AllFreeNovel
Share Us
I held up a hand.
Pure, clear water trickled through my fingers, crisp and cold and causing me to laugh with delight. It was a river, a river held up by nothing at all. I splashed us by simply by pulling my hand down swiftly.
“Green fey,” Ray said, cracking a slight grin himself. “Gotta be. They pull this shit all the time.”
“You’ve seen something like this before?”
He shook his head. “Heard about it. Didn’t believe it, though.” He looked at me, and there was challenge in it. “Feel like a swim?”
Chapter Twenty
Dorina, Faerie
We took a swim. Ray leapt upwards, into the suspended river, giving me the strange view of his body floating over nothing at all. For a moment, it looked like I was sitting under a swimming pool with a glass bottom, looking up at the sun’s rays filtering through onto my face. It was amazing.
And that was before an arm reached down, grasped my hand, and pulled me up alongside him.
The water was cold enough to be a shock, although less of one than the view. I looked down through shifting waters at the massive cavern below us, and something between excitement and fear coursed through me. Cascading sunlight picked out glints in the rocks, gleamed off a forest of limestone formations, and highlighted bats, thousands upon thousands of them, flocking like birds far below.
It was a mind-bending sight that I knew I’d never forget. But it was almost equaled when we burst out of the other side of the stream, and for a moment, I didn’t know which way was up. A wave of disorientation hit, giving me the strangest feeling that the world had flipped, and I was about to fall into the huge, blue bowl of the sky.
Then I blinked and everything righted itself, leaving me looking at a truly beautiful spot. The river murmured over clutches of rocks, the wind sighed through the treetops of an enormous forest, the sun streamed down out of a cloudless sky, and a bird sang a brief trill. Even better, the entire stretch of riverbank was deserted, without a threat in sight.
We were out!
Ray and I looked at each other, and despite everything, we laughed. And kept on doing so when he tossed his head, spraying me with water, and I splashed him back. We floated there, having a water flight like a couple of children for a moment, just grateful to be alive.
We eventually started moving, but not toward dry land as I’d expected. The shoreline wasn’t far, a brief rocky and then grassy expanse before the tree line, but Ray avoided it. I tried to ask why, but he just shook his head.
“In a minute.”
In a minute we ended up by a flat shelf of rock that extended outward from the embankment. Ray scooped me up and deposited me in a dry area out of the waterline. The rock looked like shale and had been washed by the river for so long that it was as smooth as silk under my fingertips. The sun had warmed it, in between sections of a rocky overhang, making it a comfortable enough spot.
Yet I didn’t understand why we had stopped here.
Ray squatted down beside me, his face earnest. “Look. You gotta remember three things about Faerie, okay?”
I nodded.
“One, assume that everything is trying to kill you, all the time, because it probably is. Two, never—and I mean never—go into a forest unless you got a fey guide. Seriously. The damned thing will eat you, and that is not a metaphor.”
I nodded again.
“And three, try to get out as fast as you can. If you remember those three things, you got maybe a fifty-fifty chance.”
I did not like those odds. “But how do we get out? I didn’t find a map—”
He waved it away. “Portals won’t be on a map, unless they’re the official ones we’d never get near anyway. But I got contacts. Soon as we figure out where we are, I’ll get us outta here, okay?”
I nodded. I was grateful for Ray’s former occupation, which had involved a fair amount of smuggling into the fey lands. If I had to be stuck here with anyone, I was glad it was him.
He smiled as if he’d heard that, which perhaps he had. “Look, I’m gonna go get a fish and some firewood. You want anything else?”
I frowned. “Shouldn’t we move on before making camp? Put some distance between us and the fey?”
Ray shook his head. “It’s gonna be dark before long. That’s rule number four: never travel in Faerie at night. It’s dangerous enough in the daytime.”
I absorbed that, and my stomach growled, as if placing an order. “Another fish, then?”
