“Do you really need to check your email now, dear?” Emma asked, wiping her hands on a towel as she softly closed the bedroom door across the hall and came to stand behind Kelley. Her face was lit only by the blue glow of the electronic screen. She hadn’t wept upon seeing Herne—hadn’t shed a single tear as she’d worked to save his life—but it looked as though a hundred years of sadness had flowed through her in the last few hours. “Are you expecting messages?”
“No, Em.” Kelley reached up to take the hand that Emma laid upon her shoulder and squeezed gently. “I was just trying to Google something that was bugging me.”
“I’m not even going to pretend that I know what you’re talking about,” Emma said, laughing a little wearily as she sat down.
Kelley smiled back. “Google. It’s like research.”
“Ridiculous piece of machinery. What’s wrong with books?” Emma gestured to the walls of books.
“I’m interested in some pretty specific info, Em.”
“About?”
Kelley shrugged, uncertain how to explain the niggling thing that had been intruding on her thoughts like a bit of song stuck in her brain that she couldn’t shake loose. “A . . . plant.”
“Which one?”
“It’s stupid.”
“A stupid plant?”
“No, no.” Kelley shook her head, frowning. “It’s stupid that it’s bothering me. I just wanted to find out something about vervain.”
“It helps to stanch bleeding,” Emma said. “I just used some in a poultice dressing. For . . . him.”
“I know,” Kelley said softly. “How is he?”
“Resting,” Emma said. “Your friend the Valkyrie is keeping watch.”
“She’s a . . . what?” Kelley blinked in surprise. Olrun was a Valkyrie. Why Kelley should be surprised by that, she didn’t know. Not with everything else that she’d experienced lately.
The computer made a wheezing sound, and Emma glanced at it in disdain. She went over to the wall of books and ran a fingertip along the spines. “So. Vervain . . . let me see. What do you want to know about it, dear?”
“Um. Well. Yeah. I sort of wound up in the Otherworld kind of by accident a little while ago—”
Emma turned around, a look of alarm on her face.
“No, no,” Kelley assured her quickly. “It’s okay. I’m okay. I mean . . . except for Sonny and the theater burning down and everything, I’m okay. But that’s a whole other story and . . . and . . .”
Suddenly, Kelley found that she could no more stop the tears spilling down her face than she could the words pouring out of her. The events of the last few days came crashing down all around her as she told Emma the whole sorry tale. Emma, who put an arm around her and shushed her as her shoulders shook and her voice cracked. When Kelley was finished, when the tears had finally subsided, Emma pushed the tangled auburn curls away from her face, tucking them behind Kelley’s ever-so-slightly pointed ears. Then she dried Kelley’s cheeks with a corner of the towel, like she used to do when Kelley was a small child.
“You poor thing.” Emma smiled sadly at Kelley. “You should have known you could no more leave behind Sonny than you could leave behind your own arm. He’s a part of you. As much as you’re a part of him. I knew it the minute I first saw him. He loves you so, Kelley.”
“But he was going to leave me, Em.” Kelley swallowed painfully, trying not to break down again at the thought. “I don’t know if he can ever forgive me for lying. I’m so scared that, when this is all over, he’s still going to leave me.”
“Nonsense.” Emma scoffed as if the idea was too ridiculous to even consider. “I did not give birth to an imbecile. Never you mind. It’ll sort itself out. Now.” She got up and smoothed down the apron covering her skirt as if that was that, and all Sonny needed was a good talking-to and it would straighten everything out once and for all. It made Kelley feel better knowing Emma thought that. She was his mother, after all. Even if she’d only ever met him once.
“Now. Vervain,” Emma said, hauling down an old, leather-bound book from a shelf devoted mostly to gardening texts—both practical and arcane.
“Right. When I was in the Court of Spring, Gwynn ap Nudd—the king—had a container full of the stuff in the palace.”
“Vervain in the Spring Lord’s house?” Emma asked, a faint frown on her face. It was no small help to Kelley that her aunt didn’t even bat an eye at the subject of their discussion. “But ’tis a summer bloomer—in fact it only flowers in mid-to-late summer.”
