Well, I'll see you, but you won't see me.She chuckled.
Great, now I had to worry about an invisible peeping Faerie.
“Queen Vervain?” King Cian asked in concern.
“Sorry, High King,” I said, refocusing on things outside of my head. “I was just checking with Faerie.”
“And?” Queen Meara—still holding baby Eveline—prompted.
“She agrees that it's a minor issue.”
“Oh, good,” Nora huffed. “I was getting worried.”
I blinked and looked around the table. The other monarchs weren't—worried, that is. Only Nora, Lugh, and I looked as if we'd been anxious. Was it a Sidhe thing? Did they know more about the paths and therefore knew it wasn't a big deal? Part of me wanted to talk about it more but another part of me knew that I already had too much to deal with. I had come to Faerie to relax, not get into more trouble. If there was a bigger problem, it would reveal itself in due time, no doubt. For now, we'd fix the problems we knew about.
Chapter Twenty
We rode back to the Fire Kingdom with two more faeries than we'd arrived with: Lugh and the wayfarer. Isleen couldn't stay behind to spend some time with Lugh at the Castle of Eight since she'd be needed to coordinate the search in the Fire Kingdom so Lugh decided to go to Fire with her. This meant that our carriage was full and the wayfarer, a Fire-Sidhe named Mallien (Cian was thoughtful enough to send wayfarers to the kingdoms of their birth), had to ride on the driver's platform with our Phooka driver.
I stared out of the window, wondering how many faeries were in those woods, searching for passages seeping magic into Earth. Hopefully, they'd find them quickly and repair the weakening wards before something worse than a few flowers popped up on my home planet.
“When the paths were open, did this happen?” I asked Arach.
“What?”
“The flowers,” I clarified. “Did faerie flowers spring up around the paths to Faerie when they were open before?”
Arach went still. He transferred his stare to Isleen, whose expression had gone pensive.
“What I say?” I asked.
“I'm as lost as you are,” Lugh muttered. He looked to his girlfriend for the answer. “Isleen?”
“No,” Isleen said. “Nothing of Faerie leaves without a faerie's assistance.”
“So, why is it happening now?” I asked.
Isleen shrugged. “As King Cian said, magic seeks freedom and the Faerie Realm hasn't been free in thousands of years. It's possible that the very act of trying to suppress it has made it push harder.”
“What happens if we don't get the passages under control?” Lugh asked.
“The realm could seek to expand itself to Earth,” Arach surmised.
“The magic of the Faerie Realm on Earth,” Lugh whispered. “Fuck me.”
“But we've had a giant passage to the Human Realm open for years now.” I waved toward the enormous tree that we were just passing—the one set at a crossroads between kingdoms. “Nothing like this has...” I trailed off as I realized that the Great Tree was a different path entirely. “Oh.”
“Yes, I see that you've figured it out for yourself,” Arach noted. “The Great Tree is a tracing point, not an open passage. It has the Aether as a buffer while our old paths ran through the Aether, much like Torrent's veins of Internet that he uses to connect the Human Realm to the God Realm.”
“You're worried now,” I declared, almost triumphantly.
“Yes.” Arach frowned. “Why does that gladden you?”
“Because you weren't before. It was only Nora, Lugh, and me who seemed to be scared of what this could mean. It's kinda nice to have you on board.”
“You're right, Vervain,” Lugh said in surprise. “My father was concerned about getting things fixed, but he wasn't worried.”
“Not everything is a calamity.” Arach rolled his eyes. “Faerie herself told you that all would be fine, A Thaisce. When's the last time that she didn't take a threat seriously?”
