by Jane Yolen
“Enough!” Aspen shouted, and spurred his horse forward, pulling even with his mother. Molintien and Croak struggled to stay ahead of him as ordered, and drow hands crept toward their weapons as the Seelie folk grew nearer.
Old Jack didn’t move, however, as if he knew there was no chance that a Seelie king would break the rules of parley. Especially not a weak and foolish king who had already seen the consequence of breaking the law of hostages.
“I have heard enough,” Aspen said, trying to make his voice sound deep as the sea and dangerous as cold iron. “You see my host. You may leave my lands tonight, for if you do not do it peacefully, tomorrow I shall drive you from them. You have till the morning to decide.”
Then he spun his horse and began trotting back toward the lines of his make-believe army. He didn’t look back, for fear Jack Daw would read the lie in his face, but he was certain that his companions would turn and follow him.
And hopefully none of us will get a poisoned arrow in the back.
He suddenly had a dreadful itch between his shoulder blades where he imagined the arrow would lodge. It was with great effort he kept his hands on the reins. But he heard galloping, and moments later, Snail was by his side and his mother, too, and his soldiers were around him, with the moat troll forming the rearguard, walking backward and staring daggers at the drow.
Aspen was as certain as he could be that Jack Daw wouldn’t try to kill him yet, but he certainly felt safer with his friends and family around.
“That’s your plan?” Snail said, her voice low but angry.
“Well, it will hold them for today and tonight, at least.”
“How can you be sure?” Strangely, she sounded curious, not sarcastic.
Perhaps she is starting to trust my judgment?
“Tell her, Croak.”
Croak frowned, apparently unhappy at the thought of pushing words past his tight lips, but he obeyed his king. “Higher ground,” he said.
“What the loquacious Fading Crocus is trying to say is that if Old Jack Daw wishes to attack us, he will have to attack uphill.” Aspen smiled. “It is my understanding that most commanders try to avoid that if at all possible.”
Croak nodded and spit. “Stream, too.”
“Also, he would have to get across the stream,” Aspen explained. “Certain members of his army have trouble crossing running water. Jack himself is not partial to it, but it will not hurt him as it would some of the others.”
Snail looked back at the stream and the army behind it. “And why would he do that, since you have just promised to cross the stream and attack him tomorrow so he needn’t go uphill or into water. All he has to do is wait for the foolish Seelie king.”
“Exactly. And furthermore, he knows Seelie kings have magic that the land gives them, and he will want to know what my power is before he tests those waters.”
Aspen barely had time to feel proud of how well his plan was working before Snail spoke again.
“Then why didn’t you give him two days to decide?”
“I . . . um . . .”
“Or three or four?”
Because I am an idiot?
“I . . . um . . .”
As if inspired by Snail’s biting words, her horse nipped at Aspen’s mount. He had to rein it in to keep control, and Snail pulled a little bit ahead of him. “If you’d done that, Odds could have had his army here before we had to talk to Jack Daw again.”
“Yes . . . er . . . those are all good points but . . .”
Snail looked back over her shoulder at him, one eyebrow raised, waiting for what came after the “but.”
He had nothing to offer as an excuse. “I did not think of it.”
“Hrmph,” Snail said, or something like that. Then she kicked her heels lightly into her horse’s flanks and spurred it faster toward their camp.
I am the Seelie king. I shoot fire out of my fingertips. And I have just outwitted—albeit temporarily—the greatest threat the Seelie kingdom has ever faced. He watched as Snail reached the fire and dismounted. Yet I am still unable to impress a midwife’s apprentice.
He wondered if other kings ever had similar problems.
He shrugged almost imperceptibly. Seems unlikely.
Heaving a great sigh, he kicked his horse ahead as well. They had a day and a night to rest up and plan. He didn’t want to waste a moment of it.
24
SNAIL LEARNS A LESSON
They rode away as if they didn’t mind that their backs were targets. Or at least everyone else didn’t seem to mind. Snail felt even more vulnerable than she had in the Unseelie king’s dungeon. But then, she wasn’t a warrior. Though, she thought, I’ve certainly been a fighter. And I don’t want to die today—honorably or otherwise.
The Seelie folk rode without haste but with a certain determination, and the moat troll kept pace with them, though he was huffing a bit by the end.
When they got back to camp, Snail saw that all the fires had been rekindled so that the high ground was alight with the flames. Enough for about fifty fires per real Seelie warrior. She stopped and glanced around. It was as though little flame imps were dancing on the hillside.
And then she thought: If the flames aren’t carefully tended, the entire hillside could become a pyre.
Aspen and the queen walked away to the perimeter where they were talking to the live guards and nodding at the illusions. Close up, the differences were clear. The illusions had better armor and armament. They didn’t speak, didn’t eat, managed to stay on their feet interminably. But if you didn’t know they weren’t real . . .
Snail hastened to catch up with them.
“Just in case”—Aspen was whispering to one real guard—“there are spies close enough to see.”
The queen had actually walked over to two of the illusions and was carrying on an animated conversation with them. The illusions nodded as if they could actually hear what she said.
