The Seelie King's War Read online

  Snail would need every bit of time he could give her.

  I will buy that hour with my life if need be. For Faerie, he thought.

  And for Snail.

  2

  SNAIL ON THE ROAD

  Snail hadn’t time to change or pull her hair back into a horsetail. Luckily she’d taken a bath before falling asleep, mostly to wash off the blood and flesh, pus and puke that had adhered to her skin. As a midwife’s apprentice, she’d learned a lot about cleanliness. But as a battlefield doctor . . . well, things weren’t quite that simple.

  And that so-called sleep of hers had been much delayed because of the numbers of wounded she’d been tending at the Astaeri chapel, where carvings of winged feylings watched hollow-eyed over the wounded and dying. Then what sleep she finally fell into had been cut brutally short by the steward’s wake-up call.

  That nipped-nose busybody, toffier than a toff was what she thought of him, rarely addressing him by name. Balnar. Whatever that name means. Probably, she thought, it translates into knee bender. Or bottom polisher.

  When he woke her, she told him some of what she was thinking. If it bothered him, he’d made no reply. Either he was too well schooled to show his annoyance or those words didn’t translate easily into High Court Seelie.

  She’d wanted to tell Aspen off as well, but doing so in the throne room, especially when he looked so miserable, made the words feel like an infant’s whine-stopper in her mouth.

  And then Aspen had suddenly grinned at her, and all she wanted to do was bop him on the nose. But kings—even sort-of-friendly kings who have rescued you as often as you’ve rescued them—don’t take lightly to being bopped. On the nose or anywhere else.

  So she’d glared at him. It wasn’t as if she hadn’t glared at him before.

  Aspen.

  Her old companion.

  Her only friend.

  She never called him by his king name—which was unsayable, syllable after syllable tumbling out. She’d tried to pronounce it as they’d flown from the last battlefield to the castle on that flying rug creature, the bowser.

  Aspen had watched as she’d struggled with it.

  “Just keep calling me Aspen,” he’d said at last. “Or Prince. Or Hey You! I’m not really . . . any different now.”

  “Except for that gold thing,” she’d told him, meaning the golden aura of the Seelie king, which seemed to come and go without his knowing it, or at least without his acknowledging it, except for a swift grimace every now and then as if the gold actually hurt.

  AS SNAIL RACED down the stairs, trailed by seven soldiers who were the new king’s gift to her on this impossible task—bodyguards or watchdogs, she didn’t know which—she said that long, silly name aloud. “King Ailenbran Astaeri, Bright Celestial, Ruire of the Tir na nOg, and Lord of the Seelie kingdom.”

  It was a mouthful. She knew Aspen. Trusted him. Even liked him. But she didn’t really know this Ailenbran person.

  “Yes, your ladyship?” asked the soldier closest to her, a tall elf with her hair shorn to the roots. Only the red buttons on her shoulders proclaimed her sex, clan allegiance, and rank, though not her name. She was female. Of the House of the Poppy. She seemed to be the one in charge. “Do you need to speak again to His Majesty?”

  “No, just . . . just trying out his name.”

  “It’s hard for strangers,” the woman said.

  But Snail wasn’t a stranger, not to Aspen, the Hostage Prince. Not to the poor captive prince in the Unseelie Court who had been tricked into breaking the truce. Not to Karl the minstrel—Aspen’s runaway name—with whom she’d battled ogres, trolls, drows, carnivorous mermen, never abandoning one another. It was only this new King Ailenbran who was strange.

  But I haven’t changed, she thought. Not at all. Well, not often, anyway.

  “My lady . . . ?” the elf guard asked.

  Snail realized the silent conversation she was having with herself must have shown on her face.

  “Just practicing,” she said. She didn’t say for what, and the guard didn’t ask.

  But she grunted and looked Snail up and down.

