“Yeah?”
“Back at the palace when we were in Nadia’s study with Arian . . . Something happened to me. I just . . . I don’t know. It was like I lost control for a minute. All that anger I had kind of took over. I almost used my magic to rip him in half with those curtains.”
“Does it matter?” Daniel asked. “You didn’t actually do it.”
“But part of me felt like I wanted to,” I asserted. “And I very well might have if you hadn’t intervened.”
Daniel stopped and looked me in the eyes. “Knight, relax. You wouldn’t have done it.”
“How do you know?”
“Because I know you. So seriously, stop worrying about it. You weren’t yourself.”
“Yeah,” I admitted, “but that’s what worries me.”
“Guys!” Jason called from ahead. “Come check this out!”
Daniel, Lucky, and I picked up our pace and joined the others. Our friends were standing in a large clearing, staring upward.
At the center of the clearing was an epic tree that was so mighty in width and height it would give most buildings a run for their money. What was more intriguing, however, was the beautiful mansion at the top of the tree. It was perched there like a birdhouse, the branches of the tree woven around its exterior to keep it in place.
I didn’t know what to say. And I continued to not know what to say a second later when a golden flash of light erupted in front of us.
While I may not have had words for the occasion, the woman who suddenly appeared before us certainly did.
“It’s about time,” she said.
My eyes widened to the size of saucers.
The woman looked about thirty-five. She had skin the color of brown sugar. Her eyes were dark, but warm, and her fluffy hair curled around her shoulders. She wore a teal zip-up jacket and a pair of loose gray sweatpants.
I was totally against fainting or any other kind of damsel-esque behavior. But if there was ever a time to pass out from shock, it would’ve been right then and there. This was the woman from my dreams.
“The dragon has to stay down here, I’m afraid,” she told us as she stepped closer. “I don’t exactly have a front door he can fit through.”
Before explaining any further, she closed her eyes and clenched her fists—causing a golden aura to envelop us.
“Wait, hold on a sec,” Blue started to say.
But she was cut off. Another flash of light consumed our group. An instant later we found ourselves staring down at the clearing from five hundred feet above. We were standing on the front porch of the tree mansion.
I looked down at Lucky, who seemed upset to have been left behind. He roared when he saw me and I waved to assure him we were all right. “It’s okay, boy. We’re fine. Just wait there.”
He roared again but flopped down for a rest. I turned back to face our hostess. “You’re . . .”
“Elizabeth Henley Lenore,” the woman said, extending her hand in welcome. “But you kids probably know me as the Author.”
kay, this is weird.
The Author is making us tea and coffee in her tree mansion while the five of us sit in her living room. I’m not sure there’s anything I could’ve done to prepare myself for this moment.
The living room was huge and filled with an assortment of leather couches, knickknacks, paintings, and wildlife. Across from me was a huge aviary. Despite the fact that its door was open, the colorful birds did not fly away. They flitted about happily inside.
Staring at me from the opposite end of the room were three black cats perched on shelves set into alcoves in the wall. Every other section of the mansion’s wall space was covered in hundreds of beautiful oil paintings. These were not paintings of fruits or flowers. Aside from a few landscapes, most were of people. I wasn’t sure why, but the paintings made me feel a bit uncomfortable.
I saw one where a dashing, dark-haired man with curly locks and mischief in his eyes was arguing with a woman with long black hair. Focusing on her regal features and pale skin, I realized I’d seen her in one of my dreams. She had been surrounded by green glass and had a ball of fire levitating in her hand. Here, though, there was no fire. But the background was a pale shade of green, leading me to believe the settings were the same.
The painting next to it was of a boy. He was about twelve or thirteen and had blond hair. He sat high in a tree and stared out at the ocean. It was night, and the moon’s glow cast a mystical light on his fair hair.
Beside that painting was a vivid rendering of a gorge. The colors were rich reds and oranges, but there was a black streak across the sky that looked like a crack had formed in the heavens.
