Ironside

Page 12

He had composed himself, and when one of his folk's clawed hands happened to push her, causing her to stumble as she crossed the threshold, he only looked up as though annoyed by her clumsiness. Beside him were bowls of fruit, brought cold from dark caverns; cordials of clover and nettle; and tiny bird hearts still glossy with blood. He bit into a grape, not minding the crack of seeds against his teeth.
"Ethine. Be welcome.”
She frowned and opened her mouth, then hesitated. When she spoke, she merely said, "My Lady knows she dealt you a terrible blow.”
"I did not realize your Lady liked to brag, even by proxy. Come, have a bite of fruit, take something to cool your hot tongue.”
Ethine moved toward him stiffly and perched on the very edge of the lounge. He handed her an agate goblet. She took the shallowest of sips, then set it down.
"It chafes you to be polite to me," he said. "Perhaps Silarial should have taken your feelings into consideration when she chose her ambassador.”
Ethine contemplated the earthen ground, and Roiben stood.
"You begged her to let someone else go in your place, didn't you?" He laughed with vindictive certainty. "Perhaps even told her how much it hurt you to see what your brother had become?”
"No," Ethine said softly.
"No? Not in those words, but I'll wager you said it all the same. Now you see how she cares for those who serve her. You are one more thing with which to needle me and nothing more than that. She sent you despite your pleading.”
Ethine had closed her eyes tightly. Her hands were clasped in her lap, fingers threaded together.
He took her glass and drank from it. She looked up, annoyed, the way she had once been annoyed when he'd pulled her hair. When they were children.
It hurt him to look at her as an enemy.
"I do not see that you care for my feelings any more than she does," Ethine said.
"But I do." He made his voice grave. "Come, deliver your message.”
"My Lady knows she dealt you quite a blow. She further knows that your control of the other faeries in your lands is spotty after the botched Tithe.”
Roiben leaned against the wall. "You even sound like her when you say it.”
"Don't jest. She wants you to fight her champion. If you win, she will leave your lands unmolested for seven years. If you lose, you will forfeit the Unseelie Court to her." Ethine looked at him with anguished eyes. "And you will die.”
Roiben barely heard her plea, he was so surprised by the Bright Queen's offer. "I cannot think but that this is either generosity or some cunning beyond my measure. Why should she give me this chance at winning when now I have near none?”
"She wants your lands hale and whole when she takes them, not weakened by a war. Too many great courts have fallen into rabble.”
"Do you ever imagine no court at all?" Roiben asked his sister quietly. "No vast responsibilities or ancient grudges or endless wars?”
"We have come to rely on humans too much," said Ethine, frowning. "Once, our kind lived apart from them. Now we rely on them to be everything from farmers to nursemaids. We live in their cast-off spaces and sup off their tables. If the courts fall, we will be parasites with nothing to call our own. This is the last of our old world.”
"I hardly think it is as serious as all that." Roiben looked past Ethine. He didn't want her to see his expression. "How about this. Tell Silarial that I will take her insulting and lopsided bargain with one variation. She must wager something too. She must put up her crown.”
"She will never give you—”
Roiben cut her off. "Not to me. To you.”
Ethine opened her mouth, but no sound came out.
"Tell her that if she loses, she makes you the Bright Queen of the Seelie Court. If I lose, I will give her both my crown and my life." It felt good to say, even if it were a rash wager.
Ethine rose. "You mock me.”
He made a dismissive gesture. "Don't be silly. You know very well that I do not.”
"She told me that if you wished to bargain, you must do so with her." She paced the room, gesturing wildly. "Why won't you just come back to us? Pledge yourself to Silarial, ask for her forgiveness. Tell her how hard it was to be Nicnevin's knight. She could not have known.”
"Silarial has spies everywhere. I very much doubt that she was ignorant of my suffering.”
"There was nothing for her to do! Nothing for any of us to do. She spoke often of her fondness for you. Let her explain. Let her be your friend again. Forgive each other." Her voice dropped low. "You don't belong in a place like this.”
