Fire Touched

13

I stepped in front of Adam when he started to pull his clothes off. Not that Jesse hadn’t seen him naked before. Like me, werewolves have to strip to change. Modesty is for humans. But it wasn’t only modesty that had made me step between Adam and the rest of the room. Werewolves in the middle of shifting could and did protect themselves, but they couldn’t do it well until they were fully in either form. I wasn’t worried, really, that anyone would attack him—we had Baba Yaga’s word on it. It was more the way Adam always walked on the traffic side of me when we walked around town. He didn’t expect anything to happen, but he wanted to be there if it did.

I could feel Adam pulling on the pack bonds for speed. If it hadn’t been for the necessity of signing the bargain, he could have changed at home, could have taken his time. But he couldn’t afford to be weakened in any way for very long on the reservation, so he pulled on the bonds and asked for help.

Beauclaire said, “I’ve never seen a werewolf change.”

“New experiences are hard to come by,” Zee agreed. “Unless you work with Mercy. I’ve been having all sorts of new experiences since I met her.”

Beauclaire smiled appreciatively.

I said, “We decided it would work best to go in with Adam as wolf. Guns don’t work in Underhill.” And wasn’t that too bad. “And we can’t take steel or iron. So our best weapon is going to come in ready to defend us.”

“You will stay human?” he asked.

I shrugged. “At least I can talk to Aiden this way.” The only other time I’d been in Underhill, I’d been in coyote form. The very scary fae I’d met there—a fae that Zee had treated with more caution than he did any of the Gray Lords—had known exactly what I was anyway.

If my coyote skin wouldn’t serve as camouflage, there was no reason not to stay human. I could carry more that way. I wasn’t entirely sure that I could change shape in Underhill. I hadn’t tried before, and Zee worried that only fae magic would work there. But Aiden needed a cheering section and, if the walking stick cooperated, I probably needed to be in human shape to use it.

I also probably should have grabbed the walking stick off the chest of drawers when we left. But it had seemed wrong. When the walking stick chose to come to my aid—it just came. Taking it with me . . . I worried that it wouldn’t work.

Adam’s change took a little less than five minutes. Not as fast as Charles’s—the Marrok’s son, who had been born a werewolf, could sometimes change as fast as I could, between one blink and the next. But it was faster than most werewolves. He shook himself and stretched like a cat, his claws making clicking sounds on the marble floors. Then he walked up to me as Tad gathered his fallen clothing.

I grabbed Aiden’s pack and helped him to settle it comfortably. My pack was a lot heavier. Adam, we decided, needed to be free to move, so I carried most of our supplies. Food for a week, water for a day, and a very light boatload of technology-lightened-and-miniaturized backpacking supplies. Also six hard-boiled eggs from the dozen I’d made at breakfast. Baba Yaga might not have meant anything when she’d told me that hard-boiled was best, but I wasn’t taking any chances. Aiden had a pack, too, but however old he really was, his body was that of a ten-year-old. His pack was mostly his bedroll and freeze-dried food.

We hadn’t brought a tent. Even if it rained, we couldn’t afford to blind ourselves like that when we slept.

“We’re ready now,” I told Beauclaire.

He took us back out to the main room, through two more doors, and into a room that was so utilitarian, it must have belonged to the original building. There was a closet door on one wall, and it was to this he led us.

Zee took a deep breath. “This one wasn’t here last month. There are too many doors to Underhill in too small a space.”

“We know,” said Beauclaire.

“It’s not safe,” said Zee.

“We know that, too.”

Zee snorted. “Well, somebody doesn’t, because she can’t make doorways where she isn’t invited.”

“Is this doorway acceptable?” Beauclaire asked me, ignoring Zee’s taunt.

I looked at Aiden, who shrugged. We both looked at Zee.

“It doesn’t matter where you go in,” he said. “These doorways are all too new to have found an anchor in Underhill. That means they’ll drop you someplace random. Just make sure you are holding on to each other when you go—or you’ll all end up in different parts of Underhill.” Beauclaire opened the door and stepped back. Jesse hugged her father, hugged me, then hugged Aiden.

“Don’t get them killed,” she told Aiden.

“I’ll try not to,” he said earnestly.

“Don’t get stuck,” she said.

“I’ll try not to,” he told her.

“Good enough,” she said. “If you try, Dad will do the rest.”

“Safe journey,” said Zee.

“Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do,” said Tad.

“I love you, too,” I said, and, holding on to Adam with one hand and Aiden with the other, crossed over into Underhill.

We had to go down three cement steps to get to the ground. When Aiden went back and shut the door behind us, I turned to see that the door was set in the back of a building that looked like the back of the building we’d gone into.

But my bones hummed with the magic—it was like standing on a washing machine permanently caught in the spin cycle.

“It’s a good idea to shut doors behind you in Underhill,” Aiden told me. “People who are chasing you usually go somewhere else.”

He looked around, his breathing a little fast, and his weight shifted from foot to foot like a deer waiting to see where the danger emerged, so he could flee in the opposite direction as fast as he could.

We had emerged into an anticlimactic, bland landscape that looked very much like the area around the reservation. We were on the top of a small hill at the base of larger hills. Below us was a grassy valley with a river running through it. If it hadn’t been for the lack of civilization—roads, wires, squashed beer cans—it could have been anywhere near Walla Walla.

Okay, it could have been anywhere near Walla Walla if there had been beer cans on the ground and a sun in the bright blue sky. There was no sun in the sky. There were shadows, and, from how the shadows lay, we were approximately the same time as it was back on the reservation. I just couldn’t see any reason for the shadows.

