There are wrought-iron gates all grown over with ivy. Rye pushes them, and they creak loudly, and for some reason, the moment turns solemn.
“This is the kingdom?” I ask, staring up at it all in wonder.
It feels almost like we’re in a greenhouse with a roof so high you can’t see it. The trees stretch ridiculously tall, so there probably isn’t a roof, but as soon as I step in, I have the distinct feeling that I’m under some kind of covering.
“Yep.” He nods.
“Whoa.” I peer around me.
It feels sacred. It really does. We stand under a tree, and the wind blows in, moving around us that way the wind does here, gentle and present all at once, rustling around your ears like a whisper, as though it has something to say. I’ve never seen anything like it here. It’s all marble and stone and overgrown, and life is just teeming from it, crawling from every crack and crevice.
It’s gorgeous and decrepit and mesmerising and agonising all at once. You know how it hurts sometimes to see something that should be magnificent in complete ruin?
“Oh my god.” I bend down to the prettiest pink flowers I’ve ever seen in my life and go to pick one. “Look at these. They’re—”
“Don’t touch those!” Rye says quickly, and I freeze. “That’s gl?mmfloare. It…” He pauses, squints, and thinks. “It’s bad for you.”
“Oh.” I brush my hands on my dress, smiling uncomfortably. “What happens?”
He stares over at me for a few seconds, then his eye falls to the ground, and his face lights up. “Oh, come here.” He crouches down and nods at a flower that looks like nothing I’ve ever seen before. It’s sort of pink, sort of purple, sort of like a sunset—layers and layers of petals, more dramatic than a peony, but just as elegant, and taller too. “This is the blooming nurse.” He gives me a proud smile. “It fixes pretty much everything.” He shrugs. “Broken bones, broken hearts, fractured minds, stab wounds, siren kisses, werewolf bites—pretty much everything but some spells and death itself.”
I bend down to look at it, oohing.
“They’re also really rare and poisonous if not prepared correctly,” he adds as an afterthought.
I give him a look. “Oh good.”
He smirks.
“Why can’t it break certain spells?” I ask, and then my face falters at my own question. “And also, what do you mean, ‘spells’?”
“You know.” Rye gives me a look. “Magic?”
“From the fairies?”
“No.” Rye’s face goes a bit serious. “Another kind of magic.”
And he doesn’t say anything else about it, so I bend down to pick it.
“Wait,” he says. “Leave it. We don’t need it.”
I look over at him, thinking about it. Then I nod. “You’re right.
We’re back to quiet again, and I’m wondering about that flower he said was bad and as well as why that magic flower can’t break spells and also—spells?!
“Can anything break a spell?” I ask him, sitting down next to him under a tree.
He shrugs. “There’s a natural counterbalance for the supernatural, most of the time anyway. It depends though.”
“On what?” I start braiding the grass.
“On the spell,” he says, but he’s not looking at me. “I don’t know of a plant that can bring you back from a magic death. But I know about a plant that can lift a sleeping spell or a mind fog spell or—”
I frown at him. “Who’s casting all these?”
He gives me a longish look and then sort of breathes out a laugh. “No one. Don’t worry about it.”
And with that, he stands and goes behind the tree, collecting some mushrooms that are growing beneath it, pointing out which ones are safe and which ones aren’t.
“So how long have you and Jamison been…” He leaves that open-ended, and I make sure he sees my face as I shake my head.
“No, we aren’t…anything.” I shake it more. “We’re just friends.”
He lifts his eyebrows. “Who do…”
I pull a face. “Things together sometimes.”
“Like?”
I cross my arms over my chest. “I thought we just established I don’t remember things.”
Rye rolls his eyes, and I groan, feeling trapped.
“He took me to the library the other day, I think. To a tea shop on another day. One time, he bought me some clothes—” Rye shoots me a look for that one, but I ignore it. “He took me to where the founders landed.”
“The founders.” He gives me a tight smile and a sombre nod.
“Sorry.” I shake my head. “Is that bad to say?”
“Colonisation is not great no matter how good it goes.” He shrugs. “But I guess my people landed once too. Before us, it was just the fae.”
“But your people got along?”
“Our people built Neverland.” He nods. “Just not according to history.”
“Oh.” I frown a bit.
“They were okay for the most part, the elders say, nothing like the colonisers on Earth. We’re just…not in the books. Not those ones anyway.”
“Which ones are you in?” I ask, looking for his eyes. “I’d like to look at them.”
He flashes me a quick smile. “There are caves my elders talk about, somewhere on the island that tells the full story—you know, the prophecy and the rest.”
“What prophecy?”
He shrugs. “I don’t know, something about the kingdom restored.” He waves vaguely around us.
I put my hand on the fallen marble head of a giant statue. “What happened here?” I peer up and around.
“Fairies are insanely loyal, like nuts about it. They’re pack creatures. They love family, they love each other, and you have a thing—it’s a word you use on your planet for wish slaves.” He squints at me, trying to remember.
“Genies?” I offer, and Rye snaps his fingers.
“Genies! Yeah.” He shrugs again. “That’s a caricature of a fairy. Except if you catch one, you don’t get three wishes. You get infinite wishes, and they live for so long, unless you kill them on purpose.”
“Who would kill one on purpose?” I ask, horrified.
“Themselves if they’ve got nothing to live for, or someone else if they’re trying to control another fairy.”
I frown at him. “How can you control a fairy?”
“You can’t, really. That’s why you have to catch them in pairs. It’s the only way you’ll get it to do what you want.”
My brows get low, but I keep listening.
“If you have two, and you threaten to hurt one, the other will do what you want. It’s why fairies tend to spilt up and stay apart. They’re so loyal, they’re too easy to exploit.”
“So what happened here?”
Rye scratches his neck. “People kept pillaging the village to control their magic, for money, for riches, you know—the usual shit people destroy a place that isn’t theirs for.”
I shake my head at it all. “So the fairies just left?”
“They scattered.” He shrugs. “They had to. Once the people worked out if you took two fairies at once they were a lot more compliant, two or more fairies gathering became too dangerous. We tried to shelter them. It worked for a while, my grandfather said, but fairies are so obviously nonhuman, you know? They’re too beautiful. You just knew as soon as you saw one what it was, so they took them anyway.”
“So that’s why they went small?”
“Yeah. Well, that and then the humans started to rape the women fairies to try to make halflings.”