by Skye Allen
The door was hanging open. I hauled myself upright on the doorframe, and then I was outside the room. Outside!
I took a deep celebratory breath and smelled a burning-oil stench that made my eyes water. Yellow smoke billowed from the end of the hall. I could just make out the shape of a person in the cloud, running in my direction, and then the person was in full view, and then it was Nicky. Nicky. Here. She shouted, “Right! On your right! Duck!”
A ball hurtled out of the yellow cloud and dive-bombed the Woodcutter’s head. This time his scream was more pain than surprise. The ball hovered near his face, and I saw a blur of wings. The bird dove in again and again, and the man uncovered his bloody eyes to wave blindly in the air.
And past him, in my peripheral vision, a dead-eyed girl holding a candle peeled away from the wall and glided toward us. Her movement was a snake’s, swift and smooth. The ball of fear in my gut hardened to lead.
It all happened in seconds. Nicky gestured that way, and we pelted down the corridor, away from the smoke and the gray man. I was conscious of peaks of light as we passed each candle, and the jangle of metal somewhere on Nicky’s clothes with each thudding step. My breath burned.
The hallway dead-ended in a wall, burned black halfway down its timbered height, and with a window that showed our reflection. I was chubby, gasping for air, messy pink hair creating aerodynamic drag.
Nicky slapped at the air beside her until she hit my hand. “Ready?” she asked. We were about ten feet from the window. I risked a look at her and saw the same little-kid exhilaration I’d seen on her face in the Realm the first night.
“For what?”
“We gotta go through.” And she sprinted into the window and leaped. My knee thumped on the sill as she hauled me up. The bird—oh, that’s Blossom—sped past my hair, and the air thrummed like a helicopter, and then we were outside.
Chapter 8
“WHAT THE hell? Where are we?” I said when I could speak. It was completely dark wherever we were. I turned around, but there was no building in any direction. The air smelled like bruised grass and the same toxic smoke as inside, fainter now as I caught my breath. Had we somehow traveled away from the theater? I reached into my bag for my phone. I should have tried to call Laura again from the Winter Court. Not that I’d had the chance.
“Back in the real world. Are you okay?” Nicky whispered the last few words forcefully, nose to nose. Intense eye contact with the girl who broke my heart. My eyes found the dim light that must be from a streetlight somewhere, and I saw that the top layer of skin was ripped off in a square patch on her temple. Soot was streaked low on one cheek, and tiny black dots peppered her forehead. The skin of her neck should have been shiny with perspiration, where it disappeared into a scarf, but it wasn’t. I could feel moisture still pooling at my waist and drying on my top lip. I guess elves don’t sweat. She’s not even out of breath. My fingertips slid on the keypad of my phone as I tried to speed-dial three.
“What did they do to you?” she persisted. I stuck my free hand into my hair to realign my part and came away with crisp flakes of wallpaper. She seized my arm below the elbow and turned it over in her hands. “Something happened here.” She traced my skin, not quite touching.
“Nothing. The Woodcutter. He grabbed me and—nothing. He glued my arms down for a while but I got… free.” And I still have no clue how.
Two rings. You better pick up, piano player.
“Yeah, I can see that.” She glanced up at me, brown eyes wide. “Magic leaves traces. I can feel it more than see it. It’s like a heat pattern. And that wasn’t the Woodcutter. That was just the Ice Lady’s muscle.”
Not the Woodcutter? I wanted to ask, but Laura answered this time. “What?” was her annoyed greeting.
“Hey. You’re there. Why didn’t you pick up before?” Please don’t be locked up somewhere. Please be okay.
“I told you, I’m with Saori at Professor Hill’s until late. We have chamber. Didn’t you see my note?” She’s all right. She was never at the Winter Court tonight. Relief sifted down through my body like snow and calmed everything.
“I’m not home,” I said.
“It’s late. You’re supposed to call me. I’m coming. It’s my sister. Mom’s been a bitch about making us call.” That must have been to her friends.
“Okay, I’m going.”
