Pretty Peg

by Skye Allen

  I looked around the eerie wreckage of the living room, at the broken glass and Mom’s dismantled pottery wheel among all those garish colors on the kitchen table and the long scar stretched across the floorboards like a claw mark. She was right. These people knew the enemy. They would know what to expect from a battle with the vicious Winter Folk and how to find their weakness. On my own, all I knew how to do was get hurt. And put Laura in danger.

  Three pairs of fey eyes watched me as my shoulders dropped, and I realized the hammering in my ears was my pulse. Nicky released her grip on my shoulder blades and let her hands fall to catch mine. “Shit, you’re strong. Friends like you, I don’t know if I even need bad guys,” I said in a voice that had no center at all.

  “We wait for dawn,” Timothy said. He was standing now, eyes on some line above my head, green leather shoulders square and martial. “There won’t be a way in before then. She will want drama. The sun in our eyes for a parley.”

  “Let’s go early. See what the field looks like,” Blossom countered.

  The sun? The Winter Queen likes night. And cold. And things that slither around in the dark. “She knows something. Or she has something. Otherwise what’s with the daylight?” I heard myself ask. Why was I talking? These guys had probably been doing battle with the Winter Queen for centuries. If there was an idea there, one of them would have had it already.

  Timothy stared at me. “Moon and tide. The mortal is right. The Ice Lady must have an advantage we do not know of.” He bit off the words as if he hated their taste and smacked the wall hard with the blade of his hand.

  The house shook like there had been a small earthquake, and the overhead lights went out. He must have hit the switch. In the second before he found it and flipped it on again, my vision was dominated by the glow of hot pink squares.

  I looked where my eyes had fallen seconds before. At the table, where Margaret’s diary had left a reverse color impression on my eyes, pink instead of turquoise.

  “So we go now. See the lay of the land,” Nicky said, looking at Blossom for confirmation.

  “It’s the deep of the night. The mortal will need rest and refreshment. We cannot bring her to the watch and expect her to sit silently for hours as we—”

  I interrupted, “I don’t need rest. I need to see where Laura is. The sun’ll come up in, I don’t know, a few hours. If you guys can’t help me—” And I stopped. If they couldn’t help me, I didn’t know what to do.

  “The mortal is right,” Timothy repeated, and Blossom swept past me in a cloud of rosemary to open the front door and whistle soundlessly again. The carriage was gone—did it disappear after it dropped us off? I wasn’t exactly keeping track at the time—but I heard the clop-swoosh sound of its approach. I wondered if Mr. Hegel across the street was watching with the binoculars he used to keep tabs on what Mom unloaded out of the car after work. It would serve that mean old man right if the sight of transportation from the Faerie Realm sent him to the emergency room with a cardiac event.

  “Do you need anything?” Nicky asked me in an undertone as she and Timothy filed out of the house after Blossom. I dashed across to the table and grabbed the diary. I didn’t know why I wanted it with me. What I wanted was to forget everything that was in it. A selective mind eraser for that block of memories from the last few hours. Maybe there was a glamour for that.

  Except that Margaret had lived with those memories all her life. No matter where she was now, she shouldn’t have to be the only one in the family who carried that horror around. I swallowed the hard green apple in my throat that was the knowledge of who Robert really was. And I slid the bright little book into my bag.

  Chapter 14

  THIS TIME I was prepared for the stomach-twisting velocity of the fey carriage. I sat on a fuzzy cushion in the dark interior, watching streaks of white whir by outside the open door that must be city lights. Nicky’s fingers found mine as I huddled with my bag in my lap, and I rested my eyes on the faint shape of our two hands on the dark fabric of her leg. I was dimly aware that we could not be driving on the highway, and then the carriage took a sharp twist to the left, and through the door I saw strips of red light on the ground as wind blew upward and made my hair and my jacket flap violently. We’re flying. That’s the highway down there. We’re actually flying. Any other night, that would blow my mind. Tonight I was just in a hurry to get to where the Winter Court had Laura.

