Cara poked my shoulder. “Hey, Unseelie, are you all right? You’ve been staring off into space for almost ten minutes now. Do you have a head injury you didn’t tell us about?”
I blinked, yanking myself out of my tangled thoughts.
“Uh, no. Just taking a break,” I said lamely. “It’s been a long day.”
“Tell me about it.” Aodhan finished the last stitch on my stomach and clipped the thread. “It took us hours to ride here from the Seelie border. And we rode past the entrance six times before someone spotted it.”
“Good place to hide a secret vault though,” Cara pointed out. “You don’t want one that’s easy to find.” She pointed toward the well. “Especially one that contains the Well of Knowledge.”
Aodhan snorted. “What do you know about the Well of Knowledge?”
She pouted. “When you drink the water, it gives you knowledge.”
“Where’d you learn that tidbit?” He coaxed me over onto my back so he could stitch the exit wound. “A nursery rhyme?”
“Like you know more than I do.” She huffed. “You thought the Divide had a big chasm in the middle. You thought it was literally a divide, until Brigid told you otherwise.”
“Don’t blame me. Blame my primary school. They dropped the geography module due to lack of funding.” He finished with my back in half the time it took him to stitch my abdomen, having gotten the hang of using the needle and thread. “It’s all right though,” he continued as he unwound a roll of gauze and started wrapping my wounds, “I can always use a direction spell if I get lost.”
“That’s rather pathetic, you know?” Cara said.
“You aren’t any better. Don’t pretend to be.”
Ignoring the slight, Cara rose and stretched, ambling over to the well. “But really, what sort of knowledge does this thing give you?” She rapped her knuckles on the wall of the prism ward. “Your enemy’s secrets? That why the Abarta fellow wanted a sip? To try and one-up the queens or something?” She chuckled at the thought. “That’d be the day.”
“Uh,” I said, “if you don’t already know what the well does, maybe—”
A high-pitched whistle sounded off near the exit. Brigid had mounted her horse again and was ordering her troops to move out. The last of the survivors, including Saoirse, who was hobbling, and Christie, who was hunched over and clutching her side, were being ushered through the corridor. They were a mess of patchwork bandages and torn clothing and stifled groans, but they were alive. As few as we’d managed to save in the end, I was heartened at the sight of them walking out of this chamber of horrors. The pile of bodies lying nearby was a reminder they could’ve all suffered a grim fate, had the team not stormed the vault to rescue them.
Aodhan and Cara helped me to my feet. My legs almost buckled, but I got my footing after a couple tries. Between the decent repair job and the numbing spell, I thought I could manage a slow, halting walk back to the entrance to the cavern. As long as I didn’t trip and fall, or stretch the wrong way, or raise my arms above my head, my battered organs would remain inside my abdominal cavity. I’d be broken like a twig if I had another scuffle though, even a slap fight with a pixie, so I hoped these soldiers were better at fighting than they were at book learning.
“Surprised you guys were willing to help an Unseelie,” I said as I shuffled toward the corridor. “Thought most of you military types were hostile toward your rivals.”
Aodhan shook his head. “Peacetime. Unseelie are our allies. For now.”
Cara plucked one of the flowers from her hair and tucked it behind my ear. “We honor our truces while they last. You have nothing to worry about. Unless the queens declare war before you leave for Earth.” She glanced at me, a curious arch in her eyebrow. “You do live on Earth, don’t you?”
“I’ve lived there all my life,” I lied. “Why’d you think I might not live there?”
She shrugged. “According to you, you survived getting struck by the ‘Spear of Lugh.’ Thought maybe you were somebody special for a second there.”
“If this is what it means to be special”—I gestured to my bloody self—“someone else can have the honor.”
Aodhan laughed as he climbed back onto his horse. “I like your attitude, Unseelie. Most of the half-fae I’ve met who recently immigrated from Earth have such a gloomy disposition.” He pointed to the pile of bloody corpses lying on the ground behind us. “Always nice to talk with a half-fae who doesn’t weep every time one of their distant kin suffers an unfortunate end. Human blood is such a fickle thing. It ruins most of you.”
