by Ron C. Nieto
“Yeah.” Lily thought back to the last couple of days with her grandmother, of the way she had shown her the name of all those instruments. She thought back to her childhood, to the silly rhymes and innocent games that had sent her mother screaming for the hills, and she realized it. Grandma Mackenna had always meant for her to be part of this other world. “She believed I could, too.”
“Very well.” Troy spread his arms out to the sides, encompassing the whole of the refuge, and then he performed a courtly little bow. “Show me how well you fit. Let us find the way to the riverside.”
He walked past her, sinking into the foliage and barely rustling the thick leaves with his passing. Lily followed close at his heels, but he moved too fast. The greenery seemed to part for him but reach out to entangle her, and soon, she had to chase shadows. The color of his clothing blended in with the darkness, and his pale face looking back over this shoulder with a smirk was the last thing she could distinguish before finding herself alone.
Lily rested her hands on her knees and took a deep breath, in and out. She was fine, really, but her body had trouble believing it and the emotional baggage dragged her down. However, she had seen the twisted look of a bully right before Troy disappeared from sight and she wouldn’t let him get away with it.
If he thinks a little hiking will break me, he’ll be disappointed.
The soil was soft under her shoes, the wildlife thick around her. The river had to be close, so she canted her head and strained to listen.
“There,” she whispered. It was a sound just this side of her hearing and it reverberated through the closed space below the canopy, but it was there. She turned a full circle, trying to discern where it came from, but the lingering echoes made it difficult for her untrained ear. Still, after a moment of hesitation, she took a step, then another. The ground was not quite level, so it stood to reason she would soon find the river if she followed down the slope.
In spite of her intentions, Lily couldn’t advance in a straight line. The trees weren’t the true impediment as they were sparse, thin, and wrecked. Only their upper branches presented any thickness, sprawled like grasping fingers to touch one another and creating a green cover far over her head. On the ground, it was brambles and shrubs standing in her way. Sometimes they grew in thickets impossible to traverse, and other times they stood alone and defiant, forcing her to sidestep them. Whenever she did, she made sure to take the detour toward the down slope, which would bring her that much closer to the water. She could still hear it, its gurgling a cocoon wrapped around her, and so she pressed on.
She didn’t know how many minutes she walked before the first strange thing registered.
It’s not getting louder. She tilted her head again to listen, but she found the same curtain of watery music that had accompanied her up until that point. How far can this sound travel in the foliage? How far can the river be?
She looked around again, more careful this time. Scotland was a fertile place, but even so, this degree of lushness should correspond to a riverside, she was sure of it. Perhaps brambles weren’t precisely popular plants near the water—or anywhere, for that matter—but the soil was fresh, the trees gnarled but full of life. There was moss in their trunks. She had to be close, so she sidestepped a shrub with pretty red flowers and kept descending.
Her legs began to ache by the time the next realization hit her. She lifted her gaze toward the canopy overhead and watched the brilliant green leaves quivering in the nonexistent breeze. Their borders were outlined by a faint radiance, as if receding sunlight shone beyond them, but no shafts of light crossed them to dance upon the floor. And once she truly looked, she had to wonder if the illumination had changed at all since she set out.
“Perhaps I haven’t been walking so long,” she said aloud, chasing the unease away with the sound of her voice. “I’m tired after everything that’s happened, so it feels like hours but I must’ve been just one, tops. The light doesn’t change that fast.”
Somewhere to her left, a bird cawed as if in mirth and Lily flinched, her eyes searching for the animal. Where did it come from? It was the first sign of animal life she had seen, other than herself and Troy. It hadn’t bothered her until that point, but now its presence irked her. It had felt like the bird laughed at her, a girl lost and alone in the forest, unable to find a river that lay so very close. She turned in a slow circle, hoping to locate it, but it was nowhere to be seen. She was as alone as she’d been.
Throwing a last glance over her shoulder, she chose the downslope again to resume her search. She had to circumvent yet another shrub within three paces, though. Lily turned with a sigh and then stopped and turned to regard it so fast she got whiplash. It was a shrub right out of a children story, its branches giving it a naturally rounded shape, and bright red flowers stood in stark contrast against the deep green of its leaves.
It was exactly like the one she’d passed what felt like miles before and she retraced her steps.
It stood blocking her path in just the same manner.
What the hell? Is that the same plant? Lily’s heartbeat thundered in her chest, the surety she’d felt only moments before all but gone. She forced herself to remain calm. Not possible. I’ve been walking down all the time, so circling back and not realizing isn’t an option. It’s just a similar bush. There must be a ton of similar-looking plants here.
Although her rational mind was happy with the thought, there was a larger part of Lily who had been nearly eaten by bogeys and been saved by a kelpie. She grabbed one of the branches with both hands and twisted until it broke. Her fingers came away sticky, darkened with green-black ichor, and the jagged bark snagged her hands when she stepped back to admire her handiwork. The picture-perfect shrub had become a mangled, misshapen thing. It was the only hint toward human influence she could see, too. Satisfied, she resumed her purposeful walk, taking care to always walk down the slope and following more the terrain than the ubiquitous water gurgle.
