Page 44 of The Court the Fae Forgot
He left us then, presumably to take a turn scouting out the local area while Zev and Finch finished setting up our meager camp for the day. Even long after his actual shadow had disappeared into the trees, the shadow of his words remained. He had a hold over these other two fae, though what hold that might be, I didn’t know.
Like the answer he’d given me when I asked about their—our—magic, I supposed only time would tell.
After all, he was right, as much as I hated to admit it.
There was plenty of time stretching before us, just as there was empty road. Between Shiel and Finch—or more like thanks to Shiel, despite Finch’s interruptions—I’d soon lean the true history of the fae that came to our world.
Or, at the very least, some semblance of the truth.
If he wouldn’t give it to me, then I’d find a fae who would … and I had an idea of where to start.
I might be fae now, too, but that didn’t mean the humanity in me died the instant they told me. I still felt a bond to the human side of me I’d believed in all of my life. Some bonds, some ties just didn’t die overnight.
Some, I doubted, wouldn’t die in a lifetime.
However long that might now be.
CHAPTERSIXTEEN
Shiel’s outburst—ifit could even be called that—had unsettled all of us.
For me, it was a reminder of the gap between us, of the fact that I was their captive as much as I was their companion. They’d shown up and ruined my life and then claimed to rescue me from the problem that they, themselves had caused.
And then, when confronted with this truth, they didn’t even try to deny it.
They just refused to apologize for it.
Lumping them all in together, Shiel, Finch, and Zev, wasn’t entirely fair, I know, but I didn’t know what else to do. There was an obvious hierarchy to the trio, with Shiel at their head and Finch and Zev at his heel. I couldn’t trust Shiel, so I couldn’t trust any of them.
Not that I should be trustinganyfae, even now they claimed I was one of them.
I still wasn’t so sure for myself.
I’d read a faerie phrase, felt the return of their glamour, but that was it.
It could still turn out to be a fluke, to say nothing of me actually being this long-lost princess.
I didn’t need to look into a mirror to know I certainly didn’t look like a fae. I didn’t before, and I most definitely didn’t now—not after the days on horseback stretched on without a single proper’s night’s rest to split between the four of us. The days were getting longer, and with it the heat of the sun nearly insufferable. We were heading south, the miles carrying us closer and closer to that sun that filtered through the sparse coverage of leaves that Shiel allowed to shield us during our resting hours. The roads had grown busier too, each town that we passed larger than the last.
On the odd occasion that Shiel or one of the others slipped into town for new provisions, the rest of us were allowed to sink a little further into the forest, to keep from being spotted. The visit of one fae caused enough of a stir, the visit of three? Four?
I’d tried on more than one occasion to pry an answer out of Finch and Zev whenever Shiel left us alone, but where Finch found a thousand ways to answer without really answering, Zev just smiled in silence, or shook his head in silence, or scowled in silence.
It was strange how quickly I longed for that first night, before something in Shiel had snapped. It was like he’d forgotten himself for a moment, allowed himself to be open with me when I needed him, and then the moment he discovered his mistake, he’d locked himself away. And he’d taken, in part, the other two fae with him.
For though we travelled together, the gap between us only seemed to widen as the days grew. I was sure it had something to do with our collective exhaustion, the heat, the lack of sleep, the dwindling supply of faerie food quickly being substituted with human provisions from the towns that we visited.
More than that, though, was the one thing that none of us acknowledged.
The Wildness.
It called to me more and more each day, to speak nothing of thenights.
My fitful rest beneath the sun was interrupted more often than not by dreams of the dark fae. These dreams, I could only imagine, would be nightmares in the grips of a full night’s rest.
Just as I suspected the dark-haired fae, I suspected Shiel too—that part of his reason for having us travel in the night instead of sleep was to avoid this very thing.
Because it wasn’t just in my sleep that I saw Icarus, I’d begun to see now, too, the lies that Shiel had spoken of. In the night, in the hours when the shadows grew deepest, I began to see other things, too. I saw figures. Faces. Creatures. I never looked at them, never directly. I didn’t want to feel the forest draw me in as it had twice now.
