The Unseen Tempest (Lords of Arcadia) (2 page)

Dark elf tradition stated that their dead were to be taken to the highest point possible, where their bodies would be burned and their ashes allowed to drift across the clouds and either ascend to Koran, the elven god, or fall back to the realms and be reborn as something new. Normally, Ater would have brought his partner back to Faerth and the elven lands to do this, but Puck had made that impossible.

“Should someone say something?” Molly asked, her brass body completely unfazed by the change in temperature. “I am unaware of the customs of elven burial.”

Ater, who had not once taken his eyes off the body since he had picked it up, said nothing in response.

Adamas waited a few seconds before speaking in a voice that was deep and laced with authority. “The dark elf Pullus was a brave soul—”

“He was a fool!” Ater proclaimed, uttering the first words in weeks. “He was a damned fool.” He slowly stood up and took a half step away from the body. “And it’s my fault he is dead.” Turning his head to Ruber, he said, “Do it.”

A glow began to emanate from the ruby, and Ferra opened her eyes.

“No!” she protested. The temperature in the area dipped a few degrees before she could focus her energies again. “He cannot be sent to Logos without a prayer.”

Ater didn’t as much blink as he replied, “I don’t even know who the hell Logos is; neither did Pullus. Why would Pullus be heading to him or her?”

“Someone’s etiquette spring needs winding,” Molly muttered quietly.

“Please,” Ferra implored the elf. “Let me say a small prayer.”

Ater stared at the barbarian for almost a minute, his eyes lightless, his gaze unfocused. Finally he shrugged again and said, “It doesn’t matter what you do. He’s dead.” He said “dead” as if the word burned him, and a faint shudder moved through his frame. He stepped as far away from the corpse as he could while still remaining under the cover of magic.

Ferra took a step forward and took a deep breath.

“Oh Logos most merciful, Lord of the Realms, we ask that you receive this child into your arms, that he might pass in safety through this crisis. As thou hast told us with infinite compassion, ‘Let not your hearts be troubled. In my Father’s house are many rooms.’ I ask you to prepare a place for him. And though his life mate may not yet be with him, please ensure he is never alone and that when it is his Other self’s turn, he may find him again. Even though we walk through the valley of the shadow of death, we will fear no evil, for you are with us; your hand and your life, they comfort us. Amen.”

Tears stung Kane’s and Hawk’s eyes as the meaning of the words touched their hearts. Molly dabbed her eyes out of courtesy for the occasion, even though she could not cry. If the gems felt anything, they didn’t express it outwardly. Ater kept his face averted from the rest of them.

Ferra looked at Ruber and nodded silently.

A beam of red flared from Ruber, followed by one of pure white energy from Adamas. The body burst into flames instantly, and before three minutes had passed, only a heap of ashes remained. Ater’s shoulders shuddered just once, all the reaction he would let any of them see. Ruber opened two small holes in his field for half a second, allowing the ashes to be taken by the winds and thrown out beyond the peak.

Silently, they watched them scatter.

Chapter 1

“The Realm of Aponiviso is widely considered

by visitors to be the most chaotic in

existence. To the native inhabitants,

Aponiviso makes perfect sense.

Our world is dying, and there is nothing

anyone can do to stop it.”

Milo Farnsworth

Royal page and messenger for the Family Crimson

I
HAD
no idea where we had ended up.

Normally my being lost wouldn’t mean much. Before this whole dating-a-prince-from-another-world thing, the farthest I had traveled was to Saylorville Lake, which lies on the very outskirts of Athens, to go to Danny Elman’s birthday party when I was eight. So there aren’t many places I’d seen in my own world. Now I was aware of the existence of eight additional worlds. The odds of me knowing where I was at any point in time had dwindled to a tenth of a fraction beyond nothing….

This was different.

Hawk, Ruber, and I had materialized inside a small cabin that looked like it had been decorated with things Cher considered and decided, “No that’s a bit over the top for my place.” Then whoever had done the decorating had decided to build on the idea of Hoarder Chic. Everything had been crammed into one very small room that looked like it might explode while trying to contain all of that fabulousness.

I saw Hawk’s mouth twist into a small grin as he absorbed the meaning of my thoughts through our mind-link thingy. Hey! Don’t look at me like that! I was the only geek in the world to never get into the X-Men, so the concept of having someone else’s thoughts in my head is kind of a new thing.

“So, is this it?” I asked. I didn’t move in case I’d back into something and get tacky all over my clothes.

Hawk opened his arms wide and announced in a booming voice, “Welcome to
Teach Folaithe Titania
.”

I looked over at Ruber, who waited a beat and translated the words into, “Titania’s Hidden House.”

I shook my head as I looked around the one-room cabin and then back to Hawk. “
This
is your mother’s home away from home? Kinda small, isn’t it?”

He gave me a grin that would have been cocky on anyone less attractive than him, which was everyone I had ever seen or met. In the same booming voice, he commanded, “
Ordaímse duit a leathnú
!”

The walls smoothly retreated away from us, and the ceiling rose silently above us simultaneously, making me sick to my stomach. I felt like I was moving, although my brain knew I was standing still…. Closing my eyes, I tried to settle my stomach for a moment before daring to open them again. When I did, I no longer stood in the Room of Ultimate Tackiness.

I stood unsteadily in the foyer of a mansion.

The room had quadrupled in size in a matter of seconds, and everything that had been crammed into the space was now tastefully displayed around us. It still looked tacky to me, but it was at least tastefully tacky. Hawk kept looking at me, waiting for a reaction to his trick, but honestly I just didn’t have it in me. I gave him a weak smile and collapsed into one of the chairs. “I’m really starting to hate magic.”

