I set my plate down on Father’s desk and thumped into the visitor’s chair. Father closed and locked the door, then sat behind his desk, while Dad pulled a chair off to the side. I stared at him for a long moment, knowing he was in the wrong place.
“What is it?”
“You’re supposed to sit with him,” I said, jabbing my fork toward Father.
Dad arched an eyebrow. “I need room to eat.”
“Can you explain the problem?” Father asked.
I took a deep breath, trying to put the feeling into words. “Everything feels like I’ve done it before, but nothing happens the same way twice.”
“If nothing happens the same way twice, how do you know it’s happened before?” Dad asked.
I stared at my plate, too distracted and frustrated to feel hungry. “I wake up in my bed, when I’m supposed to be somewhere else—somewhere far away.”
“Do you know where?” Father asked.
I shook my head, then paused as a place came to mind. “Maybe Misfortune?”
My fathers exchanged a look, then Father reached into his desk and pulled out a stack of letters. “We planned to talk to you about this today,” Father said as he handed me the stack.
I weighed the stack in my hands. This interaction felt new, unrehearsed. I unfolded the first one and scanned the contents. Familiar words jumped out from the page:next generation, Kingdom Defense Spell, wedding, quest. The last one in the stack was an invitation from Queen Davina of Misfortune for everyone to send their unmarried children to a meeting that would happen next week.
“This,” I said, holding up the letter and waving it for emphasis. “I need to go to this.”
“Does it spark a specific memory?” Father asked. “Or just a feeling?”
I focused on the idea of the meeting, tried to pry it open to see its secrets. It remained tightly locked against me.If only I had some mental lockpicks.Another image came to me, a blurry figure with short, dark hair crouched in front of a door, carefully working their picks into the lock. A half-memory, or my imagination? “A feeling. Like I’ve been there before even though I know I haven’t.”
Dad took the letter from me and grinned down at it. “We almost met in Misfortune.”
Father arched an eyebrow and dryly replied, “I wouldn’t call that party a fond memory.”
“Why not? It’s how we got—” Dad cut himself off, his brow furrowing as he glanced at me. “I see what you mean.”
I straightened in my chair. “You felt it too?”
“The memory is as slippery as a lubed up—”
“Rick.”
“—uh, I mean, a … dammit, Brendon, I can’t think of a better metaphor. The point is, it’s slippery, and the harder I try to grab it, the more it squirms in my hand.”
Father sighed and rubbed his eyes. Then he froze and said, “No, you’re right. There’s something … I was drunk for most of it, so I don’t remember much. And I think that’s important too.”
I tossed the letter onto the table, where everyone could see it. “So the problem is focused on Misfortune.”
“Or something that happened in Misfortune,” Father agreed. He picked up the letter and stared at it for a long while. “Alright, we’ll go tothe meeting. Perhaps some of the other champions and their families are experiencing the same memory fog.”
“We should fill in Franny and Kit when we pick up Delilah,” Dad said.
Normally, whenever Delilah came into the conversation, I groaned at the thought of my annoying little cousin. For the first time—that I could remember, at least—I was looking forward to seeing her. She was part of this, I knew. Maybe if we put our heads together, we could form one whole memory from our fragmented pieces.
Five Days Later
On the Road to Woe
Napping
