Cursed Rebel, page 3
He flicked me a perplexed frown. “What?”
“That’s what I’m going to call you, since you won’t tell me your name. Fin. Short for Fingal, which means ‘fair stranger,’” I explained.
He stopped walking for a second and just looked at me. I stopped too, hoping he’d decide he’d rather just tell me his real name.
Instead, he pursed his lips thoughtfully, and then nodded. “Fin. Okay. I can get behind that one. Although, I would like to point out, I’m not blonde,” he said, sounding amused once again.
I threw up my hands. “I was more going for the stranger angle. I was trying to make a point.”
He started walking again, glancing at me to make sure I followed. “And what would that point be?” he asked, his tone patronising, as if he were indulging a child.
If I’d been a bird, my feathers would have ruffled at that tone. As it was, I glared at him and snatched a leaf off the nearest branch, tearing it into shreds to occupy my hands, so I wouldn’t hit him. “I don’t know who you are, where you came from, or why you took me here.”
“Well, obviously, I’m from here…the Otherworld. More specifically, I was born in the far reaches of the Tangle. The forest we’re in now. And I told you why you’re here. The King wants you. I was sent to retrieve you for him. Now, I’m taking you there.”
I shook my head, frustrated. “Where is there? Where are you taking me?” I asked. Did he always have to talk in riddles?
He hesitated, his jaw locked, as if he didn’t want to tell me. I sighed, expecting him to ignore the question and go back to walking in silence.
Then he sighed, sounding resigned, and said, “To the Summer Palace.”
I remembered my Grandmother talking about the Palace. She’d said that there were two Courts in the Otherworld—the Summer Palace, and the Winter Castle—and that they had been at war for centuries. She’d said that all Fair Folk were capricious and cruel, but in different ways. The Summer fae would make you dance until your feet bled, but the Winter fae would freeze your blood in your veins. For years, I’d had nightmares after she told me disturbing bedtime stories of what the Fair Folk would do to humans who strayed into their Land.
I shuddered, wrapping my arms around myself as I walked, suddenly cold despite the blazing sun and the sweat on my skin.
The faery boy glanced at me, but all he said was, “Hurry up. I don’t want to be caught out here with a human when dark falls.”
It felt as if we had walked for hours through the endless forest. Soon, my feet were aching, and my steps became sluggish and clumsy. I tripped over tree roots and stumbled over dips in the ground, hidden by patches of flat pink flowers with wide petals. The first time I stumbled, Fin snickered, telling me to watch where I put my feet, or I’d end up in a gnome den. After the fifth or sixth time, when I almost toppled into a tangle of thorny vines draping from the boughs of a tree, he snatched my arm and hauled me upright, away from thorns the length of my thumb.
He glared at me, his fingers painfully tight on my arm, and I tried to pull away, but he wouldn’t let go.
“Try being careful,” he snapped, his green eyes sharp and cold. “Those are Fang Vines—they’ll wrap around your body like boa constrictors, sink their thorns into you, and suck up your blood. A tiny thing like you…you’ll be drained dry in minutes and left as a hollow corpse for the goblins to munch on.”
I stared at him with wide, scared eyes. I could feel my pulse hammering too fast in the skin under his tight grasp. There was something utterly inhuman in his face right then, something more subtle than his pointed ears and incredible beauty—something rotten, like the shadow of a bruise lurking under the soft skin of a peach.
For a moment, I heard my Grandmother’s voice in my head. “Never trust a beautiful boy, Lucy. Evil often hides behind a mask of beauty.” For once, she hadn’t been talking about faeries—I’d come home from school one Valentine’s day, crying because I had given a boy I’d been crushing on for weeks a Valentine’s card, and he’d laughed in my face and torn it up in front of me.
Looking at the faery boy in front of me, with his exquisite features and striking eyes, I thought that Grandma had been right. I was realising she had been right about a lot of things. I wished I’d listened to her better, wished I’d believed her when she warned me about the Fair Folk.
Staring into those inhumanly bright eyes, seeing the glitter of something cruel beneath that prettiness, I whimpered. I didn’t mean to, and the second I did, I wished I hadn’t. I couldn’t show fear there, or the beautiful monsters would tear me apart like well-disguised lions.
