Feros seemed to get somewhat of clue after the second time his head was removed from his body and didn’t directly approach Ana and instead skulked in the shadows looking at her with pathetic glances. It seemed strangely counter productive for him to spend so much time irritating someone he claimed to still love and want to try again with, it seemed to me that she had no hope of ever processing and working through the past when he gave her no space to do so and hung around the training areas like a bad smell. It was starting to irritate me as well, not only was he being extremely pathetic, like a kicked dog who just wanted to be in good graces again, but it was making me wonder how he could possibly be keeping up with his own training with Alice.

“How is Alice?” I asked, not looking up to him in the balcony above the training room. Ana and I had just finished an exhausting session and I wanted nothing but to go soak my aching muscles in a hot bath, but there was few times where he lingered long enough after Ana left to speak to him in private. “I assume her training is going well?”

“As well as to be expected,” he replied.

I let the silence sit and mature to see if he would provide any additional information, but the fiend didn’t offer any.

“It feels to me like you might have taken a bit of a break on working with her, am I mistaken?”

“A break? No, I wouldn’t call it that.”

“Then what would you call it?”

“A necessary time for her adjustment to the demon realm. The magic is very different from what’s she’s acclimatized to, she’s finding the transition difficult, something like your princess friend only less pathetic.”

I tilted my head to the side slightly in thought, then raised my gaze to the general area I sense he was sitting back in the shadows. We both knew that while Alice was wildly untrained that her sheer magical talent should have been more than sufficient to keep the worse of the magic sickness at bay. In fact, I would have staked part of my royal claim on her being able to experience no sickness at all even though it was her first venture here. She had seemed completely fine when had first arrived, so either he was deflecting, outright lying, or withholding some part of the truth, all of those options set my blood to boiling.

“I want to see her,” I demanded, “take me to her.”

There was a long pause where it felt like he was trying to come up with something.

“It wasn’t a request,” I added.

“You’ll need to speak with Rafe for that,” he said, voice not quite as jovial as his typical self.

“Why would I need to do that? She’s under my guidance.”

“We are here as refugees.” He finally had the decency to step into the light and look down at me from the balcony. His new shell looked identical at first glance, but there was something eerily different about him that I couldn’t quite place yet. “If Rafe asks me to jump I have to request to know how high. He wanted me to restrict access to the girl, no matter who asks.”

I rolled my eyes and made a dismissing motion towards with with my hand. “You are being ridiculous, you know that such an order would not stand for myself as well. While I am a guest, I am a guest monarch, you are being restrictive for some other reason and I already hate that you sneak around like a rat trying to get into the pantry all the time, now is not the time to keep up all this subterfuge and deflection.”

Again he went silent, his body so still that I wasn’t sure if he was even still breathing. “I ask this one time you accept that I have a handle on things well enough to not have your oversight.”

“It seems you have forgotten the last time I gave you that leeway. It cost me my kingdom and now you’re asking me for more, that’s a very bold and stupid move. I perhaps don’t threaten you as much as I should, but I’m sure Rafe would side with me and could conjure up something that would be sufficiently terrible as punishment. In fact, I think he may be delighted to help me figure something out, he’s still absolutely furious that your judgment brought down his human allies.”

The fiend nodded once, lips in a tight line. “It cannot be avoided then.” There was dread in his voice that sent a shiver down my spine. “Before I take you to her, I must ask that you let me explain before you make any rash decisions.”

“It is that bad?” I asked with a groan. “I will take it into consideration, but I will make no promises.”

Feros leapt over the railing to the balcony and dropped silently down to the ground next to me, his boots hardly making any sound as they made contact with the stone. He gave me an intense look and let out a sigh, before turning towards the door and motioning for me to follow. My forehead wrinkled into a worried frown as he led me through the castle and past all of the normal bedrooms to the entrance to the dungeon. As a general rule Evonia and then myself had never really utilized the dungeon rooms for much, but I knew they were filled with various restraints and torture devices in this realm. Evonia and I had really sunk a lot of effort into making people too afraid to interfere with us so the need for such things was generally kept to a minimum, but demons seemed to revel in the idea that they may get to throw someone in a dank, dark room chained up for an indefinite amount of time. I really did not like the idea that whatever was happening Feros had decided that such a place was the best place for her, either he was being exceptionally cruel to what still was a little girl or things had spiraled out of control even further than they already had.

“Here,” he said in a defeated tone.