From what Zee told me, time in Underhill could be capricious—but not as badly as in the Elphame of the fairy queen I’d encountered. We might lose or gain a few days or possibly a week. But we were unlikely to lose years or decades.

I turned slowly. We had a clear field of vision, but I couldn’t see anything that looked out of place. At the thought, I turned to look for the small building we’d exited from—but there was no sign of any building anywhere.

“Do you know which way to go?” I asked. “Have you been here before?”

“I don’t think that I’ve been here, precisely,” he said. “But I know which way to go. Mostly I find my way around by the way it feels here.” He thumped himself on the chest.

I tried, but I couldn’t feel any kind of pull or push in the magic.

“It took me a while,” he said. “This way.”

And he set off, straight up the hill. We walked for hours. Aiden’s terror subsided, though it never quite left him. Adam ranged a little, his nose to the ground and his ears alert, but he never traveled out of sight. He didn’t chase the white bunny that first appeared in glimpses, then ran across our path. Twice.

“He’s not a dog,” I commented loudly, spinning in a slow circle to look for something, I don’t know what it was. “He’s not going to chase a rabbit and leave us behind.”

I could feel the urge to chase that rabbit, and I seldom felt the need to hunt when I was on two feet. Adam didn’t even lunge at the rabbit when it emerged from a hollow just beyond his nose.

He did growl, though.

“It’s not a real rabbit,” said Aiden unnecesssarily. “After a while, even before I had magic, I learned to tell the difference. I survived a long time without magic—but I had friends then.”

“What happened?” I asked.

He laughed without humor, but his voice was relaxed. “No need to sound so careful,” he told me, his gaze on the strange sky. “It was a very long time ago, even by my reckoning. There were five or six of us humans left behind when the fae were banished. At first, we were overjoyed. We played all day long and ate the food in the larder—and there was always food in the larder. Last time I went back there, a very long time later, there was still food there—but there are other things living in the Emerald Court now, things that feed on those weaker than they. Like me and like you.

“Evander died first,” Aiden said. He was walking faster as he talked, and he kept looking behind us. “He was the youngest of us—you learned caution very quickly in that court, or you died. I don’t think Evander would have survived long even if we hadn’t been abandoned in Underhill. Evander first, then Lily and Rose—I don’t remember what their human names had been. Lily just disappeared from her bed one day, and Rose quit eating. Then it was just Willy and me. For a long time, it was Willy and me. Then we found this pretty little girl crying next to a stream. We took care of her and told her stories.”

There was nothing behind us that I could see or smell. I touched Adam lightly on his head and looked at Aiden. Adam watched him a moment, then broke free to run down the hill half a dozen yards before circling back.

There was nothing following us. Aiden didn’t seem to take note of Adam’s useless search. He looked up at the sky again, and as he did so, I realized that warm feeling on the back of my shoulders was gone. Above us, dark gray clouds roiled, and as soon as I saw them, a chill wind picked up.

“Willy figured it out first,” Aiden said, picking up the pace again. We weren’t running, but it was a swinging walk that would take us places fast. “He said it was because she always knew where to find berries and which path we should take. But Willy always had a bit of the gift—he could see things that others didn’t.”

He paused, this time looking down at the path we were on. He turned a little to the left, a steeper climb. “Never follow a path while you’re in Underhill,” he told me. “The only things here that make a path are things you don’t want to meet.”

The hill was steeper than it had been, steeper than it looked.

“He talked to me about it first,” Aiden said. “But I didn’t believe him. Underhill was just where we were—like Caledonia or Ulster, right? Willy could make up things, too—he was the best storyteller. I thought he was making up a story right up until he died and proved himself right.”

For all that he’d said it was a long time ago, Aiden’s breath was shaky. “Underhill can’t kill, not directly. But if she wants you dead, you die. Sometimes quickly but usually slower. She can’t feel pain, so it fascinates her.”

A cold wind blew down my neck just then. “Aiden,” I said, “we’re on a path again.”

We walked—and now Aiden wasn’t the only one who could feel something following us. I felt as though if I turned around, I would see someone. When I did, there was no one there—except the ghosts.

Underhill was a haunted land. Most ghosts I’ve been around—and I’ve been around a lot of them—haunt places where people might be found. Churches, homes, stores—places like that. The ghosts that I’d been seeing were tucked into hollows under trees and hiding under branches. All of them were children. One of them had been following us since Aiden had started talking about the children he used to run around with. I wish I could believe that it was the ghost who was watching us—but his regard felt desperate, as if he thought we might be able to save him.

The watcher who made my shoulders itch, that one was not desperate, just . . . predatory.

But the ghost was worrisome, too.

“I think it might be smarter not to talk about dead friends while we are here,” I told Aiden. “Can you tell how much farther?”

“Not far,” he said. “But I thought that was Underhill watching us, and it wasn’t. I think we should move faster.”

He broke into a jog that I kept up with easily—one thing I do very well is run. I could have maintained that pace for hours. Knowing that Adam was behind us was the only thing that kept me from looking.

Normally, running is the last thing I would do when I thought we were being pursued. But Aiden had survived this place for a very long time, and he was, as Jesse said, our guide.

We topped the rise and found ourselves on a flat, broad plain with waist-high grass. The wind whipped through the grass and sent the few stray hairs that had escaped my braiding this morning straight into my eyes. A huge old tree stood in the middle of the plain, and about thirty feet up the thick trunk, there was a tree house perched where the trunk split into three.

“Run,” shouted Aiden, heading for the tree at full speed.

Adam hesitated, looking behind us—but there was only the endless plain. If there was something hidden in the grass, the wind disguised its passage.

“Don’t ignore your experts,” I told Adam. “Run.”

