“We’ll see each other soon, my dearest one. So very, very soon.” The Fate Maker turned to smile at me, his eyes glittering with hate. There was another brilliant burst of light and I flinched as three swords sliced through the air in front of me.
Rhys’s blade stopped an inch from the tip of my nose and quivered there. I sat, looking cross-eyed at the steel blade and sighed. To think, back in the real world my biggest hassle had been gym class. At least there no one had tried to kill me.
I looked around. The Fate Maker’s light show had gotten everyone’s attention, and now, instead of rushing the doors, they were all standing there, dumbfounded, staring as Rhys shoved a razor-sharp sword in my face.
“I think you missed him.” I shook my head and tried not to look terrified. Right now the last thing I needed was for my people to think that I was afraid. Even though I was totally terrified.
“I can see that.” He pulled his sword back with a quick jerk and sheathed it. “How long was he here?”
“A minute, maybe two.” I stood as the other two guards put their swords away, and then I began to pace, clenching my hands into fists to keep them from shaking. “He froze all of you and the next thing I knew I was trapped on the throne so he could rant at me.”
“He put a spell on you?” Winston pushed forward, past Rhys’s guards, and grabbed my hands. “Did he hurt you?”
“No, but he wants some sort of magical relic—the Dragon’s Tear. It’s supposed to be like the mirror. Something that lets him move between this world and the World That Is.”
“Or what?” Rhys asked.
“Oh you know, the usual bad-guy stuff,” I said and huffed out a panicky laugh. “He has an army and they’re marching toward Neris. When they get here I can either give him the tear or he’s going to invade, kill all of you, kill my mom at my feet, torture me, kill me, and then let my aunt have the throne. I may not have all of that in the right order but I think that’s the basic idea.”
“Did he hurt you?” Rhys repeated. “Or was it just threats?”
“He just threatened me.” I closed my eyes and swallowed, trying to keep from losing it in front of everyone. “Just empty words about how he could hurt my mom. How he could go through to our world and kill her. That he’d bring her back here so that I could watch her die.”
“Allie.”
“He can’t do it. Not really. We’re here, and she’s on the other side of reality, beyond our reach. The mirror is gone and there’s no way that he can get to her. There’s no way between this world and that one. It’s all just threats. Isn’t it?”
“Of course it is,” Rhys said softly. “Your mom is safe on the other side of the Bleak. He can’t get to her.”
“Are you okay?” Winston asked softly. “You? Allie? Not Queen Alicia. Not your mother. You.”
“I don’t know.” I shook my head and tried not to cry. “I always have my sword on me but tonight, tonight was a ball and so I was unarmed, and even if I had had my sword it wouldn’t have mattered.” I could hear the panic seeping into my own voice. “He used magic to tie me to my chair, and I was helpless. You were frozen and I was unarmed, and there was nothing I could do. I was alone and I was trapped and there was nothing I could do.”
“Rhys,” John of Leavenwald said. He’d slipped into the area closest to the throne. “We need to give everyone a task. We need to keep them calm.”
“Calm.” I nodded. “Yes, that’s what we need to do. Everyone needs to remain calm.”
“Right.” John moved forward, blocking me from the view of the rest of the nobles while I got control of myself.
“We need to prepare,” he said to the crowd. “If the Fate Maker has dared to come here it must mean he’s planned something.”
Yeah, I thought to myself. He’s planning on murdering us all. And he intended to start with me. Probably something I didn’t want to fill my nobles on just yet, though.
“Where do we go?” one of the noblemen shouted.
“We’ll send out dragon messengers as Queen Alicia had suggested earlier. They’re quickest. They’ll go to each of your lands, stop in all the villages. If the Fate Maker’s army is two days away, we must be quick to raise an army and march them here. There is no time to waste.”
“We can’t fight an army headed by a wizard. Not again,” Lady Arianne said. “Think of the warriors we lost last time. My son, my heir, was wounded. If someone as brave as Gunter can be brought down then none of us are safe. Our army isn’t prepared for this.”
“So what do we do?” another man called out.
“We’ll fight back,” I said, ignoring Arianne’s whining and my own fears about taking our weakened army into battle. “And we’ll keep fighting back until he realizes that this land isn’t his for the taking. If he wants a war, we’ll give him a war to make the Pleiades tremble.”
“To war!” a young dragon on the far side of the room, near the windows, yelled.
“To war!” someone else joined in.
And suddenly the mood shifted from panic to something else. Something bloodthirsty. Angry.
“To war,” hundreds of voices replied, the windows in the ballroom shaking from the noise.
“Allie?” Winston looked at me, and I stepped forward, pushing my way between John and Rhys so that I could face my subjects, hoping that they couldn’t tell how badly I was shaking.
“To war,” I said, trying to ignore the way my knees were trembling and keep from vomiting on the throne room floor.
Chapter Seven
“All but the last of the dragon messengers have returned, Your Majesty,” one of the red-jacketed soldiers said. He handed me a glass of ember fruit juice and a stack of paperwork as the sun rose over the horizon, and two house fairies flitted over to us, balancing a plate of toast that I didn’t really want to eat between them. “These are the estimates of how many weapons we have below in the armory.”
“Will it be enough?” I asked, setting the documents aside and staring at the soldier instead. The estimates wouldn’t mean anything to me. They were just numbers until someone told me if the number of weapons we had was greater than or equal to the number of soldiers who needed them. I had never been that great at algebra but even I could figure out that was how the math of warfare worked.
“You’ll have to ask the lord general,” the young soldier said, his blue eyes dark. “But even if it’s not, we’re prepared to fight with rocks and our bare hands if need be.” The soldier slipped back into his place, silently guarding the formal dining room where we’d all spread out to start planning our war.
“Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that.” I took a drink of my juice and turned to the dryad sitting quietly beside me. “Darinda?”
“Yes, Your Majesty?” The head of the Dryad Order looked up at me from the parchment she was poring over with Mercedes.
“The Fate Maker said that if we didn’t cooperate he would bring my mother here and kill her. Then he’d find another girl to take my place as the Golden Rose. Can he actually do it? Can he travel between the World That Is and the World of Dreams?”
“It’s a threat, Your Majesty,” Aquella, Great Wave of the Naiads, said from her place at the far end of the table where she’d been having a hushed conversation with Boreas, king of the Aurae and the third member of the Nymphiad. “Just something he said to scare you.”
“Not if he can actually do it,” I said. “Is there any way that he can get from this realm to another without using the Mirror of Nerissette? Is there some other magic that he can cast to threaten the former queen?”