Except the Queen (38 page)

He threw his arms up, bellowing curses as Awxes attacked his face. The quill skittered across the floor, and the pots toppled over, the black ink burning the floorboards. Lankin’s arms windmilled, and he kicked his legs, trying to free himself of the attacking crows.

Leaping up—the murder of crows still mobbing his head and shoulders—Lankin ran for the door, but I was
there to block him. I should have stepped aside, but I could not, the rage would not let me. I struck him hard across that cruel face and spun him around. He recoiled and struck me back, howling as the skin of his hand burned the moment it touched my cheek. Pain exploded and my head jerked violently to one side with the blow, but I stayed upright on staggering feet, refusing to move from the doorway. I threw a wild fist at him and felt the skin of his cheek split. He rolled away from the door, shaken by my attack. His blood hissed and steamed where it splashed across my knuckles.

Robin dashed around me, plunged through the flock of crows, and went straight to Sparrow. Pulling her into his arms, he growled and bared his teeth like a mastiff.

Then Jack was there, and he grabbed Lankin by the scruff, threw him against the wall, and pressed his arm across Lankin’s throat to hold him prisoner. He could not know the power of the Highborn he treated so rudely.

“Do not touch him,” I cried, my hand held out, though useless to offer a spell of protection.

Thick smoke and the crack of lightning sizzled in the room. Jack cried out as the first blast knocked him across the room and into the wall. I, too, was hurled back by the force, but stood again and flung myself forward, over Robin and Sparrow, shielding them from the second blast so that the flying splintered wood would not pierce Sparrow’s naked skin.

Crows shrieked and cawed as they were pierced with the flying wooden daggers. They fell to the floor, wings beating frantically, blood mingling with the spilled poisoned ink.

Then a deafening roar and a veil of green smoke filled the room that set us all to coughing. Sheltered between Robin and me, Sparrow never moved.

When the smoke finally cleared through the broken windows, I knew that Lankin was gone. Only then did I raise myself and survey the damage. Two walls blasted open. Four crows dead. Jack rolled into a ball, his shirt
covered with splintered wood like the quills of a porcupine, dots of blood where they entered. Two jagged darts of wood had pierced Robin’s hand where it lay over Sparrow’s face in a protective mask.

“Jack,” I called to the slumped figure and he raised his head, then his hand, and answered. “I’m good. And you?”

“I survive.”

“Robin? And the girl? Is she all right?”

I sat back on my haunches and Robin gathered Sparrow onto his knees, his terrified eyes searching her face. Her arms were limp, her head rolled back lifeless. But her eyes watched me, moved to follow mine. Sickened, I plucked a tiny arrow from her black hair; elf shot meant to keep her still yet aware of the pain while Lankin marked her. I broke it, and tucked the feathered shaft in my pocket. It would be proof of his cruelty. Released from its paralyzing power, Sparrow groaned and her head fell against Robin’s chest.

“She will be. Robin, help me get her to my bed.”

We rose, Sparrow in Robin’s arms and Jack leading me by the elbow. At the door, I cried at the sight of faithful Lily, lying so still. Jack leaned down and touched the dog, then looked back at me and shook his head. He stroked her, his mouth drawn tight in anger. I sobbed, the arum’s power ebbing away and leaving me only tears.

Jack stood back up and held me close while I wept. And I knew then in the deepest part of me, that this was no Trickster Jack. This was a human Jack—a Giantkiller, a humbler of trolls, a Jack who made the princess laugh. He would stand by my side against the dark and he would stay there till we triumphed or died together.

We limped upstairs, in shock and pain.

*   *   *

T
HE SERVANT HANDS HELPED ME
, tearing linen bandages into strips. So dazed and wounded were we all, that no one was surprised by the hands’ appearance. Sparrow was placed gently in my bed and afterward I washed
Jack’s and Robin’s wounds and gave them a special tea brewed strong enough to make them sleep.

I waited quietly until Jack had dozed off, sitting upright in the embroidered chair, while on my bed Robin had curled like a hound at Sparrow’s feet. I sat in the kitchen, meditating, turning the fragments of knowledge around and around as the twilight edged into darkness and then night shut us in. Serana’s warning had been fair enough—but like all visions it had been ambiguous. The arum had awoken desire in Sparrow and Robin, but it had also provoked Lankin to greater cruelty. It had given me the power needed to fight him, but it had cost the lives of the innocents—Lily and the crows.

