Valiant (16 page)

He regarded her warily as she took a step closer to him. “I’m not very good at explaining things,” she said. “But I think you have beautiful eyes. I love the gold in them. I love that they’re different from my eyes—I see mine all the time and I’m bored with them.”

He snorted with amusement, but stayed still.

She reached up and touched the pale green of his cheek. “I like all the things that make you monstrous.”

His long fingers threaded through the peach fuzz of her hair, clawed nails resting carefully against her skin. “I’m afraid that whatsoever I touch is spoilt by the contact.”

“I’m not scared of being spoiled,” Val said.

The side of Ravus’s mouth twitched.

A woman’s voice pierced through the air, sharp as the clang of a bell. “You sent for Silarial after all.”

Val whirled. Mabry stood in the courtyard, tendrils of hair caught by the breeze. All around them, Folk were staring. After all, here was a chance for gossip.

Ravus’s hand rested on the small of Val’s back and she could feel the curl of nails against her spine. His voice was flat as he addressed Mabry. “Lady Silarial’s mercy may be dreadful, but I have little choice but to throw myself on it. I know she came to talk to you—perhaps when she sees how unhappy you have been and how helpful you are, she will take you back to Court.”

Mabry’s mouth bent into a wry smile. “We all must avail ourselves of her mercy. But now I want to do you a good turn for what you have done for me.”

Val reached into her back pocket to give back Mabry’s comb, the tines of it poking her fingers as she drew it out. Seaweed-wrapped pearls and tiny doves from the inside of sand dollars clung to the crest of the comb. Looking at it, Val suddenly saw the mermaid, necklace coiling in ropes of pearls and shell birds, dead eyes staring forever up at Val while her hair floated along the surface of the water, bereft of a matched comb.

Holding the comb in numb fingers, Val realized that it had come from a corpse.

“Mabry gave me this,” Val said.

Ravus looked at it mildly, clearly not attaching any significance to it.

“It came from the mermaid,” Val said. “She took this from the mermaid.”

Mabry snorted. “Then, how is it that it came to be in your hand?”

“She gave it—”

Mabry turned to Ravus, interrupting Val smoothly. “Did you know she’s been stealing from you—skimming off the top of your potions like a boggart drinks the head of cream off a bottle of milk?” Mabry snatched Val’s arm, pushing up the sleeve so that Ravus could see the black marks inside the crook of her elbow, the marks that looked like someone had put out a cigarette in her flesh. “And look what she’s been doing—stuffing her veins with our balm. Now, Ravus, you tell me who’s the poisoner. Will you suffer for her mistakes?”

Val reached her hand toward Ravus. He pulled back.

“What have you done?” he asked, tight-lipped.

“Yes, I shot up the potions,” Val said. There was no point in denying anything now.

“Why would you do that?” he asked. “I thought it was harmless, just something to keep the Folk from pain.”

“Never…it gives you…it makes humans…like faeries.” That wasn’t it, not exactly, but his face already said,
You didn’t mind that I was monstrous because you are a monster.

“I had thought better of you,” Ravus said. “I had thought everything of you.”

“I’m sorry,” Val said. “Please, let me explain.”

“
Humans
,” he said, the word soaked with repugnance. “Liars, all of you. Now I understand my mother’s hate.”

“I might have lied about that but I’m not lying about the comb. I’m not lying about everything.”

He grabbed Val’s shoulder, his fingers so heavy she felt as if she was held by stone. “Now I know what you saw in me to love. Potions.”

“No!” Val said.

When she looked up at Ravus’s face, there was nothing there that was familiar, nothing that was kind. His clawed thumb pressed against the pulse of her throat. “I think it is time that you were gone.”

Val hesitated. “Just let me—”

“Go!” he shouted, pushing her away from him and curling his fingers into a fist so tight that his claws cut the pads of his own hand.

Val stumbled back, her throat stinging.

Ravus turned to Mabry. “Say that you feel revenged on me. At least tell me that.”

“Not at all,” Mabry replied with a sour smile. “I did you a good turn.”

Val went, retracing her steps along the path, through the wall of fog, the woods and up to the castle, her eyes blurry and her heart aching. There, watching the distant flicker of the city lights, Val thought suddenly of her mother. Was this how she had felt, after Tom and Val were gone? Had she wanted to go back and change everything, but lacked the power?

Crawling along the rocks, Val saw the red tip of Ruth’s clove cigarette before she saw the rest of their makeshift camp. Ruth stood up when Val got close. “I thought you left me again.”

