The Seelie King's War Read online

  But mostly, he concluded, I am furious with myself.

  8

  SNAIL’S SECOND MOUNTAIN

  This time when they headed out, there were only the four of them: Snap and Snaggle in the front, riding side by side whenever possible, Snaggle alone in front when the trail—which was wreathed with bittersweet—became too narrow.

  Snail came next.

  Alith “held the back door,” as she called it.

  Even if Snail had forgotten Alith’s stern warning about looking backward, she wouldn’t have dared. Goodspeed was strangely nervous, perhaps missing the other horses, or maybe she feared to get tangled in the encroaching berry bushes. Her leg muscles trembled, and tiny runnels of fear, like worms beneath loose soil, raced across her neck and withers.

  “Shhhhhh,” Snail called, even leaning over in the saddle to whisper in her ear. “Hush, Goodspeed. Be a good girl.” But the horse didn’t—or couldn’t—listen to her rider and seemed to startle at every shadow, almost unseating Snail half a dozen times.

  Yet, despite shades and shadows, despite the wind suddenly picking up, despite leaves and twigs of varying sizes scattering across the trail, they met no one and nothing appeared amiss.

  At last, Snap, riding directly in front of Snail in the narrow passage, sat back in his saddle and wiggled his shoulders, almost as if to say: Nothing to worry about now.

  Snail followed his lead, sitting more loosely, relaxing, even letting out a breath she hadn’t realized she’d been holding. Goodspeed, too, took the cue. Her nervousness departed once the trail widened again and the bittersweet thinned out. Snap moved his horse up by Snaggle’s side. The gap widened between Snail’s roan and the other horses, and Goodspeed’s gait became bouncier.

  The ride continued to alternate between the two landscapes as the four horses and their riders made their way around Little Sister. The threaded forest path was littered with old leaves, reminders of past autumns, and the trees seemed to sway like ancient women at court balls whenever a breeze managed to push its way through. And then forest gave way to small meadows where the horses could lean their long necks down to grab at the tops of the grass as they waded through belly-high greenery.

  But in both landscapes, Snail could not entirely shake off her fears. While the forest was full of shadowy places that made the back of her neck prickle, the meadows seemed somehow too open, too vulnerable for comfort, for there was nowhere to hide.

  Hour followed hour, the sun moved overhead, and at last the day began to cool down.

  Alith—who’d been having an intense talk with Snaggle in the last meadow, caught up with Snail and said, “Almost in sight of Big Sister. We will make our way across one final meadow, and then I’ll send the scouts ahead.”

  Snail nodded. She didn’t turn her head. She didn’t have to, for she was already facing where they’d come from in order to talk with Alith. She thought she saw something at the shadowy edge of the forest they’d just left. Not a deer. They’d seen less than a handful and mostly near water, drinking or wading. The herds, she assumed, had already been well thinned by changeling poachers.

  “Alith . . .” she began, “I think the Greens may be crowding us.”

  Turning, Alith replied, “They wouldn’t dare . . .” as an arrow, red-shafted, flew between them, and another hit Alith’s horse high on its rump.

  The horse bolted, racing forward past Snap and Snaggle, who were both already alerted by Alith’s cry and the sound of more arrows whizzing from the meadow’s edge. And another sound now, a long skirling yell like the screeching of a hunting hawk.

  By then, Alith had been unhorsed and was crouching in the grass to make a smaller target of herself, shouting to the others, “Get down, get down!”

  Snap threw himself to the left side and Snaggle to the right, but Snail could get neither of her boots out of the stirrups without help, and besides, she’d lost the roan’s reins, so the little horse was racing away from the hurly of arrows and the cries of the invaders and into the next patch of forest ahead.

  Snail had known at once they were being attacked by Border Lords. She recognized them from their battle cry, the loud ululation that mimicked the pipes they loved to play. But she didn’t know how many there had been. At least three, she thought, maybe a lot more.

