Iron Fists and Lead Feet
Granny Spregg
Granny Spregg paces. Her palm throbs. Her hip aches. She wants to stop and rub it with her uninjured hand, but she can’t afford for the command center’s soldiers to see her infirmity. Not tonight.
“Any word?” she says instead.
“None yet.” General Callart answers her as smoothly as if it’s the first time she’s asked.
She sent a tactical unit into the Fae Districts an hour ago. She gave them a very specific address to visit, and very clear directions about what to do when they got there. She had them repeat it all back to her.
Then it was out of her hands. They were out running through the Iron City, and all she could do was stay behind, pacing and aching.
She curls a lip at Callart. It is an unreasonable response to his polite answer. She doesn’t care. She has been too powerful for too long to be reasonable.
She paces. She aches. Then, finally, the door to the command center flies open. A slender sidhe runner sags against the frame, breathing heavily, stared at by everyone.
“A scout,” he manages, still sucking on the air like a vacuum cleaner going through its death throes. “Returned. He’s down—”
“I’ll see him alone.” Granny Spregg cuts the runner off, and cuts the legs out from under the anticipation filling the room. She hobbles away through the deflating atmosphere. Thacker scuttles after her.
The runner leads her down corridors that transition from grandeur to functional to downright shitty. Grunt humor graffitis the walls. “What’s black and white and red all over? I don’t know, but if it’s got tits, I’ll fuck it.” Such, she thinks, is the quality of the soldiers employed by House Spriggan. But if this scout has good news, then she may finally have a chance to improve that quality.
The debriefing room is small and functional, and smells like an abandoned gymnasium. The goblin scout stands beside an orange plastic chair. He hasn’t sat down while waiting. He is one of the good ones. It’s why she picked him for this mission. Just because she hasn’t been in charge, doesn’t mean she hasn’t been paying attention.
“Stand outside,” she tells the sidhe runner. Then when the lackey is gone, she says, “Report.”
“We entered the target location at 2330 hours,” the scout reports. As he does so, Thacker gently drums his fingers against the door. It’s a cheap trick as countermeasures go, but it will at least defeat the runner’s ear, which is certainly pressed to the door’s far side right now.
“Cotter was dead when we got there,” the scout goes on. “There were signs of a violent altercation. We did reconnaissance and found a mercenary group in a bar nearby. After brief observation, their conversation led us to believe they were involved in the Cotter incident. We… cleared the bar, and interrogated them. Their leader—a sidhe called Merrick—took the credit when pressed.”
“Shit.” Granny Spregg is pacing again. Her hand throbs. She takes the goddamn chair herself, easing creaking bones into its meager comforts. “What about the package?”
It has not escaped her notice that the scout is empty-handed.
“Missing. The mercenaries didn’t have it either. Someone took it before they arrived, they claim. Another player. They didn’t know who. Neither do we.”
“Fuck!” Granny Spregg wants a table to flip. “Fuck.” She says it again, trying to think. “OK… OK… So, Cotter orders the Dust from beyond the Iron Wall. It comes in. We hear about it. But someone else does too. They send mercenaries to steal it. I send you. But one more player gets there first. Before the mercenaries. Before you.” She looks up at the scout. “And I don’t have my Dust.”
“No, ma’am.” The scout meets her gaze. This, he knows, is not his fault.
“You’re attempting to track down the thief.” It’s not a question.
He nods anyway.
“Fuck.” Spoken a third time, like an incantation. “Do you know who sent the mercenaries?”
“A kobold. A local civic leader—” But she’s already waving off the answer. If this kobold doesn’t have her Dust, he doesn’t matter. She needs the Dust. It is the sun around which her plans orbit. It is the match with which she will light a fuse.
She cannot march to war on the strength of empty hands.
She must fill them with something.
She looks around the room. What is to hand?
Thacker meets her gaze. She smiles at him. “Call the runner back in,” she tells him.
