“You’re worried they’ll just kill me,” said Rinka, calmly setting aside the model glider. The wing looked as good as new.
“Carmer’s right to be concerned,” Grit said, “that it won’t be the warm and fuzzy homecoming you’d imagined.”
Yarlo laughed. Everyone glared at him.
“Warm and fuzzy,” he said, “ain’t words I would normally associate with the Unseelie vocabulary.” He enunciated each syllable of the last word with relish. “Do you know what they’ll do to me, for failing them, if I ever get out of this jar?” He pressed his hands up against the glass until his finger pads were white. “They’ll make me glad I’ve no wings left to pluck. They’ll flay the skin off me with a stingray’s barb. They’ll bleach my bones for that throne—”
“Shut up, Yarlo!” Grit shot a spark at his jar, and he leapt back.
“But I guess there’s no reason why the same fate should be waitin’ for you,” said Yarlo with a shrug. “Why don’t you ask little miss Seelie princess over here to help you?”
It was exactly the question Grit had been avoiding. If only that glass were soundproof, too.
“You’re a princess?” Tinkerton asked, taking in all four inches of Grit’s height.
“No need to sound so shocked,” said Grit. “And I am. But a Seelie one. Which means—”
“Jack squat, basically,” teased Yarlo.
Grit shot another spark at the jar. “It means I can’t help you,” she said, hovering above Rinka’s bed. “I can’t act directly against the Unseelie Court. If they want one of their subjects back—and you are still one of their subjects, raised by humans or not—I can’t stand in their way. If I protect you . . . it could be grounds for faerie war.”
“Faerie war?” asked Tinkerton, looking at Grit with the same expression of disbelief as when she’d announced her royal status. For a man with a changeling for a daughter, he was rather slow to catch on.
“Remember that storm, the night your human daughter was taken? Remember the blizzard that hammered this city two days ago?” Grit snapped. “If the fae go to war, those will seem like a strong but charming summer breeze.”
“Now, listen here—” Tinkerton said, standing from his bench.
“Father, wait,” said Rinka, putting a hand on his arm. “We can’t ask any more of Carmer and Grit. They’ve already risked too much for us. They’ve lost too much for us.”
Rinka stood up, her brown eyes filling with tears. They trailed down her face like dewdrops—which they probably were, if Grit’s guess about Rinka being a dryad or an earth faerie was correct.
“If I’m an Unseelie, then I’m an Unseelie,” said Rinka. “At least I know what I am. And . . . and that’s worth something to me, even if there’s nothing I can do about it.”
She smiled wetly, shrugging her hair in front of her face, and suddenly, the idea that struck Grit was as obvious as Rinka being a changeling in the first place.
“Rinka,” said Grit. “What if there was something you could do about it?”
Just because Rinka Tinkerton was born an Unseelie fae didn’t mean she had to stay one, after all.
20.
REACHING TOWARD THE SUN
Holding on to an airship while it flew was a lot harder than holding on to a bicycle, so it was with great trepidation that Grit allowed Yarlo to secure the both of them to the gondola with his vines. Now more than ever, she half expected him to toss her over the side with her wings tied together. Her mistrust must have shown on her face, because the next thing he did was tie the rope around his waist to her own. They could move only six inches apart at most.
He gave the rope a tug and smirked when Grit flinched, her back pressed up against a rail.
“If you go, I go, Princess,” he said with a mocking bow, and settled down for the ride.
Their destination was Wetherwren Light—or at least what was left of it. Grit tried not to think too hard about that. If the old Seelie king’s heart really was still there, as Yarlo’s story said, that made it the closest center of royal Seelie power—power they desperately needed. The ship wouldn’t take them all the way there; the remains of the abandoned lighthouse were located on a small tidal island in the bay just big enough to fit the lighthouse and not much else. It hadn’t been a frequent destination when it was inhabited. Now most airships had no reason to go there at all—which was why Yarlo and Grit needed to cross to it on foot. There would already be another ship flying to the island that night, and they couldn’t afford to attract more attention than strictly necessary. Plus, Princess Pru and her Unseelie entourage would surely spot a giant snail sailing through the air toward the last local bastion of Seelie resistance.
