But he said that as if he didn’t actually believe it. And neither did I.
In fact, the first signs that word was spreading like flames in dry grass came as I went to get luncheon in the Great Hall. When I came in, some conversations stopped dead, and others broke out in whispers. It felt as if everyone was watching me as I quickly ate and just as quickly left.
People watched me as I went to the garden. No one followed me, but I sensed eyes on me. But now they would be talking among themselves about how no one ever saw me in the garden, because I went in right after luncheon and didn’t come out again until almost dinner. So where did I go? And what was I doing? Did I grow wings and fly away somewhere? Surely the guards would see that. Did I make myself invisible? Did I creep around the palace spying on them?
I knew I could make up a dozen alarming theories about what I was doing, and they had dozens of busy little minds to make up a whole lot more. By the time I came back, the entire palace would be buzzing.
But what could I do? All I could do was what I did every afternoon: open the door in the trunk of the oak tree and go to Brianna. Staying here wouldn’t solve anything; people would just gather in corners away from me and whisper where I couldn’t see them.
So, with a heavy heart, I opened the door and stepped into the deep forest.
“Well, this is a bit of a problem, isn’t it?” Brianna said when I finished the recitation of my troubles. “Let’s go outside into the garden. You look as if you could use a little fresh air.”
We left the big empty room, and Brianna and I sat down on a couple of seats made from peeled logs gone as silver with age as the thatch on the cottage roof. I didn’t so much sit as plunk myself down. I felt like dropping my face into my hands but didn’t. Instead, I took deep breaths of herb-scented air and tried to calm myself down.
Birds sang all around us, twittering in the thatch of the cottage and caroling from the trees overhead. Bees blundered around the herb flowers, lending a drone to the birdsong that might have been soothing if I hadn’t been so worried. I fixed my gaze on a lush basil plant and watched a bee harvesting pollen from its tiny flowers.
“I haven’t been successful in discovering the name of the woman who delivered your father to Sir Delacar,” Brianna said at last, her voice pitched low. “She clearly used magic to persuade him to take the boy. There are more questions there than I care to think about. Was she Fae or was she a human? If she was human, she must have been a sorceress, but in that case, why did she have a Fae child with her? Of course, your father could have been her child and half Fae, but from the strength of your abilities, most of us feel your father must have been fully Fae. And if he was fully Fae, where did he come from in the first place? Why bring him to Sir Delacar—why not place him with a human family or a childless couple? I just don’t know.” She shook her head.
“Could she—could she have been a Dark Fae?” I ventured, which was the worst possible fear I had. “Did she intend for Father to become her agent against the King?”
To my relief, Brianna laughed, and it sounded genuine. “If she did, she picked one of the worst possible ways to go about it!” I looked up. Brianna shook her head at me. “Think about it. Would you send a little boy who is easily swayed to one of the kindest men in this kingdom if you intended him to turn into a serpent at its heart?”
“It… doesn’t seem… logical,” I said slowly.
“I don’t think there was any intention.” Brianna reached out and idly picked a sprig of rosemary and crushed the evergreen-like leaves between her fingers. The sharp scent—one of my favorites—wafted over us. “Except to put that child into a safe place.”
“How would putting him with Sir Delacar be safe?” I asked.
“It is the very last place that any enemy would look for a Fae child.” Brianna dusted the crushed leaves from her hands. “On the rare occasions when a Fae child is placed with humans by Fae, it’s always been with a kindly but childless couple who live in the forest, where it is easy to watch over the child without being detected by the human family. And it’s not done by walking up to the couple and persuading them with magic to take him in. The couple always finds the child in the woods or in their garden, tries to find his parents, then takes him in themselves. I’m sorry to tell you that a good many human children are abandoned that way by parents who don’t want them or cannot afford to feed them, so Fae is not the sort of thing a couple assumes when they find such a waif. That way there is no suspicion among other Fae, or humans, either, that the child is Fae.”
