He was blithering out loud, the way she had been in her thoughts. Driven by something she didn’t understand but didn’t question, Jan changed her stride so that they were walking next to each other, and slid her arm around his waist, tucking her thumb in the loop of his jeans.
His breathing eased, and his words slowed almost immediately, as though she had calmed him merely by the contact. She felt a smug, almost selfish sort of satisfaction in that, that she could make him feel better just by being there. And, weirdly, his reaction made her feel better, too.
They were walking uphill now, a steady rise, and the grass was taller, growing more in sparse clumps rather than the previous plush, a paler green than before. It was the first real change she could remember since they’d left the woods. She wondered if one of the black-and-dun cats were watching them somewhere.
“There are different rules there, Jan. The Court—the Unseelie Court, it’s called in fairy tales. We don’t have anything like it, our world is too fragmented, too independent. There’s no law that binds us, the way there is here.
“If she’s gone Under the Hill, I don’t know what to expect.”
Jan licked her lips, wishing she’d thought to bring a water bottle as well as her pack. She still wasn’t hungry, but her mouth was dry. “So, what do we do?”
“I don’t know.”
She sighed and leaned against him, feeling his arm come up to drape over her shoulders, holding her closer. His body was warm, his smell familiar, the thump-thump of his heart slightly faster than a human one, but just as loud and—by now—reassuring.
“The thing to remember is that preters like order. Supernaturals thrive on a bit of chaos, and naturals, humans—you roll with changes. Preters don’t. All the stories, all the legends, everything emphasizes that. They follow rules—their own rules, not ours, but they follow them.”
“And how does that help us?”
“I don’t know. Yet.”
The terrain got rougher, and his arm fell away from her, each moving under their own power. Jan missed the weight of his arm, but she had to admit that it was easier to walk. They climbed over a particularly steep rise and were confronted with one last hill ahead of them, leading to their destination. Close. So very close. She wanted to turn and run—and she wanted to get it over with already.
Besides, where would they run to?
“Do you think we’ll get out of this?” she asked.
“Kelpies are endlessly optimistic. Stupidly so, even. Just ask AJ.”
She smiled, even though he hadn’t answered her question. “I’ll do that. Soon’s we’re home.”
“You’re not going home, human.” The speaker appeared out of nowhere, making Jan yelp. Tall and skinny, like a bad wind could knock it over, the long wooden stick held in its hands suggested that they take the implied threat seriously. Two companions, likewise armed, appeared as suddenly and silently out of the grass as it had.
Of course there were guards. Why hadn’t either of them thought about there being guards? Unlike the cats, they didn’t look as if they were going to ignore the strangers, either.
Jan tensed, prepared to drop or dash as needed, if Martin started to shift or needed to fight. But when he merely stood and waited, she took his cue and studied the newcomers. Not preters. Not pretty, the way Stjerne had been, not as weirdly recognizable as not-human, but still exotic, alien. And her skin still prickled uneasily, when they came too close.
“Not human. It stinks,” one of the newcomers said. Male and young, if the voice was anything to go by, which it probably wasn’t. Otherwise, Jan couldn’t tell gender at all; their hair was short, almost in a buzz cut, their faces were different shapes but all bone-sharp and blue-white, and they wore pale-colored pants and long-sleeved vests that highlighted their height without revealing anything else.
The look of disgust on their faces was universal, though.
The first one shoved one end of the burnished wooden stick at Martin’s chest. He shifted closer to Jan, but otherwise stood there, motionless.
“A beast. Nothing to say for yourself, beast?”
“Nothing to you,” Martin said. His voice was colorless, emotionless, and Jan got a very clear sense of warning: she was to say nothing, draw no attention to herself. Let him handle this.
The second guard, the one who’d mentioned a stink, sneered. “And who, then, do you think you’re going to say it to?”
“Do you really want to take me on, children?” Martin’s voice was still flat, colorless, but there was an edge of something inside now, like the warning flash of claws. “Do you know what I am?”
Jan held her breath, expecting them to retort, maybe hit him again, but instead there was silence. She recognized it: they were trying to think of a comeback and failing.
“Do you really want to challenge me?” Martin asked again, and the claws were out and visible in his voice this time. His body shifted position slightly, his feet planted, his upper body moving forward, his shoulders and elbows back. It looked awkward to her, but the three reacted as though he’d showed them a badge and gun.
“Go on, then,” the first one said finally, letting the stick fall back into neutral stance. “Go on, and you’ll wish you’d stayed to deal with us, instead.”
Martin didn’t bother to reply but took Jan’s hand in his own—it was shaking, she noted—and walked past them without a word.
When she worked up the nerve to look back over her shoulder, they were gone.
“What were those?”
“Greensleeves.” His voice was still flat and cold.
“What?” Their vests had been sort of an off-white, the color of unbleached linen, sleeves and all.
“Greensleeves. They were human, once. A long time ago. That’s what happens to the ones that are taken, but not kept. They wander, abandoned, trying to find some point to their existence, thinking to guard their abductors, to prove their worth...but they have no worth, anymore.” He sounded as if he was retelling the end of a story, one he’d heard so many times it had become indistinguishable from history. And yet, she had seen them, and they were here, and...maybe all the stories were true, after all.
