Roadside Magic

by Lilith Saintcrow

  He cocked his head and tried to sit, whacking his rear on the cabinet again. The trailer shuddered, and Robin let out another thin, half-screaming laugh. His form crackled and shimmered, and when the stretching and grinding and growling was done, he was smaller. Not by much, but just enough.

  In the end, Pepperbuckle wedged himself onto the cot with her, with a long-suffering sigh, his nose planted firmly in her chest. Robin might have minded, especially the slobber, but he was warm, and she felt curiously safe, even though the dust-wind outside whispered and slithered against every surface. The milk bottle rolled on the floor, and she fell again into a thin troubled sleep, hugging a creature who smelled not of animal but of salt-sweet child, dust, and appleblossom.

  BRIGHT NAIL

  21

  Before, there was the dreaming, the mortal world a pale baffling shadow, and the changeling moved slowly, bumping softly into objects made of insensate clay. Then came the silvery jolt as it was unmoored and the scrambling away, following a blind imperative to hide. Crouched in a storm drain, it shivered and huddled all through the rain and big skynoise, whining softly in its throat as a cold, fresh dawn brought the bad things, riding tall and straight on white, white horses.

  Later, it crept about, stuffing its mouth with leaves and twigs. So hungry. It comprehended, vaguely, that something was not right. Adrift and starving, until . . .

  The only certainty was her, the big safe, a bright nail holding the whirling together. She came, and there was something . . . familiar? Almost. Then there were bright rubies, and her voice, and the dream retreating under a glare of I, I, I.

  I AM.

  So he dozed next to the bright nail, the big safe. She muttered unhappily, tossing, and he heard more bad outside. They could not get through the winds; his nose told him so. And what a nose! The world was alive again, and hers the best scent of all, but more than that, the nose told him things.

  His ears flicked. Footsteps. He almost growled, but the wind rose again—this place didn’t like to be found. It hated breathing and heartbeats. This place was bad too, but it couldn’t hurt her.

  Not while Pepperbuckle was there.

  The wind rocked the trailer, trying to find a way in. Finally, its song lulled even the newborn creature to a deeper sleep, but his breathing warmth kept them both cradled. There is one thing the wind cannot eat, one thing it chokes on even as it rages, one thing even Summer and Unwinter merely play at.

  That softness held the bright nail and the sleeping hound, safely.

  But only for a little while.

  HOW CRAVEN

  22

  Dusk found him increasingly frantic, holding on to calm only by sheer will and practice. Robin’s scent was oddly . . . pale, as if bleached. The blood on the glass bothered him, too.

  Then the trail simply vanished, between one breath and the next.

  Jeremiah frowned. Over the fence, the trail arrowing straight for the interstate, then it dropped away. A knife-cut—one moment there, the next, gone.

  Oh, Robin. He halted, a hill of scrub brush and the weeds that rose from the scars of mortal construction sloping down to a gully. Rivulets had scarred and wintercracked the hillside; behind him were blank fences holding back manicured green lawns. Here on the very fringe of the suburbs, mortal civilization stretched and retreated as fluidly as the Veil itself.

  No suspicious overgreening here. The Seelie hadn’t come this way. Or if they had . . .

  The locket tugged against his chest, until he stepped past the vanishing point. Then it settled into a quivering, the feathers around a bird’s heart nestled in his palm. The sky was a deep peacock’s-eye blue, the sun already slipping below the horizon in a furnace of gold and indigo streaks from scudding cloud.

  Someone has her.

  She was canny, and fleet, but even a Half couldn’t step between one place and the next, cutting a scent so cleanly. A Half could use other doors into the sideways realms, sure, and much more easily than those with only a soupçon of sidhe, but to stutter-step between mortal and not-mortal so cleanly, with such effortlessness—no.

  Did she have help?

  Idiot. That house was full of mortal death, Seelie all over it. Robin didn’t linger there, she came out . . . probably fought them off, used the glass and her voice. But you need breath to sing, don’t you, and it runs out.

  She’d run a fine course, but someone had her now.

  He was too late.

  His knees threatened to give. Thunder spilled across the sky—another spring storm moving on, over fields shaking off winter’s grip. Suppertime past and bath time coming up, as they used to say at the orphanage. Why would he remember that, of all things?

  Crenn’s face, ruined as it was, took him back.

