Evanescent by Andria Buchanan Page B

feel my face reddening.
    “So, you thought he had murdered my mother, and you let him stay on the throne?”
    “The prophesies said the Last Great Rose would come—” Aquella started.
    I stood, slamming my hands on the table and glaring at them all. “I don’t care about the prophesies. I don’t care about the legends. I don’t even care that you followed someone who you thought assassinated my mother. What I want to know, right now, right this second, is if any of you, any single one of you, actually knows something useful about this Tear.”
    Boreas shook his head. “No. We don’t know anything definite.”
    “Right. Okay. So what do you think you know?” I asked.
    “All we have to go on are the stories, the legends as you call them, and they are incomplete,” Darinda said.
    “Hit me with it, then. What do your stories say these relics are?”
    “I don’t know,” Darinda said.
    “What do you mean you don’t know?” I asked, a bite to my voice. “You’re head of the Dryad Order—you know everything. Come on. Think. What do the stories say the Tear can do?”
    “They are legend, Your Majesty.” Darinda bowed her head. “The stuff of myth. Stories. I can tell you how the Dragon’s Tear was formed, from the tears of a Great Rose who watched her dragon consort die. I can tell you that the prophesies say that to hold the tear is to hold in your hand the fate of a thousand worlds. I can tell you that you are the only one with the power to destroy it. But I can’t tell you what it is or what it looks like. ”
    “So what you’re telling me,” I said, “is that we have an army marching toward us that wants a relic that we supposedly have, and all we know is that it’s a bad idea for the wizard at the front of the army to have it, and somehow I have to destroy it. But you don’t know what it actually is? ”
    “And we’re not exactly sure how you should go about destroying it,” Aquella added.
    “Great. This is perfect. Just perfect.” I sighed.
    “Wait, let’s think about this. There has to be something we can do. Some mention of them in a book,” Mercedes said. “A picture, a description. Something that tells us what we’re looking for. Otherwise how are you meant to find them?”
    “I’m not following.” I stared at her, my eyes narrowed, as I tried to work out where she was going with this.
    “Who has the biggest, most complete library in Nerissette at her fingertips?” Mercedes pointed at me. “ Ding, ding, ding, if your guess is the Golden Rose.”
    “The library?” I asked, embarrassed that I hadn’t thought of it myself now that she’d said it out loud.
    “Yes, the library. We find the book about the legends of the relics, figure out what they are, then we find the relics, use them to get everyone home, and call it a day. You can take them back to our world, destroy them, and we’ll all be safe.”
    “And locked on the other side of the portal,” I said. “If the relics can even do that. We don’t know if they are portals like the mirror.”
    “That’s okay, though,” Mercedes said, ignoring my comment about the relics even being portals. “John and the army and everyone else can defeat the Fate Maker, the relics will be destroyed and everyone gets a happy ending. Yay for books.”
    “Except we would have an empty throne and no Golden Rose to sit back down upon it,” Boreas said slowly.
    “Elect someone.” Mercedes turned to me. “You said it yourself. Queenship isn’t your idea of good government. They could elect someone instead, form a government. They don’t need us here to run their country for them.”
    “No.” I felt my chest clench in disappointment. I knew she wanted to go home, but I didn’t expect my best friend to want us to run like a bunch of cowards. “We can’t just leave them here to face the Fate Maker alone while we hide in the World That Is.”
    “But—” Mercedes started to protest.
    “Look.” I held my hands up. “Right now