“It’s the crying and the lying,” Cara added, jumping up onto her own horse with practiced ease. “The two things that make most humans unbearable.”
Ah. A fresh cup of prejudice. Just what I needed after an exhausting near-death battle.
“Oh, is that all?” I said dryly, trudging into the corridor. “And here I thought the fae could fill a book with all the things they loathed about humanity.”
Chapter Nineteen
Odette Chao did not die. She did, however, lose an arm.
Outside the fortress of thorns, three additional soldiers were waiting. One of them had a bloody leg, so I assumed he was Lorcan, the guy who’d almost gotten eaten by the lindworm. The other two looked just as bored as he did, plus a tad annoyed. All three had been forced to give up their horses and travel on foot so that the injured humans they’d recovered along the way—Granger, Mallory, and Odette—wouldn’t die before they reached the fortress. Granger and Mallory were both unconscious but breathing, while Odette was awake and persistently swearing in Chinese.
Someone had bandaged the socket where her left arm used to be, but that hadn’t made her happy. I didn’t speak Chinese, so I didn’t know exactly what she was saying, but I figured she was cursing herself for not avoiding the sword that took off her arm. When I could gather enough air in my lungs for a rousing monologue, I would try to cheer her up by pointing out a simple fact: All the svartálfar were dead as doormats. She might’ve been grievously wounded, but she’d still gotten the last laugh. Odette would live to punch another day. The elves, I hoped, were in a special hell.
Saoirse was hoisted onto the same horse as Odette, thanks to her leg, and then Brigid gave the order to head back to the entrance. We created a roughly circular formation, the walking fae at the rear, the ones on horseback at the front, the humans protected in the middle. Then we set out to backtrack along the winding path that passed by all the horrors the survivors had experienced over the past day. I knew the soldiers hadn’t bothered to take down the bodies. The fae didn’t even recover their own dead from a battlefield most of the time. They didn’t give regular funerals, just memorial services when distinguished people passed on.
What’s one more dollop of trauma added on to the pile though? These people are going to need therapy either way.
I fell into step beside the horse carrying Saoirse and Odette. “Hey, you two hanging on?”
“Go to hell, Whelan,” Odette hissed.
“Sounds like you’re doing okay then, considering?”
She shot me a glare. Half her face was a mottled purple. “You’re paying for my medical care. Every cent. And you better get me a damn good prosthetic.”
“Consider it taken care of,” I said, and meant it.
“Wait. Really?” She blinked her bloodshot eyes in astonishment.
I nodded.
Her expression softened. “Oh, uh, thanks.”
“Least I can do.”
Behind Odette, Saoirse groaned. “Either of you got a spell in your books that’ll heal a badly fractured tibia so I won’t have to wear a cast for like six weeks?”
“Afraid not,” I said.
Odette added, “Me either. Sorry. There are better healers in town though. Their prices are steep, but they know their business. I can call a couple up, if you’re willing to pay.”
“I’ll pay for that too.” I shushed Saoirse before she could protest. “It
was my idea to bring you all here, and you paid the price for following along with my half-assed plan. Yes, we saved some lives and possibly stalled an old god’s plot for world domination, and that’s good. But your pain is still my problem, regardless of that outcome. I’m the leader here, so it’s my responsibility to fix what got broken. Like your leg. And Odette’s arm. And Mallory’s shoulder. And Granger’s thigh. I’ll take care of all of you. End of discussion.”
Saoirse shook her head, but a smile crept up her cheeks. “Tell me, Vince, did anyone ever buy that ‘aloof jerk’ act of yours at any point during the seven years you spent pretending you were a cold-hearted loner who got his jollies off by charging people exorbitant fees to get their junk back from the stretches? Anyone? A single person?”
Odette stifled laughter by pressing her face into the horse’s mane.