  Who? Not Unwinter, the Gates were open and the Unseelie barred between dusk and dawn. Later, in the full spate of the Queen’s season, they would be confined to the dark of the moon as well. Summer might have sent someone to drag Robin back—the Queen had promised Gallow her life, but nothing else, and he knew well enough the power of any sidhe to twist the words as it suited them.

  Just like he knew how much Summer could bend and break and still leave a victim physically whole and breathing.

  Would Summer have sent Crenn as well?

  Figure it out later. Right now, you’ve got to find a place to hide. The Unseelie are going to come out hunting; you’ve winnowed their numbers, and they’re going to guess you’re clearing Robin’s trail. Unwinter himself might come out, too, since you have his goddamn horn. He touched the lump under his shirt, the cicatrice of frost on its chain much longer than the Ragged’s locket. It never warmed up, and it never completely froze his flesh. It just . . . sat there, chill and deadly. The one weapon all sidhe feared, Seelie or not, and he had nothing to use it on. Calling the Sluagh was nothing to mess with, and you didn’t give the ravening undead a name if you wanted the prey brought back alive.

  How craven was he, thinking of hiding when Robin was . . . what? Who the hell had her? A free sidhe? Was there a bounty?

  Of course there is, you idiot. Probably a rich one, too.

  If he’d just . . . what could he have done? Grabbed her, forced her to stay? Bruised her again, maybe? Proven, once again, the he didn’t give a damn about anything but his own selfish wants?

  You let her go, you asshole, and this is what’s happened. You just stood there, because it was easy. Like usual, taking the easy way out. He hadn’t even left the safety of his house until night came, telling himself it was to find her and not because he knew they would come looking for him, too. The kind of lie you told yourself when you knew you were a selfish, nasty piece of sidhe—easy, hollow, and self-justifying.

  The sun slipped below the rim of the earth, a subtle thrill pouring through the ground under him. Jeremiah tilted his dark head, the marks on his arms writhing madly, sting-sweet.

  Unwinter had not waited for true night. He was afoot now, at the very earliest moment of dusk, and probably really pissed off.

  Great. Jeremiah rubbed at his face, sighed, and turned in a full circle, deosil-sunwise, as if to shake off bad luck. If he’d been able to find the right words, maybe Robin would have stayed. Instead, she’d simply stepped over the threshold and was gone. I am not my sister, she’d said. As if he thought she was.

  That’s exactly what you thought she was, that’s why you got involved, you sick son of a bitch.

  None of this gave him a good direction to go in. He listened, intently. No thread of silver huntwhistle piercing the failing light yet. A few stipples of lightning in the distance, he counted silently until the thunder arrived, a shadow of itself.

  What are my options? Weary from a day’s chase and needing cover and information, well . . .

  When he put it that way, an answer became apparent. It was probably the best one he was going to get.

  It was time to visit Medvedev.

  HEALED, NO
T FORGOTTEN

  23

  So warm, a dozing weight against her middle, another creature’s breathing a far-off ocean mouthing a warm, sandy beach. It was wonderful to rest here, between sleep and waking, her arms around that lovely warmth, her nose full of a salt-sweet sidhe smell holding tinges of sunlight and a mortal child’s golden hair.

  Have to get up soon. He might be hungry. Milk and honey, bread still warm from the brughnie ovens, and his little hands raised to her as she appeared.

  Wait. Sean was dead.

  So’s Daisy. Nothing left but dreams.

  Robin stirred. It wasn’t the sea, it was the wind, and the waves were dust sliding along the trailer’s outside. Like a falsewyrm’s scales along the crusted walls of its burrow—the great drakes preferred larger caves, to keep their wings from being confined. Falsewyrms, their acid-spitting cousins, merely steamed and slithered.

  The first thing she noticed was the pictures. The solemn dark-eyed girl in several of them was now tinted with fresh color, the crocheted rose at her throat blooming pink instead of sepia, its band now clearly black velvet. Faint traceries of handwriting spidered over some of the playbills and the carnival pictures. An irritated scratching skittered under her skin as she tried to decipher some of it, so she looked away.

  Pepperbuckle stretched, his legs hanging off the small bed, the paws far too large. He yawned, candy-pink tongue and triangular pearls, sharper serrations behind the blunt show-teeth. Beautiful and deadly, just like any other sidhe.

