Roadside Magic (22 page)

A crystalline scream, a shattering, and a thump. Puck vanished, his spurt of laughter unheard in the sudden noise.

The Unseelie envoy’s head hit the tessellated floor. A bright jet of vivid pale ichor fountained from his neck, and his body slumped, twisting inward on itself as the ironblight took hold.

“
Hold!
” Summer cried, and they stilled.

Jeremiah’s sides heaved. He finished the movement, the lance’s butt smacking the ground at parade rest, and he raised his aching head.

“Fool,” Broghan muttered. “You killed an
envoy
, one granted Summer’s hospitality. You traitorous, wretched Half dog.”

“Shhh.” The Queen’s fingers tensed, digging in, and though Broghan’s face didn’t change expression, gems of clear sweat sprang out on his pale brow. Pixies would gather them, if they shook loose. “Gallow, my Gallow, bring me that Horn. When it is placed in my hands, forgiveness shall be yours.”

He wet his lips with his dry-leaf tongue and smiled.

“I thought you were beautiful, once.”
I sound amazingly steady
. “Then I saw Robin Ragged and knew you were only dust. I was not always Summer, and I
do not serve
.”

It was worth it, he decided, to see the open shock crossing that soft, cruel, beautiful face.

“You scorn me?” Whispering, as if she could not believe it.

“I scorn you,” he said, clearly and loud, “for a Half girl truer than cold iron itself, who makes you look the faithless hag you are.”

She inhaled, but he was already moving. The doors shattered as he burst through them.

Her scream shook the entirety of Summerhome, from cellar to roof.

“Kill him!”

I
t was worse with her eyes closed. It made their voices louder, clearer, and the other sounds, too. The grinding of Daisy’s broken teeth. The machine breathing for Mama, in stentorious gasps and heaves. The tinkling of tiny amber shards falling from Sean’s naked, lacerated body. Worst of all, Daddy Snowe’s footsteps, and the monotonous, terrible cracking of the leather belt.

Robin blundered away, still searching for a wall, any surface she could put her back to. Daddy Snowe kept coming, a slow even tread, not hurrying but nearer and nearer no matter how quickly she moved. “
Whoooo-eeee!
” he yelled. “
Look at me when I’m talkin’ to you, girl!
”

She’d stopped making those harsh cawing noises. There was no point. She hawked again; bright blood tinged each wad of phlegm and spit. Had she broken her voice trying to scream? Would the song still work if she had? She only had to open her throat and it would come out, as long as there was breath to fuel it . . . but she might well tear something and be left mute, or—

“
Gotcha!
” His hand, cold-fish wet and limp, brushed across
her shoulder, and Robin caw-cried again despite herself.
It’s not real, it’s not real, it’s simply glamour
. She coughed, more bloodflecked spittle flying. Even glamour could kill, if you believed strongly enough. Summer wouldn’t lock her in here if the mirrors were full of bannock, ale, and comfortable chairs.
They’re all dead. They can’t be real.

And yet.
Mirrors
, those magical things. Every time she found a solid surface and tried to brace herself, it chipped, fracturing, and the reflections became yet more Daisys, yet more Daddy Snowes, all lumbering after her, Mama too slow but her copies the worst because they made that
noise
, the machine she hauled along so she could breathe filling the white-glare room with heavy, hot, rank, foul exhalations.

His soft, persuasive touch again, familiar work-roughened fingers skating down her shoulder. Robin struck out, wildly, her fist hitting his face, snapping his head back. He roared, the old sound of an enraged beast, and she was helpless. Could not even summon a word of chantment,
nothing
. She was no warrior, like Gallow—

A silvery cracking sound. Another shape, broad-shouldered, a gleam of green eyes. The armor, now rent and tattered, his side smoking and dripping bloody pus, the rot exhaling from him. It was Gallow, and she choked.

Not him. Oh God, not him too.

She’d tried to save him. But she was Robin Ragged, and she blighted all she touched, and—

Another shattering crack. Sweet silver and amber tinkling. Her wrist hit something hard and cold; she sucked in a copper-tinged breath and spun.

There
. A quivering in midair, a rippling where none should be. She’d finally found a wall.

“
Robiiiiiin
,” Gallow croak-hissed. “
You let me die, Robiiiiiin . . .”

She choked. Her throat relaxed. It could cripple her forever, if she let the song loose now.

