“No,” he snapped. “Several miles of that belongs to the Summer Court.”
“Not according to the barrier.” I gestured at the glass-like wall stretching as far as I could see going left, right, and up.
He crossed his arms. “Well, it’s wrong.”
Sure it was.
I toed at the dead grass. “Does the barrier go down underground, too?”
“I don’t know.”
The barrier looked like it was sitting on the ground, literally pressed into the mud, but if it really was some magical barrier, it probably wouldn’t let someone dig under it. Or, er, whoever had designed the barrier when they’d cursed the courts would’ve accounted for digging. The barrier wasn’t sentient.
Was it curved, though? Like ever so slightly not straight? “Is the barrier curved?” I asked Solaris.
He shrugged. “I imagine it is since the courts are four sections within a circle.”
“Wait, so this is the outer edge?” I pointed through the barrier to the spring-like land on the other side. “Is that not the Spring Court?”
“No, that doesn’t belong to myself or my brothers. Until you reach the mountains,” he said, pointing off into the distance, “this is all the Galastian Forest.”
The forest was mossy and full of ferns and granite boulders with Sitka spruce, Douglas firs, and maybe even some redwoods. I wanted to get up higher, possibly on top of the keep, to see more of the landscape. It was absolutely fascinating over there.
“Who’s Galastia?” I asked. “A fae princess or something?”
“The first unicorn. She ate some fireflies by mistake and grew a horn before giving birth to a herd of offspring.” He waved it all away. “It’s a very strange myth.”
I was about to laugh about that myth sounding suspiciously Greek when a herd of sparkling white horses with horns on their foreheads galloped through the trees over there. Except they weren’t horses, I could see that clearly enough, but holy shit. Unicorns were real?
Trying to accept it, I said aloud, “Unicorns are real.”
“Of course they are.”
I chuckled because, yeah, I knew that struggling with unicorns being real while standing next to a dude with wings was ridiculous, but there I was anyway.
“You’ll also find goblins, trolls, fairies, sprites, dragons?—”
“Seriously?”
Solaris shrugged like it was no big deal. And, okay, maybe it wasn’t because over there was the source of every fairytale that had ever been told by the fire on a cold winter’s night for generations. Maybe humans had been passing through fairy rings for thousands of years, bringing their stories of what they saw back with them.
Right then, as I stared at tiny balls of light flitting from one flower to another, I knew…
“I don’t want to go back.”
Solaris touched my shoulder and peered at my face. He looked surprised and maybe…hopeful? “Did you just say?—”
“I don’t want to go back to my world.” I smiled through the nervous flutter in my stomach.
He stared at me for a moment, his grin getting bigger, and then he actually giggled and grabbed me into a hug. I held him close and tucked my nose into his hair, relieved that he wanted me to stay.
All of a sudden, it felt like the ground was shaking beneath my feet. An earthquake? We popped apart and looked around as the trembling continued. I could hear a sort of humming and thought it might be coming from the direction of the barrier.
“Did the barrier just vibrate?” I asked as I headed toward the moat. There were some rocks I could step on to stay out of the mud to get to it.
“Wallace, don’t go over there.”
I went anyway, carefully stepping on rocks. “Does it do that a lot?”
