The Flute Keeper's Promise (The Flute Keeper Saga) (23 page)

 “It’s her!” shouted one of the
men. “It’s the fugitive!”

“What’s that she’s riding?” asked
another.

“Never mind that. GET HER!”

I thought of calling on Tuari, but
to do that I’d have to dismiss the serpent and leave myself open to attack.
Besides, there was no time and no easy way for me to take out the flute while
clinging to the creature’s back.

A barrage of arrows flew my way.
There was no chance of them missing their mark. Like any quality Fay product,
they were infused with magic.

The sea serpent put on a burst of
speed. While it bought me precious distance from the arrows, it also brought us
closer to the arch. The curved stone passed by overhead. Then I knew only a
horrible dropping sensation in my stomach. The sea serpent hung limp in the air
for a blink of an eye.

The free fall began.

The air screamed by us. I might have
been screaming as well, but I couldn’t tell. The ground below was a blur.

The guards became distant specks
above. We were falling far too fast. There was no way I could survive the
collision at the bottom. Even if the sea serpent managed to straighten out and
dive gracefully, the impact would still be too hard. Plus, the pool at the
bottom was too shallow.

 All of a sudden
everything around us changed. In one instant, we were plummeting down the
castle cliff; in the next, we were gliding through a silent, white world with
black shadows in the distance.

“What is this place?” I asked. The
loudness of my voice startled me. There wasn’t a breath of wind. Somehow the
atmosphere was both hazy and sharp. The black shadows spun, changing forms like
liquid in a kaleidoscope. The otherworldly shapes danced, flickered,
disappeared and reappeared closer, then further away.

Up became down. Somehow I perceived
the change even though my only reference was the sinister black shadows. A flock
of the things whipped by me with a sound like laughter. A chill went through me
and suddenly I felt more scared than when we’d gone over the waterfall.

I knew where we were. There was
only one explanation because there was only one other place where the sea
serpent could exist.

We were in the Twi-Realm.

Jagged black shapes like broken
trees grew down from the sky. Cackling forms spun around me. I was able to make
out voices; a thousand voices, all at once, all screaming or wailing or
laughing hysterically.

Was I dead? Maybe we’d hit the
bottom of the waterfall. I shivered. The idea of an eternity in the eerie
half-world terrified me.

Then I saw starlight. With a flash,
we were back under the night sky. There was a perfectly natural breeze that told
me we weren’t in the Twi-Realm any more. Tepid water lapped against my legs.
Some water sprites were fighting on a lily pad nearby.

I lay slumped over the serpent’s
back. My hair dragged in the water. Slowly I pulled myself up. I felt around to
make sure I still had my shortsword. A sharp pain in my shoulder made me wince
and cry out in shock. An arrow was stuck there. Its pointed head was lodged
just beneath the skin. I was able to pull it free with one hard tug and a
string of curses.

The serpent let out a low moan. It
was then that I noticed the feathered shafts sticking out of the back portion
of its body. No fewer than twenty arrows pierced its slick hide. The wounds
weren’t fatal. Mere arrows couldn’t kill a powerful undead beast. That didn’t
mean they weren’t painful. The serpent moaned again and I trembled, feeling its
distress like it was my own.

I rolled over and looked around.
This wasn’t the pool at the bottom of the waterfall. It was a millpond with a
water wheel chugging away at the edge. Huge old trees stretched their branches
overhead. I heard the curious whispers of Dryads living in the trees. The water
sprites had also taken an interest in me. They swam up close to the injured sea
serpent and poked at it with their webbed hands.

The serpent tried to growl at the
pests but ended up moaning instead. It was time to send her back. Wherever this
place was, it didn’t hold any immediate danger. I would have to make the rest
of the way on my own.

“You are free to go,” I said,
leaning close to the serpent’s scaly head.

The serpent made a thankful
whistling noise. It stretched its body halfway up out of the water. Then it
vanished, leaving only a glittering spray of droplets that fell back to the
surface of the pond.

For a long time I lay on the grassy
shore to recover. The season’s first leaves had fallen on the pond, creating a
floating layer that lapped at my toes. I closed my eyes and listened to the
water sprites splashing around and the rhythmic chugging of the water wheel.