“Why would a Fae child be in danger?” I asked.
“That is something we should not discuss. Let’s concentrate on your dilemma. What we need to do is encourage people to be less suspicious of you.” Brianna tapped her finger against her lips as she thought. “The best thing to do is make use of your friends, the other Companions. And Sir Delacar. He’ll be the most important of all.”
“Then can I bring them all here to train with me?” I asked. “With magic?”
“That was going to be our next step,” Brianna said with a smile. “You anticipated me by about a day. Bring them tomorrow—but not in your usual training gear. You’ll need to learn how to handle yourselves without armor as well as with it, and you’ll start that now.”
Melalee was knitting in the dark by the cold hearth when I went up after supper and checked on the nursery. I have no idea how she can do that. It seems a skill as mysterious as magic to me. She looked at me when I poked my head in, and whispered, “She said ‘Mama.’ The Queen was over the moon.”
I grinned. That explained why my mother had looked so happy even though she was stuck talking at dinner with Lord Chrilen, who is as deaf as a post and never talks about anything but his dogs.
I tiptoed over to the crib and looked down. Aurora was sound asleep, all silvered by the moonlight streaming in the nursery window. I wanted to touch her soft little cheek, but I also didn’t want to wake her up. I settled for air-kissing her and went to my room.
I’d tried to slip out without Belinda noticing, but she was waiting to undress me. “A body would think you were that baby’s mother,” she said, and shook her head as she unlaced my dress. “You’re besotted.”
I just laughed as she dropped my nightgown over my head. “Yes, I am.”
The next afternoon I led my five friends (dressed in their ordinary clothing, not squire’s gear) through the tangled, wild part of the garden, with Sir Delacar bringing up the rear. I had expected the old knight to huff and puff his way in, but he was surprisingly nimble and negotiated the path as well as any of us.
When we came to the old oak and stopped, Giles looked around dubiously. “There’s nothing here,” he said. Then I placed my hand on the trunk, the outline of the door glowed, and the door opened, and he yelped and jumped back, bumping into Sir Delacar.
The old knight glared at the opening in the trunk suspiciously. “Has that always been there?” he demanded.
“If by ‘always,’ you mean since Brianna rescued the baby Prince—probably.” I shrugged. “It’s Brianna’s. She made it. But she lets me use it.”
“Ah, all right then.” Delacar calmed down a little, although my friends were still staring round-eyed at the forest on the other side of that door. “Well, lead on.”
I could tell from the way Giles acted that he recognized the part of the forest we came out in almost as soon as we got on the trail. That meant this must be somewhere reasonably near the palace, though farther than I had ever been before. Sir Delacar recognized it too; he nodded once, thoughtfully, as he looked around. No one else seemed to know where we were, though. And when we got to the cottage, both Sir Delacar and Giles looked startled to see it, which cemented my conviction that it hadn’t been there until recently.
I had my hand on the door latch when I realized that the rest were still standing uncertainly at the garden gate. I turned back to them. “You know, this is not the time to stop trusting Brianna Firehawk,” I said
quite calmly. “That horse left the barn and died of old age three centuries ago.”
To my relief, Sir Delacar snorted and smiled a little. “Quite right,” he said. “Form up, squires.” And he marched up to the door, which I opened for all of them.
There were oohs and aahs as they took in the fact that the room on the inside of the cottage was much larger than the outside of the cottage. Brianna stood over to one side, letting the squires get over their surprise, but Sir Delacar marched right over to her and gave her a full court bow, complete with a sweeping hand. “My lady,” he said as he straightened up.
Brianna was wearing something entirely new to me, probably the Fae version of a knight’s fighting gear—it wasn’t unlike what the rest of the squires and I wore to work with Sir Delacar, but it was ever so much more splendid. She had a coat of gleaming golden mail over a surcoat of scarlet, scarlet breeches, and boots with golden embroidery. The mail and surcoat even had openings for her wings. She nodded and smiled. “Sir Delacar, now that we know you trained and sheltered an apparently orphaned Fae or half-Fae child, I think you should be aware that you have achieved considerable respect from the Light Fae as a whole. I have been asked to tender our thanks.”
