First Light (Call of the Forest Realm, #1) Page 2

  “There will be more of them.” He grabbed Briony’s sleeve, pulling her to the door. “That one was just a scout.”

  “Now, wait a minute.” She snatched her arm away. “What was that thing?”

  Ava was still staring in shocked silence at the hole in the floor, but Yvette lunged for her granddaughter. “No, Briony—”

  Briony’s would-be kidnapper reached into a little pouch on his belt and threw a handful of incandescent powder toward Yvette and Ava. Immediately, both of them slumped to the floor, unconscious. Briony ran to them, shaking them, panicked.

  “They’re fine, they won’t remember anything. Follow me.”

  For some reason, Briony believed him. His eyes were bright and his face was open, despite the hard line of his mouth. She stood slowly, listening to the never-ending storm outside, and followed him.

  Briony took the steps two at a time and jumped into the sodden grass below. There was a low growl from behind them as they ran and Briony could see, as lightning filled the sky, a multitude of dark shapes scrambling across the yard toward them. She slipped a little and the man grabbed her arm, pulling her up. Up ahead, the veil of the dark forest stood like a long-lost friend, waiting for her. She hesitated for a moment. She had imagined herself stepping past the forest edge so many times. Briony knew that if she went inside the shadowy woods, she would never be the same again. She looked back toward the soft lights of the house and her chest ached when she thought of her Gran and of Ava. The growling shapes grew closer and Briony turned again, finally stepping foot into the dense forest.

  Chapter Four

  Briony took a deep, shuddering breath as the damp air of the woods pressed in around her. It was as if some lost piece of her had finally fallen into place and her whole body felt alight. Strangely, the storm did not seem to exist inside the trees. She saw the lightning sear across the sky beyond and the shower of rain as it fell, but inside the forest, the sky above the trees seemed clear and nonexistent. There was a forever black above them, absent of the bright stars that should’ve been so very familiar. The trees around her were tall and ancient, shivering in the chill breeze that whisked its way through the forest. Briony wanted to take off her boots and press her toes into the moss below her feet. She wanted to sit at the great roots of a tree and watch the forest around her. She had never felt so right.

  “Nice isn’t it?”

  Briony jumped at the voice, newly familiar, and turned. “Are you going to tell me what’s going on? Also, your name, maybe?”

  He raised one dark eyebrow. “Cirro.”

  “Well, Cirro, what just happened?”

  “We should go, we must reach the southern archway before the gremlins find us.” Cirro walked on long legs through the damp undergrowth, making his way through the forest as if he were a part of the green thicket.

  “The what? Hold on...” Briony sputtered, following after him.

  He looked over his shoulder, putting his hunting knife back into its sheath then adjusting what must have been a pack, beneath his dark cloak. “Your Royal Highness, there are many things that you don’t know about this world. I can’t be the one to explain them to you.”

  “Okay,” Briony said, tripping over a root and blowing her blonde hair out of her face in irritation. “My name is Briony, not whatever it is you just called me.”

  “I was told you would be unaware of many things,” Cirro told her in a lofty voice that made her want to throw him to the gremlins, whatever they were, “I was not told you would be dim-witted.”

  “Excuse me,” Briony snapped, her voice sharp, “I was accosted by a kidnapper and a green monster, I think I have the right to be a little distracted.”

  “I’m not a kidnapper. Your father entrusted me to protect you.”

  “My father is dead,” Briony said slowly, struggling to keep up with his long strides.

  “Your real father,” Cirro sighed, sounding put-upon. “King Eldan of the Forest Realm.”

  Briony stopped in her tracks, planting her feet. Her clothes were soaked through and she was shivering, but her resolve was strong.

  “Either you tell me everything, or I stop here.”

  Cirro stopped and turned back to her, tapping his fingers on the hilt of his hunting knife. He shook his dark head and sighed. “We’re too close to the edge of the forest, we can’t make camp here.”

