The Wingsnatchers

by Sarah Jean Horwitz

  The queen’s faeries flew over the manhole and spun around it counterclockwise, shedding faerie dust and singing their eerie song. The lid twisted off with a groan and hovered a few inches in the air. Carmer took hold of an edge, and together he and the faeries lowered it carefully to the ground.

  Carmer expected the hole beneath to be a sheer drop into darkness, but found a surprisingly smooth concrete stairway in their path instead.

  “We can’t meet in the Vallows, exactly,” Grit explained. “Official exchanges between the courts have to take place at the crossroads between realms.”

  “The crossroads between realms?” asked Carmer.

  “It’s symbolic, you imbecile,” drawled Gideon.

  “Shut it, Sharpe,” snapped Grit. “Let’s go. We don’t want to be late.”

  They left Eduardo in the care of a few of the queen’s faeries and began their descent into the tunnel.

  “What is this place?” Carmer asked Grit, but it was Gideon who answered.

  “Before the Relerail, the city tried to build an underground railway, like the Met in London,” he said as they crept down the stairs. “But Skemantis wasn’t the hub it is now even a few decades ago, and between poor planning and budget cuts, the project was abandoned. This is one of the test stations that was nearly completed.”

  They reached the bottom of the stairs and found themselves on a deserted railway platform. The faeries’ lights were barely enough to see over the edge and into the gaping tunnels running in either direction. Carmer had expected some trace of the people who once worked here to remain—some rusted construction equipment or rubbish heaps or abandoned lunch pails—but there was nothing. Even the floor was startlingly clean, as if it had been swept that day. A half-finished tile mosaic on one wall was the only indication that the station wasn’t perfectly operational.

  “We’re not alone here,” said Carmer.

  “A brilliant deduction,” sneered Gideon, but Carmer heard the fear creep into his voice.

  At Grit’s instruction they hopped down onto the track and picked their way along the rails. Thick black vines ran under their feet and along the walls, though how anything grew down here in the utter darkness, Carmer couldn’t guess. Water from the street had drained into the tunnel, and now and then they were forced to wade through inches of damp muck.

  It seemed hours later that they finally stopped at a cross section of tunnels. It was impossible to tell which ones actually led anywhere and which ones simply faded into the bedrock around them. The temperature dropped steadily. Carmer felt gooseflesh rise on his arms, and Grit drew a shuddering breath.

  Her keen ears heard the approach of the Unseelie Court before the rest of them.

  “They brought the Wild Hunt,” said Grit. For the first time, she looked actually worried.

  Then Carmer heard it—the echo of a screaming whistle, growing louder and louder. The churning, rumbling growl of an approaching engine followed. Loose pebbles rained down from the ceiling, and dust clouded the tracks ahead. A wind whipped up out of nowhere—which Carmer was quickly learning was never a good sign.

  Roaring filled Carmer’s ears. He thought it must be the noise of the train whistle and the howling wind, but then he realized it was actual howling. Battle cries, yowls, hammering fists, the clash of metal on metal, and eerie ululations all came from the unseen approaching onslaught. The mud along the tracks morphed into grasping hands, long brown fingers dripping ooze and squelching as they crawled toward the Seelie retinue. Rats the size of cats skittered in and out of the shadows. Only glimpses of their silky black backs and red eyes were visible in the faerie light.

  Carmer never saw the train round the corner, but it screeched to a stop mere feet from him and Gideon, smoking and hissing like a living, breathing monster.

  A skeletal three-eyed man in a tattered navy blue conductor’s outfit leaned out the window and grinned at them, revealing rotted yellow teeth filed into points. His cap was a dark, damp-looking red that Carmer didn’t want to think too closely about. The ghostly outlines of other men—or what looked like men—were just visible behind the cloudy windows.

  “All aboard!” he called.

  Howls, hoots, and banging noises came from inside the train.

  He pointed a papery-skinned hand with black fingernails at Gideon. “I believe one of you’s got a train to catch.”

  The hands in the mud seized Gideon by the ankles and dragged him to the ground. Gideon yelped with pain as the movement jarred his arm. His clothes were soaked through with muck in seconds.