"And why is that, dear sister? Why don't I belong here?”
Ethine groaned and slapped one open hand against the wall. "Because you are not a fiend!”
She reminded Roiben so much of his old, innocent self that for a moment he hated her, for a moment he only wanted to shake her and scream at her and hurt her before someone else did. "No? Is it not enough, what I have done? Is it not enough to have cut the throat of a nix that dared laugh too loud or too long before my mistress? Is it not enough to have hunted down a hob that stole a single cake from her table? Is it not enough to have been deaf to their entreaties, their begging?”
"Nicnevin commanded you.”
"Of course she did!" he shouted. "Again and again and again she commanded me. And now I am changed, Ethine. This is where I belong if I belong anywhere at all.”
"What about Kaye?”
"The pixie?" He gave her a quick look.
"You were kind to her. Why do you want me to think the worst of you?”
"I was not kind to Kaye," he said. "Ask her. I am not kind, Ethine. Moreover, I no longer have any interest in kindness. I mean to win.”
"If you were to win," Ethine said, her voice faltering, "I would be the Queen and you would be my enemy.”
He snorted. "Now don't go casting a pall over my best outcome." He held out the cup to her.
"Drink something. Eat. After all, it is natural for siblings to squabble, is it not?”
Ethine took the cup back from him and lifted it to her mouth, but he had left her only a single swallow.
Kaye cradled a large ThunderCats thermos of coffee as she walked to Corny's car. Luis followed, wrapped in a black coat. It hung voluminously from his shoulders, its inner lining torn to pieces. He had taken it out of the back of one of the closets, from a pile strewn with chunks of plaster.
She was glad to keep moving. As long as there was something in front of her, something still to do, things made sense.
"You got a map of upstate New York?" Luis asked Corny.
"I thought you knew the way," Corny said. "What kind of guide needs a map?”
"Can you two not—," Kaye started, but stopped in front of a newspaper machine. There, in a sidebar on the front page of the Times, was a picture of the cemetery on the hill by Kaye's house. The hill where Janet was buried. The hollow hill under which Roiben had been crowned. It had collapsed beneath the weight of an overturned truck. The photo showed smoke billowing up from the hill, fallen gravestones scattered like loose teeth.
Corny slid quarters into the machine and pulled out a paper. "A bunch of bodies were found, too burnt to identify. They're looking for dental matches. There was some speculation that maybe people were sledding when the truck hit. Kaye, what the fuck?”
Kaye touched the picture, running her fingers over the ink of the page. "I don't know.”
Luis frowned. "All those people. Can't the folk kill each other and leave us out of it?”
"Shut up. Just shut up," Kaye said, walking to Corny's car and jerking on the handle. Pieces of chrome came off on her singed fingers. She felt sick.
"I've got to unlock it," Corny said, opening the door for her with his keys. "Look, he's okay. I'm sure he's okay.”
She threw herself into the backseat, trying not to imagine Roiben dead, trying not to see his eyes dulled with mud. "No, you're not.”
"I'm calling my mom," Corny said. He started the car while he dialed, his gloved fingers awkward.
Luis pointed out the turns and Corny drove with the phone cradled against his shoulder. This time Kaye welcomed the iron sickness, welcomed the dizziness that made it hard to think.
"She says Janet's coffin wasn't disturbed, but the stone's gone." Corny pushed his phone closed. "Nobody saw anyone sledding that late, and according to the local paper the truck wasn't even supposed to be making deliveries in the area.”
"It's the war," Kaye said, putting her head down on the vinyl seat. "The faery war.”
"What's wrong with her?" she heard Luis ask softly.
Corny's eyes stayed on the road. "She was dating someone from the Unseelie Court.”
Luis looked back at her. "Dating?”
"Yeah," Corny said. "He gave her his class ring. It was a whole big thing.”
Luis snorted.
