by Cate Corvin
The sky here was dusk, washed in tones of violet and indigo. Stars still glittered above wispy clouds.
Below us, the normal districts of Avilion had vanished. Instead of the prismatic Seelie Palace, a massive, thorny castle overlooked the city below.
This was Annwyn, the inverse city of the Unseelie Court.
We soared over it slowly, Gwyn letting me drink in every detail of the Unseelie Court.
There was a forest of giant, glowing mushrooms in the distance. A black lake just on the outskirts of the city was lit up from within with swirling clouds of teal fish. Outside the thorny palace, there was a mansion that glittered like ice, overlooking a steep drop to a winter forest.
And everywhere, the trees glowed with little pixies and sprites. I reached out to feel for the trees from another land, sinking into their collective consciousness.
They weren’t sleepy, like the trees of Avilion. These trees were wide awake, just as curious about me as I was about them.
I withdrew, taking a deep breath of air that smelled like night-blooming flowers. “Can we go down?” I asked, strangely eager to see Annwyn up close.
Gwyn laughed. “Pretty, isn’t it? But I’ve got somewhere else I want to show you first.”
We flew over Annwyn and the giant lake, and into the wilderness. A slice of a crescent moon still hung over the horizon like a pendant in the sky.
Below us, a dense forest gave way to rolling hills. I didn’t realize the motorcycle was descending until we passed over a tree, so close I felt its branches reaching up for me.
He circled and brought the bike down on top of an empty hill.
I slid off, my legs a little shaky and hands aching from holding on so tight, and pulled off my helmet.
Gwyn ran his fingers through my wild curls. “Nice helmet hair.”
I put the helmet on the bike’s seat and shook out my hair. “You didn’t wear one,” I accused.
“That’s because I know what I’m doing.” He stretched, his shirt pulling up to show the ripple of abs and a tattoo of a spiked leaf. “The last thing I want is to drop you and have you splatter like an egg.”
“That’d be a pretty gross way to die.” I looked around the hill we were on. The grass underfoot was a deep aubergine and soft as velvet. “Where are we?”
Gwyn took my hand and we climbed up to the top. I could see for what seemed like miles, to the deep forests that glimmered like they beckoned us.
“This is where I grew up.” He looked out over the hills, his eyes crinkling at the corners. “Our village used to be here, but my people have long since moved on.”
I sat down. That was all I really wanted to do, just sit and drink it all in. The Unseelie Court was so peaceful compared to the constant rush of Avilion.
“I didn’t expect it to be like this,” I admitted. “You know, all that stuff about Sobek Street and the Undercity… I thought the Unseelie Court was all blood and guts.”
Gwyn sat next to me, his fingers just touching mine. “Some of it is. A lot of us stick to the old ways here. But the Undercity is just a place in between. They don’t fit in either Annwyn or Avilion.”
I laid back in the grass, looking up at the spirals of color in the sky. There were very few places in Avilion where you could just sit and breathe without a thousand other people being nearby.
Gwyn laid down next to me. It was so nice to just breathe out and let everything, all the worries, melt away into nothing.
There was a tremble in the ground. I felt it through my palms and back, the ground reacting to my presence.
“Shit,” I hissed, sitting up.
Gwyn followed suit. There were little bits of purple grass in his long hair. “Huh. Will you look at that.”
There were little dark vines curling out of the ground where my hands had been. A few tiny leaves had dared to bud on them.
“I guess the earth here likes me,” I said, trying to sound natural. “I don’t usually go around planting trees like this…”
He stroked one of the little vines, and it curled around his finger affectionately. “Clearly this can only mean one thing.”
“What’s that?” Maybe I should get up entirely before a tree sprouted under my ass.
Gwyn’s garnet eyes were dark but brilliant in the Unseelie land’s evening light. “That this…” He paused dramatically. “Is Briallen’s Hill.”
I clapped a hand over my nose, but the snort escaped. “You can’t just claim a hill.”
He stood up and brushed himself off, tossing his long hair back. “I believe I just did, Bananatree. You should probably grow something on it so everyone knows.”