  He started walking again and Briony took that as assent. They trudged through the whispering trees and Briony couldn’t stop her body from shaking in the cold. She longed for a hot shower and her bed. Cirro led her to a little clearing, surrounded in tall, swaying trees. He pulled a slender pouch from his hip and started a small, crackling fire with two obsidian striking stones. Briony settled down as close as she could, feeling the plush moss beneath her like a soft blanket. Her hands shook as she held them out in front of the fire, her fingers trembling. Cirro was watching her as he began to lay out two rough mats for them to sleep on. He stood after a moment and pulled the cloak off his back, throwing it over her shoulders. Immediately, warmth flooded her body, settling into her bones. Briony sighed and looked up at him, grateful.

  “What are you?”

  Cirro had picked a handful of plants from the base of a tree and he stirred them into water that he sat in the coals by the edge of the licking flames. He stared into the fire as he answered, crouching forward on the balls of his feet.

  “Humans would call our kind—your kind—fae. The faery folk.”

  “My kind? What are you talking about?” Briony furrowed her brow but all of a sudden, every strange urge, every oddity in the entire span of her life seemed to make sense.

  “As I said, I’m certain the king will want to explain everything in detail to you himself.”

  “I don’t care, I want answers.”

  Cirro let out a humorless laugh, handing her the warmed cup. “It’s just tea, to keep you warm,” he said when she took it warily. He took a breath. “There was a foretelling of your birth. My parents used to speak of it, but it wasn’t common knowledge until recently. The event took the royal household by surprise. Your mother, the queen, died in the warmth of your coming. The whole of our kind almost always perishes in the light, but this wasn’t true for you—you were different. Your mother gave birth to you as the sun burst through the forest’s gloom and burned her, wreathing you in warmth.”

  “Is that...” Briony said, slow and careful. Had she inadvertently killed her mother? Her mind seemed to speed up, processing the information it was given more quickly than her mouth could spit it back out. “Is that why I love sunny days?”

  “I would assume so, yes.” Cirro nodded, thoughtful.

  “Though something about cold, rainy days...” Briony shrugged, pulling the cloak higher over her shoulders. She took a careful sip of the tea. It smelled faintly of honeysuckle and the flavor was mild. It reminded her of roasted apples, peaceful and comforting.

  “Draws you in?” Cirro asked, his eyes glinting. Briony let her eyes wander over his elegant face and the length of his folded body, wondering if she would be strange to consider him handsome. It was true he was good-looking, but it was an otherworldly sort of attractiveness that drew her in, something ethereal and strange in the sharp cut of his cheek and the smooth black of his hair.

  “How did you know?” she asked, looking back at the sky above them, imagining the storm beyond the trees, cut off from the mystifying realm she now found herself a part of. She took another sip of her tea to stop her hands from shaking, cradling the warm metal cup between her palms.

  “All of our kind are drawn to storms and dark weather. It makes it easier to move through the realms in the daylight. When you were born, an ancient prophecy was fulfilled. A child of sun will be born, light in color, and dark in nature. On her nineteenth night of All Hallows’ Eve, she will ascend to the realm. The wheel will turn, forward into the new aeon. Light will be the dark and dark will be the light.”

  Briony’s mouth fell open. “What d
oes that even mean?”

  “No one really knows for sure, though the king believed that no one could touch you until your nineteenth All Hallows’ Eve. And even if it weren’t true, the enemies of the fae would have been foolish to attempt it.” He put a hand on his knife, stretching his long legs out in front of him. “The gremlins—the creatures like the one inside your home—have been forever enemies to our people. They would have been the sole ones to try and thwart the prophecy, if any had dared. Your father feared for your safety and was unsure of how to protect you. You seemed to thrive in the light and the rest of us, in the dark.”

  “So he dumped me at the edge of the forest?” Briony said, pulling a face. “Father of the year.”

  Cirro snorted at that and Briony couldn’t help but notice how welcoming his smile seemed and how bright his eyes glimmered in the dull firelight.

