by C. Gockel
The shadow was gone. And so was the stone.
The surprise caused her breath to hitch. Had she been tricked? Had the stone even been there before? Had the cuelebre found her out and was only playing with her?
Please no. Please don’t let it know I tried to fool it.
Her eyes darted to the path out. Could she make a run for it? No, she couldn’t. While it traced a full circle of the entrance cave, the cuelebre’s tail had planted itself right between herself and escape. And where was “escape” anyway? She had found the opening of the path by jumping down a hole. She couldn’t very well jump up again and be out now.
The cuelebre slithered back to the opening of the corridor, its tail still trailing far behind its head and right where Lily wished to be. Its head rose over the offering and its opening jaws cast a gruesome shadow against the wall as the cuelebre’s head dove to claim its due. Part of Lily’s mind noted the lone shadow, noted the glimpse of darkness along with the size of the teeth and the glistening trail of saliva over the tongue.
Most of her could only chant the mantra—Eat it, eat it, eat it!
It did.
Lily breathed out a sigh of relief.
And then the cave exploded.
The bun of bread couldn’t have been very far down the cuelebre’s gullet when it reared its head, its long body tensing and convulsing, shaking Lily to the ground. It roared and the sound, beyond being reminiscent of an earthquake, set the cave itself to tremble.
“Treacherous mortal!” The agonized syllables collided like tectonic plates and the cave walls splintered, gravel and small stones raining down on Lily.
And then the cuelebre’s head darted at her, its eyes shining with immortal rage, its teeth and jaws strong enough to break her just as the guardian’s refuge was breaking all around and over and under her. She tried to scramble to her feet, but the cuelebre moved too fast and suddenly the shadow cast by that gaping death was upon her—
But the shadow moved faster than the creature itself and shoved her. She fell and skidded to the side and the cuelebre’s teeth gouged out the very stone floor where she had been but a moment before.
Cool water splattered over Lily’s face and a chilly hand pulled her up. And there, in place of the shadow that had flickered through the cave, stood Troy.
Lily felt safer.
“This way,” he said, diving toward the cuelebre’s trashing head.
She faltered, every instinct she had screaming for her to duck the other way. “Are you crazy? It’s going to eat us!”
“He will trap us otherwise!” Troy countered, sparing her a glance as he hauled her along.
He was right, Lily saw as they both rushed at the very jaws of the creature that wanted to kill them. The cuelebre might be in its death’s throes, but still it tried to circle them, creating a wall with its own trashing body.
Again, the massive head dove at them. Lily read Troy’s tension just a fraction of a second before he threw the both of them down, using their momentum to tumble under the cuelebre’s mouth. The scales of its throat were close enough to touch and the heat they radiated turned Troy’s skin warm against hers.
Then, they were clear. The cuelebre had to maneuver around to restart its pursuit and the convulsions that shook it would make that very, very difficult. Still, Troy got them both to their feet and kept running, the fear in his gaze not diminishing in the slightest. The floor kept roiling beneath their feet, and the cracks in the walls became wider.
“What’s going on?” Lily shouted over the falling stones.
“The cave is collapsing,” Troy said. “We must find a path out and do it now.”
“The entrance?”
“Already gone.”
They reached the corridor leading out of the cave and Lily looked back. The cuelebre wasn’t dead, but it was dying; the scales that should’ve protected it kept the iron inside its body as it burned and poisoned it. The cave itself seemed to contort, and indeed, the spot where Lily had first appeared was already covered by debris and rolling rocks.
“Do not stop!” Troy’s voice jerked her out of contemplating the destruction and she rushed after him.
“Where are we going?” The spasms from the main room grew and hit the corridor like a whiplash, lifting Lily from the ground. She rolled with the fall as best she could, feeling the jagged edges of crumbled walls and cracked floor piercing her skin and bruising her bones.
Troy didn’t reply. He stood beyond the dais where the stone she had been supposed to fetch had lain, studying the wall. His long fingers danced over the trembling stone, touching here and there, dragging almost gentle caresses over the surface even as it broke.
“Troy? What are you doing?” He ignored her and droplets of water glistened over the wall under his fingertips.
The corridor behind them collapsed. Lily threw herself up the dais, but the ripples caught her and she fell, the stone stairs biting her ribs and her cheek. She tasted blood.
She knew she had to keep running, but for a moment, she couldn’t remember why. She couldn’t tell which was up or down as the remains of the cuelebre’s cave twisted and shattered around her. She couldn’t hear the deafening noise of the earth burying them.
She tried to crawl forward, backward, somewhere, but strong arms held her and lifted her. Without thinking, she wrapped her own arms around Troy’s neck and clung to him for consciousness as he threw them both through the opening of a new path.
Before darkness claimed her, she thought she saw a woman over Troy’s shoulder. She was a beautiful creature of black hair and pale, glowing skin, and she stood under the falling stones. Laughing.
Chapter Nineteen
Lily came around to a strange mixture of dull pain and safe comfort. She didn’t want to open her eyes and tear her mind from the calming emptiness where it had floated for who knew how long, but there was a vague sense of urgency that told her she should.