The path for all of us led here, to this house and to Sparrow. And I sighed with heavy heart, thinking it right that somehow after all the seasons that had passed, she should come to me. Or perhaps, that I was brought here to find her. My punishment and my chance to set things right.

There could be no denying it now. I had seen the proof in her apartment when she lay nude and prostrate beneath the poisoned quill. I had seen the true color of her hair. In that triangle, the hair blazed like spun gold against her cream-colored belly. I realized then that she had been hiding her hair beneath garish dyes, not wanting to call attention to herself. But I knew the color of that hair. No one—neither mortal woman nor fairy—had hair of such color. Except the Queen. And there it was, in front of me. The child who had lain on the grass that long-ago summer, who was betrayed by my indiscretion, was now the girl in my bed, wounded and in need of my protection. This time, I would not fail.

*   *   *

W
HEN THE EVENING WAS FULL
, I roused myself from the table, found the last bits of my dam’s white silk and basket. Then I slipped into the bedroom and woke Robin.

“Come with me. I need your help.”

“Get Jack.”

“No. This is your doing and mine. It is our duty now.”

Stricken, he looked up at me and rose. We both knew the dead awaited us below. We could not ignore those who had fought for us.

On the landing, the serving hands stroked Lily’s body, in a tender farewell. Only then did I realize that the dog—like the hands and the cat and the house—had not belonged to Sparrow at all, but to the Great Witch. She would not be pleased when she learned the news.

The hands wrapped Lily in a brocade cloth and placed her in a leather satchel and carried her away. Robin gathered the corpses of the valiant crows, wrapping each one in a piece of white silk, and I placed them gently in a basket. I wept again when I saw the patches of white feathers on two of the smaller crows. The little changeling girls were dead.

Then Robin and I walked outside carrying our awful burdens. He glanced fearfully back at the house.

I shook my head. “Lankin will not return, at least not for a while. He has wounds, too, you know. In every battle, there is a truce time to bury the dead and bind the wounds. We are wrapped in that truce now. She will be safe until we finish what we must. I promise.”

He shivered all over, like a dog new out of the river, but nodded as if he had heard of such a thing before.

And so we walked swiftly into the deepest part of the park where under the trees, we laid down our burdens. There we dug with our hands beneath decaying leaves and laid those small bundles out in a trough of softened earth.

We did not speak nor did we stay long for we were both too exhausted from sorrow, from anger, and from the aches of battle. Besides, we had our injured loved ones to care for at home. We made the last of the trek in a small downpour that seemed to have conjured itself out of a cloudless sky.

*   *   *

W
E RETURNED TO FIND
J
ACK
awake and in my kitchen, starting to cook an extravagant breakfast of eggs folded over herbs, mushrooms, and daubs of cheese. There was soon toast and a mug of tea, hot and steaming, new potatoes frying in a pan, blackened with butter. I felt appetite and life returning. My stomach growled in anticipation.

However, Robin paid scant attention to the food, returning instead to his place at the bottom of Sparrow’s bed. She murmured a few words to him, and he stretched out beside her, an arm wrapped around her waist.

Jack had already set the little table, the bone-handled cutlery laid out just so, framing the porcelain plates. A new taper was in the candlestick and it burned with a cheering flame. All my precious things had been carefully placed on the window ledge. I was astonished into speechlessness—would not Serana be amused at that! Wet, cold, my fingers chaffed, and stained with dirt, I sank into the chair and watched Jack take command of the little kitchen.

He moved with grace, long, dexterous fingers cracking eggs, beating them in the blue bowl, turning the pan so that the mixture might cook quickly and evenly. He said nothing, but cast his glance my way, questions lying there between us, but good manners holding them in check. Never speak first when dealing with the fey—that old interdiction. Well, it seemed he learned a thing or two from someone with common sense. Perhaps even his neighbor, Baba Yaga.
How well
does
he know her?

I let him put the food in front of me. When I took a bite, it was delicious. We ate in silence. After the meal was done, I asked but one thing of him: “Will you help me hide Sparrow and Robin? Others will come.”

“Yes. You can stay with me. Just across the garden.” He pointed out the window to an old five-story building across from mine. “I have the loft on the top floor.”

