Chapter 11
Ifollowed Solaris down a small flight of stairs and zigzagged with him through hallways. When he got to the bottom of a staircase and looked both ways, I had to tease him.
“Is this even your castle?”
He paused and frowned at me. “What?”
I grinned at him. “Are we lost?”
He huffed. “I don’t know every stairwell in the building.”
“So you don’t do a lot of sneaking around then?”
He looked me up and down like maybe something could happen in this dimly lit spot, but then two men carrying giant pots pushed through a door. Solaris startled like he’d been electrocuted, and the two men sloshed whatever was in their pots as they jerked back and tried to bow to him.
I laughed at all of them, grabbed Solaris’s arm, and hauled him toward a door that had sunlight streaming through its windows. We burst outside onto grass between the moat and the castle’s outer wall.
“Well, would you look at that…” Right in front of us and bisecting the muddy moat was the barrier. “So you built your castle on someone else’s property?”
“No,” he snapped. “Several miles of that belongs to the Summer Court.”
“Not according to the barrier.” I gestured at the glass-like wall stretching as far as I could see going left, right, and up.
He crossed his arms. “Well, it’s wrong.”
Sure it was.
I toed at the dead grass. “Does the barrier go down underground, too?”
“I don’t know.”
The barrier looked like it was sitting on the ground, literally pressed into the mud, but if it really was some magical barrier, it probably wouldn’t let someone dig under it.
Or, er, whoever had designed the barrier when they’d cursed the courts would’ve accounted for digging. The barrier wasn’t sentient.
Was it curved, though? Like ever so slightly not straight? “Is the barrier curved?” I asked Solaris.
He shrugged. “I imagine it is since the courts are four sections within a circle.”
“Wait, so this is the outer edge?” I pointed through the barrier to the spring-like land on the other side. “Is that not the Spring Court?”
“No, that doesn’t belong to myself or my brothers. Until you reach the mountains,” he said, pointing off into the distance, “this is all the Galastian Forest.”
The forest was mossy and full of ferns and granite boulders with Sitka spruce, Douglas firs, and maybe even some redwoods. I wanted to get up higher, possibly on top of the keep, to see more of the landscape. It was absolutely fascinating over there.
“Who’s Galastia?” I asked. “A fae princess or something?”
“The first unicorn. She ate some fireflies by mistake and grew a horn before giving birth to a herd of offspring.” He waved it all away. “It’s a very strange myth.”
I was about to laugh about that myth sounding suspiciously Greek when a herd of sparkling white horses with horns on their foreheads galloped through the trees over there. Except they weren’t horses, I could see that clearly enough, but holy shit. Unicorns were real?
Trying to accept it, I said aloud, “Unicorns are real.”
“Of course they are.”
I chuckled because, yeah, I knew that struggling with unicorns being real while standing next to a dude with wings was ridiculous, but there I was anyway.
“You’ll also find goblins, trolls, fairies, sprites, dragons—”
“Seriously?”
Solaris shrugged like it was no big deal.
And, okay, maybe it wasn’t because over there was the source of every fairytale that had ever been told by the fire on a cold winter’s night for generations.
Maybe humans had been passing through fairy rings for thousands of years, bringing their stories of what they saw back with them.
Right then, as I stared at tiny balls of light flitting from one flower to another, I knew…
“I don’t want to go back.”
Solaris touched my shoulder and peered at my face. He looked surprised and maybe…hopeful? “Did you just say—”
“I don’t want to go back to my world.” I smiled through the nervous flutter in my stomach.
He stared at me for a moment, his grin getting bigger, and then he actually giggled and grabbed me into a hug. I held him close and tucked my nose into his hair, relieved that he wanted me to stay.
All of a sudden, it felt like the ground was shaking beneath my feet. An earthquake? We popped apart and looked around as the trembling continued. I could hear a sort of humming and thought it might be coming from the direction of the barrier.
“Did the barrier just vibrate?” I asked as I headed toward the moat. There were some rocks I could step on to stay out of the mud to get to it.
“Wallace, don’t go over there.”
I went anyway, carefully stepping on rocks. “Does it do that a lot?”