Thacker blinks.
The runner has a politely curious expression on his face as Thacker ushers him in. He is burning to know what is happening, she knows, burning to have gossip to share with his peers, or to sell to a tabloid, or to some other House.
“Close the door, Thacker,” she says.
She can feel the sidhe’s anticipation building. Granny Spregg turns her back on him.
“I need you,” she says, speaking to the scout instead, “to carve out his heart.”
“Ma’am?”
She meets his gaze. This will be thin grounds for her plans, but desperate times…
She nods. The scout’s hesitation is only momentary. “Ma’am.”
“What?” the runner manages.
Then the scout is on him. An elbow to his face, snapping the cheekbone, the eyeball sagging. The runner clutches at the wound, screaming. He’s not trained for this. He’s left his belly exposed.
Thacker glances anxiously at the door. Still, such sounds are not entirely out of place down here. Interrogations often go awry in House Spriggan. So much of success, Granny Spregg has found, depends on a refusal to lose one’s nerve.
The scout unsheathes his sword and disembowels the sidhe in a single stroke. The smells of blood, bile, and shit fill the room, as the runner collapses. The scout slits the runner’s throat just to make sure. Thacker scuttles into a corner trying to keep the gore from washing onto his shoes, a look of violent distaste on his prissy features.
The scout goes about his work. There’s an efficiency to his butchery. Quick strokes in and out. Nothing misplaced. When he presents Granny Spregg with the heart, his arms are red to the elbow.
It is funny, Granny Spregg thinks, how similar fae and goblins are once you get inside them. All the differences that they fight over, and yet so many are only skin deep.
“Thacker,” she says, not taking the proffered item yet. “Go find us an ice box.”
She smokes a cigarette while they wait, and feels a crawling nausea in her stomach as she does so. She examines the stab wound in her hand. Thacker washed and bound it, but still… is that a small purple line snaking away from the bandage and toward her wrist? It’s hard to tell amongst the mess that her veins have become. She thinks she took the antidote in time. But did it smother the chemical’s fire completely? Only time will tell, and she has less and less of it.
Thacker returns. The heart is placed in a nest of ice. Thacker closes the box with a little click, holds it like it’s about to detonate.
“You,” Granny Spregg says to the scout. “Let me tell you the new truth of this heart. It is a goblin heart. You brought it back with you. The fae cut it from one of your fellows.” She nods. Yes, this is what she’ll do.
“Now,” she says, “for the next step: take this to General Callart, and as you do, think about which of your fellow soldiers you like the least. Tell Callart that this heart belongs to that soldier. That done, get back out there and hunt. Find me my Dust.”
“But if you do not—” She leans in close. “—and the sun rises before this plan is finished, then I will need to cover our tracks. That means, if we plan to live to see another nightfall, you will need to kill whichever of your compatriots you have told Callart this heart belongs to. So pick the name carefully. We have tonight and tonight alone.”
She turns to Thacker, ignoring the scout’s salute. “Seal this room. Get someone we trust to clean it up.” She looks at the ice box. “Tell them that, if this works, they will be richly rewarded.”
A glance back at the scout. “Everyone will be.”
Thacker and the scout nod. But they know, and Granny Spregg knows, that everything hinges on that one statement: if this works. And without the Dust, and with only an ice box and a sidhe heart to her name, that if is thin hope indeed.
Edwyll
Edwyll thinks his hands have stopped shaking.
Again, he thinks. Again in front of his eyes. The violence of the Iron City erupting right in front of him like a skull hit by a bullet.
Is it bad luck? Is it an omen? Is it just the way life is—the poverty, the oppression, the constant hatred of the goblins pressing down? Is this the obvious and natural reaction, as predictable as the ticking of a clock? Should any of this surprise him?
He doesn’t know. All he knows is that it horrifies him. Sickens him. Terrifies him. Leaves him sitting here with shaking hands and a slideshow of grindhouse gore ready to play every time his eyes close.
