Authors: A.M. Belrose
“Or watch the rest of us squirm with it.” She smiled wryly. “A young man’s fancy, and all of that.”
“Don’t make me sad to miss it.”
It took Sid a beat, and Chris’s unabashed grin, to realize he was flirting with her. Still flirting with her, more like, since she’d started that ill-advised joke in the first place. She wasn’t going to live that down as long as he knew her.
Well, if he wanted to tease, she couldn’t let him challenge her like that and think he’d won.
“Don’t get cocky. Ladies have prospects.”
“Oh? You have prospects?”
Sid waved an idle hand and tried to keep a straight face. “Dozens. Especially the ones who have faced me in the dueling yard. Isn’t beating a man into submission courtship in your country?”
“Not always.” He laughed, and touched his hand to hers where they rested on the table. “You can kick my ass anytime.”
“Prove yourself a worthy prospect.”
Then she caught Juniper
looking
at her and shut up for the rest of the night.
---
Back in her room, Sid undid the lacings of her gown with the help of one of the house girls. It was always a bit strange, coming off the battle field or out of her mortal clothes, returning to the softness of dresses. Sid embraced it; she savored the relaxation and the safety.
After the servant had hung the dress and all its accompanying layers in the wardrobe, Sid shooed her out. She pulled on a simple shift and crawled into bed. She was clean, she was fed, she was warm –
If one more thing woke her up in the middle of the night, she was turning in her shield.
Someone screamed. Sid rolled out of bed and grabbed the fireplace poker on her way out the door. Nightgown be damned, though now she could only hope this was nothing that involved arrows. Lights flickered down the hall, from the direction of the screaming, and Sid sprinted towards them. There in the hallway, in Court lands, in the House of Pines, stood the Lily Knight and his two remaining allies.
The other lackey lay dead on the floor, somewhat removed from her head. Juniper stood barring her bedroom doorway, an ichor stained battle axe clenched in her hands. Unfortunate decision making on the Summer Knight’s part. One of the remaining knights lunged at Juniper, but the Lily Knight and his last companion turned to the sound of Sid’s footsteps.
“You,” snarled the Lily Knight. He stood in full fighting armor, sword at the ready.
“How’d you get out?” Sid asked conversationally.
He turned a remarkable color, then lunged at Sid with his sword raised. She knocked his blade to the side with her poker. It was only bronze, and his sword enchanted silver, but she was faster than him and some higher power loved her. The poker held. Sid wielded it like a fencing rapier and jabbed forward. He danced back, fuming.
One of the lesser knights started towards her, but Chris came roaring down the hallway. In another case of foolhardy heroics, wearing nothing but loose pants, he punched an armed man right in the nose. The knight howled, green blood dripping down his face. He readied his sword against Chris.
Sid tried to move towards them, but her way was blocked by a considerable amount of asshole. The Lily Knight swung again. She parried with her miracle poker, but it wasn’t quite the weapon she’d prayed for. His sword tore through it, and Sid was nearly disemboweled. The tip of his blade tore into her shoulder. Here in the fairy world she bled a cold, sluggish black. The Summer Fae called her people corpses.
Her people called the Summer Fae rotting meat.
Sid went on the offensive with her makeshift, broken weapon. As long as she could summon up enough skill, maybe she could keep him on the retreat and give Juniper enough time to intercede –
The Lily Knight feinted, then came up hard, driving all his weight into her sternum with an armored shoulder. Sid went down hard on her back, winded, but she thrust her fingers into a joint of his armor and pulled him down with her. His sword hit the ground at an odd angle and buried itself inches into the wood.
He wrapped a hand around her neck. Mistake. She grasped the poker like a stunted lance and drove its broken point into his unprotected armpit with all of her strength. Thick blood poured out over her hand. The Lily Knight reared back screaming. Which was when Melly shoved two hands against his back and froze his armor, and probably a good chunk of his flesh, solid.
His eyes blazed in fruitless anger.
