Where the Wind Goes

Chapter 3 - Miss Irina

Irina Pender did not know what to do with herself when she was alone. The morning had been a frustrating string of disappointments, and it had all started because Artemis stood her up for breakfast. She'd felt so awkward, sitting there watching condensation bead on the side of her pink glass of juice while the desert sun rose overhead. She tried not to notice the attendants shifting nervously, eyeing how she anxiously pushed a fig back and forth across her plate.

"Perhaps Master Doldoorian has been summoned to a meeting," one of the attendants suggested as she removed his empty place setting.

"That's possible." Iri straightened her spine and reminded herself to look stately and composed. "He is a very busy man."

The attendant had simply nodded obligingly and then disappeared through the gold silk curtains that hung in the open doorway, and Iri let herself wilt back down into the chair. She was already resigned to the fact that it was going to be a lousy day when a messenger arrived, announcing that Artemis wouldn't be joining her for breakfast.

"You don't say," she mumbled dryly, snatching her satchel off the back of her chair. If Artemis didn't want to see her, there were other people who would.

But apparently there weren't. She wandered the dirt lanes for some time, looking for any way to make herself busy. All throughout the settlement, people were at work, making repairs from the last broga, a woefully vague term the Council used to describe all sorts of weird magical outbursts. Last night's broga had been a sudden bout of geysers that flooded the city of tents. Events like that happened all the time in Veralia– hurricane-force winds carrying pollen that poisoned their fruit trees, colorful glass that rained from the sky, massive vines that threatened to collapse the old mines. These phenomena had been happening more and more, ever since Iri's grandmother had disappeared.

It made for constant construction- tears in tent fabric that needed to be sewn up, caravans reinforced with heavy wooden beams. Some small houses had begun to pop up, built from the smorgasbord of scrap material. Meanwhile, far off in the distance, the marble walls stood guard over the city they'd left behind, tangles of thistles spilling over the gates.

Iri wanted to help, but she'd learned long ago that she'd just be in the way. With no magical ability, she had to do everything by hand. Even toddlers were more useful– at least they could levitate tools up to their parents.

She found herself wandering towards the most isolated place in all of Veralia. Far across the desert, where the horizon met the sky, her world seemed to end as if it were cut off like the edge of a map. But beyond that, lay an island of rolling fields floating in the nothingness. A blanket of twilight stars enveloped the land, and time seemed to stand still there. The island was a bridge between today and tomorrow, housing thirteen doors that could transport someone to all the known realms.

Not that any of them worked anymore. She felt the heavy iris whistle on a chain around her neck. It had been used by her mother to summon doorways to countless worlds. But both she and Iri's grandmother had gone missing when she was a kid, and now the whistle was a useless hunk of silver.

Still, every day Iri hoped her family would come walking back in through one of those doors.

The doors were housed in cottages, only one of which was inhabited anymore. She knocked on its front door and waited, but Joy, the wildling who lived there, didn't answer. So she picked her way through the garden beds, and poked her head in the open window.

"Hello?"

Like most of the forest folk, Joy could go unseen if she wanted, blending in with the lush green landscape, so Iri didn't waste time looking for her. She climbed in through the open window.