by Sofia Daniel
Morning sunlight turned the highlights in her burnt orange hair golden, and a stiff breeze blew it into her eyes. She tucked her locks behind her ears and laughed. “The Royal Fae Academy isn’t a prison. We can leave at any time as long as we can catch up on our work.”
My brows rose. “What’s on the schedule today?”
Up ahead, a row of kissing trees twisted together in patterns so intricate, it was hard to tell where one shrub began and the other ended.
Helen ducked her head to gallop under a low-hanging branch. “Just more of the same.”
I galloped after her. “Does anyone ever graduate from the remedial class?”
“It’s rare,” she said over her shoulder, guiding the horse around a low shrub. “Magic isn’t something that’s taught. You either have it, or you don’t.”
“Then why bother—”
She slowed to a trot, letting me catch up with her pale horse. The path ahead widened to accommodate two riders. “Our class is a dumping ground. A place to hold broken faeries and unwanted half-bloods until high society decides their fate.”
I grimaced at the word. Fate. Destiny. Future. They all sounded like curses. We continued through the well-trodden path flanked by sycamore trees on both sides, whose seeds spiraled down to us like the helicopters that sometimes landed on the United Nation’s offshore rigs.
The gaps between the trees grew narrower, forming a dense canopy that blotted out the sun, and the air grew heavy and thick. Our horses slowed, looking like they were struggling to move forward against a strong wind, but there was no hurricane, only still air.
“What’s happening?” I shouted.
Helen pulled on her reins, making her horse rear. “It’s a trap. Turn back!”
Before I could react, my horse froze in mid-stride, along with the rest of my body.
Chapter 16
Shock morphed into terror, which crept across my skin like the caress of a thousand tiny talons. My chest tightened to the point where my lungs on took in the shallowest of breaths, and my eyes widened. The canopy thickened, blocking out the remaining streams of sunlight and plunging Helen and me into darkness.
“Helen?” I whispered, trying to turn my head.
At the edge of my vision, Helen dangled in mid-air off the rearing horse, looking a second away from being trampled. Shit. I pulled at my arms, strained at the invisible force holding me in place, but it wouldn’t budge. The only thing I could move was my jaws.
“Who’s out there?” I shouted into the woods.
The twitter of a mockingbird was my only answer. “Who’s out there?” it cried. “Who-who-who!”
Mockingbirds occasionally ventured down to populated areas, usually on days when the fog got so thick, you couldn’t tell a dwarf from an ogre. They loved to lure children away from their homes by pretending to be playmates. I squeezed my eyes shut then opened them again. This couldn’t be a glamor. Few were powerful enough to make a person think they couldn’t move.
“Well, well, well,” drawled a mocking voice that certainly didn’t belong to a bird.
“Gala,” I snarled. And for reasons I couldn’t fathom, the tightness of my skin eased. She wanted me dead, but I doubted that she had the guts to kill a person up close and in cold blood.
Lady Gala stepped out from behind a thick trunk with Lady Aster at her heels. The curvy, crimson-haired faerie wrinkled her nose as though the sight of me on the back of a horse filled the woods with an unpleasant stench.
“What do you two want?” I said. “The next trial is oral sex.”
“Which I’m certain you will win,” said Lady Gala. “We all saw how you swallowed the janitor’s sword.”
Lady Aster placed her hands on her hips. “You looked like a starved bird gobbling a worm.”
“So, you’ve trapped me here to stop me from out-sucking you?” I asked.
“Shut your filthy mouth!” Lady Gala snapped. “We’re here to make sure you don’t defile our princes with your human taint.”
I bared my teeth, straining my muscles to break through my invisible bonds. “What’s wrong?” I asked. “The two of you can’t confront me without resorting to dark magic?”
“Fine!” With a click of a finger, the air thinned around my body.
Overbalancing, I fell off the horse and hit the ground with my hands and knees. Branches and stones cut into my palms, my knees, my shins, radiating pain through my limbs.
“Shit!”
