Free Wasteland King by Lilith Saintcrow Page A

and this was probably just a sideshow. Not so long ago Jeremiah had told himself he didn’t care if he died, as long as Robin was safe. Told himself that just as Robin wasn’t a usual faithless side, he wasn’t either.
    Here was his chance to prove it.
    He touched his lips to the flute-bell of the Horn. Inhaled… and lowered it, spending the breath uselessly. He closed his eyes. Funny, he’d been ready to die, or if not ready, at least resigned. The poison now seemed like an easy out, but of course it couldn’t ever be
easy
, could it.
    Not for Jeremiah Gallow.
    Do you really expect to pull this off, Jer?
    Behind him, Unwinter’s Keep held its breath. Were they watching him from the slit windows, peering from the casements, sidhe highborn and low crowding for a glimpse? Was Unwinter in one of the towers, looking down?
    The urge to turn around and make an obscene mortal gesture passed through him, drained away.
    He took a step onto the bridge. Another. A third. Raised the Horn again.
    In every battle, you had to give your name.
    â€œI am Jeremiah Gallow,” he whispered into its smaller mouth. Then, the irrevocable words. “And
I will master you
.”
    Then, quickly, before he could lose his nerve, he sealed his mouth to the Horn, and exhaled.
    Hard.

THE SLUAGH
13

    A
silver nail pulling a golden thread, a thunder passing through ears and heart and chest all at once, a wall of noise so great it was almost soundless.
    It rolled through Summer, that sound, a trembling through the green hills and the smoke-shamed orchard where Summer’s apple trees lifted their gnarled, ever-blossoming limbs. Summerhome quivered on its hill, the green-and-white stone flushing icy blue for a single crystalline moment. From the graceful spunsugar mountains to the white-sand shores of the Dreaming Sea, from Marrowdowne’s sinks to the high heaths where the giants and trollkin passed their slow, lumbering days, a single precise shiver passed, shifting every sidhe, awake or asleep, just a fraction of an inch. In the greatest of her halls, bolt upright on the low bench that served her as a throne, Summer raised her golden head, and the Jewel upon her brow flashed, an emerald star, as if it had not been drained and darkened by the assault upon her lands.
    In the lands of the free sidhe, from the trashwood groves just a breath of the Veil away from mortals to the deep bramblecaves where the scions of unhappy fullblood unions huddled—say, for example, the son of a dryad and a troll, or a satyr’s leering clovenhoof get—pixies thickened, following the sine wave of disturbance through tavern and waste lot, greenbelt and forgotten land clinging to the edges of urbanization. In the mortal realm, a thrill ran through the blood of any being with a share of sidhe, no matter how small. Some, artists or musicians, had nightmares; others seized upon whatever work was to hand and redoubled their efforts. Tired mortals with only a drop of sidhe blood found new strength surging through their veins, and with the sudden jolt came a nameless fear, one that caused shivers or breakdowns, dreams or a moment of
déjà vu
. Standing on the crushed-mint grass near a hungry-humming redbarked oak, a Half sidhe with worn mortal boots and a hoop of cold iron in his ear, hidden under fat snakes of matted dark hair, staggered as he attempted to leap onto the trail of his prey.
    Do you hear?
    The sound rippled in concentric rings through Unwinter’s ash-starred land, from the Dak’r Woods where a Half girl in ragged black velvet, her white hand buried in the ruff of a goldenred dog, suddenly clapped her other hand to her ear and folded down, hunching as an amazing black bolt of dreadful pain lanced through her skull, to the Ash Plains where the white flax and the occasional stars of crimson poppies bent under a sudden freezing lash, cinder-smears falling from a black sky mixed with diamondprick snowflakes. In