I bolted, catching up to Aiden in ten strides. The kid could run—but I could run, too, and my legs were longer. Beside me, Adam followed at an easy lope.

Aiden ran like a sprinter, head back, arms and legs pumping as fast as he could. Ahead of us, I could see that, though there were hand- and footholds carved into the side of the tree, the first ten feet were smooth.

“I’m going to go ahead,” I told Aiden. “When I get to the tree, I’m going to make a foot pocket of my hands. I want you to step into it, and I’ll toss you up.”

He nodded, and I threw myself forward, imitating Aiden’s very good technique. Adam stayed with Aiden. I spun when I reached the tree, letting the trunk on my back eat up the excess momentum. I laced my fingers, and Aiden, not slowing a bit, stuck his boot in my hands and I tossed him up. He landed on the tree like a spider monkey and scrambled up.

Adam braced on his hind legs, and I put one foot on his chest and used that as a step stool to get my hands up high enough, and I climbed as quickly as I could, because Adam wasn’t going to start up until I was all the way.

Aiden waited on the crude little porch in front of the tree house, his back against the wall, breathing hard through his mouth, sweat dampening his shirt. He smelled like fear.

“Come on, come on, come up,” he chanted. “What’s taking him so long?”

“I’m up,” I shouted, scuttling over the edge of the porch on all fours.

With the howl of the hunt in his throat, Adam sank his claws into the trunk and climbed the tree with the grace of a jaguar. Werewolf shoulders are built more like those of a bear or a cat. It meant that they were excellent climbers.

Aiden opened the door of the house and waved his hand at me. There wasn’t room on the porch for all three of us, so I wasted no time getting inside. Adam came in after me and Aiden after him, shutting the door firmly and locking it.

Something hit the tree and rocked it.

“You lost,” Aiden yelled. “Go about your business.”

Something roared, and I had the feeling that my ears weren’t picking up the whole thing—as if some of that roar wasn’t just sound. Skittering sounds came from the walls and the ceiling. There were no windows in the tree house and part of me was grateful. Whatever was making that noise sounded like a thousand rats or something with a thousand legs. Most of me hated hearing a threat I could not see.

Adam snarled.

“You lost,” said Aiden again. “This is doing you no good. If you don’t leave, I’ll light my wards.”

That horrible aching roar traveled through the walls and into my skull, sending hot pain through my nervous system.

“I warned him,” said Aiden. “He should know better.”

He pressed his hand on the door and . . . his magic wasn’t as big as what Beauclaire had used on the bridge, but it was plenty big enough to make me sit down on the floor harder than I’d meant to. There was a whoomph sound, like when a gas burner is turned on—only an order of magnitude bigger than that.

Silence fell.

Aiden took his hand from the door and shook it. “It won’t have killed him—not the flames nor the fall from the tree—but he won’t come up here again for a while.”

“What was that?” I asked.

Aiden shrugged. “I call him the Unseen. I don’t actually know what he is supposed to be. He’s one of the things that escaped from the prisons the fae left behind, and a lot of them started out as fae. He’s difficult to see except in strong sunlight. He’s slow, or he’d have killed me a long time ago.”

He looked around the room and blew out a huff of air. “Welcome to my home. It’s safe here—as safe as anywhere in Underhill. We can spend the night and look for a way back out tomorrow. The artifact is here.”

Now that we didn’t have unknown monsters trying to get in and eat us, I looked around. Without windows, the interior was dark except for a little light that snuck in between the hand-hewn boards—that looked more like they’d been scavenged than cut to build this tree house. The widths would be consistent for a section, then change. Right next to the door, there was a panel that was six or seven feet wide. Another plank looked more like a tabletop than a board.

Aiden lit some beeswax candles. Maybe if I’d been human, it would still have been too dim, but I see pretty well in the dark.

The room was big enough, maybe fifteen feet square. Rough shelves lined three of the walls and held a collection of treasures—literally in some cases. A bird’s feather was displayed next to an elaborate silver crown studded with cabochon gems set in silver flowers and vines. In a world where you were mostly alone, the feather was as valuable as the crown. There were books, too, but not very many—none that I could have read.

On the fourth wall there were a pair of wardrobes. The first was itself a work of art. Every bit of the wardrobe was elaborately carved in abstract designs. The second, like the walls of the tree house, was cobbled together out of bits and pieces of other things.

“I’ve never had anyone in here,” Aiden told me. “I built this after most of the others were already dead.”

“It’s charming,” I told him, seriously.

“Aboveground gives you a lot of protection,” he told me. “The first one I built here had windows—that was a mistake.”

He opened the elaborate wardrobe and pulled out some thick rag rugs and threw them at random on the floor. “I sleep . . . slept on piles of these,” he said. “We can use the bedrolls, but the rugs will soften the floor.”

“Sounds good to me,” I told him. In lieu of speech, Adam stretched out on one of the rugs and rested his muzzle on his front legs. “Adam approves, too.”

“I might as well get the artifact,” he said, and opened the second wardrobe. As soon as the doors separated, I could feel a wave of power.

The wardrobe was split into two halves. The right half had shelves filled with bright-colored fabric bags of all sorts of sizes and colors, with small boxes of bone, wood, or lacquer, and larger, jewelry-box-sized boxes. The bottom shelf was full of folded cloth. The left side held staves and swords and pole arms of all kinds.

“Are these all artifacts?” I asked.

He nodded. “I keep them in this wardrobe because it doesn’t let the power leak. Around here, power attracts attention.”

“When the fae come back,” I said slowly, “could someone find your house and your treasures?”