Sid pushed the Lily Knight off of her, gasping to get her breath back. She accepted Juniper’s hand up and took in the scene around her. Three Summer fae messily decapitated, green blood on everything and everyone. One Summer fae still presumably alive, pinned by Chris and being punched in the face very thoroughly.
The fae gurgled. Sid put a hand on Chris’s shoulder, urged him to stand up, and guided him away from the slaughter. Juniper could take care of two wounded prisoners. Chris was breathing heavily, his eyes gone terrible and dark.
To her own surprise, Sid realized she was shaking. She never let adrenaline or anger affect her on the battlefield, but this invasion of sanctuary was hideous and raw. She raised an unsteady hand to Chris’s chest, pressed her palm over his sternum and wordlessly reminded him to breathe deep.
He pulled her into a cracking hug, her hands pinned between them and her face in his shoulder. She could hear the war drum cadence of his heartbeat.
“Shh,” she whispered into his skin. “We’re okay.” She could hear Melly saying something in a rush. “Everyone’s okay. We handled it. You did well.”
She kept up the stream of awkward nonsense until he loosened his grip and let her go. For the first time in her life, she felt cold.
---
Juniper was in a high temper, and Sid didn’t blame her. Home ground was sacred, and it would have taken a huge amount of magic to breach not just Winter Territory, but hearth and home. A queenly amount of magic, which would make this the most blatant act of war in a millennia.
When they had decided to attack a knight and her lady in their bed, thinking to find helplessness, they had gravely miscalculated. Juniper was half-determined to burn the prisoners with their comrades’ corpses, or at least make them fight to the death, but Melly’s calmer head prevailed.
They would be taken before Queen and Court. Chances were the Queen’s justice would be no more merciful than Juniper’s.
Every high House kept iron restraints for prisoners, well locked-up and handled with gloves. Sid took particular pleasure in doing the duty barehanded, watching the Summer Knights flinch away from the collar and shackles. She had never felt their pain. She hoped it was severe.
Even two days later, travel preparations near complete, Chris still stalked the halls like a wounded wildcat. Sid wondered if it had been the deaths, the bodies. In the bookstore he’d had no time to believe her, much less throw a punch. Much less deliver a beating that would have hospitalized any mortal.
Sid didn’t think he was sleeping much.
The third night, lying there staring at the ceiling, she couldn’t push him out of her mind. Instead, she pushed herself out of bed, determined to do something. Calm him, thank him, she had no idea. And no time to formulate much of a plan, because there he was, pacing the bedroom hallway.
“Chris.” She tried to sound gentle, truly, but inexplicable nerves pushed her towards commanding. “You have to stop this. You have to sleep.”
He was just in his sleeping pants again. At least he’d had the intention of going to bed, however off course he was now. Torch light flickered eerily through his tattoos, all dark birds and bare tree branches. His hair was a mess. Sid reached up and pushed it out of his eyes.
“They could have killed you,” he said.
Not entirely what Sid had been expecting. “A great many things in my life could have killed me. It’s my job, a little bit.”
“They were after me. They’ve been stalking me, and I could barely do anything.”
“You were punching that guy pretty well,” Sid said.
His smile was lopsided and tinged sick. “He would have gotten back up eventually.”
“Juniper and her axe had the advantage of us both.”
“You could have
died
, Sid.”
Sid stared up at him, mystified. She didn’t know how to clarify her position any further. “Yes.”
He reached out a hand and laid it tenderly on her face, thumb stroking the arc of her cheekbone. Something popped in Sid’s stomach. She prayed it was only metaphorical.
“Can I – ” he began.
Sid wasn’t renowned for her way with men, but she hoped there were a limited number of questions he could be asking. Probably he didn’t want to borrow her shield.
She had to go up on her tiptoes to meet him, but he proved himself a gentleman by leaning down. His lips were chapped, but the kiss was soft, warm, and perfect. Sid wondered what she was doing, curling her fingers over his shoulder and tilting her head just so. She wondered what he was doing, resting his other hand on her hip, nudging her lips with his tongue.
