Queen's Gambit

by Karen Chance

  It did not work.

  I felt frustration and fear rising in my throat, and tried to tamp them down. But it was not easy. When I became angry, I tended to lash out at whatever was hurting me, but I could not do that here. As weak as I was, even had I been able to manifest my spirit form, I could not have held it for long. I could not do anything!

  Meanwhile, Ray’s plan seemed to be to wait our enemies out, but I did not think that the fey were going anywhere. Whatever they wanted from me, it seemed important to them. They had the reckless yet tenacious attitudes of men who had been told to return with their shields or on them.

  I did not think that going home without me was an option.

  “Okay, that’s about as good as I can do with a crappy blanket,” Ray said. “Now, you stay here—”

  “Where are you going?” I caught his arm.

  He pried it off. “I’m gonna go check out this cliff face.”

  “They’ll see you!”

  “I used to be a smuggler,” he reminded me. “I know how to slip around all subtle like. They won’t see me.”

  “But . . . what do you hope to find?”

  “Another way out.” It was grim. He glanced at the fey lights, now less like the running variety and more like search lights, that were strobing the cavern. “These guys don’t look like they plan on leaving anytime soon. We need a back door, and water erodes. There could be a passage to another chamber or even to the outside hidden in these rocks. And if there is, I’m gonna find it.”

  With that he was gone, before I had a chance to protest. I stared after him, feeling off balance again. I was not used to being the one left behind, the weak one, the one with nothing to do. It was disconcerting and highly unpleasant. I sat there for a moment, frowning at nothing.

  Then I started searching the cabin, looking for anything useful.

  The bench seats opened up to allow storage underneath, but there wasn’t much there. And what I did find reinforced my impression that this capsule had been used recently, despite its initial appearance. There were no weapons, but there was dried food—still edible—a container of what I assumed to be water, and another blanket.

  I pulled the latter over myself, not that it helped much. The depression we were in was shallow, to the point that we’d basically become part of the falls. The entire interior of the craft was wet and I had water beading on my skin and dripping off of my nose.

  After a moment, I took the blanket back off and used it as a bag instead, loading it down with the rest of the supplies. I emptied the two bench seats closest to me, then crawled awkwardly around to the other side of the pole to see what else I could find. I was hoping for a map, as our side in the war had allies in Faerie as well as enemies. If we knew where we were, perhaps we could reach some of them.

  But there was no map. One of the remaining seats had nothing underneath it, and the last had a coil of rope, some fire making supplies, and a mirror. I took the mirror, which was small and probably also intended for use in making fire. It was a little larger than my palm, and showed me back a face that was pale, splattered with blood, and tired looking. I frowned and turned it on my body instead.

  I wanted to see the injury to my spine, but it was difficult, and not just because of the location. But because it was so dark in here. I twisted this way and that, but the shadows were too deep. I needed better light—

  And, suddenly, I had it.

  A light lit up on the floor beside me, splashing my face with pale blue luminescence. It caused me to suck in a breath and throw the blanket and then my body over it. I froze in place, waiting to see if I had been spotted.

  And waited.

  And waited.

  After what felt like an hour but was probably only a few minutes, I relaxed slightly. Perhaps the fey had not seen me, after all. Or perhaps they had, and were merely mustering their forces.

  I waited some more.

  But no one came. I eventually breathed a little easier, but wondered what I was supposed to do now. What if more of those lights came on? I couldn’t hide them all. What if this one refused to go out, leaving me—

  The light went out.

  I blinked at it, but it was definitely out. The blanket was soldier grade material, with a rough feel and a loose weave. I could see through it well enough, especially at this distance, and the only light at the moment was faint aftereffects jumping in front of my vision.

  For a moment, I just sat there, wondering why there was a little frisson in my mind. It was a small sensation, hardly there at all, like a tiny fingernail scratching or a dim indicator light. As if something was waiting . . .

  I thought, “Light.”

  And there was light.

  “Out.” I whispered quickly.

  And there was none.

  Huh.

  I remembered how, when I first found the little craft, I had wanted to see it better, and the next moment, it had lit up. And later, at the top of the cliff in the first cave, I had heard the approaching Svarestri and wished for a way out. And the next thing I knew, Ray and I had been scooped up . . . and taken out.

  As strange as it seemed, it appeared that the vessel could read my desires, and respond to them. I did not understand how this was possible. I did understand that this was useful.

  Possibly very useful.

  Another fey ship approached, with a sweeping blue light that was creeping over the rocks and crevasses of the cliff face, coming this way.

  “Out,” I thought, as hard as I could, and their light went out.

  I smiled.

  The fey were unhappy. I could hear them from here, chattering to each other in a strange, guttural language. Odd; I had always heard that their languages were beautiful. Each to their own, I thought, and spun them around.

  I actually laughed that time, as their craft slung about, hard enough that several of them almost fell out. But they didn’t, catching themselves at the last minute, which annoyed me. They had hurt Ray, had torn him limb from limb, had peppered him with stones. They were still looking for both of us, and would likely kill him if they found us, and take me off for possibly an even nastier fate.