“I’m not even an Annwyn resident! I can’t just go growing trees when I don’t even have a visa for this court.”
Gwyn looked down at my vines, then back at me. “I believe you just did.”
“That’s not the answer for everything.” I got up, curling my traitorous hands at my sides. Getting on Queen Nicnevin’s bad side was extremely high on my List of Things Not to Do.
Besides… my trees were dangerous. What if I unleashed something that spread and destroyed everything in its path?
Gwyn took my hands, forcing me to unfurl my fingers. “It’s something I’ve noticed,” he said casually. “Every other nymph is perfectly comfortable in her element, but I’ve only seen you talk to a tree once. Never seen you grow one.”
My mouth was dry as cotton. “Maybe I grow and talk to trees all the time and you just don’t notice, because we only get to see each other for a tiny bit each morning.”
Gwyn shook his head, smiling. “The thing is, none of the trees in Avilion feel like you.”
I licked my lips. Seriously, how did all the saliva just evaporate out of my mouth this quickly? “Who goes around feeling trees? Weirdo.”
“You, which makes you the weirdo. Tree-groper.”
I giggled despite myself. “Touché.”
But Gwyn’s eyes were serious. “Why is that, Briallen? Don’t you need trees to survive? Why hold yourself back from them?”
If there was one person I trusted not to tell the world about what a fuck-up of a dryad I was, it was Gwyn. I couldn’t really say how he’d managed to squirm his way into my trust that easily, but if Jack the Jerk knew, then Gwyn deserved to know, too.
“You know how most dryads grow a tree, and they’re bound to it for life?” I asked. “I’m not bound to one tree. I can grow hundreds, and they’re… well, they’re disastrous.”
I told him everything. All the bottled-up hurt, the feeling of being completely alone…
He touched my cheek. “You’re not alone.”
I smiled up at him. “Not right now, I’m not.”
“Look around you.” He held out an arm, gesturing the rolling expanse of absolutely nothing. “Why not just let it out and see what happens? Nobody here will care. This is where the misfits come to find a home. Annwyn is about heart, not style.”
Something about that really spoke to me. Heart, not style.
Avilion was all about polish. The gloss of the Gentry ruled the city, but there was nothing polished about me. I was a walking disaster waiting to happen.
“Okay.” I knelt down. “So this will be known as Briallen’s Hill for all of time, right?”
Gwyn crossed his arms, grinning at me. “Forever and ever. I’ll even make you a sign.”
“If it’s shaped like a banana, I swear by the trees,” I muttered, and flattened my hands in the grass. “Umm… you might want to back up a bit. A little more, a little more… okay, you’re good now.”
The velvet grass warmed under my palms. The earth here was so still, peacefully waiting to make something grow.
But I didn’t want to unleash destruction and thorns. I wanted something that summed me up, everything that was Briallen written in its branches.
I summoned up happy thoughts, pushing the memories of Emain Ablach far away. I had friends in Avilion; I had a job I loved, and being with Gwyn under a starry
sky made me feel like I could just be myself.
The seed I planted pushed up out of the soil. I ran my hands over the twisted trunk, urging it to grow higher and reach for those stars.
The hum of energy in my hands faded as the tree found a shape it was happy with. I opened my eyes and looked up.
Spirals of the grass’s violet color swirled around the smooth trunk, and it had stretched its branches out wide. They dripped with mounds of thin, dark blue leaves, shaded silver on their undersides.
I strode down the hill to Gwyn, who opened his arm for me to snuggle under. We both looked up at my tree as the buds on its branches burst into bloom.
Each flower glowed pale pink, pulsing with life. As we watched, several pixies from the woods began buzzing towards it like they were mesmerized.
“That’s the best damn tree I’ve ever seen,” Gwyn said, hugging me.
I wrapped my arms around his waist as the pixies began to explore the tree, making little sounds of happiness. “I hope so. Everything good about me is inside it.”
I’d never made something so pretty before. It was… just a tree. It wasn’t trying to expand and choke out everything around it. How odd.
