Chapter 13
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
No sooner does the apartment door slam behind us than Leo shrugs out of his sport coat and loosens his tie. “I’ll be right back,” he announces, disappearing down the hall.
I glance around the apartment. “Where are Topaz and Rime?”
He returns from his bedroom, rolling up the sleeves of his now untucked dress shirt. “They’re out looking for Brier’s team. They go every day. Search campus and downtown. Down by the river, too.”
“No sign of them?”
“Not so far.” He gestures toward the kitchen. “Do you want some lunch?”
I shake my head. “Not yet.” The donut quarters I had at Redemption Baptist have been sitting like a lump in my stomach ever since Jean West uttered the word halfling. “Did it surprise you, what Jean said about there being other faeries here?”
“Yeah, it did.” He grips the back of a dining-room chair. “She knows all about us, and the only way that can possibly be the case is if there are far more of us coming here than I was lead to believe.”
“Do you think they’re just visiting, or are they living here?”
He stares past me to a spot on the puce carpet, brow drawn tight. “They’re not supposed to do either. Only a few of us have permission to come regularly to the Subworld, and we’re never supposed to reveal to humans who we really are.”
So he violated the rules when he told me—and Aaron and Avery—who he is?
Heart squeezing, I sink into the chair beside me. “Why? Because humans aren’t to be trusted?”
He lowers himself across the table from me and answers gently, “Historically speaking, no.” His hands fold on the cluttered tabletop.
“In your sixth century, Nàdar closed all its portals to the Subworld. Before then, we used to travel freely here. To Ireland and Scotland mostly, but to Scandinavia too.”
“Did humans go to Nàdar?”
He nods. “We interacted all the time. Shared ideas, stories, religion.”
I gasp, realizing with crystal clarity what eroded the camaraderie. “The Christians?”
“Yes, and the Romans before them. The Romans wanted to steal our magic, and the Christians wanted to repress it.”
The donuts just get heavier and heavier.
I ask, “But the portals are open again, right?” How else would he be here?
He shakes his head. “Unfortunately, the portals are long gone. When we had them, you could slip between realms through any cave or lake, but now it takes extensive magic to travel back and forth. Too much for your average fae. You need a celestial event, a liminal space, a sigil—so many factors that have to be exactly right.”
To keep us out and them in.
“You were expecting Robin to come back on the spring equinox,” I realize aloud. “With help.”
He barks a rueful little laugh. “Instead, Rime and Topaz showed up during an eclipse.”
And let the cat out of the bag.
“Why didn’t Robin come back?”
“She’s in hiding.”
“Because Brier knows she was here, looking for the weapon?”
He nods.
“And he knows you’re here?”
“No doubt.”
Leo is on Brier’s most-wanted list.
Alive?
Or dead?
My mouth goes dry.
He stands when he notices me moistening my lips. “Do you want something to drink?”
“Please,” I croak.
He watches me down half a glass of water, his eyes full of suspicion and concern. I placate him with a thumbs-up and a feeble smile.
“Come on.” He turns down the hall and waves for me to follow. “I’ll show you the necklace.”
When it hits me that he’s leading me back to his bedroom, I consider refusing to go.
But hey, I’m a glutton for punishment. As soon as we break the threshold, my eyes cut to his bed, and my thoughts drift to the night I spent in it.
It’s unmade today, blankets tossed aside, gray sheets rumpled and inviting.
He touches my shoulder, drawing my attention to his dresser. His face is angled away from mine, but I notice the thick, slow bob of his throat.
I rub my forehead and swallow a sigh, sitting on the edge of the bed as he takes a shoebox out of the bottom drawer.
“This was the first breadcrumb on the trail,” he says, removing the lid. “And the most important clue.”
I glance into the box. A collection of seashells?
“Go ahead.” He holds it out to me.
Up close, I can see what looks like a light-green thread snaking between the shells. When I touch it, its surface crumbles like peeling paint. I cringe and look up at Leo, an apology on my lips.
