4. Get it Together

Get it Together

M y original plan, of "walk until you can't see or until you get tired," didn't work out. My eyes were still human eyes, and in the pitch black of the old-growth forest at night, I couldn't see for shit, but my sense of the Court meant that unless I got distracted, I could walk blindly without any risk of hurting myself. On top of that weirdness, no matter how long I walked, I didn't seem to get tired. At all.

I must have made it five or six miles, hiking over rough ground and with some serious up-and-down in the mountainous terrain, before it struck me that I wasn't feeling the strain. Sure, I was in good shape; even before I'd been forced to haul stone for twelve hours a day I'd been an active person. But I wasn't used to this sort of exercise. I'd been on the move since four in the morning, and it had to be, what? Ten at night?

That was unsettling. Not as unsettling as people in trees or living hands sticking out of the bedrock, but still bad.

I tilted my head back, looking up at the few stars I could see, sprinkled in the gaps of the canopy. Standing there, I tried to contemplate sleeping out here. The steep, rocky slopes weren't safe to sleep on—or, at least, not comfortable. The valleys were wet, which seemed worse than rocks for sleeping on.

Even though I didn't feel tired, the thought of sleeping made me yawn, which soothed a little bit of the anxiety. Whatever the Court was doing to me, or had done to me, I could probably still sleep. All I had to do was find a place to try.

It was pitch black. I couldn't look for a nice flat spot, and I wasn't going to just stumble upon a good place to sleep rough. In the city, I probably could have inferred where to go, but this landscape was totally alien to me.

The land kept telling me where to put my feet, though. Could it tell me where it was flat?

Only one way to find out.

Still with my head back, I closed my eyes and tried to let myself feel. My bobbed hair brushed against my bare shoulders, a tickling presence. The mountain air was cold against my skin, even though I didn 't get chilled. The ground under my feet lived and breathed. Fungus and roots and little creeping things I had no names for grew and churned together in an endless, ancient, sultry dance. No piece of it stood alone.

Bedrock stone sprawled beneath that living blanket. The roots of trees shoved their way deeper into the stone like dandelions through asphalt, except that instead of searching for sunlight they were harpoons, deadly hunting weapons that cracked open stone like whalers killing whales. But the trees were mere newcomers, weeds in an old lot. The stone was untroubled by their hunger.

Stone obeyed the shifting earth and demanding sky, mountains scraping the heights and being worn away. Water and wind and trees and sun all conspired to grind the world down to a great flat plain, flat like the broad prairie to the west, deep soil and ceaseless wind. We were mountains . We would not submit to the water and wind and trees and sun. Not for eons. We would scrape the sky, cradle glaciers, endure —

This time, the sunlight managed to break me out of the Court's grasp. I blinked muzzily, the noontide sun dazzling my vision, and swayed on my feet.

Fuck. How long had I been standing there?

I didn't have a crick in my neck, and my feet didn't hurt. That didn't mean anything though. I could have been there for twelve hours or twelve days.

Tears stung my eyes. Was this my life now? Was I going to get caught up, over and over again, until I was as lost as the man whose hand was sticking out of the bedrock?

Standing still while the forest grows over me, tree after tree living and dying around me, the soil creeping up my calves to my thighs to my throat, the Court swallowing me whole—

"I am not going to go insane," I said out loud, so that I could hear a human voice. "I am going to walk north and a little west, and find whatever did this, and I'm going to undo it and fucking go home !" My voice cracked on the last words. I had to fight back more tears.

The whole thing sounded ridiculous when spoken out loud. I was going to—what? Find some sort of heartbeat of magic and make it let me go? It obviously wanted to incorporate me into itself. It was hungry .

My stomach rumbled at the reminder of the fact that I hadn't eaten for some amount of time. More than a day, but hopefully not much more.

In defiance of the yearning sensation pulling me north, I found a rock and sat facing in a different direction so I could dig through the backpack Gina had given me. To my surprise, it had a decent selection of food, and all of it was the sort of stuff that would keep. The sloshing had been from a large plastic water bottle, filled most of the way up with what proved to be clean water.

I hadn't felt hungry until I'd faced down food, but now I was ravenous. I tore into my supplies with no regard for the future. A paper sleeve of wheat crackers, a jar of fig preserves, and a whole wheel of cheese vanished in service to my stomach. I almost ate the second cheese wheel before deciding that maybe I should keep some food for later. Not feeling hungry seemed like a bad thing if I could still eat.

