A horn blast echoed through the forest. I felt it in the ground, reverberating up through my bones. Two other blasts answered its call, but those deep bellows did not belong to horns. In the misty darkness between the trees, a pair of towering shapes moved. They were so tall, crowned with branches, that I might have mistaken them for giant oaks had they not shifted, revealing themselves as massive thanes, both at least half again as large as the one Rook slew the day we’d met. Hounds leapt out of the woods as though fleeing from them, pale flames in the night, to boil sinuously around Hemlock’s legs, overturning the table as they vied for her affection, utterly ignored. Steam rose from their lolling scarlet tongues.
The horn sounded again. Only then did she turn.
With the movement, it was as though she pulled a dustcloth from the throne room. The air rippled, and the birches grayed and sagged, bark peeling, riddled with beetle holes. The moss underfoot atrophied to an unhealthy yellow-green, and flowers shriveled in the damp heat that rose from the earth, rank with the stench of decomposing vegetation. The summer court’s corruption had reached the springlands—or it had been here all along.
“I am here to enforce the Good Law!” Hemlock cried in a clear voice. What she said next made the trees groan and whisper and all the waiting ravens take flight in a nervous, silent cloud. “By the order of our sovereign, the Alder King.”
Eighteen
HEMLOCK HALTED only a few paces away, her open hands held out to the sides as though to show us she didn’t have a weapon, or as if she were prepared to embrace us. Given the wicked claws on the ends of her long, knotted fingers, I didn’t try to guess which.
Rook eyed her up and down, and in one smooth, contemptuous motion drew his sword. He angled his body in front of me. I seized the chance to bend and work the ring out of my stocking, and slipped it on while he spoke. “How long have you been the Alder King’s servant, Hemlock?” he spat. “I was unaware the winter court had fallen so low. Bending the knee on ceremony is one thing. Carrying out orders on his behalf is quite another.”
Even with Rook between us, Hemlock’s unsettling, luminously green gaze fixed on my face. “Do try to be more polite, Rook,” she said. “Have a look around. Myself, Gadfly, even the winter prince—none of us do what we like now.” A smile twitched across her features. “I did tell both of you silly fools to run. I told you I’d be after you.”
Rook’s sword sang through the air. It moved so swiftly I didn’t see it strike, or see Hemlock raise her arm to block it. They stood locked together, the blade lodged in her armor, Rook’s coat billowing around him as the wind settled. Her smile hardened. She dug her heels in, and her arm shook with the effort of holding him at bay. But Rook and I were outnumbered. We knew it, and so did she.
She crooked one finger, beckoning the courtiers forward. “Make yourselves useful, please, and seize them. Do wipe your faces first.”
The fair folk swarmed from the forest. Before I could react, they tore me away from Rook. Dozens of hands grasped my clothes, my arms, my hair, sticky from their feasting on putrid fruit. They jerked me this way and that, as though pretending to dance with me—leering faces spun around me like a carousel. I lashed out with my ring, and someone gave a bloodcurdling scream.
“She has iron on her finger!” the fair one exclaimed. The voice was familiar—Foxglove. “Take it from her! Take the whole hand if you must!”
An arm struck me across the back, slamming me to the ground. Gulping air in hoarse gasps, I pulled my arm underneath me and lifted my chin just enough to see that Rook had been overpowered too. Gadfly stood behind him with his elbow wrapped around Rook’s throat and his other hand squeezing Rook’s wrist, which no longer held a sword. Mask gone, he looked calm and amused as Rook thrashed with bared teeth in his grip. Their height difference was such that Rook was bent backward, unable to find footing, while Hemlock’s hounds snapped at his kicking boots.
We had scored only two small victories. A chunk of bark armor hung loose from Hemlock’s forearm where she stood aside, nursing it. Sap dripped down, sharp with the smell of winter pine; the bark was already growing back over the wound. And Foxglove sat on the ground across from me, holding a hand to her cheek. An angry weal stood out on it where I’d struck her, already melting away to flawless skin behind the furiously trembling cage of her fingers.
I knew her command had been serious and the fair folk wouldn’t hesitate to follow it through. I tugged the ring off and flung it away, past the pool of rose petals spreading around me like a bloodstain. The iron wouldn’t do me any good now.