Except the Queen (30 page)

I took a sip of tea and thought for a moment. I wanted very much to tell Serana about Jack but I shook my head. Another time. Another letter. I would say only what was necessary for her to understand my feelings.

T
he moon is up. My father calls. Like the best dog whistler, he summons me in a voice so high, only I can hear. The fog in my head has only recently cleared. But I must go. I want to deny him, but how does one resist?

Still, if I cannot stop myself, I can be slow about going there. I have been bathed, put oil in my hair, brushed my teeth. I may be my father’s hound, but I will not misrepresent myself. My human part longs to be clean of him, and free. He will hate that I am late, that I am clean, that my heart still beats in its human tempo. But it is the only small rebellion I can make.

I take what I need. What was given me in love: the silver pipe from my mother’s hand, the stone from my grandmother’s—or as near a grandmother as I shall ever get. She has fed me, cleaned me, kept me through the dark times. I owe her, but can only repay her in silence.

And then I go out the door, down the stairs. I bid no one good-bye, for I dare not intermix their lives with mine. This danger, this horror is all my own. My father waits in the green park.

The green park!

I will not go to him. I cannot. I will not betray my own. Not again. Not as I did my mother. And sitting down on the stoop, I start to weep, not the tears of a dog. Dogs do not cry. But humans do. Even boys, though we try not to let anyone see.

T
he sound was low, as if someone was trying to hide it, but I heard. It crept into my dreams of the Greenwood and stained the leaves red. I woke to blood, but not my own. A pigeon on the sill bled from its breast. I went to it, and there was nothing there but the gray shadow of its death.

Red Cap!
I thought. But when I looked down into the darker shadows of the street, I saw no one awake but the boy on the steps, barely illuminated. It was as if he drew the street light into himself and turned it to ebony.

The sound I had heard was his weeping. Throwing a cloak over my nightgown, I took the key and hung it around my neck where it burned my breast like a brand. Then I hurried down the stairs to the outside door, flung it open so fast, the knob did not harm me, and padded barefooted down the stairs.

His head was buried in his crossed arms and though he did not look up I could tell by the set of his shoulders he knew I was there.

I sat down by him, pulled him into the vastness of my bosom, and whispered, “I have made up my mind. You are going to my sister’s house. You will be safe there from whatever troubles you.” And I made the sign of the horns and spat through the middle, to make him safe for now.

Safe?
He could be in more danger there than here.
Meteora was the one who had seen the Red Cap. She was the one who had invited in the Jack. But if this was a puzzle that needed two pieces together—the boy, the girl—then I had to send him. I did not know how. But as we walked back into the house, he with face averted so I could not see if the tears still glistened in those fey eyes, I was sure I could find a way.

As we passed my eagle mailbox, I saw something in it—a green envelope, the color of the leaves. And I knew, as I always know my sister’s heart, that Meteora had sent me money. I would use it to pay the boy’s way to where she resided.
She will understand
, I thought,
for she knows
my
heart as well.

*   *   *

O
NCE UPSTAIRS
, I
PUT THE
boy back to bed and he was asleep within minutes, fear or horror or exhaustion claiming him. Then I went downstairs again to fetch the letter.

Putting the envelope to my nose, I drew in a deep breath. There was a hint of chamomile, a touch of tansy, but nothing more. A good wife would use such in her cleaning. It was a human smell overriding the herbs, not fey.

She wrote: “
Sister, can you imagine how we should feel if we had been cast away as children, banished to this dark world having known only the bright? What poisons might we have swallowed, what desperate acts might we have committed if it promised to return us even to the gates of that far-off place
?”

I sighed. How much the human world had already changed her. Not only could she work for their money, but she understood them so much better than I.

“Thank you,” I spoke to the air, knowing my gratitude would find its way to her. Then I counted all the sheets of the green paper money she had included. So many. I could not help but admire her and prayed that it would be enough to get the boy to her house, for I was determined to send him there.

Finally I went back upstairs to finish my letter and warn her of the gift I was throwing her way.

First, however, I cut a few locks of the boy’s hair as he slept, though it was tangled with elf knots. I might later be able to do some small conjuration as he slept, for he did not waken. His breath came long and slow, with a little stutter at the end. Quietly, quickly, I stuffed the hair into one of the gardener’s gloves I had purchased at the bodega.

Perhaps the hair could tell me why he had come here, or who had sent him. Perhaps it would say if he were the hunter or the hunted. But whatever it finally told me would not matter. I had already decided that he must leave this city for Meteora’s. I did not believe—no, I
dared
not believe—that he had come to me for no reason at all. The world does not work that way. Neither the human world nor the fey.

*   *   *

W
HEN
I
HAD FINISHED WRITING
my letter, I put it in its envelope and wrote out the address, then stood and placed it on the shelf, next to the batch of her letters, determined to send it in the morning. Only then did I realize that something was not quite right with my sleeping boy after all. The letters from Meteora, tied with a green ribbon, lay an inch to the left of where I had left them, no longer between two of the nails holding the mantel over the fire, but directly on one. I had been most careful about that.

