Page 9 of Crowned By the Fae King

My shoes wore all the way through. I got alternately rained on and baked by the sun, and the tall pine trees seemed to constantly emit a fine haze of resin, because my clothes acquired a faint patina of gummy, dirt-coated sap. I probably stank, I definitely looked like I'd been dragged through hell and back, and I was slowly devolving into total insanity from the solitude.

I walked for weeks through what seemed to be interminable mountain wilderness. It varied, of course; in some places the trees were as dense as a carpet, and in others the massive pines were reduced to scrubby little things twisting out of bedrock. I traversed scree slopes that looked like they were maybe due to avalanches, and crossed beautiful alpine meadows with ice-blue lakes gleaming in their stone cradles. But it was all still goddamn wilderness, without even telltale drifts of smoke in the sky to mark human habitation.

That sort of unyielding wildness felt more and more incomprehensible, day by day. It was one thing to have been told that Faery was still a wild place, ruled by monsters more than men, and another to see it with my own two eyes. I felt a little bit of kindred spirit with the explorers of yore. All those Appalachian Trail thru-hikers wished they could have this.

It was for the fucking birds, man.

The first sign of civilization I encountered was a road. I very literally stumbled upon it, tripping over a rock to stagger into the middle of a flat, open space in the otherwise dense forest.

At first I just stood there, dumbly, my mouth agape and feet too far apart, like a dog startled awake from a really good nap. There was a road. In the middle of the woods.

It wasn't only some kind of dirt track for wagons or horses or whatever, either. The road looked like it could have been transported from one of those bougie downtowns, where all the stores are called Ye Olde Shoppe and people pretend it's safe to wear high heels on cobblestone. It was paved with brick-sized blocks of some sort of gray stone, each set together with less than the width of a pencil lead between them. Little grasses and flowers grew in the cracks, but it was raised enough off the ground that they hadn't made any heaped dirt on top of it.

Someone had to clean this thing, because the trees overhung it, and they would drop needles onto it. It was in perfect shape, too, as if it had been paved in the last few years.

Why the Court had decided the mine had to go but a road was a-okay, I didn't know. But here it was, running almost in the direction that I wanted to go, and in great shape. There had to be people nearby.

I followed the road north, enjoying the feel of stone instead of spiky pine needles and pinecones underfoot. Even if it didn't take me directly to what was probably the capital city, it would take me somewhere there were people, and maybe I could take a bath and buy a berth on a caravan.

What I didn't account for is that roads are a convenient location for bandits.

If I'd been back home, I never would have been so stupid as to go strolling down an abandoned alleyway where I couldn't see all the access routes. I didn't look rich, but everyone had credit cards and cell phones these days. Even the homeless guys sometimes had prepaids. You could rob just about anyone in the city and be sure to come out of it with at least a couple bucks, and a dirt-poor Vietnamese chick like me was less likely to call the cops than some white boy with a stick up his ass.

This was a forest, though. My experience with forests had previously been limited to one weekend trip to a National Forest with some girlfriends, and a similar trip up the US-1 to go sightseeing in Big Sur with a biker who thought I'd be into riding him, as opposed to mostly being in it for the motorcycle rides. I subconsciously expected to come around the bend to see a pair of unsettlingly in-shape old people with hiking sticks in each hand, or maybe a bevy of moms grimly hauling their toddlers with them as they tried to cling onto their outdoorsy pasts. Not bandits.

I didn't even get any warning. In old-timey movies they always fire a warning shot, or come charging out of the woods on horses, making all sorts of noise as they crash through the underbrush. All that stuff must have been for dramatic effect—movie magic.

The real bandits laid in wait, crouched behind a striking heap of boulders the road wandered through. I strolled past, as blithely as a tomcat in an alley. Some sort of bird chirped.

In synchrony, two men stepped onto the road in front of me. Two more people blocked me from behind. The ones I could see were holding big fuck-off knives, things that looked like they'd been taken from the back of a butcher store. A glance behind me showed me the other two were similarly armed.

I held up my hands as they walked closer, sweat breaking out down my spine. "Hey, I don't want any trouble," I said. My eyes darted around, looking for a way out. No dice. The boulders were big ones, and while I could get up them, no problem, I didn't think I could do it before a big, angry man grabbed me by the leg and yanked me down. Talking seemed better than making a run for it. "I don't have anything you want. I don't even have any food."

"What's in the backpack?" one of the ones behind me said. He had a raspy voice, like chain smokers get.

"Canvas. A water bottle." I didn't want to call out the money or the opals. If they were going to find them, they'd find them. I didn't need to volunteer the information. "Some trash I haven't used for toilet paper yet."

The bigger of the two men in front of me guffawed. They kept walking closer, closing the distance with the lazy saunter of seasoned predators. "Wouldn't say no to something to wipe my ass with. Might be worth the effort to get it off of ya."

He was human. Both of them were. I suspected the other two would be, too. This seemed like the kind of stick-up people did, not the fancy games fae played. Why risk your life, when you were gambling millennia instead of decades?

"Not too skinny," the other person behind me said, stepping closer. "Might wash up pretty. Get her blood-bonded, might find a brothel that'd take a geisha." He had a whiny, nasally voice, the sort they give sniveling cowards in TV shows.

Chainsmoker spat. "You and your fucking sex fantasies—"

"Is this a bad time?" I asked, giving them a pretty smile over my shoulder. "I can come back later—"

"Oh, fuck this," the last man said. "Just kill the bitch already."

Deathless

"Woah, woah, hey," I said, raising my hands higher. "Look, you can take my stuff, whatever you want. Nobody's going to give a shit about me getting robbed." When I didn't immediately get stabbed, I slowly lowered my hands and started shrugging off my backpack. It slid down my arm. I set it on the ground and raised my hands again, moving like I was underwater. "See? No one has to get hurt—"

All the breath drove out of my lungs. For a second, I thought I'd just gotten elbowed in the back, until I looked down to see four inches of bloody knife sticking out through my chest, right above my left nipple.

It didn't hurt, and I wasn't dying. That was nice. That was even worth dealing with Cass' miserable sleep schedule and love affair with his left hand.

"Dead bodies don't tell tales," Chainsmoker rasped. His breath smelled like dead fish. "Can't have the lord knowing about us—"

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