The Flute Keeper's Promise (The Flute Keeper Saga) (31 page)

“I think we should go there,” Chloe
said. “We need to talk to that boy, the one called Tobin. I don’t think he’s
entirely human, do you?”

Violet looked doubtful. “Maybe it’s
just wishful thinking, Chloe.  Maybe we just miss home so much that we’re
imagining it.”

But Chloe was adamant. “Tobin has
the same look about him as Emma. Didn’t you see it? He has that sort of
glowiness that most humans don’t have.”

“
Glowiness?
” Violet asked.

“Yeah,” Chloe went on in
excitement. “And his ears weren’t quite right for a human. They stick out too
much. Besides, didn’t Mother say she was looking for people who could help us?
Don’t you think she’d at least want to know about Tobin and the professor?”

“I suppose,” Violet said. “I’m just
scared to get my hopes up.”

As it turned out, they needn’t have
worried. When they arrived back at the room they found their mother in such a
state that it put Chloe’s excitement to shame. The wheel chair could hardly
contain Othella as she whizzed about the room, throwing things into the
battered suitcases they’d picked up at a thrift store.

“Pack up,” she ordered as soon as the
girls walked in the door. “We have a bus to catch.”

This sounded like fun to Chloe.
“What sort of creature is a bus and how do we catch it?”

“It’s a vehicle,” Othella said. “We
have to travel.”

“What about the Pyxis Charm?” Chloe
asked.

Othella paused in her packing and
looked sadly at her lap. “It might work once more. Maybe. But we can’t use it
to travel here if we’re to have any hope of getting home. We’ll have to travel
as humans do from now on.”

“Where are we going?” Violet asked
as she scooped up all her papers and brochures.

“New Orleans,” Othella replied.

Chloe and Violet gave each other
wide-eyed stares.

“So you saw it too?” Chloe asked.
“The story about Professor Leboux?”

“Kiros Leboux, formerly Kiros
Rubedo,” Othella corrected her.

Violet’s face brightened
and she snapped her fingers. “I knew it sounded familiar! She’s an alchemist,
right?” Then she frowned. “She went missing many years ago, didn’t she?”

“Forced into hiding,” Othella said,
“along with many others. Most were members of W.R.A.I.T.H. They left Faylinn to
hide permanently in this world.”

Chloe understood very little of
what they were talking about. Violet had tried to explain W.R.A.I.T.H. to her
one night, but Chloe had gotten so angry over being excluded from the secret organization
that she’d forgotten what they actually did. It didn’t help that Othella and
Violet were always in on the secrets. It was like they had their own language
and they left her out on purpose.

It was all for her protection.
Othella told her that often. She pointed out that a ruler who is ignorant of
illegal activities couldn’t be blamed for them. Now that Chloe was an exiled
ruler it hardly mattered.

“So, these people who hid in the
human world, that’s who you’ve been looking for?” Chloe said.

“Yes,” Othella said. “Faylinn
expatriates.  There were half a dozen families.”

Chloe’s head spun. “I had no idea
that so many of our people lived in the human world!”

“They had no other choice,” Othella
said as she loosened her wheelchair from a snag in the cheap hotel carpet. “If
they’d stayed they would have been shipped off to Helm Bogvogny.”

“The prison?” Chloe asked in shock.
“I thought we only sent murderers and madmen to that place! What did these
people do?”

“They possessed things,” Othella
replied. “Traits and actual objects that were considered dangerous by the
Seelie Court. Many years ago, the court took a stricter stance on what it
considered to be threats against Ivywild. Most of the so-called threatening
people were persuaded to join the clergy. Those who refused were forced to live
on the run. It’s the fate that befell Emma’s grandfather, Alberich. At first he
joined the clergy to appease the Seelie Court, but then he turned renegade.
Nobody knew he had a child until Emma turned up.”

The facts swam around in Chloe’s
mind like a picture she couldn’t quite focus on. “So…Alberich possessed the
flute, right? That’s why they came after him?”

“It wasn’t so much the flute as the
power
he possessed,” Othella said.

“But you said some of the people
had actual objects,” Chloe said. “What about this Rubedo lady? What did she
have?”

