“Oh, you noticed that too, did you?”
“How could I have missed it? It’s blindly obvious. Every time you drop a base glamour, you start acting in a contradictory way, like you can’t reconcile your fae characteristics with your human ones, or with each other. It’s like watching somebody who’s had a stroke and forgotten how to walk in a straight line.”
I huffed out a little white cloud. “You’re always so complimentary.”
“I’ll compliment you when you deserve it, Whelan, and not a moment before,” she replied. “As it is, you need to get over your damn identity crisis before it gets you killed.”
I lowered my head. “I know.”
“Then stop moping about your sad backstory, and…”
A pulse of power somewhere up ahead brought everyone to a halt right at the last bend in the road before it intersected with the Royal Mainway. I shambled to a stop at the back of the group and rose to my tiptoes to look over their heads—or in the case of Boyle, over his shoulder—and view whatever obstacle had magically landed in our path.
That obstacle turned out to be five obstacles, in the form of five Unseelie soldiers on horseback. The snow settling in a vaguely pentagonal shape around the hooves of their steeds indicated they had arrived via long-range teleportation. Their position, near the edge of the Royal Mainway and directly in our path, indicated they had jumped here in order to locate the six of us.
Orlagh swore in a fae language. “That soldier at the head of the group is Lieutenant Colonel Nollaig O’Sullivan.”
The soldier in question was a severe-looking woman with a sharp nose, high cheekbones, and slate-gray hair pulled back into a sleek, tidy bun. Her pale-purple sídhe marks painted a maze of right angles and hard curves across her face, further highlighting the harsh structure of her bones and giving off the impression that she was angry even when her expression was totally neutral.
Everything about her, from her ramrod-straight posture to her perfectly starched and ironed uniform, implied that she was cold and perpetually stern. And the faces that Orlagh and Boyle threw on—those of kids caught with their hands in the cookie jar—did nothing to dispel the first impression.
“I don’t suppose you sent word ahead requesting an escort to Camhaoir?” said Odette.
Orlagh rolled her shoulders back, uncomfortable. “I did not.”
Drake ducked behind Boyle’s larger frame, as if that would obscure the dhampir’s presence from the high-ranking sídhe soldiers. “Then how did they find us?” he whined. “We didn’t even know we were portaling to this exact road until a few minutes before we arrived.”
“Our arrival must’ve triggered one of the beams,” Boyle said.
“But those are set to sound the alarm when fugitives use magic on or near the Mainway.” Orlagh bit her thumb. “If the signature list has been updated to include my magic signature…then we are in very big trouble.”
“Um, beams?” Indira whispered. “What beams?”
“Those beams.” I gestured to a stone column jutting up from the ground at the edge of the Mainway. That column was one in a long line that stretched both north and south, bordering the Mainway for as far as the eye could see.
The line looked very much like a security fence.
“So, what?” Odette said. “It’s a magic alarm system?”
“Yes.” Boyle massaged his forehead. “It’s extremely difficult to track magic signatures in most areas of Tír na nÓg, because the whole realm is so thoroughly saturated with magic. New residual energy blends into old in little time, and so many creatures with similar souls roam the land that a lot of magic signatures are nearly indistinguishable from one another, especially at great distance. So finding fugitives in the wilds beyond the cities and towns is a challenging task.”
“To make it somewhat easier,” Orlagh picked up, “a continent-wide system of warded beams was installed some centuries prior. They line all the major thoroughfares in Tír na nÓg. If the magic signature of anyone on a list of wanted criminals comes within half a mile of any beam, it will send a signal to the nearest military outpost.”
“And you’re the one who portaled us here,” Odette finished. “So you’re on the naughty list.”
Orlagh sighed. “There goes my promotion.”
“I don’t get it though.” Indira pursed her bright-pink lips. “
Why are you on the list?”
“I can think of only one reason,” I said.
“McCullough is back.” Boyle stomped his boot against the dirt.
