Heart of the Moors

Chapter 22

Aurora hurried after Count Alain as he led her toward the palace, changing directions abruptly halfway there. When he’d told her that one of his people had overheard Simon’s family arguing with a group of faeries, she’d followed him without question.

“You ought to have told me before the dancing began,” Aurora said. “Who knows what’s happened without us intervening!”

He accepted her criticism without comment. And then there was nothing to say, because she saw two groups shouting at each other. Humans stood face to face with Fair Folk, both groups appearing to be frothingly angry.

“All we want is our child back!” Simon’s father yelled into the face of a tree warrior. The faerie’s features were seemingly carved out of bark, with moss hanging off the side of his head like oddly cut hair.

“We’ve told you a score of times, we don’t have your pup,” piped up a mushroom faerie.

“We’d prefer not to fight,” Simon’s father said, “but we will if we must. We know about your weakness when cut with cold iron.”

There came a hiss from the nearby faeries at this threat.

“We know about your weakness when enchanted,” said a pixie with green wings and sharp teeth.

Never had Aurora been so glad that she’d had the foresight to forbid weapons from the festival.

“No one wants violence of any kind,” said Count Alain, to Aurora’s surprise. The crowd turned to see him and, noticing their queen standing to his side, bowed hastily.

“You are mistaken. The faeries do not have your boy,” Aurora told Simon’s family. “My own soldiers have sworn to me there’s no sign that faeries took him, but rather that it was the work of brigands.”

Simon’s father looked surprised, but he didn’t seem ready to believe her words.

“We told you!” said a hedgehog faerie, wrinkling his nose. “What do we want with a poxy human boy?”

That seemed about to set off Simon’s father again when Nanny Stoat arrived. She moved to stand next to Aurora.

“You heard the queen,” she said, making a shooing motion. “Time to disperse.”

“But one of the soldiers told me it was them,” Simon’s father said. “He said that those faeries there were the ones who carried off my child.”

“Who told you that?” Aurora asked.

Simon’s father looked around the festival desperately but then seemed confused. “I don’t know. He was here a moment ago.”

“It’s not true,” Aurora said.

Simon’s father’s expression turned mulish. “But he said—”

“Is that a way to talk to your sovereign ruler?” Nanny Stoat asked him, emphasizing her point by poking him in the leg with the end of the walking stick she held.

He shook his head, looking more repentant after her reprimand than he had following anything Aurora said.

Gathering himself up, he raised his eyes to Aurora’s. “You will tell me if you hear more news of him, won’t you? And you won’t stop looking?”

“I won’t stop looking,” Aurora said, although from what her castellan had told her, she wasn’t sure that anything more they heard would be at all good.

After he left, she turned to Nanny Stoat. “Thank you,” she said. “Without your support, I am not sure they would have believed me half as readily.” She looked around. “I hope this festival wasn’t foolish.”

“No,” Nanny Stoat told her. “We ought to be like this, all together. Even if we squabble. And it does the people good to see their queen having fun.”

Aurora smiled at that. “I am not sure what my court makes of me, let alone my people.”

“They think you’re young and a little foolish,” she replied. “And entirely too comfortable with the common folk. Not to mention the Fair Folk.”

Aurora wrinkled her nose. “And I wasn’t sure I wanted to know, either.”

The old woman laughed.

“I don’t know how to make any of them listen to me the way they listen to you,” Aurora said with a sigh.

“You will,” said Nanny Stoat. “But changing their minds is something else. You might see the beauty in magic, while some people will only ever see the power in it.”

With that, Nanny Stoat walked off, leaning on her walking stick for support. The crowd was still breaking up. Count Alain remained by Aurora’s side.

“Thank you for bringing me here and for knowing that I’d want to come,” she told him. “I didn’t think you understood.”

“Because of the necklace?” he asked her.

She thought of the arrow he’d shot into the Moors and the rage on his face. “For one thing.”

He took her hand. “My queen, I have lived my whole life thinking of the faeries as monsters. To see them differently isn’t easy for me, but you have made me want to try. I should have considered my gift to you more carefully, but as it is the metal mined in my lands, I have a special affinity for it.”

“I am glad you’re trying,” Aurora said, smiling up at Count Alain. She recalled how she’d thought that if she could convince him to see the benefits of allying with the Fair Folk, then it would be possible to convince the rest of her kingdom. She’d given up on that after the gift of the necklace, but it seemed she’d succeeded after all. She ought to be pleased.

