The Lost Queen Read online

  “Tania!”

  She snatched her head around. Edric was leaning over the high lip of rock, reaching his arm down toward her. She threw herself up and caught hold of his hand. It was cold—much colder than before, and the grip of his fingers was fierce and harsh.

  “I have you!” The voice sounded wrong.

  “Edric?”

  There was a snarl of triumphant laughter and at that same moment a blaze of lightning lit up the crouching figure above her.

  She let out a scream. It wasn’t Edric.

  The wild-eyed face that leered down at her was the face of Gabriel Drake.

  She tried to wrestle her hand free, but his fingers wouldn’t loosen from hers. She stared at their joined hands and saw that they glowed with a dull amber light.

  “Let go of me!” she shouted.

  “That I shall never do, my lady,” he called down. “You will never be free of me! Did you not know? We are bonded for all time!”

  His fingers dug into her hand and with a terrifying strength he began to haul her up the rock face. Explosions of lightning revealed the madness in his silver eyes. His laughter howled above the thunder. The rain threw needles into her upturned face.

  “No!” Tania writhed helplessly, her feet coming clear of the rock, her legs kicking as he dragged her upward.

  “No!”

  Tania awoke with a jolt that shook the bed. She forced her eyes open, her heart pounding. She stared wildly around. The curtains were open and the room was filled with daylight. Birthday cards danced brightly on the edge of sight.

  She let out a relieved groan and ran her hands over her face. She was bathed in sweat, her hair sticking to her forehead and cheeks. She was lying fully clothed on her own bed in her bedroom in London.

  It had been a nightmare. That was all.

  She lay still for a few minutes. The crashes of thunder that filled her head gradually faded away and the red fire that rimmed her tightly shut eyes dwindled to nothing.

  She took her hands away from her face and opened her eyes. She blew her cheeks out in a long breath and then sat up.

  Her clothes were sticking uncomfortably to her. She looked around the room, needing to get a fix on reality for fear that she might be sucked back into the dream. She grabbed her shoulder bag and dug out her ID pass. She gazed at the small photo of herself. Long curling red hair framed her heart-shaped face with its wide mouth and high, slanted cheekbones. Smoky green eyes stared out at her.

  Anita Palmer.

  Princess Tania.

  Two people with one face and one heart and only one life to lead.

  But which life? And where?

  Ynis Maw.

  She shuddered at the memory of Gabriel Drake’s face, his mouth twisted in a horrible smile, his eyes stretched wide so that the whites showed all around the weird silver irises. She clutched her hand to herself, remembering the painfully tight grip of his fingers.

  You will never be free of me! Did you not know? We are bonded for all time! She remembered the Hand-Fasting Ceremony that she and Gabriel had gone through in the Hall of Light. It had been against her will—her sister Rathina had tricked her into going there. Gabriel had been waiting. He had poured the liquid amber over their two hands and she had seen him revealed in all his treachery and evil.

  His plans had come to nothing. Oberon had come down on him like a thunderbolt; Tania could still remember the moment of Gabriel’s banishment. The terror in his eyes as the King pronounced his doom. And then, a split second later, he had been gone, leaving only a thin snake of smoke that coiled for an instant before fading into nothingness.

  She knew the Hand-Fasting Ceremony was only the first of many Faerie wedding rituals: The full ceremony took three whole days. She knew she wasn’t married to Gabriel in any real sense of the word, but something had happened between them—a bond had been forged.

  For the first time Tania wondered exactly what had happened to Gabriel. He had vanished but Oberon had not killed him. The punishment for his crimes had been banishment. But banishment to where?

  Ynis Maw?

  Was it a real place? A terrible land at the far reaches of the world—a place of exile and torment and horror? Was Gabriel calling to her across the worlds from that place, reminding her of the unbreakable connection between them?

  She stood up and walked rapidly to the window. She rested her forehead against the cool glass, staring down into the garden. “No. No. No.” she whispered, her breath misting the glass. “He was only able to find me here last time because I was wearing the amber pendant.” Her jaw set. “I won’t let him do that to me again. I won’t!”

