The Queen's Librarian (21 page)

And Lucas nearly fainted, because that second voice was, “
Laurie
!”

“
W
HERE
have you
been
?” Lucas’s voice came in a high-pitched shriek, and he didn’t even care, because there was Laurie, appearing none the worse for wear, in fact a little bemused, and Slade was right beside him. “And
you
!” Lucas forgot all about angry deer and Daimin and portals that had no business being open; he stepped right up to Slade and jabbed a finger into his chest. “What did you do? Where have you been? What did you think you were doing, making my sister cry? What is all of this? Who are you? What in the world—?”

“Lucas,” Laurie tried to cut in, but that only made Lucas round on him.

“And
you
!” He snatched at Laurie’s ear and gave it a sharp tug.

“
Ow
!”

“What were you
thinking
, disappearing in the middle of the night? You scared me half to
death
, I thought you’d been
kidnapped
, and the constables
questioned
me, Laurie, and
Cráwa
—do you even
know
how scary he is?—and then there was
rain
and then
no rain
, and then Parry and
Auntie Del
, Laurie, I will
never
forgive you for Auntie Del, and then Daimin and portals and animals, and and…
animals
, small scary
animals
, I can’t
believe
you did this to me, your mother’s going to
skin
me, and oh my god, Cráwa and Dorset are here, so she won’t have to, will she, they’ll be happy to do it for—”

“
Lucas
!” Laurie broke in, which was kind of good, because Lucas was running out of breath again. “I hate to interrupt your unscheduled Crazy Time, but I’m in the middle of a mission and we can’t stay here.” Laurie whistled for Bramble, who was still happily chasing the fauna back into their various holes and dens. “No one can see Slade yet.”

And just exactly where did Laurie get off being so bloody calm about…
everything
?

Lucas had used up all his air, so he was grateful when Alex asked, “Mission?”

“Master Tripp,” Slade put in earnestly, “none of this is what it seems, I swear to you.”

“No?” Lucas only barely kept his voice from wobbling with adrenaline and outrage both. “Are you sure about that? Because it
seems
like you’re some kind of renegade Daimin who promised to marry my sister and then ran away, and as soon as you did, more Daimin came looking for you, and have been wreaking nothing but disaster, just like all the books say they do.”

Slade deflated. “Ah,” he said and cleared his throat. “All right, it is what it seems.” When Lucas growled, Slade held up his hand and took a step back. “But not all of it!”

Bramble arrived, greeting both Laurie and Slade happily, and then Dorset’s voice sounded from down the hill: “Lucas? Is that you up there?”

Alex opened his mouth, presumably to answer back, but Laurie elbowed him in the gut, so his “We’re here!” came out more like “Eurgh!”

“Laurie!” Lucas cried and swatted him away from Alex with a sharp scowl. “What the deuce do you think—?”

“We can’t stay here,” Laurie said and took hold of Alex’s arm. Just as it looked like Alex was getting his wind back to retort, Laurie told Slade, “Bring him along with you—I can’t take two yet,” and then he whispered something that sounded suspiciously like a song and disappeared. With Alex.

Disappeared
.

With
Alex
.

Lucas could only manage a windless
meep
as he stared at the spot where Alex and Laurie had just been. And stared and stared. And
did not
cry. Or have a heart attack. But again, he thought about it.

Bramble knocked into Lucas’s hip, which brought him back a little, and he took a deep breath so he could ask, “Did Laurie just do magic?”

“Um.” Slade reached out for Lucas’s arm. “Master Tripp—”

Lucas batted at him and had no shame in stepping out of Slade’s reach and behind the convenient barricade of Bramble. “Did Laurie just do
magic
? Like…
real
magic? Or was it the Laurie-kind, where he just blows things up and pretends he didn’t?” And, oh God, it probably hadn’t been a good idea to put
Laurie made Alex disappear with magic
right beside
Laurie accidentally blew up a baking shed with magic
in his already overtaxed chain of reasoning, because thinking about Alex and blowing up
was not helping
.

“Lucas!” Dorset called again, closer this time, and then Cráwa’s voice boomed, “
Daimin
!” so loud that Lucas’s ears rang. “Stand and be seen!”