Sid pulled back. “I’m not dead, Chris. We’re both still breathing. Get some sleep.”
She pushed him away gently and watched him until he was back in his room.
Despite her own advice, Sid didn’t sleep at all. She got dressed and sat next to the fireplace, watching the embers without really seeing them. This wasn’t a complication she needed or wanted, especially not with someone more mortal than fae. How many years had she spent watching Juniper and Melly worry over each other? Someday, her job would be to not come home at all. That seemed like a cruel thing to do to a partner, though she’d never said as much to her married compatriots.
Once, as a very young child, Sid had asked after her father. She’d been curious, as any young thing would be. Mortals were expedient, her mother had explained. Having lost a fae husband to the wars, she wanted more children but none of the nonsense of pain. She’d found a mortal man with striking eyes and straight teeth, stayed with him long enough to catch child, and left him behind without a thought. He was long, long dead by now, nothing but bones, nothing to vex.
Sid didn’t want any children. There was no reason to carry on with Chris, to think fondly of the stubble on his jaws, the breadth of his hands, how he’d kept his glasses carefully intact this whole journey. She wouldn’t be cruel.
Juniper and a small contingent of her house guard would accompany Sid and Chris to the palace, acting as an escort for their prisoners. Come dawn, it was easy enough for Sid to lose herself in horses and preparations to ride. Chris tried to catch her eye, but it would do him good to learn to ride by himself. He had family waiting, in a house Sid didn’t particularly care for in any case. He’d soon be too busy to remember any decisions fueled by adrenaline and a man’s first sight of death.
Melly brought Sid leather traveling armor and a sword from Pine’s armory. Sid buckled her gear on over her plain clothes, made sure her sword was loose in its scabbard, and rode point.
Chris wasn’t an oblivious man. He could tell when someone wanted space. Hell, over the years he’d gotten his head around the importance of someone who wanted to be left alone and someone who couldn’t be. Sid wasn’t a threat to herself or others – at least, others who didn’t deserve it. He could give her room to breathe, even if that meant his only view of her was literally watching her back.
He was so busy figuring out how to ride a horse than he almost didn’t notice Juniper falling back to keep pace with him.
“Do you need me to talk to her?”
“What?” Chris shook his head. “No, it’s all right. We've run into a lot of stuff the past couple of days, she’s got a right to be preoccupied.”
And he didn’t think anyone had seen them making out in the hallway like a couple of overenthusiastic high schoolers. Not quite the subtlety and romance with which he’d meant to approach the situation, but. He’d felt that, for the first time, he’d seen the reality not just of Sid’s existence, or her world, but of her life. He wondered when he’d started thinking of her as unshakable, an inevitability. An anchor point.
Chris knew that was a dangerous way to think of anyone, much less someone you’d only known for about a week. That didn’t make it any easier to stop, to stuff the feeling beneath his ribs and ignore it. He had little enough stability in his life, and none of it so gorgeous.
“Sid’s.” Juniper paused to think. “Sid’s not the great with people. She spends a lot of time away, more time than most. For a long while now, all she’s had is me and Melly, really.”
That didn’t really come as a surprise. “I understand.”
“Now, I’m not giving you permission to bother her – and if you bother her, she’s going to punch you in the eye, and damned if I’ll feel bad, but.”
“But?” Chris pressed.
“Even if she wants to talk, you couldn’t make her start a talk with a legion of soldiers, you get me? So you should start that conversation.” She leveled a glare at him that he took very, very seriously. “Politely.”
“Yes ma’am.”
Juniper broke into a grin and leaned over on her horse to clap him on the shoulder. “We’ll make a soldier of you yet.”
Chris had few friends that he’d call dependable. The only one who came to mind probably wouldn’t want much to do with him, after he’d abandoned the bookstore like that. It was nice to know that there were people in the world who still looked out for each other. He sincerely doubted Juniper had ever asked Sid to hide her stash because the police were on their way.