He shook his head. “Once a place belongs to you, it belongs to you. No one will ever be able to find this place unless I’m with them. No one can come inside unless I invite them in. It’s how Underhill was set up—and even she can’t change the rules. That’s why, even though she’s mad at me, she couldn’t actually make us wander for long before I found my home. If I die, Underhill will reclaim what is here. She has her own treasure rooms—I’ve seen them. Some of this stuff comes from there.”

I looked at the contents of the wardrobe. “Don’t ever tell anyone this is here,” I told him. “The fae would never have let you go if they knew what you have.”

He nodded, reached in to the shelves, and brought out a small box and opened it. The box he put back on the shelf. In his hand was a crude bronze key. He gave it to me, then closed the doors of the wardrobe.

The key was warm in my hands.

“What does it do?” I asked.

“Pressed against a door, it makes any door a gateway to Underhill,” he said. “If you keep in mind where in Underhill you want to appear, that doorway will take you there.”

“How do you know that?” I asked.

“Underhill isn’t opposed to sharing knowledge,” he told me. “Not if she’s in a good mood.”

He looked unhappily at the key in my hand, and thinking he was worried I wanted it, I handed it back to him. But, though he closed his hands on it and stuffed it in a pocket of his jeans, the scent of his unhappiness didn’t change.

“It’s a good pick,” I told him. “Not a weapon, but valuable all the same.”

“She never abandoned me,” he told me. “She gets very lonely.” He looked up at me. “Am I doing the right thing?”

“You aren’t doing anything wrong,” I told him. “There might be other right things you could do, but that’s not the same as doing something wrong. She isn’t alone anymore.”

He snorted. “The fae. They don’t appreciate her—they use her like a slave, with no more thought to her than they give their shoes—less.”

And that didn’t sound like someone repeating a rant they’d heard once too often, I thought.

“We’ll tell Beauclaire that’s how she feels about the fae. Maybe they can do something about it,” I told him. “If you want to stay here, that’s something different. But thinking that you are the only one who can possibly keep her company—that’s a trap.”

We ate lunch from our packs and drank from our canteens.

“Is there a reason that we need to sleep here instead of heading out?” I asked, gathering our garbage and, after putting it into a plastic bag, stuffing it into the pack.

“It might take us a while to find a door to leave,” he said. “I can hurry it along a bit—that’s the real trick. Underhill can’t seal the doors from the inside, but she can make it hard to find them. That’s why she locked the fae out, and not in.” He got to his feet and paced a bit. “Night’s dangerous, more dangerous, here. It’s safer if we leave at first light in the morning.”

And this was lunchtime. I looked at Aiden pacing and exchanged a glance with Adam.

“Okay,” I said brightly. “While we wait for nighttime, why don’t we tell each other stories?”

So I told him about Bran, the Marrok, and what growing up a coyote in the woods of northwestern Montana had been like. He told me stories about living in Underhill, the creatures terrible and wonderful who made their homes here. Once he warmed up, he was a pretty good storyteller—and I developed a new perspective on Underhill, who had first appeared to him as a small girl, though she sometimes was a great lady or an animal.

She was not evil, just . . . thoughtless. She was like a toddler who breaks her toys because she doesn’t know any better. Doesn’t realize that once they are broken, they will never play with her again. After she had killed Aiden’s friend Willy, she had mourned him for a very long time. But she didn’t learn from her errors—it sounded as though she’d been hardwired to be who she was.

She had damaged Aiden more than she would have been able to if she had truly been evil, I thought. Because sometimes she was funny and good company, and at other times she was vicious. She couldn’t, herself, hurt someone. But she could taint food, turn the weather foul, or attract one of the dangerous ones (Aiden’s term) wherever she wanted. Aiden was alive because Underhill loved him.

Eventually, the storytelling wound down, and we ate dinner. Aiden fell asleep. Adam got up from the rug he’d claimed and sat next to me, his muzzle on my thigh.

She’s not going to let him go easily, he told me.

“I caught that.” I threaded my fingers through his fur. “It’s a good thing that we have the walking stick.” Sometime during the storytelling, the stick had appeared in my lap. “It should show us the way home.”

There was, I noticed, a faint green light that danced in the runes etched on the silver of the head of the walking stick. Aiden turned and, when I followed, the glow faded. I stopped and moved the walking stick in the direction we’d been headed. The green glow returned.

It wasn’t the way the walking stick had shown me how to get home last time, but it was clearly unhappy about following Aiden.

“Wrong way,” I said. “Home is this way.”

“Right,” said Aiden. “But we have to go around until we can find a way down.”

Down?

I leaned the walking stick against Adam’s shoulder, unwilling to merely set it on the ground—or hand it to Aiden, though I wasn’t sure why. When I did, I saw that the others had been climbing up a steep mountain—though the whole time I’d been walking on a flat cave floor. The direction the walking stick wanted us to go appeared to be an impassable cliff face.

“I see,” I said. “Come here and give me your t-shirt.”

Aiden’s expression was a little wary, but he pulled his t-shirt off and handed it to me. I blindfolded him and, taking up the staff again, walked him through a tree root I’d seen when I wasn’t holding the staff.

“Okay,” I said. “That worked.”

I turned him around and had him walk the same path. He stumbled over the root—I caught him before he fell. He reached up to take off his blindfold, and I tapped his hand. “Leave it for a minute. Trust me.”

“You just made me trip,” he said.

“You didn’t get hurt,” I told him.

Adam posed a different problem. I wasn’t going to blindfold him. Not when something had been following us. We needed Adam free to act.

“Close your eyes and lean on me?” I asked. He did. And I took him over the same root—and he picked his feet up and stepped over the root because he paid attention to his environment.

But he followed me right off the cliff. Or where he thought the cliff would be, anyway.

