The Flute Keeper's Promise (The Flute Keeper Saga) (38 page)

There were no Dryads whispering in
the trees. We’d come to the forest of the giant evergreens. Though my eyes were
covered, I lifted my head. I sensed the great branches towering high above.

Valory scuffled around near me.
They’d removed her gag on the threat that if she spoke out of turn they’d
enchant her voice right out of her throat. Valory must have believed them
because she hadn’t uttered a peep.

“I smell the bracelet again,” she whispered.
“I smell lots of new things. We must be close!”

“On your feet!” barked the leader.

Somebody pulled me up. The Fay men
surrounded me and Valory. I heard the leader clear his throat in front of me.

“Here’s what’s going to happen,” he
said. “We are about to let the people in charge determine if you are spies or
allies. If it turns out that you’re on the wrong side, you will be taken
prisoner or neutralized immediately.”

Valory started to say something but
then caught herself.

“What was that?” the leader asked.

“What does ‘neutralized’ mean?”
Valory asked nervously.

“It means they’ll kill us,” I said.
It wasn’t like the Fay I knew to make death threats, but drastic times did call
for drastic measures. Even so, I couldn’t shake a growing feeling of unease.
Suppose I’d been wrong? What if this was just a merciless rebel crew?

Grisly scenarios played out in my
mind as we marched close to rushing water. I heard the groaning noise of wood
and pulleys. Some kind of bridge dropped at our feet. The men urged me and Valory
across. On the other side I heard muffled sounds of activity and felt the shade
of some kind of structure.

We passed through a wide door. I felt
the side of it brushing my elbow. Everything smelled of evergreens. Our
footsteps echoed on massive wood planks. The sound of voices grew louder. It
was like walking into the training wing of the cathedral for the first time. I
felt people and activity all around me, behind closed doors and above my head,
but I couldn’t see anyone.

We stopped. The men shoved Valory
and me into a knee-high pool of water.

“Hey!” Valory protested before she
could stop herself.

I heard things being tossed into
the water. Clouds of mist rose up and tickled my nose. Somebody strapped a bowl
to my head. I felt the heavy thud of a crystal being dropped into the bowl.
Then somebody pricked my arm with a porcupuff needle.

I knew then what was going on. It
was a Truth Test. Commander Larue had given me one when I first arrived in
Faylinn. The combined materials of the water, the bowl and the needle were
meant to put test subjects into a kind of trance where they could not tell
lies. This was how Commander Larue and Lord Finbarr had determined that I
really was a long lost Flute Keeper. That time, though, I had fallen into a
trance so deep that I saw visions and spoke in the voice of my ancestors. This
time I kept a degree of control.

Valory squirmed beside me as they
poked her with the porcupuff needle. She became still very quickly afterwards.

“You,” said a distorted voice next
to my ear. It sounded like somebody speaking underwater. “What is your true
name?”

This was always the first question
asked in any Truth Test. So much was tied to a name—much more than just an
identity.

“Emma Wren,” I replied.

A pause. The watery voice spoke
again, this time with a shakiness that wasn’t caused by the distortion spell.
“How is it that you are not dead?”

“I refuse to die until the true
queen is restored and Ivywild is free of the duke.”

“What is your true name?” the voice
asked Valory.

She replied in a flat, distant
monotone. The spell had a strong grip on her. “I am Valory of Signal Mountain.
I—” she halted, struggling with the forces in her own mind. The spell had
subdued her boisterous personality, making her the perfect conduit for the
other streams of consciousness that lived in her blood.

“I am the child who shouldn’t be,”
she continued. Her voice took on an edge that made my skin prickle. If I didn’t
know any better, I’d have thought Marafae was standing next to me.

“Explain,” said the distorted
voice.

“Nin ist verkinu ter gunt,” Valory
said in a perfectly clipped Slaugh tongue. “Inger teksu geifel zer vanvati.”

“I see,” said the voice. He turned
back to me. “Is it true what you told these men about Commander Frayne Larue?
Is he dead?”

A soul-shaking sigh left my lips.
“Yes.”

Somewhere somebody sobbed.

“How?”

