Maya felt tears sting her eyes. “I failed. I should have gotten here quicker.”
Silence.
“Do I go home, now? Is my part over?”
Asterion shrugged, “What role you play in what comes next is yours to decide. Even though one Court is ascendant, the other remains, locked in loyal opposition. No Court has ruled in perpetuity. Every Queen eventually dissipates, losing the desire to rule, and ceasing to be. A day, a decade, or an age, each will step down. None can say when, but it is inevitable.”
“Oh,” said Maya. “Well, I don’t think she’ll be listening to anybody. She was so cold. So… inhuman. She almost killed me.”
Asterion remained silent for a beat, as if he would say something, but refrained. Then, “She has suffered much. The world has not been kind to her. But never forget. Though she now wears the guise of Queen, she is yet human. Cannot be other. Within her chest beats a mortal heart, and her thoughts, cruel and capricious as they may be, stem from her mortal mind.”
Maya shrugged. “Okay. I’ll try to remember. Not that there’s much I can do now. Can I… can I go home, though? Can I leave?”
“Of course,” said Asterion. “Perhaps we shall see each other again.” And then he stepped back, bowed, and disappeared. Maya blinked. He was simply gone. Sounds were beginning to fade in from all around, muted roars of a garbage truck, the honking of irate drivers, the tinny blare of salsa music from cheap speakers. Maya blinked again, and when she opened her eyes, the trees, grass, growth and glade were gone. She was standing in the middle of a busy New York street. A white SUV was barreling toward her, and with a little scream she darted aside and made it to the pavement, shaking and upset.
Maya stumbled, righted herself, and stopped. She was back. No matter that the minotaur had dumped her in the middle of traffic. Noises, people, faces. The smell of chestnuts roasting on a street corner, a hunched man dressed in several sweaters and a hood shoveling and raking them back and forth. Unable to control herself, starving, she crept up, looked at the coals and foil. Mouth filled with saliva.
“Come on girl, two dollars and you get yourself some chestnuts. Mmmhmm! Good as good gets, salty and hot and ready for your little hands. You got two dollars? You ready for eats?” She slipped her hands in her armpits, looked up at the dark night sky, at him.
No sense in trying to speak. Her throat was still blocked. She could tell without trying. An invisible wedge waiting to manifest as soon as she went to communicate with a normal person. What she would do to go meet up with Cynthia, get a drink and just talk, forget about all this madness and sink into the commonplace, speak about the girls, gossip about Senora Mercedes, the latest. She’d never thought she’d miss her old life, but now there was nothing she’d rather have.
Maya turned from the man, began to walk down the sidewalk. Brilliant squares of light splashed out onto the pavement from the display windows, store dummies dressed in exotic, outlandish outfits. She walked passed them, staring at the metal circlets, the copper flares of cloth, the strange hats. It was getting so close to Christmas. People were buying the last presents, walking along and talking animatedly to each other or to their ear pieces, purchases in hand. Maya hugged herself closer. She’d not celebrated Christmas since arriving in the States, but it seemed so fun. Bright reds and greens, a tree, presents and food. Family.
A harsh cry from above. From the night sky. Looking up, she saw a stream of figures riding the wind. A hundred, two hundred spindly people, soaring in a slipstream of movement, rushing along in a torrent through the air some thirty meters up. Bat wings beating, their cries high and victorious. Vicious. Maya shrank against the wall. Stared at the emaciated bodies that were mere silhouettes against the night sky. On they rushed, spinning and weaving, a thick river of malicious cries and laughter, ignored by the pedestrians below. Up the avenue they flew, and then soared down a side street, the last fluttering out of sight but a few moments later.
The Unseelie Court, she thought. This was their night, like every other one from now on would be. They were going to be everywhere. Nervous, she looked as far up and down the avenue as she could, trying to pierce the fog. No Jack in Irons in sight. No obvious threats. Where to go? Where to hide? Lowering her chin to her chest, she began to walk, striding, determined to keep moving. To not be found cowering.
Down she walked. Past a glittering front that was all glass, a blazing marquis above it listing the movies playing within. A large bookstore, all dark wood and beautiful covers displayed in the window. A coffee shop, the smells enough to make her mouth flood with saliva again. Restaurants, delis, clothing stores. There was no end to it.
“Oi,” grunted a voice. “Oi, get out of there.”
