Evanescent (Chronicles of Nerissette) Read online

  “But…” My heart broke at the fact that she had been so desperate to get home that she’d been willing to leave Winston and all the rest of our friends behind while she made her escape.

  “According to all of the other dryads it only works inside Nerissette. They’ve never been able to use the portals to travel anywhere else. Not even the Borderlands. Only, the thing is, I realized that none of Nerissette’s dryads have ever been to the Borderlands. They can’t visualize it. So I thought it could be that—”

  “The reason they can’t transport anywhere else isn’t that the trees are incapable of transporting them but that they can’t manage to visualize where they want to be enough to control the magic?” I sighed as my brain tried to wrap itself around what I’m pretty sure was more than one violation of basic science.

  “Exactly.” Mercedes pushed herself up to stand.

  “And you thought if you asked the portal to take us home that it could break through the wall between this world and ours? Oh, Mer.” I shook my head at her, disappointed.

  “I thought it was worth the chance, but instead of taking us there the stupid tree got confused and brought us here.”

  “I don’t think it got confused at all.” I grabbed her shoulders and turned her to face her tree. “You asked the magic to bring you home, and it did. It brought you back to the tree you claimed as your own.”

  “I only claimed it temporarily. Just until we go home. Besides, this isn’t what I wanted. This isn’t where we’re supposed to be.” She crossed her arms over her chest and narrowed her eyes at the silver tree standing tall and more than a little proud in the distance, giving off an air of annoyed indifference at the world around it.

  “When has the magic of Nerissette given any of us what we wanted? Especially when it thinks we need something different?”

  “But what could we need that’s here? Winston had the dragons burn the Crystal Palace to the ground to keep your aunt and the Fate Maker from taking control of it and the Fate Maker destroyed everything else that wasn’t in flames. There’s nothing here to find.”

  “I don’t know.” I rubbed my right hand over my left arm nervously as I glanced around, searching for someone, anyone. If only Winston were here, he’d know what to do. He’d keep his head and he’d be able to think our way out of this. “I don’t know why we’re here.”

  “So what should we do?” Mercedes asked.

  “We search the castle,” I said as I pushed myself to my feet. “Maybe there are still people here. Timbago or some of the rest of the staff.”

  “And what is Timbago going to tell us?”

  “I don’t know. But he knows more than almost anyone else, and we have to be here for a reason.”

  “What about the tear?” Mercedes asked. “Do you think that maybe we’re here to find that?”

  “No, it’s not the tear.” My hand drifted up to the necklace tucked inside my tunic and grasped the crystal, tugging on it for reassurance. Just touching it made me feel safer, calmer. Like I knew that I’d be okay.

  “What do you mean? What else could we be here for? It’s got to be the tear we’re here for.”

  “No.” I shook my head, not wanting to lie to my best friend unless I absolutely had to, but I knew I couldn’t tell her about the box hidden inside the forests of Dramera. Not until I was sure that I could keep her—and everyone else—safe.

  “So why then?”

  “I don’t know, but right now we need to find someone, anyone, who can tell us what’s going on.”

  “Right,” Mercedes said. “Where do we start?”

  I looked at the burning palace and my stomach rolled as I took in the destruction.

  “Maybe they’re all hiding in the cellars?” Mercedes suggested. “That was the plan, wasn’t it? Everyone who wasn’t fighting was either going into the woods or hide in the lower levels of the palace. Maybe they’re there.”

  “They can’t be inside that.” I swallowed as the flames crackled and smoke poured out of where my dome had been. “Where else could they be?”

  “On the road? Or maybe they went into the forest?” Mercedes asked. “If I were the rest of the household staff, when they set the palace on fire I’d have followed the army. It’s the only safe place to go.”

  “No.” I clenched my hands in my shirt, trying to keep them from trembling. “Timbago wouldn’t have left the palace.”

  The necklace I was wearing started to hum, almost as if it approved of my decision.

  “Allie, he wouldn’t stay here—the palace is on fire. On fire. A flaming palace is not a place you stick around.”

