Laura Anne Gilman

by Heart of Briar

  No. Blocking her from his.

  Bitch, Jan thought, knowing instinctively who it was under that cape. The urge to confront the preter who had stolen Tyler surged in her, and she almost took a step forward, when then the figure in the left-hand chair lifted a hand, and a figure stepped out of the crowd, into the circle of space where she stood, drawing her attention away.

  “So you are the one who has caused a disruption at the portal,” the creature in front of her said. It—he—was as handsome as the bitch was beautiful, and just as disturbing, with skin that was too pale, and ears too sharp, and a voice that was empty of anything except a grim humor. “It is rare that a human comes to us, unescorted. And to bring one of the lesser breeds with you—does he bear your equipment or share your bed? Or, perhaps, both?”

  The insinuating tone made it sound filthy, as though Martin were an animal.

  Oh, no, you don’t, she thought, after the first flare of anger hit. Magic and weird animals and interdimensional physics-changing portals freak me out, but snide bullies? Those I was dealing with by the time I was thirteen. Jan didn’t say any of that out loud, just squared her shoulders and said, again, “I’ve come for that which is mine.”

  “Oh, Stjerne’s pet?” The figure glanced lazily in Tyler’s direction. “He does not seem to belong to you, human.”

  Jan didn’t let herself look again to where Tyler stood, half hidden behind that bitch’s cloak. Her heart ached, but only a little. Martin had said that they followed rules, abided by traditions. She had to focus on that, not her emotions. “I followed him here, between worlds, led by the tie between us. That gives me claim.”

  The guard raised his eyebrow and pursed his lips. “There is truth to that.”

  “No!” The bitch stepped forward, pushing her way through the others, stung into responding. “He is mine. This human would have taken him away, but he fought to stay with me.”

  “There is truth in that, as well.”

  “You’ve brainwashed him!” Jan said, trying not to let the desperation show in her voice. “His heart still knows me.”

  “Enough,” the figure in the left-side chair on the dais said, drawing her attention back. Definitely male, for all that he was draped in a deep red brocade gown that flowed over his body like a dress, and his chestnut-brown hair curled down past his shoulders in commercial-perfect spirals. “What we take, we retain.”

  “Not always.” She might not have known much about elves, or fairyland, or anything preternatural, but she knew that much. She thought of the legends AJ had mentioned, the stories of true love and determination. “Not if I can take it back.”

  The bitch shook out her blue cloak, looking smug. “You tried once, in your own lands, and failed.”

  Jan squared herself, ready for battle. “And here I am, to try again.”

  “Once there, once here. It seems fair,” the guard said, and turned to the red-robed figure on the dais for confirmation.

  “Yes. Let Stjerne, for her arrogance, stand against this human for possession of her pet. That should settle the question of her behavior, and how well she has performed her duties to this Court—or if she has, indeed, failed us.”

  There was a fuss of noise behind Jan, as though someone tried to protest and was stopped or silenced. Stjerne herself? Or Tyler? Jan did not let herself turn to look.

  “Is that the royal ‘us’? I thought there was supposed to be a queen of the preternatural Court.” Martin’s voice was odd: almost insolent, arrogant. It took Jan a moment to realize why he still sounded so familiar: he was channeling AJ at his worst.

  She didn’t let herself look but could sense him somehow, coming closer.

  He didn’t touch her, didn’t speak to her, but she wasn’t alone.

  But he had said he couldn’t help her fight for Tyler. What was he doing? Why was he trying to make them mad?

  The male figure on the dais raised his chin and stared down his nose at them, but Jan hadn’t missed the way the figures gathered around him shifted and muttered quietly. The Court around her was almost too silent, as if he’d slapped them. Something was wrong, here. What the hell was he doing?

  “Where is your queen?” Martin asked, his voice, if possible, even more AJ-insolent. That wasn’t Martin. He had either lost his mind or he was doing something...once she thought that, she could almost feel his intent: he was trying to irritate them, to distract them, to prod them into saying something they didn’t mean to. “Why is there no queen of this Court?”

