Evanescent (Chronicles of Nerissette) Read online

  I watched them go, fear causing my stomach to tie itself into knots. What if I was wrong? What if there was some way to negotiate with the Fate Maker? What if there was a better way than war? I couldn’t see another way, though. He was coming and he was bringing an army with him; he wasn’t going to want to talk it out. And even if he did, I didn’t think there was any way we were going to compromise.

  I stood and smoothed my hands over the green linen tunic and brown trousers I’d changed into after the ball. I made my way out of the dining room and a strong hand shot out, grabbing my arm and dragging me into the shadows of the hallway.

  Winston pulled me into a hug. We hadn’t had a moment alone since the ball, and even though I had a war to plan, I couldn’t resist the idea of leaning against his chest for a few seconds. Right now, I just wanted to hug my boyfriend and pretend that all of this was a very bad dream.

  “How’s the planning going on your end?” I asked quietly. “Will the walls hold if he attacks?”

  “Forget about that,” Winston said, his voice rough. His eyes were like deep, dark pools that I could lose myself in as he stared down at me. “He could have killed you last night.”

  “He didn’t.”

  “He could have,” Winston repeated. “We were all in the room, and there was nothing any of us could have done.”

  “But he didn’t. He didn’t kill me.”

  “He got to you,” Winston whispered, and I could see that his face was filled with fear, his dark eyes wide.

  “It—”

  He pressed his lips to mine, silencing me. “You’re not allowed to let him kill you,” Winston whispered as he pulled away from me.

  “I won’t.” I rested my head against his broad chest for a moment longer.

  “I don’t know what I’d do if something happened to you.”

  “You’ll find a way to get you and Mercedes home. Rhys, too, if you can convince him to go.” I pressed forward on my tiptoes so that we were eye to eye. “If something happens to me, you make Darinda find you a portal, and you use it. That’s an order.”

  “You can’t order me to leave you behind.”

  “If I die, you have to find a way to get yourselves home. You get home and let the portal close off the gate between this world and the World That Is. Forget this place and me and everything else.”

  “I can’t forget you,” he said and tugged me closer. “I won’t.”

  “Yes, you can. Forget me, and go live a fabulous life.”

  “How about you just promise not to die and we can work on finding a portal out of here together?”

  “I’ll do my best,” I said, melting into his arms a bit.

  “I know.” He smiled for a brief moment before dropping his cheek onto the crown of my head. “Just be careful. Please.”

  “I will.”

  “And I want you to keep Kitsuna with you from now on. Let her stay and have a sleepover with you and Mercedes in your room.”

  “Why?” Not that I minded hanging out with the red-haired wryen. But why did Winston want her staying with me now? Was there some threat he wasn’t telling me about? “I know you can take care of yourself,” Winston said. “But I’d like to make sure that if you need it, you’ve got someone to guard your back. Someone else who can use a sword.”

  “Someone besides the dryad archer,” Kitsuna said, her voice low. She came toward us, her feet silent against the stone floor. “In case a more stabby, iron-loving approach is needed.”

  “I have a guard. A lot of guards, actually.” I turned to her. “Not that I don’t want to hang out with you, but—”

  “The soldiers are needed on the line,” Kitsuna said. “Every member of your security detail is needed to fight.”

  “And you’re not?” I asked.

  “I’ve fought beside you before, Your Majesty.” Kitsuna raised her chin. “It would be my pleasure to do it again. Besides, it’s not as if I’ll be flying off to war with the rest of the red dragon clan.”

  I tensed at the way she clenched her jaw as she said it. Kitsuna was a wryen—the child of two different types of dragons. Her father had been a lizard dragon from Bathune, and her mother was part of the red dragon clan. And because they were two different breeds Kitsuna was trapped in human form. The only way she could fly was riding on the back of another dragon, and most of them considered her a second-class citizen anyway—unworthy of fighting as a warrior. Not that she’d ever let that stop her.

