by Leigh Evans
“Sadly, I don’t have a bottle of sun potion.”
“I did.” His belly let out a gurgle. “It’s in the bag attached to the pony’s saddle.”
“I’ll bet you had a lot of friends in the castle, didn’t you?”
“I had a few.” He put two fingers to his lips and whistled. A short, low note, followed by a long, high one. And curse me if not a moment later did Seabiscuit come over the rise at a trot. Tail flicking, shaggy ears forward, belly swaying from side to side.
My head swiveled as she passed me. “How did you do that?”
A slow grin broke out over his face. “She likes apples.” He caught her bridle and stroked her neck. “She prefers a whole one, but a core will do.” He reached for the bag slung over the pommel.
“Slow movements, Mouse.”
“One push with me finger and you’d be flat again, Hedi of Creemore.” He squatted, placing the bag on the ground. Then he undid the strings and reached into his bag of wonders. He extracted a wad of burlap. With great care, he unrolled the swaddling to reveal a small glass bottle of clear liquid.
I eyed it, then the bag. “What else is in that sack?”
“Three more bottles of the juice.”
“You always travel with four bottles of sun potion?”
He snorted. “Of course not. I had to risk my neck stealing these from the storeroom.”
The Gatekeeper rolled stiffly to a sitting position. My magic was a fat donut around her thick waist. She reminded me of a kid I saw once at Wasaga Beach wearing an inflatable inner tube. She fixed Mouse with a steady gaze. “I will see you dead.”
“Enough with the threats.” I allowed myself one steadying breath, then tugged up my jeans so I could take a look at my leg.
Immediately I wished I hadn’t.
“It looks worse than it is,” Mouse said.
“Sure it does,” I said with my eyes closed. A flood of scents—sweet peas gone rank, faded wolf musk, and the faintest whiff of crushed herbs—teased my nose.
Mouse moved close enough to take a long, hard sniff. “The bugger who set it must have coated the teeth twice, because I can still smell the juka in the gash. That gash will need to be rinsed out well, else the bleeding won’t stop.”
I cracked my eyes open to slits, then wordlessly pointed to the bottle of potion.
He sat back, appalled. “Not with the juice! A body doesn’t splash that around. I risked my life and more to get these bottles.”
“You got a better idea?”
He scratched the back of his neck while he thought about that, then heaved an aggrieved sigh. “I’ll do it, then. Your hands are none too steady.” He reached for my leg, then hissed in irritation when I drew it closer to my chest. “Don’t be daft. I could have let her kill you.”
“I kidnapped you and frog-walked you over hill and dale all morning. Why should I trust you not to take your best shot while you can?”
“Because it’s too late for me to go back!” he snapped. “The loss of what I’ve stolen will have been noticed now. I can’t return to the castle.”
“You stole four bottles. You never planned on going back.”
His gaze held mine, then traveled to the Gatekeeper. “Your leg will need binding after this.” He got up to search the ground. “Here it is,” he said, picking up a sharp stone. He turned for his mistress. “I’ll be needing a piece of your skirt. Mind your kicks.”
“Do not touch me, mutt,” she warned.
Before it got nasty, I fake-coughed. Twice.
She subsided into a glower.
Mouse crouched cautiously beside the Gatekeeper. He caught her skirt and used the stone to make a cut in its hem. “You were right on one thing,” he said as he tore a strip from his mistress’s skirt.
“About what?” I returned the Gatekeeper’s glare of death with a somewhat muted version.
So tired. So very tired.
“I had no plans to return.” He held up the strip and measured it with his eyes, then tore another few inches. “I knew I’d never see another morning of stable duty as soon as she woke me and told me to make haste. ‘Bring food for a pony and mead for me,’ she said, ‘then meet me in the jewel room.’ When I heard those words, I got the same feeling as when I’m holding the throwing bones, except more powerful.” He thumped his chest with the back of his fist. “Felt right here. I knew my future was about to cast for the final time.”
“What tipped you off? The word ‘mead’ or ‘pony’?”
