have ended with the red-armored sidhe’s swift death. Instead, there was a rumble like thunder, and the sidhe—male, broad-shouldered, helmed with pale gold chased with rubies—dropped as a marionette with cut strings would, hit the crazyquilt-cracked pavement, and began jerking as muscles spasmed helplessly. Too-thin legs clasped in clashing metal sent up tendrils of steam.
All froze as Unwinter’s displeasure congealed, and the rest of the assembled Unseelie—sneaking through cracks, hiding in corners, a fresh influx of hounds already crunching and slurping at their sun-roasted fellows—cowered.
“Now, now,” Unwinter said, the coals beneath his shadowy helm focusing on Jeremiah. “He is mine alone. Bring me back the Ragged, and a prize to any who does so.”
A scrambling in the shadows, a chittering howl, and Jeremiah moved.
Unwinter’s mailed fist had raised, and the deadly silver curve clasped in it was not a weapon. Jeremiah recognized it—how could he not? The lance screamed a high, keening cry as he finally called upon its true speed and strength.
He wanted no mistakes.
They scrabbled and ran, the Unseelie, but the far deadlier threat was the horn Unwinter was about to wind. It was one of the few things older than sidhe or Sundering, that flute-lipped instrument, and its curve was of no geometry a mortal could look upon without queasy revulsion. It was whispered that Unwinter himself had been the only sidhe to escape its deadly call since the first dawn.
To give that ancient thing a blast of living breath was to call the Wild Hunt in its full strength, both Unseelie and Sluagh—the ravening unforgiven, who could find no rest under any god or master. The smaller horn-whistles the knights carried were copies, and awful enough, their ultrasonic cries chilling every living thing, even those that could not hear it. Unwinter had not ridden the full Hunt in a few hundred years, but if he was about to now, it meant certain death.
There was no escaping the Sluagh.
The lance quivered, straining through air gone brittle-hard as glass. For a paradoxical syrup-stretching moment, brief as a blink and long enough to contain his entire life, Jeremiah Gallow thought he was too late. Airborne, the lance pulling his body along on crimson-thread strings, a sharp sweet flare of pain in his calf where one of Unwinter’s hounds had leapt at a tempting target, a coughing lion’s shout—
—and the lance’s tip grazed the ancient deadly thing, wrenching it from the plated, long-fingered fist, sending it flying.
The gasp of horror echoing from every Unseelie who had lingered to watch their lord murder him would have been amusing if he hadn’t already been straining himself in a different direction, the lance screaming with fierce joy as finally, finally its full measure was called upon.
What if it’s not enough?
The thought was there and gone in less than a heartbeat. He hit concrete, rolling, his hand flashing out and closing over something burning-cold.
Star-metal, they whispered in corners and hiding-holes. It fell, before the dawning when First Summer woke and named the trees, when Unwinter was merely a child. Some say the dwarves made it from a lump of sky-molten metal, but they deny it; they say it was already shaped when it landed, and they merely held it until the Sundering and Unwinter’s Harrowing, when he rode through Seelie and the mortal realms at will, and all barred their doors at night.
Up again, his coatsleeve scraped almost to ribbons by the pavement, the lance vanishing into the fiercely burning marks on his arms. Behind him, Unwinter’s roar of rage shivered windows, a ring of ice expanding, nipping at Gallow’s heels. Running, heart pounding, cradling ancient death against his chest, he put his head down and yelled, a rising cry of effort that weakened the high iron church gate just enough for him to burst through, metal shattering as the flash-chill turned it glass-brittle.
Lingering consecration on the church grounds would slow them, but Unwinter wouldn’t stop until he had his horn back.
Which meant Robin was safe. Or at least, safer, because Gallow was now the sidhe Unwinter would want to pursue most.
Time to think fast, Jer.
LIPS INSTEAD OF THROAT
37
Wind roared in her ears. She wrapped her fingers more firmly in the elfhorse’s mane and leaned down to make herself a smaller target. Her hand throbbed with wild sweet pain, an exquisite drawing against each nerve’s branching channel as the mane crawled into the pinpricks, hair turning to tiny greed-gulping mouths. Hot water stung from her eyes by the wind slicked her cheeks as the