by Ron C. Nieto
“Now now,” said Marast. “Your stalwart Kelpie is not rushing off to find you shelter either.”
No, but he’s helping me walk while you traipse about. “The Queen sent you to protect me, didn’t she?” Lily said instead. “He’s just along for the ride.”
Both faeries laughed and Troy squeezed her hip again. Lily quenched whatever feeling of pride might have dared to peek out at his approval.
“Fine, I shall find a suitable solution,” said Marast. “Keep walking toward the loch to the north-west,” he added, looking to Troy. “I shall catch up with you long before you do reach anywhere important.” With that, he glided off, the snow swallowing his passing as if he were a ghost.
Lily waited a long while before daring to speak. “I’ve been meaning to ask,” she began.
“Why is it those words never preface anything good?”
She swatted his side, and she nearly missed because of the shivers despite his standing less than a foot away. “As I was saying, I wanted to ask about this visible enemy Marast mentioned. Do you think they’ll manage to strike again, after getting caught with the glamour?”
“Undoubtedly,” he said. “Although I believe he was not referring to that particular enemy.”
Lily thought about that, stumbled, and bit her tongue on a curse. “You just gave me a hundred new questions,” she said once she regained her footing.
“Did I.” Troy smirked, and while the expression was strained, it still surprised Lily because it meant she wasn’t being tested for the umpteenth time.
“So, obviously, the glamour attack was part of an elaborate plot because elaborate plots are what faeries do,” she went on, ignoring his remark because it was the best way she knew to deal with it. “Still, now the Queen has discovered the Librarian, won’t he rat out the others?”
“It hardly is quite so easy,” Troy said. “For once, I am unsure about his part in this elaborate plot.”
“But he can’t lie.”
“Hm? Your point?”
“He confessed, and he can’t lie. What’s to be unsure about?” Lily slowed down and poked his side. “Hey, the game’s no fun if you aren’t paying attention.”
“My focus appears to be elsewhere.”
Lily gaped and stopped walking altogether. “You just lost the game,” she said.
“You just stopped,” he replied, nudging her onward. As if they were just playing a game of stating the obvious.
“Troy!” she dug her heels, refusing to move even if she couldn’t quite explain why it was so important. God knew she had apologized to him a lot of times, after all. Why should she make such a fuss about his words?
Because his words were a faerie’s, and he weighted every one before uttering it.
“Why?” she asked, at a loss. “The game is always on. You taught me that, why would you lose over something so silly?”
“Will you hold your win against me as a weapon?” And just by asking that question, he acknowledged he had given her one.
“No,” she replied because really, what else could she say?
Troy said nothing else, as if that explained everything, as if he hadn’t been berating her about choosing her words with more care ever since she met him, as if all of a sudden speaking like normal people, like people who exchanged pleasantries and showed politeness, like humans, as if that was all right. As if the fact she wouldn’t hold it over his head made it fine, when he had been forgiving her mistakes since the beginning.
“You don’t keep tabs on me either,” she said, studying him as if they’d just met. “That never kept you from berating me every time I slipped.”
“You informed me you required a break from such intensive lessons last time, if I recall.” He shrugged and offered a smirk that didn’t quite reach his eyes.
“You refused.”
“The heart of the Winter Court was not a safe place fit for leisure.”
“And this is safe?”
“Safer.” Troy shrugged again.
“Yeah.” She tucked a few wet strands of hair behind her ear and tried to wrap her mind around the conversation and its implications. She couldn’t—there were too many, and her mind shied from exploring more than half of them. Sighing, she tried to do the next best thing, which was taking it all in stride and come back to it when she was ready. “I guess death by Popsicle-ing won’t be helped by watching my tongue.” She tried to joke because it seemed to be the best way to move along and to get back to her original questions, but as soon as the words left her lips, she frowned.
“I’m not freezing anymore,” she said.
“I know.” The unusual tension, the strain about his eyes, his own admission of being focused on something else—it all hit Lily like a slap. Glamour.
“You said you couldn’t affect the cold.”
“Not your perception of it,” he admitted. “I do have a moderate control over the temperature of water, though.”
And the snow was water. They were surrounded by it, everywhere. Her jeans had become soaked while trudging through the snowdrift, but now she realized her shirt and her hair were damp as well.
Lily got a mental image of the bogeys drowning when they had attacked her, back at the beginning of it all, but she shoved it aside as quickly as it had formed. “Does it really drain you?” she asked instead.
“Yes.”
Such a simple word, so many implications. Complications.
It got swept under the rug, together with his apology, because she didn’t know how else to deal with it. She began walking again, and if she paid very close attention, she could feel a tendril of warmth, just enough to keep her teeth from chattering and her limbs from shivering, seeping under her skin.
“He did not confess,” said Troy after a while.
“What?”
“Who was not paying attention to the game this time?” He smirked, still strained but amused anyway, and pinched her side just as she had poked his.
Lily squirmed, glad for the distraction. “The Librarian? He did too.”
“He accepted responsibility. A different matter altogether.”
“I don’t see how. You’re responsible for what you do, so that means he did it.”