Just as every muscle in Chris’s legs threatened to rebel, they stopped for the night. Juniper bellowed out orders with the volume and efficiency of a drill sergeant. Her guardsmen flowed around her, tramping down snow, clearing a place for the fire, securing their prisoners and horses with significantly more care for the latter.
“Sid!” Juniper barked. “You take second watch, and show the newbie the ropes.”
Chris didn’t see anyone else around who might qualify as green. Sid just nodded, a bit curt, but Chris raised an eyebrow at Juniper. She pointed at Sid’s back very deliberately, punched her fist, then pointed at Chris. Message received.
Sore and exhausted, it didn’t take long for Chris to drop off into sleep. He didn’t even dream. There was nothing until Sid softly calling his name to wake him. She didn’t reach out to shake his shoulder. Once he’d indulged in a joint-popping stretch, she led him away from camp and began talking about patrolling clockwise. She was detached and clinical in every word.
“Are we in danger here?” Chris interrupted.
Sid glared. “We
shouldn’t
be. But we should have been safe at the House of Pines as well. This is justified caution.”
“And I’m taking that seriously, but I do think. I want to talk to you.”
Chris decided not to mention Juniper’s role in all this. If he went down in flames, on his own head be it. Sid didn’t need to be pissed off at her friends, too.
“Do you?”
“Yeah.” He missed his jeans, and desperately wished for pockets to shove his hands in. “If I crossed a line, I’m sorry.”
“You didn’t – not with me. As far as the situation goes, we
both
crossed a line.” She shook her head, and her expression eased. “Chris, I do like you. And I’m certain you’re a good man. But given our situation, anything…anything else would be unwise.”
Logically, he knew exactly where she was coming from. It was a place with dead bodies and Juniper being disagreeable with a battle axe. But he’d come from plenty of bad places in his life, and somehow this world of snow and immortals and beheadings didn’t seem like the worst of them. Maybe Sid had made all the difference in and of herself.
“And if the situation changes?”
She frowned. “I don’t think it’s likely to.”
“Things are going to settle. Whatever definition you want to use for ‘settled,’ I’m not totally sure what qualifies around here. But when everything’s back on solid ground
,
you know where to find me.”
Sid often made inscrutable expressions, Chris was learning. She was so much more internally focused than most people he knew, like a puzzle box working hard to unlock itself. He didn’t know what to expect from her. He liked that.
“If things settle.” The quirk of her lips was all wrong. “I do know where to find you, yes.”
“Friends?” he asked, and finally settled for hooking a thumb through his belt.
She nodded agreement, strange smile still fixed in place, and went back to a discussion of proper watchmanship.
---
Court wasn’t what Chris had been expecting. He wasn’t sure he’d been expecting anything, really, but not a sprawling city made of pine trees and whole stone. Buildings rose up in smooth spires, as if a thousand hands had reached down from heaven and drawn rock out of the earth in one motion. Light with no source danced and sparked in the boughs of trees that grew around and through the stone.
They approached under the cover of darkness, in a place where the buildings were eerily quiet. Chris could see them going on for blocks and blocks around him, miles and miles for all he knew, and not a person in sight. Snow muffled their horses’ hooves, just as it always had, and gently falling flakes were still adding to the drift.
Chris tried peering into dark windows as they passed, but nothing stirred.
“There’s not enough of us to fill the whole city,” Sid said, her voice muffled and echoing oddly. “Parts of it will remain abandoned for hundreds of years, until we all start looking for a change.”
Juniper nodded and gestured broadly around them. “You’ll find the odd one out around here, but this is our best chance of gossip not beating us to the palace.”
Ah, their prisoners. Well, it was probably for the best anyway. Chris wasn’t sure he wanted to dive into fae society, whatever that was, headfirst. At least this gave him a little time to process this sense of vertigo.