I’m running out of time.
And she knew it to be true, even if she couldn’t tell what the deadline was for.
She stirred, tried to force movement into her limbs, and a cool weight fell on her shoulder.
“Careful, Lily,” said a voice over her, very close. Troy. “Your body requires more rest.”
“I can’t afford it,” she croaked, struggling to open her eyes and sit up.
“Because time is running out?” Troy sighed. He sounded tired. “I believe I have already told you that time is meaningless here, have I not?”
“Where are we?”
“Safe.” A smirk, tangible in his tone.
“We’ve had this conversation before,” she mumbled.
“If the familiarity helps you feel better, we may rehearse it as many times as you wish.”
“Oh, ha ha. Funny.” She tried to twist around to see him and found she was curled on her side, her back pressed against his thigh as he sat sentinel over her. His hand still rested on her shoulder and she welcomed his touch. It worked like an anchor. “Seriously now. Can you tell me what happened?”
“You succeeded in slipping cold iron past the guardian,” he said. “It appears to have killed him, but unfortunately the cave was tied to his existence. He had created his own haven, much like this is mine, and it crumbled to pieces without the will of its maker to hold all the threads together. We were forced to flee.”
“So that place doesn’t exist anymore?”
“Not as you saw it, no.”
“That’s… sort of sad. It was beautiful. In its own way.” Lily felt a shift travel through her back and shoulder. A shrug from Troy.
“It is as it is,” he said.
“Does that mean it was all for nothing? If we can’t go back, we can’t collect the stone. After everything, I botched the bargain.”
Troy’s hand moved from her shoulder, traveled down her arm, and captured her own, pulling it toward him. She rolled with the movement, lying on her back and staring up at him quizzically.
His green eyes
bore into hers and his other hand pressed a smooth, slippery black stone into hers.
“You got it.” Her fingers trembled.
“I stole it while you distracted Cuelebre with the bargain. You did a fair effort this time, but might I recommend against striking deals with every fay you encounter?”
“Wait.” She struggled to sit up but his grip left her hand and returned to her shoulder, holding her down. He gave her a warning glance not to move and she ceased her attempts, but didn’t let go of her questions. She had too many of them. “But why were you there? I thought you wanted no part in the confrontation.”
“I assure you I did not.”
“Was it because of the necklace then?”
His fingers slid to her neck and picked up the silver chain. He held all three charms and studied them, the back of his knuckles brushing the soft skin over the hollow of her throat. She felt her breath catch and he smirked when he noticed, a flash of white peeking between his lips.
He let the pendant fall back into place. “It would appear that is not the reason.”
Lily squinted at it. “When Grandma gave it to me,” she began, “I could have sworn that there was one wilted rose and two in full bloom. But the other day, when we met your friend, the especially weird one? There were two wilted roses. There are two wilted roses now. Does that make sense?”
“Yes.”
There was a moment of silence and Lily stared up with all the stubbornness of a mule until Troy’s lips cracked a thin smile.
“To answer your unasked question, the charms represent the number of times a life will be saved,” he relented. “Blooms for promise and wilted carcasses for what has already come to pass.”
“So you’ve saved Grandma’s life once, and then mine another time.” She let her fingers play with the cool metal, thinking. She wouldn’t bother asking about her grandmother because getting that information could be too tricky, but then… “That doesn’t add up.”
“Does it not?”
“No. You’ve saved me three times already. Once from the bogeys, once from the redcaps, now one from the cuelebre.” She counted each occasion out, tapping her fingers. “But I’ve only spent a bloom. How does that work?”
“In a most complex manner.”
With a huff, she ignored his restraining hand and sat up. Dizziness caught up to her for a moment, but she managed to cover up her swaying under a shift to look away from him.
“You could just say ‘I don’t want to tell you,’ you know,” she said.
“And you might learn to phrase your questions properly, Lily. Each answer obtained is a debt incurred and I cannot understand why you would beg for favors when you already know the truth.”
“Because that’s what people do!” She whirled on him. “We talk about what we know and reassure each other and say important things without the other person having to wrestle each word out of our mouths!”
“That is what humans do,” he said, his cool not breaking in front of her sudden passion. “You would do well to learn to think like us if you want to prosper while straddling both your mortal world and our own.”
Her fire banked, leaving behind the embers of embarrassment. Hugging her knees to her chest, she took deep and even breaths until she regained enough control of her voice that she could sound as calm as he did.
“Okay,” she admitted. “You’re right. I’m not thinking in faerie terms and it’s rushing me from bad situations into dire ones. I’ll try to be smarter from now on.” She dared to smile a little at him. “I guess that just giving me that piece of advice put me in your debt, right?”
Troy laughed and the sound washed over her like a river’s current over pebbles on the shore. “Indeed it did,” he said. “But worry not. I gave up on tallying after our first conversation.”
“Sorry.” Troy arched an eyebrow, still smiling, and Lily sighed. “Another notch?”
