4. Nicolette

Plucking a white rose from the bush in front of me, I broke the thorns free from their stem before dropping the beauty into the basket that dangled from my arm.

“Flower picking,” an offended voice from my right lamented. “There’s a festival going on down in the village right now. Music, dancing, cups overflowing with wine, girls whose bosoms are overflowing from the tops of their dresses, and you choose to go flower picking instead.”

I sent the disgruntled man an amused smile. “Yes, well. While I do love a good overflowing bosom…” Tone dry with sarcasm, I shrugged. “I just didn’t feel much like joining in on the revelries today.”

My personal guard slumped his shoulders and sent me a pleading scowl. “But what about me, my lady? I’m forced to go where you go. Why didn’t you consider what I felt like doing for once? And not that you care or anything, but it’s been far too long since I explored a healthy bosom.”

“Eww.” I wrinkled my nose and turned back to the bush, searching for the next perfect flower to pluck. When he continued to just stare at me expectantly, I sighed. “Indy, really. I told you to just go already. Pursue as many bosoms as you like. You certainly don’t have to stay up here at the castle, babysitting me every second of every day.”

“Yes, I do.” Blinking as if my suggestion was absolutely absurd, he shook his head. “It’s my job to protect you. Babysitting you every second of every day is literally all I’m supposed to do.”

“Wow, dramatic much?” I teased on a laugh. “You’re always shoving me off onto one of your squires to watch so you can flit about to do something else far more important. Why is today any different than—wait.” My eyes flared wide with worry.

Forgetting the roses, I hurried to him and clutched his arm. There could only be one reason why Indigo would suddenly be so inclined to personally watch over me.

“Why is today different from any other? Oh Lord, Donnelly’s under attack, aren’t we? Are we about to be invaded? Again?”

With an impatient sigh, he tugged his arm free and scowled. “Of course not. You wouldn’t be allowed outside the castle walls at all right now if the kingdom was under attack.”

I dogged his steps when he turned and paced away, trying to escape my worried stare. “But the secret entrance back into the castle is just right over—”

When I started to point, he spun around and grabbed my hand, lowering it dramatically as he widened his eyes at me. “Do you mind very much not announcing aloud or pointing out where the secret entrance back into the castle is located?” he hissed from between gritted teeth. “Just because we’re not under any kind of attack doesn’t mean listening ears couldn’t possibly be nearby. And besides, a quick entry back into the castle is no reassurance whatsoever under any kind of threat. I would never trifle so freely with your care.”

I huffed out a moody breath and yanked my hand from his so I could plop it against my hip. “Well then, if we’re not under any kind of threat, why are you being so clingy?”

“Clingy?” he repeated incredulously before snorting. “I’m not being clingy. I never should’ve taught you that word. Besides, why are you being so maudlin?”

“I’m not being maudlin,” I cried.

Except that was an obvious lie. Attending a celebration down in Mandalay was usually the exact type of event I enjoyed, especially since I’d spent the last three fortnights helping plan for it. It was flat-out strange for me to plead a headache and hover near the castle during such an occasion.

But the truth was: I had no idea why I felt blue.

I just did.

I couldn’t tell Indigo that, though. He’d haul me off to the nearest healer and have me examined for some kind of malady within the hour. And I knew I wasn’t sick. At least, I didn’t think I was. My heart simply ached for some strange, unexplainable reason. And my head pounded, right at my temple.

“Well then, I’m not being clingy,” Indigo spat back childishly before turning away and humming under his breath as he flicked a disinterested finger at a particularly limp and dreary rose.

I scowled at his back. “Are you seriously watching me so closely right now because you believe I’m sad?”

“Of course not.” He shrugged airily even as he tossed me a challenging glance and leaned against a nearby tree. Crossing his arms over his chest, he added, “For, as you just said, princess, you’re not sad.”

“I swear,” I huffed. “You are the most impertinent bodyguard I’ve ever met; do you realize that?”

“I wasn’t chosen for my sunny disposition.” He shot me a smirk and began to pick at his teeth with his fingernail. “That’s just a side benefit.”

“Oh bother.” Rolling my eyes, I turned away and studied the roses before me, except I’d totally lost the desire to pick anymore. Glancing into my basket, I only found three buds lining the wicker bottom. Not even enough to fill one vase.

Damn, I really was mawkish today. And this sensation in my temple was beginning to annoy me.

I rubbed at the raw flesh and closed my eyes, trying to will the prickle away.

“Though if you were for some reason not feeling your usual, perky self,” Indigo started in again as if he knew exactly how hard my head pounded. I opened my lashes and glanced his way to find him crossing his legs at the ankles and tapping his chin as if he didn’t have a care in the world, which I knew was a total ruse. The damn man was always alert to everything. “Then it would behoove me to remain nearby since, you know, I am the best friend you’ve ever had. Only I can boost your maudlin moods.”

