Horse and knight both froze. Another deep sniff, as the wind veered. The pavement groaned as the cold intensified, and the rider caught a breath of spiced russet fruit. He tilted his head, and heard, not so far off, the tapping of frantic heels.
“Ragged.” A chill, lipless whisper, somehow wrong. The pixies cowered, their dismay grown so vast it was now silent, more and more of them flicker-vanishing through the Veil in search of a more salubrious place.
The tiptapping of heels intensified.
The elfhorse let out a shattering neigh and bolted for the western end of Falida, just as headlights sliced an arc across its path. An old woman clutching the wheel of her ancient, rusted Ford Fiesta let out a high piercing scream as something boiled across her windshield, a suffocating black bird of terror beating in her mortal brain. The car veered wildly, bumping up onto pavement and scraping its side along a fire hydrant, and when the emergency personnel came, the verdict was sudden heart failure, tragic and completely ordinary.
The Unseelie rider was long gone.
A BRUEGHEL PAINTING
5
Panko bought the first round without taking the smelly cigar end out of his mouth. He puffed at them constantly off-site, and the fume was enough to make a man choke. Here at the Wagon Wheel, though, there was no differentiating it from the omnipresent fug of burning cancersticks anyway.
Jeremiah took a long pull off his beer and ran an eye over the crowd. Flannel, thick shoulders, the red-faced mortal women with their hair teased high. Friday nights were crowded and loud, especially during Two-Dollar Hour at this particular watering hole. Panko was a cheap bastard, but it didn’t matter. Here was as good a place as any.
“So I told the bitch,” Panko yelled over the surfroar of the crowd. The jukebox was roaring, too, overwhelmed by three deep at the bar and elbow room at every table. “I told her. Didn’t I tell her?”
“I wasn’t there!” Clyde yelled back. This was an old, old conversation, and Jeremiah wasn’t called upon to do more than nod whenever Panko’s flat, dark gaze slid his way. Which it now did, measuring his response.
Jeremiah nodded. Took another long draft of beer. It foamed on the way down, and he found himself wishing for wine. White wine, tart and crisp with apples, and Daisy’s special soft laugh when she was half drunk and he slid his hand up her leg.
His chest seized up again. Jeremiah drank faster, broke away from the bottle and had to take a deep breath, hunching his shoulders further. Five years and counting. Weren’t sidhe-blooded things supposed to forget? The only long memory is for a grudge, Paogreer the slick-skinned grentooth had said, tapping his cane on the glassy floor of Summer’s Hall, marking time as the dancing revel spun and shook before them.
No room for gratitude in that sidhe’s chest, Jeremiah had replied, and kept his hand away from the glass badge pinned to his chest with an effort. The Armormaster did not dance. Even then he had been wondering how to free himself of Summer’s clutching white hands, but it had taken Daisy to make him attempt it. He’d done his best to keep away from her for a few months after he left Court, so the Queen wouldn’t suspect she had been abandoned for a mortal.
If Summer had suspected, it wouldn’t have been just a car accident for Daisy.
Jeremiah blinked, brought himself back to the present.
“I told her not to go in the basement. But she does, even though—get this—she’s scared of it.” Panko’s broad face twisted up. He always had a tan, even in the dead of winter, his skin remembering years of working outside.
Clyde came in on cue, with a braying horselike laugh. Panko’s wife was a neurotic, if he could be believed.
Daisy had been scared of the dark, too. Like any reasonable person. Jeremiah took another mouthful of beer. How much would he have to drink before he could expect the hole in his chest to shrink a little?
There’s not enough booze in the world. He kept his expression neutral, despite the recurring thought that if Panko’s wife was neurotic, it was living with the man that had done it.
“Christ.” The flow of Panko’s familiar story snagged. “Would you look at that.”
He didn’t want to look. The noise in the Wagon Wheel had changed, too, a sharper edge to the sibilants, a breath of wonder. So Jeremiah raised his gaze, and saw nothing but the usual tired old mortal faces clustered around their tankards and glasses, cracked skin and frizzy hair; the entire fucking bar looked like a Brueghel painting on a Friday night.
Except her.
He almost choked on his beer. The markings up his arms sent sharp tingling bursts down to the bone, racing up until his shoulders stiffened as if he’d been struck.
Same slim outline, same shadow of dancer’s musculature on the back left bare except for the spaghetti straps of a blue silk dress. The skirt was flared, calf-length, and the calves were the same satiny paleness. The way of standing was the same, too, hip tilted, most of her weight on one foot. She was reaching across the bar, and the wrist was the same as well. But it was the mop of honeygold hair with its red tint that would only come out in sunlight, looking a bit washed-out in the bar’s half-glow, cut in an inverted V, longer as it fanned forward, taming and shaping that slight springy natural curl, that did it.
All the breath left him in a hard rush. If he hadn’t been sitting down he might have fallen. The markings on his arms burned, spiked flame spreading like oil down his entire body. But this was a cold fire, like meeting the Queen’s laughing, innocently murderous gaze.
Daisy was dead, rotting under a blanket of earth in the too-green graveyard at St. Pegasus. Hallowed ground, he’d insisted.
He couldn’t bear the thought of it otherwise.
“Huh.” Clyde let out a grunt, like he’d been punched. “Wonder where she blew in from.”
Jeremiah’s hand, freighted with beer bottle, locked halfway to his mouth. His entire body flushed hot, cold. Hot again, sweat prickling up his arms and at his lower back. He smelled of exertion, fresh air, and a faint sharpish apple-rotting because he didn’t know what Daisy did to make the clothes turn out sweet. That was a mortal chantment, and one he’d never bothered to find the secret of.
The bartender shook his head, swiping his hand back through greasy black hair and standing up a little straighter. He was a whip-thin Chicano, and his face had never held an expression other than resentful boredom the entire time Jeremiah had been drinking here. Now he looked mystified, and his mouth dropped open a little.
The woman turned to look toward the door, and the curve of her cheekbone stopped Jeremiah’s heart. The earrings were gold hoops, dwarven work, and they took a russet from her hair.
His beer bottle hit the sticky tabletop. Fortunately it was empty, so it only clattered, lost under the din. His fingers had gone numb.
“You okay?” Clyde sounded nervous for the second time that day.
Tingling ran along Jeremiah’s skin, scalp to sole. Left on the bar where the woman had leaned was a single silver circle, perfectly round, a glowing moon.
Quirpiece? Here? He pushed his bar stool back, the scraping lost. Another sound lost, too, under the rollicking of the jukebox and shrieking drunken laughter. Pool balls clattered in the long room off to one side, and Jeremiah heard a metallic thread stitching underneath a bright carpet of human noises.
A silver whistle’s cry, high ultrasonic thrill-singing. Too off-tone to be one of Summer’s forays, and in the wrong season besides, but undeniably sidhe. Since it was not All Soul’s or St. George’s, it likely wasn’t the anarchic free sidhe, either.
Which only left one possibility.
Unwinter, hunting.
The tingling turned into a prickle, stopping just short of pain. He shoved through the crowded humans. It was too warm in here. He was sweat-clammy, heart pounding like an overworked engine. He reached the bar, scooped up the quirpiece just as its shine sent a hard dart of light winging into the far dark corner.
A bottle shattered. Someone cursed, and a woman screamed. The quir h
ad done its job, muddying the girl’s trail, and turned scorching-cold in his palm. Jeremiah ignored it, as well as the sudden tip-shift of the crowd’s mood, and lurched after her. The crowd pressed carnivorously close, and someone shoved him. “Watch where you goin’!”
Jeremiah stepped sideways, dropped his shoulder, and drove toward the entrance. A flash of redgold as the swinging doors opened and she ducked out. There was no doubt—her stumbling attempt to flee said it all.
She was prey.
The silver whistle unsounded again, too high for any mortal but the gifted or sidhe-touched to hear, and every living thing in the bar tensed.
The mortals couldn’t hear that sound… but they could certainly feel it. A flare of violence, wine-red, closing over his vision, and he dove for the door, his weight turned into a battering ram.
The inside of the Wagon Wheel erupted. Fists, elbows, bottles. Another female scream, cut short with a crunching sound. A chair broke, and Jeremiah ducked under a clumsy strike from a squat bearded man.
The ripple of violence spread, confusing the woman’s scent. Russet gold and blue silk, a faint blooming of… what was it? Cherry? Strawberry with sandalwood? Spice-fruit, as if she was part nymph.
That was one relief. She didn’t smell like his purely mortal, salt-and-sweet Daisy. She reeked of sidhe, even through the quirpiece’s struggle to mask her. Breaking her trail with a mortal whirlpool because the riders were close behind—but riders of which Unseelie faction, and why? Was it Unwinter himself riding, one last hunt before Summer’s Gates opened and he was confined to the dark of the moon or the Blighted Lands? Or was it simply some of his knights a-riding, for no other reason than the joy of it?
It didn’t matter. She wasn’t Daisy. She couldn’t be Daisy… but still. He knocked one man aside, ducked another flung beer bottle, threw his arm up as someone tossed a bar stool. It was nothing but reflex; the leg almost clipped his skull, but the cursed sidhe speed was still with him. Everything slowed down, droplets and shards of glass hanging in struggling air, faces contorted with rage.
Jeremiah moved.
TO SELL HERSELF DEAR
6
It was a risk, leaving the quir behind. Robin pawed in the pockets of her mended skirt as she bolted down the street, finding little that would aid her. Of course it was an Unseelie knight following her; she had caught a glimpse of him, helmed and gauntleted and smoking with Unwinter.
She had also seen the play of greenblack sickness on the horse’s mane. A plagued rider. Panic beat high and thin in her throat, cold sweat tracing down her back with one chill bony finger. At least it was not Unwinter himself, though that was cold comfort indeed.
If she could just slip away, or find an entrance-point, she could be over the border and back in Summer in a trice. Returning empty-handed was better than this. All she needed was a few moments’ worth of quiet—but that, apparently, was just what she was not about to be granted. The silver whistle-cry lifted behind her, eager and searching, and she would have cursed whoever had betrayed her—had it been Goodfellow?—down to the seventh generation if she could have spared the breath.
If someone hadn’t betrayed her, she might be simply unlucky. It was, she supposed, just barely possible. During their season, the Unseelie hunted where they would, and they always liked to do Summer a disservice. Unwinter grudged the Queen her glory, it was said, but perhaps he had just grown tired of her fickleness. Sometimes Robin wondered if the Sundering was a lover’s spat now ossified, King and Queen at each other’s throats by proxy. They were wondrous well matched, from all Robin could tell.
Her skin still crawled. The reek of the mortal tavern clung to her. It was a good attempt at camouflage, but not enough to discourage a Court Unseelie. The riding hunters were far too thoroughly practiced, the lords of the lesser Unseelie accustomed to all the various ways prey sought to escape.
If the plague was Unwinter’s, and the rider suspected what she was about… well, best not to think upon it. Best just to run.
Am I formally under the Hunt? No, there was no warning, no riddle—maybe it’s simply that I am of Summer and he is not?
It would be terribly ironic if she fell prey to a plague-maddened sidhe who bore her no personal ill-will.
Still, the quir had bought her some precious time, and it might yet buy her more if the rider descended on the tavern while she slipped away. There was some risk to the mortals inside, but enough cold iron around them to interfere with the worst of the dangerous things the Unseelie could do. A few of them might be led or glamoured, or brushed with sadness.
I had no choice, she told herself as she ran, and shut it away. There was no energy to waste now.
If she could not flee, and could not tear the Veil and step into Summer, she was left with only one choice. For that, she needed her breath.
Her voice made sidhe nervous, especially those who preferred the mortal world. She could, she supposed, have sung moontouched Henzler a song, and left him a corpse freed of Summer-yearning, then hied herself over the border bearing news.
But killing the Queen’s pet would be disastrous if Summer had, against all appearances, another use for him. So Robin had decided to quarter the area, seeking Puck. This was what she had to show for her caution—running down a mortal street with the hounds on her heels, the thud of hoofbeats behind her, and her quirpiece probably lost. She could make another with small trouble, but it was such an annoyance.
She flung the breakaway, a small crystalline globe laced with hair-fine, dwarven goldwire, and it shattered satisfyingly behind her. Sidhe magic flashed, a breath of apples and a plume of perfumed smoke rising to possibly divert, or maze and pixie-lead, pursuit. If the hounds were overexcited, or if luck was with her, they would chase the breakaway’s bouncing until they ran it to ground, by which time she would have a comfortable few lengths’ worth of time to find a doorway.
She suspected, even as she put on another burst of speed and her heels clattered, skirt swinging and her hair tangling wildly, that it had not taken.
A false gift the raddled bitch gave me. Or not, but the rider is close and gaining. Gulping heaving breaths, she cast about for a place to make her stand. A rider and hounds—if she brought down the rider, the hounds might well scatter. It would take the song, and she would need her lungs full. He would attack without giving her a chance, if he could, if she was not under Unwinter’s Hunt and he was not bound by those ancient codes.
It was possible, she supposed, that he might not know who she was. That he would think her just a nymph gone astray or a mortal-Tainted sidhe of Seelie country on some personal errand. If he recognized her, the rider might well try to silence her before she could assay a rill of notes. A knife or a bolt to the throat would discourage Robin’s song most wonderfully, and she dreaded the thought.
Without the song, she was all but helpless.
Why is it this is the only time I am certain I wish to live?
An alley beckoned. There was an entrance-point just beyond, but she couldn’t run the risk of the song warping her into Twisting or worse if she tried to step between here and Summer while holding off an Unseelie. He wasn’t merely one of the fullborn but Lesser sidhe, he was a highborn fullblood Court lord; he rode silvershod and had the hounds and the blackboil plague; it all added up to Robin Ragged dead before moonrise.
Dead, or Twisted and unable to sing. Or even plagued, if mortal blood no longer was insurance against the illness. Which would be worse?
You know very well what would be worse, Robin. Be canny, now. She nipped smartly into the alley, pounded down its length, and whirled. Set her back against the weeping bricks and focused on her breathing.
No breath, no song. Control the breath, control the song. In, then out, slow. Four counts, Robin. Always four counts, or their close cousins. Four in, four out.
Her ribs heaved. Her heart hammered. Footsteps and hoofbeats, and the hounds belling as they realized their prey was treed, or at least had ceased to rabbit-r
un.
I do not so much mind dying. I merely hate being hunted. It was a lie. She did very much mind death, especially in a filthy mortal alleyway. Robin clutched the wall grimly. Long practice clamped down on her starving lungs and dry throat. She spat, once, twice, braced her shoulders against cold weeping brick, and prepared to sell herself dear when the rider finally appeared.
VENGEANCE ENOUGH
7
A flash of bright green, a pattering of glove-soled feet, Goodfellow ran softly along the edge of a rooftop on Colchis Avenue. The Veil momentarily swallowed his lithe leaping; he reappeared across the street without breaking stride. Hurrying, hurrying, his ageless heart beating a little more quickly as he heard the huntwhistles trill in the distance. Those piercing cries, both like and unlike the Horn the whistles were copied from, sent shivers of delicious wine-dark anticipation down his back. Not precisely fear, because foxing such a hunt was merely an enjoyable evening’s sport for one such as he, but oh, the fun. The interestingness of it all, a merriment of the type he liked best, with blood and screaming at the end.
Was she clever and swift enough to escape? She should be. She never disappointed. Ever since he had found her bathing in a mortal pond, rising from the water nymph-slim and river-haired, she had warmed him clear through. And oh, what a voice she had! To hear the Ragged sing, and watch the destruction that followed, was always a fine event.
Hoofbeats, chiming against concrete. Riding silvershod, the Veil twisting like seaweed around its bulk, the rider below shot away, after a ghost of cinnamon hair and white arms. Around the elfhorse, the hounds were curls of smoke-vapor, their lamplit eyes winking as they vanished and reappeared, eddying in the dark knight’s passage.