Or a grandfather, Imperia thinks. But Grandfather never said any of that horrible anti-girl stuff to Imperia’s face. He would just frown at her or command her to leave his presence. He would say that stuff to other people, who would then try not to let Imperia hear.
Imperia suddenly feels sorry for Skylar, and she doesn’t want to. She really really doesn’t want to. So she thinks about the ways that Skylar picks on Grace, but she can only imagine someone picking on Skylar, so she tries to think about Grace crying, and even that isn’t working right now.
So Imperia bunches up her fists, straightens her shoulders, and says, “So I solved it, right, Daddy?”
He looks up at her as if he’s forgotten she’s in the room.
“Actually, no, Imp,” he says. “You probably deflected the court case—I keep forgetting how important this publicity stuff is here—but you haven’t resolved the issue with Skylar at all. People who get hurt retaliate, as you well know.”
“As
I
know?” Imperia asks.
“Skylar hurt Grace and you retaliated, right?”
Imperia let out a breath. Her cheeks are suddenly growing hot. “You told me to defend her,” Imperia says, and doesn’t like the fact that her voice sounds like a whine.
“But I wanted you to—ah, hell.” Daddy runs a hand through his hair. “Yes, I told you to, and I didn’t tell you how.”
Uh-oh. He’s starting into that he’s-a-failure-as-a-parent crap. Imperia hates that.
“It’s not your fault, Daddy,” Imperia says. “I tried to talk to her. I’m just not charming like you are.”
He looks up at her, his blue eyes suddenly as piercing as Grandfather’s. “A lot of people aren’t charming, Imp. They don’t go around breaking people’s noses. You have to make this right.”
“What does that mean?” Imperia asks.
He shrugs. She doesn’t want him to shrug, because that means he’s not going to tell her. Then he surprises her by adding, “You need to defuse this, Imp. You need to stop this whole thing from escalating any further.”
“How do I do that?” Imperia asks.
“I don’t know,” he says grimly. “But I trust you can figure it out.”
SEVEN
I trust you can figure that out
. Imperia hates it when Daddy says that. She hates it when
anybody
says that. The last time she had to figure something out, she ended up punching someone in the nose.
She bows her head and sighs as she heads back into the dining room. This thing with Skylar is harder to solve than all the math problems in her little book. She sits down, makes fists with both hands and props her chin on them. Her knuckles graze her cheeks. Her knuckles are
sharp
.
The thing that’s bugging everybody about Skylar isn’t that Imperia defeated her. It’s that she has a broken nose, and she’ll be disfigured. The problem isn’t the punch so much as the horrible medical treatment.
In the Kingdom, whenever Imperia injured something, she went to the palace wise woman, a healer who would then wave her magic wand over it or rub a potion on it or make some incantation.
And then the bruise would be gone.
Imperia leans back in her chair.
Of course. The solution is that simple—and that hard.
EIGHT
Imperia knows how to get to the Kingdom, even though she’s not supposed to go without Daddy. She’s not supposed to go anywhere without telling him either. She’s going to break a lot of rules here, but she’s going to do it so that she can make things right.
There are dozens, maybe hundreds of portals between the Greater World and the Kingdom. Imperia has traveled through some of them, always with Daddy, and always holding his hand. But she has done a lot of reading about them, and she knows that you don’t have to have your magic to use them.
(This is how mortals—folks from the Greater World—end up in the Kingdoms. That’s how the evil Brothers Grimm discovered the Kingdoms in the first place.)
There’s a portal not too far from the house. Imperia slips out the back door at seven a.m., before everyone else gets up. Ruthie doesn’t even show up on Saturday, which is too bad, because if she did, Imperia would ask her to drive to the better portal in Sherman Oaks. That portal is bigger, but Imperia doesn’t really need big on this day, because she’s not traveling with Grace or Daddy.
