by Dawn Metcalf
“No,” Joy said. “You can’t—!”
“You may not threaten the graftlings in any way,” the elder satyr warned. “We will not permit it.”
Stef helped Joy to sit up, but she shoved his arm away. “She’ll still be Aniseed inside!” Joy shook her head and clawed her hands. “She tried to kill millions of people by spreading a magical poison through signaturae,” she snapped. “She tried to lead a coup against the Council! She was sentenced to death! I was there—I saw her die!”
“The one responsible for those acts has been held accountable for her crimes,” the old satyr said calmly. “Her sentence was carried out. Indeed, she died. The rules have been preserved. By our own laws, a graftling cannot be held responsible for the actions of its parent.”
Joy cupped her head in her hands and squeezed, wishing that Ink or Kurt were here. This was Aniseed before the battle on the warehouse floor, Aniseed before she fell, Aniseed now protected by the laws that she wished to break. How neat, Joy fumed. How perfectly played. Her mind reeled with revulsion, forced to admire the witch’s last loophole. How like Aniseed! Graus Claude would be impressed.
Joy’s eyes snapped open. Her head shot up.
“It has Aniseed’s memories?” Joy asked.
Dmitri stood warily near Stef. “Possibly some,” he admitted. “Lineage, language, things to help accli—”
“Can it tell me about the Amanya?” she gasped.
Stef frowned. “What are you talking about?”
“The Amanya! It’s a spell. Aniseed changed it before it was cast, and she’s the only one who knew how. That thing might know—it might remember. Look!” She pointed at the homunculus at the foot of the stump. “She sent those after me! She knows that I know! She knows that I can stop her!”
“Impossible,” the elder satyr said.
“No,” Stef said. “I saw those things attack my sister this afternoon.”
“It is a guardian golem left by the parent to our keeping, which predates the graftling’s life—and yours—by decades, if not more.” The old satyr scratched his scarred chest. “Aniseed bequeathed it as additional insurance for her young, suspecting that it might be threatened—” His tired eyes glared down at Joy. “A wise precaution, it seems.” He poked the ground with the butt of his spear. “This troop is defined by its neutrality within the Twixt. Our first and foremost authority is to care for those living in the Glen and to protect all who grow here. It is not unusual for parents to leave gifts for their heirs, and this golem is tethered to the graftling’s roots.” The battle-scarred satyr sounded weary and wise. “I can assure you that it has never left this spot.”
“But the other golems—they’re hers,” Joy cried. “Aniseed’s! Her clone could be controlling them—”
“Her offspring has barely gained sentience,” the elder said patiently. “She is too young even to speak.”
There was a high, thin gurgling, too tiny for a squeak. It was unmistakably laughter.
The satyrs turned. Stef hissed in shock. Joy glared at the half-formed thing, unsurprised, and pushed past her brother. The spears came to bear. Joy stopped and glared at the mahogany eyes spinning in their oversize sockets. Fear crawled a carpet of spider’s legs down her back.
The graftling was laughing at her.
“Tell me how to break the Amanya,” Joy said.
The baby Aniseed’s bulbous face blinked; its mouth formed a moue.
Joy’s hands balled into fists. She wanted her scalpel, but to go for it would be suicide—she’d be skewered in an instant. She wanted Inq’s wood-chipper hands. She wanted Kurt’s gun. She wanted Ink’s razor. She was so close that she could reach out and break it apart with her bare hands if not for the ward.
“Tell me how to open the door!” Joy shouted.
Aniseed’s graftling gave a small shake of its head, unmistakably impudent; its hands clutched the air, its spine curled and stretched. The chuckle came again along with the slow, wicker creak. The shapely leg coyly stretched and relaxed. The graftling almost smiled. Almost.
Joy stood as close as she dared, the ward humming like heat against the soft down of her face. Her eyes watered.
“Where is the door?” she screamed at it. “Tell me!”
