Ironside

Chapter 8

"You're a fool," Ellebere said. He looked out of place in the city, though he'd glamoured himself a red pin-striped black suit and a silk tie the color of dried blood.

"Because it's a trap?" Roiben asked. His long wool coat whipped in the breeze from the river. The stench of iron seared his nose and throat.

"It must be." Ellebere turned, so that he was walking backward, facing Roiben. He gestured wildly, ignoring the people who had to veer out of his way. "Just her offer of peace is suspicious, but if she agrees to your absurd demand, then she must have some sure way of killing you.”

"Yes," Roiben said, grabbing his arm. "And you're about to walk into a road.”

Ellebere stopped, pushing back strands of wine-colored hair from his eyes. He sighed. "Can her knight beat you?”

"Talathain?" Roiben considered that for a moment. It was hard to imagine Talathain—whom he had wrestled with in patches of clover, who had loved Ethine for years before he'd found the courage to bring her a mere bundle of violets—as formidable. But those memories seemed old and unfamiliar, as if they belonged to another person. Perhaps this Talathain was another person too. "I think I can win.”

"The Bright Queen has a deadly weapon, then, perhaps? Or armor that cannot be pierced? Some way to use iron weaponry?”

"It could be that. I turn it over again and again in my mind, but I have no more answer than you do." Roiben looked at his hand and saw all the throats he had cut in Nicnevin's service. All the pleading eyes and trembling mouths. All the mercy that he could not bestow, least of all on himself. He let go of Ellebere. "I only hope that I am a better murderer than the Bright Lady imagines me.”

"Tell me that there is some plan, at least.”

"There is some plan," Roiben said, with a twist of his mouth. "Although without knowing what Silarial intends, I know not what good it is.”

"You shouldn't have come Ironside yourself. In the mortal world you are vulnerable," said Ellebere, glowering. They crossed the road next to a too-thin mortal pushing an empty stroller and another furiously punching keys on her cell phone. "Dulcamara could have accompanied me. You could have explained what we were to do and sent us off to do it. That's how a proper Unseelie King behaves.”

Roiben veered off the sidewalk, ducking under a torn chain-link fence that singed his fingers and snagged on the cloth of his coat. Ellebere clambered over the top, jumping down with a flourish.

"I'm not sure it's proper for a knight to tell a King how to behave," Roiben said. "But come, indulge me a little longer. As you rightly point out, I am a fool and I am about to make a series of very foolish bargains.”

The building behind the fence looked like several of the neighboring boarded-up buildings, but this one had a garden on the roof, long tendrils of winter-dead plants hanging over onto the brick sides. On the second floor, the windows were completely missing. Shadows flickered against the inner walls.

Roiben paused. "I would like to say that my time in the Unseelie Court changed my nature. For a long time it was a comfort for me to think so. Whenever I saw my sister, I would recall how I had once been like her, before I was corrupted.”

"My Lord ..." Ellebere blanched.

"I am no longer sure if that's true. I wonder if I found my nature instead, where before it was hidden, even from me.”

"So what is your nature?”

"Let's find out." Roiben walked across the cracked front steps and knocked against the wood covering the door.

"Will you at least tell me what we're doing here?" Ellebere asked. "Visiting exiles?”

Roiben put a finger to his lips. One of the boards swung open from a nearby window. An ogre stood, framed in the opening, his horns curving back from his head like a ram's and his long brown beard turning to green at the tip. "If it isn't Your Dark Majesty," he said. "I'm guessing you heard about my changeling stock. The best you're like to find. Not carved from logs or sticks, but lovingly crafted from mannequins—some with real glass eyes. Even mortals with a bit of the Sight in them can't see through my work. The Bright Queen herself uses me—but I bet you knew that. Come around the back. I'm eager to make something for you.”

Roiben shook his head. "I'm here to make you something. An offer. Tell me, how long have you been in exile?"

Kaye rested beside Corny and Luis in a bower of ivy, the soft earth and sweet breeze lulling her to dozing. Night-blooming flowers perfumed the air, dotting the dark with constellations of white petals.

