14

You

Gwen

When I opened my eyes, I found myself lying on my back staring at a blue sky through leaves rustled by a warm wind. I was cushioned on fragrant moss, and the air was sweet. Was I still in Wainwright, or was I dead? The longer I stared, the more uncanny the place felt.

I sat up, wincing at the dull, body-wide soreness, and ignored Aristotle as he hopped back and forth while making distressed noises. This was his fault, after all.

I ran my fingertips across the moss, soft as a feather mattress with little white flowers poking their heads up at intervals, and realized suddenly what was wrong: I had created the magic circle in the dead of winter. This wood was at the height of late spring.

It both looked and felt like the Wainwright forest, but the birdsong was more musical, more harmonious than I was used to. And while it was near twilight, the air was warm enough to make me want to remove my jacket.

“Oh alright,” I told Aristotle as he picked at my sleeve with his beak. “Come on.”

He climbed up to my shoulder and hid his head beneath my hair, which hung in a tangled mess down my back. Lovely. I made to stand, stretching sore muscles as I did so, and realized something else about the wood that eluded me: it was alive.

Of course, you might be thinking, forests are alive, Gwenevere, and you would be right. But this forest was alive. The sound of the wind in the leaves was purposeful, an echo of soft voices, not merely noise. And the trees were not dumb vegetation but ladies gathered to whisper behind their fans about the newcomer to the party. 

I expected the usual sense of the organic chaos of life in a wood, the imperfections and random course life takes when it grows, changes, and dies. But every twig and leaf had been planned with harmonious purpose. This was not a place where life fought and adapted until it was slowly overcome by entropy. This place was created to sustain indefinitely at the peak of beauty. 

It was less like a forest, and more like a painting of a forest. An idea, not reality, yet enchanting nonetheless.

Forgive me if I did not do the description justice; it is difficult to translate the experience of being in a different world.

It was that feeling, more than anything else, that convinced me I was in the Sunset Lands. I had made it to the other side of the wall. 

And Ophelia was here, somewhere.

That thought sobered me enough that some of the sense of confused wonder evaporated and my brain jumped back into more practical thinking. I found my pack nearby, but neither the book nor the eye had been sucked through the door with me. Was that comforting or worrying?

Aristotle wormed further beneath my hair, disappearing almost entirely, but he was warm against my neck so I didn’t mind. If I had to be stuck in the Sunset Lands, I was glad he was with me, even if it was his fault. When I pulled the pack onto my back, he stood on it instead of clinging to my jacket.

Now that I was here, I needed a plan. Could I find Lia and get the both of us home? Every bit of information about the fae that I read, heard from old storytellers or saw in person floated to the top of my mind like lily pads on a pond. 

Perhaps I would need none of it, and everything I learned was a garbled, mistranslated version of the past. But anything that could help me, even a bit, was worth remembering. I refused to think about Mama or the children, pushed Tony’s grief-stricken face from my mind, and set off through the faerie woods.

Before long, it was clear this was, in fact, Wainwright forest. It was too familiar to be anything else. I found trees and rock formations where I expected to see them, only perfected when compared to their mortal counterparts. Was some alternate version of the manor also nearby?

It was worth a look. As I headed in the general direction of the castle, I exited the less traveled part of the forest, expecting to find a footpath in short order. What I found was not like any footpath I had ever seen. In the forest I was familiar with, the paths were all packed dirt. Small, round, white flowers carpeted this path, and arching bluebells lined it, glowing like tiny lamps.

I wanted to pull off my shoes and feel the cool petals against the soles of my feet. Which, if I had learned anything about the fae, was likely dangerous. Would I be bound to take the path as soon as I set foot on it? Or was it only what it appeared to be: a more comfortable way to navigate the wood?

Should I follow the path and take whatever appeared at the end, or beat my way through the undergrowth and remain in hiding until I learned more? Obvious answers may be traps in fae lands, but the wood itself was likely equally dangerous.

When I saw Lia through the magic door what felt like ages ago, she was dressed as a medieval queen surrounded by soldiers. That suggested she was not making a secret living in the woods. I gathered up my courage and stepped out of the brush and onto the path. 

Aristotle bit my ear.

“Ow! Aristotle, this is not the time for a tussle. Come out of there.”

But he was on my back with his claws dug into my pack, and it was impossible to reach him, tangled in my hair as he was.

