Page 17 of Foundling

You’re certainly not helping, Leita grumbled. She couldn’t help her crankiness. How long was this going to take? She could be patient if she tried and certainly meant the faelands no harm. This reticence would be more bearable if she saw even a modicum of improvement, but no, every day, the magic turned away.

“Does the faelands even really need a Queen at this rate?” she couldn’t help wondering.

Rather than answering, Thalia clopped over to stare down seriously at Leita, her teasing gone. Tapping Leita’s chest with her wicked horn, the mare told her gravely, Rabbits that decide they no longer need to burrow are easy prey. The fae have always had a Queen—without one, the magic corrodes.

“I know all that,” she said. “But it feels like…the magic doesn’t want a Queen.” She flexed her fingers in and out of fists, not quite sure how else to explain it. As a unicorn, Thalia could somewhat understand what she meant.

Fae and unicorns retained a connection to magic in ways no other race or creature did. Yes, the dragons and mantii had their shifting, the orcs their strength, and the sirens and harpies their songs, but they didn’t control and use magic in the way the fae did.

For fae, magic was as necessary and intrinsic as blood and breath. It could even sustain them in lieu of both—detrimental as that was. Although Leita campaigned to wean the fae from their subsistence on magic and return them to beating hearts and full stomachs, that didn’t mean magic wouldn’t still be part of them.

With such a relationship to magic, fae and unicorns formed circuits, bonds that channeled magic in healthy, helpful ways. Disrupting that circuit had dire consequences.

Every fae was taught that. It was why Leita had assumed, upon her aunt’s death, the magic would just sort of…cleave to her immediately. She’d never have thought it would take such wooing, or that it could even possibly reject her.

“I must be missing something,” Leita said, not for the first time.

It was only a suspicion, but she couldn’t help thinking there was simply one special thing—a ritual, a rite, a spell even—that would solve this. Whatever it was, this special thing was a secret passed from Queen to Queen. Amaranthe should have imparted it to her heir.

That might’ve been too good to be true, but Leita supposed it’d be fitting to find out she’d been overthinking all of it.

I think the path you’ve chosen is a difficult one that few can walk.

“You know I hate it when you talk in analogies.”

I do know, but you’re such a stubborn foal, how else would you learn? And that was a metaphor, not an analogy.

With a mighty harrumph, Leita rolled over onto her stomach. The grassy bed beneath her released fragrant notes, and she was tempted to lay there for a fortnight.

“I don’t suppose you could talk to it.”

I already have. It says it doesn’t like you.

Leita dropped her face into the grass. You’re awful, she huffed as Thalia brayed with laughter.

As they neared the eastern edge of the faelands, even Leita could tell something was strange. The magic here hardly noticed her, its attention trained at the border.

Since the fae had settled on the continent, they’d demarcated their lands with a strong border. It kept invaders out and fae in, insulating the magic in a closed circuit. An outsider would struggle to cross over it, if at all; meanwhile, a fae would struggle to leave it behind. Too far, and their connection to the faelands would snap. All of which Leita knew well.

That was the case when the border was strong, however.

One of the most important reasons for Leita to bond with the magic and begin her reign in full was to strengthen the weakened border. Magic seeped out, and there was a real danger that anything could find its way in.

The orcs they traded with were told they had to enter at certain points because that was where the border was naturally more open to passage. In reality, a strong enough bombardment could very well punch through the faelands’ main defenses.

This weakness was, therefore, the secret held in the strictest confidence within her small court. None could know, not even the fae.

So when Leita cast her sense and magic out, it wasn’t a total surprise to feel that something pressed at the already weakened border. The tendrils and threads of magic here frayed, even…melted.

The further they went, the more animals they came across. The air began to smell of smoke and crackle with latent danger.

She didn’t need Thalia to tell her, The herds say it’s a wildfire. A bad one.

How long has it burned?

Days now, and the rains haven’t come.

Leita swallowed, her throat stinging from smoke.