Ironside (12 page)

The creature pressed a thumb against the man’s forehead and hissed some words that Kaye didn’t know. The frozen man moved slowly to resume standing like an indifferent sentry, clothing soaked through and dripping.

“What do you want?” Kaye demanded, taking off her coat and wrapping it around a shivering Corny. “Who are you?”

“Sorrowsap,” said the creature, bowing his head. His hair was thin and coiled like the tangle of roots beneath a weed. “At your service.”

“Great! That’s just fucking great.” Luis held his stomach.

Corny shuddered reflexively and pulled the coat tighter.

“
My
service?” Kaye asked. Looking across the forest, she saw the other human figures walk back to their original positions. They had been coming, had been perhaps only moments away from entering the fight.

“The King of the Unseelie Court commands that I guard your steps. I have followed you since you left his court.”

“Why would he do that?” Kaye blurted. She thought of Roiben covered in collapsed dirt, his face as pale as a marble tombstone, and she closed her eyes against the image. He should have been protecting himself and been less worried about her.

Sorrowsap tilted his head. “I serve his whims. I need not understand them.”

“But how could you stop the frozen people like that?” Luis asked. “This barrier has to have been created to keep you out more than us.”

At the question, Sorrowsap smiled, his clear wet teeth making his mouth look poisonous. He reached into a sack beneath his robes and threw down what at first seemed like green leather lined in red silk. Then Kaye saw the fine hairs dotting the surface and the sticky wetness underneath. Skin. The skin of a faery.

“She told me,” said Sorrowsap.

Luis made a noise in the back of his throat and turned away, like he was going to retch.

“You can’t—I don’t want—” Kaye said, furious and terrified. “You killed her because of me.”

Sorrowsap said nothing.

“Never do that! Never!” She walked up to him, hands fisted. Before she thought better of it, she slapped him. Her hand stung.

He didn’t even flinch. “Just because I am to protect you does not give you governance over me.”

“Kaye,” Luis said stiffly. “It’s done.”

Kaye looked toward Luis, but he avoided meeting her eyes.

“I’m freezing,” Corny said. “As in ‘to death.’ Let’s get where we’re going.”

“All these people are going to die from the cold,” Kaye said, although it seemed that, lately, her trying to make things better had only succeeded in making them worse. “We can’t just leave them.”

Corny took out his phone. “Let’s call the—”

Luis shook his head. “I don’t think we should lead more victims out here. That’s what you’d be doing if the police came.”

“I’m not getting reception anyway,” Corny said. “You break curses. Can’t you do anything for them?”

Luis shook his head. “This is way beyond what I know how to handle.”

“We have to dry this guy off,” Kaye said.

“Maybe cover his fingers before they get worse. Sorrowsap, can you keep him…deactivated?”

“You have no governance over me.” Yellow eyes watched her with as little expression as an owl’s.

“I didn’t think I did,” Kaye said. “I’m asking for your help.”

“Let them die,” said Sorrowsap.

She sighed. “Can’t you snap them out of it? Remove whatever enchantment is keeping them like this—remove it permanently? Then they could just go home.”

“No,” he said, “I cannot.”

“I am going to help this guy. If he attacks me, you are going to have to stop him. And if you don’t keep him turned off, he’s going to attack.”

Sorrowsap’s face seemed expressionless, but one of his hands curled into a fist. “Very well, pixie-who-has-my-King’s-favor.” He strode to the frozen man and placed his thumb on the man’s forehead once more.

Kaye sat down in the snow and pulled off her own boots as Sorrowsap chanted the unfamiliar words. Taking off her socks, she wrapped them over the man’s hands. Luis draped the guy in his coat and ducked out of the way of a swinging arm when the hissing chant faltered.

“It’s not going to help,” Corny said. “These people are screwed.”

Kaye stepped back. The cold felt like razors cutting her skin. Even wearing her coat, Corny’s lips had gone blue. The frozen man would die with all the others.