“I do not have time for this, you little beast,” I growled as I bent backward and fought to untangle him with no luck.

“Don’t go,” he whispered in my ear.

I froze. “What do you mean?”

“Don’t go to the castle.”

I spun, trying to get a look at the bird’s face. He always had something of a masculine voice, likely from whoever had first taught him to speak, but this was a man’s voice, not a bird’s.

Had being in the Sunset Lands done something to him?

“Why not?”

“It isn’t safe for you. Stay in the woods. Hide.”

“God’s breath, Aristotle. How would you know that? Wait. Here, come out.”

I managed to get hold of one ankle and pry the bird off his desperate grip on my pack. He spread his wings wide, as if he meant to intimidate me, and eyed me sideways. I could have laughed at him if his human-like warning hadn’t scared me so much.

“Why isn’t it safe?”

The bird didn’t answer but kept his wings flared. I rubbed his chest with my free hand to see if I could calm him, but his posture never changed.

“I cannot hide in the woods. I wouldn’t know what was safe and what to avoid. Something that might be safe for us in mortal lands may kill us here.”

“I will help you,” he whispered.

I snorted, partly at him but mostly at myself for having this conversation with a bird. “You are as mortal as I am,” I said, chucking him under his bird chin. “I don’t see how you would be of any help telling the difference.”

Aristotle’s wings dropped to hang limply at his sides, and he looked down like he was ashamed.

I brought him close for a cuddle. “It’s not your fault you don’t…unless it is.”

I held the raven at arm’s length. My hand was shaking, and he still would not look at me.

“No,” I whispered. “No, I am being paranoid. That is expected in extraordinary circumstances. I am assigning meaning to things that are mere coincidences. Aren’t I?”

My heart pounded so hard it was all I could hear, and I couldn’t catch my breath. With a small sound of protest, I sank to my rear on the pathway. Aristotle hopped off my arm as I dropped my head into my hands, but they started to tingle and go numb.

“Breathe,” I told myself. “This place is playing tricks on your mind. You are not hallucinating. You know who you are. You remember your past. This is real. And you will not throw up, by god. Get it together, Gwen. Get it together.”

“You’re fine, Gwen. Stop. Stop, just breathe.”

“I’m fine,” I repeated.

“Just breathe.”

“Breathe,” I said, and pulled a slow breath in through my nose, held it, and let it out through pursed lips.

Pale, elegant, long-fingered hands closed around my wrists. I stared at the familiar hands as if they were the only solid things left in the world. The last time I had seen these hands, they were holding cards.

I leaned back and my eyes followed the hands to wrists covered in fine black wool, wide shoulders, a broad chest, a snowy waterfall of a cravat, a stubborn chin, a mouth turned down in distress, but as beautifully carved as a statue. A straight, narrow-bridged nose. Black curls falling over his forehead. Thick brows drawn up in the center. Eyes as dark as coals.

“You?” I breathed.

He shrugged. “I’m afraid so.”

Every time I had seen this man in the past came rushing back to me: at Mama’s ball, at Lady Chatsworth’s party, and afterward on the balcony when I had practically assaulted Tony. He’d given me the necklace that led me to Cassandra Monmouth, and told me the poem that unlocked the truth about the Reavers, letting me save both Percy and Thistle Honeycutt, the missing housekeeper.

He crouched in front of me, watching me remember, reading the changing expressions on my face, and winced at the knowledge in my eyes. I jerked my wrists out of his hands and stood, but he followed suit and towered over me.

“You!”

He raised both hands in a calming motion. “Look, keep your voice down, alright? I can explain everything, but”—looking over his shoulder toward the castle—“not here.”

He reached for my hand, but I jerked out of his grasp and backed away. “Don’t touch me.”

“Lady St. James—Gwen, please—“

“And don’t call me by my first name, you…you…” I could not think of a curse strong enough and settled with the clever and cutting insult, “You raven!”

He dropped his hands and rolled his eyes. “That was beneath you.”

“You cannot decide what is beneath me, you lying wretch!”

“Gwen,” he warned, “keep your voice down. We need to get out of here. Do you understand me? We are both in great danger. We have to leave.”

“I am not going anywhere with you, and I am certainly not leaving without my sister.”

“You will regret it if you go to the castle. There is nothing for you there.”