“The library is his realm, Lily. It is linked to him, much like the cuelebre’s cave was linked to the cuelebre’s life force. He is the Librarian because he is responsible for everything and anything that might happen within the boundaries of his library.”
Lily stopped walking again, turning to fully face Troy. “You think he was innocent? And . . . and the way the Queen worded the questions framed him?” The need she had for her trust in the Librarian not to have been misplaced might have powered the theory more than anything else, but it sounded solid once she said it aloud.
“Keep walking. Marast said we would not arrive anywhere without him and I wish to prove him wrong.” Troy steered her in the right direction once more and left his hands on her shoulders when she resumed walking. “But yes, I believe the Queen worded her questions in such a way that would force him to appear guilty. What I ignore is whether she did it because she desired to lure the real culprits into a sense of security, or because her anger demanded someone be punished regardless of actual blame.”
“Either way, she is aware of more faeries being involved in the plot and expects them to act again,” Lily mused. “Otherwise, there’d have been no reason to send us out.”
“Just so.”
“Do you know who it might have been?”
“No. It is tempting to reduce the group of suspects to those who desire to pursue the conflict with the Summer Court, since the glamour did attempt to rekindle the war, but it may have been someone better served by the status quo trying to push the competition out of the game. A daring play, but feasible.”
“There’s no way to know how long it’ll take for this to be sorted out, is there,” said Lily, thinking back to the Great Plague and the Great Fire. Perhaps this would go down in faerie history as the
Great Plot and take about as long to solve—so long that in the end the issue became moot, and nothing was ever truly decided.
Troy squeezed her shoulders and she felt a brief brush against her hair. “If the Doctor is still alive, after all the omens foretelling her death, then she is somewhere where time cannot touch her,” he whispered in her ear. “If she is alive, we will find her.”
Troy had never believed her grandmother would survive, so she appreciated his comfort, but it twisted her stomach into knots anyway, just like it did every time the topic came up. Lily knew she would find Mackenna. In fact, she knew where her grandmother was, and she only needed to stick to her plan to reach her. All would be well.
Sometimes, it was hard to find comfort in that belief.
“So, who’s the enemy Marast was referring to then?” she asked, changing subjects again.
“The one who did that.” Marast himself replied.
C H A P T E R XXIII
At first, Lily didn’t see it. The snow was everywhere, covering everything, and the tenuous warmth of Troy’s glamour dissipated the moment Marast came back, leaving heavy clothes sodden in tepid water in its wake. She didn’t know what she was looking for, so her eyes skimmed over drifts of windswept snow, patches of ice, skeletal limbs of gnarled pine trees barely breaking the surface. Then, on the second pass, she caught it. A tiny speck of green, the color out of place against the washed-out background, lying about fifty or sixty yards ahead. The terrain sloped down gently from where they stood, and it had helped further camouflage it, whatever it might have been, but Lily had it now.
“Should we approach?” she asked. She would’ve rather asked about what she was actually looking at, or who had done whatever they had done, but she had no idea how much of their conversation Marast had heard, so she did her best to appear competent.
“Yes,” said Marast, at the same time as Troy answered, “No.”
The Hunter tossed a bundle of clothing Lily’s way. “Yes, we should,” he insisted. “We need to make sure of the stakes.”
“We are too open,” countered Troy. He kept his face and tone neutral, but Lily could feel the annoyance thrumming off him. “I thought we would seek a defensible refuge, not a viper’s nest.”
The bunch of clothing was a parka, one of those things used for winter sports that acted as windbreaker, thermal insulator, and could transpire to boot. It was blue, roughly of the right size, and Lily had no idea where Marast had found it, but she chose not to look a gift horse in the mouth and slipped it on. “Is it dangerous?” She glanced between the faeries while zipping up her new coat. She was still wet, but the difference in comfort was immediate.
“It is dead,” said Marast.
“No, it is not dangerous,” agreed Troy. “However, something that is might still be lying in wait.”
“Not finding out the truth will not protect the Herald.” Marast unslung the white birch bow from his shoulder and strung it, testing the draw once before starting the descent. “Besides, it might be nothing.”
“It might even be something friendly and helpful.” Sarcasm dripped heavy from his tone, and Troy allowed Marast a few strides of advantage before moving ahead. “Stay close, Lily.” He didn’t make it a command, not one to force her will at least, but Lily practically saw him biting off the words before her True Name spilled forth.
Without comment, she began picking her way down.
When she was close enough to see what the green was, she wished they had listened to Troy. She wished she had stayed on top on the incline, refusing to move until Troy commanded her to. She wished she could unsee what she had seen.
“Good God.” She slapped a hand over her mouth because she was going to be sick. Violently so. “Oh, God. God.”
“You know, since you stand in the presence of creatures who cannot set foot in hallowed ground, I would think you would be more circumspect calling on your divinity,” Marast commented, crouching down and flecking snow off the hand.
Because it was a hand. The green tiny thing. It was a hand, fingers gnarled and nails yellowing and cracked, and it was attached to an arm, stick thin and with the consistency of a reed.
It was a hand, a color that should never have belonged to flesh.
