Brightly (Flicker #2) (24 page)

“If none of you answer,” warned the knight, her gaze sweeping over them, “I will have to take all of you. Who is the animal talker?”

Again, no one spoke. They stood and shivered in the rain for a long, tense minute. The growls of the cu sith grew louder, making Lee’s insides tremble, but the hounds didn’t move.

At last, the knight pressed her mouth into a thin line of disapproval. She gestured to the riders behind her and they circled their horses around the humans.

“Have your own way,” the knight said, touching the hilt of her sword. “It makes no difference. The Bright Lady will sort you out.”

“The Bright Lady?” Filo echoed, making the knight’s eyes narrow slightly.

“Lady Merrin, of the Summer Court. You are in her lands now.” The knight adjusted her grip on the reins. “If you try to run, the hounds will be on you in a moment… and once they’ve caught something, they like to take their time.”

As if to demonstrate, the cu sith rumbled louder and stepped closer. Lee took several short, mincing steps backward and bumped into Alice, who was doing the same. Soon they were all pressed together, shoulder to shoulder, the cu sith forming a tight ring around them.

Clementine looked to Henry. Lee could see the question in her eyes:
Can’t you do anything?

He shook his head, almost imperceptibly. Lee suspected he had spent most of his magic on the serpent, if not all of it. If he forced a spell now, drained as he was, he’d just hurt himself further. It could be hours or even days before he was rested enough to cast any spells.

Even if Henry could subdue the hounds and horses, the knights remained. They might’ve preferred to let the hounds have their way first, but Lee didn’t doubt that the knights could kill all of them easily with swords or arrows or their bare hands.

“Come now,” said the knight, and led them into the forest.

Lee didn’t know how long they’d been walking. Time seemed to flow in weird currents. One moment, it felt like they’d been marching for hours; the next, it seemed as though the knights had rounded them up only moments ago.

The forest was dark and endless, the trees indistinguishable from one another, making Lee feel like they were walking in place, going nowhere. Her heart was fluttering like a trapped bird, but inside her, everything else seemed to be tightening, bracing, slamming shut defensively.

Now and then, the hounds would growl and snap their jaws, herding their captives closer together. One nipped Lee’s calf, tearing through her jeans and drawing blood. She could feel the warm line of blood running down the back of her leg, pooling in her shoe.

Henry was still clutching his shoulder. He didn’t seem to be bleeding, but he looked pale and pained. She didn’t know how much farther he could walk. He probably shouldn’t be on his feet at all.

In the weird glow of the faerie lights, Lee could make out a shape looming ahead of them: a tree tunnel, the entrance wide enough for two horses to pass side by side.

“Where are we going?” Clementine asked.

The knights ignored her as they reformed their ranks: two riding ahead of their captives, one on either side, and the last two behind. Lee and the others had to huddle together, nearly tripping over one another’s feet, as the hounds pressed even closer.

When she stepped into the tunnel, Lee could no longer hear the sounds of the forest. The wind, the calling of night birds and the tapping of rainwater streaming from the treetops all disappeared abruptly, as if she’d stepped into a soundproofed room. The only noise was the muffled sound of their footsteps on the forest floor and the low grumbles of the hounds.

Daylight flickered far ahead, at the end of the tunnel. The trees grew so densely that Lee couldn’t see through any gaps in the walls or the roof, but as the path sloped gently upward, the leaves flared like emeralds, casting green-filtered light over them. Lee’s clothes were still wet and cold; she couldn’t stop shivering.

When she finally emerged from the tunnel, Lee’s vision blurred and she stumbled. Her limbs felt heavy and slow, like she was walking underwater. For a moment, she couldn’t breathe. One of the hounds snapped at her, its jaws close enough that she felt its hot breath against her hand. She snatched her hand away instinctively—but the hound was the least of her concerns.

Lee’s pulse kicked up. She had recognized that sensation: the feeling of suspension, of being
between
, then passing through something.

They weren’t in the human world anymore.

Before them was a different forest, brilliant in full sunlight. It looked much like the one they had left, but the trees here were twice as wide as any she’d seen in Deception Pass. Paths had been worn through the ferns and moss by countless feet, winding around the massive trunks and disappearing into the smaller, denser woods in the distance.

Fey strolled past in all directions, carrying baskets and pulling handcarts. Some looked more or less human—until they turned the right way and the light hit them, revealing backs that were hollow as bowls, or too-long arms with extra joints, or backward feet. Others had the heads of stags and foxes, or flowers growing from their scalps, or iridescent insect wings sprouting from their shoulders.

Three young women hurried past, their arms filled with piles of something shiny, red and dripping; Lee cringed when she realized they were skinned rabbits. A young man with many glittering, clustered eyes crossed in front of them. He held a length of rope in each hand, leading two cows. The cows slowed, swinging their great heads toward Henry, and the man had to tug hard on the rope to get them moving again.

Most of the fey hardly seemed to notice the group of knights and hounds that rode through the crowd, much less the humans huddled between them, but a few stopped to watch them pass and whispered together.

“
Keeley!”
shouted an older-looking man standing nearby, in Old Faerie. His green face was lined with wrinkles, but he looked fit and strong. For a second, Lee was thrown. She’d never seen a faery who looked so old.
“Lady Merrin’s got you chasing ghosts again, eh?”

“
That’s none of your concern, Egan,”
replied the dark-haired knight in the same tongue.

“
How many do you think you’ll have to bring to her and throw back until she gives up? Aren’t you tired of this yet? Surely she can give her knights something better to do.”

Keeley bared her teeth at the wizened faery.
“Mind your goats, old man, not the affairs of the Bright Lady.”

The old faery just laughed.

As they passed between two trees, Lee heard sounds drifting down from above: distant voices. When she tilted her head back, she stifled a gasp.

