Stiofán, the
Tuatha Dé Danann
refugee Trása had saved from certain death, proved to be an ungrateful wretch, turning on her so fast it made her head spin. He was relishing is new role as king of the Faerie and was being so obnoxious about it, Trása wanted to push him off the edge of the high platform outside her bower, just to see how many bones he could break on the way down.
Most of her lesser
Youkai
friends - even the little pixie, Echo - had gone into hiding, in awe of the
Tuatha Dé Danann
prince who had stepped into their realm. Trása's only company, other than Nika, was Toyoda, who sat in the corner rocking back and forth muttering about his special mission for Renkavana. He was so annoyingly insistent on fulfilling his mission, Trása was forced to invoke his true name, just to make him stay put. She didn't press him on the details though. Rónán had apparently also invoked his true name to extract a promise of secrecy from the
Leipreachán
and he became very distressed if she tried to force the issue.
Nika ignored the
Leipreachán
and placed the basket of ordinary human food she'd brought from the mundane world on the floor of the bower. She squatted down, her back to the entrance, blocking Stiofán's view inside. Not that he was paying any attention to Trása or her human servant. He was busy rearranging
Tír Na nÓg
to his liking, holding court outside with his
Tuatha Dé Danann
friends, reallocating the accommodation in the upper levels to those refugees of higher station than the pixies, sprites,
Leipreachán
and other lesser
Youkai
Trása had favored.
"I wasn't able to scry anybody out," Nika said in a low voice as she took a plump, ripe peach from the basket for Trása and began to peel it with her small, bone-handled knife.
Trása chewed thoughtfully on her bottom lip. "They must still be in the other realm without magic, looking for Darragh."
"Suppose they're trapped in that realm?" Nika asked, glancing over her shoulder to be certain Stiofán's attention was elsewhere.
"They have Marcroy's jewel," Trása reminded the Merlin, unwilling to entertain the idea Rónán and Darragh were both lost to her forever. "Besides, Rónán has Delphine's memories. He knows where the
Matrarchaí
have their stone circles located in the Enchanted Sphere. They'll be back."
"Which is exactly what Marcroy is counting on," Nika hissed, a little impatiently. Trása was fairly sure Nika was concerned for Pete rather than Rónán, but as their fates were so closely intertwined, it didn't really matter who she cared about the most.
"What can we do?" Trása asked. "I promised Marcroy I wouldn't leave. I promised him I wouldn't try to warn Rónán he was coming for him, either."
"
You
promised him, my lady," Nika pointed out. "I didn't promise that arrogant, ill-mannered, self-important Faerie a damned thing."
Trása smiled. Nika didn't like to be ignored. She certainly didn't like to be dismissed like a common serving wench, which was all the notice Marcroy had paid her since he arrived. Nika was a powerful magician in her own right. At the very least she deserved some respect for that.
"And how are you going to get me out of the promises I've made, Nika?" she asked, appreciating the effort, but not certain there was anything useful the young Merlin could do other than rail against the unfairness of it all.
Nika handed her the peach. "I thought I'd borrow an idea from an old children's story from my realm."
"What story is that?" she asked, biting into the fruit. It was juicy and crisp and tasted faintly of something other than peaches. Trása was intrigued. Nika rarely spoke about her realm. So many lives had been lost there to the
Matrarchaí
, most of the time she didn't want to talk about it.
"We have a legend about a young princess with an evil stepmother. The stepmother hated her stepdaughter so much, she tried to kill her with a poisoned apple."
Trása smiled at the odd notion. "Charming. Are the children in your realm particularly enchanted by tales of infanticide and evil stepmothers?"
"The poison doesn't kill the little princess," Nika explained, quite seriously. "It just sends her into a death-like sleep."
"And then she gets buried alive, I suppose. You must have some seriously disturbed children in your realm, Nika."
The Merlin shook her head, watching Trása eat the odd-tasting peach with an unnerving intensity. "She is awoken by her true love's kiss."
"That's ridiculous."
"Of course it is," Nika agreed, "but then, I only borrowed part of the tale."
