Extraordinary (27 page)

Phoebe didn't move.

“I know what you're thinking,” said Mallory steadily. “But the wall won't let you through now. Only me. Go. They're waiting.” She pointed again toward the path.

Under Mallory's anxious gaze, Phoebe finally stepped away from the stone wall. She had a plan: She'd throw herself on top of Mallory and hurtle them both through the gateway when it opened.

But when Mallory reached one hand out to the wall and it began to dissolve, and Phoebe moved closer, Mallory turned. Phoebe got one last glimpse of her face. It was desperate, half feral, and wholly defiant. The face swung close for just a moment.

Then Mallory reached out with her other hand and shoved Phoebe hard, with strength, accuracy, and efficiency.

Phoebe landed on her butt on the ground, within Faerie. A second later, Mallory had disappeared through the gateway to the Tollivers' house. Then the gateway resolved itself instantaneously back into an impenetrable stone wall.

Phoebe sat on the ground for a minute. Ordinary.

Ordinary.

It was almost like the punch line to a joke, she thought. When were humility and modesty a great big mistake? When you were a Rothschild. Except she couldn't find any humor in it.

Had Mayer really been so sure that none of his female descendants would be ordinary, as Mallory speculated? Or had he merely been counting on egotism and arrogance? Phoebe wondered briefly about some of her aunts. She didn't know them all that well; the family was too scattered. But Phoebe would swear that none of them, nowadays, were truly extraordinary, like Catherine or like the five sons. But then again, they had their businesses and charities and their lives, and yes, they all appeared to think well of themselves, and who knew? Who really knew? Maybe they
were
all special and she, Phoebe, wasn't, and that was just the truth.

And did it matter about them? No, because she, ordinary Phoebe, was here, trapped in Faerie, and they weren't.

Oh, and incidentally, she'd been betrayed by her best friend
and
by her supposed boyfriend. Which at least made her stupid, if not ordinary. She'd been betrayed into some kind of human sacrifice ... she had
allowed
herself to be betrayed ... It was all still so hard to believe. Even as she looked at the magical stone wall, even as she looked around at the Faerie garden and inhaled its fragrance, even as she felt bruising on her shoulders from Mallory's shove and on her hands from their earlier struggle, she couldn't help thinking that in a minute or two, she would wake up and find she'd been having a nightmare. She might even wake up in Ryland's arms and—

Speaking of nightmares. Ryland.

Phoebe shuddered, and in that second she knew that it couldn't be a dream. She could tell by the violent way her whole body now reacted at even the thought of him. It turned out to be true that the mere thought of somebody could make you physically sick.

If she could have thrown herself into boiling water at that moment, if she could have scraped her skin from her very bones, she would have. Anything, anything to feel clean. How could she have made such a mistake? How could she have thought he cared about her, when instead he was attempting to trick her into dying? And when she remembered—no, no, no, she would not remember. Not now. She would not let herself remember all the little things. The things she had said and done, begging, and that he must have been laughing at her—

And now there were tears too, trying to force themselves up from behind her eyes.

Both of them. Ryland and Mallory. Luring her, lying to her, manipulating her. Wanting her dead. And Catherine—they had involved her mother, they were killing her mother—

It was good to feel anger. Much better than humiliation and shame and self-pity and fear.

Was there, at least, some way to get them to release Catherine from her coma? If they had caused it? Could she bargain? Like Mayer? Was she enough of a Rothschild for that? Could she use what little she had, to try to win?

Or was she just too ordinary?

Phoebe got to her feet. The air felt piercingly sweet as she inhaled. She closed her eyes and breathed deeply, more deeply than she would ever have felt possible. So, this was what healthy lungs felt like. She smiled sourly; she almost wished she could have an asthma attack right here and now, which at least might mean dying on her own terms. Would it help them if she were to die on her own? Or did they need to be the ones to kill her? Maybe she could thwart them yet.

