Evanescent by Andria Buchanan Page A

the horizon, and two house fairies flitted over to us, balancing a plate of toast that I didn’t really want to eat between them. “These are the estimates of how many weapons we have below in the armory.”
    “Will it be enough?” I asked, setting the documents aside and staring at the soldier instead. The estimates wouldn’t mean anything to me. They were just numbers until someone told me if the number of weapons we had was greater than or equal to the number of soldiers who needed them. I had never been that great at algebra but even I could figure out that was how the math of warfare worked.
    “You’ll have to ask the lord general,” the young soldier said, his blue eyes dark. “But even if it’s not, we’re prepared to fight with rocks and our bare hands if need be.” The soldier slipped back into his place, silently guarding the formal dining room where we’d all spread out to start planning our war.
    “Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that.” I took a drink of my juice and turned to the dryad sitting quietly beside me. “Darinda?”
    “Yes, Your Majesty?” The head of the Dryad Order looked up at me from the parchment she was poring over with Mercedes.
    “The Fate Maker said that if we didn’t cooperate he would bring my mother here and kill her. Then he’d find another girl to take my place as the Golden Rose. Can he actually do it? Can he travel between the World That Is and the World of Dreams?”
    “It’s a threat, Your Majesty,” Aquella, Great Wave of the Naiads, said from her place at the far end of the table where she’d been having a hushed conversation with Boreas, king of the Aurae and the third member of the Nymphiad. “Just something he said to scare you.”
    “Not if he can actually do it,” I said. “Is there any way that he can get from this realm to another without using the Mirror of Nerissette? Is there some other magic that he can cast to threaten the former queen?”
    “There are other relics,” Darinda said, her silver eyes troubled. The fairies carefully flew her a mug of tea from the side table. “Other objects of magic that give their users unimaginable power.”
    “I know,” I said. “Esmeralda told me about the Great Relics. She said that she had cast a spell to hide them inside the palace walls, to keep them away from the Fate Maker so he couldn’t use them. What I want to know is if any of these other relics are portals like the mirror? Can he use them to travel between worlds? Specifically this Tear that he’s asking for—can he use that to get to my mother?”
    “I’m not sure,” Darinda said and then glanced at the other two members of the Nymphiad.
    “Not a lot is known about the relics, Your Majesty,” Boreas said. “They are a powerful magic that none besides the queen and her handmaiden have ever been allowed to touch. A magic the queen and her handmaiden kept secret between themselves.”
    “Just so we’re on the same page, you don’t know what these are, what they look like, what they’re capable of?” I asked. “You don’t know anything about them except that somehow my mother and Esmeralda used them?”
    “No, we don’t,” Aquella muttered. “Until Esmeralda used the mirror to bring you from the World That Is to Nerissette, most of us didn’t actually believe the relics truly existed. We thought they were legend. As far as anyone knew the mirror in the Fate Maker’s tower was just that—a mirror—and nothing more.”
    “But my mother used them,” I said. “Esmeralda said that she helped my mother use the relics to move between worlds. How else did you think she managed it? Did you think she could just magically hop there and back whenever she felt like it?”
    “We—” Darinda coughed.
    “You what?”
    “When we were told the Last Rose had been lost we assumed that she’d been killed, and the Fate Maker was trying to cover it up with this idea of the relics.” The admission came out of her quietly, and I could