Chapter 5
Ihad never ridden a horse, but now I was sitting on a fat old boy named Hopper—who probably couldn’t hop to save his own life—and trailing after a fae prince.
A fae prince who rode an elegant, white unicorn that looked iridescent in the pale winter sunlight.
The two of them looked like a fairytale come to life.
My horse had just stopped to take a shit.
What was I doing here? Not just with this horse, but with all of it.
Why had I been the one to fall through a fairy ring?
Me? Seriously? I was—had been—a word slinger for an advertising firm, not a knight in shining armor.
I was on a quest for fuck’s sake! I was following a prince, surrounded by advisors, and had a wagonload of servants ready and willing to serve us tea later on.
I was a damn Hobbit.
And as intriguing as the prince was on his elegant stead, I was still waffling over whether he’d throw me in a volcano if there was something in it for him.
He looked really good on his unicorn, though.
He still wore his fur-trimmed coat and it was spread out behind him, the whole thing silver and glittering.
His back was ramrod straight but his hips swished with every step the unicorn took.
And he kept glancing back at me. Checking to make sure I was still there? Just wanting another look at me?
No, that was what I kept doing.
I tried to focus on our surroundings, especially when Badru came up beside me and pointed out the greenhouses. “We’ve gotten very good at things this year,” he said, “and even had a harvest from the apple trees.”
“I had one of the apples earlier. It was good.”
“I’ve paid to have pies made for anyone who wants one.” He looked a bit sheepish about that, color coming to his cheeks. “A token of appreciation for their hard work.”
“That’s kind of you.”
I looked a little closer at the greenhouses we passed and saw that some of them were constructed of what looked to be windows, frame and all. Like they’d taken what they had available to start new buildings instead of just prolonging their established growing season.
“Did you farm before the curse? Or did you get everything through trade?”
“We farmed in the fields before,” he said with a gesture at the snowy land stretching to the right of us. “We had normal seasons—like every court did—though our winter was the longest of them. We can grow all year long now, but didn’t have the means to jump straight into that from the beginning.”
“I’m guessing there wasn’t any warning either.” That would explain a lot, actually.
“No, none.”
Lord Badru wore his heart on his sleeve. I could see the heartbreak in his eyes as he gazed at the greenhouses and the people bustling inside and out. He was desperate to save his people.
So, okay, even if I was a Hobbit—sacrificial or otherwise—I’d do what I could. I wouldn’t just live in the palace and do nothing. Not that Badru and the rest were doing that! Just that my contributions were unknown or untested, so I had to see what was possible.
It wasn’t long before I realized the strange reflective surface up ahead was the barrier.
It looked like a huge pane of glass stretching in every direction for as far as I could see.
Clouds might be moving through it, but not sunlight—there was a definite difference between cool gray winter on this side and soft warm spring on the other.
As we got closer, I could see people on the Spring side working in a field of…
tall grasses? They were cutting, bundling, and tossing long green reeds onto wagons.
They had trees with fresh new leaves and colorful little flowers beneath them.
Between those people and us was a calm blue lake that hugged the winter side of the barrier.
Instantly, I didn’t like the look of it.
Everyone started dismounting, and I watched several for a refresher on how I was meant to get off this geriatric mountain of a horse.
Thankfully, Hopper stood still and waited while I figured out how to get my feet out of the foot things and my leg over the proper side of him. Then I pretty much fell off him.
“Easy there,” Badru said as he helped me up off my ass.
“Oh god,” I said when I stood up. “Oh fuck. I think I’ve dislocated my hips.”
Badru laughed. “That’ll fade. Don’t worry.”
I’d been in the saddle for maybe an hour, hour and a half. How did people used to ride for days at a time? I took a few steps and realized I was walking like a bowlegged cowboy. And I’d have to get back on to return to the palace!
Well, assuming nothing I did now worked, of course. Otherwise, I’d be heading over to meet the people on the Spring side who’d stopped their work to stare at us.
I shuffled over and held up a hand to greet them. Several waved back. One man touched his pointy ear and then curled his hand and pointed at me. I did the gesture back since, yes, my ears were rounded and not fae at all. Was that my most telling human feature?
When I pointed at my chest and then mimicked swimming across the lake, nearly all of them came closer and a few of them looked like they were waving me off.
“Not terribly encouraging,” the prince said as he came to stand beside me.
“Maybe they knew the horse.”
He cleared his throat like maybe he was trying not to laugh.
“Well, first things first.” I walked close enough to touch the barrier and put my hand right through it.
“Much more encouraging,” the prince said.
“So now we test this…” I found a fist-sized rock and threw it through the barrier and into the water on Spring’s side. Nothing happened, not a ripple or a bubble.