Fighting a blush, I replied, “That’s not an act. That’s what I am.”
“Bullshit,” Odette said in a sing-song voice, muffled by the horse hair.
“Give it up, Vince.” Saoirse wagged her finger at me. “You’re not fooling anyone. You’re the same softie you were before the collapse, down to your need to make up for every perceived fault that affects other people in the slightest of ways.” She reached out and poked my forehead with that same finger. “It’s kind of condescending sometimes, you know? We came here of our own accord—”
Odette cleared her throat.
“Most of us came here of our own accord,” Saoirse corrected. “Because we wanted to rescue the victims, same as you. We’re adults, and we’re allowed to make difficult choices like that, even if the choices we make result in nasty outcomes like this. Us being hurt is not your fault, and it’s not a weight you can just drop on your shoulders to create an illusion that this bad situation was under your control. You have to learn to accept the unpredictable nature of other people’s agency, and the reality of other people’s personal responsibility.”
I opened my mouth to contradict her, but she shushed me the same way I had her a minute ago.
“Pretending everything that happened revolved around your actions is conceited,” she continued, “and it infantilizes us. As scary as it is to acknowledge you don’t hold the reins in all the situations that involve you, it’s a necessary thing to do. It helps you keep things in perspective. It keeps you from running yourself ragged. And in the right situation, it’ll keep you alive.” She gave me a stern but goodhearted look. It was a look I remembered well. From the days when Saoirse had been my mentor. “That’s a lesson I didn’t get a chance to impress on you before the collapse. Learn it, will you? I don’t have all the time in the world for you to play catch-up, kid.”
The callback to our cop days hurt almost more than the admonishment, but I accepted it.
She was right. As usual.
“So,” I said after an awkward pause, “does this mean you don’t want me to raid my savings to pay for your medical treatment?”
Saoirse’s look soured, and I got the impression she wanted to hit me for pretending to be obtuse during a teaching moment. Saoirse wasn’t mean like that though.
Unfortunately, Odette was. Her remaining hand shot out and smacked me upside the head. “Don’t be a fuckwit, Whelan.”
I staggered to the side and rubbed my head. “Ow. Jeez. It was a joke.”
“It was a bad joke, and you should feel bad…”
A shadow loomed over us.
Brigid, on her tall and menacing stallion, had doubled back from the head of the contingent. “Vincent Whelan, may I speak with you for a moment, in private?”
I wanted to say no, that I had talked to the fae enough for one day and learned far too much about far too little of the queens’ current machinations regarding Abarta and his crusade. But Brigid’s molten eyes, combined with her fiery orange facial marks and the matching highlights in her otherwise brown hair, gave off the impression of a wild and easily angered demigod born from a volcano whose toes you shouldn’t step on unless you wanted to get burned. As the unit’s leader, she was bound to be the oldest. The most mature. Perhaps the smartest. And who could forget that age corresponded to power when it came to the fae?
She was the one who killed the lindworm.
“Sure thing,” I said, projecting a cheery disposition. “Where to?”
“Follow me.”
The group emerged from the stretch of path that let out into the forest of death. I was not keen on walking among those evil trees, but none of them appeared to have moved since Odette and I passed through earlier. The same bodies were hanging in the same places. There were no new marks on the ground that indicated the branches had gotten feisty. There were no empty slots that implied the trees could uproot and move around. The obstacle seemed to be totally inert.
Still, I was reassured by the fact that Brigid carried two swords and at least six knives.
Never hurt to be prepared, you know?
She led me about thirty feet to the left and turned so we were walking parallel to the group. The distance was just enough to muddle our conversation in the ears of the other faeries, as long as we spoke in hushed tones. She didn’t want her teammates to hear what she was going to say, either because she was concerned about their potential responses, or because she wanted to protect them. My money was on the latter. The hard, suspicious look in her eyes implied the topic of this conversation was not safe in everyone’s hands.
