“Mayhap he’s the one who told them of your presence here, little bird.”
And mayhap you are, dwarf. Her mouth drew against itself, but she smoothed her expression. “Why would Unwinter care where I go, or what I do? Unless they’ve a message to send to Summer’s ear.” The thought that maybe the message would be her own rag of a body, pierced and drained, was not comforting at all, and Figurh’s next words did nothing to dispel the chill.
“You may be a message from Summer yourself. I’ll take you another way, Robin Ragged, and only ask a kiss and a kind word in return.”
“Such a knight you are.” She did not bother to slow further. The necklace warmed slightly, and at the next tangled branching of tunnels she chose the third path from the left. From here it was not as confusing. “My poor favor is not worthy of your kindness, my lord.”
“Listen to me!” The words echoed, so sharp and hard Robin actually halted, letting him scurry, panting, level with her.
She gazed down. While she wore heels, his nose was level with her bellybutton, and he was filthy as any black dwarf could wish to be. His beard was scanty on his cheeks, but his chin and upper lip more than made up for it, and was tangled into elflock-braids. Pearls of sweat stood out on his forehead, streaked the soot and dirt on his cheeks.
“Listen,” he repeated, breathless. “There are Unwinter waiting for you, Ragged, outside the front gates. Do not rush so blindly into their arms.”
Do you think they’d treat me kindly, if I did? “No fear of that. They hold no love for me, and none for you, either.”
“That’s where you’re wrong. They cluster about our gate. MacDonnell was visited not an hour before you knocked on our side door, and I overheard the parlay. Saying a ransom was paid. Someone knew you would come here, pretty Ragged, and wished you to receive whatever you bargained for, and to leave unhindered.”
“Was there a chance I would leave otherwise?”
“With MacDonnell, always.” The lazy-eyed little man paled even further. He actually wrung his horny little hands together, griming them further. The rings he wore took no foulness, sparkling clean as all dwarvenwork. “Please, please, Ragged, do not run into their jaws.”
She essayed a careless smile, and bent low. Of course he would peer down her dress, but Robin found she did not quite mind. Her lips met his bald, greasy forehead, though she shuddered internally. A healthy heat-haze, like the ripple over a blazing forge, rose from him, and the sour tang of unwashed sidhe-skin. Over that was the much-more-sour reek of outright fear.
“Thank you, Figurh.” For your concern. Misplaced as it is. “If indeed I find them waiting for me outside the gates, I shall remember your kindness in warning me. If not…” She shrugged, straightening.
“Are you so desperate to die?” He actually hopped from foot to foot, his heavy boots creaking.
Maybe. “Not until I have run my course.” She patted her left skirtpocket, as if distracted. Keep the fiction, Robin. It’s your best defense now. “You’d best return to your duties; you’ll be missed.”
“Not likely,” he mumbled. Under the filth and sweat he was pink now. “Thank you, lady Ragged. Should you survive, and need a favor I can provide, call.”
“Certainly.” I notice you don’t specifically say any favor. So much may not be in your power, if I ever come knocking. In any case, he’d delayed her long enough. “Goodbye, stoneborn.”
Five minutes later, the jumble of MacDonnell’s tunnels was behind her, and the tall black metal gates worked with his device of hammer and flail reared before her. They were ajar, no warden in sight, and she suddenly wished she could have trusted Figurh’s words.
Or anyone’s, really.
Chin high, Robin swept for the gates, to become a running hare once again. This time, though, she was prepared.
So she told herself. It did not stop the cold fear-sweat beginning all over her.
WHISTLING AT DEATH
34
Finding the Unseelie was easy. They made no effort to hide.
She’s too smart to come out this way. Please let her be too smart to come out this way.
Yet this was where they congregated, a cluster of cold intent as the sun settled a mere few fingerspans above the horizon. Not just fullborn barrow-wights, but a knight or two, wrapped in sable and utterly still among the run-down houses. They were not a-horse, not yet, and there were low slinking shapes with silver coins for eyes, flickering through the Veil and back, sliding through shadows.
