The Flute Keeper's Promise (The Flute Keeper Saga) (12 page)

Garland sighed and gazed over my
shoulder where feeble sunlight spilled through a window. The cathedral dome
gleamed golden over the pointed roofs of the village. “I suppose you’re right.
Some risks do not need to be justified by practical means.”

I followed his gaze to the cathedral.
“Anouk is pretty, isn’t she? It’s a shame she’s a priestess.”

“If I could bottle her laughter and
keep it with me…” Garland said. “Actually I could, but I would feel terribly
awkward asking her.” He smiled. “I’ve been through every book in the library
looking for errors. It’s going to be hard to leave.”

“Oh yeah,” I remembered. “So you
are going with your dad to the outlands?”

“Of course. What purpose would I
serve here?”

My gut gave a twinge. Perhaps Lev
wasn’t the only one who had been feeling useless lately.

“Is something wrong?” Garland asked
with raised eyebrows. “You look like someone just hit you.”

“I’m okay,” I said. “It’s just that
there are too many goodbyes lately.”

The parlor doors burst open and Chloe
rushed in. She collapsed on a cushion next to me. “I can’t do this anymore! I need
a break!”

Garland and I both stared in mute surprise.

Chloe lifted her head, spying a
pile of sweet buns on the table. “Thank goodness,” she said, grabbing one. She
took a huge bite and let out a sigh. When neither Garland nor I spoke up, she
glared at us. “Come on, guys. It’s me! You don’t have to go being all
delicate.”

“Then join us for a bite,” Garland
said.

“Don’t mind if I do,” Chloe said,
snatching another bun off the table. “Yummm…blueberry sugarspice. That was
Daddy’s favorite.”

There was another awkward silence.
Then I recalled how weird I’d felt when my mother died and everyone was so
quiet and careful around me. It had driven me nuts.

“I remember the first time I met
your dad,” I said. “It was right before the three of us had dinner for the
first time. Do you remember?”

Chloe grinned. “I do! I threw a
tantrum to make Daddy let you stay the night.”

“And you wanted to name me like I
was a pet,” I said.

“Has it been so long ago?” Garland
asked, scratching his green curls.

“Just two years,” I said. I leaned
back on the cushion and stared up at the fabric-covered ceiling. The first time
I’d come to this room, I’d been scared to death. I hadn’t known what to make of
the strange, scholarly Fay boy or the spoiled princess. Now they were two of my
closest friends.

“Two years,” Chloe echoed. “It
feels like a lot longer.”

“A lot has happened,” I said.

“Would you still have stayed if
you’d known how difficult things would get?” Garland asked.

“Yes,” I answered without
hesitation. “Nothing could make me regret finding home…and you guys.”

“
Emma
,” Chloe said. “Stop
it! You’re gonna make me cry again and I’ve done quite enough of that for one
day!”

“Some things never change,” I said.
“You’re still as bossy as ever.”
 “Unquestionably,” Garland added.

Chloe stood up and feigned a scowl.
“Yeah? Well get used to it.
Queen
Chloe de Lolanthe gives the orders now!”

We laughed. It felt good to share
that moment in the midst of all the mourning. It stuck with me forever
afterwards as strongly as the memory of my first meal with Chloe and Garland.

When we parted ways, a strange
sense of foreboding made me shiver. I felt as though it was the last time we’d
be together that way. I dismissed it as superstition. Just because things were
changing didn’t mean we couldn’t share meals filled with laughter.

But the chill stayed with me.

CHAPTER SIX

I scarcely saw Chloe again until
the day of the funeral. Preparations had escalated into mayhem despite Chloe’s
urging that her father’s memorial should be simple. The flood of pilgrims to
the gate only increased as citizens flocked to bid their beloved ruler
farewell. A tent city bigger than the one in Ivywild’s village sprang up around
the graveyard of Mag Mell overnight.

No message came from the Duke of
Briar even though his ships had weighed anchor just up shore from the royal harbor.
Commander Larue and his crew of Master Casters were on edge and security around
Ivywild’s perimeter was doubled.

