by as we jumped roots and dodged low-growing branches, running hard enough to make every breath a struggle. Aris somehow ran more swiftly than I, despite the extra burden, but ducked to the side with a shocked gasp when the first invader appeared.
It was twice as tall as Aris and wider around, with leathery skin the color of sandstone and legs as wide as tree trunks. A pair of five-inch tusks jutted from its lower jaw, but it completely ignored us as it lumbered through the trees, carrying a spiked club in one massive hand.
“Is that a—a troll?” I gasped.
“It’s—an—illusion,” Lia grunted between strides as Aris’s grip forced the breath out of her lungs.
“Shut up, General,” Aris ordered, skirting the next troll and turning sideways to fit between two trees.
If that was an illusion, whoever created it was a master craftsman. In my studies, authors described the act of creating a phantasm as one of the hardest arts to master. One must not only hold in their mind the details that make something look real, such as eyelashes or dirt under fingernails, but also the way the illusion interacted with its environment.
As the illusory troll stomped through the forest, its feet spread to absorb the impact and weight of its body. It left footprints and reflected light. One would have been a work of genius, but dozens of similar figures were scattered through the wood.
I tried to imagine what it might be like for English soldiers to fight illusions that real, and my blood ran cold. The fae might not handle iron weapons or shoot modern firearms, but if they could convince a regiment that their neighbors were enemies?
I tore my eyes away from the retreating phantasm and followed Aris into a darker, thicker part of the forest. My eyesight was better than good, but it was impossible not to stumble.
“This way!” a voice called, and the thunder of running feet sounded behind us. It must have been at least a squad of faerie soldiers.
“Aris, slow down,” I said in one of those yelling whispers.
“Can’t,” he said. “They’ll catch us.”
“I’ve got a solution for that. Just let me catch up, you bloody Corinthian.”
I reached them a second later, pushed aside the meaningless bangles on my wrist, and prepared to press the button on the Sightscreen.
“Gwen,” Aris growled, but I held up my hand. I didn’t want to press the button until I knew I needed it, because once I pressed it, we only had five minutes—if Delilah was correct—until the diamond gave out.
When the bushes started shaking, I engaged the runic spell. A wave of energy rolled out of the device and hovered in the surrounding air. I edged backward, getting as close to Aris and Lia as possible. Four fae soldiers leaped through the gap in the trees one at a time, elegant as coursing hounds on a scent. About five feet from me, they stopped, losing track of our footprints, their eyes glazed and confused.
I motioned for Aris to move and stayed close to him. We ghosted through the trees, making as little noise as possible as three other patrols crossed our path. Their eyes skimmed over us as if we were bushes or trees, and no more interesting.
It became clear the patrols were hunting us, and not the illusory invaders, as phrases like the traitor and kidnapped the general echoed between the trees.
Two minutes passed.
“We have to hurry,” I warned Aris, pushing his back with both hands to make him pick up the pace. “We only have three more minutes, if we’re lucky.”
“One of Delilah’s devices?” he asked.
“Yes.”
He sighed. “You know, that knowledge might have come in quite handy earlier in our visit.”
“I had other things on my mind,” I said tartly.
He scoffed and pushed into a quick jog.
Three minutes. We had to get far enough away from the patrols that they would lose our proverbial scent. They may actually be following some sort of scent or magical trace I could not sense, but if they were, there was nothing to be done about it.
“How far away is the rift?” I asked.
“Another mile.”
Horns rang out, sharp and brassy, sending birds fleeing from the treetops in a panic of feathers and falling leaves. The chase had begun in earnest.
“Let me go,” Lia said. “If you let me go, I can divert them.”
Aris leaped a fallen log, making Lia grunt when they landed and his forearm pressed into her stomach.
“Not a chance,” he said. “You are our only insurance if we cannot get through the rift.”
“Do you think Obyrron will hesitate to kill us both if he believes you have wronged him?”
“Yes, I do. You are irreplaceable, and the best hope”—he ducked a tree limb and pushed into a closer thicket—“he has of successfully invading. Too much has changed since he was last in the mortal world, and changelings are much rarer than they used to be. Use your head, General.”
