The Elemental Trial Read online

  It was then that I realized the FFR producers weren’t being generous by providing us with some comfort. It was all part of the plan. Get them together; then get them naked. It would make great TV, even if it did come with a content warning. There was no doubt in my mind that there was a camera hidden somewhere in here. Of course, the show was filming this. I wondered what the other teams were doing right now. Surely one of the couples must have succumbed to the romance? And it was romantic, I had to admit. The low light in the tents, the fresh scent of the lavender soap, the chance for a full stomach and a warm bed. Not to mention the sense of complete safety from scary faerie creatures that abounded outside. It was enough to make any red-blooded human or faerie horny.

  Where the hell was my mind going? I really did need to sleep instead of running a hundred scenarios through my addled brain, each involving the various teams doing things to each other in their own tents. And what it would be like if Orin sat down on the side of my cot, beads of water shimmering in his onyx hair…I banished the thought, wishing I could shoo it away like a fly.

  Sleep. I needed to concentrate on sleep. But…Orin still hadn’t gotten into the bath. Had he left the tent without me noticing?

  Quickly, I flicked my eyes open and shut them again in case Orin was watching me. He wasn’t.

  He sat on the carpet next to the bathtub, fully clothed, his head in his hands. It was such a different picture from the one I’d had in my mind. He looked broken, defeated, and in that moment, I knew that I was the one who’d caused it. In a moment of anger, frustrated and embarrassed by Molly and Ario, I’d broken the trust that Orin and I had built.

  I felt nothing for Ario. I knew that. The animal connection I felt was my body responding to his magic. And Tristam…well, that had been a shallow silly crush that was embarrassing to the extreme.

  What I felt for Orin was complicated and beautiful and thrilling, and there was no way I’d ever fully be able to express it out loud. I couldn’t imagine the pair of us going for a date to a fancy restaurant, and I couldn’t picture us handing over Valentine’s Day cards to each other, but at the same time I couldn’t…or didn’t want to imagine a future without him in it.

  Orin lifted his head, and I clamped my eyes shut. This time I heard the sounds of him getting undressed and finally settling into the bathtub.

  I kept my eyes closed and let him bathe in peace.

  “Morning everyone, rise and shine!” The sound of Patricia’s shrill voice cut through the remnants of sleep like a foghorn. “Time to get up and start the next leg!”

  “We don’t even get breakfast?” Orin grumbled as he pulled himself out of bed. He was grumpy and tired, but the sadness I’d seen in him the night before had gone. “Come on, let’s get moving.”

  He pulled on his socks and boots, zipping up his FFR jacket. He stood, walking towards the entrance to the tent.

  “Orin,” I whispered, but when he turned to face me, I couldn’t get any words out. I didn’t know what to say. I felt like his black eyes were pinning me to the spot, seeing right through me. “Ario and Molly…” I stammered. “They had a bet. They were trying to come between us.”

  “And you walked right into their trap,” he said.

  It took all my strength not to shoot back that he was the one who was acting childish here. But pointing fingers didn’t seem like the best way to get him to forgive me. “I’m sorry,” I said. “Ario’s an asshole.”

  “Seems like your type.”

  Again I stilled my tongue. Boy, he didn’t know how true that was.

  “I don’t want to go into the next leg like this,” I said.

  “Let’s just forget it,” he said with a sigh. “Otherwise, they win.” Then he nodded his head and left the tent.

  That was as good as I could hope to get from Orin. Our fight may not be forgotten, but it seemed we could set it aside for now. He’d at least made eye contact with me, which was a significant improvement from yesterday. I’d take it.

  With a much lighter heart, I skipped out of bed, ready to take on whatever crap the FFR threw at us. Before I left the tent, I did a quick sweep of it with my eyes. I didn’t see any cameras, but that didn’t mean they weren’t there.

  I was the last to get to the table. It turns out they had laid out a breakfast for us after all. I picked up a croissant and began to munch on it as Patricia stood up before us to announce our new teams.