  “My mother was captain of the king’s guard,” Cirro said, his voice quiet and his gaze distant. “She was killed on my 122nd birthday, by gremlins. My father lives deep in the forest and I haven’t spoken to him in centuries. We all have our problems.”

  “I’m sorry about your mother,” Briony told him, sincere. “But I was abandoned with no knowledge of my lineage. He could have tried harder, is all that I’m saying.”

  “His beloved wife was dead and his kingdom was threatened. It was either hide his infant daughter in the human world or keep her nearby and jeopardize her safety. Which would you have preferred, Princess?”

  Briony wrinkled her nose. “Don’t call me that. I’m still not sure this isn’t some weird dream.” Though in fact, she felt the truth of it in her chest. The thing, the gremlin in her house, had been real. There was some sort of strangeness at work, and she had been longing her entire life for something that she felt this certain of.

  “My apologies,” Cirro told her, looking strangely impish. “Get some rest, the cloak will keep you warm throughout the night. We have a long trek ahead of us.”

  “None of this can be real,” Briony blurted. The thought had been circling in her mind since they had entered the forest. “I mean, how could it be? How is there an entire world inside of a forest? Why hasn’t anyone found it?”

  Cirro raised an eyebrow and took out his hunting knife and began pulling it over a whetstone. “There are protections in place, spells that veil the realm. Humans can find it and even enter if they’re brave enough, but the spells give them a sense of wrongness—a feeling that they shouldn’t be there.”

  “But I never—”

  “You were different.” Cirro shrugged. “We watched you stand at the edge of the forest for years. It was how the king knew what you were—who you were.”

  “All of those years, I never felt whole. There was always something missing. I’m not saying that I believe you completely,” Briony sighed, looking around the dark forest and watching her breath fog in the chill air. “But I’m willing to go with it for now.”

  “I admire your decisiveness,” Cirro said, a smile lingering at the edges of his mouth.

  Briony finished her tea and sat by the fire for a moment, observing Cirro as he sat on a stump, vigilant and ever watchful. She supposed he would sleep later and then wondered if faeries did sleep. Briony was supposedly one of them and she loved to sleep, curled under the thick blankets of her large bed with the falling rain singing softly at her window. She ached fiercely for the comforting smell of her house and the familiar walls and floors of her bedroom.

  She listened to the melodic sounds of the knife over the whetstone and tried to gather her thoughts. Her head was spinning with every ounce of strangeness Cirro had recounted. Everything that had happened from the moment he’d stepped through her door had been insane—unbelievable. Her homesickness mingled with a deep-seated sense of belonging that had started to fill her ever since entering the forest—since finding out the truth. If it was true. If she was who Cirro said she was, she wondered if she would ever see her family again. Could she visit them? It seemed like a silly thing to ask and she shook herself. Wherever she was going, wherever he was taking her, she would figure it out then.

  When she finally curled up on the bedroll, her dreams were of golden sunlight and the bright warmth of day. She dreamt of the soft, lush grass beyond her grandmother’s house and of the stained-glass sunroom inside, bathed in the glow of mid-afternoon and overflowing with greenery and bright summer flowers. It was familiar there and she wished to stay in the dream forever, cradled by never-ending warmth and by the promise of being at home.

  Chapter Five

  Cirro woke her up sometime much later, drawing the bedroll from beneath her as she stood. She stretched her arms high above her head, holding her borrowed cloak as it fell. It was impossible to tell what time of day it was from the pitch-black sky above them, damp and dark. The forest seemed forever lit by incandescent moss that grew from the trunks of the towering trees.

  Briony felt as if she were finally grounded and awake, though the part of her that longed for who she was and stayed buried in the warm dream she’d had, missed the sunshine and the daylight, and a substantial part of her longed for her loved ones. She wondered if they were looking for her or if they were even thinking of her at all. Cirro had said that they wouldn’t remember anything, but did that mean their memories of her as well? It hit her after a moment, that she might be royalty, a princess. This had to be some kind of fever dream or a hallucination brought on by Ava’s takeout food. Though Cirro seemed real enough and the forest around her was definitely real and remarkably familiar.

