Don't Forget Your Way Home
An ordinary afternoon in the garden turns into anything but, when Y/N follows a curious detour to a willow tree that, to her knowledge, didn't exist. What waits for her on the other side of a nap she never meant to take is no longer home.
The book was about mythical creatures.
Y/N had found it in a box at an estate sale, the leather cover gone soft at the corners, and she'd been meaning to read it for a month before she finally spread her blanket out on the lawn and cracked it open.
The sun beat down on her face as she laid on her back, holding the book outstretched to the sky as her eyes scanned over each page, taking in the intricate drawings of each creature and their descriptions.
She got four pages in before the ducks distracted her.
There were three of them, paddling in slow circles on the pond at the far end of the garden, and something about their innocent behaviour pulled her attention clean off the page. She marked her place with a ribbon and stood, brushing grass off her skirts.
The walk across took longer than it should have.
It always did, in this garden.
Her father had let the landscaping run wild years ago, hedges grown thick and paths curving in ways that doubled back on themselves, and she'd stopped minding it. Getting lost in her own garden felt like a small, safe kind of adventure.
She was most of the way to the pond when she saw the willow.
It stood off to the left of the path, branches trailing into the grass, and she paused in her steps. She knew this garden. She'd grown up in it and spent most of her days in it.
There was no willow.
She looked at it a while longer, decided she must have simply never noticed it before, a very dismissive thought, and went and sat beneath it instead of at the pond. The ducks would still be there when she got up.
Hopefully.
The shade was cool and the grass underneath was soft, and Y/N told herself she'd rest her eyes only a moment.
When she opened them again, the light had changed. It was almost dusk and she swore she could hear the worried calls of her handmaiden.
She sat up too fast, head swimming, and looked around for the willow. Gone. The path was gone too, replaced by something narrower and cobbled, and the air smelled different, colder, like stone that had never seen sun.
She got to her feet and walked the way she thought was home.
What stood there instead was a castle.
—
The wards caught her mid-step.
She could feel them, a pull at her ankles like an invisible thread drawing taut, freezing her in her steps, keeping her unable to move, and then a sound rang out across the courtyard, high and clear, not quite a bell and not quite a voice.
Y/N froze.
She had been turning to leave, some instinct in her screaming that this was not her home, none of it was, not the stone beneath her flats nor the strange sharp cold in the air. Then the moment the sound rang out, doors she hadn't noticed banged open along the courtyard wall, and footsteps came from every direction at once, boots on stone, fast and many.
She was surrounded within seconds.
Hands came at her from all sides, plain rough hands, cold from the outdoor air, tugging at her sleeves and the hem of her skirt, fingers catching in her hair to pull a lock forward and examine it like it was made of something rare. Someone said a word in a language she didn't recognize. Someone else laughed, short and startled. She stumbled when the crowd pressed in tighter, caught herself against a stranger's shoulder, was shoved forward again by the press of bodies, and her heart was going so hard she could feel it in her throat, in her ears, drowning out most of what was being said around her.
"Enough."
The voice cut through air, no shouting required, and the crowd parted like it had been trained to. A woman stepped through the gap, older, sharp-eyed, dressed the same plainly as the rest but carrying herself like she wasn't. She looked Y/N over once, head to foot, and whatever she saw made her expression settle into something unreadable.
“This way,” she commanded, turning without waiting to see if Y/N would follow.
Y/N followed, because the alternative was standing alone in a courtyard full of strangers who had a keen interest in her, and because some part of her, the same part that had told her to run a minute ago, was telling her now that this woman, at least, was not a threat.
The inside of the castle was colder than the courtyard.
Torches burned low along stone corridors, throwing long shadows that moved before Y/N's eyes could catch up to them, and every hallway smelled faintly of woodsmoke and something herbal underneath it, rosemary maybe, or sage.
The ceilings dropped lower the deeper they went. Servants pressed themselves to the walls to let the pair pass, and not one of them looked away, dishrags and buckets and armfuls of linen forgotten in their hands as they stared.
