liar? Wise of you. “We happened to cross paths.” He may be seeking to sell you to Unwinter, but you’re safe enough for the moment.
A tangle-haired brughnie girl, her green coarsewoven skirts hiked enough to show her knobby barklike ankles and bare horn-toed feet, slammed a foaming mug of nut-brown bitter down before him. She whirled smartly away, and Jeremiah winced inwardly. Now Goodfellow had stood him a drink. The debt was slight, but it could be a wedge. Yet he could not be impolite, so he lifted it and took a long draft.
When he wiped his mouth, the tingle of good sidhe ale all through him and his nerves suitably bolstered, he bumped the backpack below the table with his boot. It was a reassuring weight. “Ragged.” He accorded her the courtesy of a surname.
She nodded slightly. Her eyes were close to indigo now, and he thought she was perhaps weary. Through the smoke and fug of the Oak’s closeness, he could not catch a breath of that cherryspice perfume, and he dared not lean forward to try.
“Gallow.” She accorded him the same. “I bring word. She wants you.”
He dropped his gaze, staring into the mug’s blind eye. A messenger? She said she was under commission.
“The Queen.” Her voice had dropped, but she said it slowly, in case he was stupid enough to not take her meaning. “It pleases her to have your presence in Summer.”
It does not please me. “She can go to Hell.” He could not help himself, glancing up to take a sipping glance of her face.
He couldn’t pretend she was Daisy, but he couldn’t look away, either.
Her expression had not changed. She studied the lithori, with a slightly distracted air. “Do you think such a place would accept her?” It could have been an incautious sally, or a warning.
He shrugged. Why did they have to talk about Summer? He wanted to ask her…
… what? What did he want to say? You look like a mortal I once knew. An insult to any reasonable sidhe. There had been no hint of changeling on Daisy; it was impossible. All of this was impossible.
Wondering why Daisy’s face was now a haze in his memory was, too. He was just like every other faithless sidhe. Would there come a time when he could go a day, a week, a month, without thinking of her?
Except he had just gone an entire afternoon doing just that.
Eventually, Robin pressed on. “You’ve seen the plague. They are dying, Gallow.”
“So are mortals.” A bitter cut.
“Panko. I remember.” She nodded, those curls falling forward. The sun in her hair had diminished, a smolder now. “The mortal-Tainted don’t take the sickness. It began to grow marked last year, and the Queen did not open the Gates until the very last moment, and then only a quarter of the way. She cannot do so this year without risking a withering.” Her gaze drifted over the Oak’s interior, much as a warrior would study terrain.
She remembered a dead man’s name, at least. It was more courtesy than he expected. She was drawn tight as a harpstring, and she was indeed weary. Only a desperate woman would trust Goodfellow—and why had he, of all people, brought Gallow here, hinting at Unwinter? Did it serve him to make mischief? Had he told this Robin whom she resembled?
The bigger mystery was, of course, why she resembled his dead wife. Coincidence, just maybe.
To put his hands in her hair, make a fist, feel the slippery silkiness—
He took another long pull of the ale as she continued her soft recitation.
“Unwinter suffers the most, since his land is open to all. The Free brush against the sickness and take it more often than not. Mortal blood affords some immunity. Half are safe, and above to a quarter of mortal blood. ’Tis the fullblood who fear, and those who were yesterday so proud of their aristocracy now dig for peasant ancestors, hoping to find some insurance.” She took a small mannerly sip of her wine, set it down again with a click. “When the Gates open, of course the danger to her Court is greater. Yet I ask myself, Gallow, what will happen to Half and less, when Summer and Unwinter are gone?”
I don’t care. His lips were numb. Maybe it was the ale. “It cannot be that dire.”
“It is. Unwinter is ravaged, the Black and Low Counties unwonted quiet. The rest of the free spaces before the Second Veil, who can tell? The freefolk—those