“Not yet,” he said. “I shall be supervising the transport and care of the Bone Harp. But make no mistake—you and I are no longer allies.” At this, he turned a dry-ice look on Caryl. She utterly wilted.
“That—seems harsh,” I said, concerned about the expression on her face.
“I will always rue what Slakeshadow did in my name to that innocent child. But Miss Vallo is a child no longer, and it took me only a few hours to realize that I had been manipulated. I must seem quite the fool to you.”
“Your Majesty, I never—” she began, her eyes filling with tears.
“Silence,” he said. “My divided nature was my undoing. I failed to remind myself that love is as much poison to my kind as fear is to yours. You would think, after everything I suffered with Fedya, I would remember.”
“I can see that you’re hurt,” I said, since Caryl seemed incapable of reply. “I’m genuinely sorry if we salted old wounds. But we’re still on the same side here, aren’t we? My priority is to prevent a crisis in Arcadia, and preferably without devastating it by sealing all its magic away.”
The king was still looking at Caryl. The softness that usually blunted his edges when he looked at her was gone. She saw the change too, and she looked pale to the point of fainting.
“Please forgive me, Your Majesty,” she said.
“Of course I forgive you,” he said, colder than ever. “You are what Slakeshadow made you. But there are only so many times that a reasonable man can make the same mistake. Farewell.”
I stared after him as he ascended the stairs.
“Drama king,” said Claybriar scornfully. “What did all that even mean?”
“I’m not entirely sure,” I said. “You okay, Caryl?” Since she didn’t have Elliott out, I risked a gentle pat on the shoulder. She drew away from me subtly, but noticeably enough that I pulled my hand back.
“I’m fine,” she said, wiping at her eyes. “It’s my fault. I have neglected and manipulated him by turns—I suppose even an immortal has limited patience.”
“I’m sorry,” I said quietly. “I’ve been where you are right now. More times than I can count.” Claybriar was watching me like a hawk, so I turned back to him. “Are you going to be safe at this meeting with your nemesis?” I asked him. “I know I at least won’t get eaten, but I worry about bringing you into range of those teeth.”
Claybriar tipped his head. “Huh. You’re right; he can’t eat you.”
“I’m honestly more worried I’ll stumble into important spells somewhere along the way and screw them up.”
“I can help,” said Claybriar. “There’s some really nice areas, pure wilderness, untouched by spellwork. Give me some time to work out a route and I’ll get us there safely.”
“Is this a date? If so it’s an incredibly crappy one.”
“I don’t know; a scenic suicide mission sounds pretty romantic to me.”
“I’m not going to let anything happen to you, Clay. If Throebrand so much as licks his lips in your direction he’s going to be choking on iron.”
“I love you,” said Claybriar.
He just . . . said it. He made it sound so natural, so free of angst. As though it were nothing to be ashamed of, nothing with repercussions, nothing I was even supposed to answer. He just felt it, and said it, and he was already walking up the stairs.
I looked at Caryl. Her eyes were wide.
“Well,” she said quietly, maybe bitterly. “You’re a very lucky woman.”
I don’t know what made me do what I did next. Damned Borderline impulses, they’re like grenades whose pins fall out at random and you have to decide on the spot whether to blow yourself up or someone else. In this case I lobbed the thing at both of us by moving in to kiss her.
I stopped just in time, but she kept standing there, looking at me. Very still, her wide gray-hazel eyes just a hand’s span from mine.
“I dare you,” she said in a strange tone.
So I kissed her. Quickly, almost vindictively, fingertips resting for just a moment at the back of her neck. And then I turned and hobbled up the stairs, not looking back at her, already hating myself. I barely made it to the couch before everything buckled.
Claybriar sat next to me. “You okay?”
“Not really.”
“What’s the matter?”
I already knew I wasn’t going to tell him.
“Just—Inaya won’t let me quit,” I babbled. “It was rough today. I’m still shaky. What Dr. Davis would call ‘emotionally vulnerable.’ ”
“Do you need anything?”