  Snail knew her type. Hard to the core, no room for compromise, quick to make decisions, quicker to choose sides. She’d met quite a number of them in the three days of saving what Seelie soldiers she could, bringing them back to the Seelie fortress on the flying bowser, some of them raving with fever, some of them weeping their losses.

  That was when she’d learned the names and totems of the Seelie clans. She’d felt it was the least she could do for those in her charge. The best she had was long spent in her own private battle against rent flesh, broken bones, and gushing blood. And burying the ones who didn’t make it, the majority of her patients. When the last who could be saved had been delivered to the castle, and she’d looked around for the bowser to thank him for his hard work, he’d disappeared.

  “Gone off,” a palace guard had told her. “Just flapped itself up into the air, spun over the place twice, and disappeared.” Wearily, he pointed to the south. “That way.”

  Remembering all this, Snail turned to the Poppy soldier. “Tell me your name, warrior,” she said carefully. They preferred the term warrior to soldier. Snail felt strongly that if she was to die on this commission from the king, she should honor the names of those who would die with her.

  “Alith, m’lady,” said the elven guard without the slightest hint of sniffery.

  “My name is Snail,” Snail returned. “At least, that’s what my stepmother called me, and what the king prefers, and is as close to a real name as I have. I had another, but it didn’t stick.” Sofie, she thought, but didn’t say it aloud. She nodded at Alith. “And I’m no real lady, you know, just a battle pal of the king’s.”

  One of the soldiers, his buttons blue and green, like Snail’s eyes, snickered behind them and whispered loud enough to be heard: “Battle pal, that what they call it now?”

  Snail made no move to silence him, but Alith turned and glared.

  “One more such outburst, soldier,” Alith told him, the term diminishing him in public, “and you will be sent home in disgrace.” Her face was stern enough to be made out of wood. “The king has sent the doctor”—she emphasized Snail’s position—“on a mission so secret, neither you nor I know aught about it but to obey m’lady’s every command. And you will obey, or I shall battlefield you, and no one will bring me to account for it. I am of the House of the Poppy, the house where General Limnith resides. I am daughter of her first family and hold the records of the house in both archery and the sword. You are an upstart of an upstart house, here only because your betters died so recently in battle, they have not yet even been praised and sung into the earth.”

  At that moment, Snail knew that Alith would get her where she needed to go or die for her.

  Or both.

  AT THE BOTTOM of the castle steps, a pair of equerries held the reins of seven horses, two rangy roans, three blacks, two greys.

  Horses! Snail thought. Why does it have to be horses? The bowser had been bad enough, but she’d managed all right because he’d liked her. Understood her. But the closest she’d ever gotten to a horse was to the unicorns who pulled Odds’s wagons, and they were skittish beasts with minds tuned only to grass, grain, and water.

  She knew that on the bowser, flying high over the heads of the Unseelie folk, she’d be able to watch their maneuvers, spy them long before they were even aware she wasn’t just a strange bird overhead.

  But horses . . .

  “These are our fastest steeds,” Alith was saying. She took the reins of one of the roans, about one-third the size of a unicorn. “This one is gentle, and she will listen to your hands.”

  “My hands?”

  “On the reins, m’lady.” She handed the reins to Snail, who eyed the horse with a certain amount of distaste. The
mare eyed her back in much the same way.

  Alith came close, almost whispering in Snail’s ear. “You . . . er . . . have ridden before, m’lady? Yes?”

  Snail hissed back, “I was a midwife’s apprentice before. . . . We didn’t have a lot of horses. But I helped drive a team of unicorns in the war.” She didn’t add that this meant she’d mostly sat talking to Dagmarra the dwarf who did the actual driving, holding on to a rein only when asked to, which was practically never.

  “Well, speak to the mare as you do to a laboring woman, with kindness intermixed with authority. She just wants to please you, bred for it, though it may take her a while to figure that out.”

  That made as much sense to Snail as anything could. She leaned in and said to the little horse, “I will guide you if you will guide me, horse.” But even she could hear the uncertainty in her voice.