Sir Delacar blushed a brilliant crimson. “I’d like to think it was something any good and decent knight would have done.”
“But you were the one the unknown chose,” Brianna pointed out. “And I think it was because she saw something very noble and kind in you.”
He continued to blush but snorted a little. “I suspect if you’d asked Geniver about it, the lad would have told you I was anything but kind.”
Brianna laughed. “Well, your young squires are likely to say the same about me soon.” She raised her voice a little. “Come here, if you please, Companions, and form a line in front of me.”
The rest stopped gawking and scrambled to obey her. I took my place at the end of the line. With Sir Delacar at her side, Brianna made a show of inspecting us as if she were our commander.
“You’ll do,” she said approvingly. “Do any of you have any questions before we begin?”
Giles raised his hand. “My lady, Miri told us about how you were training her with a shield she made out of magic. If we got especially shiny shields, would those work as well as her magic one?”
“That is a fine question, Giles,” Brianna replied. “And the answer is both yes and no. Your shield would have to be so shiny that it could serve as a mirror, and the least little scratch or scuff on it would allow the levin bolt to penetrate through to you.”
“And just imagine how much work it would be to keep the shields that shiny,” Delacar pointed out shrewdly. “In a pinch, you could use a mirror to reflect that kind of magic weapon. But I suspect the ploy would not last very long.”
Brianna nodded. “No, it would not. It’s one that is quite well known to both Light and Dark Fae. Miriam was very lucky that her foe was so enraged by the unexpected resistance that she didn’t think and reacted instinctively by blasting back with pure power. I can tell you that this doesn’t happen often.”
“Fae fight dirty,” muttered Nathaniel. He probably hadn’t expected Brianna to hear him, but she did. She looked right at him, and he flushed with embarrassment.
“You are quite correct, Nathaniel,” she said solemnly. “The Dark Fae fight dirty. Exceedingly so. If it weren’t for the Rules and the Compact constraining them, they’d fight even dirtier. As it is, they are always trying to find a way around the Rules.”
“What if they break the Rules?” Nathaniel asked, made bolder by the fact that Brianna had answered him. Then he flushed again and added a belated “my lady?”
“They lose their power,” Brianna said. “Just as we do if we break the Rules and attack them without being attacked first.”
Nathaniel’s brow puckered with puzzlement. “But—how? And why, my lady?”
But Brianna only shook her head at him, so I knew then that this was a Fae secret that wouldn’t be told to humans.
I wondered if one day it would be told to me.
But that was all the talking we got for the afternoon.
Brianna made magic shields for everyone but me. I had to make my own, of course, and I had the distinct impression that Brianna intended for me eventually to be the one making shields for everyone. And then she began lobbing levin bolts at us—even Sir Delacar. Everyone flinched and winced at first (except me), but as they got used to the idea of fireballs hurtling at them and began to actively deflect them instead of passively letting them hit the shields, Brianna changed her aim so we all had to react and move the shields to protect ourselves.
The Fae was utterly merciless, and from the look on Sir Delacar’s face, he approved. I really don’t know what would have happened if any of those things had hit us, but thanks to our training under Delacar, we were all quick enough (or Brianna was deliberately being slow enough) that it didn’t happen.
She did give us frequent breaks, but by halfway through the afternoon, we were really feeling it. And by the time she let us finally end the session, we were as dripping with sweat as I had been the first time. Giles didn’t seem to care, but the other four looked dismayed at what they probably thought was the ruin of good clothing.
“Hold still, Nathaniel,” Brianna ordered, and worked her magic on him. And truth to tell, I think his outfit was cleaner when she finished with it than it had been when he walked in. She did all the boys first. Then Brianna turned to us girls.