I looked around and continued admiring the works of art. There was a blonde woman in a pink dress wearing a golden tiara; a ballroom full of girls in gorgeous red gowns; a curly haired brunette lying face down in the snow surrounded by men in black uniform; and . . .
Natalie Poole.
I stood from the couch, drawn to the painting like a ghost, my boots pressing delicately into the periwinkle carpet.
Natalie’s image was life-size, and she looked about eighteen. She was holding hands with Ryan Jackson—a sunset creating a glare of light between them. There was love there that was undeniable.
I could tell by the style of artwork that the same artist who’d painted this had drawn the sketch of Natalie in the file from Fairy Godmother Headquarters and Arian’s bunker.
“Who are they?” Jason asked as my friends came to stand beside me.
“Natalie Poole and Ryan Jackson.”
“The girl you’ve been dreaming about and the guy she’s supposed to fall in with?” Jason clarified.
“Yeah.” I nodded. “I—”
I stopped.
In an adjacent hallway, I saw another painting. A painting of me.
My friends and I moved wordlessly toward the hall. It was lined with as many paintings as the living room. This first one was of me in the Capitol Building, gazing up at the blue sapphire chandelier I’d discovered there. The paint representation of me stared up at the enchanting light fixture with as much awe as real me stared at her image now.
The next painting showed Blue and I in the banquet hall of Lady Agnue’s. We were eating waffles and talking about something excitedly. My hair was much shorter, about shoulder-length.
Following that came a painting of Daniel and I in a forest. We were fighting a dozen men whose earthy garb led me to believe they were magic hunters.
The five of us turned the corner and my heart almost stopped. We had entered a huge studio. There were tables full of paints and watercolors and pastel chalk. Half-finished paintings stood on easels throughout the space while blank canvases were stacked in the corner like mountains.
The shocking part, however, was that adorning the studio’s three-hundred-foot walls were a good number of renderings featuring me as the subject.
The moment we’d rounded the corner I’d seen my face looking down on me. It was a familiar scene—me falling through the sky in armor, terror in my eyes, Pegasi darting about in the background. It looked like the day Blue and I had gone undercover and entered the boys-only Twenty-Three Skidd tournament in Adelaide—the day I’d gotten my prologue prophecy.
I recognized other familiar scenes. Daniel and me furniture-surfing through lava tidal waves in the Cave of Mysteries; Lenore and me arguing in her office; Jason and Blue sitting in a crimson booth on the magic train, lecturing me. The list went on.
Only about half these paintings contained familiar scenes, though. The others were of experiences we’d yet to live.
I stared at a watercolor of me standing in a small boat with Daniel. The vessel was simple wood and was surrounded on all sides by foreboding mist.
The clinking of dishes made us all spin around.
“Let’s adjourn back in the living room, shall we?” the Author said, nodding back the way we’d come. Her hands held a tray of steaming cups. “There’s not really a lot of s
itting room in here.”
We began to follow the mysterious woman. I noticed Daniel pause. His eyes were locked on an unfinished piece of art. When I approached the easel I recognized both girls in the rendering. The first was Kai. Her face had been imprinted in my mind since Daniel had shown me her picture in his pocket watch.
The other girl in the picture was me.
We weren’t doing anything of interest—just standing there facing each other. But there was some sort of haze in the background that looked like weird clouds with faces. The image caused me to shiver.
“Guys?” Blue called from the hall.
We turned to follow her. Daniel flicked his eyes to me as we walked. “Not a word,” he murmured.
My friends and I sat down on the same couches and chairs as before.
“You’re surprised, aren’t you?” the Author said as she joined us, placing herself on a leather armchair.
“Um . . .” Blue bit her lip. “That’s one word for it.”
“Confused would be another,” Jason added.
“Ooh, I’m changing my answer,” Blue declared. “I’m going with confused too.”
“I think we’ll all go with confused,” I responded on behalf of the group, half-joking but also with seriousness in my tone.