“He was subjected to the
experiments and tortures of the clergy and the duke’s staff at Helm Bogvogny.
Their experiments drained him, but he escaped to search for Lord Finbarr. He
died giving up the last of his strength to fight some of the duke’s men.”

There came more sounds of sniffles
and sobs.

The test giver took a long time to
speak again. Even through the voice distortion spell, I could hear the sorrow
in him. “Then you have come all this way to tell his story.”

“Not only that,” I said. “I have
come for allies. We must reclaim what the duke stole. We must defend Faylinn
against the gathering evil. I’m going to make a stand. I’ve come to seek out
those who will stand with me.”

The room filled with cheers. Hundreds
of voices rose up in unison.

“I must warn you,” said the test
giver over the din. “Our forces are meager. We are distant from home, with no
army and no allies other than the desperate and oppressed. Are you still
willing to fight?”

“Yes.”

“Then you are among friends,” said
the test giver. The effects of the distortion spell faded so that he spoke
normally. “May your courage strengthen ours ten times over, and don’t you ever,
EVER disappear like that again!”

The rope fell away from my wrists.
I couldn’t rip the blindfold off fast enough as I stepped out of the shallow
pool. I was crying and laughing and trembling all at the same time. My heart
felt like it might burst.

Lord Finbarr looked in the same
condition. He hugged my shoulders tightly. The winter had been unkind to him.
There was no green left in his hair, only snowy white curls. He was thinner
than I remembered and there were new worry lines all over his face.

“You’re alive!” Lord Finbarr sang.
“You’re alive! Bless the stars and the moon and the earth and every leaf of
every tree! Oh, my child, we had lost all hope!”

Somebody, or rather,
two
somebodys clung to my boots.

“We thought you were gone
forever
,”
said a tearful Harriet.

“Yeah,” Alice chimed in.

“It’s a miracle,” said Bazzlejet,
who was sniffling unabashedly at my side.

Garland Finbarr nudged him out of
the way and gave me a loud, sincere kiss on the cheek. “Anouk said she told you
to do the same for me.”

I saw Anouk waving from outside the
huddle. She no longer wore her robe or her head scarf or any scrap of green.
Instead she looked like a normal young woman except that she was all aglow with
some strong emotion. Garland took her by the hand and drew her into the throng
of people surrounding me.

They were all there, packed into
the great room of some ancient wooden building. Jules Larue beamed at me from a
distance. He was holding his wife, who appeared to be near hysterics. She
managed to give me a watery smile and a little wave before collapsing on her
husband’s shoulder. I couldn’t begin to imagine how they must feel. A beloved
member of their family was dead while I had apparently returned from the grave.

There were others. I spied my butler,
Fritz, along with much of the nobility’s personal staff. Some of Commander
Larue’s Master Casters and scouts were there. They put on brave faces, but a
few of them had to turn away and take out a handkerchief.

It was all so happy and yet all so
sad. The absences were like a gaping hole in an otherwise perfect mosaic.
Commander Larue could never come back. There was no Chloe, or Violet or
Othella. I craned my neck, halfway expecting to see Chloe shoving through the
crowd.

“Em?”

I turned. Valory stood alone,
wide-eyed like a lost child. The Truth Test had worn off and she sounded like
her normal self again. Everyone seemed to be ignoring her or too frightened to
come close.

I worked my way through the crowd and
grabbed Valory’s hand.

“I didn’t know you could speak
Slaugh,” I said.

Valory gave me a confused look. “I
can’t.”

“Everyone,” I said loudly, “this is
my friend, Valory. She saved my life and helped me find my way here.”

“How y’all doin’?” Valory asked.

The others hung back and stared.

Harriet was the first one brave
enough to creep close to Valory. She tilted back her head and gazed in awe at
Valory’s wings and the furs hanging from her belt. “Are you a really real Slaugh?”
she asked timidly.

Valory knelt down on one knee so
that she was closer to Harriet’s height. “I sure am. That don’t mean nothing,
though. I’m as gentle as a baby squerbil.”

Harriet giggled. “You’re really
tall for a girl.”

“Maybe you’re just really short,”
Valory said in a teasing voice.

“Huh-uh!”

“Yeah-huh!”

That did it. A swarm of children
crowded around Valory and bombarded her with questions. Glowing from all the
attention, Valory sat down cross-legged in the floor and indulged them.

