Canes of Divergence (24 page)

“And you don’t think that’s weird?”

“If I were you, I would probably think it is. He still sort of scares Quinn sometimes, although she sees him quite often. It’s very rare for him to miss an important event for the royal family. If you were going to be with us for the baby’s Naming Ceremony, I could guarantee you a chance to speak with him.”

“At this point, I’m not sure I want to.”

“Fair enough,” William said, smiling.

“Do you want some help carrying that?” Zander asked, noticing that William was having some trouble figuring out how to balance two plates and a glass when he was so obviously trying to avoid using his injured arm any more than he had to.

For a second, William looked like he was about to refuse, but then he nodded. “Sure, I’d appreciate it. Thanks.”

Before they made it back to Quinn, Zander risked one more question. “Why do you think Alvin came and talked to me?”

William stopped walking. “I don’t know, Zander. Alvin is not something I’m an expert on. I would guess that it means something, though. Quinn now believes that Alvin has appeared in her dreams all these years for a reason – that he was leading her back here where she belonged. I don’t know why he appears to Owen, though, and I have no idea why he would show up in the daytime, in person, to you. Maybe it was just to prepare you to face something weird.”

“Well, it was weird,” Zander said. “But I can’t say that it prepared me for this.”

Eirentheos

T
HE THIRD MORNING
he was in the castle was the first time Zander was brave enough to scoop some of the hot grain cereal from the serving dish into his bowl. If every person in the castle ate it nearly every morning for breakfast, he figured it couldn’t be that terrible.

He almost didn’t actually try it, though. His courage dissipated as he stirred the
strange-looking mush, waiting for it to cool. He set the bowl off to the side, at the top of his plate, hoping nobody would notice, but he looked up to see Linnea smirking at him.

Grabbing the bowl again, he shoved a big spoonful in his mouth.

That was a mistake. The cereal was still hot enough to burn his tongue, and he blinked several times, trying to hide the fact that his eyes were watering. The little he could taste of the cereal was bland and slightly bitter, and he had to force himself to chew the bite and swallow.

Linnea was giggling quietly now as she reached for a small ceramic pitcher in the center of the table and made a show of pouring what looked like honey from the pitcher onto the cereal in her bowl. Then she added milk from her glass and some dried berries from a bowl, stirring the whole thing before taking a bite.

Zander glared at her, and then, very deliberately, put his bowl as far in front of his plate as he could reach.

He didn’t know when Ben had started watching the whole thing, but Zander saw him roll his eyes at Linnea. She only smiled and stretched up to kiss him on the cheek.

Ben shook his head and whispered something to her – whatever it was didn’t change her amused expression at all – before looking back at Zander.

Ben cleared his throat.
“Linnea, Thomas, and I were thinking about going on a horseback ride after breakfast. Would you like to join us?”

The idea sounded so much more interesting than hanging around inside while Quinn and William took care of the baby and soaked up their time with Owen, that Zander agreed immediately, forgetting – at least until they reached the stables – that he
didn’t know much about riding horses.

The problem came into sharp focus when
Ben came back from the stables leading a large, chestnut-brown horse and stopped in front of Zander.

Linnea, of course, noticed the hesitation he was trying to hide. “Have you ever ridden a horse before?”

Zander narrowed his eyes. “Yes.”

She raised an eyebrow.

“A few times,” he mumbled under his breath. Of course, those “few times” had been once on a guided trail ride with a mellow horse. Quinn had talked about teaching him to really ride this summer – but that obviously wasn’t going to happen now.

Ben was giving him an incredulous look – the kind of look Zander supposed he would have given one of the senior guys at school if they’d said they didn’t know how to drive. “Horses aren’t really a thing in my world,” he said. “
But I know enough.”
Sort of
.

“Are you sure you want to go?” Thomas asked.

Now it felt like a challenge – and besides, he was
not
going to go back upstairs and tell Quinn and William he was back because he couldn’t ride a horse.

“I’m sure. I’ll be fine – it will be fun.”

“Good.” Thomas smiled, and turned back to what he was doing.