Trása blinked, her vision blurring a little. "Whish part?" she asked, alarmed to find herself slurring the words. "The kish?"
"The death-like sleep part," Nika explained softly. "I think you should lie down now."
"Why?"
"Otherwise you might fall down, my lady."
Trása's head was starting to spin. "Nika .... What ... what have you ... done?"
"Nothing but keep a promise, my lady," the Merlin said softly, still sitting with her back to the door, blocking the view into the bower. "You saved my life. Don't you recall what I told you when you saved me and the
sídhe
I was trying to protect? I swore, if the chance ever arose, I would save your life in return."
"By
poishoning
me?" Trása was having trouble keeping her eyes open. Whatever drug Nika had used in the peach, it was alarmingly effective. "How ... doesh
that
work?"
Nika glanced over her shoulder briefly, to make certain they were still free to talk without being overheard. "Stiofán is a fool, my lady. He doesn't care what happens to you. With Marcroy gone, if he believes you are dead, he will not object to me removing your smelly, mongrel corpse from his lofty new home. When we are gone from here, I will take you back to the mundane world and open a rift from there to your home realm. I have been there now, so I can find it again. After we arrive, you can show me the way to Pete's realm. Once we find
that
realm, we will locate Pete, Logan and Rónán and then we will collect Darragh and your friend, Sorcha. We will then all come back here and take care of these uppity
Tuatha Dé Danann
lords who think they can take over our home."
Nika's explanation was so long, Trása had to fight to stay awake to hear the end of it. The bower was spinning now and the branch beneath her was moving up and down so violently she felt like a small boat being tossed around a stormy sea. She struggled to hang on to consciousness, shaking her head, which just made everything worse. "It won't work. In my realm ... I'm curshed ... I'll turn back ... into an owl ..."
"I thought of that," Nika said, reaching for the disgusting woad-marked, mummified baby's foot talisman the Merlin used to open rifts. She leaned forward and slipped it over Trása's neck. "You'll be a bird, but you'll still be you," Nika said, taking her by the shoulders and lowering her to the furs that made up the bower's sleeping area. "You can use my talisman when you wake. You can open the rift with it, even in avian form."
"I ..." Trása couldn't remember the rest of what she wanted to say. She simply couldn't fight it any longer and the furs were so soft and didn't seem to be moving about as much as everything else. "I ... I ... don't ..."
Trása didn't have the strength to finish a sentence she lacked the energy to form in the first place. Somewhere in the distance, as if she were listening through a waterfall, she thought she heard Nika calling for help, yelling something about someone dying, but Trása couldn't focus on one thing long enough to be sure.
In the end, she gave up trying to figure it out, snuggled into the warm furs and surrendered to the darkness, thinking if it was her that was doing the dying, as deaths went, it really wasn't so bad after all.
Haley cried a lot the first few days she was home. Sometimes she cried for her lost life, sometimes she cried for the family she didn't know any longer, and sometimes she cried for no reason she could explain.
And sometimes she didn't know why she was crying and it just seemed the only thing she could do.
It wasn't that anybody was being cruel and unkind. It wasn't that they didn't try to understand. Far from it. Everyone was going out of their way to be considerate. But no matter how they tried, nobody could explain why her life had advanced by a week, while the lives of everyone else had moved on by ten years.
She'd been gone no time at all in her mind. In the house she'd grown up in, her room was now Neil's study. He wasn't an annoying pre-teen brat, any longer. He was studying physics at university, working on his master's dissertation on some obscure topic Hayley couldn't even comprehend. He'd left a few days after her return - relieved to be going, she suspected - for a trip to Geneva and the Large Hadron Collider.
There was no Large Hadron Collider in the world Hayley had left a week ago.
Her father kept avoiding her. He kept finding things that needed to be done at Kiva's house. Her car - no longer a Bentley, but something called a Lexus Hybrid these days - seemed to need an inordinate amount of work. Kerry took a few days off work, but her normally stoic and supportive stepmother couldn't even bring herself to look Hayley in the eye.
