Chapter 5
5
“Brace yourself,” Elias warned me as I stepped through the doorway. Everything turned pitch-black, and then, immediately, blindingly white. I closed my eyes and held on to him, a little disoriented. I felt a lurch deep inside my stomach, like I was going to throw up.
There was some kind of turbulence, like an earthquake, and then, from beneath my eyelids, I could tell the light had dimmed. Squinting, I started to take note of our surroundings; we were inside some kind of cave. Crystal stalactites jutted down overhead, twinkling. I heard running water somewhere. A river or stream, splashing against rock. Up ahead of us, I saw an opening. On the other side there was sunshine and lots of green.
A minute later we emerged onto sandy shores softly lapped by a shimmering blue sea that matched the bright sky above. I blinked to let my eyes adjust. On the left there was a lush, dense jungle; to the right, a settlement of bahay kubos. I looked over the quaint wooden houses to see a huge structure—a castle, maybe, from what I could make out so far away—looming above the rooftops. It was searingly hot, and the air was thick, but it wasn’t unpleasant. I knew Biringan was the hidden fairy realm of the Philippine Islands and so shared its climate. And because I was of its blood, I could enter its domain from anywhere in the human world, even from Southern California, where we had just left.
At the beach in front of us, mobs of people gathered—not human people, but my father’s kind, encantos. Elias gestured to them. “They’re here to see you. No doubt they’ve heard about what happened in the human realm.”
“Great,” I said sarcastically. Just what I needed on the worst day of my life. An audience. They stared at me, and some of them were smiling. “Welcome back, Princess,” I heard a few of them say.
Elias pointed to the placid blue sky. “We’re safe here. The insurgents and their storms have been held back, for now. They won’t dare attack you here, under Biringan’s protection.”
Mom had done it. Did she defeat them?
Was she alive?
She had to be. She had to be alive. I would know if she was dead, I told myself. I would feel it. She had to have survived.
There was a small wooden boat docked at the pier. We stepped in, and then Elias began rowing across the lake to another dock on the other side. All around us, I could see fish darting through the water around the boat, some staying alongside it and some swimming ahead.
A huge tail splashed at the surface, and then an entire body popped up out of the water. It took me a few seconds to process what I was seeing. The fish had a human upper body and nearly human face, except for the bluish-gray skin and the gills on their neck.
“Mermaids,” I murmured, stunned.
“No, iha, sirenas,” Elias said. Then he whispered, “Much more deadly than mere mermaids.”
The sirena disappeared beneath the water.
I couldn’t let the surroundings distract me from the immediate issue. “Do you think my mom is okay?”
“Your mother had the Sword of Kabunian. The Hand of God. It will have kept her safe,” he said firmly.
“You’ll go back, though? And make sure?”
Elias didn’t answer me. He looked off into the distance. At last, he said, “If that is your wish, Princess. But first we must secure your ascension. That is why she did what she did.”
I nodded as I gripped the amulet, trying to anchor myself to something. I felt disoriented, a little dizzy. And suddenly, acutely alone.
I couldn’t think, couldn’t process what was happening. My father was dead, and my mother... she had to be alive. Elias would find her and bring her back. I had to believe I would see her again.
But there was no more time to think about any of it. The boat drifted to a stop again in front of a wooden pier.
A small army was there to greet me. Guards lined the short walkway from the cavern to the road in strict formation and fanned out into the field beyond. All dressed in white formal uniforms, with long swords at their sides, they reminded me of nutcracker figurines.
A wooden calesa waited in the road beyond them. The two-wheeled carriage was painted white, with gold-spoked wheels, and the whole thing was teeming with massive, faux-floral garlands—at least, I thought they were fake. No flower could actually look like that. It seemed like the carriage itself was blooming, all the huge, vivid flowers and vines growing right out of it. Four white horses whose manes caught shades of blue and purple in the light stood at the front, unharnessed.
A guard stepped up to the boat and held his hand out to assist me. I stepped out and onto the dock, knees shaking and ankle still throbbing.
Nothing was familiar at all, even though I had spent my earliest years here. Not the vivid colors of the foliage and sky, not the hilly, lush landscape, not the undulating mountains in the distance or the river that wound through the dense forest jungle.
My mother had tried to prepare me for my role; she had taught me about the different types of encantos, and over the years my father had written me long letters about life at court. While I knew what to expect, I was still in awe of the sights in front of me.
I felt uncomfortable all of a sudden. My faded jeans looked ridiculous and out of place. I tugged my shirt down self-consciously.
