by Skye Allen
The fight was at the edge of the platform now. The beam in the center rocked as it was surrounded by a snarl of half animals and ugly fey things. I watched as a furry man in Summer livery was cornered by a stilt-tall gray Winter fighter, its spear held level to the little man’s face. The spear looked like an icicle, jagged and deadly. We’re losing. We never had a chance.
It wasn’t until I caught a glimpse of the elf in the mica armor, the one from the Lady’s guard who had been injured in the fight when Laura was kidnapped, that I finally snapped to my senses. I have powers. The Summer Queen had given them to me the night I first saw the mica man.
Off, I thought hard to the chain around my wrists. It slid to the ground like a live snake.
At that moment Robert appeared. He was about twenty feet in front of me, and his back was turned, but I knew it was him. His brown sweater was dull now in the daylight, making him look mundane next to the brilliance of the fey in their multicolored skin and feathers and armor on both sides of the battlefield. I could see his scalp through his military haircut. He was down on one knee, with the corn goat beside him holding a bristling armful of arrows, and when he turned his head, I saw the glint of his glasses. He was sighting along a heavy crossbow, aiming at a small Summer elf with a brush of red hair and a weapon that was taller than he was. It looked like one of the little boys who had been sword fighting outside the Summer Court tents last night.
He fell in a heap when the arrow hit him.
I thought, Where did Robert learn to shoot a bow and arrow? And I thought, He must have sent that corn goat to poison me in the first place. And then my arms were crossed tight around my shaking chest, and I was thinking My brother just killed a little boy.
Standing made me dizzy, but I knew we had to get away before Robert looked back at us. I ducked when a tall wooden stick swung near my head, and I heard a rough shout. “Get to cover, mortal!” I didn’t know if the voice was addressing me or Laura or even Robert, but I hauled Laura up, and we hobbled off the platform. We moved as fast as we could, with her injured ankle and my stiff legs, to get clear of the creekbed where the fey were fighting. A little way into the woods, a fallen laurel tree formed a natural barrier. I straddled it to get across, one leg at a time, and then helped Laura ease over.
She slumped beside me, our backs to the log, the battle behind us. Her head rested on her flowered knees. “Stay down,” I said without looking up, and then I looked at her. She was crying silently, her face a red blur of indistinct features. Her injured hand was cradled in her elbow.
“I know. You’re right. This could not be more hideous,” I said. I shifted on the damp leaf mold and shuddered as a centipede scuttled out from under my calf. My heartbeat thudded in my face as I caught my breath. I felt flooded by the fear chemicals racing through my blood.
“When is this going to be over?” she asked. Her voice was flat despair as she held up her awful hand. “I don’t know if I can ever—” And a sob choked her. She tugged her skirt over her legs and buried her head in her sweater.
If I can ever play again. That was all that mattered to Laura. I felt a surge of pity for my sister. She had been dragged into this fey battle against her will, even without her knowledge. Professor Hill had kept her in the dark, and all along he’d been planning to trade her in for a reward. I thought about that, how she had worshipped her piano teacher, and then he’d been murdered, just now, inches away from us, and she’d had to hear that sound. That would hurt her for years after this, once we recovered from today. If we survived today at all.
I took a deep breath of chilly forest air to tell her we were going to the hospital as soon as we could escape, and I was blinded. A burst of stars filled up the air in every direction, and I heard a brassy clanging, like a whole marching band had just been thrown down the stairs. The noise and light lasted seconds. When I could see again, I turned around to look at the battlefield, and saw one of the Summer Queen’s fur-legged livery men hoisting an empty wooden bucket and running at the platform where Laura and I had been tied up a few minutes ago. Did he just throw whatever made that noise?
Laura was kneeling up, facing the platform now. “Oh! We’re pushing them back! Our guys waited for us to get out of the way, and now we’re pushing them back, look!” I looked. She was right. The Summer fighters were moving steadily toward the platform now, backing the Winter fey against the steeper bank on the far side of the creekbed. One of the Summer Queen’s blue-skinned warriors twirled a long metal ribbon in the air over its head, whooping out a high yell. The ribbon snared the tattooed green sprite around the chest and pulled her down.
