Wayfarer

Nine

“You lied to him!” Linden accused when Thorn came back into the Queen’s study. “And you tricked me!”

“No, I didn’t,” replied the older faery smugly, sitting down and propping her feet up on the table. “I made all of you promise not to tell Knife-but did you ever hear me say that I wouldn’t?”

She was right, Linden realized. Part of her was glad that Timothy was back with Knife and Paul, but what Thorn had done still made her uneasy, and she wondered if Timothy would ever trust a faery again.

“Linden,” said Valerian, and she looked up as the Queen continued, “the knowledge that you gained from your adventure with Timothy is of great value to us all, and I am glad that you returned safely to tell us of it. But even so”-her voice became stern-“you also acted foolishly in leaving the Oak without permission, and it is only by the Gardener’s mercy that you are still alive. What I said to you before, I will say again: You are still too young and unskilled in magic to undertake such a dangerous task.”

She rose to her feet, her gaze holding Linden’s. “As Queen Amaryllis’s appointed successor, I forbid you to leave the Oak again until I give you my permission to do so.”

Linden’s cheeks flamed, and she hung her head. “Yes, Your Majesty.”

“I also forbid you to have any more contact with Timothy. This is not his quest, and we have no right to involve him in it. Already he dares not return to London because of what you have done; we can only pray that he suffers no worse consequences. Do you understand? You must let him go, for his sake.”

A knot of pain formed in Linden’s throat. She slumped forward and buried her face in her arms, overwhelmed with misery.

“It’s all right,” said Wink soothingly, stroking Linden’s hair. “Knife and Paul will take good care of-What is it?”

This last was to Thorn, who had gone very still and held up a hand for silence. Soundlessly the dark-haired faery eased herself out of her chair, padded to the door, and with one swift motion yanked it open-but no one was there.

“Blight,” she muttered as she slammed the door again and stalked back to her seat. “The little weasel must have heard me coming.”

Campion looked up sharply from her stack of books. “Bluebell? How long was she listening?”

“She must have followed me up the Stair when I came back,” said Thorn. “And I was too busy congratulating myself on having outwitted the boy to notice her listening at the keyhole-but I’d know that prissy sniff of hers anywhere. Wither and gall!” She thumped her fist into her palm.

“All is not lost,” said Valerian. “If she only heard the last part of our conversation, then she knows nothing except that Linden is being punished for leaving the Oak and for making contact with Timothy. The matters we discussed earlier will remain safe with us, as they should be. Campion, have you found anything?”

“The problem is,” said the Librarian abstractedly, turning another page, “even the best of our records only go back four hundred years, well after our people broke off from the other faeries-or were exiled from them, I suppose. And when I talk about best, I mean the Queen’s own version of our history, which she had to rewrite from memory after the Sundering; Jasmine had destroyed or censored everything else. There just isn’t much here to work with.”

Valerian looked grave. “Then the human legends are our last remaining hope. We can only pray that Timothy is able to find the information we need.”

“If Knife doesn’t strangle him first,” said Thorn, and Wink rapped her over the head with the teapot. “Ow!”

“Serves you right, you mean thing,” said Wink.

“Sit down,” ordered Peri, pointing to the armchair, and Timothy sat. Apprehensive as he was, he could hardly take his eyes off her now that he knew she had once been a faery: The clues were all there in her lithe movements, the angles of her bones, and those wild, dark eyes. Not to mention about a hundred other things she’d done and said since he’d first met her…

“Why are you here?” she demanded.

He hadn’t expected her to start into him quite like that. Most people would have said Where have you been? or Why did you leave? or Don’t you know how terribly worried we were?

“I…didn’t have a choice,” he said awkwardly.

“Nonsense. Your note said you’d be gone for three weeks; you obviously thought you’d have no trouble finding a place to stay. But now here you are again-so what went wrong?”

“I met Linden.”

Peri’s whole face changed, anger washed away by incredulous hope. She sank onto the footstool and whispered, “Linden? Thorn never mentioned…She’s alive? She was with you?”

Timothy nodded. “She told me everything. About the Oakenfolk and how they lost their magic-and about you, too…Knife.”

For a moment Peri sat frozen; then she leaped up and ran down the corridor, shouting, “Paul! Paul!”

Here we go again, thought Timothy.

“Children of Rhys,” muttered Paul some time later, wheeling up to the computer desk. “Sounds Welsh if you ask me….” He squinted at the monitor, then made an exasperated noise and said, “Oh, don’t give me that rubbish.”

“What is it?” asked Peri. She’d followed Paul and Timothy into the studio but was keeping well back, eyeing the computer like a potential threat.

