Behind her, the cries began.
THE HORN
36
Each version of the potential battle flowed together, narrowing toward a certain point. Beyond that, everything was murk-mist, whether death or simply confusion-flux he didn’t care to guess.
What mattered was the receding hoofbeats, bell-chiming silvershod. And her cry, rising clearly audible on the veils of evening breeze.
“I have the cure, Unwinter!”
Goddamn you, woman, just run. He braced himself, lance sweeping sideways as one of the Unseelie, a tallish knight in red perhaps thinking to make himself a name or gain some favor, pressed forward with a crystalline, curved sword upraised.
The movement should have ended with the red-armored sidhe’s swift death. Instead, there was a rumble like thunder, and the sidhe—male, broad-shouldered, helmed with pale gold chased with rubies—dropped as a marionette with cut strings would, hit the crazyquilt-cracked pavement, and began jerking as muscles spasmed helplessly. Too-thin legs clasped in clashing metal sent up tendrils of steam.
All froze as Unwinter’s displeasure congealed, and the rest of the assembled Unseelie—sneaking through cracks, hiding in corners, a fresh influx of hounds already crunching and slurping at their sun-roasted fellows—cowered.
“Now, now,” Unwinter said, the coals beneath his shadowy helm focusing on Jeremiah. “He is mine alone. Bring me back the Ragged, and a prize to any who does so.”
A scrambling in the shadows, a chittering howl, and Jeremiah moved.
Unwinter’s mailed fist had raised, and the deadly silver curve clasped in it was not a weapon. Jeremiah recognized it—how could he not? The lance screamed a high, keening cry as he finally called upon its true speed and strength.
He wanted no mistakes.
They scrabbled and ran, the Unseelie, but the far deadlier threat was the horn Unwinter was about to wind. It was one of the few things older than sidhe or Sundering, that flute-lipped instrument, and its curve was of no geometry a mortal could look upon without queasy revulsion. It was whispered that Unwinter himself had been the only sidhe to escape its deadly call since the first dawn.
To give that ancient thing a blast of living breath was to call the Wild Hunt in its full strength, both Unseelie and Sluagh—the ravening unforgiven, who could find no rest under any god or master. The smaller horn-whistles the knights carried were copies, and awful enough, their ultrasonic cries chilling every living thing, even those that could not hear it. Unwinter had not ridden the full Hunt in a few hundred years, but if he was about to now, it meant certain death.
There was no escaping the Sluagh.
The lance quivered, straining through air gone brittle-hard as glass. For a paradoxical syrup-stretching moment, brief as a blink and long enough to contain his entire life, Jeremiah Gallow thought he was too late. Airborne, the lance pulling his body along on crimson-thread strings, a sharp sweet flare of pain in his calf where one of Unwinter’s hounds had leapt at a tempting target, a coughing lion’s shout—
—and the lance’s tip grazed the ancient deadly thing, wrenching it from the plated, long-fingered fist, sending it flying.
The gasp of horror echoing from every Unseelie who had lingered to watch their lord murder him would have been amusing if he hadn’t already been straining himself in a different direction, the lance screaming with fierce joy as finally, finally its full measure was called upon.
What if it’s not enough?
The thought was there and gone in less than a heartbeat. He hit concrete, rolling, his hand flashing out and closing over something burning-cold.
Star-metal, they whispered in corners and hiding-holes. It fell, before the dawning when First Summer woke and named the trees, when Unwinter was merely a child. Some say the dwarves made it from a lump of sky-molten metal, but they deny it; they say it was already shaped when it landed, and they merely held it until the Sundering and Unwinter’s Harrowing, when he rode through Seelie and the mortal realms at will, and all barred their doors at night.
Up again, his coatsleeve scraped almost to ribbons by the pavement, the lance vanishing into the fiercely burning marks on his arms. Behind him, Unwinter’s roar of rage shivered windows, a ring of ice expanding, nipping at Gallow’s heels. Running, heart pounding, cradling ancient death against his chest, he put his head down and yelled, a rising cry of effort that weakened the high iron church gate just enough for him to burst through, metal shattering as the flash-chill turned it glass-brittle.
