The phooka did not answer right away. Already she had an idea as to the answer, an intuition as to the sympathies and resonances that might alert him to her potential. But she wanted to hear his explanation.
“The same way that I know we shall soon do battle against the Seelie Court, your Highness,” he said. “It is the way of things. You have been Yourself both many, many times, and also never before. Each time you ascend to your throne we have this conversation. Seven times you have had my head struck from my body, offended at my assistance. Seven times as well you have commended me for my efforts, celebrated my guidance. But usually I am beneath your notice. Ignored, dismissed.” His smile carved wide his face, self-satisfied, pleased. “Though of course, your coming is its own reward.”
Maribel felt the truth of his words. Could sense the dueling desires to both punish and praise him. Insufferable, cunning, useful phooka. She gazed down at where he knelt, and then laughed softly, amusement winning through.
“Battle,” she said.
“Soon,” he replied. “The Seelie Court will be gathering their forces. They will strike at us, preferring a futile gesture over ceding the field without protest. Though no battle is guaranteed, with Caladcholg in your hand, we are all but certain to crush them.”
Maribel gazed down at the curved blade. Lifted it, allowing a glow of moonlight to run down its length, catch the wicked point and then disappear. She could slice through trees with it, she knew, cut through rock. But its power lay not in the sharpness of its blade. Its very presence would twist events in their favor.
“And what of my counterpart,” she asked, turning an eye to the phooka below. “The Queen of the Seelie Court?”
“They have no Queen,” said the phooka. “They have instead a Lady. A Lady of Light and Laughter, wedded to the Green Man. But neither are present, nor shall they be as long as you wield the blade. Thus the Seelie will marshal their knights and Barons, their soldiers and churls, and all shall fall before us, as they have each time in the past.”
“Well,” said Maribel, her smile brilliant, “That sounds wonderful.”
“One more thing, my Queen,’ said the phooka, rising now to his feet. “I have brought you a gift. If I may be so bold.” He turned then, looked into the darkness to their left, and two twisted goblins staggered out, hauling on a length of chain whose end was affixed to a ring of metal which was clamped around the neck of a struggling man.
“Antonio,” said Maribel, voice low. Her husband had his hands bound behind his back, his face bloodied, his hair and clothing in disarray. He looked like he had been dragged through bushes and mud, and upon seeing her, he let out a cry.
“Maribel!” His voice near crazed. “What’s going on? Oh God, Maribel, help me!”
She gazed down upon him, and it was as if she had double vision, saw two Antonio’s superimposed over each other. One, a man; familiar, loved, summoning memories from the past, every line in his face known. The other, a stranger’ pathetic and filthy, a bag of blood and bones, a mortal who would die in a score of years and be forgotten like all the others. So easy to break, to crush, and still—just as easy to hold and love. For a moment, he hung in the balance, and then she raised her chin, and the sudden and wild hope that had burned in his eyes sputter and die.
“Maribel?” Despair in his voice now, panic. “
Amor
, please!”
Maribel began to pick her way down the rocks, carefully setting her foot on each outcrop or ledge. With a jerk, the goblins yanked Antonio down to his knees. He let out a cry of pain as they cracked onto the rocks. But then he fell silent. Watching, stunned, as she approached.
Finally, she reached the ground, and with languid grace walked up to him. “Your face,” he whispered, when she was close enough. “What has happened to your face?”
She paused, and reached up to brush her fingertips against her cheeks, her jaw. Her skin felt cool to the touch, but strangely marred, spider thin cracks running beneath her eyes. She smiled, and the expression made Antonio pull back.
“My husband,” she said. He looked old, pathetic, the mud stains mixed with the blood, his shirt untucked, a tie loose about the sagging folds of his neck. Slowly, she untied the knot, and then pulled the subtle and elegant tie free, sliding it out from under his collar with a hiss. “Antonio.”
“Maribel,” he whispered. “What’s gotten into you? Who are these… people?”
She laughed, “They are my new friends, my servants, my subjects. And I? I am their Queen.”
“Oh, for God’s sake Maribel, enough with the
tonterias
!” A sudden harshness in his voice. He never had been easy to quell. “Tell them to let go of me, go call the cops, something—,” but he stopped short when he felt the curved outer edge of Caladcholg press against his Adam’s apple.
“Don’t tell me what to do, Antonio,” she whispered, leaning in close. Eyes staring into his. “Don’t ever tell me what to do.”
