With a Golden Sword (DFZ Changeling Book 2), page 10
“It’s always about you, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” Jamie answered immediately, too locked under his control to even blink her eyes, which were now dry and red. Simon blinked them for her with a disgusted shake of his head. Truly, she and Victor deserved each other. But while this hadn’t been nearly as informative as he’d wanted, there was still one piece of information he hoped to scoop up before he released her.
“I’m going to ask you one more thing,” he said in the calm, monotone voice that was most effective when talking to people in this state. “You will answer to the best of your knowledge, and then you will forget we had this conversation. Understood?”
“Yes.”
Simon nodded and leaned closer, pushing Jamie’s mind as hard as he could without breaking it as he asked his final question.
“Where is the Rider’s head?
Chapter 7
The night sky—visible from everywhere in the city now that most of the Skyways had collapsed—was lightening toward dawn by the time Lola finally made it back to Tristan’s creaky hallway.
It wasn’t her fault. The moment she’d cleared the mess outside Simon’s hospital, she’d booked it down the icy sidewalk to Riverfest. A cab would have been faster, but she didn’t have enough gossamer left to make a phone anymore. It was only a few miles in any case, but when she finally made it back to the door by the bathrooms inside the Dandy Lobster, it had opened into a broom closet.
This sent her into a panic. Lola didn’t know if her doppelganger had worked too well and Tristan had moved the doors without realizing she wasn’t inside, or if he had realized and locked her out as punishment. That felt a little harsh, but Tristan was a fairy. A gallant one, but still a trickster famous for being easily offended, and he had specifically told her not to leave.
Whatever the reason, she wasn’t getting back without him. She was sneaking over to the waiters’ station to call him on the restaurant’s phone when Lola realized she didn’t know Tristan’s number. The card he’d given her with his info had been lost ages ago, and Lola hadn’t thought to ask him for a new one, since, until today, she’d never left his barrow. It hadn’t even crossed her mind, and now she was stuck out in the city with no way to get back.
Calling herself every type of idiot, Lola shoved her way back through the crowded restaurant and locked herself in the bathroom to focus on her gossamer. She still couldn’t transfer her consciousness back to her decoy body, but nothing could stop her from feeling the magic that was her literal largest piece. She could sense the big lump she’d left behind as clearly as she could feel her tiny body’s bony fingers. That should have been as good as a compass, but the whole reason she was staying with Tristan was because it was impossible to get a solid location on a fairy barrow. She knew it was somewhere to the west, but every time Lola thought she had a solid direction, her other self would slide away, leaving her spinning in circles.
She ignored the people hammering on the door for thirty minutes before she gave up. Clearly, following her magic wasn’t going to work, but while she couldn’t get a handle on her own power, Tristan’s was another matter. The door she’d come in through was gone, but Lola doubted he’d cut himself off from the DFZ entirely. There had to be another door to his barrow here somewhere, so Lola let herself out of the bathroom to find it, waving apologetically to the now very long line as she ran out of the restaurant with her nose in the air to catch the scent of Tristan’s sea-salt magic.
She kept her nurse outfit on the whole time. Even with what Lola felt was an unbelievably short height, people didn’t notice someone in scrubs walking alone like they would’ve noticed a child. She’d learned the hard way back when she’d worked for Victor that kids were a total no-go in most situations, especially after dark. Even in the DFZ, people cared about that sort of thing, but a nurse out and about at weird hours was totally normal.
It worked like a charm this time, too. Lola didn’t feel so much as a second glance as she walked out of the festival area into the Underground proper, sniffing like a bloodhound at every intersection as she worked her way methodically through the empty streets.
The lack of people was more unnerving than she’d expected. The DFZ was normally a hive of activity at all hours. She hadn’t noticed it in the bustle of Riverfest, but once Lola got out into the more normal areas of the city, the crowds had thinned to nothing. Lots of businesses were open, but no one was inside, and traffic was so light that she could have walked in the street. It was eerie and unnatural, but at least the lack of distraction made it easier to follow Tristan’s scent.
