CHAPTER#89

Then again, only she knew what it did. She must have had a good reason to tuck it away for later.

Two hours passed, and the daylight coming through the yurt dimmed. Mike was growing anxious, checking the time left off on his phone. He had tried to look out the flap more than once, but a pair of horse butts had greeted him each time. The centaurs guarding him had turned just enough to aim a pair of threatening kicks his way, and he decided to quit looking.

Ratu gave up shadowing him and found an inconspicuous part of the yurt to hide in. Crouched down, she was hard to spot, and spent time drawing symbols in the dirt. Thinking it was an attempt at a plan, Mike had approached, expecting a rough drawing of the camp.

Nope. She had drawn a chibi-style rendition of Asterion having a picnic with Beth.

"Really?" he asked.

She shrugged. "It's not like I have anything better to do?"

He groaned inwardly. She was right, there was nothing to be done. Frustrated, he walked across the yurt and kicked one of the buckets. It bounced off the back wall and clattered to a halt.

Eventually the flaps of the yurt opened. Ratu vanished with a faint pop, her serpentine form slithering beneath the leaves and grass on the floor. In walked Zel, her face a mask of misery. She was followed in by a female centaur with dark skin and thick braids along her back.

"I'm so sorry about all this," she said, but Mike held up a hand to silence her.

"I don't need apologies. I need answers. How fucked are we?"

The centaur with Zel grimaced at his language, but said nothing. He noticed she carried a sword across her waist.

"Very. I invoked parley to keep us alive long enough to get away, but a chance didn't come up and now we're stuck here."

"Clearly. And isn't parley some kind of fancy pirate speak? Why are centaurs invoking it?"

Zel rolled her eyes. "The Herd loves their rules. You have to understand that centaurs hold honor and tradition above all else. That being said, it isn't uncommon for them to find fun new traditions to absorb and observe until the end of time, the more formal the better. Parley came about during the last great purge in the eighteen hundreds or so."

"The purge?"

She nodded. "Centaur history is a mess, but the reason there aren't centaurs on Earth is because they were either killed or they went somewhere else, like here. It was called the purge because my people had to make the choice to fight or leave, and the different tribes kept warring for leadership as we migrated together. Parley is something we picked up from the French. Or maybe the British, I'm not sure. But the Herd put it in place so that tribes could approach each other without fear of death."

"Sounds vicious."

"The centaurs of old were very uptight. My people are considered very liberal in their ways by comparison."

"They were going to kill us."

"They still might." She cast a nervous look at the centaur next to her. "How's your stomach, by the way? Still all twisted up?"

He could tell she was asking about Ratu. "Oh, it's fine. So explain to me why there's a centaur tribe in my wardrobe."

"Ah, that. That's a surprise to me as well." She moved toward the side of the yurt and sat, her legs folding beneath her. The other centaur remained standing, her hand laid across the hilt of her sword. "This place is a pocket dimension. When the Herd was migrating, we were offered a chance to come here and be the protectors of this place. As long as we kept intruders out, we could live here in relative piece."

"And who offered you guys that?"

"That's... an interesting story. Nobody can remember him. Or her. It was many generations ago, but a bargain was struck. This place is actually an island. If you sail away, you end up on the other side of the island, almost as if we were on a tiny planet."

Mike nodded. "The Architect, maybe?"

"Or an early Caretaker. Hard to say. Anyway, Emily came here many years ago, before I was born. My people fought with her, but she kept sneaking in and out with the help of the Snow Queen."

"Why did she keep coming here?"

"The tower. It was here before we were and is supposed to hold dangerous magic. That's why we were appointed as guardians of this place, to keep intruders from going to the tower."

He remembered his brief glance at the impressive structure, and something niggled at the back of his mind in thinking about it. "So you used the wardrobe to get to Earth?"

"No. When I snuck to Earth those years ago, I did not emerge from a wardrobe, but from a magical tree in the backyard of your house. It was difficult, but my aunt figured out how to do the magic that Emily did. The Snow Queen got trapped here many years ago, but now I think that Emily chopped down that tree after we found a way to pass through it."

"She made it into the wardrobe." Interesting. "But why not burn it down entirely and lock her here forever?"

Zel shrugged. "I don't have that answer for you. All I know was that when I stepped through the wardrobe, one of my worst fears had been realized and I got caught up in my own disbelief. If I had just pushed you back through, we wouldn't be in this mess."

"So tell me about this mess."

"Well, here's the short version. When I disappeared, it was assumed that Emily took me from the Herd. That was the story my aunt encouraged when she returned, but they saw through her lie. Now that we're back, Orion has demanded that we follow through with our pre-arranged marriage."