Sirensong (24 page)

“We need to rest,” Kimber said suddenly, startling us all because we’d barely spoken two words since we’d gotten started this morning.

“We’re still too close to the palace,” Ethan immediately protested. “We can’t afford a rest, not when we sat there not moving for hours last night.”

Kimber was about to retort, but she fell silent, her face going pale.

“What?” I asked, looking frantically around. “What is it?”

But then the rest of us heard it too: the baying of hounds in the distance. Not anywhere near distant enough, either.

“Shite,” Ethan and Keane said together, and I didn’t have anything better to add. I doubted a mortal bloodhound would have much trouble catching our trail, and I knew that Fae hounds would be even better at tracking than mortal ones.

“Is it my imagination, or are they getting closer?” Kimber asked in a small voice.

“They’re getting closer,” Keane said. “Come on, we’ve got to run!”

It wasn’t hard to catch his sense of urgency, and we all took off running through the trees, painfully aware of the baying of the hounds growing louder. There was no way we were outrunning dogs, but we weren’t going to just sit there and wait for them to catch us.

“Would your shield spell keep the dogs from smelling us?” I panted at Keane as we ran. Not that I thought he had enough strength to cast it after last night.

He shook his head. “I wish.”

I turned to Ethan. “You got anything?”

“Nothing!” he said, grabbing my arm and urging me to run faster.

I was already stumbling from exhaustion, and I was never as graceful as the full-blooded Fae anyway. When I tried to eke a little more speed out, the tip of my shoe caught on something, and I went sprawling. Ethan was there hauling me to my feet practically before I hit the ground. I managed one more hunched-over stumble-step, and then went down again, realizing I was still tangled up in whatever I’d tripped on.

And that was when I noticed the tendril of ivy wrapped around my ankle.

“Come on!” Keane urged, he and Kimber coming back to me as Ethan tried again to yank me to my feet.

The ivy didn’t let go, and soon a sea of it flowed toward us, creeping out from behind bushes and crawling down the trunks of the trees.

I swallowed a scream as the ivy leapt into the air, tendrils raining down around us, forming a dense green wall, trapping us. Familiar, needle-sharp thorns sprung from the vines, though the Green Lady made no attempt to prick us with them.

“Be still and be silent,” a disembodied voice ordered us, and I don’t think any of us was inclined to argue. Not with all those thorns pointing our way. I slipped my hand into Ethan’s as we crouched within the shelter of the ivy. Beside us, Kimber was clutching Keane’s arm, and he was looking a little wild-eyed.

The baying of the hounds drew nearer and nearer, and I felt the vibration of hoofbeats, though I couldn’t hear the horses over the racket the dogs were making. It sounded like the dogs were right on top of us.

Suddenly there was a rustling sound and a dog gave a high-pitched yip. The baying stopped, replaced by anxious-sounding whimpers. Moments later, I finally heard the sound of hooves. The horses came to a stop, and a man’s voice shouted, “Let us pass.”

“You will pass when you have paid the toll,” the Green Lady said.

I’d assumed this was the same Green Lady who’d accepted my blood sacrifice, but her voice sounded subtly different.

The man made an impatient sound. “We have no suitable sacrifice to offer, and we are in pursuit of a fugitive from the Queen’s justice. Let us pass!”

“Come back when you have a suitable sacrifice,” the Green Lady said. “Until then, you will go no farther.”

The man said something I figured was probably a curse, though I didn’t recognize the language.

“You are impeding the Queen’s justice!” he said, all offended-sounding.

“I am within my rights,” the Green Lady replied. “There is no requirement that my tolls be extracted only upon roads, and I choose to extract one here. Surely you do not begrudge the land its nourishment.”

There was some grumbling. Our pursuers most definitely did begrudge the land, but none of them was stupid enough to say so. Depending on how thoroughly tied the Green Lady was to the land, she probably could make the lives of anyone who annoyed her pretty damn difficult.

“The fugitives you are aiding plotted the assassination of the Queen’s granddaughter,” the lead pursuer tried again. “Every moment we spend arguing increases the chances that they will escape the punishment they deserve.”