“He escaped from Maige Itha intact enough to weave a tale of woe that paints him as a victim and us as the dastardly villains who defected from his command.”
Drake whispered, “What do we do now?”
Orlagh closed her eyes. “We go with them and recount to the agents of the Army Investigative Service the story of McCullough’s gross negligence in Kinsale. He won’t be able to deny or twist the facts when they are stated outright. Whatever inflated charges he has laid against us will be summarily
dropped, and McCullough will likely be taken into custody pending a court-martial.”
“It could take hours, if not days, for the AIS to clear us.” I shoved my fists into my coat pockets. “We don’t have time for a detour like that.”
“We don’t have a choice in the matter,” Orlagh said grimly. “If we run, they will pursue.”
The five soldiers on horseback hadn’t budged since their appearance. But they all held their reins with one hand, and the hilts of their swords with the other, an obvious warning.
“Fine,” I spit. “We’ll play along. For now. But if McCullough tries to turn this into some kind of kangaroo court…”
“My mother would never allow such a thing.” Orlagh unclipped her sword from her belt and signaled for Boyle to do the same. “Her morals are beyond reproach, and she strives for justice above all else.”
“Faerie justice,” I reminded her. “Which some of us might not find palatable.”
“It is what it is,” Boyle said, handing his sword to Orlagh. “We will simply have to hope for the best.”
“Little short on hope right now,” Odette mumbled. “Got a bit of a scarcity problem on the other side of the veil, if you hadn’t noticed.”
The two soldiers didn’t respond to the jab.
Orlagh set off toward the waiting group of sídhe, both her sword and Boyle’s tucked under one arm, hilts pointed at the ground, a sign she was planning to surrender them. Boyle hung back until Orlagh reached the halfway point between us and them, before he too began a cautious approach. The rest of us remained stationary, muscles taut and joints locked, fight or flight response creeping toward the latter option.
If the situation went south, I was fully prepared to order everyone to scatter. I’d handed out new RTP talismans before we left my basement. So if we all ran in different directions, dove into the cover of the woods, and activated those talismans, there was a decent chance that at least some of us would escape.
Of course, if I can’t fully mask my aura in the void, I thought sourly, it won’t matter if I escape from here. Abarta’s intercept spell will just grab me again, and without my body armor and other protections, I’ll end up in pieces on the floor of that dungeon.
Orlagh’s creeping advance finally ended a few feet in front of O’Sullivan. Orlagh saluted her superior, and the two women had a short, hushed conversation. I didn’t catch any of the words, but Orlagh’s tone sounded apologetic, whereas O’Sullivan’s sounded just north of reproachful.
When the conversation wrapped, Orlagh offered the two swords to the male soldier to O’Sullivan’s right. The man leaned down, snatched the blades, and slid each one into a different loop of leather sewn into the front face of one of his saddlebags.
Orlagh looked over her shoulder and nodded to Boyle, who’d paused at the halfway point. In response, Boyle motioned for us to finally approach the soldiers.
Wary from my recent experiences with s�
�dhe soldiers who were not named Orlagh and Boyle, I placed myself at the head of our little procession, frost crackling at my fingertips. There was no way I could hope to defeat even one of these full-blooded sídhe, especially in my current condition. But at the very least, I could use my newfound power to create a distraction that would give the others an opportunity to flee.
As we closed in on their group, the soldiers eyed us with varying degrees of disdain.
They didn’t pay Odette much mind, as she was human, though a few of them did a double-take at the sliver of her metal arm peeking out from beneath the sleeve of her coat. They gave Indira mild frowns, annoyed at seeing a Seelie tromping around in Unseelie territory. They shot Drake looks of immense suspicion, a few of them bordering on disgust; to the fae, the very existence of dhampirs was offensive.
And as for me? Well, all these sídhe observed me with what would’ve been burning hatred had ice not run through their veins.