Val looked over at Lolli and Luis, curled up together. Luis looked different, his eyes circled darkly and his skin pale. “I just went for a walk.”

Ruth took another long drag, the end of her cigarette sparking. “Yeah, well, your friend Dave just went for a walk, too.”

Val thought about the revel and wondered if Dave had been there, another sweet tooth, wandering dazed among capricious masters.

“I…I,” Val sat down, overwhelmed, and covered her face with her hands. “I fucked up. I really, really fucked up.”

“What do you mean?” Ruth sat down next to Val and put her arm over her shoulder.

“It’s too hard to explain. There are faeries, like real Final Fantasy faeries, and they’ve been poisoned and this stuff I’ve been taking—it’s kind of a drug, but it’s kind of magic, too.” Val could feel tears trickle over her face, and swiped at them.

“You know,” Ruth said, “people don’t cry when they’re sad. Everyone thinks that, but it’s not true. People cry when they’re frustrated or overwhelmed.”

The mermaid’s comb was still in Val’s hand, she realized, but she’d been clutching it so tightly that it had broken into pieces. Just thin sheets of shell, nothing more. No reason to think it proved anything.

“Look, I’ll admit you sound a little crazy,” Ruth said. “But so what? Even if you are completely delusional, we still have to work out your delusion, right? An imaginary problem needs an imaginary solution.”

Val let her head fall onto Ruth’s shoulder, relaxing in a way she hadn’t relaxed since before she’d seen her mother and Tom and maybe before that. She’d forgotten how much she loved talking to Ruth.

“Okay, so start at the start.”

“When I came to the city, I was just operating on autopilot,” Val said. “I had tickets to the game, so I went. I know it sounds insane. Even when I was doing it, I thought it was crazy, like I was one of those people who kills their boss and then sits back down at their computer to finish reports.

“When I ran into Lolli and Dave, I just wanted to lose myself, to be nothing, to be nothingness. That sounds all wrong and dumb, I know.”

“Very poetic,” Ruth smirked. “Kind of goth.”

Val rolled her eyes, but smiled. “They introduced me to some faeries and that’s the part where everything stops making sense.”

“Faeries? Like elves, goblins, trolls? Like the ones on Brian Froud panties at Hot Topic?”

“Look, I—”

Ruth held up her hand. “Just checking. Okay, faeries. I’m going with it.”

“They have trouble with the iron, so there’s this stuff that Lolli calls Nevermore. Never. It keeps them from getting too sick. Humans can…take it…and it makes you able to create illusions or to make people feel the way you want them to. We were doing deliveries of it for Ravus—he’s the one that makes the Never—and we would take some for ourselves.”

Ruth nodded. “Okay. So Ravus is a faerie?”

“Something like that,” Val said. She could see a laugh in Ruth’s eyes and was grateful when it didn’t move to her lips. “Some of the Folk died of poison and they blamed Ravus. I think this comb came from one of the dead faeries and Mabry had it and I just don’t know what that means.

“Everything is so crazy. Dave turned that cop into a dog on purpose and Mabry told Ravus we were stealing from him so he thinks I had something to do with the deaths and I haven’t had Never in two days and my whole body hurts.” It was true, the aches had started up again, the pain dim but growing, the temporary reprieve of faerie fruit not enough to keep her veins from clamoring for more.

Ruth squeezed Val’s shoulders in a sideways hug. “Shit. Okay, that’s crazy. What can we do?”

“We can figure it out,” Val said. “I have all these clues; I just don’t know how they fit together.”

Val looked at the remains of the comb and thought of the mermaid again. Ravus had said rat poison killed the faerie, but rat poison was a dangerous and unlikely substance for a faerie poisoner to use, especially an alchemist like Ravus. And why would he want to kill a bunch of harmless faeries?

A human could have done it. A human courier was expected, not at all suspicious.

Val remembered the first delivery she’d ever been on and the bottle of Never Dave had unstoppered, breaking the wax. Shouldn’t Mabry have been worried? With all the poisonings, wasn’t that like taking an aspirin with the safety seal broken? The only way that anyone would do that was if they already know who the poisoner was or if they were the poisoner themselves.

And Mabry had known that Val was using. Someone was telling her.

“But why?” Val said out loud.

“Why what?” asked Ruth.

Val stood up and paced on the rock. “I’m thinking. What’s the result of the poisonings? Ravus gets in trouble!”

“So?” Ruth asked.

