We remained at the table, late and later still into the night. The bottle of Scotch made a slow journey around the table. Glasses were filled, tunes played, songs sung. We should have been more afraid, but at least for the moment we refused such thoughts.
And haven’t the bravest of our Seelie warriors spent the night before a battle doing just this? Celebrating their lives together, holding it precious before the threat of losing everything, even life itself? That is what it says in all our ballads and great songs. “So drink to the life I would love to have lived . . .” goes one. And “Brother, I stand, with my sword ready, my staff at my side . . .” If I could have remembered more than two verses of any of the old war ballads I would have sung it to rouse us. But such things had not been the leaf and stem of my life back then. I usually fell asleep beneath the Queen’s table and never heard the songs all the way through. Perhaps, that was just as well, for though we five were brave, we were hardly warriors. And when had bravery alone stood against dark magic and won? It had to be magic against magic for us to have a chance. So I took another sip of the amber liquid and let it burn down into my stomach for comfort and warmth.
In the lapse between one fiddle tune and the next—and just as Vinnie was lifting the bottle for another round—we were startled by a gust of wind that rapped against the windowpanes. Four cats leaped to the ledge, tails twitching, fur lifting along their spines.
“What is it, boys?” Vinnie set the bottle down on the table. “Are the rats playing beneath the sill again?”
The cats’ ears flicked, agitated, but they refused to turn away from the glass. An old marmalade tom with a chewed ear arrowed his head low and, nose against the pane, growled softly.
From where I sat, I could see only the pale reflection of our candle’s flame and Sparrow’s face leaning over it.
The wind gusted again, this time hammering the panes loose in their wooden frames. The startled cats hissed, backs arched high, as little windlings, normally the shyest of creatures, wriggled spindly fingers and filmy bodies through the narrow cracks. Once inside, trailing torn wings, they flung themselves wildly around the room with the frenzy of mayflies. They hid, darning themselves into Vinnie’s braid, ducking down behind Sparrow’s ear, nestling in Robin’s fiddle, their voices trilling out from its wooden belly. One, folding its wings, wriggled into the breast pocket of Jack’s shirt. I held my hands up to them, beckoned them not to fear and four of the poor wee things landed on my palm, their silken touch a cold puff of air.
In soft, whispery voices, they cried, “They come, they come. The Seelie and the Unseelie, the shriven and the cursed, the newly made and soon-to-be-dead.”
One of them even fluttered up to my face and puffed, “Flee, flee for here will they meet and here will be blood.”
Another joined her, crying, “Their war destroys us as easily as summer lightning sweeps grass into flames.”
I spoke a swift prayer that Serana be protected as she rode high in the night sky with the crones. She was flying toward a storm she did not know was so soon gathered. No, I castigated myself. It was I who drew her into this. I alone. My speaking to the boggans of the Queen’s child; my calling Serana to Milwaukee; my leaving the dove to lead her here. My fault. Mine. I did not say it aloud. I did not have to.
But of those at the table only Vinnie had wits enough to act.
“We’re outta here,” she barked, clapping a black hat on her head. She picked up a heavy walking stick, its handle stout and club-shaped, its point wrapped in metal. Iron by the smell of it.
“Where to?” Sparrow asked, threading her fingers through her hair, dislodging the windlings.
“The Bridge of Trees. Here, you’ll need this.” From a closet she pulled out three more rounded sticks, the length of my arm. White ash, they were, with animal spells inscribed in black, “Baltimore Orioles, Chicago Cubs, Detroit Tigers.”
With a strange smile, Jack grabbed one and, gripping the wooden handle with both hands, swung it with obvious pleasure. “You kept my bats,” he said. “I thought Mom sold them along with my cards.”
Vinnie grimaced. “She was crazy, not stupid. Those are ash—you never give away ash. And they come in handy when the rats prove too much for the cats. Like now.”
“I’ll take my fiddle,” Robin said, refusing a bat and instead tucking his fiddle under his arm, the bow hanging from the crook of his forefinger and thumb.
“Bit risky, isn’t it?” Vinnie asked.
“It can do things.” Robin lifted the fiddle to his chin and scraped the bow against the strings. The fiddle howled and the windlings wailed, ducking into cups and bowls. All the cats scattered out of the room as though their tails had caught fire. The planked floorboards rumbled, lifting from their frame, nails screeching and popping from ancient grooves. Puffs of malignant brown spores chuffed up from the twisting floorboards, and I caught the scent of burial dirt, spiced with bone and blood. I choked on it, and the others coughed hard, gasping in the thickened air.
“Stop! Stop!” I shouted.
And he did, placing the fiddle back underneath his arm. His skin was white, the hooded eyelids a bruised lavender. His mouth turned cruel, and his eyes made a chill throb through my recent wound. Those eyes were suddenly black mirrors, smooth as polished stone. And when he tossed his head, the coils of hair parted, revealing the long shape of his ears. Then he shuddered and the pale skin flamed rose once more.
“What are you?” I whispered.
“Don’t fear me, Sophia,” he answered softly. He held out a hand toward Jack, who had been gripping his bat more tightly, ready to swing. “Or you, good Jack.”
Vinnie clucked her tongue softly against the roof of her mouth. Only Sparrow waited, hands in her pockets, an understanding sadness like a shadow on her face.