“I don’t blame you,” the Author said. “I imagine they don’t tell you much about me out there, do they?”
“Beyond the whole ‘she chooses protagonists, writes their futures, and then ships their stories off to the rest of the realm’ thing—no, they don’t,” Daniel said.
The Author sighed. “That sounds about right. None of it’s true, I grant you, but it is more or less what I expected.”
Our mouths dropped open.
“Sorry . . . What do you mean, none of it’s true?” Jason asked.
“My sister is going to want to kill me for telling you all this,” the Author mused. “But she is the one who put me in this position, so the fault lies with her. Plus, I am not on board with her agenda. And since she won’t listen to me, speaking with you kids might be my only hope of influencing what’s to come.”
“Again, not following,” Blue said. “Starting with the whole ‘my sister’ thing.”
“Yes, well, as I said, my name is Elizabeth Lenore—Liza if you like. My ‘Author’ title is an invention of my sister, Lena Lenore.”
I practically choked on the biscuit I’d bitten into.
“Yes, uh, lovely woman,” I said clearing my throat as I tried to recover from the awkwardness.
“You’ve met her?” Liza asked.
“Yes.”
“Then we both know you’re lying.”
I couldn’t help but smirk a bit. “I take it yours is not an amicable sibling relationship?”
“Considering that she locked me in this forest over a century ago, I am going to say no,” Liza replied.
“Wait, wait, wait,” Blue interrupted again. “You keep saying all these things that don’t make any sense, Miss Author . . .”
“Liza.”
“Okay, Liza. What in the name of Book are you talking about?”
Our hostess sighed. “Since it seems that all anyone out there knows about me is those books and that ‘Author’ title, how about I answer your questions by telling you a story. Does that sound good?”
We all nodded.
“Fantastic,” Liza said. She leaned back in her chair and crossed her legs. She looked relaxed but there was eagerness in her tone that suggested she’d been dying to tell this story for a long time.
“Our tale begins many years ago with two sisters reporting for their first day of training at the Fairy Godmother Academy. They are your average, fresh-faced recruits—spirited and youthful with anxiety aflutter in their stomachs. The future looks bright as they enter the magic transfer chamber. It is there that they are imbued with the powers of retired Fairy Godmothers, and receive the corresponding wands. But alas, that is where the world alters for the younger sister in a way that can never be reversed.
“At first everything seems fine. But as the weeks go by and training progresses, the younger sister begins to experience strange dreams. Most are fuzzy at first, and she writes them off as nothing. However, as her magic training intensifies, so do her dreams. And stranger still, she soon begins having dreams about people she knows. Not people she knows directly, but visions of people whose faces she’s seen in files at Fairy Godmother Headquarters. Visions of Fairy Godkids from all across the realm.”
I shifted in my seat.
“The younger sister keeps quiet—not wanting to admit the strangeness of the phenomenon or burden her older sister, who has received a big promotion within the Fairy Godmother Agency. However, as the years go by the younger sister begins to realize that the strange dreams are not just nocturnal imaginings; they are visions of the future. She validates this time and again by finding the Fairy Godkids whom the visions are about and keeping an eye on them.”
I gulped and realized that my hands were gripping the armrests of the chair I was sitting in. I had only recently gone through the same discovery that my dreams were visions of the future. I tried not to let this similarity unsettle me as Liza continued.
“Fascinated by her new ability,” our hostess went on, “the younger sister finally decides to try and make more sense of it. She begins writing down her dreams in journals like stories. And when she has multiple visions of the same people, she develops outlines for these stories like plot points so as to better keep track of them. The problem is that she is not quite sure in what order the events in her visions are going to take place.
“However, after some reflection, she ascertains something crucial—the times when her dreams are the strongest and most detailed correlate with the amount of training and wish granting she performs in her daily Godmother duties. In other words, the more magic she uses, the more dreams she has and the clearer they become. In some cases, if she uses enough power in a short period of time she can even navigate her way through her dreams while she sleeps.”