Use it.
Lila’s advice sounds heartless now. Sitting here in the wake of yet more death. A cold, calculating way to look at the world.
But if I want to do something to change it, he thinks, maybe I need to be cold. Or if not cold, just… harder to hurt. Thicker skinned.
Or is thick-skinned just what cold fae call themselves to justify their callousness?
And yet he would change this. Sitting there, fighting through the aftershocks of adrenaline, that certainty takes hold of Edwyll with a sudden fierceness. Fear sublimating to anger like steam to snow in the sky above, ready to plunge down and transform the landscape utterly.
Another blink of his eyes. Another glimpse of blood and bone detonating, everything coming undone.
He would change this. And he has one way to do so. His weapon of choice.
He reaches into his messenger bag for a spray can of paint. And finds something else. A reclaimed treasure.
He pulls out his parents’ White Tree. The symbol of the fae become useless, become self-defeating.
Use it. Change it.
He wants to put this city back together. He wants to reassemble it as something new and beautiful. He wants all the fae to feel the way he feels when he sees the beauty that still lives within them. Not the same as it was. Transformed. Sublimated like steam to snow.
He looks at the cheap china tree, its inelegant branches clumsy and blunt. He looks at the walls of the building he’s hiding in. A squat currently abandoned. Filth on the floor. Empty cardboard cartoons of old rice and moldering moss patties. The scent of urine. A few lazily scrawled tags in among obscenities. Such a typical space for the Fae Districts. Such a predictable space.
Change it.
He reaches into the messenger bag again. His fingers on a spray can feel like touching hope. Feel like the filling of his chest when he’s at Lila and Jallow’s, and the collective there is talking about seeing more than the Iron City immediately before their eyes. A way of still seeing beauty.
He pulls the paint can out, feels the weight of it. He shakes it back and forth and the clack of metal pea against aluminum walls settles him.
Green. He’s taken the green can. He can do something with green.
The first strokes are broad, sour-neon splashes that mean nothing more than his hand is still shaking. He works with that, though. He thinks of the music he heard earlier, the angry buzz-saw rattle of its basslines, the violent thunder of its drums, and the pixie’s vocals floating over that chaos. Beauty emerging from darkness. Yes, he can work with that.
He finds browns, bloody reds, bruised purples. A nest of vines and thorns appears. He thinks of the sound of gunfire. He thinks of bodies falling. The thorns grow higher.
He is, he thinks, creating something monstrous.
Or is something monstrous creating him, he wonders? Is the Iron City—polluted, perverted, corrupted—reaching out? He sketches bodies caught in the briars, limbs pushing through from shadow. His hands are still shaking.
Yellow streetlight splashes through his hideout’s broken windows. His artwork looms through shadow, towers over him.
This is so much darker than anything he has made before. Even as he shifts to a paint brush, every stroke seems brutal. But he looks at the White Tree again and thinks, There has to be contrast; there has to be darkness. In the end, he feels, you need that for a glimmer of hope to shine.
Sil
At first, it is so dark, Sil cannot know for sure if her eyes are open or not. Perhaps, she thinks, her eyes no longer work. So much of her feels broken right now.
A great weight is pressing down on her, like the thumb of some ineluctable god. She can hardly move her arms or legs. She has been buried alive.
She does not panic at this revelation. Weapons do not panic, after all. Rather, she simply slows her breathing, presses her shoulders back and down, clenches and unclenches the muscles in her thighs and calves, going through the exercises without thought.
When done, she unfurls her fingers, and tries to get a sense for what entombs her. Knowledge is power after all, albeit not much power down here in the dark.
She feels a cold surface, rough, interrupted by sharp fractured angles. She cannot place it. She pushes harder, then harder still.
Something grinds, gives way. Light and dust drift into her limited world. She chokes and squints.
She cannot remember exactly what happened. She was with Jag… She was climbing… Memory billows around her, elusive as smoke.