Their journey also depended on Yarlo keeping his end of the bargain. As he was a failed spy—and now a seemingly willing turncoat—the Unseelies would be after him just as much as they were Rinka. He had no choice but to officially switch his allegiance if he wanted Seelie protection. But first, he had to escort Grit through Unseelie territory: along the shoreline, and across the bay to the island. Yarlo wasn’t exactly her first choice of travel companion, but he was an Unseelie who knew the lay of the land.
“Tell me more about Wetherwren Light,” Grit said, nudging him with her foot. She might as well use their unwilling proximity to needle him more effectively. “I want to know more about the old Seelie king, if we’re going to use his . . . what’s left of his royal magic.”
Grit couldn’t make herself say his heart, an omission that Yarlo, judging by his raised eyebrow, definitely noticed. Faerie hearts weren’t for using, for wielding as tools. Most of the time, when a faerie died peacefully, their heart’s magic flowed back into the magic of all things fae. That was how it should be. But sometimes, when . . . extracted . . . by force, the heart’s magic lived on, even after the faerie’s body had died. The Mechanist had manipulated stolen faerie hearts to do his bidding, most notably to animate his evil mechanical cats—likely the same cats that had snatched Yarlo’s wings.
And now, to use a faerie’s heart—a faerie king’s heart—for their own ends, even if those ends were noble ones . . . it made Grit wonder if she was being loyal to the fae after all.
“There’re some folks who said no ship ever ran aground while Wetherwren Light was in fightin’ form.” Yarlo looked toward the approaching shoreline. “That the waters around it for miles were always calm, even if there was a storm ragin’ out at sea, and the light was so bright and warm it made all the rest look dinky as a candle.”
Grit thought about all the years the faerie king must have worked with humans—the cooperation between him and the lighthouse keeper, and whether they were friends, like her and Carmer. How many people they brought safely home. She smiled to herself. Maybe he wouldn’t mind using his magic this way, after all.
“Could never seem to hold a lighthouse keeper for very long, though,” said Yarlo, with his own nastier smile. “Some of them went mad, I heard. Some went missing. One just jumped, one year, right from the top of the light—”
“I get it,” Grit said. Her flash of good feeling disappeared at Yarlo’s knowing look.
“Well, you know,” said Yarlo, “no human ever fared too well after spendin’ too much time with the fae.”
“THIS,” CARMER SAID, hoping he didn’t sound as ridiculous as he felt, “is a good faerie.”
“Don’t-poke-the-puppy-don’t-poke-the-puppy-don’t-poke-the-puppy,” Thundrumble muttered in a continuous stream as Carmer held her up to the nose of Jules the husky.
Every inch of Thundrumble’s round frame was fraught with tension, her eyes scrunched up so tightly it barely looked like she had eyes at all. She was clearly fighting the instinct to break out in her porcupine spikes at the appearance of any perceived threat—and a giant, slobbering, wolflike dog was definitely on the list of Things That Could Eat Faeries in a Single Bite.
But Jules merely sniffed Thundrumble for a few seconds, her dark, wet nose twitching, before sitting back on her ha
unches and staring at Carmer as if to say, “Well, that doesn’t look very appetizing. What else have you got?”
Thundrumble let out a sigh of relief so big it lifted her right out of Carmer’s hand.
“Wait a minute,” Carmer told her. “We’ve still got a few more.”
And they proceeded down the line of waiting dogs, each one of which, fortunately, decided that the prickly faerie wouldn’t make much of a snack, either.
If Robert and Isla Blythe thought it odd that the personality they knew as “Tinka” had requested in his most recent letter to borrow their dogs for an evening, they never let on, and cheerfully offered the services of Jules and the rest of the huskies. Grit had nearly laughed until she cried at the sight of Carmer with five leashes in hand, struggling to wrangle all of them across the Wonder Show camp.
“There you are,” said Rinka, kneeling down next to Carmer. A shivering Canippy crouched in her outstretched hand; the faerie shrieked when the dog’s pink tongue lapped up the side of her face in a friendly lick. Rinka chuckled. “See, they’re not so bad.”