A boot struck me in the gut, making me arch my back. “That’s for cheating fate.” Lady Aster kicked me in the solar plexus with enough force to knock the wind out of my lungs. “And that’s for being such a human whore!”
Pain ricocheted through my insides. I reared up and grabbed at the faerie’s legs. “Bitch.”
Lady Aster jumped back, flapping her wings to propel herself through the air. The movement sent bits of leaf litter flying through the clearing. Her crimson hair spread out from her head like a nest of disturbed snakes, making her look like a fire sprite from deep within the mound.
“Coward.” I shuffled toward her on my knees, balling my fists and aching to pummel the prettiness out of her face. Before I could stagger to my feet, someone looped a metal chain around my neck and yanked hard.
“How do you like it?” Lady Gala placed a foot in the center of my back. “This is murder-grade iron, guaranteed to cause a faerie’s painful death.”
The chain’s two-inch-long links dug into my neck and cut off my air. I rasped, “S-stop!”
Lady Gala snarled with the effort of keeping the chain taut. “I won’t let you use that disgusting mouth to steal away our princes.”
“Kill her!” Lady Aster hovered above us, her teeth bared in a mask of hatred. “Don’t stop until she’s dead.”
As I gasped for air, thoughts whirled through my head—mostly premonitions of being strangled to death or having the iron burn my head straight off my neck. I thrashed from left to right, anything to loosen the chain or throw the crazed faerie on my back off-balance, but the grip around my neck must have been sealed by magic.
“Filthy halfling.” Lady Aster floated down and whacked me across one cheek.
Fury surged through my veins, and my arm shot out. I slammed my fist into her nose, reveling in the crunch of bone against my knuckles.
“Ah!” Her head snapped back. Blood spattered over my face, which popped and sizzled against my iron garrote.
Lady Gala gasped, and the iron around my neck loosened. Air whooshed out of my lungs, and I grabbed at the chain, pulled, and jerked her to the side. She stumbled into a tree trunk with a satisfying thud.
My windpipe loosened. I inhaled a huge breath and scrambled away from the fallen faerie. Chinks of light streamed in through the canopy onto the leaf litter. Maybe hurting the faeries had weakened their spell. I wasn’t going to remain on my hands and knees to find out.
As I staggered to my feet, the iron chain dropped to the forest floor.
“You beast.” Lady Aster flew overhead like a demented butterfly. She clutched her nose, crimson blood dripping between her fingers.
Blinking the dots out of my eyes, I swung my fists and yelled, “Come any closer, and I’ll pull off your fucking wings!”
She sped away.
I turned to Lady Gala, who crawled back toward where she’d left Helen dangling precariously off her horse. Thick, leather gauntlets covered her hands, which she had presumably needed to strangle me with iron.
Baring my teeth, I snarled, “You…”
With a gust of wind, her gauntlets blew away, and she raised her hands, sharpening her fingernails into claws of ice. “Vile creature.” Color leeched from her platinum hair, and her skin turned translucent. “I’m going to tear out your heart and present it to Prince Rory on a block of ice.”
“Fuck that.” I picked up the iron chain with my bare hands and fashioned it into a short loop. “What happens when this touches your face?”
Her features dropped. “You
wouldn’t dare murder me in front of a witness. My father’s the Duke of Nevermore!”
“This is a trial to the death, you moron!” I swung the chain like a lasso.
Lady Gala opened her mouth and screamed, blowing out a gust of air so fierce and cold, it froze the surface of my skin. Squinting against the attack of frost, I turned around and protected my eyes.
The wind lashed at my back, not easing until her voice echoed from far up in the trees. I held position until I remembered that Helen ws still in danger.
“Shit!” I dropped the chain, dashed through the remnants of the Fated’s magic toward the frozen horse.
Helen slid further off the mount, her face twisted in a mask of panic. I grabbed my friend around the waist, pulled her off the saddle, and scrambled back toward the trees.
A heartbeat later, the spell vanished, and the horse twisted around with a blood-curdling shriek.