Robin spoke softly. “I am like Sparrow. A mistake. Something that shouldn’t have happened. I am the darkness to her light, the UnSeelie bound to the Seelie. Born too low and sent away to the world of man in the guise of a hound. To seek and to find.” He shuddered and I saw the hound beneath his skin, a dark hound, with long floppy ears and bloodred eyes. Then he shuddered again and was only Robin, the scare-bird, the fiddler, the one who followed Sparrow faithfully and would come wherever and whenever she whistled. As he spoke, his mouth was a bruise in his face.
“And do you serve them still?” I asked. “Or are you free?”
“Free. Like Sparrow. Like you and your sister. I could not stomach the taste of blood, nor the lash my Master was certain to give me as reward for doing his bidding. I refused to answer when he called me to his side. Your sister found me in that state of refusal, Sophia. I was poisoned, left to die slowly over days, tortured by nightmares. I wandered in my grotesque form, following the lingering scent of green that I knew was your sister. She found me on the doorstep. She was right, you know. You are glowworms pushing back the darkness.”
“You read her letters!” I was appalled, but not surprised. Had not Sparrow read mine?
“All of them. I knew I had to come here, for after your sister, it was Sparrow I was to seek and find. I had to warn her. Explain it to her.”
“Explain what?” Was this at last to be the true reason for my exile?
“The Queen exiled you and Serana not as a punishment, but to provide protection to her child. She counted on Sparrow finding one of you, light drawn to light. I was sent to hunt Serana, and thereby the girl, should she come. My Master found another, here in your city, Meteora, to do his bidding.”
“Lankin,” I said, bitterly.
“Yes. I didn’t know that until I came here. Your sister was right to send me here. But I was so blinded by the arum, I could not guard Sparrow. Lankin found her and nearly . . .” He shuddered like a dog, his skin wrinkling with fear.
“But if we are meant to protect her, why are we here now?” I asked, confused, wanting all the little threads to braid together in a single strand. “Should not someone inform the Queen? Is this not her affair?”
“My mother, if that’s who the Queen is, left me on my own a long time ago. I’ve been running ever since. But not anymore,” Sparrow said. “Robin and I are here to make a stand for ourselves.” She reached out to twine her fingers in his, sounding both brave and magical. It was then I noticed in the bright light of the kitchen that the trouble tattoo on her neck was almost gone. Clearly there was power in their union, healing power.
“We’ll be making a stand in the boneyard if we don’t hightail it outta here,” Vinnie snapped. “Run now. Talk later.” She nudged Sparrow toward a low door in the kitchen and behind her Robin followed close, then Jack, still gripping the bat uncertainly.
I hesitated until I saw the gray slag-heap faces of the Boggles pressed against the windowpanes. Too big to creep in as the windlings had done. Kept out by the wards for now, they waited. Waited—but not for long.
Darting after the others, I found myself descending into a musty, dark cellar. In the dim light of a single bulb the floor appeared like an ocean of shifting fur. Cats—dozens of them—swirled in agitated circles around our ankles, hissing and spitting. Kittens mewled from baskets stacked around the edges of the room.
From above, we could hear the sounds of the front door being splintered and a window shattering. The cats flowed up the stairs behind us in a wave of caterwauls and flashing teeth, their claws scrabbling on the wooden stairs.
“Come, quick. There’s a tunnel here that leads out to the bridge. The cats will hold them for a while.” Vinnie bent low and scurried into a small narrow passage.
“Is that our escape route?” asked Jack for all of us.
“No, it’s where we will make our stand,” Vinnie told him. “Better than this small, closed-in place.”
“How come I never knew about this tunnel?” asked Jack.
Vinnie laughed deep in her throat. “And why would I tell an angry, active boy about something like this?” she said. “Do you think I was crazy?”
“Well,” Jack said, hesitating a moment longer than necessary, “yes, actually I did.”
That made her put her head back and laugh full out. The laugh, like a calming spell, settled us all.
There was no light in the tunnel; we felt our way by running our hands against the smooth walls. I could smell the river and it carried the fresh tang of the Greenwood. Vinnie had chosen well.
The smell grew stronger and, abruptly, the way led upward again, rising to a gentle slope. Ahead, Vinnie called to us to stop. Moonlight slivered into the tunnel, as she shoved a shoulder against a matted wall of twigs and branches, forcing an opening.
We pushed out of the tunnel and were on the banks of a narrow river directly below the bridge. A cluster of ancient oaks surrounded us, and I could imagine in centuries past how they must have filled the banks on either side of the river. Now all that was left of them was a meager stand of twisted trunks.
A rustle in the tangled branches made me glance up and I heard the krawk of a crow hiding in the leaves. And then another.
“Awxes!”
He cawed again, exhorting us to move along. He and the rest of his murder were here, watching.
“Have you not lost too much already, old friend? I bid you go and be safe.” But he stayed, and with him the others of his black brood.
Then I looked up at the bridge, where we were to make our stand. The stench of iron grabbed me by the throat and I stumbled, doubled over by the rank taste of it. Vinnie grabbed me and hustled me toward a narrow set of concrete stairs.
“It won’t be so bad on top,” she said. “And they won’t follow us so easily this way.”
“Where are we going?” I asked.
“Not the briared path of righteousness, nor the lily path of wickedness, but the green path to—”
“Elfland! The road to Elfland, atop this monstrosity?” I was heaving with the stench of iron.
Just then I heard Red Cap’s horns blaring in the distance, a call that curdled the mist and drove the stink of sweating hounds and farting Bogglemen on the winds. There was no more time to resist. Red Cap and his minions would be as incapacitated as I by the iron. Vinnie was right. We had to go up there onto the bridge.