“Exactly,” Kelley agreed. That much knowledge, at least, she had gleaned from spending summers weeding Em’s garden. “And all the other flowers I saw there were spring bloomers, which, y’know, made sense. It just kind of struck me at the time as odd.”
“There’s not only medicine but very potent magick in that herb, if I recall.” Emma frowned down at the book in her hands. She turned on the desk lamp, and Kelley saw that the spine read A Miscellanie of Mystikal Herbs and their Magikal Properties. Emma muttered softly to herself as she thumbed to the last of the yellowed pages. Kelley sat fidgeting, staring at the dim band of light that flickered under the closed bedroom door across the hall. Emma must have lit candles to give Herne light in case he regained consciousness. When he regained consciousness . . .
“Is Herne going to be okay, Em?”
“Of course he is. Hush now. Don’t even talk elsewise.” Her aunt’s features stiffened, but she didn’t look up as she ran a hand down the index at the back of the book. “Don’t even think it.”
Kelley nodded, silent.
Thinking makes it so, she thought, and tried very hard to imagine Herne well and whole again.
Kelley shuddered a little at the remembered sight of the arrow that hadn’t gone all the way through. . . . Her aunt had actually had to cut it from the Hunter’s flesh. There had been so much blood. Kelley didn’t know it was possible for someone to survive that kind of blood loss. Never mind that Herne was centuries old and something of a deity—he bled like every other plain-vanilla mortal Kelley had ever seen hurt.
“Here we are now. Vervain. Latin name Verbena officinalis,” Emma read from the entry. “Although not an uncommonly found plant, it has historically been held in sacred regard. It was once as highly revered as mistletoe by the druids and was frequently employed in mystic rites and spells—both harmful and helpful. Used in a medicinal capacity to stanch the flow of blood . . .” Her aunt’s eyes flicked toward the guest bedroom door and then back down to the page. “It is also known as iron wort. Vervain is often associated with this metal in ancient cultures, and infusions of vervain were used by blacksmiths in the water baths they used to cool swords, because of the belief that the magical properties of the herb would strengthen the iron. . . .” Emma raised her eyes from the page and scanned the books in front of her, not really seeing them. “Iron is anathema to the Fair Folk. Poison.”
Kelley thought about that. She’d always been protected by her clover charm, and so iron had never been an issue for her—not until the fight at the Avalon Grande, of course. She felt a twinge from the wound to her side that was, by now, mostly healed. And the tips of her fingers still throbbed dully from the touch of Herne’s knife. Iron wort. Why would Gwynn have something like that in his court? Why do the Fair Folk do anything? She had been able to make so little sense of most of them that this one mystery added to the bunch didn’t really tip the scales.
“What was he like, the Lord of Dreams?” Emma asked.
“Who—Gwynn?”
“Aye. There are a lot of stories about him in the old folktales. Mostly contradictory, of course. He’s the Lord of Light one moment, the Lord of Darkness the next. Sometimes the Lord of Dreams, sometimes Nightmares. . . . He sounds very mysterious.”
Kelley smiled. “I dunno. I like him. In fact, Gwynn is one of the only High Fae that I really almost feel comfortable with. I sort of feel sorry for him, too. For the way Auberon and Titania stole his kingdom from
him.” Still, she did wonder what on earth Gwynn was doing with a bunch of iron wort, and she said as much.
“Perhaps he uses it for its healing properties, love. You don’t know. And there’s no sense drawing sinister conclusions out of the thin air. Sometimes what looks like a weed is really just a wildflower. Still . . . it strikes me that something so powerful as that particular wildflower should be considered with a great deal of respect. Especially when it finds its way into the hands of beings like the Fair Folk. They wield power like rich men spend money.”
“Emma,” Kelley said suddenly, thinking of the Hunter, “how did you . . . I mean Herne was—he is . . . and you . . .”
“How did a simple country girl ever wind up with a forest god as a lover, do you mean?” Emma laughed quietly and swept a stray tendril of hair back from her face.