That little thief!
He must have taken them down. No one else had been in my rooms. He had read something of what my sister had written. What kind of person would do such a thing, being a spy in the house of a friend? Not Vanilla Blue at all, but definitely Robin O’ the Green, the tricksy one. Still, I would not let him know I guessed for that would lose me my one bit of an edge.

Oh, you rapscallion
, I thought and determined to sit up all night just to keep an eye on him. To be certain that he actually slept.

And to be certain that I did
not
sleep, I rolled bits of garlic wrapped in peppermint into two tiny balls and shoved one in each of my nostrils. The smell alone kept me up, even without the herbs’ wakefulness properties, till the first tendrils of false dawn crept across the windowsill.

In all that time, Robin did not move, but slept deeply, even snoring a bit, probably exhausted by his tears and his mischief combined.

*   *   *

“J
OIN ME FOR TEA
,” I said, as he struggled from the bed—rubbing his eyes and yawning.

I had made a peppermint tisane, strong enough to disguise what else I had put in: the berries, a single blue at the bottom of his cup, twice broken, twice blessed, that he might do my bidding without complaint. I hoped I had that much magic left.

He went to the water room, then came back and took the cup from me, more to soothe any misgivings, I would guess. My own cup, prepared before, had no berries at all. We clinked the cups together, and then he took a huge gulp to please me, to cozen me, or perhaps to remove the sleeping parchment from his mouth. He smiled, then took another sip. And another. Then, without prodding, he said, “I dreamed that I was a crow flying over a landscape that looked like a chessboard.”

“A chessboard?”

“Squares of black and red, and . . .” His hand described a draughts board.

“How . . . odd,” I remarked, though I thought it all of a piece. Surely it was the Queen’s Game he’d dreamt, perhaps the Black Knight’s gambit.

He shook his head, till the hair covered one eye. “That’s not the odd part. I dreamed I was hunting for something.”

“What were you hunting?” I drew in a quiet breath. Waited.

“Some . . . girl,” he said, “with purple hair. Or maybe
black. And a tattoo on her neck like a bruise. Isn’t that . . . weird?”

The blessed blueberry had done its work. Or else he was guiling me, using the descriptions of the girl in Meteora’s letter. How much could he have read while I was downstairs getting my eagle mail? Not enough, I hoped. Though he could have read it at other times, when I was at the shop, perhaps, and I, thinking he slept. I decided to assume that I still had some herbal magicks in me and smiled at him as if fondly. “Definitely . . . weird.” But all the while I wondered if he were testing me as I him. And I was beginning to think his dream significant enough for me to act upon it. Farseeing I might be, but he seemed already well ahead of me. I could scarcely wait until he was gone back into dreams so I could do something about my suspicions.

Again the blueberry blessing did not fail me. He yawned. Shrugged. Returned to the bed and fell into sleep. This time I was sure of it.

I shut all the curtains but one that overlooked the trees. The rowan shook silver leaves where the setting moon shone on it. Those spindly trees are nothing like our forests, but they were all I had. “Watch,” I whispered to them. “Hold.”

Taking his teacup to the window, I stared at the bottom. The leaves were muddied and unclear. I turned the cup from side to side, tried to make sense of the reading. At last I brought the cup back to the cleaning sink and set it down.

Then I took up the glove and shook out Robin’s hair onto the low table, making a circle of it with a red candle at the center. I had found that candle in one of the cupboards, pushed way to the back. Found things have great power.

Luckily, there was no wind to disturb the circle of hair and thus destroy my symmetries. Luckily there were no passersby to call out drunkenly and challenge the line of my chant. For once, the streets were still of sirens and motor horns. I judged I had arrived at the moment for my spell.

Pricking my finger with a small pin, I let a drop of blood bead before placing the finger—blood first—onto the flame to put it out.

Yes, blood-castings are dangerous. But the tea leaves were unclear. My scare-bird might have simply been a good boy brought low by dreams. He might have been only a curious lad who looked through my letters as a child reads signs. But I guessed he was something more. The Queen’s tool? A spy for the UnSeelie? A minion of Red Cap’s? I had to be sure, or at least as sure as my feeble spells might tell me. Because if I was right, I needed to send him to my sister at once, put him next to the black-haired girl, or throw him into the Red Cap’s path.

So danger or no, I went the way of blood. The spiral of smoke began to twist upward and I held my breath. Slowly it formed a picture. I was relieved, of course, that such a casting still worked here, in this rough, magic-lorn city.

The twisting smoke made a picture that was as clear as the tea leaves had been muddled. And what the picture showed me made me start. Not with alarm, but with a kind of relief. In the smoke was my trickster and the tattooed girl, their mouths devouring one another, breast to breast, so entwined nothing could part them. And all about them were dancing stars.

As I wrote quickly to Meteora: