Patricia Briggs Mercy Thompson: Hopcross Jilly

by Patricia Briggs

  She wasn’t conventionally beautiful—her face was too inhuman for that, with eyes that were too big and a nose too small for humanity. Her scars weren’t as bad as they’d appeared when I’d seen them before. They looked older and less angry . . . but there were a lot of them.

  “We are ready,” Samuel said, looking at Ariana with a hunger that had nothing to do with his stomach.

  Zee reached behind his head and drew his dagger, dark-bladed and elegant in its deadly simplicity, from beneath the collar of his shirt. Either it was magic or a sheath, I couldn’t tell, and with Zee it could be either one. He used it to make a single clean cut on his forearm. For a moment, nothing happened, and then blood, dark and red, welled up. He knelt and let the blood drip into the dirt.

  “Mother,” he said. “Hear me, your child.”

  He put the hand of his uninjured arm into the soil and mixed his blood into the powdery earth. In German he whispered, “Erde, geliebte Mutter, dein Kind ruft. Schmecke mein Blut. Erkenne deine Schöpfung, gewähre Einlass.”

  Magic made my feet tingle and my nose itch—but nothing else happened. Zee stood up and counted off four paces before he sliced his other forearm.

  Kneeling, he bowed his head, and this time there was power in his voice. “Erde mein, lass mich ein.”

  Blood slid over his skin and down onto the backs of his hands, which were flat on the ground. “Gibst mir Mut!” he shouted—and rolled his hands over, wiping the blood on the ground.

  “Trinkst mein Blut. Erkenne mich.” He leaned forward and put his weight on his arms. First his hands, then his arms sank into the ground until they were buried past the wounds he’d given himself. He leaned down until his mouth was nearly in the dirt, and said quietly, “Öffne Dich.”

  The ground under my feet vibrated, and a crack appeared between the place Zee sat and the place where he’d mixed his blood with the soil.

  “Erde mein,” he said. The ground quivered with the vibrations of his voice, which sounded darker, as if he were dragging it out of a deep cavern. “Lass mich ein. Gibst mir Glut.” He put his forehead on the ground. “Trinke mein Blut. Es quillt für Dich hervor. Öffne mir ein Tor!”

  There was a flash, and a large square of dirt just disappeared, leaving in its place a stone staircase that went straight down for eight steps, then began to turn upon its inner edge. I couldn’t see any farther because a thick fog rose from the depths of the hole and obscured the stairway about ten feet down.

  Zee jerked his hands out of the ground. There was dirt on his arms, but no wounds and no blood. He raised one hand and held it out to Ariana, giving her a stone that glowed.

  “I can hold it for about an hour,” Zee told us. “Ariana can use the stone to find the way back to me. If you see the light begin to flicker, it means I am at the end of my strength, and you need to get back here. So long as this door is open, the time in the Elphame will sync with the time outside. If this door closes, you might get out, but I don’t know when you’ll find yourselves if you do.”

  SAMUEL LED THE WAY DOWN, FOLLOWED BY ARIANA. I sent Jesse ahead of me and took up the rear. The light above us grew quickly dimmer until we were traveling in virtual darkness. Jesse stumbled, and I caught her before she could fall.

  “Here,” said Ariana. “Put your hand on my shoulder, Jesse.”

  “I’ll put mine on yours,” I told Jesse. “Samuel, can you see anything?”

  “I can now,” he said. “It’s getting lighter ahead.”

  “Lighter” was a relative term, but the ten stairs we went down I could see. The stairs ended in a dirt tunnel that was lit by gems embedded in the ground that were as big around as oranges. The ceiling of the tunnel was about six inches lower than Samuel was tall, and the roof and sides were thick with tree roots.

  “There aren’t any trees above us,” I said. “And even if there were, we’ve come down a long way past where I’d have thought there would be roots.”

  “She has a forest lord in her court,” said Ariana, reaching to the side where strings of roots made a rough curtain for the dirt wall beyond. The roots moved toward her, caressing her fingers briefly before falling back where they had been.

