darkened, and I could make out a slim girl lying on a bed. There was a washcloth on her forehead that fell off when she sat upright at our approach. She cringed against the wall.
“Who is it? I told you I didn’t want to see anyone….”
“It’s all right, Moria,” said her mother. “This is the queen. She’s come to talk to you. She’s not going to hurt you.”
The girl wilted even more, blond hair covering half of her face. “No, no…She’s come with the others, come with her human blood to bind us and kill us and-”
“Moria,” I said gently, holding my hands out as one would under a white flag. “She’s right. I’m not going to hurt you. I just want to talk to you. It won’t take long.”
“They all say that,” Moria said, eyes wide with tears. “They all say they won’t hurt you…all the humans… you’re no different…they all say they aren’t….” She lapsed into muttering too low for me to hear, her hands clinging to the covers.
“I think,” Dorian murmured to me, “that her experience has left her…ah, a little touched. I doubt you’ll get anything useful from her. There’s a healer at Maiwenn’s court who’s particularly good with sickness of the mind. You should send for her.”
I had a feeling he was right but had to make one more attempt. “I just want to know where you’ve been. Who took you. I want to make sure it doesn’t happen again. Tell me who it is, and I’ll stop them.”
“No,” she breathed. “You’re the same…the same as him…the Red Snake Man.”
“Red Snake…” I still had demons on the brain, and an image of their red and black mottled skin came to mind. Were they snake-like? “Moria, were you taken by demons? Or some kind of…” Hell, in the Otherworld, any monster you could imagine pretty much existed, as Smokey had shown us. “…um, snake monster?”
She shook her head frantically. “Our own kind don’t hurt us. It’s only yours…you’re all the same…the human blood…all marked the same….” Her eyes left my face and lowered. For a disorienting moment, I thought she was staring at my chest until I realized her gaze was on my arm. I absentmindedly touched the spot. It was where my snake tattoo coiled around my arm. Moria squeezed her eyes shut. “All the same…”
I stiffened. “Did he…are you saying the person who took you had a tattoo like this on his arm?”
“The Red Snake Man,” she whispered, still refusing to open her eyes.
“Did he banish you? Did he force you to this world? Or did you come back on your own?”
“Iron…iron everywhere…”
I stared off at nothing for several seconds. “I’m done,” I said, turning to her parents. “She can rest now.”
I left the house as swiftly as I’d come in, Dorian matching my pace. “What’s going on? That meant something to you.”
I nodded, heading toward where Rurik stood with our horses. “I think I know who took her-and maybe the others. Not bandits or a monster. It was a human.”
“How do you know that?”
“Because of the tattoo.” The Red Snake Man. I’d seen a red snake tattoo just the other day-on Art. He’d had that on one arm and a raven on the other. “It’s another shaman, one who lives very close to where the crossroads around here opens up in my world.” He was also the shaman who had told me to my face he knew nothing about gentry girls. I came to a halt by the horses and absentmindedly stroked the side of mine. She looked back and sniffed me. “But why? Why would he take a gentry girl? Or more than one? His job is to get them out of our world. I could see him banishing them out of the human world….That might traumatize her, but that doesn’t sound like what happened. She disappeared from this world. She made it sound like she didn’t want to be in the human world.”
Dorian snorted. “Eugenie, where in your jaded existence did you pick up this naïveté? If a human took one of our girls, it’d be for the same reason we’d take one of theirs. For the same reason any man would abduct a girl.”
I blanched at his implications. “But more than one?”
“He wouldn’t be the first man to prefer-ah, how shall we say it? Variety.”
I couldn’t see it of Art, not the Art who happily tended his garden and offered us beer and pop. He’d known Roland for years. They’d worked together. Was Art truly a kidnapper and rapist? Or was the girl just traumatized from being banished? It could be a pretty horrific experience.
I grimaced, feeling a sharp twisting in my stomach. I’d come too close to rape already in my life to treat even a hypothetical situation lightly. Was Moria a victim? Were there others like her out there? Maybe it wasn’t truly Art…and yet, her words had dark implications. The human blood. A mark like mine. The Red Snake Man. The crossroads to Yellow River. He had to be involved; I just didn’t know how.
I gave the horse one last pat and then mounted. “I have to get home,” I said, turning back to Dorian and Rurik. There was some mistake here, some mix-up. Art wasn’t involved in this. He couldn’t be, at least not in the way Dorian had suggested. “I have to talk to someone. Immediately.”
I waited for the requisite Dorian joke, but none came as he mounted his own horse. “Then we go different ways. Be careful, Eugenie.” For some reason, frankness and concern from Dorian was more disconcerting than his usual banter.
“If I’m right about this, then it’s a human matter. Should be a cakewalk compared to what I deal with around here.”
Dorian shook his head. “I’d have to disagree. Give me demons and restless spirits any day over human deceit. But if you need help, I’m here. Just ask.”
Again, there should have been a joke here. I glanced away, troubled by the way he looked at me. “Thanks. Hopefully it’ll be a simple matter.” How exactly? That I didn’t know. I wasn’t sure that roughing Art up would really accomplish anything-if he truly was at fault here. “See you later, Dorian.”
He nodded by way of a farewell. Then: “And of course, my dear, you may kill as many humans as you like, but please try not to harm any more of my subjects. If you can help it.” There it was, at last. The joke.
“Noted,” I said. I attempted a glare, but there was a smile on my lips as I did.
I set a hard pace back to my castle and the gateway that would bring me back to my own world. Crossing over at the Yellow River one would have been faster, but I needed to go to my home in Tucson and prepare myself before facing Art. Rurik matched my pace easily and mercifully stayed silent. He’d watched me and Dorian together the way a child watches his or her divorced parents, in the hopes that Mommy and Daddy might make amends someday.
My whirling thoughts made the trip go fast-as did the land’s quick route today-and we were greeted with a commotion when we reached the castle’s outer borders. A group of guards came tearing toward us, and my heart seized. What now? A siege? Demons? Kiyo? Yet as they got closer, I could see that the guards almost looked… enthusiastic.
“Your majesty! My lord! We found her.”
Rurik and I drew our horses to a halt and climbed down. I felt my legs scream and knew I’d be sore later. I wasn’t so practiced a rider that I could ride like that without consequences. I ignored the pain and turned to the guards.
“Who?” I demanded.
“We have her. The girl. The runaway girl from Westoria,” said the guard, clearly pleased at his success. Rurik and I exchanged puzzled glances.
“That’s impossible. We already saw her.”
The guard shrugged. “We found her out near the steppes, by the Rowan Land border. She matches the description and was clearly afraid of us. She tried to run away.”
“Take me to her,” I said helplessly. Had my guards found another of these kidnapped girls? It would certainly provide more information.
He led us inside toward one of the little-used rooms, explaining that they hadn’t wanted to put her in the dungeon-although her fear and desire to escape had required a guard. His expression turned uncomfortable.
“We, um, also had to bind her in iron. She kept attempting magic. They’re still not able to fully stop her.”
A guard like this could never handle iron shackles without causing himself intense pain. Sometimes, though, prisoners would be bound in bronze cuffs with a tiny bit of iron affixed to them. It required delicate handling by the