Kelley felt herself blushing. She wasn’t sure she was ready to have this kind of conversation with her aunt. “Um. I suppose. You really don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to. . . .”
“When I first met Herne,” Emma said, “he was mourning the loss of a friend.”
“The Greenman,” Kelley said.
“Aye. There was something about his sadness that was so deep and so filled with pain—not just for this one friend but for all the ones in his long life that he had lost. He touched my heart.” Her voice, the way she said it, made it sound like a song. Like the lullaby she used to sing. “I always suspected that one day he would break it.”
“You knew he’d wind up hurting you,” Kelley said. “And still you went to him.”
“The future’s not set in stone, Kelley. And some things are worth risking hurt. A great deal of hurt.” Emma’s gaze drifted back to the closed door of the guest bedroom, where one of those things now lay, and the hurting in her eyes was all for him.
For Sonny’s father.
Kelley thought of Sonny and of how she’d promised to return from Herne’s Tavern to tell him what she’d seen. She’d been gone a long time and she wondered if he missed her. Wondered if he was worried about her. If he was looking for her. She hoped he wasn’t. She hoped, in fact, that he was far, far away from that place.
“I should check on him,” Emma said.
Kelley nodded and followed her aunt across the hall.
Herne lay still and pale in the bed. Olrun was sitting in the old rocking chair by the window, and she inclined her head silently as Emma crossed to sit on the edge of the bed. Emma put her hands on either side of the Hunter’s face, and a small sound escaped his lips. His eyes fluttered open and then closed again. Kelley watched as his lips twitched in the ghost of a smile and he sighed.
“I’m dreaming,” he murmured thickly. “It is a good dream. . . .”
“Acushla,” Emma whispered. “It is no dream.”
Kelley felt her heart swell as Herne’s eyes opened again and his face, ravaged with pain, softened into a smile of pure, radiant happiness. Silently, Olrun crossed the floor to where Kelley stood at the threshold and, together, they left the two long-ago lovers to have their reunion in private.
Chapter XIX
Carys’s folk had set up a kind of Faerie triage and were dealing with the wounded as best they could. Those Lost who possessed healing magick of any kind were moving among those with the most dire injuries. Sonny spotted Neerya flitting among knots of Faerie, distributing food and drink from her precious hoarded stores.
“It seems as though they have things under control here,” Bob noted. “Perhaps we’d best go find our girl. I don’t like the fact that she hasn’t come back yet.”
Sonny stood up. He didn’t like it either. And he didn’t think the Horned One—he didn’t think his father—would fault him for going topside again on that account. Not when it seemed that all danger had passed . . . and he had so many questions he needed to ask both Herne and Kelley.
He told Maddox and Cait and Fennrys to stay and help. There were an awful lot of hurt Lost. Then he went to find Carys and tell her that he was going up to the Tavern to find Kelley. Carys just embraced him briefly and turned away. She made a fussy show of pouring a mug of water for a wounded gnome, almost as if she didn’t want Sonny to be able to read her reaction to his departure. She must have known, Sonny thought, that there was nothing that could have kept him from going. Not if Kelley might be in trouble.
“Powerful trouble,” Bob surmised, as he and Sonny headed topside. “It’s that damned charm. When I stole it from Gofannon before he could deliver it to the leprechaun, I—what?” He blinked at Sonny’s disapproving look. “Oh please! He’d confided in me that he was making a powerful charm that could find and harness enormous magicks—his finest work, he said. He never should have done that. It’s not as if he didn’t know who he was speaking to.”
“He hasn’t exactly forgiven you for the theft, you know,” Sonny said, keeping his sword at the ready as they strode upward through the long passageway. Everything up ahead seemed quiet, but he wasn’t taking any chances.
“Nonsense,” Bob scoffed. “I doubt he even knew who he was making the talisman for in the first place or why. And it was ages ago. Literally. I’m quite sure all is forgiven.” He waved the matter away. “That’s the thing about you mortals. You don’t know how to properly hold a grudge. I’ve held grudges for millennia.”
“That and we’re not prescient.”