  “Wait!” said Grit. She stood on Carmer’s shoulder. “My name is Princess Grettifrida of Oldtown Arboretum. I come as a representative of Queen—”

  “Yeah, yeah, I know who you are,” said the three-eyed man. He opened his door and swung down from the train. “Question is, why should I care? My king wants his head. Maybe his liver, too. The old man does enjoy a handsome cut of liver.”

  The conductor licked his lips with a forked tongue, but the muddy hands stopped trying to drag Gideon any farther toward the train.

  “As a Friend of the Fae, he’s entitled to a fair trial under his own court,” said Grit.

  The conductor fumbled in his coat pockets and plucked out a dingy-looking pack of cigarettes and a lighter. He took a long moment to light one and take a drag before he spoke.

  “Well, darling, you’re lookin’ at judge, jury, and executioner.”

  The shadows in the darkness hissed and giggled their approval.

  “Mister Moon, at your service.” He doffed his red cap—it was definitely stained with blood—and leaned forward in a mocking bow.

  “The Wild Hunt’s keeping up with the times, I see.” Grit nodded to the train.

  “Well, you know, lots of lost souls to gobble up on the platforms these days, even topside,” said Moon, grinning. “And a surprising number of jumpers, too.”

  “Just take me and get on with it,” spat Gideon Sharpe, huddled against the wall. “I’ve seen enough of faerie justice to know what’s in store for me.”

  “With pleasure, boy,” snarled Moon. His third eye flashed, and he looked beyond Carmer and Grit to the tunnel behind them. “But first it seems we should welcome an uninvited guest. Why don’t you come out them shadows, Mr. Archer?”

  There was a wet thud and brief sounds of a struggle before the black vines creeping along the tunnel walls dragged a nearly unrecognizable Mechanist into their midst. The Seelie faeries shrank back in alarm, and even Carmer took a step away. Titus Archer was filthy and disheveled in his Mechanist costume, ghastly cloak of faerie wings hanging half off his shoulders.

  He spotted Carmer first.

  “You!” Archer lunged toward the boy, but the vines tightened around his wrists and ankles and forced him into a kneel. The train’s light shone straight into his face. He breathed hard through his nose and squinted up at Mr. Moon’s three black-rimmed eyes.

  “This is the man you sold our secrets to?” Mr. Moon asked Gideon incredulously. “For what? A warm bed at night? Learning your ABC’s?”

  Gideon turned his head away.

  “I hate to be the one to break it to you, chap, but you’ve got pretty poor taste in father figures.”

  Carmer looked at Gideon then, and he wondered exactly how Gideon had ended up covered in cuts with his arm in a sling. Carmer had an educated guess.

  “He made me do it,” said Gideon. “He made me lead him to the faeries. He stole the Unseelie hearts that were entrusted to me, they’re on him right now—”

  “Why, you lying little—”

  SMACK. A length of train track broke off from the ground, a snapping snake of metal, and struck the Mechanist across the face. The blow sent him sprawling to the earth. When he struggled to a sitting position, blood was pouring out of his nose.

  Carmer gasped: the tracks, like much of the train, had to be made of iron, but these faeries were manipulating them all the same.

  “I would have saved all of y
ou,” Archer growled at Mr. Moon. “A new order, a new way for the fae to contribute to the world again. What are you now? Forgotten gods and dying spirits, scraping out your meager existence while you hide in the shadows.”

  “Really quite an unpleasant fellow, ain’t he?” Moon commented to Gideon. Then Moon’s eyes turned hard, and in one fluid motion he was nearly on top of the Mechanist, the human man’s chin gripped in his sharp black nails. “Did it ever occur to you, Mr. Archer,” hissed the conductor, “that some of us might prefer the dark?”

  The Mechanist’s eyes widened in fear.

  Mister Moon bent closer and flicked his forked tongue over Archer’s bleeding face. He wrenched the silver bands from Archer’s wrists and pushed him back down into the mud. Mister Moon caressed the stones—the faerie hearts, Carmer knew now—with surprising gentleness and slid them over his own bony hands.