Ugh, that was an unpleasant thought. I didn't want to have to measure my humanity by my ability to conduct basic biological processes.

I took a deep breath. Held it. Let it out.

"Okay," I said.

There weren't that many options. I was somewhere in a freaky magic forest – a beautiful forest, full of tall elegant pine-looking trees and birds singing all sorts of warbling songs, but still freaky and magical – and I had no idea where. Even if I'd had a map, which I didn't, I didn't have any way to navigate. How could I, when everything looked the same in every direction, except for the angle of the slope? I wasn't some sort of park ranger. I had exactly one landmark, and it was another freaky magic thing.

I could use that landmark to go in a different direction—opposite, for example. I knew there was a place called "Flies" south-ish, because that was the direction people left with the opals. Heading dead away from the Court's heart might get me there, wherever "there" was. I had no way to know without trying it.

Showing up on the doorstep of the people who'd owned the mine didn't seem like a great idea, though. They'd been keeping me as a slave, after all, so they probably weren't that kindly inclined towards humans. And besides, who knew if I'd even find a civilization of any kind? I had no idea how thoroughly the Court had scrubbed away buildings. Maybe everything was like this.

In that case, maybe that heartbeat was my best bet after all. At the very least, I knew something was waiting for me there—

— a man sprawled in sleep, his breaths even and calm, sunlight warm across his brown skin and gleaming off the bronze feathers of his wings.

I shook my head, refusing to get caught up again. Whoever and whatever he was – if he was even real – he (Xarcassah) could wait until I got there.

Xarcassah. That was a fae name if ever I'd heard one.

"I fucking hate this," I muttered.

I rearranged the backpack with vicious movements, taking out my frustration on objects as I crammed them back into the pack. With nowhere better to go, I pointed myself for the sleeping focus of the power all around me, and started walking again.

A person can cover a shocking amount of distance when they don't get tired, thirsty, or hungry. I hiked at a clip that would have made me a menace on the sidewalks back home, keeping my blood pumping and skin warm. Though I probably could have straight-lined it, no problem, I steered around mountains and ravines where I could, trying to minimize my actual walking distance .

Since the Court seemed inclined to keep me in perfect physical form, I didn't bother stopping for rest. I hiked for a solid three days until a boulder kept me from going down my chosen path, and I stood there and screamed and thrashed at it with a stick like a crazy person.

Maybe I was going crazy, but also the fact that I'd been booking it across an endless forested mountain-scape with no sleep probably had something to do with that. My arms and legs felt shaky, too, in that wobbly-starvation way. I decided that maybe food and sleep were necessary, even when you couldn't feel it, and tore through most of the rest of my supplies that evening before passing out in the middle of a small meadow.

I felt much better in the morning.

Even though I was sick of the forest, in the morning light, with a solid night's sleep under my belt and a breakfast of salami and cheese in my belly, I could admit that it was a pretty place. This was the sort of place people dreamed about when they thought of wilderness. There were at least a half-dozen different kinds of evergreens, ranging from things that looked like they could have been ornamental plantings in a rich person's yard to massive, soaring trees with trunks that had to be four feet in diameter—and those were just the trees. The landscape was thick with greenery, flowers, and early fruits. There were even weird, vivid lichens growing on rocks and trees, and funky little air plants tucked in the elbows of branches.

It was summer, which meant everything was thick with bugs, but they didn't seem to want to bother me. The cicadas droned all around me, a constant rising and falling buzz of sound that didn't even cease at night. Butterflies flittered through the air, drifting from flower to flower, and little hazy clouds of gnats claimed patches of sunlight.

Fast, brightly colored birds with iridescent crescent-moon-shaped wingspans darted through the air, catching insects I couldn't even see. Gossamer spiderwebs linked tall pieces of grass or spanned the distance between branches. I even saw something distinctly faery, a tiny flying lizard that caught a big fat moth and ate it on a twig while making direct eye contact with me.

I still liked Long Beach better, but this was okay , I supposed. Pretty, at least.

Not long after I'd decided to maybe sleep sometimes, the Court woke back up. It wasn't the same sort of violent awakening as before, but the timbre of the power all around me shifted. Instead of a constant sort of stasis, things seemed more purposeful. There was focus to it, and that focus wasn't on me. Curious what that meant for me, I took my belt knife to a small twig, scraping away the bark to reveal the green underneath.