Helen flinched in my arms. “What happened?”
“You were right.” I set her onto her feet and pointed at the chain on the ground. “It was a trap. The Fated wanted to strangle me with iron.”
Helen stepped back, as though the chain was a rattlesnake. Her gaze landed on my neck. “That touched you and didn’t burn?”
“Apparently, I’m impervious.” I bent down, picked up the iron chain, and weighed it in my hands. Two pounds of scrap metal could provide a three-generation family in Doolish enough to live like kings for a month.
Helen whistled for her horse, which cantered further into the trees. “Are you alright?”
My fingertips slid over the tender skin on my sore neck. “I’ll live.”
She gave me a tight smile that made me wonder if she was already anticipating my death at the hands of the Fated. “That was sloppy of them to gift you with all that iron.”
I stared down at the chain coiled on my palm. “At least I can lash out with this if they get close.”
“The wards must have informed them that you were passing.” After three tries at calling for the horse, the beast trotted through the trees and offered its nose. Helen reached into her pocket, fed it a cube of something white, and gave the horse several calming strokes on the muzzle.
“Let’s hurry to the Mound and see if you can find a blacksmith willing to fashion that into defensive weapons,” she said.
My dappled horse trotted out through the trees with its nostrils flared.
“But I don’t have money beads.” I patted its flank in thanks for returning.
“You won’t need any if you let him keep some of that iron for himself.” After mounting, she leaned over to offer my horse a cube.
As the horse ate from the palm of her hand, I placed a steadying hand on the base of the horse’s mane and hoisted myself onto its back. “Let’s go.”
The ride through the rest of Prudence Woods was uneventful, apart from a pair of silver unicorns riding at our sides. Although Helen reached out to pet the one closest to her, I stared ahead, ignoring the beautiful creatures.
Recent events had heightened my paranoia, and I couldn’t help thinking they were another trap. Everyone knew unicorns were judges of virtue and only allowed a virgin’s touch. If I so much as looked one in the eye, they would gore me with their horns.
Eventually, we reached the edge of the woods, and the unicorns rode away. Poppies the size of sunflowers occupied a field beyond the thinning trees, and around them stood a tree large enough to fit my entire house.
“The entrance of the mound is through that trunk,” she said.
“Do we have to leave the horses behind?” I strained my eyes to see a hidden doorway on the bark, but it just looked like a regular old tree.
“We’ll need them to get around,” she replied.
As we galloped through the poppy field, the flowers on Helen’s side dipped their heads, but the ones on my side stayed upright. The morning sun shone down, lighting the ends of their petals a bright scarlet. For a moment, I thought it was also warming the side of my face, but I turned to meet Helen’s assessing gaze.
“What?” I asked.
“Those girls see you as a major threat,” she said.
I raised my shoulders into a shrug. “Or they relish the opportunity to exercise their inner bitches.”
“There’s no inner with them,” Helen replied with a chuckle.
Several horses grazed at the rapunzel growing around the tree trunk. We rode around them to the other side of the tree, which seemed to stretch forever. I chalked the experience up to some kind of intricate ward I probably wouldn’t understand.
“You used to be friends with the Fated,” I said.
She ran a hand through her orange hair. “Back before their wings glowed, we all sat together because our fathers were dukes.”
“What?” I stared at the side of her face. “For some reason, I thought those girls had been fated since birth.”
“Their wings glowed on Samhain.”
“When did you lose your magic?” I asked.
“The day before,” she replied.
A series of knots appeared on the tree’s bark, along with intricate swirls and patterns that seemed to be some sort of code. I didn’t ask, as I couldn’t help thinking about Helen’s former friends each becoming fated to the princes the same time she lost her magic.
Sucking in a deep breath, I asked, “Do you ever think—”
“All the time,” she said, her voice cracking with pain. “King Oberon wanted the princes to rule together with a single queen, and he was in talks with all the dukes about it. After Samhain, when fate supposedly assigned each prince a mate, the king and queen decided they would each rule the courts instead.”