The rest of the city was bare of Unseelie, as far as he could tell. They could merely be waiting for nightfall. Or they could know, without a doubt, where she would be.
A wave of tension passed through him and away. Learning to wait was all about letting those waves come and go, swaying just a little as they rocked you. It kept the muscles warm, not precisely a fidget but not a conscious movement either. Just a respiration, tree branches on a cool breeze.
There was little cover in this decaying residential neighborhood, so he perched on the gabled roof of what used to be a Catholic school, then a bar—certainly the most ironic reversal he’d seen in a building lately. Now it was boarded up, but enough consecration remained to make it a little safer.
Neither of the Courts cared for Christ’s followers and their chantment of cross and incense, wine and blood—not to mention their loathing of the sidhe, and reduction of the Folk to children’s tales. Belief, that great mother of chantment, could be used even by mortals, and the Pale God’s rituals were at cross-purposes with the chantment of wind and water, tree and green field. The sidhe were not feared and propitiated as they had once been, and they took the affront with ill grace.
Besides, between the peaks of the rooftop, his silhouette was not as noticeable, and he had the height.
Birch and 58th met in a perfect crossroads, west of the school. He could see the uneasiness in the Veil flirting above the cracked pavement—the four arms radiated outward precisely between each compass point. It was the sidhe equivalent of an overpass, a pavement flower that could take you anywhere, even through a dwarven chieftain’s front gates.
The sun sank further. If Robin was wise, she would find any exit but this one, and he would be watching a fool made of Unwinter. There was no urgency, only expectancy, a calm waiting.
They simply did not act this way unless they were very sure of their prey. Even the hounds were loose and lazy, rubbing along fences and slinking between swords of liquid golden light.
A dilation. Curious breathlessness, as the gates between day and dusk opened wide. The sun slid low, low, lower, and there was a flash of white and russet, a breath of blue silk.
A last gleam of gold filled her hair, and Jeremiah lost all his breath. Maybe it was just the angle, or the light, but she was…
Robin Ragged stood in the precise center of the crossroads, her head upflung and her shoulders back. Even the dark circles under her eyes and the soot of dwarven realms could not hide what she was—a lightning bolt, an arrow of white-hot electricity, the original a mortal copy had been pressed from.
No. He shook his head, because the hounds in the shadows had tensed. Dusk rose, but too quickly, an unholy darkness filling the streets leading to the crossroads. It would choke off every path of retreat, and there was only one thing, in Summer or Unwinter, that could cause such a glooming.
No. It can’t… no.
It raced up the road with inky, grasping fingers, digging in the cracks, steaming slightly as its chill breathed up to kill any lingering of spring.
Jeremiah was already moving, slip-sliding down the roof. He heard Robin’s contemptuous laugh—had she planned for this? Probably not; she was whistling at death, just like a true sidhe.
Had she given him the slip just to die here, because of a boy sheathed in amber?
He was just a baby… I fed him. I bargained…
She would not be the first to revenge herself on Summer by seeking her own demise.
No.
A moment of weightlessness. He was falling, flung from the roof’s edge, as if all his moments on the jobsite had been a prelude. Just fall, and let gravity do the rest.
He hit already running, and spat a half-measure of curse between his lips. It did not take shadow-form; instead, a silver brilliance streaked along the edges of the phrase, boiling into blazing light. The lance hummed into life, solidifying as he swept it laterally, crunching through a low liquid dogshape with obsidian teeth and mooncoin eyes. Iron flushed along the lance’s wicked-sharp edge, a molten-red glow, and the Unseelie hound’s deathscream was a high piercing cry that shattered the stasis of the streets.
Robin gasped as he skidded to a stop before her. He barely remembered the intervening space; he spun, and the interlocking fingers of chance and combat made him stop, unerringly, the lance pointed due north.
“What are you doing?” she whispered, as Jeremiah shouldered her aside.
Isn’t it obvious? Saving your life. “I said I’d protect you.” The words took him by surprise. “And so I shall.”
