by Skye Allen
Nicky opened the sack. There was a hand-sized round of bread sitting in it. It had the hollow weight and slightly oily feel of having just come out of the oven, and it burned my fingers when I eased it out onto the table.
“Well wished, mortal,” she said and broke the roll in half. She bit into the steaming crust and closed her eyes.
I cupped the other half in my hands and held it near my face. “Is it safe?”
“I don’t know. You might end up getting caught up in some fey war or taking a lover from the other side,” she said. When I was too slow to react, she said, “Teasing. It’s not like the peaches. It won’t interfere with your judgment. It’ll just satisfy your hunger. Body and spirit.”
I bit into the moist bread and tears sprang up. I was a child, it was a winter afternoon full of cold fog and dead trees, and I was sitting in the school library window seat with The Little Princess propped up on my knees and both hands full of hot smuggled bread. I shivered the way you do when a deep chill leaves you and you finally get warm.
I said, “All this for me? Seems extravagant.” We were half whispering over the sound of the band. Her hair tickled my cheek when I leaned in to talk into her ear.
She met my eyes then. Eyebrows and lips quirked up, wide nose spread out as her cheeks lifted. She was going to say something irreverent, and we were going to sink into a long kiss like falling down a well, and I was going to forget all about whatever question I’d just asked.
But she said, “You’re their hero now.”
“Oh come on.” I edged around to look at her, trading touch for a better sightline. I wanted to be touching every bit of her and looking at her face at the same time. I settled for locking my fingers in with hers. Her hands felt dry and cool where mine were hot. I spun one of her fat silver rings with my fingertips.
“You’ve proven you can take the Winter henchmen. At the Winter Queen’s stronghold—her seat of power, where her forces are strongest. That was no small thing. Your sister is already in better hands with you than just about anyone, fey or mortal.”
“That was an accident! I didn’t knock him out or anything. That guy was going to—” And the flow of words died in my throat as my vision filled with nine-year-old Margaret, making a run for the locked garage door.
“Oh, my sweet thing, I’m sorry. You were hurt. And scared. You never should have been drawn into this conflict.” Nicky’s brows drew in together over squinting eyes, head angled to one side. For a second she sounded just like Blossom.
“It’s not that. It’s my—family. I found out tonight that my brother is—that he—my brother Robert, I haven’t even talked to you about him.” I swallowed hard on the burning coal that was stuck in my throat. Do not start singing. “He raped my sister. Our sister, Margaret, he—when she was little. Him and his friends. Over and over. I always knew something happened,” I added when I saw the alarm in her face. “It’s just that it turned out to be worse than I thought. Way worse. And now I just found out that he was up in the Realm. In the Winter Court.” And that was all I could get out. No more air would come up out of my lungs. I felt a squeezing sensation on my temples, like they were caving in, and huge black spots grew in the middle of my vision. I guess the spell on the diary does only work once, I thought distantly. I unhinged my clenched teeth and commanded my nose to work until air flowed in. “Seems weird, all this battle danger stuff, and now some old nightmare from my plain old family just springs up. And Robert. He just shows up there?” It’s not fair, I wanted to say, but I was ashamed to. The Realm is supposed to be just mine. Mine and Margaret’s. Not his.
Nicky’s arms were around me, and she was talking to my hair, whispering things I couldn’t make out. I breathed in her cigarette-cinnamon smell and rested my damp face on the soft wool of her collar. I felt utterly beaten down, bruised and lost and incapable. I laughed weakly. “I could handle the whole fairy underworld thing, but this Robert shit is blowing my mind.”
“You think he’s the Woodcutter.” Her voice floated on the air, light enough I could pretend I hadn’t heard.
I couldn’t say it out loud, not yet. My brother killed my sister. And he was going to kill me and Laura. I nodded. I didn’t have to speak, not just yet. Nicky would let me sit here for another minute before I had to answer that question out loud.
I didn’t think about Margaret’s heart then, outside her body where it didn’t belong. I thought about the time at the county fair when I was six, and Dad dared all of us to go on the big roller coaster, and Robert held my hand. He didn’t say anything. But he didn’t let go until we were back on the ground and I finally opened my eyes.
