“No time to be lost, my lady!” Lalkamal urged. “It’s time to go home!”
“Come on, get a move on!” Neel waved me toward his horse. “Let’s get out of this place!”
I felt a last pang of hesitation. “Wait a minute!” I looked from brother to brother: one smiling, the other frowning. “This”—I gestured to the rubble in front of me—“is my home!”
“Does she not know?”
Neel scowled. “I guess not.”
“Know what?”
“This is not your home, my lady,” Lal said. “You are from a place far away, a Kingdom Beyond Seven Oceans and Thirteen Rivers.”
“We don’t have time for this, dude,” Neel urged. “Just grab her; let’s go.”
“No one’s grabbing me!”
Behind me, there was a groaning noise as the demon started waking.
“My lady, you have always known you were different?”
I nodded.
“Perhaps even, not of this world?”
I stared.
There was a low-pitched moan from the direction of the demon. Both horses were flapping their wings and stamping in fear.
“Oh, wake up!” Neel snapped. “No one ever told you about how they found you in a clay pot floating down the River of Dreams?”
“What?” My eyes widened. “How did you …”
And then he said it.
“No one ever told you that you were really a princess?”
There it was. The truth. Staring at me right in the face this whole time.
(Yeah, you don’t have to say it. I know it’s a little ironic in light of my previous attitude toward princesses in general.)
“Hai, mai, khai!” The ground rumbled beneath my feet.
“Run, Princess Kiran!” Lal yelled.
“I’m riding Snowy,” I called, sprinting toward Lal’s white horse. This time, it definitely winked at me.
The horses had just launched off the ground when I looked down and saw the frothy-mouthed demon bolting toward us. It stood on my front lawn, shrieking as we sailed higher and higher into the night sky.
I was flying.
No. Way.
I was flying.
Cool wind whipped through my clothes and hair as we glided into the night. Despite everything, I was in awe. If I were to reach out, I could pluck the very moon from the sky and put it in my pocket. The houses below me were like teeny toy villages, but I wasn’t freaked out. Instead, I laughed out loud. Even the stars seemed to be twinkling at my pleasure.
“It is most wonderous, is it not?” Lal pointed out a few constellations. “You know, every one of those stars is a spell.”
“Are we riding into outer space?” Despite our lack of pressurized space suits and oxygen tanks, it didn’t seem like an unreasonable question to ask.
“Alas, no. Just a different dimension.”
Oh, well, that explained it perfectly.
Not.
I gulped in some crisp night air, feeling strangely new. My parents were missing. My house was a wreck. I was flying off to who knows where. The situation sucked, to put it mildly. But I’d faced down the scariest Halloween monster I’d ever met, and I hadn’t hidden or backed away or anything. I’d acted. I’d fought. I’d done something useful and brave. And that part of it felt kind of, well, amazing.
As we rode, I found myself actually relaxing, if that makes any sense. It was super easy to talk to Lal. Turned out, he was a great sky-tour guide, and kept pointing out things like cloud formations, flocks of Canadian geese, a shooting star—which was a spell being cast, he explained. After a while I couldn’t see the ground below us. The funny thing was, I wasn’t scared of falling—not at all. I got the feeling I’d always lived up there with the sky and the stars. Maybe it was all that curtainless sleeping in the moonlight, but it felt comfortable and familiar, like the moon itself was looking out for me.
Lal even let me take the reins. Neel was right; I’d never been on a horse before (riding lessons weren’t exactly in our family budget), but Snowy was gentle and responded right away to my touch. A good ways ahead, Neel’s black horse—whom I’d started to think of as Midnight—bucked and snorted as he galloped in the air. I could only see his vague outline by the thousands of twinkling stars that lit the way.
Lal caught my gaze and sighed. “My brother is so much better than me at almost everything.”
Lal’s words startled me, because they were tinged with that same wistful jealousy I thought I’d seen on Neel’s face back on my front lawn.
“That’s not true.” I stumbled over my words in my effort to be reassuring. “You’re brave, and nice, and very ha— um, I mean, very princely.” I almost said the word handsome but stopped myself barely in time.
“You think?” I couldn’t see Lal’s face, but he sounded nervous. “I’ve been working on it, the princeliness, I mean.”
“Oh, it’s going realy well!” I said in a rush. “You have excellent manners and perfect posture and great … erm, diction!”
“Many gracious thanks, my lady!” Lal said stiffly. Then his voice lost its confidence again. “But I don’t think I’ll ever be as smart and strong as my brother.”
Wow. Neel was a lot more of a bully than I thought. I couldn’t believe he would make Lal feel so bad about himself. Way uncool.
We rode for a while longer in silence, until I started to yawn something fierce.
“Sleep, dear princess,” Lal said, taking back the reins. “It is a long distance to the Kingdom Beyond Seven Oceans and Thirteen Rivers.”
“And we’ll find my parents there?” I rested my exhausted head on Snowy’s mane. I could hear the horse’s breathing, steady and low, like a waterfall—and imagined I could even hear the river of his blood flowing in his veins. I was asleep before I heard Lal’s answer.
The dawn was already breaking when I opened my eyes. My butt was sore from spending all night on a horse’s back, and I had a wicked charley horse in my left leg. I imagined it was like being on an overnight flight—except without the stale air and packaged peanuts.
Lal was saying something to me, pointing to the ground below, but the wind whipped his voice away. I shook my head, not understanding, until he repeated, “We have arrived! The transit corridor!”
The horses flew toward the ground, like planes preparing for a landing. My ears popped and I did the trick of swallowing hard. It didn’t work. (I’ve read you can also chew gum, but I didn’t have any, or, like, hold your nose and blow, but I was afraid that would risk unplanned boogerage in my hand, so I didn’t do that either.)
After hours of riding separately, Neel pulled his horse up next to Snowy, and now the two winged horses flew side by side, whinnying at each other.
“Your parents are beyond the transit corridor, Princess,” Neel yelled. “To get to them we’ll first have to get you through the checkpoint.”
“I suppose you possess the appropriate documentation?” Lal asked near my ear.
“Documentation?” I gulped. The horses were coming down fast. And all I could see below me were dusty rocks and red earth.