“If you have to bail…” Clyde was, at heart, a decent man. Rare enough in any realm.
Jeremiah shrugged. “I haven’t done anything,” he repeated. “I don’t know.”
“Well, go on down if you’re gonna.” Clyde turned on his heel. “You didn’t clock out for lunch, either. Don’t make paperwork for me.”
“Fine.” Jeremiah followed. The iron in the building resonated, singing its cold song as the breeze picked up.
The elevator heaved and shuddered its way down. Jeremiah trudged toward the office, the bite of almost-worry under his breastbone sharp and unwelcome. His right hand wormed its way into his jacket pocket, the calluses on his fingers scraping rough corduroy.
Daisy had picked this dun coat out for him. Heavy and graceless but sturdy as hell, leather patches at the elbows, found on sale. Thrift stores were her favorite places. The broken-down, the beggars and half-drowned kittens, the cheap and the castoff overwhelmed her gentle heart. Maybe that was why she’d settled for him.
The right-hand pocket held three iron nails. A little bird had warned him, and unwilling gratitude warmed the inside of his ribs.
If he hadn’t been touching inimical mortal metal, he might not have seen it. The office—a temporary trailer listing just a few degrees out of true, less well-built than Jeremiah’s own—hunched against the damp. Warm electric light shone from its windows… and up the wooden steps lifting toward the door were smears of phosphorescence, weak in the gray daylight. They glowed a sickly green, and his fingers spasmed against cold iron. The marks on his forearms twisted, writhing under the skin and dragging their tingling claws bone-deep.
Unseelie. Here, in the daylight. But why?
Robin. There was no other explanation. Had the rider been pure Unseelie? A highborn of Unwinter, be it the Hunt or the Hallow, simply wouldn’t fall apart at the mere touch of a dwarven-inked lance, even iron-bladed.
It took far more than that to kill them. Or the Sluagh.
If the ragged little Robin had been under the Hunt of Unwinter Himself, killing one rider wouldn’t have stopped the pursuit. There would have been more of them, and they would have followed her over Jeremiah’s doorstep, cold iron or no. Once the Hunt—or, God forbid, the Sluagh—was called, it took more than a single piece of cold iron to bar passage.
There had only been the one, though. No names exchanged, no bloodgilt to be asked. Why would Unseelie brave even cloud-filtered sunlight and ask about him? He hadn’t been Summer’s Armormaster for a long while, and any sidhe with a grudge against him would have found him before now—and found him willing enough to answer.
He kept moving, the same heavy mortal footfalls. Regret and chill forgotten, every sense alert, he made no attempt to alter his gait. They would have heard him long before now. Let them think him stupid or oblivious.
He eased his hands free of the corduroy pockets, letting go of the iron regretfully. Now that he was on guard, glamours wouldn’t be nearly as effective. His workboots thudded on the rickety steps. It was ironic—a construction site full of cold iron, and the Unseelie had been ushered to a tin can of a trailer that wouldn’t seriously hamper anything they wanted to do.
The doorknob was slick and ice-cold; he twisted it and stepped in.
Immediate darkness enfolded him, wet illusion clinging and cloying. He ducked, and the spat curse went over his head, its wingtips brushing past his hair and sending a rill of ice down his spine. Fullblood. Great. The marks on his arms gave a flare of cold heat as he drove forward, the lance resolving and striking lightning-quick.
Most flying curses were sight-line; he swept the lance, the blade striking home in something soft as dark-glamour fell away, spent. The inside of the office was a shambles, paper exploded everywhere; the lanceblade sinking in just under the ribs of a tall, black-clad noseless scarecrow of a sidhe, all the visible slices of its skin patterned with the violet tree-ring markings of lightshielding chantment.
They had planned and prepared for coming out by day, and asked for him by name. The intervening years fell away, and he was the Armormaster again, calculating as he moved, the lance part of his breath and bone.
Sylvia the secretary lay flung back over her desk, her throat cut and a bright jet of arterial spray painting the corkboard where project-resolution timetables and OSHA notices were tacked up. The stench of a mortal battlefield rose—copper blood, adrenaline sharp against his palate, the reek of loosed bowels.