  “What kind of fae are you, Ariana?” asked Jesse. “Are you a forest lord, too? Or a gremlin like Zee, because you can work silver?”

  “There are no others like Zee,” she told us. “He is unique. Almost all fae can work with silver to one extent or another—silver loves fae magic. But you are right: there are iron- kissed fae in my background, and steel holds no terrors for me.”

  We were talking quietly, but I wasn’t too worried about being discovered. There was a feeling of . . . emptiness here that told me that there was no life other than the roots that tangled in my hair and tripped my feet.

  “We—” I stopped, remembering that I wasn’t supposed to discuss anything about the fairy queen. Had I already broken my word? Did it matter when we were storming the castle?

  “Jesse,” I said, deciding to play it safe, “we haven’t planned anything at all about the rescue.”

  “There’s no planning when you’re running through Elphame,” said Samuel, who was walking bent over, with one hand up to ward off the roots. “It’s not that kind of place. Ariana will lead us to her grandson and Gabriel, and we’ll try to get out by coping with anything that happens along the way.”

  “That sounds . . . simple,” I said.

  “It could be simple,” Ariana told me. “She cannot be expecting visitors—there just aren’t very many fae who could open a back entrance into a fairy queen’s lair. Thralls will not react to us—they know nothing and are not much more than automata who follow the queen’s orders. We may be able to find Phin and Gabriel and leave with them before anyone realizes there is something wrong.”

  “Should we have brought—” Ariana’s fingers touched my lips.

  “Best we not talk about what that one so desires in her lair,” she told me. “I expect she might hear that. And no. It is powerful, and even if it will not do as she wants, it will still do great harm in the wrong hands.”

  “All right,” I said.

  Samuel raised his head. “Best we not talk anymore at all. I’m starting to pick up the scent of people now.”

  I could smell them, too, once he’d pointed it out. We were coming upon more-traveled ways. The loose dirt of the floor became packed earth, and the roots thinned and were replaced with rough-cut square blocks as the dirt floor became cobbles, and the ceiling rose so Samuel could stand up straight again.

  There were already other tunnels joining ours.

  I caught the scent before Samuel, but I think it was only because the woman came upon us from behind, and I was walking last. It didn’t matter, though, because I only had time to whirl around, and she was upon us.

  She wore a torn jacket and filthy jeans and carried a large wooden cutting board in both her hands. She walked right into me and bounced off. When she tried to walk around me, I blocked her a second time.

  “Take this to the kitchen,” she said, without looking up at me. She shifted her weight from one foot to the other, all of her attention on the board she held. Her hair hung in ragged clumps, and there was dirt on her knuckles. Around her neck was a thin silver collar. “The kitchen, child. The kitchen. Take this to the kitchen.”

  I moved out of her way, and she all but sprinted past us.

  “She’s not taking care of her thralls,” said Ariana disapprovingly.

  “Thrall?” asked Jesse.

  “Slave,” I answered. “You know when someone is enthralled with a movie or a boyfriend—that’s from the same root word.”

  “Follow her,” said Ariana. “The kitchen should be at the heart of Elphame.”

  We jogged after her, passing by a young man in a police uniform, a woman in a jogging suit, and an older woman carrying a steaming teapot, all wearing silver collars, and all moving with unnatural intentness. The floor switched from cobbles to stone tiles, and the ceiling rose
again until it was fifteen feet or more above our heads.

  The gems that had lit the passage we had been in were lining the walls and dangling from the ceiling from something that could equally well have been fine silver wire or spiderwebs. Whatever it was, it didn’t look strong enough to hold them. Samuel’s head would hit the lower gemstones once in a while, sending them swinging.

  We came into the kitchen, which could have been imported from a 1950s TV set—a very large cooking set, since there were two six-burner stoves in a room that was bigger than my now-deceased trailer. I looked around, but none of the people in the kitchen was Donna Reed or June Cleaver . . . or Gabriel Sandoval, either. The glistening white appliances were rounded in a manner my eyes found odd, and the three refrigerators had silver latching handles and Frigidaire stenciled in silver across the top. People with silver collars were preparing food and drink—and didn’t seem to notice our presence at all. The woman we’d followed here put the cutting board on the counter next to one of the sinks and began to fill the sink with water by working the hand pump that it had instead of a faucet.

