“You let the sea witch cast a spell on you?” The wariness vanished, crowded out by awe and fear. “And you survived?”
“She’ll kill me eventually, but not today. Today I’m going to get you out.”
“How?”
Good question. We were crouched in the middle of an enchanted forest with nothing but a hollow tree for cover, and I still had no idea where the other kids were. For that matter, I didn’t know how I was going to get them out when we found them. All I had was a knife that was too big for my hands, a candle I didn’t dare to put down, and a half-grown Cait Sidhe who kept fluxing between terrified and arrogant. There have been times when I had to work with less, but root and branch, you can only count on a miracle so many times before reality puts its foot down.
Not that there was anything else I could do. It was time to roll the dice against that miracle one more time.
“You were running from the Huntsmen before,” I said. “How did you get away?”
“It was Helen,” he said, sounding ashamed. Of course he was ashamed—no teenage boy wants to admit that he was saved by a girl. “She found a way out of the room we were locked in. None of the others would follow her. But I . . .”
“You thought it might be worth trying.”
“I thought I could find the trail they brought us in by.” He looked away. “I thought I could get us out, and Uncle Tybalt would come, and we’d destroy them.”
“How far did you get?” I asked. I hated to do it; his posture told me he was on the brink of tears, and pushing him over that edge might make him useless. I didn’t really have a choice. I needed to know whether I had any hope of saving the others.
“A long way,” he whispered. I waited, but he didn’t say anything else. He just huddled, ears pressed flat, shaking.
Right. I rose, offering him my hand. “Come on. We’re going now.”
“Where?”
“Away from here.” I didn’t know how I’d get him out without going through Blind Michael, but that could wait. He needed to be moving more than I needed to have a plan.
He looked at me warily, then slid his hand over mine, covering it to the wrist. The reality of what the Luidaeg had done was sinking in. How was I supposed to save the kids and defeat Blind Michael when I was just a kid myself? Raj was watching me with an anxious sort of trust. I sighed. Whether I stood a chance or not, I had to try. I hate being the last resort.
It took us longer to fight our way out of the woods than it had taken to enter; the branches snagged at our clothes, and the roots tangled around our feet until it seemed like the trees were actively working against us. But the candle was steady and blue, and I found that if I watched the flame rather than the landscape, I could walk without stumbling.
“You can get there and back by the candle’s light,” I murmured.
“What?” said Raj.
“Nothing. Just a rhyme.” A thin, steady light in the distance marked the edge of the trees. “It looks like we’re almost out.”
Raj tightened his grip on my hand, clinging to me like I was his only connection with home. Maybe I was; he didn’t exactly have any better options. “What comes next?”
“I don’t know.” I gave him what I hoped was a reassuring look. “I won’t leave you.”
I hate it when I lie by accident.
We stepped into the open, turning toward the mountains, and started to walk. Eventually, Raj let go of my hand, choosing to walk a foot or so ahead of me. Nothing disturbed us as we walked out across the plains, outside the range of any reasonable cover. There was nowhere left to hide when the flame of my candle suddenly flared upward, burning a bright, furious orange.
And the Huntsmen came. They boiled up out of the ground, surrounding us in an instant. There was no time to run and nowhere to run to; all we could do was stand our ground and wait to be taken. Their attention was fixed on Raj, but I didn’t expect that to last. I reached out and grabbed for his shoulder, even though I didn’t know what good it would do. It was instinctive. I suppose what happened next was instinctive, too. Cornered tigers will fight, after all.
Raj lunged for the nearest Huntsman, shifting into feline form in midair and going for the eyes. He was making himself a distraction. I had to admire the effort, even as I started after him, screaming, “Raj, no!”
Whatever illusion was protecting me wasn’t strong enough to hide me from my own stupidity. The nearest Huntsmen turned toward my voice, eyes wide and startled, like they were seeing me for the first time. The one Raj was lunging for swatted him away. He fell without a sound, landing in an unmoving heap as the others closed in on me, weapons drawn.