It was happening everywhere on the platform. A Summer elf in plum leather jumped piggyback onto one of the Winter Queen’s gray guards and slit his throat with a weapon that looked like half a pair of scissors. A waxy-looking man with a snake’s tail threw himself at the beam, trying to climb up, but a ring-around-the-rosy girl threw a jar of water on him, and he steamed and slid back down and seemed to melt.
Laura pumped her good fist in the air. “Get them!” she shouted. My head dropped to the log we were still kneeling behind. I should be feeling the same riled-up battle lust, but I was too rigid with terror and adrenaline to do anything but breathe shallowly into the dried mud and leaves under my forehead. I looked up again and saw the air shimmer a few feet away. Blossom, turning into a bird. She’s here. Oh thank God.
But it wasn’t Blossom, or if it was, I’d never seen her turn into a… whatever that was. In the pale morning light, the animal’s flanks were fire. Long sheaves of flame flickered out from its back. Those are wings. It stamped on something hard with hooves I couldn’t see, and the liquid black eyes in its horse face seemed to spark when they filled with sunlight. Winter and Summer fey all scattered in a wide circle around the animal, breaking up the knot of the fighting. The creature reared up with a long cry, and I saw the unicycle boy in its path, stumbling in a panic and seizing the taller man beside him.
The man turned around and was Robert. In one smooth motion, he drew his gun, and the air exploded.
It was louder than anything I’d ever heard. I had heard the sound of gunshots on the street when I was inside. I had heard cars backfire and been through minor earthquakes. But nothing had prepared me for my brother firing a handgun thirty feet away from me.
The air seemed to vibrate for a long time. The silence was total. No shouts, no fighting noises, no stamping feet. No wind in the trees. No breathing. I realized the shot had made me deaf.
When I could look, I saw where the fiery horse had fallen. It must have crashed hard. It should be right there, in my line of vision, where Timothy was lying on the ground. It was him. He was that animal.
Blossom, with a face full of fury, tackled my brother from behind and jammed her fists into his ears. There was still no sound, and I thought, with my reactions all delayed and out of order, that I was the one who’d been punched. Then Robert’s open mouth overflowed with liquid lead, pouring out in a pewter river down his face and pooling on his chest.
My hearing came back all at once, like when you come up out of water. Tears sprang to my eyes, just from the impact of having my senses be so utterly overwhelmed. I heard a huge thud as something the size of a tree was dropped to the ground with a sound like smashing windows. I risked a look up over the log again. It was a group of the tall ash-faced Winter fey, icicle spears in shards all around their feet.
“I see that we have your champion, sister.” The Summer Lady’s rich voice poured like molasses over all the small clanging sounds and stilled them. I scrambled to my feet and rushed to the edge of the platform. Blossom, in her frilly ballet skirt, blonde hair undone, stood with one foot on Robert’s chest. In one plump hand, she held his own knife, slick with blood, angled toward his throat.
They got Robert, and now it’s all over? That didn’t seem right. But then I saw the beam and the dozen Winter Folk who were lashed to it. The green sprite bit with her pointed teeth at the chain arou
nd her wrist.
The Winter Queen nodded her head once. It was a concession. She had lost. It was done.
The whole battle had lasted… fifteen minutes? Half an hour? A deep shudder started in my navel and spread out to my fingers and toes, and when it should have stopped, it didn’t stop. Shock. I must be in shock.
Every fey creature held its breath as Blossom adjusted her grip on the knife and raised it for the blow she was going to deliver straight down into Robert’s chest. She stopped then, a savage grin on her face that was not human at all, and caught her Summer companions in a sweeping glance. “Too fast? Let me begin with an eye.”
“No! That’s my brother!” I heard myself shout.
Blossom turned in my direction, but her white face said she didn’t know me when she looked at me. She was gone, dead to everything but rage. She raised the knife again, the point aimed toward me now, and I was sure she was going to throw it at me.