  “Keep her safe,” Winston said as he let go of me. “Keep each other safe.” After one last, lingering look, he hurried in the opposite direction, back toward the aerie where the rest of the dragons were busy preparing for war.

  “I can keep myself safe,” I muttered as he left. “Thank you very much. Flaming snot for brains.”

  “Your Majesty…” Kitsuna touched my shoulder, and I wrenched my gaze away from Winston to her.

  “What?”

  “Are you feeling okay? You’re usually not so tense when the prince consort suggests that I act as your bodyguard.”

  “It’s not you. It’s just…” I sighed and ran a hand up into my hair, tugging at the roots. “I have an army to prepare and a relic to find, and I have no idea where to start.”

  “My suggestion would be to start at the beginning.”

  “And where is that?”

  “Breakfast. According to the cooks you’ve had nothing more than a glass of juice and a few bites of bread since the Fate Maker’s appearance last night.”

  “But the others—”

  “Breakfast.” Kitsuna herded me toward the kitchens. “An army, and its queen, all fight on their stomachs. So first we eat and then we go to the library to help the nymphs.”

  “Slight change of plans,” I said. “Instead of eating and then looking, let’s get breakfast for everyone and eat while we search.”

  Chapter Eight

  I stepped through the open double doors to the library and froze, sizing up the miles of bookshelves covering the walls for almost four floors. I had a sinking suspicion that the book we needed was going to be all the way at the end of the top shelf farthest away from us. It’d be just my luck.

  “Are you okay?” Kitsuna asked.

  “Your Majesty?” Boreas turned to stare at the tray I had loaded with food in my hands. “Why are you carrying a tray full of muffins?”

  “I brought everyone breakfast,” I said and raised an eyebrow at him.

  “I have tea and dragon’s blood,” Kitsuna said from behind me. “As well as some of the ember fruit juice that Her Majesty is so fond of.”

  “You brought breakfast?” Mercedes looked at me curiously.

  I shrugged. “I thought we could all use it. Or Kitsuna did.”

  “Right.” She followed me as I set the tray down on the main table in the center of the library. She picked up a muffin made with some sort of green fruit I didn’t recognize that sort of tasted like cherries. “Breakfast. Solves all our problems, doesn’t it?”

  “Not really.” I couldn’t meet her eyes. “We may not have any idea about what the Dragon’s Tear is, but maybe the muffins will help us think more clearly?”

  “And if we find the tear, you’ll destroy it, won’t you?”

  “I have to.” I took a bite of my muffin. “It’s the only way to keep everyone safe.”

  “Allie, if you destroy it, we’ll have lost two relics, and we still won’t be home. We’ll be trapped here. Won’t we?”

  “Yes.” I nodded. “But we’re already trapped here anyway. We can’t go home.”

  “Of course not,” Mercedes snapped, glaring at me. “Because somewhere along the line, after they plopped that crown on your head, you forgot that going home was what this was all supposed to be about. Finding a way to get us home. Not staying here and playing queen.”

  Before I could say anything she grabbed another muffin and stormed past me, deeper into the library.

  “Crap.” I sighed and turned to Kitsuna, who offered me a
cup of tea. “That could have gone better.”

  “Yes. It could have.” She looked around the library.

  I followed her gaze, taking in Aquella, Boreas, and Darinda standing with their heads together over a scroll, chewing on muffins, but Mercedes was nowhere to be found. Weird.

  “So, where do we start?” Kitsuna asked, her voice hushed as if the books themselves were forcing us to stay quiet.

  “No idea.” I walked over to the nearest bookshelf and grabbed a green leather-bound book and read the spine: Criminal Trials of the Great Fairy Rebellion of 922. Probably not going to be helpful.

  “I guess we start digging through these books and figure out what the heck it is we’re looking for.” I grabbed another book, this one bound in black, and read the heavy silver letters on the spine: Naiad Culture: A History for Nincompoops. This might take longer than I’d first thought.

  “Come on,” Kitsuna said, motioning toward the far wall. “Let’s go ask the map. She’ll know where the dragon section is.”