Lingering consecration on the church grounds would slow them, but Unwinter wouldn’t stop until he had his horn back.
Which meant Robin was safe. Or at least, safer, because Gallow was now the sidhe Unwinter would want to pursue most.
Time to think fast, Jer.
LIPS INSTEAD OF THROAT
37
Wind roared in her ears. She wrapped her fingers more firmly in the elfhorse’s mane and leaned down to make herself a smaller target. Her hand throbbed with wild sweet pain, an exquisite drawing against each nerve’s branching channel as the mane crawled into the pinpricks, hair turning to tiny greed-gulping mouths. Hot water stung from her eyes by the wind slicked her cheeks as the elf-mare neighed and turned sharply, obeying the pressure of her knees and shifting weight.
Wratton Street was busy at dusk. Horns blared, headlights glaring at the sudden appearance of a wild-haired sidhe on a white horse. Up the sidewalk, the elfhorse uneasy at the cold iron throbbing under pavement and in the canyon walls of this street, the rider’s immunity to inimical metal communicating itself through the creature but not enough. A clatter of silvershod hooves, Robin’s sharp cry as they nipped under the Metropolia Hotel’s red and white striped awning, a bank of windows suddenly full of smoky forms as the Veil quivered around them.
A hard turn, Robin’s body melded to the white mare’s. She’d never ridden a horse in her benighted mortal childhood, but Court meant palfreys and easy walkers, and she had been complimented on her pretty seat more than once, with varying degrees of innuendo. Stealing away to call an elfhorse and coax it into a moonlight ride over the scented hills or the sugar-white dunes along Summer’s half of the Dreaming Sea was one of the few things she would miss if she turned away from Court.
Or if she was banished.
The long straight shot of Santhorn, up a slight rise, would be accessible at the corner of Wratton and 8th. Just a few more blocks to go, clinging to the mare’s back, the horse’s flush deepening as its hooves pounded, chimed, rollick-and-rocking back and forth.
Silver huntwhistles pierced the deepening indigo of the sky. If she let the elfhorse have its head and reached Santhorn she stood a chance. At the crest of the hill was Amberline Park, well along with its greening because the mortal hilltop was not full-sideways to Summer’s realm; they aligned more often than not, sidhe rubbing through as a knife-edge creases taut paper.
The whistles behind her, curving forward on either side to cup her course, were a silver net as true darkness filled the city’s rivers of pavement. Even the pollution of orange streetlight painting the undersides of the clouds couldn’t alter that shadowing, a reminder of the time when mortals barred their doors at dusk and would not open them until dawn. More among them heard the sidhe-horns in those days.
Heard, heeded, and feared.
The perfect crossroads in the Marlyle residential section was far behind her now, and there were tiny flashes in her peripheral vision. What the—
They were flutterings, each one a point of foxfire. The sidewalk was no longer deserted, the elfhorse needle-threading through pockets of the Veil as the crowd thickened. More horns blared as some drivers saw her and others didn’t; there was a crunch of metal as the distraction of her appearance struck like a viper.
I am sorry for it, she thought, wishing the wind would drive the words from her head.
The firefly-dots were pixies, hop-skipping around the rents in the Veil as the horse casually flickered through real and mo
re-than-real with each step. Green, red, blue, their jewel-wings fluttering and their babble a high, excited drone through the sound of Unwinter’s pursuit. Why were they clustering about her?
Sorry for everything. For those she had just learned the names of—Panko, Sylvia. For those she had sung into death’s arms at Summer’s command—riding like this, her arm tingling before it grew numb, she heard them all. She even heard Parsifleur and Henzler, caught in webs not of their making.
Most of all, she sorrowed because she suspected she had just left Jeremiah Gallow to die at Unwinter’s dubious pleasure. He had been afoot and challenged the Unseelie King, and it was because everything Robin Ragged made the mistake of caring for withered.
Daisy. Even Mama. And the most hurtful name was also the smallest.
Sean.
Was he still awake and aware inside the amber casing? The expression of horror on his young face—what had Summer done to him before she struck, or another sidhe struck with her blessing? Did he know Robin was the reason he had been—oh, of course. Summer would not let a chance to drop that information pass.