  But if Ynis Maw was a real place, could someone as powerful as Gabriel Drake find a way to escape?

  “Oberon wouldn’t let that happen,” she said. “He’d have made sure Gabriel could never come back.”

  She became aware of how uncomfortable her borrowed clothes felt against her skin. She walked to the bed again and looked at the bedside clock.

  It was three thirty. She spotted her phone lying on the carpet. Sitting on the edge of the bed, she retrieved it. She had one text message.

  It was from her best friend, Jade.

  YOU BAD GIRL! WE WANT ALL THE GORY DETAILS! COME TO THE PIZZA PLACE AS SOON AS SCHOOL FINISHES!

  Tania smiled. Typical Jade. Word must have gone around the school saying she was okay, and now Jade wanted the inside story.

  Tania was suddenly eager to see her friends again, but…“Sorry, Jade,” she said aloud. “You don’t get to know the truth this time.” She texted back: I’LL BE THERE.

  “What I really need right now is a shower,” she decided. As she stood up, she remembered the black amber stone. She fished it out of her pocket and walked to the desk. Sitting down, she took a sharp-pointed nail file out of a drawer. She held the thin stone between her finger and thumb on the desk and began to twist the nail file against its surface. After a few moments she saw that she had made a small circular dent. She worked for the next few minutes, drilling into the stone until she had made two small, neat holes, one at each end of the oval. Then she found a piece of lilac ribbon and threaded it through the holes.

  She tied the ribbon firmly around her wrist. She shook her hand a couple of times, making sure that the makeshift bracelet was secure. She picked a metal ruler out of a drawer and held it in her fist. She was aware of the faintest of buzzing in her fingers, as if a tiny fly was trapped in her hand. But that was all. She was safe.

  She got up and headed for the bathroom. She’d take a shower—and then it would be time to go and see Jade and the others.

  Tania came back into her room, wrapped in a bath sheet and with her wet hair up in a towel turban.

  Apart from the fact that this was a Thursday and she ought to be at school, everything else around her was beginning to feel disarmingly ordinary. The posters on her walls, the pile of schoolbooks by the desk, her possessions spread out around her just like they always had been. Her bulletin board with magazine pictures and postcards and old cinema tickets tacked all over it. A picture of her and Jade crammed into a photo booth, pulling faces. A photo of her and Edric—Evan then, of course—in Hyde Park, standing on a bench and making daft theatrical gestures, being Romeo and Juliet for Jade’s digital camera.

  This was reality. Faerie was…what? An illusion? No, not that. But not real—not in the way that this room was real.

  Except that she knew that it was.

  Almost without thinking about it, Tania made the simple side step that opened the door between the worlds.

  She let out a breath as her room melted silently away. Instead of the soft carpet, there were hard wooden boards under her bare feet. Instead of her bedroom she found herself staring at brown walls of smooth stonework. The room into which she had stepped was circular, with a low dark-beamed ceiling and a narrow, unglazed arched window that blazed with golden sunlight.

  “You idiot!” she said aloud. “You were upstairs! You could have ar
rived here in midair!” She laughed at her good fortune: She had come into Faerie inside some kind of building, with a room on the same level as her bedroom in Camden.

  She knew from past experience that Faerie and the Mortal World replicated one another—almost as if they were two photographic images one on top of the other, sharing the same space but in quite different worlds. For her, stepping from one world to the other was as simple as moving from one room to another; it was her gift, and no one else in Faerie could do it without the use of powerful and dangerous enchantments.

  She padded over to the window. The scent of Faerie air filled her head, sweet as roses, strong as honeysuckle, mysterious as moonflower. Through a veil of slender leafy branches, she found herself gazing over the parkland that sloped gently down toward the Royal Palace.

  Was it really only yesterday that she had walked these grassy downs with her sister Cordelia and a pack of racing hounds?