The door looked unassuming and my sense of what I remembered about the dungeons placed it somewhere on the lower level opposite where the ritual room was located.

“Please remember to at least try to let me explain before you do anything rash.”

Before I could answer, Feros flared his power, expanding it to form a perfect seal around the door, then tugged the handle, causing a cascade of blindly verdant magic to rush out through the cracks. He quickly wrapped his own magic around it and pushed it back through the doorway so he could open the door wider and allow us entrance. He only opened the door just enough for me to slip through, then he motioned for me to come around the side of him and etner the chamber, I complied and shivered as my own aura struggled to keep the wild fae magic at bay.

“Miss Toria,” Alice gasped, jumping up from the makeshift pile of blankets and pillows on the floor.

The room had quite obviously been used as some sort of interrogation room with shackles dangling from the walls and suspicious stains coating every surface. There was the girl’s makeshift bed and a few candles in the room, but little else. Feros entered the room quickly behind me and snapped the door closed with a sigh of relief.

“Why is she down here?” I demanded to know.

“I can’t keep my magic in anymore,” Alice said sadly, she looked to the ground and dug at a strange purple stain on the stone with the toe of her shoe.

“I can see that,” I said, feeling the wild magic swirling and seeking a way out of the room. “My question is really more for your trainer, he is the one in charge of you.”

“I think they put a fail safe in her,” he said with a long sigh, “I have never heard of such a thing before, but I can’t think of any other reason.”

“A fail safe?”

“Perhaps when fae are close enough her magic becomes unmanageable and they would be sure to be able to track it.”

“Close enough?” I asked with alarm. I turned to face him directly, an intensely serious expression on my face.

“It’s all just conjecture,” he said, putting his hands up like I might strike him. “I don’t know that is the case so there’s no need for alarm just yet. Perhaps the fault lies in the skills of the girl and she is just too weak in this realm to keep it contained, we don’t know and I don’t know enough to pinpoint just yet.”

“You wouldn’t have even suggested the first idea if you were at least some level of certain that was the case.”

He gave me a pained, but amused look. “You are too clever my queen, but I assure you if I thought there was real, imminent threat I would have sounded the alarm and not risk the wrath of the Draks. Like you have already mentioned, they do in fact know exactly how to make my life miserable and painful so I would like to avoid that at all costs.”

“How are you doing, Alice?” I asked, changing the subject briefly so I could ruminate on how exactly I was going to approach this situation. “It doesn’t seem like there’s much for you to do here.”

“It’s boring,” Alice said, looking around the mostly empty room. “I can play with my magic here at least, but there’s not much else.”

“It seems that Feros here has forgotten that you are still a little girl, albeit a magical one, and not a prisoner awaiting sentencing.” I turned my gaze back to Feros. “She should at least have a real bed and a desk, preferably some books or something else for her to do as well. You are away enough for me to know you are not constantly training her at the moment.”

“It is a struggle to get in and out of the door with even just two people,” he explained, “carrying all that stuff with multiple people would be a nightmare.”

“Then I guess you’ll just have to do it all yourself.”

He gave me a tired, pained look but I stared back at him intently until he gave me a nod of compliance.

“Good,” I said and stepped forward to place a hand on Alice’s shoulder. “I need you to try to work very hard on getting your magic back under control, okay?”

The little girl looked up at me with her wide, blue eyes and nodded very seriously. “Of course Miss Toria, I’ve been trying, it just won’t go back in.”

“I understand, but you have to keep trying. You can’t leave this room to explore the rest of all this new magical land until you do.”

“I know!” she exclaimed in distress. “I want to go see and feel all of it, it’s not fair.”

“Soon enough we’ll get you out meeting all the demons and feeling their magic,” Feros said, picking up on what I was trying to do. “This is a good test of your control, if you can manage this then you’ll be able to be around all sorts of different magic safely. So try very hard and I will return later with some furniture and your possessions.”

“Yes, of course!” she said and clasped her hands excitedly at her sides. “I am going to try right now!”

As soon as she closed her eyes and scrunched her face up with effort I could feel the magic in the room pull towards her, but there was just so much of it. There was a barely perceptible difference, but I was impressed that there was a difference at all.

“Good girl,” I encouraged, then followed Feros carefully out of the room. As soon as the door closed I snapped my attention to him with an angry grimace on my face. “You are an idiot.”

“I won’t argue this time.”

“This is reckless and dangerous.”

“I’m aware.”

“All this drama with Ana is to distract from this isn’t it?”

“Guilty as charged.”