Chapter 12
Into the Big Yellow
“You put a sleep enchantment on me,” Cha accused Dy, who looked completely unbothered.
Dy tucked her golden hair behind her ears, which did nothing to tame the wild and springing mass of it, and shook her head. “A vast overstatement.”
Cha had woken, realized Big Betty had come to a halt, and immediately crawled out of the secret compartment, cursing the stiffness of her body, as if she had indeed slept for centuries.
Katu slunk out, yawning widely to reveal sharp white fangs and a pink kitten tongue, going to use the litter box they kept for him and Warg for these just-in-case situations.
She’d found Dy in the cab of Big Betty, bleary eyed and sipping a cup of hot coffee.
When Cha came through the door—dodging the muscular swinging tail of Warg who was going out, no doubt also to use the litter box—Dy simply pointed at the second cup of coffee, black, just the way Cha liked it.
Sometimes it was good to be partners with a sorceress, even if they cast spells on you.
“It’s okay to drink this?” she asked, though obviously Dy wouldn’t be drinking hers if it wasn’t.
“I’ve kept a shield around Big Betty to keep the Moonstone magic out. We can eat and drink what we brought with us, but only until the magic leaks through. Make hay now.”
Cha had never much enjoyed haying season, but she loved coffee and gulped it down. Really good coffee too. With her brain clearing by the moment, she demanded, “How is it an overstatement saying I know you put me to sleep?”
Dy waved that off. “Just a bit of sleepy suggestion. I use it on my kids all the time. Stop bitching. Eat some breakfast. You need fuel as much as Katu does.”
Hmph. Cha didn’t much care for Dy’s bossy attitude, but she did love Phinny’s cooking. She took a big bite of the pistachio-cream filled bun and rolled her eyes in sheer delight.
“You need protein, too.” Dy handed her another kind of roll, this one with sausage and spinach inside, equally delicious.
While Cha ate, Dy stared out of Big Betty’s wide windows at basically nothing.
She’d done something to darken them, to screen out the blinding white of the Moonstone landscape, so that it barely glowed.
Stark, uncanny, the glittering white dimmed to gray by the shading, the fae realm looked like what Cha imagined the moon might if people could go there and walk around.
Hell, for all she knew, the fae could do that and that’s where Moonstone was located.
It broke her brain to think about it too hard, but the fae realms weren’t laid out geographically like the human lands.
They were somehow nestled each inside the other.
So where the human realm was laid out more or less horizontally, with mountainous bumps and watery dips, the fae realms were spheres.
Or irregular blobs. Apparently it was as much of a mistake to picture them as symmetrical geometric shapes as it was to think of the human world as perfectly flat.
Obsidian, for example, from the maps Cha had looked at, was portrayed as a big, blobby shape, with a blown-out side that extruded like an arm to connect with the human lands.
Then Moonstone lay inside Obsidian, an uneven rind of white thicker in some places and very thin in others.
They’d just crossed the thin part—or so Cha assumed—and sat at the gates of Citrine.
What else could that golden glow up ahead be?
It sure wasn’t the rising sun. Probably “gates” was a misnomer, too.
“Is that Citrine?” she asked, letting go of the whole sleep inducement like she was one of Dy’s babies thing.
“Yup.” Dy passed a hand over her eyes. “I figured we should take a breather and discuss the crossing, how you want to play this.”
“Rough night?”
“Smooth sailing. No one else on the leys. Moonstone is a very weird place and I won’t be sorry to leave. I’m just a little tired.”
“You need a mom to give you a sleep inducement.”
Dy gave her a wry and weary smile. “I also figured at least one of us should be rested. You’re going to be on point soon.”
Warg barreled back through the doorway, warbling a greeting, then plastered his snout against the forward window, right in the center of the slobber circle he’d clearly been laying down for the entire trip.
Katu followed with feline grace, giving Cha a full body slide of greeting before curling up near her feet.
“Warg likes it here,” Cha observed with some bemusement, rubbing the big cat’s head. Katu clearly didn’t like it so much.
“Yes, oddly so. I’ve been having a devil of a time convincing him he doesn’t need to go out there.
At the words, Warg tipped back his polka-dotted, spined head, and howled with ear-splitting volume. Both women clapped their hands over their ears. He just grinned at them, tongue lolling between yellowed, serrated teeth. “Warg isn’t from Moonstone, is he?” Cha suddenly wondered.