“It’s never done that before. Wallace—”
“I just want to touch it.” I reached for the barrier. “I want to see if it’s always vibrating and we just can’t tell because it’s such a low—”
All I did was put my hand on the smooth surface of the barrier and then suddenly I was flying backwards. I hit the ground hard, the breath knocked right out of me.
“Wallace!”
I knew he’d yelled but the sound was muffled behind my pounding heartbeat and a ringing in my ears. Solaris was suddenly leaning over me, worry etched all over his face. He touched my head like he was checking for injuries. I didn’t know if anything was broken, but holy fuck, I needed to breathe.
Trying to take a breath felt like a battle inside me, like my lungs forgot what they were doing. Solaris helped me sit up, and I sucked in another breath a little easier. Goddamn, that was awful.
“Don’t ever do that again,” Solaris chastised me as he felt along my neck and back. “The barrier actively keeps people in or out. Only animals can pass through.”
“And clouds,” I said only because I was looking up and a cloud literally just did exactly that.
“Maybe you should lie down again…” He cupped the back of my head and gently pressed on my chest.
“No, I’m okay now.” I took his hand from my chest and just held it. “Got the wind knocked out of me, but I’m fine.”
He watched me breathe for a little while, worry still making him look so vulnerable. I wrapped both arms around him and hugged him tightly. He leaned heavily against me, took a shaky breath, and sighed.
So, yeah, no more touching the barrier. Should’ve listened when he said not to. Which one of us lived here and knew all about the curse? Yeah, not me. Fuck sakes, that could’ve been so much worse.
At the same time, though, now I knew just how much the man in my arms cared about me.
Like, he didn’t have to say any words—that was fine—but I could tell that I’d scared him by making him think he could’ve lost me.
I’d scared me, too, honestly. But that he didn’t want me to leave, didn’t want me to be hurt, meant everything to me.
I eased my hold on him, and he sat back enough for me to see his face.
Blue eyes big and worried, he still looked shaken, so I smiled reassuringly and gave him a gentle kiss.
It was a brief kiss, too, and in the time it took me to lean back again, little feathers started spreading across the rest of his face.
Solaris blinked, frowning, and touched his face as the iridescent blue-green feathers covered his formerly pale skin. His lips were a dark turquoise color with a lighter shade ringing his eyes. I took his hands and found he had feathers on the backs and blue skin on the palms.
And then, as I watched, thin vines with leaves the size of my pinky fingernail tangled in his golden blond hair. But way more impressive than that was the set of antlers that up and grew right out of the top of his head. We both gasped at that. My fae prince was suddenly a ten-point buck!
Solaris backed away and stood up, his hands grasping the base of each antler, and looking as shocked as I felt.
Which was when his wings fluttered and grew three sizes bigger.
They stretched over his head as high as his antlers and touched the ground at his heels.
Their edges were scalloped in black and the green and blue parts twinkled in the sunlight.
I stood up slowly, taking all of him in, and started smiling. “So this is the real you, huh?”
He gulped as he stared at me, a different kind of worry in his eyes now. “I… I’m…”
I cupped his feathery face, the bitty little things feeling like a touch of texture to his skin. “Don’t worry. You’re beautiful.”
He huffed a laugh and leaned into my hand. “This is how I looked before the magic drained away from me.”
The vines had little purple flowers blooming. They looked suspiciously like the ones from the fairy ring, only much smaller and darker.
“Do you have your magic back then?” I held one of his hands, looking for glitter or sparks or something magical.
Solaris held his other hand palm down toward the ground and stared at a spot of withered grass. When nothing happened after a few seconds, he shook his head. “I can feel it’s there, but I can’t make it work.”
I glanced at the barrier. “Well, I guess there’s still more to do then.” I didn’t want to put it all on him, but it was possible it was all on—
“I have more changes to make,” he said quietly. Regretfully.
So he knew. He accepted.
I held his hand and led the way back toward the door into the castle. “Let’s go show those wizards your new, er, old look is back and see if they’ll gasp all the air out of the room. Maybe you can make one of them pass out.”
Solaris chuckled, and then he had to lead the way because I had no idea where I was going.