He swallowed, the motion causing him to cut himself on the blade. A bead of blood appeared, and then ran down to soak into the white collar of his shirt. “I’m… sorry,” he said. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to.”
“But you did,” she said, straightening. “You did, and you always have. And that’s all right. I liked being told what to do, when I was with you. To think that I dreamed of our marriage being a harmonious partnership composed of two equals. But you never saw me as such, and, in truth, neither did I.” Her smile widened. “And from there we danced our way to this current predicament.”
Antonio gaped up at her. She saw him rally himself, his eyes become guarded. Realized, amused, that he had finally accepted that she was other, now, and should be treated with the same kind of diplomacy he has used on terrorists and fractious rebel leaders.
“What do you want with me, Maribel?” he asked, voice calmer now. “Why am I here?”
“Kill him,” said the phooka. “He is a tie to your old life. A chain binding you back. Release yourself, my Queen.”
Her blade whispered out, fast enough to blur in the moonlight, and, with a flick of her wrist, she severed the phooka’s left horn. Sword extended out behind her, she watched the mighty horn wobble, and then the upper half pitched to the left, fell with a clatter to the rocks. The phooka watched her, frozen.
“Suggest again that I am in any way imprisoned, bound, curtailed or less than the Queen of Air and Darkness and I shall sever your head from your body.”
The phooka fell to his knees and pressed his head to the dirt, so suddenly that it looked like the strings to a puppet had been cut. Maribel gazed at him, and then turned her consideration to her husband.
“I don’t know what I want from you,” she said, suddenly stretching her hands over her head, arching her back and rising to her tiptoes. She held the stretch for two beats of her heart, the air cool on her exposed stomach, and then released it slowly, sinking back to the ground. “Perhaps for you simply to learn who I am, now, what I have become. For all your traveling and experience, I now realize that you are an uncommonly ignorant man, Antonio. Perhaps this night shall serve as your education.”
She turned, bunched her legs, and then leapt back up to the top of the waterfall, soaring seven yards to land softly and with inhuman grace on her original perch. Turned, a wild energy arising within her.
“You have put me in mind of more pressing business, however.” Her gaze left her husband, and raked over the still and silent mass of the Unseelie Host. “There is one missing from our ranks, one I have desired greatly to see ever since he made his presence known to me.” Her gaze was molten iron, and where it passed, dark forms wilted and shrank back. “Where is the unborn one, the babe who never knew his name, who never suckled from his mother’s breast? Where is the hungry one, the silent one, the eater of life and dreams? Edamukku, Kirsu, Nid Libbi,
where is Kubu
?”
Her words bruised the air, and the assembled host before her shifted and glanced at each other, but none spoke.
With a cry she thrust both arms into the air before her, fingers of one hand splayed, sword pointed in the other at the heavens. Threw back her head, closed her eyes, and
reached
down, down into the earth, poured her power as one might pour ink into the cracks of the rocks, down into the tunnels and beyond, into the realm of the dead and gone, down into the realm where Kubu dwelled. The phooka hissed, drew back, but she ignored him. She sensed the vastness, of not only rock between her and her prey, but more, a distance not geographic, but spiritual. Still, she compassed it, and with a cry brought him to her.
Opened her eyes. There he was. Where the phooka had knelt, there now sat Kubu. Enshrouded in black robes so dense and dark she could not make out the folds, a doll with enormous pale eyes, irises a washed out blue, forehead bulging, nostrils slitted and thin lipped. It gazed up at her with an emotion alien and distant, simply taking her in but not reacting.
“Kubu,” she hissed, and lowered her sword so that it pointed at him. “You find me different? No longer lost in your darkness, lost in your realm, but now ascendant, all powerful? Do you wish, now, that you had kept you little hands from my daughter?”
No response. Those enormous eyes peering up at her. Anger roiled within her, and she fought the urge to leap down and strike off his head. Instead, she gathered herself.
“You will serve,” she said, “As the others do. As the catalyst for my coming, you shall herald my might, and lead the battle against the Seelie.”
Murmurs from the ranks. She ignored them. Stared at the small and terrible figure.
Her voice grew low, husky. “For I am the Queen of Air and Darkness, and your realm is but part of mine. I claim you as my own.” And then, quicker than the eye could follow, she leapt down from the rocks, fell upon Kubu, and skewered him through the chest.