She begins to move in whatever small ways she can. She bends a swollen knee, rolls a bruised wrist. Every motion hurts, but her prison starts to buckle. Air brushes against a bloody graze. She works her whole arm free.
She picks and pulls now at the things crushing her. Then she recognizes them in a sudden rush. Bricks. Layers of them covering her entire body. She is not buried deep, though. She works her other hand free, pulls blocks of baked clay away from her face.
She sits up in the ruin of the paper mill, stares into a world of drifting smoke. She coughs and tries to put her memories back together piece by piece.
The fae, she recalls. The attack. The fire escape. She remembers steel shrieking, and then diving through the mill’s rotting shutters. Then prowling, getting ready for an attack, hearing the mob come in through the door downstairs, hearing them approaching. Then…
Then a shout, an explosion. A detonation. She doesn’t know what set it off. She was flung through the air, skidded beneath old machinery. Bricks rained down like bullets, clanging and clattering off the old iron. Then something had collapsed. Something fundamental. She had felt the whole world tilt beneath her. She had been poured down into oblivion, rolling out of her hiding place, bricks grinding against her like millstones.
And then… nothing. And then… now.
Jag. The thought is like a lightning strike. She left Jag outside.
Keep my daughter alive or I shall visit upon you a thousand plagues of pain. She sees Osmondo Red once more, sitting on his throne, his whole body hunched around his distended stomach, snarling, a goblet of wine in his hand like some parody of a golden age king.
She must find Jag. This is the imperative tattooed into her psyche. I think therefore I must find Jag.
She stands. Her whole body screams at her. Her left knee almost gives way. She grunts, casts around, grabs a spar of broken wood to use as a crutch. Two paces later, she goes back to collect her sword. It lies on the base of her abandoned brick coffin. The cloth wrapping on the hilt that protects her from the iron’s dull throb is torn, but still serviceable. The blade is dusty but not bent. At least that makes one of them.
Hands full, she hobbles through drifting brown clouds, searching for the street, and for a sense of the city she has temporarily misplaced.
When she finds it, it lunges back into clarity. Figures mill about: fae staring at the collapsed factory. Too many. Jag, she thinks, is not safe.
The fae register her emergence from the ruin. They point. Their attention matters little to Sil, though. They are civilians, after all—collateral damage waiting to happen.
“Jag!” she tries to shout, but dust and pain clog her bruised throat. “Jag!” she calls again, a dry bark of a sound, but Jag doesn’t come forward.
Rather, someone else approaches from the crowd, a hand outstretched—whether in kindness or aggression, she doesn’t have time to judge. She whips out the scabbarded sword, cracks the length of its blade across their forehead and sends them reeling away.
The crowd shrieks, scatters like startled birds. Twenty seconds later she is alone in the street. Jag is still not there.
“Jag!” she barks again, waiting for her to come crawling out of whatever hiding spot she’s found.
She does not come.
“Jag!”
Sil’s pulse comes quicker now. When she calls Jag’s name, she feels a tightness in her throat.
“Jag!”
And Jag is not there. And she is not. And she is not. The absence of her draws out, becomes undeniable. And Sil cannot think it, but now she must.
She has lost Jag.
And now, here, standing alone in an empty street, Sil starts to panic.
Granny Spregg
“What are the fae?”
Granny Spregg stands in House Spriggan’s library. Her family has joined her. Privett is there, still smarting from their earlier encounter, hunched on a small leather pouf, sending sullen looks at the fireplace that crackles and smokes behind his mother. He is, no doubt, thinking about the possibilities of shoving her into it.
Her daughters are there as well: Nattle and Brethelda. Nattle sprawls on a chaise longue, mountainous dresses dribbling onto the floor, cigarette smoke billowing above her. Brethelda sits straight-backed in a leather chair, wearing a gentleman’s morning suit, the rod still clearly rammed irretrievably up her ass.
