Darklight (10 page)

The leprechaun backed off for a moment, grinning madly at Sonny through a curtain of tangled hair. “Now, boyo,” he said in a slurring lilt, “s’very thoughtful of ye to hang back and keep me company while yon girlie thief and her mongrel doggie scamper away through th’woods. Has she stolen anything of yours yet? Your heart maybe? Such a tasty wee thing she is.” He laughed lasciviously. “Let’s commiserate on’r losses—here, give us a hug!”

The creature launched himself across the space between them, picking Sonny up in a crushing bear hug. Sonny brought his knee up into the Fae’s rib cage and head-butted him sharply, ignoring the pain that bloomed in his own skull. The leprechaun staggered back a bit, and Sonny’s feet touched the ground again. Leverage regained, the Janus lunged sharply forward, running his adversary into the wall. There was a flash of poison-green light from the Fae’s wild eyes, and he fell forward onto his hands and knees on the dirt floor. Sonny readied himself for another attack. It never came.

Instead the leprechaun’s nose began twitching like a rabbit’s. The Faerie was staring in horror at the damp patch on the dirt floor where Bob had poured out the dregs of his wine. Sonny remembered what Bob had said about a curse.

“No,” the creature moaned.
“No, no. No!”
His voice grew ragged, frantic with emotion that sounded dangerously close to madness. “Waste . . . such
waste
. . .” The leprechaun suddenly began to weep bitterly.

Bob hadn’t exaggerated when he’d called the leprechaun the slave of drink. Wide-eyed in revulsion, Sonny watched as the mad creature began scraping up handfuls of the wine-dampened earth, shoving his fingers into his mouth and sucking through his teeth to leach out the minuscule amount of liquid from the muddy grit.

Recalling what Bob had also said about the consequences of killing a Wee Green Man, Sonny backed away soundlessly, trying not to attract the Faerie’s further attention. It seemed he didn’t have to worry. The leprechaun was so consumed that he didn’t even notice as Sonny grabbed his leather satchel, dumped out his laundry, and replaced it with his arsenal. At the last moment, he remembered his good-luck charm—Kelley’s script. Plucking it silently from the little table beside the cot, he shoved it into his satchel along with the weaponry, glancing briefly at the ward fire as he did.

It looked like the band of redcaps had abandoned the cottage yard and were on the move. They were not traveling the same path that Fennrys and Kelley had taken—rather, they were hurrying along the one that led not directly to the river but to the top of an overhang above the little margin of shore near the waterfall. It was a perfect place for an ambush.

Sonny moved swiftly to the door, closing it gently behind him, and took off at a run to the small meadow around the back of the cottage where Lucky grazed.

“I’m not going any farther until you tell me what the hell is going on!” Kelley shouted.

“I thought you wanted to go home.” Fennrys’s voice was thick with frustration. They were arguing. It was like music to Sonny’s ears for at least two reasons. One, Kelley was still very much alive. And, two, Kelley was mad at Fennrys.

“Yeah, but I don’t want to kill myself to get there. Or you! I mean look at you—you can barely stand. Why are we running?”

Thank the gods,
Sonny thought, relief surging through him as Kelley’s voice echoed off the crevasse walls up to where he’d ridden Lucky. They’d gotten there in time—barely. The funk of redcap stink was so thick in the air that the trolls had to be very close by—somewhere in the woods at the edge of the precipice, waiting to ambush Kelley and Fennrys from high above where they now stood arguing.

“Ow!” Sonny heard her exclaim. “Let go of my arm, Fennrys. I’m warning you—”

“Kelley, would you please, for the love of the gods, just shut up and run?”

“Fenn, if you’re not telling me something—oh god! Is Sonny in some kind of danger?”

Yes,
Sonny thought as he found himself flying through the air, knocked from the kelpie’s back by three or four redcaps that had launched themselves at him from the trees overhead.

He hit the ground and rolled, grasping for purchase in the sparse grass at the cliff’s edge, his legs dangling. The redcaps squealed, suddenly realizing what a precarious situation they were in, and tried to climb up Sonny’s torso and over one another as the lip of the cliff crumbled and they began to fall. Sonny twisted in midair and managed to land on at least two of them.

When he got to his feet, all he could see for a moment was Kelley staring at him, mouth agape.

“Sonny!” she cried, sprinting toward him. He held his arms open for what he meant to be a good-bye embrace. But Kelley dodged past him, scooped up a fallen tree branch that lay on the strand, and clobbered one of the redcaps. The branch shattered in two over the creature’s ugly, lumpy head just before the vicious little troll would have plunged a long-bladed knife into Sonny’s unprotected back. The creature slumped back into a heap onto the ground.