I was so busy watching their weapons that I never saw the one who hit me. There was a sudden, sharp pain in the back of my head, and I was falling again, back into mist and candlelit darkness. And there was nothing.
ELEVEN
I AWOKE FACEDOWN in the middle of a marble floor that had been white once, before it was buried under years of mud and gore. My head was throbbing in time to an unseen samba band. I took a brief mental census, confirming that my aching head was still attached to the rest of me before pushing myself upright.
I could feel the blood the Luidaeg used to make my candle even before I realized that my fingers were still wrapped tightly around it. The flame blazed up as soon as I looked at it, growing until it was a foot high and burning brilliant red. That couldn’t be good. Raj was nowhere in sight. That could have meant he’d managed to escape the Hunt, but I didn’t think so. There was probably some ceremony he’d already gone through that I still needed to undergo in my new role as one of Blind Michael’s captive children. There are always ceremonies in Faerie, even in the parts that we’d rather ignore.
The room I was in was probably a ballroom before it became a prison. The walls had been shattered about ten feet up, and the roof was entirely gone. Brambles boiled over the walls on three sides, obscuring all the doors. Tattered tapestries hung between the loops of briar, their patterns worn away by dirt and time. The sky had grown even darker while I was unconscious, but there were still no stars. No stars at all.
Shadows too dark for changeling eyes to pierce pooled at the base of the walls, and I could hear giggling and rustling noises coming from inside them. That wasn’t promising. I’ve learned to never trust the laughing ones; they’re either insane or genuinely glad to see people frightened and in pain, and either way, they’re likely to cause problems.
I stood, trying to ignore the shivering weakness in my knees. The Rider that knocked me out had obviously done it before, because I wasn’t dead—it takes skill to knock someone out from behind without smashing their skull. If I was lucky, the pain would pass before I needed to run. I seemed to be counting on luck an awful lot.
It took a moment to be sure I wasn’t going to fall down. When I was confident my balance would hold I called, “All right, I know you’re there. Now come out where I can see you.” My words almost echoed Acacia’s, and that coaxed a small, wry smile from my lips, even as I wondered whether May knew where to find me. What good is a Fetch if she isn’t there when it’s time to die?
My voice echoed against the walls. As the echoes faded, the children came creeping into the open. At first they came in little groups—two and three at a time, staying tight and close together—but the groups grew larger as they got bolder, until they were approaching in clusters of five and six and even eight. They ranged from toddlers to teenagers on the edge of adulthood, and there were a lot of them, moving too quickly for me to count. I froze, watching them. They were wrong. The children were . . .
The children were wrong. It was hard to tell their breeds or make my eyes define what I was seeing. Some of them were easy to identify—he was Daoine Sidhe, she was a Bannick, he was a Barrow Wight—but subtly changed, until they looked more like parodies of their races than actual fae. Others were strangely blurred and blended, twisted into strange mockeries of what they should have been. Pointed ears and cat-slit eyes,
scales and fur, wings and long, thrashing tails were combined without any visible logic, creating things that were entirely new, and entirely wrong.
There was a Tuatha de Dannan, perfect and unaltered, except for the streaky brown feathers that turned his arms into ragged wings. Behind him was a Centaur with the hindquarters of a small Dragon. He had iridescent green scales in place of fur, and his hooves were more like talons. A Piskie with webbed hands and legs that tapered to fins straddled his back, her snarled hair tied out of her eyes with a strip of dirty linen.
I opened my mouth to test out their bloodlines, and gagged on the impossible mixture that hit the back of my throat. Their blood might remember how they started, if I had the time to taste them out one at a time, but in a group, they were smothering. He hadn’t just changed them on the outside. He’d changed them all the way down to the bone.
