Chapter 2
Show me your injuries,” Mannix said while close enough to me to count the pores on my nose.
“Pardon?”
“If you fell through the ceiling—”
“There isn’t a hole in the ceiling or anything. It’s more like I appeared just under it and fell from there into the water.”
“Rings can do that,” Hydris said from where he’d skirted around behind me.
“I’m handling it,” Mannix said through a clenched jaw. “You can go.”
I didn’t like the way he was treating Hydris. Of course, I knew that the dynamics of this place were none of my business, but the condescending tone and how this dude was acting like he was in charge just rubbed me wrong.
I squared up to Mannix and felt a little satisfaction in the fact that he twitched back.
“From my perspective,” I said, “I’d been hiking in the mountains of Michigan for about six hours when my friends and I stopped to rest. Milo went to sit down on some rocks, but up and disappeared instead.
I rushed to help him.” I cocked my head at Mannix when he slowly slid back a step.
“Now what I’d like to know is if he could go through the same ring as me but somehow end up in a different place. Any ideas?”
Yeah, Mannix didn’t like me. He might’ve been thrown off his game when I stepped up to him, but now he narrowed his eyes and his lip curled just enough to notice. Did fae growl? Because I thought maybe he wanted to.
“That’s not possible,” a woman said to my right. “The rings have always been a fixed passage from one point to another.”
I took my time taking my eyes off Mannix to look at the new person.
She was blonde, her hair up in some kind of tornado of golden hair, and her blue eyes were anime huge.
An accordion-type collar that was maybe only six inches deep circled her neck, making it one of the smaller collars.
Her dress, with its giant sleeves and wide hips, looked like the pattern of blue roses on my grandmother’s couch, the one under plastic that I’d never been allowed to sit on.
“Hydris said no one else came through before I did,” I said. “And as much as I wanted to believe Milo had gone over the side of the ledge because I couldn’t believe my eyes, now that I’m here after doing the same thing he did, I think maybe your rings aren’t doing what they normally do.”
The woman looked to the man beside her, who was frowning at me.
Not in a Mannix way, but like he was confused, puzzling something out.
He was dressed in deep purple with a cream-colored collar that stuck out at least a foot in front of him.
How did he not trip over everything when he couldn’t see his feet?
“Please describe what the ring looked like,” he said.
I turned away from Mannix completely and relaxed as I went to stand closer to these two. “Gray stones, sort of rectangular, lots of little holes. They looked more like someone cut them that shape than that they formed naturally.”
“Any flowers?”
“Yeah, little purple and white ones grew in between the stones.”
“Do you recall how many petals the flowers had?”
I shrugged. “Star-shaped maybe? So…five?”
The guy gulped so loud I heard it. Looking to his fellows, he said, “That is incredibly powerful magic. Much more than is necessary for a normal ring.”
Hey, we were getting somewhere! “So who could do that kind of magic?” I couldn’t quite believe that sentence came out of my mouth. “Can we talk to them and see if they can send me back home?”
I looked around for Hydris, wanting to share in this potentially good news, but he was gone. “Where’s the prince?”
The blonde woman said, “He left. He…does that.”
She sounded as disappointed as I felt. I thought he and I had had a thing going there. I’d at least expected him to do more to corroborate my story and maybe stand up for me with these people. His people.
Guess I’d been wrong.
From behind me came Mannix’s voice. “We can investigate further. You can go earn your keep while we’re forced to accommodate you.”
I spun around. “Excuse me? I didn’t come here voluntarily just to inconvenience you people.”
But now Mannix was doing the one thing that always got under my skin: he was ignoring me. He spoke to one of those armored guards he’d called for earlier, saying, “Take him to Lars. Have him find something for the human to do.”
Okay, now I took offense. “Listen here, champ, I’m not—” Both guards grabbed a forearm each, their grips a hell of a lot stronger than I’d expected. “Woah! Hold on now. We’re not done here.”
But I was very done there because the guards marched me right out of the room. It was literally go with them or lose my arms. I was going to have bruises as it was.
“For fuck’s sake, ease up! I’ll go with you.”
One let go and started walking in front of me, and then the other released my arm and hung back behind me.
I didn’t stop or fight or anything like that—I just walked between them.
Running away wasn’t really an option because I had no idea where to go.
No one to turn to either. I didn’t know who Lars was, but maybe he’d know something that could help my situation.
We walked down hallways that were just as impressive as they’d been with Hydris.
I was still upset about him abandoning me because it had felt like I had an ally in this crazy place.
An ally with clout. And now he was gone and I was off to…
What? Get a temp job in a palace? I wasn’t even sure I had skills a place like this would want.
Did they need someone to teach strength training or yoga?
The windows were starting to be up near the ceiling, making me think we were in the basement again.