The small mouth ‘o’ed, the frail hands opening and closing, the fat head wobbling as Aniseed’s immature clone laughed and laughed and laughed. The whirling eyes locked on Joy as if focusing on her for the first time. It squirmed, leaning forward.
“Bah-lee-wick,” the graftling whispered with mocking glee.
Joy stumbled back into Stef’s arms, her mouth echoing the word.
“Bailiwick?”
The little Aniseed twitched its twiggy arms against its chest, wheezing thin laughter. “Go.” It laughed. “Bah-lee-wick. In Bah-lee-wick. Go!”
“I know it’s inside the Bailiwick!” Joy whispered hotly. “But where?” She struggled in her brother’s arms. “How do I open it? How do I bring them back?”
“What are you talking about?” Dmitri asked.
Aniseed’s clone laughed again. “Locked. In. Bah-lee-wick!”
Joy stopped struggling.
“This conversation is inadmissible as evidence of any wrongdoing!” the elder satyr shouted, waving his arms. “As has been decreed by the Council of the Twixt!” He crossed his spears and brought them down sharply, scattering the guards with a burst of authoritative garble. He pointed at Dmitri and snapped his fingers. Dmitri grabbed Stef’s arm.
“We must go,” Dmitri said.
“Joy,” Stef urged and pulled her back.
Joy felt herself being pushed, stumbling and numb, away from the sparkling clearing; she had no words or strength to resist. The forest receded into blurry shapes, the satyrs disappearing, the shadows thinning, growing light—but the whole of her was focused with horror on the twisted brown thing curling out of the stump, perched atop Aniseed’s leg like a trophy, with the fiery-eyed golem squatting at its heel and the nail-slate scratch of the graftling’s mocking, cackling laughter.
She knew. She remembered.
Aniseed was the courier.
She was behind it all.
And now she was protected by the Twixt.
SEVENTEEN
JOY CRASHED THROUGH the undergrowth, her feet slipping on mushrooms and decay. The blue neon light flashed behind her eyes as she ran past Stef through the beacon’s doorway, groping blindly at the felled tree, her bare feet surfing through the soft mulch before lurching to a halt.
Aniseed! She was still alive—somehow, though not quite. Growing, getting stronger, protected under Twixt law.
Graus Claude! The door was locked inside the Bailiwick—along with the princess—hiding the King and Queen and most of their people inside a pocket universe, lost to everyone but the courier who’d betrayed them all.
Aniseed! She’d visited the Bailiwick frequently, Graus Claude’s student/lover/friend. She could go to him at any time, crawl inside him, access the door and lock her opponents away by making everyone else forget. Aniseed was the courier, the traitor, the spell-caster, the key, the missing link. Aniseed had carved herself a loophole at the cost of her limb; a small price to pay for ultimate power, as well as a fresh, clean slate. Was that what she’d promised to do for Hasp? Could she have grafted other Folk, giving them the freedom of a new life, a new body, beyond the Council’s decree?
A hand closed over her wrist, and she gasped, half expecting Stef, and not at all expecting the thing that grinned at her with rotted teeth and piggy black eyes.
Briarhook!
“Lost you?” Briarhook grinned. His claws squeezed harder and his hedgehog bristles shook. “Lost in my wood?” His breath stank of fetid meat. Joy gagged as he leaned closer. “I lost, too, you,” he sneered and thumped the metal plate in his chest.
“Lost my heart!” He hissed and slapped the plate again, harder. He lifted her by the arm and shook her violently. “Want my heart!”
Her head swam, and her shoulder socket screamed. She blasted him with Inq’s air glyph, but it only rattled the black-brown quills, blowing bits of leaf and rags from his back. Briarhook snarled, and his fat rat’s tail whipped against the ground. He smacked her against a tree, and she grabbed hold of a branch, eyes tearing, ears ringing, gasping in panic.
“You’ll never get it if you hurt me,” she said hoarsely. “Never!”
He let go in an instant, his eyes scrunching to slits. Joy tensed, wondering what could come next. She remembered the feel of Briarhook’s white-hot quill as he’d branded his signatura into her arm—a signatura that was no longer there. She’d erased it, breaking the rules.
