by Butcher, Jim
At my words the raven let out a croaking caw. It shook itself, bits of moldy feather drifting down, and then beat its wings a few times and settled on another branch, almost out of sight.
“Harry,” Elaine said.
“Yeah?”
“If you make any corny joke using the word ‘nevermore,’ I’m going to punch you. Do you understand me?”
“Never more,” I confirmed. Elaine rolled her eyes. Then we both started off after the raven.
It led us through the cloudy landscape, flitting silently from tree to tree. We trudged behind it until more trees began to rise in the mist ahead of us, thickening. The ground grew softer, the air more wet, cloying. The raven let out another caw, then vanished into the trees and out of sight.
I peered after it and said, “Do you see a light back there in the trees?”
“Yes. This must be the place.”
“Fine.” I started forward. Elaine caught my wrist and said in a sharp and warning tone, “Harry.”
She nodded toward a thick patch of shadows where two trees had fallen against one another. I had just begun to pick out a shape when it moved and came forward, close enough that I could make it out clearly.
The unicorn looked like a Budweiser horse, one of the huge draft beasts used for heavy labor. It had to have been eighteen hands high, maybe more. It had a broad chest, four heavy hooves, forward-pricked ears, and a long equine face.
That was where its resemblance to a Clydesdale ended.
It didn’t have a coat. It just had a smooth and slick-looking carapace, all chitinous scales and plates, mixing colors of dark green and midnight black. Its hooves were cloven and stained with old blood. One spiraling horn rose from its forehead, at least three feet long and wickedly pointed. The spirals were serrated on the edges, some of them covered with rust-brown stains. A pair of curling horns, like those of a bighorn sheep, curved around the sides of its head from the base of the horn. It didn’t have any eyes—just smooth, leathery chitin where they should have been. It tossed its head, and a mane of rotted cobwebs danced around its neck and forelegs, long and tattered as a burial shroud.
A large moth fluttered through the mist near the unicorn. The beast whirled, impossibly nimble, and lunged. Its spiral skewered the moth, and with a savage shake of its head, the unicorn threw the moth to the earth and pulverized the ground it landed on with sledgehammer blows of the blades of its hooves. It snorted after that, and then turned to pace silently back into the mist-covered trees.
Elaine’s eyes widened and she looked at me.
I glanced at her. “Unicorns,” I said. “Very dangerous. You go first.”
She arched an eyebrow.
“Maybe not,” I relented. “A guardian?”
“Obviously,” Elaine said. “How do we get past it?”
“Blow it up?”
“Tempting,” Elaine said. “But I don’t think it will make much of an impression on the Mothers if we kill their watchdog. A veil?”
I shook my head. “I don’t think unicorns rely on the normal senses. If I remember right, they sense thoughts.”
“In that case it shouldn’t notice you.”
“Hah,” I said in a monotone. “Hah-hah, ho-ho, oh my ribs. I have a better plan. I go through while you distract it.”
“With what? I’m fresh out of virginity. And that thing doesn’t look much like the unicorns I saw in Summer. It’s a lot less . . . prancy.”
“With thoughts,” I said. “They sense thoughts, and they’re attracted to purity. Your concentration was always better than mine. Theoretically, if you can keep an image in your head, it should focus on it and not you.”
“Think of a wonderful thought. Great plan, Peter Pan.”
“You have a better one?”
Elaine shook her head. “Okay. I’ll try to lead him down there.” She gestured down the line of trees. “Once I do, get moving.”
I nodded, and Elaine closed her eyes for a moment before her features smoothed over into relaxation. She started forward and into the trees, walking at a slow and measured pace.
The unicorn appeared again, ten feet in front of Elaine. The beast snorted and pawed at the earth and reared up on its hind legs, tossing its mane. Then it started forward at a slow and cautious walk.
Elaine held out her hand to it. It let out a gurgling whicker and nuzzled her palm. Still moving with dreamlike slowness, Elaine turned and began walking down the length of the lines of trees. The unicorn followed a pace or two behind her, the tip of its horn bobbing several inches above Elaine’s right shoulder.