“Thank you,” Sonny said in astonishment.

“I’m sorry I left without saying a proper good-bye,” Kelley said, the broken makeshift club gripped in her white-knuckled fist.

“I’m sorry I let you,” Sonny said, and opened his arms again. But as Kelley moved toward him, a flash of movement from above made Sonny grab her by the shoulders and thrust her toward Fennrys instead.

It seemed there wasn’t going to be time for a proper good-bye after all.

“Fenn—get her out of here!” Sonny barked, looking up. “Now!”

The rest of the redcap pack barreled over the precipice high above, cannonballing down onto the beach, punching craters in the earth as they landed—deadly, spiked boots first.

Out of the corner of his eye, Sonny saw Fennrys grab Kelley around the waist and half drag, half carry her upriver as fast as he could. Then there was no time left for anything other than the fight.

S
onny!”
Kelley shouted and struggled like a maniac in Fennrys’s iron grip as she saw Sonny brace himself for the onslaught of the horrible-looking creatures that seemed to pour down out of the sky.

Holding Kelley around the waist with his one good arm, Fennrys dragged her down a steep slope toward the river and the waterfall that tumbled in a foam-and-rainbow curtain down a sheer rock face.

Kelley screamed ferociously for him to let her go, but her voice was a tiny bird call compared to the thunder of the falls. Fennrys hauled her toward what appeared to be the solid, impenetrable wall of boiling-white water, dove straight into it . . . and then burst
through
it.

The noise from the wall of water abruptly silenced as they entered what appeared to be an underground cave or tunnel, and the entrance behind them vanished, shimmering like a mirage and turning into a wall of solid, sparkling rock. The Wolf set Kelley back down on her feet, and she turned around and punched him hard in the chest.

“Damn you!” She stalked back to the wall that had been their way in. It was no longer a way out. Sonny was there, somewhere. On the other side. Fighting those things. Still clutching the broken branch end, she hammered it at the rough stone, but the wood just splintered uselessly. “Open it, Fennrys.” Kelley rounded on the Janus. “Open it or so help me, I’ll—”

“I can’t.”

His tone of voice silenced the argument in her.

“That doorway swings in only one direction,” he said. “We don’t have any choice but to keep going forward. And you can punch me all you like, but it will not change that simple fact.”

She saw in his face, and heard in his voice, that he was telling the truth. He really couldn’t reopen the door. “But Sonny—”

“Can take care of himself.” Fennrys stared at her, unblinking. “If I didn’t think that, I wouldn’t have left him. I’m a Janus. We don’t abandon our fellows, no matter how idiotic we might think they are.” He turned on his heel and started walking. “Now come on. Unless you’d prefer to waste all that effort he’s putting into saving you.”

It felt as though they’d been traveling forever. As they trekked through an underground landscape that was like nothing Kelley had ever seen before, she’d been forced to let go of her anger toward Fennrys. She knew that it would be pointless to ask him to slow down. Or to stop. Or to go back. So she clenched her jaw against the jarring pain every time she stumbled in her strappy sandals on the uneven, rocky ground, and followed silently. Through twisting, labyrinthine caves and tunnels, Fennrys led her at a punishing pace, and she knew it was because Sonny had as good as ordered the Wolf to protect her. That thought made her feel both secretly warmed and rebellious at the same time.

“Y’know,” she muttered, half to herself, as they walked, “I don’t
need
saving. I’m perfectly capable of taking care of myself.”

Ahead of her the Wolf snorted. “Yes, yes. You’re very brave,” he said sharply. “Never mind
you
—did you ever stop to think that your being there ‘helping’ Sonny fight could get
him
killed? We’re trained for this sort of thing, Kelley. You’re not.”

“I didn’t see
you
clobbering any trolls back there.”

“Right. Nice shot. Beginner’s luck. Whatever. If it was
me
back there, I’d say take your stick and have at it. I wouldn’t give a damn. But Sonny
does
give a damn. A huge one. For him, you’re not a help in a scrap. You’re nothing but a distraction. And
that
makes you a liability—the kind that leads to unfortunate, often fatal, mistakes.”

“I . . . I didn’t think of it like that.”

“I know you didn’t,” Fennrys said in a milder tone. “Now come on. We’ve got a long way to go.”

The tunnel walls and vaulting caverns were covered with sparkling luminescent crystals that gave off a softly shifting light. Streams ran alongside them through some of the tunnels, the waters dark and mysterious, swirling and eddying to reveal flashes of swift-swimming fae. Kelley noticed, whenever they traveled beside one of those streams, that Fennrys made sure to keep her well away from the edges of the water.