  The mare shook her head.

  “Her name is Goodspeed,” said Alith. “Blow softy into her nostrils first. Your breath will become her breath.”

  “Listen, Goodspeed,” said Snail, sending a breath into the horse’s soft nostrils, one side and then the other, “I’m as new to you as you to me. So we will learn together. But . . .” And then she spoke the last four words with the authority of a midwife, battle doctor, and gravedigger. “But go we must.”

  “And,” Alith said, “with good speed.”

  “With good speed,” Snail repeated, just as the equerry moved close to help her mount.

  THEY RODE SOUTH, which was where the king’s foresters had informed the general that Professor Odds and the changeling hordes had been heading. The foresters knew, because if any king’s deer was killed—a deed punishable by death—it lit up a sorcerer’s map in the Royal Forester’s Hall. But King Ailenbran had granted the changeling army dispensation to hunt his deer, though they may not have known it, so they were safe from prosecution. Snail had been so proud of Aspen then, though hadn’t told him so. Now she wished she had.

  As they rode on, Snail leaned over her horse’s neck often to tell her what a good, swift companion she was. At each word, the little roan seemed to move faster.

  “Thank you, Alith,” Snail whispered under her breath.

  Snail supposed that they were making good time, but the paths through the woods seemed endless, and endlessly similar. The trees were unmoving bark-clad sentinels they had to maneuver around. Some had even fallen down and blocked paths, which meant two of the soldiers—a different pair each time—had to dismount and haul the offending greenery to one side.

  They also had to rest the horses at frequent intervals.

  At one such rest, Alith had explained, “The horses cannot keep going without a stop. They will if you ask them to. They will burst their hearts for you. But then they will be dead, and you will have no way to move quickly.”

  The bowser needed no such stops, Snail thought. He simply flew us where we wanted to go, then lay on the ground, spread out like the rug he so closely resembled, and slept until called upon again. She suddenly remembered one time when she’d been so exhausted she could hardly stand, dropping down in the meadow grass right next to him. While she was sleeping, he’d wrapped himself around her, and she’d slept to the bowser’s snores like the rumble of thunder before heavy rains. She doubted a horse could do that. Goodspeed or not.

  AHEAD, THE TREES seemed to thin out, and the moon was already high above the tips of the tallest firs.

  Alith held up a hand. “We camp here.”

  The excuse she offered Snail was that the horses needed the stop, but Snail suspected Alith knew that she either had to get off Goodspeed or drop off. Her thighs felt loose and wobbly. And her back felt as if someone had stuck old Chef Bonetooth’s sharpest cleaver into the lower part of her spine.

  “We all need sleep,” Alith added.

  Snail doubted that. No one else looked in the least bit tired.

  “How long, sir?” asked one of the men, a hawk-nosed fey with a row of crooked teeth who looked far older than the others. An army commander, it seemed, was always a “sir,” never a “ma’am.”

  “We’ll take an hour-long watch each, Snaggle,” Alith told him.

  Snaggle, Snail thought, almost giddy with exhaustion. How appropriate.

  “We leave at first light.” Alith turned to Snail. “A few hours only, m’lady.” It was both a warning and an apology.

  Snail nodded. “Understood.”

  She dropped off of Goodspeed immediately, then dropped into slumber almost as fast.

  3

  ASPEN’S MEETINGS

  With Snail gone, Aspen threw himself into devising a clever scheme sure to save the castle from the approaching horde. At least, that was his plan.

  First he talked to his generals again, General Limnith of the Home Guard and long-retired general Frogmouth PondHopper. They met in a small, private chamber off the throne room.

  Balnar shuffled around, moving thick tapestries aside so sunlight could shine through the mundane glass, speaking little but absorbing a great deal.

  General Limnith stood straight and tall and severely beautiful as she reported to Aspen the impossibility of their situation.