The idea was to keep the dogs stationed around various parts of the Wonder Show’s New Year’s Eve Spectacular, the performance right on the harbor where Driftsiders would ring in the New Year. If they could sniff out any invading Unseelie faeries, it would be one less thing for Carmer and company to worry about. Of course, that meant getting the dogs acquainted with the smell of the friendly faeries first.
The second dog whined when Rinka approached it, though it sniffed Canippy happily enough. Rinka blushed and handed the faerie to Carmer.
“Maybe you should do this,” she muttered, not looking at Carmer’s eyes. “I—I don’t think they like me very much. They know there’s something . . . wrong . . . with me.” She brushed her hands on her skirt and backed away.
Carmer started to protest, but then stopped himself. It was true that the dogs were more skittish around Rinka than with Thundrumble or Canippy, like they could tell she wasn’t entirely as she seemed. The full extent of Rinka’s magic was still hidden beneath the surface, still camouflaged by powerful faerie glamour.
Carmer supervised the rest of the Free Faeries as they flew up to the dogs directly, since they no longer seemed to need his help. When it was clear no one was going to eat anyone else, he left them to it.
He found Rinka drafting at her pull-down desk—which, like most other furniture in her ship, was a light, polished wood. She looked small behind it; in fact, it seemed like she’d been getting smaller every day this week, as if the magic holding her human form together was growing feebler by the hour, sensing its time was coming to an end—for better or worse.
“There’s nothing wrong with you,” Carmer said, shoving his hands in his pockets. “You’re just . . . different.”
It was so wholly inadequate that when Rinka finally smiled, Carmer did, too.
“I wasn’t fit to be a faerie,” Rinka said, staring down at her drawing, “but I’m not fit to be a human, either.”
“I think an entire flying circus full of people and faeries might disagree,” Carmer said. He looked around and wondered if she realized how incredible she was. How every single ship and balloon in the circus, every performer living their dream, every child filled with wonder and awe at the sight of their first airship, and everyone else affected by each invention she’d ever built, would never be the same without Rinka Tinkerton. “I think they’d all say you’re pretty amazing, if they knew what you could do.”
Carmer blushed and looked down at his feet, fiddling with his top hat. He half expected a teasing remark from Grit before remembering she was off on a journey of her own.
“I always used to wonder why I loved balloons so much,” said Rinka quietly, still looking at her drawing. “Why I kept making things whose entire purpose was to go higher, and faster, and higher and faster still.” She looked around at her ship full of hanging drawings and stretching sculpted branches. “But now I know. I was like a tree, reaching toward the sun. Like I knew, somehow, the sky was where I belonged.”
Rinka’s expression darkened, looking at the faeries and the dogs, now cheerfully playing with one another at the other end of the ship. “But I don’t belong. Not really,” she said. “No one can know what I can do, because they’d never accept me as I am. That’s what Father’s always said, and he’s right. I can’t even go outside, Carmer. I’m just . . . I’m too impossible.”
Carmer sighed. He knew Rinka loved her father, and that Tinkerton loved her, but he couldn’t help but think that locking someone in a tower—even a fancy sideways one—wasn’t exactly a recipe for a well-adjusted individual, faerie or human.
“That’s funny,” was all Carmer said. “I know someone else who was supposed to be impossible, and she’s doing just fine.”
MERMAIDS WAITED FOR Grit and Yarlo at the shoreline. Both faeries had used their magic to deflect as much attention away from themselves as they could, but their scent on the wind was enough for all wild things to know that two faeries were trying to cross the exposed passage to Wetherwren Light—and they were doing so on foot. A falcon soared overhead, and Grit thought she could feel its beady eyes turn to them, even hundreds of feet in the air.
Yarlo and Grit had barely taken three steps onto the thin, shelly strip of beach when a dozen armored ghost crabs scuttled into view, cutting off their path with interlocking white claws. The mermaids were out of sight, just beneath the gently lapping waves. Perhaps they hadn’t decided if the intruders were worth surfacing for.
