“They want to make peace with the humans,” she sneered. “That is a fool’s game. A game of attrition that we can only lose as we watch them reproduce like rabbits while we ever so slowly die off. Making peace with cockroaches makes more sense. The trick is to kill them off or, better yet, get them to kill themselves off for us.” She smiled. “I’m very good at that last one.”
“I take that as a no,” I said. “So why do you want the artifact when you don’t even know what it is?”
“I’m not the only fae or even the only Gray Lord who despises humans,” she said. “But I need a bigger power base to gain the support of the fae for my plans. They need to see me as a Power, someone who can back up her ideas with action. An artifact retrieved from Underhill, stolen from under the noses of the Council of the Gray Lords, would do nicely. As long as I do it before you hand it over, the other Gray Lords can do nothing but wring their hands. Retrieving artifacts that have fallen into human hands is an acceptable venture and not a crime at all.”
“I see,” I said.
“If you hand it over to me,” she said, “I’ll let you live.”
“It will void the bargain,” Aiden told me in a low voice.
I nodded. We had promised to do everything in our power to bring back an artifact. Handing it over just because we were outgunned wouldn’t qualify. I couldn’t remember all of the exact words, but I was pretty sure “even unto death” was in there.
“Why bring them?” I asked, nodding at her three minions. “You are a Gray Lord. It sounds like you’re going to take a stab at ruling the fae all by yourself—and you can’t take on the three of us without help?”
“She cannot use magic to attack us,” said Aiden suddenly. “Before Underhill let them come back, she made them swear not to use their magic here.”
“It matters not,” the Widow Queen said. “You are both unarmed, and the werewolf is no match for the four of us by himself.”
Aiden nodded. “Maybe that would be so,” he said, “if you were right about that unarmed part.” Aiden sucked in a breath and gestured with his hand. Flame spilled out of his fingers and— I didn’t see what he did with it; I was too busy dodging a bronze broadsword wielded by the man in green.
In martial art terms, a broadsword is by definition an outer-circle weapon. There has to be a certain amount of space between the combatants in order to properly swing a sword of that size. The Widow Queen had a rapier, which would have been harder to deal with, because a rapier is quicker and more flexible. Not that the broadsword was easy. Still, the first strike the fae aimed at me I dodged. I managed it not so much because he couldn’t have hit me, but because he’d assumed I’d be a lot slower than I was—and because he’d expected me to try to get away. I stepped into him.
He was a better fighter than I was, but he wasn’t faster than me. Nor was he as motivated, and I think he underestimated me. He thought he was fighting a girl with a stick when he was fighting Adam’s mate, Coyote’s daughter, armed with Lugh’s staff.
As I closed with him, I hit him hard in the abdomen with the end of the stick. I think he let me make the hit because he started to do . . . something. I expected the stick to bounce back off his armor, and was ready to roll to the side, but the walking stick stayed where it was—and so did the male. In my hands, the walking stick came to life. I felt its outrage that someone would have attacked us without provocation. It had never spoken so clearly to me before. I couldn’t tell if it was the blood or Underhill, though both sang through the old wood.
The male fae froze where he was, and the stick finally pulled free, the spearpoint black with blood. The point was longer and thinner than I’d ever seen it. The fae man fell to the ground and didn’t move. He was dead by the spear and by the magic in the walking stick, and his death greatly satisfied the old artifact.
Kevlar was no match for a spear made by Lugh.
But there was no time to wonder about the stick. Adam was fighting the Widow Queen. He’d bloodied her leg, but had taken a slice in return along his side that was bleeding badly. The female in silver was lying on the ground, her head and shoulder burned away. Aiden lay on the ground not far from her, unconscious or dead—I couldn’t tell which.
The final fae, the male in gold, struck at me with his sword. This one had some magic in it; I could feel its hunger. It was a short sword and more agile than the broadsword had been.
