I grimaced. What was he so happy about?
Roseus was there too, in his military best, his armor gleaming and pristine. He gave me a wry smile, and glanced at Lockwood for the briefest of moments. No hint of regret there.
A faerie with purple wings fluttered out to the middle of the pond, his wings whipping around him. He waved his hand out in front of him, and a scroll appeared in the air with a pop and a flash of bright light. He took it scroll from the air, unsealed it, and rolled it open. Adjusting his glasses on his nose, he gazed at the scroll before his voice rose to fill the meadow.
“Hear ye, hear ye! Let the proceedings of the royal courts begin!”
Chapter 33
My eyes seemed to be playing tricks on me as I watched blossoms blow in a nonexistent breeze in the Summer Court’s side of the divide. Snow nestled so softly in the branches of the tree in the Winter Court’s section of the tent.
Caught between the two, I felt the chill from Winter, the hot breeze from Summer. I stood under a sky split between overcast and grey over Unseelie territory and sunny and blue over the Seelie. There was a smell of fresh flowers out of the summery meadow, and the chilly aroma of snow and pine needles from the frigid snowfield.
And here I was, smack in the middle of this study in contrasts … and what looked like the start of a war. I just hoped it didn’t begin here, over me and my companions, though it certainly seemed it was destined to.
A rustle of movement out of the corner of my eye made me turn, and my heart did a flip as I saw Lockwood stir. He moved his head first, then his arms, ever so slowly, raising up into a sitting position. He touched his head and grimaced, as if it were screaming in pain.
I finally chanced a small look in his direction, the purple-bearded faerie still calling out names, and found that he was looking up at me.
My eyes grew wide.
His narrowed.
“Are you okay?” I said aloud, though I had no idea if he could hear me.
He nodded as the grandiose announcements of the court proceeded around us, but he cradled his head gingerly; even the slight motion of the nod seemed to bring him pain.
“Shhh,” Orianna whispered, finger across her lips. “This lot does not take kindly to being interrupted.”
I clamped my lips together to prevent myself from saying anything else. I didn’t doubt her.
“Since the Summer Court has called this meeting,” called the announcer faerie, some of pomp and circumstance done, “they will speak first.” He bowed to Summer.
The Queen of Summer smoothed her skirts as she stood, a kind smile on her face, but a nasty glint in her eye.
“My fellow fae—” she barely got out before the Winter Queen stood up across the gap between them. The Summer Queen’s expression darkened, her face twisting as her opposite number flapped her wings and rose a few feet above the Unseelie platform. “Yes, Queen Pruina?”
“I have no stomach for Seelie dissembling today, Ignes,” the Winter Queen said. There was not a trace of amusement to be found anywhere on her face, and she stared, impatience clear, at her Summer counterpart. “Let us speak plainly for once.”
“I see no reason why protocol cannot be observed—” the Summer Queen said.
“Because you have invaded our borders,” Pruina said. “Because you have slaughtered our people, burned their homesteads, seized our lands—need I go on?”
“Your provocations forced our hand,” Ignes said, the Summer Queen’s shoulders moving up in a light shrug. She was smiling now, though faintly. “We can hardly be expected to stand by while you—”
“We have done nothing to you!” Pruina said, rising higher on the flap of her wings. There was a cold blue magic radiating out from her now, a corona of cyan energy that reminded me of her eyes.
“Oh, yes, Winter is always innocent of any wrongdoing,” Ignes said with a little giggle. “I forgot.”
“Winter is always guilty of being murderous wretches,” came a voice from below the Summer dais. I recognized it, though I hadn’t heard it since the hospital.
Calvor.
Master Calvor had shoved his way to stand beside the dais, and now he rose to just a foot or so lower than the Summer royals. He nodded at Ignes, and she deigned to acknowledge him with a nod in return, as though giving him leave to speak. He turned his attention back to the Winter Court, and his eyes were glowing with a hot rage of his own.
“No one here knows better than I what Winter stands for.” Calvor drew every word out, a little dribble of rage-drool slipping down out of the corner of his mouth. “Lies. Dishonesty. You stand here in the presence of our great and gracious queen and spit in the face of her offered hand—”
“Only one person here is spitting, man, and I don’t think it’s Pruina,” I said under my breath. Orianna shushed me.
“How do you spit in the face of a hand?” Queen Pruina asked, as a ripple laughter ran through the Winter Court. “Does a hand have a face? Do you draw it on, perhaps, like a child treating their fingers as puppets?”
Calvor flushed tomato red. “You do us great dishonor, Queen of Winter—”
“You do yourself plenty of dishonor all on your own, Calvor,” Pruina said. “When your son isn’t doing it for you.”
That one landed like a lightning bolt in the middle of the assemblage. Everyone shut up in a hot second, even the queens, though Ignes turned a furious shade of red.
She was the first to break the silence. “We will find nothing but insults here,” the Summer Queen said, rising higher on her beating wings, as though she were trying to match Pruina in flying height, even across the pond. “Our satisfaction will come elsewhere, on a different field, I think.”