  “Excuse me,” said Ariana, walking up to a man who was stirring something in a pot that looked like oatmeal.

  “Stir the pot seventy times seven,” he said.

  “Where are they keeping the prisoners?” Samuel asked, putting the push into his voice that the really dominant wolves could. His voice echoed oddly in the room.

  Slowly, all the action in the kitchen came to a stop. One by one, the six people wearing silver circlets around their throats turned to look at Samuel. The man Ariana had spoken to stopped moving last. He pulled his spoon out of the pot and pointed to one of the seven rounded doorways. The others, one by one, pointed the same way.

  “Forty-seven steps,” the oatmeal stirrer said.

  “Take the right tunnel,” said a man who’d been chopping turnips.

  “Eighteen steps and turn,” said a girl kneading bread. “The key is on the hook. The door is yellow.”

  “Do not let them out,” said a boy who looked about thirteen and had been filling glasses with water from a pitcher.

  “Resume your tasks,” said Samuel, and one at a time they did so.

  “I think that’s the creepiest thing I’ve ever seen,” said Jesse. “Are we just going to leave these people here?”

  “We’re going to get Gabriel out and Phin,” said Ariana. “And then we’ll take this to the Gray Lords, who have forbidden the keeping of thralls. Only the fairy queen can release her thralls, and the Gray Lords are the only ones who have a chance of making her do that. In the Elphame, she rules utterly.”

  “What if she’s enthralled Gabriel?”

  “She won’t have,” said Ariana positively. “She promised Mercy, and breaking her promise would have dire consequences. And my Phin is protected against such a thing.”

  The path we took from the kitchen was less grand than the one we’d taken into it. The floor was made of those small white octagonal tiles with a line of black tiles running about a foot from either wall. Forty-seven paces from the kitchen, the tunnel widened into a small room. The black tiles formed a complicated Celtic knot in the center of the room. There were passageways that opened across from ours, and one to either side.

  We took the one to the right. Here the floor was rough wooden planks that showed the marks of being hand hewn. It creaked a little under Samuel, who was the heaviest of us.

  “Eighteen,” he said, and there was a yellow door with an old-fashioned key hanging off a hook—the first door we’d seen in the Elphame.

  Samuel took the key from the lock and opened the door.

  “Doc?” said Gabriel. “What are you doing here?”

  “Gabriel.” Jesse pushed past Samuel.

  Key in hand, Samuel followed her in. Ariana and I brought up the rear.

  Gabriel was hugging Jesse. “What are all of you doing here? Did she get you, too?”

  The room was white. White stone walls, white ceiling with clear crystals hanging down to light the room. The floors were made of a single slab of polished white marble. There were two beds with white bedding.

  The only color in the room came from Gabriel and the man who was lying on one of the beds. He looked dreadful, and I’d never have recognized him if Ariana hadn’t whispered his name.

  Phin sat up slowly, as if his ribs hurt, and Ariana rushed to kneel beside his bed on one knee.

  He frowned at her. “Who?”

  “Grandma Alicia,” she said.

  He looked startled, then he smiled. “Has anyone ever told you that you don’t look like anyone’s grandmother? Is it a rescue, then? Like in the old stories?”

  “No,” said Samuel, who had turned to face the doorway. “It’s a trap.”

  “Welcome to my home,” said a familiar dark voice. “I’m so happy you came to call.”

  The woman who stood in the doorway of the cell was lovely. Her hair was dark smoke, pulled back in a complicated braid composed of many small plaits. It flowed down her back and dragged the ground like an Arabian show horse’s tail and set off the porcelain of her skin and the rose of her lips.

  She was looking at me. “I am so glad to have you in my home, Mercedes Thompson. I was just trying to call you on my cell when—imagine my surprise—I discovered that you were here. But you did not bring it.” Having a fairy queen talking about cell phones almost was enough to make me laugh. Almost.