Brianna laughed as we (I’ll admit it) preened a little after she was done with us. “All right, young ladies. Off with you. I expect to see you back here the day after tomorrow.”
And she turned to me. “Because tomorrow will be something new for you.”
As I followed my friends out the door, I realized that I was actually looking forward to that.
CHAPTER FIVE
AFTER THAT WORKOUT SESSION, BRIANNA’S PLAN, WITH SIR Delacar’s agreement, was for us to spend every other day with her in her cottage learning how to defend ourselves from magical attacks. On even-numbered days, I studied alone with her. When I trained with the Companions, we used either conventional shields that had magic applied to them by Brianna or magic shields she created. We certainly worked as hard under Brianna as we did under Delacar—but we certainly left smelling sweeter and cleaner. Delacar would watch from behind defenses created by Brianna and sometimes suggest things to her that always resulted in us working even harder.
Even Giles began looking a little worn, and he told me in confidence that he’d never been worked so hard in his life, not even when he was the wood hauler for the kitchen. I went to bed exhausted every night, and sometimes I didn’t even make it as far as the subtleties at dinner before excusing myself and going to bed. The only thing I spared time for were my morning and afternoon visits with Aurora, who just kept getting more adorable with every new thing she learned. Even Belinda left me alone and stopped giving me the disapproving stare all the time. I guess she figured that what I was doing was punishment enough. Or maybe, since two other girls of rank were doing it, she had grudgingly decided that it was all right for me to train as a warrior.
After two solid weeks of extremely hard work, Delacar suddenly declared that the next day we could rest, that we’d earned it fair and square. And that included me. I was going to be excused for the day from both my sets of lessons.
Anna and Elle said that they were going to spend the entire day lounging about in the garden with some of the ladies who weren’t Mama’s ladies-in-waiting and do nothing but eat fruit, embroider, and listen to the minstrels.
All three of the boys decided on a boating expedition—I have no idea why unless they planned to drift on the lake all day, sleeping, with food at hand. Both the girls and the boys asked me if I wanted to join them, but I had another idea.
You would think that with a day of leisure ahead of me, I would sleep late, but no. I was so used to waking at just after dawn that I woke then anyway
. I think Belinda was expecting me to sleep in because she wasn’t awake, so I was able to get into a pair of my practice breeches and one of those sturdy smocks, and sneak out through the kitchen before she even knew I was gone. I told one of the cook’s helpers what I wanted, and while I was eating a breakfast of plums and bread and butter, he got me some food for luncheon and did it all up in a napkin. I knew exactly where I was going too: straight to the stable. I got my old pony—thank goodness the grooms had been keeping him exercised for me, or he would have been very grumpy—saddled him, hung my luncheon and a bag of oats for his meal on my saddle, and rode out, heading for the forest track that would eventually lead me to Brianna’s cottage—I figured it might be interesting if I could see how far the cottage actually was from the palace. I could have walked, but I hadn’t ridden in weeks, and I liked Brownie’s easy pace. As we got to the edge of the forest, his ears perked forward. He seemed quite pleased with where we were going. He should be; we used to do this all the time before Mama married the King. But we hadn’t gone nearly as far into the forest as I planned to do today because we usually took the road that skirted around the edge.
We weren’t alone, by any means. There’s always someone collecting something along the forest edge. There are not a lot of forestry laws in Tirendell, and the ones that exist are just common sense. And anyone can search the forest for edible plants, nuts, fruits, mushrooms, and herbs. So there are always people foraging at the edge of the forest.
I rode past them, and no one recognized me. I looked nothing like a noble, of course, and with my long hair braided and tucked inside my shirt, I probably looked like a boy on his farm pony coming back from the city on an errand. At any rate, some people ignored me, and some people waved to me, but everyone was too busy to talk to me.
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