princess rose to her feet. “Inq and Ink were not affected because they are not Folk,” she said. “I made them with my own hands, my own magic, my own words—I am a Maker, like my family. My words have power. Everything you see here, every whorl of wood, every stone, every leaf, every drop of water and each grain of sand I have made while I have been imprisoned here.” Joy’s eyes drank in the whole of the pocket world, trying to imagine every detail created by hand. She tried to step off the grass that curled underfoot as if she were accidentally crushing someone’s art.
“Whatever affected the entirety of the Folk left the Scribes untouched.” The princess considered Joy with interest. “Humans were not affected, either—you’ve retained your memories, unlike the rest of the Folk.” She paused, then amended, “Although I imagine that that is also true of those who escaped—the treachery was limited to the confines of this world, the world of the Twixt. It is why we can have this conversation at all,” she added. “Inq said that, being part-human, you would be able to remember.”
Joy frowned. “I don’t know anything about any King and Queen,” she said. “Or any lost Folk, for that matter. This is the first I’ve ever heard of it.”
“Not you,” Inq said. “Your stories—your myths and legends and literature passed down through the ages. I’ve read them. I know that they’re there.” She counted on her flawless fingers, “Genesis, Exodus, Homer, Shakespeare, Spenser, Chaucer, Yeats, Grimm, Oberon and Titania, Zeus and the Titans, Persephone and Hades, Enki and Ereshkigal, Osiris and Isis, Yul-ryeo and Mago, Inti and Mama Kilya, Dagda and Lugh.” She gasped for more breath. “Tam Lin, Olorun, King Arthur and Gwenhwyfar, Seelie and Unseelie fae, the fairy courts, the Snow Queen, Queen Mab, Morgan le Fey—any of this sound familiar?” Inq gestured at the expanse created by the Maker-Princess in her caged closet world. “Humans remember the past in a way the rest of the Folk cannot. It lives in your stories, which means it lives in you. That means that you can help me, you can do something.”
Joy knew exactly what Inq wanted her to do.
“You want me to help you find the traitors,” she said quietly. “And kill them.”
“If it comes to that,” Inq admitted. “Of course, I suggested simply killing everyone on the Council years ago and forcing the door to open,” she said with a smile. “But it’s hidden down here from all but the Council, and we don’t know where it is. Besides,” she added, “Mother didn’t like it.”
“I do not approve of killing innocents, no,” the princess said. “Even if there is a wickedness among them. It was the reason I chose to stay behind in the first place—too many innocents had suffered death on both sides.” She glanced at Joy. “I understand that you and I share this respect for both worlds.” She knelt and drew her hands through the brook, cupping them together, merging twin handfuls of water. “Once our peoples were one—that, too, has been forgotten. This was our world, a shared world.” She let go with a splash. The liquid clung to her fingers and fell like real water, the light sliding and splashing as she shook droplets from her nails. But the next moment, her hands were instantly dry. It was eerie and somehow horribly sad, how unreal and imaginary it all was. “I would like it best if we could identify the traitors, force them to undo that which they wrought, and thereby locate the door to our King and Queen so that the rest of our people can come home.” She opened her hand to Inq, and they linked their fingers together. “I would like to reunite my family, to see my mother and father and sisters again.”
Joy squirmed around the all-too-familiar fantasy, the tug-of-war, love-and-hate dream of her mother and father getting back together, forgiving and forgetting and becoming a family again. Hers could never really be like that, but she understood the longing. But did someone have to die to make it happen? Worse than death—erased from existence as though they’d never been? Joy winced at the memory of falling into the hollow briar patch and realizing what she had done to the Red Knight.
“Why not forget about ousting the traitors and seeking revenge and concentrate on finding and opening this door?” Joy asked. “It’s got to be somewhere in here, right?”
“The courier alone knew its location,” the princess said. “And no one but the Head of the Council knows the courier’s identity, which was chosen in secret in order to protect and balance the Twixt’s many fractal loyalties. Whoever it was abandoned that task or forgot about it long ago. No one aside from myself and Inq has been here since.”
Joy sighed. “But if you could find the door, you could open it.”
The princess shook her head. “The door cannot open until either the Council members unanimously agree to open it—decreeing that it is safe for the others to return—or it will open automatically when all those on the Council have perished, allowing those on the other side to return to have their revenge.”
“Return?” Joy said. “You mean like the Imminent Return?”
The princess smiled. “It is one of the few memories that remain,” she said. “The old saying may have lost all meaning, but the words cannot be undone. Our traditions are endemic and still contain hints of the truth. Whatever happened to erase their memories, it could not undo it all. In our hearts, we know that our King and Queen will come back to us someday.”
“Returning to Earth from somewhere behind a locked, lost door,” Joy said.
The princess touched the glyphs at her breast. “Those are the rules.”
The words made Joy’s blood pound. She was sick of rules! “Whose rules?”
“Theirs—the King’s and Queen’s,” the woman said. “They created the Twixt by making the rules.”
A cold splash shivered down Joy’s spine, her mind suddenly clear. “The King and Queen made the rules?” she asked. “They were the ones who made the rules of the Twixt?”
The princess nodded sagely. “Yes,” she said. “Of course. That is why they are our King and Queen, the greatest Makers, and why all the Twixt must abide by their rules.” She gestured with a graceful hand. “We surmised that the only way the traitors could have conspired a coup was to somehow negate the First Edict, to forget their loyalty to the King and Queen—you cannot be loyal to that which you do not know exists.”
“So find the traitors, find the door, open the door,” Inq said, counting them out on her fingers. “Presto! Instant Imminent Return.”
“But if no one remembers them...” Joy began, then stopped at the expression on the tall woman’s face. It was a look of pain and loss and hope and despair that she remembered during her own Year of Hell, reflected a hundredfold. A wrenching war of What if? and What then? A prickle crawled over her skin, peppery and uncomfortable.
“They will be able to set things right,” the princess said. “They can revise the rules once they return. Only, we must find the way to bring them back.”
But Joy was no longer listening, her attention riveted by that one sentence: They can revise the rules. Hope blossomed, fierce and fiery, blotting out everything else. She wouldn’t have to change. She could keep her body. She could get out of whatever Sol Leander had in store for her, whatever the Twixt was doing to her, whatever was brewing in her veins—it could stop.
If she could find the King and Queen, then they could change the rules.
“Okay,” Joy said softly before she knew it. “I’ll help.” She turned to Inq. “But on two conditions. First, no assassinations.” She couldn’t say “no killing” because even Joy knew not to bind Inq that much. The female Scribe nodded, and the princess looked on with approval. “And second, you have to tell Ink.”
Inq’s face crumpled. “What?”
“You have to tell Ink everything,” Joy insisted. “Tell him everything you’ve told me. No secrets. No loopholes. You have to introduce him to his mother. You have to bring him here and let him see the truth.”
“No,”