  Not Tristam, not Tristam, not Tristam! I repeated the mantra in my head over and over in the hope that I’d suddenly become adept at thought control or at the very least, wishful thinking. Orin’s and my friendship was hanging on a delicate thread as it was. I didn’t think that spending the next few days with Tristam would do it any favors.

  “Jacq,” Patricia said, looking at me as if she were crowning me Miss Teen USA. “You and Orin are paired with Dulcina and Phillip for this round.”

  Oh, thank god! I’d take the pair that tried to burn us to death any day over my duplicitous mortifying crush and his hostile sidekick. Yeah, I knew I had my priorities out of whack.

  Dulcina gave me a shy smile, and Phillip nodded his head in my direction.

  Orin came up behind me and passed me a yogurt and a cup of coffee, before holding out his hand to shake Phillip and Dulcina’s.

  “You have fifteen minutes before the next leg starts,” Patricia hollered cheerfully. “Eat your fill.”

  I hadn’t spent a lot of time with this pair, so I was pleasantly surprised at how easily we fell into light conversation. We told them about the goblins, and they made me laugh when they mentioned Tristam falling down a pit in the mines, which turned out to be the goblin latrine. Quite apt as he was always full of shit!

  A gong sounded, signaling that our time for breakfast and chatting was over and we had to go back into hell. It was strange—having brunch one minute—then facing unknown horrors the next. I wondered if this is what it was like to be a Navy SEAL or something. Not that I was nearly that cool. Or that capable.

  Patricia handed Tristam a piece of parchment before sashaying over to us, handing Phillip an identical note. “Your clue. Good luck!”

  Phillip unfolded it, and we all crowded around to read. It was a riddle.

  “What passes before the sun yet makes no shadow?”

  “Anyone have any idea?” Orin asked, shrugging.

  “Maybe it has something to do with these?” Phillip said, holding up one of the winged brooches we’d each been given the day before.

  “It’s the wind,” Dulcina said, looking up, her purple hair shimmering in the sun. “The wind would leave no shadow.”

  “Okay…” I said. That didn’t seem super helpful.

  “The sylphs,” Orin said, his eyes widening and his face growing pale. “We’re going to the Court of the Sylphs?”

  But he got an answer as across the field Tristam started to float up in the air. He whooped, doing a little loop-de-loop before jetting into the bright blue. I closed my mouth, realizing I was gawking at the other teams. Molly was looking right at me, and as she floated into the air, she gave me a little salute. That was weird.

  “Where do you think they’re headed?” I asked, looking around. The landscape was beautiful, with pretty meadows and lush forest around us, fading into jagged cliffs in the far distance. And the sylphs? The word sounded familiar. I felt like Orin had mentioned them before, but I couldn’t remember. I’d gotten a bit of a crash course on faerie zoology these last weeks.

  Dulcina prodded me in the side and then pointed skyward, up to the face of the tan cliffs. Way, way up.

  My jaw dropped again as my eyes adjusted. The tops of the cliffs weren’t just a jagged silhouette as I’d assumed. They were…a castle with soaring spires and bridges. An entire city.

  I didn’t need to ask how we were going to get up there. The other teams had shown us that much, at least.

  I wasn’t scared of heights, but the thought of having nothing between me and the ground except a small cushion of in
visible magic was enough to make me feel sick.

  Ben and the other team’s cameraman moved in front of us to catch our reactions. Ben’s hands trembled slightly on the camera. I guess heights weren’t his thing.

  I looked over at Orin, who was staring at the grass, sucking in a deep breath. I remembered how terrified he’d been as we climbed down the mountain in the Sorcery Trial, and how he’d frozen as the dragon dropped us. I hoped he’d accept my help to get him through this.

  I held up my pin as I’d seen the others do. Dulcina and Phillip held up theirs too. Only Orin was left. I knew this was going to be difficult for him, so I softly took his hand in mine and raised it, praying he wouldn’t jerk it back. Dulcina and Phillip’s pins began to glow lightly, and their feet took off from the ground. I waited for a feeling of weightlessness, but nothing happened.

  “Come on!” Phillip yelled down to us. He was already ten feet in the air.

