Roadside Magic

by Lilith Saintcrow

  Silence. Even the faraway urban blur of traffic faded. A faint soundless wind began, and in the distance, the first high ultrasonic thrill of a huntwhistle rose.

  GOD’S HOUSE

  37

  Father Ernest McKenzie had once been a boxer, and he could, he supposed, still slug a sinner if need be. He’d thought about it when he realized there was someone else in the church this morning. Who knows what had alerted him—a faint scuffling noise, the warmth of another breathing body, or perhaps he was going crazy. But when you spent so many hours in a building, you got a sense of its fullness, and its emptiness, too.

  He had almost called the police, too, but then . . . well, it was God’s house, wasn’t it? If someone would steal from God, there was likely to be a damn good reason, and one old, asthmatic priest was not hero material.

  What the intruder didn’t know was that there was a second entrance, and even a man as large as the good Father assigned to this slowly dying parish could creep silently into the choirloft. It was there he heard their voices in the afternoon—a man and a woman. Most of what they said was nonsense, of course, but the tones—soft, caring, a pretty contralto voice and a man’s baritone—oh, the tones reminded him of so much. Like Amelia, who could have had him instead of God, if she’d accepted his ring. But she hadn’t, and the polio took her, and a few years later he was ordained. Surely the Blessed Virgin would forgive a poor sinner who prayed to Her but saw a dead woman’s face in Her place?

  “I would do anything for you,” the man said, quiet as if he were in the confessional, and it sounded true. You could tell, after a while, what truth sounded like—or you thought you could, in those close confines.

  The rest of it was . . . odd. He didn’t dare peek through the screens, knowing the choirloft had a few squeaky boards in its floor. He stood in the door and strained his ears; it sounded like they were on the run. Criminals, perhaps . . . but that was God’s business, wasn’t it? Or the Devil’s. Either way, not Father McKenzie’s.

  He retreated softly as they did, taking the back passages until he could slip out through the locked southern door, and he skirted the entire front of the church to give them time. His heart beat, fast and thin, as he tried not to hurry down the gravel path at the side. The prayers became audible as he approached the side door in the laurels, but he didn’t look. Let him imagine them, both young, the man and the woman relying on each other in an uncertain world. How had they slipped through locked doors? Who knew? He would call a locksmith tomorrow morning.

  Or maybe not. It was God’s house, not his. Surely the Lord would keep the locks or not, as it suited him.

  The good Father did, however, lock the parsonage doors and made sure every window was locked as well. That done, he retreated to his bedroom window, and with the lights off he could see two shadows in the graveyard, leaning on each other. The smaller shadow left the taller one and walked to the chainlink fence. Halted. There were no graves along that strip—maybe the smaller shape had bolt cutters, and the cost of repairing the fence would no doubt make little difference to God, but Father McKenzie was just a sinner, and he had just started to berate himself for not calling the police, because even if it was God’s house McKenzie was the steward and a good steward was responsible . . .

  The fear began. It crawled down Ernest McKenzie’s back, a cold prickling sweat, his useless balls drawing up under his skivvies and his hands beginning to shake. Was it delayed reaction, or—

  A foxfire glimmer in the wastefield beyond the fence. That land nominally belonged to Our Lady of Perpetual Heart, but even the faithful were choosing cemeteries over the hallowed earth now. The Father gripped the windowsill, watching the shimmer coalesce. It was a cold glow, and he remembered the stories they had scared one another with in summer camp. Corpseglow and will o’wisps, ghost tumbleweeds and pale riders, childhood fears crowding rank and thick through the cracking carapace of adulthood.

  “Hail Mary,” his dry lips whispered, “full of grace. Look over this sinner, please. Look over this sinner.”

  A shadow in the glow, a wrongness, and he went to his knees in front of the window, his heart thunder-straining. He rested his sweating forehead against the sill, and even if it was God’s house, even if he had offered sanctuary and a hot meal, he knew he would not be opening his doors this night. He squeezed his eyes shut, but he could still see the corpseglow. Was it his sins coming for him? Had they been demons, thumbing their nose at God, hiding in his very church?

  “Hail Mary, full of grace . . . pray for this sinner, now and at the hour of . . .”