Then the Summer Lady said, “The mortal child is right, my beloved. Let her say farewell.”
The air sparked with tension as Blossom’s dark eyes met the Queen’s. Then, without looking away, her lace-covered arm came down. There was a collective release of breath. She stepped away from Robert and wiped the blade on her skirt, leaving a bloody path.
I was standing inches from Robert’s half-raised torso. I looked down into his familiar face and felt the ice that was keeping me upright crack and shiver. He scrabbled at his blotchy ear and hauled himself up.
Standing, my brother was half a head taller than me. He wouldn’t look directly at me. The sun hit his glasses, and he reached up with a hand streaked in blood and pulled them off his face. I saw tiny lines around his mouth.
He looks worn out. Stupid old guy. Stupid old psycho killer.
“I was just following orders,” he said in a voice that was mostly air. The silver was gone from his mouth. I wondered how it had vanished. He glanced in the direction of the Winter Queen, who was motionless on the far side of the beam. “I never wanted this to happen. I just wanted… forget it. Just… forget me. If you can.”
That was the only time he met my eyes.
I thought about my brother, who had perfected the grilled peanut-butter-and-Frito sandwich after school for me and Laura when Mom was working and Dad was at the bar. My brother, who punched the mailbox the year I was six when he hadn’t made the soccer team.
My brother, who killed my sister.
I opened my mouth to speak, but nothing came out.
I dug into my jeans pocket, and my fingers found what I was looking for. I reached out and grabbed his hand with both of mine and pressed the glass tube into it and turned around, blind with tears.
There was no sound.
I learned later, because Nicky told me, that he clapped the poison to his mouth. The glass must have dissolved. And when I asked later, I also learned that he didn’t feel any pain. I didn’t know if that was true or not, but I knew that for all their duplicity, the fey could not tell an outright lie.
Now, when I turned around again, my hand gripping Laura’s good one, our brother was still. He lay on his back, naked eyes not seeing the sky. I took in his hand, tanned to the wrist, where it lay curled near his face like a child’s. The smear of dirt on his neck. His mouth with its long upper lip, slack now. He couldn’t hurt anyone anymore.
They were both gone now, my sister and my brother. The ice in my gut rocked. I thought, It’s too soon. I can’t bury another sibling. And I thought, It’s okay, Margaret. We got the guy. And then I thought, Mom, and everything solid in me turned to water, and I slumped to the ground.
Screaming started, and I thought it was coming from one of the ring-around-the-rosy girls who were clumped at the top of the bank, but then Laura broke away and pelted into the woods, and the scream faded.
I didn’t go after her. I couldn’t comfort her.
Chapter 17
THE DOORBELL rang on Sunday morning as I was blowing on a too-hot cup of coffee. My whole body jolted, like when you fall off a cliff in a dream. I had finally reached Mom at her hotel in Mumbai with the help of the police, yesterday morning, when the battle was over. I’d told her what happened. My version was deeply abridged: Robert was dead. And he had been the one who’d killed Margaret. I couldn’t keep that part from her. I didn’t know what else she would find out when she got home, which would be as soon as she could get on a plane, but I thought I’d have a day or two before I had to face that hurdle.
I finger-combed my hair and put my “hi Mom” smile on. The flight took over seventeen hours. If she’d been fast and lucky, and if it wasn’t my day, this could be her. I opened the door.
It was Dad. The last time I’d seen him had been six months ago, when Margaret died. He hadn’t looked this old then. He stepped inside to fill up the entire doorway. Pouches under his eyes, terrible breath.
I didn’t speak—I knew the police had told him the basics, and I was grateful that I didn’t have to tell him myself. He crushed the wind out of me in a long bear hug. Then he fell down on the couch. “I drove straight from Priest River,” he said into a pillow. “Good night, kid.”
The house was clean, at least. Neil had helped me when I’d gone into a scouring frenzy last night. The dining table was cleared of mail, and I’d even polished it before putting back the jade plant and the pottery wheel. I knew Mom was on her way home. And I’d needed something to do while I was worrying about Laura.