“Quinn probably has her own horse and everything, doesn’t she?”
he asked, watching the other three tend to horses that were very obviously
theirs
. Linnea’s chalky-white horse almost looked like it was hugging her, nestling its nose into her neck as she stroked it and fed it an apple.

The brown horse had no interest in Zander.

“Yes. My parents gifted Dusk to her on her first visit here – before we even knew who she was,” Thomas answered. “Now, of course, she owns an entire stable of them, but Dusk will always be special to her, I think.”

“I wonder how Dusk is doing, actually,” Linnea said. “This is the first time she’s been separated from Quinn for this long since after the first time Quinn came here. I know Quinn misses her.”

Zander frowned.

“Dusk and Skittles – William’s horse – are back in Philotheum. Quinn was very pregnant when they traveled here, and they weren’t planning on being here this long.”

Skittles
. It wasn’t quite a rainbow-pooping unicorn, but close enough, Zander chuckled to himself.

“Yeah, she told me about that – not about the horses, though.” He didn’t know anything about missing a horse, but he guessed it would be even worse than the way he really would have liked to see his truck right about now. “What’s your horse’s name?” he asked Linnea.

“This is Snow,” she said, rubbing the horse’s neck. “That’s Storm,” she pointed to Thomas’ horse, “and Scruffin is Ben’s. The one you’ll be riding is Chestnut. He’s pretty old and gentle. If you’ve ridden before, you should be able to manage him.”

Linnea’s optimism made him think he was hiding his apprehension better than he thought he was.

Thomas and Ben finished loading things into the saddle bags and onto the saddles. Ben, Zander noticed, was especially heavily armed. He wasn’t in full uniform, but he wore a shirt with the crest of Philotheum embroidered on the sleeve, and he carried both his sword and a concealed dagger on his body. Attached to holders on the saddle were more weapons, most notably a crossbow and a sheath of arrows.

He hoped Ben was just paranoid.

So far as Zander knew, the biggest security risk in the kingdom right now was
him
. He was under strict instructions not to tell anyone where he was from, aside from the few members of the immediate family and three guards who knew. Actually, for the most part, he was kept so far away from people that he wouldn’t have had a chance to tell anyone.

While he sort of understood everyone’s concern about keeping the bridge to the other world a secret, it also confused him. Obviously, William and Nathaniel had been using the gate on a regular basis for many years – didn’t anyone know where they’d been going?

And while he obviously had no way of knowing for sure, the few stories he’d heard about Quinn’s first visits here suggested that she hadn’t been under nearly the same level of restrictions he had been.

Now that he’d been here for three days, and he’d calmed down a bit, and mostly come to a place of understanding with Quinn and William, he was starting to become a bit fascinated with the whole thing. He was staying in a
castle
– a real, honest-to-goodness castle in an alternate universe. He had to admit that was kind of cool. Especially as he looked around at the elaborate yards and stables. Quinn lived in a place like this all the time?

“Do you need help getting on?” Linnea’s voice jolted him back from his reverie.

He glared at her. As if a tiny little thing like Linnea would have been able to help him get on a horse in the first place? “No, I think I can manage, thanks.”

She shrugged and jumped on Snow so lightly that he almost didn’t see how she did it. Once she was in the saddle she turned to watch Zander, her gray eyes full of amusement.

It couldn’t be that hard.

Deliberately avoiding looking at Linnea – or checking to see if either of the guys were watching, he placed his foot in the stirrup and climbed up. He hit his leg on the back of the saddle as he swung it over
, and he landed a little too hard as he sat, causing Chestnut to make a slightly disgruntled sound, but he was on – without help.

Ben shot Linnea a warning look when she giggled, but Thomas looked like he was biting his lip to keep from joining her.

This might be a long day.

Much to Zander’s surprise, after a few false starts, and having to have Linnea and Thomas demonstrate for him how to get Chestnut to walk and stop, by the time they passed the guard at the gatehouse and were on a dirt road outside the castle grounds, he was actually starting to feel a little more confident.

“Where are we going?” he asked Thomas, as they followed Ben and Linnea into a wooded area.

“Nowhere in particular. Just thought we’d get the horses out for a bit, have lunch outside. Are you doing all right?”

