I needed to reach Taliesin, though I didn’t know if he’d healed enough to help me. Del wouldn’t do it unless I offered her more money, which I definitely didn’t have.
Running both hands down my face, I steeled myself for what was to come. I pulled on the magic that allowed me to step in-between and felt my beast stir with concern for Cerri.
We’ll get our princess back. I promise. Or we’ll die trying.
I no longer cared if my beast ripped its way out of me. If I had to rely on the creature to save Cerri, then I would…I just hoped Faust wouldn’t be there. That was the last thing I needed.
27
CERRI
No matter how long I circled this obnoxious hedgemaze, the sun above didn’t budge an inch. It felt like it’d been hours…no,days. I knew time moved oddly in the fae realms. Had I been pulled into one?
Okay, I knew that absolutely made sense. What else could this be? No one could blame me for being a little slow on the uptake. It’d been a long day and my reserves were running out. My skin was stretched tight under the constant light of the sun. Freckles had cropped up along my shoulders and along my collarbones.
The deeper I went, the eerier the landscape became. The sun took on an awful orange hue. Small cages were caught deep in the thorny bramble of the hedges. When I peered deep into the bramble, I could see tiny sleeping bodies. These weren’t like the pixies I’d met in the tiny park back in Syracuse.
These were people, shrunken down to fit in the little cages. Though they slept, their faces were contorted with horror and pain like they were trapped in nightmares.
I lifted my head and peered forward. Above the hedges, I could see the crumbling peak of a castle ahead. My breath hitched. Memory tried to crawl its way out of the depths of my mind, but there were too many magical barriers. It banged against the inside of my skull in a desperate plea to escape. I couldn’t let it out, though.
Not on my own.
I had to keep pushing forward, even if this was a trap. The thought had crossed my mind more than once. I knew that this had to be Beryl’s work. It wasn’t like the gateways into fae realms would just magically open up for me. That’s not how this worked. Fae magic was all about intention.
I needed belief for the magic to answer to me. Right now, all I had were questions.
“Are you going to trap me here with the rest of my biological parents’ court?” I dragged my fingers along the hedges.
This time, they didn’t try to bite me. This close to the center of the maze, the hedges seemed to be quaking in fear. I felt some of them try to reach out to me like hands reaching for help. I couldn’t give them what they wanted.
I was nothing more than a fool who’d walked right into a trap.
Shaking myself, I wondered where that thought had come from. Fear tried to crawl out of the pit of my stomach, but I was tired of cowering. I’d survived Alvin and Bastien already. Fear wasn’t going to have any hold over me anymore.
There was something in the air. It was the same force causing the sleeping fae to have nightmares in their magical slumber. The magic tried to take ahold of me, but I threw my arcana out. I reached into the sky and tried something new.
While my arcana always felt like sunlight, I’d never considered manipulating the sun with it. This wasn’t the mortal world, so I figured magic might work differently here. Instead of summoning plants that might quake in fear like the others, I reached for whatever was making the sun orange.
When my arcana grabbed ahold of something tangible, I almost leapt in triumph. I shoved and pulled, but the force refused to budge. That’s when I dug in my heels and wrapped steadying vines around my calves and thighs. They held me in place while I put everything I had into moving that force.
Finally, after a layer of sweat beaded my forehead and my lungs burned with effort like I’d been physically pushing a boulder uphill for hours, the force slid out of the way and fresh sunlight shone over head.
A glow washed over the maze, but it didn’t wake the sleeping fae. I was thankful if only because I didn’t know how to free them yet. I didn’t want them to be trapped in a waking nightmare even if they were already in a sleeping one.
Guilt turned into a stone in the pit of my stomach. I looked around, taking in everything that was supposed to be mine. I could already tell, even without the unlocked memory, that this was my parents’ court. This was the home they’d desperately tried to defend and the people they’d wanted to save.
They were trapped here in this cursed existence.
“Look at what your parents left behind,” Beryl said, suddenly appearing beside me.
She towered over me. Her spine bent forward, making her even more inhuman with her too long limbs and fingers that seemed to have too many knuckles. She was justtoo much.
She turned her gleaming red eyes towards me. Her slick, blood-colored lips split into a smug grin that I wanted to slap off her face.
Yeah, that would end great. Bitch-slapping an evil fae queen would absolutely backfire right about now. But that didn’t stop the urge from gripping me like an addiction I hadn’t given into in months.
“This isn’t mine,” I said, though my heart wasn’t in the argument anymore.