  He wasn’t a mollywog, cobbled together out of spare bits and given temporary life. Each part of him flowed into the next, whole and perfect. The blush of red to his fur-tips, more pronounced now, turned him almost the color of Robin’s hair. His skin twitched as she petted the curve of his shoulder, and he arched into her touch. His nose, cold and wet, snuffled at her other elbow, her forearm tucked under her head. A lick from that warm, velvety tongue, and she pushed herself up on her elbow, staring at her forearm. The scar was a thin white line, already fading; she traced it with a fingernail, wincing a little as it twinged. Healed, but not forgotten.

  Just like everything else.

  Pepperbuckle heaved a canine sigh and had to roll back and forth to get off the bed, shaking himself once he landed with a thud much heavier than a creature his apparent size should have been able to produce. It was a good thing his spine was sidhe-flexible; he worked himself around until he was pointed at the door, then stood, ears perked and his entire attitude one of hopeful resignation.

  What did a sidhe made in such a manner eat? Could he hunt for himself?

  Robin sighed, ran her hands back through her hair, grimacing at the grit under her fingertips. She’d find out soon enough. “Good boy.” The bottle rolled underneath the bed as her heel tapped it, and the old instinct to dive for it so the deposit could be claimed rose briefly.

  “Leave it where it is,” she murmured, and Pepperbuckle tensed. “No, it’s all right. Tell me, little one, is it safe to stick our noses out into the wind?”

  The fine, fringed tail wagged. The hound stepped to the door, sniffed gravely, and the wagging intensified.

  “You’ll have to let me pass.” She edged along his side, wary again. His ears flicked, she had to press her hip against him to get to the door. His heat was welcome, even if she shared it—feeling just how cold mortals were, even temporarily, left more of a chill than she wished to admit. “There.”

  He bolted into a hushed, windless night, and Robin peered out. The dry hiss of dust scouring the walls retreated as she hopped over the threshold, and now she could see more clearly where the hound had brought her.

  Ah. The Veil curdled thick, snagged on something old and foul. The bigtop, strips of its cover fluttering scabrous even in the stillness, was where it had occurred, and Robin peered all around her, turning sunwise in a circle. Milk-fed and rested, now, she could even sense the slipping and catching in different parts of the carnival, including a throbbing brightness not far from the sad, scoured little trailer whose door banged shut behind her, the sound of a dissatisfied trap chomping after a fleet-footed morsel.

  Pepperbuckle leapt, a crackling running through him as he took his larger size before throwing himself down in the fine floury dirt and rolling, all four legs waving exuberantly. Robin swallowed a laugh and felt under her hair with quick fingers. The two pins, the bone comb, the elflock, all there. The knife at her belt, the pipes secure in her hidden right pocket, a cheap blue plastic ring in her left-hand pocket. Her skirt, its needle-chantments renewed, was just as fine as ever.

  And just as distinctive.

  I cannot return to Summer.

  Had Puck told the Queen of her betrayal? She couldn’t risk it. And now, with Pepperbuckle . . . someone might guess. Perhaps a fullblood highborn might even sense what she had done, what a Half was never supposed to do. Robin could perhaps tread through the fringes of Summer, where none from the Court were likely to wander, but only in dire need.

  If she could not return . . . well, there were other places to wander. Perhaps she might even come to miss the greenstone towers of Summerhome or the fragrant hills. Who knew if the hound she’d named would stay at her side? She could not depend on anything or anyone. At least at Court she’d known the risks.

  She shook her head and flicked her fingers, turning widdershins once. Her hair was too distinctive, and her dress as well. She could steal mortal clothing, true, but . . .

  Pepperbuckle leapt to his feet, shaking a small thundercloud from his fur. A spatter of moisture touched Robin’s cheek; she touched it and wondered if it was raining in the mortal realms or if it was salt water. That bright, reassuring glow, at the other end of the carnival’s fairway, beckoned.

  The hound fell into step beside her as she set off for it. Halfway there she realized what it had to be, and why the new-named canine had brought her here. It must have seemed an attractive burrow indeed.

  Especially with one corner of it fastened to a fragrant, fascinating slice of a place Robin recognized, dangerous of itself and doubly dangerous now that she had to pass unremarked. But also tempting, very tempting.