“That’s what will happen to Tyler? If we don’t rescue him?”
Martin wouldn’t look at her. “If he’s lucky.”
Jan bit her lip and started walking faster. After a minute, Martin caught up with her. A few paces on, her hand slipped into his and felt the answering, reassuring pressure.
“We can do this,” he said quietly.
“They don’t think so. They let us go because they think we’re going to fail. They couldn’t take you, but this Court can.”
The rise they’d been on gave way to a plateau, and then the next hill started. The sky above was starting to darken and clear, but the quality of light hadn’t changed—still silvery-gray, still giving her eyestrain. She scanned the grass in front of her, and something caught her eye, a faint indentation and shadow. There was not quite a path but an indication of where others had walked, leading up. People—beings—came here, on a regular enough basis to create a trail.
They were getting closer. She could feel it.
Panic hit her again, suddenly, a familiar and unwelcome companion. “I can’t do this.”
“Yes. Yes you can.” He came up behind her, put his arms around her upper body, resting his chin in her shoulder. “You can. AJ saw it in you. You can do this. For Tyler.” His breath ruffled her hair, warmed the tip of her ear.
The two of them, going up against a court of beings like the bitch? Martin’s confidence was sweet, but stupid. Jan’s eyes prickled, and her throat swelled, as though she were going to cry, but no tears came. All right. They would go, and they would do what they had to do, and then...
And nothing was certain beyond the moment. Okay, fine. Embrace the uncertainty. She hadn’t sat quietly in her apartment crying because she had been abandoned. She hadn’t hesitated, when Martin called her on her promise, pulled her int
o this impossible, terrifying, gloom-struck world.
All right, maybe she had hesitated. But she hadn’t refused.
“Everything built up can be broken down,” she said, quoting Glory on one of her more annoying motivational jags. “Everything that is broken down can be rebuilt.”
“If you’re not dead, you’re still alive,” Martin said in response.
“Let me guess: AJ.”
He just squeezed her hand once, and they walked on in silence.
Chapter 15
If time was wonky in fairyland, it got wonkier the closer you got to the Court, or whatever was lurking under that mountain, Jan decided. Time and distance seemed to be dilating, or compressing, or something, because she would have sworn they’d only taken a few steps up the last hill when the mountain was suddenly in front of them.
“So.” Jan tilted her head back to look at it. It wasn’t a pretty mountain, up close. Squat and square-shouldered, mainly rock and random trees, occasional patches of shrubs... It looked unfriendly as hell. Or maybe she was projecting. “We go up that.”
“Into it,” Martin said.
“Right.”
She waited, almost expecting some third challenge to show up, but nothing happened except the mist lifted a little more, showing more dark sky.
There was a real path now, distinct if not well-marked. They followed it, winding around boulders, rising slowly but steadily above the plains. The pale green grass gave way to dryer soil, then bare rock, as they went up into that last hill, looking for a way inside.
“There.” Jan was the one who saw it first, although it was truer to say that she felt it before she saw the opening in the side of the mountain, like a cold spot in a room. Somewhere between a cave mouth and a doorway, it was nearly ten feet high and twice as wide, banded along the edges with some kind of white metal that held its own light, like a solar lamp.
Emergency lights, like in a plane, she thought.
They stood outside the mouth and waited. Jan wasn’t sure what they were waiting for, but she counted off the breaths, making it to thirty before Martin stepped forward, and she followed.
The opening led to a cavern, smooth-walled and at least ten feet high, maybe more. There were brackets set into the wall, each of them holding a round shape that glowed softly. In that light, she could see that the cavern extended farther in, and at the far side there was a door, closer to normal-size.
“Ready?”
“That was possibly the stupidest question that has ever come out of your mouth,” she told him.
“We could just stay here. I mean, eventually we’d starve to death, or someone coming in or out would find us and probably take us to the Court, anyway, but—”
A kelpie’s danger was in his charm, his appeal. He seduced by making you want to be with him. Jan knew that and took his hand, anyway. “C’mon.”
Inside. Under-the-hill, Martin had called it. Well, there was truth in advertising, because they went down a stone path, deeper and deeper, until Jan lost all sense of how far they’d gone. The air was still fresh, so there had to be some kind of ventilation system.... But why wasn’t there anyone else? Was this the only entrance? No, there had to be others, even preters needed emergency exits, right? Maybe they were coming in the back door, and that’s why nobody was here; it wasn’t that they were waiting down there already, expecting them...
They didn’t speak, fingers twined together like Hansel and Gretel heading into the forest, her breathing harsher than his. It was too dry, the air filled with dust, and she wanted to pull out her inhaler, but it was the only one she had, and she’d been using it a lot; she had the bad feeling she might need it more, later.