  Torture, I thought. They will want to know our plans for the war. I smiled again, and even without the mirror, I knew it was not a nice one. Let me show you my plans, I thought, and sent their craft rocketing across the void—

  Straight into another.

  The two crashed, then backed up and did it again. And again. And again, until very few of the boards remained intact and even fewer of the fey remained on board. And those who did were screaming.

  They must have been yelling for help, because the other vessels came zipping over from every direction, and I learned a new thing: I could not control them all. One was easy; two was possible with simple commands, such as ram each other repeatedly. But no more. Whenever I tied to add a third, it jerked slightly, and seemed to stall out for a moment, but then tore away from my mental grasp.

  Fair enough, I thought, and ordered one of the new arrivals to start firing those blue energy beams at all the rest.

  “What the hell is going on?” Ray demanded, sliding back inside our ship.

  “I am creating a distraction.”

  “What?”

  I sent the wildly firing vessel straight at two more, which sprang out of the way just in time. But they weren’t able to avoid getting strafed by those weapons. The sizzling blue beams mostly missed one craft, just sheering off a bit of the top, but the other was sliced clean in two.

  Unfortunately, most of the fey appeared to have ducked. Fortunately, that did not help them much, as their craft was now tilting and whirling and acting crazy. It started firing randomly, too, although I had not told it to, which caused the others to scatter.

  And gave us a chance.

  “Let’s get out of here,” I said to Ray, who was staring at me.

  “Wait—you did that?”

  “These things seem to respond to thoughts.”

  “S
ince when?”

  “Since always?”

  He scrunched up his face, then looked around. “Doesn’t work for me.”

  “But it does for me, and we need to go.”

  “Not out there,” he argued, checking out the wildly slinging weapons’ fire. “We could get hit as easy as them.”

  “Then what’s your plan?”

  He thought for a second. “You can control this thing?”

  I nodded.

  “Then send it back where it came from—after we get off.”

  “Get off? But—”

  “Trust me. Just do it! Do it now!”

  I didn’t understand the urgency in his tone until I looked up. And noticed that all of the remaining vessels were charging back in, weapons blazing. A consensus had obviously been reached to sacrifice the rogue ship, despite the fact that some of their compatriots were still on it.

  Which was a better distraction than anything I’d been able to come up with, I thought, as the cave lit up.

  Ray threw me over his shoulder, and as soon as we cleared the ship, I sent the little vessel zipping back across the cavern. That led to mass confusion, as several of the fey crafts continued with the attack, while the rest broke off and tried to follow our speeding bullet. Ray didn’t hesitate; he started climbing up the rocks beside the falls, while I hung over his back and tried to keep the chaos going.

  It was getting harder. I managed to cause another vessel’s weapons to fire briefly, which set a second on fire. I also caused the lead vessel fleeing after ours to stutter and falter for a moment, and almost get run into by another. But then I lost the connection, and it tore away into the darkness.

  And when I tried a new command, all that happened was that I felt dizzy and unwell.

  I didn’t think we’d be getting any more help. But then, perhaps we didn’t need it. Ray had indeed found a backdoor: a tiny crevasse in the rock that we could barely fit through, with the dark, wet stone close on both sides. At one point, he had to put me down, turn sideways, and drag me through an especially narrow area, but I didn’t mind.

  Particularly when I saw what was on the other side.

  “What is it?” I asked, hearing the awe in my voice.

  He stared upwards. “I think . . . it’s a river.”

  “It can’t be a river. There’s nothing holding it up.”

  Ray didn’t answer that time. He just started climbing, taking us higher and higher and closer and closer. The not-a-river continued to sparkle like a vein of pure emerald, cutting across the ceiling of the cavern like another huge piece of stained glass. Only this glass moved.

  Sunlight speared down through it as it shifted, dappling our faces as well as the rest of the cave we approached, until we came close enough that I could have reached out and touched it.

  I looked at Ray, who had put me down on a protruding rock for a moment so that he could rest. He either read my mind or saw the wish on my face. He shrugged.

  “Might as well. We gotta get out of here somehow.”

  I held up a hand.

  Pure, clear water trickled through my fingers, crisp and cold and causing me to laugh with delight. It was a river, a river held up by nothing at all. I splashed us by simply by pulling my hand down swiftly.

  “Green fey,” Ray said, cracking a slight grin himself. “Gotta be. They pull this shit all the time.”

  “You’ve seen something like this before?”

  He shook his head. “Heard about it. Didn’t believe it, though.” He looked at me, and there was challenge in it. “Feel like a swim?”

  Chapter Twenty

  Dorina, Faerie

  We took a swim. Ray leapt upwards, into the suspended river, giving me the strange view of his body floating over nothing at all. For a moment, it looked like I was sitting under a swimming pool with a glass bottom, looking up at the sun’s rays filtering through onto my face. It was amazing.

  And that was before an arm reached down, grasped my hand, and pulled me up alongside him.

  The water was cold enough to be a shock, although less of one than the view. I looked down through shifting waters at the massive cavern below us, and something between excitement and fear coursed through me. Cascading sunlight picked out glints in the rocks, gleamed off a forest of limestone formations, and highlighted bats, thousands upon thousands of them, flocking like birds far below.