  I walked over to the Tree Folk stand and peered down at the piece of parchment trapped beneath the glass. “Hello.”

  The map hummed in reply and words appeared on its surface. “What can I help you with today, Your Majesty?”

  “I have no idea what I’m looking for, actually. So I was hoping you could guide me.”

  Two tiny Xs appeared on the map, directly in the center of the library—where the case stood—and when I peered down at them I saw that the one X had a note on it that said, “You are here.” The other had a note on it that said, “You are not here.”

  Well, that was helpful.

  I moved closer and pressed my nose against the glass so that I could read the tiny script on the map. “Not so close” scrolled across the top of the map in bold calligraphy. “You’ll smudge my glass.”

  I moved back slightly and narrowed my eyes at the case. “Is that better?”

  “Much, thank you.”

  Kitsuna shook her head, and I couldn’t help but grin. “Tree Folk wood. Always sassy, rarely helpful,” I said as I thought about how the doors—and the furniture in my bedroom—all had the same attitude.

  The legends of Nerissette said that the Tree Folk were a tribe of dryads that had become so close to their trees they’d given up human form and became trees themselves. Then, one day, during the Great Wizard Wars, before the Pleiades showed themselves to the people of Nerissette, the Tree Folk had been destroyed—turned into various objects that could think for themselves. In the case of the Crystal Palace, it meant that we had living furniture in some places. Living furniture with way too much attitude.

  “I need to know where the books related to the Dragon’s Tear can be found in the library,” I said.

  “Dragon books are found in section four.” The words floated across the top of the map and I watched as a small area of the map—section four—began to glow. “Books about tears and sadness can be found in various places. Please be more specific.”

  “I don’t want to know about tears.” I bit my lower lip. “I want to know about the Dragon’s Tear—the relic. I need to know about the relics.”

  “Books on prisons, alchemists, and the search for eternal life can be found in the following areas of the library.” The map began to glow in three different sections, one near the top of the third floor, another in the very back of the library, and the third somewhere off to the left, in a section labeled Necromancy. I swallowed and then looked up to see a glowing light coming from what I thought just might be the “raising the dead” section of the library. Not really a place I wanted to go if I could help it.

  “I’ll keep that in mind.” I tried not to roll my eyes. Tree Folk furniture could think—it was sentient—but as I’d found through various trips to the library, the map didn’t always tell you what you wanted to know, more what it thought you needed to know.

  “It is my strongest recommendation that you search for your answers in section four.”

  “Right.” I nodded. “Thanks.”

  “Come on,” Kitsuna said.

  I gave the case one last look before turning to follow Kitsuna along the highlighted path the map had laid out on the floor. We made our way up the spiral staircase toward section four, and climbed onto the balcony on second floor of the library. I was careful not to look across the railing or down below. It wasn’t that I was afraid of heights, it was just that suddenly the barrier between open air and me didn’t look nearly sturdy enough. If one of us tripped it was a long way down to a very hard marble floor.

  “You okay?”

  I tried to smile but all I managed was a weak grimace instead. “Fine.”

  Kitsuna eyed the space in front of us uneasily. “I’m glad we’re not up in the higher sections near the third and fourth floor. What about you?”

  “You can’t be afraid of heights.” I glanced over at her. “You’re a dragon. A dragon. That’s like being afraid of fire even though hello? Dragons are fireproof.”

  “I’m a wryen,” she said, “and no, I’m not afraid of heights. I like being up high just fine. What I don’t like is falling. Which seems like a real possibility right here. So come on, let’s go find some books on dragons and just how great it is to be fireproof.”

  “Do you have any idea what we’re looking for?” I asked.

  “Yeah,” she said. “The book with the title 10,000 Things You Didn’t Know About the Dragon’s Tear and Where to Locate It. What else?”

  “If only it were that simple, huh?”

  “It’ll be fine. We still have two days,” Kitsuna said.

  “That’s not much time.”