  “He would have stayed,” I said, even though I didn’t know why I was so sure. “He would have wanted to be nearby in case there were people still in Neris who needed him.”

  “There were soldiers attacking,” Mercedes said. “He wouldn’t have stayed.”

  I turned away from my palace and toward the maze. “He would have hidden and waited for them to leave. He wouldn’t abandon the palace.”

  “Where then?” Mercedes asked. “Where would you hide in this nightmare?”

  “Inside the labyrinth.” The stone hummed again, and somehow I knew I was right. When the palace caught fire he would’ve herded the rest of the household staff into the maze. If they could’ve gotten to the inside of the labyrinth the magic that surrounded the mermaids’ pool might have been enough to keep them safe.

  “Why would they go to the labyrinth?” Mercedes asked. “It’s surrounded by trees. Trees burn, Allie. If the palace was on fire then the labyrinth is the last place they would have gone.”

  I started toward the hillside where the labyrinth was anyway, determined to find Timbago. “I don’t know how I know, but I do. If Timbago is here then he went to the maze.”

  We reached the hill between my palace and the mermaid’s grotto and I saw smoke coming over the other side of it, a giant funnel of horrible-smelling black smoke curling toward the sky.

  “Oh, God.” I sprinted up the hill, Mercedes following behind me.

  “Wait!” She screamed, and I felt all the air rush out of me as she tackled me from behind, knocking both of us to our knees just as we reached the top.

  The tears I’d been holding back slipped down my cheeks. I looked up and found myself staring at lifeless bodies scattered in the valley below where the labyrinth had once been. Brigitte, the housemaid who had woken me on the morning of my Great Hall, was curled up on her side, her eyes closed like she was sleeping.

  Timbago was lying on the ground in front of me, his eyes closed and his face turned toward the sky, his arms flung out at his sides as blood soaked through his shirt.

  “No!” I lunged toward him, and Mercedes threw her arms around me, holding me as I started to sink to the ground, my knees shaking as I stared at him, wide-eyed and disbelieving. “No. No.”

  “Wait, please.” She hugged me closer. “Everything down there is still burning.”

  “I have to get to Timbago,” I sobbed, scrambling to get free of her arms as she pinned me against her, cradling me to her chest. “He needs my help.”

  “Allie—”

  I jerked out of her arms, sobbing, and crawled to him, unconcerned about the embers floating around me. “I can’t leave him here like this.”

  “Your Majesty…” Timbago’s voice no more than a faint whisper, and his eyes fluttered open. “Is that you, Queen Alicia? My queen. The Rose in my charge, what are you doing here?”

  “I could ask you the same thing,” I said when I finally reached him. I patted along his chest looking for his wounds, trying to keep from crying. “What happened?”

  “We…” He struggled to sit up and winced as I helped him sit upright, leaning against my side. “…were outnumbered.”

  “I’m sorry,” I sobbed as he reached up to grab my hand in his clawed one.

  “It’s our war, too, those of us who only serve and watch. It’s our home to defend as much as it is yours. All of us. This was our
home as much as it is yours. None of us were willing to abandon it. To abandon you.”

  “I know.” I nodded, and he clutched at my shoulder with his other hand.

  “The tear? Have you kept it safe?”

  “It’s in my crown case in Dramera. It’s safe.”

  “No.” He reached up to cradle my neck, slipping his finger underneath the chain of my necklace and pulled it up so that I could see the crystal shining in the mixture of fire and sunlight. “Keep it safe.”

  “But—” I stared down at the necklace and suddenly it all made sense. The tingly feelings that I felt every time I touched the necklace. The burning desire I had to hide the tear from Darinda, to keep her from touching the bracelet. I’d thought it was to keep the bracelet safe, but it hadn’t been. It had been to keep her from touching it, from telling me that the bracelet contained no magic. The tear itself had worked the magic to keep it hidden. To keep it safe. Even from me.

