Page 6 of Crowned By the Fae King

The night breeze swept across my neck, the breath of the mountain chill on my bare skin. His breath would be warm, though—hot. A Court in the skin of a man, strength radiating off of him like heat, his touch as overwhelming as the power all around me.

I shook myself free of the image, a chill that had nothing to do with the night making me shiver. If the Court could catch me so easily when I was awake, what would happen when I slept? Would I be watching the world through the eyes of a warg, a mouse, an owl? Would I lose myself in the stillness of the trees, or in the endless movement of the wind?

What if I never woke up?

North, and a little west, the heart of the power all around me beat, a timeless throb that drew me to it like a moth to a flame. Whatever the Court had done to me, it was in me, and while that bothered me, I knew I wouldn't be alive without it.

I chewed on my lip. Going on some sort of hare-brained quest for the heart of a Court sounded like something out of myths and legends, but so did forests growing in the space of a heartbeat and trees releasing captives because I asked them to do it. It wasn't like I had any other direction to go, and if I wandered off blindly I'd probably walk in circles until I died of dehydration or got eaten by a warg.

Presuming the Court would allow me to be eaten by a warg. It hadn't let me die from falling forty feet onto rocks. Maybe I wouldn't be allowed to die at all.

Better not put it to the test, though, I thought with a sigh, refocusing on the world around me. That heartbeat felt far away. It was going to be a long trek.

Get it Together

My original plan, of "walk until you can't see or until you get tired," didn't work out. My eyes were still human eyes, and in the pitch black of the old-growth forest at night, I couldn't see for shit, but my sense of the Court meant that unless I got distracted, I could walk blindly without any risk of hurting myself. On top of that weirdness, no matter how long I walked, I didn't seem to get tired. At all.

I must have made it five or six miles, hiking over rough ground and with some serious up-and-down in the mountainous terrain, before it struck me that I wasn't feeling the strain. Sure, I was in good shape; even before I'd been forced to haul stone for twelve hours a day I'd been an active person. But I wasn't used to this sort of exercise. I'd been on the move since four in the morning, and it had to be, what? Ten at night?

That was unsettling. Not as unsettling as people in trees or living hands sticking out of the bedrock, but still bad.

I tilted my head back, looking up at the few stars I could see, sprinkled in the gaps of the canopy. Standing there, I tried to contemplate sleeping out here. The steep, rocky slopes weren't safe to sleep on—or, at least, not comfortable. The valleys were wet, which seemed worse than rocks for sleeping on.

Even though I didn't feel tired, the thought of sleeping made me yawn, which soothed a little bit of the anxiety. Whatever the Court was doing to me, or had done to me, I could probably still sleep. All I had to do was find a place to try.

It was pitch black. I couldn't look for a nice flat spot, and I wasn't going to just stumble upon a good place to sleep rough. In the city, I probably could have inferred where to go, but this landscape was totally alien to me.

The land kept telling me where to put my feet, though. Could it tell me where it was flat?

Only one way to find out.

Still with my head back, I closed my eyes and tried to let myself feel. My bobbed hair brushed against my bare shoulders, a tickling presence. The mountain air was cold against my skin, even though I didn't get chilled. The ground under my feet lived and breathed. Fungus and roots and little creeping things I had no names for grew and churned together in an endless, ancient, sultry dance. No piece of it stood alone.

Bedrock stone sprawled beneath that living blanket. The roots of trees shoved their way deeper into the stone like dandelions through asphalt, except that instead of searching for sunlight they were harpoons, deadly hunting weapons that cracked open stone like whalers killing whales. But the trees were mere newcomers, weeds in an old lot. The stone was untroubled by their hunger.

Stone obeyed the shifting earth and demanding sky, mountains scraping the heights and being worn away. Water and wind and trees and sun all conspired to grind the world down to a great flat plain, flat like the broad prairie to the west, deep soil and ceaseless wind. We were mountains. We would not submit to the water and wind and trees and sun. Not for eons. We would scrape the sky, cradle glaciers, endure—

This time, the sunlight managed to break me out of the Court's grasp. I blinked muzzily, the noontide sun dazzling my vision, and swayed on my feet.

Fuck. How long had I been standing there?

I didn't have a crick in my neck, and my feet didn't hurt. That didn't mean anything though. I could have been there for twelve hours or twelve days.

Tears stung my eyes. Was this my life now? Was I going to get caught up, over and over again, until I was as lost as the man whose hand was sticking out of the bedrock?

Standing still while the forest grows over me, tree after tree living and dying around me, the soil creeping up my calves to my thighs to my throat, the Court swallowing me whole—

"I am not going to go insane," I said out loud, so that I could hear a human voice. "I am going to walk north and a little west, and find whatever did this, and I'm going to undo it and fucking go home!" My voice cracked on the last words. I had to fight back more tears.

The whole thing sounded ridiculous when spoken out loud. I was going to—what? Find some sort of heartbeat of magic and make it let me go? It obviously wanted to incorporate me into itself. It was hungry.

My stomach rumbled at the reminder of the fact that I hadn't eaten for some amount of time. More than a day, but hopefully not much more.

In defiance of the yearning sensation pulling me north, I found a rock and sat facing in a different direction so I could dig through the backpack Gina had given me. To my surprise, it had a decent selection of food, and all of it was the sort of stuff that would keep. The sloshing had been from a large plastic water bottle, filled most of the way up with what proved to be clean water.

I hadn't felt hungry until I'd faced down food, but now I was ravenous. I tore into my supplies with no regard for the future. A paper sleeve of wheat crackers, a jar of fig preserves, and a whole wheel of cheese vanished in service to my stomach. I almost ate the second cheese wheel before deciding that maybe I should keep some food for later. Not feeling hungry seemed like a bad thing if I could still eat.

Ugh, that was an unpleasant thought. I didn't want to have to measure my humanity by my ability to conduct basic biological processes.

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