She froze. Turned her head slowly, so slowly she fancied her neck would creak. Standing in a narrow alley, squeezed in between a Dumpster and the wall, was a monstrous pig. No, a pig man. Hunch shouldered, head huge, bent almost double, arms long and reaching to the ground, it was staring at her with tiny eyes. Maya backed away.
“No,” it grunted again, the voice flecked with high accents that she could imagine giving way to shrill squeals at a moment’s notice. “This way, not that way. Not safe.”
Maya paused. Twin tusks curled delicately up along both sides of its prodigious snout, its great ears like cupped hands twitching as it waited impatiently. It was a pale pink, a naked color, and wore a black singlet like some old circus performer.
“Who are you?” she asked.
“Jimmy Squarefoot,” he said. He shuffled back, into the gloom. “Come on, out of there. Too open. Danger.”
Maya hesitated. Jimmy Squarefoot was ugly, disconcerting, but he certainly hadn’t attacked her. Unless he planned to do so in the alley? She took a step forward. Looked all around her. At the hundred faces passing her by, all of them closed off, indifferent to her fate, her peril. She couldn’t even talk to them. At least she could talk to Jimmy.
Maya entered the alley. It was narrow, and she had to squeeze past the foul smelling Dumpster, into a heart of darkness beyond it. Jimmy was a darker knot in the shadows, great headed and shifting his weight from foot to foot.
“I’m Maya,” she said. “Of the Seelie Court. Are you…?”
“Seelie, Seelie,” said Jimmy. “I’m Seelie right enough, though mayhaps I should change and cast my lot in with the others. Bad night for Seelie. Dangerous night.”
Maya nodded. Jimmy’s nervousness was strangely comforting. “I know. It’s only going to get worse, isn’t it? What should we do?”
Jimmy turned, shuffled about, raking the floor with his fingers, searching. “Don’t know. Avoid trouble. Lie low. Wait.”
“Well, that’s not going to help with anything,” said Maya. “We’ve got to do
something
.”
“Queen of Air and Darkness. She rides the night. Caladcholg. She cut snip you up if you stick your snout out. Not wise. Stay quiet. Stay low. Wait.”
Maya crossed her arms. “No. We’ve got to fight. Do something. Perhaps we can go see Old Man Oak? Do you know Guillaume?”
Jimmy snuffled, a slightly panicked note entering his voice. “Far! Too far. I could run, perhaps, but what if I were seen? What if captured? Cut snip and cooked up for eating.”
Maya turned and walked back to the mouth of the alley. Looked out into the street. It was like looking through a distorted glass, through a window that played tricks on her mind. People’s faces were different. The difference was subtle, but there. She watched people stream by. They were strained, twisted. Subtly disfigured, as if everybody were frowning, their eyes narrowed. Made ugly by their thoughts. She shivered. Not a friendly face in sight. In the distance, she heard the hollow crump of a car colliding with another. Raw, ugly yelling.
“We need to get to Brooklyn,” she said to Jimmy. “Can you find a way to get there? Go through a secret door, or…?
Jimmy shook his head, ears flapping. “Too dangerous!”
Maya strode up and grabbed him by both ears, lifting his great porcine face so that it stared right up at her. “Enough! It’s going to be dangerous no matter what we do! You hear me? It’s not going to get any better unless
we
do something. So quit it! Can you get us there, or not?”
Jimmy Squarefoot stared up at her, little eyes wide, mouth opening and closing like a fish out of water, and then, carefully, gently, he reached up with his long arms and disengaged her fingers from his ears. Smoothed them out, and then rubbed his snout furiously.
“My snout itches when I do something stupid.”
“You haven’t done anything yet,” said Maya.
“But going to.” A note of resolve. “Up-see-daisy.”
“Up-see-daisy?” asked Maya. Jimmy turned around, presented her with his curved back. “You want me to ride on your back?”
“Piggy back,” he said, and snorted. She thought it was with humor, but couldn’t be sure. Carefully, she placed her hands on either side of him, and then, with a jump, hiked herself up and landed below his shoulder blades. He was bent over so that when he linked his arms behind the small of her back, she felt perfectly mounted.
“Run run,” said Jimmy, slowly, carefully, turning around. “Run run run.”
“To Old Man Oak,” she said.
“Run run run run run!” And then, before Maya could speak, he bounded forward, shooting past the Dumpster and out into the street. Another leap and he was in the street itself, having jumped right over an old taxi cab to land in the middle of two lanes. Bending, his skinny legs taking his weight with ease, he turned south, and
ran
.
