Page 15 of The Cursed Kingdom

My adrenaline is finally wearing off, and my hands shake as I slip on the sneakers and tie up the laces.

What’s Lill doing right now? I hope she’s okay after opening that portal. It looked like it took a lot out of her, and she was already so weak.

She must be furious with me, but I hope she knows I did this for her. I’m going to bring her back enough delysum that she won’t even know what to do with it. She’s going to live a long, healthy life. I’ll make sure of it.

It would have been helpful if she hadn’t dropped me off in the middle of fucking nowhere, though.

I know she’s from a large city, the damned capital, to be exact. Even drunk, she wasn’t taking the risk of being spotted by opening the portal straight to her former home.

I swipe my hand through the air, unable to resist the temptation. The shimmer is so distracting, even if it’s arguably the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen. I didn’t realize magic was tangible, and the little flecks are everywhere.

If this is how much magic Lill’s body was accustomed to, it’s no wonder she’s always so sick. The faeries ingest it with every breath, and the human realm has none.

It’s such a shame that human bodies can’t ingest and use magic, and I hope it doesn’t irritate my respiratory system. I have terrible seasonal allergies, and this looks an awful lot like pollen.

The magic swirls as I swipe my hand through it, the flecks moving with the wind. How do the faeries ever get used to this?

I need to concentrate.

The sun is high in the sky, so I assume it’s around the same time it was back home. It shouldn’t take me too long to reach the cabin, and it’ll hopefully provide me with a place to rest and collect my bearings. It might also be where I sleep tonight.

The sun will go down in only a few hours, and I don’t want to be caught in this open field when it does. I should stay here for the night and leave first thing tomorrow morning. I don’t know what kind of predators live out here, and I’d be a fool to think I’ll be top of the food chain.

I tie my hair up and begin walking, eager to get a move on. For all I know, opening the portal alerted some magic faerie people, and I don’t want to be caught standing here when they arrive. Will they punish me?

This would all be so much easier if Lill had been more forthcoming with her information. Getting her to talk about the faerie realm, specifically when she’s not blackout drunk, is like pulling teeth. I’m beginning this journey with nothing more than snippets of information and a whole lot of assumptions.

The walk to the cabin takes longer than I thought, at least an hour. The tall prairie grasses are surprisingly hard to maneuver through, and I work up a good sweat as I travel under the beating sun.

I use this time to perfect my plan, though.

I assume I’m near the capital, Bellmere. Lill once mentioned that’s where she’s from, but I need to find my way to the Redstall Forest. Lill said that’s the only place where the delysum plant she needs to survive grows.

All I need to do is find the Redstall Forest, pick a shit ton of the plant, and return home. The first two steps seem easy enough, and I’m hoping that by the time I’ve accomplished them, I’ll have learned enough about the faerie realm to find a way back home.

If Lill can open a portal in her weakened state, I don’t imagine it will be too hard to find another faerie willing to open one for me.

I’m not above begging—or fucking. I’ll happily fuck a thousand faeries if it means saving Lill. I was with several questionable men during my clumsy college years, so I’m sure I can manage sleeping with a silver-haired god or two. It’s hardly a sacrifice.

I’m sweating bullets by the time I reach the cabin. Well, it’s more of a shack. I was hoping for more, and I wipe my forehead as I do a lap of the exterior. The small, wooden building is rundown and clearly abandoned, but I’m still hesitant to enter.

What if there’s a magic death trap on the door?

Lill has told me about magic, but I’ve obviously never seen her use it. I have no idea what it does or what the faeries use it for, but I’m preparing for the worst. I’d rather expect the worst and be pleasantly surprised than grow cocky and end up roadkill.

There are three crooked steps leading up to a relatively solid-looking door, and I wipe my damp, scratched-up palms on my leggings as I walk up toward it. Nothing explodes, which I take as a good sign, and I squeeze my eyes shut as I grab the doorknob, twist, and push.

The door hinges squeak, and I wait an obligatory three seconds for death to find me before working up the courage to open my eyes.

“Oh.” I huff. “It’s a tool shed.”

A bunch of junk is piled up in the far-right corner of the room, and a few rusty farming tools are hanging against the back wall. I may be in a different realm than the one I know, but I recognize a shovel, spade, garden fork, and planter buckets when I see them.

That’s all there is, though.

I eye the pile of junk, debating whether it would be worth picking through, but it doesn’t look particularly safe. There’s a lot of rusty metal, and I see a plank with nails hammered into it in the back.

I’m up to date on my tetanus shot. I made sure I was up to date on everything before coming here, but I’m not going to push my luck. I don’t know what kind of medical care the faeries have, and I really don’t want to die here.

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