Sylvia had two cockatiels waiting at home in her apartment. She kept the coffee hot and didn’t complain when the boys dirtied the bathroom in the office trailer. She walked around in a cloud of Loveswept perfume and chain-smoked in her office, a merry defiance of company policy. She could find any document in seconds flat, stall an inspector or find a hard hat, “lose” an asshole’s paycheck, or nag a worker into Doing the Right Thing. Now her pudgy middle-aged body, thick legs indecently splayed under her usual tartan skirt, slumped in the final indignity of death over her thronelike metal desk.
Jeremiah twisted the lance, ripping it free. Two, there’s at least one more. Get your weapon free. Move. Move!
Another Unseelie hit him from the side, the wicked edge of a flint knife kissing his jacket and scraping the tough material with a ripping sound as Gallow twisted, right boot stamping down and driving him away from the strike. The blade was probably poisoned, and if it touched skin he’d be in trouble.
The butt of the lance flicked out, catching the second noseless bastard right in the middle of his elongated face. Watery greenish ichor sprayed, and the smell of freshly cut grass filled the trailer, fighting with the stink for supremacy. Jeremiah snapped his own curse, and the second Unseelie went flying. The sidhe smashed into the flimsy bathroom wall and kept going, fetching up against the toilet with a sickening crack. The mirror shivered into pieces.
Bad luck, but for who? The lance flicked again, catching the first Unseelie in the throat as he sprawled, snarling, one maggot-white hand clapped to his side. The shock of a life ending grated up the haft, and the lance made a hungry keening that trembled the flimsy windows in their sockets, vibrating along every edge and settling in Jeremiah’s back teeth. Sick heat boiled up his arms, following the channels of the marks, and his jacket smoked with sudden heat.
The Unwinter sidhe were in dusty black suits, their eyes holes of darkness. If there was half-and-half left in the dish near the coffeepot—and Sylvia made certain it never ran out, yet another reason to admire her—it would be soured by now. Nausea twisted like a fish under Jeremiah’s breastbone. The door had swung shut, and he didn’t have time to reach behind him to lock it.
The second Unseelie rose from the ruins of the bathroom wall, broken drywall settling over him in a pall of fine white dust. “Gallow,” he whispered, and the sound turned air to ice, Jeremiah’s breath pluming in the sudden chill. Paper stirred, rustling, and the lance shrank. Close-quarter fighting was not good with a reach weapon; it was too confined in here.
Still, any blade would have to do when faced with a scion of Unwinter.
Each sidhe wore belts with heavy twisted silver-gleaming buckles. Rings flashed on the live one’s fingers, a pale golden gleam. Barrow-wights, then, fullblood but not highborn. Dangerous, and deadly—but not very bright.
Jeremiah inhaled smoothly, disregarding the smell. His boots shuffled in paper as he moved forward, lance ready, its tip glowing a dull hot red. Steam writhed along its edge, and it shifted again, wicked sharklike teeth growing from its edges.
He had forgotten how good it felt to kill.
“Wight.” He spat the word like a curse. The dead sidhe on the floor twitched, runnels of dust eating ageless flesh. In the old times, he would take the rings as bloodgilt. They would jingle on his belt when he walked, and he would trade them for bright bits of moonmetal to tie in his hair. Or he would gift them to her, since there was little she liked better from an Armormaster than shinies from an Unseelie’s fingers. Or ears.
Or throat.
br /> The barrow-wight hissed, exhaling. They were sneakthieves and assassins, not direct fighters. Were there more? Had to be; nobody would send a trio of mere wights to deal with him.
The stupid wight leapt forward, strangler’s hands outstretched and a collection of black-flapping curses taking shape in the air around it. The lance jerked, and the swipe ended with its teeth tearing in sidhe flesh, the green scent pungent-foul as fresh-cut grass rotted in marshy swampwater. Curses fell, flapping and wriggling, and intuition bloomed under his skin. There had to be more. Nobody would send only a troika of wights to—
The world halted, then turned over. A huge noise, almost soundless in its immensity, and Jeremiah flew. The explosion rammed him through the trailer’s wall, the lance screaming as its feeding was interrupted, but the flush of power up its haft and through the marks was enough to shield him from the worst of the blast. Landed hard, rolling, his jacket smoking afresh and the lance retreating into insubstantiality as a column of fire rose. Black smoke billowed.
