Free The Familiars #4: Palace of Dreams by Adam Jay Epstein, Andrew Jacobson

and crocuses were in bloom.
    For several miles the Three walked alongside a cow and the dairyman who tended to her. Still in disguise, Skylar engaged in friendly conversation with the cow, and while much of the chitchat revolved around the best-tasting grass in the region, a few purposeful questions were able to make it clear that news of Loranella’s near demise had yet to spread beyond the castle walls. Which meant the familiars’ fugitive status was likely unknown as well.
    After passing a trading village, Aldwyn came up over a small hill and the trio found themselves staring down at the Ebs, a thick band of blue hugged on either side by pebbly shores. The waters sparkled under the high sun.
    “Hey, look at that inn,” Gilbert said, pointing a suction-cupped finger toward a wooden building just off the main road. “Remind you of anything?”
    Aldwyn couldn’t help but smile.
    “Looks just like Tammy’s,” he said. She was the orange-and-white house cat who had invited the familiars to stay in the innkeeper’s barn during their first adventure across Vastia. “There’s even a cat door out front.”
    Spice yachts and fishing boats glided upstream, propelled by phantom sails and silver oars. A golden bridge crossed the river, hovering above the waters with no wooden beams to support it.
    “Do you think Banshee and Galleon had a hand in that?” Skylar asked.
    “I don’t know, but it looks like some wizard was definitely showing off,” Gilbert replied.
    “Then it probably was Galleon,” Skylar said.
    Bridges like these had been magically erected all over the land in place of the ones that had become river dragon fodder during the Uprising. And Banshee and Galleon, who stood with the circle of heroes, had been traveling across Vastia rebuilding the queendom to its former glory.
    A pair of soldiers stood at security checkpoints on both sides of the bridge. Lines of humans and animals stretched down the road. The four guards held magnifying scopes up to their eyes, viewing each traveler as they passed.
    “Those are revealing glasses,” Skylar said. “They’re able to expose any illusion by creating a yellow aura around it.”
    “Is there any way to counteract it?” Gilbert asked.
    “Those devices are foolproof,” Skylar said. “They were the creation of the great inventor Orachnis Protho, first used against the Phantasmanians, an evil sect of illusionists seeking to overthrow King Brannfalk. I never imagined one would be used against me.”
    “We’ll have to find another way across,” Gilbert said.
    “Not necessarily,” Aldwyn said. “Maybe instead of making the revealing glasses not work, we can cause them to work too well.”
    “I don’t follow,” Gilbert said.
    “Skylar, would you be able to cast an illusion on everyone standing in that line?” Aldwyn asked.
    “I don’t know. I’ve never tried something of such magnitude before. Even if I could, I’m not sure how long I could hold it. Why?”
    “If every man, woman, and animal trying to cross that bridge appears as if they’re hiding behind an illusion, those soldiers might start to think there’s something wrong with the glasses.”
    “I do hold the Nearhurst record for most illusions conjured at one time,” Skylar said. “It’s worth a shot.”
    The blue jay lifted her wing and it began to tremble. Then right before Aldwyn’s and Gilbert’s eyes . . . nothing happened. Everyone standing in the line appeared just as they did before Skylar raised her wing.
    “Not to be the slow frog here, but I’m still confused,” Gilbert said. “I don’t see any illusions at all.”
    “You’re not supposed to,” Skylar said. “I just conjured identical illusions of each person and animal in line. That way when they reach the bridge, the guards will see a yellow aura around them, but instead of suspecting that everyone here is trying to pull a fast one, they’ll have no choice but to think that something is amiss with their