Brigid didn’t speak immediately. She waited until we were halfway across the forest of death before she said, “When your companion with the red hair told us you had infiltrated the vault to rescue prisoners from a group of criminals working for a remnant of the sleeping gods, I was skeptical. I thought perhaps you were misinformed, or that your enemy was someone masquerading as the god Abarta. Primarily because the missive our fort received last month from central command stated that someone calling himself Abarta had attempted to cast a spell on Earth that would in some way affect the courts, and that he was prevented from doing so by Earth-based agents of the sídhe. We were ordered to be on alert for future disturbances caused by this man on our side of the veil.”
“You sound like you have a good grasp on who Abarta is,” I replied, testing the water. Was she more informed than the rest? Or was she simply keener than her superiors had given her credit for? I had the distinct impression these young and rather ditzy soldiers were supposed to take this situation at face value: some humans had gotten grabbed by a group of lowlifes working for another lowlife who was playing god, as lowlifes were wont to do, and the soldiers needed to clean the mess up, secure the vault, and send the pitiful humans home.
If those humans ranted and raved about a trickster god and a brewing war?
Eh. They were humans. All they did was lie and exaggerate, right?
These were the soldiers who weren’t supposed to ask too many questions, and who were conditioned to ignore any answer that didn’t fit the spoon-fed narrative from their superiors.
“A good grasp compared to the rest of my unit, you mean,” Brigid said after mulling my comment over. “I listened in on your conversation with Cara and Aodhan. You think them woefully ignorant. Of their own history and of pertinent current events that will likely have an impact on their future.”
Oh, yeah. She’s a sharp one.
“Not to be rude,” I started, “but they…”
“They are.” She sighed. “I don’t dispute that. Roughly half the soldiers who patrol the borders, or hold other menial positions in the army of our court, are castoffs from a poor or disgraced branch of a sídhe family. Those who lost the queen’s favor. Those who fell on hard times during financial shakeups. Those who walked into a rival family’s trap three centuries ago, and whose children are still paying for their mistake. There are hundreds like them. And they’re all the same. Uneducated. Unrefined. Unaware of the depth of their own misfortune.”
“You don’t sound the same.” I swung out to the right to avoid a divot in the dirt. I could’ve
sworn the root inside that divot twitched when it noticed I wasn’t going to stumble over it. But I chose to ignore it. I also chose to ignore the tree we were passing on the left had a scary face carved into its trunk, and appeared to follow us with its empty bark eyes, and gave off the vibe that it wanted to eat me.
Evil trees? What evil trees?
Brigid tightened her grip on the reins of her horse. “My family’s downfall was less than a generation ago, and my father managed to retain some favor in the lower reaches of the court. He works in the dregs of the palace library, sorting through millions of old documents and books. A grueling, thankless job, but a job that keeps my family anchored in the capital instead of being spat into some nameless rural town. But the minimal favor he possesses can only do so much. It could not, for example, get me a job anywhere of note.”
“So you ended up as a soldier in the army.”
“An opportunity available to all who meet the minimum qualifications, even the lesser fae of the Seelie Court.” She didn’t refer to the lesser fae with spite, as some sídhe did, but I could tell it galled her that she got lumped in with them. On the one hand, the elitism annoyed me, especially since she knew what it was like to be looked down upon for your heritage. On the other hand, as a full-blooded sídhe, her raw power was far beyond that of any lesser fae. She could’ve excelled in many fields that relied on magic strength. If only she’d been allowed to.
“Can you climb the ranks, or…?”
“That depends,” she answered evenly, “on how I play the game. The army, even in the outer reaches of Seelie territory, is just another branch of the court. The same rules apply. Most of the soldiers are not ambitious, discerning, or calculating enough to play it, but the game is still there to be played regardless. You must merely choose to make the best moves before someone else does.” Something dark and dangerous flashed through her molten eyes. “And watch your back to ensure you don’t get stabbed before you can claim your prize.”
What Man Defies Page 18