  And then with no bump, no runway, no transition at all, we stopped moving. Timothy’s face appeared in the doorway with an exhilarated expression and his curly hair in a spray of frizz around his forehead. “Ladies?” He extended an arm, which Nicky scorned as she sprang to her feet.

  I heard the roar-crash-trickle of the river before I could see anything in the darkness, and smelled mushrooms and damp, and felt moist air on my face. Then there was a scrape right near the carriage and the distinct sound of—giggling. I heard the pop of a small explosion, and a yellow light bobbed at knee height. Then two orange lights floated near it. “Show yourselves,” Blossom commanded in a honey-coated steel voice.

  The colored lights hovered higher, and the round faces of a clump of ring-around-the-rosy girls were illuminated. A girl wearing an eye patch hoisted her lantern above her head—the light was a pod-shaped tube with a wriggling knot inside, and as I watched, individual yellow grubs hurled themselves against the sides. She thumped the crook into the soft ground and led a charge down the hill, away from the carriage. As the little girls ran away, more lights raced up the trees behind them, until the dark umbrellas of the oaks on the hill were all outlined in the sunset colors of thousands of tiny lights.

  “So we weren’t the only ones with this idea,” I said. The lights made the hillside look like a party. It didn’t match my state of mind, jittery with fear and worry. Laura was here somewhere. My stomach felt like it was galloping ahead of the rest of my body.

  “We knew battle was probably coming, unless the Ice Lady and the Lady of Summer worked something out before the equinox. We just weren’t sure exactly where,” Nicky said beside me. I hadn’t known she was there. Her compact strength comforted me. I blew out breath and told myself to follow her lead, or I’d never find my sister.

  Alive. I’ll find her. But she might not be alive. I told that thought to go away, but it broke into a million soap bubbles and laid on my tongue, flavoring everything I saw and heard and smelled.

  The path down the hill was illuminated now, but it disappeared between the rough shapes of the oaks and waving stands of pampas grass that shone as if they were lit from within. I followed Nicky’s straight-backed shape down the track, which was too narrow for more than one person to walk abreast, and felt gravel give way to a springy texture under the soles of my shoes. A long, skinny shadow leaped, and I realized the smell in the air was woodsmoke, and then we were around the steep bend, and the first thing I saw was the bonfire.

  It was as high as a house, framed by a ring of stones that marked the center of a fey tent city. Light flickered over the undulating walls of maybe a dozen pavilions set close together in every color and pattern. I spotted two ring-around-the-rosy girls darting through the beaded curtain that formed the doorway of the nearest tent, one girl hiding in a wide stripe of tent wall that was the exact red of her dress. Seated on the stones with their backs to us were a man with the stocky build and oyster-mushroom ears of a dwarf and two female figures I guessed were nymphs, with swirls of fabric pooling behind them. One of the nymphs had a deep-bellied musical instrument in her hands. She swept silvery hair off her face and struck a jangling tenor chord as the dwarf threw back his oversized head and sang. For the first time since leaving Fern’s, it occurred to me to wonder where Professor Hill had disappeared to after the other piano player took over for him there.

  The muffled sound of drums came to my ears. “What’s happening?” I asked Nicky.

  “They’re getting ready for battle. Look.” She pointed to a saffron tent with strips of fur hanging
in its doorway. Seated on a stump in front of it, facing the fire, was one of the Summer Queen’s warriors from Tilden Park. His tunic was made of pebbles, and it was lumped up above the dark fur of his knees as he worked a piece of cloth over the weapon in his massive hands. He dipped the cloth in a bowl near his bare feet and held the weapon up to the firelight, squeezing the cloth in his fist to drip liquid over each of the spines on its end.

  “What is that?” I whispered.

  “Poison, I’d guess. Most of the game people have a musk that is toxic to anyone but them. Makes for a lonely life.”

  “Game people?”

  She coughed out a laugh and drew me out of earshot. “It was a name they came up with themselves, maybe a couple hundred years ago. They were being hunted—foxes, wolves, some bears. Game.”

  “Are they real animals?”

  “Promise me you will never ask them that.” Her voice bubbled with amusement.