These three are the children Spregg: the de facto rulers of House Spriggan, one of the five great houses to rule the Iron City. Her offspring. The despots she has deposited into the world.
General Callart has joined them as well. And Thacker too, of course, fidgeting and shuffling.
Now, Granny Spregg waits for their answers. What are the fae indeed?
“Nothing,” Privett mutters.
“Peasants,” Nattle says, fishing in her petticoats for a fresh smoke. She is always smoking. Even through the pregnancies that gave Granny Spregg her unwanted moniker.
Brethelda stays silent. Because she is the smartest of all Granny Spregg’s children.
“Fuel,” says Granny Spregg. “The fae are fuel. Without them, the engine of our wealth runs dry. Their labor drives us forward. We need them.”
“I am overwhelmed with gratitude,” Privett mutters.
“That,” Granny Spregg snaps at him, “is because you will forever be a petulant child. They do not deserve gratitude. They lost the Iron War. We won. It is the privilege of victory for us to do with them as we please, to revisit upon them the ignominies they visited upon us for so many generations. It is our pleasure to throw their children on the fire and watch them burn.”
“Do you have a point, Mother?” Brethelda looks bored. And she, in the end, is the one Granny Spregg must sway. She is the one the others will follow. Scoring cheap points off Privett will only get Granny Spregg so far with her.
“Remember this,” she says to her eldest daughter. “When you were born, we had no fae healers kneeling at our feet. We were still in the North, and a midwife had to stitch my cunny back together with thread. So, at least do me the service of listening from time to time.”
Granny Spregg knows she has never been very good at pandering to her audience.
But Brethelda quirks her lips, and Nattle guffaws out loud. Privett, though, still looks like someone who’s just got done fellating a lemon.
“Fuel.” Granny Spregg heads back to her main point. “Fuel spilled—” She pauses for a significant look. Brethelda, she knows, likes pomp and high-handedness. “—can burn a house down.”
She lets it sink in.
“Do you remember that literature teacher Mummy got us?” Nattle says suddenly. “He loved metaphors like that. What was his name again?”
Granny Spregg has seen Nattle throttle a brownie to death with a violin string. The air-headed heiress act does not deceive her for a moment.
Granny Spregg signals to Thacker, and he scuttles forward, puts the ice box down on a small coffee table.
“The fae,” Granny Spregg says as he opens the ice box, “have forgotten their place.”
They all look at the heart. And all Granny Spregg can hope is that the anatomy teachers she hired did not do such a good job that the infinitesimal differences between a goblin heart and a fae heart are visible here. Because this, right here, is her moment of drama.
“One of ours?” Brethelda asks.
Granny Spregg notes with satisfaction that it is hard for Nattle to look so sanguine now.
“No,” she spits at Brethelda. “I cut it from a calf in the kitchens and brought it here to waste your time.”
She is glad Thacker is standing behind the rest of them. His poker face is shit.
Brethelda turns to General Callart and arches an eyebrow.
“We sent a scouting troop into the Fae Districts tonight,” Callart says. “A scout brought back this. He told me it belonged to a private third class called Jibberts.”
The scout has done his work well. Callart has bought the story. His conviction adds strength to her deceit.
“Well hopefully he died before he passed that awful name onto any children,” Nattle says.
“And why did we send a scouting troop into the Fae Districts?” Brethelda asks. Even as a child, neither candies nor casual violence would ever tempt her away from her obsessions. Granny Spregg wonders if she would be proud of Brethelda if her daughter wasn’t such a bitch.
“Are you concerned that the fae might be justified?” Granny Spregg drips with disdain. Hopefully it doesn’t look as rehearsed as it really is.
“I am concerned that poor management may have provoked the fae and led to house assets becoming endangered.” Brethelda looks her dead in the eye.
“Don’t you manage the troops, Privett?” Nattle says, staring at the ceiling.
“I didn’t fucking send them,” Privett snaps, because he’s still an idiot.