“I need to figure out how to plan this meeting with Prince Fettershock around work and therapy. Ugh. This isn’t going to be good, Clay. I don’t have time to fall apart right now. The things I do when I get like this—”
“Like jump off buildings?”
“No. No, never again. But I have other ways of destroying myself. Don’t let me, okay? Keep an eye on me. Lash me to the mast.”
His gloved hand found just the right spot between my shoulder blades, moved gently back and forth. “I’m here,” he said. “I’ll hold you together better than all the steel screws in the universe. But if you’re not up for this meeting with the man-eating monster, I’d understand. Maybe I can take care of it on my own.”
“You think I want to miss a chance to face down a giant monster that’s afraid to eat me? Not a chance. In fact, I think that’s exactly what I need right now. I’ll make it work tomorrow. Somehow.”
• • •
I’d run through several scenarios of what the Unseelie King’s seventeen-year-old son might look like, but none of them remotely resembled the person who waited for us the next afternoon in a dry, pleasant little cave an hour’s walk from the Arcadia side of the Gate. The young prince could just as easily have been an Asian-American kid plucked straight off the streets of L.A.
His sneakers were red and orange; his asymmetrical bangs were dyed navy blue at the fringes. Everything else he wore was black. He was crouched on a red-gold rock at around my eye level, illuminated by a natural skylight in the cavern, with a huge burlap sack lying on the ground underneath him. When we entered, he began to speak in what I eventually recognized as fast, accented English. Not British; Chinese, maybe?
It was a struggle just to be mentally present, much less adapt to his speech patterns. Negotiating with Inaya to leave work early had been ugly, and unless everything here went like clockwork I still wasn’t sure that I’d make it back to the real world in time to see Dr. Davis.
“You’re the queen’s champion,” Prince Fettershock was saying to Claybriar when my brain finally caught up.
“That’s right,” Claybriar said.
The prince stabbed a finger at me. He had the same slender, beautiful hands as his father, which, after a moment, I realized was exceedingly weird.
“And you’re Ironbones. Cool. I hardly ever see other Echoes together. My Echo is in graduate school for architecture. You’ve not heard of him yet, but you will. I’m Shock, or that’s what I go by in Hong Kong. Good to meet you.”
“Are you—human?” I said, baffled.
“Not yet,” he said. “This is my facade. Do you like it? I made it myself; it’s one of my talents. I made one for my father as well.”
“That explains a lot.”
“Well he can’t visit Los Angeles looking like some nineteenth-century Russian.”
“What do you mean you’re not human yet?”
“I’m stuck at Court for another year; the sidhe have borrowed this ‘age of majority’ nonsense from humans, and so I don’t get to decide anything about my own life even though I have more brains than most of these politicians put together. Where is the monster?”
“Throebrand?” I said. “I don’t know. Stuck in traffic?”
“My father would not understand that joke.”
“Your father doesn’t understand a lot of things.”
“True. Would you like to see the dog?”
“Uh�
��okay.”
Shock hopped down off his perch and opened the bag, hauling out what looked for all the world like a massive, recently-dead Irish setter.
“I love big dogs,” he said, giving the huge limp body a hug, then giving its fur sweeping strokes of his graceful hand. “I can’t have one in my Earth apartment, unfortunately. This was so much fun to work on. Setters are not normally over thirty kil—uh, seventy pounds or so. This one is around, mmm, ninety? I don’t think I could get away with a bigger one, and I’m not skilled with wolfhounds. Also I thought he would like the fur. He is red, correct? The manticore?”
“Very,” I said. I was fighting a sudden sadness; the chatty kid reminded me way too much of Teo.
“So once he shows up I will cast a spell to link this body to his soul—we are assuming he has one, right?—and when I do that the dog will disappear. Or at least it will look like that; it will really be hidden somewhere else on the v-axis. It will switch with the manticore body automatically when he goes through the Gate.”