“You idiot.” It wasn’t possible for her to sound more disdainful. “I need no—”
The darkness cringed away from ironglow and moonshine, and a soft chilling laugh rose as the gloom ran together, a quicksilver melding. From the pool of darkest blackness, just on the northern corner of Birch and 58th, the glass of a butcher’s shop window shivered to pieces as something birthed itself from its sheer reflective face.
Caparisoned only in darkness, the destrier born on cold stone-choked shores of the Dreaming Sea near the Rim stepped mincingly through, each of its hooves clawed and settling with a thin scream on a cushion of resisting air. Atop its broad back, a rider appeared, sable armor swallowing reflected light from Jeremiah’s tiny circle of safety. From the broad spiked shoulders a long velvet cloak swirled, shredding into smoke and greenish steam along its tattered edges; under the dull-glinting helm two red coals fastened on Gallow and the woman who inhaled behind him, her hand reaching his shoulder and digging in. She didn’t have the strength to bruise him, and the sudden hot sharp spike of guilt in Jeremiah’s chest was the silence a moment before a volcano’s thundering eruption.
“Robin.” He sounded calm, and precise, even to himself. “Run.”
The lance hummed, and Jeremiah Gallow braced himself to battle Unwinter himself.
CANNOT CARRY TWO
35
What is he DOING? She wanted to speak—idiot, you were not supposed to be here. You’ve ruined everything. There was not breath for it, if she expected to slip them both free of this trap. Robin had expected to spring the jaws shut just a hairsbreadth away from her own flesh, then lead them a merry chase.
She had not expected the Armormaster to show his face yet.
She sought to push him aside, finishing her inhale, her throat relaxing. Her fingers had dipped toward her left skirt pocket; every scrap of Unseelie attention fastened on her. As if she would give away her advantage so easily. Did they all think her stupid?
Arrogance blinds them, Robin. See that you do not share that fault.
Gallow completed the ruin of Robin’s fine plan by moving forward a half-step, as the butcher shop’s window shivered and starred with breakage behind the tall, dark rider. “I am Jeremiah Gallow,” he said, calmly and clearly. “And I challenge thee, Harne, Lord of Unwinter.”
He’s gone mad. That’s the only explanation. Robin reached up, feeling blindly under her hair.
“You.” The chill, lipless tone froze the sidewalk in concentric rings as the destrier stamped, a pretty movement made horrifying by its ungainly grace. Its rider lifted one black-mailed fist, metal scraping as he pointed with a finger far too long to be human. “You dare challenge me?”
“I said as much.” Gallow’s lunatic calm didn’t crack. “Are your ears stuffed with pixie-weed, that you did not hear me clearly?”
A rumbling sound that might have been a laugh, as the Unseelie—and there were more of them now, pouring through rips and refts in the curtain of the Veil, stepping sideways from whatever place in their realm that lay like gossamer fabric over this one. Robin had to exhale, her fingers slippery under the heaviness of her hair, an awful chilling sense of being naked and vulnerable stroking her nape.
“How proud you are,” Unwinter said, and the razor-edged amusement was dreadful. Robin’s ears, sharpened by attention to cadence and harmony, drilled with sudden pain, hearing wrongness. It wasn’t just the grim hunger of a creature that could devour souls wholesale she heard, but something else.
Something she had heard not so long ago, in Summer’s dulcet tones.
Apprehension.
The world hung suspended for a long moment, as the situation shifted and wavered inside Robin’s head. Unwinter was generally held to fear nothing; it was his iron rule that kept his realm from sliding through the Second Veil, not to mention kept the sneaking, malicious Unseelie under some manner of control. If he had begun to dread the plague, instead of seeking to leverage it…
… well. A very small suspicion—that the illness was not of Unwinter’s doing at all, despite what some of Summer’s Court said, or even a “natural” disaster—sharpened still further. Which was very interesting, but nothing she had time to worry on.
Her fingers slid away from Gallow’s shoulder, muscle gone hard as tile as he prepared to be a complete and utter imbecile. Perhaps he even had a plan.
Distraction, Robin.
“Hold your tongue—” Unwinter began, as if his saying it would stopper her throat. Perhaps it would have, had she not already been lung-full and determined.