“I am using it, you great, bloody idiot! They will continue to chase us as long as you have me.”
“They will chase us anyway, and you know it. If I am not a member of the King’s court, I am too dangerous to be left alive. Besides, you ordered me to use whatever means were necessary to get your sister out of the Sunset Lands. I deem your presence necessary. So shut up and let me run in peace.”
“Gwen,” Lia said, “Gwen, you must see reason. I can give you both more time to—“ Her voice cut off as Aris pressed his free hand over her mouth.
He must have put the knife between his teeth because he did not say another word as we ran. More horns sang, this time from several places. I glanced over my shoulder in time to see figures crashing through the brush behind us. My already taxed lungs squeezed in panic. We had escaped once through treachery. If they caught us again, there would be no escape.
“We have company,” I told Aris.
We had less than a minute before the Sightscreen failed, and that was only if Delilah had been exact. I had no weapons, no magic, nothing to defend us with. A dark shape, as large as a hound but longer and more lithe, leaped through the break between trees and bushes. It landed on the trail we had just blazed, its nose close to the ground.
It looked like a giant mink, and it was following our scent. Not a second later, Shiverback appeared, following the mink like a master huntsman with his hound. He saw me and his face lit up with malicious glee. The Sightscreen was dead. We were caught.
“Five hundred yards,” Aris called, his breath now sawing as hard as my own. “Run, Gwen!”
I turned, pushing my legs for every scrap of strength left in them, and caught Aris up. He held out the knife, which I barely managed to grab, and said, “Protect yourself.”
“What about you—and Lia?” I panted.
“Let me—worry about—that.”
The enormous animal was gaining, a foot at a time, and would be on our heels in less than ten seconds. I had seen the claws it used to push itself across the ground, curved and as long as my fingers. Those claws would slice across the back of my thighs or my calves as easily as scissors through paper.
We broke into a familiar clearing, one that made my breath stop as hard as if I had just hit a brick wall. Aris dug his feet into the dirt, turned, and swung Lia’s legs as if they were a cricket bat. Her feet caught the mink-creature under the chin and sent it tumbling backward through the air with a squeal of surprise.
Shiverback hit me a moment later, his weight crashing into the small of my back and bearing us both to the ground. My already broken ribs screamed in protest, sending electric currents of pain buzzing up to my brain until my eyes watered. On instinct, I planted my right foot, bucked my hips, and rolled the both of us. I slashed at anything I could reach as I tried to pull in a breath.
The knife struck twice, eliciting gasps, and then something hit the side of my head with a flash of light. I careened backward like a felled tree, landing hard enough to knock the air from my lungs with an oof.
For a moment the canopy spun over my head, black leaves and branches twisting against a blue-black sky and the first faint dusting of stars. I gasped in enough air to keep myself from fainting and scrambled backward, away from Shiverback and the murder in his eyes.
The mink-creature stood up on its hind legs and shimmered into the dark-eyed woman. She crouched, then attacked Aris. He dropped Lia, caught the woman’s flying hands, and casually threw her into a tree trunk. She hit with enough impact to shake the ground.
Shiverback’s eyes flicked toward her, registering an instant of pain, and I used that moment to leap to my feet and fly at him. This was different from the sword fight. I had armor of a sort, then, and it wasn’t mere strength against strength. I nearly matched him in speed, which had saved me during our duel, but he caught my blows with the same ease Aris had used, batted the knife from my hand, and locked his fingers around my throat.
My toes left the ground.
“If you want to keep your sister alive, General, you had better call off your Raven.”
I clawed at his hands, kicking uselessly, and fought for air as blackness swam at the edge of my vision. Lia stood, brushed off her skirt, and locked her eyes on the fae man. It could have been my near-fainting state, but I would swear that her eyes glowed with green fire.
“You should not be frightened of The Raven, sir.” She raised one hand and emerald flames bloomed from her palm, licking up her fingers and lighting her face with cruel light. “You should fear me.”