“Why is your facade still active?” I said. “You’re in Arcadia. Shouldn’t you be reverting to your fey form?”
“I spend far too much time in your world,” he said. “I’ve managed to attend the Hong Kong International School for two years now, using only seasonal breaks to return to Arcadia. The Project shouldn’t let me, but it’s like they’re afraid of making me angry. So I have a weak link to my fey body; sometimes it takes days for me to change back. You should be happy I haven’t; the real me is hideous.”
“What an awful thing to say about yourself.”
“Thank you, Mother,” he said. “Just kidding; my mother would never have said things like that. She was too busy cutting up babies. Good riddance to all this, honestly. I wish my eighteenth birthday would come faster.”
“If you’re leaving when you reach majority,” I said, “who’s going to be king after your father?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “Father can have another child, or hog the throne forever. Not my problem.”
“You are not at all what I expected. Your father described you—a little differently.”
“I guess fey are allowed to lie, as long as it’s to themselves.” He stopped, and for a moment I saw a hint of the maturity his father had mentioned, a brief calm in his eyes. “I guess you must think Father is a bad person,” he said. “Humans think that about all Unseelie. But honestly he’s just broken; he’s seen too much, and there’s too much pressure on him. I look at him and I—I don’t want to end up like that.”
“Can’t say I blame you,” I said.
“You know,” Shock said, “you’re not so bad.”
“You were expecting something different?”
“Maybe,” he said. “Father made it sound like—”
I never got to find out what Winterglass made me sound like, because the air suddenly vibrated with a familiar coughing, brassy roar.
“Here comes our monster,” said Shock. Then he yelled something in the Unseelie tongue, heading for the mouth of the cave.
“Throebrand speaks English, you know.”
Shock stopped in his tracks, then swiveled on his sneakers to face me again. “Are you kidding?”
“Your dad didn’t tell you?”
“Not even a hint.”
“Why am I not surprised.” I sighed deeply.
Throebrand approached the mouth of the cave and loomed just outside it. It wasn’t a huge opening, and with him standing in front of it, he entirely blocked our view of the desert outside.
“You don’t actually want me to go in there, do you?” the manticore rumbled, tail lashing back and forth.
“Don’t like confined spaces?” I said, willing my body not to panic at the sight of the massive predator.
“I was thinking of you,” he said. “If I step in there, I’ll be the cork in a bottle.”
“Wow, it does speak English,” breathed Shock. “Like, TV English.”
“I’m fine with you staying outside,” I said. “Throebrand, this is Prince—uh, this is Shock. That dead dog on the ground over there is apparently your shiny new Los Angeles body.”
“Kind of small, isn’t it?”
“I’m afraid they don’t make dogs your size,” I said. “Not outside of hell, anyway.”
“Fine, fine,” said the manticore in his distant-thunder voice. “Going to be weird looking up at you people though.”
Shock rubbed his hands together, all business, and launched into a rapid-fire orientation speech.
“Okay, now, you were supposed to undergo some training. But we don’t have time to go through all of it. Given the body, I suggest a leash. Leather only. Avoid contact with car exteriors, tools, anything with iron or steel. Aluminum’s okay but you can’t always tell what’s what by looking. So if it’s metal, avoid it. Don’t take him on an escalator or allow him to walk over a grating; we can’t put him in rubber soled shoes. If you forget for a second it’s no matter; just move away from whatever metal you touched. Humans will forget what they saw all on their own, if it’s quick enough.”
“Why are you addressing this whole speech to her?” growled Throebrand. “I’m not an actual dog.”
Shock turned to Throebrand, not missing a beat. “Give yourself twelve to twenty-four hours to get used to operating this body. Maybe more, since it’s so different from yours.”
“And so much smaller. I want to emphasize smaller.”
Shock cracked his knuckles. “Are you ready?”
“Ready as I’ll ever be,” said Throebrand. “Dog me.”
