Beri’s eyes stung as the Flower Fey hurried out of his office. He reached up to pinch the bridge of his nose. Another dead end. How could Beltrix Beldonna have led him to yet another dead end?

  Katie’s dead, something cruel in him whispered. They’re right; you’re just trying to stave off the inevitable. Wetness touched his fingers where he held his eyelids shut. She couldn’t be. He loved her too much, had loved her for too long. He had lost everyone else. He simply could not accept losing Katie, too.

  No. No, she’s not dead. She was taken and I’m going to find her.

  He smmed his office door open so hard one of the knights had to leap out of the way, then strode down the hall without noticing the beauty of his surroundings or the spectacur view down the mountain. A sharp left turn took him to the proper corridor, and he shoved into the library. The doors banged against the walls, thundering an echo from the marble.

  This time, Beri started with the oldest grimoires in the stacks. He pulled out everything he could find that hummed with magic under his fingers, everything that promised him power, everything he didn’t need a passcode to access. He let them thud onto his usual table, throwing up a cloud of dust. The librarian regarded him with round, worried eyes. Beri ignored her.

  There was something in one of these books. There had to be. He yanked three more thick tomes off the shelf, whirling back toward his table.

  On the other side of the aisle, a thin blue volume tumbled off the shelf and thumped onto the carpet. Beri stopped walking.

  The back of his neck prickled. There was no one around, no one who might have teased the book free, and he had been nowhere near enough to jostle it loose. How, then, had it fallen right as he turned to see it? He approached the little book cautiously. It was dark blue leather, like the rest of the volumes in the library, but the front cover was engraved in gold script: Diary.

  Feeling inexplicably nervous, Beri looked both directions for anyone who might have seen. Even the librarian was cut off from view by the shelves. His skin rose into bumps and he imagined he could hear low whispers, just under audible range. He stooped, fingers stretching toward the book–

  It did not hum with magic. It vibrated so hard it ached in his teeth. This book, of everything in the library, contained real spells, something, perhaps, he could use. Beri snatched it up and added it to his stack.

  The books he’d chosen stood on both sides of his usual chair in leaning towers. He shoved the left aside to make space for his elbow and his pens, then sat, opening the diary to the first page.

  December 3rd, 2012, it said.

  It was in a familiar hand, though whose he couldn’t quite remember. It was round and precise, with each circle individually drawn and stacked atop the one below it, not carried over or run together. He was certain he’d seen it before, but not sure where.

  I have found the God Bar.

  Beri started. God Bar? The only way to find out what that meant was to read on.

  The sheer number of deities drinking therein was remarkable. They were from every religion and pantheon ever encountered or created, all jumbled together in a mishmash of culture and myth, each drunker and more foolish than the st. I encountered everyone from the Norse god of Thunder, Thor, who was quite good at darts, to the pixie’s–

  Beri drew a hard breath through his nose.

  –the pixie’s so-called Border Lord.

  A step brushed the carpet beside him. Beri had been so caught up in his work that he gasped and half fell from his chair before he steadied himself against the table. To his right appeared Countess Lirelle, looking regal and vaguely sad.

  A hand nded on his opposite shoulder. Duke Diltiri, a cousin of his mother’s, stood beside him, wearing a grave expression.

  Beri frowned at the duke, then at the countess. He would have risen if not for the heavy hand holding him still. “What–what is it? What’s the matter? Is something wrong?”

  “I’m afraid so, cousin.” Diltiri’s voice was smooth and calm from years as a diplomat. “We spoke to that Beldonna woman as she made her way out. She said you were asking about mythological figures.”

  Beri tried to scoff, though his heart tripped and raced ahead. “Is asking about mythology a crime?”

  Lirelle bit the corner of her lip. “No, darling, not a crime. But concerning when you ask her if she has any way of contacting said deity.”

  Beri tried to stand. Diltiri pushed him back down. “See here, boy. You have been through a terrible trauma, and we have tried to let you have your leeway to heal as you might.” Lirelle murmured agreement. “But now…it’s become a concern.”