"It's weird." Kaye leaned back against the grass. "It's dark now, but it was night when we got here and it was bright then. I thought it was going to stay eternal day or something.”

"That is odd," said Corny.

Luis ripped open his second protein bar and bit into it with a grimace. "I don't know why she's making me stay. This is bullshit. I did everything she told me. Dave is ..." He stopped.

"Dave is what?" Corny asked.

Luis looked at the wrapper in his hands. "Prone to getting into trouble when I'm not around to stop him.”

Kaye watched the petals fall. The human changeling was probably returned to Ellen by now, taking up all Kaye's space in the world she knew. With one quest done and the other impossible, she had no idea what would happen next. She very much doubted the Queen would just let her leave. Keeping Luis at court was both encouraging and discouraging—encouraging because maybe Silarial would let him guide them back at some not-too-distant point, but discouraging because the Seelie Court felt like a web that thrashing would only wrap more tightly around them. Like thorn bushes.

Not that she had anywhere else to go.

Silent hobmen brought a tray of hollowed-out acorns filled with a liquid as clear as water and placed them beside plates of little cakes. Kaye had already eaten three. Lifting a fourth, she offered it to Corny.

"Don't," Luis said when Corny reached for it.

"What?" Corny asked.

"Don't eat or drink anything of theirs. It's not safe.”

Music started up somewhere in the distance, and Kaye heard a high voice begin to sing the tale of a nightingale who was really a princess and a princess who was really a pack of cards.

Corny took the cake.

She wanted to put a cautioning hand on Corny's arm, but there was something brittle in his manner that made her hold back. His eyes glittered with banked fire.

He laughed and dropped the confection into his mouth. "There is no safe. Not for me. I don't have True Sight. I can't resist their enchantments, and right now I don't see why I should bother trying.”

"Because not trying is stupid," Luis said.

Corny licked his fingers. "Stupid tastes pretty good.”

A faerie woman approached, her bare feet silent on the soft earth. "For you," she said, and placed three packets of clothing on the grass.

Kaye reached over to touch the first one. Celery green fabric felt silky under her fingertips.

"Let me guess," Corny said to Luis. "We're not supposed to wear anything of theirs either. Maybe you're going to walk around naked?”

Luis frowned, but Kaye could see his neck go red.

"Stop being a dick," she said, tossing Corny his pile of clothes. Corny grinned as if she'd paid him a compliment.

Ducking behind a bush, she pulled off her T-shirt and slid the dress over her head. She'd been wearing the same camo pants and T-shirt since she'd left Jersey, and she couldn't wait to get out of them. The faery cloth felt as light as spider silk when she pulled it over her head, and it reminded her of the only other faerie gown she'd worn—the one she'd almost been sacrificed in, the one that had come apart in the sink when she'd tried to wash the blood out of it. Her memories of the averted Tithe were still a shuddersome blur of bedazzlement and terror and Roiben's breath tickling her neck as he'd whispered: What belongs to you, yet others use it more than you do?

His name. The name she'd tricked out of him without knowing its worth. The name she'd used to command him and could use still. No wonder his court didn't like her; she could make their King do her bidding.

"I look ridiculous, don't I?" Corny said, stepping out from the branches and causing Kaye to start. He wore a brocaded black and scarlet tunic over black pants, and his feet were bare. He frowned. "My clothes are soaked, though. At least this is dry.”

Kaye turned, letting the thin skirt whirl around her. "I like my dress.”

"Nice. All that green really brings out the pink of your eye membranes.”

"Shut up." Picking up a twig from the ground, she twisted up her hair with it like she'd done with pencils in school. "Where's Luis?”

Corny pointed with his chin. Turning, Kaye spotted him leaning against a tree, chewing on what was probably the last of the protein bar. Luis glowered as he shoved his hands deeper into the pockets of a long brown jacket, clasped with three buckles at his waist. Kaye's damp purple coat hung from the branch of a tree.

"I guess we're supposed to go to the party like this," Kaye called.

Luis sauntered closer. "Technically, it's more of a revel.”

Corny rolled his eyes. "Let's go.”