  At the same time, she realized that since she couldn’t seem to get down as instructed, her chances of escape were better in the forest than in the open meadow. The little mare had saved her with that impassioned burst of speed.

  Snail knew there was a fierce enemy behind, and what was before her was still unknown. This is a hideous game of chance, she thought, knowing that in this instance, the unknown was a marginally better wager.

  Goodspeed seemed to know that, too, and they barreled along the trail, not caring that they were leaving a huge trail of hoofprints and broken twigs that even an incompetent tracker could follow.

  Branches reached out to slap at them, one leaving a welt on Snail’s forehead and another opening a gash on the horse’s hindquarters. Twice Goodspeed leapt over logs, both times almost unseating Snail, who managed to stay on only because she’d wound her hands in the little mare’s mane.

  They kept running until Goodspeed ran out of speed, out of legs, out of breath itself.

  Snail could see a lighter space in the forest ahead. She leaned forward, gathered up the fallen reins, drew in a deep breath, and whispered to the horse, “Even a bit of speed is better than no speed at all.” And making a clucking sound with her tongue against the top of her palate, she encouraged the roan into a fast walk.

  The horse did her bidding but was houghing badly as they moved forward, and suddenly Snail remembered Alith saying, “They will keep going 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.”

  She realized this was the moment Alith had warned her of, but she’d no other options. She had to move forward or be captured.

  Or die.

  Or—she thought—maybe both.

  She let Goodspeed slow down but didn’t dare let her stop.

  I’d weep, she thought, if I thought it would help, then drew in a deep breath so she could make a good next choice.

  However, the little horse seemed to have caught a second wind and picked up speed on her own.

  “You are your name, little one,” Snail said, giving Goodspeed a pat on the shoulder, and began to cry in relief.

  When they got to the place where the forest trail ended, Snail could see the sparkling of hundreds of early campfires, like fireflies, on the plain below. She could just about make out the form of Odds’s big linked wagons in the very center of the fires. And above them all loomed the mountain, casting a huge shadow as the sun began to disappear behind it.

  She wondered if she was bringing the changelings a message of hope or a thunder of Border Lords in her wake. She strained to see behind, but the dark was fast closing in.

  It was then she heard a heavy thudding behind her. Glancing back quickly, she could see the black forms of two horses running flat out toward her.

  Snail knew Goodspeed had nothing left to give and flung herself off the horse. This time luckily both feet came out of the stirrups, though her left boot stayed behind.

  Reaching down into the right boot, she drew out her old knife. Then she stood and, at the same time, unsheathed Alith’s knife that she’d tied around her waist. They would have to do.

  “Come on, you blasted Border Lords,” Snail cried. “I’ve already killed an assassin, an ogre, and a carnivorous mer. You won’t find me wanting.” It was an exaggeration of course. But they weren’t to know that. And besides, all she really wanted to do was to survive.

  But the riders couldn’t have heard her anyway, over the pounding of their own horses’ hooves. They kept riding, as if to run her down. She wondered what g
ood the knives would be against horse hooves, against the bows in the riders’ hands, against the arrows.

  She thought of the unmourned Groan hung on the tree by his hair, arrows sprouting out of him like spring roots, and started to tremble.

  It was too late to run.

  9

  ASPEN GETS GOOD COUNSEL

  Aspen entered the throne room to find his mother standing alone and looking up at the throne as if wondering why her husband wasn’t sitting there.

  I must seem a pale replacement to her.

  She had lost weight in the weeks since she’d helped Aspen and Snail escape the castle, grown weaker and perhaps even a tad frail. Probably because she’d spent most of that time in the dungeon. Balnar had carried down her special loom to keep her hands and mind occupied during the long, lonely days. It had been Balnar who brought her food and water to keep her alive when everyone else had fled, taking the dungeon key with them. It had been Balnar who told him of the queen’s whereabouts.