  It was a mind-bending sight that I knew I’d never forget. But it was almost equaled when we burst out of the other side of the stream, and for a moment, I didn’t know which way was up. A wave of disorientation hit, giving me the strangest feeling that the world had flipped, and I was about to fall into the huge, blue bowl of the sky.

  Then I blinked and everything righted itself, leaving me looking at a truly beautiful spot. The river murmured over clutches of rocks, the wind sighed through the treetops of an enormous forest, the sun streamed down out of a cloudless sky, and a bird sang a brief trill. Even better, the entire stretch of riverbank was deserted, without a threat in sight.

  We were out!

  Ray and I looked at each other, and despite everything, we laughed. And kept on doing so when he tossed his head, spraying me with water, and I splashed him back. We floated there, having a water flight like a couple of children for a moment, just grateful to be alive.

  We eventually started moving, but not toward dry land as I’d expected. The shoreline wasn’t far, a brief rocky and then grassy expanse before the tree line, but Ray avoided it. I tried to ask why, but he just shook his head.

  “In a minute.”

  In a minute we ended up by a flat shelf of rock that extended outward from the embankment. Ray scooped me up and deposited me in a dry area out of the waterline. The rock looked like shale and had been washed by the river for so long that it was as smooth as silk under my fingertips. The sun had warmed it, in between sections of a rocky overhang, making it a comfortable enough spot.

  Yet I didn’t understand why we had stopped here.

  Ray squatted down beside me, his face earnest. “Look. You gotta remember three things about Faerie, okay?”

  I nodded.

  “One, assume that everything is trying to kill you, all the time, because it probably is. Two, never—and I mean never—go into a forest unless you got a fey guide. Seriously. The damned thing will eat you, and that is not a metaphor.”

  I nodded again.

  “And three, try to get out as fast as you can. If you remember those three things, you got maybe a fifty-fifty chance.”

  I did not like those odds. “But how do we get out? I didn’t find a map—”

  He waved it away. “Portals won’t be on a map, unless they’re the official ones we’d never get near anyway. But I got contacts. Soon as we figure out where we are, I’ll get us outta here, okay?”

  I nodded. I was grateful for Ray’s former occupation, which had involved a fair amount of smuggling into the fey lands. If I had to be stuck here with anyone, I was glad it was him.

  He smiled as if he’d heard that, which perhaps he had. “Look, I’m gonna go get a fish and some firewood. You want anything else?”

  I frowned. “Shouldn’t we move on before making camp? Put some distance between us and the fey?”

  Ray shook his head. “It’s gonna be dark before long. That’s rule number four: never travel in Faerie at night. It’s dangerous enough in the daytime.”

  I absorbed that, and my stomach growled, as if placing an order. “Another fish, then?”

  “Another fish it is.” He arched an eyebrow. “Don’t wander off.”

  I gazed after him, wondering if that had been a joke.

  Ray sloshed back into the stream, but the area nearby was rocky and the water turbulent. He eventually ventured further away, where a bend in the river and some trees mostly hid him from sight. I would have been more concerned about that, but he was a master vampire. He could take care of himself as well as hear me if I called out.

  And I could hear him curs
ing in between dives, which made me smile.

  After a while, I started looking through the waterlogged blanket of items that I had taken out of the capsule. I opened up the soggy knots and spread the fabric out to dry. I put the contents on the other side of me and took stock.

  There were the four blood bags, which had surprisingly remained intact. There was the mirror, which had not, but I had the flint and striker so that did not matter. There was a small bundle of kindling, which seemed odd with how heavily forested this area was—until I remembered Ray’s comment about the trees.

  I gazed at the ones across the river, but they were so thick that I could not tell if anyone, or anything, gazed back. They had huge, old, wizened trunks, like the last stretch of woodland I’d seen, most of them topped by massive canopies of dark green leaves. There was a scattering of yellow tops among the group as well, one that was violently red, and another that was vividly purple.

  The more colorful ones explained the varicolored leaves that floated gently downstream, and had collected near the waterline. They were all different sizes and shapes, some spotted and speckled with age, others still bright and vibrant. I couldn’t name all of the species, but some were oak and a few looked like maple.

  If there was anything odd about the trees, other than their size, I couldn’t tell. Although occasionally one would shiver slightly as if in a breeze, while the surrounding forest stayed still. I slowly laid the sticks out to dry, still watching them, and wondered if it would be taken as an offense if we actually built a fire.

  And then wondered at finding myself in a place where that was a reasonable question to have.

  I went back to exploring our cache.

  There was the small bag of emergency food, which was nuts and some odd, orange colored, dried fruit. There was the canteen-like container of something that was definitely not water, as I had first assumed. I sniffed it, and then tried a minute drop on the end of my tongue.

  Fey wine.

  And it was fresh. Like everything else in the cache, it had been put there relatively recently. As if someone else had discovered the capsule and did their best to hide it, but also used it on occasion, for what I did not know.