“So, you don’t manage the troops?” Nattle feigns confusion. “Are you dressed up like that just for playing toy soldier?”
Brethelda’s dry smirk is back.
“She…” Privett froths, and gesticulates at his mother. “… interfered.”
Brethelda’s transition from impolite amusement to polite curiosity is smooth as a well-oiled mechanism.
Granny Spregg wants to roll her sleeves up for this one, but it is General Callart who speaks next.
“Our venture was minimal in scope,” he says. “Madame Spregg knows what she is doing. This is an act of unwarranted aggression by fae who have forgotten their place.”
Granny Spregg tries to judge Callart’s motives. Why defend her? She has amused him tonight, she knows, but his loyalty is not so easily bought. She doesn’t hold it against him. He did what was necessary to hold onto his position after her children deposed her.
Rather, she realizes, there is a shivering note of anger to his voice. His soldier has been killed. He is outraged.
She has an ally.
At least, she does as long as her lies hold.
“The fuel,” she says, capitalizing on the moment, “threatens to burn. We need to remind the fae who they work for.”
“A show of force, then?” Brethelda asks. And she is not just asking about the troops. Brethelda always speaks in layers.
“I’m here asking, aren’t I?” Granny Spregg says, more petulant than she would like. She forgives herself, though. Because she doesn’t have the Dust yet—just an ice box and a heart of questionable provenance. Because she cannot challenge Brethelda yet. Because no matter what the House troops do in the streets, her show of force here and now, in this room, is minimal.
Brethelda finally lets her smile spread over her whole face. “You are, aren’t you?”
Nattle giggles. Even Privett smirks, though Granny Spregg cannot say for certain that he knows what he’s laughing at.
She doesn’t say anything, though, just waits, back as unbowed as age and osteoporosis will allow.
Brethelda looks away, takes a breath, makes sure everybody knows this is her decision.
It is all posturing.
“No matter how we provoked them, and I’m sure you two did screw this up somehow,” she says, looking from Granny Spregg to an outraged Privett, “Mother is correct. We cannot let this stand. We must show decisive action.”
She steps over to Callart, places a hand on his shoulder. “A battalion, you think?” she says to him.
She angles her back just a little toward her mother. Cuts her out of the conversation in little ways. But, Granny Spregg simply waits while the details are hashed out. And Brethelda tries to spoil it, and take the joy from it all, but in the end, the truth is that Granny Spregg has gotten her way. The moment may have ugly wrapping paper, but it is still a beautiful gift. And when they all have left, she looks to Thacker, and she smiles.
Edwyll
Edwyll steps back, looks at what he has created. The mural towers over the room, massive, foreboding, reaching for something better, desperate. And looking at it, there is a moment of pleasure before the doubts set in, before the flaws start to stand out brighter than the splashes of neon paint he’s sprayed. For a moment he thinks he might be close to saying something meaningful.
Then he shakes his head, steps away. Close, but… it’s still not right. Not quite. It’s still lesser than the idea in his head.
He goes to the window, looks out at the Iron City just visible through the smears and stains on the cracked glass. The city he would save one painting at a time if he could. Is it safe out there now? Or… safe enough, because it cannot ever be wholly free of threat. He wants desperately to get back to Lila and Jallow’s. But he doesn’t want to become part of the night’s body count trying to get there.
The street outside is a long one, running several hundred yards in either direction, only cut off to the east by the crest of a slight hill, the slope running down in a long decline to where he can just make out a distant T-junction to the west. It’s hard to see much of it. And there is smoke rising behind the buildings opposite, but the glow of the fire is on the horizon, not here, not now and in his face. And sometimes that is as safe as the city can seem.
Slowly, carefully, Edwyll opens the squat’s door, peers out onto the street. It’s quiet its whole length. He licks his lips. This is about as good as it’s going to get.
