Roadside Magic (5 page)

The prey had been sighted.

T
he truck stop on Highway 4, at the very edge of the city, burned with electric light, soaked itself in diesel fumes, and was full of enough cold iron to deter any sidhe with less than at least a half share of mortal blood. Robin hopped nimbly onto a Dumpster’s slick lid, leapt to catch the rung of a rusting ladder, and hung for a moment before a whispered chantment boosted her up just enough to brace one of her feet on an odd, protruding brick. Why there was only half a ladder didn’t concern her as much as its sudden wobbling and rocking, but she reached the roof without further disaster.

Inside would have been better, but the place was stuffed full of mortals, mostly wide-shouldered men hunched over plates of fried grease. Everything in Robin shuddered at the thought of actually speaking to one of the worn, bleached-dry waitresses, or holding enough of a glamour to keep from being eyed by the men. Even the thought of creeping in to steal butter or a carton of milk made her stomach twist.

Besides, the less she rubbed shoulders with mortals, the better. For them,
and
for her.

Up here, the breeze had turned sharp, and curls of steam rose from her bare shoulders. The temperature didn’t bother her much; nothing short of stonecracking steppe-freeze could trouble a Half who had learned the warming breath. She still clasped her elbows in her palms, hugging herself. Huge metal letters—
DIN R
, the
E
missing and the stumps of its support struts sheared and rusted—made low, uneasy sounds, singing as moving air mouthed them and the building below throbbed, a wasp-nest waking.

She turned in a full circle sunwise, then the other way, rubbed the smoke-tarnish from her eyes, felt at her collarbone before she remembered her locket was gone. Touched the pins and the bone comb nestled in her hair next to the matted elflock, touched the knife’s cold hilt.

The east was lightening into gray; Night had turned its last corner and shambled wearily for her own bed. In Summer, the Home on the Hill would be almost silent, only the kitchens full of susurration as the brughnies and merrimegs woke and began tending the ovens. While the Gates were open, sometimes Summer Herself would wake at dawn, but rarely before, and never during Unwinter’s half of the year.

Still turning aimlessly, Robin shut her eyes. Her heels scraped as she moved, once twice thrice widdershins, once twice deosil, her skirt swinging and the motion inadequate to stave off crowding thoughts.

Everything inside her skin was whirling, too.

A clatter from below stopped her, redgold curls bouncing as she froze. Golden light flooded the rear of the restaurant, and she crouched before she realized it was just the diner’s back door. A crunch and a slam was a bag of garbage tossed into the Dumpster she’d climbed on, and the light faded to a dim glow.

Curious, she straightened slowly and crept to the edge of the roof.

A lean young man propped himself against the chainlink fence separating the diner’s back from a wide expanse of cracked paving full of the shining beetles of trucks, a quick red flash illuminating his aquiline face and dark hair as he lit a cigarette. The brughnies called them
nagsticks
; they smelled awful and tasted worse. Still, they were stolen sometimes, often by pixies, either to fox a mortal or to use as currency at one of the sidhe markets. Goblins and trolls sometimes liked them, eating as many as a dozen at a time and falling down in a foam-mouth stupor, seeing whatever passed for visions, to them. A mortal poison, less fatal than cold iron.

Robin watched. He was young, merely a boy, with no shadow of down upon his cheeks yet. Why was he puffing on one of those awful things? His dark head was segmented, a hairnet pressing the hair into geometric sections. His eyes glimmered a little as he half-lidded them, obviously enjoying his stolen moment.

She stepped back, carefully. Again. The letters presented a brave front to the world, but behind them on the roof, the supports were a jungle of rust and damp. She had slept deeply in the trailer, but everything in her still ached a bit. Weariness and pain, both mortal sensations. At least the highborn affected not to feel them. Not until close to death.

She settled where the
E
had been, propping her back against a wide, rusted beam. It itched a little, though her mortal half insulated her from cold iron’s poisoning.

Robin had never thought she’d be grateful for mortal blood. How long had she spent at Court, wondering if any of the knights there had spent a summer with Mama? To find out, instead, that she was the child of a monster . . .

You did it!
The crowbar, smashing time and again as the shape below her writhed and flung up its malformed hands. Her mortal stepfather would have been proud of how coldly she had caused pain. Daddy Snowe, always full of stories about how he’d gotten back at someone who had disrespected him, or looked at him sidelong, or any of a hundred insults.

I’d almost rather be mortal
. It was a lie, though. Anything was better than their brief, gray, meaningless lives. Wasn’t it?