  We crossed a grassy path between tents, and I almost tripped when a man who came up to my hip hurtled along with his head down and a full bucket of water on each broad shoulder. “Hurry, out of my way, Lady needs this!” came his reedy voice.

  “So, battle?” I asked. In the uneven light, I couldn’t see Nicky’s face, but something about her winced and drew inward.

  She wasn’t the one who answered. We took two more steps, and light bloomed from a cluster of the ring-around-the-rosy girls’ lanterns mounted on bamboo poles. They were driven into the sandy ground in front of a tent with an entrance that arced up like a church doorway. Slender banners snapped in the breeze all along its height in the Summer Lady’s colors: persimmon, gold, wine. The Lady herself was seated on a low stool with her face turned away from us, giving orders to a scowling Timothy as two elongated creatures with blue skin stood by with spears. One of the guards bent its oval head low enough to whisper in Timothy’s ear, and he broke his impassive posture to beckon to Nicky and me with one hand.

  “Mortal child, be welcome to our camp. Yes, my people prepare for battle,” the Lady said, and her voice was warm almonds and buttery flowers, and despite all my fear, I sighed out a breath I hadn’t known I was hoarding.

  All these people are fighting for Laura? The question must have been written on my face, because the Lady continued, “This unrest has been a long time building. We fight to gain control again over territory into which my Winter counterpart has made cuts and carvings as if it were meat. We must battle for those who have been lured to the side of cold and darkness. Too long have the children of Summer been exposed to that season of death. And yes, dear mortal, it is known that your sister is held captive.” Her voice dropped to conversational intimacy then, as if the part about the territory and the deserters was a speech for the public, but the part about Laura was just for me.

  “Lady, I have to go get Laura, if she’s here. Don’t make her wait until the sun comes up.” I gestured to the sky beyond the fuzz of light made by the lanterns. The blue guards gasped in unison. I must be sassing back. I guess you don’t talk to royalty like that.

  But the Lady’s unnaturally long hand went to her exposed throat then in a gesture of dismay or alarm, and I realized I must have said something even more serious. She was wearing a swath of deep orange fabric shot through with gold, and when she moved, her robe looked like a sari.

  Once again as I watched the Queen of the Summer Court I was reminded of Mom, drifting around India on her soul-searching walkabout. There was so much I had to tell her. “Had to” in the sense that it was urgent to get the hideous news about Robert out in the open, so it would stop burning me up inside with the sensation that I’d swallowed drain cleaner. But deep down, I knew I wouldn’t tell her. It wouldn’t do any good, not to Margaret, and not to Mom, who would just have a meltdown and have to be wheeled off to the kind of institution where they would search my bag when I went to visit. I wondered if she would ever really recover. If it would help her at all for me to tell her at least that they’d caught the guy who killed Margaret. I’d make up some story about who it was. A soldier, out of his mind with PTSD, unable to see a civilian woman and not an enemy target.

  For all I knew about Robert, that might be exactly who he was.

  Laura knew about Robert. If she’d read the diary, she knew. Did she read it, before she was overpowered by three Winter fey warriors with ice spears, whatever those were? I met the Lady’s deep hollow eyes and opened my mouth to reiterate my demand, feeling the panic dig its way through my abdomen until it scraped my bones.

  “Child, it is not possible to discern where the prisoners are being detained until the agreed-upon time of the battle arrives. I feel sorrow on your behalf that my people cannot embark on a rescue sooner than dawn.” The Lady’s voice was sweet and soothing. Her tone was telling me to be calm. I resisted. This was no time to be calm.

  “Not possible? Isn’t she here somewhere? This is where the fight’s going to be, right?” I asked.

  The guards stared and tightened their froglike fingers on their spears. I felt them tense, as if I was threatening to attack their queen instead of just asking questions. I blew out my frustration and saw the pink fringe of my bangs flutter in my peripheral vision. Nicky, beside me, rested a hand on my arm as if to say Careful.

  But the Lady smiled, the black scar in her smooth brown cheek deepening, and curved her bare arms toward me. I smelled her almond scent as her dress rustled. “There is some knowledge not even I have,” she said with a note of regret. “Stay here among us as we prepare for sunrise. Take refreshment. Be assured that my wisest advisors would have your sister best protected by waiting for sunrise.”