They told her to take her time. They told her there was no rush getting back into her old life.
It would have been good advice, too, if she had an old life to go back to.
In between crying fits, she watched TV, astonished and alarmed by the world she'd returned to. Europe was teetering on the edge of economic ruin, America had an African American president and everybody, it seemed - even Kerry and her father - owned an iPhone. There was a war going on in Afghanistan. There had been another war in Iraq. And no matter where she looked, somebody named Kardashian (famous for no reason Hayley could determine) was on the cover of every magazine that had once featured actresses like Kiva.
Hayley splashed cold water on her face, hoping to wash away the evidence of her tears, although she was home alone and nobody was here to witness this latest crying fit. Kerry had gone back to work at Kiva's house today. The actress had returned from the BAFTA's and would be expecting Kerry and Patrick to be at her beck and call, regardless of what might be happening in their personal lives.
Staring into the mirror, Hayley felt like she was looking at a stranger. The girl looking back at her was still seventeen. Still looking forward to her school formal. Still waiting for Ren to notice she was a girl. Still wondering what she wanted to be when she grew up.
Only she
was
grown-up. In the blink of an eye Hayley was twenty-seven. Legally she was an adult. And nobody knew what to do with her.
The distant chiming of the doorbell forced Hayley to abandon her depressing questions about what she was supposed to do with her life now it had been turned inside out. She didn't know who'd be at the door during the day and wasn't sure she wanted to answer it anyway. It might be another reporter trying to get an interview.
She pushed off the basin and reluctantly headed down the stairs as the doorbell rang again. Whoever it was out there had very little patience. Before she was at the bottom of the stairs it rang a third time, and then a voice called out. "Hayley? Are you in there? Let me in, pet, before some nosey paparazzo happens by!"
Haley reached the front door and jerked it open in shock. "
Kiva
?"
Ren's mother glanced left and right and then pushed past Hayley to come inside, quickly closing the door behind her. She leaned on it and smiled as she took off her dramatic dark glasses and unwound the Hermes scarf covering her perfectly-arranged blonde hair. "There. I think I actually managed to make it here unseen."
"How did you get here?"
"I drove myself." She frowned at Hayley's expression. "I can drive, you know, Hayley."
"Then why hire my dad as your chauffeur?"
"I find the time travelling to and from the set a good time to study scripts," she said. "One can't read a script and drive. Are you alone?"
Hayley nodded warily, still trying to imagine why Kiva would come here on her own to see her. "Neil left for Geneva yesterday. Mom and Dad are at your place. Working."
"Good, then we can talk. Do you have anything to drink?"
"It's nine-thirty in the morning, Kiva."
"I wasn't thinking of me, pet," Kiva told her as she pushed off the door. "I rather think you're the one who's going to need the drink when you hear what I have to tell you."
"Kerry doesn't know I'm here," Kiva said, as she accepted the cup of instant coffee Hayley made for her. There was an espresso machine on the bench, but Hayley had no idea how to operate it. It was new, along with kitchen cupboards, the decor and the car out in the driveway. When did anyone in this house care that much about coffee, anyway? "I'd rather you didn't mention it to her."
"Why not?"
"Because I'm going to tell you things Kerry would rather you didn't know."
Hayley was intrigued, but she was also acutely aware of who she was talking to. Kiva was the queen of all drama queens. She was probably here to pitch the idea of turning Hayley's life into a movie or something - starring Kiva Kavanaugh, of course.
"What doesn't Kerry want me to know?"
"That we know where you've been, for one thing."
"Of course you do."
Even Kiva couldn't miss her scepticism. "All right, I admit I don't know
specifically
where you've been, but I'm pretty sure I know what happened to you."
"Really? Do tell."
"You been to another reality," Kiva said, in a matter-of-fact tone. "And they healed your sight with magic."
Hayley stared at Kiva for a long moment, not sure if the actress knew the truth or was just indulging in a coincidental flight of fancy.
"Is that what you think?"
"It's what I know," Kiva said.
"And how do you know it?"
"Ren told me."
Hayley didn't have an answer for that.