Maya held on for death life, hair whipping back, eyes watering. Jimmy Squarefoot could
move
. Each bound carried them forward at tremendous speed, springing past cars, leaping high enough to look down at buses, over traffic lights, high enough to stare through second floor windows. Maya closed her eyes, held on, and then cracked them open.
It was incredible. There seemed to be no end to his energy, to the power in his legs. They were covering ground at a tremendous speed. Already they had reached Canal Street, Chinatown off to their left, the familiar smell of food and the cries of late night hawkers filling the air. The buildings of the Financial District loomed tall and august beyond, and then, Brooklyn.
From the right, the sound of a trumpet. It was a terrible sound, mournful and dolorous, it spoke of drownings and bodies moldering, forgotten, in shadows. It was like the dying cry of an elephant, down on its knees and unable to stand. It filled the air, filled her head, and struck a shivering rush of ice cold fear through her. Jimmy Squarefoot let out such a squeal of terror that he almost drowned out the clarion call, and then she saw why.
Mounted figures were riding out from the cross street ahead. She caught her breath.
Beautiful,
she thought,
beautiful
. A torrent of horses, tall and graceful, long legged and with arched necks, their manes wild and uncombed, eyes leaving streaks of bloody crimson behind them like smears of light across photographs of late night traffic. Horses, coal black and dawn gray, ten, twenty of them, raising their heads and racing forward as if into the surging foam of an oncoming sea. And riding them were impossible men and women, so svelte and lithe and elegant that they seemed the dream creations of clothing designers who gave no thought or care for the realities of human limbs and proportion, who stretched and demanded the impossible from their models until they cried and bled and failed. But not these. Long limbed and alien eyed, clad in armor, elegant and variegated, made of a metal unknown to her eye that gleamed like the oil slick smears across the common asphalt of gas stations, fluted and spiraling, horned and detailed with impossible finesse and skill. Urging their horses on, blowing on quenna horns made of human bones, high pitched, spiraling cries that melded with the first mournful horn so that a cacophony of death and sweet promise of torment reached their ears.
Jimmy Squarefoot, squealing yet, leapt to the right, surging up and over oncoming traffic, legs kicking in the air as they came swooping down on the pavement, clipping a street vendor so that he spun out of sight, down amidst his fake purses, and then up once more, legs bunched beneath them, up three stories in sheer panic, right against the yellow stone wall, Maya screamed and closed her eyes but Jimmy simply bounced from the wall and came back down to the ground.
The horsemen were riding them down. Lances, she saw, long as the fingers of the rising sun, tipped with black metal, a forest glade of them coming their direction as the riders rode through traffic as if it didn’t exist, cutting through fortuitous openings, surging in graceful leaps over the tops of cars. And she understood then that tonight, tonight of all nights, these riders would ride so. Always slipping through unhurt, guiding their mounts through impossibilities, as they chased them, hunted them down.
“Run!” she screamed at Jimmy, but he needed no urging. If she thought they had been going fast before, now she knew otherwise. Winged by panic, he surged forward, the horses wheeling behind them and giving chase. Onwards in great bounds, each one four or five car lengths long, the buildings whipping by now, blurred, faces of the pedestrians mere smears. He released his hands from where they had been locked behind the small of her back and used them to find purchase on the smooth road each time they landed, pushing with all four limbs as they went. Maya, her heart in her mouth, wrapped her arms around his great, bristly neck, and held on for dear life.
The cries and quenna notes followed them. Looking over her shoulder, she saw a rider urge his mount against traffic, horse rising to leap over sedans, hatchbacks, whatever came their way, each leap a glorious thing. Swerving and giving chase, she saw the man draw a dagger from his belt, and, with a vicious flick, send it spinning her way. She screamed and closed her eyes. Where the dagger went, she could not say, but it hit neither her nor Jimmy and that was enough.
A rider with flowing red hair, a sheet of flame whipping behind her head, drew abreast. Jimmy leapt wide to the right, and she urged her horse across, keeping pace. With each leap Jimmy soared high, but in doing so committed himself to one set direction. The rider, reading his intent, would then swing the horse in that direction, and try to be where he landed. All the while navigating and dodging the traffic of a New York City avenue. It was impossible, it was incredible, and to her disbelief, Maya saw that the rider was pulling it off. This was skill beyond mortal ken, beyond anything she had seen.