29
When we returned through the Gate with a staggering, panicked, drunk-looking Irish setter, Phil pointedly ignored us. He just sat there at his desk in the tower room, filling out paperwork.
“You’re going to tattle on us, aren’t you,” I said.
“Right,” Phil said bitterly. “So you can tell Caryl I was the leak, and she can give me spleen cancer. I’m staying the fuck out of this. Not even looking.”
I turned back to Claybriar. “I’m not going to be much help with the—dog,” I said, “since I can’t touch him, and I can understand why it’s awkward to put him in your care. Maybe we should take him to Tjuan?”
“Sure,” Claybriar said. “But I’d like to keep an eye on him too, since it’s my job to keep people safe from him. I’ll stay in one of the empty rooms here till this is sorted out.”
Throebrand slipped, hitting his chin on the floor. “Fuck,” he said.
“Gah!” I took a step back. “Oh my God, you can still talk? Don’t do that.”
Throebrand grunted, and tried to get up, but his paws slipped out from under him again on the polished hardwood floor. Splat.
“You might have to carry him,” I said to Claybriar, and winced at the look he gave me.
The queen’s champion reluctantly heaved his nemesis off the floor and headed for the stairs. I lingered for a moment, watching Phil’s back and trying to figure out some way of getting through to him, but finally decided that it was pointless.
I also realized that the real reason for my hesitation was that I didn’t want to go where logic told me I needed to go next. Unfortunately, I didn’t have a lot of choice in the matter.
Caryl’s nose was buried in a copy of Rainbow Valley when I arrived. For a moment I thought that she, like Phil, was simply going to pretend I wasn’t there. On the off chance that she was absorbed in her reading, I stood politely and waited for her to notice me. Eventually, she closed the book and looked up at me but didn’t stand. She also didn’t summon Elliott.
“Hello,” she said cautiously, her posture tense with expectation. “Do you have news, or—?”
“News,” I said. Her posture loosened a little; did I detect a hint of disappointment?
“Go on then,” she said, and wrapped her arms around herself. Her teeth chattered slightly.
“Are you cold?”
“No.”
“Caryl—I’m sorry. About—”
“It’s all right. I’m the one who should apologize.”
“What?”
“I goaded you,” she said. “I know you think of me as a victim, but you forget that I am extremely intelligent, and that I have been studying you since before I hired you. I impulsively attempted to—provoke a response, and it worked.”
Of all the conversations we could be having about this, this was not the one I’d been expecting.
“So,” I said with a trace of irritation. “You think this is a sitcom, where people kiss and then just kind of say ‘oops’ and move on? As far as I’m concerned, you’re my goddamned boss. Everything we’re doing here is about trying to reinstate you. And you’re telling me right now that you intentionally sexually harassed me?”
She looked suddenly fretful, and I regretted my harshness. I wanted to ask her to summon Elliott, but I realized that I was starting to use the familiar as a crutch even more than she was. They were her feelings; she should be the one to choose whether or not to feel them.
“I didn’t think it through,” she said. “I’m still trying to learn how to function without Elliott.”
“I wasn’t exactly blameless here either,” I said. “No one twisted my arm. But we have got to figure out a way to work together without this being a source of—whatever.” I gestured vaguely.
“What exactly would you like to do about it?”
I looked at her, at the exposed edge of her collarbone, at the soft round edge of a breast under her gray sweater. I let her see me look. She started shivering again.
“I’m trying to get out of the habit of doing what I’d like to do,” I said.
“It seems to me that the healthiest thing would be for us to attempt an actual relationship,” she said. “There is nothing in the Project’s contract to forbid it. And so long as we manufacture obstacles for ourselves, the temptation will only be stronger.”
“And then what happens when the relationship implodes? I don’t have a convenient place to stash the pain while I continue trying to work with you.”
“It has already imploded,” said Caryl, so calm she almost sounded like her adult self. “We cannot un-ring a bell.”
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