A corner of his mouth tugged up. “Neither. She wanted me to meet her in the jewel room.” He started walking back to me, the long strip of fabric bunched under his arm. “You see, for years, I’ve seen her suddenly start and touch her vest pocket. Then soon after that, she’d find a reason to visit the jewel room. She’d shut the door and stay in there for a day or more. Most thought she was doing her job polishing the pretties, but most didn’t check the bottom of her skirt when she reappeared. Sometimes it was dusty, sometimes muddy, sometimes wet.” He knelt beside my outstretched leg and took time to arrange the things he needed for the task ahead. Bottle of potion, sharp rock, length of bandage. “I knew there had to be an exit to the outside world from inside of the jewel room.”
“That’s not the type of secret you share with your servant.”
“Aye, it was one she’d kill me for knowing.” He touched my wound with light fingers. “I expected to be set alight with her balyfire sent as soon as I’d finished whatever task she set for me.”
“Those fireballs she tosses—she doesn’t have an endless supply of them?”
“Not her. She’s only middling high on the royal list.”
“How much magic does she have?”
“Only her balyfire. But her most powerful magics are the connections she has to important people. You don’t play the fool with the Gatekeeper, and you don’t expect her to play it either. Which is why I knew she meant to bury me with her secrets. So, instead of fetching water for the pony and mead for her, I broke the lock on the storeroom and took enough bottles to last me four moons.”
“You couldn’t have taken more?”
“That’s all that was left.” He slid his palm under my calf, then jerked his chin at the bottle of juice. “Will you want a sip before I start? To take the edge off?”
My trust wasn’t won that easily.
“No,” I said.
He picked up the rock, then inquired, “Then will you want a stick to bite down on? Whatever has been scabbed over will have to be—”
“Don’t want to hear the details, Mouse.”
“If you cry out—”
“Just. Do. It.”
“Right, then. Best you don’t look.”
I averted my gaze to a nearby shrub. “Where were you going to run to?”
“I was going to seek my luck with what was left of the Raha’ells,” he replied. “Normally, they have no greater use for us mutts than the Fae, but I thought they might like to know about my mistress’s special door. A secret entrance into the Royal Court’s castle—now that would be a useful thing to know, don’t you think?”
You think?
“For someone who wanted to sneak into the castle,” he added in case I wasn’t following.
Fat luck. I might be dopey, but I wasn’t that out of it that I couldn’t pick up on the storm-the-castle significance of a back door into the well-guarded fortress. Though I wanted to make sure of one detail. “The castle’s connected to the Spectacle grounds?”
“Aye, it is, and the guards won’t be expecting trouble from within the castle, now would they?”
I thought of my bullet list. Finding Trowbridge was now on the top of it. Was there a place for rescuing a pack of Rahae’lls at the bottom? No. We can’t. If we made it to the end of the list—the book destroyed, the Black Mage dead, my brother back to being Lexi—it was suicide to expect that we could free the Rahae’lls on top of all that.
And then everything Lexi and Trowbridge had gone through s
ince I made the pact with a wily old goat meant nothing. Isn’t it good enough to stop bad things from dripping into my own world?
Mouse cleared his throat and jerked me back to the here and now. “I don’t need to do that now, though, do I?”
“What?”
“Seems to me I don’t need to find what’s left of the Raha’ells.” He picked up the bottle of sun potion and pulled the cork out with his teeth. He spat it out, then gave me the same sort of smile Lexi used to send my way after he’d conceived a grand new plan. “I’m healing the leg of a girl who wears two amulets.” He drizzled a thin stream of liquid into my wound. “Is the Son of Lukynae alive?”
“My Trowbridge is a hard man to kill.”
“Trowbridge, is it?”
I stared at him, feeling my eyes burn.
“Will it be him or the Shadow we’ll be finding at the rock?”
“I. Don’t. Know.” Three broken words.
He stared at me, then nodded. “I guess we’ll have to wait and see, then. Now would you like a sip of the juice before I bind it?”
