The Treachery of Beautiful Things (15 page)

The question caught Jenny off guard. Her fingers tightened around a fistful of grass. “It’s—it’s the first chance I ever got. I looked everywhere. Tried everything. But it never
worked, not until now.” It wasn’t quite true. She tried to hide the blush that heated her cheeks, but Jack didn’t appear to notice. He made a dismissive noise deep in his throat.

“There are chances every day,” he said, waving a hand in the air. “The portals are everywhere. I know. I have to keep people away from them all the time.” He gave her a pointed look.

“You are so arrogant!” she burst out, ripping a fistful of grass from the ground and hurling it at him. It didn’t have quite the desired impact. He looked at her, unfazed, and pulled a blade from where it dangled in front of his face. She grabbed another fistful, struggling to keep her voice even. “Maybe there are ways through on this side,” she bit out, “but it’s different where I come from.” She pushed away the voice that told her she’d been too afraid to try, too terrified of forests and trees after what she had seen that night. She sat straighter, tightening her death-grip on the grass. “I owe it to Tom to try. I owe it to our family. You don’t know what it was like, after he was gone. They think he’s dead, but for so long, they thought—we all thought—”
The worst
. Oh God, the worst nightmares imagination and the media could conjure up. “But he isn’t dead. And I’m
not
crazy. He’s here.”

Jack leaned against a tree and crossed his arms. “Perhaps. But maybe he should be dead. Maybe you should leave it like that for the sake of us all.”

“Are you a monster? He’s my brother! I love him!” she shouted. This time her fingers curled around a stone and
she hurled it at him, her anger breaking her hold on reason. She didn’t see Jack’s arm move, but he snatched the rock from the air in front of his face.

Jenny recoiled as if she’d been struck herself.

“You loved him seven years ago,” said Jack in a voice terrible in its calmness. “Now you love a ghost, a memory. You’ll see. You don’t even know your brother anymore. Seven years, Jenny, seven years in the court of the queen…” He tossed the stone aside.

“He’s my brother, Jack. He was my best friend. We looked out for each other and I lost him. It was my fault. I went home and he didn’t. And everything changed.” Jenny struggled to keep her voice steady. “I want him back. I love my brother. Can’t you understand that?”

Puck looked up from preening at his fur.

“Don’t listen to him,” he said with a laugh, clapping his hands together. “Jack can’t tell you about love, fraternal or otherwise. He doesn’t have a heart.”

Jack pushed off from the tree he’d been leaning on. “Shut up, hobgoblin. You know nothing and understand less.”

“What do you mean?” Jenny asked, ignoring Jack’s darkening face. “Puck?”

“Just what I say,” he chuckled. “Jack has no heart. Otherwise he couldn’t perform his duty, do his job day after day, night after night. But he longs for a heart, don’t you, lad? A heart of your own?”

“You’re nothing but a miserable little—” Jack began, but Puck tutted him to silence.

“Of course I am. And you long for the heart you can never have. They won’t let you have one.”

“My heart is safe,” Jack said, sliding down to sit at the base of the tree, like a puppet with cut strings. “There’s nothing more to be said on that, Puck. As well you know.”

Jenny watched him, his head bent, worrying a blade of grass in his fingers. She hesitated a moment, then got to her feet and approached.

The sun was low in the sky. The trees cast long shadows around him.

Jack suddenly surged to stand. He towered over her, a dark silhouette with burning eyes like gas flames. “I should go.” His voice sounded odd. Something from her nightmares. Something momentarily forgotten and yet, because he was Jack, terribly familiar.

She took a step back, her foot pivoting in the dirt. When he didn’t move, Jenny advanced on him quickly, before she could lose her nerve. Fingers fumbling, she managed to undo the clasp of her necklace. The little golden heart dangled between them. She stood before Jack and offered it to him. The setting sun made the gold gleam red, and she thought of the dragon’s glittering scales.

“It isn’t much,” she whispered, “but…take it.”