  “Let’s go,” Cirro called over his shoulder behind him, looking disgruntled and winsome as he walked past her. “Before the wood nymphs begin their singing.”

  “Because that’s...bad?” Briony asked him confusedly, remembering the bright, happy wood nymphs from her grade-school mythology books with their flower crowns and bright leaf bikinis.

  “Their toneless singing is only for the moss and the trees,” Cirro told her grouchily. She found it easier than before to keep pace with him, as if she were slowly becoming part of the forest herself.

  “How many creatures live in the Forest Realm?” Briony asked, looking around her and taking in the dark, gloomy atmosphere and the dim-lit trees.

  “Too many to count, though the fae hold dominion for now.”

  “For now?”

  “The crown changes hands every millennium or so. If the king has no offspring, no real heirs, a new king must step up and claim the crown. Any creature of any species may lay claim to the throne, including the gremlins,” Cirro said, looking back at her steadily. “It’s why they appear so ruthlessly desperate to end the king’s line.”

  Briony nodded, thinking it over in her head. She imagined what her life would have been like if she had grown up in the Forest Realm, as their princess. She knew nothing of the fae court, save for what she had read in useless books. She found that she really couldn’t imagine a world without her gran in it and where she had no idea who Ava was.

  Cirro walked quickly, looking behind him every so often. Then there was a soft whisper of beating wings and Cirro reached over to pull her behind him protectively. Briony found that she wasn’t afraid, and she leaned forward, looking around his lithe shoulder and bumping into him with her nose as she did so. He smelled of rainstorms and spices. It was a strange scent, but she found that she liked it, nonetheless. Something flew up to them, quick and glimmering. Cirro rolled his eyes.

  “I see you’ve brought back her royal highness,” shrieked the glittering little creature in a high-pitched voice. “How very wonderful. Truly amazing. Shall I alert the king?”

  “You do that,” Cirro said, waving it away. “Sprites,” he told Briony as she stared, watching the tiny creature flutter and flit through the trees. “They’re busy-bodies—very eager to please the king and anyone else that has the misfortune of crossing their path.”

  “How did it know we were here?” Briony asked as they continued walking. Cirro’s cloak was st
ill around her and she pulled it close.

  “Like I said,” he told her, “busy-bodies.”

  “Cirro?”

  “What is it?”

  “How old are you?” Briony asked bluntly. She had been curious at how long her supposed kind could live for, and whether it would apply to her as well.

  “Do you really want to know?” Cirro asked, smiling a little. Briony nodded. “I’ve been alive for about five human centuries, though time moves more slowly in the Forest Realm.”

  Briony nearly fell over a tree root, staring at him in shock. “Five hundred years old?”

  Cirro shrugged. “Pretty young for our kind.”

  “Will I age the way you do?” Briony asked, again wondering if she would spend five hundred years inside the forest as he had.

  “You’re different, but you’re still fae.” He nodded.

  They walked for what seemed like ages. Briony was tired but she was eager to see the place where she would have—should have—spent her childhood. She wondered if she and Cirro would have been friends or whether fae royalty was similar to human royalty.

  Several thoughts raced through her head as they walked doggedly through the underbrush, though what came out was: “I won’t have to speak with anyone, will I? I’ve never been good with public speaking or people in general.”

  Cirro smirked, brushing a twig from the length of her hair. “I don’t know, Princess. Once you’re safe within the walls of your father’s home, I’ll be leaving.”

  “What do you mean leaving? I can’t do it on my own,” Briony said, panicked. “I don’t know anything about this place.”

  Briony imagined navigating this strange, dark realm on her own and her palms grew sweaty. Cirro seemed to know everything about the forest and its inhabitants. He was the closest thing that Briony had to a guide. The sudden thought of being on her own was alarming.