  Silence, an angry, nasty silence, and Jan felt her skin prickle again. Danger. A shifting anger, rising from the crowd, directed at...them? No. If it had been aimed at them, she knew, they’d be dead already, it was that intense, that hard.

  “Gone.”

  The voice came not from the dais, but the crowd below. A slender, jean-clad figure—and Jan couldn’t tell if it was male or female, its long red hair caught in a simple braid, its features bloodless and severe—stepped forward.

  “The Queen is gone. Into your world.”

  “Silence.” The prince, or king, or whatever he was, snapped the word out so sharp it bled the air.

  “The shame of it will not be silenced. She is gone, and will not return,” the redhead said, undaunted. “She refuses her duty, rejects her obligations, for fascination. What is your world, that we should be so enamored of it?”

  “Gone for a while, for them to be so angry, and so resigned,” Martin said softly, meant only for her ears. “For one of their own, their queen to reject them? So very angry. The consort holds on with his fingernails.”

  “So that’s what all this is about?” The pieces were starting to move under her hands, the colors and shapes finally creating something she could understand. “She abandoned you, so you want revenge?”

  The crowd muttered, and the consort settled back in his chair as though Jan were no longer a threat, she hadn’t proven herself worthy. Another shape shifted, and she shook her head, letting it fall into place. “No. That’s not enough for you. Not as angry as you are.”

  She understood the anger, the mix of frustration and disbelief, the self-doubt and the fear, for yourself and for him, that something terrible must have happened....

  “You want whatever captivated her, what took her. That’s what this is all about. Not greed: anger. Fear. You can’t stand that she wanted what was in our world, so you’re going to claim it for yourself, all of it this time, so nobody can ever leave again.” The entire world, and all the people in it.

  If they were as rigid, as tied to rules and traditions as Martin said, a queen’s abandonment must have thrown them for a whopper.

  “Why did she leave in the first place?” Jan picked up what Martin had started; she couldn’t manage that kind of arrogance, but disbelief worked almost as well. “What did you do to drive her away?”

  She knew that making them angry probably wasn’t smart, but she understood Martin’s plan now, she thought: this was what AJ had sent them to find out. The reason for the change, why the preters were making such an almighty push now. But what were they pushing for?

  There was an unhappy rumble from the crowd, silenced only by a raised hand from the figure in the seat next to the consort, a tall, hard-faced female who hadn’t spoken or moved, until then.

  “She felt something new in the wind,” the redhead said, refusing to be cowed. “Some new twist in the worlds. She slipped away to follow it, and would not return.”

  “She must be brought home. And punished. We know how, now.” The consort stood up then, glowering down at Jan—and, she presumed, at Martin, as well.

  Elves, Jan decided, didn’t glower well. Then he raised his hand again, and two others stepped forward with ugly, sharp swords in their hands, and Jan decided they glowered well enough.

  They didn’t like having their secret exposed—or having humans question them. Jan studied the blades, considerably more lethal than her own useless, pocketed knife, and tried to calculate the odds of her bolt
ing, getting through the crowd, past the guards and the greensleeves...

  Nope. She was dead.

  “You agreed to a contest,” Martin said, and suddenly he was between her and the swords, his body turned and his shoulders set. The two preters looked at each other, a sideways glance, as though trying to decide what to do, but stood fast.

  “No matter that she is impertinent—she is human. Humans do that. You agreed that she might have the chance to win back her leman, to return with him through the portal, unmolested, undetained.”

  That was more than they had promised, actually. Jan clenched her jaw; now was not the time to be nitpicking. Three goals: win back Tyler, find a way to stop the preters from kidnapping in wholesale numbers, stop whatever they had planned. Get home safe.

  “I made no such promise.” The consort looked to the figure next to him, as though for confirmation, and it—she—nodded.

