Holly Black by Ironside

Author:Ironside [Ironside]
Format: epub
Published: 2010-02-18T21:12:49+00:00

Chapter 8

Forest, I fear you! in my ruined heart

your roaring wakens the same agony

as in cathedrals when the organ moans

and from the depths I hear that I am damned.

—Charles Baudelaire, "Obsession"

"You're a fool," Ellebere said. He looked out of place in the city, though he'd glamoured himself a red pin-striped black suit and a silk tie the color of dried blood.

"Because it's a trap?" Roiben asked. His long wool coat whipped in the breeze from the river. The stench of iron seared his nose and throat.

"It must be." Ellebere turned, so that he was walking backward, facing Roiben. He gestured wildly, ignoring the people who had to veer out of his way. "Just her offer of peace is suspicious, but if she agrees to your absurd demand, then she must have some sure way of killing you.”

"Yes," Roiben said, grabbing his arm. "And you're about to walk into a road.”

Ellebere stopped, pushing back strands of wine-colored hair from his eyes. He sighed. "Can her knight beat you?”

"Talathain?" Roiben considered that for a moment. It was hard to imagine Talathain—whom he had wrestled with in patches of clover, who had loved Ethine for years before he'd found the courage to bring her a mere bundle of violets—as formidable. But those memories seemed old and unfamiliar, as if they belonged to another person. Perhaps this Talathain was another person too. "I think I can win.”

"The Bright Queen has a deadly weapon, then, perhaps? Or armor that cannot be pierced? Some way to use iron weaponry?”

"It could be that. I turn it over again and again in my mind, but I have no more answer than you do." Roiben looked at his hand and saw all the throats he had cut in Nicnevin's service. All the pleading eyes and trembling mouths. All the mercy that he could not bestow, least of all on himself. He let go of Ellebere. "I only hope that I am a better murderer than the Bright Lady imagines me.”

"Tell me that there is some plan, at least.”

"There is some plan," Roiben said, with a twist of his mouth. "Although without knowing what Silarial intends, I know not what good it is.”

"You shouldn't have come Ironside yourself. In the mortal world you are vulnerable," said Ellebere, glowering. They crossed the road next to a too-thin mortal pushing an empty stroller and another furiously punching keys on her cell phone. "Dulcamara could have accompanied me. You could have explained what we were to do and sent us off to do it. That's how a proper Unseelie King behaves.”

Roiben veered off the sidewalk, ducking under a torn chain-link fence that singed his fingers and snagged on the cloth of his coat. Ellebere clambered over the top, jumping down with a flourish.

"I'm not sure it's proper for a knight to tell a King how to behave," Roiben said. "But come, indulge me a little longer. As you rightly point out, I am a fool and I am about to make a series of very foolish bargains.

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