And perhaps, Snail thought, they can. One never knows with magic.
“I sure hope your fires keep your illusion warriors warm,” Snail told Aspen. “There’s certainly enough fire for the lot of them.”
“Keeping them warm is important,” Aspen said as his mother joined the conversation.
“Really?” Snail realized that sounded irritable. She hadn’t meant to say that aloud. But knowing she might be dead in the morning seemed to have sharpened her tongue.
“The fires feed the illusion,” Aspen said blandly.
The queen added, “The illusions have been made of light. In total darkness, they will simply disappear and need remaking.”
“And alas, our illusionist is dead.” Aspen pointed at the cart, where Mishrath’s now-shrouded body lay.
“Why can’t you remake the illusions, Aspen? You’re the king!”
The queen looked shocked at this outburst, but Aspen merely shook his head.
“I am a fire-mage, Snail. A gift I was evidently born with. Illusion is a different school, one which takes years to learn. No one taught me any magic when I was a Hostage Prince. Why would they?”
He shrugged as if it had been no true matter, but Snail knew it mattered a great deal to him. And by his mother’s face, Snail knew it mattered to her, too.
“Well, then we’re about to lose a lot of men,” Snail said quietly. They both looked at her in alarm. “In case neither of you have noticed, it’s going to rain before nightfall.”
“How do you know?” the queen asked.
“I could tell you it’s a changeling thing, and that it’s my gift, but just look at that sky.”
Aspen looked up hastily at the dark, gathering clouds. “Oh no,” he said. “What can we . . . ?”
“Snail,” the queen said, “can you go up on the bowser and see if Odds’s army is anywhere close?”
“In a storm?
” she and Aspen said as one.
“Is a storm any more dangerous than a war?” asked the queen.
Snail had no response for that.
“Never mind,” the queen said, “I shall go.”
“Absolutely not,” Aspen said. And Snail added, “I just needed to know how important it was.”
“We have to know,” Aspen told her, “how long we have to stall. Without the illusion of a larger army . . .” He left the rest unsaid.
“I’ll go and try to convince the bowser . . .” Snail tried to sound spirited, ready. But all she felt was dread.
The queen shrugged out of her heavy cape. “If the rug will go up, you will need this for the cold and the rain. It is made to repel them both.”
“You will need it down here, madam . . .” Snail began.
“I will have little sleep tonight,” the queen said. “This is where my small magicks must try their best.
“What are those magicks, Mother?” Aspen managed to look dubious and hopeful at the same time.
“Party magic,” she said, “the sort of thing a queen needs to be able to do. And now, if you please, send your men to bring me a dozen house-tall trees from the far side where there are no watching eyes.”
“Trees, Mother?”
“I can’t make trees, my darling boy, but I can make everything else we need.”
He sent the Poppy Clan under Fal’s direction to get what his mother required.
But at Snail’s insistence, she and the queen traded capes. There was no way she was going to let the queen stay out in the rain, even at some magical party, without any warm clothes.
THE BOWSER WASN’T as easy to convince. He’d been enjoying his time by one of the fires and at first had bared his teeth at her, snarling at the suggestion.
Snail had heated up some water on the flames and given the bowser a quick bath, thinking all the while that they both would be wet soon enough once the storm broke.
However, again clean—although not entirely a true gold—the bowser wrapped himself around Snail’s legs like a large, shapeless dog.
A minute later, Snail was sitting on him, and then they were off.
It was a colder and rougher ride than before, even though they were only skimming the treetops. Snail could feel ice in the air. And once the storm, which was advancing from the mountains, started spitting at them, hurling raindrops as hard as pebbles, neither she nor the bowser was happy. She apologized to him over and over, in between explaining where they were heading.
Darkness and rain made it almost impossible to see how close they were to the trees, and twice she could feel the tops of firs brushing the bowser’s belly, and he shivered uncontrollably for what seemed like hours. It felt as if there were a river running beneath her as they flew.
SOME TIME LATER, a chance strike of lightning showed her the huddled hordes of changelings below, and further back, the linked wagons of Odds’s troupe. Maybe, Snail thought, a day away from Aspen’s camp. Not more. But probably not less. The storm was slowing everything down.
“Down there,” she whispered, and the bowser dropped so precipitously in his hurry to get out of the rain, Snail was almost thrown off. But she’d been ready for such a maneuver and clung to his fur, though the queen’s cape was ripped from her shoulders by the wind and lost in their descent. She wondered how she’d explain it to the queen, to Aspen, then realized that in the larger view of what was about to happen, it was too small a thing to worry about.
Soaking wet and miserable, they landed not five large steps from the front of the wagons.
Snail got up off the bowser, and he humped and hunched his way to the back end of the wagons, disappearing through one of the doors. Then Snail went in the door she expected belonged to Odds.
It was not Odds’s room at all, but Maggie Light’s.
“I hate,” Snail said, “how the rooms keep changing around.”