  Martin kept talking, faster than she’d ever heard him go. “And yet, you will. Because the challenge is a good one, the contest fair but impossible for a human who had already lost once to win again, here, Under the Hill. You will agree, and agree to the terms, and let the challenge go forth. Because to do otherwise—” Martin let the silence draw out just a second longer than was comfortable, and then finished “—would imply that you were afraid.”

  They were afraid. Martin was right. They were terrified—of something. Had the queen leaving thrown their world that much off balance? Like a clay pot on a wheel, maybe, and when one of the hands guiding it slipped, the entire thing went misshapen?

  Jan licked her lips, willing her lungs to stay calm, to not let her cough. Thankfully, the cavern was cleaner than she would have expected, as though magic kept dust away. She wondered if that, finally, was a spell, or if fairyland was just naturally dust-free. If so, it was the first positive point she’d seen about it.

  She should have been terrified; she should have been shaking like a leaf, convinced she was going to fail, convinced she was going to die. Instead, she was wondering about the preter’s housekeeping habits. Jan was pretty sure that everyone in this place was insane, including herself.

  “No second challenge,” Stjerne protested, her voice whip-sharp. “He stays here. He is mine!”

  The consort did not even bother looking at her, but the figure in the chair next to him, the one who had quelled the crowd before, did, and she subsided. Jan averted her own gaze, not wanting to look someone that scary directly in the eye.

  “Is this your word?” Martin asked. “Is this your word, to agree to one term, and then offer another? Can the bargains of the preternaturals be that degraded?”

  He was goading them again, trying to push them into something. But what, and why? They’d already found out why the preters were acting this way—did Martin have an actual plan, or was he tap-dancing, trying to buy time? If so—time to do what? No cavalry was going to ride over—under—this hill.

  Jan wished to hell that they’d had time to discuss this more, before being hauled into the Court. While she was at it, a handbook would have been nice, too.

  “Nothing is as it was,” the consort said. “All is askew.” He smiled at them, and his smile was scarier than his glower, all thin lips and menace. “But we will right it, balance the sides and claim it all. We know the secret now. One human, less or more, will not change the inevitable result. We will prevail.”

  “The hell you will,” Jan said to herself, stung. And then, louder, “The hell you will. You will return what is mine, and you will get the hell out of my world.”

  The consort’s smile broadened into a grin, displaying unnervingly white and sharp teeth that reminded Jan of the gnomes. They weren’t omnivores, and she suddenly wondered what happened to the changelings and bespelled humans who didn’t become greensleeves or stay useful....

  “The challenge,” Martin said, reminding them both to stay on track.

  “You accept the terms?” the consort asked Jan

  Even if she ignored anything and everything AJ and Martin—and the others—had told her, Jan knew that preters—elves—lied. They were tricky by their very nature. She had learned that much in her web surfing. You couldn’t trust their word, and you most definitely could not trust a contract with them, because there was always a loophole, always an exit clause. She had absolutely no idea what she was getting into if she agreed to this.

  But she’d known, from that moment in the street, with Martin calling on her promise, that it would come down to this. Maybe even before, when Tyler had first disappeared, when she had learned what had happened to him and to others...

  She touched her pocket, making sure that the inhaler was still there, felt the hard shape of the knife in her other pocket pressing against her hip, and nodded.

  “I accept.”

  * * *

  Meredith paced down the length of the side street, irritated and hyper-alert. Even days old, the scent led her here; there was no way to mistake the musky river smell of the kelpie. And there had been a muddle of something else, too. Dark and violent, still and cool like a night wind. She had never smelled it before, but she knew from the very fact that she did not recognize it what it must be. Preter.

  The alley also smelled of over-ripe garbage, sweat and something that had died a long time ago, so long it was only dry bones now, but she could ignore all that. The two smells that were important lay on top, most recent. The kelpie—and, one presumed, his human—had come here. Had encountered a preter. Magic had been worked, not the clean, clear magic of her own kind, but something more complicated, smelling of meat and bone and blood and pain, until some part of her was uncomfortably excited by it.