She made a twisting gesture and Shiverback screamed. I hit the ground on my side, gasping, watching events unfold in slow motion while I fought to breathe through my burning throat.
The dark-eyed woman had recovered from her blow and approached Aris like a cat stalking a bird. She feinted to one side, then shot in from the other, lashing out with abnormally long nails that tore across his belly.
“They are here!” Shiverback shouted through the pain.
Lia stepped in close, her beautiful face twisted into lines of hate. Fire erupted from both hands and traced up her arms. “Tell me,” she said in an icy voice, “do Birch-men burn?”
Aris dodged the woman’s next attack, then caught her arm, turned, and kicked her knee. The joint cracked and bent the wrong way. She tumbled to the dirt with a cry of pain.
Lia snapped her fingers.
Shiverback screamed.
The woman rolled to her side, eyes locked on her partner as she clutched her knee. “No!”
Aris hauled me to my feet, but Lia stood over Shiverback, watching him writhe as flames engulfed him, listening to the crackle as his skin popped and burned. The lurid light lit her face from below, turning it into a mask of wrath.
My stomach heaved.
“Come on,” Aris said, grabbing her wrist despite the fire and dragging us both away from the clearing. The dark-eyed woman crawled across the ground to where her lover burned, tears streaming down her face in the ghastly light.
When Aris stopped, I knew where we would be. There were no mushrooms growing here. Instead, there was a circle of small, mossy, oval stones of varying heights standing upright like sentinels protecting something of great value.
“Don’t step in there,” I whispered, dragged back in time to the evening I watched Lia jump into a faerie circle and disappear.
Aris took my face between his hands, forcing me to look at him. His eyes were like coals, intent and burning. “I’m going to open the rift,” he said. “I’ll be like a bridge to pull you through. It will hurt. You understand? Wait till I tell you, then take my hand. Gwen, do you understand me?”
I nodded numbly.
After an instant of hesitation, he grabbed my face and kissed me hard. Then he positioned himself outside the stone circle, taking several deep breaths, as if he were going to leap into cold water.
Horns sounded, and this time they were closer.
Lia simply stood watching the green light of her fire glow on the treetops. The dark-eyed woman screamed, a cry of desolation I recognized intimately.
With a grunt, Aris rammed his shoulder forward. The motion looked like a man trying to shoulder open a door. He hit something solid, bore against the invisible barrier, locked his shoulder, and drove with his legs.
Yellow sparks erupted from the place his shoulder met the rift in the magical wall that separated the Sunset Lands from the mortal world. A frisson of power shivered through the air, making my skin rise in goosebumps.
Teeth bared, face locked in a grimace, Aris cried out, “Grah!” as the line of sparks streaked from his shoulder down over his chest, splitting his body into the half pressing into the mortal world, and the half still in faerie.
His clothing smoldered.
“Come on!” he ordered through teeth clenched in pain. He looked like a man trying to hold up a collapsing ceiling with nothing but his legs.
I stumbled forward and took Lia’s hands. Another horn sounded, and this time it was only on the other side of the clearing.
“Lia,” I said. “Come home with me.”
Her face had been eerily blank while watching the flames, and now it crumpled in sorrow. “I can’t, Gigi. I can’t come with you. Go home and take care of Mama. The Raven will tell you what to do, but I must stay here.”
“No,” I pleaded, feeling the sky and all its stars come crashing down on me as I forced the words out through the damage in my throat. “I can’t live without you anymore. I can’t stand it.”
She threw her arms around me, and for the first time in a dozen years, every empty space in my heart was filled. Whatever had happened before this, whatever Lia had done and I had suffered, she still loved me. I felt her love like the sun coming up in my soul.
“Gwen!” Aris shouted, his voice wracked with pain.
“I love you, Gigi,” Lia said into my hair, squeezing hard enough to hurt, then she pulled away, pushed me, and said, “Go!”
The hound guards broke into the clearing, swords drawn, followed by half a dozen fae warriors sprinting towards us. “Save the general!”