With Adam leaning against me, I took Aiden by the arm, held the staff in my free hand, and took them in the direction the staff dictated.

“The ground feels hard,” Aiden said after a few minutes.

“Yes,” I said. “Don’t think too hard about it. Just walk.”

It wasn’t that the cavern floor was flat. Finding a path where the three of us could walk abreast wasn’t always practical. Once, traveling on a worn wooden bridge over a river, I had to leave one of them behind and escort them across one at a time. But mostly I could push Aiden ahead of me and keep Adam against my side as the green light in the walking stick got brighter and brighter.

We stopped to eat . . . lunch? Dinner? I couldn’t tell. We just needed food. Before I took off Aiden’s blindfold, I cautiously released my hold on the walking stick, leaving it balanced for a moment on its own. In the time it took for the stick to fall back into my hand, the light dimmed, and we appeared to be in a rocky ravine. But no one was standing in midair or anything.

“Okay,” I said. “You can take your blindfold off.”

Adam stepped away from me and shook himself.

Aiden and I had meal preparation down pat. I’d open the bag of freeze-dried food and fill it with water, and he’d heat it up—no fire needed. The first three bags went to Adam, who needed a lot of calories. When I’d eaten as much of my food as I could, I opened up the packet and held it down for Adam to finish off. But Adam was standing alert, taking in deep breaths of air.

I stood up and gripped my walking stick and sucked in air to see if I could catch the scent that had alerted Adam.

“What is it?” asked Aiden.

“Fae,” I said, only that moment certain.

He frowned at me. “Which fae?”

“I think she means us,” said the Widow Queen, appearing out of thin air. She was accompanied by three others, two men and a woman. None of them were familiar to me except for the Widow Queen. All of them wore armor, though not the kind of armor I’d have expected. Theirs was the sort that soldiers or police might wear, except for the colors. Most police SWAT teams wore black or blue, not silver, gold, green, or, in the Widow Queen’s case, lavender. Kevlar, I thought, didn’t have any cold-iron components. These fae were traditional enough that they carried swords strapped to their hips or over their shoulders. I didn’t see any guns.

“Good afternoon, Aiden,” the Widow Queen said. “Have you retrieved it yet?”

He stared at her mutely. I could scent his fear.

“Retrieved what?” I asked, stepping closer to him.

“The artifact, child,” she said to me. “The artifact.”

I put a hand on Aiden’s shoulder. “Are you here as a representative of the Gray Lords, to receive the artifact in fulfillment of our bargain?” I was pretty sure I knew the answer to that, but it was best to get everyone’s cards on the table to avoid a misunderstanding.

“They want to make peace with the humans,” she sneered. “That is a fool’s game. A game of attrition that we can only lose as we watch them reproduce like rabbits while we ever so slowly die off. Making peace with cockroaches makes more sense. The trick is to kill them off or, better yet, get them to kill themselves off for us.” She smiled. “I’m very good at that last one.”

“I take that as a no,” I said. “So why do you want the artifact when you don’t even know what it is?”

“I’m not the only fae or even the only Gray Lord who despises humans,” she said. “But I need a bigger power base to gain the support of the fae for my plans. They need to see me as a Power, someone who can back up her ideas with action. An artifact retrieved from Underhill, stolen from under the noses of the Council of the Gray Lords, would do nicely. As long as I do it before you hand it over, the other Gray Lords can do nothing but wring their hands. Retrieving artifacts that have fallen into human hands is an acceptable venture and not a crime at all.”

“I see,” I said.

“If you hand it over to me,” she said, “I’ll let you live.”

“It will void the bargain,” Aiden told me in a low voice.

I nodded. We had promised to do everything in our power to bring back an artifact. Handing it over just because we were outgunned wouldn’t qualify. I couldn’t remember all of the exact words, but I was pretty sure “even unto death” was in there.

“Why bring them?” I asked, nodding at her three minions. “You are a Gray Lord. It sounds like you’re going to take a stab at ruling the fae all by yourself—and you can’t take on the three of us without help?”

“She cannot use magic to attack us,” said Aiden suddenly. “Before Underhill let them come back, she made them swear not to use their magic here.”

“It matters not,” the Widow Queen said. “You are both unarmed, and the werewolf is no match for the four of us by himself.”

Aiden nodded. “Maybe that would be so,” he said, “if you were right about that unarmed part.” Aiden sucked in a breath and gestured with his hand. Flame spilled out of his fingers and— I didn’t see what he did with it; I was too busy dodging a bronze broadsword wielded by the man in green.

In martial art terms, a broadsword is by definition an outer-circle weapon. There has to be a certain amount of space between the combatants in order to properly swing a sword of that size. The Widow Queen had a rapier, which would have been harder to deal with, because a rapier is quicker and more flexible. Not that the broadsword was easy. Still, the first strike the fae aimed at me I dodged. I managed it not so much because he couldn’t have hit me, but because he’d assumed I’d be a lot slower than I was—and because he’d expected me to try to get away. I stepped into him.

He was a better fighter than I was, but he wasn’t faster than me. Nor was he as motivated, and I think he underestimated me. He thought he was fighting a girl with a stick when he was fighting Adam’s mate, Coyote’s daughter, armed with Lugh’s staff.

As I closed with him, I hit him hard in the abdomen with the end of the stick. I think he let me make the hit because he started to do . . . something. I expected the stick to bounce back off his armor, and was ready to roll to the side, but the walking stick stayed where it was—and so did the male. In my hands, the walking stick came to life. I felt its outrage that someone would have attacked us without provocation. It had never spoken so clearly to me before. I couldn’t tell if it was the blood or Underhill, though both sang through the old wood.