It was true. The number of things that a month ago would have been impossible previously was too high to count, and frankly it was starting to wear on me.

Three weeks had passed since Hawk had convinced everyone else we needed to gather an army. Since then I hadn’t had any time to adjust.

Ruber’s people began to sort through the mountains of information they had gathered for centuries about the realms. Their focus involved the previous three hundred years or so, after making the assumption that most of earlier history had either been repeated with modifications or was no longer relevant. I didn’t have a clue how they were doing it, but they were trying to find who would be willing to ally with Hawk when he faced Puck in the battle for Arcadia, the fallen capital of Faerth. The rumors circulating said that Puck, a changeling psychopath, had dealt with the royal family and seized the throne in bloody revolution and most likely had an army made of the Dark.

The Dark was the Arcadian name for any creatures they saw as beneath them and useful as servants of various sorts.

Puck might control the throne, but as long as Hawk still drew breath, Puck would never be king. He had sent a djinn, which looked a lot like Jafar when he became a genie in
Aladdin
, after us in an attempt to kill the only people left who could stop him. We had won, but at a cost. Ater’s—boyfriend? Lover? Husband? Partner, let’s go with partner—Ater’s partner had been killed while they saved Ruber’s younger brother. Pullus’s death slammed home to me that this wasn’t a fairy tale. Everything I’d been living through was real, and it was dangerous.

I had spent sixteen years being the most normal person I knew, and my ordinary life hadn’t trained me to cope with scouring the Nine Realms trying to find an army to fight a crazy shape-shifter. I mean, I had read all the books kids were supposed to read and had wished from time to time I could find an adventure like that. I wasn’t exactly wishing a tornado would come down and hit my house or that some ugly snake dude killed my parents when I was a baby, but there were times I had wished something exciting could happen to me.

And, presto, it had.

Now that wish seemed so idiotic. I wondered who would ever want something like everything I’d seen and done to happen to them.

“Are you okay?” Ruber asked, floating down to my line of sight. “Did the teleport affect you?”

See? That’s what I mean. Sixteen years and never once did someone ever ask me something like that.

I shook my head. “It isn’t that. I’m just tired.” Which was only part of it. Growing up, I never understood Dorothy and her constant whining. I mean, she lived on a pig farm in the middle of Nowhere, Kansas, her world was black and white, and some skeevy-looking farmhands worked for her aunt and uncle, and
that
was what she dreamed about going back to? She was in a world of color and magic and Lollipop Guilds and all kinds of cool crap, but all she went on about was how she needed to get home. I really thought she was just the dumbest girl I had ever seen.

Now I know exactly how she felt.

I missed my dad, I missed Jewel, and I felt sick to my stomach that they were out there thinking I was gone or worse. Every time I tried to picture what my dad must be going through, I wanted to fall down and cry.

But there was no time for that. The only thing we had time for was figuring out where there might be people willing to follow Hawk and then splitting up to find them.

Hawk knelt down and took my hand.

He knew the truth about my thoughts, the same way I knew he was dying inside not knowing if his mother was alive or not. Yet he didn’t say a word out loud about his fears. Even when Molly, Ferra, and Caerus, Ruber’s sister, had left the mountain to follow a lead the three of them had discovered, Hawk hadn’t let a sign of worry surface, although risking other people to help save his family was tearing him up inside. To the outside world, he looked like the very model of a confident leader. But I could hear him praying inside that they would come back safe, because if they didn’t, he would never forgive himself.

I leaned forward and rested my forehead against his, and we mentally hugged. But that hug was so much more than a physical embrace that I don’t know if words could ever convey the actual feeling. It was like being surrounded by this warmth of love so pure, so… yeah, I was right. Words just aren’t going to get it done. Let’s just say it’s the most intimate thing you can imagine, times ten.

Ruber’s voice interrupted my nirvana. “Is this a
thing
?”

From what I understood, gemlings don’t experience emotions the same way humans do. Hawk had suggested that because they had brains created literally out of stone, they were unable to experience feelings as deeply as we could. Ruber had suggested that Hawk shouldn’t talk about things he didn’t know about, which would leave him with very little to say at all. Hawk had suggested Ruber do something that would have been impossible even if the elemental had been flesh and blood, and the topic was dropped.

Hawk had literally saved my life with his love, and it was hard not to be overwhelmed by that. His people referred to what we felt as the Calling. The Calling was their version of love at first sight, except it seemed to come with magical powers and stuff. We had merged our… life forces? Souls? See, this is more X-Men stuff, so I don’t know how to explain properly, but trust me when I say it’s like we were one person sharing two bodies.

One of the bodies was handling everything better than the other.

“You could have warned me that the house was a Transformer,” I said to Hawk quietly.

I could feel him grab the relevant images from my memories. In the same moment, I could “read” the magical equivalent of robots in disguise. Turns out they were mechanical constructs like Molly, only giant-sized and without the manners.

“I thought you would know because I know,” he answered once he could feel my thoughts settle down. “I’m sorry.” The feelings of regret and sorrow were so real that even Ruber should have seen them oozing out of him, but then again, gemlings don’t really understand human emotions, so I wasn’t that shocked.

“I try not to pry” was all I could muster, because he knew the last few times I had pried, he’d pretty much lost his shit and yelled at me. There was so much in his mind he was afraid for me to know that it was easier not to read his mind than you’d think it would be.

He brought me in for a much needed hug, which of course brought a humph of impatience from Ruber.

If you ever have the chance to be friends with a talking magical ruby, turn it down. Talking magical rubies are major mood spoilers.