Silver Borne

Samuel said, “Phin, Jesse, Gabriel, Ariana, me, and Mercedes, then.”

“Phin, Ariana, then the rest followed at the end by Mercedes,” counteroffered the queen.

I saw what she was doing. By putting Ariana and Phin at the begi

Samuel shook his head. “Phin, Jesse, Gabriel, Ariana, me, and Mercedes.”

“I am getting bored,” said the queen. “Agreed. The bargain is struck.”

Ariana gave Samuel a narrow-eyed look—I think it was because he put her before him. But I agreed with him. Get the helpless ones out first, then those who could best protect themselves. That meant Ariana before Samuel.

“The bargain is accepted,” agreed Ariana, and she stepped forward, embracing the flaming fae. As soon as she touched him, her hair burst into flame as did her clothing, and what was not burnable dropped to the ground, including the stone Zee had given her to hold. Its steady light was almost u

“She holds earth, air, fire, and water,” Samuel told me. If I hadn’t known him as well as I did, I might have thought he was disinterested. “It is what made her able to do great magic after most of Underhill was out of reach. Magic fire will do her no harm.”

The queen was speaking to the witch. After she was finished talking, the witch stood up, a steel knife in her hand. She gathered up her chains and moved to the farthest extent, which left her just able to reach the forest lord. She plunged the knife into the tree-like creature, and it bellowed, shook, and bled amber fluid onto the knife. The floor moved under my feet and the ceiling roots contracted and wiggled.

Samuel put a hand under my elbow to steady me—so I knew the blood had worked. He could see through the glamour to the reality of what we dealt with.

The witch licked the knife and dipped a finger into the cut she’d made in the trapped fae. She used that finger to draw symbols that hung in the air where she’d put them, and glowed a sickly yellow. She pulled up her shirt to expose the skin of her belly, then she reached into the air and grabbed the symbols and slapped them onto her bare skin. When she was finished, she walked back to the throne, sat down, and finished cleaning the blade with her tongue. She caught me watching her and smiled.

Maybe she didn’t know about the glamour, or maybe she thought I was afraid of cats. One thing was for sure: she knew that I was scared of her. I wished I knew what she had done.

Whatever it was, it was unlikely to be helpful to us. And we needed help. Three minutes times six is eighteen—and Zee had already been holding the entrance open for a while. Adding eighteen minutes was going to push him well beyond the hour he’d promised. The fairy queen wouldn’t need Zee’s opening to allow them to leave—but if it was still open, then they would walk out on the same day they’d entered.

The time was up at last, and the fae Ariana held turned to ice. Three minutes is a long time to hold on to a giant ice cube. I couldn’t understand why Ariana continued to hug him close instead of holding him more loosely so not as much of her was against him. Especially as all of her clothes had burned away and she was naked, with nothing between her and the ice.

“Flesh to flesh, remember,” said the fairy queen in such a grumpy tone that I knew she’d hoped Ariana would back off.

I heard some murmurs from the fae around us, remarking upon Ariana’s scars. How ugly they were, how shameful. I thought they might be commenting on purpose, as some subterfuge of the fairy queen, but if so, their taunts seemed to have no effect I could see on Ariana.

Three minutes was up, and Jesse was safe—and the fae Ariana was holding turned into smoke. She seemed to have been prepared for it, though, because as the ends of him started to dissolve, she reached out and snagged the cloak of the fae who was nearest her. She wrapped the cloak around herself and the fae, then touched the cloak with her cold hand, and a layer of ice covered it, trapping the smoke in the frozen cloth.

Surreptitiously, I glanced around at the fae who were in the room with us. There had been a few in the hall when we’d gotten here, but the others had entered more purposefully afterward, as if she’d summoned them all. I counted twenty-eight, not including the forest lord, who, I suspected, couldn’t be numbered among her followers.

I looked at their faces, and they seemed to be less . . . blank than the thralls, but I didn’t think that they were free agents either. Maybe it was the way all twenty-eight stared hungrily at the queen, as if they were waiting for any task, any order—anything at all that they could do for their true love whom they worshipped. I’ve been around the fae. I’ve seldom seen any three of them see eye to eye on anything, let alone twenty-eight.

“Look at the scars her father gave her,” said one.

“How could she live through that—it looks as though she’s been mauled by beasts.”

“Don’t you know the story?” said a third. They all looked at Ariana, instead of the fairy queen, as the third one continued. “Her father called his beasts to torture her every morning for three years.”

Ariana’s mouth tightened as she remembered, too. And then that three minutes was up as well—she’d won freedom for Gabriel.

The fae under the cloak began to grow, and Ariana let the cloth fall to the ground. At first I couldn’t figure out the challenge. The creature had changed into another fae, a large male with almost human features. His skin was the color and texture of a silver birch, some places smooth and white and others rough and dark gray or black. His hair looked like shredded bark and hung around his face. He wasn’t ugly or horrible—but then Ariana started to shake.

Beside me, Samuel stiffened, a low growl begi

“Hello, daughter mine,” the fae-man with bark skin said. After that, he switched to Welsh; the accent was so obscure I couldn’t tell what he said. He raised his right arm—and I saw that it had no hand on the end of it—and petted her hair with it.

Ariana’s father had been a forest lord, but evidently not the same kind of forest lord as the one the fairy queen held, because he looked quite a bit different.

The fairy queen had been using her people to weaken Ariana for this moment, to remind her of what had been done to her by this man. But she had underestimated Ariana if she thought Ariana was going to lose this easily. Her arms tightened on the man and pulled him next to her.

Samuel’s Welsh I could understand: he wasn’t talking over the phone, he was speaking slowly, and what he said was pretty simple. “He can’t call his hounds, Ari, my love. Don’t worry. They are dead and gone. I made sure of it. He’s not real, not real. She doesn’t have that kind of power. My da, he killed yours. I killed the hounds, and they are not coming back.”

Patiently, he kept up the refrain, giving her something to listen to other than the fae, who evidently wore the face and form of her abusive father.

I was watching the face of the witch, and I wasn’t as certain as Samuel that her father wasn’t real. Witches can do some very scary things. The first three things the fae turned into—fire, ice, and smoke—those all smelled of fae magic to me. This one—other than the scent he bore, which was his own—this one reeked of black magic, witch’s magic—and witches could call back the dead.

For three minutes, Ariana held the man who had been willing to torture her until she was mindless. At the end of the three minutes, she could have let go and walked out of the Elphame, leaving Samuel and me to stand prisoner. She was tougher than that. So when her father turned into a snarling werewolf that bore more than a passing resemblance to Samuel, she went to her knees so she could pull him close and stared—at Samuel. Her eyes grew black, and her face went blank, but she held on, mouthing one word over and over—Samuel’s name.