Ironside (Modern Faerie Tales 3)

A faerie woman approached, her bare feet silent on the soft earth. "For you," she said, and placed three packets of clothing on the grass.

Kaye reached over to touch the first one. Celery green fabric felt silky under her fingertips.

"Let me guess," Corny said to Luis. "We're not supposed to wear anything of theirs either. Maybe you're going to walk around naked?”

Luis frowned, but Kaye could see his neck go red.

"Stop being a dick," she said, tossing Corny his pile of clothes. Corny grinned as if she'd paid him a compliment.

Ducking behind a bush, she pulled off her T-shirt and slid the dress over her head. She'd been wearing the same camo pants and T-shirt since she'd left Jersey, and she couldn't wait to get out of them. The faery cloth felt as light as spider silk when she pulled it over her head, and it reminded her of the only other faerie gown she'd worn—the one she'd almost been sacrificed in, the one that had come apart in the sink when she'd tried to wash the blood out of it. Her memories of the averted Tithe were still a shuddersome blur of bedazzlement and terror and Roiben's breath tickling her neck as he'd whispered: What belongs to you, yet others use it more than you do?

His name. The name she'd tricked out of him without knowing its worth. The name she'd used to command him and could use still. No wonder his court didn't like her; she could make their King do her bidding.

"I look ridiculous, don't I?" Corny said, stepping out from the branches and causing Kaye to start. He wore a brocaded black and scarlet tunic over black pants, and his feet were bare. He frowned. "My clothes are soaked, though. At least this is dry.”

Kaye turned, letting the thin skirt whirl around her. "I like my dress.”

"Nice. All that green really brings out the pink of your eye membranes.”

"Shut up." Picking up a twig from the ground, she twisted up her hair with it like she'd done with pencils in school. "Where's Luis?”

Corny pointed with his chin. Turning, Kaye spotted him leaning against a tree, chewing on what was probably the last of the protein bar. Luis glowered as he shoved his hands deeper into the pockets of a long brown jacket, clasped with three buckles at his waist. Kaye's damp purple coat hung from the branch of a tree.

"I guess we're supposed to go to the party like this," Kaye called.

Luis sauntered closer. "Technically, it's more of a revel.”

Corny rolled his eyes. "Let's go.”

Kaye headed toward the music, letting her fingers run through the heavy green leaves. She plucked a great white flower down from one of the branches and pulled off one bruised petal after another.

"He loves me," Corny said. "He loves me not.”

Kaye scowled and stopped. "That's not what I was doing.”

Shapes moved through the trees like ghosts. The laughter and music seemed always a little more distant until suddenly she was among a throng of faeries. Crowds of folk danced in wide and chaotic circles or diced or simply laughed as though the breeze had carried a joke to their ears only. One faerie woman crouched beside a pool, conversing intently with her reflection, while another stroked the bark of a tree as though it were the fur of a pet.

Kaye opened her mouth to tell Corny something but stopped when her eye was caught by white hair and eyes like silver spoons. Someone threaded through the crowd, cloaked and hooded, but not hooded enough.

There was only one person Kaye knew with eyes like that.

"I'll be right back," she said, already weaving between a damp girl in a dress of woven river grass and a hob on crude mossy stilts.

"Roiben?" she whispered, touching his shoulder. She could feel her heart speeding and she hated it, she hated everything about how she felt at that moment, so absurdly grateful she would have liked to slap herself. "You fucker. You could have told me to go on a quest to bring you an apple from the banquet table. You could have sent me on a quest to tie a braid in your hair.”

The figure drew back its hood, and Kaye remembered the other person who would have eyes like Roiben's. His sister, Ethine.

"Kaye," Ethine said. "I had hoped I would happen on you.”

Mortified, Kaye tried to smile but it came out as more of a grimace. She couldn't believe she had just blurted things she wasn't sure, in retrospect, that she wanted even Roiben to hear.

"I have only a moment," Ethine said. "I must bring the Queen a message. But there is something I would know. About my brother.”

Kaye shrugged. "We're not exactly speaking.”

"He was never cruel when we were children. Now he is brutal and cold and terrible. He will make war on us whom he loved—”

It startled Kaye to think of Roiben as a child. "You grew up in Faerie?”