“Very.”
It was hard to tell what might be out in the garden, or in the darkness just beyond. The storm was almost here, and the breeze was increasing. I watched it run a circuit of the yard, high in the trees, slipping under the green leaves and turning them over so that their lighter undersides caught the moonlight. More leaves turned as the wind raced along the fence, until the yard became a silver flag unfurling with a rustle against the dark green storm clouds.
But if there was a person in all that, I couldn’t see him.
Claire was shaking her head. “Nobody will be here for a couple of days at the earliest, I promise you. Even if he’d somehow escaped, he couldn’t be here.”
“The fey timeline differs so much from ours that there’s no way to know how much time has passed there since you left. They could have had weeks to look for you.”
“No, they couldn’t.”
“Claire! I saw you a month ago and you weren’t even showing! And now you have a one-year-old—”
“Nine months.”
“Whatever. The point is—”
“That time is running faster here right now, giving me a head start.”
I turned from staring at the garden to look at her. “Come again?”
“The fey have the timeline variations charted out. It’s one of their major advantages over us. They always know exactly when they’re going to arrive in our world, and we never do in theirs.”
“How the hell can you chart something like time?”
She pushed up her glasses, the old signal for nervousness. Or maybe it was just the heat. The air was thick with rain, muggy and hot like an encompassing blanket. Smothering. Like the daysubrand took two hundred lashes, and learned nothing but how to hate.
Like he’d needed the lesson.
“Caedmon has this room in the palace where they keep up with it,” she told me, sitting back down. “There’s this big thing on the wall. It looks sort of like a map with two rivers. One is our world’s timeline; the other is theirs. And they each have their own riverbed, you know? Sometimes they go pretty parallel, while in others, one will bow out in a big loop, taking a lot more time to get back anywhere near the other.”
“So sometimes time runs faster here, and sometimes it runs faster there?”
“Yes. I checked yesterday, and it will be a while before anyone can come after me.”
“How long?”
“It depends on how long they look for me in Faerie before thinking that maybe I slipped through. The current bend in the river—if you want to call it that—isn’t huge. So yes, a few more days. Maybe a week if I’m lucky.”
I stared at the yard, unconvinced. “Then why do I feel like I’m being watched?”
“Probably because you are,” she said sourly. “The fey have spies all over the place, and not all of them are human.”
“Meaning what?”
“They can use elements of our world to spy on us. The Blarestri are descendants of the fertility gods, the Vanir—or so they claim. It allows them to connect with plants, animals, that sort of thing.”
“What about the Svarestri?”
“They’re descended from the other, rival group of gods—the ?sir, who influence things like the weather.” She wrinkled her forehead. “I’m not sure what they can do. They weren’t a popular topic at court.”
“I can understand why!”
She shook her head. “It goes back a lot farther thansubrand’s ambition. There was some war, a long time ago, between the two groups of gods. The ?sir won, and their followers ruled Faerie for ages. Then one day, they suddenly disappeared, with no warning, no explanation. It left everyone to sort things out for themselves. So, of course, there was another war.”
“And the Svarestri lost.”
“Not . . . exactly, no. Nobody really won that time. They were too evenly matched, and it just ended up being a slaughter. I don’t know much about it because none of the older fey who were there want to talk about it. Anyway, after a while, the Svarestri settled in the lands they’d been able to hold, and the Blarestri did the same in theirs. And they’ve just gone on hating one another ever since.”
“But Caedmon let his sister marry one of them?”
She rolled her eyes. “Not just anyone, the king. And I don’t know about ‘let.’ Efridís was determined she wasn’t going to marry beneath herself, and because she was princess, everyone at her own court would have been beneath her. Caedmon went along with it, thinking the marriage might improve relations between the two camps, foster goodwill and that sort of thing.”
“But it hasn’t.”
“Nothing is going to do that! All the Svarestri care about is getting back into power. It’s like they’re obsessed with it. I think they made the marriage because they thought if Caedmon died childless, their prince would rule everything. Only now Aiden is in the picture.”