For a moment the little demon did not react, but simply stared at her, face blank, and then he grimaced, scowled, and closed his eyes. No blood poured from the wound, but he began to thrum, to vibrate, and Maribel leaned forward, staring down at his face, a smile carving across her features. Kubu continued to writhe, the movements so rapid and increasingly violent that it was only the sword that kept him in place, and then he flew apart, as if he had been composed of a dozen ghostly versions of himself which now had finally broken away from each other.
The ghosts of Kubu fled into the ranks, leaving only his robe behind, and he was gone. Maribel straightened, withdrew her sword, and looked about. Waited. Goblins and ogres and worse gaze about in confusion, fear, and then a figure stepped forward, hulking and foul, and she knew that her plan had worked.
Built like a refrigerator, clad in white robes and with hands like baseball mitts, the creature drew hisses from those around it. A cowl fell about its face, the face of a baby, cheeks pitted, mouth a twisted rosebud, eyes tiny, forehead and cheeks bulbous. There was something leprous about it, something damaged and foul, but its strength was evident. Another similar figure stepped out from the Host, and another, until some twenty or so identical forms, all clad in ivory robes and with idiotic, cruel and hungry expressions gazing at where Maribel stood.
She felt a chill rush through her as she met those blank gazes, dark fairies infused with the essence of Kubu, and then laughing, she flung out her arms. “The city awaits us,” she cried, “This Island is our playground, ours to mold and to shatter. Go now, and revel as we have not reveled in long ages!”
And, as one, as if released from a binding spell, the Host exploded outwards, howling and shrieking and loping and running, taking to wing, striding off on long legs and short, some disappearing into shadow, others diving into the pool and not surfacing again. Within moments, all had departed, all had departed but for the phooka who now held Antonio’s chain.
She ignored Antonio’s calls as she leapt up into the sky, a frisson of excitement passing through her at a new realization. She would kill him later, she decided. When he had seen enough to either lose his sanity or admit his abject ignorance. The thought pleased her, and with another laugh, she launched herself into the night once more.
Jimmy Squarefoot ran. With grim determination, he made his way south down the Isle of Apples, his every bound fueled with fear of the blades wielded by their pursuers. But even those steeds could not keep up with his springs and leaps, and by the time they reached the Brooklyn Bridge, the knights had been left behind. But Maya was concerned with a wholly different race. Time. She couldn’t see Kevin from her position, but she knew he was bleeding out. Bleeding into his own stomach. Were any major organs ruptured? Was he dead already, head lolling in Jimmy’s arms?
They took the bridge in three prodigious leaps, and then they were moving through downtown Brooklyn.
Stupid man
, she thought.
What kind of idiot attacks a knight with a crowbar?
On they leapt, Jimmy grunting now with each bound, worn out, his leaps growing shorter, slower.
Finally, they bounded over a low, stone wall and were in the park. Grass and snow stretched out before them, a curtain of trees in the near distance. A band was playing to their right, crowds of people drifting toward it, something melodic and infused with strains of synth pop, filling the air with its rhythmic beat. Maya gazed down at the people heading in that direction, some holding thick blankets, others bags of groceries or bottles of wine. A night concert, part and parcel of life in New York for those fortunate enough not to have to think of anything else. She closed her eyes, rested her forehead against Jimmy’s back.
A few minutes more, and then Jimmy stumbled, stopped, fell to his knees. Maya blinked open her eyes, slid from his back. Her legs were stiff, the inside of her thighs in agony from having gripped his sides for so long. She hobbled around him, and stopped. Stared. Gaped.
Old Man Oak’s glade was filled. It was as if all the creatures and beasts of the land of fae were gathering for their own concert. Ringed around the vast and mighty tree cavorted and stood endless impossibilities, rank upon rank of them. Knights on champing chargers, multihued pennants hanging limp from their lances, their armor similar to that of those who had chased them but emblazoned with noble animals, hearts and arrows, owls and rising suns. Young women clothed in impossibly gauzy and translucent wraps, their languorous bodies the idle dreams of perverts everywhere. To the left of the trunk, close to its base, stood a griffin. As large as a tractor, its great eagle head stared fiercely down at her, its bronze plumage ruffled about the nape of its neck, massive tawny lion flanks settled in a sitting position. Great claws, its fierce beak—Maya’s heart stopped, stilled in awe at its terrible beauty.