“Underhill is angry with the sidhe and not your kind,” corrected Ariana tiredly, though she staggered to her feet. “Though my father’s home is not best pleased with the two of us, that is also true.”
Underhill had been necessary for her work. Magic did not lend itself to complicated things in the Outside, the land that now belonged to the short-lived, magic-blind folk.
“Underhill does not concern itself with sidhe or not,” grumbled Haida, steadying Ariana when she would have fallen. “Only fae and not fae. And the fae are failing it, allowing the humans to bind what was not meant to be bound.”
The hobgoblin was a great deal stronger than she looked, which was useful under the circumstances. But she was tired, too, so their travel was slow. If they could get out of her father’s lands before he returned with his hounds, they might have a chance at eluding him for a short while.
But Ariana knew there would be no real escape. Artifact or no, it was her destruction that her father craved. So when the ground warned her, the trees whispering his name as flowers trembled—and then his horn sounded, summoning his hounds—she was not overcome with dismay. She would have had to have some hope to feel dismayed.
“We are finished,” she told Haida, feeling fear rise like bile even without the magic of his hounds touching her. That he called to them meant that he must have found a way to win them back. “You need to flee.”
The hobgoblin snarled at her.
“Do not make me make it an order,” Ariana said—but it was already too late, for either of them.
“Ariana,” purred her father’s voice.
She turned around and faced him. He wore his wild aspect, stag horns reaching upward and tangling in the lower branches of the tree he stood under.
A shiver slid through her, a feeling of inevitability, as if this moment had been fated since her birth. That other part of her, the one she’d warned Haida to be careful of, stirred restlessly, ready to shield her from her father. The thought of the hobgoblin reminded her that Ariana was not the only one her father had reason to be angry at.
“Father.” She stepped squarely in front of her little, faithful friend.
He looked around the woods, at Haida, at the grass at Ariana’s feet—at everywhere other than Ariana herself—and smiled gently. “Did you think to flee me with the artifact still undone?”
“No, Father,” she said staunchly. He would kill her. When he knew it all, he would kill her. “It is finished.”
He held the little silver bird out to her. She hadn’t realized that he’d been holding it.
“This?” He tossed it on the ground, and in a voice that carried the low rumble of distant thunder, he said, “This is garbage. You have broken your promise, your sworn word. To do so is death for the fae.”
She raised her chin as triumph rushed through her. Whatever she and her beast had managed, it had thwarted her father’s will. She might die, but he could not use her to destroy the world. “It does what I promised you it would. What the thing you turned me into by the tender care of your hounds promised you that the artifact would do. It eats the magic of any fae the wielder desires and allows it to be consumed again. Finished and sealed, so it cannot again be altered.”
She could not lie and did not need to. The first part had been done when she and Haida had sought to deflect the artifact’s purpose. The last she knew as well. However else the artifact functioned, she had not broken the word given by the beast.
He narrowed his eyes at her and snarled. The glimpse of the fangs in his mouth tightened her stomach and left her light-headed.
“You knew what I wanted,” he said.
“Yes,” she agreed, finding that the light-headedness had brought with it a sort of sereneness—or maybe that had come from the earlier feeling that this meeting had been fated for them. He would kill her. Hopefully, it would not hurt too much, but there was nothing she could do to prevent it. “You knew that I did not want to build what you wanted. The strictures you gave me were loose enough that I could slide around them.” Her father was powerful but not clever, not like her mother had been or Haida.
“You will make me another artifact, then,” he said. “Or fix this one.”
She shook her head. “The bird is finished. It is an artifact sealed and immutable. And I?” She smiled at him. “Artifacts demand a price. I do not have enough magic left in me.”
Artificers were rare, even among the most powerful of the fae. He would not find another he could bend to his will before the terms of his agreement with one more powerful than he would come due. She closed her eyes and raised her face to the sun; she didn’t expect to live long enough to see another day. Her only satisfaction was that he had not won: her magic would not destroy the fae—and her father would not outlive her by long.
Her father picked the bird up off the ground and rolled it around in his hand—and she saw that his right arm ended in a rough and bloody lump of bandaging.
“Father,” she said before she considered the wisdom of it, “what did you do to your hand?”
SIX
Samuel
My father ran his fingers through Adda’s unhealthy brown coat, and growled, “I thought you said she demanded the forest lord’s hand to power the spell.”
The witch had called Adda as soon as the forest lord—one arm wrapped in bandages—had left. She kept him until late in the afternoon, then dumped him outside when she was finished with him. As soon as he fell, my father and I had changed back to human. Adda needed help no wolf could render.
I brought the bowl of water to the weakened wolf and fed the water to him, one handful at a time. I made no answer to my da’s accusation. His anger wasn’t directed at me, and there was no way to answer the anguish in his eyes. Words didn’t come to me as they once had, anyway.
Instead, I crooned to the suffering beast as he swallowed. Da patted my shoulder in mute apology for his sharpness, and I nodded an acknowledgment.
She’d mutilated Adda again.
His left front paw had not regrown from the last time; moreover, it was festering despite all I could do. I’d noticed that the wounds she made to feed her magic were more likely to rot than other, naturally acquired wounds, more difficult even for werewolves to heal.
To work the spell for the fae, tonight she’d taken Adda’s right front paw, too. He could not walk in wolf form and he had not the strength to try to take on a human form, even if he knew how, which I was not certain of.