Three minutes times six is eighteen--and Zee had already been holding the entrance open for a while.
Adding eighteen minutes was going to push him well beyond the hour he'd promised.
The fairy queen wouldn't need Zee's opening to allow them to leave--but if it was still open, then they would walk out on the same day they'd entered.
The time was up at last, and the fae Ariana held turned to ice.
Three minutes is a long time to hold on to a giant ice cube.
I couldn't understand why Ariana continued to hug him close instead of holding him more loosely so not as much of her was against him.
Especially as all of her clothes had burned away and she was naked, with nothing between her and the ice.
"Flesh to flesh, remember," said the fairy queen in such a grumpy tone that I knew she'd hoped Ariana would back off.
I heard some murmurs from the fae around us, remarking upon Ariana's scars.
How ugly they were, how shameful.
I thought they might be commenting on purpose, as some subterfuge of the fairy queen, but if so, their taunts seemed to have no effect I could see on Ariana.
Three minutes was up, and Jesse was safe--and the fae Ariana was holding turned into smoke.
She seemed to have been prepared for it, though, because as the ends of him started to dissolve, she reached out and snagged the cloak of the fae who was nearest her.
She wrapped the cloak around herself and the fae, then touched the cloak with her cold hand, and a layer of ice covered it, trapping the smoke in the frozen cloth.
Surreptitiously, I glanced around at the fae who were in the room with us.
There had been a few in the hall when we'd gotten here, but the others had entered more purposefully afterward, as if she'd summoned them all.
I counted twenty- eight, not including the forest lord, who, I suspected, couldn't be numbered among her followers.
I looked at their faces, and they seemed to be less .
.
.
blank than the thralls, but I didn't think that they were free agents either.
Maybe it was the way all twenty-eight stared hungrily at the queen, as if they were waiting for any task, any order-- anything at all that they could do for their true love whom they worshipped.
I've been around the fae.
I've seldom seen any three of them see eye to eye on anything, let alone twenty-eight.
"Look at the scars her father gave her," said one.
"How could she live through that--it looks as though she's been mauled by beasts." "Don't you know the story?" said a third.
They all looked at Ariana, instead of the fairy queen, as the third one continued.
"Her father called his beasts to torture her every morning for three years." Ariana's mouth tightened as she remembered, too.
And then that three minutes was up as well-- she'd won freedom for Gabriel.
The fae under the cloak began to grow, and Ariana let the cloth fall to the ground.