Crown of Faeries

16 | Fortitude

Psst.

Psst.

Caelia. A hand brushed my shoulder, waking me up slowly from the darkness that consumed my dreams.

My eyes slowly parted to see the shimmering nose ring hoop. "Freya?" I blinking twice, trying to rid the feeling of sand in my eyes.

When I opened my eyes again, a new piece of jewelry hung before my own nose.

My mother's necklace.

Snatching the necklace out her hands, I hoped up into a sitting position on the bed. "I can't believe how many times I loose this!" I shouted before a yawn took me over.

Freya's deviant eyes looked amused. "It almost got burned with that coat of yours." I flashed my eyes to hers and raised an eyebrow. "I found it only because the slippery piece of metal fell from a pocket."

"I--I could have sworn Kieran had it." I muttered to myself as I looked closely at the necklace.

Freya sat her round butt on the edge of the bed, making it sink at an awkward position. "So tell me, what's a princess--I'm sorry, not princess," she smirked at me before tossing her dark locks over a thin and bare shoulder. Her corset top was strapless and hugged her small breasts closer to her thin chest. "But what are you doing with a Wielder Charm?"

My lips parted. "A Wielder Charm?"

Freya's brow furrowed. "You're really this ignorant." Her words never really met the questionable standard as she looked at me.

I shrugged. "Before all this, I could have sworn I was just human."

She narrowed her eyes at me. "Well, I've only seen those charms once or twice in my life."

"How?" I crossed my legs and tried to make my seated position more comfortable.

Freya looked up at the ceiling before sighing. "Once upon a time, I was a naive little Nymph with nothing more to do with her time than to mess with the big bad wolf of the sea." She glanced at me and gave me a come on, really? look when she saw the confusion in my eyes. "Sirens!" She nearly shouted with indignation. She shook her head. "My family was part of the Waterike Tribe, essentially water Nymphs. Well, naturally, I liked to make fun of Sirens because their nature is to be stuck as part fish and to never walk the land--regardless of what some might say otherwise. And one day, I messed with the wrong siren. She snatched my ankle when I dared to skip across the water in my Nymph form, and she pulled me under. I was about to drown when the water started to shift in odd directions." Freya barked out a laugh. "I still remember that ugly fish face frightened. I started to laugh underwater before I blacked out from lack of oxygen. But I never fully did because when the water parted and formed a boxed wall--about ten stories high--and I was down at the bottom of this large lake behind the forest, I was lying there with the siren flapping about, dying.

"The sun seemed so bright that day, when the water parted. I looked up to see this man standing on the edge of the wall he formed and I'll never forget the necklace he wore." Freya pointed to my mother's necklace that rested in my palm. "It looked just like that. I spent three years after that trying to learn everything I could about the man who had saved me, but I never learned his name or met him."

Her eyes and voice wondered off into the distance and I ran a thumb across the face of the pendent. "A servant in the castle saw this a flipped." I looked at Freya and watched as she sucked herself out of her trance. "She started to panic but her words were inaudible. The only thing Kieran and I heard was Wielder."

"Did he make a connection?" She dropped an eyebrow in a curious stare.

I shook my head. "No. He seemed clueless."