“There are other relics,” Darinda said, her silver eyes troubled. The fairies carefully flew her a mug of tea from the side table. “Other objects of magic that give their users unimaginable power.”
“I know,” I said. “Esmeralda told me about the Great Relics. She said that she had cast a spell to hide them inside the palace walls, to keep them away from the Fate Maker so he couldn’t use them. What I want to know is if any of these other relics are portals like the mirror? Can he use them to travel between worlds? Specifically this Tear that he’s asking for—can he use that to get to my mother?”
“I’m not sure,” Darinda said and then glanced at the other two members of the Nymphiad.
“Not a lot is known about the relics, Your Majesty,” Boreas said. “They are a powerful magic that none besides the queen and her handmaiden have ever been allowed to touch. A magic the queen and her handmaiden kept secret between themselves.”
“Just so we’re on the same page, you don’t know what these are, what they look like, what they’re capable of?” I asked. “You don’t know anything about them except that somehow my mother and Esmeralda used them?”
“No, we don’t,” Aquella muttered. “Until Esmeralda used the mirror to bring you from the World That Is to Nerissette, most of us didn’t actually believe the relics truly existed. We thought they were legend. As far as anyone knew the mirror in the Fate Maker’s tower was just that—a mirror—and nothing more.”
“But my mother used them,” I said. “Esmeralda said that she helped my mother use the relics to move between worlds. How else did you think she managed it? Did you think she could just magically hop there and back whenever she felt like it?”
“We—” Darinda coughed.
“You what?”
“When we were told the Last Rose had been lost we assumed that she’d been killed, and the Fate Maker was trying to cover it up with this idea of the relics.” The admission came out of her quietly, and I could feel my face reddening.
“So, you thought he had murdered my mother, and you let him stay on the throne?”
“The prophesies said the Last Great Rose would come—” Aquella started.
I stood, slamming my hands on the table and glaring at them all. “I don’t care about the prophesies. I don’t care about the legends. I don’t even care that you followed someone who you thought assassinated my mother. What I want to know, right now, right this second, is if any of you, any single one of you, actually knows something useful about this Tear.”
Boreas shook his head. “No. We don’t know anything definite.”
“Right. Okay. So what do you think you know?” I asked.
“All we have to go on are the stories, the legends as you call them, and they are incomplete,” Darinda said.
“Hit me with it, then. What do your stories say these relics are?”
“I don’t know,” Darinda said.
“What do you mean you don’t know?” I asked, a bite to my voice. “You’re head of the Dryad Order—you know everything. Come on. Think. What do the stories say the Tear can do?”
“They are legend, Your Majesty.” Darinda bowed her head. “The stuff of myth. Stories. I can tell you how the Dragon’s Tear was formed, from the tears of a Great Rose who watched her dragon consort die. I can tell you that the prophesies say that to hold the tear is to hold in your hand the fate of a thousand worlds. I can tell you that you are the only one with the power to destroy it. But I can’t tell you what it is or what it looks like. ”
“So what you’re telling me,” I said, “is that we have an army marching toward us that wants a relic that we supposedly have, and all we know is that it’s a bad idea for the wizard at the front of the army to have it, and somehow I have to destroy it. But you don’t know what it actually is?”
“And we’re not exactly sure how you should go about destroying it,” Aquella added.
“Great. This is perfect. Just perfect.” I sighed.
“Wait, let’s think about this. There has to be something we can do. Some mention of them in a book,” Mercedes said. “A picture, a description. Something that tells us what we’re looking for. Otherwise how are you meant to find them?”
“I’m not following.” I stared at her, my eyes narrowed, as I tried to work out where she was going with this.
“Who has the biggest, most complete library in Nerissette at her fingertips?” Mercedes pointed at me. “Ding, ding, ding, if your guess is the Golden Rose.”
“The library?” I asked, embarrassed that I hadn’t thought of it myself now that she’d said it out loud.
“Yes, the library. We find the book about the legends of the relics, figure out what they are, then we find the relics, use them to get everyone home, and call it a day. You can take them back to our world, destroy them, and we’ll all be safe.”
“And locked on the other side of the portal,” I said. “If the relics can even do that. We don’t know if they are portals like the mirror.”
“That’s okay, though,” Mercedes said, ignoring my comment about the relics even being portals. “John and the army and everyone else can defeat the Fate Maker, the relics will be destroyed and everyone gets a happy ending. Yay for books.”
“Except we would have an empty throne and no Golden Rose to sit back down upon it,” Boreas said slowly.
“Elect someone.” Mercedes turned to me. “You said it yourself. Queenship isn’t your idea of good government. They could elect someone instead, form a government. They don’t need us here to run their country for them.”
“No.” I felt my chest clench in disappointment. I knew she wanted to go home, but I didn’t expect my best friend to want us to run like a bunch of cowards. “We can’t just leave them here to face the Fate Maker alone while we hide in the World That Is.”
“But—” Mercedes started to protest.
“Look.” I held my hands up. “Right now we’ve got nothing more than talk. This Dragon’s Tear may be another portal or it may not be. It could be a weapon or a way of casting spells or, I don’t know, a way to keep people from crying when they chop onions. But we don’t actually know what it is.”
“If it’s another portal—” Mercedes started.
“Then it’s a threat we need to worry about.” I had to weigh the importance of backing my best friend against doing what had to be done for the good of everyone else. “And it’s a threat we’ll have to destroy because no matter what, we can’t allow him to travel from this world to another.”
“Like I said, we could destroy it from our side,” Mercedes said. “We could use it to go home and then destroy it there.”
“I don’t know. All I do know, all any of us know, is that the Fate Maker will be here, outside the gates of Neris, in less than three days. He’s coming for blood and a relic that we don’t know anything about. We do know is that it’s magical and he wants it, and that’s enough reason for me to make sure he doesn’t get it.”
“What would you have us do, Your Majesty?” Darinda asked, her voice soft.
“Rhys, Winston, and Eamon of Leavenwald are out in the courtyard, figuring out how to barricade the walls and where to put the army and the dragon version of the air force so that we actually have a fighting chance against the Fate Maker’s army. Sir John has started trying to evacuate the people of Neris, but most of them are refusing to leave—they say that they’re staying to fight. That means when the battle comes, we’re going to have a lot of people here, and it’ll be chaos. That means we need to be prepared. Hospital tents. Food.”
“But—”
I ignored whoever had tried to chime in. We had too much to get done for me to listen to everyone bicker and second-guess one another now. We were running out of time.