But I was not in the mood to be intimidated or coddled. Anger was so much better than fear, and both were preferable to the panic I felt moments ago, or the grief trying to settle on my shoulders when I thought about my life with Aristotle, every private moment, the tears, the laughter, the way I had been more honest, more exposed to that bird than to anyone else in my life.

“No.” I shook my head and flexed my hands. “You do not get to tell me what to do. How dare you think that you have any right to—“

In a flash, the man was on top of me, one hand clamped over my mouth and the other at the small of my back, pressing me against him from chest to hips. He leaned down until his face was inches from mine and warned, “Be. Quiet. Now, you can come with me of your own free will, or I will pick you up and carry you, but you cannot stay here and you absolutely can not go to the castle.”

I froze, but it was not because his body was warm or his breath smelled inconceivably like red wine. It was because stillness looked like submission. After a moment of searching my eyes, he nodded and stepped back, thinking I had seen reason. But reason fled and all I saw was a chance to attack.

“Gwen!” He barked, but it was too late.

I unleashed every bit of fury I had, throwing punches, kicks, and other moves I had not had the chance to practice in ages. He side-stepped, parried, or ducked every attempted attack as if I were an untrained child, which only infuriated me more.

“Gwen, stop,” he grunted, parrying a jab and leaning out of the way of a cross. “There is nothing for you in the castle, and we don’t have time to—“ The right hook nearly hit his self-assured chin, but he caught my fist and held it. I swung the other, but he caught that, too, and said, ”—this. You are not safe here.”

With almost no effort, he spun me by my fists until my back was to him, wrapped one arm around my waist, and picked me up like a toddler, pushing all the air from my lungs. I didn’t have the strength or the speed to stop him.

I had been right the first time I saw him. He was dangerous.

“There,” he said, taking a deep breath and adjusting the fit of his jacket with his free hand. “Let’s get out of here. I’ll explain everything once we’re safe.”

But I, naturally, did not go quietly. I was too angry to think straight, so I wriggled like a landed fish, kicked, and unleashed a string of invectives that would have made Mrs. Chapman blush from shoes to hairline.

“Put me down you wretched, poxy-faced, lily-livered, son of a flea-bitten goat and a—“

He turned around, ignoring me and my struggles.

“Mangey donkey! You long-faced, lying weasel! You—“

“Gwen—long-faced?”

“Crusty, pustule-filled—“

“Halt!”

He froze, I stopped cursing, and he heaved a resigned sigh. I raised my head to see two breathtaking creatures in shining armor standing on the path, one with a silver spear and the other with a crossbow, both leveled at us. They might have been human if it wasn’t for the long, lean lines of their limbs and the backward bend of their legs. Their elongated muzzles peeking beneath helmets fashioned like canine faces.

I suspected, in mortal lands, they would have been hounds.

We turned, or I should say that he turned with me dangling in a very undignified way from one arm. “Lovely, Gwen. Now look what you’ve done.”

“You’re one to talk,” I muttered.

The guards lunged, Aristotle said, “Shit,” and I was free, tumbling onto the path on hands and knees.

“Stop him!” one guard barked, but they were not fast enough. A raven disappeared in a whir of feathers, leaving me alone. 

Alone. 

He left me. 

I was too stunned and tired to fight.

They bound and gagged me, dropped a sack over my head, and led me away as a prisoner. Which was not at all what I had planned.

Nothing sounded as it ought. Footsteps didn’t echo properly, and silence wasn’t only the absence of noise but a kind of low, melodic background hum. Smells were similarly unexpected. I had not noticed until my eyes were covered, but the odor of decaying vegetation did not exist in the forest. Instead, the rich scent of green things and the light, powdery aroma of flowers perfumed the air.

But, as we walked, those scents gave way to richer, wilder smells that had no mortal counterparts. Some things were familiar but not in the right combinations. The guards, who were also hounds of some kind, smelled of wind, rain, and the coppery tang of blood, but also of…coffee?

They jerked to a stop, and the guard holding my elbow in one oddly shaped hand cleared his throat.

“What do you have there, Harl?” a feminine voice asked. The sound of it made a shiver run down my spine, but I couldn’t say why.

“A trespasser, lady. We caught her fighting in the forest.” His voice sounded like the words were growled between clenched teeth.

“Fighting? Truly? How delicious. Who was she fighting?”

“The Raven.”

A beat of surprised silence. Her voice was not so confident when she said, “The Raven? You are sure of this?”

“Sure as I can be.”