Kaye headed toward the music, letting her fingers run through the heavy green leaves. She plucked a great white flower down from one of the branches and pulled off one bruised petal after another.

"He loves me," Corny said. "He loves me not.”

Kaye scowled and stopped. "That's not what I was doing.”

Shapes moved through the trees like ghosts. The laughter and music seemed always a little more distant until suddenly she was among a throng of faeries. Crowds of folk danced in wide and chaotic circles or diced or simply laughed as though the breeze had carried a joke to their ears only. One faerie woman crouched beside a pool, conversing intently with her reflection, while another stroked the bark of a tree as though it were the fur of a pet.

Kaye opened her mouth to tell Corny something but stopped when her eye was caught by white hair and eyes like silver spoons. Someone threaded through the crowd, cloaked and hooded, but not hooded enough.

There was only one person Kaye knew with eyes like that.

"I'll be right back," she said, already weaving between a damp girl in a dress of woven river grass and a hob on crude mossy stilts.

"Roiben?" she whispered, touching his shoulder. She could feel her heart speeding and she hated it, she hated everything about how she felt at that moment, so absurdly grateful she would have liked to slap herself. "You fucker. You could have told me to go on a quest to bring you an apple from the banquet table. You could have sent me on a quest to tie a braid in your hair.”

The figure drew back its hood, and Kaye remembered the other person who would have eyes like Roiben's. His sister, Ethine.

"Kaye," Ethine said. "I had hoped I would happen on you.”

Mortified, Kaye tried to smile but it came out as more of a grimace. She couldn't believe she had just blurted things she wasn't sure, in retrospect, that she wanted even Roiben to hear.

"I have only a moment," Ethine said. "I must bring the Queen a message. But there is something I would know. About my brother.”

Kaye shrugged. "We're not exactly speaking.”

"He was never cruel when we were children. Now he is brutal and cold and terrible. He will make war on us whom he loved—”

It startled Kaye to think of Roiben as a child. "You grew up in Faerie?”

"I don't have time for—”

"Make time. I want to know.”

Ethine looked at Kaye for a long moment, then sighed. "Roiben and I were brought up in Faerie by a human midwife. She'd been stolen away from her own children and would call us by their names. Mary and Robert. I misliked that. Otherwise, she was very kind.”

"What about your parents? Do you know them? Love them?”

"Answer my question, if you please," Ethine said. "My Lady wants him to duel instead of lead the Unseelie Court into battle. It would prevent a war—which the Unseelie Court is too depleted to win—but it would mean his death.”

"Your Lady is a bitch," Kaye said before she thought better of it.

Ethine wrung her hands, fingers sliding over one another. "No. She would accept him back. I know she would if he were only to ask her. Why won't he ask her?”

"I don't know," Kaye said.

"You must discern something. He has a fondness for you.”

Kaye started to protest, but Ethine cut her off.

"I heard the way you spoke to me when you supposed me to be him. You speak to him as to a friend.”

Kaye shook her head. "Look, I did this declaration thing. Where you get a quest. He pretty much told me to fuck off. Whatever you think I know about him or can tell you about him, I just don't think I can.”

"I saw you, although I didn't hear the words. I was in the hill that night." Ethine smiled, but her brow furrowed slightly, as though she were puzzling through Kaye's human phrasings. "Still, one must assume the quest was not an apple from a banquet table nor a braid in his hair.”

Kaye blushed.

"If you thought the King of the Unseelie Court would give you so simple a quest, you must think him besotted.”

"Why wouldn't he? He said that I . . ." Kaye stopped, realizing that she shouldn't repeat his words. You are the only thing I want. It wasn't safe to say that to Ethine, no matter what had happened.

"A declaration is very serious.”

"But... I thought it was, like, letting everyone know we were together.”

"It is far more immutable than that. There is only ever a single consort, and more often there is none. It joins you both to him and to his court. My brother declared himself once, you know.”

"To Silarial," Kaye said, although she hadn't known, not really, not before right then. She remembered Silarial standing in the middle of a human orchard and telling Roiben that he'd proved his love to her satisfaction. How angry Silarial had been when he turned away. "He finished his quest, didn't he?”