  “I had to make sure that it was protected,” Timbago said, wrapping both of our fingers around the stone. “I swore my life to protect the tear until it was needed. Now it is. When the time comes, use it to trap the Fate Maker inside the Bleak, and then destroy it. Break the spell and trap him.”

  “How? Everything we can find says that I need a fire a million times hotter than all the dragons of Nerissette combined. I don’t know what burns hotter than dragon flame or where to find it.”

  “Break the spell and destroy him. Destroy him, my queen. Only then will you ever have the chance to make Nerissette free. Be a good queen.” Timbago let his eyes close, slumping against my shoulder.

  “Timbago?” I shook the goblin but his mouth fell open and nothing else happened. He didn’t breathe or move or anything. “Timbago!”

  Mercedes came toward me and stood on the other side of his body, her eyes wide. “Allie?”

  “He’s dead. I don’t know what happened. He was alive and now—”

  She reached down and touched the side of his neck, her hands trembling. She pulled away from him and came around to grab my shoulders, dragging me away from him as well. “I’m sorry, Allie,” she whispered into my hair.

  “But he was just talking to me. You had to have seen him. He was just sitting up, talking to me.”

  “Allie.”

  My hunting shirt was smeared red with blood and the goblin’s body was drenched in it as well.

  Mercedes stood and raised her hands, swaying toward the roasted, dead branches of the shrubs that had made up the maze. “I’m so sorry,” she said. “I’m so sorry that I let them do this to you.”

  She raised her arms higher, and the trees of the surrounding forest began to sway, a wailing sound coming from the clash of their branches that sounded like they were weeping for the sacrifice of the burned shrubbery. The breeze from the trees lifted the ashes and they began to float away, drifting past me like angry snowflakes.

  When the last of the ashes had fallen away I stood and moved closer to Mercedes. I stared at the empty pool, the water in it dried up, the large rock in its center that had once been Queen Talia’s throne just sitting there alone. They were gone. All of them were gone.

  “Allie?” Mercedes looked at me.

  “What?”

  “What do we do now?”

  “I don’t know.” I let my hand come up to tug on the crystal of the Dragon’s Tear. “I really, really don’t know.”

  …

  As the sun went down over the forest I heard the snap of a branch. Mercedes and I just kept staring into the fading daylight, waiting. Somehow I was pretty sure whoever was coming up on us wasn’t with the Boy Scouts, but right now I couldn’t find it in me to care.

  “Oh my God and all the stars,” Rhys said as he came into the clearing and found the remains of the burning lawn illuminating the horror in front of us.

  “Rhys?” Mercedes struggled to her feet and then helped me up. “Oh, God, Rhys.”

  “What happened to you?” He wrapped his arms around both of us, holding us to his broad chest. “Are you okay?”

  “No.” My heart clenched and my stomach heaved as I started to sob again, deep, aching cries that scratched the back of my throat as my shoulders started to shake. I didn’t want to believe what I’d seen. I didn’t want it to be true, but I knew it was. I couldn’t pretend it hadn’t happened. “They’re gone.”

  “Everyone?” His voice was soft as he clung to us, holding me up as my knees shook and I buried my head in his shoulder and cried. “Surely not all of them? Someone must have gotten away. They would have followed the army into the forest, retreated. Someone—”

  “We don’t know if it’s everyone. But anyone who stayed to defend the palace—he killed them. He killed them all. Every single one of them.” Mercedes’s voice cracked on the last words and I looked up to see that she’d buried her head in his shoulder.

  “In the name of the Pleiades,” he said, his eyes fixed on the carnage in front of us.

  “All of them?” He looked at me, his eyes wide. “What about the mermaids?”

  “We don’t know. None of the…” Mercedes lifted her head and her eyes lingered on the field in front of us. “There are no mermaids—their pool is empty.”

  “The maze was on fire when we showed up,” I said, trying to keep from losing it right here in the middle of the still-smoldering field. “There was no way that any creature, even the mermaids, could have survived that kind of fire.”

  “They were under ice, though,” Mercedes said. “They froze the pond. So maybe they were protected. They could be safe.”

