Page 18 of Twisting Twilight (Homesteader Hearth Witch #9)

CHAPTER ELEVEN

With the grassland helpers holding the books and flipping the pages, I could eat my cheese and crackers without risk of contaminating Kian’s precious books.

And with him lecturing at length about each entry they turned to, I could’ve returned the fire opal lorgnette unsmudged.

Kian insisted I keep it for now, just in case.

Neither Fiachna nor I was very pleased about that.

“Now, as I was saying before that untimely interruption,” Kian began.

“You drank half a canteen during that ‘untimely interruption,’ Book Boy,” Flora called back.

This time, she sat on Emmett’s soft shoulder and waved her glowing green hand back and forth in the air in front of her, miming the bushwhacking swipe of a machete.

The grass parted in front of the old men’s marching feet, easing our passage, and the ever-present wind ruffled it right back into place after us.

The junior scholar flushed, hunching his shoulders under the garden gnome’s mild rebuke. Well, mild for Flora, I suppose.

“You’ll get used to it,” I reassured him. “Now, we were talking about the Court of Shoals’s lady having a fancy diadem and the Ouzel ‘ not’ being a pirate ship but having strange cargo logs?”

“Yes!” He seemed to perk up as he tapped with his pointer at various entries along the multiple logbooks the grassland helpers carried.

Flecks of gold light reflected from the embossed covers scattered across the rippling grass like fireflies.

“Cargo logs are specific. They include the item and amount every time. Were this any other logbook, you’d see something like ‘Winter wheat, three hundred barrels,’ and ‘Olive oil, twelve hundred bottles,’ and the like.

But diadem ? The Ouzel is not wasting a voyage on one single diadem this many times.

It obviously refers to the Jewel of the Sea upon Lady Muriel’s head, and thus, treasure .

“And these diadem entries correspond to the times it was attacked, not by a ship, but from below.”

“The muirdris,” I remembered. The sea dragon.

“Or a rival court,” Flora suggested, returning to her theory that the high lady of the Court of Tides might be using her own magic to terrorize her rival. “The high fae aren’t above sabotaging each other.”

“Mind your own biscuits and gravy, Honey.” Daphne pointed to the grass ahead of them. “That isn’t going to part itself.”

With a roll of her eyes, Flora once again faced forward and mimed her machete.

Kian was quiet a moment, eyes boring into the garden gnome’s back as if to glue in her place (and maybe her mouth shut), before he lightly cleared his throat.

“The Ouzel was forced to dump its cargo three out of four times in order to get away.” Kian drew my attention to the captain’s notes below each diadem cargo entry.

“Either that appeased the muirdris or it just made the ship light enough to flee. Each time it returned to port after one of these attacks, it was forced into dry dock for repairs.”

The lorgnette rearranged the Faerish script to reveal: The shipwright believes we ran aground upon an unchartered reef or shoal.

But I’ve sailed this sea for over two centuries.

There is nothing ‘uncharted’ about these waters.

And he did not hear the sounds that came from below, nor did he feel the ship buck when it was stuck simultaneously from both sides.

Those are not gouges from shoals or punctures from coral.

Those are the marks left behind from fangs.

“Do you think the muirdris was attacking the treasure to rebuild its hoard?” I asked.

What if these draig and muirdris were like the bower birds of the mortal realm?

They collected all sorts of shiny things for their nest to attract a mate.

Or, what if the treasure was the nest needed to incubate their eggs?

Either way, it made sense for the sea dragon to reclaim what it had lost (attack the coastline blocking its ancestral nesting grounds) or acquire new nesting material (attack the Ouzel ).

“And if the captain suspected a muirdris was targeting his ship, why would he continue treasure hunting?” I pressed.

“The exact why is lost to history.” Kian extracted another scroll, unfurled it, and handed it to the grassland helpers to hold.

“But this could be a clue. The treasure liberated by the Ouzel was said to be exotic. Nimue and her mistress were the last outsiders before the Blight to be treated to a tour, and lucky for us, she was an accomplished artist. And that’s saying something, since she was a human changeling.

Beth, I think, was her mortal name.” He waved that detail away as if it were something trifling.

It was that unbothered dismissal of a woman’s real name that broke my concentration. “Changeling?”