Nothing happened.

Uh-oh.

It seemed to like me , in particular, though. Maybe it was letting things live their lives again, but would still pay attention to me if I needed it ?

It was worth checking, at least.

I jabbed the knife into my fingertip. Blood welled up, pain singing out—and then falling silent.

I licked the blood off. There wasn't any mark left; not even a scar.

"Well," I said, my voice hoarse from disuse. "That's nice, I guess." I'd have to keep tabs on my body a little more carefully. I suspected that something that would be near-instantly lethal – like falling forty feet onto rocks with my skull – might still be lethal, now. The Court was paying attention to things, not merely letting its power act. If it wasn't focused on me, it might not act in time.

As the hours of hiking rolled by and the day tilted towards night, I started suspecting that my mental image of the Court as a man was more than my brain trying to personify a source of magic into something comprehensible. I couldn't see him, exactly, and I definitely didn't have any sort of mind-reading available, but if I took stock I could get a feel for where his body was, and all the biological effects of emotions seemed to transfer.

My sense of him wasn't always passive, either. When he shifted from sitting to standing, my shoulders went back; when his hands splayed on a table, the pleasant stretch of his tendons warmed my hand.

Emotions that weren't mine commanded my body. The sharp feeling of fear-sweat prickled down my spine when I was strolling along a cheerful little stream, admiring the skimmer-bugs flirting across its surface. Hours later, I couldn't unclench my jaw or ease the tension in my shoulders, stress driving me to keep moving, to stay awake, to keep walking even long after the sun went down and the nocturnal creatures started calling to each other across the valleys.

I was like a tiger pacing in her cage, restlessness thrumming under my skin. I needed to escape—needed an escape; wanted to have anything to think of other than the trap I was caught in. It was like being at the end of a double shift, watching the minutes tick away, desperate to clock out and sleep , just rest —

Every nerve in my body came alight with pleasure.

I staggered and moaned, grabbing onto the nearest thing – a tree branch – to keep from falling over. Heat thudded between my legs, everything going tingling and tight. "Fuck," I gasped out—

— sprawled in bed, his head thrown back, left hand gripping his cock and the fingers of his right hand digging so hard into his inner thigh that I could feel it—

"—oh, you motherfucker," I said in a groan.

I shoved my hand down my pants and flopped back against the tree, because there was nothing I could do but ride out the wave of arousal. Tension coiled inside of me. I chased it, rubbing my fingers hard against my clit, driving myself towards the pleasure that sang for me, just out of reach.

"Oh, fuck, Cass, c 'mon," I moaned. I didn't think he could hear me. I didn't think he even knew how much his Court loved me.

Pleasure spiked in my core. I had one moment of eyes-wide, blinding need, and then ecstasy crashed into me with the force of a sledgehammer. My vision whited out. My pussy clenched, over and over, the waves of pleasure leaving me limp and whimpering. Everything shook, hot and swimmy.

I slid down to the ground, my legs going wobbly and refusing to hold me up. Bliss sank into my bones, the first truly good feeling I'd had since I'd been stupid enough to charge into a burning building. I dropped my head back against the tree, taking careful breaths. The sensation of being unable to sleep drifted away as I sat there—as he let himself sleep at last, with orgasmic release as his lullaby.

Xarcassah was a person. A fae person. A fae man .

That beating heart had to be his. But the Court was also him, somehow. All the land around me, which caught me with such ease, was as much him as the body I could sense when I focused on the person of the Court.

"Who are you?" I whispered to the velvet darkness of the night, shaken. It wasn't only the Court. It was him , a man I didn't know at all, my body reacting to everything that happened to him, and to everything he did.

The fae King was dying, I remembered suddenly, with a sinking sense of dread. The King of the Court was dying, which was why the whole operation at the mine had been so rushed and haphazard. The King's ability to magically influence the Court was as weak as it would ever be. No one was paying attention to the wilderness, but it wouldn't last forever.

Someone's paying attention now , I thought, my expression grim as I remembered the focus of the Court. Dark eyes, looking into mine, and trees responding with pleasure to the touch of my hands. A man bound to the Court. A man bound to me .

I didn't think it went both ways. He was affecting the Court, and the Court was affecting me, leaving me on the receiving end of his emotions, like a glass at the bottom of a champagne waterfall. I had no idea why that would be, but I could only think of one reason why someone new would be changing the Court:

The old King was dead.

Long live the King.