A small trickle of blood oozed from
the wound in my shoulder. It seemed like a trivial thing. I was alive.

The living could not enter the
Twi-Realm. That’s what I’d always been told, and yet I’d been there. Somehow
the sea serpent had pulled me into it and brought me back out in a different
place, sparing me a terrible death at the bottom of the waterfall.

“Where am I?” I asked aloud.

“Old Potter’s Mill,” said a Dryad
in the nearest tree.

This didn’t help me at all.
“Where’s that?”

“The eastern edge of Aki’s Forest,”
the Dryad said. “Just on the outskirts of Loosestrife.”

CHAPTER
THIRTEEN

The light breeze had turned quite
gusty by midmorning.  Ragged low clouds tumbled through the sky. The weighted
pulley on the flagpole clanged like a hammer, adding to my frustration.

I’d been staring at the thing for
twenty minutes. I had gone to the address on the note Anouk had given me.
Cheery little dwellings dotted the roadway all except for this spot. It was a bare
lot and, as the address had suggested, a flagpole. I had not thought it would
be quite that literal.

An old Fay woman was working in her
yard two houses over. I thought about going and asking her if she knew where to
find the Larue place, but the duke’s men had already come through earlier that
morning. Without a proper disguise, it wouldn’t be smart to approach somebody
out in the open.

So I stared at the flagpole. It was
made of wood and it was ridiculously tall—so tall, in fact, that I couldn’t see
the top of it. Occasionally I caught the shadow of some large shape through the
low-flung clouds, but my neck began to hurt from craning upwards.

Clunk, clunk, clunk
went the
pulley. My head throbbed with it. “Shut up already!” I huffed, reaching out to hold
the line taut for two seconds so I could think.

FWOOSH! The line jerked me upwards
like a fish on a hook. My feet left the ground and I zoomed higher and higher.
Startled out of my wits, I clung to the rope for dear life. Somewhere along the
way a flag passed me, traveling down as quickly as I was traveling up. Higher
and higher still I flew until I passed through a damp layer of clouds.

The top was in view. Convinced I
was going to shoot past it, I squeezed my eyes shut and held on even tighter.

I stopped. The rejuvenated clanging
of the pulley made me open my eyes. I was stranded at some indecent height
above the ground, which I couldn’t see anymore because of the clouds. A tether
line led from the ball atop the flagpole to a house.

I blinked. A house had no business
being up in the sky yet there it was, complete with a patio garden and a cute
picket fence. It took a moment for me to comprehend the madness of it. Then I
saw that there were other tethers on the house that led up to a gigantic canvas
balloon. The blimp-sized balloon swayed overhead, casting the airborne dwelling
into shade.

 “Who goes there?”

It sounded like Commander Larue. I
looked around in excitement, but it was not Commander Larue who glared at me
from the patio. This man looked slightly younger with a face softened by a
beard and mustache. The eyes were the same, though. Hawk yellow and full of
spark, they summed me up from head to toe in an instant.

“Bazzlejet Larue told me to come
here,” I shouted. The rope started to feel slippery in my grasp. My voice rose
with my anxiety. “I am Emma Wren.”

The man’s face relaxed. “The Emma
Wren?” He turned and shouted towards the house, “Look, honey, it’s Emma! She
made it!”

A short, round lady with curly hair
the same silvery blue color as Bazzlejet’s walked onto the patio. “Bless my
stars! We’ve heard so much about you!”

A bird flew by level with my head.
My palms burned. It occurred to me that these people might not realize I didn’t
have wings. “Hey, could you guys, uh, get me down from here?”

The woman smacked herself on the
forehead and giggled. “Of course! How silly of us. Honey?”

“Coming right up!” said the man. He
took a long stick with a hook on the end and stretched it towards the flagpole.
When the hook caught around the pole, he pulled the whole house gently over to
it.

I jumped down as soon as I saw the
patio beneath me. It was all I could do not to hug the floor. I was not without
manners, however, and etiquette dictated that I stand up and be civil to the
insane, cloud-dwelling couple.