Robin didn’t care. It burst out of her, a wall of golden sound, something tearing wetly in her chest. They clustered around her, the shades of her failures, and right before she threw herself after the song’s trailing noise, they screamed, too. Darkness burst around her, the velvet flower of Summer’s night, crackling, cascading slivers of stone and glass melting into black curse-birds coasting around her, pecking, their claws dyed bright scarlet. She ran off the edge of the tower’s floor, through the hole in the wall, and fell through salt-scouring wind. Tumbling over and over, the sliver-curses puffing into flame, the song dying as she ran out of breath to fuel it. Then there was only the roar of the sea, and she had time to think,
So this is how I die . . .

 . . . just before she hit the warm, unforgiving surface of the Dreaming Sea.

H
e arrived just as the bloody-winking light at the top of the tower turned to pale flame and winked out. From Summerhome, it would be the death of a horizon-riding star, if anyone was watching.

Goodfellow would have wagered, though, that nobody would bother. Not even Summer, her lily-white hands full of other matters and the Jewel on her forehead dangerously dark. Did she guess that some corners of her realm had escaped paleness and fraying because of another influence upon their fabric? What else might the sidhe girl who had taken up First Summer’s lovely Jewel have suspicions of?

Could the Tower have consumed the Ragged so quickly? It would be the first disappointment she had given her sire, were that the case.

The courtyard before the tower was sadly neglected, covered with thornvines. Some were blasted, shivering and whispering of the distaste that had blighted them, and Puck clicked his tongue once, shaking his nut-brown head. Such a temper she had, not like First Summer. Pale and deadly patient
that
lady had been, Danu’s first-chosen one, until she was betrayed.

And why was he thinking so much upon the past?

Puck sniffed, nostrils widening, and untangled the threads of scent. One in particular—sugared cherries, with a streak of mortal salt and the fabulous, indefinable fragrance-thread of
her
, his own flesh, wayward and rambling—pleased him. She had caused him no little trouble and inconvenience, true—but before that, she had delighted him as few others could, and proven herself the best of daughters. All in all, it was a balance.

And wasn’t that so very sidhe of her?

“Oh, my darling,” he whispered, “what fine times we shall have, when—”

The sound of breaking interrupted him. The courtyard heaved, and he skipped from stone to stone, avoiding the thrashing of the thornvines. Thick tentacles of spike-laden, juicy green crawled hungrily up the rough bisque sides, and the entire tower shuddered on its foundations.

Cracks racing from the top met the climbing thornvines. Stone-dust puffed out, and the sound was of giant glass plates shattering, over and over. Puck had to hop lively, skipping from foot to foot, to avoid being crushed by masonry grinding itself to finer and finer particles as it slammed the courtyard’s face.

His laughter rang amid the crunching and shattering, a noise of nightmarish goodwill. He danced amid the destruction, and when it ended, the Tower was a stump of white rubble, blackened at the top.

There was only one explanation. Its prey had escaped, and wreaked some damage upon it by doing so.

Puck, his sides heaving with deep breaths, laughed fit to die. He clutched his middle and keened, his merriment further blackening questing thorn-tendrils when they drew too close. When the noise finally died, he bowed, sweeping the thick-dusted floor of the courtyard with an imaginary hat, even
adding the small flick at the end of the movement that was in fashion among Summer’s Court at the present moment.

The bird had flown. If she survived the fall and the Dreaming Sea’s cruel, cold, numbing arms, he could collect her later. She had not disappointed, indeed, and now his attention was needed elsewhere.

He straightened, yellowgreen irises flaring with mad joyful light, and stepped . . . sideways. The Veil closed about him, leaving only the scorch of his eyes on the dust-choked air. It was perhaps a good thing, for as that tear in Summer folded up around itself, there was a faint cough from the wall at the tower’s landward side.

Had Puck seen Alastair Crenn’s haggard, moss-draped head, his dark eyes gleaming like coals through the damp strands, he might have thought to slay the sidhe who had seen him arrive too late for one of his purposes. Or perhaps not.

Either way, Crenn slid down the other side of the wall and began working along it, pushing his way through the hungry vines.

Sooner or later, he would reach the cliff’s edge.

U
nwinter’s Keep turned its back to cliffs falling into the Dreaming Sea. A spine of sharp black mountains marched away from Sea and Keep both, their jagged tops fuming white ash, from dwarven furnace, wyrm-breath, or simply because under the cold exterior stone lay a crimson-hot rage too huge to be fully buried. It was whispered that only Unwinter’s will kept his domain—the mountains to the Black Counties, the Dreaming Sea to the Ash Plain and the thorny tangle of the Dak’r Woods—from sliding through the Second Veil into dissolution. The blackstone spires of his Keep flew crimson pennons, and no ash ever dulled its glossy sides.