We left Briallen’s Hill to the pixies, and Gwyn made me put the helmet back on for a sky tour of the rest of Annwyn.
I couldn’t believe how it made me feel to finally grow a real tree without fear of someone breathing down my neck or ripping it out by the roots.
It was like I’d finally gotten to take off a stifling mask and just be me.
My peace and happiness were finally interrupted when Gwyn’s phone buzzed in his pocket. He looked at the screen with a scowl. “Hunt business,” he said. “I’ll take you home.”
We tore back through the portal to Avilion, and the world lurched around us again as we passed back to the flip side of the world, where the sun was still bright in the sky. I blinked, tears forming against the glare.
This time, he didn’t fly over Avilion, landing the bike in Acionna Harbor. I pointed out which way to go until the roar of the bike bounced off the narrow roads of Mothwing Falls.
“Here!” I shouted in his ear.
Gwyn pulled it to a rumbling halt, and I realized we had an audience.
Carabosse was outside her shop, sitting in a rocking chair and petting her cat sìth’s pointed ears. She gave me a disapproving look.
And at the top of the stairs, by my apartment door, were two nymphs from Fairy Ferry: Nadiya Korova and Audra Brightbreeze.
They were already muttering to each other, their eyes glued to Gwyn’s bike.
“When it rains, it pours,” I muttered, climbing off the bike and pulling the helmet off. I put it back in its bag, and looked up at Gwyn, drinking in his pretty features.
“One for the road?” I asked, feeling inexplicably shy.
His teeth flashed in a grin, showing those pointed canines. “Thought you’d never ask, Bananatree.”
I didn’t bother with the cheek this time. I just stepped forward as Gwyn’s arm snaked around my waist and tilted my head to kiss him full on the mouth.
His tongue slid over my lip and I opened for him, letting out a soft moan as he kissed me deeper. I was this close to climbing up on the bike again when a voice sang out, “Briaaaallen!”
I pulled away reluctantly, feeling like a kid who’d had their candy stolen.
“See you soon,” Gwyn said, running his thumb along my lower lip. I tried to smile and stepped away, letting the bike roar down the street.
I wished I could fly away for a little longer.
Instead, I let the fairy tale fade, and went back to the bitch known as real life.
20
Their eyes were enormous as I walked up the stairs, running my fingers through my wind-wildened curls. Nadiya had left a trail of droplets that I followed like a red carpet up to my apartment door.
Audra’s pale blue hair whipped around like she stood in the center of a tiny, localized storm, betraying her excitement.
“Bri, he’s Wild Hunt. Is this why you left us?” She wrung her fingers, the same light-sky shade as her hair. “Oh, holy winds. You got caught up with them, didn’t you? You got a bad boy boyfriend and now you’re his—”
“Audra,” I interrupted, a sense of foreboding filling me and washing away some of the joy and relief Gwyn had brought me like the tide. “He’s not… not technically my boyfriend. I guess. Sort of? Maybe. We’re friends, okay?”
Nadiya raised one of her pencil-thin eyebrows, hands on her hips. “When you cut through all the bullshit you just said, that sounds an awful lot like ‘boyfriend’.”
I adjusted my windblown shirt and glared at them. “Did the two of you come here to interrogate me about my nonexistent boyfriend?”
The last thing I wanted to do was answer for my messy life to my friends. I didn’t even know what was going on.
Only last night I’d walked up these steps with Robin, and now he was acting like it had never happened.
Was Gwyn my boyfriend? He was so much more open than my tight-lipped boss, willing to tear down the wall between Lesser and Gentry like it was nothing.
He met me for morning dates with an enthusiasm Ioin had never shown.
And we kissed every time we saw each other now…
As though she were reading my thoughts, Audra said, “But you just kissed him.” Her purple eyes were enormous, staring right through me.
“Yeah, well…”
“We’re not here about your boyfriend.” Nadiya examined her bitten nails, probably pondering all the drowning she was missing out on right now. “Numa sent us to beg for you to come back to Fairy Ferry.”
I snorted, convinced I’d misheard. “Sorry, what?”