They’d gone several paces before I saw that the plan wasn’t working. The unicorn’s body language changed. Its ears flattened back to its skull, and its feet shifted restlessly before it finally rose up on its hind hooves, preparing to lunge, with the deadly horn centered on Elaine’s back.
There wasn’t time to shout a warning. I lifted my blasting rod in my right hand, summoned the force of my will, and pushed it through the focus with a shout of“Fuego!”
Fire erupted from the tip of the rod, a scarlet ribbon of heat and flame and force that lanced out toward the unicorn. After having seen how spectacularly useful my magic wasn’t on the Ogre Grum, I didn’t want to chance another faerie beast shrugging it off. So I wasn’t shooting for the unicorn itself—but for the ground at its feet.
The blast ripped a three-foot trench in the earth, and the unicorn screamed and thrashed its head, trying to keep its balance. A normal horse would have toppled, but the unicorn somehow managed to get a couple of feet onto solid ground and hurled itself away in a forty-foot standing leap. It landed on its feet, already running, body sweeping in a circle to bring it charging toward me.
I ran for the nearest tree. The unicorn was faster, but I didn’t have far to go, and I put the trunk between us.
It didn’t slow down. Its horn slammed into the trunk of the dead tree and came through it as though it hadn’t been there. I flinched away, but not fast enough to avoid catching several flying splinters in the chest and belly, and not fast enough to avoid a nasty cut on my left arm where one of those serrated edges of the horn ripped through my shirt. The pain of the injuries registered, but only as background data. I stepped around the bole of the tree, taking my staff in both hands, and swung it as hard as I could at the delicate bones of the unicorn’s rear ankle.
Well, on a horse they’re delicate. Evidently on unicorns, they’re just a bit tender. The faerie beast let out a furious scream and twisted its body, tearing through the tree, shredding it as it whipped its horn free and whirled to orient on me. It lunged, the horn spearing toward me. I swept my staff up, a simple parryquatre , and shoved the tip out past my body while darting a pair of steps to my right, avoiding the beast’s oncoming weight. I kept going, ducking a beat before the unicorn planted its forequarters, lifted its hind, and twisted, lashing out toward my head with both rear hooves. I rolled, came up running, and ducked behind the next tree. The unicorn turned and began stalking toward me, circling the tree, foam pattering from its open mouth.
Elaine cried out, and I whipped my head around to see her lifting her right hand, the ring on it releasing a cloud of glowing motes that burst around her in a swarm. The little lights streaked toward the unicorn and gathered around it, swirling and flashing in a dazzling cloud. One of them brushed against me, and my senses abruptly went into whiteout, overwhelmed with a simple image of walking down a sidewalk in worn shoes, the sun bright overhead, a purse bumping on my hip, stomach twinging with pleasant hunger pangs, the scent of hot asphalt in my nose, children laughing and splashing somewhere nearby. A memory, something from Elaine. I staggered and pushed it away from me, regaining my senses.
The motes crowded around the unicorn, darting in to brush against it one at a time, and at each touch the faerie beast went wild. It spun and kicked and screamed and lashed out with its horn, lunging at insubstantial adversaries in wild frenzy, but all to no avail.
I looked past them to see Elaine stan
ding in place, her hand extended, her face set in an expression of concentration and strain. “Harry,” she shouted. “Go. I’ll hold it.”
I rose, heart pounding. “You got it?”
“For a little while. Just get to the Mothers,” Elaine responded.“Hurry!”
“I don’t want to leave you alone.”
A bead of sweat trickled down the side of her face. “You won’t be. When it gets loose, I’m not waiting around for it to skewer me.”
I gritted my teeth. I didn’t want to leave Elaine, but to be fair, she’d done better than I had. She stood against the unicorn still, only a dozen long strides away, her hand extended, the creature as contained as if she’d wrapped it in a net. My slender and straight and beautiful Elaine.
Memories, images washed through me, dozens of little things I’d forgotten coming back to me all at once; her laugh, quiet and wicked in the darkness; the feeling of her slender fingers slipping through mine; her face, asleep on the pillow beside me, gentle and peaceful in the morning sun.