Lockwood beat upon the flexing, magical glass. “My queen, I beg your leave to speak—”
“Silence, liar!” she said. I could have sworn she sent a hot gust our way, one that I felt even through the magic of the glass around us. “I will not suffer to hear your insult added upon that already tasted this day.”
“How do you taste insult?” I asked. “I thought kids my age spoke funny, with all the ‘literally,’ but you guys screw with the English language in ways that would drive my teachers bananas.” This time, Orianna did not bother telling me to be quiet. The court was already erupted into a steady rumble that spread about the meadow.
Lockwood slumped back down in his cube, and I wondered what the hell was wrong with him. If he had something to say, this seemed like the time to say it.
Unless … maybe he knew that what he had to say was only going to make things worse. Though it was hard to see how that was even possible, at least from where I sat in the middle of what looked like an argument that was heading toward war.
“We have not even addressed the tyls problem,” the Summer Queen said, and a halo of sunlight shone down on my cage, forcing me to squint.
“I don’t have a tyls problem,” Pruina said, fluttering just a touch higher. What kind of a contest was this between them?
“You sent a spy into my court,” Ignes said, and I felt every eye in the place turn to me. Well, us, since I was in the cage with Orianna.
“This is awkward,” I said, as a rage erupted on the Summer side, fae showering our cage with thrown stuff. I counted a few starfruit and a sparkly shoe, all of which bounced off the magical sides of our enclosure. Thankfully. The shoe had a heckuva a heel and looked like it would have hurt.
“I’ve dealt with worse,” Orianna said. She was holding her head high … uh, literally. Damn, even I was not immune to the ways of my people.
Something heavy smacked against the magical glass and slid down. I peered at it as it rolled off and rolled into the pond. “Is that a codpiece? Because I’m not sure how you can deal with worse than having a crowd of angry fae throwing a codpiece at you.”
“We have a saying in Faerie,” Orianna said, apparently undisturbed by the codpiece chucker. “‘The truth lies in the dark.’”
“What does that even mean?”
I asked, as the Summer crowd continued to rage, though they had stopped throwing stuff.
She shrugged. “Well, it’s a pun, I think, with the ‘lies’ part.”
“Lame.”
“Other than that,” she said, “I guess it means that it’s really hard to see the truth in this place.”
I looked at Lockwood, who was slumped down in his cage, his back turned to the Summer Queen, his head down. He was studying his knees with great intensity. I thought about all the illusions, the talking around the point, the casual misdirections. Mine, in this case, but every single one of them applied to the fae I’d met since I got here. “Well, that seems pretty spot on.”
She nodded as a howl went up from Winter, the soldiers banging their weapons against each other in some sort of display designed to match the ferocity that had risen from Summer only moments ago. I’d never been in the middle of a war rally before, but it kind of struck me that it was aptly named in that it was a little like a pep rally, with less pep and more, uh … war.
My vision flickered, just as it had before, and again … I saw something way different than what was in front of me.
The sound of thunder rang, as though the Winter army had gone from hooting and jeering into becoming a living lightning storm, raging around me with skies of black-grey hanging overhead. Gone were the colorful uniforms and wings, and in their place were endless ranks of soldiers in armor—one side bright and the other side dull. No hint of camouflage like you’d see from Earth armies; these were like some garish throwback to medieval times.
But that wasn’t the worse part, the armored ranks. The worst part was that there seemed to be hundreds of thousands of them. They stayed in close ranks, their magical weapons clenched tightly in their hands, staring across the field between them, and I realized …
This was what actually lay around us. Not a court, not a pretty meadow or a frozen one. There was no sign of the queens and kings in my flicker—just two armies squaring off, with us stuck in the middle.
Everything else was just magical illusion that allowed these two opposing sides to yell at each other with the illusion of closeness. Who knew how far apart the royals actually were?
My breath came fast and heavy as I looked all around, and found my answer. In the distance, far removed from the field of battle, were the thrones of the Seelie court. Whipping around, I saw the same was true of the Unseelie court. They seemed about a mile apart, but Lockwood, Orianna and I …
We were actually on the battlefield. On the verge of war.
I blinked a few times, and I was back in the glass cage, sweating profusely.
No one seemed to notice my freaking out apart from Orianna, who was looking at me with mild alarm. “What?”
“I just figured out where we actually stand in all this.”
She raised an eyebrow. “It’s bad, isn’t it?”
“Well, it’s certainly not good …”
Somewhere in the middle of my vision, the Summer Queen had started shouting, partially drowned out by the hubbub of the armies and the fae.
“Enough,” Ignes said. “For too long we have let this drag on. No solutions are forthcoming.”
“What solution do you seek?” Pruina called back. Her voice seemed magnified, which it probably was, since she was a mile away from us. “Short of Winter ceding our entire territory to you, what would you have from us, Ignes?”
The room fell silent.
“The truth at last,” Calvor said, when the Summer Queen looked at him. “All these insults, all these provocations … they are an orchard that grew from one singular seed.” He inflated himself, and rose just a little higher. “One of your little tramps … murdered my son.”
“Is that so?” Pruina asked.
“It is so,” Calvor said. Ignes nodded along, apparently content to let him do the talking on this one.