It’s hot outside even though it’s early, and at most of the houses, the sprinklers have just ended their timed watering. Here, everything seems to run on technology, and everything has a time and a place. Even watering, because apparently, water is rationed, an idea that just plain scares her.
A lot scares her about the Greater World. Kids at school say they’re not allowed to walk by themselves because they might be abducted. At first, Imperia thought they meant abducted by bad serial killer guys, like in the movies, but no, they actually mean by kidnappers, because their parents are so rich and so famous.
Abductions don’t happen in the Kingdom, at least not for her or Grace, because if someone took them, that someone would be beheaded or worse. Grandfather has no problem with violence, and sometimes uses it to enforce his decrees. One unspoken decree is don’t mess with his family.
Sometimes Imperia thinks that’s a much better way that Daddy’s insistence on talk, talk, talk.
A couple of people are outside, working in their lawns, trimming flowers and digging in the dirt. One woman actually says hi to Imperia, and Imperia gives her a startled hi in return.
She wants to run now, but she doesn’t. She makes herself walk to the little park that only covers half a block.
According to the sign, the park was someone’s property, but that person donated it to the neighborhood so long as everyone takes care of it. There’s an iron gate around the lovely trees, and a code on the gate so that only people who live here can get in. Imperia memorized the code the first time they came here, and now she taps it into the gate’s keypad. She hears a click as the gate unlocks.
She pushes it open and steps in.
There are so many trees here that the place is actually cooler than the rest of the neighborhood. Flowers bloom everywhere. She has no idea what kind they are. There’s a little shrine over what should’ve been a little pond with a fountain, but another sign says that the pond is empty because of the water shortage.
She steps behind the shrine to a gigantic palm tree that’s so big it looks fake. She runs her hand on the tree’s spiny bark and suddenly she’s inside the portal.
She barely fits in it by herself. It smells of tree and a bit like fog. She knows how this works: she’s supposed to think about where she wants to go in the Kingdom, but in case she doesn’t have the think-power yet, she mutters, “Grandmama Lavinia’s, please.”
Then she worries that the portal won’t know who Grandmama Lavinia is. At that moment, though, she stumbles forward into a familiar part of the Kingdom’s forest, overlooking Grandmama Lavinia’s house. The air is cool and filled with fog, and there’s no sun at all.
Really, Grandmama Lavinia’s house is a manor, and it originally belonged to Mom’s dad. He inherited it from his dad. Mom’s mom died when she was a little girl, and it took Mom’s dad a long time to remarry. When he did, he remarried Grandmama Lavinia whom, the evil Brothers Grimm say, forced Mom to live like a slave, and sleep near the fireplace. That’s why she was called Cinderella.
The truth is more complicated than that, and has to do with a big fight that Grandmama Lavinia and Mom had a few weeks before the ball where Mom met Daddy. Mom was living in the kitchen in protest when Mom’s fairy godmother showed up—and that’s where everything gets muddled.
Imperia doesn’t really understand what happened, and neither does Dad. He just says that sometimes no one’s right, and the entire situation can be hurtful, and he says that’s what happened here.
But he loves Grandmama Lavinia, and so does Imperia. Imperia trusts Grandmama Lavinia more than she trusts most people. And Grandmama Lavinia won’t report her to Grandfather, so she’s safe for the time being.
The house is just around the corner, tucked up against the forest, at the end of a long road. Imperia smiles when she sees the square brown form, the stained glass windows on the second story, and the arch-shaped stone door. She loves this place more than any other place in the Kingdom.
She lets herself through the gate on the matching stone fence and takes a deep breath of the cool damp air. With luck, no one has seen her, and that means no one will report her to her grandfather.
She goes around the side and lets herself in the kitchen door. Cook is already bustling, making bread and cakes for the morning meal. When Cook sees her, she raises her eyebrows.
“N’one said you’d be coming here,” Cook says.
“It’s a surprise.” Imperia knows Cook won’t tell on her because here, Imperia has Authority. “Is Grandmama here?”