"Roiben," Corny said. His voice sounded too loud, as though the name were echoing off the walls of the car. Kaye closed her eyes, but the dread didn't ebb.
"That's not possible," said Luis.
"Why do you think Silarial wants to see me?" Kaye demanded. "Why do you think it's worth two messengers and a guarantee of protection? If he isn't dead already, she thinks I can help kill him.”
"No," said Luis. "You can't date the Lord of the Night Court.”
"Well, I'm not. He dumped me.”
"You can't get dumped by the Lord of the Night Court.”
"Oh, yes you can. You so completely can.”
"We're all on edge." Corny rubbed his face. "And it's a bad day when I'm the voice of reason. Relax. We're going to be stuck in this traffic for a long time.”
They drove upstate while the late afternoon sunlight filtered through the leafless trees and the new-fallen snow melted into slush. They passed strip malls hung with wreaths and garlands, while kicked-up road salt streaked tide lines onto the sides of cars.
Kaye looked out the window, counting silver cars, reading every sign. Trying not to think.
At sunset they finally pulled onto a dirt road and Luis told them to stop.
"Here," he said, and opened the door. In the fading light Kaye could see an ice-covered lake stretching out from a bank just beyond the lip of the road. Mist shrouded the center of the lake from view. Dead trees rose from the water, as though there had once been a forest where the lake now stood. A forest of drowned trees. The fading light turned the trunks to gold.
Wind whipped loose snow into Kaye's face. It stung like chips of glass.
"There's a boat," Luis said. "Come on.”
They walked downhill, shoes skidding on the ice.
Corny gasped and Kaye looked up from watching her feet. A young man stood in front of her, half obscured by the branches of a fir tree. She yelped.
He was as still as a statue, in a down jacket and a woolen cap. He stared past the three of them as though they weren't there. His skin was darker than Luis's, but his lips had gone pale with cold.
"Hello?" Luis said, waving his hand in front of the guy's face.
The man didn't move.
"Look," Corny said. He pointed through the evergreen trees to a woman in her fifties standing by herself. Her ginger hair fluttered in the slight breeze. Squinting, Kaye could see other spots of color along the lake. Other humans, waiting at attention for some signal.
Kaye's gaze dropped to the man's chapped fingers. "Frostbite.”
"Wake up!" Luis shouted. When that got no response, he slapped the man across one cheek.
The frozen man's gaze shifted suddenly. Without a trace of expression he threw Luis to the ground and stomped on his stomach.
Luis groaned in pain, rolling to his side, his body curling up defensively.
Corny threw himself at the man. They fell backward, cracking through the thin ice of the lake as they splashed into the shallow water.
Kaye rushed forward, trying to pull Corny onto the shore. A hand closed on her arm.
She turned to see a creature, as tall and thin as a scarecrow, shrouded in tattered black fabric that whipped through the air. His eyes were a dead, pupil-less white, and his teeth were clear as glass.
Kaye's scream died in her throat. Her nails scrabbled at the creature's arm and he let her go, pushing past. He moved so nimbly that by the time she'd turned her head, his skeletal hand was on the frozen man's throat.
Corny splashed up onto the bank and collapsed in the snow.
The creature pressed a thumb against the man's forehead and hissed some words that Kaye didn't know. The frozen man moved slowly to resume standing like an indifferent sentry, clothing soaked through and dripping.
"What do you want?" Kaye demanded, taking off her coat and wrapping it around a shivering Corny. "Who are you?”
"Sorrowsap," said the creature, bowing his head. His hair was thin and coiled like the tangle of roots beneath a weed. "At your service.”
"Great! That's just fucking great." Luis held his stomach.
Corny shuddered reflexively and pulled the coat tighter.
"My service?" Kaye asked. Looking across the forest, she saw the other human figures walk back to their original positions. They had been coming, had been perhaps only moments away from entering the fight.
"The King of the Unseelie Court commands that I guard your steps. I have followed you since you left his court.”