The male fae froze where he was, and the stick finally pulled free, the spearpoint black with blood. The point was longer and thinner than I’d ever seen it. The fae man fell to the ground and didn’t move. He was dead by the spear and by the magic in the walking stick, and his death greatly satisfied the old artifact.

Kevlar was no match for a spear made by Lugh.

But there was no time to wonder about the stick. Adam was fighting the Widow Queen. He’d bloodied her leg, but had taken a slice in return along his side that was bleeding badly. The female in silver was lying on the ground, her head and shoulder burned away. Aiden lay on the ground not far from her, unconscious or dead—I couldn’t tell which.

The final fae, the male in gold, struck at me with his sword. This one had some magic in it; I could feel its hunger. It was a short sword and more agile than the broadsword had been.

The walking stick had, once before, used me to fight. This time it was more of an inspiration, using things I already knew. I wasn’t the walking stick’s puppet this time; I was its dance partner. It was like the hunt song, like a dance in which my partner was the more skilled of us, and I followed his lead. Step and duck and thrust and parry blended together as called for by our dance, in a syncopated rhythm that followed a random beat to keep our opponent from catching our dance step. It would have been fun—I could feel the walking stick’s joy—but I remembered Aiden’s crumpled form.

And then magic flashed. I stumbled but recovered in time to counter the sword and put my foot behind my opponent’s weight-bearing leg. When he tried to step back to regroup, he stumbled over my foot. I could have struck before he recovered, as the walking stick urged. But Adam’s agony, a direct result of the surge of magic that caused my misstep, flashed through our mating bond and made me take two steps away so I could center myself again for battle. It couldn’t matter, right now, how badly he was hurt. Or if he was worse than hurt.

Adam’s agony faded from our bond as the male attacked again, his mouth twisted in concentration. I fought with everything I had, focus possible only because of years of training with Sensei first, and later Adam. I set aside my fears and fought as coolly as I could manage, my attention on the here and now, and not on anything else. I couldn’t afford to make another misstep.

When the blade of the walking stick slid into the gold-clad male’s throat, it was just a part of our dance.

I could feel it when the walking stick called death to our enemy, felt the moment the male died of a wound he might have recovered from.

Adam lay still on the ground. I couldn’t see if he was breathing, and I couldn’t take the time to look. The Widow Queen, who, to defeat Adam, had broken her word to Underhill about using magic, crouched over Aiden, searching him, muttering to herself, “Where is it? What is it? It’s got to be somewhere.”

I tried to stab her with the spear, but she sensed us at the last moment. We danced, the walking stick and I, and between us we kept her busy, but she was slowly winning. Her armor was better than the armor of the man who’d died beneath our shining blade. I hit her hard with it, and she shrugged it off without the spear blade leaving even a surface scratch.

Magic, the stick told me. Magic armor.

She gathered magic as we danced, and there was nothing I could do about it. When she chose, because she was in control of the fight, she broke free of our dance by knocking me onto my side. I scrambled up, but it was awkward and too slow. It gave her the moment she needed to throw her spell at me.

The walking stick knew what it was, therefore so did I: a spell that would make it impossible to move, not even enough to breathe or for my heart to pump.

I felt the artifact make a decision as the magic came toward us, because Coyote had seen that it was becoming aware and coaxed it to free will. The stick twisted in my hands and intercepted the magic directed at me by a Gray Lord of the fae. Lugh’s walking stick ate the Gray Lord’s spell, and in doing so, it died.

To save me.

The Widow Queen had dropped her guard when she cast the spell. Confident, I think, that there was nothing someone like me could have done to save myself. And she was right. The walking stick bought me that moment of grace—and I launched into a spinning back kick, and felt it land with the precision of a move I must have done ten thousand times in practice. I heard the snapping of her neck, watched her body fall as quickly as mine. I rolled to my feet; she stayed in the awkward position she had fallen in, her breath rasping in and out.

I reached down and grabbed the spearhead of Lugh’s walking stick and thrust it under her chest and into her heart. She stopped breathing then.

The fight was over, and I was the only one standing. For a moment I hesitated, bewildered by the unexpectedness of my survival. But only for a moment because Adam was still down.

I ran to my mate but there was already someone there. Three someone elses.

The first was Aiden. He looked as though he’d crawled through the ashes of the female he’d killed. The expression on his face was very old.

The second was a child, about Aiden’s age. Her hair was bright red, short, and very curly, her face rounded with blue eyes and pretty but unremarkable features. Her bottom lip was stuck out in a pout. I had no trouble recognizing her from Aiden’s descriptions.

The third was Baba Yaga, wearing the guise she’d worn the last time I’d seen her.

I fell to my knees next to Aiden, who turned to me. “He’s dead,” he said starkly. “He died to keep me safe.”

“No,” I said because I could feel our mating bond. There was nothing useful coming through it, but it was still there, so he couldn’t be dead. Even though there was no breath in his body and his great heart was still under my shaking fingers.

“The Widow Queen always was good with death curses,” said Baba Yaga. “Fortunately, I’m better.”

“He was taking Aiden away again,” said the little girl belligerently. “He should die.”

“If he hadn’t helped me,” said Aiden in a very calm tone, “I would have died.”

“She promised not to kill you,” Underhill said. “I wouldn’t lead her to you until she promised.”

Aiden looked at her, his face grim and sad. “Tilly, the Widow Queen didn’t have to kill me herself. The fae woman over there would have done it.” He lifted his shirt to display a red mark. “Adam knocked her away, and I scorched her with my fire. But in doing so, he left himself vulnerable. He saved me, and that gave the Widow Queen time to hit him with her spell.”

