Page 7 of Crowned By the Fae King

I took a deep breath. Held it. Let it out.

"Okay," I said.

There weren't that many options. I was somewhere in a freaky magic forest – a beautiful forest, full of tall elegant pine-looking trees and birds singing all sorts of warbling songs, but still freaky and magical – and I had no idea where. Even if I'd had a map, which I didn't, I didn't have any way to navigate. How could I, when everything looked the same in every direction, except for the angle of the slope? I wasn't some sort of park ranger. I had exactly one landmark, and it was another freaky magic thing.

I could use that landmark to go in a different direction—opposite, for example. I knew there was a place called "Flies" south-ish, because that was the direction people left with the opals. Heading dead away from the Court's heart might get me there, wherever "there" was. I had no way to know without trying it.

Showing up on the doorstep of the people who'd owned the mine didn't seem like a great idea, though. They'd been keeping me as a slave, after all, so they probably weren't that kindly inclined towards humans. And besides, who knew if I'd even find a civilization of any kind? I had no idea how thoroughly the Court had scrubbed away buildings. Maybe everything was like this.

In that case, maybe that heartbeat was my best bet after all. At the very least, I knew something was waiting for me there—

—a man sprawled in sleep, his breaths even and calm, sunlight warm across his brown skin and gleaming off the bronze feathers of his wings.

I shook my head, refusing to get caught up again. Whoever and whatever he was – if he was even real – he (Xarcassah) could wait until I got there.

Xarcassah. That was a fae name if ever I'd heard one.

"I fucking hate this," I muttered.

I rearranged the backpack with vicious movements, taking out my frustration on objects as I crammed them back into the pack. With nowhere better to go, I pointed myself for the sleeping focus of the power all around me, and started walking again.

A person can cover a shocking amount of distance when they don't get tired, thirsty, or hungry. I hiked at a clip that would have made me a menace on the sidewalks back home, keeping my blood pumping and skin warm. Though I probably could have straight-lined it, no problem, I steered around mountains and ravines where I could, trying to minimize my actual walking distance.

Since the Court seemed inclined to keep me in perfect physical form, I didn't bother stopping for rest. I hiked for a solid three days until a boulder kept me from going down my chosen path, and I stood there and screamed and thrashed at it with a stick like a crazy person.

Maybe I was going crazy, but also the fact that I'd been booking it across an endless forested mountain-scape with no sleep probably had something to do with that. My arms and legs felt shaky, too, in that wobbly-starvation way. I decided that maybe food and sleep were necessary, even when you couldn't feel it, and tore through most of the rest of my supplies that evening before passing out in the middle of a small meadow.

I felt much better in the morning.

Even though I was sick of the forest, in the morning light, with a solid night's sleep under my belt and a breakfast of salami and cheese in my belly, I could admit that it was a pretty place. This was the sort of place people dreamed about when they thought of wilderness. There were at least a half-dozen different kinds of evergreens, ranging from things that looked like they could have been ornamental plantings in a rich person's yard to massive, soaring trees with trunks that had to be four feet in diameter—and those were just the trees. The landscape was thick with greenery, flowers, and early fruits. There were even weird, vivid lichens growing on rocks and trees, and funky little air plants tucked in the elbows of branches.

It was summer, which meant everything was thick with bugs, but they didn't seem to want to bother me. The cicadas droned all around me, a constant rising and falling buzz of sound that didn't even cease at night. Butterflies flittered through the air, drifting from flower to flower, and little hazy clouds of gnats claimed patches of sunlight.

Fast, brightly colored birds with iridescent crescent-moon-shaped wingspans darted through the air, catching insects I couldn't even see. Gossamer spiderwebs linked tall pieces of grass or spanned the distance between branches. I even saw something distinctly faery, a tiny flying lizard that caught a big fat moth and ate it on a twig while making direct eye contact with me.

I still liked Long Beach better, but this was okay, I supposed. Pretty, at least.

Not long after I'd decided to maybe sleep sometimes, the Court woke back up. It wasn't the same sort of violent awakening as before, but the timbre of the power all around me shifted. Instead of a constant sort of stasis, things seemed more purposeful. There was focus to it, and that focus wasn't on me. Curious what that meant for me, I took my belt knife to a small twig, scraping away the bark to reveal the green underneath.

Nothing happened.

Uh-oh.

It seemed to like me, in particular, though. Maybe it was letting things live their lives again, but would still pay attention to me if I needed it?

It was worth checking, at least.

I jabbed the knife into my fingertip. Blood welled up, pain singing out—and then falling silent.

I licked the blood off. There wasn't any mark left; not even a scar.

"Well," I said, my voice hoarse from disuse. "That's nice, I guess." I'd have to keep tabs on my body a little more carefully. I suspected that something that would be near-instantly lethal – like falling forty feet onto rocks with my skull – might still be lethal, now. The Court was paying attention to things, not merely letting its power act. If it wasn't focused on me, it might not act in time.

As the hours of hiking rolled by and the day tilted towards night, I started suspecting that my mental image of the Court as a man was more than my brain trying to personify a source of magic into something comprehensible. I couldn't see him, exactly, and I definitely didn't have any sort of mind-reading available, but if I took stock I could get a feel for where his body was, and all the biological effects of emotions seemed to transfer.

My sense of him wasn't always passive, either. When he shifted from sitting to standing, my shoulders went back; when his hands splayed on a table, the pleasant stretch of his tendons warmed my hand.

Emotions that weren't mine commanded my body. The sharp feeling of fear-sweat prickled down my spine when I was strolling along a cheerful little stream, admiring the skimmer-bugs flirting across its surface. Hours later, I couldn't unclench my jaw or ease the tension in my shoulders, stress driving me to keep moving, to stay awake, to keep walking even long after the sun went down and the nocturnal creatures started calling to each other across the valleys.

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