mincingly through, each of its hooves clawed and settling with a thin scream on a cushion of resisting air. Atop its broad back, a rider appeared, sable armor swallowing reflected light from Jeremiah’s tiny circle of safety. From the broad spiked shoulders a long velvet cloak swirled, shredding into smoke and greenish steam along its tattered edges; under the dull-glinting helm two red coals fastened on Gallow and the woman who inhaled behind him, her hand reaching his shoulder and digging in. She didn’t have the strength to bruise him, and the sudden hot sharp spike of guilt in Jeremiah’s chest was the silence a moment before a volcano’s thundering eruption.
“Robin.” He sounded calm, and precise, even to himself. “Run.”
The lance hummed, and Jeremiah Gallow braced himself to battle Unwinter himself.
CANNOT CARRY TWO
35
What is he DOING? She wanted to speak—idiot, you were not supposed to be here. You’ve ruined everything. There was not breath for it, if she expected to slip them both free of this trap. Robin had expected to spring the jaws shut just a hairsbreadth away from her own flesh, then lead them a merry chase.
She had not expected the Armormaster to show his face yet.
She sought to push him aside, finishing her inhale, her throat relaxing. Her fingers had dipped toward her left skirt pocket; every scrap of Unseelie attention fastened on her. As if she would give away her advantage so easily. Did they all think her stupid?
Arrogance blinds them, Robin. See that you do not share that fault.
Gallow completed the ruin of Robin’s fine plan by moving forward a half-step, as the butcher shop’s window shivered and starred with breakage behind the tall, dark rider. “I am Jeremiah Gallow,” he said, calmly and clearly. “And I challenge thee, Harne, Lord of Unwinter.”
He’s gone mad. That’s the only explanation. Robin reached up, feeling blindly under her hair.
“You.” The chill, lipless tone froze the sidewalk in concentric rings as the destrier stamped, a pretty movement made horrifying by its ungainly grace. Its rider lifted one black-mailed fist, metal scraping as he pointed with a finger far too long to be human. “You dare challenge me?”
“I said as much.” Gallow’s lunatic calm didn’t crack. “Are your ears stuffed with pixie-weed, that you did not hear me clearly?”
A rumbling sound that might have been a laugh, as the Unseelie—and there were more of them now, pouring through rips and refts in the curtain of the Veil, stepping sideways from whatever place in their realm that lay like gossamer fabric over this one. Robin had to exhale, her fingers slippery under the heaviness of her hair, an awful chilling sense of being naked and vulnerable stroking her nape.
“How proud you are,” Unwinter said, and the razor-edged amusement was dreadful. Robin’s ears, sharpened by attention to cadence and harmony, drilled with sudden pain, hearing wrongness. It wasn’t just the grim hunger of a creature that could devour souls wholesale she heard, but something else.
Something she had heard not so long ago, in Summer’s dulcet tones.
Apprehension.
The world hung suspended for a long moment, as the situation shifted and wavered inside Robin’s head. Unwinter was generally held to fear nothing; it was his iron rule that kept his realm from sliding through the Second Veil, not to mention kept the sneaking, malicious Unseelie under some manner of control. If he had begun to dread the plague, instead of seeking to leverage it…
… well. A very small suspicion—that the illness was not of Unwinter’s doing at all, despite what some of Summer’s Court said, or even a “natural” disaster—sharpened still further. Which was very interesting, but nothing she had time to worry on.
Her fingers slid away from Gallow’s shoulder, muscle gone hard as tile as he prepared to be a complete and utter imbecile. Perhaps he even had a plan.
Distraction, Robin.
“Hold your tongue—” Unwinter began, as if his saying it would stopper her throat. Perhaps it would have, had she not already been lung-full and determined.
The song burst free, a flood of gold that painted the intersection with furious light akin to sunshine. Certainly it was close enough to make several of the hounds cringe and scream, their hides smoking; the higher Unseelie cowered into shadowed cracks. Unwinter too made a noise, but it was swallowed briefly in the light.
Dispelling the force of the cry over such a broad area meant it would fade within bare seconds, but she was already moving. Her fingers tugged painfully at her hair, untwisting the precious bone