“’Scuse me, lovebirds?” It was a tenor voice, high up somewhere behind me. I untangled myself from Nicky and turned around to see Timothy, his floppy hair edged in flame by the apricot light from behind him.
Timothy, whose tree house I’d just been in. Where I’d found the same kind of poison the corn goat had tried to take me out with. Whether or not Nicky thought that was innocent, I knew he could use it on me. He knew we’d broken into his place, because we’d set off his trap. By now he must know what we’d found there. Fearful, I watched Nicky’s face to see what my next move should be.
To my surprise, Timothy bent to grip Nicky’s shoulders with both hands. “You need to come. They’ve struck,” he said, and his expression was steel.
Chapter 13
NICKY JUMPED up and seemed to stand at attention. “What happened?” She must have seen something in his face I didn’t see. I rubbed my cheeks and stood up too, to see Blossom behind Timothy, with her fringed eyes wide and her lips pinched into a line.
Nicky was zipping up her jacket. The air crackled with urgency. Up in the front of the room, the drummer had switched from lazy brushes to something that sounded flat and warlike.
“Where are we going?” I tried to sound like I was in the know. One of the team.
“Sweet mortal, it’s your home,” Blossom held my coat out for me as she said it. She peered into my face. “There is no time. A fight there. Laura Grant is safe, but only for now. We left the Lady’s guard there, but… please, come now.” Something in her voice made me jam my arms into my coat and almost turn the table over in a rush to get out the door.
When we were out on the sidewalk, Timothy and Blossom exchanged a look and a nod. Blossom put two glitter-manicured fingers to her lips and mimed huffing out a taxi whistle, but no sound came out.
I looked at Nicky. Her mouth was turned down as she toed a stencil on the sidewalk. Her shoulders had the tensed-animal look she got when something bad was happening. I turned back to look in the window of Fern’s one more time. Where Professor Hill had been, there was a girl at the piano now, with an origami rose tucked into the ribbon on her porkpie hat.
We were standing on Broadway in a drift of fog colored orange by the streetlights. Smokers and light and the whine of a bagpipe spilled out of O’Connor’s, a few yards down the sidewalk, but nobody looked in our direction. The fog-wet street was empty of cars. I wondered what happened to the Realm, out in the back garden at Fern’s. We were back in the real world now, no doubt.
Timothy and Blossom stood with their heads bent together, Timothy’s boots taking turns kicking a bus bench. “So he’s not mad?” I asked Nicky in a low voice. I wanted to ask her about what happened at my house, but she didn’t know any more than I did.
“Oh, he’s mad. He claims the Winter goods he had at his keep were for research. He claims. I don’t think he’s a traitor, if that’s what you—here.”
Then there was a whoosh so soft I might have imagined it, and the implausible clop of hooves, and then from up the hill a high rounded car sped and stopped directly in front of Fern’s.
It was not a car. It was the carriage I’d seen at the revel. Shaped like a loaf of bread, fatter at the rounded top, it was painted with green veins over white walls that looked pliant. Four men in short green jackets raced around the carriage to lay a set of gold steps against a door in the sid
e. They hurried back to stand beside long handles at the four corners of the car. They were going to carry it.
“No time!” Timothy called, and he leaped onto the running board at the back of the carriage. “Go go go!” He hauled me up by an elbow, and I felt a burning streak of pain under my arm where the Winter Queen’s gray man had frog-marched me around the theater. That was just last night. No wonder I was still sore. I heard a hollow ticking sound as Timothy slammed his arm across my back and roared “Hold the hell on!” into my ear. I seized a green-striped barber pole with both hands and looked back. The street blurred black and orange behind us, and my hair whipped across my face. Through it I glimpsed the livery men, furry legs churning.
“Where are Blossom and—” I tried to yell. Timothy slapped the side of the carriage as if to say, “They’re in there.” If he was a traitor, he could push me out right now and claim it was an accident. So he must be okay. Not that I’m planning to start trusting him.
And then we were in front of my house. “How did they do that?” I asked. I was exhilarated. My skin felt cold and awake. I leaped down off the narrow painted board I’d been gripping with my shoes, and my knees wobbled as I landed on the hard cement of my driveway.