Robin lifted her hand, examining her palm. No bubbling rash from cold iron, no tinge of smoke left on her since turning had whisked it away, no bruising from gripping the crowbar so tightly. Her skin was whole, unmarked by bruise or plague.

The aching was
inside
. Mortal enough for that, at least.

“The poor cat,” she whispered, and pulled her knees up, tucking her skirt around her legs. Behind the diner, the door slammed again, the mortal boy going back to whatever tasks awaited him. Once, Robin might have spoken to him, given a simple chantment to ease weariness or take the nagstick craving from him.

Any kindness she could offer would only bring disaster in its wake. Had she finally learned her lesson? Sean, trapped in amber by a vengeful queen, shattered on a cold, uncaring sidhe floor. A pawn in a game he could never have understood, removed from the board and broken into glass-sharp amber fragments.

Robin rested her chin on her knees, fixed her gaze on the horizon. The gray was strengthening. When the sun finally breached that faraway shore, she would be ready.

In the meantime, she sat and brooded and did her best not to think on what Gallow might be doing, if his house had been visited by Unseelie in search of her, or if he had the sense to
flee, take himself back to Summer to become Armormaster again. That would be safest for him, indeed.

He had, after all, challenged Unwinter himself. Perhaps it was only because Robin looked like Daisy, and he felt . . . what?

Stop it, Robin.

But oh, she wondered, and the wait for true dawn was long.

S
ummerhome stretched green and white upon the Hill, its towers bare of pennants or flags. A red dawn had arisen, black smoke rising from fleecy drifts of blossom in the orchard as the bodies of both Unseelie and the lesser casualties of Summer’s folk were burned, woodwights and brughnies tending the flames with nets of chantment. Their high-beaked masks, the noses stuffed full of merrywell and other helpful herbs, floated above dark, motheaten robes—the heavy blue velvet had not been used for many a long year, tarnished silver thread alive with chantment to shield the wearer from spark or vapor.

The highborn sidhe fallen in Unwinter’s treacherous raid upon the heart of Seelie were already interred in the Moaning Caves, and the Half-mortal or above, corpses barely tinged with the quickrot that accompanied most sidhe upon their death, would be torched on pyres along the Dreaming Sea. Summer’s will had restored her lands; the smoke was the only sign of the violation. That, and a certain . . . paleness. Perhaps the air was not as rich as it once had been. Perhaps the greensward was not quite as fragrant.

“Such a waste.” A soft, bell-clear murmur, and she drew her
heavy mantle higher about her milk-white shoulders. Golden hair tumbled down in heavy ripples. A particularly acute observer might have noticed the beginning of tangles under the sleek waves.

A
wise
observer would know not to comment upon them, to pretend not to notice.

“And yet.” The Queen sighed, the Jewel on her forehead dark as it had not been for long, long years as well. A single spark of green revolved in its depths, burning bright and steady as hatred. “The ashes will nourish the trees, the mourning will pass, and we shall once again be merry.”

She turned, but not far, showing only a slice of her pale cheek and a single glimmer of a black, black eye. Behind her, shadows and heavy draperies filled the private bower. Summer was a creature of light and air, but this close, secret room held little of either. Even the candleflames were low and reddened, bruised pinprick-eyes.

In the precise center of plain, mellow-burnished wooden floor, he knelt as was polite when called before
her
. Broad-shouldered, he would be tall when he rose, and his armor, though dull leather instead of a fullblood knight’s polish and glimmering metal, was well made and chased with chantment beside. He was no high Seelie knight, but the two hilts rising behind his fine shoulders were fluid-curved, dwarven work. His hair was much too long to be currently Court-fashionable, and its color—rich chestnut, but with a tinge of green, as if moss had crept among the strands—bespoke some dryad in his lineage. Curtaining his face, brushing his shoulders, it shielded his features from the faint candlelight.

He stared at the floor, unmoving, and after a short while Summer laughed. “There is a task I would set thee, Crenn.”

The Half knight—for such he was, a fullblood dam and a
mortal sire ensnared under a whitethorn tree—did not move. His tone matched hers, almost a whisper. “Then I shall perform it.”

Maybe, for a moment, he had considered giving another answer, one less politic and, hence, less wise.

Summer did not seem to care. “Very well. There is a creature I wish hunted, trapped, and brought to me without so much as a feather disturbed.”

A long pause. “That is not . . . usual.”

“Is it beyond your abilities, Half?”

No movement broke his perfect stillness. Yet he remained silent.

“I thought not.” Summer moved, a flicker of her pale fingers. A pair of drow-sharp eyes might have noticed a shadow on the back of one, perhaps a spot of age—but it had to be a trick of the dim lighting. Summer never withered, eternal and beautiful . . .

