“Here is where you went. So I—” Her voice wobbled; so did her bike.
She got off it, kicked its stand in place, and turned a slow circle, blinking
rapidly at the tall, silent trees, pennants of mist hanging from their boughs.
“Princess Perdita asked me to follow you. So I—” Her voice trickled to a
whisper. “So I did.
“Here?” he repeated sharply, and she shrugged helplessly.
“It’s where you went.”
Daimon parked his own bike, frowning, watching her turn another bewildered
circle, searching for anything familiar. Memories appeared in his mind like
stepping-stones; he tracked her backward to the royal library, to the palace
garage.
“Why on earth,” he asked with some annoyance, “would Perdita ask you to
follow me all the way up the north coast?”
“Well.” Her face, still colorless, seemed to shield itself then behind a
warrior’s mask, calm, watchful, focused on that fraught question. “It seems
she met your mother. Who explained what she, and Lady Seabrook, and your
friend Vivien Ravensley have in mind for you. At the least, a wedding. At
most, war between Wyvernhold and Ravenhold. Between you and your father. The
end of the rule of the Wyvernbourne kings.”
Daimon, staring at her, felt the fog that had taken up residence in his head
fray a little, breeze-blown, hinting at the precipice on which he stood.
“That sounds,” he said, his eyes narrowed against the mist, “that sounds
like some old story.”
“Doesn’t it?”
“How did it end?”
“Badly. Very, very badly.”
He was silent again, his eyes on her face now, using its calm to look as
clearly as he could into the swirling, unsettled mists of the past weeks. He
had met a young woman with astonishing eyes. She had taken him into another
world, showed him marvels, the most marvelous of which was how she had made
him see so clearly the drab, pointless, unfeeling world he had been born in,
devoid of vision, trivial to the extreme, and completely unworthy of his
curiosity and his love. In return, she had asked him only the simplest of
favors: to find a cauldron, to help her regain her lost realm, to become her
consort when she was crowned queen.
He closed his eyes and glimpsed the edge of the precipice at his feet, the
long, long fall into the unknown.
Where had he been? he wondered, seeking Dame Scotia’s face again to steady
himself as he balanced precariously between worlds.
He remembered then the knight in black he had battled with a broadsword, whose
impervious, implacable strength within the armor, behind the expressionless
helm, had seemed to him the shape and invincible face of his own confusion,
his conflicted impulses. The lovely, smiling, unexpected face that appeared
beneath the helm as he lay vanquished on the ground had transformed the dark.
“How did you do that?” he demanded, incredulous again. “Is there some
Ravensley in your past? Is that how you could follow me even here?”
“Ravensley? Not that I know,” she answered, looking baffled. “The family
crests tend toward beasts that get along very well with this world. Is that
where we are? In that fay realm?”
He glanced at the silent trees, the bay streaked with long sluices of mudflat
as the tide slowly, gently, pulled back into the sea. “I’m not sure. In
someone’s past, I think.”
“Is that why you stopped here? Because you sensed something? It drew you
here?”
“I stopped because I heard a rumor that within a shabby diner advertising all
you can eat there might be the vessel of ancient and enormous power I was
requested to find and return to Ravenhold.”
“Ravenhold. Not Wyvernhold.”
“I have the raven’s eyes. So I’m told. And the raven’s heart. I would
recognize what belongs to the raven.” He wandered restively a few steps to
where the Kingfisher Inn should have cast its shadow, should have hidden the
water from view. “Apparently, the inn vanished when it saw me coming.”
“The entire town vanished,” she breathed. “It’s like a dream. A spell cast
over us.”
“Yes.”
“Has this happened to you before?”
“Oh, yes,” he said, memories flooding into his head, a colorful wave of
scraps, moments, brief and timeless.
“Well, how— What do you do to find your way out of it?”
He looked at her from within the tide, no longer seeing her. “What makes you
think I have ever wanted to find my way out? Have you ever been spellbound?”
“Not until now.”
“This is where I found everything I thought I wanted. I left the world behind
to come to this place. I left my heart here, always, so that I could find my
way back. Now I can’t even find that.”
“What?”
“The face I loved. My heart.” He paused, searching for one face in memory,
and finding someone else entirely. “You should not be here.”
“No,” she said softly, somberly. “But I am. Lord Skelton warned us about
quests. How they reveal even when they seem to conceal, or confuse, or make no
sense whatsoever. Maybe this is not the spell that binds your heart; maybe it
is part of the quest you are on.”