“She lied to me,” hissed Underhill—and like the thing that had attacked the tree house, her voice carried more than mere sound. “And she used magic. She broke her word.”

“So she did,” said Baba Yaga briskly. “She was always like that. She was after the artifact, I’m afraid. I told her that she had no business trying to keep something that powerful for herself.”

I looked up at Baba Yaga. I’d seen her raise someone from the dead once. “Can you bring him back?”

Baba Yaga shook her head. “Can’t do, dearie. At least, not right now. He’s not dead yet. Not like that other one. I could wait if you want, but what you want to ask me is whether I can break the Widow Queen’s spell.”

“Can you break the Widow Queen’s spell?” I repeated her instructions, my bloody hand clenched deep in my husband’s silver fur and my heart in my throat.

“Only with Underhill’s permission,” Baba Yaga said. “I keep my promises.”

“No,” said Underhill.

“Tilly,” Aiden snapped. “You aren’t being nice.”

“It isn’t nice to run away,” she snarled at him, and her voice made my chest hurt.

“I wouldn’t have run away if you hadn’t set the fae on me as soon as I got Outside,” he said. “On all of us. They all died, Tilly. They can’t come back because you taunted the fae, and they thought they could get something from us if they just took us far enough apart. No more Ice, no more Cloud, no more Terra. They died as mortals do. They cannot come back. But I can. I will. But you have to let Baba Yaga break the Widow Queen’s curse.”

I held my breath. He’d lived with her for centuries—he loved her, and she loved him back in her own way. His word would sway her more than anything I could say.

“If he dies, I will hate you forever,” he told her. “I will leave and never come back. And I’ll tell everyone I meet how mean you are.”

Underhill’s face flushed angrily, but I could see that the threat meant something to her.

“I’ll allow a bargain,” she said finally, folding her arms on her chest and obviously unhappy. “A bargain for the Witch’s service. A bargain I approve of.” She looked at me and smiled, a slow, cruel smile. “A life-for-a-life kind of bargain.”

Baba Yaga said, “Give me an unborn life, then, Mercy, so I may restore his.”

I put my hand over my belly—but I wasn’t pregnant. We’d talked about it but had decided to wait before we tried.

“An unborn life is acceptable,” said Underhill slyly, taking in my gesture and my expression.

“You can’t do that,” said Aiden in a low voice. “He’d never want to buy his life with another’s. Especially not his own child’s.”

I got up and went to the backpack and took out one of the hard-boiled eggs, chills sliding down my spine. What if I had just dismissed her remark over the phone? What if I hadn’t decided to bring them along? What if we had eaten them for lunch yesterday, as I’d almost suggested?

I handed Baba Yaga the egg. “One unborn life,” I told her, my voice shaky.

“Hard-boiled are my favorite,” she said, popping the whole thing, shell and all, into her mouth. “I can’t eat them much anymore at home. I keep telling her that just because she stands on a chicken leg doesn’t mean she is a chicken.”

Underhill looked back and forth between me and Baba Yaga. “You tricked me,” she said, looking at me like I was interesting. She looked at Baba Yaga and suddenly smiled—a smile that didn’t belong on a young face, so wise and joyous. She laughed and clapped her hands. “That was fun,” she said. She looked at me. “You should come visit me. We could play a lot of jokes on each other. It would be fun.”

“It could be fun,” I managed. That was the truth, right? The possibility existed that it would be fun—but I’d have put my money on terrifying.

Baba Yaga waved her hands at Adam—and he sucked in a breath of air so hard he choked, and the wolf convulsed, trying to breathe.

It hurt. I could feel it along our bond, but if he hurt, he was alive, so I didn’t mind. Much. I fell to my knees beside him and put my head against his heart so I could hear it beat. He coughed as the pain faded, and tried to get up. It took him two tries, but once he was on his feet, he shook himself briskly. I held him for a moment more.

He was alive. I breathed in, breathed him in, and believed. I wiped my tears—of fright and grief—and then loosened my hold.

“He’s okay?” asked Aiden, sounding, for once, the same age that he looked.

“Of course,” said Baba Yaga. “Everything was done right and proper.”

Adam turned to Baba Yaga and bowed his head. And then he did the same to Underhill. If his gaze was wary, I don’t think anyone else there knew him well enough to notice.

Underhill sighed. “I suppose you want to leave again,” she told Aiden. “I won’t make you work for it. There’s a door about a half mile that way—” She pointed. “Baba Yaga knows where it is.”

“I will visit,” Aiden said. “But you have to promise not to make me stay here.”

Underhill bounced on her toes, and her voice was shy as she said, “Visiting would be better than lost forever. But you will die out there.”

“Death is part of life,” he told her. “Without the one, it is hard to have the other. That’s what my mother used to say. But I could visit until then.”

“You used to not remember your mother,” she said.

“I’m remembering more Outside. I could come and tell you stories about it.”

She gave him a tentative smile. “I like your stories. All right. I promise not to make you stay here.”

Baba Yaga took us to a different door than the one we’d used to come in. This one was set in one of two walls belonging to the remnants of a hut that had seen better days. When she opened the door, I could see only the empty, overgrown patch that had once (presumably) been the hut’s interior, but stepping through it, with Adam beside me, landed us in the same little, nondescript room that we’d entered Underhill from.

It had been light in Underhill, but it was evening here.

“How much time has passed?” I asked urgently.

Baba Yaga shrugged. “As much as needed to.” She paused, then smiled at me. “Oh, yes. I forgot that you had some adventures in an Elphame court. Underhill is far more stable, and her ties to this world are stronger. Time passes differently, yes, but not all that differently. If you had stayed in Underhill for a year, you might find that you’d spent a year and a half. But with a short visit, generally you might lose or gain an hour or six, but mostly it’s not enough to matter.” She smiled again. “Generally.”