"Yes," Ethine said. "He was to stay at the Unseelie Court, as Nicnevin's sworn knight, until the end of the truce. Nicnevin's death ended it. He could be the Bright Lady's consort now if he wanted, if he returned to us. A declaration is a compact and he has fulfilled his side of the bargain.”

Kaye looked around at the revelers and felt small and stupid. "You think they should be together, don't you? You wonder what he saw in me—some dirty pixie with bad manners.”

"You're clever." The faerie woman did not meet Kaye's gaze. "I imagine he saw that.”

Kaye looked down at the scuffed tops of her boots. Not that clever, after all.

Ethine looked thoughtful. "In my heart I believe that he loves Silarial. He blames her for his pain, but my Lady . . . she did not intend for him to suffer so—”

"He doesn't believe that. At best he thinks she didn't care. And I think he very much wanted her to care.”

"What quest did he send you on?”

Kaye frowned and tried to keep her voice even. "He told me to bring him a faery that can tell an untruth." It hurt to repeat it, the words a reproach for her thinking he liked her enough to put feelings above appearances.

"An impossible task," Ethine said, still considering.

"So you see," Kaye said, "I'm probably not the best person to answer your questions. I very much wanted him to care too. And he didn't.”

"If he doesn't care for you, for her, or for me," Ethine said, "then there is no one else I can think of whom he cares for, save himself.”

A blond knight strode toward them, his green armor making his body nearly disappear into the leaves.

"I really do have to go," Ethine said, turning away.

"He doesn't care about himself," Kaye called after her. "I don't think he's cared about himself for a long time."

Corny strolled through the woods, trying to ignore how his heart hammered against his chest. He tried not to make eye contact with any faeries, but he was drawn to their cats' faces, their long noses and bright eyes. Luis's scowl was fixed, no matter what they passed. Even a river full of nixes—cabochons of water beading on their bare skin—did not move him, while it was all Corny could do to look away.

"What do you see?" Corny asked finally, when the silence between them had stretched so long that he'd given up on Luis's speaking first. "Are they beautiful? Is it all illusion?”

"They're not exactly beautiful, but they're dazzling." Luis snorted. "It sucks, when you think of it. They have forever, and what do they do— spend all their time eating and fucking and figuring out complicated ways to kill each other.”

Corny shrugged. "I probably would too. I can see myself with bag after bag of Cheetos, downloading porn, and playing Avenging Souls for weeks straight if I was immortal.”

Luis looked at Corny for a long moment. "Bullshit,” he said.

Corny snorted. "Shows what you know.”

"Remember that cake you ate before?" said Luis. "All I saw was an old mushroom.”

For a moment Corny thought he was joking. "But Kaye ate one.”

"She ate, like, three." Luis said with such glee that Corny started to laugh, and then they were both laughing together, as easy and silly as if they were going to be friends.

Corny stopped laughing when he realized that he wanted them to be friends. "How come you hate the folk?”

Luis turned so that his cloudy eye was to Corny, making it hard for Corny to read his expression. "I've had the Sight since I was a little kid. My dad had it and I guess it got passed down to me. It made him crazy; or maybe they did." Luis shook his head wearily, as though he were already tired of the story. "When they know you can see them, they fuck with you in other ways. Anyway, my dad got the idea in his head that no one was safe. He shot my mother and my brother; I think he was trying to protect them. If I had been there, he would have shot me, too. My brother made it— barely—and I had to put myself in debt to a faery to get him better. Can you imagine how things would be without the fey? I can. Normal.”

"I should tell you—one of them, a kelpie, killed my sister," Corny said. "He drowned her in the ocean about two months ago. And Nephamael, he did stuff to me, but I still wanted ..." His words trailed off as he realized that maybe it wasn't okay for him to talk about a guy that way in front of Luis.

"What did you want?”

In the clearing ahead, Corny spotted a group of faeries tossing what looked like dice into a large bowl. They were lovely or hideous or both at once. One golden-haired head looked uncomfortably familiar. Adair.