And then we came around a corner and the sound of a hell of a lot of people talking and rushing around hit me right along with a blast of moist heat.
The kitchen. It was an enormous open space with huge ovens lining one wall, all kinds of equipment that could’ve been for cooking or torture, and yeah, tons of people carrying ingredients or trays of food, mixing, chopping, or plucking.
Everyone seemed to have a job, but on the whole, it looked like chaos.
A man came over to us. He was elderly to the extreme but also seemed unusually spry, like Dick Van Dyke being a hundred years old and still dancing down a red carpet.
He wore all black in vest, shirt, and pants that stopped just below his knees, hose or knee socks, and pointy-toed shoes with heels.
Compared to the other people down here, he was spotless and pressed to a fine crease. Was this Lars?
“What’s this then?” he asked as his sharp gaze flicked between me and the guards.
“Lord Mannix wants the human to work for his keep,” the guard on my right said as if he was trying to sound like Batman.
“A human?” Lars peered at me like he might need glasses. “Displease your owner, did you?”
“Owner? Nobody owns me, buddy. I’ll earn my keep like Lord Dipshit wants because I’m not an asshole who expects free room and board, but no one’s going to own me.”
“Alright, alright.” The old man waved me back. “Don’t have a fit.”
“I’m not having a fit. Just making sure we’re on the same page.”
“You can go.”
“I can— Oh.” He was talking to the guards, who both stomped off the way we’d come.
“Alright then. I’m Lars, the butler.”
“Bridge.”
“So tell me, Bridge, why would two palace guards be delivering you down here?”
I told him what had happened to me so far, from my splashing arrival and meeting Hydris to what that one guy had said about the powerful magic.
“Lord Valborg,” he said with a nod, “likes for everyone to think he’s a spellworker, but it’s all talk.”
That was disappointing. “So he doesn’t know what he’s talking about?”
“Oh, he knows a great deal, but he can’t work the magic at all.”
“All talk, no action.”
“Basically.” He clapped his hands together like he was wickedly excited. “So, Bridge, what work would you like to do until they figure out why you’re here?”
“Why I’m here?” That was a weird way to put it.
“Strapping lad like you must be comfortable with physical labor.” He started walking away, so I hustled to follow him. “How about the gardens or the stables?”
“Well, um, you should know that I’ve never really done any gardening and haven’t spent time around horses since I was a kid.”
He waved that away as he walked fast enough that I had to trot to keep up with him. “They need more muscle. You’ll probably spend most of your time lifting and toting.”
I accepted that. If I couldn’t get my usual workouts and the classes I taught, then I’d improvise with manual labor.
And I didn’t mind doing something since I didn’t like the idea of being a freeloader.
A little help would’ve been nice since I was here involuntarily after all, but expecting a handout from Mannix seemed stupid.
And if Hydris wasn’t even going to stick around long enough to find out where I went… I sighed.
We exited out a door, up a few steps, and—
“Wow.”
—I had to pause a moment as I stood on the edge of a beautiful garden with trees and flowers just beginning to bud, winding white stone paths, and three different fountains. One of the fountains had a figure on tip-toe, finger pointing at the sky, who looked an awful lot like Hydris.
“Come along,” Lars said as he started speed walking again. “This place isn’t for you yet.”
Right, because I was the help. We maintained the garden but didn’t partake of it.
Hold on. “What do you mean by ‘yet’?”
“Yet?”
“Yeah, you said the garden wasn’t for me yet.”
“Huh. Can’t imagine.” He managed to make his rickety-looking body move even faster. “We’ll start with the stables. This way.”
One of us was absolutely losing it and, considering I was in a fairytale right now, I couldn’t rule out the possibility that the lunatic was me.
Maybe I was unconscious in a hospital bed, my head cracked open from slipping on those rocks.
I hadn’t realized I was into fairies and such, but clearly I’d been harboring a secret desire to be their stable boy.
What a stable it was, though. Practically a palace itself just from the outside, it was the same cream-colored stone, two stories, and at least two football fields.
There had to be thirty stalls on each side, and all of them big enough to be an efficient one-bedroom apartment.
It must’ve been feeding time because folks were bustling about with buckets as the horses poked their heads over gates to whinny at them.
I jerked to a stop as a tall, delicate-looking white horse gazed at me with big blue eyes because… Because there was a silver horn in the center of its forehead!
“Is that…a unicorn?”
“It is,” Lars said. “Each of the princes were gifted a foal when they were young.”
A sudden image filled my mind of Hydris in his gauzy robe laughing delightedly as he rode this amazing creature through a field of blue flowers.
It made me smile for a moment, but then I shook my head as if to dislodge him from my brain.
I probably needed to stop thinking of the disappointing prince.
It was possible I’d never see him again.