  “We’re trying!” I shouted back, holding the pins up higher. I lowered my voice so only Orin could hear. “I can’t do it. I can’t do the magic.” Shame flooded me, strong and hot. I’d failed. Proven yet again how utterly useless I was at this. But Orin lowered my hand and stared at his pin.

  “It’s not you. These pins aren’t magic. They’re as ordinary as something from an old lady’s hatbox.”

  “Why would the producers give us fake pins?” I asked, wrinkling my brow.

  “I don’t know,” Orin frowned.

  I thought back to the moment when we’d pulled them out of Patricia’s little velvet bag. Maybe there’d been two duds in there and we’d just been the unlucky ones? Molly had pulled each of them out…then handed them to us…hadn’t I seen a little shimmer of magic when she handed one to me, and then to Orin?

  My eyes widened as I realized.

  “What’s the hold-up?” Dulcina shouted from above.

  “Our pins are broken!” Orin shouted back.

  Phillip and Dulcina floated back down to join us.

  “They’re not broken,” I announced, my hands curling into fists at my side. “They’ve been sabotaged.”

  15

  “What do you mean?” Dulcina asked. “Who?”

  “Molly,” I said, certainty flooding me. “She pulled all four of ours out of the bag and handed them to us.” That’s why she was staring at me with that gleeful expression as she took off. Bitch!

  Phillip hissed and turned in an angry circle. “Great, so we stumbled into the middle of your turf war with Ario and Molly?”

  “They’re snakes,” Orin spat.

  “It’s fine,” Dulcina said. “We just need to find another way to get you up there.”

  Orin opened his mouth, no doubt to ask who knew a flying spell that could help us when a shimmer of purple magic lit the clearing.

  Dulcina had transformed into her Pegasus form. She shook her downy white mane as she lowered herself onto one knee, clearly offering her back for us to ride.

  “I guess there’s more than one way to skin a cat,” Orin said.

  “You guys are so fucking lucky,” Phillip grumbled, shooting up into the air.

  I was liking that guy less and less. And I hadn’t liked him to begin with.

  Dulcina was beautiful in her faerie form, but her Pegasus form was majestic. Her silvery white coat glistened in the early morning light. I had to fight the urge to stroke the feathers of her wings as I climbed aboard, to feel if they were as cotton candy soft as they looked.

  Orin climbed up in front of me, threading his fingers in her mane.

  “You better hold on,” Orin said through gritted teeth, and I threw my arms around his waist with a screech as Dulcina launched herself into the air.

  We soared upwards, followed closely by Ben and the other cameraman who were now in some kind of small flying machine. I could see Ben’s white face looking out at me through the window. He gave me a small trembly thumbs up, which I reciprocated, as best I could with my hands clutched around Orin’s waist.

  Dulcina was fast, and we quickly closed the distance between us and the other team. Phillip kept pace beside us, seeming to have turbocharged his little wing brooch somehow. As we soared past Molly, Tristam and their partners, I couldn’t resist giving them a wave. Despite the backstabbing, cheating lot of them, we were once again in the lead.

  Orin’s muscles were taut beneath my hands, his entire form as rigid as a statue. I wondered if his eyes were closed. If walking on the side of a cliff scared him, he must be terrified right now. I pondered what I could do to soothe him, but in the end, I said nothing. Anything I tried to say would be stolen away by the whistle of the cool wind, and I didn’t know what I’d say, anyway. Things were still weird between us.

  So instead, I tucked my face behind his shoulder out of the worst of the wind, marveling at the landscape passing beneath us, trying not to think of how Orin smelled of herbaceous lavender soap from his bath last night and how hard his abs felt beneath my grasping hands.

  The shimmering line of a river snaked beneath us, wending its way between green fields and dark smudges that I knew were forests. I found a grin forming on my face, despite not knowing what would face us when we landed. Once, the most I’d hoped for in my life was my own tiny apartment less than two hours from work and a stunt job on a real Hollywood flick. Never in a million years did I expect that this Montana girl would be clinging to a faerie on the back of a Pegasus, on my way to the Court of the Sylphs, whatever the hell that was, with millions of people tuned in. When I looked at it from that perspective, maybe this wasn’t so bad.

