I nod. “Tell me more about magic.” Emmett did say that people valued authenticity. I spent most of my life longing for information about faeries. If only ten-year-old Ivy could see me now.
“No one ever asks me these things.” He smiles. “Small magic, thekind I can do, is innate.” There’s a dandelion patch growing along the edge of the barn. Bram waves his hand, and it bursts into a cluster of pink tulips. I gasp.
Bram just laughs. “It’s really not all that useful.” The tulips crumble to ash as he says it.
He closes his fist and opens it, revealing a shiny gold coin. He hands it to me, and I’m surprised to find it ice cold.
“Wait,” he says softly. And the coin melts into a small puddle of water in my palm.
I laugh in awe.
“Big magic, the kind my mother has, is the product of years of study in palace schools. I never had the patience for it, and I came here when I was so young. There’s no one to teach me but her, and she doesn’t have the time or the interest.”
My breath catches at the mention of the Otherworld. There are a million other questions on the tip of my tongue.What does it look like, what does it smell like, does it rain all the time like it does here, is everyone there as beautiful as you, how does the magic work?
“I have a confession,” I say.
He raises his brows. “Is that so?”
Color rises in my face, and I suddenly regret saying it, but there’s no turning back now. “I spent half my life completely obsessed with faeries. I collected every bit of information I could, drew pictures of the Otherworld, made my sister and Greer play faeries with me.” I don’t say that I never quite grew out of it. “We had this book that our old cook would read to us,Faeries of the British Isles. I must have traced the artwork inside at least a hundred times.”
I clamp my hand over my mouth. I shouldn’t have admitted to owning illegal information about faeries to the son of the queen.“I’m sorry!” I exclaim. “The book was burned the moment my mother realized what it was.”
Bram studies my face. “I’m not going to tell. In fact, I’m a little relieved. No one ever talks to me about this. It’s like they’re uncomfortable with the idea of me being different.”
“I like that you’re different.” I mean it. “And never doubt that I’ll always want to hear more.”
He presses his lips together. “Home can be difficult to talk about. Things didn’t end well between my parents. I felt stuck in the middle.”
“Is that why you decided to come here?”
He shrugs. “It wasn’t much of a decision. My mother and father once ruled together as king and queen of the Otherworld, but they disagreed on a few things, particularly on how humans should be treated. My mother, like many in her court, was fond of using humans as playthings, but my father had a soft heart and no stomach for it. When my mother tried to oust him in a coup soon after I was born, he had no choice but to close the door permanently between our worlds.”
“That’s how she ended up on the battlefield that day?” I marvel. “How did you father defeat her?”
He looks so sad I regret asking. “Iron.” The word is only vaguely familiar. I must have read it in Mrs. Osbourne’s faerie book.
“I don’t know what that is.”
Bram shrugs. “I suppose you wouldn’t. It’s a natural element, a type of metal you can melt down to make things like weapons, tools, chains. She had all mention of it scrubbed from history.”
“And your father used it against her?”
“He was afraid of her. He had good reason to be.”
“So she came here instead.”
Bram nods. “She couldn’t go home, but she still needed to be queen of something.”
“If the door was locked, how did you get in?”
Bram looks down at the ground solemnly. “My father may have been softhearted, but he was still a king, and the closer I came to being of age, the bigger threat I was to him. Court in the Otherworld is vicious and competitive. Everyone lives forever, so the only way to succeed to the throne is by killing its previous occupant. My father feared that I was still loyal to my mother, or maybe just plain old ambitious, and he became paranoid that I was trying to kill him. The enchantments he put on the door allowed only our bloodline to travel through. He threw me out in the middle of the night and locked it permanently behind me.”
Grief roars through me, grief for Bram at being cast out of his homeland, for his father’s betrayal, and grief for myself at this final blow to my theory that Lydia could have fallen through to another world. She was right, I am childish. Lydia isn’t a girl from a faerie tale, she’s just a girl.
But Bram has shown me that magic does exist, even if it’s small.
“I’m so sorry, Bram.”