  “It should have.” Mr. Moon patted the front of his train as if it were the nose of a faithful steed, and the engine roared to life. He snapped his fingers, and one of the train’s doors slid open. Gideon Sharpe flew through the air like a rag doll and into the car. The door slammed shut behind him.

  “What are you doing?” demanded Carmer. He ran to the window where Gideon Sharpe stood pounding on the glass as disembodied, skeletal hands grabbed at him from all sides.

  “It talks,” smirked Moon with surprise. “Oh, don’t worry about him, little Friend!” Mister Moon swung up back into the driver’s seat. The hands grabbed at Gideon’s face, his hair, his neck, until he was obscured from view and dragged back into the murky gray smoke that filled the compartment. The roaring of the engine barely covered the sound of his screams.

  Carmer banged on the window, but the mere touch of the car burned him like a brand, and he snatched his hand away.

  “He rides with the Hunt!” shouted Mister Moon.

  Battle cries, wails, and the pounding of spears and shields met his words.

  “For how long?” Grit yelled at him.

  “Until I decide he’s paid off his debts,” Moon replied with a savage grin. “LAST CALLLLLLL.” His voice boomed through the tunnel until it shook. Bits of dirt and pebbles fell down on Carmer and the faeries.

  “Carmer, run,” ordered Grit from his shoulder.

  Carmer looked to the Mechanist, who was still shackled to the tracks, struggling in vain against the viselike grip of the vines and the wires twisting themselves around him. “But —but what about him?” he asked above the din of the engine and the shrieking of the Unseelie faeries.

  “Carmer, we need to move NOW!”

  Carmer ran. His last glimpse of Titus Archer was of black vines growing out of the magician’s mouth, choking back even his screams.

  Being chased by the Wild Hunt was like being chased by a tornado. Carmer ducked into a service doorway in the nick of time. He sucked himself in, holding on to the short emergency ladder with all of his might as the train roared past. He opened his eyes, just for a split second, and thought he glimpsed a terrified face staring back at him.

  And then all was quiet. Only the scurrying of rats and the soft drip, drip, drip of dirty water disturbed the silence. The queen’s faeries’ lights shivered around Carmer’s head; they looked at him with concern, bobbing anxiously up and down.

  Carmer placed Grit safely on one of the rungs of the ladder, sank to the ground, and promptly vomited all over his shoes.

  25.

  WINGS TO FLY

  Grit sat atop the Whispering Wall and absentmindedly picked at loose pebbles with the spurs of her heels. Dusten’s saddle was in her lap, and the owl himself wasn’t too far away, happily munching on a cluster of fat worms she’d unearthed for him that morning. He deserved a treat after the upheaval of the past few days. They all did.

  She was supposed to be fixing the straps of his saddle—all that time around Carmer’s inventions had given her a few ideas for improvements—but she found her gaze wandering. For the first time, she didn’t just look beyond the wall to the South Gate and the city outside, but back into the Arboretum. It was a chilly, overcast day, but there were still people strolling through the trees, sweethearts stealing away for a moment under the kissing bridge, a group of young factory workers tossing a ball around on their lunch break. They couldn’t see the faeries that lived and breathed right beside them, but Grit saw everything: the Sprout Mothers leading fall cleanup lessons in the vegetable patch, the mice and squirrels putting the finishing touches on their homes for the winter, the water faeries tending the fountains and streams, the lamplighters resting in their glassy domes until sundown.

  Just a few days ago, Grit would have thought it impossible that her magic could one day tie them all together. Now she could feel her power coursing through her veins, connecting her to the kingdom and every faerie in it. But she was still gaining back her strength from dismantling the Hyperion. She hadn’t been able to do any magic since then, and it bothered her like an itch she couldn’t scratch.

  Grit gave up on Dusten’s saddle for the moment and set it aside. She closed her eyes and rubbed her hands together, reaching deep down for the spark that was always there, waiting to be lit. She blew on her hands and opened her palms; a small flame flickered there for a few seconds and fizzled out.

  Grit lurched forward, dizzy and tired from even that simple effort. She forced herself to take deep breaths. Dusten waddled over to her and nudged her gently with his beak.

  “It’s all right, Dusten,” she assured him, but she turned her face into his feathers to wipe a few tears away all the same.