The junior scholar flapped his hand. “The fad died out years ago. Humans were too delicate for this world and their deaths brought great sorrow to their masters.”

“Masters?” I was beginning to sound like a parrot. A very angry parrot with a large, powerful bill.

“Well, they were pets, so…” Kian shrugged.

“ Pets? ” I’d been a high fae’s pet once. Enthralled, toyed with. “And what of any human/fae offspring? Are they treated with such irreverence too?”

“Of course not!”

Well that was a relief.

“They never go to term. They’re always miscarriages.

I suspect if such a bastard child should reach maturity—well, it’s never happened before in recorded history, so I’d have no idea what to expect!

What a fascinating little mind problem. I suppose one could argue the fae bloodline had been polluted or watered down, and depending on the status of the fae parent involved, it?—”

“Let’s just stay on topic,” I said sharply.

The junior scholar had no idea how callous he sounded, and the rawness of my enslavement to Ossian was still too near.

He’d fully intended on consummating a marriage to gain my magic, but what if I had fallen pregnant?

I shoved the thought away only for it to be replaced by another one.

Violet had come to Earth and procreated successfully.

Was there something about the mortal realm that had facilitated that, or had she just been lucky?

A fascinating little mind problem, as Kian would’ve called it, and not relevant to the moment. I blinked rapidly, clearing my eyes of the mist that had formed there, and turned my attention to Beth ’s scroll.

The masterful strokes of the watercolor-and-ink painting rendered fist-sized gems and golden amphoras, bejeweled swords and decorative armor. It was all Faerish in origin, even the chests upon chests of gold ingots and walnut-sized pearls. Kian’s pointer guided me to a?—

“Is that a typewriter?” I exclaimed.

“Is that what you call it?” Kian hurriedly withdrew his notebook and a travel-sized quill. “ Fascinating . Type… writer—is that one word or two?”

I didn’t hear him. I’d plucked the scroll from the helper and yanked it right in front of my nose so I didn’t have to squint and the perfectly captured details of the typewriter could reveal themselves.

“Typewriter, you say?” Emmett abandoned his position on the rope and bustled over, wiping the fog from his spectacles.

He got nose to nose with the scroll, paying no mind to Kian’s whimper that the condensation from his breath might cause the ink to run.

“Ah, that’s a Sholes and Glidden! Beautiful condition too. ”

“And look here!” Nestled beside a silver halberd was a Japanese kimono. Sprinkled in amongst the other Faerish treasures were at least a dozen more Earthly artifacts. And from many different centuries, too.

“Typewriter?” Kian prompted.

“It’s one word, dear,” Daphne answered.

“There’s got to be a portal somewhere,” I exclaimed, looking up from the scroll. “In that archipelago, there’s a portal leading to Earth!”

Kian favored me with a wild grin. “So it seems. Now I believe this is more of a sporadic temporal rift between our realms. As you can see from the different artistic styles of these mortal artifacts, these have all come from different centuries. Yet all appear in pristine new condition.”

“Someone could’ve opened a portal to a museum,” Flora said. Always the devil’s advocate, that one.

“Portal, temporal rift, who cares? What does this mean?” I gave the scroll a little shake, directing the conversation back on topic.

Horrified that I would treat such a precious scroll with such roughness, Kian carefully extracted it from my grip, rolled it back up, and gave it to Fiachna for safekeeping.

Emmett made a little sound of protest, not yet finished with his own examination.

With a disappointed pout, he trudged back up the line to help the others tow the fae.

“When the Blight struck the mainland,” Kian explained, “Lord Derrien and Lady Muriel fortified their castle and sent out their most powerful fae, but all were powerless to stop it. The Blight destroyed a dozen villages, two lesser cities, and had struck the castle before the High Lord and Lady of the Court of Beasts turned it away. Yet something in the Court of Shoals”—he searched the cloudless sky for the right word—“ paused it. I believe something in the amassed treasure, something from your realm, halted it.”

The conversation between Callan and Shannon came rushing back in a brand-new light.

‘The Blight only affects the immortal lands and all its citizens, except the faelene. She is mortal!’

‘It only affects those things because that’s all it’s ever known.’

‘So it won’t recognize her!’