“So Mabry wants revenge on him,” Val said. Of course: Revenge for the death of her lover. Revenge for her exile.

Mabry then. Mabry and a human accomplice. Dave was obvious, since he’d been the one that didn’t bother to disguise that he was skimming Never from Mabry, but what reason did he have to kill faeries?

It could have been Luis. He hated faeries for what they’d done to his eye. He wore all that metal to protect himself. And he was using the Never, as the marks under his knee proved, even if he denied it. But for what if he couldn’t see glamour? And why didn’t he care that Dave had gone missing? Why pick now to hook up with Lolli when she’d wanted him for longer than Val had known her? He was so unworried. It was as though he knew where his brother was.

Val stopped at that thought.

“This is what we have to do,” Val said. “We have to go to Mabry’s house while she’s still at the revel and find proof that she’s behind the poisonings.” Proof that would convince Ravus that she was innocent and proof that would convince the others he wasn’t the poisoner at all. Proof that would save him so that he would forgive her.

“Okay,” said Ruth, shouldering her backpack. “Let’s go help your imaginary friends.”

Strike a glass, and it will not endure an instant; simply

do not strike it, and it will endure a thousand years.

—G. K. C
HESTERTON
,
O
RTHODOXY

Val and Ruth made it to Riverside Park in the cold hours before dawn. The sky was deep dark and the streets were hushed. Val’s heart beat rabbit-fast, adrenaline and muscle cramping keeping her from noticing the chill air or the late hour. Ruth shivered and wrapped her monster-fur coat tighter as the wind blew up off the water. Her cheeks were streaked with makeup, smudged by tears and careless hands, but when she smiled at Val, Ruth looked like her old, confident self.

The park itself was mostly empty, with a small group of people huddled near one of the walls, one of them smoking what smelled like a joint. Val looked down the row of apartment buildings across from the park, but none of them was quite right. She picked out the clogged fountain she’d stood at days earlier, but when she looked across the street, the door facing her was the wrong color and there was a metal grate over the windows.

“Well?” Ruth asked.

Val shifted her weight. “I’m not sure.”

“What are we going to do if you find it?”

Looking up, Val saw a gargoyle in a place slightly different from where she remembered, but the stone monster was enough to convince her that the house she was looking at had to be Mabry’s. Perhaps her memory was just off.

“Watch for anyone coming,” Val said, starting to cross the road. Her heart thundered in her chest. She had no idea what she was getting them into.

Ruth hurried after her. “Great. Lookout. I’m a lookout. Another thing to put on my college applications. What do I do if I see someone?”

Val looked back. “I’m not sure, actually.”

Staring at the building for a long moment, Val grabbed hold of one of the gutter rings on the downspout and hoisted herself up the wall. It was like climbing a tree, like climbing a rope in gym class.

“What are you doing?” Ruth called, her voice shrill.

“What did you think I needed a lookout for? Now shut up.”

Val climbed higher, her feet pushing against the brick of the building, her fingers digging into the loops of metal as the gutter groaned and dented under her scrambling weight. As she reached for a windowsill, she found her hand in the mouth of a gargoyle, its chicken-bred-with-terrier face tilted to one side, eyes wide with surprise or excitement. She snatched her fingers back moments before the stone teeth snapped closed. Off balance, she kicked at the air for a moment, her full weight on the gutter and her one hand. The aluminum bent, tearing free of the supports.

Val jammed her foot into the brick and heaved hard, jumping and scrambling to catch the ledge. She heard a high-pitched squeak from below as she grabbed hold of the windowsill. Ruth. For a moment, she just hung on, afraid to move. Then she pulled herself up along the molding and pushed the window. It stuck and for a moment, she was afraid it was locked or painted shut, but she pushed harder and it gave. Climbing inside, past the tangled curtains, Val found herself in Mabry’s bedroom. The floor was gleaming marble and the bed was a curving canopy of willow branches, piled with rumpled silks and satins. One side of the bed was clean, but the other was dusted with dirt and brambles.

Val went out into the hall. There was a series of doors that opened into empty rooms and a staircase of ebonized wood. She walked down it and into the parlor, the squeak of the floorboards and the splash of the fountain the only sounds she heard.

The parlor was like she remembered, but the furniture seemed differently arranged and one of the doorways appeared larger. Val walked out of the apartment and into the main hallway, careful to brace Mabry’s door open. She flipped the lock on the front door and jerked it open. Ruth gaped at her for a moment from the sidewalk, then ran inside.