An inhuman cry of pain ripped from Aris’s throat.
It was not a decision, not even an instinct or reflex. It was a necessity. I grabbed a double handful of Lia’s dress, ignored her surprised cry, and threw myself backward, trusting Aris to catch us.
A strong hand wrapped around my upper arm with bruising strength and pulled. Buzzing heat washed over me in a rush from the back of my head, over my face, shoulders, torso, and finally down to my toes.
My skin felt like it was being peeled back to expose the raw flesh beneath. My conscious mind spun away from my body to somewhere above my head. Visions swam before my eyes, real enough to touch but thin, like wet paper.
A man with dark eyes and mahogany curls, his handsome face wrenched in lines of grief. Two golden heads pressed together in an embrace. New London wreathed in flames that danced to a symphony of screams and mournful cries. A dark silhouette standing with arms raised before a sea of enemies.
I watched from a distance as the three of us tumbled backward through the rift to land, smoking, in a pile in the snow.
Then gravity hit, and my mind catapulted downward and smashed into my body in a rush. Pain flooded every sense like a tidal wave, then eddied back to be replaced by the cold. It was so cold. I rolled toward Lia and wrapped my arms around her, but she lay limp across Aris’s torso.
His skin was red in a line, scalded down his face and across his bare chest to the shallow wounds on his stomach. I ran my hands over his face and neck, pressing my fingers against the skin beneath his jaw. My heart thundered in my ears.
Breath of god, Aris, be alive. Please be alive.
He said the passage might kill him. He had warned me, and I’d been so focused on Lia that I hadn’t even realized what pain, what danger he’d put himself in.
No heartbeat pressed back against my fingertips.
With a cry, I smashed my lips against his and exhaled, forcing my breath into his lungs. They used this treatment for drowning victims, and I did not know whether it would work on magical injuries, but desperation to do something clawed at my insides with frantic need.
Breathe.
I brushed his blue-black hair off his forehead, sealed our lips together, and forced more air into his lungs. Again and again, until my vision swam with little stars, until tears and sweat made sealing our mouths together impossible.
No, Aris. Breathe!
His lips were turning blue, and my heart was slowly withering in my chest.
Breathe, damn you!
“Gwen,” Lia said in a voice like sandpaper. “Gwen, move.”
I ignored her.
She pushed my hands out of the way and rested her fingertips on his chest above his heart. Her forehead wrinkled in concentration, her eyes focused. Her arms started shaking, but nothing happened.
“Come on,” she breathed, and her lip curled with effort, but no fire appeared. Did she think burning Aris would bring him back?
I prepared for another breath, but a flicker of light, like sparks from a wire, lit up her fingertips for a moment, and hope blazed to life in my gut.
The spark died.
I wiped my mouth and leaned over Aris again…and felt the barest breath warm on my face. Against my trembling fingers, a heartbeat pumped once, twice, three times.
He jolted, gasped in a breath, and color returned to his lips.
We had all made it through. Aris was alive. We were all alive and home. I pressed my cheek against his chest, curled into a ball, and cried.
How long I cried I cannot say, but my hands and feet were numb when Lia stood up. She glanced around the clearing as if she’d never seen it before. Her body shook, either with cold or shock.
“Here,” I said, standing to wrap my arms around her. “You’re fine, Lia. You made it. We’re home.”
She pushed my arms off her shoulders and stood shivering. Her hair fell in tangled golden waves down her back and across her face, and her eyes were hard as she flexed her fingers uselessly at her sides.
Despite just saving Aris’s life, she must have been disoriented. My head was still fuzzy, and I had not been in the Sunset Lands for more than a week. How was she even standing?
“It’s okay,” I reassured her. “You’re home.”
Her eyes narrowed, and pink that had nothing to do with the cold climbed her cheeks. When she spoke, her voice was low and angry. “What have you done? By the moon and stars, Gwen, what have you done?”
I stood there, flabbergasted. “What? What do you mean, what have I done? I’ve brought you home.”
“I can’t be here! Damn you, I told you to go without me. Haven’t you already cost me enough?”