Caught between preparations for the
funeral and organizing their coming journey, Lord Finbarr and Garland were all
but invisible. Nobody from the Cathedral called on me. Lev had not come to see
me, either.

To make matters worse, I still couldn’t
find the red dagger. I had searched Lev’s room high and low for it all to no
use. Either I’d dropped it somewhere between there and my room, or he had it. I
couldn’t think why he’d take it, though.

So it was with a very black mood
that I joined the procession of nobles on the trek to Mag Mell. Over sixty
carriages made the journey. Chloe, Othella and Violet rode in the very front.
The Seelie Court was in the second carriage. I was four carriages back with the
king’s cousin, Marisol, the Baroness of Ipswimmy Island. The lady had a deep
tan and a cold, apparently, since she kept blowing her nose loudly into a
floral print handkerchief.

“Dreadfully cool for this time of
year, isn’t it?” the baroness asked as she tugged a shawl more tightly around
her shoulders.

I gave a half-hearted nod as I
stared out the window. My mind was elsewhere.

“Would you look at that?” the
baroness said, remarking on the lines of Fay along the road. They stood at
attention as the carriages rolled by. “I’ve never seen so many people! Of
course, my cousin Theo
was
a great man.”

“Yeah,” I said listlessly.

“It’s funny now to think how
everyone was scared of him at first,” the baroness said in a near whisper.
“When Theo was crowned, everyone thought he would be the end of Ivywild.”

I thought of Chloe’s situation. The
similarities piqued my interest and I looked the baroness in the face for the
first time. “Why was everyone scared of him?”

The baroness gave me a quizzical
look. “You mean you don’t know? I suppose you are rather young. Well, the fact
of the matter is that Theo didn’t like the clergy.”

“Why not?”

The baroness glanced from side to
side to see if anyone was listening even though she and I were the only ones in
the carriage. Then she leaned forward and whispered, “He never liked the idea
of an elite class of scholars. He wanted to make all knowledge available to
everybody by creating schools all over the mainland. He used to talk about it when
he spent summers with us on Ipswimmy.”

“Why didn’t he follow through with
it?” I asked.

The baroness leaned back in her
seat and knitted her eyebrows. “I don’t know. I had some letters from him
around the time of his coronation. Something made him change his mind rather
suddenly on that point. I don’t think he was worried about his popularity, so
it must have been something else.”

Intrigued, I pressed further. “Do
you remember was his letters said?”

“I don’t recall exactly. That was
back when he wrote often, so all the letters run together. At any rate I know
he was very brief about his reasons. The clergy was more important than he
realized so he decided to devote his energies to other causes.”

“More important than he realized?”
I repeated.

“He never got more specific than
that,” the baroness quickly assured me. “Whether he intended it or not, his
popularity skyrocketed afterwards. Then he married that stuck-up Othella and we
seldom heard from him again. I do hope little Chloe takes after Theo more than
she does Othella.”

“She’s a fair amount of both,” I
said.

The buggy lurched to a stop. A
porter opened the door. The baroness blew her nose one more time and stepped
put. I mulled over what she had said while I waited my turn to get out.

Mag Mell was bursting at the seams
with commoners and nobles alike. My place was reserved near the royal family. I
followed the baroness through the mass of people. The place was filled with the
sounds of mourners who wept unabashedly.

“Oh heavens!” the baroness said. “They’re
going to get me all worked up. It’s a good thing I brought a spare hankie. You
remembered yours, didn’t you?”

 I felt around in the pocket of my
robe to see if my butler had provided me with a handkerchief. Fritz was really
handy at supplying all the little things I never thought about. Sure enough, I
found a silk handkerchief folded in my pocket. To my surprise, I also felt a
crinkly sheet of paper. 

I recognized the paper
and my face went warm. It was the torn page that I had gone into with Lev.
Around the edges of the page he had written a message:

“Today is the day. I’m
sorry I couldn’t see you before I left and I’m sorry I’ll have to miss the
funeral. I hope that by the time we meet again, Faylinn is at peace and we will
have both fulfilled the goals we set for ourselves. I will never forget you,
Emma Wren. You are a better friend than I ever deserved.
Liebet Ivern —
Lev.”