  I raised my chin. By stealth, by strength, by bargain. “I am not such a poor bargainer, fairy queen. If I had brought it, we could not play.”

  She smiled, and her silver-gray eyes warmed. “By all means,” she said. “Let us play.”

  14

  “BUT THIS IS NOT THE PROPER PLACE FOR BARGAINING,” she said. “Follow me.”

  Ariana picked up Phin in her arms. Samuel looked at Gabriel.

  “I’m okay, Doc,” he said. He glanced at Ariana, then looked at me. “Werewolf?” he mouthed.

  “No,” said Samuel. “That’s me. Ariana is fae.”

  Gabriel jerked his head to Samuel. “You’re . . .” And then his face cleared. “That explains a few things . . . Snowball?”

  Samuel smiled. “Are you sure you don’t need help?”

  “Phin’s the one who was really hurt,” he said. “He’s gotten a lot better over the past week, but he didn’t start off good.”

  I gave Gabriel a sharp look, but I supposed it wasn’t really important to tell him that he’d only been gone a day, out in the real world—if we didn’t get out before Zee had to stop holding the door open, then it really wouldn’t matter.

  The fairy queen’s voice floated through the doorway. “Are you coming?”

  Ariana nodded to Samuel, who took point again out the door, following the fairy queen. Ariana went next, and I waved my hand for Gabriel and Jesse to precede me. I took a deep breath, the kind that cleared your mind and lungs before some extreme endeavor—and smelled earth and growing things in this cold marble room.

  Only the fairy queen’s glamour would work in her Elphame, Zee had said. I paid attention to my nose as we walked down the hall in the wake of the fairy queen.

  Question, I thought, as I tried to sniff out the scents that were real from the ones produced by the queen’s illusions. If it looks like a hallway, feels like a hallway, and acts like a hallway—is it important to figure out that it isn’t a hallway?

  But curiosity is very nearly my besetting sin. Gradually, as we walked, the scent of dirt, of the sap of wounded wood, and of something that might have been sorrow grew. I glanced up at the dangling lights and saw tree roots instead of silver wires, and shining rocks instead of gemstones, rocks much like the one Zee had given Ariana. I blinked, and the gems were back, but I didn’t believe in them anymore, and they wavered.

  I stumbled and looked down, momentarily seeing a root sticking up from a soft dirt floor, then my vision changed and the tiny white tiles, laid flat and even with nothing to trip over, were back.

 
; “Mercy?” Jesse asked. “Are you all right?”

  The queen looked back at me, and her face—though still beautiful—was different from the woman she’d been just a few minutes ago. It was elongated from chin to forehead, and her eyelashes were longer than humanly possible without glue and fake eyelashes. Narrow, clear wings, like a damselfly’s, poked up from her shoulders. They were too small to lift her body off the ground without magic.

  “Fine,” I said.

  The long silver gown the queen had been wearing was real enough, but there were dark brown stains that might have been old blood on the hem and near her wrists. The necklace she wore, which had looked like a silver-and-diamond waterfall, was of tarnished black metal, and the set stones were uncut.

  My first sight of the great hall she led us to was jaw-dropping, if only for ostentatiousness. The floors were white marble shot with gray and silver, and pillars of green jade rose gracefully to support an arching ceiling that would not have looked out of place at the Notre Dame Cathedral. Silver trees with jade leaves grew out of the marble floor and shivered, disturbed by a wind I could not feel. When the leaves knocked together, they chimed musically. Graceful benches carved out of pale and dark woods, like a wooden chess set, were placed artfully around the room, occupied by lovely women and beautiful men, who all looked at us when we entered the room.

  At the far side of the hall there was a raised dais with a silver throne, delicately made and decorated with gems of green and red, each as big as my hand. Curled up next to the chair was a cat that looked like a small cheetah until it lifted its head, displaying huge ears. Serval, I thought, or something that looked a lot like the medium-sized African hunting cat. But I didn’t smell a cat: the whole room smelled of rotting wood and dying things.

  And then the room I was walking through wasn’t a room at all.