“I believe his exact words were ‘get that conceited asshole of a dryad back in here’,” Nadiya said serenely, but Audra exhaled a puff of cloud in exasperation.
“He also told us to get down on our knees and beg if we had to. I think word’s starting to get around, and he’s having a hard time getting pretty girls to work for him.” She snickered, taking pleasure in Numa’s plight. “Nobody wants their ass grabbed.”
I thought about how many times in the last two weeks I’d had my ass grabbed on the job, and how odd it was that it would be so much less bothersome than Numa doing it.
On the other hand, if I knew that letting Numa grope me would end up with Robin arresting him, I’d probably be all for it.
I leaned against the railing as the cat sìth slinked up the stairs towards us. It jumped up and snuggled against my shoulder, purring hard when I scratched behind his ears.
“You know my answer already. If I never see a satyr again, I’ll die happy.” I scratched the cat sìth’s fuzzy throat, well aware that I’d likely be seeing another satyr in the next twenty-four hours. “Numa can go fuck himself, since no one else wants to do it.”
Nadiya gave me a thin, razor-sharp smile. “I told him this would be a waste of time.”
“We didn’t even get to grovel,” Audra sighed. Nadiya rolled her eyes.
“So, what are you doing now, Briallen?” She eyed the Acorn 8 sticking out of my pocket. “I know you sure as hell didn’t buy that off the Fairy Ferry salary, and someone told me they saw you in Myrage a few weeks ago with a Gentry male.”
Audra’s eyes got even bigger, which I hadn’t thought possible. They were already the size of saucers. “Are you whoring for the Gentry? Wait! Is that what your Wild Hunter boyfriend does? Do you have to go to all the other Hunters and… you know… service them?”
She looked like one other favorite gossip columns had come to life right in front of her, practically shivering with excitement.
A prickle of unease ran up my spine, followed by irritation. “I’m not whoring for anyone,” I snapped. “If that was my job, I would’ve stayed with Numa and made him hand over extra. A pervy satyr and the Gentry— pffft. I see no difference.”
Nadiya gripped Audra’s upper arm, squeezing her gently.
>
“You can keep your secrets,” she said, still wearing that smile that could cut like glass. “We’ll tell Numa we got down on our knees and groveled our shriveled little hearts out, but I would never blame you for leaving that behind.”
Even if I told them the truth, which Robin’s potion prevented me from doing, was that what it would look like to them? Working for Robin, whoring for Gentry… maybe to someone else, it was the same thing.
In the end, he still held all the cards. He could turn my world inside-out for one night, and the next day pretend nothing had ever happened.
I took a deep breath. “Thanks, Nadiya. I’m just figuring things out right now. My visa will be up soon, but I’ll be damned if I stay here for Numa’s sake.”
She nodded and started tugging Audra towards the stairs. “Call us sometime, Bri,” she called. “Don’t become a stranger.”
I raised my hand in farewell, keeping my smile pasted on as the cat sìth headbutted my shoulder for another round of scratches. I let the expression drop when they turned the corner.
A stranger. Was that what I was becoming to everyone?
My phone began vibrating in my pocket, and I almost groaned aloud when I pulled it out and saw the name across the screen. I should’ve been happy that she’d cared enough to call.
I answered the phone and put it to my ear, giving the cat sìth a goodbye scratch down his spine. “Hello, Mom.”
My mother had one of the sternest voices I’d ever heard in my life. Even her greetings made me feel like I was about to get a dressing-down. “Well, hello to you too, Briallen. You haven’t called in months, dear. I was starting to get worried.”
I unlocked the apartment and let myself in, my stomach twisting as I headed to my room. “Oh, come on. You know I’ve been busy.”
The twisting became a feeling of illness as I pushed my door open. Clothes from last night were still scattered on the floor, one pillow had been tossed to the other side of the room, and we’d left the comforter in a twisted mess.
I heard Pomona’s light breathing on the other end of the line as I closed my door and leaned against it. “Dear, I just worry about you.” She sounded strangely gentle. “Avilion is a big, wild place, nothing like Emain Ablach…”