"We have to go," he whispered to Luis. "Before he spots us.”

Luis took a quick look over his shoulder as they walked faster and faster. "Which one? What did he do?”

"Cursed me." Corny nodded as they ducked under the curtain of a weeping willow. Neither mentioned that Silarial had promised no harm would come to them. Corny guessed that Luis was as cynical about the parameters of that promise as he was.

A tangle of faeries rested near the trunk of the tree: a black-furred phooka leaning against two green-skinned pixie girls with brownish wings; an elfin boy slumped by a drowsy-looking faerie man. Corny stopped short, surprised. One of them was reciting what seemed to be an epic poem on the subject of worms.

"Sorry," Corny said, turning. "We didn't mean to bother anybody.”

"Nonsense," said a pixie. "Come, sit here. You will give us a story too.”

"I'm not really—," he started, but a faery with goat feet pulled him down, laughing. The black dirt felt soft and damp under his hands and knees. The air was heavy with the rich smells of soil and leaf.

"The drake rose up with wings like leather," intoned a faery. "Its breath set afire all the heather." Perhaps the poem was about wyrms.

"Mortals are so interestingly shaped," said the elfin boy, running his fingers over the smoothness of Corny's ears.

"Neil," Luis said.

The phooka reached over to touch the roundness of Corny's cheek, as though fascinated. A faerie boy licked the inside of Corny's arm and he shivered. He was a puppet. They pulled his strings and he danced.

"Neil," Luis said, his voice distant and unimportant. "Snap out of it.”

Corny leaned into their caresses, butting his head against a phooka's palm. His skin felt hot and oversensitized. He groaned.

Long fingers tugged at his gloves.

"Don't do that," Corny warned, but he wanted them to. He wanted them to caress every part of him, but he hated himself for wanting it. He thought of his sister, following a dripping kelpie boy off a pier, but even that didn't curb his longing.

"Come, come," said a tall faery with hair as blue as the feathers of a bird. Corny blinked.

"I'll hurt you," Corny said languorously, and the faeries around him laughed. The laughter wasn't particularly mocking or cruel, but it hurt all the same. It was the amusement of watching a cat threaten the tail of a wolf.

They slid off the gloves. Decayed rubber dust flaked from the tips of his fingers.

"I hurt everything I touch," Corny said dully.

He felt hands at his hips, in his mouth. The soil was cool against his back, soothing when the rest of him was prickling with heat. Without meaning to he reached out for one of the faeries, feeling hair flow across his hands like silk, feeling the shocking warmth of muscled flesh.

His eyes opened with the sudden knowledge of what he was doing. He saw, as from a great distance, the tiny pinholes in cloth where his fingers touched, the blackberry stains of bruises blooming on necks, the brown age spots spreading like smeared dirt across ancient skin. They didn't even seem to notice.

A slow smile spread over his lips. He could hurt them even if he couldn't resist them.

He let the pixies stroke him, arching up and biting at the exposed neck of the elfin boy, inhaling their strange mineral-and-earth scents, letting lust overtake him.

"Neil!" Luis shouted, pulling Corny up by the back of his shirt. Corny stumbled, reaching out to right his balance, and Luis pulled back before Corny's hand could catch him. Corny grabbed Luis's shirt instead, the fabric singeing. Corny stumbled and fell.

"Snap out of it," Luis ordered. He was breathing fast, maybe with fear. "Stand up.”

Corny pushed himself onto his knees. Desire made speaking difficult. Even the movement of his own lips was disturbingly like pleasure.

A faery rested long fingers on Corny's calf. The touch felt like a caress and he sagged toward it.

Warm lips were next to his. "Get up, Neil." Luis spoke softly against Corny's mouth, as if daring Corny to obey. "Time to get up.”

Luis kissed him. Luis, who could do everything that he couldn't, who was smart and sarcastic and the last boy in the world likely to want an awkward geek like Corny. It was dizzying to open his mouth against Luis's. Their tongues slid together for a devastating moment, then Luis pulled back.

"Give me your hands," he said, and Corny obediently held out his wrists. Luis bound them with a shoelace.