Paul peered down at the light on the modem, which was flashing red, then switched it off with an irritated sigh. “It’s on the blink again. I can try restarting, but I have a bad feeling it’s not going to work.”

Timothy should have been disappointed, but he was too busy stifling a yawn. He’d told Paul and Peri his story over an enormous breakfast, which had gone a long way toward making him feel human again, and a hot shower and clean clothes had helped, too. But now that his stomach was full and the ice in his bones had melted, he was finding it difficult to stay awake.

“No good,” said Paul a moment later, pushing back from the computer.

Peri looked frustrated. “But we need to find out about these Children right away. If there’s any chance of finding them and convincing them to help the Oakenfolk-”

“There’ll be internet access at the library,” said Timothy.

Paul gave him a curious look. “You seem to be pretty committed to this, for someone who didn’t even know faeries existed until yesterday. Are you sure you want to get involved?”

“I’m already involved,” said Timothy. “So I might as well make myself useful, right?”

Paul and Peri exchanged glances. “Fair enough,” said Paul, “but from now on, you don’t go anywhere without Peri or myself. We all understand what’s at stake, so there’s no more need for drama or keeping secrets. Whatever we do, we do together.”

Timothy couldn’t argue with that. Especially since Paul and Peri had known about the Oakenfolk’s plight, and been trying to help them, a lot longer than he had. He nodded-and to his surprise, Peri put an arm around his shoulders and gave him a comradely squeeze. She didn’t say I’m sorry we let you down or I should have trusted you or any of the things he’d thought he wanted to hear her say, but somehow that simple gesture made everything all right between them just the same.

“I’ll drive you to the library,” she said.

Sunlight was burning through the last of the rainclouds as Timothy and Peri left the house, and the temperature felt even milder than before. Overnight, a small clump of crocuses had forced its way through the soil of the front garden and was blooming resolutely in the corner. As they crunched across the gravel toward the waiting car, Timothy zipped up his borrowed jacket and decided that England wasn’t so bad after all…but he still missed his home in Uganda, and probably always would.

“Was it hard for you?” he asked Peri. “Leaving the Oak, I mean?”

Peri slid into the driver’s seat and put the key in the ignition; with a determined twist she turned it, and the engine rumbled to life. “Yes and no,” she said as Timothy climbed in beside her. “I had Paul, of course: That helped. And I knew the Oak was still there, even if I couldn’t live in it anymore. But even though I’d learned enough about your world to get by, I wasn’t prepared for how different it would be.”

“I suppose it would be pretty disappointing in some ways,” said Timothy. “Boring, even.”

“Boring?” She flicked him a glance. “You’ve no idea how tedious it was growing up in the Oak. But disappointing…yes, I suppose it was. I’d been friends with Paul for over a year by then, and we already knew we loved each other, but his parents didn’t know me at all, and it wasn’t easy to win them over. They sent me to stay in town for a few days, alone, while they tried to figure out where I’d come from and what to do with me…. It was horrible. And even after Paul convinced them to let me move into the House, I had so much to learn, and I kept making mistakes. There were times we both wondered if we’d done the right thing-but it was done, and we had to make the best of it.”

She backed the gray Vauxhall out of the drive and onto the road, speeding up once they’d crossed the stone bridge. Hedge-tangled walls rose around them as the wood fell away, making it difficult to see more than a few meters ahead. It must have been fun for Paul teaching her how to drive, thought Timothy.

“It did get easier, though, right?” he asked.

“Not for a long while. I just got better at-” Suddenly her foot came down on the brake, and Timothy rocked forward, the seat belt cutting into his shoulder.

“What?” he exclaimed, but then he saw it: a small brown-and-red bird, fluttering back and forth across the road as though to block their path.

“I’ve never seen a robin behave like that before,” said Peri, frowning as she drove closer. “Is it injured? Or protecting a nest?”

Timothy started to answer, then yelled and flung his arms over his face as the bird launched itself straight at the windshield. Peri wrenched the wheel, skidding the car across the road; they crashed into a hedgerow and stopped abruptly, broken twigs and dried-up berries pattering over them.

“Peri?” asked Timothy, and then in alarm, “Peri!”

She sat motionless, slumped against the steering wheel. He couldn’t see any blood on her face, but when he grabbed her shoulder she felt stiff as glass, and he couldn’t make her move.

A bird-shaped shadow flickered past the car’s front window, then dropped down beside Timothy’s door and swelled, ominously, into a tall human shape. Then came the voice, level and commanding, impossible to disobey:

“Get out of the car.”