  “A concern?” Beri swallowed. “If you mean Miss Beldonna, she signed an NDA. She can’t legally go to the press with anything we discussed.”

  Lirelle tsked. “The reporter who called to ask why you flew in an American alien hunter was certainly not bound by an NDA. I think we put her off, but we might not be so lucky next time.”

  Beri opened his mouth to protest.

  Diltiri spoke gently over him. “I think it’s for the best if you stay in your quarters for a while, Most High. Just until we can find a doctor to see to you.”

  “Perhaps we can get that doctor from the hospital in Denver,” Lirelle suggested. “Would you like that, Most High?”

  Ah. So, this was how it would be. Not an arrest; not a fight. A trap made of pity.

  Diltiri grasped Beri’s elbow firmly, pulling him out of the chair. Desperate, Beri yanked his arm away. Should he fight back? He could best either–any; now that he was standing he could see a cadre of Pace Guards as well–of these people with nothing but a hummed spell. But it was Lirelle who had come to him, and Diltiri. He couldn’t harm them.

  That must have been the pn all along. The council had sent the closest thing he had to family to accost him, knowing he wouldn’t fight back. They had managed him again.

  He drew himself up to his full height, squaring his shoulders. “We are not insane. Whatever you think, we are perfectly in control of our faculties.”

  Lirelle patted his hand. He jerked away from her. Grab the book, something told him. Take the diary. He snatched it up.

  “What’s that?” Diltiri asked.

  Beri gave him a poisonous look. “Surely you won’t deny your king reading material while we are confined to quarters.”

  Diltiri looked down and away. “Of course not, Most High.”

  They trooped in silence to the Royal Wing at the northernmost tip of the pace. Beri didn’t bother to lower the air temperature. He was icy enough without tricks. Whenever Lirelle or Diltiri looked his way, he refused to meet their eyes until they dropped their gazes.

  They can’t get away with this, something petunt in him shouted, stomping its feet on the tile. I am the High King of Faerie! They can’t treat me this way! But they could treat him this way, and unless he was willing to kill them, there was nothing he could do to stop it.

  No one accompanied him into his quarters. They left him on the lonely side of his door while the lock clicked closed. He yanked off his suit coat and flung it down on the sofa.

  Into the stillness of his sitting room, Beri shouted out his anger, short and sharp. He considered breaking his knuckles by punching a hole in the wall, but no, that would further convince the council of his unsuitability to hold the throne. Instead, he dropped, groaning, into a nearby chair and buried his face in his hands. His palms were so bright he had to squeeze his eyes shut.

  The silence of his rooms descended, thick against his ears. What would Thael say if he knew his son had retaken Avalon with a conscripted army and a handful of half-human rebels, only to lose it months ter in a bloodless coup? How could this have happened? How had Beri let it happen?

  Well, that answer was simple enough. He had refused, still refused, to give up on Katie. Wherever she was, she was with cruel people who had hurt her even before they took her off her own pnet. The sound of her scream echoed constantly in his ears. What would they be doing to her now that she was completely under their power? Something awful, surely. She needed him. She needed help.

  I’m coming for you, love, he thought, and tears almost overtook him. I swear I’m coming.

  He’d tossed the blue diary onto his tea table. He picked it up now and opened the front cover to start over from the beginning.

  Whoever had written the book, she was a brilliant wizard, both gifted and well educated. The God Bar was a pce where divinity gathered, and it had somehow become an obsession of hers. She’d determined to find it at all costs. She wanted to know if she could get in. If she could get in, the wizard believed she would be validated. She would be remembered.

  The Border Lord, for her, was a peripheral person who mattered very little. But he mattered to Beri. There was only one person who mattered more. And the wizard’s diary made it clear where this pixie god could be found.

  There really were spells inside, meticulous diagrams and complicated sheet music in an alto register Beri would have to strain to hit. But all of it buzzed in his fingertips like real magic. The equations were meticulously correct. He could recreate this spell. He needed only the components, readily avaible in any magic shop in the city.