There were many more, but I pushed them away. That had been a long time ago, and they wouldn’t mean a thing if neither of us survived the next few minutes and hours.
I turned my back on her, left her struggling against the strength of that nightmarish unicorn, and ran toward the lights in the mist.
Chapter Twenty-six
The Nevernever is a big place. In fact, it’s the biggest place. The Nevernever is what the wizards call the entirety of the realm of spirit. It isn’t a physical place, with geography and weather patterns and so on. It’s a shadow world, a magical realm, and its substance is as mutable as thought. It has a lot of names, like the Other Side and the Next World, and it contains within it just about any kind of spirit realm you can imagine, somewhere. Heaven, Hell, Olympus, Elysium, Tartarus, Gehenna—you name it, and it’s in the Nevernever somewhere. In theory, at any rate.
The parts of the Nevernever closest to the mortal world are almost completely controlled by the Sidhe. This part of the spirit realm is called Faerie, and has close ties with our own natural world. As a result, Faerie resembles the real world in a lot of ways. It is fairly permanent and unchanging, for example, and has several versions of weather. But make no mistake—it isn’t Earth. The rules of reality don’t apply as tightly as they do in our world, so Faerie can be viciously treacherous. Most who go into it never come back.
And I had a gut feeling that I was running through the heart of Faerie.
The ground sloped down and grew wetter, softer. The mist swallowed sound quickly behind me, until all I could hear was my own labored breathing. The run made my heart pound, and my wounded hand throbbed painfully. There was a certain amount of exhilaration to the movement, my limbs and muscles stretching and feeling alive after several months of disuse. I couldn’t have kept up the pace for long, but luckily I didn’t have far to go.
The lights turned out to be a pair of lit windows in a cottage that stood by itself on a slight rise of ground. Stone obelisks the size of coffins, some fallen and cracked and others still upright, stood scattered in loose rings around the mound. The raven rested on one of them, its beady eyes gleaming. It let out another croaking sound and flew through an open window of the cottage.
I stood there panting for a minute, trying to get my breath, before I walked up to the door. My flesh began to crawl with a shivering sensation. I took a step back and looked at the house. Stone walls. A thatch roof. I could smell mildew beneath an odor of fresh-baked bread. The door was made of some kind of heavy, weathered wood, and the snowflake symbol I’d seen before had been carved into it. Mother Winter, then. If she was anything like Mab, she would have the kind of power that would give any wizard the creeps. It would just hang in the air around her, like body warmth. Except that it would take a lot of body to feel its warmth through stone walls and a heavy door. Gulp.
I lifted my hand to knock, and the door swung open of its own accord, complete with a melodramatic Hammer Films whimper of rusting hinges.
A voice, little more than a creaking whisper, said, “Come in, boy. We have been expecting you.”
Double gulp. I wiped my palms on my jeans and made sure I had a good grip on both staff and rod before I stepped across the threshold and into the dim cottage.
The place was all one room. The floor was wooden, though the boards looked weathered and dry. Shelves stood against the stone walls. A loom rested in the far corner, near the fireplace, a spinning wheel beside it. Before the fireplace sat a rocking chair, occupied, squeaking as it moved. A figure sat in it, shrouded in a shawl, a hood, as though someone had animated a bundle of blankets and cloth. On the hearth above the fireplace sat several sets of teeth, more or less human-sized. One looked simple enough, all white and even. The next was rotted-looking, with chipped incisors and a broken molar. The next set had all pointed teeth, stained with bits of rusty brown and what looked like rotten bits of flesh stuck between them. The last was made out of some kind of silvery metal, shining like a sword.
“Interesting,” came the creaking voice from the creaking chair. “Most interesting. Can you feel it?”
“Uh,” I said.
From the other side of the cottage, a brisk voice tsked, and I spun to face the newcomer. Another woman, stooped with age, blew dust from a shelf and ran a cloth over it before replacing the bottles and jars. She turned and eyed me with glittering green eyes from within a weathered but rosy face. “Of course I do. The poor child. He’s walked a thorny path.” The elderly lady came to me and put her hands firmly on either side of my head, peering at either eye. “Scars here, some. Stick out your tongue, boy.”
