25
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Sweet-things in hand, Killian and I departed from the bakery and started the long journey up the hill of Marazion, strolling along side-by-side on stretches of stone.
The buildings on either side of us were narrow and tall, the two rows confining us into a tunnel of man-made stone, suffocating me from the inside out as I yearned for the open meadows.
I could see just a squint of blue sky directly above us, but like most of England it was turning grey as clouds collected and I had never wished for Saoghal’s somehow always-blue skies more than I did then.
Our meander had been quiet and peaceful, Killian still grabbing on to my hand as if he needed it to ground him, until he suddenly went rigid and stopped our walk.
“What is it?”
He motioned for me to stay quiet, then slipped the two of us down a stench-filled back-alley that was home only to a variety of people’s garbage. Once our backs were placed firmly to the stone, he peered his head around the corner and shot back into the alley.
“What is it?” I repeated, my tone softer and quieter.
“Pop your head out, look left.”
I did as he said, crawling along the brick wall until I was at the corner. Convinced that I was going to die the moment I popped my head out, I took a deep breath and braved the sharp turn of the rocks.
There, walking down the road on the opposite side that we had been, were two men.
Both tall, both broad, both simply glimmering with charm.
They each had their hair slicked back into neat waves atop their heads, their eyes shimmering beneath thick, heavy brows.
One of them let out a particularly loud laugh that shook the streets around us, before he returned his focus to smoothing out the suit he wore and adjusting the white colour against his smooth skin.
Looking at them, I wanted to do nothing more than stare a little longer, assess them a little further.
Not of my own will, I started to walk towards them, until a burly hand grabbed mine and yanked me back around the corner. It was with a scream and a hiss that I found myself back in the alley, pinned to the wall by Killian’s body.
While the two strangers had been large and sculpted in neat, smooth ways, Killian was tremendous and solid in a brawny, rugged type of way.
I shook my head several times, the fog that had lured me out of the street and towards the strangers passing with every second. “What… Who…”
“Fairies,” he whispered, his voice hoarse as he kept me pinned between his two hands that met the wall behind me. “Stay quiet.”
Fairies!
Last year, Killian had given me a few quick rules while in Saoghal. At the time, they had been simple with: don't show anyone my ears, don’t trust anyone, but most importantly, don’t mention fairies.
Yet here they were. Two of them in broad daylight, strolling down the street, matching slacks with their hands deep in their pockets. No wings, no trail of magical dust behind them, no outlined glow. Just human-looking creatures with that strangeness to them that made me want to investigate.
Killian remained as stiff as a rock, caging me in, until we saw the two fairies pass by the entrance to the street. Once they did, Killian’s eyes lolled and he let out a sigh, finally releasing me from my imprisonment.
“But… Why couldn’t they see us?” I asked as he nodded and allowed us to exit the stingy back alley.
“It probably would have been fine if they saw you. But not me.”
Killian’s stern face suggested he thought that was explanation enough. Perhaps he didn’t know me as well as he thought, because I took to pouting and frowned. “Why not?”
“The history between us, our two kinds, is not a pleasant one. And I do not mean like the kingdoms of Saoghal with their disagreements and their small fights. I mean from the moment the earth sprouted and fairies and pixies sprouted with it, we have longed for the extinction of the other.”
My frown remained as I guided us across the roadway and took to the narrow path that ran along the top of the hill, overlooking the ocean beyond. “But why? Why hate one another?”
To that, Killian shrugged. “If you ask me, I don’t think a single one of us remembers why we hate the fairies. When I was young, I asked my mother and father, and they gave me the same answer that their parents gave them and theirs gave them. No one remembers. We just do.”
I couldn’t help but to roll my eyes. “It’s silly, isn’t it? You pixies are… Well, you know how to hold a grudge. Between the constant fighting of the kingdoms of Saoghal, then the Rachainn, you’d think that perhaps the feud with the fairies could be forgotten. One less thing to worry about.”
To my surprise, Killian actually nodded along. “I agree. But we’ve reached somewhat of an understanding. The fairies dwell in the human realm, taking to your sizes and your mannerisms, and we remain in Saoghal. There was a place, once, where we all existed alongside one another.”