The blood left my hands completely. They were white from clutching the armrests so hard.
I thought back to recent months when I’d slept without dreams of the future. The dreams had vanished completely during my two weeks trapped in the Therewolf prison in the Forbidden Forest. I’d had no dreams for a majority of our stay at Adelaide Castle during our class field trip earlier in the semester. And before that I’d experienced a customary spell of dreamlessness in the summer before returning to Lady Agnue’s.
Now I understood why.
Ashlyn had explained that Magic Build-Up occurred when I went too long without using my powers. Since I didn’t experience Magic Build-Up all the time, we figured that my wand was what was keeping me in check.
Despite being enchanted to turn into whatever weapon I willed it into, wands only responded to the magic touch of a specific Fairy Godmother (which I had courtesy of Emma). So, although it was an extremely small amount, every time I used my wand I used a tiny bit of magic.
Therein lay the answer.
I hadn’t gotten a chance to use my wand much during our stay in Adelaide, it was hard to get practice in over the summer under the watchful eyes of my parents, and my wand had been confiscated during our Therewolf incarceration. At the close of all those episodes, I experienced Magic Build-Up.
Complete understanding washed over me.
No wand = No magic usage.
No magic usage = No dreams and inevitable Magic Build-Up.
Magic Build-Up = Dreams return with a vengeance.
Based on this revelation I also knew why my dreams had been getting so much clearer lately. With all the antagonist attacks we’d been dealing with, I’d been using my wand more frequently. And more magic led to increased vision strength and clarity.
“It is an amazing discovery—”
My attention snapped back to Liza as she kept telling her story.
“—and over the next few years the younger sister pus
hes her magic more and more—intensifying her training in an effort to fortify her foresight. As the power of her magic rises, so does the power of her dreams and her ability to make sense of them. Eventually she succeeds in learning how to completely navigate through her visions, ascertain where they fit in with real timelines, and channel them deeply enough to draw specific details—names, locations, dates, and so on. And then . . . one night the younger sister experiences something new. She does not dream of people or places; she dreams of words. They appear in her head in the form of cryptic, rhyming lines detailing fates for people in the realm. They are prophecies.”
My friends and I exchanged a glance.
“With this additional power the younger sister concludes the information she is gathering has grown too vast to be kept within simple journals and logbooks. She starts charting out the lives of her dream subjects across her walls and ceilings—turning her entire apartment at Fairy Godmother Headquarters into a giant map of the events she’s foreseen in her head.”
Liza reached over to a small table beside her seat. It had a remote with two buttons on it. She pressed a button and the room rumbled. A second set of overlapping walls descended from the ceiling. These new walls appeared to be giant whiteboards. They were covered with timelines and scribbles of names, dates, places, and other labels in different colors.
Once the walls settled, the room stopped shaking and a table holding a basket of whiteboard markers emerged from the floor. Liza rose to her feet. Behind her, I spotted a timeline in red labeled: Chance Darling.
A lot of Liza’s writing was too messy to make sense of, but I did pick up a few keywords written around Chance’s timeline: “Magic Hunters,” “Daphne & Cereus,” “Twenty-Three Skidd Arena,” “James,” “Wonderland,” and “Crisanta Knight.”
My name was written at the beginning of the timeline, again in the middle, and toward the end. Looking at it made me gulp.
Liza didn’t address this, though. She seemed to have picked a spot on the whiteboard at random to illustrate her point, gesturing at it widely.
“With her dreams growing so powerful and plentiful, the younger sister has to know more; she has to figure out what’s meant to happen to these people. But that, unfortunately, is her downfall. One night the older sister—the great and powerful Lena Lenore—has terrific news. The Agency’s current Godmother Supreme is retiring and after many years of arduous, committed service, the older sister has been selected to fill the boss’s shoes. Unable to contain her excitement, the older sister bursts into the younger sister’s apartment and sees everything.”
Inherent Fate Page 29