And then a figure appears at the crest of the distant hill, and he freezes, staring, trying to assess the peril. The figure, he realizes, is running. But is it pursuer or pursued? He can see no quarry for the figure to be hunting, so the question becomes what is chasing after it? Edwyll shrinks back into the doorway’s shadows, ready to dart away into relative safety.
The figure has made it almost halfway to Edwyll before its pursuers appear. Edwyll is almost on the verge of writing the runner off as a lone lunatic, running from phantoms. It’s not as if mental illness is uncommon here in the Fae Districts. But then the pack of silhouettes comes jostling and jogging over the rise. They’re too far away for Edwyll to really make them out but from the fearful glances the runner casts over their shoulder, the relationship is clear.
What did the runner do? Edwyll wonders. How much innocence can they claim?
He looks at them more closely, trying to see what clues their appearance can give, how much he can ascertain about his own state of danger from their arrival.
And then, the shock like plunging his face into ice water, he realizes he knows them. Knows her.
The goblin from the bar. The goblin with the bodyguard who turned a night out into a bloodbath. The goblin whose appearance seemed to herald the night’s descent into horror and shit.
Edwyll flinches away just from the sight of her. His eyes are desperate, searching for the swordswoman, searching for the danger. He does not want to die.
Then, slowly, logic catches up. If the goblin is running then her bodyguard cannot be here. If the goblin is running, then her sins have caught up with her.
He shouldn’t care, he thinks. He should be full up with images of the bodies in the bar. She is the oppressor, and he is the oppressed.
But that has never been the world Edwyll wants to create. And as the goblin draws closer, the panic is too raw in her eyes for him to be heartless. Her breathing too ragged. The pack of fae pursuing her are shouting and catcalling. He does not want them to do whatever it is they intend to do.
He can imagine Knull screaming at him. Because what sort of weak, pitiably soft-hearted fool would save one of the oppressors when the chance to exact revenge—to see revenge exacted—is so close?
She has a good lead on her pursuers, over two hundred yards at least, but she can’t shake them, not on this long, faceless street. There is no one here to save her.
Except him.
He stays there, watching her draw inexorably closer, dragging her fate behind her as surely as if it was tied to her ankle.
“Yo, bitch!” he hears from the crowd behind her.
“Gonna fuck you up!”
Why would I save her?
A patron. The thought rises out of the churn of his mind. That was what he thought when he first saw her. That’s why he approached her back at the bar. Because a patron would give his art a platform, would give his voice and his message a loudspeaker. Would give him a chance to change things.
From a few streets away there is the sound of gunfire, a low whoomph. The pursuing fae cheer. The goblin lets out a terrified shriek. Several raccoons burst from the cover of nearby garbage cans and go running for cover.
Edwyll looks at the gaggle of fae. How far away are they? How clearly can they make him out? How big of a risk would it be to…
“Over here!” he hisses. He hasn’t thought it through, and the goblin is almost past him, but he can’t watch this. He can’t. Not again. He doesn’t want the Iron City to be this way. He doesn’t want the fae to be this way. He wants to change things. Maybe this is something he can change.
The goblin looks at him wildly. She is caked in dust, almost white with it, except for where tears and sweat have left little rivers of green down her cheeks.
“Come on!” he says, risking a little more volume. “I’ll hide you.”
She hesitates a moment longer, the fae drawing closer, and closer, then suddenly darts towards him, and the doorway, shoving past him with a desperation that precludes gratitude. Edwyll shuts it behind her but can still hear the calls of the fae.
“You can hide, little rabbit,” one yells, “but we’ll still find you.”
How close are they? Edwyll wonders, heart still pounding. Surely still too far away to pick out a precise door. Surely.
“In the shadows,” he says urgently, glancing back at the goblin. She is standing in the middle of the room, staring around. No wonder she ended up being chased by some mob. He wonders if she is touched in the head.
He goes back to the doorway, holding the rough door closed, trying to plan out what he can say. To these fae. To the goblin. When it’s over. How he can make her see that she owes him.