* * *
The path between the Two Sisters was a well-worn deer path, complete with deer droppings.
Finally. I turned in my saddle to glance at the sun.
“Keep doing that and you’ll break open your wound, again,” muttered Mouse.
I hadn’t seen a cloud. Not a single one.
“If you’re looking for a jinx, you needn’t,” Mouse said, apparently adept at mind reading. “They only like the pure-blood wolves. We mutts are beneath its notice. They like the Kuskadors too, but that stands to reason—for all their airs, underneath their serving uniforms they’re full-blooded wolves too. The jinxes take no notice of the difference between the two. Agitators or ass-lickers, it doesn’t care. They look for the pure blood. They’ll skim across the sky until they find it.”
Trowbridge’s blood must read as a pure Raha’ell. “You’re talking about the milky haze that has glittering bits inside it.” I wanted to be absolutely clear that we were on the same page. “What are they?”
“They’re conjures.” He lifted his shoulders and let them drop. “Unnatural incubuses that feed on the hunt. But as I said, you need not bother your head over it. They have no taste for our blood.”
I closed my eyes briefly. Jinxes.
“How many are there?” I whispered.
He nodded. “Every dawn, the mother jinx gives birth to four little ones.” Without breaking pace he cupped his hands. “No bigger than that they are, when they’re firstborn. Full of sparkles and light. Fair wondrous, they are at first.”
“They don’t stay that way. They turn into storm clouds.”
He grimaced. “Before the Rahae’lls start to howling in the Spectacle pens, we know the mage’s hunting party is coming back with new captures. It’s written in the sky. Every jinx follows her bounty, rumbling like a vengeful consort who’s brought her cheating lover back to heel. My hair stands up on the back of my neck, watching the jinxes flow back into their mother’s belly.”
“How big is the mother?”
“She’s grown as big as the Spectacle grounds. It won’t be long before she’ll be hanging over the castle’s back walls. You’d think the court would be in a fine fettle about that, but they’re so glad to see the Raha’ells being herded into the pens, none of them have said a word in public. Though who knows what they say when they’re abed?”
He lapsed into a short, but thoughtful, silence during which I savaged the soft skin inside my cheek.
Bad things had begun to drip.
“I was there for the birth of the first,” he said reflectively. “Me and a few lads. To be honest, little was done in the kitchen and the stables that morning. Anyone who could find a reason to loiter on the back ramparts without getting a boot in his ass for his trouble did so. We all wanted to see the Black Mage conjure his way out of trouble.”
“Trouble?”
“They blame him for the night the Raha’ells broke free. Once the dust settled and the court discovered that he’d lost both the Son of Lukynae and his own Shadow … he was in dire trouble.” Mouse stared ahead, but I don’t think he was seeing the trail or the stiff back of the diminutive Fae. “It was quiet the morning of the conjure,” he said. “So quiet—”
“You could hear a pin drop,” I added.
“A pin drop,” he repeated, “aye, that’s a good one. It was so quiet, a pin could have dropped and all would have heard it. The Black Mage walked to the center of the Spectacle grounds. He stretched out his hands, wide as this”—Mouse pantomimed a medium-sized fish—“and said that it was time to end the court’s problem with the wolves outside the castle’s walls. Some tittered in the back, because any stripling of the Royal Court can make a balyfire and that’s what it appeared he was going to do. But instead of fire, he produced the jinx. He let it float upward, and it grew bigger and got those shiny flashes … tiny pretty jewels … and then those titters turned to silence. ‘This is a jinx hound,’ the Black Mage said as proud as could be. ‘It knows the scent of the Rahae’lls and it will hunt, never tiring, until it has run to ground every single Raha’ell man, woman, and babe.’”
“How many of the Son of Lukynae’s people have been captured?”
“I don’t know how many Raha’ells have been captured, but there can’t be too many left free. The pens are full and they’ve had to build three more. The jinxes are bringing in young ones now. And we’ve never seen that before. They say the Raha’ells cherish their children and would die protecting them.”
A piece of information that would cut Trowbridge to the bone should he know.