They walked until the earliest hours of the morning, when sunlight was just starting to leak over the horizon. The stone towers ended abruptly, each stopping at the same point at the edge of a snow covered field, and across the field rose a wall of pure-white something. It didn’t look like marble, but Chris had skipped all the parts of science class that talked about rocks. Juniper lead them in a rough semi-circle, skirting the wall until they reached a wooden gate carved with a reindeer and guarded by two men in silver armor.
The sight of the Summer Fae caused enough of a ruckus that Juniper had to talk the guards down from an impromptu execution, a position she was obviously loath to represent, and they took no notice of Chris at all. He hung back as Juniper and Sid did their job as important ladies of rank, and took his time studying the stone wall. It was as seamless as the buildings, without join, and the hinges of the door were strangely inset. It looked as if the wood had just been pushed into the stone, as soft and easy as a knife into butter.
The laws of physics be damned. Chris’s head spun, but he bit his cheek until the panic passed through him and away. He wouldn’t be hysterical. It wouldn’t achieve anything. He was far from useful here, but he refused to be useless.
The guards let them through. As soon as the gate closed behind them, Juniper and Sid dismounted. Chris followed their lead, then watched two more silver-armored guards emerge from a small stone building set into the wall. They joined Juniper’s guardsmen and, taking charge of the prisoners, set off parallel to the wall. Juniper watched them until they were out of sight, her expression hard.
Sid put a hand on his elbow. “Come on.”
They hiked their way up a hill before the palace came fully into view, a many storied building of the same material as the wall. It shone in the moonlight, and looked like nothing Chris knew on earth. It looked like a fairy tale. He didn’t laugh.
---
As it turned out, you didn’t get to just waltz in, wake up the queen, and have a chat. They ran into more guards at the doors to the palace proper, and Juniper got stuck in another long chat with them while Chris tried to identify any light source. Finally, they were escorted down several winding hallways, deposited in a sitting room, and told, politely, to hold their horses.
The room was ornate beyond imagining. Silver and gemstones glittered from every corner, with a heavy emphasis on diamonds. He was sure that every cushion was made of silk, or something equally horrible to spill a beer on. The crowning glory of the room was a cavernous marble fireplace and its carved wooden mantle. Above it hung a tapestry easily as tall as Chris; it depicted a woman in ornate armor sitting astride a reindeer the size of a horse. In one hand she clutched a long spear, and on that spear was impaled a head, presumably to match the various severed body parts hanging from her saddle. The rivulets and splatters of brown blood were lovingly rendered.
Juniper noticed him gaping at it. “That’s Sid’s great-grandmother. Damn near single-handedly solved all our problems, until the Autumn Court intervened.”
“No one ever heard from Dame Aventurine after that,” said Sid. She sounded put out about it.
Chris thought he could pick out a family resemblance, though Aventurine’s hair – and presumably feathers – was hidden under a helmet. She shared Sid’s steady green gaze, her proud chin, and the slope of her nose.
“She was a hero?” Chris asked.
“She would have been queen, if she could have brought herself to forsake her house.” Sid shrugged. “And then, well, she disappeared.”
“When the last queen passed, the crown went to Aventurine’s youngest sister instead,” Juniper added.
Chris couldn’t help gawking at Sid a little, but she held up a hand before he could say anything.
“Things don’t work the way you’re used to. I'm not anywhere near royalty. When the queen dies or abdicates, the crown could go to anyone she finds worthy.”
“Even odds on Melly,” Juniper said with a grin.
“Closer than me,” said Sid. “Can you imagine a half-mortal on the throne? I’d be neck deep in execution orders just to get rid of all the complainers.”
But still, the way she looked at the tapestry was warm and proud. Chris wasn’t entirely sold on the genocide angle, but the Summer Court hadn’t set themselves up for the benefit of the doubt in his eyes.
A woman entered the room through a discreet side door. Chris honestly had no idea what her job or rank might be, so he stood when Juniper and Sid did.
“You’re expected,” said the woman, and turned without another word.
Juniper followed her through the door with a confident stride, but Sid hesitated, and Chris wasn’t entirely sure he was invited. Sid reached out and grabbed his arm, cool through layers of borrowed linen.