  They’re evil. But that evil is part of their seduction, AJ had warned them back when this all began. They speak to the darker sides, the selfish desires. You may be tempted. You may not see the harm. But they will use you, and give you only dirt in return.

  AJ was her pack leader; even if she hadn’t agreed with him, she would have obeyed. But he was right; this was not a thing she should choose. So she looked at the excitement, accepted it, and then put it down.

  She was lupin; instinct did not rule her, she ruled it. Her orders were to find the kelpie and report back on his progress. She would do that. She would not fail.

  Sometimes, though, duty and responsibility were so boring.

  Meredith looked around, sniffed the information again, and sighed. Whatever had happened here, it was over. Even the most recent smells of magic were going stale.

  The old portals were tied to place, to season. AJ had briefed them, over and over again until they could repeat it in their sleep. These have no such restrictions that we can find, but the preters we have hunted always return to a specific place; they do not simply disappear when we find them. Something draws them back to where they came.

  So if the kelpie and his human had gone through here, it seemed likely that this was where they had to come back.

  That could take a while, though. Remembering the street vendor around the corner, she went back to buy a kebob and a soda, found a spot with a clear line of sight, and settled down to wait. Eventually, either the kelpie or a preter would come through, and she would have something to do.

  Chapter 16

  All the panic that Jan hadn’t felt before flooded into her the moment she agreed to the challenge, and the chamber erupted into quiet but excited murmurs. Martin took her by the elbow, and she jumped, startled, even though she’d known he was there.

  “What did I just get myself into? I can’t fight, you know that. I’m—”

  He stroked her arm, the way she might have touched his neck in his other form, and some of her panic ebbed away. He was here. She wasn’t alone.

  “You did what we came here to do. What needs to be done. We know why they’re doing this, even if we don’t know how. If we can get your leman home, then we can see what he remembers, what he knows.”

  “I’m crap at fighting,” she said, her entire body trembli
ng now. “You know that. I’m fast, but I’m not strong, I don’t know how to use this damn knife, and the last time I hit someone, I think I was eleven. And the moment I get an asthma attack—and you know I will, that’s the kind of luck I have—it’s all over.”

  “It’s not a fight. Not like that, anyway.”

  He drew her off into a corner, the preters who had been standing there moving away to give them the illusion of privacy. Apparently they were very polite, once you agreed to die.

  “It’s a fight like what, then? Because now I’ve got, like, Survivor-style matches in my head, and I’m not going to be any good at that, either. In fact, I’ll be worse.”

  “Jan.” He turned her, his hands on both arms now, gripping her around the biceps, his long, lovely face close to hers. He had very thin lips, she noticed. Nicely formed, but thin, just like the preter’s. But he had good teeth, square and strong, and his breath was sweet; if his body smelled like green water and moss, his breath smelled warm and dry, and just a little sweet, like cocoa. She wanted to inhale him, all her senses wildly alert and hyper-focused.

  “Jan. AJ chose you for a reason.”

  “Yeah, because my boyfriend was dumb enough to get abducted by elves.”

  “Listen to me.” He cupped his hands around her chin, forced her to look at him. “We didn’t tell you everything.”

  “Of course not.” She couldn’t even be bitter; nobody ever told her everything, not clients, not boyfriends, not werewolves. And they expected her to play catch-up all the way down.

  “The preters, they’ve taken a dozen or more since we’ve been watching,” Martin said. “None of their lemans would do anything, with or without us. Tyler wasn’t special. You were.”

  “Me.” She stared into his eyes, seeing for the first time the flecks of gold and green deep within the dark brown depths.

  “You. Smart, and quick, and clear-hearted. Stubborn when you knew you were right, but willing to listen, willing to hear. Brave. So very brave—Jan, do you realize how brave you are?”