Slade darted an anxious glance past the pines and then back to Lucas. “Master Tripp, I’m sorry, but we can’t stay here.”

“Where did he take Alex?” Lucas warbled. Oh God—he was warbling again. The hysteria must be singing its warm-up notes backstage to prepare for its curtain call. “I need Alex, I can’t do this without—”

“I shall take you to Mister Booker right now,” Slade said and reached out to set a hand on Bramble and then took hold of Lucas’s arm, just as the distinct soft plod of footsteps on a thick layer of pine needles rustled behind Lucas.

Lucas turned, spotted Dorset, and gave him a wide-eyed look then a shrug, and then there was a sharp
heave
from inside Lucas’s chest and everything grayed out.

H
E
CAME
back to himself slowly, ephemeral voices misting in and out of his awareness for long minutes and a distinctly unpleasant swirling sensation in the pit of his belly to go with the now pounding headache. But there was a solid grip around his middle that made it all right for now.

“… really kidnapped?” he heard Laurie say, and then Laurie laughed.
Laughed
, like Lucas hadn’t just gone through hours and hours and
hours
of pure, torturous hell because of it. “That’s so brilliant!” Laurie enthused. “Too bad Mother didn’t put the word out. People would be—
ooh
! Maybe there would have been candlelight vigils and the like.” He sighed. “I feel very special.”

He was “special,” all right.

Lucas was so going to…
do
something
to him, and he had no idea what because his brain was kind of sluggish and didn’t seem to want to work at the moment, but it was going to be something very bad and it was going to
hurt
. A lot. And Lucas was going to be very smug about it for-bloody-
ever
. He tried to say as much, but something that was trying to be
gonna get you
but probably didn’t come out that way was all that wheezed out, but it made the grip around him tighten, and a soft-bristled kiss that could only be Alex settled against Lucas’s temple, so it made that all right too.

“Lucas? Love?”

Yeah. Alex.

Lucas snuggled back into the warmth of what he now understood was Alex’s chest and sighed. “Mm,” he said and pulled Alex’s arm a little tighter around him. “Best cuddler
ever
,” he mumbled.

He was warm, at least. And on a floor, by the feel of it. So, not outside surrounded by hostile fauna anymore. That was good.

Alex chuckled, warm breath fluttering just under Lucas’s ear. “You ready to wake up?”

No, Lucas most certainly was
not
. When he was awake, bad things happened. The whole world would probably be much better off if Lucas simply slept through whatever chaos Laurie had wrought while he’d been not-kidnapped.

Ah, right. Laurie. Who was in desperate need of an arse-kicking. Perhaps Lucas should wake up and take care of that.

“C’mon, Lucas, up with you; your prince commands it.”

Oh yes. Lucas most certainly should take care of it.

Lucas cracked his eyes open and lifted a blurry squint directly into Laurie’s bright grin, twinkling down at him like he had every right. Lucas had every intention of retorting rather hotly to Laurie’s remark, but Bramble chose that moment to slurp his giant tongue up the side of Lucas’s face and then plop himself down so he was half across Lucas’s chest, so all that came out was “Yergh!”

“Ah, there you are!” Laurie said, and he was farther away now, so Lucas couldn’t actually see the grin, but he could hear it. “If you’re done swooning now, perhaps we can get on with things, yes?”

“I did not
swoon
!” Lucas sat up, indignant—and, whoa, dizzy—and took a swipe in Laurie’s general direction, but the
oomph!
that answered the impact was not Laurie’s and so not nearly satisfying. “You just wait until I get hold of you, you… you
wretch
!” He swung out again but only managed to bat at empty air this time. “Have you any”—
swing
—“idea”—
swing
—“what you’ve put me—?”—
swing
—“Stay still, you little—
where are my bloody glasses
?”

“Well, I was holding them for you so they wouldn’t break,” Laurie replied—a little breathlessly,
ha
! “But now I think I’ll just keep them until you calm down a bit.”