  And she turned away toward her sumptuous tent with her guards gliding behind her, and the saffron curtain tumbled closed with Timothy and Nicky and me on the outside in air that felt suddenly colder.

  “Well, well, mortal, you don’t back down from a fight.” Nicky was laughing, but a glance at Timothy brought her up short. He looked stony. “What?”

  He turned abruptly and stalked off into the shadows between tents. Nicky looked at me. “Don’t pay any attention to him. Panties in a bunch about protocol.” She took my arm as she spoke and steered me away from the Lady’s glowing tent. I didn’t want to leave. I felt a tug backward as we headed in the opposite direction from Timothy and looked over my shoulder at the snapping flags and the delicate shadows crossing back and forth inside the silky walls. I smelled spice and roasting meat and heard the jaunty swirl of a flute, and I wanted to be there inside those walls, listening to the smooth balm of the Lady’s voice as she told me over and over that Laura was going to be fine.

  “Come on,” Nicky urged, and then her eyebrows went up toward the curls at her hairline. “Oh. You need distractions.”

  How can she tell? I hurried to catch up with her now speeding steps. We passed a ragged line of little boys with bows and arrows, all kneeling at the shout of a woman with a head full of dreadlocks who stood nearby. It was another one of the Queen’s warriors, I realized when I looked at her shiny wood armor, the one with strips of bark for hair. She opened her mouth to give another order, and I saw a row of sharp yellow teeth. “What?” I said.

  “The Lady, she—remember the glamour? With the peach?” Her exquisite face was pinched with a feeling that looked like remorse. I nodded. “Well, the Lady has something like that all the time. It affects some of us too, mortals more—watch it!” That was to another pair of water buckets, this time being hauled on a yoke by a stout freckled girl in overalls that were open in the back to reveal iridescent green wings. Huh. So some of the fey are chubby. The Summer Lady is not exactly skinny either. I could get used to their idea of a pretty girl.

  “Mortals more what?” I asked.

  “Just more. But like I said, you’re hard to glamour. And how you fought with her just now, that was—ha. That’ll get around. They’ll be calling you Fearless Josephine or something soon.”

  I did not know what she was talking about, but I didn’t ask any mo
re questions, because just then I saw the place where the Winter Court had to be holding Laura. We had been walking downhill away from the fey camp, toward a road of pale flickering lights that I saw now were small fires spaced a few yards apart along a wide dry creekbed. A stone bridge arced over it, and under the bridge, I saw shadows scuttling in and out of the cold light that was the same white-green color as the candles in the Winter Queen’s ruined theater.

  That was Winter Court camp. It had to be.

  I dove onto my belly, bumping my chin on a patch of sharp gravel and feeling the damp ground soak my T-shirt. From here I had a better view of the space under the bridge, even though we were still on a hill. Two fires lit the entrance to a cave that was formed where three or four massive boulders huddled together. When the water was flowing, it would gush out of those rocks. That must be why the bridge was so high. A fallen log lay across the top of the cave entrance, covered in black moss on one side. I couldn’t see inside.

  But then the white flames on either side of the cave shot up, and for one split second I could see, in that perfect natural prison, what was unmistakably a girl’s long hair. The girl was seated in profile right inside the mouth of the opening, hunched over as if the ceiling was too low to sit upright. Her face was turned away, but I knew that was Laura’s wavy hair, and even in the depthless black-and-white light I recognized the big flowers of her favorite skirt.

  I scrambled to my feet and pelted down the hill, yelling “Laura! It’s me! Laura! It’s gonna be okay!” Something snagged my shirt: Nicky, pulling me back. I tripped on a root and slid, dimly aware of the sound of ripping fabric. The bank was steeper than I’d thought when I was higher up. I was sliding down fast, on a track to land right in one of the fires on my side of the creekbed. Plants came uprooted out of the soft dirt into my hands as I tried to brake, and I smelled the rush of green when I crushed them.