Y/N kept her chin up and her eyes forward and her arms wrapped tight around herself, and tried very hard not to think about ovens, about the fact that fairy stories always seemed to start exactly like this, lost girl, strange house, kind old woman leading her further inside.
The doors at the end of the corridor were tall, dark wood banded with iron, and the woman pushed them open without knocking.
Heat rolled out first, a fire built high in a hearth at the far wall, and then noise, easy overlapping conversation and the clink of cutlery against plate.
It was a dining room, long table down the center of it, laden with food Y/N didn't recognize and food she did, and around it sat four boys who had clearly stopped paying attention to anything but each other and their dinner.
Their cloaks, unusual things, layered and asymmetric, dyed in deep colors that didn't quite match any court fashion Y/N knew, hung loose off the backs of their chairs. One of them had his boots up on the seat beside him. Another was gesturing with his fork mid-sentence, sauce dripping unnoticed onto the table. A goblet sat balanced at the very edge of the wood, one shift away from falling, and nobody at that table seemed to register it as a problem.
However, the most prominent sound in the room was the music that seemed to fill every corner of the room without a proper source.
The headwoman cleared her throat.
Nothing happened the first time. She did it again, sharper, and this time four heads turned in near unison, conversation and song dying mid word.
Y/N felt every one of those four sets of eyes land on her at once, and she had never in her life been more aware of the state of her, braids coming loose from its ends, dress fine and clearly foreign and grass stained at the hem, hands twisted so tight that they had gone stiff. Nobody said anything. The fire popped in the silence. Somewhere behind her, one of the servants who'd followed them shifted their weight, and the sound of it seemed enormous.
"Found her wandering the east grounds," the headwoman said, into the silence that had been left behind. "Just past the stone wall. Didn't so much as look at the wards until she tried to leave again, and that's when they finally caught her."
That got a reaction. One of the boys, the one with his boots still up on the empty chair, sat forward enough to plant them properly on the floor.
"Didn't alert till she tried to leave?" he said. "That's not how they work. They're supposed to catch anything the second it crosses the boundary."
"I'm aware of how the wards work, thank you Lord Edward." The headwoman didn't so much as glance at him. "Which is why I brought her straight here instead of to the kitchens."
That seemed to mean something to the two closest to her, because their easy, sprawling posture around the table sharpened all at once. Forks were set down. The one who'd been gesturing mid-sentence finally seemed to notice the sauce dripping off the end of his utensil onto the table and didn't move to wipe it up, too busy looking at Y/N instead.
She did not enjoy being looked at like that. Like a puzzle someone had found in the wrong drawer.
"She hasn't said anything," the headwoman went on, when nobody else filled the silence. "Not since I found her. Not a word, the whole walk in." A pause, considering. "I did wonder, at first, if she couldn't."
"Couldn't what," said the boy nearest the fire, not looking up from where he was still cutting into something on his plate.
"Speak."
That got him to look up. And she quickly realized that all the attention in the room was on her.
Y/N felt the word land in her chest before she could stop it, felt her mouth open on instinct to say I'm not mute, I can hear you, I understand every single thing you're saying, I just don't know if I'm allowed to speak or if speaking will get me thrown in a dungeon or worse, and what came out instead was nothing. Her throat had closed up somewhere between the courtyard and this room and refused, absolutely refused, to cooperate now that it mattered.
Which, in hindsight, did not help her case.
"Huh," said the one by the fire, and went back to his food like the matter was settled.
"She's not deaf," the headwoman said, a little defensively, like she'd caught herself in an accusation she hadn't meant to make. "She flinched at the horn same as anyone would've. Just seems she's decided not to talk."
The four sets of eyes turned back to Y/N, considering this new information with the same mild curiosity someone might give a cat that refused to come when called.
Y/N opened her mouth again. Closed it again. If she started explaining now, first word out being ‘I'm not from here, I don't know where here even is, and also where exactly am I’, she had a feeling that was going to go over even worse than silence.
So she stayed quiet, and let them think what they wanted.