“Best friend?” Blurting out a surprised laugh, I demanded, “Says who?”

He lifted a single shoulder and scanned the forest before returning his cocky grin to me. “Says reality.”

I continued to chuckle as I found a nearby tree stump and set myself upon it, resting my nearly empty basket on my lap as I did. Smiling up at him, I admitted, “You do manage to entertain me frequently with all the absurd things you say. I’ll admit that.”

Inclining his head as if to thank me for the compliment, he studied me a moment before murmuring on a serious tone, “You know you can always talk to me, don’t you, Nicolette? I’m not just your bodyguard. You’re like a sister to me. If anything is troubling you—”

“But it’s not,” I cut in insistently, flashing my teeth to get him to cease talking about it, already. A headache certainly wasn’t something to make an issue about.

He sighed but then nodded, letting me know he’d stop, only to press, “But if it were—”

“Yes,” I cried in aggravation. “Of course I’d come to you with any concern. In fact, my menstrual courses are set to begin any day now. So I’ll make a note to tell you about every cramp and bloated—”

“You know what I mean.” He scowled at me, even as his face turned a bright crimson from the mention of female matters.

And I did know what he meant. But that was the problem. I had no concerns. No problems. Nothing worthy of any kind of depression. How did one talk about such an unseen, unknown enemy?

Forcing a smile, I said, “If you’d really like to bring me cheer, dear friend, why don’t you tell me one of your funny, peculiar stories again?”

Nothing distracted Indigo like his bizarre but highly entertaining tales.

I’d first met him five years ago when he’d come to Donnelly from High Cliff with Princess Allera so she could wed my brother Brentley.

Indigo had been a High Cliff knight at the time, protecting her, but he’d blended into Donnelly life nicely since then. And now, he was one of us.

Brentley had assigned him with the duty of seeing to my personal security about four years ago, and in that time, Indy and I had grown uncommonly close. He hadn’t been lying when he claimed to be my best friend. We squabbled nearly every day like siblings, fighting and disagreeing over pretty much everything. I adored him like no one else. So I was well aware that nothing would set him off like calling his stories funny or peculiar.

Which is exactly why I did so.

Quite regularly.

His outraged responses were just too amusing to resist.

And right on cue, he scowled at me. “They’re not funny or peculiar, brat. They’re fascinating and exciting. You just don’t appreciate the true magnetism of what I tell you.”

“Of course, I do,” I argued. “That story about the metal horse that moves on two wheels will stick with me forever. What did you call the conveyance again?”

He narrowed his eyes before mumbling, “A motorcycle.”

“A motorcycle,” I repeated in mock awe. “Such a very creative concept. I mean, who would ever think of crafting a carriage like that? Your mind is a wonderland, Indigo, I swear. Where do you come up with all your fantastical ideas, anyway?”

Indigo opened his mouth, pausing before he shook his head. “I don’t,” he finally admitted. “They’ve been passed on to me from my grandpa, Atchison. And they’re not fantasy,” he added, lifting a finger in warning when I opened my mouth to respond. “They’re true. Every single one of them.”

I waited until he lowered his hand before I smirked. “Your grandpa, Atchison, sounds like a fanciful man himself.”

Indigo merely rolled his eyes. “Well, you’re wrong. He was a genius.”

He sounded so respectful and reverent, I lost the will to mock him, and instead asked, “He’s the one who was related to Vienne, correct?”

Vienne was a native Donnellean, like me. We’d grown up in the castle together, and I looked up to her as the big sister I’d never had. For a few short years, we’d actually been related, because she’d been married to my cousin Soren. But then Soren had turned evil, lost his life, and Vienne had taken Allera’s brother Urban for a husband instead.

“Aye,” Indigo answered with a nod. “Vienne’s grandmother, Anniston, was Grandpa Atchison’s older sister.” Leaning closer, he lowered his voice significantly. “If you were ever curious how old Wren Mandalay became such a genius himself with all his clever inventions, like clear rock, it’s because of his wife, Anniston. She and my grandpa, Atchison, learned everything they knew from their mother, Amelia.” He glanced around the forest before turning back to me and pushing away from the tree where he was leaning. “Can you keep a secret, princess?” he whispered as he knelt beside me.

“Of course.” I loved secrets, so I scooted to the edge of my tree stump and patted the space next to me, giving him leave to sit. “Tell me everything.”

“Well…” Looking just as eager to share his news as I was to receive it, he plopped down beside me. “My great-grandmother, Amelia—Vienne’s great-grandmother—wasn’t born in the Outer Realms at all. She was actually the first Replacement who came here eighty-three years ago.”

After staring at him a moment, waiting for him to explain what any of that meant, I finally shook my head. “Okay,” I said slowly. “And what is a Replacement exactly?”