Scores of tree houses were cradled in the branches of the massive trees. They were nothing like the one in Kendall’s back yard, the glorified plywood platform where Lee and Kendall had played as children. The houses above her were elaborate, large enough that someone could live comfortably inside. Like the trees themselves, the houses were covered in moss.

A network of bridges connected the trees, each bridge made of winding branches and vines that had been encouraged to grow across the divides. Lee could see more bridges reaching out to trees farther out, and more houses. Though they looked small and indistinct from so far away, Lee could make out the shapes of faeries crossing the bridges.

This was almost nothing like the revels Lee had seen. It looked like a permanent settlement, a fey city in the middle of the forest, complete with houses and livestock, where everything had been built
around
the trees, each structure adapted to the existing, natural one.

The knights led them away from the settlement, to a silent, shady grove where no faeries roamed. One of the knights dismounted her horse and trotted to the middle of the grove, to a large square of earth where nothing grew.

Kneeling, she pressed her hand to the ground and the dirt shifted, shaking and crumbling apart to reveal a hole, about five feet square. The dirt piled itself around the hole. With growls and bared teeth, the hounds urged Lee and the others forward.

Stone stairs led down into a dim chamber dug into the earth. The floor was dirt and mushrooms that gleamed in the darkness. Pale roots crept up the dark earthen walls like veins, faintly luminous.

“Down,” said Keeley, from atop her horse. “You’ll wait here until the Lady is ready to see you.”

When Clementine looked over her shoulder at Keeley, defiant, Lee could see the same girl who’d hauled Henry out of the water, the girl who sometimes did things that shouldn’t be possible, and she worried that Clementine was going to try to fight the current again.

Henry curled his fingers around Clementine’s wrist and some of the stiffness left her posture. He didn’t have to say anything. With one touch, he communicated with her:
Not now.

In the end, Clementine went. They all went, one by one, filing into the cold hole in the ground. Clementine never stopped looking at Keeley, her eyes burning. She was the last to go.

The moment Clementine was below with the rest of them, the dirt seemed to come alive again, sweeping itself over the hole and forming a ceiling. The knights stood around the hole, looking down into the chamber as the earth covered it, and Lee felt suddenly like she was at the bottom of a grave.

A few thin shafts of sunlight broke through the dirt ceiling; at least they probably wouldn’t run out of air. Around them, the roots and mushrooms cast a faint, sickly glow.

Lee felt abruptly dizzy. She paced to the other end of the chamber, restless. The walls seemed to waver back and forth and the ground felt like it was tilting under her feet.

Above them, Lee heard the knights walking away, and the snorting of their horses. As soon as all was silent, Filo reached toward the ceiling, pressing his hands against it with no result. He gloved his hands in blue flame and tried again, but the earth refused to yield. Jason and Clementine joined him, prodding the ceiling with magic-wrapped hands.

“It’s completely solid,” Filo concluded. His hands were still raised, bathing him in blue light. “Whatever enchantment’s holding it together, I can’t crack through it. Not like this.”

With a sigh, Jason shook the remaining yellow energy from his hands. It dispersed into the chill air like sparks from a campfire. “You know,” he said, “I’m getting really sick of this happening to us.”

Davis looked up sharply. He was tending to Henry’s shoulder by white light of a small magical orb that floated between Alice’s hands. “This has happened to you before?”

Shrugging, Jason said, “When you’ve been captured by one faery, you’ve been captured by them all. No matter what, you end up in a pen.”

“At least this one isn’t poisonous,” Filo said wearily, rubbing his eyes with one hand.

“That we know of,” Alice said darkly. Her eyes never left the light she’d made. “Nobody touch any of those mushrooms.”

Henry goggled at Filo for a moment, then winced as Davis tightened the bandage on his shoulder. “What the hell kind of jobs do you people
do
?”

If anyone answered him, Lee didn’t hear it. When she had been walking through the forest, focusing on moving her feet and keeping clear of the hounds’ teeth, it was easier to push the other thoughts from her mind. Now that she was finally standing still, surrounded by walls, it hit her like a punch to the chest.

Faerie. She was trapped in Faerie again.

Lee’s hands started to shake. When she blinked, she could see it in the darkness behind her eyes: Umbriel’s endless summer, all the unearthly beauty, all the hungry creatures, the world streaked with paint and blood and starlight.

Her breath was coming in hard, painful gasps. She tried to sit down, but her legs gave and she fell instead. Her heart drummed in her throat as she pushed herself upright. Its beating was so loud in her skull that she barely heard Clementine when she asked, “You okay, Lee?”

“Don’t touch her.” Nasser’s voice sounded far away. “Give her some space.”

“What’s happening?” she heard Henry ask. “What’s wrong with her?”

Nasser didn’t answer. He went to Lee, kneeling in front of her. He raised his hands as if to touch her, but ultimately held back. When he spoke, his voice was slow, calm, everything she couldn’t be. “What’s going on? Are you hurt?”

Lee was shaking her head, though her throat felt like it was closing. Sharp, tight pains constricted her chest.

“Is it one of your flashbacks?” he asked.

Over the last year, there had been times when something like a noise or a smell sent her tumbling into her memories of Faerie that left her shaking and gasping for breath. But those moments had never been like this. The feeling of terror had never hit her so hard, never made her want to claw through the walls to get out, never made her feel like she was dying.

“I can’t breathe,” she managed, between gasps. “Nasser—I can’t—”

Carefully, he touched her hand. When his fingers brushed her skin, his eyes widened and she felt him jump a little, as if he’d reached out with his senses and touched what was happening inside her. She knew that, when he concentrated, he could read emotional energy the same way he read magical energy. It was a moment before he could speak again.