“Exactly. I mean really,” Bob went on, warming to the subject of the failings of mortals as they hurried, “Gofannon’s problem was his pride in his work. That and he’s just a touch weak-willed. Not his fault. It happens with the artistic types. Sensitive and all that. It’s how Auberon talked him into that wee bout of eternal servitude in the first place: ‘All the shiny metal you can forge forever, and the only thing you have to give up is your freedom.’ . . . Lord, what fools these mortals be, indeed.”
“Aye. If only we were all so levelheaded and pragmatic as the Fair Folk.” Sonny increased his pace. They were close to the Tavern now.
Bob let the sarcasm pass. “At any rate, whoever wants the Green Magick, they’ll need that shiny trinket to get it. That is, if they want to have any hope of harnessing all that power instead of being consumed by it. Of course . . . they’ll also need to find out where the Green Magick is hidden.”
“Right. Inside of me.”
Bob nodded.
Sonny slowed and stopped before the illusory dead end that led to the Tavern proper. He frowned. “You shouldn’t have told me. Kelley was right. No one should ever know—not even me. It’s too dangerous.”
“Nonsense. I mean—yes, of course, it’s too dangerous. If they—whoever ‘they’ may be—find you, then that’s it. This game is up. And only bad things will follow.” He looked at Sonny with a vast, unwavering sympathy. “It is a harsh, heavy burden for you to carry, Sonny Flannery. That’s why Kelley did what she did. But it is a part of you, and you have the right to know. That’s why I did what I did.”
The stillness in the Tavern was eerie. The Fae who’d stayed behind to help Herne defend the place were all dead, a lot of them pierced through with arrows. Sonny didn’t need magick to tell him they had come from Selene’s quiver. Suddenly, as they rounded a corner of one of the Tavern’s twisting hallways, Bob stuttered to a halt.
“Careful,” he said, putting out a cautionary hand.
There was a red pool of blood on the floor. And beside it . . . a dead glaistig. Sonny stepped over to where the body of Jenii Greenteeth lay in a twisted heap, surrounded by a pool of her own blood—green and thick and smelling sickly sweet like rot. Like mildew. Like flowers that had been left too long in a vase.
Bob nudged the glaistig delicately with his toe. “Very dead.”
A dead Green Maiden and no sign of Kelley. Or Herne. It was all very worrying. None of it, however, affected Bob quite so much as the sight that greeted them in the Tavern’s main courtyard. When Bob saw the gaping pit in the earth in the corner of the garden, a black hole in the pale moonlight, the expression o
n his face was exceedingly grim.
He turned to Sonny. “Are you sure Jenii said her brother was still alive?”
“She said barely. That he was insensible. At death’s door.”
“Not anymore, I’ll wager. We have to get out of here,” he said suddenly, shouldering past Sonny and edging his way along the ragged lip of the gaping pit. “Now. Damn. Now . . .”
“What’s the rush?” Sonny asked. Bob had an uncanny nose for smelling trouble approaching and an unusually canny way of dealing with it. But then they both froze. There was a noise coming from the hallway. Bob hissed for Sonny to hide himself.
When Sonny didn’t react instantly—hiding was fundamentally against his nature, after all—Bob spun around and delivered a sharp kick to the back of one of Sonny’s knees. His leg went out from under him and Sonny tumbled forward into the deep hole in the ground.
“Keep your head down if you want us to get through this, boyo,” Bob whispered, and then disappeared.
Sonny heard him running across the flagstones toward the long, mahogany bar that curved around one side of the courtyard. From his position lying at the muddy bottom of the earthen pit, Sonny could see nothing but a patch of darkening sky above his head. But he could hear everything.
“Jenii?” a deep, rumbling voice called from the hall beyond the courtyard. “Jenii, where are you?”
Sonny froze. He knew that voice. He heard Bob hiss under his breath—a raw swear word in a very old tongue—and knew that he recognized it, too.
“Hello, Gofannon,” Bob called out casually. “Looking for someone?”
“Hello, Puck, old friend,” the blacksmith said, his voice lacking any warmth.