The Fiuri Realms (Shioni of Sheba Book 5) Read Free

descended toward them. It settled atop their prison and twisted shut. “Kalcha will pay handsomely for you two.”
    The bottle lurched. The cruel eyes peered at them. Shioni realised that he was a man, the most enormous man she had ever seen. Or, was she tiny? What … what was happening?
    Her companion babbled in terror.
    They began to bob about. Shioni realised that the man was walking somewhere. It was hard to tell, because the bottle’s walls shimmered with magic, casting light inside the bottle while outside, all was pitch-black. She tried to steady herself somehow against the slippery surface, but kept falling over as the man’s movements rattled them about like seeds in a pod. Was he climbing the walls? Eventually Shioni braced herself by lying across the bottom of the bottle.
    Her mind raced. Azurelle had once been trapped inside a bottle by the evil witch Kalcha. She had been unable to escape. Instinctively, she felt for her dagger and her sword. She had no weapons. Kalcha had turned her into a Fiuri? She shook her head. Was that even possible? Yet here she was, imprisoned, very clearly a mouse’s whisker smaller than her friend Azurelle, who lay curled up in a ball right next to her. As she watched, Zi’s shoulders began to shake.
    “No, not again, not the bottle!” she wailed, between sobs. “I’m going to die. No, no, no …”
    Shioni glanced over her shoulder. Wings! She had wings! But to her intense disappointment, she did not have Azurelle’s beautiful patterns on her arms and legs. Instead, her skin was smooth and pale. Even her wings were translucent, with no discernible colour. Then Shioni bit her lip in anger–how selfish was she? Her friend was snivelling her heart out and Shioni was worried about the colour of her wings?
    “Hyenas bite me,” she whispered. “Zi, calm down.” Shioni put her arms around the Fiuri’s shoulders. “Look, I’m stuck in here with you. We’ll get through this together, I promise.”
    “Shioni?” Azurelle flung tears about as she wagged her head in amazement. “What’re you doing … you’re my size! What? Oh … oh, it’s the first time we’ve ever hugged properly!”
    This was the trigger for further floods of tears. After a long time, Shioni managed to calm Zi down. She knew that they were outside of Castle Hiwot now. By some unknown power their captor had managed to scale the walls, both the inner keep and the outer defensive wall. Now he was trotting westward into the Simien Mountains on the back of a hardy mountain pony. He did not release the bottle for an instant. Every so often, he would hold it up to his face. Shioni realised she could have stuck her fist up his nostril with ease. She imagined doing exactly that, and yanking out a handful of nose hairs, but the thought did little to comfort her.
    Zi stroked her wings and plucked Shioni’s antennae. “Stop that,” said Shioni. “It feels weird. I feel like I have snail eyes poking out of my forehead.”
    Azurelle’s clear blue eyes widened. “They’re real.”
    “Of course they’re real.” Shioni bit her lip. Real wings? Really? On cue, the tips of her wings quivered and she felt that movement behind her shoulders. If the antennae were weird, wings were weird times a hundred.
    “You’re a Fiuri. You’re kind of cute as a butterfly-person–ooh, what an adorable blush!”
    “I am not blushing!”
    Zi’s giggle tinkled in the bottle as her usual cheer reasserted itself. “Your eyes have changed colour, though. They used to be a lovely grass-green. Now they’re colourless. I’ve never seen anything quite like it. And I’ve never seen a colourless Fiuri either. You’ve got no patterns.”
    Azurelle had the grace to sound sad as she lamented Shioni’s lack of patterns. Shioni was just about to say so when Zi extended her leg to compare it critically to Shioni’s.
    “Hmm,” she said. “My legs are a lovely brown with these beautiful azure-coloured curlicue patterns. Ever so