At my small noise of fear, the faery boy blinked. He looked at his hand gripping my arm, so tight the skin around his fingers had gone red, and his expression briefly softened. He let go suddenly, turning away quickly. “It’s getting dark. We need to hurry. Keep up.”
Fin kept up a brisk pace, moving through the trees, over roots, and hopping rocks as if he had this pathway memorised to the last pebble. Tired and confused, still processing the shock of being whisked away to another world in my sleep, I stumbled and tripped and couldn’t keep up. I quickly fell behind, and when Fin disappeared into the foliage somewhere, I came to a halt, staring around me in the hopes for some sign of him. Nothing. I was alone and lost in the Otherworld.
Turning in slow circles, my eyes scanning the trees and bushes for a flash of red hair or a rustle of movement, I called out tentatively, “Fin?”
No answer.
I bit my lip, a thread of panic weaving its way through me. “Fin! Come on, faery boy, this isn’t funny!”
Nothing, but the whisper of the wind.
“Dammit,” I muttered. Gnawing on my thumbnail, I considered what to do. Obviously, I couldn’t just go wandering around—I believed Fin when he’d said it was dangerous. I also couldn’t just stand there like a sitting duck, waiting for something to find me.
As I stood, caught in a web of indecision and growing fear, I heard a noise—just a quiet noise, like a child’s laugh. I tilted my head, listening, and heard it again, faint amidst the rustling of leaves and the murmuring breeze. I turned, trying to pinpoint the source, and a flicker of movement in my peripheral vision caught my attention. Whipping around, I saw nothing. My heart was racing.
“Fin?” I called, my voice high and wavering like a plucked guitar sting. “Fin, please, stop this! It’s not funny!”
The laughter came again, like the tinkle of chimes in the wind, and a flash of gold to my left made me spin around. With darting eyes, I searched the leaves and ferns, the briars and foxgloves, and numerous plants I couldn’t name. Then something tugged on my hair, and I yelped, leaping sideways, feeling strands of hair pull free of my scalp. Wincing, I raised my trembling hand to my head and heard the giggling again, but I still couldn’t see anything.
“What the—”
“Up here, silly girl,” a sweet child’s voice called.
I looked up. There, perched on a branch above my head, was a little girl in a dirty blue-grey dress. She was adorable, with wide blue eyes and long, blonde hair that spilled form under a little blue cap shaped like a flower. Her small ears were pointed, and when she smiled, I saw her teeth were too. I backed away anxiously, unreasonably—or maybe not unreasonably—afraid of the tiny child. Her eyes, unnaturally huge and bright, tracked my steps with an eagerness that made a feathery chill tickle its way down my back.
“Where are you going all alone, pretty human?” the faery asked me in a singsong voice, her smile stretching her mouth.
“I-I’m not alone,” I stuttered. “I was with someone. A faery, a boy with red hair, but I got separated from him.”
The little girl tilted her head, blinking her huge eyes, and vanished. The next second, before I could even blink, she was right in front of me. I gasped, stumbling back, and she grabbed my wrist.
“That’s okay. I can help you find him,” she said, taking my hand in her small one.
I noticed her fingernails were blue, like her eyes and her hat. Panicked, I snatched my hand out of hers. “N-no, that’s okay. I can find him myself.”
The faery girl looked up at me, her smile fading. She looked at her empty hand sadly, her thin brows drawing together, and for a second, I felt horrible for upsetting her. Then she raised her eyes back to mine, and they were cold and grey.
Her mouth twisted into a snarl, baring rows of sharp, pointy teeth, and let out a shriek of anger. “Nasty, mortal filth!” she screeched.
Horror skittered through my bones, and a scream caught in my throat as she lunged off the ground at me. Her curled fingers, like claws, aimed for my eyes. I stumbled backward and tripped over a rock, hitting the ground on my back hard enough to knock the breath out of me. My chest spasmed as I tried to suck in air for a scream, and the faery girl leapt on me like a giant spider, wrapping her tiny hands around my throat. She bashed my head off the ground, and pain shot through my skull, dimming my vision at the edges.