“Hand them over,” Alex intoned sternly and nudged and tugged until Lucas was on his feet, Alex’s hand warm and firm on Lucas’s arm, which was good, because Lucas couldn’t bloody see to the end of his nose without the spectacles. “Fair play, Laurie,” Alex said. “After what we’ve been through lately because of you, I’d say a challenge is the least you should’ve expected. He can’t brain you with a gauntlet if he can’t see you.”

“Which is rather the point!” Laurie retorted.

“Can’t you at least pretend to be a little bit
sorry
?” Lucas demanded. “We were nearly
killed
by forest creat—”

“You say ‘nearly killed’, I say ‘character-building adventure’.”

Lucas made a dive in the direction of the voice and the blurry blob that must surely be Laurie, but Alex held him back with a quiet “That’s a cupboard” in his ear, so Lucas supposed he was grateful.

“Master Tripp.” Slade’s voice. “I am truly sorry for all of this. I never meant for any of it to happen, I swear. I only… well, Parry introduced me to Clara, and I simply…
couldn’t
.”

“Couldn’t
what
?” Lucas snapped. “Couldn’t stop yourself from breaking her heart?”

“
No
, I….” A groan.

To Slade’s credit, it did sound rather wretched, but Lucas was past the point of sympathy or empathy or any other “athy” that didn’t end up with his fist in
someone’s
face, and he was caring less and less whose face that might be every second.

“Listen, Lucas,” Laurie said, “it’s a bit complex, but the short of it is that Parry opened the portal in the Circle and met Slade. They met several times, in fact, and in the process of getting to know one another, Slade told Parry about the gold in the mounds.”

“The….” Lucas frowned. “Gold… what now?”

“It is the way of my people,” Slade put in. “When we come to your world, we lay our offerings in the bosom of it. It is a token of thanks and a request to bless our safe passage back.”

“The bosom….” Lucas blinked. And then he remembered Mister-Scontun-who-wasn’t-Mister-Scontun and his minions with the shovels. “You bury gold. In the ground. Around the Circle.”

“That’s what those little mounds scattered all over the place are,” Laurie said.

“Yes, I’d figured that out,” Lucas said faintly, mind racing over all of those tiny hillocks littering the lawn between the ring of almost-monoliths and the Circle itself. He’d cursed the blasted things hundreds of times—they made trimming the grass so much more difficult than it needed to be, but leveling out the ground was out of the question, because that would be desecration. And it would mean resodding.

Resodding was
really hard
.

“You’ve got that
look
on your face, Laurie,” Alex said suspiciously. “Spit it out.”

“
Well
,” said Laurie, smug, “see, the thing is, the offerings had always been made to and accepted by the caretaker of the Circle. But when the Circle was closed for good, there was some kerfuffle in the Brinley family. Some citizens of the Realm didn’t agree with closing it, you see. It was really quite—”

“My people were only trying to help,” Slade cut in. “Your Booths Brinley
asked
for rain. We weren’t to know—”

“Yes, yes, I was getting to that,” Laurie soothed. “You see, it seems Booths was rather an arse. He wanted my great-gran’dam to sign the rights to the Circle over to him so that he wouldn’t have to tithe half the gold to the Crown, but Great-gran’dam wouldn’t give over because she was not an idiot. So Booths had the brilliant idea that if he got the Daimin to flood the little dell to the west of the Circle—”

“He said he wanted to enlarge the lake,” Slade put in defensively.

“—and then dammed up the lake’s inlet, the Circle itself would flood, too, and then Gran’dam would let him buy the rights, because the Circle would be worthless, right? Except, as I said, Great-gran’dam was no idiot. She knew the weeks of rain weren’t natural, but she didn’t suspect that Booths would flood his own lands and risk his own assets, let alone his tenants.”

“So she came to the Daimin herself,” Slade said. “The Queen’s Magician at the time served as translator.”

“And when she asked them to help and to stop the rain—fully expecting them to comply, because they always had before—”

“My people said, ‘But we’re not done with the flood yet’—”

“Which
really
pissed off Great-gran’dam. And since a pissed-off Great-gran’dam was, I’m told, a sight to behold but never approach, she went back to Booths and demanded he shut the Portal until she could figure out why the Daimin had suddenly turned hostile and wanted to flood her lands for no good reason.”