With each step, the weight of her legs increased and her movements became sloppy. The light still didn’t change, so she took to counting her steps to mark the passage of time. Two hundred saw her losing her footing over a raised root she should have been able to avoid, three hundred and ten marked the first time she miscalculated and got grazed by a bramble’s thorny branches, and by the time she reached five hundred, she was reduced to trudging on, trampling everything in her path or getting thorned by it. She knew she should mind the little cuts and bruises, but she barely had the energy to keep going, let alone to do so with any grace.
Eight hundred and thirty-one steps later, she found it.
Half the plant was round, coming up to her waist, covered in delicate red flowers. The other half had been twisted and flattened. Some red petals had fallen to the ground, and those that remained clinging to their stems were spattered with dark green-black droplets like congealed blood.
A wave of nausea threatened to overwhelm her as she took in the only hint of human presence in the whole riverside. Her mind tethered on the brink of despair while her heart thudded to a stop, and then a burst of adrenaline kick-started her, sending a myriad thoughts racing along with the maddening staccato in her chest.
Grandma told me stories about this, didn’t she? People getting lost in faerie paths. How did the protagonists escape? There were lights, right? You had to follow them. She swallowed. Or was that the way to get lost in the first place? It had been too long and, at the time, they were nothing but silly nursery tales. Bits and pieces of information fluttered just out of reach, beckoning her, but not giving her enough to prove useful. Sometimes, people surfaced after years wandering the paths, even though it felt like only minutes. I already feel like I’ve been walking all day long and then some. She refused to think about the other stories. The tales of people never coming back—more often than not after having enraged a faerie.
A bird cawed and Lily jerked out of her thoughts. Its tone had been mocking and she half expected t
o find a huge, black raven laughing at her. She shivered and it cawed again, more urgently. She cast about, hoping to spot it. Somehow, her invisible companion scared her as much as discovering the faerie path did.
Nothing. She was alone.
“There was no call for violence,” Troy’s voice said, not two feet in front of her.
She shrieked. He closed his eyes while she did, as if to better take in her fear, and then his tongue darted out and licked his upper lip.
“And no true need for that, either, nice as it was.”
“Since when did you get here?” Lily’s voice shook, but not as much as she thought it would.
“‘When’ and ‘here’ are misleading concepts in this instance. I… watched you.”
“I saw you disappear ahead of me.”
“And you saw me appear again.” He shrugged, as if visual proof meant nothing.
“You’ve been watching me stumble on all this time? Without saying anything?” Lily tried to cajole her fear into indignant anger. That, at least, felt a little like a shield.
“Saying anything? To guide you to the riverside?” Troy smirked. “That would defeat the purpose of our experiment, I should think.”
“That’s it? You were just trying to prove a point? And if I had gotten lost forever?”
“Then I would have been right.” He stalked in a circle around her, drawing closer. “In fact, I believe I am. It has taken you this long to even recognize one of our paths, and it is quite obvious you are blind to its exit. No simpler snare than this lies ahead for you… And you are not capable of dealing with it.”
In spite of her weariness, Lily drew herself up when she felt his presence behind her. “If there’s an exit,” she said, “I’ll find it.”
Troy stopped moving. She didn’t dare look back at him.
“The exit has not changed since you began searching for it. You have not seen it, and you will not find it now.”
“I know what I’m looking for this time,” she insisted.
“In fact, you do not.” There was a new nuance in his tone. Lily fought to place it. Was it… perplexity? “Why would you keep trying to cross a barrier you cannot even feel?”
So I need to feel out for a barrier. That’s something, I guess. Aloud, she said, “Because I won’t step away from this.”
His fingers touched her arm. They were long, graceful, and cool. A shiver ran down her spine as she turned, following the lead of his slight pressure.
He stood close. She had known it, but it hadn’t prepared her to face him, neck craned back to meet his gaze. His viridian eyes studied her, looked into her with a mixture of confusion and curiosity along with many other things she had no name for, and it made her dizzy. After an endless moment, he nodded and took a step back, breaking the spell.
“If that is what you wish,” he said in a low voice. “You have been warned.”
C H A P T E R X
It wasn’t so much that the world changed as it felt like Lily herself changed. Something shifted in her center and her perception snapped into place. The echoes that had reverberated under the canopy dissipated, and the ground warped before her eyes. For a disorienting second, Lily couldn’t tell what way was up. Then, it settled.
Rays of sunlight darted across the tree leaves and danced in her eyes, their angle suggesting a fast-approaching twilight. There was no real wind, but still she heard occasional puffs of humid breeze ruffling the vegetation. Birds tweeted somewhere in the background—there must be a nest nearby.
Dazed, she walked past the shrub of red flowers, following the clear gurgle of water, and not three yards later, she caught the glint of weak sun reflected on running water.
“What is this?” she asked, turning around. The place was both the same and different from the one she had stood on a blink before.
“The riverside,” Troy said.
“I was on the riverside? All along?” She pointed the shrub, the path under her feet.
He narrowed his eyes, choosing his words with care. “The path you wandered was superimposed to the riverside, yes.”