  Robin glanced around. So many trailers, and Pepperbuckle could likely tell her which ones were safe. There had to be a scrap of ancient mortal cloth somewhere in this place she could use to disguise her outline.

  Then, she could step into the bright glow of the Gobelin Markets and search for more permanent camouflage.

  DOZY INTUITION

  24

  A heavy, marvelous spring rain smoked down, warm and forgiving, drenching Alastair’s hair and skin. It pattered on canvas and tassels, and its song threaded through the hawker’s cries. Soggy velvet and false-shining tinsel, steam-vapor from vats of bubbling dye or stew, gold-crusted pasties sending out a mouthwatering delicious vapor though the meat in them was likely to gripe you, and fruit had appeared under heavy awnings, piled in carts. Such fruit, too! Damsons ripe and juicy, the dark jewels of thumb-sized blackberries, cherries both blushing and sun-yellow, ice-cold melons piled high and proud, apples of every hue—a poetess had glimpsed such things once, and though her doggerel left a little to be desired in Crenn’s opinion, she’d still managed to grasp some of the flavor of the Gobelin Markets.

  The Markets were many and one, at the same time. An alley might be Morocco, bone-colored stone and desert spice, even the smoke full of sand. Another might be a winding cobblestone corner of Paris, a bookshop full of dusty tomes with a wizened wight hunching drawn-shouldered in the door, his narrow head wreathed with pipe-smoke. A bodega, reeking of exhaust and New York’s dry-oil, wet-ratfur smell, stood next to a Madrid cheese shop, wax-covered wheels and thickmilk slices glowing behind dusty sugarspun glass. A noodle stand on a Taipei sidewalk jostled a Timbuktu silk-seller’s stall, the Veil flexing and twisting in long almost-visible scarves. To wander the markets was to circumnavigate the globe in just a few steps, and those without sidhe blood would often fall, pale and gasping,
to the paving or wooden sidewalk as they sought to enforce some rhyme and reason on what their senses were telling them. Seizures were common, and unless they had a guide to take them on the less . . . active . . . routes, they might find themselves meat for the gripebelly pasties.

  If the purely mortal ever came here, they were desperate; you couldn’t find the markets without a sidhe helper. Even those with just a touch of sidhe blood would have difficulty discovering an entrance. Some said that if you could find the edge of the markets and peer under, you’d catch a glimpse of giant chicken legs carrying the whole collage across a dreaming slice of mortal earth. Who knew?

  Crenn drifted with the crowd. The long-haired, graceful ghilliedhu girls were out in force since the Gates had just been opened, craving excitement after winter’s long sleep. Other dryads, too, including the whitethorn women with their generous hips and spike-mailed hands. One of them might have been his own dam, if her tree still stood, but he was Half and easily forgotten even if he had been calved on a night of storm and groaning.

  Still, sometimes he watched them, wondering. Such questions were pointless, but could only be used against you if they were spoken.

  Dwarves cried at the corners, their metalwork bright and inviting, their filthy fingers lingering over filigree and wrapped hilts. Poisonsellers and lightfingers chanted in shadowy corners, mostly outcast drow and trow, their dark-adapted eyes luminous. The perfume of sidhe from either Court and the Free Counties as well crept into the blood and breath, a subtle exhilaration. The Enforcers, their black leather masks and long black coats functional instead of decorative, were not often seen—but they were about.

  The goblins valued peace, because it was more profitable than the alternatives.

  If you wandered long enough, the market began to make a mad manner of sense. Crenn carefully halted every so often to let the current pass him by, his target at precisely the right distance—far enough away it couldn’t sense him and hide or quiver with eagerness thinking him a danger or a client, close enough that the patchwork around it didn’t change too much, kept less fluid by his attention. No two paths through the market were the same, ever, so to thread its needle-shops you had to work on a dozy intuition, almost dream-logic but not quite, chantment dripping from every surface like water-weeds. A ram-headed bloodybone jack slid past, his horns tipped with ocher and the glint in his eye bespeaking business; once a satyr pranced his way a clip-clop, keeping to the wall opposite and watching for any dryad. They vanished as soon as the beast appeared and came back when he was out of sight, tossing their hair and waving their long fingers. Pixies sparkled, clustering rips and rents in the eddying chantment, colors breathing through them in spectrum waves.