I flinched. “If it finds the trail of a—”
“It won’t stop.”
Chapter Eleven
We met the ward before we met my twin at Daniel’s Rock. As per usual, the Gatekeeper was in the lead, trudging along with the enthusiasm of an enlisted man on his first twenty-kilometer hike. Mouse walked alongside Seabiscuit and me. The trees had begun thinning, providing tantalizing glimpses of a gray rock face.
Being on my guard wasn’t on my list anymore.
I’ve made it.
Be alive, Trowbridge. Be there.
Karma must have a hotline to every thought I’ve ever spun in my head. No sooner had I envisioned Trowbridge standing outside the rock, his face wreathed in relief and pride, than the entire vista in front of me—the Gatekeeper’s resentful form, the tall trees, the sun-filled space beyond—was suddenly obscured by a wall of blue.
A curved one. Like someone had taken a glass bowl, poured a cup of thick blue paint in it, upended the whole damn thing, and slammed it down in front of us.
“It’s a ward!” I yelled.
“Sheep’s teats!” said Mouse, lunging for my pony’s bridle.
The frightened pony pranced forward, heedless of the fact that we were heading into trouble instead of moving away from it, and barreled right into the Gatekeeper.
Her shoulder hit the ward, went right through the barrier, and kept going.
It could have been any type of ward—one created to hide things, or one fashioned with the intent of filling someone with so much ill ease that they’d walk away not knowing why they felt compelled to, or even one that made no pretense at being anything other than a barrier.
But it was the bad kind. The one filled with a sticky, syrupy sort of magic that sucks you into its suffocating hold. The weight of the magic is a vise grip of pressure around your ribs and diaphragm. You’re drowning in heavy liquid, and time seems to slow, so you’re fully aware as you suffocate. I’d been in one such ward only once, in Threall, and there had been a point midway through it where I hadn’t been sure I was going to make it all the way out.
The Gatekeeper half-pivoted toward me as she was drawn into it, her brows lifted to the sweaty fringe of her bangs, her mouth a big wide O, in anticipation of an “oh shit!” that required no translation from Merenwynian. Then, without even a pop or a slurp, she was p
ulled backward into the ward’s treacle grip.
All parts of her disappeared except for the long green shimmering rope of magic that she’d complained about off and on all morning.
“Cut!” I cried, but it was too damn late. I was the Pekingese owner who’d been too slow to step into the condo elevator only to watch the doors close abruptly on her pet, leaving her holding one end of the leash while the happy pooch took a sky ride to the penthouse. And I can tell you now with absolute authority that the horrified owner must have thought something along the lines of—
Oh shit, there goes my bitch.
“Magic!” my Fae exclaimed. A sparkle of titillation went right through my hand all the way to my plummeting heart.
“Cut!” I hollered again, trying to control Seabiscuit.
But it was all too late. Too late to figure out how to get a panicked pony to back up—she snorted; she pranced; she danced.
Too late for Mouse. He didn’t even get a chance to comment on sheep’s teats before he was swallowed by it.
Too late for Hedi. The line of magic between me and the Gatekeeper drew taunt.
I sat back in my saddle and shouted belatedly, “Cut, cut, cut!”
Also too damn late.
Genghis Khan must have had at least one moment when he sat on a knoll overlooking a town and thought, All this war and death is just too freakin’ hard. But you know what he did? He sucked it up. He spurred his trusty steed and ransacked that village anyhow …
If there was no reverse on this horsie, I was going in full speed.
I gifted Seabiscuit’s fat flanks with a heartlessly vicious kick. She whinnied, her back quarters bunched, and then, by golly, I got my slow-motion moment. I entered the ward on the momentum of the pony’s leap into blue oblivion and enjoyed the slow slide toward the back of her saddle.
For the count of three, I stayed there—hellishly caught in the no-no instant before the big fall—time no longer slowed, but frozen. I was surrounded, a culture specimen being sandwiched between layers of blue-tinted viscous material.
Pressure, all around me.