The flow of bodies pressed in
around me, urging me forward. I stood motionless, holding the note. It was
real. He was leaving.

“Move it!” said a man behind me. I
stumbled out of the line into a crowd of gawkers who had come to watch the
nobles. The page trembled in my hand.

Seeing Lev’s goodbye on paper drove
home the thing I’d been denying ever since he told me he was leaving. I was
crushed.

Somehow I thought he’d have a
change of heart and stay. It was terrible and selfish, but I admitted to myself
that’s what I’d been hoping. That vain hope had kept me from saying some important
things to him and now I’d lost my chance.

Or had I? The graveyard was overflowing.
What good would one more mourner be to a dead man? I pushed my way to the back
of the crowd where the carriages and cusith hounds had been tied. None of the
porters were paying attention, so I untied one of the shaggy green hounds from
his post and led him away slowly. When I was on the other side of a row of
parked carriages, I climbed onto the hound’s back and flicked the rein.

The beast charged forward down the
dusty road. I wasn’t sure exactly where I was going, but I knew the road that
led past Mag Mell eventually veered off to the shore south of Ivywild. There
were only a couple of sizable harbors nearby. Most of the coastline was too
steep and craggy to make for good ports.

A horn blared the commencement of
the funeral. One or two latecomers gave me strange looks as I rode past. Dust
flew up from the cusith hound’s paws, staining my white clothes. I didn’t care.
I was hell-bent on one thing only and that was reaching the port before Lev left.
If I arrived looking like a filthy beggar, so be it.

The countryside flew by in a blur.
With every mile I felt lighter. Until I’d held the torn page in my hand I had never
confessed, even to myself, how much Lev really meant to me. The thought of him
leaving was like a hammer blow to a thin sheet of ice. The wall had cracked,
and all the feelings I’d been holding in check rushed out all at once. I didn’t
want to live a day without him, and I had to let him know it. Life was too
short not to.

I was being reckless. I knew better
than to let my heart lead my brain, but I felt like I would burst if I didn’t
get to see him one last time. Even if I couldn’t stop him, I had to tell him
how I felt.

The cusith hound’s tongue was
hanging out. His ears perked up at the sound of gulls circling overhead. I
breathed in the salty aroma of the ocean and my heart did a flip.

This was love. It was wonderful and
overwhelming, like standing at the bottom of a waterfall. I was alive and I was
ridiculously in love with Lev Hartwig. Cursing myself and laughing at the same
time, I steered the hound to a side road that curved through the grassy hills
to the seashore on the other side.

How could I have been so stupid?
Lev was the most important person in my life and I was about to let him sail
away. I leaned over the hound’s neck and urged him to go faster.

The sound of surf crashing nearby
sent me into a fit of near lunacy. The road grew softer, giving way to beach
sand. Then a glorious sight met my eyes. Ship masts peeked above the top of the
next hill. I practically dragged the cusith hound with me over the crest of the
grassy dune.

The blustery sea breeze fought me as
I climbed. When I reached the top of the hill, I saw a small port on the other
side. The water was shallow with docks reaching far out into the slate colored
waves. Only one ship was moored there. The crew was unfurling the sails but the
planks were still attached to the dock and it looked as though people were
loading last-minute items aboard.

I left the hound and sprinted down the
hill. Now more than ever I longed for wings. I ran so hard that my lungs burned,
not stopping until my feet pounded on the wooden boards of the dock. Only then
did I shield my eyes from the sun to look for Lev.

I spotted him almost instantly. He
was giving instructions to the dockhands about where some crates needed to go.
He looked like he’d been working out in the sun for a while. His hair was
sweaty and his face was flushed with a grayish tinge. I watched him covetously
for a moment before running down the dock to him. I was about to shout his name
when I witnessed something that made my blood run cold.

A tall, tattooed Slaugh girl flew
down from the ship and landed beside Lev. “You’d better come aboard,” the girl
said. “They’re hauling up the anchor.”

Lev nodded and consulted a slip of
parchment. “I’ll be along soon enough, Katriel. Make sure the others are
settled in.”