I blinked. “Uh?”
“Stick out your tongue,” she repeated in a crisp tone. I did. She peered at my tongue and my throat and said, “Strength, though. And he can be clever, at times. It would seem your daughter chose ably.”
I closed my mouth and she released my head. “Mother Summer, I presume?”
She beamed up at me. “Yes, dear. And this is Mother Winter.” She gestured vaguely at the chair by the fire. “Don’t be offended if she doesn’t get up. It’s the wrong season, you know. Hand me that broom.”
I blinked, then reached over to pick up the ramshackle old broom with a gnarled handle and passed it to Mother Summer. The old lady took it and immediately began sweeping the dusty floor of the old cottage.
“Bah,” whispered Mother Winter. “The dust is just going to come back.”
“It’s the principle of the thing,” Summer said. “Isn’t that right, boy?”
I sneezed and mumbled something noncommittal. “Uh, pardon me, ladies. But I wondered if you could answer a few questions for me.”
Winter’s head seemed to turn slightly toward me from within her hood. Mother Summer stopped and eyed me, her grass-green eyes sparkling. “You wish answers?”
“Yes,” I said.
“How can you expect to get them,” Winter wheezed, “when you do not yet know the proper questions?”
“Uh,” I said again. Brilliance incarnate, that’s me.
Summer shook her head and said, “An exchange, then,” she said. “We will ask you a question. And for your answer, we will each give you an answer to what you seek.”
“No offense, but I didn’t come here so that you could ask me questions.”
“Are you sure?” Mother Summer asked. She swept a pile of dust past me and out the door. “How do you know you didn’t?”
Mother Winter’s rasping whisper came to me, disgusted. “She’ll prattle on all day. Answer us the questions, boy. Or get out.”
I took a deep breath. “All right,” I said. “Ask.”
Mother Winter turned back to face the fire. “Simply tell us, boy. Which is more important. The body—”
“—or the soul,” Mother Summer picked up. They both fell silent, and I felt their focus on me like the tip of a knife resting against my skin.
“I suppose that would depend on who was asking whom,” I said, finally
.
“We ask,” Winter whispered.
Summer nodded. “And we askyou .”
I thought about my words for a moment before I spoke.
I know, it shocked me too.
“Then I would say that were I old, sick, and dying, I would believe that the soul is more important. And if I was a man about to be burned at the stake in order to preserve his soul, I would believe that the body is more important.”
The words fell on a long moment of silence. I found myself shifting my feet restlessly.
“Fairly said,” Mother Winter rasped at last.
“Wise enough,” Summer agreed. “Why did you give that answer, boy?”
“Because it’s a stupid question. The answer isn’t as simple as one or the other.”
“Precisely,” Summer said. She walked to the fire and withdrew a baking sheet on a long handle. A roundish loaf of bread was on it. She set it on a rack to cool. “This child sees what she does not.”
“It is not in her nature,” Winter murmured. “She is what she is.”
Mother Summer sighed and nodded. “These are strange times.”
“Hold on,” I said. “What she are you talking about, here? It’s Maeve, isn’t it?”
Mother Winter made a quiet wheezing sound that might have been a laugh.
“I answered your questions,” I said. “So pay up.”
“Patience, boy,” Mother Summer said. She took a kettle from a hook by the fireplace and poured tea into a pair of cups. She dipped what looked like honey into each, then cream, and gave one to Mother Winter.
I waited until each of them had sipped before I said, “Right, patience expired. I can’t afford to wait. Tonight is Midsummer. Tonight the balance begins to tilt back to Winter, and Maeve is going to try to use the Stone Table to steal the Summer Knight’s mantle for keeps.”
“Indeed. Something to be prevented at all costs.” Mother Summer arched an eyebrow. “Then what is your question?”
“Who killed the Summer Knight? Who stole his mantle?”
Mother Summer gave me a disappointed glance and sipped her tea.