Blue neon hissed behind him. A figure dropped from the trees.
“Is there some quarrel, Wood Guardian?” Avery said as he straightened, the feather cloak settling in the leaves like wings. It might have been a question, but the words held steel. Joy didn’t know what to think of it. She could barely think at all.
Briarhook grunted warily. “Lost, she,” he said. “In woods.”
Avery nodded. “Fortunate, then, that I have found her.”
The hulking hedgehog crouched, eyes lidded as he quailed before the Tide’s man. In his bid for freedom, Briarhook had changed sides during the battle against Aniseed. He knew the power that the Tide held on the Council.
“My heart,” he muttered.
Avery turned his sea-blue eyes to Joy. “She does seem to have that effect on Folk,” he said. “Poor fools. Such women are heartless, I’m told. Pay them no mind.”
Briarhook snarled and opened his paw, which grew red in the center, bleeding to white. The heat was palpable, like waves off summer asphalt, curling some of Avery’s feathery edges. Avery twitched his cloak aside. Joy stood firm and held her breath.
Briarhook dropped his hand slowly. The fire died. He sneezed, a burst of sound. He pointed a single claw at her, its point barely above her chest, and laughed a grating, sawing laughter as sick and black as tar. Briarhook shook with glee and lurched back one step, then two.
“Lost.” He laughed merrily. “Yes, you. My heart—know you!” Briarhook chortled. “Yes, know you now. Heartless. Ha! Good, yes. Good.”
Briarhook backed his way into the woods, opening up his arms, embracing the forest, fading away, laughing, into the bramble dark.
Joy sucked air into her lungs, unwilling or unable to move until the tingling seeped slowly back into her limbs. She mashed her dry tongue against the roof of her mouth. Avery swept his cloak back into place and eyed the neon-blue globe.
“A beacon,” he observed. “You are full of surprises, Joy Malone.”
“You!” Her nerves snapped as she spat. “You knew!” Joy shook with rage and shock and disgust. “I bet the Tide’s known all along!”
Avery rested his long hand on the hilt of his sword; the scabbard flicked the swallowtails of his cloud-colored coat. “Perhaps if I had more information, I could admit or deny it. As it is, however, I have no idea what you are talking about.”
Joy blinked furiously against tears. “Aniseed!”
Avery frowned, the name of his martyr spoiled on her lips.
“What of her?” he asked.
“She—” Joy said, slowly registering the look on his face, a mix of annoyance, confusion and, oddly, of hope. He didn’t know! She switched gears. “Sh-She started all of this—Briarhook, the Tide, the Red Knight, everything.” She pushed real fear into her words to cover her near slip. “She tried to kill me!”
“You and a great many others,” Avery said. “A crime for which she was declared a traitor, dismissed by the Council, stripped of her honors and publicly executed.” His voice hardened, spiky and grim. “You were there.”
“Yes,” she said, gulping for composure. “I was.”
Joy imagined herself as one of the witnesses who could have sworn that they’d seen Aniseed fall, giving her graftling time to grow stronger in secret, but the Tide didn’t know that; or perhaps it was only Avery who didn’t. She couldn’t risk telling him more and having it get back to Sol Leander. She swallowed, forcing calm, desperate to throw him off. He mustn’t know! He mustn’t find out! She wracked her rattled brain to find something to throw him off. “Did you know that before they were enemies, Graus Claude and Aniseed were lovers?”
Avery shrugged. “What of it?” he said. “Immortality has a way of making lovers out of enemies and enemies out of friends. Such scandals belong to humanity, not us...with the possible exception of your favorite chair.” Joy deliberately ignored the insult as she struggled to stand on her own two feet. Avery offered her a hand. She ignored that, too. He sighed, sounding exasperated, cross.
“Well, then,” he said, “ff there’s nothing else—”
“Of course there is,” Joy muttered. “There’s more. Much more.”
Avery stepped closer, almost daring to touch her shoulder. “Tell me, then.”
