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I mulled over what I had learned, questions tugging at my mind. "What I don't understand is why the traitor would put her in the ground, not kill her, and then leave the throne open for Cas to claim. And why did they need me to break her out?"
Nia opened her mouth to respond, but it was a weak voice from the bed that drew my attention instead. "Because it was you. You cursed her underground, and then you abandoned your duty and ran."
Oliver was awake.
The look of shock on my face was a direct mirror to the one Nia wore. Oliver said nothing further, gingerly pulling himself up into a sitting position. His eyes were clear and strong, the dark circles beneath them the only giveaway that he had been inches away from death's doorstep.
"I wouldn't. . ." But I trailed off. I didn’t know what I would have done. I'd like to think I was still the same person now that I was then, but how could I be when I couldn't remember the life experiences that made me who I was? All I had were the memories in my head now of a childhood where I wasn't wanted and a slew of bad decisions. Where did the real memories begin and the fake memories end? "How long have I been in the human realm, Oliver?"
"One hundred years, give or take. Fae age incredibly slowly. Think millennia." I searched his face for any sign of deception, or maybe a smile and a laugh to say he was joking, but it didn't come. Sweat slicked my palms, a nervous tingle settling into the soles of my feet as I digested that information.
"A hundred years? I don't understand. I—I remember everything. The foster homes, the schools, the boyfriends. I remember it all." I stopped talking, not because I didn't have more to say, but because I could no longer breathe normally, the air coming out of me in short, urgent gasps as the panic attack came on.
I couldn't wrap my mind around it. A hundred years is an incredibly long time. There was no way I was out there in the human realm, restarting my life every . . . what, ten years? Twenty? Over and over and over again. And I didn't remember any of it. I never had any inkling that something was amiss, not until that night after the car wreck when Lexi bit me.
If I wasn't already sitting, I probably would have fallen.
"Breathe," Nia urged me. I'm not sure when she had moved, but now she crouched in front of me. She set her hands on my shoulders, and a cold chill flooded through my body, freezing the ball of anxiety inside of me. She kept her hands where they were, and after a few moments, I calmed, doing my best to breathe deeply. Oliver watched us from his bed, expressionless.
"I will tell you everything, Rowan, but you have to listen," he said finally. In his Fae form, he didn't look much older than forty, his pointed ears peeking out of the top of his silver hair. It would take some getting used to his appearance from the witch façade of the old man I had originally known him as. "You asked why you ran? Because that's what you always do. Your first instinct is to always run, it always has been. And like I've been telling you for five hundred years, you cannot run from this. Not anymore."
He pulled himself out of the bed slowly until he stood on two feet. He swayed slightly, and Nia rushed over to steady him, her frosty healing leaving me feeling empty but calm. I saw the same tranquility spread into Oliver, and he stood straighter almost immediately.
"You shouldn't be up. Your body will recover at double the rate if you sleep."
"I'll be okay, dear. This is important. The sooner we are all on the same page, the better," he said, gently patting her hand before removing it. He took a breath as her power withdrew from him, but still, he remained steady. A loud rumble echoed in the small hut, and he gave a sheepish grin, a little bit of the cheery light I had seen before returning to his eyes. "Food first, yes?"
ChapterFive
The eating area of the Briar Stronghold was impressive. Where the houses were plain and modest, the eating hut was anything but. It was similarly made of stone like the housing, but there was no roof. Instead, the room was tall and wide with long wooden slats laid sparingly over the top for the pagu to perch on. A large tub of water stood in the middle of the room, filled with large fish splashing and writhing about as eagle-eyed pagu peered in from above, occasionally taking a moment to jump down and get one before flying back up to perch while they ate their meal.
“We try to keep fish stocked here for them,” Nia told me as we walked in. “When the Queen was cursed, the Marked tried to take a stand against Casimir, hoping we could right the throne, once and for all. But he is powerful, almost as powerful as she was, and his army has only gotten larger. We suffered devastating losses, and he’s been hunting us down ever since. He doesn’t want us to ever have the numbers to challenge him again. The stronghold is generally safe, but we don’t like them venturing too far off the property. There are hunters specifically tasked with taking us out. They cannot know about this place.”
We stepped up to a small buffet line, and I marveled at the strange food in front of me. There was nothing hot, but instead, many fruits that I recognized but entirely different. Purple bananas, black apples, and blue grapes that were covered completely on the outside by thorns. I could make a whole shopping list out of all the things I saw.
“Only fruit?” I questioned, not that I was complaining. I’d always loved fruit, especially for breakfast. There was just something about the sweetness on your tongue first thing in the morning that really set your day up for success.
“Fae thrive on sweet things, primarily fruit, and don’t need much to survive. The magic that runs through this realm runs through us and helps us sustain our life force. And they taste the same.” Oliver grinned at me as he grabbed a plate from the side, piling it on with the feast before us. He seemed to be more at ease in this place than I’d ever seen him, despite the attack he’d just endured. I followed suit, grabbing a banana and a grape bunch, vaguely concerned about how I would get around the thorns. I’d bet I could poke someone's eye out with one of those. I left the black apples for another day; there was a limit to how adventurous I could be. “The Faerie realm and the mortal realm are loose reflections of the other, they are tethered together by the magic that lives in both realms. We have a sky with moons and an ocean with water, fruit, and even animals. That is, all the realms are similar but different. Yet they exist in balance.”
“So, what happened?” I asked Oliver as we plopped our trays down on a nearby table. “Why didn’t you come right through another portal?”
“Tantaii. She burst out of that rubble and did her best to kill me. Portal work takes concentration, and it's very hard to open another portal when a rampaging queen is chasing you. When I was finally able to open one, I didn’t have a lot of time to think about where to put it, and I unfortunately spit myself out near a camp of naga. I’m very grateful for your pagu,” Oliver said, dipping his head towards Nia in thanks.
She gave him a polite smile in return. She picked a thorny grape off its vine, and I watched as she pulled the fruit apart by the thorns, a perfectly round globule plopping onto her plate below before she popped it into her mouth. I did the same thing to one of my own, and I almost moaned as the honeyed sweetness blossomed over my tongue.
“Oh my god, these are amazing!” I exclaimed as I opened a few more, eating through my portion.
Nia crinkled her nose at me, a playful judgment in her eyes as she watched me. “Your gods are inspired by the Fae, by the way.”
“How did that happen?” I’d never been much for religion, but I loved a good history lesson.
“People of both realms used to be able to travel freely between the two. It wasn’t always that way, but two thousand years ago, the great Fae King Thuromon found a way to open the link. The in-between was just that, a travel stop, with portals always open on both sides. Both realms lived in harmony, in true peace. It really was a beautiful sight.” Sadness permeated Oliver’s voice.
“What changed?”
“Your mother,” Nia offered, a sour expression marring her regal face. “She won a trial by combat challenge against King Thuromon seven hundred years ago, and with his death went the peace. I wish I had been born early enough to see it.”
“With the open door between realms, there was a surge of halfling births,” Oliver added on. “Shifter halflings are rare given their fertility parameters, but halfling witches, vampires, and even humans ran rampant.
