He nodded slowly. “I can think of a couple of places, but if you did this ... I mean, don’t get me wrong. There’s nothing I’d like better than to get you out of this cursed place. But do you know what you’re truly asking? If you want to hide out back in our world, then you can’t do anything that would risk detection. You can’t use your gentry magic. You can’t even use your shamanic magic. Any of that could alert some Otherworldly creature wandering our world.”
“I know that,” I said. That hollow feeling within me intensified.
A faint smile lit his features. “I know you do—in theory. What I worry about is that you’re going to stumble across some poor person being tormented by a ghost and do a banishing without thinking twice. It’s not easy for you to stand by while others suffer.” He gestured around us. “Case in point.”
I stared off, knowing he was right. Could I do what I was proposing? Without me realizing it, my hand had moved protectively to my stomach. I could do it for them, I decided. I could do it for all the innocents in Dorian’s kingdom and my own. Better to ignore a haunting, I thought, than to allow others to die for a prophecy that probably wasn’t even real.
I took a deep breath. “I understand. I’ll do it—or rather, not do anything.”
Roland studied me for a few more seconds and seemed satisfied with what he saw. “What about all of this? Don’t you need to have some kind of regular bonding with this place ... and the other one?”
“I do,” I said. “And that’s probably going to be the trickiest part here. Jasmine can do a few quick fixes to tide the land over. I don’t know how long the land will accept her, though. If it can’t ... then, well, I’ll have to come back or else I’ll have caused suffering of a different type. The land will wither otherwise. But, if she and the land can manage it until the end of my pregnancy, I’ll just be the only one who suffers. Being away from the land affects me too.”
“I don’t like the sound of that,” he said darkly.
I smiled. “Don’t worry. It’s nothing physical or dangerous. . . just an intense longing. Like caffeine withdrawal.”
He didn’t look convinced. “I doubt it’s that simple.”
“Maybe not,” I agreed. “But what about the rest? You said you’ve got a few places in mind that I could go?”
“I do, though I’ll need to make some queries first.” In a rare show of affection, he rested his hand on mine. “I wish I could just take you home with me. I’d feel better if you were always in my sight.”
I squeezed his hand back. “Even you couldn’t take on a gentry army knocking on your door. And we can’t risk Mom.” I didn’t add that if this plan worked out, Roland couldn’t see me at all. Wherever I ended up hiding, I’d have to stay there with no connection to my loved ones. Roland and my mother would undoubtedly be watched. Meeting his blue eyes, I knew he’d already thought of this. He didn’t like it, but he’d agree to it.
After a bit more discussion, Roland was ready to leave and begin his search. That was his way. If there was a problem to be solved, he didn’t want to delay. He wanted to get right on it and take care of business. Now that we’d reached this decision, he was anxious to get me out of the Otherworld and into safety. Once he left, it was time for me to begin my own preparations, starting with the most important piece—Jasmine.
I found her in a nearby rose garden, curled up on a bench with some magazines she’d procured from a recent trip to the human world. After first swearing her to secrecy, I explained the plan Roland and I had concocted. Her reaction wasn’t what I’d expected.
“Take me with you,” she said immediately.
“I can’t,” I said. “That’s the whole point. I need you here. You’re the only person who can cover for me.”
“I’m the only one who can really protect you out there,” she insisted. After a moment, she made a small concession. “Well, maybe Pagiel too.”
I had to work hard to keep my face serious. It was almost cute how she was convinced that out of all the powerful gentry around here, many capable of miraculous feats, only two teenagers could adequately watch over me.
“He can’t come. No one I know can, that’s the point. I can’t even tell anyone where I’m going.”
“That’s bullshit,” she said. The profanity was an amusing contrast to her otherwise ladylike appearance, complete with a flowing ivory gown and flower-bedecked hair. “How will we know you’re okay?”
“You won’t, but if we can maintain obscurity and anonymity, you can be ninety-nine percent sure I’m fine.”
She didn’t like that. She didn’t like any of that. Seeing how fiercely she wanted to protect me, I marveled at how Dorian continually worried about her wanting to steal power from me. If that had been her intent, you’d think she would jump at the chance to become the lands’ caretaker. Instead, she made it passionately clear she only wanted to be by my side.
