I Do Believe in Faeries (The Cotton Candy Quintet Book 3) by Erin Hayes Read Free Book Online Page B

immaculately displayed. It was enough to make a huge impression on my then-five-year-old mind.
    But it was nothing like this.
    I remembered that Jordyn had made that trip a little more special by using a little bit of her earth magick to create a doll entirely made out of flowers. I cherished that doll and even dried it to preserve it as much as possible. I still kept it underneath my bed, although it wasn’t as pretty as that one day.
    I missed Jordyn. I wondered if she was worried about me or if she had noticed I was missing. Would she think that I had been kidnapped? Or that something had happened to me?
    Was human time the same as Faerie time?
    I chewed on my bottom lip. Robin noticed my somber mood, but didn’t say anything. For once, I was glad that he didn’t quip or make fun of me.
    A guard stood at the door, glaring down at us. I could only describe him as a troll, as he was about twelve feet tall with warty skin and a bad odor that made my eyes water.
    There were apparently a lot of different kinds of faeries.
    “Robin Goodfellow,” the troll rumbled in a voice that was almost too low for me to hear. He suspiciously eyed my companion. “What brings you here?”
    Robin crossed his arms and cocked his head. “We’re here to see Titania.”
    “It’s Queen Titania to you!” Mustardseed cried in his high-pitched voice, panicked that Robin hadn’t addressed the queen correctly. “I’m so sorry, Gigamarth. I tried stopping them and—”
    “Tried and failed, Mustardseed,” said a lovely voice that wasn’t the troll’s.
    Just when I thought things couldn’t get any weirder, a sparkle of faerie dust appeared in the space between us and the troll. A heart-breakingly beautiful woman stepped out from the dust and crossed her arms as she shrewdly looked at Robin.
    “I suspected as much,” she said. Her voice lilted with each word, like a harp had married with vocal chords, pretty while sounding unimpressed with Robin in front of her. “Robin Goodfellow, I haven’t seen your carcass in these parts for a long time.”
    That beautiful voice sounded angry. I was so transfixed, my mind panicked about disappointing her, rather than worrying about what effect that would have on me in the end.
    “Just doing my own thing, your grace,” Robin said, unaffected by her.
    Her gaze landed on me, and her upper lip twitched in a sneer. “Well, well, well,” she said. “What do we have here?”
     

Chapter 7
     
    The luster of Titania’s beauty wore off after about five minutes.
    Sure, she was taller than me with a waterfall of blond hair that would make a Pantene Pro-V model jealous. Her eyes were icy blue and her skin flawless. She wore a dress made out of blue flowers that looked like it had been woven by a thousand tiny faerie hands.
    She was beautiful. But I quickly found out that she was a bitch.
    And that she did not like me one bit.
    I still had to shake my head and remind myself every once in a while that she was a faerie queen who did not want me here. Her manner was at odds with her beauty, giving me a headache the entire time we talked to her.
    We were in a courtyard inside the castle which acted as her throne room. The sun here warmed our skin and it felt peaceful the entire time. There were many different kinds of spring faeries here, from ones that were smaller than Mustardseed to those that were bigger than the troll out front. They all looked at me like I was some sort of alien. I guess, in a way, I was, but that was no excuse for how Titania was treating me.
    She massaged her temples as she looked down at us from her ornate, natural throne.
    Another thing I picked up on very quickly: she hated Robin.
    “Why would I be interested in an unborn baby?” she asked in a bored voice. “I’d have to magickally incubate it until it’s done, and you know I have no time for that.”
    “You’ve wanted stranger things,” Robin countered. “You remember that changeling you wanted, but Oberon wanted for