“You’ve gone crazy,” Ruth said. “We just broke into some posh building.”

“It’s protected by glamour,” Val said. “It has to be.” For the first time, Val considered the two doors she’d assumed went to other apartments. One was set opposite the door to Mabry’s, the other at the end of the hall. Given the size of the rooms and the staircase in Mabry’s apartment and the size of the building from the outside, it didn’t seem possible that the doors led to anywhere at all. Val shook her head to clear it. It didn’t matter. What mattered was that she found some evidence to implicate Mabry, something that would prove she poisoned the other fey, prove it not just to Ravus, but to Greyan and anyone else who thought Ravus was behind the deaths.

“At least it’s warm in here,” Ruth said, walking into the apartment and turning around on the gleaming marble floor. Her voice echoed in the nearly empty rooms. “If we have to be cat burglars, I’m going to see what’s to steal in the fridge.”

“We’re trying to find evidence she’s a poisoner. Just a thought before you start putting random things in your mouth.” Ruth shrugged and walked past Val.

A display cabinet rested in one corner of the sitting room. Val peered through the glass. There was a bit of bark inside, braided with crimson hair; a figurine of a ballerina, her arms on her hips and her shoes red as roses; the broken neck of a bottle; and a faded and browned flower. Val thought she remembered different bizarre treasures from her earlier visit.

It made Val conscious of how impossible her task was. How would she know evidence, even if she saw it? Ravus might recognize these objects—know their uses and perhaps even part of their history, but she could make nothing of them.

It was hard to imagine Mabry as sentimental, but she must have been once, before Tamson’s death made her hateful.

“Hey,” Ruth said from the next room. “Look at this.”

Val followed her voice. She was in the music room, beside the lap harp, sitting on an ottoman covered in an odd, pinkish leather. The body of the instrument looked to be gilded wood, carved with acanthus swirls, and each of the strings was a different shade. Most of them were brown or gold or black, but a few were red and one was leaf green.

Ruth knelt down beside it.

“Don’t—,” Val said, but Ruth’s fingers brushed a brown string. Immediately a wailing flooded the room.

“Once I was a lady in waiting to the Queen Nicnevin,” a voice full of tears intoned, accent rich and strange. “I was her favorite, her confidante, and I took my pleasure in harrying the others. Nicnevin had a particular toy, a Knight from the Seelie Court that she was overfond of. His tears of hate gave her more pleasure than another’s cries of love. I was called before the Queen—she demanded to know if I was intriguing with him. I was not. Then she held up a pair of his gloves and demanded that I look at the embroidery along the cuffs. It was a careful pattern sewn with my own hair. There was more proof—sightings of us together, a note in his hand swearing devotion, none of it true. I fell down, begging Nicnevin, wild with fear. As they led me to my death, I saw one of the other ladies, Mabryn, smiling, her eyes bright as needles, her fingers reaching out to pluck a single strand of hair from my head. Now I must tell my tale forevermore.”

“Nicnevin?” Ruth asked. “Who is that supposed to be?”

“I think she’s the old Unseelie Queen,” Val said. She dragged her fingers across several cords at once. A cacophony of voices rose up, each one telling its bitter tale, each one mentioning Mabry. “They’re all hair. The hair of Mabry’s victims.”

“This is some spooky-ass shit,” Ruth said.

“Shhh,” Val said. One of the voices sounded familiar, but she couldn’t quite place where she’d heard it before. She plucked a golden string.

“Once I was a courtier in the service of the Queen Silarial,” a male voice said. “I lived for sport, for riddles, and dueling and dance. Then I fell in love and all those things ceased to matter. My only joy was in Mabry. I desired a thing only if it delighted her. I basked in her gladness. Then, one lazy afternoon, as we gathered flowers to weave into garlands, I saw that she’d wandered off. I followed and overheard her speaking with a creature from the Unseelie Court. They seemed well acquainted and her voice was soft as she told him the information she had gathered for the Unseelie Queen. I should have been angry, but I was too afraid for her. If Silarial had found out, the consequences would have been terrible. I told Mabry that I would tell no one, but that she must leave directly. She told me she would and wept bitterly over deceiving me. Two days later I was to duel in a tournament with a friend. When I donned my armor, it felt strange, lighter, but I paid it no mind. Mabry told me she’d stitched her own hair into it as a token. When my friend struck, the armor crumbled and the sword cut me right through. I felt the silk of her hair against my face and knew I was betrayed. Now I must tell my tale forevermore.”

