Twelve Days of Faery (9 page)

“What a warren!” he said, with a sigh.

“Not a warren!” Althea said, her eyes sparkling: “A maze! I wonder why Carmine didn’t tell us.”

“I suppose it’s possible that Carmine doesn’t know quite everything,” Markon said dryly. Carmine, he privately considered, hadn’t known anything
like
enough about this venture.

“Left or right?”

“Eagles,” said Markon, and pointed at the glass corner to his left. His eyes met Althea’s, as bright as hers were, and then flicked back to the tiny etching of an eagle that decorated it.

Althea clapped her hands. “Wonderful! How clever of you to–
oh!
–”

Markon, who hadn’t quite caught the soft
swoosh
of something glassy as it slipped through the blue shadows, saw a flower of dark red blossom on the shoulder of Althea’s green dress and flung both himself and her around the corner before the second sliver shattered against the wall.

“Oh!” said Althea again, panting. “That hurts...rather a lot, actually. What was that?”

“Hold still,” said Markon, his fingers digging into her shoulder. The shaft of glass still protruded from her shoulder, needle thin and horribly delicate. He drew it from her flesh little by little, slick with blood, while Althea gripped her lip with her teeth and tried to breath very carefully, then cast it aside to shatter on the floor and pulled aside the shoulder of her gown with bloody fingers.

“I didn’t see it coming,” Althea said, pressing a hand to the open wound in spite of Markon’s ministrations. “It’s only a small hole, Markon.”

“Small, but deep and bleeding freely,” Markon said grimly. “We’d best keep moving, I think.”

              Althea conjured a small, flowing ribbon of light to ripple along the passage floor in front of them, pushing back the shadows briefly. As reassurance went it was a double-edged sword: it certainly made their way easier to see in the cold blue light, but the flickering shadows it formed had Markon’s eyes darting at every fluctuation.

“Did you see where the glass shard came from?” asked Althea. Her eyes were also searching the shadows, and the patch of blood on her shoulder was rapidly spreading.

“No. Whatever it was, it was behind us.”

“I know,” said Althea. “But there was only the door behind us.”

“Is there anything about glass shards in the stories?”

“Not a word. Oh. Markon, look to the left.”

To their left was a dead end. The rippling light of Althea’s magical ambiance played on the wall; which, at a variance to all the other walls around them, was oddly lumpy. Markon tried to tell himself that the lumps only seemed to bulge and grow because of the shifting of the light, but when the suggestion of a head and torso thrust themselves free from the wall, quickly followed by a second glass head and torso, it was impossible to lie to himself any longer.

“We should walk a little faster,” said Althea decidedly, but Markon was already hurrying her away from the dead end.

“Do you think it was one of them that did it?”

“They’re the only other things that are moving in here,” Althea said. “Bother! There are more of them!”

Markon, who had already seen them—had seen, moreover, the ominous way in which two spike-laden appendages were brought to bear on himself and Althea—seized Althea around the waist and whirled them both down the next passage, regardless of its inscription. Shards of glass spat and splintered at the corner, stinging the back of his neck and biting into his side. Althea, caught close to his chest and shielded from the worst of it by Markon’s body, said in his ear: “Was it an eagle?”

“Don’t know,” Markon said tersely. “Keep going: they’re following.”

“I’ll lead,” Althea said, snatching at his hand. “You watch for the glass men.”

              It could have been a nightmare, Markon thought, except for the warmth of Althea’s fingers. They left a trail of blood drops that would have distracted him if he hadn’t been so focused on watching out for more of the glass men. Althea guided him through it, quietly frustrated whenever Markon swept her implacably down the wrong passage to escape another pair of glass men, and unable to use her ripple of light to read inscriptions for fear of drawing more of them. Fortunately the tangle of passages and covered walkways seemed to be more of a puzzle than a maze, and for every wrong way that they were forced to take Althea managed to get them back on the right track like a small, perfectly poised hound. As they ran, blood trickled down Markon’s collar from the cuts on the back of his neck. It occurred to him that there was more blood than there should be, and when he looked down at Althea in the dark blue light of a covered walkway, he thought she was paler than she had been, the whole left side of her bodice stained dark red.

“Althea?”

“It’s fine,” she said, with something of a gasp. “I’ll see if I can heal it once we have a moment to rest. Now that we’re not lighting up the walkways or making too much noise we should be able to sneak about the passages more easily. Do you have a handkerchief?”

Markon did. He pulled the ironed and scented square from his pocket, annoyed at himself for not having thought of it himself, and hastily tied it around Althea’s shoulder and under her arm.

“Make it tight,” she said, chafing her left hand with her right. And then, in a rather different voice: “Did any of the spikes hit you? You’re bleeding.”

“Only splinters,” Markon said, tugging his knot tight. “They shattered on the wall. Why?”

“Never mind,” said Althea, curling her left hand into her skirts. “I’ll fix that when we get out, too. Let’s keep going.”

              They crept through the passages like blue ghosts themselves, stealing past rapidly forming glass men and dashing through intersections that held men from earlier skirmishes. It seemed that once the glass men formed and separated from the walls, they remained in the passages.

They were both panting by the time they stumbled into a high, arched rotunda from which myriad passages spiralled into the navy darkness.

“Found it!” said Althea, her laugh low and weary. Markon put his arm around her waist, staining his own shirt with blood, and drew her toward the low, glassy table that stood in the centre of the rotunda. On it was a small glass case with a small glass door that was shut by a complicated glasswork mechanism. Inside the glass case, innocuous and slightly dirty, was a sizeable shard of metal that looked like it had once been part of a great broadsword.

“What is it?” asked Markon, his breath fogging the glass. “You can’t tell me he wants a simple scrap from an old sword.”