Faerie has her citizens and her monsters, and sometimes the two are the same, but it’s by design, not accident or malicious alteration. We are what we were meant to be, and every race has a role to play. The Daoine Sidhe are beautiful and fickle and so tied to blood that our hands are never clean. The Tuatha de Dannan bridge the gaps between our varied lands, gatekeepers and guardians. The night-haunts may be monsters, but they perform a service the rest of us can never repay; they eat our dead and keep us hidden. We do our jobs.
Even the Firstborn, unique as they all are, have a role to play. They give us legends and night terrors; they give us things to aspire to and avoid, and without them, Faerie would lack focus. There would be nothing for the heroes to hunt for or the villains to aspire to become. We need them as much as we need each other. But these children had no purpose anymore. The things they’d become were nothing natural, even on the strange shores of Faerie. It didn’t matter how it had been done, or why; all that mattered was that it was too late to save them. All I could do was hope the children I’d been sent to save weren’t already among them.
“New girl,” said a Urisk with long antennae growing in front of his stubbed and broken horns. He was wrapped in a stained muslin sheet, toga-style, with slits cut for his gauzy locust’s wings. The hair on his goatish legs was sparse and matted.
“New girl,” said the Centaur. The Piskie on his back smiled, baring a mouthful of unnaturally angled fangs.
“New girl,” she said.
The others took up the cry, whispering, “New girl, new girl,” as they crept closer. I stood my ground, fingers clenched white-knuckled around my candle. Luna warned me about Blind Michael’s children, telling me to beware and be wary, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t be afraid of them. I could pity them, and I knew better than to trust them, but I couldn’t fear them.
The Piskie reached out and tweaked a strand of my hair, twisting it between heavily webbed fingers. Her expression was politely fascinated; she was probably somewhere near ten years old. “Human blood,” she said finally, and yanked, hard.
I jerked away, clapping my free hand against my scalp. “Hey! That hurt!”
She ignored me, laughing as she held up the strands of hair she’d stolen. “Rider or ridden?” she demanded. “How strong?”
This seemed to be a great question, and an even better game. The children began to skip in a circle around me, chanting, “Rider or ridden, Rider or ridden,” over and over. They stressed the second syllable of each word, making it a singsong rhythm that clashed with the pounding in my head. I was uncomfortably aware that at least half of them were bigger than I was, and that the ones who weren’t either came paired with larger friends or had some sort of natural weaponry. All I could think of was the Jabberwock, with its claws that catch and teeth that bite. Me, I had my knife and my candle, and that was it.
The flame was burning higher and higher, and it seemed to be doing some good—only the Piskie had touched me. The circle they’d formed around me would draw in close and then spread out again, like the children were trying to stay out of the candlelight. I waited for the circle to close again and then thrust the candle out at arm’s length to test my theory. The nearest of the children shied back, nearly breaking the line.
“How many miles to Babylon?” I asked, half whimsically. The entire circle staggered back, so fast that some of the smaller children fell. The youngest I could see was a tiny Roane with raw-looking gills fluttering in the sides of his neck. He looked like he couldn’t have been more than three years old when he was taken. Oberon only knew how long ago that was; the Roane have been all but extinct for centuries. Oak and ash, how many lives had this man destroyed? Why hadn’t anyone stopped him?
There’d be time for hatred later. Right now, getting out was what mattered. I took a step forward. “Don’t you remember the answer? It’s threescore miles and ten.” The children moved back again. One of them hissed. “Can I get there by a candle’s light? Oh yes, and back again.” I was passing them, and they weren’t stopping me in their haste to get away from the light. All of them were fleeing now, all but that little Roane boy who couldn’t seem to get back to his feet.
Pausing, I offered him my free hand, heedless of the danger. It wasn’t his fault. None of them had chosen this. He raised his head and looked at me, eyes wide and empty. I jerked away instinctively just before he lunged, leaving his razor-sharp teeth to close on empty air. They opened a wide gash in his upper lip, and it began oozing blood that was practically black.