It was only then that I realized the Green Lady was hiding us so thoroughly that our pursuers didn’t even know we were there.

“Then you’d best hurry back with your sacrifice, don’t you think?” the Green Lady said, and there was no missing the hint of annoyance in her voice. Her leaves rustled, and I imagined she was making an impressive display of her thorns.

The man cursed again, but soon afterward, we heard him stomp away. Then we heard the hoofbeats as the riders retreated, taking their chastened and whimpering hounds with them.

When we could no longer hear the echo of the horses’ hooves, the Green Lady’s vines receded, forming themselves into a tall woman in a flowing green gown.

“I will delay them until the sun goes down,” she said. “I would merely have waited until they brought me a sacrifice, but their arrogance and rudeness requires they be taught a lesson. Their hounds will be unable to scent you until I allow it.”

I swallowed my urge to say thank you. “Would it be rude for me to ask why you’re helping me?”

“You gifted my sister with the treasure of a willing sacrifice. As you have seen, the Sidhe are no longer as gracious about providing sacrifice as they were of old. It is time to remind them of the importance of good manners.”

“Is there any chance you could help us get to the standing stones without being caught?” Ethan blurted.

Kimber’s eyes widened, and she punched Ethan in the arm. “Shut up, Ethan!” she hissed.

The Green Lady didn’t have any features on her face, and yet even so I could feel the glare she turned on Ethan, who held his hands up and tried to look innocent.

“Sorry. I was just asking. I’m not a native of Faerie. I don’t know the rules, and I apologize if I just broke one.”

The Green Lady kept her disapproving gaze on Ethan. “If you don’t know the rules, then perhaps it’s best not to speak.” She swept her gaze over all of us, and we obediently kept our mouths shut. “The standing stones you used to travel here will be heavily guarded. I’d advise you to avoid them. However, there is another set you can try for, one they will not expect you to know about and will be less likely to guard. Depending on how fast you travel, you should find a small stream sometime tomorrow. It runs parallel to the road for several miles, and then turns west. Follow it when it turns, and it will lead you to the standing stones. They will take you to another set that is close to Avalon’s southern border.”

The Green Lady’s words kindled a spark of hope in my chest. Instead of traveling through these woods for days, or even weeks, dodging pursuit and hoping the elements didn’t finish us off, we could reach Avalon as soon as tomorrow. Our flight might not be as impossible as we’d thought. I refused to let myself think about how many problems I would still have once I reached the safety of home.

“Go now,” she said, her voice cold. “I will delay your pursuers as promised.”

She started to lose shape, apparently finished with our conversation. Her head melted into her body, and then the vines became just a tangle of greenery, creeping away into the forest, blending with the underbrush until all traces of the Green Lady vanished.

We walked until we were ready to drop, keeping ourselves relentlessly moving despite our exhaustion, determined to put as much distance behind us as possible before we lost the Green Lady’s protection. A couple of times, we heard hounds baying in the distance, but it was always far away.

Around midday, we found a little ground-fed spring and each drank about five gallons of water to ease our parched throats. A little later, we found a patch of what looked like blackberries, and we were hungry enough to eat them even though they didn’t
taste
like blackberries, and we all knew eating mysterious berries wasn’t the brightest idea. Lucky for us, there was no sign of them being poisonous—i.e., no one got sick or died—and I wondered if the Green Lady was giving us a little extra help, helping us find just enough food and water to keep going.

It wasn’t till the sun went down that we finally admitted we had to stop and get some rest. After last night’s rainstorm, the temperature never quite got back up to what it had been, and as the sun disappeared, the temperature took a nosedive. I’d never once been cold on the journey in, but tonight the breeze gave me goose bumps. And that was
before
the misty drizzle started.

We groaned in chorus. The drizzle was just enough to dampen our clothes and make us all clammy without being enough to provide us with any water. We ate the last of the blackberries—or whatever they were—as we searched for another place to hide for the night. The trees here didn’t have any convenient hollows, and the ground continued to be flat, not even providing any rocks we could use as shelter from the wind.