“Yeah, I’m fine.” He could almost get used to this, he thought – riding a h
orse on a path through the woods.

Most of the trees were bare, or close to it, with a few brown crunchy leaves clinging tenaciously to the spindly branches. It would have been almost eerie, but for the view through them. When the path veered to the left, Zander could turn enough to see the majestic outline of the castle against the pale blue sky.

Past the castle, in the distance, he got an occasional glimpse of what he supposed was the capital city of Eirentheos – the low stone buildings and houses he caught sight of were so different from what he thought of as a city.

Nobody was talking; everyone seemed to be just enjoying the ride and the fresh air. Ahead of him, Ben and Linnea were riding so close together their feet were nearly touching in the stirrups. She kept her horse perfectly in line with his, and more than once Zander saw one reach over
to touch the other in affection.

Suddenly, from seemingly out of nowhere, an enormous
black and gray bird swooped right in front of Linnea’s horse.

Zander pulled Chestnut to a stop so quickly that the horse tapped his front foot in protest, making him wobble in the saddle.

Thomas, ahead of him now, turned around and frowned.

Linnea didn’t even seem startled.
The horse kept moving, although she dropped the reins and held out her elbow; the bird landed lightly there for a second, accepting a quick pat on the head before fluttering back away into the trees.

Once he was sure he was breathing again, Zander nudged Chestnut to catch back up to Thomas and Storm. “Does that kind of thing happen often?” he asked.

“What?”

“Birds just dropping out of the sky to say hello.” Just when he was starting to feel like this world was mostly normal, even if he did have to cross a magic bridge at midnight to get here, something happened to make him feel like he’d stepped into a fairytale again.

Thomas chuckled. “That’s Zylia. She’s Linnea’s.”

He put his hand under his chin to make sure his mouth wasn’t hanging open. “And Linnea can just let her land on her like that? Even with those talons?”

“Zylia’s gentle. Unlike
some
seekers,” he said, letting out a long, low whistle.

Zander watched, amazed, as a different bird swept out of the trees – where could it have been hiding? This one had the same long gray wings with black tips, but its head was lighter, and there were white spots on its chest.
It landed on the ground near them, but took off almost immediately again when Thomas didn’t stop. It circled a few feet over their heads for a moment, and then disappeared again.

“Meet Sirian.”

“Wow. Does
everyone
have a bird like that here?”

“No.
All of the people in my family who are old enough do. Some guards raise them. There are only a few genetic lines of the birds who will allow it, though. They’re kind of rare.”

“Does Quinn?”

“Oh yes. Her Raeyan is the offspring of Sirian and William’s bird Aelwyn – and that little bird has more personality than the rest of them put together. He rescued her once, when she’d been kidnapped.”

“When she’d been
what
?”

“It’s a long story.”

“Would now be the time to ask you exactly what’s going on here? I mean, I sort of get that Quinn is the queen of another kingdom, but I don’t understand how anything else works. Her real father was from here?”

“Yes. You want the short version?”

“Whatever version you have. I think we have time.”

Thomas chuckled. “
So, yes, Samuel, Quinn’s father, was from here.”

“Okay
, but that doesn’t make any sense. Why would a king or whatever from this world go to my world and have a child?”

“Well, he was never the king. He was supposed to be, but before he was old enough to take the throne, his
father died, and his mother got married again to a man named Hector – a man who wanted nothing more than to steal his throne, or actually to put his own son there – a man who was willing to kill Quinn’s father to accomplish that.”

“I thought Quinn’s dad was killed in a car accident in our world.”

“He was – or at least that’s what we always thought. When Samuel was still a teenager, he realized that his stepfather intended to have him killed. He managed to escape Philotheum and come here, to Eirentheos. He lived with my grandparents for a while, but when they learned how to use the gate to the other world, he went to go live there. It’s more complicated than that, of course, but that’s the basic story.

“
Nathaniel, who was also aware of his stepfather’s intentions also left Philotheum and ended up going there too, when they saw the advances your world had – the electricity, the medicine. He believed his life to be in danger as well, and I don’t think he was wrong.”