  Beri’s heart sank. There was no way he could collect them himself, locked in as he was, and there was no one who would be willing to fetch them for him. They would probably just determine that a mad man needed no additional help in doing mad things.

  He read on.

  There was a charcoal drawing of a magic circle, and from the runes drawn in it, he could tell it was more stable than teleportation. It was a portal, a permanent door to pass through from Faerie to this God Bar. All one needed to open it was to sing the spell (in its admittedly high register.)

  “You mad genius,” he murmured into the silence, impressed. “You did it, didn’t you? You really made this thing.”

  Something about the cadence of the woman’s writing was so familiar to him, so soothing. The book felt like it had been written by someone he could trust. A friend. Beri was quite certain he would like this wizard if he met her. Perhaps, when all this was over, he could reach out to her. She was creative in a way he simply wasn’t. He would love to pick her brain.

  He closed the st page, blood thrumming with possibility. There, written in the now-familiar hand on the back pte, were two words: Solis Quintinar.

  His skin froze, rising into prickles. My sister. Beri’s eldest sister had created the spell to access the God Bar. For a moment he was back on the beach, watching her create butterflies by blowing into the end of a conch shell. No wonder he thought he would like this woman. Though she had been an adult when he was born, and heir to the throne, she had spent a great deal of time with him when he was a child. She’d encouraged his magical pursuits with kindness and enthusiasm. It was because of her that he had become a wizard.

  Solis had died the same day as his father, hung on the same gallows. He wondered if the deities at the God Bar really did remember her. Had she made enough of an impact on divinity to become immortal in their memories?

  Tears stung Beri's eyes and clogged his throat. He hadn’t begun to know her. He hadn’t had the chance. He should have been able to spend a lifetime learning from her, and instead ogres had yanked her away. The unfairness of it all hit him in a heavy wave.

  It took time to gather himself and think through the book’s implications. Solis had not only written this diary. She had created the portal and gone through it. She had found the God Bar and the Border Lord.

  Beri remembered having her things moved to a celr under the South Wing where the knights and pace guards lived and trained. He hadn’t wanted to look at any of it. He hadn’t wanted to think about it. But now, it meant that the portal not only existed, but he knew exactly where it was.

  He tried his door, just in case. It rattled in the door frame but didn’t open. They really had locked him in his own room and left him alone. Outside, the rains had begun to fall. Dusk was over. It was full dark now.

  Most of his windows didn’t open. Stained gss was too expensive to be abused that way. There was a window in the upstairs bathroom that opened into one of the gardens. He could get through it, he thought, but of course he would immediately be seen sneaking around the grounds. His skin glowed even more obtrusively in darkness than in daylight.

  Gloves, he thought. A scarf. He shrugged back into his jacket, then hurried across his sitting room and up the stairs. His wardrobe was the walk-in type, full of fine clothes he rarely noticed. He located a pair of thin deerskin gloves and a Burberry scarf which he wrapped all the way around his head like a bacva. Just so he wouldn’t stand out without it, he added a gray coat that brushed his calves and hoped it was appropriate attire for a God Bar.

  He was so close now he could smell Katie’s hair.

  Beri stepped onto the closed toilet lid, then the tank. He shoved open the window and threw his leg out over the sill. The world smelled of rain. He took a deep breath, wishing he believed enough in the Goddess to pray for Her favor. If he met Her at the God Bar, he would owe Her an apology.

  The drop from the little window was three stories down. Beri straddled the sill, grimacing. Would any of the guards be close enough to notice if he cast a spell? Maybe. But someone was certain to notice if he fell out and broke his neck. He threw his other leg out to sit in the window. They dangled into space, far above the apple trees that lined the garden paths. Fear chilled through him and sped his heartrate. He had done this a thousand times. The beginning was terrifying every time.

  Beri sang up a wind hard enough to send the tree boughs whipping, then stepped out onto it. He fell a heart-stopping quarter inch before he got all the air particles moving in the same direction and forced them to hold him up. Slowly, he walked down an invisible staircase of his own making, past the crowns of the trees, into one of the tidy flower beds off the Apple Gate.