Grit immediately rubbed her hands together, summoning the energy to call a flame to life to launch at the crabs, but she didn’t have the chance to shoot off as much as a spark before one of Yarlo’s ropes snapped around her wrists.
“Hey!” Grit gaped at him. Well, that had been a short-lived bargain.
“What did I say?” Yarlo demanded of her. He yanked on the rope, forcing her to her knees. “No funny business, or we walk like this the whole way there.” He gave the rope another tug, and her knees scraped on the rocks through her trousers.
“What do you think you’re—”
“Howdy, boys,” said Yarlo to the ghost crabs. One of them clicked its claws menacingly, and Yarlo tipped his tiny hat. “Fine evenin’, ain’t it?”
We do not get many visitors around these parts. What interesting company you keep, faerie.
The voice—voices?—came both from beneath the waves and inside Grit’s head, though the mermaids themselves never surfaced. She wasn’t sure if they were talking to her, or Yarlo, or both. She stayed silent, her mind racing, with no clue how she was going to get out of the clutches of those webbed fingers, should they decide to drag her straight down to Princess Pru. Yarlo, on the other hand, spoke up right away.
“This little Seelie freak, you mean?” asked Yarlo. He flicked the toe of his boot against Grit’s metal wing, just hard enough to jar her shoulder. She glared at him and focused on generating enough heat, just enough to get those ropes smoking . . .
“She’s my prisoner,” Yarlo said confidently.
She is fae, said the mermaids, sounding even more skeptical. The waves on either side of Grit and Yarlo lapped higher. And all things fae belong to themselves. Only the king may keep prisoners in this kingdom, and he has not told us of any Seelie girl with a metal wing.
Grit paused in her struggle. What did these mermaids mean, the Unseelie king hadn’t told them about her? When she’d approached the palace before, it was like she’d been expected. She’d assumed Yarlo had snitched and the king knew everything about her. Princess Pru and Mister Moon certainly did. Perhaps the rumors of her tumultuous visit hadn’t yet reached this side of the bay.
Grit peered over the edge of the rocks, searching for a glimpse of wet, flowing hair or filmy gray eyes underneath the water.
Yarlo corrected himself: “Ah, of course not, ladies. I should’ve rephrased; she’s my enemy.” He looked sideways at Grit, his eyes steel. “She dishonored me, and I cap
tured her.”
Grit stopped trying to set the ropes on fire. Was Yarlo . . . lying?
Dishonored you? asked the mermaids. How could one so small and young manage that?
Yarlo ground his teeth together. “She worked with the monster who took my wings,” he snarled. “A human inventor, up north. She helped him capture faeries to steal their magic, in exchange for that mechanical wing.”
He was lying. And the strange thing was, judging by the fact that the mermaids hadn’t dragged them straight down to Princess Pru, the mermaids didn’t seem to know it.
Even though she knew it was best to play along, Grit could barely force down her protest to such a blazing falsehood. As if she would ever have helped the Mechanist! Still, she tried to look downcast and defeated.
The water churned, rising higher, but the mermaids were silent.
“I’m taking her to the lighthouse to summon the Wild Hunt,” explained Yarlo, and Grit remembered her own mother explaining to Carmer, what felt like so long ago, the rules for official dealings between faeries of different courts.
They had to meet on neutral ground. Where the fae do not tread, Queen Ombrienne had said. The crossroads between realms.
Wetherwren Light, she supposed, could be either—or both—of those things, depending on how you looked at it. A guide from one land to another, abandoned by the Seelies but avoided by the Unseelies; it could have been years since any living fae had set foot there.
“Then they’ll decide her fate,” Yarlo finished.
Grit held her breath, listening to the waves licking the rocks. The setting sun glinted across the ghost crabs’ shells.
You may pass, said the mermaids, and this time, a few curious heads broke the surface, clammy foreheads and squinting eyes unaccustomed to being above water. We will send a message to the Hunt to expect your arrival.
It seemed that slipping past the local Unseelies unnoticed had been a bit too much to hope for. If Grit’s guess was correct, though, and Princess Pru did intend to attack the Wonder Show tonight, she had a feeling the Hunt would be otherwise engaged.
The Crooked Castle Page 19