  And when Aspen had returned from the battlefield with news of the king’s death—and possibly his brothers’ deaths as well, for he was shining in the gold of kingship—she’d wept even as she stumbled, cramped and sore, over the ruins of the prison door he’d just blasted to pieces.

  “How can you weep for the man who locked you away like a criminal?” Aspen had snarled.

  “I did criminal things,” she told him. “And I did them willingly. Your father only did his duty. He always did his duty.” Then she’d laid her hand on his shoulder, which immediately began to thrum with the royal golden glow. “As you must now do.”

  Aspen watched her silently and wondered at a woman who could deny a monarch in order to be a good mother, yet still loved the man who denied his own fatherhood to act as the king.

  Now, somehow sensing Aspen in the throne room—a mother’s awareness, Aspen suspected, nothing magical—she turned and smiled.

  “Ailenbran,” she said in her soft voice, holding out her heart hand to him.

  He stepped forward and gave her his left hand as well. Up close, he could see lots of grey strands in her ash blonde hair. She ages not a whit for centuries, and as soon as I return, she goes grey as a harvest goose.

  “Where is that girl of yours?” she asked, as if it were a grand ball and he was short a partner.

  He knew she meant Snail. “She is no one’s girl, Mother. Least of all mine.” He could scarcely imagine how furious Snail would be to hear herself referred to as someone’s girl. “And I have sent her away.”

  His mother looked stricken. “Why would you do that? She was—”

  “The only creature with half a brain in this castle?”

  “I would never say that to anyone!” she exclaimed, turning away. She spoke her next words to the throne so none could say she lied. She was famous for her truth-telling. At one time, it was something the king had valued in her. “Though it may be true.”

  “She had to go speak to someone whom no one else could.” And who might be very angry with her.

  Aspen suddenly thought of the assassin who had come for him while he was with the professor. And how the professor had fed the assassin to Huldra the troll without a second thought. If Odds is angry enough, he might kill Snail.

  And then a worse thought hit him. She might already be dead!

  “Oh, Mother! What have I done?” he cried. It was as if a floodgate opened and his words were water. “I need to stop her! Go get her. I will send soldiers. I will go after her myself. I will—”

  It was not kingly. But when his mother opened her arms to him, he was relieved that the throne room was empty, for he folded himself into her embrace as if he were seven again, about to leave for the Unseelie Court.

  “If Snail had to go, then you have done your duty,” she whispered into his hair. Then she stepped back and pushed him away, adding, “Your Majesty.” It was a hint not to be ignored, and he took it.

  Straightening, he wiped his eyes. Adjusted his tunic. Finally nodded to his mother.

  She stared at him for a few moments before curtseying. “Come,” she said, “let us eat. No one has ever saved a kingdom on an empty stomach.”

  His mother’s logic was unassailable: he could not think of a single person who had saved anything of note while starving. Except, perhaps, his mother, who had saved the honor of the Seelie Court while in the dungeon with little food.

  IN THE GRAND Dining Room, they sat alone at a ridiculously long table, Aspen in the King’s Seat. His mother, as the second most noble in the room, should have been seated in the Second Seat at the far end. Instead, she sat right next to him, in a cushioned chair reserved for “guests of the king,” who on occasion had been known to be no more noble than a duke or an earl. If history was to be believed, a commoner’s backside might even have dusted the pillows once or twice. His mother’s, for example, before she had been made queen, though no one ever remembered that. Or at least no one ever spoke about it out loud.

  “Close your mouth, Ailenbran,” she snapped. “It is unseemly.”

  Spoken, he thought, happy for the moment, like a mother of a seven-year-old and not the dowager queen.

  Balnar chose that moment to enter and take their orders, stopping briefly when he saw where the Queen Mother sat. She raised an eyebrow at him as if daring the old steward to say something. For a moment, Aspen thought he might. But instead, he just grabbed the setting from the Second Seat mutely and moved it to its new home.

