“If the fey are slowing us down, the same is true for her,” Rosier reminded me.
“Yeah, except she has permission to be here. She can use all the magic she wants!”
Not to mention that last time she’d been with two other Pythias: her own mentor, some doddering old woman named Lydia, and what had looked like a Byzantine princess, all ornate golden robes and elaborate lacquered curls. They’d been an odd-looking group, but powerful. More powerful than me.
I started tugging at the backpack.
“What do you want?” Rosier demanded.
“The canteen— Oh God!” I’d worked it out of the side, but abruptly dropped it.
“What?”
“You oozed on it!”
I sat back against the tree trunk, closed my eyes, and just breathed for a minute. It could be worse, I told myself. We were here. Once these guys passed by, we’d get back on the road and should be at court by morning. I’d find out what Pritkin had learned about the staff, and where it might be in my time. And then, as soon as the cursed soul showed up, we’d be out of here. Out and back and everything would be just . . . well, not perfect, all things considered, but much better.
God, so much!
After a moment, I felt my spine relax and find a space for itself against the tree’s rough bark. The ground was wet from the perpetual Wales weather, and the air was chilly enough that I could see my breath when I could see anything. But it was also weirdly soothing. The tramp, tramp, tramp of all those feet, the sigh of the wind, the peaceful darkness.
The clap of a slimy hand over my mouth.
My eyes flew open to see Rosier’s horrible proto face staring into mine, the usually green eyes milky, the noseless nostrils flaring— “Mmphh!”
“Shut. Up,” he hissed, and a second later, I understood why.
Because a hooded fey was standing there, a dozen yards off, holding out some kind of glowing sphere. It was slightly bigger than a softball, and sloshed like liquid when he moved. Which he did when a twig cracked behind him, and he spun to meet another fey, whose spill of dark hair gleamed in the moonlight.
Which was what the light was, I realized, as the second fey crouched down to the ditch and came up with his own handful of water. It stuck together in the same way it might have in space, forming a wobbly orb that seemed to glow from within, catching and enhancing the beams filtering through the trees. Enhancing them into a good approximation of a flashlight, I realized, mentally cursing as the twin orbs threw shadows our way.
“See something?” the second fey asked. The spell I’d picked up on my previous visit to this era was still translating for me, but it looked weird, seeing his lips move out of sync with the words. Like a video gone wrong.
“Smell,” the first fey said. “An odd scent. I don’t know it.”
They paused to breathe for a moment, looking oddly like a pair of vamps scenting the air. And my eyes focused on Rosier’s still-lit cigarette, lying on the ground where he must have dropped it. Until his webbed toes crushed it into the mud.
“Your nose is better than mine,” the other fey said, swinging his orb around. And causing Rosier and me to try to climb inside the tree trunk. Luckily, the never-trimmed foliage hung low, casting a dark shadow. And we didn’t move, didn’t breathe; I think my heart might even have stopped.
Until the first fey smiled, a brief glint of white in the darkness.
“Always was,” he said, and the two melted away like part of the night.
I contemplated throwing up, not least because Rosier hadn’t released me.
“Wait,” he whispered, so low that it might have been the sigh of the wind.
But it wasn’t. Like it wasn’t another shadow that moved just beyond the tree limbs, visible only because the misting rain was suddenly missing. In a man-shaped void.
I wasn’t going to throw up, I decided calmly. I was going to pass out. From lack of air and from a general sense from my nervous system that it had had enough. It couldn’t do this shit anymore.
But then the bastard moved off, too, as silently as he’d come, and I fell softly into the muck.
And just stayed there, trying to breathe quietly, while the rest of the troop trouped on by.
It was getting to me, I decided. All of this. It just was.
Not just shifting a ridiculous-sounding fifteen centuries, but everything. I thought maybe Caleb had been right: I needed a vacation. Somewhere sunny. Somewhere with a beach. And warm sand instead of perpetual mud, and a soft chaise instead of more freaking tree roots, and a hot guy— “Which one?” somebody asked.
“What?”
“I didn’t say anything,” Rosier informed me.
I vaguely realized that I was on my back, and that he was wiping my face with what looked like a moist towelette.
Maybe because it was a moist towelette.
“Where did you get that?” I asked blearily.
“Out of the pack. Lie still,” he added when I started struggling to sit up.
“Why? They’re gone.” Even the sound of footsteps had vanished while I was busy graying out.
“Humor me.”
I humored him. I didn’t feel so good.
“We need to get going,” I pointed out, after a moment.
“In a while. Let them get well away first.”
That . . . sounded like a plan, actually. I lay in the mud, staring up at the swirl of stars visible through the dark, wet canopy above. And waited while my hideous companion cleaned me up. Or made me as clean as anyone ever got in Wales, which wasn’t very. Even the fey’s hair had been dripping. . . .
“Is there a reason Pritkin’s element is water?” I asked, after the wind tossed some in my face.
“Is it physically impossible for you to lie quiet?” Rosier asked.
“Humor me.”
He opened his mouth to say something but then closed it again abruptly. “Well, obviously.”
“And that would be?”
“I already told you, he’s part fey—”
“What part?”
“An eighth, if you must know.”
“An eighth?”
“Yes. His mother was a quarter, his grandmother half, and his great-grandmother—”
“Does he know?” Pritkin had always acted like his fey blood was minimal.
“I’ve no idea.”
“You didn’t talk about her? His mother, I mean?”
“No. She was dead. What was the point?”
“That she was his mother?”
Rosier scowled at me, like I was the one acting weird. “She was also part fey, and he was infatuated enough with the creatures as it was. Just like her, always talking about them—”
“His mother was always talking about them?” I tried to get up on one elbow, but Rosier pushed me back down with an irritated tchaa sound. “Then she didn’t live there. In Faerie.”
“Well, of course she didn’t live there! How would I have met her in that case?”
“Then where did she live? Who was she?”
He scowled some more, but to my surprise he answered. “You already know that.”
“I don’t. Pritkin doesn’t talk about it.”
“But surely you’ve read the stories.”