Except she really didn't want to die. And there was Catherine, and the little idea, the tiny idea she'd just had, about bargaining for her. If she could at least save Catherine, that would be something. Even if her mother and father never knew what had happened to Phoebe, it would be something Phoebe could do to atone for how—she lashed herself—how
stupid
she had been about Mallory, about Ryland.

One more deep breath. Then Phoebe dusted herself off and grimly began walking deeper into Faerie, as Mallory had told her to do.

The path was supposedly located just beyond the central garden. Phoebe hurried through the garden, not taking the time to do more than glance at the throne that dominated the space, although she did note that its table was now empty of books. Perhaps the books had belonged to the faerie queen, rather than Ryland. No doubt she had kept tabs on the Rothschild family and its varied branches all these years, as she waited for one of the daughters to be as ordinary as Phoebe.

But it hadn't just been that she was ordinary, Phoebe thought. It was that she had been gullible. Yes, she had been deliberately manipulated by others—by both Mallory and Ryland—into saying she was ordinary. But she also had to take responsibility for her own actions, and her own mistakes, and for where they had led her. She couldn't simply blame them.

She had known, deep in her own heart, for example, that keeping her involvement with Ryland secret from her parents was wrong. What if she had told? Would that have changed things?

Catherine would say that you couldn't learn without errors and misjudgments. That you learned better when you made mistakes than if you did things perfectly. But what if you didn't live long enough to learn from your mistakes?

Now Phoebe could see an opening in some trees ahead; maybe that was where the path was. She trudged toward it, her pace steady and measured. And while she trudged forward, she kept thinking, trying to stay logical and calm, as Catherine would.

Here was the path. It was a little trail that wound through a substantial copse, almost a forest, of thick white ash trees. The walkway was bordered by soft mosses of various greens. Tiny purple flowers peeked through the moss. Phoebe could not see what lay beyond the trees; only that the path wound downhill through the trees. Doggedly, she walked. She barely noticed the trees around her, or the faint breeze that moved the green leaves that formed a canopy above her head, or the beautiful, flute-like song of a wood thrush somewhere in the canopy.

At last, Phoebe emerged from the ash trees and was confronted by a lake. Its waters were black and flat, and it stretched wide to left and right. But Phoebe's path ended directly ahead, at the base of a dock that stretched out onto the lake. At the end of the dock bobbed a little gray rowboat that looked considerably less than trustworthy.

Phoebe's heart stopped for the space of an indrawn breath, and then it took to beating in her chest as frantically as the wings of a hummingbird. Standing on the dock above the rowboat, facing Phoebe, handsome and unsmiling, was Ryland Fayne.

Phoebe turned, bent, and neatly, directly on top of a lady's slipper, threw up.

Ryland had come near—Phoebe could feel him even though she wasn't looking at him—but he made no move to touch her.

“I know,” he said to her downturned head, “that you have spoken with my sister.”

Phoebe opened her eyes. Throwing up had made her feel better. If it was not quite the decontamination she had wanted, it was something akin to it. She now felt empty and clear. She could function.

Also, her old desire to please Ryland—the power of his effect on her—was simply gone.

For a moment she wondered at herself. After all, Ryland was inches away and only yesterday—mere hours ago—she had craved him and his approval like a flower craves sun and rain.

It was as if, deep inside her, an electrical switch had been thrown. Emotions clamored inside her, but not one was about him. For Ryland, for her ex-boyfriend, for the love and understanding she had believed in and now understood to have been false, her own body had just delivered the final verdict. As, indeed, it had tried to do all along, if she had been able to listen.

She spared a second to be glad, glad,
glad
that she had never actually made love to him. It was worth the horrible things he had said to her about it, to have that knowledge now.

She straightened and looked Ryland in the eye. She was aware of the volume of things that were unsaid between them, but she felt the need to speak only one. And she said it simply and quietly and surely.

“I never loved you.”

He said, “True.”

“I thought I did.”

“Yes.”

“A magic potion, something like that?”