“So far as I know, no. And he’s not white, nor does he feel like Moonstone magic. But I don’t know where he, or the other lodestones come from. No one does. So…” She shrugged.
Cha squinted at the golden glow ahead. It looked like an orb. Maybe that was the entire realm of Citrine and they’d jump into it like a pond. Or more like a sticky egg yolk by the look of it. “You said humans have been to Citrine and survived, right?”
“According to legend, yes. There are some scholars who believe the ancient tales of golden courts and shining fae, the idea of the ‘summer’ court are actually Citrine.”
“A place saturated with yellow pixie dust instead of a land of gold,” Cha murmured.
“Not eternal summer, but intangible radiance…” Dy said, sounding as if she quoted something. At Cha’s side eye, she smiled softly. “An old poem.”
“Gotcha. What do you want the plan to be?”
“Honestly? To turn tail and run for home. This place gives me the creeps.”
“You could,” Cha offered. When Dy turned the full force of her baby blues on Cha, the sparking anger rising in them, Cha held up her hands.
“You got me this far,” she pointed out, thinking of the weird daydream/non-conversation with Azul.
Maybe she shouldn’t be dragging Dy into this mission of mercy and potential self-destruction.
“Maybe the rest should be up to me and Katu.”
Surprisingly, Dy hesitated, seeming to consider it. “What about our plan to trade the agnicurnum? You wouldn’t be able to carry the crates in Katu.”
“I’m not sure that trick will work anyway,” Cha replied cheerfully, telling herself she wasn’t at all shaken by the prospect of Dy pulling out. “Probably I’m better off playing the besotted, lovelorn human crossing leagues and facing down enchantments and cruel sorceresses to find her fae lover.”
Dy snorted. “You can be a good actress when moved, but I seriously doubt you could convince anyone of that.”
Cha was closer to being that than Dy could imagine. “Let’s do that. You saw me to the border. I’ll transform Katu; we’ll skate down the ramp and be out of your curly, golden locks.”
Dy opened her mouth, but whatever she’d decided was lost to time as she straightened, getting that listening look she did when her sorcery tingled.
“Law hounds,” she answered Cha’s unspoken question.
Big Betty woke from her nap and revved to life.
“The Moonstone fae forces. That was the other reason I put you to sleep. I suspected the Moonstone fae might have a way of detecting your presence in their realm if you were conscious. No coincidence they zeroed in as soon as you were awake.”
“How do they know I’m here?”
“How do the fae know anything? I wouldn’t be surprised if they don’t have some sort of tracker implanted in you during your stay with them.”
What an unpleasant thought. Though surely Azul would have taken care of any such device. Wouldn’t he?
Big Betty surged silently forward off the slow white on the side and raced into midstream on the powerful Moonstone ley line. The force of the line so close to Citrine threw Cha back in her seat.
“Warn a gal, would you?”
“Sorry,” Dy sang out, not sounding sorry at all.
“I forgot that it would be a huge transition from the side ley to this.” Her magic sparkled in the air, like glitter from the Moonruby wand, except that it settled into Warg, who soaked it up like a sponge wiping away spilled brut rosé.
Cha didn’t fully understand how the lodestone creature worked to ground Dy’s magic, but the excess magic felt as if it focused into the ley line in some way her ley rider senses could almost follow.
Audible sirens shrieked in the near distance, closing on them. Cha checked the side mirror. “At least a dozen hounds, closing fast. Or… law weasels?” The carriages kind of looked like ermines in winter mode, leaping sinuously along the ley line. “Very fast.”
“Hang on,” Dy said tossing Cha a quick grin at the belated warning, then tipped her head at the glowing orb sitting dead ahead and growing exponentially huger with every passing second.
Physical space, like time, was apparently just as mutable in the fae realms. “No telling what this transition will feel like.”
“Can’t be worse than Obsidian to Moonstone,” Cha observed.
“Oh, yes it can. By an order of magnitude, would be my prediction,” Dy replied. “Each fae realm is an order of magnitude more powerful than the previous one, so I expect this crossing to be truly wrenching.”
She didn’t have to sound so gleeful. Cha braced herself, patting Katu’s head. Dy urged Big Betty to an even faster speed, which seemed imprudent since they didn’t know what hitting that big yellow yolk would be like.
“Ah, Goldilocks,” Cha began…
And they hit the border.