Page 60 of The Court the Fae Forgot
I did as Shiel directed too, urging the mare onward, my mind still reeling so much from the realization of everything Finch and Shiel had said, that it took me a moment to register where exactly it was he’d told the horse to head. It hadn’t even phased me that the horse had listened to his instructions. I’d had my suspicions that the horses understood their fae masters, but this was the first time I’d actually seen it for myself. It still wasn’t until the horse was about to plunge straight into the forest, straight for its heart, that I fully understood.
I stopped following his order immediately, pulling the reins of the horse tight. The mare let out am angry whinny, her hooves grinding into the dirt and leaves so suddenly that it took every clenched muscle in my body to keep from being thrown from the saddle.
It was no small miracle that Shiel remained seated behind me, too.
“What are you doing?” Shiel snarled, hands trying to take the reins from me, his head turning back toward the angry crowds, now rapidly gaining on us from either side. Some of them were on horseback now, too, intent on pursuing us instead of simply running us out of town.
Zev swore as he pulled their own horse to a halt. “What is it? What’s wrong?”
I shook my head, my eyes searching out that deepening darkness.
“No,” I said, “No, there has to be another way. I won’t go into the Wildness.”
I’d skirted the edge of that deep, dark place, but never actually goneintoit. Not really. Even the times that it had called to me, dragged me in awake or dreaming, I’d never plunged into it wholeheartedly, racing past the point where safety was more than a few footsteps away.
Shiel paused then, turning away from the growing shouts to cup my face with a tender hand.
“Do you trust me, Aurra?”
I blinked up at him, surprised to find that I did.
I really did.
“I will keep you safe from whatever we find in this Wildness,” he said, gentle and with purpose. “No harm will befall you so long as you remain at my side.”
And with that, I let Shiel take the reins. His hand snaked around my waist to hold me close as he urged the horse onward. Zev did the same, and together, we plunged at long last into the Wildness we’d for so long tried to resist.
CHAPTERTWENTY-THREE
Surely our pursuerswouldn’t dare follow us far into the depths of the Wildness.
They couldn’t be so foolish.
Unlike us.
The Wildness’ magic didn’t call out to us the way it had the times before. It didn’t reach for us with its dark fingers to drag us in. It didn’t have to. Not when this time, we came willingly.
The horses bolted through the underbrush long after the snapping twigs and branches had drowned out the sound of our pursuers. I felt Shiel grow more tense by the second, his eyes trained firmly ahead to be sure we didn’t run into a tree or stumble over a log.
Or fall headfirst into a hungry ravine.
We flew beneath the trees so fast that there was no chance to sense the shift between the forest and the Wildness, not until Shiel finally pulled on the horse’s reigns so she began to slow, more gently this time. Her breaths were ragged, her sides heaving beneath us as we came to a stop beneath the trees. White foam frothed on Zev’s mount as he and Finch came up beside us as well. We sat in silence, ears trained for any sign that the humans had followed after us.
All we heard was that silence. Deep. Dark. Stretching on beneath the tight-knit canopy of trees.
At last, the three fae shared a look of relief.
“I think we lost them,” Finch said, twisting in his seat to scan the forest at our backs. Even as he did, that little bit of relief in his voice died.
Because we might have lost the men following us, but we’d lost ourselves as well.
I thought I’d seen the Wildness before, but it was nothing compared to the place we found ourselves in now.
That canopy of shade overhead was more like a ceiling, the tree branches so entangled that they cast us in perpetual twilight. The trunks were thicker around than a man could reach, each one towering up several stories overhead, their bark made of twisted, scarred wood resembling tortured faces the longer I looked.
Little grew beneath the trees here, so complete was the darkness.
The underbrush had long since cleared, giving way only to strange, otherworldly plants and vines that snaked their way along the trees, waving in some unseen breeze.