 . . . or so all the songs said, and of course the bards who sang of her grace would not lie.

Alastair Crenn remained still. His boots were of mortal make, sturdy leather. The rest of him was sidhe-dressed, except for the earring in his left ear, a hoop of cold, dull iron. Precious few, even Half, would wear such a thing so flagrantly.

Finally, Summer spoke again, her tone not so dulcet. Instead, each word was edged, crisp, and cold. “Bring me Robin Ragged, whole and well, no matter where she has rambled.”

Crenn considered this. “I have heard her life belongs to Gallow, the former Queensglass.”

“I do not recall releasing him from service. Just as I do not recall asking you for gossip, Half.”

His head dropped a fraction. That was all.

“Gallow-my-glass claimed her life as a boon, and I granted
it.” The Seelie Queen turned back to the window. Did a tremor go through her, rustling the great velvet mantle figured with the constellations of Summer’s evening sky? “Your task is to bring her to me, Crenn. Whole and well, without a bruise or a scratch.”

“And if she is unwilling?”

“That,” Summer said softly, “has never halted your course before, huntsman. Take yourself from my sight, and execute your errand.”

“As Summer commands.” He rose with a quick habitual shake of his shaggy head.

She let him reach the heavy oaken door before the hook was sweetened with bait. “Crenn.”

He halted between one step and the next.

“Bring her to me, and I will make you beautiful again.”

His shoulders stiffened. He made no answer, and Summer’s mocking laughter, a knife-edge hidden under velvet, followed him out the door and down the narrow, winding stone steps, their centers hollowed by many feet. The North Tower had not been used in a long while, but it was here Summer had retreated after Unwinter and his cursed minions broke the borders and ravaged her holdings.

At the bottom of the staircase, another knight paused. Braghn Moran the dark-haired, once the lover of another highborn sidhe lady, now high in Summer’s favor and forgetful of his former paramour, bared his sharp teeth at Crenn. The highblood’s pristine, sun-chased armor threw back torchlight with a vengeance, a glamour of light and air moving with him.

His mailed fist clasped the thin arm of a vacant-eyed changeling, its cornsilk hair disarranged and its homely, freckled face blank as a well’s eye. It wore a colorless shift, and the cloying spoilfruit smell of a drugging chantment lingered around
it. Tiny jewels of drool swelled at the corners of its generous mouth, and since it was no longer holding a visitor’s place in the mortal world, the high, cartilaginous points of its ears poked up through its hair, almost meeting behind its head.

“Such a little thing,” Crenn said by way of greeting. An indirect insult, to not address a fullborn properly, and yet he avoided the impoliteness of sullying the Moran’s title with his half-mortal mouth.

The Feathersalt’s former lover did not curl his lip. “Undeserving but lucky, to have an audience with such an august personage.” Faint disdain colored the words, but only that.

“No doubt.” Crenn strode past. Above, there would be a hungry smile, and the flash of a flint-bladed knife. It was the third changeling he had witnessed brought back to Summer’s tender mercies just this morn, as he arrived at Summerhome to answer a summons in the form of a graceful white bird.

The dove had struck into the heart of his swamps and called him away from his tedious, comforting solitude.

Unwinter had indeed struck deep, as well. All Summer’s subjects fumed at his treachery, to strike as the Gates were opened, after a revel to welcome renewal from the Queen’s white hands and green Jewel, the fount of all Seelie.

Still, Alastair Crenn, the Huntsman of Marrowdowne’s deep tangled fens, found much to wonder at. How had Unwinter found the means to break the borders? How many changelings would be called home to Summer’s hunger and the flint knife? Why would Summer send
him
, a Half knight turned assassin, after the Ragged, whose voice could kill and whose shuttling to the mortal world, erranding for Summer herself, had been much remarked upon of late?

I will make you beautiful again.

His face twitched, once, and he restrained the urge to touch
the seamed and runneled flesh. He strode through the Great Hall, noting the black streaks on the map of Summer’s dominions burned into glossy marble, the paling at the edges. Cor’s Heart was suspiciously faded, the Far End nearly vanished, and Marrowdowne itself frayed near the delta-mouth, where the Dreaming Sea swallowed both sand and fresh water from the Marrow’s winding, fern-choked flow.

The glassine steps before the great door were faded, cracked, and dull, too, and all Summer trembled for a moment. Crenn’s sharp ears prickled, and he heard the sound of a blade cleaving air, and a single soft, choked cry echoing from the northmost tower.

One less changeling in the world.

His pace quickened. Dawn was near, and he was about to visit the mortal world for the first time in a very long while.