The walking stick had, once before, used me to fight. This time it was more of an inspiration, using things I already knew. I wasn’t the walking stick’s puppet this time; I was its dance partner. It was like the hunt song, like a dance in which my partner was the more skilled of us, and I followed his lead. Step and duck and thrust and parry blended together as called for by our dance, in a syncopated rhythm that followed a random beat to keep our opponent from catching our dance step. It would have been fun—I could feel the walking stick’s joy—but I remembered Aiden’s crumpled form.
And then magic flashed. I stumbled but recovered in time to counter the sword and put my foot behind my opponent’s weight-bearing leg. When he tried to step back to regroup, he stumbled over my foot. I could have struck before he recovered, as the walking stick urged. But Adam’s agony, a direct result of the surge of magic that caused my misstep, flashed through our mating bond and made me take two steps away so I could center myself again for battle. It couldn’t matter, right now, how badly he was hurt. Or if he was worse than hurt.
Adam’s agony faded from our bond as the male attacked again, his mouth twisted in concentration. I fought with everything I had, focus possible only because of years of training with Sensei first, and later Adam. I set aside my fears and fought as coolly as I could manage, my attention on the here and now, and not on anything else. I couldn’t afford to make another misstep.
When the blade of the walking stick slid into the gold-clad male’s throat, it was just a part of our dance.
I could feel it when the walking stick called death to our enemy, felt the moment the male died of a wound he might have recovered from.
Adam lay still on the ground. I couldn’t see if he was breathing, and I couldn’t take the time to look. The Widow Queen, who, to defeat Adam, had broken her word to Underhill about using magic, crouched over Aiden, searching him, muttering to herself, “Where is it? What is it? It’s got to be somewhere.”
I tried to stab her with the spear, but she sensed us at the last moment. We danced, the walking stick and I, and between us we kept her busy, but she was slowly winning. Her armor was better than the armor of the man who’d died beneath our shining blade. I hit her hard with it, and she shrugged it off without the spear blade leaving even a surface scratch.
Magic, the stick told me. Magic armor.
She gathered magic as we danced, and there was nothing I could do about it. When she chose, because she was in control of the fight, she broke free of our dance by knocking me onto my side. I scrambled up, but it was awkward and too slow. It gave her the moment she needed to throw her spell at me.
The walking stick knew what it was, therefore so did I: a spell that would make it impossible to move, not even enough to breathe or for my heart to pump.
I felt the artifact make a decision as the magic came toward us, because Coyote had seen that it was becoming aware and coaxed it to free will. The stick twisted in my hands and intercepted the magic directed at me by a Gray Lord of the fae. Lugh’s walking stick ate the Gray Lord’s spell, and in doing so, it died.
To save me.
The Widow Queen had dropped her guard when she cast the spell. Confident, I think, that there was nothing someone like me could have done to save myself. And she was right. The walking stick bought me that moment of grace—and I launched into a spinning back kick, and felt it land with the precision of a move I must have done ten thousand times in practice. I heard the snapping of her neck, watched her body fall as quickly as
mine. I rolled to my feet; she stayed in the awkward position she had fallen in, her breath rasping in and out.
I reached down and grabbed the spearhead of Lugh’s walking stick and thrust it under her chest and into her heart. She stopped breathing then.
The fight was over, and I was the only one standing. For a moment I hesitated, bewildered by the unexpectedness of my survival. But only for a moment because Adam was still down.
I ran to my mate but there was already someone there. Three someone elses.
The first was Aiden. He looked as though he’d crawled through the ashes of the female he’d killed. The expression on his face was very old.
The second was a child, about Aiden’s age. Her hair was bright red, short, and very curly, her face rounded with blue eyes and pretty but unremarkable features. Her bottom lip was stuck out in a pout. I had no trouble recognizing her from Aiden’s descriptions.
The third was Baba Yaga, wearing the guise she’d worn the last time I’d seen her.
I fell to my knees next to Aiden, who turned to me. “He’s dead,” he said starkly. “He died to keep me safe.”