  “A full luncheon, Majesty?” he asked, addressing them both. “Or just a brief repast?”

  Aspen was suddenly ravenously hungry. “A full luncheon, I think, Balnar.”

  His mother nodded her agreement, then touched the side of her chair. “It is tradition and formality that got us into this mess, Ailenbran,” she said. “Imagine wanting to hang a child because he broke some imagined pact he had no say in.”

  “I do not need to imagine it, Mother. I was that child.”

  His mother looked at him sharply. “But you are not that child anymore.”

  Aspen realized that he had been wrong to think his mother’s stay in the dungeons had weakened her. She’d been hardened by it, any softness in her turned to sharp bone; and the new grey hair was the grey of cold iron that would burn any who dared try to harm her or hers again.

  “No, Mother,” he said, drawing strength from her fierceness. “I am not that child anymore.”

  THE LUNCH WITH his mother was cut short by a breathless messenger charging into the dining room. Balnar followed behind, thin hands reaching for the messenger’s cloak.

  “I am sorry, Your Majesty,” he said. “I tried to stop him!”

  Aspen waved him off. “Leave him, Balnar. It looks important.” Everything at this juncture is important, he thought miserably.

  “It is, Your Majesty,” the messenger said, bowing low and confirming Aspen’s worst suspicions. He wore the uniform of a scout, though he was far too young to hold such a post. There was a red poppy in his cap, announcing his clan. Aspen knew he was one of the Poppy Clan boys who had refused to flee the castle when news of the great defeat had come. Instead, the entire House of the Poppy had become soldiers overnight, and a few of the other clans—some more reluctantly—followed.

  Brave, Aspen thought. Brave, but so, so young. Even younger then I am. “Speak, then, scout. Kings have long ears and short patience.”

  “Outriders, sire. Our scouts have made contact with the enemy’s outriders.”

  “How far from the castle?”

  “Three days’ march, sire.” The scout gulped. “Perhaps a bit more.”

  Aspen knew the scout was trying to soften the blow with that last bit. Scouts three days out and the army perhaps a half day behind them. Aspen stood, the last bites of his lunch forgotten. “That is not enough time.”

  “Enough time for what, Ailenbran?”
his mother asked. She began to pick choice pieces from their lunches and pile them on top of a napkin.

  “For Snail to return with reinforcements.” If she can convince Odds to help. Aspen shook his head. She has to convince him. There is no other way. “We need to delay the Unseelie.”

  “Understood, sire.” The young scout tucked his tunic down. Checked his sword in its sheath. “I will return to the scouts and order them to attack. We will hold them as long as we can.”

  “That is a brave offer, scout,” Aspen said, “but we are going to need more than bravery to slow the Unseelie forces.”

  “Yes, sire.” The boy’s face shone with eagerness as he waited to be told what to do next.

  “We need a plan.”

  The scout was sensible enough to look relieved.

  “And do you have a plan, dear?” his mother asked quietly. She was folding in the corners of the napkin now, forming a roof over the small pile of food.

  The scout leaned in to hear his answer, as did Balnar.

  “Yes,” Aspen lied.

  And knew he lied.

  I have no plan and even less hope. But I am sick of sitting and waiting. Every day more folk flee the castle, and those are the smart ones. If I do not give the rest of them hope and reason to stay, when the Unseelie reach us in three days, it shall just be my mother and me holding the walls. And Balnar. Always Balnar.

  He looked at the old retainer, who probably should have been retired long since. Loyal to a fault.

  “Balnar, ready every horse we have left and find soldiers to ride them. If there are not enough soldiers, put anyone or anything who can ride on their backs.”

  “Stop, Balnar!” his mother said, her voice almost rising to a shout, which startled both Aspen and Balnar. Turning to Aspen she said, “That is your plan?” For the first time her voice was sharp. “Ride to your death and take the last of your kingdom with you?”