  I shook my head. “How? There’s no more water. They had nowhere to go.”

  “I’ll go check. Just in case.” Rhys turned away from the two of us, striding off toward the embers, kicking them out of his way as he went. He stopped at the lip of the pool, staring into it with his hands clasped behind him. He stood there for another moment and shook his head before turning and returning to us.

  “They aren’t there,” he said. “No sign of them having had been there, even. If they had been trapped inside the pool when it was on fire, there would be ashes or something. And there’s a rune on Talia’s throne. Maybe they used it to get away.”

  “Where would they go?” I asked. “They’re mermaids, they couldn’t exactly run through the forest.”

  “I don’t know where they’d go, but you can’t give up hope.” Rhys sat next to Mercedes, and I crumpled beside them, pulling my knees to my chest. He wrapped one hand around mine and snaked his other arm around Mercedes. “All we know is that there are no bodies and no ashes. And for now that means no mermaids. But we’ll find them.”

  “Or they could have burned beyond all recognition. Their ashes could have blown away. The wizards could have taken them somewhere.”

  “Don’t think like that.” Rhys squeezed my hand. “Wherever they are, we’ll find them. You can’t give up hope.”

  “You said that already! But look around you!” I pulled my hand away from his and threw my arms in the air. “What here tells you we should hope? Everyone is dead, Rhys. They’re dead! They stayed here when I ran so that they could protect me, so they could protect a stupid house, and they died. For what?”

  “Allie.” The calm in his voice just made me angrier.

  “They died to protect what? This?” I waved my hand at the palace grounds, still smoldering around us. “Me? What? What sort of choice did I make that led to this? Tell me!”

  “I don’t know.” He shook his head and looked at the burning hillside below us. “We chose to fight an evil wizard, and this is one of the consequences.”

  “People died because of what we did today. We killed them. The choices I made killed them.”

  “So what do you want to do?” Rhys asked. “Do you want to stop? To surrender? Because let me tell you—if you surrender, more people will die. Lots more people. Is that what you want?”

  My entire body trembled as tears slipped down my cheeks. “No.”

 
; “Good.” Rhys nodded, his jaw tight. “Then get a hold of yourself and remember that you’re supposed to be a queen.”

  “Rhys,” Mercedes said, her voice dripping with warning.

  “No.” He turned to glare at her and then back at me. “They stayed to give you time to get away. Timbago stayed to give you time to escape with the tear. They died protecting you because they believed in you.”

  I swallowed and clutched the cool pendant. “I know.”

  “So we finish this,” Rhys said, his voice low, almost a growl. He stood and threw a rock at the still-burning embers. “We bury our friends, and then we go back to Dramera, regroup our army, and we make the Fate Maker pay for what he did. Do you hear me, Allie? We make him pay for this.”

  I nodded as he reached to help me up and gave my shoulder a brief squeeze. “We hunt him down and we end this. I end this. Once and for all.”

  He kept his eyes on mine and nodded slowly as I reached up to touch the Dragon’s Tear. Timbago had told me generally what to do, but first I had to finish taking care of my friends. “We need to get shovels.”

  “No, we don’t.” Mercedes said, her voice soft. “I can handle it.”

  “It’s my…”

  “I can handle it. Just… Rhys, keep her back turned.”

  “I don’t need to keep my back turned.”

  “Do it for me,” she said.

  Instead of saying anything I lowered my head, resigned, and let Rhys turn me away from my best friend and the horror that would always be tattooed inside my mind.

  “I’m so sorry,” Mercedes said. I could hear the world around me start to cry out a horrible heartbreaking song, the ground itself trembling like it was weeping. “I feel your pain, my sisters. I am so sorry.”

  “What?” I tried to turn, but Rhys kept a tight hold on me, not letting me move.

  “Come on,” Mercedes said as she wrapped her arm around my waist, and the two of them half carried, half dragged me up the hill and away from the maze. When we reached the top I stopped and shook myself loose, turning around.