I caught my polite “thank you” before it left my tongue. “Good to know,” I said instead.

She looked at Aiden, who was frantically patting his clothing. “Here, boy,” she said, digging into a pocket. She pulled out the key and gave it to him. “It’s probably better if you have this now. Otherwise someone might say that I brought the artifact back and not you, hmm?” She looked at me. “Remember to dot your tees and cross your eyes”—which she did—“when dealing with the fae.” She smiled broadly. “Now then, we should go to Beauclaire’s office, I think. You can be sure that someone from the Council will be awaiting our arrival—and Beauclaire’s office is as good a target as any.”

Two someones were waiting for us—or at least, they were in Beauclaire’s office talking quietly. Goreu and Beauclaire seemed awfully startled by our entrance to have been actually waiting for us.

“That was quick,” said Goreu. “We didn’t expect you for another day at least.”

“How quick?” I asked.

“Twelve, maybe thirteen hours,” said Goreu.

“Huh,” I said. “We were there a day and a night and most of another day.” I’d gained back about twelve hours of the month that the Elphame court had stolen from me.

Adam’s clothes were folded and awaited him on a chair near the fireplace, which held a merry little fire. He walked over to the chair. I don’t think that anyone except me knew how sore and tired he was.

“What are you carrying?” Beauclaire asked me.

I’d used one of the dead fae’s shirts to collect what I could find of the walking stick. I laid it on the desk in front of Beauclaire and opened the shroud to reveal shards and splinters of gray wood, some silver bits, and the spearpoint, still stained with the Widow Queen’s blood.

Beauclaire touched the silver spearhead lightly and raised an eyebrow.

“The Widow Queen thought that she’d like an artifact all to herself,” I said.

Goreu growled. “I told you she acquiesced too easily. That she took the defeat of her people at the werewolves’ hands with too much grace.”

“You took care of her?” Beauclaire asked me, ignoring Goreu. He didn’t raise his eyebrows in disbelief, but it lurked in his tone.

“Aiden, Adam, and I,” I said. “But we had help. She couldn’t do great magic without Underhill’s consent, which she didn’t get. The walking stick . . . helped me, too. In the end, that’s what killed her. Without Baba Yaga’s help, Adam would have died.”

“Baba Yaga,” said Beauclaire with a frown. “What was . . .” He quit talking, but his frown didn’t go away. “Coyote’s daughter,” he said quietly. “He and Baba Yaga are akin, tricksters and unreliable champions of the underdog. I can see why she might be inclined to help you.”

He was talking about her like she wasn’t in the room.

“She didn’t have much use for the Widow Queen,” said Goreu.

I glanced discreetly around, but she wasn’t in the room. I started to say something, I don’t know what, when Adam drew on the pack bonds to do another quicker-than-usual change. The power flowed to him, I felt the edge of it. But more than power, I felt the joyous welcome that sang through the pack as they celebrated Adam’s return.

When I paid attention to the others again, Beauclaire was once more examining the remains of his father’s work. Aiden was fumbling in his pocket, and Goreu was watching me.

“Interesting,” he said. “I hadn’t realized how much magic resides within the werewolves. That magic produces their condition, yes, that I understood. That they themselves could produce and use magic . . . that I didn’t know.”

I gave him a faint smile. “Every day brings something new,” I said.

His smile was a fraction wider than mine had been, and his eyes were warm. “Not if you have seen as many every days as I have,” he murmured. Then he cleared his throat, and said, “You went to Underhill to retrieve a gift for my people.”

Aiden held out the key, which looked like nothing so much as a nail that someone had gotten creative with. Its consequence was not added to by the dirt on Aiden’s hand. I glanced down at my hands—they were dirty, too, and bloodstained.

Unprepossessing sight as the key made, Goreu and Beauclaire both focused on it intently.

“Oh yes,” said Beauclaire. “This, this is very good.”

Goreu smiled at Aiden. “Good choice,” he said. “But let’s not tell anyone it was a choice, shall we?”

“It was the only one I could find,” Aiden said, his voice ringing with truth. He didn’t say what exactly the “one” referred to. That’s the secret of dealing with people who can tell if you lie.

“Excellent,” said Goreu. He looked at me, then glanced over my shoulder, where Adam was just finishing dressing. “Our bargain is made, and you have fulfilled all that you promised to try. None shall gainsay.”

“It is done,” said Beauclaire, and magic surged, spread, and flowed outward.

“It was done before,” I pointed out. “When we signed the agreement.”

Beauclaire nodded. “Yes. But that you were successful in your endeavor gave additional power to the bargain. Not only have we promised to maintain neutrality in the Tri-Cities but the bargain will itself enforce the neutrality on any fae in your territory.” He smiled. “As defined in our contract.”

“I have a further bargain to propose,” said Adam. He came up behind me and rested his hand on my shoulder.

“Oh?” Goreu examined my husband’s face warily.

“I think you’ll be happy with it,” Adam said, a smile in his voice. I glanced over my shoulder and saw his dimple.

“Underhill,” Adam said, “has requested that Aiden visit her now and then. She misses him. For him to do that, you have to guarantee him safe passage from my territory, through yours, and through a door to Underhill.”

I watched the understanding spread across both Gray Lords’ faces, but it was Goreu who said, “A very interesting bargain you propose. We shall have to discuss it.”

“Underhill would be obliged if you agree.” Aiden said aloud what everyone was thinking. “If you’d like, I could put in a good word for those who have dealt true with me and my friends.”

“Aiden has had a very long time to learn how best to deal with Underhill,” I told them.