“Breathe, child.” Danika held up her palm. “I can answer all your questions, only breathe. One. I saw him. Two. That is not how I knew you were here.”
Nix frowned, wondering how Danika had realized where she actually was, but much more concerned with how things had gone for him. With heart in her throat, she flicked her wrist. “Well? How is he?”
“Well.” Danika bent at the waist, plucking up a daisy from beside her shimmering pink slipper and began to toy with the petals. “Well, as well as could be given the circumstances, I suppose.”
Nixie’s eyes widened.
“No, don’t fret, wee one. He is fine, as I said. Robin is a smart man; he managed to secure Crispin’s mouth shut before the knights arrived. And somehow that man, with his silver tongue, was also able to convince them that Crispin was in fact the bandit Robin Hood.”
Grabbing on to her head, Nixie wrinkled her nose. “Let me get this straight. Robin switched places with Crispin?”
“Aye, that’s about the gist of it.”
“So that means he’s—”
Danika nodded. “A king. As he should have always been. Yes.”
She was happy for him. She really was. He’d gotten everything he’d ever wanted. And yet the thought of it made her heart bleed.
“His wish, lass, his final wish. He sent you to me.”
Nixie looked up at her friend. “To you?”
“Aye. For safe-keeping. A fairy has no use for a genie. You’re as safe here as if you had no power at all. Ye’ll never be found. You can live your next twenty years as you wish it.”
“But that’s now how this works. You have to make wishes.”
Danika’s smile was swift. “No, I don’t, lass. You’re lamp is sheltered on fairy ground.”
Nixie’s wasn’t exactly sure why that should make a difference, but it obviously seemed to.
“Trapped inside my bottle.” She couldn’t help the bitterness from shading her words.
“Look around you, Nixie, this is his home. Explore this world that he’s built for you. Learn the man, for I feel that is why he’s created this.”
She hugged her arms tight to herself. “I learn him, and I fall even deeper in love. But twenty years, that’s an eternity here in Kingdom. As I learn him, he’ll forget me.”
“No.”
Squelching the hope that suddenly wanted to burst through her like a fist to the gut, Nixie cocked her head. “How? No?”
Danika’s smile grew beatific. “Fairy lands and Kingdom operate under two different types of laws. Here, we can bend many rules. Not all, mind, but…many.”
“The wishes being one of those rules?”
Danika didn’t answer that question, but lifted her brows with a “now-you-got-it” look on her face. “But other rules as well.”
Nixie was having a hard time keeping the hope contained. “What exactly are you saying, Danika?” She clutched at her chest.
“That I am married to a man who controls the night. And that if I asked him to perhaps create a portal for a king—”
She felt like she could hardly draw a proper breath, her eyes widened as her pulse raced.
“—a portal that could take said king anywhere his heart desired from the moment the sun went down till the moment it rose, he could.”
Nixie raced up to Danika, wrapping her arms around the fairies slender waist. “Yes. A million times, yes!” Tears were streaming down her face as she said it.
“There are limitations,” Danika said softly after Nixie finally released her from her death grip.
The fairy’s dragonfly wings zipped in agitation.
“And they are?” It filled her stomach with nerves at the sound of it, but at least she’d get to see Robin, at least she’d get to touch him and hold him and—
“Robin would merely be a shade of himself. He would not be here in body, but in spirit.”
“Spirit…” The word came out a sad echo. “So I can’t touch him?”
“No. But”—Danika’s smile was soft—“in every other way, he would be real. You would hear him. You would know him. Not physically, lass, but I’ve told ye before, love isn’t always physical. I was without my Jericho for hundreds of years, no contact at all, and yet we managed. You can too, child. This may not be ideal, but—”
There were two options as she saw it.
Keep away from him indefinitely, until her time expired. Or see him every night. Learn his soul. What made him smile. What made him tick. When she thought about it like that, it wasn’t a big deal at all. Never seeing him again, that was the true torture.
“Have you talked to him about this?”
“Aye.”
“And?” She hopped onto the toes of her feet.
Danika rolled her eyes affectionately. “Do ye honestly think I would have come to you about this if I wasn’t already sure of his answer?”