“The Rubedo Tablet,” Violet said in
an awed voice. “It is the key to all alchemy. It lays out all the rules. It’s
been in the Rubedo family for ages.”

“Alchemy is forbidden,” Chloe said.
“Even I know that. It’s right up there with building machines and all that
other stuff your club dabbled in.”

Othella and Violet both raised
their eyebrows.

“Ah,” Chloe said. “I see.
W.R.A.I.T.H. dabbled in
that
, too.”

“Alchemy and machinery are just like
magic,” Violet said defensively. “They’re only as good or as bad as the person
using them. The Rubedo Tablet is harmless by itself. In the wrong hands though—”

Othella gasped. She glanced at the
vision box. The news was still on. “Oh, no.”

“What? What is it?” Chloe asked in
alarm.

“Her disappearance,” Othella said.
“All the strange circumstances surrounding it make me wonder if somebody came
after her.”

“Do you mean somebody from our
world? Who would come after an alchemist who’s been missing for all these
years?”

They all fell silent.
Chloe’s head hurt from entertaining all the new, frightening knowledge. She
wasn’t one to back down, though.

“Well, one thing is
obvious,” she said after a few moments. “If it was somebody from our world,
they’d have to have a Pyxis Charm.”

They all paled when they
considered what it meant.

“Robyn,” Violet said.

“Unless the Seelie Court
was able to fix the one that broke,” Othella said. “They recovered the pieces,
but it’s unlikely that anyone outside of W.R.A.I.T.H. could mend the thing.”

Now the wheels in Chloe’s
mind were turning and she began to think like the great strategist her father
was often praised for being. “What we have to figure out is who would have the
most to gain by abducting an alchemist.”

“Or the Rubedo Tablet,”
Violet said. “Maybe they were looking for it and Kiros just got in the way.”

“We know that Robyn does
weird things with machines,” Chloe said. “It seems likely that she’d abuse
alchemy, too. But how would she know about Kiros?”

“The Seelie Court would
know all about Kiros,” Othella said. “I always assumed that if they could
acquire the Rubedo Tablet they’d just destroy it. I don’t know what they’d want
with alchemy.”

Chloe groaned. “That puts
us back where we started.”

Othella snapped her suitcase
closed. “We’ll just have to go to New Orleans and see what we can uncover. It’s
going to be a long trip. We’ll need a good meal first. You girls finish
packing. Hurry!”

Chloe filled her suitcase
blindly, tossing things in without a care towards orderliness. Too much else
occupied her mind. What on earth was happening in her kingdom? She couldn’t
wait to go back and put things right again. If that meant riding something
called a bus to New Orleans, then so be it. One way or another she was going to
figure everything out and when she finally did make it home, somebody was going
to pay dearly.

CHAPTER
EIGHTEEN

The weather held during our whole
first day of travel. Valory’s skills turned out to be priceless. She helped me
make skis out of a split tree branch so that we could make faster progress.
Even through the blanket of snow Valory sniffed out the trail that had long
been used by fur traders crossing the mountains. Whenever she lost the scent,
she flew up above the forest to look ahead until she could pick out the trail
again.

I marveled at her talents. I’d
never met anyone so resourceful. Valory was perfectly in tune with the
environment. I wished I could translate the scents of the wilderness like her or
foretell the weather by the pitch of the wind.

As much as I admired Valory’s
skills, one thing did worry me. She was at home in the wild, but what would
happen once she walked into a town for the first time? I knew from experience
that the first taste of any new community could be overwhelming and I didn’t
have super senses. Furthermore, I had been brought up around people. Crowds
didn’t bother me. From the way Valory talked, she’d never been around more than
two people at a time and hadn’t even met ten people in her whole life.

I decided to address the problem
later that night after we’d pulled leather hides over a framework of fallen
branches. We sat outside the tent and roasted meat over a fire.

“Valory?”

“Yeah?” she said, poking our
soon-to-be dinner with a forked stick. “What’s eatin’ you?”

I took a deep breath. “There are a
couple things we need to get straight if we’re to keep a low profile.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Valory said, waving a
hand carelessly. “You don’t really have to call me ‘Your Highness.’ I was just
making a bit of a joke.”