A strong hand reached out and
pumped mine. All resemblance of harshness had left the man’s face so that now
he looked jovial—a feat Commander Larue couldn’t pull off on one of his best
days.

“Pleased to meet you, Miss Wren,”
the man said. “I am Jules Larue. This is my wife, Cecily.”

The woman was beside herself with
excitement. She squeezed me tight as a long lost relative then let out a shriek
of horror when she saw the bloodstain on my shirt.

Thinking somebody had been shot, I
ducked and covered my ears.

“Oh, sweetie, what happened?” she
asked, staring at my wound. “Just you come right in here this instant and we’ll
get you patched up. Are you okay? Do you feel faint? You look a little peaky.
Here let me get you some tea.”

“Just let her breathe for a minute,
Cecily!” her husband said, laughing. “Where are the girls? Girls, come on out
and meet our guest!”

Somewhere a door squeaked. Two
bright curly blue heads, one slightly taller than the other, bounded out onto
the patio. Two round, freckled little faces clambered around my knees and two
high-pitched voices spouted questions even more quickly than their mother.

“Is it really her?”

“The girl Bazzy told us about?”

“Look at her ears.”

“How’d you get so dirty?”

“Is it true you come from hu-man
land?”

Somehow Mr. Larue managed to
interrupt them. “Girls, this is Emma. Why don’t you tell her your names?”

 “I’m Alice,” spoke up the taller
one, who looked to be in the neighborhood of six years old. She held her hands behind
her back and rocked on the balls of her feet.

“I’m Harriet!” piped up the younger
one. The smile she flashed me had some gaps in it. Her hair was bright electric
blue, a color that would probably fade to something more subdued with age. “I’m
this many!” She held up a hand of sticky fingers.

“No, you’re this many,” said her
dad, holding up four digits.

“And that’s my other sister,
Elizabeth,” said Alice. She pointed to another girl whom I hadn’t even noticed.
The surly young teen leaned against the house and looked unimpressed with the
racket the others were making.

“It’s Beth,” the teenager said as
she surveyed her fingernails. “Daddy, can I go down to the village? Some of my
friends are going to a party at the old mill.”

“No,” Mr. Larue said. “You’ll stay up
here with us. We have company.”

Beth rolled her eyes and trudged
into the house.

Harriet giggled and whispered,
“She’s mad ‘cause Daddy doesn’t like her boyfriend.”

“I don’t either,” Alice said. “He’s
a pimple face, and he makes loud, smacky noises when he kisses her!”

Such were the scandals of the Larue
household. I got all the dirt from Alice and Harriet as I was given the
whirlwind tour. The airy kitchen was where Momma had exploded a whole bag of
grain trying to make bread. The sitting room was where Alice had made a pet of
a mouse, but then Daddy had accidentally stepped on it. The upstairs parlor was
where big brother Bazzy first made his wings appear. So it went from bedrooms
to pantry until we emerged on an observation deck atop the house.

Mrs. Larue was having fits over my
bloody shirt, so her husband made her go prepare lunch to give her something to
do. I was grateful. I wasn’t used to being worried over and that was clearly
what Mrs. Larue did best.

Mr. Larue crossed his arms and
looked out over his house. “So what do you think of Chateau Larue?”

I looked down. The ground was still
invisible because the clouds had not thinned any. “It’s great but…”

“…But?” Mr. Larue said, grinning.
“Why build it all the way up here? Just a whim, really. It was actually built
on the ground like all the others, but then I figured, why be like everyone
else? Now we get great views on clear days and we aren’t bothered by beggars or
solicitors…or teenage boys with bad intentions.”

“Or mechamen,” I added.

“Right,” Mr. Larue said. “I saw
those things at the king’s funeral. Nasty buggers. Good thing we’re all first
rate flyers around here or we might have been in trouble.”

I leaned on the railing of the
observation deck and let the breeze lift my dirty, matted hair. Pretty soon I’d
have to take Mrs. Larue up on her threat of a bath. First I needed to figure
out a plan. I couldn’t take advantage of the Larues’ hospitality forever, nor
did I intend to. I needed to find Garland and Lord Finbarr as soon as possible.

“Has Bazzlejet been here?” I asked.