“Are you sure you want to do this?”

“If you’re asking do I know what I’m in for, the answer is yes. Sort of.” Then he smiled, brushing back the thick gray hair, those eyes too bright a blue.

“How do you know this?”

“When I was ten years old my mother left us and my father, bitter about it, deposited me into the reluctant arms of my mother’s sister, a woman strange and fascinating. She was neither gruff nor kind, but drank small glasses of whiskey, read tarot cards, tea leaves, and told stories.”

“Stories?” I asked, sipping my tea.

“Yeah, the kind that make the hair on the back of your neck stand up and send you either running for the shrink’s couch or into art.”

“And since you are of normal size, I am assuming you went into art,” I replied, trying to conceal my ignorance. I have no idea what conjurer he imagined would turn him small. Or why.

He laughed and it was a pleasant sound in my kitchen that drove away the dampness of my joints. I must have guessed correctly.

After we finished eating, he went to wrap the sleeping Sparrow in a blanket. Robin growled at him, a throaty sound I have never heard a human make before.

“Then you’ll have to carry her, son,” Jack said. “We have to leave here now.”

I added, “The truce will end at the moon’s height and we still have to make Jack’s loft a fortress.”

Robin swaddled Sparrow in a blanket while Jack grabbed what extra food remained in my cold storage. I gathered up my treasures and placed them in my pocket and we left, locking the door to Baba Yaga’s house behind us. Or what remained of it. It seemed I was being forced into exile again.

Walking close together, we crossed the courtyard, past the garden to Jack’s building. An old rickety lift pulled us to the roof and I have not been so frightened of a cage since the time Serana and I tried to trap a Roc and nearly got our fingers nipped off. Besides, being surrounded by so much iron made me wheeze.

But finally we entered Jack’s abode and even my cautious sister would have been wild with happiness.

It was a garden of sculptures: wood and leather, twigs and fur, and green plants growing in abundance. There were stones with natural holes, shells with coiled secrets, a tortoise carapace, and dried fronds of bracken. The air was fragrant with the scents of linseed, cedar shavings, and charcoal. Slender stalks of rowan and blackthorn had been woven into the frames around the windows. Safeguards against the UnSeelie court. I wondered if he knew that.

Jack directed Robin toward a large bedroom with a window on the ceiling that looked up at the stars. The wooden bed was covered with a huge quilt of velvet patches stitched together with colored silks. Here the children slept, like chicks storm-fallen from their nest and now returned.

Jack led me to a smaller room at the back of the studio where he stored books and paintings. There was a simple bed covered in a woven cloth of midnight blue and it was as narrow as the cot where once my sister and I shared our youthful secrets. Not with ardor, but with great tenderness he held me in his arms, and in that embrace, I let the terror and grief of our long day recede.

*   *   *

N
ONE OF US SLEPT PAST
the dawn, but it was rest enough. Besides, we had work to do. Jack and Robin had to make the loft safe in case a new battle should break out. I never doubted there would be one soon.

Since the poisonous ink had given Sparrow a fever, my healing skills were sorely tested. I melted beeswax into a paste with some fresh ginger I found in Jack’s pantry. I added a bit of my own blood drawn from the crook of my left arm and the sweat of a city mouse caught behind the wall. I added a cobweb from the corner of Jack’s bookshelf and the squeezings of rowan berries. It worked albeit slowly. But after a day, most of the frightful tattoos began to disappear—though the one for trouble, no doubt the first, seemed deeply etched.

Jack made a vegetable soup thickened with eggs, but
Robin would suffer no one but himself to feed Sparrow. He raised her head to the spoon, though he managed to get her to take but one sip, or two. She was no more than a ribbon of white flesh now, but I knew how resilient she was—sturdy like her namesake.

*   *   *

A
T NIGHT
I
HEARD
R
OBIN
whispering in the dark, heard Sparrow’s feathered answers while Jack and I took turns standing watch. But either we had hurt Lankin more than we knew, or he was plotting with others for a next move. I wondered about that. He did not seem the type to share. On the other hand, he might have been selling information and still looking for the highest bidder. I could guess who the bidder might be. Had I not seen him on the street? Lankin was bad, Red Cap unthinkable. Though I didn’t say anything to the others, Jack’s loft no longer seemed much of a fortress at all.