The marsh lights in Jack’s eyes dimmed. His anger, his
darkness, seemed to die in him, like the calmness of the forest after a storm. He looked down at her, his eyes turning bright with confusion. “That’s gold. It’s a pure metal. I can’t, Jenny.”

Jenny frowned. “What’s wrong with that?”

“Gold has a magic all its own.” Puck laughed. “All things do. But gold is strongest of all. Noble, precious, magical gold. Even the earth itself can’t corrode it.”

Jack growled, baring his teeth at Puck, who grinned even more violently, as if that too was a taunt. For a moment she thought Jack would launch himself at the hobgoblin and stepped closer to part them.

Jenny swiftly took Jack’s hand and pressed the necklace into his palm, closing his fingers over it. His skin was warm and smooth. She let go.

“If you help me find the one who gave it to me, it’s the smallest payment.”

“I asked no payment.” Something flashed in Jack’s face that Jenny couldn’t identify. She looked at him, searching his eyes. “I have to go,” he said again.

He stood there in the lengthening shadows, unmoving. Impossibly tall, unnaturally large. The light played tricks and gave the angles and planes of his face an appearance like polished wood. His right eye was greener than ever, a forest green of new leaves and fresh shoots. The blue of his left eye was the noon sky on a cloudless day.

“You will help me, won’t you?” she asked. He uncurled his hand and stared at the heart. “You can’t try to send me back again. Not after…”

Jack shuddered, the sense of menace leeching out of him, and looked at her once more. Changeable as the wind, her guardian. Like leaves in that wind, never resting. Jack nodded and fastened the chain around his neck. He tucked the locket carefully under his shirt.

“Very well, if that’s your will. I’ll take you to him, though I still think you won’t care for what you discover. I’ll make sure you get safely to the queen’s palace and see your brother.”

It rushed over her in a wave—relief, victory—but he looked so miserable she couldn’t let the full extent of her elation show. She was sure he saw it anyway. “Thank you,” Jenny whispered. It sounded like a prayer.

“I have to go.”

“But…” She glanced back at the trees. Was it out there? Watching them? The thing in the forest. She sensed it, coming closer all the time. Following her. It seemed to remember her as clearly as she remembered it. “The creature…”

Jack followed her gaze, his eyes hard as precious stones. Then he turned away. “It won’t bother you,” he said. “I’ll keep it away. I’ll be back here when you awaken.”

The sun sank lower in the sky, only a slice of it visible above the tree line. Still Jack watched from the safety of
the thickest foliage. Jenny sat, her hair twisted in a hasty knot, eating the last of the berries she had gathered. They stained her lips and her fingers. Every so often, she took out the stone the Leczi had given her, turning it over in her palm.

Her heart was too great for this place—he knew that now with certainty—and as such too open to being beguiled. The way she had rescued the Leczi child, and stood before the Leczi herself…The queen would grind her to dust. Oberon would use her no better.

She should go back to the Edge. But she wouldn’t. He’d have to hand her over to one or the other.

And he’d promised to take her to Tom. To the palace. To the queen.

The thought was like swallowing iron.

Titania offered freedom if he obeyed her, if he handed Jenny over like a shiny bauble. He’d brought Titania lost things before…But that was because Oberon normally wanted nothing to do with the mortal world. This time it would be different.

Jack closed his hand over the gold pendant, felt it slide on the chain around his neck. Her heart, her mark on him in changeless gold. Had she bound him now as well? Or had he bound himself the moment he’d said
I’ll keep a watch, I swear it.

And bound himself further when he’d promised to take her to Tom.

He groaned, a deep creaking moan. Why had he said that? And she’d looked so happy. Like he’d just promised her the world instead of her doom.

The light had faded to almost nothing now. Still Jack lingered. Jenny settled down for the night, laughing at some of Puck’s jests. The hobgoblin was positively courteous with her this evening, and Jack frowned.

Where had Puck gone when they’d faced the Leczi?