  “We could not defend these walls against a one-armed boggart with a wooden eye and a dodgy hip.”

  It was the same thing she had said to him after the last of the battle refugees had been flown in. Aspen thought the general’s remark odd, given that she herself limped and wore a patch over an eye lost in the last Seelie War.

  The bowser had been magnificent in its flights, never hesitating nor complaining, nor—as far as others could see—flagging.

  But to Aspen, the animated rug had looked worn, dusty, grey. He would have ordered the bowser cleaned and brushed when the last Seelie folk had been brought into the castle, but when he looked around, the thing could not be found.

  “East,” a guard had said, pointing southeast, toward the coast.

  At the time, Aspen had been angry at the bowser’s flight from them. But afterward he realized how little he understood about made things. Did they have a natural wear-out the way magic things did? Or did they go on forever? He decided just to be grateful for all that the bowser had done.

  “Even if your lady Snail finds this professor of yours,” the general went on, “even if she convinces him to bring his people to the castle, and they get here on time, a mess of mud-men manning the ramparts will be about as much use as a boar at a birthing.”

  Aspen wondered if the “boar at a birthing” metaphor was a jab at Snail’s former occupation but quickly decided the general did not mean anything by it.

  “And, yes,” Limnith added, flicking her long silver braid for emphasis, “I think sending a midwife’s apprentice to raise an army is an exceptionally poor way of running a war, though a very good way to lose it.”

  Or I could be wrong, Aspen thought.

  He was about to reprimand her when PondHopper snapped at a passing fly.

  General PondHopper had been ancient before Aspen’s father had been born, though terrifically loyal, as all of the Toad Clan were. Balnar had reminded Aspen of this just the day before.

  “Pond!” barked Limnith, which startled the old frog prince into closing his mouth and saluting.

  She turned back to Aspen. “Majesty, my apologies. That is the problem with bringing these old amphis out of retirement.”

  “We had no choice,” Aspen told her quickly. “As we have no choice in sending a midwife–field surgeon”—he made the distinction quite clear—“off on a mission of great moment.”

  The general wasn’t slow. She understood his emphasis, realized her mistake, and nodded solemnly. Then she saluted briskly before taking PondHopper’s withered right arm in hers, marching them both out the door before Aspen could dismiss them.

  Well, he thought, sighing, that went about as well as could b
e expected.

  AS SOON AS the generals left, Balnar—always anticipating his king’s next move—ushered in a trio of invited Seelie architects. Aspen had wondered if there might have been something in the palace’s structure that he and the generals had overlooked in thinking about defenses. These architects were from the greatest schools, scholars of the art, some even descendants of the palace designers. Having been raised primarily in the Unseelie Court, Aspen had been a bit surprised to learn that Seelie architects all lived long enough to have heirs. Unseelie architects invariably died along with their secrets shortly after building whatever castle, keep, or cairn they’d been commissioned for. But then most Unseelie architects were changelings, stolen from the world of men and raised to build, never knowing what their fate would be.

  And in truth, he thought, we Seelie are no better. The architects of Astaeri Palace may have been elvish, but the labor was all slave. It was well known that just the making of the moat for Astaeri Palace had cost the lives of more than a thousand slaves, thousands of years ago, in the time of his great-great-grandfather. To raise the building itself, he supposed, the number had likely been too high to count.

  He asked the architects his three Sticksman questions, which they gaped at, and then pressed them for information on the palace.

  They blathered on for an hour before the balding dwarfling, highest ranking of the three, admitted, “There are no secret doors, hidden passageways, or collapsible walls, sire.”

  The second, an elflord who’d probably been so low in his family ranking, he’d taken neither to the army nor bardry, added, “No trapped corridors, nor any other architectural oddity that would allow us to win the day.” He seemed almost happy to report this to Aspen, who was—his sneer said clearly—too young and too much the Hostage Prince to claim his allegiance.