That would teach me not to reach out to the monsters. I stepped backward, holding up my candle like a shield. “If your feet are nimble and your heart is light, you can get there and back by the candle’s light,” I said, as fast as I could. “How many miles to Babylon? It’s threescore miles and ten—” I kept chanting, backing toward the wall.
The children were slinking back into a group, watching me with angry, empty eyes. It’s always nice to feel loved. I kept backing up, chanting the rhyme over and over until my shoulders hit the wall. I glanced from side to side. There were no doors. No way out.
Emboldened by my sudden stop, the group of children began creeping closer. They surrounded me in a loose semicircle, stopping well out of reach. The Piskie looked at me, saying, “Oh, you won’t go.” She seemed to be the unofficial spokesperson for the group. Most of the others didn’t say anything more complex than “new girl” without being prompted. “There’s no leaving before it’s time.”
“I see,” I said, not moving. “That’s good to know.”
“Good and bad don’t matter—there’s no point in running. Rider or ridden, it’s not your decision, and if it’s the second, to the stables you’ll go. If the first, you’ll join our company . . . for a time.” There was no softness in her smile. “Making enemies of the only friends you’ll find here isn’t wise.”
“Maybe she wants enemies,” said the Centaur.
“No one smart wants enemies,” replied the Piskie.
Considering that I’d voluntarily entered Blind Michael’s lands, I wasn’t sure I qualified as smart. “What happens now?” I asked, keeping my voice steady. They were avoiding the candlelight, but candles can’t last forever. Eventually, the wax would burn down, and they’d take me.
“Now we wait,” said the Piskie.
“We wait for Him,” added the Urisk, in a hiss.
“He’ll come.”
“Because you’re here.”
“New girl.”
“New blood.”
“Rider or ridden.”
“And maybe he’ll take one of us when he takes you.”
“To the Ride—”
“—the Hunt—”
“—to where the darkness waits—”
“He’ll take us home.” This last was from the Roane, who popped his thumb into his mouth as he finished speaking. His fangs fit neatly around it, barely grazing the skin, although the blood from where he’d bitten his own lip made that difficult to see.
“How long have you all been here?” I asked, keeping my shoulders pressed against the wall. I’d been distracted by their seeming innocence o
nce, and I wasn’t going to risk doing it again. In this place, innocence could kill.
The answers came from all around, called out too quickly for me to see who made each one. “A long time.”
“Long time.”
“Many new children.”
“I was new once.”
“We were all new once.”
The Piskie hugged herself, saying, “Sometimes He comes and picks one of us, even when there aren’t any new ones. He takes us away to join Him, and we never come back here again.”
“Where is here?” Children like to talk—even monster children. If I could keep them talking, they might tell me something I needed to know.
“Home,” said a voice from the back of the crowd. The Piskie scowled over her shoulder before looking toward me again, eyes narrowed.
“The Children’s Hall,” she said. “It’s where we wait. You’ll wait, too, if you’re a Rider.”
“And if I’m not?” I was certain I wouldn’t like the answer.
“If you’re not a Rider, you’re ridden,” said the Centaur, smiling thinly. “You won’t come back here, if you’re ridden. You’ll go to the stables, and do your waiting there.”
That didn’t sound promising. “What—” A heavy grinding filled the air as the flame of my candle turned a brilliant white, blazing up another foot. The children stepped back, laughing, suddenly at ease. “What the hell?”
“You’ll understand now,” said the Piskie, through her laughter.
And everything changed. The walls of the Children’s Hall dropped away, transforming the shattered ballroom into a clearing ringed by warped, almost menacing trees. Riders lurked in the shadows of their branches. The candle flame abruptly dwindled to a tiny blue spark, and just as abruptly the children were upon me, pinching and shoving as they surrounded me on all sides. They pulled me back when I tried to break away, jeering at my distress.
An Artificial Night - BK 3 Page 12