Elias escorted me toward the carriage. None of the guards looked directly at me; they kept their eyes forward and their expressions glum beneath their comically large hats. When we got near, one of them opened the carriage door. I reached out to touch one of the flowers. Surprisingly not fake.
I climbed up some little steps on the side of the carriage.
Inside, the seats were wide and plush, upholstered in silk, soft and buttery, and the canopy was decorated with intricate embroidered floral patterns, edged with gold thread. I wanted to reach out and run my finger across the texture, but I was afraid to make it dirty. It was like sitting inside a museum piece.
Elias sat across from me. The door shut.
We set off down a rustic dirt road that was lined with flowers, inky blues and intense pinks, bright yellow and white and every shade of green imaginable. Onlookers stood at the edge, vying for a chance to see the princess inside the carriage. They looked like any group of regular people, until I noticed the small differences that gave them away as encanto—their elfin ears; the impossible perfection of their thick, glossy, waist-length black hair; their long, delicate fingers and spiry necks.
“Remember, Princess. Enemies are everywhere. Since your father died, we’ve been investigating, but until we know who the insurgents are and which court they’re working for, trust no one.”
My mother had schooled me in the history of Biringan and how the four courts representing the four kingdoms had been unified long ago. In his many letters, my father explained it was an uneasy alliance, and while Sirena, our court and kingdom, was the most powerful and thus the overall ruler, there were those who chafed under our reign. As the princess of the Sirena Court, diwata of Paulanan, I embodied the power and spirit of the mountains and the seas. The Court of Sigbin harnessed the power of thunder and lightning and was full of encantos who practiced chaos magic. The equinox courts were the kingdoms at the outer edges of the realm—the Court of Tikbalang was rooted in the power of the forest and known for its affinity for animals, while the Court of Lambana commanded the air and the wind and counted mischief among its talents.
The road split, veering off toward the mountains in the distance, disappearing into towering trees to the left; we took the right turn, through still more trees, where the crowd could no longer gather. As we traveled farther and farther from the world I knew, I marveled at how the landscape could be so familiar, yet not; the earth was somehow darker and richer; the blue sky and puffy clouds looked like a watercolor or a filtered photo. The birds seemed to come straight from a fairy tale. They were plumper and less skittish, and it almost seemed as if every one of their feathers was perfectly hand-painted. I didn’t know much about birds, but I was pretty sure those patterns and colors didn’t exist in the regular world. I was tempted to hold my hand out the window and see if one would land on my finger.
Still, I was well aware that, just like in a fairy tale, evil was lurking somewhere nearby. Waiting for the right moment.
Elias sensed my apprehension. “The sooner you are crowned queen and solidify your power, the sooner you—and all of us—will be safe.”
As we rounded one of the turns, some sort of huge stone or hill appeared in front of us. It rose up into the clouds, so high that I couldn’t tell where it ended. Like everything else, it was almost too perfect to be real.
“Almost there,” Elias told me. “The palace is just ahead of us now.”
I leaned close to the window and searched around in every direction. “Where is it?” I asked him.
He pointed at the enormous rock. “Right in front of us, Princess.”
This time when I looked back, I saw immediately what I’d missed before. There, at the base, partially obscured by a cinematic fog, a glittering palace materialized from within, like it was carved directly out of the stone around it.
As my eyes focused, I studied all the detail. The surface of the palace kind of reminded me of a geode I bought at a museum gift shop when I was little—a dazzling gemstone inside an unassuming gray rock. The entire surface looked like that. Tiny multifaceted gems jutted out as if the stone had been split wide open long, long ago, revealing the jeweled interior. There were many windows, too many to count, set deep into the structure, and at least four rounded, pearlescent towers.
When we got closer, I saw a steep path set with large stones, like marble, winding up to a huge, domed doorway, which seemed to be made of glass or some type of crystal. Smaller—though still larger than any human would ever require—double doors were cut out of the glass. I watched as they opened to let in two guards marching in line. Two more stood on either side of the doors, and still others were visible within.
We parked in front of the path. A guard stepped up and opened the door. Elias exited first, then helped me out.
I stood outside the carriage and took in the castle I would now call home. I had been there before, but I was too young to remember. My mother had made sure I grew up knowing who my father was, what my birthright entailed, but this was so far from our reality of cramped one-bedroom apartments and hand-me-down furniture that I found it hard to believe I was truly from here.
And as I looked at the serious faces of the rows of armed guards surrounding me, I reminded myself that while it appeared to be a dream on the surface, it concealed a nightmare underneath. A throne without a ruler and a plot to kill the heir.