I rubbed the back of my neck, wondering if whatever happened to Helen had a counter-curse. “Did you tell anyone?”
“My father,” she spat. “But he dismissed my suspicion as nonsense.”
We continued cantering around the tree, reaching the grazing horses I was sure we had seen from our approach from the poppy field. Maybe this ward required us to circle the tree a specific number of times.
“Is there such a thing as a faerie doctor?” I asked.
She slowed down to a trot. “My father sent for a healer who couldn’t find anything wrong with me and recommended me to the remedial class.”
“Oh.” It seemed fishy that the Duke of Medietas hadn’t done more to help his daughter. “Have you tried asking a hag?”
Her nose wrinkled. “Whatever for?”
“They seem to know everything or at least a way to start,” I said with a shrug.
Hags were virtually indistinguishable from old ladies until they demonstrated their power. While they didn’t have the magic or the majesty of high faeries, they could be just as effective in getting things done.
I trotted at Helen’s side, wondering how long it would take to enter the mound. When Dad went missing, the hag we paid to search for him had said she could find him, but she wanted a slice of my destiny. Sicily forbade me to make such a terrible deal, saying that Dad had probably snuck onto a UN vessel and would send for us when he had settled in the outside world. I used to think she was naive and overly optimistic, but now I wonder if that had just been a front to protect me from making a terrible sacrifice.
“Here we are.” Helen pulled on the reins, and her horse stopped.
A bark knot expanded into an archway that led into darkness. Helen turned to me and grinned. “Keep your eyes closed until you feel sunlight on your face.”
“Alright.”
The archway stretched large enough to accommodate us side-by-side on horseback, and we rode in. I tensed my muscles, ready for an attack in case the Mound had a ward as powerful and vindictive as the Royal Fae Academy’s.
“What happens if I open my eyes?” I whispered.
“It feels like falling,” she said. “The Mound is larger than the Isle of Fae because its levels stretch far beneath the sea.”
My insides trembled. Elijah once told me that if the inha
bitants of the Mound ever left, there wouldn’t be enough land on the surface to accommodate them all. It made sense, considering that creatures like drakes and fire sprites lived in its depths.
Images of those bat-winged faeries filled my mind. They probably dwelled in the level of evil. “Are we going to a specific area?”
“You can open your eyes, now.”
Blinking, I looked around to find us standing in the middle of what appeared to be a giant amphitheater. Covered stalls stood on over a dozen concentric circles, each spreading out to increasingly higher levels. Beyond the tiers, mountains stretched into the distance with a view of the palace on one side and the academy on the other. This made no sense.
“Wait a minute,” I said. “I thought the Mound would be—”
“Dark?” she asked with a twinkle in her eyes.
“The Mound is underground, isn’t it?” I tracked the movements of two topless hobgoblin females strolling by with skirts that barely covered their goat legs.
A pair of blue-skinned pixies flew past on bumblebee wings. Each held buckets of water that splashed and sloshed in its container without spilling a single drop. I tilted my head to the side and wondered if the bucket contained some sort of water-based creature.
“The wards that separate each level provides a view of the outside and ambient lighting.” She walked ahead on her horse and beckoned. “Come on. Our first port is the auction house, then we’ll find you a blacksmith.”
“Right.” I stared up ahead at a podium, where a male faerie with leathery, black wings stood beside a trio of pixies wearing ragged and stained togas.
This male seemed more like an emaciated bat compared to the four warrior-types who had taken Sicily. Around the faerie, several high faeries shot sparks of light in the air, presumably bidding on the little creatures. My heart sank at the sight. Nobody had told me the pixies were enslaved.
“There he is!” cried a shrill voice.
The sounds of feminine giggles distracted me from the auction, and I turned to find a crowd of female faeries gathered around a specific individual.
He was a single, beaming male dressed in the Royal Fae Academy uniform with cerise hair, high cheekbones, twinkling forest green eyes, and a mouthful of perfect, white teeth.