  Far away to her left she saw turrets and gatehouses that she recognized, set behind wide formal gardens intertwined with yellow pathways and adorned with fountains and elegant white marble statuary. The tiny shapes of people could be seen walking, no bigger to her than pawns on a distant chessboard. These buildings were the Royal Apartments, home to King Oberon and his daughters. Somewhere in that mass of red-brick gothic buildings, with their steep gray slate roofs and cream-colored stone ornamentations, was her Faerie bedchamber.

  The building she was in now was not part of the main bulk of the palace; it was a small tower set on the hillside among a grove of aspen trees.

  A stone spiral staircase clung to the curved wall opposite the window, winding up from the floor below and continuing to a wooden trap door in the ceiling. Part of Tania longed to follow the coiling steps to ground level and to run out into the open, to feel the grass under her naked feet and the warm breeze on her face.

  She laughed. “In a towel?” she said. “I don’t think so.”

  Faerie would always be there for her. Just a small side step and she could come back whenever she wished.

  She turned with one last wistful glance out the window and sidestepped into the Mortal World.

  She came into her bedroom just as her mother was leaving.

  Her mother gasped. “Where on earth did you pop up from?”

  Tania swallowed hard. Think! She pointed behind the bed. “I was down there,” she said. “I lost a slipper under the bed.”

  “Well, you might have said something—I did call.”

  “Sorry, I didn’t hear you.” Tania forced a smile. “Did you want something?”

  Her mother gave her an odd look. “Just to tell you that I’ve spoken with the police officer who was in charge of your missing person case.”

  Tania felt a pang of alarm. “I don’t have to talk to the police, do I? Dad said everything would be all right.”

  “Everything is all right,” said her mother. “But I had to let them know you were back. The official line is they don’t intend to take any further action.”

  A wave of relief swept over her. “Thanks, Mum. You’ve been really good about this.”

  Her mother gave a wry smile. “Yes, haven’t I? I expect we’ll all be able to laugh about this in ten years’ time.”

  “Let’s hope,” Tania said. She looked thoughtfully at her mother; maybe it was time to drop another small bombshell. “Mum? How would you feel if I wanted to change my name?”

  Her mother looked puzzled. “What do you mean?”

  Tania took a steadying breath. “I’d like to be called Tania.”

  Her mother stood silently in the doorway for several moments. It was impossible for Tania to tell what she was thinking from the expression on her face. Was she mad at her? Amused? Confused?

  “Tania?” her mother said at last, as if getting used to the feel of the name on her lips.

  “Yes. Would it bother you?”

  Her mother folded her arms and tilted her head to one side. “Tania’s a nice enough name, I dare say,” she said. “Your dad and I could probably cope with calling you that if it’s what you really want. But unless you get it changed officially, you can’t sign yourself as Tania Palmer, you know.” She raised her eyebrows. “I suppose Palmer is still okay, is it?”

  Tania smiled, wishing she could tell her mum how much her agreeing meant to her. “Yes,” she said, meaning it. “Palmer is absolutely fine!”

  As was usual for this time of day, the Pizza Bar was buzzing with young people stopping off for a snack and a chat with friends on their way home from school.

  Tania and her girlfriends were occupying a corner table. They each had milkshakes and were picking from a large pizza in the middle of the table. Tania’s end of the table was filled with birthday cards and newly opened presents from Jade, Natalie, Rosa, Susheela, and Lily.

  Lying unwrapped on the table were lip balm, hand lotion and cotton balls in a chrome tin with CHIK KIT! embossed on it, a pink and white polka-dot notebook with matching pen, a brightly colored photo frame, a box of cosmetics called PAMPERED PRINCESS, which had made Tania smile, and from Jade, a very pretty silver bracelet with green stones set in it.

  “Well, I think you’re a total deadbeat for not having a birthday party,” Rosa said to Tania. “What kind of person is too busy to party?”

  Tania shrugged. “The kind of person who has to learn the lines of a really tricky play that she has to perform at the end of next week? Besides, I didn’t say I didn’t want to have a party at all. I just said not right now.”

  “Forget the party,” Jade said, giving Tania a piercing look. “I want to know what happened with you and Evan.”