Althea hung over the display, her hand gripping a fistful of Markon’s shirt for support. “I don’t know. It’s horribly powerful, but it’s benevolent– and oh! it’s connected to so many things! But it’s...
shielded
from me. Why would it be shielded from me? It’s human-made...”

Althea’s voice trailed away, and Markon heard her say a soft, sorrowful: “Oh.”

“What is it?”

“It’s nothing,” said Althea, but there was a pinch of sorrow to the corners of her eyes. “We can’t leave this with Carmine. It’s not the sort of thing that should be in Faery.”

Markon threw a wary look around at the passages that surrounded them. “We should take it and keep going. Will it attract
them
when we open the case?”

“Probably,” Althea said, and opened the case. She snatched the shard from its bed of velvet and said to him: “We’d better start running now. It set off every magical alarm in the mountain.”

Markon grabbed her by the hand with an exasperated look, but when he tried to pull her back the way they’d come, she said swiftly: “Not eagles this time! Apples!” and dragged him toward one of the other passages instead.

“Why are we going back by a different way?” he said, catching sight of the tiny trio of apples that was carved into the wall.

“Because it’s claws, then eagles,
then
apples!” said Althea. “
Duck
, Markon!”

Three glass spikes zipped over his head and shattered at the end of the passage. Markon, bent almost double and close to stumbling, hauled Althea around the next corner and headlong into four of the glass men.

“No!” said Althea, in a small, panting voice. Markon ruthlessly seized her despite her struggles, wrapping his arms around her and turning his back to the men. Then he ran, lifting her bodily from the ground, her head shielded in his shoulder, bypassing the intersection from which they’d come.

He didn’t even feel the spikes when they entered his flesh. He knew they were there, because as he ran with Althea clasped tightly to his chest and the shard of the sword between them, blunt and heavy, he saw them in the wall reflections that flanked him.

“Apples,” he said, when his heavy legs felt like they couldn’t go any faster. “Apples and then we’re out.”

And he hoped with all his heart that it was so.

              Markon would never remember exactly how he got out of the glass mountain. There were myriad etchings of apples and even more appearances of the glass men, who despite the lack of Althea’s magic light, seemed to hone in on them with deadly accuracy. He ran further than it seemed possible for them to have journeyed already, and at last he was running in snow, under the ridiculously beautiful Faery sky with its high, full moon.

He put Althea down rather less gently than he’d meant to, feeling a stiffness in his arms that was far from natural. She gave a little sob, the shard dropping to the snow, and Markon opened his mouth to apologise but found that it, too, was stiff.

“Sit down,” said Althea shakily, one hand bearing him down into the snow. The pinky and middle fingers of that hand were hard and glossy and...glasslike. Markon tried to tell her so but his mouth wouldn’t move. Neither did the snow feel cold beneath him, and the cuts on his neck no longer hurt. In fact, nothing seemed to hurt.

And then Althea began to remove the glass spikes one by one: ten or so of them. That
did
hurt, a hopeful, agonising promise that perhaps he could be stopped from turning to glass after all. She worked quickly, drawing and discarding in one motion, but it was a long time after she finished drawing out the spikes that Markon became aware that he could feel her hands on his back, and that he could move again. He turned to pull Althea into his lap despite the aching of his muscles, holding her close in relief that she was still there, still alive, still flesh.

              Althea suffered it for a moment that was far too short, then disengaged herself and set snow flurrying as she rose.

Markon also climbed stiffly to his feet, while Althea picked up the shard again and slipped it into her pocket.

She said: “Is that better?”

He flexed his shoulders, relieved to find that the muscles stretched and bowed as they normally did.

“Yes,” he said. “That is– yes, I think so.”

Althea boxed his ears. It was quick, violent, and entirely unexpected; and it sprawled him back into the snow from which he’d risen.

Entirely shocked, Markon said: “What?”

“I was already poisoned,” Althea said. The words came out slowly, and it was borne in on him that she was so angry that she was finding it hard to speak. “I was holding it back enough to last. A few more spikes wouldn’t have stopped that.
Don’t
ever do that again
.”

“I was protecting you!” said Markon, scrambling to his feet once more.

“I know,” snapped Althea. “Don’t do it again!”

She hugged him fiercely, bloodying the front of his shirt as well, but before Markon could respond in kind she pushed him away and turned her back on him to ascend the hill.

Markon stared after her straight, angry spine for a perplexed moment, then hurried after her.

“I’m not going to stop protecting you,” he told her severe profile, when he caught up with her. Then, because she was as white and weary as death, he put his arm around her waist again.

When he felt her arm go around his waist again, gripping a handful of shirt as it had done in the glass mountain, he couldn’t help the smile that spread over his face.

              “What’s this, sweetness?”

Carmine’s voice was light, but Markon saw the swift step forward that the fae took, and was undeceived.

“We had some trouble,” Althea said, her voice as light as his. “I take it you didn’t know about the glass men?”

“Not a suspicion,” said Carmine, his fingers running over Althea’s damaged shoulder and then sliding down to her half-glass hand. “I would have stolen it myself if it wasn’t for fae law. It’s horribly restrictive in some ways. The human?”

“I healed his wounds,” said Althea. “They were worse than mine. I almost lost him in the snow.”

Carmine cocked an eyebrow at Markon and said to Althea: “Shall I fix this for you, sweetness?”

“Oh, why not?” Althea said tiredly. “Where’s the girl?”

“The next room,” Carmine told her. He inspected her hand first palm down and then palm up; and at last placed a long, lingering kiss in the centre of it. “That should do it, I think. It’s the door on the right, if you absolutely
must
leave straight away.”