “but if I had to take a guess… Earth?”
“Earth?” She stood up quickly. “You can’t be serious! But Earth was crawling with robots and skyscrapers and whatever else the humans left. How can this be the same planet?”
I wasn’t sure how to break the news to her gently, so I didn’t even try.
“Merlin sent us back in time,” I explained. “My best guess is this is around 2015, give or take a decade. Merlin said ‘tell my mothers I love them,’ but he didn’t mention anything about himself, which leads me to think this is the few short years Dena and Allanah lived together before they found Merlin in the cave.”
Nimue lay back down and put a hand over her eyes.
“This can’t be happening,” she told herself. “The robots broke through the protection spell and one of those pieces hit me in the head. Soon I’ll wake up, and everything will be okay—”
“Okay? How could everything be okay? The robots were going to hunt us down one by one and slaughter us, Princess. Merlin sent us here because he had no other choice. Trust me, sorcerers don’t take time travel lightly, which is why that stone spent so much time with the Mother in her cave.”
“Fine. So what are we doing here, then?”
I exhaled in a way that made it obvious how thick she was being without actually saying it. That would have been treason, after all.
“We need to stop the robots before they even leave Earth,” I said, trying to make my voice sound patient. “If we can enlist Dena and Allanah to help us, then maybe they can figure out the specifics of exactly how we’re supposed to do that.”
“Great.” Nimue was slightly more hopeful. “So where are they?”
Naturally, she had found the one kink in my plan immediately.
“How am I supposed to know?”
We both stared out into the black night. In the distance the lights of a single town winked through the trees like predators’ eyes, but from the little I knew about Dena and Allanah, they would not live there.
“Wait a minute.” I turned quickly and began feeling at the desert ground.
“What are you looking for?”
“Just get down here and look with me,” I ordered, forgetting about the treasonous tone in my excitement.
“Fine.” The princess hoisted up her royal red robe and sank to her knees, then joined me in my search. “Now that I’m getting my only robe dirty, can you explain what we’re looking for, Maidservant?”
Ouch.
Only a princess could belittle someone so quickly. Though I could have volleyed an insult back at her, I didn’t; I knew Nimue as well as I knew myself, and though she seemed like a vicious dog protecting a bone, she was really just tired and scared. Not only had her father been taken by the robots, but we had just watched our only hope fall apart under the robots’ relentless lasers. Plus, she had held my hand, whether friendly or more than that, which made her vulnerable in a way I knew she hated.
For a solitary princess who spent most of her time alone in a tower by choice, it had been a big day.
Though no objects lay in the path of my hand, my fingers connected with something solid.
“Here,” I said as I pressed my palm higher against the invisible wall.
“What do you mean? There’s nothing there.”
“Merlin wouldn’t have sent us back in time and across space just to have to hunt down his mothers. I bet you he dropped us right in front of their house. Think about it: when your wife has green skin, you can’t exactly let her garden without some precautions.”
Finding something that felt like a door, I knocked hard three times. The sound of rustling drew closer, and then a surprised “Who is it?” followed.
“You wouldn’t believe us if we told you. But we’re friends of the Igreefees and the Council, and we need your help.”
Two women whispered behind the door, and then suddenly the whole house became visible when they opened it. The house was even more destitute than a Dramanian peasant’s shack from the outside, but through the door, the rooms looked warm and welcoming after our journey.
“Wow,” Nimue whispered. “I’ve heard so much about you two, and here you are, just like everyone said.”
Allanah looked at Dena and shrugged. The wizard’s hair was even redder and wilder than the stories, and Dena’s skin even greener. They were both stunning women, and I instantly had crushes on both of them. Most of the Dramanians had my pale skin and black hair, and they looked sickly compared to the colorful vibrancy of these two wives; only Nimue, with her royal gold hair, could match their beauty.
“Come in,” Dena said. She moved aside to let us pass, and we gratefully moved to the kitchen and collapsed in the chairs there.
“Would you like some sweet strawberry tea?” Allanah asked.
Not knowing what sweet strawberry tea was or even what a strawberry was, we agreed. Dena placed two tall glasses of a pink drink in front of us, and I eagerly took my first gulp. Then, to my dismay, I spit it back into the glass. The taste was foul, like shoving a handful of sugar into my mouth and being forced to chew.