“No,” I said because I could feel our mating bond. There was nothing useful coming through it, but it was still there, so he couldn’t be dead. Even though there was no breath in his body and his great heart was still under my shaking fingers.
“The Widow Queen always was good with death curses,” said Baba Yaga. “Fortunately, I’m better.”
“He was taking Aiden away again,” said the little girl belligerently. “He should die.”
“If he hadn’t helped me,” said Aiden in a very calm tone, “I would have died.”
“She promised not to kill you,” Underhill said. “I wouldn’t lead her to you until she promised.”
Aiden looked at her, his face grim and sad. “Tilly, the Widow Queen didn’t have to kill me herself. The fae woman over there would have done it.” He lifted his shirt to display a red mark. “Adam knocked her away, and I scorched her with my fire. But in doing so, he left himself vulnerable. He saved me, and that gave the Widow Queen time to hit him with her spell.”
“She lied to me,” hissed Underhill—and like the thing that had attacked the tree house, her voice carried more than mere sound. “And she used magic. She broke her word.”
“So she did,” said Baba Yaga briskly. “She was always like that. She was after the artifact, I’m afraid. I told her that she had no business trying to keep something that powerful for herself.”
I looked up at Baba Yaga. I’d seen her raise someone from the dead once. “Can you bring him back?”
Baba Yaga shook her head. “Can’t do, dearie. At least, not right now. He’s not dead yet. Not like that other one. I could wait if you want, but what you want to ask me is whether I can break the Widow Queen’s spell.”
“Can you break the Widow Queen’s spell?” I repeated her instructions, my bloody hand clenched deep in my husband’s silver fur and my heart in my throat.
“Only with Underhill’s permission,” Baba Yaga said. “I keep my promises.”
“No,” said Underhill.
“Tilly,” Aiden snapped. “You aren’t being nice.”
“It isn’t nice to run away,” she snarled at him, and her voice made my chest hurt.
“I wouldn’t have run away if you hadn’t set the fae on me as soon as I got Outside,” he said. “On all of us. They all died, Tilly. They can’t come back because you taunted the fae, and they thought they could get something from us if they just took us far enough apart. No more Ice, no more Cloud, no more Terra. They died as mortals do. They cannot come back. But I can. I will. But you have to let Baba Yaga break the Widow Queen’s curse.”
I held my breath. He’d lived with her for centuries—he loved her, and she loved him back in her own way. His word would sway her more than anything I could say.
“If he dies, I will hate you forever,” he told her. “I will leave and never come back. And I’ll tell everyone I meet how mean you are.”
Underhill’s face flushed angrily, but I could see that the threat meant something to her.
“I’ll allow a bargain,” she said finally, folding her arms on her chest and obviously unhappy. “A bargain for the Witch’s service. A bargain I approve of.” She looked at me and smiled, a slow, cruel smile. “A life-for-a-life kind of bargain.”
Baba Yaga said, “Give me an unborn life, then, Mercy, so I may restore his.”
I put my hand over my belly—but I wasn’t pregnant. We’d talked about it but had decided to wait before we tried.
“An unborn life is acceptable,” said Underhill slyly, taking in my gesture and my expression.
“You can’t do that,” said Aiden in a low voice. “He’d never want to buy his life with another’s. Especially not his own child’s.”
I got up and went to the backpack and took out one of the hard-boiled eggs, chills sliding down my spine. What if I had just dismissed her remark over the phone? What if I hadn’t decided to bring them along? What if we had eaten them for lunch yesterday, as I’d almost suggested?
I handed Baba Yaga the egg. “One unborn life,” I told her, my voice shaky.
“Hard-boiled are my favorite,” she said, popping the whole thing, shell and all, into her mouth. “I can’t eat them much anymore at home. I keep telling her that just because she stands on a chicken leg doesn’t mean she is a chicken.”