“Wait, Jo. I’m crashing here. It’s all the way in Half Moon Bay, and we have a coaching first thing tomorrow, so….”
“Cool,” I said, and she hung up.
So she wouldn’t be home tonight. I considered how I felt about being in the house alone. Maybe I could take Neil’s mom up on her standing invitation and sleep on their couch tonight.
I heard a breathy voice giggling behind me and turned around to find Blossom pulling me into a rosemary-scented bear hug. “You’re a champion! And your sister, she’s in a safe place?”
“With Professor Hill. Am I glad you’re on my side. Thanks for coming for me,” I said to her pale cotton-candy hair. Scratchy lace on her shoulder tickled under my chin. I laughed unsteadily. I felt wobbly as the fear and adrenaline tapered off.
That and the nearness of Nicky. The girl I wasn’t going to speak to ever again, even if she did just pull me out of a burning building. I tried to summon my indignation at being used. Lying elf. Look at her. Of course she has a girlfriend. Or twelve. I turned my back on the two elves and sat on the damp moss to pick splinters out of my socks.
Blossom was beside me in a swift second. “That was some nasty scene back there. Are you breathing?” She laid a glitter-manicured hand between her high breasts.
Dark eyes were the only thing she had in common with Nicky. I looked at the smooth field of her cheeks framed by white-blonde waves, the feathery eyebrows, and the bow of her mouth. “Yeah.” I sighed out loud to prove it. My sister was safe. I could breathe now. “So the Winter Queen, she’s not going to come here?”
“She is likely licking her wounds. The Lady of Winter and mine, the Summer Queen, can travel to your world, but it is not as easy for them to pass as mortal.”
I looked around for landmarks, since we were back in the real world, but all I saw were woods and the lumpy outline of something that could be a boulder, lit by greater-urban-area nighttime lighting. “She can send her guys out to make trouble, though. They can get around without being noticed so much, right?” I said.
Blossom nodded. “That’s right. Now I need to know. What did they do to you?”
I told her about my interview with the Winter Queen and my time in the locked dressing room. When I got to the part where the man I now knew was not the Woodcutter pulled a knife on me, she put both arms around my shoulders and said, “Oh, horrible. Oh, none of this was intended.”
My sweat had cooled to clamminess. I stuffed my hands in my hoodie pockets and hunched up my knees. I kneaded my question in my mind until it was formed enough to speak. “Listen… I need to know about this war. If I’m going to be—coin… and if my sister…. I need to know how to….” My throat closed as the aftershock of my night hit me and rolled, a slow quake of fear and relief that it was over.
Except that it wasn’t. “How to stop it,” I finished. The words came out in a wheeze, like trying to talk when you’re choking.
“We owe you an explanation. One that should come from the Lady, but she is not here.” Blossom’s wispy voice seemed to firm up as she spoke.
“Aren’t you her… right-hand woman?”
She nodded and tossed a fistful of empty air down into the dark ground at our feet. There was a wet hissing sound, and a hand-sized flame sprang up. I stared as it grew to campfire size and filled the air with its smell. “I serve as an ambassador at times, together with Timothy Desroches. But you have met his brother,” she exclaimed. She peered at me for confirmation.
“He was almost my brother-in-law. My sister was going to marry him.”
“Pretty Peg. In a way, she was one source of this present strife
. It did not sit well with the Lady that Jerome chose a mortal to be his heart’s home. That… disagreement… opened fissures among my people, where we had thought there were solid walls.” She spoke in the measured way Nicky did when she told a story about the Folk.
Nicky was walking a wide circle from one edge of the darkness to the other. I made out a stand of redwoods where she stood now, bending to pick something up. Nicky rescued me. She didn’t have to do that. What does she want from me now? But I didn’t actually feel angry, even though anger would be the normal reaction. How I felt was baffled. And grimy. And like I’d been hit by a train.
“But Jerome’s love for Pretty Peg was only the match that was tossed into the powder keg,” Blossom went on. “What do you understand about the two fey courts?”
“Um, I like the Summer one better?”
