of some kind in Fae. They whispered of it, fear in their hushed voices, and she saw the purple blemishes that stained their skin. She saw the marks spread and had never seen the like of them. As a healer, she was intrigued.
Time had to be slipping away, though. It was hard to keep track in Fae, but Yasmina knew that Rania would be challenging the Dark Queen at the arranged time. She had to get the gem of the hoard to Hadrian in the armory before that.
The sky grew steadily darker, as if deepest night was falling.
When Yasmina saw the caged swans being hauled to the court, she knew she had to act.
The guard before the treasury was one she’d learned was the least energetic. Maybe it was because of the purple stain spreading down his arms. It was on his neck, too, and he seemed to find it itchy. He rubbed his brow and sighed, then one of his fingertips fell off.
Yasmina and the guard watched it shrivel, then turn to a brown leaf and blow away. He chased it, snatching it up from the ground and trying to fit it back on his hand. Instead, it crumbled to dust.
He looked around and spotted her. His mouth opened to raise the alarm. Yasmina lifted her uncle’s bichuwa, but the guard suddenly shrank into himself. He transformed into a field mouse before her very eyes, one that had a faintly purple tinge to its fur. He looked to be as surprised as she was. Then his fur changed to plain brown and he scurried away, disappearing into the growth on the heath.
The brass key to the treasury lay on the ground where he had dropped it. Yasmina seized it and entered the treasury to claim the prize.
The old Fae mound wasn’t under a shopping mall after all.
It was in the middle of a cemetery. Balthasar couldn’t believe it.
The church beside the cemetery had to be two hundred years old and was both tiny and a bit rundown. Several of the windows had been broken and were boarded over. It looked abandoned. The door was locked and also padlocked. He parked in front of the gate and turned off the engine.
Silence.
Balthasar had taken Hadrian’s Land Rover and just followed his whim, and ended up in this place, wherever it was. He wasn’t sure he was even on the map anymore. He hadn’t passed another car on the winding road for at least half an hour before reaching the churchyard. The road ended at this place and he had the definite sense that he’d arrived.
Balthasar got out of the truck and looked around. There were no houses in the vicinity. He hadn’t been anywhere so desolate in a long time and had a serious case of the jitters. The moon was full and high in the sky, so bright that it was like a searchlight. The iron gate to the cemetery hung askew and the trees were old and crooked. That had to be a hawthorne in the very center of the cluster of worn gravestones, so crooked and huge that it had to be older than the church.
A golden light shone from beneath its roots. That sight made his heart stop, then race.
As he moved closer, Balthasar saw that there was a gap between the roots, like the entry to a cave. And he heard the music, that infectious merry fiddle music that could set the most reluctant toes to tapping.
He’d found a portal to Fae and he was going to enter it.
The alarm on his watch buzzed. It was midnight. It was time.
Balthasar took a deep breath and walked toward the golden light, knowing what he had to do. Just before he reached the hawthorne, he heard the calls of birds above him. He stopped and looked up, wondering what kind of bird would be in flight so late at night. Maybe he was stalling, but he looked anyway.
Eight trumpeter swans descended out of the starry night in perfect unison. They landed in a circle around him in the deserted cemetery. One came toward him and inclined its head as if in greeting.
“Edred?” Balthasar guessed.
The swan gave a houp-houp sound.
They were Rania’s brothers. Balthasar smiled, glad that he wouldn’t be completely alone.
He gestured to the tunnel opening. “I think this is it.”
Edred stretched out his neck as if sniffing the air that emanated from beneath the hawthorne. Then he straightened and nodded, looking Balthasar right in the eye.