“Delicious,” I lied with a grimace.
Nimue, learning from my mistake, only took a tiny sip. Though she choked the sugary liquid down, she could not hide her dislike.
“I don’t think dragons can stomach strawberries,” Nimue explained apologetically as she pushed her glass away, “whatever they are.”
“You’ve never had strawberries?” Dena looked at us sharply. “Where did you say you were from, exactly?”
“We didn’t.” I took a deep breath. “Princess Nimue and I are from a planet far away called Draman. Our race is half-human, half-dragon, and we lived on Draman in uninterrupted peace until robots from this land came looking for… someone very important to you. That person, once we found him, helped send us back in time to stop the robots from ever being created in the first place. If we don’t destroy them in your time, they will kill everyone in ours.”
Dena and Allanah shared a look that didn’t take a mind reader to translate.
“And this person who is so important to us? His name is…?”
“Mani,” Nimue said too quickly. Either she understood without me saying anything that we could not tell his parents that he was Merlin—or else he would never run away to the Council, find Lup, be accidentally transformed by the sorceresses, and become the great wizard Merlin who had sent us back in time—or she was just cautious.
“And how do we know this Mani?”
“He’s your son.”
Dena’s skin went a whole shade lighter, her equivalent of pale. Allanah put her glass down on the table with a smack, then looked at her hands as though she had never seen them before.
“Our… son?” she asked, her voice trembling. “But how—”
“Adopted son,” Nimue rushed. “You’ll meet his mother as she’s about to die, and she will give you instructions on how to find him. Trust me, I’ve been tracking down tales about Mani for a long time. He finds a man named Merlin—you may have heard of him—and the two end up saving everyone. Merlin’s the one who sent us back, with Mani’s help. He wanted us to tell you he loves you, by the way.”
“Our son,” Dena echoed after Allanah, neither seeming to take in much of what we were saying by that point. “Oh, Allanah, it’s everything we’ve ever hoped for.”
“We know this is a lot to accept,” I said gently, “but right now your son is in a lot of danger. If we don’t figure out how to stop whoever created the robots, then not just your son but your entire races will be extinguished. Please, help us with this mission.”
“Of course we’ll help,” Allanah said.
“Just like that?” Nimue and I exchanged a glance. “You don’t need evidence or something?”
“Honey, I found out about magic in the midst of a crisis just like this one. King Roland—who was supposed to be dead, by the wa
y—somehow found a way to control all of the earth dragons with a spell. I was the first witch to produce a dragon from the Egg, and I was the first person from the Mansion to also join the Igreefee. Along the way I had my share of ‘the entire race will be extinguished’ moments, and if everyone had stopped and asked for evidence, those moments might have become forever. So just tell us what part we need to play in your plan, and we’ll do it.”
“Thank you. But….” How could I say that we didn’t have a plan? Not even a primary suspect? “Maybe we should start on this tomorrow, after everyone is rested. We can tell you what we know about the robots, and you can tell us who else we might need to recruit.”
“Excellent plan.” Allanah rubbed sleep from her eyes. “Dena, would you show our guests to the extra bedroom? I want to make a few calls to certain allies.”
Dena led us up the rickety old stairs to the bedroom that would soon become the living space of the great Merlin. Unfurnished with much besides a metal bed, scratched wooden dresser, and beat-up rocking chair, the room was a blank canvas just waiting for Merlin’s creative hand. Maybe he would even hang a picture of the night sky—of the constellations where one day he would carry his people from danger.
Wait a minute.
As soon as Dena left us with extra toothbrushes and towels, I sweetly said good night and then closed the door quickly. Nimue had already collapsed backward on the bed, not bothering to remove her dusty clothes or shoes. Typical princess.
“Nimue, I just realized something.”
“What?” she asked, disinterested. Her eyes were closed, and she had probably already begun to drift into sleep.
“If Mani never meets the robots after his awakening to Merlin, then he never takes his people to space. And if the robots never come to Draman to look for him, then you never fly their spaceship to Balu. Dawn and Bando never soar by at the exact second that Skelly and I escape from our planet’s atmosphere, so the child and I have nowhere to go except deeper into the unknown of space.”
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