  We were rapidly approaching the tall cliffs, their stone faces hewn into incredibly intricate arches and windows. It was clear that while the palace sat atop these cliffs, tunnels ran throughout the cliff-face, housing the people of the Sylph Court.

  Dulcina caught a slipstream, following Phillip up towards the soaring spires of the palace atop the cliffs. Orin let out a little grunt as our mount tilted upwards and we started to slide backward. “Squeeze with your thighs,” I hollered in his ear, not sure if he had spent much time riding. It was all in the legs.

  Dulcina leveled off her ascent, and we banked in a circle, heading towards a large open platform inlaid in intricate geometric patterns of different colored rock. While I hadn’t dreaded the flight like Orin had, even I breathed a sigh of relief when Dulcina backbeat with her enormous wings and her hooves clattered to a stop on the stones of the sylph aerie.

  I slid off her back onto shaky legs—my knees almost giving way. Orin slid off next, and he staggered into me, his face pale and covered in a sheen of sweat. “I’m never doing that again,” he said, collapsing to one knee, his palms pressed to the sun-warmed stones.

  I hooked my hands under his armpits and pulled him back to his feet. “You’re going to have to get down somehow.”

  “Nope,” he shook his head, his eyes closed. “This is my life. I’m just going to live here now.”

  I patted his back, turning to Dulcina, who had shifted back to her faerie female form. Her cheeks were pink, her eyes bright with joy. “Everyone okay?”

  “Thank you so much,” I said. “We owe you.”

  “No problem,” she said. “We’re teammates, at least for now. Though I think Orin here might have pulled a chunk of mane out, he was holding on so tight.” She ruffled her purple locks.

  “Sorry,” Orin said gruffly as a gust of wind soared over the top of the cliffs, buffeting us.

  “The other teams are approaching,” Phillip called out, pointing into the distance. “Let’s get moving.”

  We jogged towards him, too happy to get off the exposed cliff-tops that seemed to be designed as landing platforms. “Where are we headed?” I asked, catching up.

  “This is the royal palace for the sylph monarchs,” Dulcina explained. “The clue led us here, but I’m not sure what we’re supposed to do now that we’re here. Let’s just head inside. I bet there’s someone there who will give us our next clue.”

  “Or
something to jump out and try to eat us,” Orin said.

  “Or that,” Dulcina agreed grimly.

  I was too busy goggling at the sights around me to worry about any of that as we passed inside out of the bright sun and thin air. The light stone of the cliff soared over us, forming a tunnel with a vaulted arched ceiling. The stone was banded with different colors of tan and pinks, forming a beautiful design.

  “What’s a sylph again?” I whispered to Orin.

  Phillip, who must have overheard me, shot a withering look over his shoulder at me. I stuck my tongue out at him as soon as he turned forward again.

  “Air elementals,” Orin explained. “Like Zee was a fire elemental. They are close kin to the wind and storms.”

  “They keep to themselves,” Dulcina added, “though the Pegasi and the sylphs have a good political relationship, so I’ve probably known more than most. They’re fairly peaceful, so I’m little surprised they agreed to be involved in the race.”

  “Guess they couldn’t pass up a PR opportunity any more than the next faerie,” I said.

  “They are notoriously fond of games and riddles,” Dulcina explained. “So maybe they were drawn to the logic component of the trials.”

  We were passing out of the tunnel now into a broad circular courtyard. Over the courtyard stood a delicate latticework of stone that cast beautifully complex shadows onto the stones beneath our feet. A tinkling fountain depicting willowy dancing maidens graced the center, and around the edges were stone benches and flower boxes overflowing with blooms. I thought it just might be the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen.

  “Ah hem,” a throat cleared behind me, and I finished turning in a circle to find the other three bowing respectfully to a strange male and female standing before us. Crap.

  I hurried into a bow as the man spoke. “Rise, fair competitors. Welcome to the Court of the Sylphs. I am King Finverr, and this is my queen, Astra. We are most honored to have you here.”