It still took nearly all night before she found what she was looking for. Fifteen blocks west of Riverfest, down a terrifying hallway in the basement of a collapsed motel, she finally caught wind of the concentrated power that was the surest sign of a low road. Getting to it meant climbing down a stairwell covered in a waterfall of slimy black water, but to Lola’s fairy nose, the mildew and grease were overwhelmed by the clean, cold scent of the northern sea. It blew most strongly from the door at the back, a stained, rust-covered metal slab that looked exactly like the sort of thing you screamed at horror movie characters not to open.
Lola was a bit nervous about opening it now. Unlike the doors she’d used earlier, this one was locked, which was a problem. Not because she couldn’t get around a deadbolt, but breaking into barrows was a quick way to get yourself dropped into something unpleasant, like a troll den. She’d never found out if Tristan kept any trolls, but it’d be just her luck to stumble into one now.
She supposed she could have just knocked, but then Tristan would know for sure that she’d disobeyed him, and Lola wasn’t ready to stick her head into that hornets’ nest unless she absolutely had to. Besides, what was the point of being a changeling if you couldn’t slip into places you weren’t supposed to be? She’d already gone through the trouble of finding his door. Might as well go all the way as she transformed her pointer finger into a lock pick and got to work.
Thankfully, Tristan’s disguised barrow door gave her no more trouble than a real cheap deadbolt. Barely a minute after she’d started wiggling the pins, the lock clicked, and the rusty door swung open to reveal the pristine white-and-blue hallway. Lola was still celebrating her unexpected victory when she realized the slimy black water from the hallway was rushing into the hole she’d just made. Cursing at the disgusting mess, Lola threw herself inside, slamming the door behind her before she flooded Tristan’s low road. This cut off the water, but the impact caused the already rickety hallway to start swinging like a collapsing rope bridge over a ravine.
Fortunately, the entrance to Tristan’s apartment was only a few feet away. Lola charged toward it, grateful yet again that she’d chosen a small, light body as the blue carpet began to sag under her feet. She could already feel the supports giving way when she burst into the barrow’s living room.
The swaying stopped the moment she was through the door. She still slammed it for good measure, pressing her back against the wood as she struggled to catch the breath her gossamer body didn’t actually need, but couldn’t stop fighting for so long as some part of Lola considered itself human. She was still calming herself down when her panicked eyes spotted the windows.
The sweeping view of the Alaskan wilderness she’d been staring at for the last three weeks was gone, replaced by a white-sand beach lined with palm trees that were currently being lashed by a terrifying tropical storm. It didn’t look like much of an upgrade, but at least Lola understood now why the doors had shifted. Tristan must have moved his barrow while she was out.
That wasn’t unusual in and of itself. Tristan had moved his home dozens of times over the years she’d known him, but that was back when food had been plentiful. Not being a real fairy, Lola didn’t understand the particulars of barrow magic, but even she knew that moving was expensive. If he’d done it now when food was so hard to come by thanks to Victor’s bane, there had to be a reason. Probably a bad one.
Lola shed her nurse costume like a banana peel, switching back to a miniature version of her usual body as she ran past the ever-present magical banquet table—which was now laden with piles of tropical fruit and coconut pastries—toward the guest room. She threw open the door with a bang, then sagged in relief when she saw her sister in the bed like always. She was walking over to touch the girl’s warm skin just to reassure herself everything was actually fine when she heard someone clear their throat.
Lola whirled toward the sound to see her doppelganger. Her other self was still sitting where Lola had left her, only instead of being slumped over the chair watching trashy TV on her phone, she was sitting up at a card table playing what appeared to be an intense game of cribbage with Tristan.
A very beleaguered-looking Tristan. The knight was dressed for battle in a full suit of armor that had probably been gleaming silver at one point. Now, though, every piece was scraped and dented, and the old Welsh longsword he’d stabbed into the floor next to his chair looked even worse. Its hilt was broken on one side, and the heavy blade was so full of notches it looked like a saw. Even the spots where it wasn’t broken were pitted from what looked like acid, and the lower half was completely covered in a sticky black substance Lola recognized as dead gossamer.