“It’s okay. It’s just verdigris.”
Verdigris? Oh, wait, the Statue of Liberty. “It’s copper?”
“Yeah, and the beads are bone.” He reaches into the box, much more boldly than I did, and lifts one of the larger shells. Along with it come more shells, separated by white beads and trailing in a line along the copper wire. They make a gorgeous clinking sound as they unfurl.
“It’s incredible,” I breathe.
The full necklace dangling from Leo’s hand is large enough to cover a man’s chest. He lays it out on the corner of the bed so that we can see all the shells, and the beads and copper disks interspersed between them.
I ask, “How did you get it?”
“I borrowed it. From a member of the Yew clan. His ancestor was one of the leaders of the rebellion against Ember.”
I run a light finger over a ridged cockle shell, listening as he explains, “His name was Orion, Orion the Falcon. And we’re pretty sure he was the one who brought the weapon here to be hidden.”
“To the Roanoke Colony?”
“Yeah. He probably came by ley line—to the Great Dismal Swamp.”
Ugh, I hope he had some sort of mosquito repellent.
According to what Leo tells me next, the whole weapon search started when Brier requested Leo and his researcher-scholar buddies—officially called the saoithe—comb the archives for anything they could find on Ember Belladonna.
“Out of nowhere?” I arch a brow. “Seems a little suspicious.”
“To say the least. Brier said it was because he and the council wanted to learn from her mistakes, but a small number of us weren’t convinced.” He frowns as he adds, “Unfortunately, the rest of the saoithe still think he genuinely wants to help Nàdar.”
He goes on with his story, describing how alarmed and disturbed they were by what they found in the archives, because not only did Ember declare herself queen and reign with terror for nearly three years, it appeared she created some sort of super weaving ring that allowed her to control all of nature.
Hands on his hips, Leo exhales. “You know how our rings work, right? Rime said he told you.”
I nod. I could be snarky. I could say what we’re both thinking, Because you sure as hell weren’t going to tell me, but the regret coming off him is enough to keep my mouth shut.
He rubs the back of his neck before he perches on the bed catty-corner to me and continues bringing me up to speed.
Since Leo and the other like-minded scholars were pretty damn sure the ring was the reason Brier suddenly wanted to know about Ember, they set out to figure out where it might be.
When they discovered it had been given to a human to hide, Leo and Robin, the anthropologists who specialize in the Subworld, were put in charge of the search.
They were the ones who figured out how to track down Henry Browne.
“We gathered as many names as we could of the fae who led the rebellion against Ember, and started hunting down their descendants, hoping maybe someone down the line had a journal or an artifact or some kind of information about where the weapon was taken.” With one finger, Leo pulls on the copper wire, stretching the necklace to its full length. “And we found this.”
“And it’s definitely not Nàdarian?”
He simply shakes his head. Guess they don’t like shell jewelry in his realm. Shame. I pet one of the copper disks, flicking the green flecks of verdigris off my fingertips.
“And it’s not English. Or European,” he adds. “A little googling was enough to confirm it was North American. And then we had the bones carbon dated.”
I gape at him. “Do they have that kind of technology in Nàdar?”
“No. Here, in the Subworld. At Oxford.”
Oxford again. His supposed year abroad.
With averted eyes, he explains how, after matching Ember’s dates to the Roanoke Colony, all the pieces started to fall into place.
A wild, untouched land no fae and few humans knew existed.
An Englishman named Henry Browne. A people familiar with the land, willing to guide and trade with friendly foreigners.
“We think Orion befriended the Secotan who led him to the Roanoke settlers, either on the island or after they dispersed. And there he found Henry Browne, who most likely had the Sight, and charged him with hiding the weapon.”
“Was that who you think Avery saw? Browne and Orion?”
“There’s no way to know, but at least their dress confirmed the time period.”
I nod, busy taking in and analyzing all this information. “Okay, but why didn’t Orion just hide it himself? Or give it to the Secotan?”