  The rain fell in earnest now, striking his scarf and shoulders with the sound of muffled snare drums. He hummed another quiet tune and the rain stopped falling on him, leaving dry a perfectly concentric circle where he stood. Two cones of light, fshlights, sliced across the path nearby, then cut together like scissors. The Pace Guard. They would have been informed he was not allowed to leave his room. Beri sank back against the pace wall, palms pressing cool marble, heart pounding afresh.

  The two guards walked past, chattering together about some woman who looked very goddessdamned fine in her Pace Guard uniform but had a stick up her ass. Then they rounded a corner and were gone.

  Beri crept between the pnts and the wall, hoping the shadows would be enough to hide him. There was an outside door on the south side of the pace which the knights and guards used to pass into the locker room after drills. No one would be showering at this hour. Probably. He hoped.

  The proving grounds, a fenced in ring of loose sand, were empty. Beri released a breath he hadn’t realized he held. He’d have to cross the ring to make it back into the pace. He hurried over the wet silt, which clumped heavily against his shoes, and pulled open the door. He took a moment to wonder if it was bad that it was unlocked but decided now was not an appropriate time to worry about it.

  The locker room was silent and still. He didn’t bother to creep through it; no one was present.

  When he reached the hall outside, a different set of guards spied him immediately. “Hey, you there! What are you doing?”

  Beri summoned a wind and waved it down the hallway, sending the two toppling off their feet with a cnking of armor and a pair of startled cries. He dashed down the corridor, heart racing, breath rasping against the scarf he still wore over his mouth. He reached a stairwell and cttered down them while the guards were still struggling free of each other.

  The shadows on the stairs grew and lengthened. Beri didn’t have the light of his skin to see by and had to slow down or fall. It took an agonizing lifetime to reach the celr at the bottom. The door was locked with a fingerprint recognition device; he pulled off his glove and pced his palm against the gss. A red light above the scanner turned green and he let himself in.

  The celr was lit with red light, clear enough to see by but gentle enough not to break down precious items over time. The walls were distant and shadowed. The ceiling was higher overhead than one might expect from a celr storeroom. Beri had never been down here before.

  Here was Miathi’s favorite car, covered with a meticulously clean drop cloth. There was a rack of Lorai’s clothing, including an incredibly cool spiked leather jacket her little brother had coveted more than once. These things were his now, he supposed. He walked past the jacket without picking it up.

  His curiosity was wasting precious, guard-free time. He closed his eyes and stretched out his senses, hoping something would buzz into his awareness. Distantly, far off to the northeast of his position, something magical quietly hummed to itself. He turned his steps toward it, hoping against hope he really hadn’t lost his mind.

  In the furthest possible corner from the door, a copper circle, rger in diameter than his standing height, leaned against a marble corner, glinting dully in the crimson. It was adorned with now-familiar runes and buzzed with magical energy like an electrical current. Awed, Beri reached out to touch it. It thrummed under his fingers. He had to press them together to dispel the strange sensation.

  Distantly, voices called findings to one another. Shit. He flipped open the book to the sheet music, then pressed his fingers against his ear, humming to himself as he attempted to find the proper key in an unfamiliar register.

  A shout rose behind him. He ignored it, just as he’d learned at Caliburn, and lifted his voice to a high, sweet note. He was accustomed to singing tenor. Alto was difficult but not impossible. He hoped the quicker tempo he’d need to adopt wouldn’t ruin the spell.

  The copper ring fred white-hot. The magical hum rose into answering music, and the world folded in on itself.

  ~*~

  The pace guards arrived just in time to watch the heel of a shiny shoe, and the hem of a long coat disappear into a strange copper ring full of electrified water. They exchanged a worried look.

  “I’m not going in there,” the first guard said.

  “Well, I’m certainly not,” said the second. “Following wizards around is a sure way to end up cursed.”

  They stood together, staring.

  “What say you, we pretend this never happened?” asked the first guard.

  “I think that’s an excellent idea,” said the second.