The Golden Winged Horse

Chapter 6

After several heart wrenching stories from Tristan about how terrible humans were to his kind, both me and Macie realised that under no circumstances were the fairies going to pay the ransom my father so insisted upon.

"Can I ask," I said to Tristan. "Did the fairies know that they were being photographed?"

"Yes," he replied. "Cameras back in those days weren't exactly small and delicate."

"If they knew they were being photographed, then they must have known that there was a risk of them being shown to others?"

"Fairies had been seen by others before this. What made this different was that it was the first instance in which proof had been provided. It's one thing for children to say they'd seen a fairy but it's quite another to actually say they have evidence."

"I understand," I said. "No one expected the outcome to be what it was just because of a few photos."

Tristan nodded. "Exactly. But that one thing has caused us to entirely change our way of living and our views on interacting with humans."

I sighed. My stomach grumbled, reminding me I still needed to eat. Picking Tristan up, I carried him back into Dad's office and placed him back exactly where he'd been.

"I'm going to get something to eat with Macie and think things over, see if we can find a way around this."

Tristan bent his front legs and slowly lowered himself back down onto his side. "Good luck. I would appreciate being left to sleep until dusk comes."

I smiled at him. "Of course. I'm sorry."

Walking out of the office, I closed the door behind me and went back to Macie in the living room. I flopped down onto the sofa and sighed.

"Quite a pickle you've got yourself in here, Princess Pan," Macie said.

"Really? I hadn't noticed," I replied, laughing. "Come on, let's go get some food. Maybe we'll have a brainwave or something after we've eaten."

"Arby's?" she said, wiggling her eyebrows up and down.

"Of course. I never expected to eat anywhere else."

Squealing with excitement, she ran for the front door, almost falling down the steps from the porch to the drive. Some small part of me really wanted Ben not to be working today but I knew that Macie had his shifts memorised more than her own.

All the way there, we could do nothing but talk about the current situation. For me it was kind of old news, but I'd had a couple of days to take it all in. For Macie, however, it was the talk of the century.

"Who knew fairies were real. Like, actually real," she said, shaking her head from side to side. "This is just c-r-a-z-y. Can you believe it? Like, really?"

I laughed at her. "Every time I doubt it, I remember there is a magical golden horse sat in my dad's office that speaks. That kind of makes it real."

"Can you imagine if he was a life-sized horse? He'd be totally amazing. I bet he'd be amazing to ride."

"Actually, outside of his glass dome prison, he is life-sized. That was kinda the first thing he warned me about, not to take the glass off."

"Wow," she breathed. "I would love to see that. Imagine riding a Pegasus, that would just be...I can't even think of a word." Her green eyes glazed over as she wandered off into her own daydreams.

I giggled. "Now who's Princess Pan?"

She widened her eyes, looked across at me, and gasped. "What if there were two Pegasus, then Ben could ride the other one and we could fly off into the sunset together."