“Nasty Human! Nasty! I wanted to help you, nasty mortal girl!” the faery girl shrieked, banging my head against the ground repeatedly.
The pain was like a thumping headache, only twenty times worse, and her little hands were cutting off my air. I couldn’t breathe, I couldn’t think, and all I could see was the cold look in her wide eyes and the brutal snarl on her childlike face.
She smashed my head on a rock, and I choked on a cry of pain, stifled by her hands around my throat. My vision went red, then black, as I passed out.
Chapter Five
** Lucy **
I woke up either seconds or minutes later, feeling as if, well, as if someone had smashed my head off a rock. I blinked tears from my eyes and looked up. Fin was standing over me, holding the faery girl off the ground by the back of her dress. He looked fierce, his green eyes narrowed, and the sculpted angles of his face sharp. He said something to the faery girl in a language I didn’t understand—Gaelic by the sounds of it.
“Ise tha mienne!”
I may not have understood the words, but the tone of his voice and the look on his face made it clear that whatever he was saying, it wasn’t happy.
The girl’s eyes widened. She looked terrified. She held up her little clawed hands and replied in that language. “Tha mi duilich! Tha mi duilich, triath Fallow!”
Well, I could recognise an apology in any language.
After a second, Fin tossed the girl down. She whimpered as she hit the dirt, and then vanished. Fin turned to me, anger blazing in his eyes. Shaking, each breath scraping my throat, I tried to sit up, but dizziness swamped me, and I collapsed to the ground. He grabbed my arm, hauling me to my feet.
“You idiot!” he hissed. “You could have been killed! That was a Bluecap, Lucy! Bluecaps are a cousin to Brownies. They are naturally helpful, but they are easily offended, and you do not want to make a Bluecap angry! What were you thinking?”
His grip on my arm hurt, and his anger scared me, but it also provoked my own. I was tired, hungry, and frightened. I was also sick of him treating me like a ragdoll he could just drag around and manhandle at will.
“I didn’t mean to offend her!” I snapped, “You disappeared, and she showed up, claiming she would help me find you, and I thought she was trying to pull me into a trap! What was I supposed to do?”
Fin gritted his teeth and pressed his face lose to mine, close enough that I could see the flecks of silver blazing in his eyes. “You were supposed to keep up and try not to get yourself killed!”
I set my jaw. “Let go of me.”
To my surprise, he did. He flung my arm away from him and turned away, as if I disgusted him.
“You should be more careful, Lucy. I will not save you from your own stupidity again.”
Tempted to hit him, I glared at the back of his head and muttered, “At this rate, you’re going to need someone to save you from me. Tosser.”
He made a frustrated noise and ran a hand through his wild hair. He looked up. “It’s almost dark. We should stop for the night.”
Taking a deep breath to steady myself while my heart rate slowed, I looked around at the endless sea of trees, with their too-bright leaves waving gently under the darkening violet sky. It was like being lost in a jungle.
“Stop? Where? You might be able to sleep in trees, but I can’t.”
Fin turned, all trace of the intense, scary creature I’d seen a minute before wiped away by a boyish grin. I blinked, unnerved by his sudden mood swings. He walked over to a large bush laden with vivid cyanosis-blue berries. Sticking his hands into the bush, he parted the tangles of wiry branches and narrow leaves like curtains, revealing a dark hollow inside.
Fin waved a hand at me. “Well, in you go.”
I stared at him. “You expect me to sleep in there? I won’t fit.”
He just grinned and motioned me forward. I sighed. Cautiously, I leaned forward, peering into the bush, but all I could see was blackness. I hesitated, imagining some ferocious animal leaping out and trying to eat my face. I glanced back at Fin and his eager smile.
“How do I know this isn’t a trap?”
The faery boy blinked, as if the question had taken him by surprise. Then he shrugged and said, “You don’t.” He put a hand on my back and shoved me into the tiny hollow of darkness.
I was enclosed in blackness for only a second. I felt it pass over my skin like a breath of cold air, and then I was crouching inside…a cabin.