Twitchy hands rested on silvery hilts, itching to draw blades and take a stab at me. Magic lay tingling on tongues, mere syllables away from ripping me to shreds with blades of ice and brutal gales.
Though I had never met a single one, these soldiers loathed me.
It had to be McCullough’s doing. He’d probably told everyone who would listen about the “traitorous” half-sídhe who usurped his command, punched him in the face, and sent him off to die. No doubt he had conveniently neglected to mention the reason why I had done those things.
It would have been my pleasure to set the record straight—
knocking McCullough down a few pegs had been my dream for months—
had the city McCullough nearly gifted to the vampires not been hours away from absolute destruction.
If I lose Kinsale because of McCullough’s bullshit, so help me every god in the Otherworld, I will find a way to kill that man.
After O’Sullivan finished her personal assessment of our threat level—minimal at best, judging by her contemptuous snort—she let out a sharp whistle. The other four soldiers maneuvered their horses to form a circle around us. Which served to cut off all possible escape routes and to keep us all safely inside the area of effect for the teleportation spell O’Sullivan was preparing to cast.
If you accidentally stuck a body part outside the boundary of a teleportation spell, that body part would get left behind. And given that most of Tír na nÓg’s land mass was covered in wilderness, that body part would probably get eaten by something with very sharp teeth before you had a chance to double back and recover it.
Magic didn’t have much in the way of safety measures.
Odette leaned close to my ear and whispered, “They’re not going to take our weapons?”
Bemused, I replied, “Why bother? We aren’t strong enough to defeat them, no matter what weapons we have on us.”
She scowled. “I’m not harmless.”
“Course not. But to them, you’re about as harmful as a wasp.
Strong enough to sting, but easy enough to swat.”
She grumbled something in Chinese that did not sound polite.
I agreed with the general sentiment.
Double-checking to ensure everyone was where they were supposed to be, O’Sullivan spoke the invocation for the teleportation spell. Guttural words rolled heavily off her tongue, and after each one struck the air like a low-toned bell, a purple beam of energy shot up from the ground just beyond the boundary of our cluster.
As the last word of the invocation faded into the air, twenty beams stood tall and bright in a perfect circle around us. Then, the beams started to vibrate, producing a loud hum that sent animals skittering off through the woods and disturbed the freshly fallen snow. And finally, there came a blinding flash of purple light.
The light vanished a moment later, along with most of my balance and half my fortitude. Nauseous and swaying, I blinked the stars out of my eyes to find that the scene of the wintery forest road had been swapped out for a wide, rolling plain of frosted grass that twinkled in the moonlight.
The forest was now miles away, at the trough of a long and gently declining hill. From our vantage point near the top of this hill, you could observe the full breadth of the valley. Below us, the Royal Mainway snaked through numerous patches of dense woodland, hopped a narrow river crossed by an old stone bridge, and finally disappeared around the base of a snowy, jagged peak far off in the distance, the first of an expansive mountain range.
Somewhere inside that mountain range lay Camhaoir.
“Wow,” Drake murmured, “now that’s a view.”
“I’m not sure which is more impressive,” Indira said. “The view in front of us, or the view behind us.”
Curious, the rest of us peered over our shoulders.
Rising from the crest of the hill was an enormous white stone fortress. The building was roughly eight hundred feet long, and just as wide, consuming the entire area of the hilltop. Its defensive curtain wall was almost twenty stories tall and covered with countless shimmering wards. Behind that wall, at each corner of the fort, square towers topped with jagged obsidian battlements rose another fifty feet into the winter sky.
Blue silk banners the size of billboards hung from the top of the curtain wall, above the portcullis, proclaiming the building belonged to the Unseelie Army and that its name was Fort Drochrath.
This was the seat of the Unseelie Army’s High Command. When the army’s top generals didn’t meet with Mab and the other high-ranking political leaders in Camhaoir, they met here to make critical decisions on everything from short-term troop movements to major shifts in policy that would change the face of the army for centuries to come.