Indigo muttered a curse before smacking himself in the forehead. “Sorry. That’s my own term I came up with.” Leaning in until his shoulder was pressed against mine, he heaved out a breath. “But I wasn’t sure what else to call them; it just made sense at the time, so yeah…” He sent me a shrug. “Let’s just go with Replacement, shall we?”

“Sure…” I murmured, still just as carefully. “So what is a Replacement, again?”

“Oh! Right. Sorry.” Letting go of my fingers, he spread his hands, holding them about a foot apart with his palms facing. “It’s like this. When a very powerful person of magic wishes to depart the Outer Realms, it’s possible for them to escape this world and travel into an alternate dimension. Except—”

“Wait.” I held up a hand. “An alternate what, now?”

“Dimension,” Indigo repeated, blinking at me as if I should know what that meant. He waved a hand. “It’s like a whole new world. A different realm from ours entirely.”

“Oh! You mean, like the place Vienne’s nanny, Wynter, went when she was hiding from the guards who came to question her about dark magic, right before our war with Far Shore?”

“Exactly. Except the nanny didn’t complete the ritual, which was why she was eventually pulled back to Donnelly. You see, to get there—to this other realm—and remain there, the magical person traveling needs to trade places with someone already there. For them to go through and stay, someone from that realm must come here to take their place, to equal out the balance. And those people who come back from the other dimension are what I’m calling Replacements. From what I can tell, they are dragged here unwillingly, unexpectedly, and most definitely unknowingly until suddenly, here they are.”

I stared at him a moment as he stared back, waiting for me to process everything.

A second later, I scowled and slapped him on the shoulder, hard. “Indigo Moast,” I scolded. “You’re putting one over on me, you scoundrel. I thought you seriously believed all that balderdash for a minute there.”

His mouth dropped open. Then he surged to his feet to pace in front of me. “I do believe, Nic. Just listen.” Pausing before me, he opened the front of his frock and reached in to pull out a small rectangular lump of parchment.

I lurched to my feet and away from the foreign object because it looked freakishly magical. And the last time I’d handled anything infused with magic, I’d disintegrated Vienne’s sister to ash.

I wasn’t so keen on magical objects these days.

“What the devil is that?” I demanded, eyeing the mysterious device untrustingly.

Indigo didn’t try to hand it to me though, he merely unwound a string of leather from around it and flipped it open, revealing more and more pieces of parchment inside, hundreds of them, bound together and fanning up from the center between two thicker outer shells to make an arch. Captivated as all the parchment settled again, I watched in awe when Indigo pressed his hand down on it.

“This,” he told me, “is called a book.”

“A book,” I repeated reverently, easing cautiously closer. “Is it dangerous?”

My bodyguard laughed. “Of course not. It’s just a scroll cut into bits and sewn together. See.” He fanned through the rectangular sections again before showing me the strings in the center that kept them bound as one. I blinked at the words on the leaflets, realizing he was right.

“My God.” I grinned in amazement. “It really is just a scroll separated into pieces. How fascinating.”

“Yes. And I must say, it’s much more convenient this way.” Indigo squinted at the words before flipping through the leaflets. “Now, which page was it on?” he murmured to himself.

“Page?” I glanced up and looked around, expecting to see one of my brother’s attendants approaching, but I spotted no one else in the forest with us. “I don’t see any pages out here.”

We seemed quite alone in the forest, which was why I had elected to wander aimlessly through the trees this afternoon. The ache in my chest had left me feeling restless, craving solitude and lots of space. The forest surrounding the castle moat was the perfect setting for that.

Noticing my bewilderment, Indigo smiled. “No, no. Not that kind of page. A page is also what a sheet in a book is called.”

I frowned. “But that’s confusing. Why ever would anyone refer to those things as pages? They in no way resemble any of the errand runners my brother employs.”

Indigo shrugged. “No idea. It’s just what Grandpa Atchison always called them. Here…”

Reaching the page he’d been seeking, he paused and ran his finger over the words before nodding and glancing up at me. “From my research, I’ve discovered that seven Replacements have come through the breach at three different times throughout the last eighty-three years. They look like us, they talk like us—well, mostly like us, anyway—and they think like us. But I believe they’re far more advanced than we are, and oh—they don’t have magic there in their realm. No healers, no soothsayers, no potion brewers, no curse makers or charm tinkers, and no realm breachers. Nothing of the sort.”

I shook my head, not comprehending such a place. “No magic? None at all? But how is that possible?”

“To them, magic is a fantastical notion, while things like motorcycles and carriages that fly through the air like a bird are their reality.”

My eyebrows rose. “Carriages that fly?” Voice turning dry and belief faltering, I said, “Really?”

How absurd. He couldn’t honestly expect me to believe such a thing.