  “It will come back, you know.”

  Grit’s mother was suddenly beside her, looking beautiful as usual in a gown of soft gray cobwebs and baby’s breath.

  “It just takes time,” said Queen Ombrienne. Her iridescent wings shimmered, even in the overcast light, in shades of brown, purple, and blue. “Your magic is incredibly powerful, Grettifrida. More so than I ever expected.”

  “So I get advice now?” scoffed Grit. “I had to figure it all out on my own, Mother. I had to bribe Free Folk to teach me. I had to catch salamanders in strangers’ fires with my bare hands, because I didn’t know how to sing to them. I spent years trying to hide what I was really good at, because nobody told me it was worth anything! A human boy saw power in me when you were too scared to let me light a single spark.”

  “And I was wrong,” admitted Ombrienne.

  Grit let go of Dusten’s feathers in surprise and stared at her.

  “You have your own unique power, Grettifrida, and I hope you continue to use it well. I will teach you what I can, if that is what you desire.” Ombrienne stepped forward and cupped her daughter’s cheek. “Without you and your knowledge of the outside world, we would have never been able to stop the Mechanist.”

  “Thank you,” said Grit stiffly, resisting the urge to duck out from under her mother’s touch. But after a few seconds, she turned away and looked out toward the South Gate. She imagined Carmer and the rest of the circus camp packing up and moving on now that the Seminal Symposium of Magickal Arts was over. He could barely speak to her when they parted the other night, after the Unseelie Court had unleashed their wrath on the Mechanist. It would be years before the next Symposium, and she wasn’t sure he would come back. Perhaps he’d had enough of the faeries of Skemantis.

  “Which is why I’ve been thinking,” continued Ombrienne, “that you should leave us for a while.”

  “What?” Grit gaped at her mother, who looked out past the Arboretum gates with a critical eye.

  “You are different from the rest of us, Grettifrida,” acknowledged the queen, “but your curiosity about the world outside these walls is what saved us all. Perhaps, in the years to come, that knowledge will be more valuable. It may even be the key to our survival.”

  Grit couldn’t believe what she was hearing.

  “So you . . . you want me to go with Carmer?”

  “Believe it or not, my dear, I want you to do what makes y
ou happy,” said Ombrienne. “If you had asked me before all of this nonsense with the Mechanist, I would have said no. But I know that you understand your responsibility to your people now. I know you will return when they have need of you.”

  “I will,” insisted Grit. She flung herself at her mother and threw her arms around the queen, taking them both by surprise. “I promise, I will. Thank you, Mother.”

  Ombrienne squeezed her daughter tightly. She stood back and placed her hands on Grit’s shoulders. “If you’re to be a woman of the road, dear, you’re going to need more dependable transportation.”

  Ombrienne waved her hand, and the mechanical wing appeared in the air before them. The queen began to sing, the same haunting melody that opened the door to Faerie, and gold sparks wove in and out of the gears and pulleys and along the paper-thin glass. The wing spun in a tiny twister of shimmering gold, the glass changing to the iridescent membrane of a real faerie wing while the metal stayed intact. The brass glinted in the sunlight.

  The wing made its way toward Grit and hovered near her back. Ombrienne’s eyes met Grit’s, awaiting her approval; Grit took a deep breath, nodded, and put her arm through the strap. There was a pulley system that extended to a knob she was meant to hold in her hand to control it, but there was no need of pulleys when the whole thing was animated by faerie magic, and it disappeared in the spinning gold sparks. An electric shudder went through her and she felt the wing connect with her back with a stinging zap of power. It burned sharply for a moment; she cried out in surprise and fell hard on her knees.

  The sparks disappeared, and the pain along with them. Grit took a shaky breath and looked over her shoulder. For the first time in her life, she saw two fluttering wings behind her.

  Ombrienne took a tentative step forward, face filled with concern. “Are you all right? I didn’t think—”

  Grit held up a hand. “Give me a minute.” She lurched to her feet, mechanical wing fluttering alongside the real one. Faerie magic alone hadn’t been enough to help her, but paired with Carmer’s model, it might just work. Grit closed her eyes, wishing as hard as she could, just daring to hope—