“What…Lia, you’re home,” I said the word with as much emphasis as my stiff lips allowed, imbuing it with everything home meant. Couldn’t she understand? We were safe and together at last. Everything we suffered, all the time apart, those wounds would heal now.
Before she could respond, a wave of energy washed over us, making Aris whimper, and knocking us backward. A hound appeared not a foot from where Aris lay. It wobbled on its feet, disoriented, shaking its huge black head.
“It got through,” Lia muttered.
The beast was twice the size of the largest of our hounds, muscled and dark as a midnight sky. It was a hound guard, likely one who had chased us into the clearing. It could have been Harl or Graowh and I wouldn’t have been able to tell. I was too tired and weak to be any good in a fight and Aris was still laying on the frozen ground.
I grabbed Lia’s wrist and dragged her behind me. “Can you burn it?” I asked.
The sound she made was somewhere between disbelief, anger, and grief. “No.”
My eyes flew over the ground for a branch, a heavy rock, anything that might serve as a weapon, but the snow disguised everything.
The hound focused on us, and a rumbling growl shook the air. We circled as it prowled toward us, my bare feet burning with the cold and slipping on the snow. Lia raised a hand and grunted, but no green fire sparked to life. We had nothing to protect ourselves from those teeth. Had we come through all this just to die in the very place we had been separated so many years ago?
The hound’s lip curled back in a snarl. It crouched and leaped, the motion so fast that I only had time to turn my back and drag Lia against my chest.
A shot split the air, making my ears ring as the hound hit us. We sprawled on the frigid ground in a heap.
“Gwen!”
A familiar voice, running feet sliding in the snow, a pair of warm hands. Tony lifted me and held me against his chest, one arm around my back as he turned to point his pistol at the limp hound. It didn’t move. I allowed myself one moment, just one, to revel in the feel of him. Then my heart fluttered like an injured bird, caught between relief and panic.
Lia did not move from where she’d collapsed.
I gestured to her and Aris with my chin and said through chattering teeth, “We have to get them inside.”
Tony, ever the practical man, didn’t bother with questions. He bent and lifted Lia to her feet.
I crouched over Aris and pulled his torso off the freezing ground and into my lap. He flinched and said, “God’s breath, woman, your fingers are cold.”
A weak laugh bubbled up, and I dropped my forehead against his chest, but it was colder than my hands. I pulled his opposite arm to tug him around, then worked my shoulder under his armpit to lever him up.
“You could help me a bit, you bloody oaf.”
“I thought,” he gasped, “I was a Corinthian.”
“You can be both things.”
I pivoted us to face Tony and Lia and repeated, “We have to get them inside.”
Tony’s brown eyes, usually so warm, were wide with embarrassment. “Them?” he asked, eyeing my dress before averting his eyes. “From the look of things, we had better get you inside.”
I glanced down at myself, realized that what passed for a dress in the fae court would not have even passed for underwear in England—which had not been helped by a fall into the wet snow—and felt the blessed heat of a blush rise to stave off a bit of the cold.
“We are too far from the house to get you back before you freeze,” he said. Then turned to Lia and asked in a gentle voice, “Can you stand on your own?”
She nodded.
Tony slung off his backpack and began rummaging around. Before long, he had a small but tidy fire going. We crowded around it, and Tony forced me into his jacket. The gesture was likely more for his peace of mind than my comfort, but it was so warm that I could not complain.
He fired three more shots into the darkening sky. “The groundskeeper should hear that and be on his way,” he said.
But he was wrong. One shot would have been enough for Garfield to release the hounds. Several minutes later, baying echoed through the trees. Of course, I may not have any toes by the time they arrived, but when I looked across the fire to see Lia standing there, arms wrapped around herself with Aris close behind, I could not regret it.
She was here. I was not alone. We did it. Every battle, every scar, the years of searching and study and pain and sacrifice were worth it.
We saved the girl.
“Tony,” I said, unable to keep tears from streaming down my face, “this is my sister, Ophelia.”