She wondered how long before Stef would appear and gave him the truth: “I can’t.”
Avery shook his head, a dry chuckle on his lips. “Stubborn to the last,” he said. “I fail to see how I can be of any help, then.”
“I’m not asking for your help!”
“Indeed,” he said. “You should.”
Something in his tone hinted a warning; something in his gaze tried to tell her that there were words he could not speak aloud. Being part of the Twixt made her realize there was a great advantage to having grown up with things going unsaid. If you cannot tell a lie, always look for what’s unsaid—therein lies the loophole. Aniseed had found one. So could Joy.
“Okay,” Joy said. “Help me, then. Bring a message to Inq.”
“A message?” he said. He didn’t say Why? which was surprising. His next words were “What is it?”
“Say—” Joy stopped and chose her words carefully, knowing that anything said would get back to his master. “Say that Aniseed was the courier.”
Avery frowned, his curiosity piqued. She could see it—like a cat’s gleam in his eyes. “What does that mean?” he asked.
Joy paused. Did the Amanya erase even that? “Say it back to me.”
“‘Aniseed was the courier.’”
He could remember that much because it was meaningless. The members of the Tide might know the name of their martyr, but none of them—not even Sol Leander—would recognize her post since they’d forgotten its purpose. If the Amanya spell didn’t do the trick, the secrecy surrounding the courier’s identity would. Fortunately, both Inq and Kurt would understand her message, and she could tell them the rest when they came for her. Watching his face, Joy wondered if Avery might half remember, a fleeting thought pushed aside, déjà vu dismissed. Could she somehow jog his memory? Could a human do what the Folk could not?
“Does that...mean anything to you?” she asked.
The question hung in the air, sprinkled with neon light.
“No,” he said, finally. “Should it?”
“Yes, it should,” Joy said, disappointed. “It definitely should. But it doesn’t.”
Avery stepped aside, the beacon’s blue light reflecting off his pale hair and blue-green eyes. “I will do as you ask, if only to prove my point.”
“Your point?”
“I am not your enemy, Joy Malone.”
She considered that. He cannot tell a lie. “All right,” Joy said slowly. “Prove it. Last I knew, Inq was at Graus Claude’s.”
Avery futzed with his cloak. “The Bailiwick’s domicile is closed.”
“Yes, I know,” Joy said. “He’s gone to speak with the Council.”
“Yes... I know,” Avery said.
Joy’s hopes sank. She heard what was unsaid—her mentor had already confessed, the Council had convened and Sol Leander had heard the Bailiwick’s crimes if it was already known to his aide. She wanted to ask more but thought better of it. Stef would come through soon, and Graus Claude was currently beyond her reach. She’d find a way to help him, but right now, she had more immediate threats to worry about.
“I see,” she said slowly. “Thank you.”
He almost smiled. Almost. “I will deliver your message,” he said as he raised one edge of his cloak and a single white eyebrow. “Try not to die before the gala tomorrow—it would be considered crass.” He let the cloak fall, and the weight of it wiped him out of the world with a sweep of feathers, gone. In a wink, there was nothing but the woods and the beacon’s fading light.
Joy blinked. She took one breath, then two, shuddering on the exhale.
Too close. Much too close. She made a small sound in the back of her throat as she tore down the incline, sliding and scraping until she hit the gritty roadside, stumbling on gravel as she raced toward the car.
She jumped into the passenger seat and locked the doors. Breathing deeply, she smashed the meat of her palms into her eye sockets as if she could smudge the terrible images from the back of her brain. She ground her teeth. She kicked the floor. Clenching her jaw, she screamed, loud and long. Trembling, she wiped at the feeling of claws on her skin, but couldn’t scrape the look of Aniseed’s fetal clone from the back of her eyes.
They were screwed! Graus Claude had turned himself over to the Council and was more than likely behind bars or worse. He could be anywhere in the world, anywhere in the Twixt. Even if she could make Aniseed tell her how to open the door, she couldn’t get to him now, couldn’t get to the door...