“How do you know this?” Pruina asked.
The silence fell again. Calvor blinked a few times. Apparently, this was not the question he’d expected.
“What …” He shook his head, as though trying to clear out a particularly hazy thought. “What do you mean? How do we know? Because we know, of course—”
“How?” Pruina asked again.
“You insult us again,” Ignes said, cheeks reddening.
“No,” Pruina said. “I am very carefully avoiding giving insult. I am asking a question in earnest—by what means did you come to this suspicion?” She flittered down, just a touch, and I wondered if she was trying to diffuse some of the anger. “And against whom do you levy your charge?”
“Against one of your subjects,” Calvor said, and he rose, along with his voice, suggesting some sort of aggression or anger coming with his movement. “Some little forest trash—”
“A name?” Pruina asked. “You have one, I presume, since you accuse?”
“Gretha, I believe it was,” Calvor said, reddening just a little more. “A forest nymph of some sort.”
“Now, this is interesting,” Pruina said. “For I have spoken to this Gretha … and she does suggest murder.” The Queen of Winter’s eyes flashed an icy blue. “She suggests … she defended herself against assault by the Master’s son—”
The Summer side erupted again, and this time a volley of stuff that seemed way worse than fruit and a shoe (but not as bad as a codpiece) showered down on the Winter troops. It was a curious thing, that Summer had brought what amounted to an angry mob in their glamour, while Winter had brought soldiers. I’d seen to the heart of it, and they were both obviously troops, but that they portrayed them so differently …
Well, it was curious.
The Summer Queen raised her hands and the mob of disguised troops settled. “More Winter lies. The word of a murderer held up as truth? I should not be surprised at this, coming from your court—and I am not.” Her eyes glowed with malice, lips a thin line of distaste.
“If by your odd, Summer reckoning you mean ‘truth,’ I should not be surprised, were I you,” Queen Pruina said. “The truth, so long excluded from the hearing of the Summer Court, must have the strangest ring to it when it does find its way in. But yes, we only have the testimony of the girl who committed the act …” Pruina smiled slowly, thinly, “… and your paladin who witnessed it.”
Another shock of silence rocked the would-be battlefield.
That was how Lockwood was involved.
That was why he had avoided Calvor like he had at the hospital.
But why would witnessing an event like that cause them to send him into exile? Something didn’t add up.
“There will be no resolution here, my Queen,” Master Calvor said, looking to Ignes. “There is nothing to be gained by parlaying with those who would insult us, would lie to our faces, would impugn—”
“I’m not impugning anything,” Pruina said, “merely suggesting you could listen to your own loyal paladin—”
“You speak true, Master Calvor,” Queen Ignes said, floating a little higher. Her wings shone with a subtle silver gleam as they fluttered in the summer sun. “Our satisfaction will be gained not through talk …” Her face hardened, eyes flashing a dark angry color. “… But through action alone.” She straightened up. “Let us commence.”
“Oh, no,” I muttered under my breath. I hadn’t seen a flicker, but somehow I knew what was going on beneath all the illusions right now.
The battlefield … the one we were standing right in the middle of … the one that had been at relative peace only a moment earlier …
Was about to become the center of a war.
Chapter 34
The charge of the armies against each other should have been louder, I would have thought, after the sounds of thunder that had rocked me before we’d even begun. The Summer army surged over the pond, and it rippled out of existence, replaced by ground where a thousand boots tread as the mob of spectators turned into a colorful, angry army of Seelie. I still couldn’t see the armor that I’d noted in the flicker, but they were mov
ing forward in a disciplined movement now, all the chairs cast aside as though they’d never even been there, and more of them swelling from beyond the trees that surrounded the meadow.
“Uh oh,” Orianna muttered as the Summer army swarmed past. Winter had girded itself, its soldiers planting themselves in place. The snows appeared to melt as the Seelie moved forth, as though the scenery were the most dramatic pronouncement of how the battle was unfolding. Snow giving way to grass was like a visual cue for what was happening around us, the front line of the Summer armies colliding with the Unseelie defenders in a magnificent clash.
I couldn’t see all that well, but there was no missing the flashes of silver blood that appeared as army met army. My earlier question about whether Orianna would bleed gold was put to rest; it was all silver, everywhere, on all of the fae, regardless of their court of allegiance.
We were well behind the front rank of the battle now, the Summer army pushing Winter back as the meadow grew and the snowfield shrank. The clangor and chaos was scary as hell for me, the shouts and screams of battle like nothing I’d ever seen before, but the line of Unseelie held, rising up three and four ranks high as Summer soldiers took wing and started to try and fly over. They met in a great clash of sides, and soon enough I couldn’t see the front of the battle.
A bright blast of green streaked over my cage, and the fae of Summer swept out of the way in a circle without even seeing it. It passed through their front, striking Winter soldiers in a blast that forced me to look away from the brightness. It was so intense, but when I looked back, the ranks had closed again, and I could not tell if anyone had been killed by it.
I couldn’t be sure, but it looked like it had come from where the Summer Queen floated, glaring at the battle ahead. But … she was a mile away, wasn’t she? Had she really just thrown a spell from that far back?
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