“They’re called airplanes,” Indigo went on, his eyes glittering with excitement. “And that’s how my great-grandma, Amelia, got here. She was flying over a massive sea in an airplane with a man named Fred, looking for a certain island to land on in the middle of the night. Then there was this grand flash of lightning, and the next thing she knew, she was crash-landing into the Bjorn Cliffs. Her friend died in the collision, and Great-grandmother was severely injured. But Great-grandpa Moast was among the first to find her, and he immediately recognized her as his one true love. So he patched her back together with true love’s kiss, and that was that.”

Indigo gave a rueful grin as he tapped the black tattoo on the side of his face, near his left eye. “The love mark at its best, eh?”

My own mark gave a pulse of tingling awareness, causing me to shiver. And uninvited, a vision wavered through my brain of a boy with close-cut brown hair and dark, untrusting eyes. He’d been the only person my love mark tattoo had ever responded to, and I’d barely gotten five minutes with him before he was gone again. It’d been years since then, yet my mark still pulsed with sorrow whenever I thought of him, needing something that only his presence could seem to quench.

I couldn’t look at another person’s mark or even listen to anyone talk about them without thinking of that boy, wondering if I’d ever see him again, hoping he was okay, and knowing I’d never feel truly complete unless he returned to me.

“Great-grandpa Moast tried to help Amelia return to her realm, but when they realized there was no way, he eventually convinced her to stay and marry him. They had two children together—Anniston and Atchison—and after a time, she and Great-grandpa became emissaries for High Cliff. If they hadn’t been assassinated by those wretched Graykeys, they probably would’ve been able to prevent Lowden’s entire civil war.”

I squinted at him. “So King Bjorn of High Cliff made her an emissary?” Blinking in disbelief, I said, “And she wasn’t even born of that kingdom?”

“Exactly,” Indigo answered, nodding gravely. “Which should tell you right there how wise and knowledgeable she was. After only a few short years in the kingdom, she grew to be that important. She was actually born in a kingdom called Atchison.” Indigo shrugged. “Which is, of course, how my grandfather got his name.”

“Right,” I repeated. “Of course.” All the while, I wondered if my bodyguard was losing his mind.

I scratched at my tattoo because it began to itch again. My, it was certainly sensitive today. Just thinking about my one true love had gotten it all in a dither.

Indigo narrowed his eyes and sent me a dry glance. “I need you to believe me, Nicolette. You’re the only person I’ve ever told about the facts behind my research. Just check this out.” He pointed to the open page in his book. “I’ve talked to all seven Replacements—or, at least, to people who talked to them directly, since most died before I was even born—and all their stories mesh. Isn’t that incredible? When Great-grandma Amelia arrived, she swore it was the year nineteen thirty-seven.”

“Nineteen thirty-seven?” I screeched incredulously.

Indigo nodded. “I know, right? And exactly thirty-three years later, when the next batch of Replacements appeared—on motorcycles—they claimed it should be nineteen seventy. And then thirty-two years after that, the last three arrived, saying it was two thousand two in their world. All the dates match up as the Replacements appear, meaning, over there, it would be the year—hmm, let’s see. Oh yes, it’s twenty-twenty right now.”

“Twenty-twenty?” I snorted and waved a hand. “Well, no wonder why they’re all riding around in giant metal birds. They’re from the future.”

Indigo squinted over that suggestion before he slowly shook his head. “No. I don’t think so. From the maps Great-grandma Amelia drew for Grandpa Atchison when he was young, none of their terrain matches ours. They’re not from this future, not at all. I’m telling you, they’re from an entirely different plane of existence altogether, which makes me think their realm exists concurrently with ours; they must’ve just started recording their time before we did. Or maybe it moves faster than ours. Yes, that would make sense because they’re far more progressive than we are in so many ways with their motorcycles, and airplanes, and books…” He lifted his book to show it off. “And get this. Some of their queens…” Wiggling his eyebrows, he nudged my elbow. “Have even ruled their kingdoms. Now, if that isn’t advanced thinking, I don’t know what is.”

“Really?” I perked to attention. “Ruling queens, you say? Hmm. I like the sound of this place already. How do I get there, again? It might make a good summer getaway.”

His shoulders slumped. “You’re still not taking me seriously, are you?”

“Oh, Indy.” I sighed and hooked my arm through his, turning him in the direction of the castle when the evening trumpets blasted from the bell towers, announcing the approach of the evening meal. “Does it really matter whether I believe or not? You have a captive audience. Just keep telling me your tales.”

He frowned as he escorted me back home, shaking his head as he said, “Someday, I’ll get you to believe me. I swear it.”

“I have no doubt you will,” I agreed indulgently.

Because he probably would. With this constant tingling from my mark, I was almost sure I’d be insane within a fortnight and willing to believe just about anything.