“Rafe? You all right?”
Cyclops owl. Condor. Unicorn.
“Jay.” Rafe got one word out. It was all he could manage.
“They’re lazy as house cats,” Jeremy said. “We might be here all day. I don’t mind. I’ve missed this.” He smiled and twined his fingers into the unicorn’s white mane. “When I was a kid and Mum and I flew on planes, I would look out the window and see the clouds under us. I wanted to touch them. Mum said you wouldn’t feel anything but water vapor, but I didn’t believe her. They had to feel like something.” He stroked the unicorn’s long neck again. “This is what clouds are supposed to feel like.”
Rafe couldn’t stop gazing all around him, drinking in the beauty like a man who’s crossed the desert on his knees drinks water from an oasis.
“I painted all this. I carved it,” he said to himself. He spun, looked at Jeremy.
“I wasn’t painting my dreams. I was painting my—”
“Memories.” Jeremy nodded.
“This is what you wouldn’t tell me?”
“Couldn’t tell you.”
“Why?” The agony of fifteen years of loneliness, of wondering, of wandering, of waiting for an answer he thought would never come could be heard in that one single word, that question that was the biggest question of all.
“Because if I told you, we never could have come back.”
“What?”
“Look around, Rafe. This is magic. Real magic. Magic plays by its own rules, and it doesn’t like to answer questions. Magic brought us here. It let us go home again. It let us come back. If magic imposes rules on you, you follow them, no matter what.”
“You couldn’t tell me?”
“No, but I can now.”
Rafe sat down on the ground a few feet from Jeremy and the unicorn.
The unicorn snorted softly through its nostrils. A unicorn snore?
“Once upon a time in West Virginia, two boys were lost in the woods. But not for six months. We were lost, but only for a day and a night,” Jeremy said. “You were upset. You’d fought with your dad the night before, and you didn’t want to go back home. We thought if we missed the bus on purpose, we could get Mum to pick us up, and it would be so late in the day you’d just spend the night at our house. That was the plan.”
Rafe had heard this much of the story before.
“You and your father had gotten into it before, but this felt different for some reason. You weren’t just angry. You were scared.”
“Of what?”
“Going home,” Jeremy said. Rafe nodded for him to go on. “We were trying to find the Goblin Falls. They’re not on any trail, but we’d heard you could find them if you followed a certain game trail. We thought that would be a good enough excuse to explain why we’d gone off-trail. And that’s how we got lost. And we were lost. Completely, stupidly, utterly lost. It was about five in the evening when we realized we had no idea where we were. So, of course, we panicked and did everything wrong.”
Jeremy told him everything about that day, how they followed the game trail, thinking it would lead to somewhere with people. It didn’t. They found a high hill and climbed it, thinking they could see the trail. They couldn’t. Huddled together for warmth, they slept on the hill.
Jeremy gently stroked the sleeping unicorn’s horn with the backs of his fingers. “By morning, you were in bad shape, barely able to speak. You got dehydrated so fast, I thought we’d never get home alive. It’s the most scared I’ve been in my life.” He raised his head and looked up and around, then smiled. “Then I saw this red bird on the tree branch. I thought I was hallucinating. It looked like a crow. It called out to us and then flew into the hollow of the tree. Somehow I knew we were supposed to follow it. So we did, and then…we were here.”
“Here? Right here? Where’s here?”
“The kingdom of Shanandoah,” Jeremy said. “Not like the river in West Virginia. You spell it with an A. Shanandoah, named for Shannon Yates.”
“My sister,” Emilie said.
Rafe looked over his shoulder. Emilie had woken up and now stood clinging for dear life to the side of one of the trees.
“We never called her Shannon. Never knew that was her name. Here, she’s known as Skya. This is her kingdom.”
“What do you mean this is her kingdom?” Rafe asked Jeremy.
“I mean, she’s the queen. Queen Skya.”
Emilie dropped slowly to her knees.
“I’m sorry I pushed you away at first,” Jeremy said to Emilie. “For years, I’d worried someone would ask me to find a missing girl in the Crow, and I’d have to tell them no without telling them why.”
“You don’t have to explain,” Emilie said. “This…” She looked up at the tree that seemed to rise a mile into the sky. “This explains everything.”
“Skya didn’t tell us much about her life before she came here, but she did tell us about you. She said she had a baby sister who’d been adopted somewhere to someone. She didn’t even know your new name. Here, you’re known as the Lost Princess of Shanandoah.”
“Me,” Emilie said. “That’s me? Oh my God, that is me.”
“You.” He stroked the unicorn’s long neck again, then looked at Rafe. “The first time, we woke up right here. Well, somewhere over there.” He pointed toward a gently flowing stream. “I didn’t even notice the trees at first, only the water. It was fresh and clear, so I got you some to drink, and you started to come around. I had never been so happy in my life to see your eyes open.” He paused for a breath. “Then the Bright Boys found us. Terror, even holy terror, draws them like moths to a flame.”
“Bright Boys?” Emilie asked.
“Hard to explain them,” Jeremy said. “The queen calls them her immortal mortal enemies. They look just like teenage boys, but somehow you know they aren’t. The teeth are too sharp. They eat fear. They could smell the fear all over us. We must have looked like a feast to them. I don’t remember much. We probably both passed right out. Then suddenly…” A look almost beatific, like a saint in an old painting seeing a vision, passed over Jeremy’s face. He didn’t smile. He didn’t need to. His eyes glinted as if a candle burned behind them. “I heard a hunting horn. I’d never heard one before except in movies, but I knew that’s what it was. I woke up to the sound. Then all these girls with swords rode in on horses and started killing the Bright Boys left and right. It was incredible.” Jeremy laughed. “Even scared shitless, I remember thinking, I like these girls. I hope we can be friends. By this point, we were tied up together on the ground, so all I saw at first were two feet in brown boots. Then this one girl looked down at us and smiled. She said, ‘You two look a little lost.’ That’s how we met Skya. Your sister,” he said to Emilie, “saved our asses.” He looked at Rafe again. “The next thing I remember is being in the palace, and you were with the healer getting the cuts on your back cleaned up. Then there was wine and pie and I don’t remember much else from that first day except we decided if we were dreaming, we didn’t want to wake up.”
