Arabesque: A Wings Companion

Chapter Twenty-Two

Tamani had never been so happy to see Avalon as he was coming back through the gate to Japan. After spending time with the Mischa, he wanted nothing so much as a cleansing shower—but simply breathing the air of his verdant homeland was a close second. Avalon was a place of life and connection, in stark contrast to the way the Unseelie witch gloried in death and detachment. What sort of rot would have to take hold of your core to poison your entire being that way? Had it ever even occurred to her, at any point along the way, that she might be doing wrong?

Once the gate was closed, his mind went immediately to Laurel. Finding her, touching her, simply reminding himself that she was alive. They'd been apart just two days, but it felt longer. Much longer. She would be staying at her quarters at the Academy, which was a good distance uphill, but Tamani barely noticed the slope as he counted the steps to reunion.

"I'm afraid you've come all this way for nothing," Yeardley called out as Tamani approached the gate to the Academy grounds. He was clipping leaves off a currant bush with a small set of silver pruning shears, gathering the greens into a stone bowl while a group of young Mixers watched. As Tamani closed the distance between them, the Fall faeries under Yeardley's tutelage turned away from their lesson to gawk. They looked too young to have been at the Academy during the trollish invasion, but they would have heard stories from their older classmates. Inaccurate stories, doubtless, as stories were wont to grow in their retellings. Rather like weeds.

"Laurel isn't here?"

Yeardley shook his head, handing his tools to one of his students and shooing them back toward the Academy. "She said she had something to attend to at home."

Tamani frowned. "Was she able to make much progress with—"

"I suggest you catch the Queen before she's too much farther from the gate," Yeardley interrupted, a strange gleam in his eye. "Laurel wanted you to follow as soon as possible."

"Then I guess I'd better do that," Tamani said, bowing slightly before catching himself and giving a polite nod instead. Moments like that were fewer, ten years on, but there was no particular reason to not bow to Yeardley—Laurel's tutor had proven his worth and worthiness time and again. Snubbing people who demanded obeisance, people like Marion, was easy. The overthrow of the old social order had not yet resulted, however, in any new ways to communicate respect to the people who deserved it.

A puzzle for another day. By the time Tamani got back down to the Gate Garden he was more than a little irritated. He'd considered trying to find Yasmine so she could pretend—as she had so many times—to open the gate, but between his failure at the Manor, the creepy advice from the Unseelie, and the looming threat of the sea fae, Tamani was having a hard time worrying about secrecy. If someone saw something and decided he was a secret Winter faerie, well, it wouldn't be the most outrageous thing whispered about his heroic feats.

Probably.

His phone started pinging the instant he returned to California. Twenty-eight texts in three days—not many if he'd been one of the humans attending school with Rowen, he imagined, but there were only a handful of people who even possessed Tamani's number, and most of them lived in the same house. By his standards, it was an avalanche.

He glanced down, ignoring six messages from Rowen—if something serious had happened there, he wasn't in any position to act on it now. Laurel, meanwhile, had sent him twenty messages over the course of the last twenty hours—updates on where she was going, but nothing about why. Had she discovered a new way for him to deal with the sea fae? Some ingredients were difficult to get in Avalon; she may have come back to gather materials from her personal garden.