“What happened to you?” she cried, running over. “Are you okay?”
“Oh, I’m fine,” Tristan replied, giving her a needle-sharp look from beneath his dented helmet. “We were just enjoying a game. Weren’t we, Lola?”
“I’m not enjoying this game,” her doppelganger replied bluntly. “There are too many rules, it takes too long, and the stupid fairy keeps cheating.”
“She’s very forthcoming with her opinions,” Tristan said. “Also with your location, what you intended to do there, and why you made her.” He arched a dirt-smudged eyebrow. “If you’re going to go to the effort of making an impostor, you might want to teach it to lie.”
“I hadn’t realized you were planning an interrogation,” Lola said sheepishly, looking down at her small feet. “I wasn’t trying to trick you. I just didn’t want you to—”
“Know you’d run off to do precisely what I asked you not to?”
“Worry,” she finished, dissolving her grumpy doppelganger into a rainbow pile of magic that she immediately pulled back into herself.
Coming back together felt even better than Lola had anticipated. She was savoring the feeling of having actual toes again instead of foot-shaped lumps when Tristan dropped his cards on the table with a sigh.
“I’m not going to bother asking how you got into an untethered low road that shouldn’t have been accessible to anyone but me,” he said, turning to face her. “I’ve long accepted that your magic doesn’t obey anything like normal rules. All I want to know is did it work?”
“Did what work?” she asked, sinking into the Lola-shaped depression her copy had left in the padded chair.
“Don’t be cute,” he warned, propping his elbows on the card table to glare at her properly. “I came in to ask for a dream to replace my lost gossamer and ended up chatting with your oh-so-charming copy for an hour. How did you even make her, anyway? That was a true conjuration. I didn’t know your gossamer had gotten that good.”
“Being away from Victor does wonders,” Lola replied, puffing up at the unexpected praise. “And I had to do something with all the magic I was leaving behind. A copy seemed like good cover, though I mostly made her because I didn’t want to leave my sister alone.”
She glanced longingly at the girl on the bed. Tonight was the longest they’d been apart since Lola had ripped her out of Alberich’s golden bed at the bottom of Fenrir’s pit. She’d hoped the change would trigger something, but her sister looked exactly the same as she had when Lola left, still quiet as a corpse beneath the guest bed’s fluffy comforter.
“Well,” Tristan said, leaning back in his chair, “Seeing as you’re here sighing over your pet human and not mounted on a spike in front of Victor’s new office tower, your ruse must have worked at least a little. Did you see the Rider at all, or were you able to give him the slip?”
“Definitely not the slip,” Lola said, looking down at the bad hand of playing cards her double had left on the table when she’d vanished. “I left as much of my magic behind as I could, but the Rider still found me in under five minutes. The only reason I’m not toast is because he was able to wiggle around Victor’s kill order on a technicality.”
“He got around a direct order?” Tristan looked impressed for a moment before his scowl snapped back into place. “Good for him, but I’m very disappointed in you, Lola-cat. I know you’re fundamentally incapable of following directions. Normally, I’d say that’s your best feature, but this is serious. You know what we’re up against. Did I not specifically tell you not to give the blood mage any more weapons?”
“I was trying to take his weapons,” Lola said, slumping into her chair. “I didn’t whittle my gossamer down to a nubbin and risk the Rider for kicks. I was trying to rescue Simon.”
Tristan’s eyebrows shot up. “The blood mage’s apprentice? He’s still alive?”
Lola nodded.
“And?”
“And I don’t want to talk about it.”