I turned my attention back to Lord
Finbarr. I could tell that he had as many questions for me as I did for him.

“You have to tell me how you
survived that fall!” Bazzlejet said to me.

“Do you have any other news of the
duke?” Garland asked.

“You must let me tend to your hair,”
Fritz insisted, frowning at my grimy tresses. “Some of our Pixie staff is here.
We can get you cleaned up.”

“All in good time, all in good
time,” Lord Finbarr said, waving them off. He straightened his glasses and took
me by the elbow. “I know you must be exhausted, but could you grant me a little
time for a meeting?”

I wasn’t tired anymore. I felt as
though I could run a marathon. “Sure.”

He led me to a little room just off
the big one. It showed signs of recent repair. New wood had been laid down to
patch holes in the floor. A curtain hung as a makeshift door. Lord Finbarr drew
the curtain closed against the protests of Bazzlejet and the others.

I studied the little room. There
was hardly any stone used in its construction. Instead it used the giant planks
of wood from surrounding trees. From the weathered look of the wood and the
patches of moss that grew in places, I gathered that it was very old.

“What is this place?” I asked.

Lord Finbarr sat down on a carved
out tree stump and gestured for me to take a rustic chair.

“It had a name once, but for
hundreds of years it has simply been called Woodman’s Hall. It was used as an
outpost for hunters who supplied our troops in the last of the wars against the
Fomorians. It blends in with the timbers of the forest. I’ve kept this place in
the back of my mind just in case Garland and I needed to use it in our travels.
Looks as though we all needed it more than I could have imagined.” He sighed
and pushed back some of the white curls on his forehead.

I said nothing. I still found it
hard to believe that I was actually sitting in a room with Lord Finbarr.

“Are you hungry?” he asked.

I shook my head. Marching through
the forest I’d felt famished, but now food seemed trivial. “I just can’t…I
mean…you’re here! After what happened to Commander Larue…”

“Tragedy,” Lord Finbarr said. He
struggled with the next words. His eyes blazed with anger like I had never seen
in him before. “Those cowardly dogs. I always knew enough not to trust the
Seelie Court, and I was beginning to have my doubts about the clergy.” He gave
me a guilty look. “I did convince you to train as a priestess. I must
apologize. My intentions were those of a meddling old man. I didn’t think
they’d actually try to harm you. By putting you in their domain I hoped to put
them at ease while you cultivated a bit of harmless knowledge.”

I thought back to the poison fruit.
“I wouldn’t call it harmless.”

Lord Finbarr stared down at his
hands. “I can’t imagine what you’ve gone through. By all accounts you shouldn’t
be alive. Rumors say a dozen of the duke’s men saw you go over the waterfall
and you never came up at the bottom. Then Jules Larue and his family said you’d
crashed into the side of a mountain along with most of their house.”

“Both true,” I said. “I can’t
explain it. Maybe the family curse works differently for me. Maybe it just
keeps me alive so that I have to keep watching my friends die.”

“Oh, that old thing,” Lord Finbarr
said as though he were talking about a dirty rug and not an ancient, powerful
curse. “You sound like your grandfather. Or perhaps you’ve been listening to
that old windbag, Grimmoix?”

I’d never heard Lord Finbarr refer
to another adult in such a way. “I’m just starting to get the feeling that
destiny has a lot more control over my life than I do. I don’t like it.”

“Let me tell you about destiny,”
Lord Finbarr said. “It’s rubbish.”

“But what about people who can see
the future?” I asked. “High Priestess Grimmoix can. So could her niece, Linaeve.
How can they do that if there isn’t already some framework in place?”

Lord Finbarr’s eyes twinkled and he
gave me a wry smile. “Funny you should mention Linaeve. I remember something
she told Florrie once. She said that fate was all about connections. A strong enough
connection can allow you to glimpse a person’s heart for what it really is, to
live out their dreams and nightmares, and even see them when they’re far away.
With most people, though, she could only see a tiny little thread. She said
that people tend to weave themselves into their own situations. Those get
tangled together, and that’s when you can start to see where the whole mess is
going to end up. But it is never out of your hands to untangle yourself. It is
never out of your hands to weave a new path.”