Jerome had appeared at the intake desk when Laura and I got to the emergency room, sometime yesterday. I didn’t question how he knew to be there. What he told me kept playing on a loop in my head, as if it were more important than anything else: That finger might be permanently damaged. I have healing powers, but they can’t best the Winter Queen’s. Your sister might have to give up the piano. She’d be alive, but she might not see that as a good thing.
My sister was alive, but Jerome’s brother was not. I wondered how he would cope with that. Timothy was supposed to be immortal. I remembered what Nicky told me: the fey are difficult to kill. Except when they have a mortal bound to their battlefield. Did that make it my fault that he was dead? I closed my eyes and poked them with my thumbs to squeeze out my sorrow and confusion.
My brother was dead too. That, I could not begin to sort out my feelings about. Not yet.
Laura was asleep in her bedroom now, aided by the kind of painkillers they only issue you three of, no refills. I touched the closed lid on the piano. I would have to get used to the house being this quiet. Laura was hopeful that she’d be able to play again, but her cast would be on for a month before she could even try. She’d told me she didn’t even want to hear the word “piano” until then.
I had promised Mom we wouldn’t break anything valuable. And I’d failed. Laura’s hand was broken. And Robert was dead.
Mom showed up that afternoon. I was relieved. I didn’t think I was equipped to handle Dad on my own. She climbed out of a taxi in a sunburst of red and purple chiffon that floated upward in the wind. The rain seemed not to land on her. Even her hair was floating around her head.
She pulled me into damp, silk-covered arms for a brief second and then extracted herself to pay the taxi driver. I picked up two of her suitcases. There were two more lined up in the driveway. She followed me into the house.
“Oh!” she exclaimed. “Home!” She stepped out of the bathroom while I was pulling the last of the new luggage inside. “Oh my God, Josy, your sister. Your brother.”
I did not know what to say. “Yeah.” I felt very young, like the years of Dad and Robert being gone had never happened.
“I just… when I got the news….” She mopped at her face with a Kleenex and tugged at the ends of her gray-brown hair. “Your father made it here?”
I pointed to the snoring pile of blankets on the couch. “Some things never change. At least he didn’t get in my bed,” she said.
“I wouldn’t have let him.” I unpeeled myself from the doorway and adjusted my
baggy Frankengown. It was an early effort, an Orange Crush T-shirt intercut in diagonal stripes with candy-print fabric.
Mom’s eyes bounced up and down my dress. “Honey, you don’t wear that to school, do you? Are you sure you want to remind people of food?”
My size was an endless struggle with Mom. She was convinced that if I didn’t lose weight, I would end up dying of a heart attack when I was thirty, alone with the six cats who would be the only living things that could love me. She had said those exact words once. I sighed. I wasn’t in the mood for a fight. “I made this,” I said.
“I just worry about you, what’ll happen to you.” She rubbed her ears. It was the gesture of a tired little kid. She’d go take a nap soon and be out of my hair.
“You shouldn’t. I kind of met someone I’ve been hanging out with,” I said. I regretted it right away. Now she would give me one of her hopelessly ill-informed lectures about safe sex between women, and it would take me forever to get her voice saying the phrase “mucous membrane” out of my head.
But this time, for once, she didn’t pick at me. She said, “Oh, my girls. Just be happy.” Her giant brown eyes filled, and she shook her head, looking at me but not seeing me. She was seeing Margaret. She had to be. “Just be happy. You’re the babies I have left,” she repeated, and then her voice went high into the kind of sob you can’t control, and she ran upstairs.
I looked at her closed bedroom door for a long time. Mom wasn’t perfect, wasn’t even there a lot of the time even when she was home in body. But I felt a block of grief for her right then that I wished I could hold in my hands and give her, like a loaf of bread. I feel this for you.
When Dad woke up, he drove off in his ancient van and came back at six thirty smelling like beer and bearing two big paper bags full of Indian food.