He hears a hand hammering against a door a few buildings away. His heart hammers right back.
“Come out, little gobbo!” another fae yells from the street outside. Rats scuttle in the far corners of the squat.
“Hide,” Edwyll hisses, all his attention on the door, focused on the inevitable—
Thump. Thump. Thump. A hand thundering against the wood. The door rattling in the frame. Only Edwyll’s foot keeping it closed.
An inarticulate shout of excitement from the fae outside. Someone shoves on the door harder, unbalances Edwyll, and he only just manages to catch it in time, so it only opens a sliver, doesn’t fly open, doesn’t reveal everything.
A sidhe face leers through the gap, eyes wide with victory, and then almost immediately on its heels is confusion. Edwyll is decidedly not their prey. Edwyll and the sidhe stare at each other.
“Where is she?” The sidhe is perhaps twenty years old, wearing a heavy wooden chain and with flint studs in his ears. Tattoos crawl over his neck, and Edwyll can smell the whiskey on his breath.
“Who?” is all Edwyll can manage.
“My little rabbit.”
“What?” Edwyll’s throat is constricting. This is stupidity. He is risking too much for too small a hope. Who is to say that this is even a rich goblin he’s hiding?
More fae are jockeying behind the one who banged on the door, trying to peer in.
“We saw her go in this door,” the lead sidhe says.
“It’s just me in here,” Edwyll says, and he tries to make it sound confident, but it emerges as a whisper. It would be so easy for them to push him aside.
He sees anger curdle in the sidhe’s face. His nerve fails, and he opens his mouth to blurt out that she is here, right here, but then the sidhe turns away, throws up his arms. “Must have been another house,” he says. “Keep looking. We’ll find her.”
Edwyll’s breath rattles out of him as the pack spills back out into the street. He needs to close the door, but the glare of danger’s headlights has not faded from his retinas. He stands, still watching, still recovering, as the fae move down the street, kicking and knocking on other doors. Then one bursts open and suddenly there are three angry demi-dryads—half kobold judging by their wild red manes of hair—in the street, wild-eyed and tangle-bearded. They wave broken bottles at the pack, and shriek, and fall over each other, and then the pack of fae are all laughing and running away. And still Edwyll clings to the door like it’s a raft in the night.
And then they’re gone—the pack. But the goblin is not. She is still right here with him.
One more breath. One moment to close his eyes and compose himself. To remind himself that he did this for a reason, that his future hinges on this.
He opens his eyes. He turns around.
The goblin is standing just where he left her, only three paces from the door. If it had been pushed open just an inch more, the fae would have seen her. As if she never really cared about his survival at all.
“What is that?” The goblin cuts him off. She is pointing at the back wall of the house.
Edwyll’s mural is vast and sprawling, lit only by the spill of streetlamps and moonlight coming in through the still open doorway and dirty windows. The dark thorn bushes sprawl about the ruins of the room in angry streaks of neon green and crimson, curling darkly over bodies and limbs. Desperate eyes stare out from stark shadows. And then, in the center of it all, arching up over everything—dominating, defiant, renewed—is the White Tree. Its bark is silver in the moonlight. Its leaves are gold. And to Edwyll, even in his own rendering of it, it is beautiful. It is shelter. It is the promise of a world that has shed the shackles of its past and embraced what is here, and now, and precious in a living world. It’s what the fae of the Iron City could see if only they would raise their heads. If only they would hope.
At least, that is what it is to him, or was meant to be.
“Just a mural,” he says.
“Who painted it?” the goblin asks.
“I did.”
Finally, the goblin turns and looks at him. She stares, those yellow eyes gleaming bright as torches in her skull.
“You?”
“It’s rough,” he says automatically. “More an idea than—”
“It’s beautiful.” She cuts him off. She turns back to it again, as if drawn to it. “Your painting. You’ve made something beautiful.”