But it was impossible for her to feel much of anything when she still needed to make things right with Phillip.

She’d spotted him during her dance with Alain. It had been all she could do not to rush from the dance to chase him down and explain things. She knew she shouldn’t have spoken so harshly to him after the banquet in the Moors. She owed him an apology.

But first she had to find him.

When she returned to the dancing area, a branle was being performed, the participants moving back and forth in a wide circle, up onto their toes and down again. Phillip was neither among the dancers nor among those watching. Her godmother was nowhere to be seen, either, but there was some time before the signing ceremony.

With a sinking heart, Aurora danced the gavotte, the saltarello, and several caroles. Her spirits lowered with each one, although a tree man spun her with such grace that she never lost her footing. And yet, she could see that her plan was working. She wasn’t the only human partnered with a faerie. Nor were all the dancers noble. For her last set, she was partnered with a sturdy farmer who clearly couldn’t believe his luck and guided her through the steps with aplomb.

When it was done, she excused herself from the floor. Phillip hadn’t returned. She meant to look for him in another area of the festival, but before she could, Lady Fiora brought her a cup of cider. Immediately, she began discussing the nobles who had come, and telling Aurora how beautiful she had looked on the floor.

“I shouldn’t say this, but my brother stared so while you danced,” Lady Fiora said with a giggle. “And you are beautifully flushed. Your eyes are positively sparkling.”

“Have you seen Prince Phillip?” Aurora asked before gulping down the drink.

Lady Fiora looked surprised. “Why, I thought he’d gone,” she said. “Back to Ulstead.”

Aurora’s heart seemed to twist.

“Did I say something—”

“Excuse me.” Aurora raced away from the dancing and across the lawn, past jugglers and an impromptu wrestling match between a hedgehog faerie and a burly human who seemed surprisingly equal in both strength and agility, past the storyteller Maleficent had uncursed, who was telling a tale about a fish with a ring in its stomach. But Phillip was nowhere she looked.

It was hard for Aurora to move through the crowd without someone stopping her to tell her either how lovely the festival was and how much they were enjoying it or to make a request that she do something about, say, their neighbors’ goats always grazing on their land.

But Aurora paused long enough only to smile or thank the person or say that she couldn’t help them right then. And with each step, her feeling of panic intensified.

She spotted Flittle near a large basin where children were laughing and bobbing for apples.

“Have you seen Phillip, Auntie?” she asked.

“No, my dear,” said Flittle. “Is he lost?”

Aurora moved on, but at every turn there was someone to engage her in conversation.

“Did you see what Lord Donald of Summerhill is wearing?” asked Lady Sybil. “He’s got on a jacket with sleeves so long they’re dragging in the dirt!”

“Beauteous Queen Aurora, whose hair resembles nothing so much as the wheat of fertile fields, I was devastated to lose the riddle contest,” said Baron Nicholas. “But though I could not have the first dance, perhaps I can have this one. Won’t you step out with me?”

“I see the reason for the treaty now,” said Balthazar the tree man. “Not before, but now.”

“What a marvelous festival this is,” said Thistlewit. “Come and take a piece of cake with your favorite auntie.”

Prince Phillip had left Perceforest. She wouldn’t ever get to say farewell to him.

She sagged down onto the grass.

All around her the festival went on, but the sounds of it seemed to recede in her ears. She could think of only one thing—she loved Phillip. The very thing she had feared, the very thing she’d thought she was protected from, had happened.

She had looked for him in moments of distress, sought him out when she was in need of cheering up. She had laughed with him and told him her fears and hopes. And she had loved him all the while, not knowing that was love. But now she had lost him forever, for want of the courage to know her own heart.

Above her head, a raven circled, cawing to get her attention. Diaval landed in front of her, hopping and waving his wings.

“What is it?” she asked him, moving close and bending toward him. “Has something happened?”

A few people looked at her, thinking that it was very strange to see their queen expecting answers from a bird. She waited for him to become a man, but he didn’t change. He just kept hopping and dancing and squawking wildly.

A terrible dread filled her.

“Nod your head twice if Maleficent is in danger,” Aurora said.

Diaval bobbed his head twice.

“Take me,” Aurora said. “I’ll follow.”