At intervals the cavern branched off into what seemed to Kelley a hundred different passageways, but Fennrys always seemed to know which way to go. Occasionally he’d stop at a fork in a tunnel to lift his head and sniff at the air for a brief moment or two. Then it was back to leading her through the fantastical passageways at a near run.

When they finally emerged from the crystalline, twisting caves, it was deep night, so deep that it was almost morning again. Kelley remembered that time worked differently—or not at all—in the Faerie realms. She wondered what time it was at home, and her hand went automatically to the pocket of her shoulder bag where her cell phone lived, to check the time. The zipper was open and the pocket was empty—she must have lost the damned thing in the river.

Not like I can really phone home from here, anyway . . .

She breathed deeply of the chilly blue air. A sickle moon shone above the slender treetops, casting more light on the landscape than even a full moon did back home. The branches of the trees were bare—more bare than they were back in the mortal realm, where April was starting to tease the leaves out from slumber. Here, the land looked as if it were held suspended at the ends of winter’s chilly fingertips, moments before free-falling into spring.

Which was apparently where they were—and not, it seemed, where Fennrys had meant to lead them.

“Spring. Damn,” he swore softly. Then less so: “Damn it! Damn, damn, damn!”

“Fenn?”

Fennrys turned on his heel and started back toward the river. Kelley followed in his footsteps, but she bumped into him when he stopped abruptly. The cave entrance was gone. The river continued on in an unbroken line into the distant hills, the edges of the water trimmed with lacy ice, sparkling coldly.

“Fennrys?” Kelley wanted to know what was happening, but the Wolf’s normally unflappable demeanor was . . . well, flapping.

He muttered something in a vocabulary that made Kelley’s ears burn and said, “Right. Come on then.”

“Is something wrong?”

“No. Yes. Not for you,” he answered unhelpfully. “Maybe.”

“Where are we?” she asked.

The Fennrys Wolf, warrior, Viking prince, and fearless Janus Guard swallowed convulsively and said, in a very quiet voice, “Home.”

“We’re
where,
exactly?” Kelley asked again. They were following a wide road of smooth stones and thick, fragrant moss.

“We’re in the Vernal Lands. In the Kingdom of Spring. The shadow lands opposite your mother’s.”

Kelley had already deduced that the Vernal Lands, domain of the Court of Spring, was the
last
place in the Otherworld that Fennrys wanted to be, but she strove for what she saw as the bright spot in the situation. “So we’re far away from my mother, at least,” she said. “This is good. Right?”

“Wrong. This is . . . not good.”

“That’s not exactly encouraging.”

“I haven’t been back here since Auberon chose to make me a member of the Janus Guard. My former lord and master”—his voice was tinged with a sharp edge of sarcasm—“was less than agreeable with
that
arrangement.”

“And who is your ‘former lord and master’?”

“His name is Gwynn ap Nudd. He is the king of the Court of Spring.” They crested a rise in the land, and Fennrys pointed with his good hand at the architectural impossibility rising up in front of them. “There is where I grew up.”

A pale yellow sun rose over the hills at their backs, illuminating weeping willows that swayed gently in the breeze. On some of the branches, icicles still hung like ornaments, dripping onto the frosty grass. Banks of spring-blooming flowers lined the wide path, leading the way to the fairy-tale palace. It was like Oz, or Sleeping Beauty’s castle. Or Rivendell. More like, all of those others were pale imitations of
this
—as if the human imagination had once seen this place in all its glory and forever after strived to return to it. Or re-create it.

“You grew up
there
?”

“Yes.” Fennrys glared at the castle reproachfully. “It wasn’t my idea, but yes.”

“But it’s so pretty.” Kelley looked back and forth from the palace to her companion as they walked, having a hard time reconciling the place with the person.

“Yeah. Very nice. And not even close to where I wanted to wind up just now. Damn it all.”

“Where did you mean to go?”

“I
meant
to lead you through the crystal caves to the Summer Court—I was sure I’d followed the right way.”

Kelley frowned. “Sonny doesn’t seem to trust Titania.”

“Sonny was raised by Auberon, who spends most of
his
time and energy mistrusting Titania.” Fennrys shrugged. “When he isn’t busy trying to get her to climb into that big chilly bed of his, of course.”

“Riiight.” Kelley
really
didn’t need the visuals. “Um . . . look! Flowers.”