“Lock her up until the King calls for her,” she said, at last. Even I could not miss the apprehension in her tone.

Harl grunted and the dragging continued.

We stopped walking a short time later, and someone untied my wrists. I ripped the bag off my head in time to see Harl disappear, but not behind a closed door. I was not in a room made of stone, as I expected a cell to be. It looked like the inside of a tree, with walls of living wood and a floor of the same soft moss I noticed in the forest. Instead of a door of iron bars, the wood simply grew back to cover the passage.

It was as if a door had never been there.

If I hadn’t been gagged, my mouth would have hung open in shock. This was a prison inside a tree, one that responded to the guard’s wishes. Was that magic, or simply a property of the world, here? And where was the light coming from?

Luminous mushrooms, something like wood ears, grew along the ceiling and cast a soft, pale green light about the chamber. It would have been magical if it wasn’t a prison cell. It was also silent and lonely.

I did not even have a window.

How long I stood in pure stupefaction, staring at the blank wall, I could not say. There was no way to mark the time unless I counted breaths or heartbeats, and that required more focus than I could muster.

I’d abandoned Sam, Sally, Tony, my mother, and everyone else I cared about to bring my sister home, and instead, I was stuck in a faerie prison with no means of escape save what I brought with me and the words of a woman I hadn’t even seen. 

Lock her up until the King calls for her.

How long would I wait? 

Would they feed me in the meantime? Faeries were notoriously absent-minded where mortal needs were concerned. What would my family think or do when Tony told them I was gone? A picture of Mama’s face, as it crumpled in grief, flashed across my mind.

I sank to the floor and dug my fingers into the moss in frustration. It was as thick and soft as the carpets of Wainwright. I stretched out, defeated, buried my face in my arms, closed my eyes, and tried to sleep.

An indescribable sound made me shoot upright, bleary eyes struggling to focus as a shock of adrenaline electrified my limbs. Still too sleep-addled to trust my vision, it took a moment to believe what I saw; the wood on the opposite wall melted away into an arched door. It was like watching a tree grow but in reverse.

The creature who entered my cell was thin, swarthy, with long limbs and knobby joints. The tips of its ears poked far out to the sides of its head, and its pale eyes were huge, goggling above a long, slender nose. The simple garments of homespun wool—long socks, a belted smock, and pointed shoes—hung on a thin frame.

I was fairly certain that I was looking at a brownie, but I suspected it would be rude to ask for clarification.

It carried a garment tossed over one arm, a little embroidered velvet bag in the other, and crossed the room with a jerking motion that was something like watching a fawn learning to walk.

The brownie stopped in front of me, held out the garment and the bag, and said in a voice like crumpling paper, “Wear these.”

I tucked my hands behind my back. “No.” 

I had to choke off the impulse to add thank you to the end of that sentence. Proper English manners would likely get me in a lot of trouble, especially if I indebted myself to a faerie simply by sharing my appreciation.

The brownie blinked as if my single-word statement had been confusing.

“My own clothing suits me just fine,” I clarified.

The brownie wobbled forward and tossed the gown at me. I caught it on instinct. The little velvet bag was left on the floor, and the door closed up behind the brownie as it left.

I dropped the dress, for that’s what it was, on top of the velvet bag and stomped to the other side of the room, muttering, “Wear these, indeed.”

It took a good bit of grumbling and pacing to calm my nerves, perhaps twenty minutes as well as I could judge. The most logical explanation for being given such clothing was a presentation before the King. Were I to wear the dress, I would appear biddable and less dangerous…which would also make me appear weak. Worse, I would have no protection.

But if I refused, I would likely insult the King and start my foray into the Sunset Lands on dangerous footing. But I would, at least, be physically safer. Though wearing several knives and grenades in the presence of a fae monarch was a foolish political decision, even for me.

I was stomping down the last bit of moss over my hidden trove of weapons when the creaking startled me again. This time I watched the wood grain thin and compress, shifting like wet clay sculpted by an invisible finger.

The hound guardsmen entered, looked at my dirty coat and disheveled hair—not to mention my glorious black eye courtesy of Lord Rutledge—and gave me disapproving glares.

“You are not ready,” one of them growled.

“I am perfectly ready.”

They exchanged uncertain glances, shrugged in a way I interpreted to mean it’s her own fault, and escorted me from the room by spearpoint. 

I was going to see the King of the Faeries.