“Whoa,” I breathed, staring around with huge eyes. I was standing inside a tiny cabin—more like a shack really—with a bed against one wall, an empty hearth opposite it, and a small round table with one chair. The walls and floor were bare, rough wood, as if the cabin had been hacked out of the middle of a giant tree. After the stifling heat outside, the coolness of the dark, lightless cabin was refreshing, and goosebumps dotted my arms.
Grandma had told me the fae could do all sorts of magic, create illusions, change shape, make you believe a poisonous toadstool was really a rosy red apple so you would eat it,She hadn’t mentioned anything like the cabin, and even if she had, I doubted it would have prepared me for the amazement of it.
“Hmm. At least Pan left it clean for us.”
I jumped and turned as Fin stepped through the wall behind me—through the wall, since there was no apparent door—and looked around with his hands on his hips. His eyes fell on me, and he grinned at my expression.
“How…how did you…” I stammered and shook my head. “It was a bush!”
Fin rolled his eyes, strolling toward the cold hearth. “You mortals are so literal about everything. Yes, the doorway to this cabin happens to be a bush.” He crouched by the fireplace and swept his hand over the dry kindling. With a soft pop, it burst into flame.
I stared, my mouth opening and closing like a fish gasping out of the water. “B-but…how? You can’t just ignore the laws of physics, or…or whatever! A cabin cannot fit inside a bush!”
Sighing, the faery boy stood and faced me. “Like I said, too literal. The cabin isn’t inside the bush. The bush is just the doorway. I disguised it that way. This place,” he paused to knock on the wall with his knuckles, “is actually nowhere near where we were. It’s far deeper into the Tangle.”
I stared at him, trying to make sense of what he was saying. My brain hurt, so I gave up. “I don’t understand.”
Fin chuckled. “Of course you don’t. You’re mortal.” He said it as if being so was a mental disability. I glared at him. He didn’t seem to notice, or if he did, he ignored it. He dropped into the wooden chair at the small table—both of which looked handmade—and tipped his head back, sighing again. I hovered by the invisible doorway we’d come through, wondering if getting out again was as simple as walking through the wall and if I could escape while he wasn’t looking and maybe find a way home.
As if reading my thoughts, Fin turned his head and cracked one eye open. “Don’t even think about it, Snowdrop,” he warned in a low voice. He jerked his chin toward the bed. “Sit down.”
I glanced at the bed, and felt heat rise to my cheeks, though I didn’t know why. It wasn’t like he’d asked me to get in the bed with him. We’d been walking all day. My feet and legs ached. Still, I didn’t like being told what to do. I folded my arms crossly and glared at the back of his head.
Without looking at me again, he waved a hand in a dismissive gesture. “We’re going to be here all night, so you can either use the time to get some rest, or you can stand there all night, glaring at me. Your choice.”
For a minute, I considered the latter option, just purely out of stubbornness. However, my legs were starting to shake, and if I didn’t sit down soon, I was going to collapse. I growled as I stalked over to the bed and dropped down on the edge, still glaring. The second my weight was off my feet, every muscle in my body went limp, and I almost sighed in pleasure as the pain started to drain from my burning thigh and calf muscles. I had the sudden, desperate urge to lie down, curl up, and sleep for a few days.
I yawned and started to kick off my trainers before I remembered I wasn’t alone. I jerked upright, forcing my eyes open, and saw Fin was watching me with an oddly unguarded look on his face. For a moment, with the firelight casting shifting shadows on his angular face and haloing the edges of his red hair in gold, he looked…almost human.
He realised I was staring back at him, and his expression turned cool. He looked away, folding his arms as he stretched out his legs under the table. The only sound in the tiny space was the crackle of the fire and the soft rasp of my breathing. Shadows clustered in the corners of the room as the air turned warm and foggy with the scent of burning wood.
The sweat from all that walking had cooled on my skin, and my damp t-shirt clung to me. The new warmth just made me feel sticky. Tired as I was, I really wanted a shower, some clean clothes, and a toilet. I’d have killed for a bathroom right then, but there didn’t seem to be one in the tiny little shack, and I’d be damned if I mentioned it to Fin.