Blossom was ahead of me, racing past the camellia bush for the front door. It was half open, a triangle of yellow light on the step. “No, no, no,” I heard her moan, a hungry cat sound that was more animal than human. Timothy blocked the doorway with his green leather shoulders. Why was I so slow? I leaned to the side to look through the picture window. The living room looked normal: the couch, the ancient rag rug with the bleach stain that vanished under the table, the tacky tulip light with the blinding 120-watt bulbs swinging from the ceiling on its plastic-coated chain over the piano. Quiet. Empty.
My house should not be either quiet or empty. And that light should not be swinging.
Nicky was next to me now, a firm hand on my shoulder. “How about let us look first.” I shrugged her off and tried to dive under Timothy’s elbow where it was preventing me from entering the house. He stuck his arm out across my stomach, and wet camellia leaves slapped my mouth.
“Oh, not—thorn and stone,” Timothy muttered and crossed in two strides to where Blossom was kneeling on the rug. Her tulle skirt belled out, and her white-blonde head was down, intent on something I couldn’t see. I crept across the threshold. There was a chemical smell I wasn’t used to, acidic and green, like plastic burned in a fire of wet wood.
“Nicky, what are they looking at?” I called without turning around. I glanced around the living room again. Laura’s yellow Schumann book was on the floor, spine up. Light glittered in the kitchen doorway. The shards of a broken plate were everywhere. On the kitchen table, where Mom’s pottery wheel should be, there were only the pair of rusty vise grips and a cut-off plastic milk jug full of red clay. Bolts and knobs spelled out chaos across the ikat tablecloth. Why was the wheel missing? Had someone used it to hit Laura? “Where’s Laura?”
A cat sound came from the floor. Blossom looked up with her movie-star makeup streaked. “He’s gone,” she said in her breathy voice.
He? Who was she talking about? Timothy was talking now, in a high formal voice, but not in a language I recognized. His hands moved over a line I hadn’t seen in the floorboards, a pale score mark that curved toward the kitchen. Mixed in with the shattered glass, where the line ended, I saw bits of seashell and blue beads.
The warrior with the beach-glass armor. That was who was gone. I heard a sharp gust of wind and realized it was my breath sawing out of my lungs.
“I left him right here. He could hold them off. He’s the Lady’s guard.” Blossom was half crying.
Hold who off? “Nicky, Blossom, oh my God, hold who off?” My stomach was full of metal shavings. “Where the hell is my sister?” All week I had been afraid this would happen, and now it actually had. I should never have left her alone. But I thought we were safe here. I looked around with eyeballs that felt hard and twice as big as normal. Nicky and Timothy were walking the edges of the room on their knees, touching the baseboards with light fingers where furniture was not in their path. I spotted Mom’s wheel, on its side under the table. It looked small and functionless now.
Timothy gave a command I didn’t understand in that stiff preacher voice, and Blossom nodded sharply and stood on her ballet slippers to pad to the back door and lay her palms on it, one ear to the doorknob as if she were listening. She crossed back to where I was standing numbly and said, “Can we sit down?”
I ordered my knees to stop holding me up, and my body landed on the couch with a puff of dust. Blossom angled herself beside me and arranged her pale skirt. “Josephine Grant, I am afraid that we do not know where your sister is.” Her white face was still, but her eyes were wide when she searched my face. She went on in the voice of a child reciting a book report. “I was summoned here tonight by the Guard of the Host, whose armor you see in ruins here.” Her small hand waved in the direction of the broken glass. “I saw only Winter warriors, three, with spears of ice.” I heard a gasp from Timothy, paused beside the piano, hands grinding into the loose fabric on his knees. “In the time I took to retrieve you and Dominica, the Winter forces overpowered our strongest fighter.” She seemed to force her face up to meet my eyes.
“And took Laura somewhere?” I was up, at the front door. “Let’s go. It has to be the Winter Court. They had that, oh God. The dressing room where they had me locked up. The piano. They wanted her first. They were going to get her all along.” The piano that looked like bones. They’re going to kill her there. If she’s not already dead. I bit my tongue, hard, to stop that thought.