Lily thought back once more to the stories she could recall from her grandma. Most characters entering or exiting a faerie path wouldn’t even realize they’d left the real world until it was too late, so it made sense. Still, for the entrance to have been so close, and for her to be unable to feel it…
She shivered and then, to hide it, began to pick her way to the river. Troy followed on her heels, his strides easy and confident.
“How long since the attack? You told me saying ‘yesterday’ could be misleading, and I think I remember time doing weird things in the faerie paths.”
“Well done,” he said, giving her a look of surprise and honest praise. “Time does tend to run quicker in mortal lands, and sometimes it folds many times over in the heart of our territory. This path was close to your world, and close to the river, so the correlation should be quite straightforward. I suspect little more than a day might have passed, perhaps two.”
“I’m worried the trail will turn cold,” she admitted. “Or that someone noticed the attack and called the cops. They’ll never understand what happened and they might make it difficult for us.”
Troy shrugged. “Mortals prefer not to see the affairs of fay.”
“I can sort of see why.”
They reached the river just then. It wasn’t wide, but the water was pure and the current fast. Glancing up and down, she saw no known landmarks, no houses. For all she knew, it wasn’t even the Dee.
“Is it far to my grandma’s?” she asked, still worried about their timing.
“I shall take you there,” he said, avoiding her question.
The memory of the way he had changed when escaping the bogeys rushed back to her and hit her like a sledgehammer. Her mind had shoved it into a box labeled delirium, allowing her to cope, but his comment brought the vision of a stallion flashing to the forefront of her awareness, with coat like coal tar and eyes like cut emeralds.
“Wait,” she said. “Is there no other way?”
He smiled, the gesture reaching his eyes, alighting them with a wicked gleam, and stared at her long enough to make her squirm.
“And what appears to be the problem with this way, Lily Boyd?” His voice softened a little when he pronounced her name and she only felt a tingling and a gentle encouragement instead of the violent pull she had experienced earlier.
“I don’t want to ride you,” she blurted, blushing. His smile widened and she cursed her pale skin. Judging by the heat, her cheeks looked like apples.
“I thought all the little girls wanted their own pony,” he pressed, amused by her distress.
Lily bit the inside of her cheek. Part of her wanted to react to his innuendo. Another petulant part wanted to tell him she wasn’t a little girl. Yet another part wanted nothing more than to salvage whatever was left of her dignity, and in the end, the last part won.
“I can’t ride, I told you,” she replied, as if that were the whole reason.
“You did so quite admirably before.” He went along, but his tone and eyes made it clear he hadn’t been fooled.
“Must have been the stress. You know, life-or-death situation. I’ve read adrenaline does that to you.”
“Judging from your delicious babbling, an insufficient stress level should not be a problem this time, either.”
She opened and closed her mouth. “Damn it,” she said at last, averting her eyes and glaring at the floor. “Isn’t it embarrassing for you?”
“Not at all. Why would it be?”
Lily scoffed, but then she caught his expression. There was a hint of curiosity there. For him, it was a legitimate question and the fact gave her some pause.
It can’t be just me losing my mind in the gutter. The idea of a girl riding a guy is universally dirty, isn’t it? Unless faeries don’t work quite that way. Unless he thinks of himself more like a horse. Unless he’s not seeing me as a girl at all. But I am a girl, an
d he isn’t an animal.
She forced out a small cough. “Never mind,” she said after too long in silence.
He nodded, claiming the verbal victory with grace, and then his form became a liquid shadow that shifted and coalesced into the tall steed.
“You cannot fall,” he said in her head just like he had the previous time.
“Is it related to the protection magic?” she asked, feeling awkward for speaking to a horse.
“It is related to a kelpie's nature. Our riders never fall.”
“Okay.” Subdued, she did her best to climb on his back and he endured her accidental hair pulls and knee blows. Then, she was up and she felt what Troy meant. A subtle, gentle energy began pouring over her skin, the sensation not unlike being submerged in tepid water. A feeling she didn’t want to dwell on.
“That’s handy,” she said, “but we should probably hurry.”
And then they were off.
C H A P T E R XI
It was as if not a single minute had passed for the cottage. She’d expected to see police tape around the yard, policemen coming and going, outraged neighbors and curious onlookers, but there was none of that. Dusk was falling, just like it had when she had run away, and the front door rested against its frame where it had been wrenched off its hinges. The windows were closed and the blinds down as if the whole house made ready to rest for the night, oblivious to the violence within. Lily slid off Troy’s back and shivered. In truth, she didn’t want to go back in there. All her good memories had been replaced by a waking nightmare she had no wish to relive. And deep down, she wondered if Troy wasn’t right, if the best solution wouldn’t be a train to Manchester and a long time to forget.
She shook herself. No. Grandma deserves better.
And so she steeled her resolve because she wondered if Mackenna wasn’t alive and waiting for her to acknowledge that the old tales had it right most of the time.
“Will you come inside?” she asked Troy when he finished shifting back into human form. She knew she could communicate regardless of his current shape, but she still had a hard time thinking of the horse she had ridden as Troy, much less talking to him.
