If the blackboil plague breached the Court, that white skin might be raddled in days, and that golden hair a snarl of dishwater. Her graceful slenderness would become a jenny-hag’s bony withering. Eventually, Summer might choke out a gout of black brackish fluid, and expire, her eaten body collapsing into foul wet dust.
A comforting thought, and one Robin kept despite the danger. She turned away from Summer and faced the mortal world again. Everything now depended on luck, speed, and her native wit. Her whistle became a high drilling buzz, lips pursing and her hair lifting on a breeze from neither realm. Robin Ragged’s blue silken skirt snapped once, her heels clicking as she stepped with a jolt fully into the mortal world, slipping through a rent in the Veil just her size and shape. Her fingers left cold metal, the Gates’ thrum disappearing like a train rolling into the distance, and the alley closed around her. Bricks, garbage, the effluvia of combustion engines and decay.
For all that, it was an honest reek, and she welcomed it as she took a few experimental steps. The world rippled around her, cautious as it always was to accept a child of the sideways realms, then firmed like gelatin.
She made it to the alley mouth, peered out into the city. Night gathered in corners. It was the perfect moment of dusk, when the tides between all the realms, sideways and mortal, turned and the interference made it difficult to track anything, much less one ragged little bird with a whistle that trilled into silence.
She cocked her head. She’d gone unremarked.
At least, she thought she had, until the ultrasonic cry of a silver huntwhistle lifted in the distance, and she thought perhaps they had been watching far more closely than even the Queen had guessed.
It was whispered that Unwinter himself had loosed the plague, and even now reveled in its destructive force. Certainly Summer had openly hinted as much, when the black boils began to cut a swath through the unaligned. The free sidhe often named themselves the lucky ones who bowed to no master—at least, not fully, though there was always the Fatherless.
Don’t think about him. If all goes well, you won’t see him tonight. He won’t even know you’ve been out and about.
Robin slid out of the alley and set off down the deserted street, cars humming in the distance and every nerve in her body quivering-alert.
Now let’s see how well I run the course. Her heels tapped the sidewalk as she lengthened her stride, her much-mended skirt whispering and her curls bouncing. She was not so foolish as to think fear of any reprisal from Summer would keep her whole should Unwinter’s hounds have orders to bring the Ragged to their liege.
She was, however, just arrogant enough to think perhaps she could outrun them, and if all else failed, there was always the song, its thunder under her thoughts a comforting roil.
Dusk closed around her, and Robin hurried.
Contents
Title Page
Welcome
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
extras
BY LILITH SAINTCROW
About The Author
A Preview of Trailer Park Fae
Copyright
COPYRIGHT
Published by Orbit
ISBN: 978-0-3565-0635-7
All characters and events in this publication, other than those clearly in the public domain, are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
Copyright © 2015 by Lilith Saintcrow
Excerpt from Trailer Park Fae copyright © 2014 by Lilith Saintcrow
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
The publisher is not responsible for websites (or their content) that are not owned by the publisher.
Orbit
Little, Brown Book Group
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London, EC4Y 0DZ
www.littlebrown.co.uk
www.hachette.co.uk
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