“What are you doing?”
“Checking.”
“For what?”
“Alligators? Crocodiles?” I threw a handful of pebbles into the water. “Shrieking eels?”
The prince squinted up at me like I wasn’t making sense. “What are you talking about?”
“You’ve never heard of those animals?”
“No.”
“Big lizards that live in the water and can bite a man’s arm off?” I used my arms to mimic a gator’s bite.
“Gods, man,” he said with horror. “Hydris would never allow such a creature to exist in his court.”
“Hydris is the Spring prince?”
“Yes.”
Hydris and Flurris. Cute.
“So you can control what does and doesn’t exist in your court?”
“Yes.” He paused before adding a reluctant, “to a degree.”
“Uh-huh. I’m going to take that to mean that you can decide whether to have wolves but not whether to grow corn in a blizzard.”
“We had wolves, but my people needed the animals they hunted.”
Now I was the horrified one. “You killed them all?”
“No! They merely sleep in their dens. When we break the curse and there is plenty for all again, I will wake them.”
“Oh. Okay. Why not domesticate them?”
“We would still have to feed them. And they would cease being wolves.”
“Huh. Good point.”
Badru and Giselle came over with a few others. “Are you going in then?” Giselle asked with a wary glance at the water.
“Yeah, I am.”
I undressed, not sure if I was being brave or stupid. The water was already there, so it couldn’t form suddenly and take me out. Also, I knew how to swim. Hopefully better than a horse did.
In just my undershirt and loose shorts, I was reminded of how cold it was on this side. And being that it was spring on the other side and not summer, the water might also be cold. “I’ll be as quick as I can,” I said to myself as much as everyone else.
The people on the other side seemed to have got on board with me coming over as one of them held a tarp of some kind and another held a rope.
A felt fingers brush the back of my hand and looked down to find Flurry had touched me. There was pink blooming on his cheeks and he wouldn’t look me in the eyes, but he said, “Good luck, Milo.”
Oh, the way that bolstered me up. I strutted toward the barrier and very confidently pushed my hand through. The barrier gave with a rubbery sort of resistance, and I just went for it, diving through it and into the water.
It was fucking brisk, like I’d thought it might be. Not at all wanting to linger, I started a quick breaststroke toward shore. I could hear the people ahead of me cheering me on.
Suddenly, it felt like something was pulling me back.
I did an awkward bend to try and see if someone had literally grabbed my ankle.
In doing that, though, I came to a stop and now it felt like I was sinking.
I couldn’t stay at the surface. Treading water wasn’t working.
When I lunged forward to start swimming again, I couldn’t get my feet up behind me.
“I’m being pulled under!” I hollered to the people watching on the shore.
One man started kicking off his shoes and taking off his shirt. I kept trying to reach them, but I was stuck in place and the water was up to my chin now.
Oh, god, the water was stopping me from making it to shore the same way it had stopped that poor horse. The fucking water was trying to drown me!
“No,” I snarled and redoubled my efforts. I wasn’t going to die in some fairytale land with nightmare water. “Fuck you!”
I heard someone holler and looked over to see that the man who’d undressed was getting thrown back onto shore by a wave. He’d come in to save me, and the water wouldn’t let him?
Shit. Oh, my god, this was bad.
I had a thought to turn around, go back to Winter, and managed the spin, but then I was underwater. I held my breath, watching the surface get farther and farther away from my grasping hands.
I was going to die.
All of a sudden, something hit the surface above me and sank down.
A rock. A rock tied to a rope. The man might not have been allowed to reach me, but the weighted rope had.
I grabbed the rock with both arms and hugged it to my chest. Reaching up as my lungs started burning, I pulled on the rope, hoping someone could feel that and get me the fuck out of there.
I could feel the tension of something pulling on me and something else pulling on the rope. Not being the religious type, all I could think to pray was please. Please let this work. Please don’t let me drown. Please!
Whatever had me in its grip gave, and I broke the surface a moment later. I gasped and coughed and gasped again. Rolling onto my back, I just held onto that rock and let them pull me to safety. But in doing that I realized I hadn’t been saved by anyone from Spring.
I was heading back through the barrier to Winter.
And I was glad.
I reached through the barrier, and someone grasped my hand. Between that and the rope, they pulled me through and up onto solid, snow-covered ground. I immediately started shivering, teeth chattering, and couldn’t stop myself from trying to curl into a ball.
“Furs, now! And light a fire. We have to get him warm!”
I couldn’t quite catch my breath and there was a black circle closing in on my vision, but right in the center of my sight was Flurry’s frantic face. I reached for him as everything went dark.