Val sat down hard, staring at the harp. Mabry was a spy for the Unseelie Court. She had killed Tamson herself. Ravus had only been her instrument.

“Who was that?” Ruth asked. “Did you know him?”

Val shook her head. “Ravus did, though. He was the one swinging the sword in that story.”

Ruth bit her lower lip. “This is so complicated. How are we going to figure out anything?”

“We already figured out something,” Val said.

She stood up and walked into the next room. It was the kitchen. There was no stove, however; no refrigerator, only a sink in a long expanse of polished slate. Val opened up one of the cabinets, but it was filled only with empty jars.

Val thought about Ravus’s glamoured form, his golden eyes the flaw in his disguise. There was something disquieting about these perfect rooms, dustless and without even a stray hair or bit of grime, echoing only with footsteps and the splash of water. But if there was a glamour, she had no idea what was beneath it.

Ruth walked into the room and Val noticed the white powder drizzling from her backpack.

“What’s that?” Val asked.

“What?” Ruth looked behind her, on the floor, and shouldered off the bag. She laughed. “Looks like I ripped the canvas and popped a hole in our baby.”

“Shit. This is worse than a bread-crumb trail. Mabry’s going to know we were in here.”

Ruth squatted down and started sweeping the powder together with her hands. Instead of forming a pile, it gusted up in white clouds.

As Val looked at the flour, she got an idea. “Wait. Hey, I think I might have to commit infanticide.”

Ruth shrugged and pulled out the sack. “I guess we can always have another one.”

Val ripped open the paper packaging and started sprinkling flour on the floor. “There has to be something here, something we can’t see.”

Ruth grabbed a handful of white powder and threw it at the door. Val tossed another fistful. Soon the air was thick with it. Their hair was covered and when they breathed, flour coated their tongues.

It settled all over the apartment, showing the fish pond as a broken pipe spilling water into buckets and pooling on the floor, revealing the sagging sheetrock of the ceiling, the chipped tiles along the walls and tracks of mouse droppings on the floor.

“Look.” Ruth walked over to one of the walls, powder making her ghostly. Flour was stuck to most of the wall, but there was a large bare patch.

Val tossed more powder at the gap, but instead of hitting the wall, it seemed to go through the space.

“We got it.” Val grinned and lifted her fist. “Wonder twin powers activate!”

Ruth grinned back, knocking her fist into Val’s. “Shape of two fucking lunatics.”

“Speak for yourself,” Val said, and ducked through the gap.

There, in a shadowed room hung with velvet drapes, was Luis. He lay on a carpet patterned with pomegranates and was wrapped in a woolen blanket, but despite that, he was shivering. There was blood on his scalp and several of his braids had been cut off.

At first Val just gaped at him. “Luis?” she finally managed.

He looked up, squinting, as though against a bright light. “Val?” He scrambled to a sitting position. “Where’s Dave? Is he all right?”

“I don’t know,” she said absently. Her mind was racing. “What are you doing here?”

“Can’t you see that I’m chained to the floor?” Luis said. He turned his wrists and she saw that his own braids were wrapped around them, pulled taut.

“The floor?” Val repeated stupidly. “But what about the carpet?”

Luis laughed. “I suppose this place looks beautiful to you.”

Val looked at the low couches, the bookshelves overflowing with cloth-covered fairy stories, the faded grandeur of the carpet and painted molding on the walls. “It’s one of the most gorgeous rooms I’ve ever been in.”

“The plaster walls are cracked and there’s a leak in the ceiling that pretty much means that whole corner is black with mold. There’s no furniture here, either, and certainly no rug—just floorboards with some old nails sticking up out of them.”

Val looked around at the soft light coming from a pewter lamp with a fringed shade. “Then what is it that I’m seeing?”

“Glamour, what else?”

Ruth ducked her head into the room. “What’s goi—Luis?”

“Hold on. How can we be sure it’s really you, Luis?” Val asked.

“Who else would I be?”

Ruth came most of the way in, her foot still in the glamoured opening, as though she thought it might close at any moment without a wedge. “We just left you in the park and you were sleeping.”

Luis let his head fall back. “Yeah, well, the last time I saw Ruth, I was with Lolli and Dave in the park. We’d picked out a place to sleep near the weather castle. Lolli was leaned up against me, dozing off when Dave just got up and walked off. I knew he was upset. Shit, I was freaking out, too. I thought maybe he wanted to be alone.