Accept that there really is no coming home again.
It wasn’t until they were at his grandparents’ house in Kingham, Oxfordshire, that Jeremy’s mother told him Martha had died while he was gone. She said all the comforting things a mother was supposed to say—She was a very old dog…She didn’t suffer…No, no, it’s not your fault she died…But he didn’t really believe any of that. Martha loved him, yes, but she loved Rafe even more. And if any animal in the world can die of grief, it was a dog in love with a boy who was never coming back.
His grandmother fussed over him, and even promised him a new dog. She acted like he had simply gone on an extended holiday, nothing more.
“This must be a shock to you, leaving the States and coming here after all you’ve been through.”
It wasn’t a shock to him. Once, he had woken up in a medieval palace, in a bed with posts made of braided willow trees with a red crow named Aurora perched on the footboard, and a girl called Queen Skya offered him pie and wine. He remembered his first taste of Shanandoah—the pie was rainberry and lemon with sea salt, served with spiced wine in silver goblets. The memory made his mouth water.
When you have drunk spiced wine with a queen and a crow, nothing can shock you anymore.
His mother was English to the bone. Whatever trauma she’d been through while he was gone, she kept it to herself. Only once did he see past the “Keep Calm and Carry On” smoke screen. A few days after coming to his grandparents’ house, he sat at their upright piano in the drawing room and played “Primavera” from memory, played it perfectly.
Only when he’d finished and seen his mother in the doorway staring at him in near horror did he realize the mistake he’d made. No one went six months without playing piano then picked up a piece that complex without missing a note. And there were no pianos in Red Crow State Forest.
But there were pianos in the Moonstone Palace, in the queen’s private salon. Skya loved to hear him play nearly as much as Rafe did. If anything, Jeremy was better now than before they’d disappeared.
“I would practice in my head when we were lost,” he said. A lie. “I didn’t want to get behind.”
She nodded, pasted on a smile. “Sounded lovely. Well done, my love.”
They never spoke of it again.
Learn to live with boredom.
Jeremy was enrolled at a school close to his grandparents’ house. Not a boarding school. His mother couldn’t bear the thought of it. But it was a good school. They even had a fencing team. He knew how to sword-fight—Queen Skya’s Valkyries had taught him—but fencing with a foil was different enough that he only seemed like a natural to his fencing master, not some sort of mad prodigy. Fencing kept him sane. It felt like he was keeping his skills sharp for the day he would return to Shanandoah.
He didn’t forget his quest to find the missing princess but didn’t know how to begin quite yet. Queen Skya had warned him the gift she was giving him would help only if and when the lost princess was ready to be found. Could be tomorrow. Could be ten years or never.
Until then, he simply had to go on with his life.
One day at school, a girl named Lily lost the opal ring her grandmother had given her for her sixteenth birthday. Weeping, she stood before the class and described the ring, offering fifty pounds to anyone who found it.
Other boys in his class laughed and snickered. Some of the girls too. But Jeremy would have wept, too, if he’d lost Rafe’s St. Hubert medal, which he wore night and day, never taking it off, even in the bath.
Opal ring, gold band…Jeremy pictured it on Lily’s finger. Then, out of nowhere, like a flash of lightning inside his brain, he saw it in her bag. He plucked her bag off the floor, stuck his hand into the bottom, and pulled out the ring. It had slipped inside a torn seam.
Lily gasped and ran to him, tears gone, all smiles, all hugs.
“How did you know?” she asked. The look in her eyes was awed. He didn’t like it. It was a taste of things to come.
“Mum lost a ring in her bag once. It was loose on her finger and fell off. Lucky guess.”
Lily became his first girlfriend, but it didn’t last very long. A month or less. He was still in love with Rafe. And relationships, he was quickly learning, required honesty. Jeremy couldn’t tell Lily the truth about anything. Even the question How are you? required a lie. He always said he was fine. Eventually, she caught on to the fact that she was doing all the talking, and he was only pretending to listen. Not her fault. She was a lovely girl, but his heart was far away.
“You can tell me anything,” she said one night. “I promise you can.” She’d wanted them to sleep together, but letting his guard down scared him too much. Would she figure out he’d done that before and want to know the who and the when and the where?
“There’s nothing to tell,” he said. Another lie. There was everything to tell. Nobody could begin to understand how it felt to be the only person on the planet who knew the best way to lure a mermaid to you was putting candles into paper boats and setting them adrift. Mischief makers, the mermaids surface to blow the candles out. Rafe had caught one and made her tell him a secret. She told him the secret, whispering it in his ear. Then she kissed him square and deep on the mouth.
“You can catch me anytime, beautiful boy,” she said before she swam off, leaving him wide-eyed and blushing.
“Fess up, dollface. What secret did she tell you?” Queen Skya demanded.
“She said someone on this boat was in love with me.”
“Not me,” Queen Skya said. “Ask them.” She pointed at her Valkyries.
“Not me,” said each of the seven Valkyries.
Jeremy pointed at Aurora, who betrayed him by flying off the boat, leaving only him as the culprit. So he admitted it, and he would remember Rafe’s smile ten times a day until he died.
“You miss someone in America, don’t you?” Lily asked. She was wearing a T-shirt with a mermaid on it.
Finally, a question he could answer honestly. “Yes.”
Then she broke up with him, which was a relief. He could only pretend to enjoy watching movies in her bedroom so much before he lost his mind and screamed, I have fought battles with demons cloaked in human form. I have swum with mermaids and parlayed with giants and hunted snow deer on hidden mountains with queens and princes! No, I do not want to watch Harry Potter with you again!
“Hope she’s pretty.”
Jeremy only laughed. Rafe was very, very pretty, yes. Even mermaids thought so, and they were notoriously hard to impress.
Be prepared. There will be people who don’t believe your cover story.
He picked Magdalen College and studied English. His mother thought he was following in his long-dead father’s footsteps. Thomas Nigel Cox had graduated from Magdalen with a first in Classics and English. But no, going to Magdalen was a private joke between Jeremy and the universe. It amused him, being a student where C. S. Lewis, creator of Narnia, had once been a Fellow.
He played the part of a university student well enough until the day a tutor’s daughter went missing. She was only three years old and wandered from the back garden into the woods behind the house, and by the time Jeremy heard the news, she’d already been missing two days.
Her name was Petra, and when Jeremy called her name inside his mind, he saw her curled up asleep, deep inside a rotting log.