"What are you—" Corny tried to make some sense of what was happening, but he was still reeling.

"Thread your fingers together," Luis said in his competent, calm voice and pressed his mouth to Corny's again.

Of course. Luis was trying to save him. Like he saved the man with the mouth full of pennies or Lala with the snaking vines. He knew about cures and poultices and the medicinal value of kisses. He knew how to distract Corny long enough to bind his hands, how to use himself as bait to lure Corny away from danger. He saw right through to Corny's carefully hidden desire, and—worse than using it against him—Luis had used it to rescue him. Exhilaration turned to acid in Corny's stomach.

He stumbled back and staggered toward the curtain of branches. They scraped his face as he passed through.

Luis followed. "I'm sorry," he called after Corny. "I'm—I didn't—I thought—”

"I'm? I didn't? I thought?" Corny shouted at him. His face was suddenly too hot. Then his stomach clenched. He barely had time to turn before retching up chunks of old mushrooms.

Predictably, Luis had been right about the cakes.

An owl's yellow eyes caught the moonlight, making Kaye jump. She'd given up on calling Corny's name and was now just trying to find her way back to the revel. Each time she turned toward the music, it seemed to be coming from another direction.

"Lost?" said a voice, and she jumped. It was a man with greenish-gold hair and white moth wings that folded across his bare back.

"Kind of," Kaye said. "I don't suppose you could point me the way?”

He nodded and pointed one finger to the left and the other to the right.

"Hilarious." Kaye folded her arms across her chest.

"Both ways would bring you to the revel eventually. One would just take quite a bit longer." He smiled. "Tell me your name and I'll tell you which is better.”

"Okay" she said. "Kaye.”

"That's not your real name." His smile was teasing. "I bet you don't even know it.”

"It's probably safer that way." She looked into a dense copse of trees. Nothing seemed familiar.

"But someone must know it, mustn't they? Someone who gave it to you?”

"Maybe no one gave me a name. Maybe I'm supposed to name myself.”

"They say that nameless things change constantly—that names fix them in place like pins. But without a name, a thing isn't quite real either. Maybe you're not a real thing.”

"I'm real," Kaye said.

"You know a name that isn't yours, though, don't you? A true name. A silver pin that could stick a King in place.”

His tone was light, but the muscles in Kaye's shoulders tensed. "I told Silarial that I wouldn't use it. I won't.”

"Really?" He cocked his head to the side, looking oddly like a bird. "And you wouldn't trade it for another life? A mortal mother? A feckless friend?”

"Are you threatening me? Is Silarial threatening me?" She stepped back from him.

"Not yet," he said with a laugh.

"I'll find my own way back," she mumbled, and headed off, not sure where she was going and not caring.

The trees were heavy with impossible summer leaves, and the earth was warm and fragrant, but the woods were as still as stone. Even the wind seemed dead. Kaye walked on, faster and faster, until she came to a stream pitted with rocks. A squat figure crouched near the water, the brambles and branches of her hair making her look like a barren bush.

"You!" Kaye gasped. "What are you doing here?”

"I am sure," the Thistle witch said, her black eyes shining, "you have better questions for me than that.”

"I don't want any more riddles," Kaye said, and her voice broke. She sat down on the wet bank, not caring about the water soaking her skirt. "Or eggshells or quests.”

The Thistlewitch reached out a long, lanky arm to pat Kaye with fingers that felt as rough as wood. "Poor little pixie. Come and rest your head on my shoulder.”

"I don't even know what side you're on." Kaye groaned, but she scooted over and leaned against the faery's familiar bulk. "I'm not sure how many sides there are. I mean, is this like a piece of paper with two sides or like one of those weird dice that Corny has with twenty sides? And if there are really twenty sides, then is anyone on my side?”

"Clever girl," the Thistlewitch said approvingly.

"Come on, that made no sense. Isn't there anything you can tell me? About anything?”

"You already know what you need and you need what you know.”

"But that's a riddle!" Kaye protested.

"Sometimes the riddle is the answer," the Thistlewitch replied, but she patted Kaye's shoulder all the same.