Page 74 of Curse the Fae

My smile widens as Elixir grapples with his next question. “Does, er…does this view please you?”

Honestly? I want to kiss his cheek, but I’m not sure this Fae can handle that amount of sweetness. “Yes, it does,” I reply. “Can’t you tell?”

I’d been joking, but Elixir frowns in contemplation. “No,” he realizes. “I…” After a moment’s concentration, his frown deepens. “No, I cannot.”

That’s unexpected. But for some reason, I don’t feel motivated to contemplate what that means. Later, I tell myself. Not now, when there’s so much else to marvel at.

“They’re stunning,” I confess.

Rich gold floods his irises, and his voice grows animated. Elixir is still kneeling, but now he settles beside me. “Will you tell me what they looked like?”

Drawing in a breath, I describe the kelpies’ vibrant colors and aquatic features, down to how fast they’d charged. I do my best to paint a vivid picture in his mind.

The river ruler gazes into the distance, as if imagining. When I finish, his accent dips low, the intonation melancholy yet alleviated. “They have not changed,” he whispers.

I sketch his wistful profile. “When was the last time you were here?”

“As a child, I would watch them,” he says, lost in a haze of memory. “My mothers would take me here.”

“Your mothers?”

“Marine and Lorelei,” he says. “They were mated mermaids. They loved watercolors, harp music, the smell of lemons, and the art of brewing mixtures. I adopted the practice in their names, as well as for myself.”

In all sincerity, I hadn’t thought of the river ruler as someone with parents. Back when I hated him, I had assumed he’d been spawned from the depths of this place or hatched in a den of anacondas. According to the Fables, it’s rare for Faeries to sire children, but it does happen.

There’s no mistaking the way his words shrink, reduced to threads of sound. I recognize the audible texture of bereavement firsthand. “Did they care for you?” When he nods, I coax, “What happened to them?”

Every muscle in his face tweaks, from haunted to livid. “They died.”

My throat clogs. This violent, powerful being has made no home for himself. He has no family or animal familiar. He lost his mothers, and now he’s losing his world.

He might have brothers through a shared experience, but that shared experience had involved a traumatic attack, in which the fauna and avenging Faeries of his land had been slaughtered. He might have rescued some of them, but he hadn’t rescued all of them.

After what I’ve discovered, I shove my way past that brutish exterior. In this moment, I see what he can’t. The picture is a devastating one—anger, beauty, and tragedy. What I see is a conflicted soul who would rather hate than hurt, who would rather punish the ones who’ve caused him grief rather than mourn what he’s lost.

Did his mothers perish in The Trapping?

It’s too soon to pry. I scoot closer until our shoulders press. “I’m sorry,” I whisper. “I know how it feels to lose family.”

I’m not only talking about my sisters or Papa Thorne. Regardless, the Fae’s expression twists, caught between penitence and vengeance. He knifes a hand through his hair. “You were not supposed to learn about The Sunken Isle’s hidden outlet. Only my mothers and I have known. I do not know why I shared that secret with you. I do not know why the fuck I brought you here.”

“You wanted me to see the kelpies.”

“But I do not know why.”

I have a theory, though it’s too scary to acknowledge. It has everything to do with him admitting he hasn’t been here since he was a child, back when his mothers were alive. It has to do with him sharing this isolated moment with me. It has to do with him asking if the kelpies had been a pleasing sight. Yet if I let myself think of him as a sensitive being, I’ll never make it out of this place.

Instead, I confess, “My mother and father died, too.”

Elixir’s head jolts toward me. He had assumed I’d been talking only of losing Lark, Juniper, and Papa, but there’s more to the confession.

The Fae doesn’t ask, but he does swerve in my direction. If I speak, he’ll listen.

In this dark abyss, I let the story unfold. My parents were sailors who loved the ocean. Although they hailed from Middle Country, they spent years exploring The Southern Seas. But for the first years of my life, they settled down in the land of their roots and showered me with love.

They told me stories about oceanic mammals and aquatic creatures—whales larger than pirate ships and fish with sword-shaped noses; cities of glowing coral; starfish and seahorses; and deep-sea fish that sizzled with light. Also, they told me about the southern dragons, not the ones that reign over the sky but those that dominate the sea like great leviathans, able to breathe fire beneath the depths.

Every day of my existence, my parents’ hearts longed for the ocean. Unfortunately, seafaring was no life for a child, so although they vowed to wait until I was old enough to sail with them, they made a different choice when I turned nine. I promised I wouldn’t be any trouble if they brought me along. When that didn’t work, I cried my eyes raw and begged for them to stay. Instead, they left me with a kindly neighbor and swore to return.

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