“It’s liberating, isn’t it?” Puck snorted, then sat down in the grass, turning his face to the sky. “So, this is our last night as exiles, huh?” he mused, leaning back on his elbows. Fireflies rose from the grass in a blinking cloud. “It seems weird, but I might actually miss this. No one pulling my strings, no one bossing me around—except irate brownies demanding their brooms back, putting spiders in my bed. It’s…relaxing.” Glancing at me, he patted the ground.
I lowered myself into the cool, damp grass as blips of amber and green buzzed around us, landing on my hands, in my hair. Looking at Ash, I took his hand and tugged him down, as well. He settled behind me, lacing his arms around my waist, and I leaned against him and closed my eyes. In another life, perhaps, it would’ve been the three of us: me, my best friend, and my boyfriend, just hanging out under the stars, maybe breaking curfew, worried about nothing except school and parents and homework.
“What are we doing, here?” came Grimalkin’s voice as the cat slipped through the grass beside me, bottlebrush tail in the air. A firefly landed on the tip, and he flicked it off irritably. “This looks remarkably close to relaxing, if I did not know a certain prince is far too uptight to relax.”
Ash chuckled and drew me tighter against him. “Feeling left out, cait sith?”
Grimalkin sniffed. “Do not flatter yourself.” But he minced his way across the grass and curled up in my lap, a warm heavy weight with soft gray fur. I scratched behind his ear, and he vibrated with purrs.
“Do you think my dad will be all right?” I asked, and Grimalkin yawned.
“He will be safer here than he would be in the real world, human,” the cat replied in a lazy voice. “No one enters this place without Leanansidhe’s permission, and no one leaves unless she allows it. Do not worry overmuch.” He flexed his claws, looking content. “The human will still be here when you return. Or even if you do not. Now, if you would attend to the other ear, that would be nice. Ah…yes, that is quite satisfactory.” His voice trailed off into rumbling purrs.
Ash laid his cheek against the back of my head and sighed. It wasn’t a sigh of irritation or anger or the melancholy that seemed to plague him at times. He sounded…content. Peaceful, even. It made me a little sad, knowing we couldn’t have more time, that this could be our last night together, without war and politics and faery laws coming between us.
Ash brushed the hair from my neck and leaned close to my ear, his voice so soft not even Grimalkin could’ve heard it. “I love you,” he murmured, and my heart nearly burst out of my chest. “Whatever happens, we’re together now. Always.”
We sat there, the four of us, talking quietly or just basking in the silence, watching the night sky. I didn’t see any falling stars, but if I had, I would’ve wished my dad be kept safe, that Ash and Puck would survive the coming war, and that somehow, we all would come out of this okay. If wishes were horses. I knew better. Fairy godmothers didn’t exist, and even if they did, they wouldn’t wave a magic wand and make everything better. (Not without a contract, anyway.) Besides, I had something better than a fairy godmother; I had my faery knight, my faery trickster, and my faery cat, and that was enough.
In the end, it didn’t matter. A simple wish wouldn’t save us from what we had to do, and my mind was made up. When dawn turned the sky pink and the envoys came for us again, I already had my answer.
PART TWO
CHAPTER TEN
THE EDGE OF IRON
Faery was not how I remembered.
I recalled the first time I stepped into the Nevernever through the door in Ethan’s closet. I remembered the enormous trees, so close and tangled that their branches shut out the sky, the mist writhing along the ground, the perpetual twilight that hung over everything. Here in the wyldwood, neither court held sway; it was a fierce, neutral territory that cared nothing for the medieval customs of Summer or the vicious society of Winter.
And it was dying.
It was a subtle thing, the taint that had sunk deep into the land and forest, corrupting them from the inside. Here and there, a tree was empty of leaves, and a rosebush had steel thorns that glinted in the light. I walked into a spiderweb, only to discover it was made of hair-thin wires, much like the net the spider-hags had used on me. Outwardly, the change was faint, almost invisible. But the beating heart of the Nevernever, which I felt all around me in every tree, every leaf and blade of grass, was pulsing with rot. Everything was touched with Iron glamour, and it was slowly eating away the Nevernever, like paper held above a flame.
And, judging from the twin looks of horror on the faces of Ash and Puck, they felt it, too.
“It’s awful, isn’t it?” said the gnome envoy, gazing around solemnly. “Not long after you were…ahem…banished, the Iron King’s army attacked, and wherever they went, the Iron Realm spread with them. The combined forces of Summer and Winter were able to drive them back, but even after they were gone, the poison remained. Our armies are camped on the edge, where the wyldwood meets the Iron Kingdom, to try to halt the Iron fey that keep pouring from the breach.”