  The glow burned behind his eyelids. Ernest McKenzie thought of Amelia, her buckteeth and fair blond face, her faded gingham dress and the torrid, hot-biscuit odor of her sweat, and he wept. His heart kept hammering, filling his ears and throat and wrists, and he spilled over onto the floor, his head hitting hardwood with a faraway thunk.

  There was one mercy, probably from whomever he prayed to. The heart attack was swift, and he felt no pain, sliding quickly from his large mortal shell.

  His last, semiconscious thought was of the space between Amelia’s neck and her shoulder, a tender hollow he had always wanted to kiss . . .

  LITTLE DOVE

  38

  A single point of greenish foxfire, at the height of a tall rider. The darkness closed around it, and her breath puffed out in a white cloud. Sere winter grass, just barely greening underneath its cold-blasted coat, flattened and flash-froze as the clawed hooves of a creature from the black-sanded shores touching Unwinter’s ash-choked country spread against a cushion of screaming, frigid air.

  The light shivered over a high-crowned helm, over the spikes of armored shoulders, down the tattered, thick velvet of a heartsblood cloak, the red so deep it was almost black. Under the helm, two vicious, bloodred sparks; the sable armor flowed with him as Unwinter tightened his gauntleted fists, each one bearing an extra finger, each finger bearing extra joints. Dwarf-made and beautiful, the blackened metal ran with chill brilliance as the un-horse, a night-mare birthed from the Dreaming Sea and grown large on choice meats and struggling prey, caracoled with beautiful, awful grace.

  The hounds came next, the mucus-yellow lamps of their eyes firing first, their bodies piling through the rift in the Veil Unwinter had torn. Should she feel special, because he’d appeared as soon as the words left her mouth? For once, a fullblood highborn had done the bidding of a Half.

  Don’t get cocky. Her mouth was dry. She kept breathing, four in, four out, watching those cold gleams above the helm’s visor. The reins, neatly dressed, hung with that same heartsblood velvet; the destrier’s caparison was pretty enough, she supposed, if you hadn’t ever seen the knights of Summer go riding on a moonlit evening, over the rolling hills on a snow-white path.

  All the same, there was a certain grace in the refusal to sugar the deadliness, to put a candy shell upon his cruelty.

  The metal under her fingers burned. Enough cold iron to keep the hounds back, and the consecration, though weakening here at the edge of the graveyard, was still solid enough to hold an Unseelie at bay.

  Even this one.

  Unwinter’s head lifted slightly. A faint noise behind Robin—she suppressed a sigh of irritation. Would the man never listen?

  “Little dove.” A deep voice, its edges sharp-cold enough to numb while they sliced. Like a clear-running Arctic stream, jagged rocks along the bottom. “You are foolhardy, to invoke me thus.”

  I hope not. “Milord. I am grateful for your company.”

  “Little liar.” A slight note of amusement, perhaps. “I abide by your father’s terms.”

  For a lunatic moment she thought he meant Daddy Snowe. Then she remembered Puck, standing on the concrete at the edge of Amberline Park, and her own betrayal of Summer.

  Could you call it betrayal, though? There had been Sean, the changeling child begged as a boon, and stolen from her as well, encased in amber and shattered
on the marble floor. Sean was dead, and it was Summer’s fault—except, deep down, Robin knew it was her own, as well. Just one more day, just let me keep him one more day.

  Well, she had, one day too long. Now there was the bitter price to pay, over and over, for the rest of the life she was scrambling so hard to retain.

  “I have something that will interest you, milord.” Very careful, her hand knotted in the fence though the metal threatened to ice itself to her skin. “You are a fair and generous lord, I have heard, and I would ask—”

  “You want the Half hiding behind you not to burn, little dove. It is not so hard to guess.” A low, grinding chuckle. “What will you give me in exchange, Ragged?”

  “She’ll give you this, Harne of Unwinter,” Jeremiah Gallow said from behind her. He was much closer now. “Your Horn, in exchange for your protection of the Ragged. In every possible way, with all standard and extraordinary provisions, for eternity.”

  A long silence. Ragged’s fingers tingled. Tucked in the pipes, a secret cargo, lay another thing she could trade. Was Gallow silly or feverish enough to think it would be that easy?