The weight of sunset pressed down on Jack, turning his rational thought sluggish and dull. Of a morning he would be able to figure it out, he was sure. But now…something else strained to get out with the growing dark. He struggled against it, trying to grasp the idea that was gathering momentum at the back of his mind. Puck had gone somewhere. Puck’s attitude had changed. Why? Not because she’d saved the Leczi’s child, surely. So where had Puck gone? And why?

The natural energies of the forest froze and contracted. Jack straightened, his bones aching as if the frost had gnawed on them. A wave of absolute cold burst through the trees, followed by the heat of a tropical night. He bent, his hands supporting himself on his knees, and tried to turn, but a force far stronger than him closed a mighty grip around him, holding him still.

“Well, what have we here?”

The voice resonated through his chest, as if it echoed off
stone in deep places. A figure stepped up to the edge of the tree line. Jack’s body reacted in spite of itself, as it always did, as he was bound to do. He dropped to his knees and bowed his head.

“My lord.” The words fell from his mouth, brought forth, whether Jack willed them or not.

Oberon towered over him, dark eyes glistening in his flawless face. Vines and fruit tangled in his black curls, and the antlers that formed his crown looked incongruous and yet as much a part of him as his strong arms or fleet legs. Some said he’d been a god once, in the mortal world, or as good as. Jack didn’t know anything about that. All he knew, deep in the most sacred part of his soul, was that the king was to be obeyed. And even deeper, right down in the most secret place of all, a place he could never think of revealing, Jack hated him for it.

Oberon’s full attention turned on Jenny, his eyes burning as he watched her lie down, watched her eyes close and her breath settle into the rhythm of sleep.

“Whatever have you found, Jack?” he asked, his voice rumbling like the earth itself.

“She’s on a quest,” Jack replied. “In search of her brother taken by the queen.”

Oberon snorted at the mention of Titania. It was well known that they hated each other now. Arguments over servants, over boundaries, over anything at all…The queen was
powerful, but she feared the king. And he in turn loathed her independence.

“But that’s not all, I believe,” the king replied. “Puck tells an interesting tale, you know? Of a great heart, of a battle with the Redcaps, of her rescue by a Kobold, no less, the rescue of a girl of pure spirit and heart. Of that same girl, risking her life for a fae child. The offspring of Leczi, who every other being here would have left to die. What do you make of that, Jack?”

The wintry cold inside Jack’s chest spread into his limbs like frost across the forest floor. Puck had told. Puck had told everything. Worst of all, Jack wasn’t even surprised. He’d been reckless. Now he bit down on his anger and tried to choose his words with care, though the compulsion to obey blurred his conscious mind.

“I’m charged with guarding the Edge, my lord, and with protecting those who quest in the Realm.”

The trembling in his limbs warned him that the sun had almost set. His body ached, but Oberon’s very presence held him as he was, on his knees. And would continue to do so until the king had extracted whatever he wanted. And then he would do whatever he willed. And not for the first time.

Elders preserve me,
Jack thought,
this will hurt. He’ll make sure of it.

“Tell me, Jack,” Oberon went on relentlessly. “Who do you serve?”

“You, my lord.”
Best to get it over with quickly. Best to get it done.
“I serve only you.”

Trailing brambles of agony began to stretch out through his limbs, tearing their way through the skin.

“Not…entirely true, that answer. Who else?”

“You, my lord. I serve only you.” Panic touched him now, setting his blood rushing. Did Oberon know about Titania’s offer? Did he know about the casket? He must, if he gave it to her. Or had she taken it? Could she do that? Jack hadn’t told Puck any of it. What else had the king heard? What could he know?

Oberon chuckled and the pain sharpened still further, thorns puncturing him from the inside.

“Perhaps I misspoke myself,” said the king. He reached down one huge hand to Jack’s shoulder. It was the first actual physical contact, and it crushed him into the soil. “Who else
would
you serve?”

“My lord? I don’t…I don’t…” Jack clenched his teeth. He couldn’t say it, not again. He’d made that mistake before and look where it had gotten him.