The Queen's Librarian (19 page)

A sharp bark from Bramble arrested his attention, and by the time Lucas snapped his head up, shooting his gaze ahead, everything had abruptly gone still and far too quiet. Dark path, dark tree branches stretching their long, knob-knuckled fingers to grasp at the dark sky, and silence, thick and heavy. Bramble’s short bark didn’t leave so much as an echo.

Lucas frowned. “Bramble!”

No response, no spot of white fur against the gloom, no rustle in the thick fall of autumn leaves on the ground.

“That’s… odd,” said Alex.

Lucas had no idea where the shiver came from, but it crawled right up his spine and shimmied out through his shoulders. “Bramble, come on, boy, where are you?”

There wasn’t even movement in the brush. Saffron blew a soft breath out through her nose and sidestepped a little into Alex’s horse until Lucas tightened his calves against her barrel. “Bramble!”

The moon wasn’t quite out yet and it seemed to Lucas that evening had fallen abruptly and all at once with a too-quick
thud
. Darkness crowded in, and the silence that clamped down with it was eerie and unnerving. No wind in the trees, no hooting calls of nightfowl, no snap of twigs….

No happy barks or even mildly annoyed
woofs
.

“Lucas,” said Alex slowly, staring at the empty path ahead, “where did Parry go?”

“Never mind Parry,” Lucas warbled. “Where’s my
dog
?!”

I
T
WAS
only another ten-minute ride to the Circle. Lucas swept his gaze continually while he rode, squinting through the dark, looking for a flash of white and listening for a familiar bark. Nothing came.

“Perhaps Parry simply quickened his pace and rode ahead, and Bramble followed,” Alex said. “It’s… very dark, after all.”

Too
dark, Lucas couldn’t help thinking, but didn’t want to say out loud. So dark it was downright eerie. Under different circumstances, he would likely be busy talking Alex into turning around and hightailing it anywhere but here, and definitely not steadily plodding to a place he didn’t necessarily relish visiting in the daytime.

As he was dealing with
this
circumstance—the one where his sister’s intended, his cousin, and now his dog had all disappeared in too-rapid succession—turning around and running was, at the moment, merely a half-fond and half-guilty wish.

“We’re almost there,” Alex went on. “We’ll just—”

“
Yipe
!” squeaked Lucas then felt his face heat with a blush. Alex was trying to be comforting, but every time he reached out to lay a hand on Lucas’s arm or shoulder or leg, it made Lucas jump, which made Saffron quiver and jerk her head.

Alex snatched his hand back and said, “Sorry,” and Lucas didn’t hear even the smallest of smirks in the tone.

Lucas had never really considered himself either brave or cowardly. He couldn’t, in fact, recall an occasion when the distinction had been necessary to make. As much as the “discussion” at his mother’s the other day had annoyed him, fisticuffs, in truth, were not a part of Lucas’s life experience, and courage was generally measured by one’s willingness to take a gamble on a new type of barley.

Ghosts and bogeys—or Daimin, for that matter—had never factored in. And yet, somehow, Lucas had no trouble at all imagining the woods around him were thick with them.

“Do you hear that?”

Lucas paused at Alex’s whispered question, Saffron dancing a little beneath him, but once she stilled and the quiet sounds of hoofs on ground and creaking leather stopped, Lucas had no real trouble hearing what Alex apparently had: the perpetual spill of the inlet feeding the lake a touch south of the Circle muttered a familiar background ripple, but it didn’t obstruct the low voices, distinct footsteps on stone and what sounded like a clink of metal.

The Stone Circle was set within an unbroken ring of thick pine growth, trees that were as broad around as a man, and older than Orchard Downs itself. There was no path to get through to the troughed dell in which the Circle sat, only a picket of tree trunks, low branches and the deep undercarpet of hundreds of years’ worth of fallen pine needles.

Lucas and Alex made as little sound as possible as they dismounted and secured the horses’ leads to branches at the edge of the pines and made their way in, to the distinct and very unusual protest of both horses, who seemed rather put out at being left behind. Alex eyed them bemusedly then reached for Lucas’s hand in the dark. Lucas felt no shame in clinging back.

Thirteen boulders, vaguely monolithic, ringed the great slab of glyphed granite that was the Stone Circle. Moss had crept up the bases of several of the stones, Lucas noted with the part of his mind that just couldn’t help it, because part of his job as caretaker was to scrape said moss and trim the high grasses around them. It didn’t look like it was going to be a problem, though, because, as far as Lucas could tell, every single forest creature that had been busily discombobulating Lucas by not making noise while they’d tramped the last mile to the Circle had now joined their fellows in a jarringly attentive audience on the inner loop of the pines that ringed the Circle. As if the Circle itself had called them. Families of deer and rabbits and raccoons idled in the thin expanse of clearing not three paces from where Lucas and Alex stood behind the edge of the pines. Even the swans from the lake were there.

It took several moments of gawking before the surrealism right in front of Lucas jumbled itself into reality in his head; he didn’t know if it was helped or hindered by the fact that Alex seemed to be having a staring contest with a small confusion of weasels. Alex looked just as gobsmacked as Lucas felt. The weasels looked… well. Decidedly unimpressed, actually.

And then Lucas noted with the part of his mind that was trying not to run around in panicked circles that he could see all of this because a soft, white glow was creeping out from the heart of the Circle itself, edging out until the glyphs at the outer rim of the granite slab were lit bright and nearly blazing with a phosphorescent burn.

This, in turn, lit up the figures that stood inside the Circle itself, three of which Lucas didn’t recognize and two of which he did.

“That’s Parry!” Lucas whispered, and he shot his arm out to point straight ahead to where Parry’s broad back was outlined in white light and his hair shone even more gold than usual. Hordes of furry creatures turned to blink at Lucas with the same sort of annoyance an audience at a play would turn on someone noisily expressing his stifled appreciation for long, skilled fingers and an exceptionally talented mouth.

… Not that Lucas had any personal experience with anything of the sort.

Lucas registered all this only momentarily before he straightened from his stoop behind the trunk of a tree and took a step away, because that other silhouette was unmistakably, “Bramble!”

“
Shh
!” hissed Alex and yanked Lucas back.

“Ow!” Lucas yelped and twitched against the grip. “Really,
why
is everyone manhandling me lately?”

“
Shh
!” Alex hissed again and kept a firm hold on Lucas’s arm. “Do you want them to see us?”

Lucas paused. “Well, I don’t know.” He turned to the array of woodland creatures, which were now—pointedly, it seemed to Lucas—ignoring them. “I think they already know we’re here.”

Alex rolled his eyes. “I’m talking about
them
.” He waved to where Parry stood pointing at several figures who appeared to listen for a moment or two and then nodded before stooping to pick up….

“What do they need with shovels?” Lucas wondered aloud, but the question was answered rather quickly when whoever they were began digging holes into the lumpy, mound-pocked grass between the circle of boulders and the Stone itself. “Oh, I don’t
think
so!” Lucas growled, and he couldn’t help the jerk forward, or the strangled sound of annoyance when Alex yanked him back again. “But I’m going to have to fill those back in!” Lucas protested. “And then I’ll have to resod! Resodding is really hard!”

He was warbling.
Warbling
. That couldn’t mean anything good for his equilibrium.

“Very likely the least of our worries right now,” Alex insisted.

Lucas frowned back down the hillock, fuming. Not at Alex, but at…
everything
.

Enough. It was just…
enough
. People digging up
the Queen’s own property
,
which was kind of Lucas’s too but not really, and apparently
coming through portals
that were supposed to be
closed
and
off limits
to do it,
stealing cousins
and possibly future brothers-in-law,
woodland creatures
bloody
scowling
at him like… like
scowling things
, and people
shifting
his
paradigms
without consulting him, what with sisters who thought he was a
girl
, aunts who talked about his
sex life
, in front of
Parry
no less, and
oh my god, how is this my life?
because none of it was
right
and none of it was
natural
and none of it was
getting Laurie back
or
making Clara happy again
, and if Lucas didn’t stop
thinking
with such
emphasis
pretty soon, he was going to pop a
blood vessel
and that persistent
headache
that had been rattling its chains menacingly since
the Drunken Duck
would rise up like a mocking leviathan and actually
explode his skull
, and wouldn’t
that
just be the perfect icing on this
ridiculously ludicrous crazy-cake
that was the past several days of his—

Whoops, whoa, breathe, Lucas.

God, he was going to hyperventilate. Maybe even die! Could you die from hyperventilating? Technically, it was a loss of breath, wasn’t it, so logically it wasn’t out of the realm of—

Luckily, Lucas made himself light-headed and kind of blacked out on his feet for a second, but it was long enough to explode all his spinning thoughts into a shower of sparkly little not-thoughts behind his eyes.

Pretty
.

And then he felt a tiny bit better. Well, not
better
, but at least he’d managed, temporarily at least, to avoid the awkward epitaph of death-by-frenzied-inner-monologue, which would have been marginally less embarrassing than death-by-puddle.

There might be, Lucas admitted to himself, the smallest possibility that he was getting just a tiny bit hysterical.

“No! That wasn’t the agreement.”

Parry’s voice and then Alex’s tightening grip on his arm brought Lucas a few inches back from the edge of looming, not-entirely-self-induced panic. He jerked his glance back to the figures busily ruining the landscape.

Parry seemed to be arguing with… ah. “I should have known he’d be in the middle of all this,” Lucas whispered to Alex through his teeth as he watched Mister-Scontun-who-wasn’t-Mister-Scontun shake his head at what Parry had just said and answer in a lower voice that Lucas couldn’t make out. And then Mister-Scontun-who-wasn’t-Mister-Scontun waved around what looked like a suspiciously familiar book. “I don’t
bloody
believe this,” Lucas grated and didn’t even feel the smallest twinge of guilt for swearing. “That massive
hoister
has been to my house again.” The outrage from the first time had quadrupled by now and was eagerly mixing in with the frenzied froth of alarm and growing outright fear currently serving as Lucas’s mind. He gritted his teeth. “That’s my book of lexicon!”

Alex seemed to take that in for a bit longer than necessary, then he turned to Lucas and stared. “Hoister?”

“…Um.” The out-of-nowhere-ness of it kind of knocked the wind out of Lucas’s overwrought angst. “Yes?” Lucas blinked. “Laurie says it all the time.”

“He does. And do you know what it means?”

Alex looked at Lucas in such a way that, if he didn’t know better, Lucas would suspect perhaps he was unwittingly doing a rather excellent impression of a gaping fish. Not that Lucas was. Doing an impression. Because Lucas didn’t do such things. Impressions. But if he did do impressions, he was sure they would be excellent. Hence the “excellent impression” part.

All right, wow. Perhaps Lucas had taken an inadvertent bite out of that crazy-cake.

“It… er.” It took Lucas a moment to get the whirling of his thoughts anchored to a different axis. “I sort of assumed it was some newish slangy insult that all the trendy lads were saying.”

“No, only Laurie,” Alex sighed. He patted Lucas’s shoulder. “He uses it as a code for which girls have let him lift their skirts and which haven’t. You know—hoist? Lift?” Alex wrinkled his nose and looked away, muttering, “I kind of hate myself a little for knowing that.” He glared at a doe that had turned her head to stare at him. “
What
?”

Lucas attempted to digest it all for a long moment before he ventured, “So if Laurie said that young Miss Polly Jensen is a ‘horrible hoister’, then that would mean—”

“That Laurie didn’t get any.”

“And if he said that sweet little Ginny Fisher is a ‘dashing good hoister’, then that—”

“It’s probably safe to say that sweet little Ginny Fisher is likely not half as sweet as you think she is. Although….” Alex shrugged. “I expect that would depend on one’s perspective.”

Lucas blinked some more then said, “Ah.” He should have known better than to try sounding even a little bit fashionable. Actually, he should have known better than to repeat a word he’d learned from Laurie. And having done so in front of an audience of furry forest denizens—who seemed to be paying far more attention than Lucas was comfortable with—made it strangely more embarrassing. He tilted his head. “So I just said Mister-Scontun-who-isn’t-Mister-Scontun was a little bit of a tart for taking my book again?”