Eventually, too tired to move another step, we made our halfhearted camp among the roots of an enormous tree. It blocked a bit of the wind, and the drizzle had subsided, but we were all shivering in our damp clothes. Well,
I
was shivering. The Fae weren’t much affected by the cold, but that didn’t mean they were comfortable. We huddled together, me with Ethan and Kimber with Keane, but there was no kissing or teasing or secret smiles. Even the shot of hope the Green Lady had given us, the hope that tomorrow night we might sleep in our own beds, wasn’t enough to lift us out of our misery.

After about a half hour, Ethan rose to his feet. “I’m going to collect some firewood,” he announced.

Keane snorted. “Oh, yeah, that’s a good way to hide. Light a fire that anyone can see. With wet wood, I might add.”

Ethan scowled at him. “I can create a localized illusion that will hide us and the fire. And I don’t care how wet the wood is, I can make it burn.”

Usually, Keane would have argued more, but I think he was too tired to bother. “Fine, do what you want,” he said, then laid the back of his head against the tree and closed his eyes.

“Stay close,” Kimber warned as Ethan moved away. He spared time for a “well, duh” look before he disappeared into the darkness.

Ethan was as good as his word, returning to our makeshift camp with an impressive pile of branches. It took a while to get them burning, since he didn’t have a handy “light wet wood on fire” spell ready. From what I understand of magic, most of the Fae would take hours or even days of practice before they could train the magic to do a new spell, but Ethan managed it in about fifteen minutes. I could tell even Keane was impressed, though he would never dream of admitting it. At least Ethan refrained from acting all smug.

I can’t say we were exactly comfortable after that, but the fire was a welcome relief, and our silence as we huddled around it was almost companionable.

It didn’t take long for us to start yawning, the warmth of the fire making us even sleepier than we already were. We set up a watch schedule, because even though we’d neither seen nor heard signs of pursuit in the last several hours, it was still out there. Ethan took the first watch, and the rest of us curled up on the damp ground.

Exhaustion pulled me into sleep with alarming speed. My dreams were filled with images of blood and death and a man in a hideous horned mask chasing me down darkened roads. The man in the mask chased me into a dead-end alley, and I came to a stop in front of a high brick wall I could never climb. Heart pounding in my throat, I turned to watch helplessly as the man in the mask—the Erlking, I remembered with a sudden start—stalked down the alley toward me.

“My magic can destroy you,” I reminded him, then started to hum under my breath.

“I don’t think so,” the Erlking responded, and though I couldn’t see his face behind the mask, I heard amusement in it.

I kept humming as he continued to approach, but the magic was coming only sluggishly to my call. Unlike the flood I was now used to, there was only a trickle, and terror almost stole my voice.

The Erlking was too close. I couldn’t wait any longer or he would have me, so even though I hadn’t gathered enough magic to do much of anything, I let loose my screaming high note.

He was on me before the sound rose from my throat, his hand clamped over my mouth, trapping my scream. I flailed.

And woke up to find a hand over my mouth and my wrists held together in a bruising grip. But it wasn’t the Erlking’s eyes burning into mine, it was Ethan’s.

My first thought was that I’d been thrashing around, having a nightmare, and Ethan was trying to keep me quiet so I wouldn’t draw any search parties. Still sweating from the terror of my dream, I forced myself to relax in his grip and signal to him that I was awake. But he didn’t let go of me.

Ethan dragged me to my feet, one hand still clamped over my mouth, his other arm wrapped around my waist, trapping my own arms at my sides. His grip was bruisingly tight, and he didn’t ease up when the pained whimper of protest rose from my throat. Then, he started to drag me off into the forest.

I didn’t know what the hell was going on, but I
did
know something was horribly wrong with this scenario. Ethan was hurting me, dragging me away from the campfire and my sleeping friends. But I hadn’t suffered through all my self-defense lessons with Keane for nothing.

I stopped struggling against Ethan’s hold, then stomped down hard on his instep. He cried out in pain, the sound jerking both Keane and Kimber out of sleep. They jumped to their feet while, wincing, I took advantage of Ethan’s distraction to give him an elbow to the gut.