“Hyacinth,” Fennrys said, and cast a baleful glare at the fragrant blooms. “And those ones there are paperwhites,” he said, pointing. He caught a glimpse of her staring at him in astonishment and growled, “I hate hyacinths.”

Kelley bit her tongue to keep from laughing at his expression.

They traveled the rest of the way in silence to the palace’s terraced marble steps. Squaring his shoulders, Fennrys led her up to a pair of tall, slender doors made of polished silvery wood. He raised a bunched fist to hammer on the doors, but they opened of their own accord before he could land the first blow. Fenn sighed and gestured with a courtly sweep of his good arm for Kelley to precede him.

Kelley stepped inside the palace doors, and a reed-thin slip of a Faerie girl emerged from an alcove, walking with a ballerina’s grace. She wore a diaphanous, spring-green gown that, from the waist up—Kelley was shocked to see—would have gotten her arrested in New York, were it not for the pale blond hair that fell in an artfully obscuring fashion over her shoulders. The top half of her ensemble contrasted dramatically with the almost demure nature of her long, layered skirts that swept all the way to the floor, making it seem as though she hovered along the ground, rather than walked. The outfit managed to make Kelley, in Tyff’s torn and muddied designer jeans, feel both under- and over-dressed.

“M’lord Fennrys,” lisped the sylph in a shy, childlike voice, her lips barely opening to let the sound out. “Welcome home. We’ve sorely missed your presence here.”

Fennrys gave her a barely cursory nod and turned away, asking, “Where is your master? Tell him the lady Kelley, daughter of Winter and Autumn, wishes an audience.”

“This way,” she murmured, gesturing with one long arm. Kelley thought she saw—for the briefest instant—a pure, red gleam in the Faerie girl’s eyes. “He awaits you both.”

The Fae waved them deeper into the palace, glancing sideways at Kelley as she passed, and then falling in behind them, following at a discreet distance. Kelley tried to shake off the creepy feeling the girl gave her. It was only natural, she supposed, that the Fair Folk would have heard about her after the events of last autumn and been curious. Still, she could feel the girl’s eyes on her like drill bits boring into the muscles of her back as they walked, and she wished ill-humoredly that she could manifest her wings and flash-blind the staring girl for a moment.

Fennrys stalked ahead of them. He obviously knew the way without needing to be shown, and Kelley was bursting with curiosity to know what it had been like growing up in this place.

When they turned a corner and entered suddenly into a vast room, all thoughts of idle chat flew from Kelley’s brain.

The Great Hall of the palace of the Court of Spring was like a soaring forest of birch and willow trees, leafless and petrified into pillars of slender white marble arching high into a watercolor sky. Far overhead, where the delicate branches of the stone trees came together, they formed a latticework that supported a shimmering ceiling made of millions of shards of rainbow-colored glass.

Casting her gaze around as they walked the length of the sumptuous hall, Kelley wondered how Gwynn’s palace compared with her father’s.
With Auberon’s,
she mentally corrected herself. Before she had time to wonder how Gwynn himself would compare, he stepped through an archway that led onto a dais where stood a silver throne.

The king was tall and thin and looked as though a stiff wind could snap him in half or a heavy rain wash him away. His hair was like fine black silk, tied in a tail down his back, and his eyes were the color of sapphires, startling against the whiteness of his skin. He wore a long, sweeping robe the color of midnight overtop of a bluish white tunic, belted with silver. He did not smile when he looked upon her.

“She has Mabh’s eyes,” he said.

“Actually, my mother has her own eyes. These are mine,” Kelley snapped, the words leaving her mouth before she had time to think.

“And her temperament.”

Beside her, Kelley noticed that Fennrys wasn’t saying anything. His signature cocky swagger had been missing from the minute he’d realized they’d taken a wrong turn coming out of the caves. Well,
she
was not about to be cowed.

“Do you always speak about people standing right in front of you as if they weren’t there?” Kelley asked, her tone politely conversational. “Is this the hospitality of the Court of Spring? Seems a bit chilly to me, as though you might still be waiting for the thaw.”

Silence filled the hall, and Fennrys shifted uncomfortably. Kelley wondered for a moment whether she had been too bold and then decided it didn’t matter: she was the daughter of a queen. And a king. She would not be talked down to.

The Faerie king descended from his dais.

“Please,” he said, and held out his arm for her to take. “Forgive me. You are quite right. That was uncivil of me, and you have traveled far.” Gwynn led her gently toward a little table and a couple of chaise lounges—the kind that belonged in rooms where people didn’t ever actually sit down to lounge. “Jenii,” the king said over his shoulder to the lovely girl, “refreshments for our guests.”