“That is not a bargain,” I said, trying to keep her from seeing the blood on my mouth. “It is an exchange. I would consider such an exchange only if my comrades are allowed to leave. It is having them leave here safely and soon that I’m interested in bargaining for.”
“A true bargain?” she said. “Do you play an instrument?”
The piano and I have a hate-hate relationship. I didn’t consider that playing, and I know my piano teacher hadn’t either. “No.”
“A different bargain, then. You hold something of my choosing while it changes. For each time it changes, I release one person.”
She snapped her finger, and the witch muttered to herself, and the fae nearest us—a short and fine-boned creature with skin like a peach and pinkish green hair—burst into flame. It wasn’t glamour because the room didn’t change. They were real flames even though they didn’t seem to hurt the fae.
“She can’t hold flame, without dying,” said Ariana. She hadn’t looked at Samuel or me since I kissed him. I don’t know if she suspected something was up—or if she thought we were lovers. “And that breaks the heart of the bargain. It must be something that is possible—however unlikely—for the challenger to accomplish.”
“Fine,” said the queen. “If you are so particular, Silver, you may be the challenger.” She laughed, and the roots in the ceiling writhed as the sound of bells echoed in the room. “Of course I knew who you were, dear Silver—how could you think otherwise? Are there so many of us who chose to live so disfigured by the fangs of hounds and wolves? No. Only Silver. So you may take this bargain, and the alternative is that I will kill this almost-mortal woman who is not so human as your Phin or the boy. Half-blood is not human enough to be saved by the guesting laws of the Elphame.”
Ariana didn’t seem to hear the queen’s taunts. Instead, she said clearly and slowly, “I take hold of this fae, who will change—the first shape of fire counts as one. After that, for every time he changes, one of my comrades will go free. He will change five more times, three minutes each form, and if I succeed, all shall leave. If I don’t, one leaves for each shape I hold.”
As she was talking, Ariana set Phin down next to Gabriel. Even under the queen’s thrall, Gabriel put a hand on Phin’s shoulder to steady him.
“Four times,” said the queen. “Five shapes. I will not let go of Mercedes Thompson, who holds the Silver Borne.”
“It’s all right,” I told Ariana. “I’m a survivor. Ask anyone. I can deal with the queen about the book when all of you are safe.”
“Six forms,” said Ariana. “One for each. It is in the rules. ‘The bargain requested, all prisoners invested in the outcome tested.’ ”
The poetry didn’t flow well, but I suppose that it didn’t need to be very good poetry to record the rules of a fairy queen.
The queen’s eyes fluttered in irritation. I had a hard time not looking away—or blinking too fast myself.
“Agreed,” she snarled. “But Mercedes is the last to be freed and your grandson first.”
Samuel said, “Phin, Jesse, Gabriel, Ariana, me, and Mercedes, then.”
“Phin, Ariana, then the rest followed at the end by Mercedes,” counteroffered the queen.
I saw what she was doing. By putting Ariana and Phin at the beginning, she thought she was reducing Ariana’s motivation even as the bargain became harder and harder to keep.
Samuel shook his head. “Phin, Jesse, Gabriel, Ariana, me, and Mercedes.”
“I am getting bored,” said the queen. “Agreed. The bargain is struck.”
Ariana gave Samuel a narrow-eyed look—I think it was because he put her before him. But I agreed with him. Get the helpless ones out first, then those who could best protect themselves. That meant Ariana before Samuel.
“The bargain is accepted,” agreed Ariana, and she stepped forward, embracing the flaming fae. As soon as she touched him, her hair burst into flame as did her clothing, and what was not burnable dropped to the ground, including the stone Zee had given her to hold. Its steady light was almost unnoticeable against the flames as the rest of Ariana smoldered a moment before lighting up as well.
“She holds earth, air, fire, and water,” Samuel told me. If I hadn’t known him as well as I did, I might have thought he was disinterested. “It is what made her able to do great magic after most of Underhill was out of reach. Magic fire will do her no harm.”
The queen was speaking to the witch. After she was finished talking, the witch stood up, a steel knife in her hand. She gathered up her chains and moved to the farthest extent, which left her just able to reach the forest lord. She plunged the knife into the tree-like creature, and it bellowed, shook, and bled amber fluid onto the knife. The floor moved under my feet and the ceiling roots contracted and wiggled.
Samuel put a hand under my elbow to steady me—so I knew the blood had worked. He could see through the glamour to the reality of what we dealt with.
The witch licked the knife and dipped a finger into the cut she’d made in the trapped fae. She used that finger to draw symbols that hung in the air where she’d put them, and glowed a sickly yellow. She pulled up her shirt to expose the skin of her belly, then she reached into the air and grabbed the symbols and slapped them onto her bare skin. When she was finished, she walked back to the throne, sat down, and finished cleaning the blade with her tongue. She caught me watching her and smiled.
Maybe she didn’t know about the glamour, or maybe she thought I was afraid of cats. One thing was for sure: she knew that I was scared of her. I wished I knew what she had done.
Whatever it was, it was unlikely to be helpful to us. And we needed help. Three minutes times six is eighteen—and Zee had already been holding the entrance open for a while. Adding eighteen minutes was going to push him well beyond the hour he’d promised. The fairy queen wouldn’t need Zee’s opening to allow them to leave—but if it was still open, then they would walk out on the same day they’d entered.
The time was up at last, and the fae Ariana held turned to ice. Three minutes is a long time to hold on to a giant ice cube. I couldn’t understand why Ariana continued to hug him close instead of holding him more loosely so not as much of her was against him. Especially as all of her clothes had burned away and she was naked, with nothing between her and the ice.
“Flesh to flesh, remember,” said the fairy queen in such a grumpy tone that I knew she’d hoped Ariana would back off.
I heard some murmurs from the fae around us, remarking upon Ariana’s scars. How ugly they were, how shameful. I thought they might be commenting on purpose, as some subterfuge of the fairy queen, but if so, their taunts seemed to have no effect I could see on Ariana.
Three minutes was up, and Jesse was safe—and the fae Ariana was holding turned into smoke. She seemed to have been prepared for it, though, because as the ends of him started to dissolve, she reached out and snagged the cloak of the fae who was nearest her. She wrapped the cloak around herself and the fae, then touched the cloak with her cold hand, and a layer of ice covered it, trapping the smoke in the frozen cloth.
Surreptitiously, I glanced around at the fae who were in the room with us. There had been a few in the hall when we’d gotten here, but the others had entered more purposefully afterward, as if she’d summoned them all. I counted twenty-eight, not including the forest lord, who, I suspected, couldn’t be numbered among her followers.
I looked at their faces, and they seemed to be less . . . blank than the thralls, but I didn’t think that they were free agents either. Maybe it was the way all twenty-eight stared hungrily at the queen, as if they were waiting for any task, any order—anything at all that they could do for their true love whom they worshipped. I’ve been around the fae. I’ve seldom seen any three of them see eye to eye on anything, let alone twenty-eight.