Maggie was sitting, unmoving, in front of the table, looking into her mirror so that it seemed as if there were two Maggie Lights sitting there, both equally still.
Or perhaps I’m hallucinating from the cold, Snail thought, for even though she was now indoors, she was shivering.
“Maggie . . .” she began. Her teeth began to chatter, and she couldn’t say another word.
Maggie turned quickly, stood, and came over to Snail with the coverlet from her bed in her hands. She wrapped Snail in it and said something softly.
Snail realized it was a song and knew she should put her fingers in her ears because Maggie always sang her spells, and this was not the time for her to become spellbound. But she couldn’t move, swaddled as she was in the blanket, and besides, suddenly she didn’t care.
Maggie sang:
Sun warms earth, and secrets grow,
Deep beneath the winter ground.
Shoots and stalks and roots reach up
Until the springtide can be found.
Find the sun, child, find the sun . . .
As the song burrowed into her, Snail felt an inner springtide filling her with warmth. Not just the warmth of the blanket. She knew it was the spell because she was warm in places the blanket didn’t touch—her feet and hair tickling with the warm. Where she had been soaking wet, now she was dry. Dry and distraught.
She had come to hurry Odds along, to get him to Aspen before Mishrath’s phony army faded. But with the storm there would be nothing she could do. The changeling army would move as fast as it could and no faster.
This time her mission was sure to be a failure. In fact, she told herself, it already is.
But then she thought, Maybe the bowser brought me to Maggie instead of Odds for a reason.
Snail knew what she had to do.
“Maggie,” she said, “come with me. On the bowser. Help me help the Seelie king.”
Maggie cocked her head to one side, looking slightly demented. “I do not do well in the wet,” she said.
“If it settles before morning?”
“Then I will go.”
“Should I ask Odds?” Snail said. “Will he give his permission?”
“I serve the professor’s purpose,” Maggie said, “but he does not own me. He only made me.” She looked straight at Snail. “His purpose was for me to give you whatever you ask for, whether it is spoken or unspoken.”
“Thank you,” Snail said. She began to shuffle toward the door.
“Where do you go, child?”
“To keep an eye on the storm.”
Maggie smiled. Snail could not tell if it was an effort. “You sleep; I will watch.”
Snail opened her mouth to resist, then realized Maggie could just sing her to sleep. “All right,” she said, “if you promise to wake me once the rain lightens.”
“I promise,” Maggie Light said.
That was enough for Snail. She climbed onto the bed, still wrapped in the blanket, and fell immediately into an exhausted sleep.
IT WAS STILL dark when a hand shook her awake. Snail sat up, disoriented for a moment before remembering all that had happened. “Has it stopped raining?”
“It has,” a voice said, but not Maggie Light’s. “And I am going with you, too.”
Dagmarra grinned. “I canna leave you to fight a battle without me.”
“But what about baby Og?”
“My brother will take care of him,” the dwarf said. “He’s not much of a fighter. And Og’s too young to be in the front lines of a war.”
“And Maggie?”
“She’s cleaned up the bowser, so stump your sticks, girl. We have a flight to make, prisoners to take.”
“Done with sleep, promises to keep?” asked Snail.
“You’d make a great dwarf,” said Dagmarra, “if only you were shorter.”
She held out a cape that could wrap around Snail three times. �
�This belonged to Huldra the troll,” she said, adding in case Snail had forgotten, “Og’s mother.”
Snail nodded. “I brought him into this world,” she reminded Dagmarra.
“So you did. But wars often make us forget things. And forget our friends.”
Snail ignored that, saying, “I’m not sure the bowser can carry us all.”
“Maggie will take care of that.”
Snail nodded. She was sure that Maggie could convince anyone of anything. So she got out of the bed, rumpled and hungry but not complaining about either. And took the huge cape.
They went outside, where Maggie was waiting for them. The bowser, now completely golden on the top, lay spread out on the still-wet grass.
Maggie sat down first, lacing her fingers in the bowser’s fur. He seemed to shiver with joy. Dagmarra was next, snugging up to Maggie and putting her arms around Maggie’s waist. She looked only at Maggie’s back, and Snail realized the dwarf was terrified—not of the fighting but of the flight—though Snail was sure that nothing would shake that admission out of her.
Snail was the last to sit down, sandwiching Dagmarra between Maggie and herself and wrapping them both with the troll’s cape. Then she grabbed two handfuls of the bowser’s fur. “You know where the Seelie king is,” she told the bowser. “Take us there as quickly as possible.”
Dagmarra said something. At first Snail thought it might be a prayer. But then when Dagmarra repeated it, Snail understood what she was saying. “Maggie’s left a note.”
“A note?”
Dagmarra looked back at her long enough to say, “For Odds. So he knows she’s gone and where she’s going. He won’t be long in coming after.”
And then the bowser lifted, and Dagmarra said nothing more, just clung even tighter to Maggie.
They headed toward the west, the sun just beginning to shed its light upon their backs. Snail held on to that small light and the smaller hope that she’d taken a tiny step toward helping Aspen win his war.
25