The hairs lifted on his arms. He leaned closer. He couldn’t see through the vines, aside from those gray fragments of air. Nothing moved, and all he heard from within was the faint rustle of leaves. He smelled fresh greenery and old stone.
He had heard of portals, but never seen one. Only the fae could create or control them, along with one or two legendarily talented witches in times past, who had worked for the government or royal family.
One being Rosamund Highvalley.
Merrick reached through the space where the headboard used to be, breathing shallow and fast. This was probably very stupid; something could bite his fingers off, or seize him and drag him in, or …
Cool air bathed his hand. His arm felt squeezed or stretched at the threshold, exactly the way people described the bodily effect of moving through a portal. He let his fingers brush the leaves, then yanked his hand back and waited. No spell overtook him, and all he found on his fingers was a trace of dust.
Wiping it off on the sheet, he frowned. With the headboard gone, how would he close the portal if he wanted to? He could hardly leave it like this. He touched the flower-bead to one of the bedposts, and the portal vanished, sealing itself back up into headboard shape. Feeling its loss like a pang, he immediately touched it again with the bead.
It reopened gamely. He stared at the curtain of leaves. They fluttered a little with the gust created by the portal opening, then fell still.
He slid a hand into the tangle of vines. They resisted, tendrils catching and tearing. He went in with both hands. The rustling sounds echoed beyond, as if it were a cave. Where was this place? Somewhere within the fae realm? If so, he hoped to the powers above that he wasn’t attracting the attention of something monstrous that lived in it.
For a moment he thought uneasily of the spookier varieties of fae. Whitefingers, who lurked in birch forests and could cause insanity or death with one touch of their long bone-white fingers. Kelpies, who came surging out of lakes and streams to devour people. Fair feasters, who enchanted humans into falling in love with them, then slowly killed them by feeding upon their blood over the course of days or months.
He made himself stop thinking of those.
He’d begun leaning on the vines while trying to part them, teetering on his knees on the head of the mattress. Then a thick vine gave way, dropping out from under his elbow. Merrick went toppling into the portal.
He landed on flat stone with a grunt, a few feet below. In panic he leaped back up to make sure the portal hadn’t closed behind him, but no, there the spare bedroom waited, beyond the vines. He reached through to touch the mattress, to reassure himself. Then he turned around.
With a shout of terror, he scrambled back against the wall.
Stone walls enclosed the room. The floor was a mosaic of colored tiles. A seven-sided glass window in the high ceiling let in the diffused light from the night sky. On the stone bier a few paces away lay the body of a young man, formally dressed, one hand on his chest, the other on the iron sword at his side.
But not a dead body. Not exactly.
He recognized this place, this sleeper. Any Eidolonian would.
This was Prince Larkin’s Bower, in the heart of the palace, honored and guarded at all hours, no one allowed to enter its sanctity since it was sealed up in 1799.
And Merrick was inside it.
CHAPTER 6
ALL THIS TIME, IN THEIR SPARE ROOM, A PORTAL had existed, linking up Highvalley House, on the east coast of the peninsula, with Floriana Palace in Dasdemir, fifty-some miles away on the west coast.
Merrick threw a glance at the glass door where tourists came to look in on the sleeping prince and leave their flowers and sweet-dream charms. It was nearly midnight; the bower would be closed to the public. But wasn’t it guarded around the clock? Surely the guards would see him.
All he could see in the door was a dark reflection of the bier. One-way glass? That couldn’t have existed in 1799, but maybe Rosamund had designed it magically.
After he stood frozen for half a minute, curiosity overtook him. He tiptoed toward the door. As he got nearer, he discerned regular vertical folds through the glass, and huffed a silent laugh. Curtains. He remembered now. The palace guard drew a red velvet drape over the glass at night; it was part of the protocol, the way flags had to be taken down at night in some countries. The drape had been tied back at the side of the door during his field trip in high school.
The guards outside couldn’t see him without opening the curtain, and as nothing had happened inside Larkin’s Bower for over two centuries, they would have no reason to look. As long as Merrick stayed quiet, he ought to be safe.
He swiveled and approached the sleeping prince as cautiously as he had approached the door.
There was likely no Lava Flow charm hidden here after all. Rather, Rosamund must have created the portal for the last step of her ambitious plan, wherein she would release the prince after dealing with the problem of Ula Kana, then appear with him triumphantly, a grand public surprise to restore her damaged honor. Her plan had fallen into oblivion, however, because although she obviously had the magic ready to release Larkin, she never had been able to arrange an alternate prison for Ula Kana and had subsequently disappeared. Thus Larkin had been abandoned.
Merrick drew near enough to touch the prince, though he didn’t dare.
The bier was draped with an Eidolonian flag in the national colors of lava red and kiryo-feather blue. The island’s native kiryo bird, small but clever and musical, had been chosen as a symbol of the vulnerable but artistic humans who had settled here; while the lava represented the unstoppable earth-deep forces of the fae.
Larkin wore clothes in the same shades. Small jewels glinted all over him: in his earlobes, the medals and pins on his sash, the rings on his fingers, and the hilt and scabbard of his sword. He was dressed in the eighteenth-century version of Eidolonian “tatters,” or ceremonial wear: long jacket, tunic, knee-length breeches, cape, and sashes around waist and chest, all with artfully tattered hems, meant to flutter as one moved. Symbolic of the island’s winds, waves, and volcanic flames, tatters also paid homage to the fae’s gossamer garments.
Larkin’s russet hair lay smooth below him, down to the middle of his back, some of it gathered in a topknot held with a circlet of gold and jewels, their shine dimmed with dust. Dust lay thick on his eyelashes too, and the ridges of his lips. You couldn’t really tell how much dust there was from outside the glass.
A long-forgotten memory returned to him. Before a field trip to the palace at age fourteen, Merrick had seen only artists’ portraits of Prince Larkin, such as the one in their textbook, because photos of the bower always came out blurry. Magic often had that effect on photography. In the portraits, Larkin was posed with one foot forward like a dancer, and had close-set eyes, too much forehead, orange hair with an unlikely amount of wave and gloss, and lace spilling out the front of his vest. Merrick, along with many classmates, had made fun of him.
Then they had come here and seen him in person, and Merrick had fallen quiet, because the prince didn’t really look like that. He looked like a real person, with the normal amount of forehead, deep red hair that people said was a throwback to his redheaded Turkish ancestor Orhan Dasdemir, and very nice eyes, to judge from their thick brows and lashes. He was beautiful. Merrick had become fascinated with him, and felt oddly moved to see him lying there, untouchable. Not dead, but forever enchanted.