Page 4 of Crowned By the Fae King

She jerked her head up and down.

That was good enough for me. I ran my fingers down along the burl of the tree like I was undressing a man, sliding my fingertips underneath the hem of his robe. A knot of tension came undone in my chest, the pain of my beating heart easing. The bark parted underneath my fingertips.

Gina started hyperventilating. I ignored her, focusing on that feeling of relaxation—of ease. That's my good boy, I thought, a strange thought, because the statue in the little shrine where the fae left offerings was a goddess figure. But the being under my hands felt distinctly masculine, a knowledge so deep-seated there was no questioning it.

My fingertips traced down through the grown-together bark, and it opened for me. Relief spilled into me as Gina staggered forward and collapsed on the ground. She curled into the fetal position, whispering "oh my god, oh my god, oh my god" over and over again, shivering as the rain wet her exposed skin. Nothing of her clothing remained but what had been outside the tree. Everything else had been shredded.

The tree slowly started closing, bark growing over naked, exposed wood. I bowed to it, hand starting to shake again. This was— This was too much. I couldn't do this—

Then who else will? I asked myself, closing my eyes and trying to meditate for a moment. The Court was listening to me. I didn't think it necessarily liked me, but it felt inescapable, as if some piece of it had grown roots into me, or gotten lodged in my soul. Had that happened on the wall? When I'd hit the ground, and it had healed me even while I was breaking on its stone?

It didn't matter. I could help the people in the woods, and I didn't think anyone else could. It had to be me.

I didn't have anything else, so I gave Gina my soot-smeared, burned overshirt to tie around her hips in an awkward diaper, so at least she wouldn't be naked, and I led her out of the forest to the open ground around the opal cliffs.

People looked at me like I was some sort of freak, or leper. I didn't say anything to them. I just handed off Gina, shaking and crying, to the first person I saw, then turned around and walked back into the dark forest.

Alone

Ispent hours getting people out of the forest. Once it got light, and the storm cleared to a beautiful summer-blue sky, some of the braver people started helping me, but none of them could pull people out of trees the way I could. The forest wasn't growing as fast as it had before, though, and some people weren't trapped as thoroughly as Gina had been, and could be cut out before the bark closed over them again.

I'd seen that one man swallowed by stone, and I knew there had to be others, but the rock stubbornly refused to shift for me. I was sure the buried people were alive, though I couldn't have said why, and when we found the hand sticking out of the ground I knew I was right.

It was limp, but it was warm, and it had a slow, steady pulse. The man entombed in the stone was alive – unconscious, but alive – and since there was no way he was breathing, it had to be the Court keeping him that way.

I sat there for a while, holding his hand. I didn't know who he was. I couldn't recognize the hundreds of people who'd lived in the mining camp by their hands. But he was alive, and trapped, and the stone stubbornly refused to budge. Stone is used to holding treasures, I supposed. Why would a person be any different than an opal?

I didn't want to leave him to the mercy of predators, so before I moved on I spent some time building a cairn around his hand. Maybe someone would know what had happened. Maybe they could figure out how to get people out of the hungry earth. There was no reason for him to have his hand chewed off in the meantime.

Not everyone had survived—not even close. Whole buildings had been engulfed, or had collapsed. The outpost had burned to the ground, and the shantytown was charred and smashed to smithereens where it wasn't underground. Trees grew through almost all of it, their trunks marked with soot but completely undamaged.

Anyone standing directly over a growing tree had been impaled and effectively exploded by the rapid growth of the tree. I did what I could for them when I found them, arranging their bodies in the proper shape and saying a brief prayer over them, and hoped that Faery didn't have hungry ghosts.

One of them was the fae man who'd brought me here from the mortal world. I stared at his broken corpse, fighting back tears. I didn't give a shit about him – bastard had blood-bonded me patching me up from getting clawed up by one of the dancers at the bar I tended, with a playful, "promise to serve me for a thousand years and I'll clean up these scratches for you" – but he'd been my way back. He knew how to get to Long Beach. How to get me home.

Now I'd have to find another way.

I turned and looked north and a little west, and not for the first time. Something in that direction made me homesick, a quiet yearning that kept turning me towards it like a compass swinging north. Why? What was there?

How was I supposed to know? I didn't know shit about this Court. I didn't know shit about Courts. Whatever was happening seemed to be fixated on me, in a way that made the hair on the back of my neck stand up, and I had no idea what any of it meant.

The Court's responsiveness to me wasn't going unnoticed, either. People were giving me a wider and wider berth every time they encountered me, moving away from me as if whatever had interested the Court so much was contagious.

It hurt. I hadn't made any bosom friends in the months I'd been here, but we'd all been on the same side, blood-bonded mortals under the fae overseers, doing our best to survive. We'd been companions-in-arms, and now I was tainted.

Even the people I'd pulled out of trees looked at me like I was at fault. Especially them.

It wasn't only the mortals, either. The few fae who'd survived stayed well out of my way. They kept darting me looks like they thought I was going to flay them alive. None of them would look me in the face, let alone the eyes. I knew they had to know something about what had happened to me, but the one time I tried to approach one of them, he turned away from me and wouldn't even speak to me, his shoulders so tight I knew he was waiting for the blow to fall.

I didn't try again after that. It wasn't worth the attention—wasn't worth emphasizing the difference between me and everyone else. They already didn't want me here. I shouldn't give them more reasons to make me the enemy.

They got brave enough to tell me at nightfall. I noted bitterly that they'd waited until everyone that could be saved, had been, and until after I'd helped find enough supplies that everyone would be able to eat for at least a couple days. That everyone could turn on me so quickly didn't surprise me, but it could still go suck a bag of dicks.

Gina was their spokesperson. I guessed people figured I'd be less likely to do some sort of horrible Court-magic thing to my bunkmate and ostensible friend.

"So, um," she said, not looking me in the eyes. She had one arm wrapped around her chest, and a backpack dangling from her other hand. "We, um. Think you should go." Gina held out the pack to me.

I didn't take it. I fought to keep my expression serene and voice level. "Go where?" I asked. "We're in the middle of nowhere, and the sun's setting. It's going to be dark soon."

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