Underhill looked back and forth between me and Baba Yaga. “You tricked me,” she said, looking at me like I was interesting. She looked at Baba Yaga and suddenly smiled—a smile that didn’t belong on a young face, so wise and joyous. She laughed and clapped her hands. “That was fun,” she said. She looked at me. “You should come visit me. We could play a lot of jokes on each other. It would be fun.”
“It could be fun,” I managed. That was the truth, right? The possibility existed that it would be fun—but I’d have put my money on terrifying.
Baba Yaga waved her hands at Adam—and he sucked in a breath of air so hard he choked, and the wolf convulsed, trying to breathe.
It hurt. I could feel it along our bond, but if he hurt, he was alive, so I didn’t mind. Much. I fell to my knees beside him and put my head against his heart so I could hear it beat. He coughed as the pain faded, and tried to get up. It took him two tries, but once he was on his feet, he shook himself briskly. I held him for a moment more.
He was alive. I breathed in, breathed him in, and believed. I wiped my tears—of fright and grief—and then loosened my hold.
“He’s okay?” asked Aiden, sounding, for once, the same age that he looked.
“Of course,” said Baba Yaga. “Everything was done right and proper.”
Adam turned to Baba Yaga and bowed his head. And then he did the same to Underhill. If his gaze was wary, I don’t think anyone else there knew him well enough to notice.
Underhill sighed. “I suppose you want to leave again,” she told Aiden. “I won’t make you work for it. There’s a door about a half mile that way—” She pointed. “Baba Yaga knows where it is.”
“I will visit,” Aiden said. “But you have to promise not to make me stay here.”
Underhill bounced on her toes, and her voice was shy as she said, “Visiting would be better than lost forever. But you will die out there.”
“Death is part of life,” he told her. “Without the one, it is hard to have the other. That’s what my mother used to say. But I could visit until then.”
“You used to not remember your mother,” she said.
“I’m remembering more Outside. I could come and tell you stories about it.”
She gave him a tentative smile. “I like your stories. All right. I promise not to make you stay here.”
—
Baba Yaga took us to a different door than the one we’d used to come
in. This one was set in one of two walls belonging to the remnants of a hut that had seen better days. When she opened the door, I could see only the empty, overgrown patch that had once (presumably) been the hut’s interior, but stepping through it, with Adam beside me, landed us in the same little, nondescript room that we’d entered Underhill from.
It had been light in Underhill, but it was evening here.
“How much time has passed?” I asked urgently.
Baba Yaga shrugged. “As much as needed to.” She paused, then smiled at me. “Oh, yes. I forgot that you had some adventures in an Elphame court. Underhill is far more stable, and her ties to this world are stronger. Time passes differently, yes, but not all that differently. If you had stayed in Underhill for a year, you might find that you’d spent a year and a half. But with a short visit, generally you might lose or gain an hour or six, but mostly it’s not enough to matter.” She smiled again. “Generally.”
I caught my polite “thank you” before it left my tongue. “Good to know,” I said instead.
She looked at Aiden, who was frantically patting his clothing. “Here, boy,” she said, digging into a pocket. She pulled out the key and gave it to him. “It’s probably better if you have this now. Otherwise someone might say that I brought the artifact back and not you, hmm?” She looked at me. “Remember to dot your tees and cross your eyes”—which she did—“when dealing with the fae.” She smiled broadly. “Now then, we should go to Beauclaire’s office, I think. You can be sure that someone from the Council will be awaiting our arrival—and Beauclaire’s office is as good a target as any.”
—
Two someones were waiting for us—or at least, they were in Beauclaire’s office talking quietly. Goreu and Beauclaire seemed awfully startled by our entrance to have been actually waiting for us.
“That was quick,” said Goreu. “We didn’t expect you for another day at least.”
“How quick?” I asked.
“Twelve, maybe thirteen hours,” said Goreu.
“Huh,” I said. “We were there a day and a night and most of another day.” I’d gained back about twelve hours of the month that the Elphame court had stolen from me.