“The Seelie Court’s close,” Luis said.

“There I cannot follow,” said Sorrowsap. “If you go, you will be without my protection and that would cause my Lord deep displeasure.”

“We’re going,” Kaye said.

“As you say.” Sorrowsap bowed his head. “I will wait for you here.”

Kaye looked at Corny. “You don’t have to come. You’d warm up quickly in the car.”

“Don’t be an idiot,” he told her through chattering teeth.

“The next leg of the journey means getting into that,” Luis said, pointing along the shore. For a moment Kaye saw nothing. Then the wind rippled the water, setting something to rock and glisten in the moonlight. A boat, carved entirely from ice, its prow shaped like a swan ready to soar into flight. “The Bright Lady didn’t exactly tell me about her frozen zombie sentries, so I’m thinking she’s full of surprises.”

“Oh, great. That’ll warm us right up,” Corny said, stumbling over the frozen snow.

Kaye stepped gingerly onto the slippery surface of the boat and sat down. The seat was cold against her thighs. “So, would this water fix Corny’s curse?”

Corny got in next to her. “I don’t—”

“Corny?” Luis frowned.

“Neil,” Kaye said. “I mean fix Neil’s curse.”

“No,” Luis pushed the boat hard and it slid out onto the water. Luis hopped in, making them rock wildly as he sat. He looked over at Corny, and there was something considering in his gaze. “Too still and not salt.”

They didn’t paddle, but a strange current propelled them across the lake, past the drowned trees. Beneath the dripping hull of the boat the water was choked with vibrant green duckweed, as though a forest grew underneath the waves.

Green and gold fish darted under the boat, visible though the ice hull. Fish had to keep swimming to breathe, Kaye thought. She knew how they felt. There was nothing safe to think about, not Roiben, not her mother, not all the people slowly dying on the far shore. There was nothing to do but keep going until despair finally froze her.

“Kaye—check it out,” Corny said. “It’s like from a book.”

Through the mist, Kaye saw the outline of an island filled with tall firs. As they got closer, the sky grew lighter and the air became warm. Although there was no sun, the shore was lit bright as day.

Corny glanced at his watch and then held it out to show her. The digital numbers had stopped on December 21 at 6:13:52 p.m. “Bizarre.”

“At least it’s warmer,” Kaye said, rubbing his arms through the coat, hoping she could rub the chill out of him.

“That would be better news if we weren’t in a
boat made of ice.
”

“I don’t know about you all,” Luis said. He smiled slightly, almost like he was embarrassed.

“But I can’t even feel my ass anymore. Swimming might be better.”

Corny laughed, but Kaye couldn’t smile. She was putting Corny in danger. Again.

The last of the haze blew off and Kaye saw that each tree on the island was white with cocoon silk in place of snow. She thought she could see masses of caterpillars writhing at the peaks of the trees, and she shuddered.

The boat dug into the soft mud. They climbed out, feet sinking slightly so there was a sucking noise with each step across the shore.

Stupid mud,
Kaye thought.
Stupid boat. Stupid faery island.
She found herself suddenly exhausted.
Stupid, stupid me.

There was music, distant and faint, accompanied by the sound of laughter. They followed it into a grove of flowering cherry trees, the blooms blue instead of pink, petals falling like a shower of poison with every slight breeze.

She thought of something the Thistlewitch had told her when she had explained to Kaye that she was a changeling:
The child’s fey nature becomes harder and harder to conceal as it grows. In the end, they all return to Faerie.

That couldn’t be true. Kaye didn’t want it to be true.

Corny shivered once, hard, like his body was shaking off the cold, and toed off his sodden and mud-covered shoes. It was warm, but not hot, on the island—so perfect a temperature, in fact, that it was as though there were no weather at all.

A few of the Bright folk strolled on the grass. A boy in a skirt of silver scale mesh held the hand of a pixie with wide azure wings. Clouds of tiny buzzing faeries hovered in the air like gnats. A knight in white painted armor looked in Kaye’s direction. A singing voice, heartbreakingly lovely, drifted down to where she stood. From the branches of the trees, pointed faces stared down.