Her stomach clenches as she asks the question because she really didn’t think ahead. What if Grandmama is visiting friends? Or on some prolonged trip?
“Upstairs,” Cook says. She isn’t showing the right amount of respect, but then she never has. The one thing that Imperia has gleaned from her mother’s childhood stories is that Grandmama Lavinia has never been able to train her staff properly.
Imperia nods, then heads to the back staircase. She creeps up the side, like she used to do when she was really little and up too late. She reaches the top. Most of the doors are closed, including Grandmama’s bedroom door.
Imperia knocks, then pushes the door open. She says, “It’s me, Grandmama,” just in case Grandmama thinks it’s one of the servants.
“Imperia?” Grandmama sound surprised. “Just one moment.”
There’s a flutter and a hint of perfume as Imperia steps inside. The bed curtains are stirring. With one bejeweled hand, Grandmama pushes the curtains back.
Imperia frowns. She would swear, with the curtains moving like that, that Grandmama has just gotten out of bed. But Grandmama is still in bed, and the bed is messier than usual. Grandmama has grabbed her black silk dressing gown and tugs it on as she sits up. She’s tiny and blond, with slightly upturned eyes and an upturned nose. She almost looks younger than Mom.
There’s rumors that Grandmama has mixed blood—part small fairy, part human. And while Imperia hasn’t cared about that, her other grandparents do. They think Grandmama Lavinia is a bad influence because of it.
“What are you doing here, child?” Grandmama asks, smoothing her blond hair back with one hand. “Is there trouble?”
Imperia’s eyes get wet but she blinks hard, bites her lower lip, and nods.
“Oh, my.” Grandmama swings her thin legs over the bed and slips her feet into a pair of black feathery mules that she got in the Greater World recently, when she helped Daddy find the right house for the girls. “Did something else happen with your mother?”
“No.” Imperia’s voice is small.
“Is your father here?”
“No,” Imperia says.
“Grace?”
“No,” Imperia says.
Grandmama puts her hands on her hips. Her black silk dressing gown only comes to mid-thigh, and swings outward like a party dress. Her lips thin. “So your grandparents are here.”
“No,” Imperia says.
Grandmama straightens in surprise. Even with the heels on her mules, she’s barely as tall as Imperia now. “You’re here on your own?”
Imperia nods.
“From the Greater World?”
Imperia nods again. There’s a lump in her throat. She missed Grandmama Lavinia more than she can say.
“What went wrong? Did something happen to your father and Grace?” She sounds panicked now.
“No,” Imperia says. “They’re fine. But Daddy’s really mad at me, and I need your help.”
Grandmama’s eyes narrow. “You came here because your father is mad at you?”
Imperia nods. “He wants me to figure out how to fix something I did. And I don’t know how.”
“He wants you to figure this out on your own?” Grandmama asks.
“Yes,” Imperia says.
“And you thought you could ask me to fix it?”
“
No,
” Imperia says. “I thought you could help me fix it.”
“Yeah,” Grandmama says softly to herself. “That’s figuring it out on your own.”
She glances over her thin shoulder at the dressing screen near the back of the room. Then she comes to Imperia, puts her arms around her, and hugs her.
“Give me a minute, child,” she says, “and I’ll meet you for breakfast in the sun room.”
Imperia glances at the screen too, but she doesn’t know why. Then she nods, sighs, and heads out of the room. She hears voices behind her, and hopes that she’s hearing servants.
She heads down the front steps to the sun room, which is really the let’s-hope-there’s-sun room. The sun doesn’t come out a lot here, and when it does, it doesn’t always reach this room.
Still the room is nice, and Grandmama Lavinia uses it as her dining area. There’s a sideboard on the interior wall. The other walls are all glass, and Grandmama has flowering plants all around. An oak table dominates the middle of the room, and is already set up, with jams and cakes and plates in the middle.