Wars had been won and lost as a result of discussions in this building. And the orders that emerged from behind its crystalline gate had regularly decided the fate of thousands since it had been built at the start of the second war with the Tuatha Dé Danann.
I had only ever seen pictures of Fort Drochrath.
I never expected to see it in person, much less venture inside.
Here’s to hoping it’s not a one-way trip.
On a cue from O’Sullivan, we headed toward the broad front gate.
Four guards stood at attention, two on either side of the gate.
They followed us with their emotionless eyes as we passed beneath the raised portcullis and entered the bailey.
The fort’s bailey was a sprawling cobblestone courtyard. Wooden stables lined one side, occupied by the white, gray, and black horses assigned to the various officers. On the opposite side was a large rectangular section made of dirt covered in loose straw, with tall poles, archery targets, and chalk circles scattered about—a practice area where soldiers ran drills in the morning.
In the center of this courtyard sat the towering entrance to the keep, a blocky ten-story building whose regular cleanings could not hide its age. The white stone was faded and weather worn, the massive wooden doors were cracked, and the metal hinges of those doors had blackened under the constant bombardment of winter.
Yet the doors were nothing short of formidable, as the sheer amount of magic energy emanating from them formed a physical buffer. It required significant effort to push your body past that buffer, and I was in such poor shape that it took me three tries.
One of the sídhe soldiers laughed at me, but a glare from O’Sullivan shut him up.
She refused to look even remotely unprofessional in the presence of non-sídhe. The sídhe were supposed to be “better” than everyone else, per the general faerie mindset. So they had to play the part, act cool and disaffected, whenever pitiful creatures like us were in earshot or sight.
You just wait, I promised them. I’m going to embarrass every last one of you before this day is done.
When O’Sullivan was about ten feet from the doors, they silently swung outward of their own accord. O’Sullivan dismounted, and the other soldiers followed her example. One of them rounded up all the horses and led them off toward the stables,
where a couple grooms were waiting to take possession of them.
After that soldier returned, with Orlagh’s and Boyle’s swords tucked into his belt opposite his own blade, O’Sullivan wordlessly strode into the keep. The group obeyed the silent command to tail her.
The interior of the keep was a clash of old and new.
Magic sconces that had been forged centuries before hung from the walls, illuminating the wide corridors with soft white light. The polished gray stone floor was stained and uneven from the millions of footfalls that had passed atop it since the construction of the fort.
Several of the roughhewn walls were decorated with faded black scorch marks, battle damage from the one time in its whole history that the fort had been breached—by the Tuatha, of course, during the final war.
The furniture, in contrast to everything else, had a more modern flair. Some of it was indistinguishable from pieces you would see on Earth, the fae manufacturers having taken a cue from human tastes. Which was less rare than many might think.
Trends in fashion and food and other interests frequently bled across the veil—or at least they had before the collapse—and whatever meshed well with faerie society was usually kept in the long term.
Gathered around many of these modern tables and benches and chairs were small groups of soldiers. Some were on their breaks, casually chatting and eating and drinking. Some were having informal meetings, hashing out their to-do lists and discussing current events that might impact High Command in the near future.
From more than one muttering mass, I caught tidbits about the unexpected formation of the Wild Hunt over Seelie territory and speculation about how the army would respond to the threat.
As we wound through the labyrinthine halls, a lot of these groups fell into a hush. A few clearly knew exactly who O’Sullivan had been sent to collect, and why; they threw up disgusted looks and turned to their neighbors to gossip about our perceived criminality.
But most of the soldiers had no clue who made up our motley crew, and a lot of them had obviously never seen anyone who wasn’t native to Tír na nÓg. They didn’t know what to make of Odette the human witch, and they were left scratching their heads at Drake’s odd appearance.
What Dusk Divides Page 5