“If I were keeping count.”
“Why is saying ‘sorry’ so bad?” Troy went to reply but she held up a hand. “Wait, wait. This is another of those things I already know the answer for, isn’t it? Let me try.” She began to tap her fingers against her lips. “It’s because it means you’ve done something wrong… Because if you apologize to someone, then that means you’ve wronged that person,” she said after a moment.
“And this entitles them to demand compensation for each time you have apologized to them,” said Troy. “Would you care to keep guessing?”
“About the necklace?”
He nodded.
“Sure. Let me think.” She gave him a small, nervous grin. “I’m not sure I remember the wording you used that first time you told me about it,” she confessed. “But you did say before facing the cuelebre that it had to be within your possibilities. Still, that can’t be it because you did manage to save me so, technically speaking, you could. Am I right?”
“You are correct. In fact, even if you do not recall my exact words, you have inadvertently stumbled upon the answer already.”
“Have I? What did I—? Not possibilities, so then saving me. That’s all I said, and that’s not an answer. That’s talking circles.”
“A clue?”
“Yes, please.”
“You should know that ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ are nearly as terrible a misstep as ‘sorry.’”
Lily laughed at his smug smile. “Okay, you! Out with the clue then!”
He regarded her for a moment longer, shaking his head with an amused light in his eyes. When her chuckles subsided, his eyes fell to her necklace, resting in the hollow of her throat.
“Saving you, Lily, must not be mistaken with saving us.”
“That’s not fair,” she said, suddenly subdued. “It doesn’t count because you were there with me? You still saved me and it doesn’t matter that you were in danger too.”
“That was my mistake when crafting the necklace, Lily,” he said with a shrug. “I hope you understand now the importance of detail?”
“Yeah, I think I do.” She bit her lip and plunged on. “There’s a detail I can’t figure out yet.”
“And that is?”
“Why were you there, Troy?” She caught his eye and he let her hold onto it. “You said you didn’t want to. You told me to find another way, but still you came. Why?”
He was silent for so long that Lily had to avert her gaze. He was silent long enough that she was sure he wouldn’t reply. He held his silence, and she felt his attention on her, studying her while their bantering mood dissolved in tension. She bit her lip to keep from fidgeting, and just when she thought she would explode and apologize to him in spite of what she now knew, she felt the back of his fingers against her cheekbone.
She startled and held her breath.
“You are a most peculiar creature, Lily,” he said, his touch sliding down the side of her face and under her chin, tilting her head so she had to look at him. “In my experience, humans will blunder happily to their deaths because they refuse to acknowledge the world as it is, because they do not allow themselves to remember that they are neither alone nor quite as powerful as they believe in the true scope of things. You blunder forward with equal determination and enthusiasm. You court disaster with every step you take toward your goal, but you are conscious of it. And yet your awareness of danger, of how heavily outmatched and how badly outclassed you are, does not seem to arrest you, does it? That is peculiar and interesting indeed, Lily Boyd. Even though I know that only a fool would find foolishness worthy of respect.” He stood up then, a languid unfolding movement that broke contact between them and freed her from the spell of his gaze. “If your curiosity is sated now,” he continued, staring at the tree-line beyond their little clearing, “I would advise you to rest before we return to Glaistig. You shall need your wits and your energy for that encounter and we do not know when another opportunity for sleep and healing will present itself next.”
She wasn’t tired. Her body might have been, but thoughts whirred in
her mind and she felt as powerless to stop them as she was to stop her heart from beating. Her curiosity was far from sated and she longed to continue their conversation even as he turned his back on her and walked to the edge of his riverside haven. Still, there was truth to his words, of course, and the least she could do after he had answered all her questions was respecting the need for distance he was expressing now.
She curled up on the ground and faced him, contemplating the lines of his shoulders and the way stray droplets of water would sometimes drip from his hair down his back, and let the vision of him lull her to sleep.
Chapter Twenty
Lily wouldn’t have thought it possible, but she did manage to sleep long and sound. When she awakened next, the weariness and disorientation she had felt before were gone.
“Are you ready?” Troy said as soon as she blinked her eyes open. He stood a few feet away from her with a restless tension about him that immediately hit her as odd.
“Yeah.” She sat up and stretched her back with as much discretion as she could muster. “In a hurry, are we?”
“I did get the impression that time was of the essence, yes. It runs in a different manner while we are here, but it does run nonetheless.”
Lily looked over at him and couldn’t tell if he was puzzled at her sudden laziness or if he was mocking her usual comments of “when” and “where.”
“You’re right, I guess,” she said. “I’m just not used to moving right after cracking one eye open.”
“If you wish to linger, that would not be a great issue.”
“No, no.” She stood, yawning, and patted her pocket to ensure the stone that would fulfill her part of the bargain was still there. “Lead the way. Is it far?”
“Quite close, in fact.”
He picked up her knapsack on his way and handed it to her. She slung it over her shoulders and fell into step behind him. Instead of heading for the river, as he had the last time, he took a different, winding path that soon had them climbing out of the humid forest.