Rye’s eyes pinch. “Did he say he did, or—”
“Well, we mostly really spoke around it?”
“Okay?” He nods, unsure.
“Um—” I frown as I try to word it. “I think it was topically inferred.”
Rye pulls a face.
I breathe out loudly. “We talked about having sex.”
“Whoa!” Rye pulls back, and Rune starts chiming like a maniac, practically bouncing off invisible walls.
I gasp and point at Rune firmly. “You honestly have a terribly filthy mind for a fairy, I do mean it.”
“No, that one’s on you.” Rye shakes his head. “You nearly had sex with Hook?”
“No.” I shake my head. But maybe. “We talked about it. We haven’t even kissed. Nothing happened, but—”
“But you wanted it to?”
I straight up look at him down my nose. “Maybe.”
Rune throws a tiny fairy firecracker at my shoulder that looks like someone popped a water balloon made of glitter. I give her a look as I dust my shoulder off.
“Peter tried to have sex with me the other day,” I tell them.
Rune starts saying the bad words under her breath again, and Rye looks far away in his thinking.
“I have a headache,” he says mostly to himself before he looks up at me, frowning. “What happened?”
“Well, he tried, and I said no.”
“Why did you say no?” he asks.
There is an answer; it’s plain as day on my face. I don’t say a word. I don’t need to. I think it just lives there. An affection and a fondness that aren’t safe on the outside of me, but I don’t know how to keep them in anymore, and I hate to tuck them away.
“Wow,” Rye says as he watches me quietly. He nods at the mouth of the cave. “This is it.”
We walk in past some columns five times as tall as the tallest man I know.* The cave itself is spectacular. Rimstone dams and flowstones galore. It gets dark quickly in here, though it’s okay because Rune is a light in and of herself. We move through the hallway and into a different room that’s darker and dryer than the others.
Rye gives the wall a solemn nod, and it takes a moment for my eyes to adjust, but then I see it. The prophecy. Or at least I think that’s what it is. It’s mostly written in some kind of hieroglyph that I don’t understand, but I feel quite certain my mother could.
“The true heir,” Rye says, staring at the glyphs in front of us before he looks back at me. “And you don’t even know if you like him.” He laughs dryly.
“I do too like him.” I frown, and Rune trills in discontent, and I don’t know whether I can look either of them in the eye at the minute so I look at the wall instead, running my hands over some Latin engraved into the wall also. “What’s this?”
“Praecepta vivimus,” Rye says with a tight smile.
I purse my lips, trying my best to translate it. “The rules we live by?”
He nods, then shrugs dismissively. “They’re not real, just something the founders wrote on the wall when they found this here.”
There are a few things written down: sanguis pro sanguine, in somnis veritas, in scientia et virtute, semper fortunas iuventutis, and a few more that are harder to read in the lack of light.
“Ad pacem, ad lucem, ad magicam, ad naturam, ad omnium bonam ac libertatem,” I read aloud to no one in particular before I look between the two of them. “Were they true to it?”
Rye purses his mouth and shrugs. “Some.”
Rune jingles in agreement, and I hope to myself that Itheelia falls under the banner of that some.
“Come on,” Rye says, leading us back out to the main cave. “That’s not even the best part.”
And he’s right.
A great deal of this cave is at least partially submerged. It’s impossibly dark in parts, but then there’s holes in the roof where the light pierces through in a way that almost looks like shooting stars, and the water—it glows.
I stare at it in wonder only for a half a second before I dive in, unable to help myself.
“They’re Noctiluca scintillans,” Rye says, smiling down at me.
“They’re what?”
He laughs, then jumps in too. “Bioluminescent plankton.”
I let out a small laugh. “I thought you were going to say it was mermaid dust or something magical.”
“No.” He shakes his head. “Just phosphorescence. Still magic though,” he says, looking straight at me.
Rune coughs to break the tension in the room that I don’t understand.
“Hey, Daph.” Rye catches my eye. “Hook’s a really good man, you know.”
“I know.” I frown defensively and duck under the water for a second. I think he’s maybe the best man. And then I sigh at the same part I do every time—the part that doesn’t make sense. I pop my head back up. “He can’t be my fate though.”
“Says who?” Rye asks.
“Well—” I roll my shoulders back. “You. Everyone. Anyone whose paying attention to myself and Peter and everything that’s happened with my family till now.”
Rune chimes in my ear, kicking up some water into my face with her tiny foot, and I roll my eyes at her because she’s really hung up about that breeze.
“Would it matter if Hook wasn’t?” Rye asks, swimming into a beam of light.
“Well.” I swim after him. “I should think so?”
“But why?”
I shrug, hopeless. “Because it’s fate.”
“Right.” He looks sad for me. “Maybe fate’s not all it’s cracked up to be.”
The fairy tinkles again about the snow, but I think she’s putting too much stock in the weather.
“There wasn’t a great anything to it, Rune.” I give her a look. “He just put his coat on me is all.”
She sighs, belling again.
“No, maybe she’s right,” Rye says with a shrug. “Maybe there are different kinds of fate. Maybe everything’s fate.” He gives me a long look. “Maybe we all are.”
And then he ducks under the water.
* * *
* Not to name names, but Jamison.
CHAPTER
FOURTEEN
“Wake up, girl,” Peter says, his nose pressed against mine. “We’re going to play.”
I rub my eyes, tired. “Play what?”
He beams down at me. “Make-believe.” Then he pulls me out of bed. “Let’s go.”
He shakes me by the shoulders excitedly, and I give him a look. “Peter, I’m not dressed.”
He growls under his breath. “Fine. Hurry then,” he says, and then he walks away.
“I should like to have breakfast first,” I call after him.
“No time!” he calls back. “You have five minutes!”
“Where are we going?” I ask mid-flight.
“It’s a surprise.” He beams, holding my hand tighter. He looks at me in my fairy birthday dress. “Where’d you get that from?”
“Rune.” I give him a proud smile. “Do you like it?”
He shrugs. “It’s okay.”
I’m wearing her boots again today. I’ve been wearing her boots a lot lately, mostly because it means I can hide the dagger in them.
I give his hand a squeeze. “I am hungry though.”
Peter looks over at me with a long-suffering face.
“Sorry.” I grimace. “You didn’t let me have breakfast.”
“You should have been up earlier!” He rolls his eyes.