But finally, after hashing out the same points I’d just made with Roland and Dorian, I was able to convince her. I think the attack on Ansonia helped her accept the decision a little more easily. In growing close to Pagiel, Jasmine had gotten to know his sister as well. Jasmine was as outraged as the rest of us over the attack and didn’t want to see any repeats.
“I’ll do it,” she said at long last. “I don’t want to, but I’ll do it.”
“Thank you. That means a lot.” I had to repress the urge to hug her. No matter how close we’d gotten, our sisterly relationship hadn’t quite crossed into great shows of physical affection.
She shrugged. “Ah, well. This is nothing. You’ve got a lot worse ahead.”
“Oh?”
“Yup.” She gave me a sympathetic look. “I sure wouldn’t want to be you when you tell Dorian.”
Chapter 6
That made two of us. That realization had been building within me this entire time: I would have to tell him. No one else really needed to be informed. One well-timed crossing to the human world, and no one here would be able to find me. Jasmine could do damage control afterward, telling my staff I was gone. Both kingdoms had seneschals to handle the day-to-day affairs, and everyone was used to Jasmine and Shaya assuming control when I wasn’t around. They’d all be shocked, but they’d adapt.
But Dorian? He was an entirely different matter. No matter what had gone down in our past, there was no way I couldn’t give him a heads-up that I was about to disappear for a while.
Nonetheless, I put off delivering the news for as long as I could in the following days. He kept hanging around the Rowan Land, and I no longer bothered him about returning to his own home—which normally would’ve tipped him off that something was afoot. Instead, he reveled in our time together and was an endless source of funny recreational ideas that made target practice on pastel wooden animals seem downright mundane. And without contact from Roland, it was even easier to procrastinate with telling Dorian the news. I simply had no news to tell.
Aside from the constant attempts at entertainment, Dorian also decided he would educate himself on the technicalities of labor and delivery in the human world. Considering my own haphazard knowledge of such matters, I wasn’t sure I was the best source, but he insisted that if I was going to keep touting the need for a human doctor, he needed to understand why.
“So what exactly do they do when you have these doctor’s visits?” Dorian asked. “They seem pretty frequent.”
We were outside, taking in the nice weather, about a week after I’d last seen Roland. “Well,” I said, “they, um, check my vitals. Like blood pressure and stuff like that.”
“Blood pressure?”
“It’s kind of like your pulse. But kind of not,” I said lamely. Yeah. I really wasn’t the best person to be explaining medical lingo.
Dorian leaned back against a tree. “Well, any of our healers could do that for you. I could do it for you even.”
“It’s more complicated than that. And sometimes, I have ultrasounds at my appointments.”
“Ultrasounds?”
And so went the rest of our conversation, with me having to constantly stop and explain what I’d just said. Each time, Dorian had some gentry equivalent for whatever I described. Some were more far-fetched than others, like when he said he was certain gorging on cake all day would achieve the same results as a blood-sugar test. He also had a very complicated explanation about how balancing a chicken in a tree was a well-established gentry method of determining gender. I was almost certain he knew there was no real equivalent to half the things I told him about and that he was making most of this up on the spot. He was simply trying to entertain me with the outlandish. Describing a C-section, however, brought his quips to a halt.
“I don’t really know what to say about that,” he told me honestly. “It seems very extreme. And dangerous.”
“Maybe here it would be,” I said, thinking of the gentry aversion to metal. A scalpel might as well be a sword. “Among humans, it’s a pretty safe and standard thing. Saves a lot of lives—though I’d rather avoid it if I can. I don’t want a scar.”
Dorian considered. “Actually, that’s the only part I can understand. Why not wear a scar of motherhood? Better than a tattoo or some other mark of honor. Let the world know what you’ve achieved.”
I stretched out on my side in the grass. “I’d rather just let the kids speak for themselves.”
He smiled and let the subject go. “There’ve been no more attacks on Eugenie lookalikes, by the way. It seems Maiwenn has more restraint than we thought.”
“That’s good,” I said. The guilt over Ansonia still haunted me. “Beyond good. So you don’t need to raze her kingdom just yet?”
“Not quite yet, no. Though I nearly would for what she’s put you through.” I think he meant it. After all, he’d once run a guy through to defend my honor.
