It worried me, what might happen if he did. And maybe it would have been nothing, but the way the volcano rumbled instilled in me a quiet fear that perhaps Peter wouldn’t even have to lift a finger and there’d still be hell to pay.
“Does he like you?” Rye asks.
“Jamison?” I clarify, because I suppose I have a few balls in the air at the moment, and I wouldn’t be entirely offended if someone were to wonder whether Peter actually does.
“Yes, Jamison.” Rye rolls his eyes.
“Oh, um—” I purse my mouth. “I think so?”
Rune rolls her eyes.
He lifts an eyebrow. “You think so?”
I nod. “Mm-hmm.”
Rye’s eyes pinch. “Did he say he did, or—”
“Well, we mostly really spoke around it?”
“Okay?” He nods, unsure.
“Um—” I frown as I try to word it. “I think it was topically inferred.”
Rye pulls a face.
I breathe out loudly. “We talked about having sex.”
“Whoa!” Rye pulls back, and Rune starts chiming like a maniac, practically bouncing off invisible walls.
I gasp and point at Rune firmly. “You honestly have a terribly filthy mind for a fairy, I do mean it.”
“No, that one’s on you.” Rye shakes his head. “You nearly had sex with Hook?”
“No.” I shake my head. But maybe. “We talked about it. We haven’t even kissed. Nothing happened, but—”
“But you wanted it to?”
I straight up look at him down my nose. “Maybe.”
Rune throws a tiny fairy firecracker at my shoulder that looks like someone popped a water balloon made of glitter. I give her a look as I dust my shoulder off.
“Peter tried to have sex with me the other day,” I tell them.
Rune starts saying the bad words under her breath again, and Rye looks far away in his thinking.
“I have a headache,” he says mostly to himself before he looks up at me, frowning. “What happened?”
“Well, he tried, and I said no.”
“Why did you say no?” he asks.
There is an answer; it’s plain as day on my face. I don’t say a word. I don’t need to. I think it just lives there. An affection and a fondness that aren’t safe on the outside of me, but I don’t know how to keep them in anymore, and I hate to tuck them away.
“Wow,” Rye says as he watches me quietly. He nods at the mouth of the cave. “This is it.”
We walk in past some columns five times as tall as the tallest man I know.* The cave itself is spectacular. Rimstone dams and flowstones galore. It gets dark quickly in here, though it’s okay because Rune is a light in and of herself. We move through the hallway and into a different room that’s darker and dryer than the others.
Rye gives the wall a solemn nod, and it takes a moment for my eyes to adjust, but then I see it. The prophecy. Or at least I think that’s what it is. It’s mostly written in some kind of hieroglyph that I don’t understand, but I feel quite certain my mother could.
“The true heir,” Rye says, staring at the glyphs in front of us before he looks back at me. “And you don’t even know if you like him.” He laughs dryly.
“I do too like him.” I frown, and Rune trills in discontent, and I don’t know whether I can look either of them in the eye at the minute so I look at the wall instead, running my hands over some Latin engraved into the wall also. “What’s this?”
“Praecepta vivimus,” Rye says with a tight smile.
I purse my lips, trying my best to translate it. “The rules we live by?”
He nods, then shrugs dismissively. “They’re not real, just something the founders wrote on the wall when they found this here.”
There are a few things written down: sanguis pro sanguine, in somnis veritas, in scientia et virtute, semper fortunas iuventutis, and a few more that are harder to read in the lack of light.
“Ad pacem, ad lucem, ad magicam, ad naturam, ad omnium bonam ac libertatem,” I read aloud to no one in particular before I look between the two of them. “Were they true to it?”
Rye purses his mouth and shrugs. “Some.”
Rune jingles in agreement, and I hope to myself that Itheelia falls under the banner of that some.
“Come on,” Rye says, leading us back out to the main cave. “That’s not even the best part.”
And he’s right.
A great deal of this cave is at least partially submerged. It’s impossibly dark in parts, but then there’s holes in the roof where the light pierces through in a way that almost looks like shooting stars, and the water—it glows.