The fairy gave her a scathing look, but Lola just slumped harder. She really didn’t want to discuss what had happened, and not just because she was still mad at Simon for staying with Victor instead of coming home with her. She didn’t want to tell Tristan because his queen was counting on the Hero to weaken Alberich. If the fairies knew Simon was planning to betray his old master, they might decide he was a risk to their strategy, and even in her current skeletal state, Morgan wasn’t someone Lola wanted to drop on Simon’s head.
“What about you?” she asked, blatantly changing the subject. “Why did you move your barrow? And why do you look like you just got back from losing a war?”
“Oh, this is nothing,” Tristan said flippantly, brushing a smear of dead gossamer off the giant dent in his silver shoulder plate. “You should see the other guys.”
Lola gave him a serious scowl, and he settled back into his chair with a wince. “I was searching for Alberich’s head.”
“Isn’t he already wearing it?” Lola asked. “I mean, I know fairy heads are normally super-secret, but Alberich has been galloping his Hunt in front of the entire world for weeks. That’s a lot of scrutiny to endure, so I just assumed…”
Her voice trailed off at Tristan’s beleaguered look. “Trust me,” he said. “If Alberich was wearing his head, you’d know. You’re seeing the Nightmare King at his finest thanks to an endless feast of human fear. People believe in him again, so he doesn’t have to worry about being melted out of the sky like you or I would, but this is actually one of the better-case scenarios. When the Underground King puts on his head, that’s when we should really be afraid.”
“So why hasn’t he done it?” Lola asked. “Not that he needs the extra power since he’s already riding circles around everyone, but Alberich never struck me as the holding-back type.”
“He’s not,” Tristan agreed, finally removing his battered helmet. “But a fairy’s head is a double-edged sword. Wearing it allows us to reach our fullest potential, but it also gives the enemy something to swing at. Normally, gossamer is immune to pretty much everything except disbelief. We can’t be stabbed, shot, crushed, burned, or blown to bits. We also can’t be drained of magic or banished like spirits. Dragon fire does sting a smidge, but only when they’re using their life’s fire, and I’ve yet to meet the dragon who was willing to burn itself to a crisp to defend a few mortals.”
“The blood magic bane hurts,” Lola pointed out, rubbing her arms at the memory.
“And that’s why it’s such a big deal,” Tristan agreed. “It gives humanity a weapon that can actually hurt us, a fact Victor Conrath is currently leveraging to the hilt. But even if his cursed magic shattered every fairy on the planet, Victor could never destroy us fully unless he found our heads. They’re the only way true fairies can actually die, which is why Alberich will never put his on no matter how powerful it makes him. Even he’s not that reckless.”
“If that’s the case, how’d you get so banged up?” she asked, frowning at the trickle of rainbow gossamer blood leaking down from his temple. “If you weren’t trying to take Alberich’s head off his shoulders, how did you get those injuries?”
“From his barrow.”
“Wait, you actually got in?” Lola said, sitting up. “I thought fairy barrows were impenetrable strongholds!”
Tristan gave her a flat look. “Says the changeling who just broke into mine.”
“Exactly,” she said. “I’m a changeling. Nothing’s ever known what to do with me, but you’re a real-deal fairy. If you could just walk into Alberich’s barrow this whole time, why didn’t you do it sooner?”
“Because I don’t enjoy being eaten,” Tristan snaped, lifting his arm to show her the giant teeth marks that had turned the delicate plates of his silver armor into crushed scrap metal. “Just because I can’t technically die so long as my head is safe doesn’t mean I can’t be brought right up to the edge. The only reason I risked it is because Alberich and his court were distracted by cities full of terrified humans. My queen and I thought it’d be a quick search through an empty house, but Alberich had a lot more monsters left over from the old days than we anticipated, and even I can get outnumbered.”
Lola looked at his dented armor with new horror. “How many did you fight?”
“Too many,” Tristan said, tilting his bleeding head toward the window where the tropical storm was still scouring the unfamiliar beach. “I had to move my barrow to the other side of the planet just to get away, and for zero reward, I might add. I barely managed to make it halfway down before Alberich’s monsters forced me out, and I didn’t catch so much as a whiff of his head.”
