Page 33 of First Light
“Carys!” It was Duncan’s voice. Something in the rough timbre told her it was him, and he was getting closer.
She hated him. Hated him for bringing her here, hated him for forcing her to see the truth.
You were right, Duncan. I really do hate you.
She pushed open a wooden door and nearly fell into a cobblestone courtyard teeming with traders, workmen, and soldiers. She looked over their heads and saw the large arched castle gate in the distance. She picked up a broken basket someone had discarded on the ground and pulled her hood forward, hoping to blend in with the market customers.
In the short time she’d been inside, the castle yard had become a riot of energy. Voices of every type, women pushing apples into her face. Children darting around her legs, and somewhere above it all, a group of men were singing.
Carys pressed into the crowd and walked toward the great wooden gate she and Duncan had walked through, gasping a little when she nearly ran into a giant wearing green corded leggings. She looked up to see a man with dark curling hair, arched cheekbones, and rich reddish-brown skin looking down at her with a curious expression. She blinked when she saw his pointed ears pierced with a dozen gold rings.
“Sorry,” she muttered at the tall fae before she tried to move around him.
“Nêrys ddraig?”
Carys blinked. “No, my name is—” She caught herself before she gave her name to a fae. “Not Nêrys.”
Had she misheard? How could the fae man know her name?
She pressed on, turning away from the fae but still heading toward the gate. A dog barked at her ankles, and a short figure pulled it by the collar. It looked up, and Carys realized it wasn’t a child as she’d thought but some kind of shorter creature with large eyes, a stubby nose, and a wispy beard.
It shouted something in a language she couldn’t understand.
Not real. Not real.
Except it was so very, very real.
Her feet were raw and blistered in Duncan’s oversized boots, but Carys blocked the pain and kept going. She might not be a star athlete—might have failed on every school team she tried out for—but one thing she was really good at was walking.
She walked over rough cobblestones and muddy puddles. Around wagons and through the overwhelming barnyard smell of cows, horses, and pigs that were herded through the castle yard.
The massive wooden gate loomed in the distance, and she hunched her shoulders and walked in that direction, hoping that whoever had been calling her name was still searching the twisting hallways of the stone edifice behind her.
Get out. Get away. Back to the cottage. Back to the forest.
Soldiers stood on either side of the gate, but as she’d expected, they were watching who was coming in far more than who was leaving.
She scooted closer to a group of brightly dressed traders who were speaking in English, laughing about a deal they’d just made on fabric. Keeping close to their group, she slipped past the castle guards, under the massive wooden portico, and crossed the drawbridge.
She was out.
CHAPTER NINE
Once the castle was behind her, Carys let out a sigh and slowed her steps a little, moving out of the way before she was run over by a market cart. She stood on the side of the road to survey the lane before her and the dark rise of the hills beyond.
The main road bisected the town that surrounded the castle. To the left, lanes led off toward taller wood-and-plaster buildings that climbed up the hill leading toward the ridge where an old stone tower stood guard. There were carts and horses walking through the lanes. Signs hung from shop windows, and men and women swept off the wooden stoops in front of the tall buildings.
To the right, sloping downhill, were squat houses and patched gardens. Dogs trotted through cobbled streets, and cats lazed on thatch roofs. There was an eye-catching mix of homespun garments and brightly dyed T-shirts hanging from clotheslines. The garish mix of modern and ancient arrested her eyes as she took everything in.
Outside one house, a line of plastic flags flapped along the top of a woven wattle fence. There was a broken mirror hanging prominently on the wall of a whitewashed house, and a plastic cartoon mouse topped a scarecrow in a back garden.
This was a human world, but it wasn’t hers. There was no metal, no hum of electricity in the air. There were no phone or electrical lines crossing overhead, but the atmosphere was anything but silent. The town clamored as she walked through it, bursting with the magical and the mundane.
To her right, a rotund shopkeeper conversed with a squat creature that looked like a dwarf or a goblin of some kind. Their postures reminded her of the old farmers back home—both the man and the creature stood with their hands on their hips, heads nodding as they chatted.
A willowy fae woman was bent over in a garden plot to her right, examining something next to a housewife with long grey braids. They chatted in Gaelic, the human woman gesticulating passionately as the fae woman nodded along.
Carys saw birds she didn’t recognize flying overhead and the occasional flutter of something that might have been a sprite or a nymph that flashed brightly in the flat morning light, then disappeared before she could make out anything concrete.