  “And what of yourself, Gallow-my-glass? You challenged me to a duel. Dare you decline now?”

  “Oh no.” Gallow actually laughed, a short, bitter sound. He sounded, in fact, almost exactly like Crenn the assassin. “I shall fight you, and welcome. Will you give your word, Unwinter?”

  The bloody glimmers in the helm’s depths narrowed slightly. “The Ragged is welcome in my dominions. Those who hold fealty to me shall extend her welcome, and protect such a precious bauble.”

  “Why have your hounds been hunting her?”

  “Where else shall I find my challenger, but by dogging his lady’s footsteps? Come now.” The sparks under his rimed helm intensified. The hounds wove about his destrier’s feet as the nightmare-beast pawed. A chunk of frozen sod lifted. “I long to test your mettle again, Armormaster. Did you find her embraces palled, and sought one closer your station?”

  The way he said her made the word a curse, and there was no question of whom he meant. Just as, when Summer said him when she spoke of her erstwhile lord, there was none.

  “No more than you did, sirrah.” Gallow’s hand closed around Robin’s shoulder, fever-warm, slightly sweating. She almost gasped—it was madness to speak this way to Unwinter. Her knees were suspiciously rubbery.

  Silence greeted this sally. The destrier pawed again, and the hounds darted forward, a living, liquid wave. The chainlink snapped, crackling as sidhe flesh touched threads tainted with cold iron, and Gallow’s hand became a vise, dragging her away.

  “Hasty, hasty,” Gallow said as the hounds squealed, cringing back and smoking.

  “You cannot stay there forever.” Unwinter, equally fey.

  “STOP!” Robin yelled, and the song trembled under the surface of the word. The chainlink rattled again, flushing with gold for a brief moment, and the squealing intensified. She shook Gallow’s hand from her shoulder, and clutched her fists in the long, draggled velvet. Who was the fortune-teller who had worn this coat before her?

  I hope she had better luck, whoever she was. She cleared her throat, inhaled—and Unwinter’s destrier stepped mincingly aside. Perhaps the song had hurt him, last time. “I would trade too, Unwinter.”

  “Careful, little dove.” Unwinter pulled the reins tight, and the destrier’s neck arched painfully. “You amuse me, but my patience grows thin.”

  “What would you give me, Unwinter, for the cure to the plague? And for knowledge I hold of its cursed source?”

  For now she knew, beyond a doubt, precisely who had loosed the blackboil upon the sidhe. Had Summer tried one of the ampoules yet?

  “Robin?” Jeremiah’s whisper, hot and fierce, in her ear.

  Unwinter considered her. Her knees were definitely trembling now. To throw away such an advantage, to let one such as this know what she carried . . .

  Who was mad, now? They were all moontouched.

  A low groaning sound rose. The chain rattled, invisible hands pulling at it. It wasn’t her knees.

  “Give me the thing about his neck, little dove, and I shall honor you—”

  Whatever the lord of the Hunt wished to honor her with remained unspoken. The ground tilted, and Robin screamed, a short curlew cry flaring with desperate gold. Jeremiah’s own yell, rougher and less sonorous, rose, too. The stone walls holding the graveyard in quivered, jelly-shaken, and the chainlink rattled venomously. Solid earth fell away underfoot, cracks widening in the graveyard’s surface, a crazyquilt of crevices. Headstones tilted, Robin’s shoes scrabbled for purchase as she leapt, the chantments Morische the Cobbler had wedded to them snapping and crackling as they fought gravity itself. Earth crumbling, the stink of ground hallowed by dead and blessing rising—the nightmare of every sidhe, mortal clay suddenly animate again, and hungry for revenge against its tormenters.

  More noise, over the groaning of riven earth. Battle-cries, the clashing of sword, shield, and lance. Elfhorses and Unseelie steeds trumpeting, familiar barking and howling, snapping and growling. Summer knights? Attacking here? How did they—

  Robin fell into blackness, and fell deeper. Every solidity vanished, and she barely felt the small, horn-hard hands catching her, slowing her descent. Rock groaned, cradling her, and she tumbled, breathless, through space and the Veil itself, unable even to find a four-count of air to loose the song, her only weapon.