She giggled, and for a brief second she seemed like a little girl. “I can hardly blame you. I’m not sure how far back to go. The Fair Folk are very old.”
I’d guessed as much. Nicky had told me they lived forever, after all. “Why get up in the people business? Why bother with me and my sisters?”
“The Summer Folk have always loved mortals, lived alongside you, even if you haven’t always known us for what we are. Brownies who look after mortal farms—even the children’s tales about ‘fairy godmothers,’ diluted as they are, have a grain of truth at their start. Though there are those like Timothy who think now that we should draw away, after all that has happened.”
“But not you. Or the Lady. Or—” And my eyes went to Nicky, near the trees.
“I expect Dominica has her own unique interpretation of tradition, given her new alliances,” Blossom answered.
I heard Nicky protest, “Do not call me that!”
New alliances? She can’t mean me, I thought. Blossom ignored Nicky with an expression so long-suffering I wondered if they could be sisters after all, despite the fact that Nicky could pass for a twelve-year-old Mexican boy, and Blossom was a pale, bosomy pin-up girl.
“So you like us. That doesn’t seem like grounds for war.”
“Our Winter kin do not share our affection for mortals. There is a pleasure they take in cruelty.” Her long pause was full of stories she didn’t speak out loud. She went on, “The Summer Folk—think of us as your good luck. Bringing lovers together as if by chance, warding off sickness for a woman who has young daughters to raise, no matter how she might poison her own body out of sorrow.” She met my eyes. Oh. She means Mom.
“So you’re like God. Guardian angels.”
Her smooth forehead gathered into a deep braid. “No, nothing like that. What mortals choose for themselves, the danger they willingly embrace…. You are thinking of our place in the world as fate, as if mortals had no free will. That’s not at all what it is.”
“But you bring the good.”
“What good we can. And the Winter Folk bring only harm and malice.” There was labor in her voice. I wondered what she was seeing in her mind. “All that my summer kin would do to nudge good fortune toward a mortal, each of those acts could have a counterweight by the Winter fey. A cruel one of the Folk could as quickly cause you to stumble into the path of destruction and would relish the result.”
“You mean they could still push Laura under a bus? In spite of all the protection she’s supposed to have now with the binding thing and Professor Hill and all? Or Neil, or anyone? I mean, aside from this whole Woodcutter thing, what would be in it for them?”
“It is in the nature of certain fey to be cruel. There is a delight they take in it that is… a shame of all my people.”
“So you’re fighting for control of the entire world?” I said it in a terrible British accent, but Blossom didn’t laugh.
“Like every mortal civil war, we would say it is a fight for a way of life. For innocent mortals who are barely aware of us, and most are not—child, there are places in the mortal world, blighted places where a simple lack of water has led to mortal violence. Mortal illnesses that spread with no restraint. There are places that have been won by Winter. If the Lady of Ice wins this war….”
“The whole world will be like that,” I finished. I nodded and let that thought sink in. “Yeah, so, innocent mortals. What the hell is it about me and my sisters?” I had asked Nicky that question at Flea, and she hadn’t answered. I’d tried to get Jerome to talk about it, but he was lost in his cloud of regret. I wasn’t sure I could get anyone from the Realm to give me a straight answer. I dug my fingers into the moist earth beside my leg and worried a root loose.
She told me the same story Nicky had told me about Margaret, but this time there was a twist. “Pretty Peg loved our Jerome, and he loved her. No one knew how their love was to last. A mortal cannot be made truly immortal, not by any method that would have left her unscathed. But Jerome had a gift for healing, a sense for combining the right plants at the right tides, hands that could remove pain with a touch.”
“He fixed Neil’s hand when it got slammed in the car door. It was broken, and he just held it, and it was fixed,” I said.
Blossom took in a long breath. “Yes, Jerome would do that.” She held her hands together in the folds of her skirt, interlocking the white fingers as if she were holding someone else’s hand in hers. “He believed he could make your sister immortal, or at the least extend her life and youth. She was so fresh and fair, and we are vain creatures. His love was not blind to beauty. He wished her to be lovely for all her days.”