“I know,” I said. “That’s not what
I meant. Actually, it would probably be safer if
you
called
me
something else.”

“That’s easily done,” Valory said,
removing a drumstick from the animal on the roasting spit. She bit into it with
unrefined zeal. “Whaf oo want me kawl oo?”

I wrinkled my nose. “Don’t talk
with your mouth full. I can’t understand you.”

Valory swallowed and wiped her
sleeve across her mouth. “I asked what you want me to call you.”

“Call me Rachel,” I said. It was
the name of my best friend in elementary school. “Even if you slip up and call
me Emma, do not, under any circumstances, call me by my last name.”

“What’s your last name again?”
Valory asked.

“Never mind. Just call me Rachel.
Remember that. The second thing you’ve got to keep in mind is to be quiet.”

Valory scowled over her drumstick.
“What are you gettin’ at?”

“In town, people who make a lot of
racket draw attention. That is exactly what we don’t want. I’m not saying don’t
talk to people. Just be polite and keep your voice down. The main thing we’ve
got to do is to listen. You’re good at that. Listen especially for any news of
Ivywild or any mention of the name ‘Finbarr.’”

“You mean your friends who came up
this way? You think they’re still around?”

“I can only hope that somebody
knows where they are,” I said dubiously.

A warm breeze blew through our tent
that night. I looked forward to a morning of melting snow. Instead we woke up
to rain. The showers put Valory in a grumpy mood.

“Blast and soot and jellied lizard
eggs!” she exclaimed as she rolled up the sopping wet tent. “I knew I smelled
something coming yesterday! I thought it would finally be a nice little
springtime thaw but would you look at this mess?” She kicked the bones from
last night’s dinner into a muddy puddle.

At least it felt warmer out. I felt
happy watching the snow melt until we got under way again and found the mud to
be ten times harder to walk through than snow.

The only bright spot of our
morning’s journey was that the trail became better defined and we started to
pass little camping spots or sign posts that showed we were on the right track.

At just past midmorning, Valory
stopped in her tracks and sniffed deeply. The rain, now a light drizzle, clung
to every needle and leaf of every tree in shining droplets. Valory had loaned
me her hat to help guard against my being recognized. Now free, Valory’s
crow-black hair glittered with beads of water all around her face. Looking at
her, I realized that she had a beauty all her own. Though her face sometimes
evoked shades of Marafae or Hagan, she possessed an inner light that softened
her harsh features. I couldn’t help but think how lucky it was that she’d been
brought up far away from the intrigues of a royal court. She knew nothing of
betrayal or power lust. Such things might have stifled her inner light.

“We’re gettin’ close,” Valory said.
“I smell chimney smoke and cooking meat and something else that’s like bitter
bread.”

“I’ll bet that’s the ale in the
pubs,” I said. “How much further?”

“I make it out to be another hour
or two down into the valley.”

I felt a burst of energy. I
couldn’t wait to find out what had been happening in my beloved Ivywild. I felt
a little scared, too. I hadn’t forgotten High Priestess Grimmoix's warning. If
I lived until summer, then Ivywild would be destroyed. It was just now creeping
up on spring. I mused darkly that there was still plenty of time for me to kick
the bucket if I couldn’t prove her wrong first.

“There you go again,” Valory said,
shaking the moisture from her wings.

“What?” I said.

“Sometimes you get this funny dazed
look and I can tell your mind is off wanderin’ somewhere far away. You need a
leash for that thing.”

I shrugged. “It’s nothing. I’m just
tired.”

“Uh huh,” Valory said with a coy
grin. “What’s his name?”

“I wasn’t thinking about a boy! I
was just thinking of home and how it hurts being away and not knowing where all
my friends are.”

“And one of those friends
is
a boy, no doubt,” Valory said. “Oh, come off it. You talk about Ivywild like
loads of people live there. You can’t tell me at least one of em’ didn’t steal
your fancy.”

It was no use denying things to
Valory. She had an uncanny knack for detecting guilt. “Well, I suppose there
was a boy, once. Not Hue. I told you about Hue, remember? This was a different
boy.”