  Her second-to-last thought was of Gallow. Had he fallen, too?

  And her last, frankly more worrisome:

  Why on earth are the dwarves interfering?

  FINDERGAST’S MERCY

  39

  Being this far underground made him . . . nervous. Their halls were beautiful, certainly. Hilzhunger’s territory was obsidian-walled, wet black stone running with its own fey light when the Veil shifted. It was an open question, whether the dwarves were truly below or just preferred close confines and their corners of the sideways realms obliged. If the sidhe had philosophers among them, they might have debated the matter endlessly. As it was, none cared enough to truly find out, and perhaps such a mystery was best left unexamined.

  Crenn rolled his shoulders back, loosening the tension, and watched Findergast bobble around the cot. Sprawled on it, Jeremiah Gallow gasped for breath, his harsh coughing echoing from the hard, glassy walls. His hair slicked to his skull, his armor’s chestpiece pushed up to show a slice of belly, his eyes closed and the fever burning in him, he looked almost mortal.

  Almost.

  Findergast had the misfortune of being beardless, but his skill as a chirurgeon more than made up for it. Dwarves could not bear to craft an ugly object, it was said, and this one’s dirty, hardened hands couldn’t bear to set a bone improperly, or allow a sickened creature to die—if it could be prevented, and more important, if he were paid well enough. The gleaming torc of soft mellow gold at his neck, worked with triskelions and hammerglyphs, marked him as one of Hilzhunger’s clan. The Red were nominally allied with Summer; the Black dwarves bowed to none but often found Unwinter more congenial to trade with.

  Summer’s habit of sending her Armormaster to fetch trinkets the dwarves did not wish overmuch to part with was perhaps responsible for some of their reticence.

  “Just look at this,” Findergast muttered. “Where does he get such marvelous poison, I’d like to know? Even that blasted boy’s isn’t as virulent.”

  Can you treat him? Crenn didn’t say it out loud. Why Summer would want him kept alive was not Alastair’s business, and in any case, could he be said to care?

  “Robiiiiin,” the man moaned, striking out with fists, feet, and weird uncoordinated grace. Findergast wove around the strikes, which were slow enough to permit such a dance.

  So he did care for something. Crenn’s smile would have been wolfish if not for the persistent unease crawling between his shoulderblades. The girl’s voice was nothing to trifle with, even when she wasn’t singing. N
ot only that, but Summer . . . well. She had been waiting for him, as if she expected he would slip through the Veil and bring her news first, instead of the girl herself.

  Bring her to me. And make certain the dwarves care for Gallow. Summer had even deigned to caress Crenn’s shoulder, and the dual shiver of loathing and curdled desire made his moss-matted hair sway. She’d laughed, the bright bell-note of a sidhe girl, but her eyes were so black, and the Jewel had flashed once, warningly.

  Whatever Summer had planned for Robin Ragged was not likely to be pleasant. Another thing Crenn shouldn’t care about; it wasn’t his business.

  The dwarves had performed as promised, and Summer’s payment for the first half of their services was already being melted in their furnaces. The other half would be handed over when the poison burning through Gallow was ameliorated. Summer couldn’t be foolish enough to expect even the greatest of dwarven healers to check Unwinter’s venom. At least, not completely.

  Just like she couldn’t have sent Braghn Moran to treat with Hilzhunger; the dwarves would not let a full sidhe through their gates. Wise of them, with the plague about.

  “Good, he’s some fight left in him. Strong, very strong. Let me see, let me see.” Findergast strode to the table along one side of the low room, full of alembics, bubbling chantment-pots, vile substances in mortar and in jar, candles burning with straight, wax-white flames. The gas-blue flames under some of the bubbling glass bulbs were tiny flamesprites, crunching on tiny sipping mouthfuls of kharcoal while they performed for their host. The light ran wetly over flowing designs carved in the obsidian walls, and Crenn suppressed another shudder.

  How did they breathe down here?

  Scraping, cursing, muttering, the healer worked. Foul-smelling pastes steamed against the wound on Gallow’s side, blackening and crisping as they interacted with the clear, welling poison oozing from its seamed surface. Gallow stilled, his muttering ceased. Crenn let out a soft breath.