The silky did not appear to notice the sarcasm. She smiled as though he were offering her great praise.
And so they came, a parade of deeds and gifts, each more grisly than the last, all of them done in the name of Roiben, Lord of the Unseelie Court. Each hideous feat laid before him as a cat drops the bird it has finally killed, once all possible amusement has been wrung from toying with it.
"In your name," each one said.
In his name. The name that no one living knew in full, save for Kaye. His name. Now that it belonged to all these others to conjure and to curse by, he wondered who had the greater claim to it.
Roiben gritted his teeth and nodded and smiled. Only later, in his chambers, sitting on a stool in front of his mouse-tail rug, did he allow himself to be filled with loathing. For all those of the Unseelie Court, who cut and slit and gutted everything they touched. For himself, sitting on a throne in a court of monsters.
He was still staring at the gifts when a terrible, thunderous crash made the walls shake. Dirt rained down on him, stinging his eyes. A second shock reverberated through the hill. He raced out of the room, toward the noise, and passed Bluet in the hallway. Dust covered her, and the long twisted spikes of her hair nearly obscured a fresh cut on her shoulder. Her lips were the color of a bruise.
"My Lord!" she said. "There has been an attack!”
For a moment, he just stared at her, feeling foolish, not quite able to understand. For all his hatred of Silarial, he couldn't quite accept that he was at war with those he had loved, those whom he still considered his people. He couldn't accept that they'd struck first.
"Attend to yourself," he told her dazedly, moving on toward the sound of screams. A handful of faeries darted past him, silent and covered in dirt. One, a goblin, stared at him with wet eyes before rushing on.
The great hall was on fire. The top was cracked open like an egg, and a portion of one side was missing. Gusts of greasy black smoke rose up to the starry sky, devouring the falling snow. At the center of the brugh was a truck—a semi—its iron body burning. The chassis was twisted, the cab crushed under heaps of dirt and rock, as red and gold flames licked upward. A sea of burning oil and diesel fuel spread to scorch everything it touched.
He stared, stunned. There, under the debris, were dozens upon dozens of bodies: his herald, Thistledown; Widdersap, who had once whistled through a blade of grass to make a serving girl dance; Snagill, who'd carefully limned the ceiling of the feasting room in silver. The hob who'd woven the mouse-tail rug screamed, rolling around in fire.
Ellebere pushed Roiben to the side, just as a granite tombstone fell from above, cracking on the floor of the hall. "You must leave, my Lord," he shouted.
"Where is Ruddles?" Roiben demanded. "Dulcamara?”
"They don't matter." Ellebere's grip on Roiben tightened. "You are our King.”
Through the smoke, figures appeared, chopping at the fallen and the injured.
"Get the fey in the hallways to safety." Roiben wrenched his arm free. "Take them to the Kinnelon ruins.”
Ellebere hesitated.
Two bolts flew through the rancid smoke to embed themselves in what remained of the earthen wall. Thin shafts of glass that Seelie knights used for arrows—so fine that you could barely feel them as they pierced your heart.
"As you said, I am your King. Do it now!" Roiben pushed his way through the choking brume, leaving Ellebere behind.
The same faun who had brought Roiben the hooves of his fellows was trying to dig another faery out from beneath a mound of earth. And nearby lay Cirillan, who loved tears so much that he saved them in tiny vials that cluttered up his room. His aqua skin was smeared with dusty blood and silver burrs that had been shot from Bright Court slings.
As Roiben watched, the faun gasped, his body arched, and he fell.
Roiben drew his curved sword. All his life he had been in service to battle, but he had never seen the like of what was happening all around him. The Bright Court had never fought so inelegantly.
He dodged just before the tines of a golden trident caught him in the chest. The Seelie knight swung again, her teeth bared.
He slammed his sword into her thigh and she faltered. Grabbing her trident at the base, he sliced her throat, quick and clean. Blood sprayed his face as she fell to her knees, reaching for her own neck in surprise.
He didn't know her.
Two humans rushed at him from either side. One held up a gun, but he cut off the hand that held it before the mortal had a hope of firing. He stabbed the other through the chest. A human boy—perhaps twenty, with a Brookdale College T-shirt and rumpled hair—slumped over Roiben's hooked sword.
For a moment, the boy reminded him of Kaye.
Kaye. Dead.
There was a shout and Roiben turned to see a shower of silver pinecones burst just short of where he stood. Through the smoke he saw Ruddles, taking a bite out of the side of a Seelie fey's face, Dulcamara dispatching two others with knives. One of Roiben's pages, Clotburr, slammed a burning harp into another faery.
Here, in his once majestic hill, human corpses still held their iron weapons in stiffening hands as they slumped beside more than a dozen unmoving Unseelie troops in shining armor. The fire lit the bodies, one by one.
"Quickly," Dulcamara said. Choking black smoke was everywhere. Somewhere in the distance, Roiben could hear sirens wailing. Above them, the mortals came to pour water on the burning hill.
Clotburr coughed, slowing, and Roiben lifted him up, settling the boy against his shoulder.
"How did she do this?" asked Dulcamara, her fingers clenched white-knuckled around the hilt of her blade.
Roiben shook his head. There were protocols to faerie battles. He could not imagine Silarial putting decorum aside, especially when every advantage was hers. But too, who of her people would know what she had done this day? Only those few she had sent to command the mortals. Most were dead. One cannot dishonor oneself before the dead. It occurred to him then that he'd misunderstood Dulcamara's question. She didn't want to know how Silarial could be so hideously inventive; she was puzzling out how it had been accomplished.
"Mortals," Roiben said, and now that he considered it, he had to admit a grudging awe for so radical and terrible a stratagem. "Silarial's folk are charming humans instead of leading them off roofs. She's making troops of them. Now we are more than overmatched. We are lost.”
The weight of the soot-smeared faery in his arms made him think of all of the folk of the Night Court, all those he had sworn to be sovereign over. All those lives he'd been willing to accept in trade for Silarial's death. And he wondered in that moment what he might have accomplished if he'd done more than just endure. Whom he might have saved.
As though catching his thoughts, Ruddles turned toward him with a frown. "What now, my King?”
Roiben found himself wanting to win the unwinnable war.
He had known only two rulers, both great and neither good. He did not know how to be any kind of King nor how to win, other than to be even more ruthless than they.
Kaye pushed Corny ahead of her, through the crowd near the door of the club, out past the ID-check woman, who still looked giddy with enchantment. He held his hands above his head, as in surrender, and when people came close, he flinched. They walked like that for several blocks, past people in their heavy coats shuffling through the slush. Kaye watched the heels of a woman's ostrich-leather boots stab through an icy mound of snow. The woman stumbled.