Shifting Shadows: Stories from the World of Mercy Thompson(9)

“Haida, we can do this,” she said with more confidence than she actually felt. “The hounds have been chaffing under his leash, and they have left him. That’s where he has gone—to reclaim the hounds. We might have enough time to do this thing.”

•   •   •

Using Haida’s sense for the wild magic that lingered in the smallest thing and was closest to the Heart of Magic, Ariana worked until the hobgoblin made her stop and eat. Then she worked some more, the constant drain from the emerging artifact only a slight handicap.

The very slowness of its working was evidence that her other self was fully engaged in the attempt to mitigate the harm the artifact could cause, something she had not known for certain. The beast had seen the way to render this artifact mostly innocuous, just as Ariana had, and had shown itself to be an ally of sorts.

A fae of average power would have to keep the artifact the beast had crafted for weeks before it had an appreciable effect on his magic. So much the beast had managed.

She lost track of time, so tired she did not realize that it meant the beast had come to help. When she came to herself, she held a silver bird in her hand and just enough magic in her body to tell that it was an artifact, sealed and done. But she could not tell if she had accomplished her purpose or not.

She cupped the little silver bird in her hands, trembling with fatigue, as the walls trembled around her. This was her father’s house, and it did not take joy in those who would work against him.

“It is done,” she told Haida, who was hovering nearby. “Can you tell if it is for good or ill? I have burnt out my magic in its making.”

“Leave the silver bird,” said Haida. “It will distract him, and much good may it do him. I am not such as you to read an artifact. You have done what you could. Come, let us leave this place before it collapses apurpose. Underhill is no longer stable, and it is angry with us.”

“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.