The song burst free, a flood of gold that painted the intersection with furious light akin to sunshine. Certainly it was close enough to make several of the hounds cringe and scream, their hides smoking; the higher Unseelie cowered into shadowed cracks. Unwinter too made a noise, but it was swallowed briefly in the light.
Dispelling the force of the cry over such a broad area meant it would fade within bare seconds, but she was already moving. Her fingers tugged painfully at her hair, untwisting the precious bone comb worn against her scalp, and her hand tingled with Realmaking’s pins and needles. She found Jeremiah’s coatsleeve in the glare, plucking at it with her free hand, a vine’s desperate caress.
“Go!” he cried. “I’ll hold them!”
Her throat was still full of the light, and only moments of its flood remained. Hold Unwinter?
Did he seriously think he could?
She tugged again, her fingers sweating and the song beginning to fade at its edges. Shadows crept back in, against the false daylight she had birthed. They tore at its edges, and the sweat was all over her as she held the tone steady. Running out of breath and the energy to persuade him to come away.
He shoved her, bruising-hard, again. “Go!” he yelled, and though he perhaps did not mean to, he struck her with his shoulder, almost knocking her down. The ivory comb clutched in her fist—four-pronged, its fluid head and carven mane writhing as it scented readiness—twitched madly, struggling for release. Her fingers spasmed open, but she caught the wicked little thing as it sought to jump free—and stabbed her free palm with the four sharp prongs, driving them into the flesh below her thumb.
The pain jolted up her arm, all the way to her shoulder. She did not flinch, but Realmaking and chantment both roared through her. Which meant, of course, that the song died as she pulled the bone pin free of her flesh.
Blood welled in her violated palm.
Creaking, crackling cold rushed in as the light vanished. Dusk returned, dazzled but still ascendant, and the Veil unfolded in origami petals, yet another sideways-realm behind it glowing pearly-bright. A shape loomed, white and curious, stamping as it answered her call.
Chantment wasn’t the song under her thoughts, it was enchantment, and it stole its force from the will of the one performing it. The less sidhe blood, the more will required—and the more sidhe blood, the more evanescent the chantment. Unless you were o
f the pure, but then you were at risk of the plague descending upon you with its greenspots and blackboil rot.
But every sidhe of Summer could call an elfhorse, just as every sidhe of Unwinter could summon a twisted, darkened mount.
A slim white elfhorse bowed its head as it finished solidifying, shaking its waterfall of silver tail. Robin, scrambling with a clatter of heels, grabbed at its silken mane and was up in a heartbeat. The four bloody pricks in her palm scorched as she wound her fingers securely in the mane, and a flush spilled through the creature’s satiny glow.
As long as she fed it, the mare would carry her.
“Jeremiah!” She coughed, rasping. “Come!”
“A night-mare cannot carry two.” Unwinter’s grinding laugh killed the last traces of liquid golden light. No few of the hounds were charred lumps, and the rustlings in the shadows were Unseelie no doubt still smoking and steaming. She had scarred no few of them, and they would remember.
It was a pity she could not do more. She could continue to let the song loose in lungfuls, but they would swarm her before long.
Jeremiah stood, balanced lightly in his heavy boots, the lance he somehow carried with him held at the same angle.
“You have a challenge to answer, knight.” Gallow’s hands were steady, but the weapon quivered. It bloomed with red along its blade—cold iron, she realized, shuddering even though she was Half and immune to its effects.
Still, if one were to face Unwinter, iron was a good ally. “Gallow,” she whispered. “Come away.”
“Go, Robin.” How did he sound so certain? “I shall see you soon enough.”
Unwinter’s laugh tore at the darkening. Night shivered, turned to ink instead of indigo. “Indeed. You both shall be my guests ere long.”
Still, she hesitated, the elfhorse nervously sidling as it scented Unseelie.
Jeremiah’s patience broke. “For God’s sake, go.”
It was enough. She touched her heels to the white mare’s sides, and the horse shot forward like foam on a breaking wave.