Leo shrugs. “Probably because of the language barrier. He would’ve needed to impress upon whomever he gave it to the importance of hiding it.
” He slides a few shells out of the divot in the mattress made by his thigh.
“And we don’t really know why he didn’t hide it himself, but I imagine he would’ve felt safer not knowing where the ring was.
If he handed it off to a human, then no Nàdarian would ever know its location. ”
Although unfortunately, plenty of Nàdarians, even half a millennium later, could link enough clues to track it down.
“But why come all the way out here?” I press. “Why not just bury it there on Roanoke Island or throw it into the ocean or something?” It seems like the Mariana Trench would be the ultimate hiding spot. Completely inaccessible to anyone. Even most fish.
Leo doesn’t even try to hide his smile. I’m doing it again, asking a million questions, most of which have no concrete answers. But seriously, it doesn’t make sense. Why all this rigmarole just to get rid of the damn thing?
“Well, it’s recorded in the archives that it was given to Henry Browne to quote-unquote ‘bury beneath the highest peaks,’ so that was a pretty big clue there.
But also because it needs to be buried deep enough to absorb its energy.
Only the earth can ground fae magic; water is a conductor.
” He twists his ring, thinking as he speaks.
“See, when we die, our rings are buried with us, at least eight feet underground. And seeing as this weapon is dozens of times more powerful than a weaving ring, the shallow marshes of the coast wouldn’t suffice. ”
Okay, true, because apparently even Browne’s big-ass hill isn’t deep enough to absorb the toxic energy. What else would explain the hauntings?
Leo turns one of the copper disks over and over, perhaps comparing the amount of verdigris on its sides.
“When Robin and I got here, we started on Roanoke Island, interviewing everyone who might be able to help us—professors, archeologists, the Indigenous peoples in the area. We learned the colonists most likely survived and assimilated with the tribes close to the coast, but we needed to figure out how an Englishman could find his way out here.”
In the short time I’ve known Leo, he’s more than once awed me with the way his mind works. With how articulate he is. And much to my mortification, this is one of those times. I’m mesmerized by the intellectual curiosity shining in his eyes.
Oblivious, he adds, “So when we found out about the Spanish forts, we followed the trail here, tracing them all the way to Tennessee, then doubling back when we found out Alderford might’ve been a sixteenth-century settlement.”
The settlement along this stretch of the French Broad River, where Henry Browne’s half-Cherokee son was born and raised. “How on earth did Brier’s cronies figure all this out in half the time you did?”
“They didn’t. They’ve only been one step behind us the whole time.
In fact, Robin saw two Nàdarian historians at the Bodelian when we were at Oxford.
” Leo exhales and rolls his neck, his dark curls sweeping along his stiff white collar.
“Unfortunately, Brier’s team of scholars is probably three times the size of ours.
Way too many people believe in him and will do anything he asks.
And he’s not above strong-arm tactics if they won’t. ”
I restrain a shudder. As cozy and safe as it seems here on this bed—in this apartment, in this quaint small town—we’re in the middle of an urgent race.
Shaking off the sudden dread settling on my shoulders, I reach behind Leo for the shoebox. He twists to see what I’m doing, his face suddenly so close to mine, our cheeks nearly brush. I jerk back and thrust the box into his hands.
“Uh, so,” I stammer, “that’s what you and Robin were doing all those months? Following Browne’s trail?”
He nods, his breath noticeably shallow. “Since the autumnal equinox.”
“When you just suddenly appeared here, in the Great Dismal Swamp?”
“No.” He snorts a laugh, rising to put the necklace back in his dresser drawer. “I flew from Heathrow to Dulles.”
Already half undone, I burst into a hysterical fit of giggles, and for a moment, Leo looks alarmed. I wave as I convulse, signaling that I’m fine. Slowly an awkward smile spreads across his face and a few chuckles rumble out of his chest.
“I think you need some lunch,” he says, and gestures to the door.