Ryland looked thoughtful. “Glamour, we call it. But it was hardly necessary. There was willingness. You wanted to love me.”

Phoebe winced. “Because of Mallory.”

It wasn't a question, but he answered as if it were. “In part.”

Despite herself, Phoebe was curious. “And the other part?”

“It was time for you. It's not as if any man would have done—not quite—but after all, you are a normal young woman.”

“You mean an ordinary young woman.” Phoebe had not meant to let bitterness escape, but it did. However, Ryland only nodded and shrugged.

“In this case,” he said, “they are just the same.”

That was all. He could have been a complete stranger. In fact, Phoebe thought, he
was
a complete stranger. She knew nothing about him as an individual whatsoever, and did not care to learn. She was done with him.

Except for the pesky little business of effectively being his prisoner.

In the silence that followed, Ryland offered Phoebe a handkerchief. It was a silk handkerchief from another century; pretty, delicate, meant to be dabbed gently in the corner of a lady's eye. But the handkerchief was faded and fraying with wear, fragile as an ancient cobweb. For all Phoebe knew, it was indeed a cobweb in disguise. After a second she shrugged and accepted it anyway, and used it to wipe her mouth. She then took a vicious little bit of pleasure in handing it back to Ryland, even though he took it without a flicker of disgust and, incredibly, simply tucked it away in the pocket of his pair of remarkably threadbare—and dirty—linen pants.

Phoebe looked at him, then, really looked at him. First his clothes and body, and then his face. She frowned, because this was not the gorgeous, carefully dressed Ryland that she had known. He was alarmingly thin, and his clothes hung on him as on a scarecrow. And his face was drawn and gaunt, and, well, yellowish.

Mallory hadn't looked well either, come to think of it.

Huh.

“Are you finished?” Ryland made a vague gesture toward the flower that Phoebe had assaulted by throwing up on it.

“Yes,” she said politely. “I think so.”

“Then we have to leave. But we go by boat, which might upset your stomach more.” Phoebe followed his gaze back toward the lake and the dock that he'd been standing on when she first saw him.

“I'll be fine.” Deep inside Phoebe, an unexpected emotion joined the orchestra of anxiety and humiliation and rage and bitterness and terrible, terrible fear.

Curiosity.

Ryland offered Phoebe his arm to walk down the dock; she ignored it and instead walked just ahead of him, feeling the dock's wooden planks give dangerously beneath each step, for it, like the handkerchief, seemed to be on the verge of falling apart. When they came to the end of the dock and found the shabby little rowboat tied up to it, Phoebe allowed Ryland to hand her into it. He did this expertly, so that not a drop of water touched her, even though the boat sat a little too low in the water for her taste.

Phoebe sat in the stern and watched Ryland untie the boat and slip into place facing her. He began rowing them across the lake. Despite his thinness and the appearance of weakness, Ryland's movements were strong and smooth. Shoulders, arms, working together. Once upon a time, she'd have taken pleasure in watching. Now she wondered if his human-like appearance was even real. Would he, like the faeries in the story Mallory had told about Mayer, prove in his real form to have skin of tree bark? Or would there be horns on his head?

What did Mallory really look like?

Were the handkerchief, the dock, and the rowboat too, all illusions that were cracking?

Neither Ryland nor Phoebe spoke for a time. With the back of her mind, Phoebe identified the chatter of a kingfisher coming from somewhere nearby. That made her wonder if birds crossed freely between the human and faerie realms, and if so, how. At least the landscape itself, around them, seemed firm and healthy.

“You don't have any questions for me?” said Ryland, when they'd reached halfway across the lake and Phoebe had still not spoken.

“Yes,” said Phoebe. “As it happens, I do. What about my mother? You were responsible for what happened to her, right?”

“Yes.”

“So will she wake up now, and be able to go on with her life?”

Ryland glanced behind him and reoriented his rowing. “That is a question,” he said, “that you will have to discuss with the queen.”