“Oh God, what’s that?”
“Calm down, Lily,” said Troy.
“This? A hand, obviously.”
“A hand of . . . of what?” Please let it be a faerie, please let it be a faerie . . .
“Lily.”
Marast looked at her with a raised eyebrow. “You do not mean to imply that fay could degenerate into something this disgusting?”
Lily heaved.
“Calm down now, Lily Boyd,” Troy snapped, gripping her upper arms to hold her steady.
The command finally came, and it sank its teeth in Lily’s soul with vicious glee, twisting her stomach inside out and squeezing her throat, putting an end to her body’s attempts to lose her last meal. The violence of it wrenched her from Troy’s grasp and she fell, her knees sinking on the snow while a blanket of endorphins covered the horror of what she had seen.
The memory of the twisted hand was still there, but it seemed normal. Nothing out of the ordinary. Nothing to worry about.
Lily wanted to retch again, but again that forced calm stole over her, turning her labored puffs of breath into even intakes, allowing her muscles to relax and her mind to think.
She wished he had commanded coherent thought from her too, but only for a moment.
“What did it?” There really was no point in asking what exactly had been done, or to whom. It was far more important to know what had done it, and whether it would do it again. Whether it would try it on them.
“A wonderful question,” Marast said, examining the hand and arm. “Suggestions, Kelpie?”
Kelpie, not Troy. Still pissed off.
Troy unceremoniously helped Lily to stand and scoffed. “Are you not the great Royal Hunter?”
And Troy’s just as prissy. The little disagreement they had back there wasn’t so little at all, was it?
“Worry not, I plan to find out.”
“No. We are meant to remain safe, not to seek out danger. This mystery is nothing to us.”
Part of Lily wanted to agree. If something that could cause this was around, she didn’t want it to find her. But another part thought they should discover what it was and put a stop to it—if two faeries couldn’t face it, then what chance did humans have?
So she stayed silent, focusing on working her way through Troy’s command and back to her own senses. They would do as they pleased anyway, regardless of her input.
“Come, Kelpie, are you so worried your little human will cringe at your nature? By this point, she must know you are a trickster and not a fighter.” Then, Marast narrowed his eyes. “If you do know what creature we face and would rather cower from it, I am sure you will not be judged.”
That did grab Lily’s attention. Come to think of it, he didn’t say he didn’t know. “Troy?” she asked. “What did it?”
Troy spared her an annoyed glance before rounding on Marast once more. “I know no more than what you suspect. While you are free to pursue whatever game you see fit in your own time, it would be remiss to forget you act following the Queen’s bidding now.”
“And that is why the threat must be eliminated.” Marast turned from them and stalked away, arrow nocked and held loosely in his left hand. Within three strides, he had blended with the snow so perfectly that not even a ghost of his passing could be seen.
Lily waited for a few moments, enough to guess the Hunter could no longer hear them. “You know what faerie did this,” she told Troy, not quite making the statement a question.
He shook his head, more in frustration than in denial. “And so do you,” he said.
“I don’t. This feels somehow different from the glamour attack. A bit more obvious.” Which was the understatement of the century.
“You do know. The cause is furthe
r back in time. Now come. If that fool insists on minding this business, we should not stay here.” He began to walk back up the slope.
“Why not?” Lily was grateful to turn her back on the hand, and on the rest of the body that probably lied beneath the snow, but still. “Do you think it’ll attack twice at the same spot?”
“I am fairly sure it shall. She still has not strayed far from it, and nearly half a year has passed on this side of time.”
Half a year? “She?”
“Lily.” Troy sighed. “Just come. Do not stand there.”
“Why?” She crossed her arms. It probably wasn’t the best moment or even the best thing to be picking a fight over, but the truth was that she needed to remind herself she had a will of her own after he had taken control from her.
“There is ice under your feet,” he said. “I took the opportunity to read about humans while we were in the library, and I believe your physiology is not designed to survive a plunge.”
Lily frowned and looked down. She could not see the ice, but it was true that the snow mounded where Troy stood. As if the wind had caused it to drift and gather on the shores. On the other side, the expanse of white was undeniably flat and uniform. A lake? Yes, of course. The loch Marast had told them to reach before wandering off in search of her coat, when he had suspected something was up but had been unsure about what. The question was: which loch was it? It was impossible to tell, with all terrain features hidden from view.
Or was it?
A familiar prickle in the back of her neck caused goosebumps to erupt all over her skin. There was something about the hinted shoreline curve, something about the rises of snow beyond suggesting hills. It was familiar. Her eyes sought out a spot on the far side of the loch. Against the gray-white of low hanging clouds, she thought she saw a thin column of rising smoke.
“Lily!”
“This is Braeroddach Loch,” she said, turning to stare at Troy. “The cuelebre’s cave was here.” But they had killed the cuelebre. She had poisoned it with an offering of iron baked into sweet bread while trying to comply with a bargain struck with Glaistig. Information in exchange for a stone the cuelebre had guarded, a stone to heal the pixie pox attacking children and cattle in Glaistig’s lands. Now, the cuelebre was gone, and its domain was gone with it. How could it be related?