Nicky was the one who stood in the doorway to block me. “It won’t be there, not this time,” she said in a soothing voice. I didn’t want to be soothed. I wanted to punch someone.
“What intelligence do you have, elf?” Timothy said, arrogance in his stone face, chin jerked upward. He outranked her. Even from his position kneeling on the floor in my mismatched, dusty living room, he was in command.
“More than you, Desroches,” she snarled.
Desroches. “Puppet theater!” I shouted. I knew Jerome had moved the puppets around, but I also knew he wasn’t the only one. The Winter Queen, or someone else from the Winter Court, had put that snow globe there. I only knew the messages in the puppet theater came from fairies who couldn’t get to me in person, so it made sense that both the Queens would use it to communicate with me. Blossom had told me last night that they couldn’t come to the mortal world easily.
There could be a message in the puppet theater now.
The three elves did not try to block my progress to my room. I flipped the light switch and illuminated my red-and-white quilt, clothes kicked to the side of the bed, dresser cluttered with papers. Through the eyes of the Summer Queen’s two knights and my fey lover, I couldn’t help seeing the grubby hem on my curtains and the flowered wrapping of a maxi pad sticking out of my top dresser drawer. I shoved the drawer shut with my hip and peered into the blue depths of the theater.
There was my miniature paper family: chubby Josy, not smiling this time. Mom draped in a pink crepe paper sari. A man in a hard hat and vest who I realized with a depth charge of emotion had to be Dad. There was another man, a soldier who had a rifle attached to his cardstock shoulder by a yellow string. That must be Robert. The blue horse stood beside Josy, its long head nuzzling her arm and its eyes lidded. Everyone else was turned away from each other. There’s no Laura. No Margaret. Oh God, the only people here are the ones who are still alive. And Margaret’s ghost horse. I shuddered at that thought, even before I saw that the brown stage floor was covered in evergreen needles.
I raised my hand to sweep them away, and Blossom caught my wrist. Her strong fingers felt like handcuffs. “What does that say?” she asked. I looked closer at the scattered needles: they were laid out in little swirling heaps that formed letters. No, not letters, just pretty twists and spirals.
“It’s redwood. A Winter plant—evergreens are in the circle of the Winter Folk,” Nicky said to me.
“So it’s a message from the Winter—” I said.
“Queen, yes,” Nicky finished.
Timothy intoned a string of syllables, blinked his pale eyes, and said in English, “Dawn, Devil’s Gulch.”
“That’s in Marin,” I said at the same time Nicky said, “She’s calling for a battle.”
“It’s on. I thought they’d be able to head it off.” Timothy sounded nervous.
“Can’t we go get Laura before dawn? Anything could happen to her,” I said.
“Not likely. The Winter Queen needs her captive alive and reasonably well, for us to be summoned to fetch her. She wants something else from us. Oh, sweet child, this is not your fight. You should not have been conscripted.” Blossom was smoothing my shirt as she spoke. I fought the urge to push her away, and then I thought Screw it, they have my last living sister, and I did brush past her to get out of my overcrowded bedroom.
“Del might be a hostage,” Nicky said in a low mutter to Timothy.
“Who’s Del?” I knew I sounded frantic, but I didn’t care. I was halfway across the living room, going for the car keys Laura was supposed to keep in the rabbit dish by the door. Please let them be there.
“The guard who was here tonight. His armor was damaged. He’s probably wounded. But we don’t know if they took him alive.” Nicky was fast. She got to the door before me and shot her hand out to the knob. The vines tattooed on her wrist looked very black next to the cuff of her dark red jacket.
“What’s the holdup? They have my sister and your guy. Can we go, please?” My voice sounded like all the padding was ripped off. I was trapped. I could not be trapped, not right now. In some twisted instinct from my savage tickle fights with Laura when we were little, I lunged for Nicky’s ribs, thinking if I could catch her off guard, she’d let go of the door.
She was too quick for me again. She threw her arms around me like a wrestler and bear-danced me away from the door. “We are going to get her. But do you think it will do any good for us to rush in, no strategy, hardly any weapons, and make some unformed demand? No. Let’s do this right.” Her voice was dense with electricity near my ear.