  “Sorry to disappoint you, guys,” Tania said as casually as she could manage. “But precisely nothing happened with me and Evan—if you mean what I think you mean.”

  “Oh, come on!” Lily said with a snort of laughter. “You’ve got to be kidding. You two have been all over each other for weeks now.”

  “And then you both vanish for three whole days,” Susheela added. “And three whole nights!”

  “You can tell us,” urged Natalie. “We’re your best friends.”

  “I’ve already told you the whole story,” Tania said. “There’s nothing more to tell. Except for the fact that my mum and dad have forbidden me to see him outside school, which is a total pain.”

  Jade grinned. “Well, what did you expect? I’m surprised they haven’t set the police on him for kidnapping you. And as for that curfew you were talking about—that’s nothing! My folks would have locked me in my room and thrown away the key if I’d pulled a stunt like that. You were gone for three days, Anita! I can’t believe you didn’t call me or anything.”

  “That’s right,” said Lily. “You could have sent a Wish You Were Here card from wherever the two of you were hiding out.”

  Tania sighed. “We weren’t hiding out anywhere,” she said. “And can you try to remember I’d like to be called Tania from now on?”

  “Okay, Tania,” Jade said with comic emphasis. “We’ll try, Tania.”

  “Why Tania?” asked Natalie. “Apart from the fact that it’s an anagram of Anita, what’s so great about it?”

  Tania frowned. An anagram of her mortal name? She’d never even thought about that. “I just like the name.”

  “I bet it was Evan’s idea,” said Lily. “Go on, admit it. Evan wanted you to change your name.”

  “No he didn’t,” Tania said.

  “Kind of ironic, though, isn’t it?” Jade said, gesturing with a floppy wedge of pizza. “You and Evan are playing Romeo and Juliet in a couple of weeks, and your folks have forbidden you to see him—kind of like what happens in the play, isn’t it?”

  “I hope not,” Tania said. “They both end up dead.”

  Natalie grinned. “You don’t want to die for love of him, then?”

  “No thanks!”

  “Hey, speaking of people dying of love,” Susheela said suddenly. “Did you guys see the last episode of Spindrift? I
mean, is Coral Masters a total dork or what?”

  Spindrift was a daily soap that everyone at school watched, but somehow Tania couldn’t summon up the enthusiasm to join in the conversation. As they chatted, it felt to her as if she was watching them from behind a glass screen, as if she still had one foot and at least half of her brain in Faerie.

  She pictured her Faerie sisters, wondering what Sancha or Hopie would make of pizza and milkshakes. And television and radio and movies—there was nothing like them in Faerie. If you wanted entertainment, you made it for yourself. She was certain that Cordelia would hate the crowds in London, although Zara might think the city was fun. Yes, she could almost imagine music-loving Zara going to a nightclub.

  “When are you going?” Lily’s voice pierced through Tania’s thoughts.

  “Tuesday week,” Jade said. “Florida, here we come!”

  Tania realized her friend was talking about her upcoming family holiday. “Is Dan going with you?” she asked. Dan was Jade’s older brother—he was away at university.

  “There’s a ticket booked for him,” Jade said. “But last time I spoke to him he was still trying to make up his mind. Some of his pals from uni are backpacking across India for the summer, and he was talking about tagging along with them.”

  “Have you got a holiday planned, Anita?” Natalie asked. “Oops! Sorry. Tania, I mean.”

  “Try Tanita,” Rosa suggested. “Or Anitania.”

  “I think we’re going to Cornwall,” Tania said, ignoring Rosa.

  “Wow!” Jade said with mock awe. “Cornwall again! That’s just so exotic.” She raised an eyebrow. “How come your folks never go abroad, Tania? How come you’ve never been anywhere exciting in your whole life, ever?”

  Tania smiled but said nothing.

  Try Faerie for exciting.

  III

  School on Friday morning was a strange experience. Tania found it embarrassing to be driven to the teachers’ parking lot by her dad, and to have to sit with him in the principal’s waiting room while people walked past giving her peculiar looks.