It was, after all, what mortal playthings were for. Like Mama, abandoned with a baby when mortal summer ended. Robin, just a silent swelling inside Mama’s body, was the burden that forced Mama to turn to Daddy Snowe for help, because waiting tables, even with a breath of sidhe upon you, was not enough to feed and shelter mother and child. And Daddy Snowe, suspecting Robin wasn’t his, turned to vinegar like cheap mortal wine.
If not for Robin, Mama and Daddy Snowe might even have been happy. Maybe, just maybe, Daisy would have found a way out of the trailer park.
If not for her, Sean might have been returned to his mortal family after a year and a day, his changeling brought back and feted before it was taken to Tiend or given to the apple trees, or perhaps even wicker-burnt on the Dreaming Sea’s singing shores if Summer felt the need for spectacle instead of territory.
The huntwhistles drew closer; Robin urged the elfhorse on. How were they managing to surround her? Of course, now they would guess her destination, and if Unwinter had murdered Gallow swiftly, he would be riding in her wake as well, the ecstatic terror of his presence giving his hunters fresh strength.
The pixie-drone changed pitch, and they clustered about her. Was it merely the excitement of novelty—who had ridden openly through a mortal city in many, many years, even as the sidhe counted things? The iron, the smog, the poisoned rain—all these were deterrents, and the fullborn didn’t care to risk such things or give the mortal-Tainted pride of parade.
The pixies piped at her. Were they intending to lead her astray, or alerting Unwinter to her presence? Flashes of their fluttergauze draperies, tiny sigh-woven shifts as they darted before her, crawling over the horse’s mane, smoothing her hands with their tiny paws—three fingers and a dexterous thumb, their particular chantment soothing the numb-tingling.
Stone, I think they’re trying to help—
Hoofbeats thundering on either side, the whistles near and chilling. The trap snapped shut, but she was on its lips instead of in its throat. Pixies scattered, chime-laughing, dark wings beating around the edges of Robin’s vision. Headlamps swerving, red-jewel brake lights two close hungry eyes before the elfhorse let out a shattering neigh and compressed itself, a moment of lifting, flying as silvershod hooves smoked and crunched against a car’s roof. The drawing on Robin’s veins intensified, the night-mare seeking her immunity to cold iron as steam-roasting rose in veils, and the pixies were turning on the riders behind her, tangling hooves and tugging on clothing, biting with their tiny, fierce, wicked teeth.
Why are they helping? They have no debt to me. They’re free sidhe. This is not right.
The park’s entrance, a stone arch with perpetually open, decorative gates, loomed before her. Gravel scattered, and the elfhorse gleamed moonlit in the sudden dimness. Pressure released, easing, but the mare suddenly turned, hindquarters bunching, as a mass of pixies flew straight into its face. Rearing, Robin’s hands torn free of silver mane, its hairs slicing deep as it sought to keep her.
She tumbled through free air, hit hard. Trees danced, their branches tossing with chiming pixie laughter. A crunch in her shoulder, the world turned over again, and Robin knew no more.
GLEAM IN THE GLOAMING
38
It was a good thing the cursed sidhe speed was still with him. Scrambling and slipping across the rooftop, he leapt and dropped into a dripping, overgrown garden. It had started to rain, of course, because running from Unwinter with the freezing weight of the Horn clutched to his chest could never be easy. There was slight comfort in the fact that even though he was likely to die at the Unseelie King’s spiked gauntlets, his deed had been witnessed and would be sung of for a very long time.
That was rabbit-thought, though. He had no intention of dying.
He burst through a holly hedge, thorny leaves tearing at his coat and hair and skin. Slowed slightly, clasping the Horn to his chest and breathing in the Old Language, the thing shrinking as it took its other form. A silver medallion bounced against his chest; he put the chain over his head while running, almost tripped, hair caught in the fine links tore free of his scalp, and he dropped its burning ice down his shirt.
It hurt. The agony scorched all through him, skin in contact with something inimical, both sidhe and mortal flesh trying desperately to avoid it. He fell, rolled out of habit, and reached his feet running again, pushing the pain aside.