“Like Saoghal? But bigger?”
He nodded.
“The Aos Sí, Redcaps, Pixies, and Fairies. There were Elves and Gnomes and Sprites, too.”
I gulped before offering a small admission of my year off. “The Aos Sí and the Fairies, are they not the same thing?”
Killian’s grin grew wide as he looked down his shoulder at me. “You’ve been reading about us, haven’t you?”
Among other things.
“They are similar, but not always the same.”
“That doesn’t make any sense.”
He shrugged as we continued along.
“How did you know they were fairies? They just looked like… handsome men?”
I made my pixie companion laugh at that, the small creases along his face tightening. “Is that what made you walk towards them, Olivia? Because they were handsome men? I don’t recall you walking towards me in the same way.”
My face blushed a putrid shade of red and I dipped my chin so that my hair could cover it. But Killian reached over and tucked that hair right back behind my ears, his fingers skimming the rounded ends of them.
“Do not be embarrassed. Fairies have a very unique type of magic, a magic of the mind and the emotions. They cannot burn you with fire but they can convince you to fall on your own blade. That pull you felt towards them? It is as natural to their being as the need to breathe is. They cannot help it and you cannot resist it.”
“But you can?”
“It takes most pixies many years to train against attacks of the mind. I have trained for decades. So yes, I can. But, oh–” Killian’s attention snapped, the two sides of it rebounding and nearly taking me out with the speed that he spun away from me.
“What is it?”
“Look,” his voice was smooth as his jaw hung, his eyes wider than ever as he glanced up the side of a building.
I followed his line of sight only to find myself staring at the side of a stone-building, just like the past one-hundred that we walked by.
But what was different about this one, what had Killian’s focus snared, was a mural on the side of it.
It was an eruption of purples and blues, blacks and pinks, accentuated with the long, lazy drags and peppering of white across the scene. It was an explosion of galactic proportions, a painting of the galaxy.
“Reultan,” he breathed.
It seemed cruel to try and tell him that he was staring at a poorly-painted version of the milky-way, so I let him stand in that bewilderment for a moment longer.
“Reultan?” I finally asked. I remembered a brief conversation about it on my last visit, a mention of a fifth kingdom of Saoghal that was not of the land, sea, nor sky, but of the stars.
Killian nodded several times. “Reultan was the strongest of our kingdoms. The most mighty, the most feared. The pixies that resided there… They were like us but they were not. There was something else about the pixies of Reultan – the Rionnag’Rugadh.”
I tugged at Killian’s shirt to urge him along, we were so close to the outlook that I wanted to sit down and possibly fall asleep within. Star-struck, he nodded and followed my lead.
“What happened to them?”
“No one knows. Most believe that they died, that some great war between them and another species wiped their kingdom completely.”
“And you?” I peered to my left, knowing full well that Killian was often like I was – hopelessly optimistic.
“I believe they still exist. I believe that they sit, watching us all. Watching our failures and our cruelness. I think that they are reminded, time and time again, that leaving Saoghal to its own destruction was the only way.”
My brows knitted as I contemplated that. Not so much what he was saying, but the fact that it was him saying it. It sounded far too similar to the type of things the Rachainn would say. But all thoughts of that and Saoghal slipped from my mind as we at last found the spot I wanted to sit at.
Along the sea-shore, high above the sea at the height of the hill, we walked up to the hedge of stone, adorned completely in the richest of green sprouting and grass atop it. Pausing there, I turned to motion for Killian to pause alongside me.
We, as one, looked off and away from Marazion, to the long pool of Mount’s Bay, and then to the ocean beyond.
Blue took on a new meaning as it stretched for eternity, blending seamlessly against the budding horizon in the distance, comforted and cuddled by the whitest of clouds that formed at the conjunction.
The salt of the sea soared up the hillside, filling every pocket of air and forcing us to sigh as it slipped into us.
The cries of seagulls echoed off of every stone as they launched from this coast to the next, wings of white and grey fluttering against the blue skies above.
It was as if that blanket of grey that had been building over the top of Marazion was parting, just for us, just for right now, so that I could live in this moment.