The palanquin had returned, the bridge-trolls shivering and sweating as they bore its cargo. Inside its velvet-swathed dimness was a paper box, gaily wrapped with silver foil. Carried to the throneroom by two pale, noseless barrow-wights, it was set before the dais. The Throne, its spines tipped with fresh crimson, was not empty, though deep shadow filled its recesses.

An unsound of tearing, the Veil parting, and Puck Goodfellow stepped lightly through. His hair was wildly disarranged,
his smile gone, and his leathers had seen hard use, no longer brand-new.

Unwinter’s gauntleted fist rose, and the wights stepped back, their pale moon-sickle blades returning to the sheaths. It was unlike the Fatherless to appear so, without the courtesy of visiting Unwinter’s bone-frilled High Steward first, and the Lord of the Fell’s eye-sparks, crimson orbs strengthening in the cave of his helm, fixed on the visitor.

“I crave pardon, oh Lion of Danu, for appearing thus.” Puck bowed, but with none of the fine little movements of Summer’s Court fashion. “I hastened to bring you news.”

“
Did you, now
.” Unwinter’s tone was soft, but so cold. The wights tensed, very much like Unwinter’s slim needle-tooth hounds, and elsewhere in the Keep, activity began. It could have been merely a change of the guard, or preparations for a feast.

“Oh, we bear each other no love, but I have done you many a service, lately. Do you know what rests in yon gift, Lord of the Hallow?”

“I suspect, Fatherless.
Her
treachery knows no bounds. Once again you come to me, reeking of
her
perfume.”

“ ’Twas not Summer who did this, my lord.”

Unwinter’s mailed finger twitched. One wight drifted forward, flexed its long strangler’s fingers, and lifted the lid from the box. Sealing-chantment broke, and a reek of ironblight rose.

The head of Cailas Redthorn, violet dapples of lightshielding still engraved upon his cheeks, lolled on a purple satin cushion. He was one of the favored, the fullborn highblood who had been with Unwinter since the Sundering and consequently rode as boon companions on night-mare mounts when the hunt called.

“
Who, then?
” Still softly, but the wights both shivered.

Ice crystals decked Puck’s hair now, and his ear-tips flicked to rid them of freezing globules. His lashes, weighted with tiny flecks of ice as well, drooped heavily as he blinked. “ ’Twas the Gallow who did it, oh Lord of the Hunt. Struck your envoy down in Summer’s very hall. Before he did, though, he showed the entire assemblage a wonder.”

“No doubt he did. Why are you here, Fatherless?”

“To bring thee news.” Puck straightened from his bow, his breath flash-freezing and falling tinkling to the blackstone floor. The flames whispered, shifting, in the firepit. “And to offer thee alliance, if you would have it.”

“
Why now?
” The mailed finger twitched again, and the wight clapped the lid back on the box. The two picked it up again, reverently, and carried it to the firepit. A heave, and the cleansing flames ate through chantment and paper, sidhe flesh and bone. The thin, bone-white smoke that rose was perfumed with deep, cloying rose-scent, the mark of Cailas’s family.

“Summer has taken my little Robin. I bear no deep love for either Court, but I will not brook insult.”

“You never have.”

The wights vanished, presumably fearing their lord’s temper. Puck rested his hands on his boy-slim hips. “Not all of us have your tolerance, gracious one.”

Unwinter’s short, unamused chuckle shivered the ice, grinding it into finer particles. “
I shall consider us allied, Fatherless, when I ride to war and you and yours ride with me.
”

“And when will that be?”

More laughter, cut off halfway as Unwinter leaned slightly forward. The deep, cloaking shadow broke with glints and glimmers over his fine dwarven-made armor, as fluid as the Gallow’s but with no leather sheathing. The Throne twitched,
and the blood at its tips was now red ice. “
When I call upon you, free sidhe. Until then, leave me in peace.
”

“As you like.” Puck sketched another bow, and as he had arrived, did not bother to walk from the Keep.

He simply stepped through the Veil and was gone.

Unwinter remained very still, the crimson eye-sparks fixed first on leaping crystalline flames, then on the spot where Puck had stood. “
Cailas
,” he said, softly but without the hurtful cold weighting each syllable.

Then, “
Puck
.” His mailed fingers flexed.

Last of all, he settled back and tented those fingers, the mail making a slight chiming as his extra finger twitched. “
Gallow
,” he breathed, and the Keep resounded, from cellar to tallest spire, shuddering as a plucked harpstring.

Unwinter began to laugh.