There goes our safety record, he thought hazily, before instinct tucked his head and he hit the side of a handy pickup truck. The impact left him stunned, nothing broken but blood bursting briefly from his nose and ears. The world took a breath around him, settling back into its rightful dimensions with a thump.
The construction trailer exploded again. Flames writhed, fat ropes of yellow and orange. Probably from a fireglobe; it would burn everything it could reach down to ash until the parameters of the curse laid inside it had been reached. Nine feet, or twelve, or twenty-one.
No mere wight, even a highborn one, could bargain for a fireglobe this intense. They had to have help from fullborn higher in the Unwinter Court.
Who among either Court would want him dead this badly? Or was Robin supposed to be with him? Why would they want her? She was definitely of Summer. You only had to look at her to see as much. Under commission, she said—so she was working for the Queen herself. What games were Summer and Unwinter playing now?
Jeremiah braced himself against the side of the truck, his ribs heaving as he dragged in breath after breath, staring, wiping at the blood on his upper lip. A swift pain piercing his ears was membranes healing. It had been a long time since he’d tasted his own claret.
Have to get out of here. There could be more.
For a moment he simply stared, like a witless fool. The mortals would think him dead now. Clyde would be puzzled, to say the least. Shouts and running feet, someone hit an alarm and the noise mounted as the fireglobe took another deep breath and expanded another yard in all directions, hungrily seeking. The smoke sent out questing fingers, burning stuff rained down. Papers, bits of tin and smoking wood, peppering the earth like rain after a hard-baked drought.
The lance trembled on the edge of visibility as he tried to decide if he needed it. Were there more Unseelie around?
If there are, you must draw them away. Be stealthy, Jer. Be smart.
Humming in his hands, its blade leaf-shaped and dappled, the lance burned cold blue before it winked out, retreating up his arms as he forced it away.
Jeremiah shook his head, regaining sense and breath both.
Time to vanish.
WIGHT, KNIGHT, AND HOUND
17
With its back to cliffs falling into the Dreaming Sea, a lacework of wet black stone burned with red at its tips. Scarlet pennons flew from each slender tower and a deep, low mumble plucked at the air. Thorn-tangles shuddered, writhing against the border of the moat; greasy black water rippled as the Watcher within it moved, its oily scaled hide surfacing for brief moments.
Among the thorns, splashes of crimson and spots of moonglow bloomed.
The Rim rose to the castle’s north, piled black stone crawling with wights and honeycombed with their barrows as well as the harpy-nests and crags for the fire-goats. Further up the Rim, the mines crouched, their wide mouths carved with fantastical loops of wyrmscale. Few of the great winged beasts remained, their own mountains at the very edge between Unwinter and the Second Veil’s glimmering. The mines below held trollwrights and free dwarves, those without the alliance and network of a fierce clan—and those outcast.
Unwinter turned none away. His was not Summer’s aristocracy of beauty. To live in his ashen realm you needed only to swear fealty—and be prepared to fight.
The thorn-tangles at the mountain-feet were pierced by blackrock roads, their glassine faces sometimes full of drifting mist as Unwinter’s will moved through his kingdom. A will like the mortal iron, it was whispered, kept the Second Veil back and built this refuge, without Summer’s petty games of glamour and reliance on the flint knife.
The thorny Tangles gave way to Dak’r Wood. Sometimes mortals slipped through chance gaps in the Veil and walked its moonglow paths all a-wonder—and no few of them fell prey to those who lived in its fastness. The tribes of the Dak’r—drow, brughnie, smalltroll, gytrash and woodwight, grennik, grentooth, and the nymphs of the shade—were not all carnivorous… but many were, and they bore no love for the shapers of cold iron.
It was in the fens and the Ash Plain that the hunting coursed. The Plain, its pale flax and bleached bloodpoppies ruffled by chill wind, swept itself with long cindersnow fingers, hound and fleet white deer scattering. The fens held kelpie just as the Dreaming Sea’s rocky Unwinter shore held sharptooth selkie and singing mergirls—and it was on that shore the night-mares stepped from pale foam and crashing spume, stamping on the beach and tossing silvery fish high before catching them afresh in their wide, obsidian-toothed maws. It was these mounts, silvershod and fleetfooted, the very few boon companions of Unwinter rode. The rest of his knights made do with shadowy elfhorses—and other beasts.
