The Stargazer

Stargazer (chapter nine)

“I wasn’t always trapped here.”


The words were so soft, for a moment she thought she had imagined them. Rowan stirred, still not looking at her. His gaze drifted from the bonfire to the starless sky. There was an indefinable longing in the pose, as if he were wishing himself elsewhere, to another time and place. Perhaps he was. She knew she’d wished more than once to be free of this place. But without a star to wish on, her mother couldn’t hear her. Without her ability to touch air, she couldn’t even Whisper her family and tell them she was alive.


“I was the astro-nav on a pilot ship when the King found me.”


She had no idea what an astro-nav or pilot ship were but she held her peace.


“We made a bargain and he brought me here. He hadn’t told me everything, though. The others were already here.” Bitterness crept into his voice. “He never intended to uphold his end of the bargain. I was just the catalyst to get the others moving and then they were gone. He had what he wanted and he didn’t need me anymore.”


He fell silent for a moment, his gaze fixed on the black expanse of sky. Aislinn didn’t press him. In her chest, her heart pounded. If her instincts were right, he was more than the thirteenth lord. Someone far more.


“He let me go for a while,” he murmured, his voice soft as if he were lost in a distant memory. “Not home. Not where I wanted to be. I kept trying, though. Kept trying to figure out where I was, so that maybe I could find a way back. Then he dragged me back here and left me. Bastard hasn’t fulfilled his end of the bargain but he won’t let me go, either.”


“If the King is Fae as you believe,” she said, choosing her words with care, “he can’t let you go. The bargain has not been fulfilled. He is bound by his word to make good on it.”


“He lied to me.”


Apparently, Rowan wasn’t in the mood to hear anything that vindicated the King that kept him trapped here.


“He didn’t lie,” Aislinn tried again. “If he said it, he is bound. Oaths form too easily in the Fae Realms to chance being bound by an untruth. Did he give you any time limit on when he would have to deliver his end of the bargain?”


“He is the King of Time,” he reminded her harshly. “Time limits mean nothing to him. I’ve been in this place for over two hundred years if you count each period of light as a day. Do you know what? I’m still a negative one hundred and forty years old.”


Negative… Aislinn drew a deep breath and turned her own gaze to the sky. He had good reason to despise the King who had left him to rot. He’d been dragged back in time and abandoned to his own devices before being imprisoned again, trapped alone in a bubble.


Details jammed the thought sideways. The beasts. Wheezer. The King had not forgotten about Rowan, no matter what he believed. He kept him amused and had created someone to interact with him. Rowan wouldn’t see it that way but she saw desperation behind the seeming frivolous and perhaps cruel actions. Too much power had been expended on his behalf for him to be an afterthought.


“What is it like? In your time, I mean?”


He jerked as if the words stung and she felt his gaze touch her before sliding away again. She’d surprised him. Now she’d find out if that were a good thing or not.


“Not this quiet,” he snorted.


Shifting on his feet, he crossed and uncrossed his arms. Finally, he rubbed at his neck, casting her another long look. Aislinn kept her gaze on the sky, letting him come to a decision at his own pace.


“See, we near destroyed our world, so we searched for and found the power to reach other worlds. We learned to craft places we could live in and ways to travel long distances in a flash. We thought we were gods. But we never learned to get along.”


Humans had always been more aggressive than their Fae counterparts. Perhaps because they lived longer, Fae were slower to violence, preferring subtle revenge to outright mayhem. Perhaps they were simply more aware of the fine balance that kept things right in the world. Tilt the balance and bad things happened.


“Things got hot, wars broke out, and people died. Lots of them.” He went quiet again and then sighed. “Those in power thought that we needed more manpower to win, that winning meant peace. All sides thought that way, I guess. They went and engineered things so more male children were born to fill their armies, more soldiers to die in their wars. Females were born less and less until someone realized there weren’t enough females left to have enough children to keep the human race going. As if blowing one another up wasn’t enough, we’d gone and killed ourselves without knowing.”


The balance had been upended. Aislinn understood, perhaps more than he knew, how precarious a state that was. It would take sacrifice and careful handling to set things right again. She nodded, tucking her head.


“Your women are protected, then. That’s why you got so angry today.”


“Sorry about that.”


She snorted. “No, you’re not.”


A soft rasp that might have been a chuckle. “You’re right. I’m not. Women don’t belong in a fight. You could have gotten hurt.”


“So could you,” she pointed out sweetly. “In fact, you did. I’m not going to run away and hide when my only place of shelter is threatened. You can’t expect that of me.”


“Yes, I can.”


“I’m not a woman in your time or of it, Rowan.” She held up a hand to forestall the argument she was certain was headed her way. “Rest assured, I do not like pain and have no intention of being hurt. I don’t care for fighting, either, but if it comes down to it, I will fight.”


“I thought you liked the bow.” He turned to face her, crossing his arms again and glaring. Their temporary truce was apparently over. “At least that would have kept you out of the fray. Instead, you had to grab that silver thing and dive into the thick of it. That didn’t look like you were trying not to get hurt.”


“I wasn’t the one bleeding at the end, now was I?” She regretted the sharp words the instant they left her lips. “I’m sorry. That wasn’t very well done of me.”


“I was thinking score one for you, actually.” His lips twitched before he regained control and resumed glowering. “The bow?”


She waved a hand at the dark around them. “This—place—didn’t give me a bow, it gave me the traditional glaive of the Sidhe. It wasn’t a choice on my part.”


“If you promise to stay out of the thick of things, I’ll ask Wheezer to hunt you up a bow. Promise?”


“On one condition.”


“I don’t bargain with Fae.”


Aislinn glanced pointedly around them and matched him glare for glower.


“I don’t bargain with Fae anymore,” he amended.


“I’m not going to make you promises when I receive nothing in return,” she shot back. “You tell me nothing unless I pry it out of you. How do you expect me to try to figure out how to get us out of here if you don’t tell me what you know?”


“I don’t need your help.”


“You said yourself, you’ve been here over two hundred years. I’d say you need someone’s help.” She straightened her spine, flicking her wings out in preparation for a quick retreat. “I will be doing my best to break this spell, Rowan Changeling. With or without your help.”


Frustration propelled her into the air without waiting for his answer. She would  find a way out if it was the last thing she did.