  “But the upside is that we only have to search the palace and not all of Nerissette. That makes it easier. At least we’re not going to find out that it’s a half a day’s flight away in one of the far settlements of the Firas. Or, even worse, inside one of Arianne of the Veldt’s hair decorations.”

  “You do have a point,” I said. “Now, if I were a book on legendary dragon relics that can be used to destroy the world, where would I hide?”

  “What will you do if we find it? Will you really destroy it?” Kitsuna asked as we started scanning the shelves for something, anything, that could help us locate the tear.

  I bit my lower lip and didn’t meet her eyes. How was I supposed to explain that I didn’t want to destroy the tear, but I didn’t have any other option? I couldn’t let the Fate Maker have it. “I don’t have a choice, do I?”

  “We always have a choice.” Kitsuna shrugged. “Everything we do is a choice. The Fate Maker chose to be evil. You’ve chosen to fight him. That’s the way it is. When he comes to our gates and demands that relic, you’ll refuse him, and that’s another choice, a choice that not everyone would make.”

  I shook my head. “Anyone would fight back against him. There’s no choice there.”

  “Your aunt wouldn’t.” Kitsuna reached for a book and flipped it open, scanning it. “She’d give him the relic if she thought it would increase her power.”

  “Then she’d be an idiot. He would kill everyone if he had the relic.”

  “She wouldn’t care,” Kitsuna said, looking up at me from her book. “They’re cruel in Bathune. There’s a reason they choose to reside in a place where nightmares live.”

  “Cruel?” I asked.

  “Yes, cruel. Did I ever tell you that I saw my father once?” she asked. “He came back to Dramera from Bathune to see my mother.”

  “But wait, didn’t he take off on your mom after you were born?”

  “He did.” She shut the book and reached for another. “He came back, though, once I’d come of age. It’s said that some wryens can hunt. They’re often good trackers. We have a dragon’s hunting instinct, but because we can’t shape-shift we’re much better on the ground than regular dragons. So human flexibility with a dragon’s nose.”

  “So you’re like the hounds the Fate Maker told me about once.”

  “Hounds?” Kitsuna lo
oked surprised. “How do you know about those poor creatures?”

  “Gunter of the Veldt had brought one in from Bathune to hunt. The Fate Maker said that people had died trying to hunt the Hound and that it had escaped.”

  “I’m not surprised,” Kitsuna said and wrinkled her nose. “Gunter has always seemed like a cruel child trapped in a man’s body. Anyway, my father came back to Dramera to see if I had similar skills to that of a Hound.”

  “Do you?”

  “No. In Dramera, female wryens aren’t traditionally trained to hunt. And even if they were, there are no older wryens in Dramera who could train me. So, when my father found out that I wasn’t going to make him any money, he left again. He didn’t even see me.”

  “What?”

  “He never even bothered to come and see me. He went to my mother and asked about my abilities, and when she told him that I couldn’t track, he went away again and never even came to see me. He couldn’t walk up the stairs to the loft I was hiding in to see his own daughter because I wasn’t going to turn him a profit.”

  “That’s horrible.”

  “That’s how people in Bathune are taught to think. It is a cruel country and your aunt is a hard empress. If she were in your position she would hand the Dragon’s Tear over to the Fate Maker and not think twice about the consequences to other people. ”

  “Then it’s a good thing that this is our quest and not hers then, isn’t it?” I reached for a book—A History of Dragon Lore. That looked promising. I flipped it open and started looking for any mentions of the tear. “Dragon Creation Myths,” “Dragon’s Fire,” “Magical Properties of Dragon Scales.” Nope. “Myths and Legends of Treasure”? Now, that could be interesting.

  I flipped through the book to the beginning of that section and started to skim through the text. There, halfway down. The word “Tear.” That was it. I skimmed a few more pages. Nothing more than a mention of the Dragon’s Tear. No description of what it was or what it could do.

  “This isn’t helpful,” I said as I slid the book back onto the shelf. There had to be some way to narrow it down from the hundreds of books in section four. “I need to find something, anything, about the Dragon’s Tear. Please, whatever stars rule this world, help me find something useful.”