Thrumming resonated through Unwinter, the roads a shifting plucked string. Sleek wet heads rose from crashing surf or mirrorglass fen; the cindersnow on the Ash Plain became a pinprick-stinging hail. A wind slid through the Dak’r and the Tangle; winterheart nymphs and blue-glowing pixies scrambled to escape, retreating inside their homes. Wights drifted to the edges of their barrows, burrows, or boles, peering out with bright curiosity—or naked fear.
Inside the mines, trollwright and dwarf alike paused. The music of hammer and anvil took on a sharp, chiming edge, the glass knife that would shatter in the wound quivering restlessly, the wicked-barbed silverine arrows whispering in their bundles.
Production of those weapons had quickened of late, though if the plague continued its ravages, there might be a shortage of hands to wield them.
A deeper flame bloomed at the heart of Unwinter’s Keep, the black pile on the cliffs. Some whispered that Summerhome was a pale copy of this citadel, but never very loudly.
The bridge-mouth opened, its tongue dropping silently. Ruddy glow leaked through Unwinter’s Gate, a cold fire. Shadows clustered, and the Watcher in the moat stirred to a frenzy, lashing about until, from one of the high, dust-draped towers, a shriek sounded.
It melded with the thrumming, and Unwinter quaked. Hounds belled and bayed, hooves rang against the Bridge, and a sortie rode forth at Unwinter’s bidding. It was late in the season for a hunting, but Summer had not opened her gates yet.
Consequently, even though afternoon held the mortal world sideways-below-above under an unforgiving glare of that awful day-eye the mortals loved so much, the lord of Unseelie sent them hence to slip through blood-bought gateways and into shadow, waiting for dusk.
Wight, hound, and knight, they rode in pursuit.
SMALL CATHY
18
It was both familiar and strange. A chill wind under a leaden sky, the thin-skinned trailers shivering. During the day, only the elderly or the very young rattled around inside the tin cans. Broken cars and toys scattered in small weedy approximations of front yards, plastic sun-bleached and pollen-roughened paint baked onto metal by long, slow summers of decay.
The smell of it threatened to grease-soak her skin. Fried food on ancient ranges, crusted inside ovens that had to be proppe
d shut, backed-up drains and sharprot mildew that never fully faded no matter how much bleach you used. Cat piss, desperation, and twice-boiled coffee. Sagging porches, plywood-patched siding—even the pavement was veined with age, like the back of an old mortal’s hands.
Robin flitted at the edges of the trailer park, keeping to the weeds and winter-naked saplings outside anyone’s yard. What was a sidhe, even a mortal-Tainted one, doing here? He was no pixie, to find a home in even the smallest bit of free soil or even pockets of the Veil itself.
There was a stand of birch saplings and other small trees struggling across a trash-strewn field behind his home. They were not awake, even with a sidhe living so close. Hadn’t he spoken to the trees? Of course, the entire trailer park and its surroundings might be razed to make way for something even mortal-uglier, the living earth sleeping fitfully under concrete. He might well decide it wasn’t worth the effort, or the heartbreak when such careful work was undone.
Maybe such a decision was even wise.
She circled, her unease growing. It wasn’t until she finally stepped fully out onto the paving near his home, committing herself, that she realized she had been noticed.
A wan mortal child, probably no more than six or seven, peered through the slats of a broken fence. Bright blue eyes, but a sallow face, pinched and uneasy as Robin herself felt. No coat, her tiny feet only in ragged dirty socks, the child crouched in long damp grass, anemic weeds brushing her hips and elbows. She stared, and behind her, the listing trailer next to Gallow’s looked dark and dead. Was the power shut off?
Robin remembered standing outside another trailer, long and long ago, her fingertips on rusting barbed wire as she listened to the arguing behind her, rumbling from a dark cave of a brown and white tin shack. The child’s gaze was direct, and sad, and very, very sharp.
The little ones see the most of a sidhe, they said. They are not yet blind and deaf.