Just when she thought the hallway they were in would go on forever, or maybe just dump them on the other side of the mountain without actually taking them anywhere, the path opened into another chamber. She stopped, Martin beside her, and stared. Unlike the entrance chamber, this one was three times the size of her entire apartment, and at least two stories high. A single light floated overhead, giving enough clear white light to see everything below it perfectly. The chamber was ringed with stone benches, the seats carved with so much filigree, Jan wondered if they could actually support any weight, or if they were just for show. It was the first bit of design she’d seen anywhere, almost startling after so much bare wall.
There were no doors visible in those walls, their entrance the sole archway, and Jan wondered for a moment if they’d come to a dead end. Then Martin squeezed her hand and lifted his chin to indicate a single figure standing against the far wall, where the benches turned down and blended into the stone floor.
How had she missed that? Had it even been there before?
“Go,” Martin said, his voice barely a whisper, and he let go of her hand. “Go forward, and claim what is yours.”
She swallowed hard, already missing the comfort of his touch, and stepped forward. The preter—it was an elf, of course it was an elf, no matter what they called themselves they were elves—raised its head and stared at her.
She had expected it to be attractive. She had expected it to be unnerving. She hadn’t expected it to be terrifying. Unlike the greensleeves, this creature exuded a real, if quiet, menace, even more than the bitch, because its attention was entirely focused on her.
Martin stayed behind, and for a moment she hated him intensely for abandoning her. But that wasn’t fair. He’d told her before that he couldn’t interfere, couldn’t help. He didn’t care about Tyler.
This was her battle.
She forced herself to study the preter. The high cheekbones and pale skin were utterly eclipsed by the eyes, which were round and large and a solid black, with no pupil whatsoever. Was it the lighting? Was it angry? Were their eyes always like that? It was stupid and pointless, but it was better to wonder stupid things than think about what she was about to do.
They stared at each other, Jan’s heart thumping way too fast and too loudly, until she was sure everyone under the mountain could hear it. The guard showed no surprise at her appearance; it showed no emotion at all, beyond that impersonal menace.
They liked order, patterns, rules. They were bound by tradition and didn’t deal well with surprises. Well, she was about to surprise the hell out of them. Hopefully.
“I am here to claim what is mine,” she said. Her voice did not shake, did not tremble, but carried cleanly across the space, as though she were speaking of something of no consequence.
The preter stared at her and then stepped aside, and the wall opened into an arched doorway, a twin to the one they had come in through, as though the opening had always been there.
Guess she’d said the right thing.
It took every inch of spine Jan had—and the knowledge that going back wasn’t an option—to step through that archway. She did not look back, but only hoped that Martin followed.
Inside, there was an even larger chamber, this one lit by many smaller, more blue-tinged lights, and filled with people.
No, not people, Jan corrected herself quickly. Preters. Elves. Dozens of them, some wearing bright, elaborate gowns and long vests, others in pants, shirts, and jackets that wouldn’t raise an eyebrow back home. Some were pale, others dark, but they all had that tall, unearthly grace when they moved, and they were all—now—looking at her. They had been gathered along the walls to the right and left of the doorway, and were filling in the space behind her, even as she walked forward. It was almost as though they were driving her toward the end of the room, where a huge dais was set up with chairs—and figures sitting on those chairs.
There was a sense of panic, the herd beast surrounded by predators. Jan refused it, shoving it away. She had survived the cats by being still, and they’d gotten past the greensleeves by being confident. This was just another test, and not even the scariest one.
But, oh, how she hoped that Martin had her back.
She listened, as she walked, and was reassured by the faintest echo of anothe
r set of feet behind her on the stone floor. Unless a preter was creeping behind her—don’t look, she thought, don’t look—Martin was there.
She and Martin, up against the entire—what had he called it? The Unseelie Court. They were outnumbered, something like twenty-to-one, and all she had on her was a knife she didn’t know how to use, and Martin...well, he had hooves. If the magic worked the same way on them, maybe she’d be able to attack while their eyes were closed as he shifted? But then her eyes would be closed, too....
She reached the center of the room and stopped, forcing her mind clear. She needed to be ready for what would happen, not what might. The problem was, she didn’t know what would happen, either.
A stolen knife in one pocket, inhaler in the other, a kelpie at her back, Jan lifted her head and approached the preter Court.
The dais was directly in front of her now; five long strides would take her right up to it. She stopped where she was. The dais itself was made of the same stone as the walls, smooth silvery-gray and carved like the benches out front. Apparently it could support weight. A lot of weight.
She had thought, maybe, there would be two figures seated there; instead, she counted ten, seven of them standing, the other three seated on the slender-legged, high-backed chairs that had caught her attention when she came in.
They were all still, as though caught in various poses of conversation, and they were all looking at her.
Disconcerted, Jan’s gaze flicked around the room once, taking impressions more than specific details, then she went back to the one figure that caught her eye.
Tyler, toward the back of the room, half hidden by others. How had she not known he was there, the moment she walked into the room? The preters and humans around him whispered to each other, flicking fans and raising their hands for privacy, but he watched her, his face still and tired, and she would have sworn she saw a flicker of something in his expression. Recognition? Hope?
She opened her mouth, not knowing what she planned to do—call his name, race to his side?—and then the figure in front of him shifted, spreading a deep blue cloak outward, blocking him from Jan’s view.
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