“She was,” I said. I poked the fire with my toe until I smelled scorched rubber. “She died when she was twenty-three.”
“Oak and thorn, child, do you think I did not love her too? It should not have been. Her death should not have come, not the way it did, not with the sorrow it brought.” The words tumbled out, and she moved to put her arm around me again.
I leaned against her lacy shoulder and breathed her rosemary smell. Something frozen solid in me was thawing. The feelings I was afraid of, that I didn’t know what to do with. The voices in me that said Margaret died in agony. My sister, who loved me. She’s dead. And the older, scarier voices. Mom thinks you’re ugly and fat and pointless. Dad doesn’t even want to know you. I had been moving around that iceberg ever since Dad moved out. Breathing small breaths so as not to disturb it. But something threatened to break loose now, and I hissed out air between my teeth to stop myself from crying. Now was not the time for my big messy feelings. I was overwhelmed because I’d just been in a fey jail cell and then been hauled out a window by Nicky. I was probably in shock. Keep it together, missy.
“So Jerome only liked her because she was a pretty girl?” I sounded callous. I knew it. That was better than crying. It was too soon to cry with this woman I hardly knew and had no idea if I could trust. Even though she did peck out my captor’s eyes for me. You’ll be alone tonight. I promise you can have a good cry when you’re alone.
“There’s more to that story.” Nicky was back, with a pocketful of redwood cones the size of finger joints that she tossed onto the fire to make it flare. Her voice was soft, like she was talking to someone who had just woken up. She didn’t look at me, and she stood at enough distance from the fire that I couldn’t see her face.
Blossom said, “Some in the Summer Court, some close to the Lady, believed that Jerome sought the counsel of those Winter Folk whose knowledge of the magical arts is not tempered by care for the consequences. Jerome removed himself in voluntary exile when Pretty Peg was killed. I believe he could not endure the shame of being accused day after day by his own kin.” She addressed the fire, pointy chin level with the ground, and her baby voice went hollow.
I considered what I’d just heard. “Wait a minute. Jerome went over to the bad guys to get drugs or whatever so my sister could live forever?” The sad little doctor’s face floated up in my mind, head in his hands. No wonder he felt so guilty.
“Understand that he loved her. Understand that,” Blossom said. Her white face was pinched. She
must hate all this.
“I know. But then what? Why war after that?”
“Because Jerome crossing over, even to trade, widened the doorway for other Folk to be swayed by the Winter Lady and her charms. Because that way she was able to amass a group of followers who could truly threaten the Summer Court. Before this, she and her little band were nothing but a faint needle of annoyance. An ambitious and seductive leader, yes, but do not get the wrong impression. It is the Summer Queen who is the true head of Faerie,” Blossom said.
I wondered if that part was more opinion than solid truth. Vile as they were, the Winter Court must believe they had the right to be in charge too. “So the bad guys never had an even number of people until now. Until Jerome did what he did,” I said.
“Not equal numbers yet, although we don’t know that for sure. But yeah, what started as a pesky little band of hellions is an army now.” That was Nicky.
Blossom added, “There was already unrest among the Summer Folk. There had to be soil for those toxic weeds to take root. Those who believed that we should not consort with mortals, not the way Jerome did, formed an alliance, a banner of sorts under which to march. The Folk have struggled to remain united since.”
“So my sister dies, and then you come after me? And Laura? What’s that about?” I still wanted an answer. I shredded the white root with my fingernails.
“We know what the Woodcutter’s choice was, but we cannot know why. Josy, you must hear this well. The Summer Lady’s chosen guard are the keenest minds and finest blades in the Realm. We have failed for nearly two seasons to find Pretty Peg’s killer. If he can evade us, we know he is very dangerous indeed,” Blossom said, or I thought she said “indeed,” because Nicky spoke at the same time.
“Revenge.”
They looked at each other, Nicky bending down with a question on her dirty face and then squatting on her heels on Blossom’s far side, as far away from me as she could be and still be near the fire. “And it is not all the Fair Folk who conspire against your family. Who want to hurt you because, in their eyes….”