Free Charles Bewitched by Marissa Doyle Page B

to be your—”
    “Enough.”
    The word was spoken quietly,
but it struck Charles like a slap across the face. He fell silent and stared up
at the fairy lord, whose brows had drawn down in a frown.
    “She will be my wife, and
that is that. I will not hear any more such speeches from you, my page.” There
was a subtle emphasis on the last two words that made Charles redden again as
he remembered what he was now supposed to be.
    “Yes, my lord,” he said.

Chapter
Seven
     
     
    For the next few days
Charles kept his head down, trying to absorb all he could about the fairy world
and not draw attention to himself. It wasn’t easy, as everyone wanted to see
their lord’s new human servant. He saw Persy, who looked miserable, several
times, but was unable to do more than give her quick, encouraging smiles and
nods. Most of his time was taken up by the fairy lord; while his duties weren’t
onerous, he needed to be paying attention at all times while he was “on duty,”
to serve refreshments or fetch things or answer his master’s questions about
life in the human world. The fairy lord had no other pages or indeed many other
servants, apart from his soldiers standing guard around the palace. This at
first puzzled Charles, until he realized that the fairy lord truly never slept,
and so had all the time he needed to manage the affairs of his lands.
    “He wasn’t joking that he
never rests,” he said to Margaret on the third day—at least, he thought it
might be the third day, though it was hard to judge without the sun to give him
cues. “How do you get away without sleeping?”
    “I don’t know. We just do. Well,
I need it a bit more because I’m part human, but usually for us sleep is a—a
pastime, you’d call it. Something we do for fun. He doesn’t have time for fun,
though maybe he will once he and your sister are married,” Margaret said, but
didn’t look convinced.
    Charles bit back the
response that always flew to his tongue—that Persy already had a
husband—because it did no good. He’d begun to feel a grudging respect for the
fairy lord, and might indeed have come to like him if he hadn’t kidnapped his
sister. But having him for a brother-in-law was out of the question; he liked Lochinvar
in that role just fine, thank you.
    Margaret picked up his hand
and fitted hers against it, comparing the length of their fingers. She had
adopted him as her pet, it seemed, and was always near him whenever he wasn’t
actively serving the fairy lord. She was fond of asking him questions and
holding his hands or playing about with his hair, which was sometimes
disconcerting though he found he didn’t at all mind it. In fact, it was rather
plea—
    “Yours are so much bigger
than mine, aren’t they?” she said, examining their joined hands, then added,
almost absent-mindedly, “My mother would like you to visit her.”
    Charles had nearly forgotten
about her mysterious mother in the midst of everything else he’d been doing.
“Would she? That’s splendid—I’d like to talk to her too. When can we go?”
    When turned out to be not till several hours later, after
a long time spent sharpening the fairy lord’s pens and blotting his letters dry
as he worked at his desk. Spending so much time gazing at the strange, spiky,
and incomprehensible fairy script made Charles dizzy. His senses hadn’t seemed
to be working quite right since he’d come here: sight and hearing and touch and
smell all seemed to be overlapping in odd ways, and his perception of distance
and even balance were off. Margaret had told him it was because his world and
the fairy lands were made of different materials, which sounded as plausible as
anything might.
    “I think it is time we visit
your world,” the fairy lord said to him as he finished the last letter. “You
are not yet acclimated to this land, I see. We shall have a dance later. That
will help both you and my Persephone feel better.”
    Did he miss nothing?