He was glad he’d put Daisy’s jewelry in a safe place even as he cursed himself for not hauling his bow along when he left Court. A weapon with some distance would be incredibly useful at the moment—
“Hist!” Movement in the shadows, further down the hedge he was now running parallel to. “Gallow! This way!”
His arms tingled. The lance ached to burst free, but Jeremiah denied it. “Puck!” he gasped, not breathless yet but close. The medallion against his chest was heavier than it should be, warming by too-slow degrees. “Hide! Unwinter!”
Puck fell into step behind him, running lightly on glove-shod feet. “You have made a merry mess of many plans, Armormaster. Come, this way.”
It was useless to speculate whether Goodfellow intended mischief or not. Any mischief that could be done to his pursuers was welcome, and the free sidhe seemed to have an interest in this affair. If Jeremiah could guess what it was, that was all to the better.
For right now, any aid in escaping what pursued him was to be grasped with both hands.
He followed as the boy nipped through a gate and clambered up the side of an imitation-Tudor house. Across the roof in a flash, and there was an oak tree in its backyard, a fine spreading set of branches just barely tipped with new green. Up into those branches the boy clambered, with Jeremiah right behind him.
This won’t shield us. “Goodfellow—”
“Hush.” The free sidhe tilted his sleek dark head. “You shall not be Unseelie meat tonight.”
Awful nice of you. Can’t say I want you to change your mind. But why are you doing this? “I ask the price for this aid.”
Puck’s sharp white teeth flashed as he laughed, a small whistling sound. “It is not for your sake I bestir myself. Be quiet.”
For whose sake, then? Robin’s? He swallowed dryly. Maybe the Fatherless simply wanted to pull Unwinter’s tail.
It would be just like him. A dangerous game some other sidhe would pay the price for, and mischief merry enough to make any sidhe laugh if they were not the target.
Jeremiah balanced among the branches, finding that the lightfoot had not deserted him, either. His heart thundered until he could spare the concentration to calm its pounding, gapping his mouth so he could breathe softly. Night air, full of subtle flavor—warming earth, ice and rotting things, the tang of exhaust and the blue ghost of evening rain. Tiny cold kisses on his face and hands, and he heard the huntwhistles in the distance.
Puck’s eyes glowed greenyellow, his pupils dark hourglass h
oles. The free sidhe hooked a knee over a branch and brought his hands to his mouth, a swift graceful movement. He inhaled, Jeremiah tensed…
… and the pipes, usually at Puck Goodfellow’s belt, gave a long breathy moan like a woman in love’s final throes.
It wasn’t precisely music, simply a rill like a running stream, sliding at the very edge of hearing. Jeremiah’s skin roughened with gooseflesh; he’d heard enough tales of what could happen if those pipes shrieked. The soft skimming unsound tautened into silvery loops, complex and doubling back on themselves as air pressure changed.
The temperature dropped at least five degrees, Jeremiah’s breath suddenly a plume of white vapor. Rushing and sliding in the shadows, all around the overgrown garden’s crumbling brick wall—had the whole of Unseelie come out to play in this one city tonight?
A high trilling from Puck’s pipes. It buzzed and blurred between the clamor and clatter of Unwinter’s riding. The Fatherless narrowed his burning eyes, moving with loosely fluid grace as a chill breeze mouthed the tree.
Jeremiah moved as well, riding the swaying. Just like what surfing must be like, he supposed. He and Daisy had talked idly about moving to California one day. Golden sunshine and oranges all year-round, and maybe no sidhe hiding in the shadows… but the Dreaming Sea touched all shores.
There was never any escape.
The cold eased, a little at a time. In the distance, more huntwhistles. On the other side of downtown—was that where Robin was leading them?
Puck’s music died, and the pipes dangled loosely in one brown hand. He cocked his head, yellowgreen gleams winking out as he shut his eyes and listened, the sharp points of his ears dewed with condensation, poking up through the droplet-gemmed mat of his hair. He was sweating, too.
So there was something Goodfellow feared. Or the effort had cost him much.
Trailer Park Fae Page 19