A knight with eyes the color of turquoises walked up to meet them and bowed deeply. “My Lady is pleased by your arrival. She asks that you come and sit with her.” He glanced at her companions. “Only you.”

Kaye nodded, worrying her lip with her teeth.

“Beneath the tree.” He gestured toward a massive willow, its drooping branches covered with struggling cocoons. Every now and again one of the silken purses would rip open and a white bird would flutter loose and take flight.

Kaye made herself lift one of the heavy leathery branches and duck underneath.

Light filtered through the leaves to glimmer on the faces of Silarial and her courtiers. The Lady of the Bright Court did not sit on a throne, but rather on a collection of tapestry cushions heaped upon the ground. Other faeries were strewn about like ornaments, some of them horned, others thin as sticks and sprouting leaves where hair might have been.

Silarial’s hair was parted in two soft waves at her brow, the strands shining like copper, and for a moment Kaye thought of the pennies that had fallen from the man’s mouth in Luis’s apartment. The Bright Lady smiled, and she was so stunning that Kaye forgot to speak, forgot to bow, forgot to do anything but stare.

It hurt to look at her.

Perhaps like great pain, great loveliness must be forgotten.

“Will you have something?” asked Silarial, gesturing to bowls of fruit and pitchers of juice, their surfaces beading from the chill of the contents. “Unless it is not to your taste.”

“I’m sure it is very much to my taste.” Kaye bit into a white fruit. Black nectar stained her lips dark and ran over her chin.

The courtiers laughed behind their long-fingered hands and Kaye wondered whom exactly she had been trying to impress. She was letting herself be baited.

“Good. Now take off that silly glamour.” The Lady turned to the faeries that lounged beside her. “Leave us.”

The assemblage rose lazily, lifting their harps and goblets, pillows and books. They made their way out from beneath the tree as haughtily as offended cats.

Silarial turned on the pillows. Kaye sat at the very edge of the pile of cushions and wiped the black juice from her mouth with her sleeve. She let the glamour fall from her, and when she saw her own green fingers, she was surprised by her relief at not having to hide them.

“You mislike me,” Silarial said. “Not without reason.”

“You tried to have me killed,” Kaye said.

“One of my people—any one of my people—was a small price to pay to trap the Lady of the Night Court.”

“I’m not one of your people,” Kaye said.

“Of course you are.” Silarial smiled. “You were born in these lands. You belong here.”

Kaye had no answer. She said nothing. She wished she did know who had birthed her and who had switched her, but she didn’t want to hear it from the Lady’s lips.

Silarial plucked a plum from one of the plates, looking up at Kaye through her lashes. “This war began before I came into the world. Once, there were little courts, each huddled together near a circle of thorn trees or beside a meadow of clover. But as time passed and our places thinned, we drew together in larger numbers. My mother won folk to her with the keen edge of her blade and her tongue.

“But not my father. He and his people dwelt here in the mountains and they had no use for her or her kin, at least at first. In time, however, she fascinated even him, becoming his consort, gaining governance over his lands and even bearing two children by him.”

“Nicnevin and Silarial,” Kaye said.

The Bright Lady nodded. “Each girl as unlike the other as two of the folk could be. Nicnevin and our mother were of a kind, with their taste for blood and pain. I was as our father, content with less brutal amusements.”

“Like freezing a ring of humans to death around a lake?” Kaye asked her.

“I do not find that particularly diverting, merely necessary,” Silarial said. “Nicnevin killed our father when he gave a boon to a piper she preferred to torment. I am told our mother laughed when my sister explained how it had been done, but then, death was my mother’s meat and drink. I served her a banquet of my grief.” The Bright Queen looked upward, into the wriggling shadows of the willow. “I will not let my father’s lands fall to my sister’s court.”