“All right.” Thais squinted at her map. “I think that’s this. Powell’s Field. After that, we leave Luke’s property.” She sighed. “I say we check this area out, and if we find nothing, we head back. If we fail this assignment, we fail it.”
“All right.” Dru glanced up at the sky. “I’ll take the west half of the field. You take the east. We can meet in the middle.”
Thais looked dubious. “Is it a good idea to separate?”
“There’s no danger. We’re on Academy grounds,” Dru said. “I’ll see you in five.”
She tugged gently at a dangling lock of her friend’s hair, and headed off into the shadows.
She hadn’t gone far before she started to regret leaving Thais behind.
The field wasn’t cleared—it was rocky and pitted, and the low heels of her boots caught on the uneven ground.
She paused to apply a Surefooted rune, but that didn’t help with the brambles that scraped at her as she reached the field’s edge, where overgrown hedges ran wild under gnarled oak trees.
Dru moved further into the shadows, keeping an eye out for clusters of four-leaf clovers or signs of faerie circles.
The wind had picked up, and rattled the leaves overhead in a way that sounded uncomfortably like bones clacking together.
She was about to throw up her hands and trek back to find Thais when she glimpsed a strange shadow—a wide opening in the trunk of an oak tree.
She moved closer. It was an arch-shaped hollow at the base of the tree, surely too symmetrical to be natural. Dru dropped to her knees and peered at it. She could see nothing but darkness, but it was an odd sort of darkness—a darkness that seemed to shift, almost wriggle a bit…
Julian would definitely tell me not to do this, she thought, and stuck her head into the hole in the tree.
It turned out the darkness was peculiarly shallow.
Perhaps an inch of blackness, which gave way to an illuminated tunnel inside.
A tunnel that sloped gently downward, its walls veined with tree roots, a soft light pulsing from a torch set into the wall.
The torchlight had a pale, darting quality, like a will-o’-the-wisp dancing through branches.
Faerie light, Dru thought. Her heart was beating rapidly.
All she had to do was crawl into the tunnel and retrieve the torch—it was incontrovertible proof of faerie presence.
With her hand on the seraph blade at her waist, she inched forward, the dry crunch of meadow grass giving way to packed earth.
The hole in the tree was narrow, but with a wiggle, she was through, and standing up inside the tunnel. A leaf had caught in her hair; she shook her head impatiently and made her way over to the torch.
It was clearly of faerie workmanship, delicately carved of pale gray stone, burning with a smokeless flame. As she reached for it, the lick of fire flared up, illuminating the tunnel with a momentary daylight glare.
The light only lasted for a moment—the flame sputtered low, a red glow at the base of the wick.
Dru found herself standing in near darkness, though her Night Vision rune allowed her to see—not as well as if there were light, but clearly enough to make out that the tunnel was suddenly full of movement.
Then she heard a sound. An eerie, high-pitched repetitive sound, like mirthless giggling.
The hair rose on the back of her neck. She wrenched the now-dead torch free of the wall and began to back up toward the tunnel entrance.
But there didn’t seem to be a tunnel entrance anymore. The underground corridor stretched away behind her, the walls bulging with roots and vines. There was no sign of an archway leading out into the night.
Dru couldn’t help but hear Julian’s voice in her head. The problem, Dru, isn’t that you don’t know when something isn’t a good idea. The problem is that you go ahead and do it anyway.
She cursed silently, imagining every bad word she could think of and some she was pretty sure she’d just made up.
Then she sighed, pressed her back against the wall, and began to make her way slowly down the tunnel.
It had to go somewhere, though she knew it might simply lead her deeper into Faerie.
Because she was definitely in Faerie now.
She could feel that the air had changed.
The way that the air in old cathedrals tasted of cold stone and age, the air here suddenly smelled different, sharp and edged and green, not like a garden but like the cut stems of plants.
There was something strangely familiar about it, though she couldn’t imagine why.
Familiar, but also ominous. Things seemed to move in the shadows, and she heard again that strange, childlike giggling. She moved as silently as she could, away from the laughter, her back against the dirt wall.
But the sound only grew louder. The dimly lit torch in her hand shook, sending wavering bars of illumination across the tunnel walls. She heard a sound like rattling that turned out to be the scrape of a dozen rushing little feet, when a moment later, a clutch of goblins burst out of the shadows.
Dru had seen pictures of goblins before, though she hadn’t encountered one in real life.
They were even nastier in person. About half her height, with ropy, skeletal, little bodies, dressed in filthy rags.
Their feet looked like bird’s feet, with talon-like toenails; they were bald except for a few strings of white fluff, and their skin was pink and bumpy, like plucked chicken skin.
Their eyes were huge and saucery, their teeth jagged, and their noses weren’t really there. More like craters in their faces.
Revolted, Dru wanted to kick out at them, but each one carried a weapon—a clever-looking axe, a bronze dagger, a long, serrated blade. They were small, but they certainly outnumbered her. She cursed silently again as they surrounded her, giggling and chattering in high-pitched voices.
“Shadowhunter—”
“Seen them before, yes I have—”
“No y’haven’t, Hogface, you’d’ve told us about it—”
“Shut yer mouth, then—”
“Looks tasty, it does—”
“Let us have a bite, just a bite, then, Snaggle—”
“Shut up, you lot.” The order was barked out by the biggest of the goblins, who wore what looked like the remnants of a human child’s overalls. Dru tried not to think about the human child whose clothes might have been stolen. Hopefully they’d rooted the overalls out of some trash.
The goblin—Snaggle, apparently—leered at Dru. True to his name, he had only one tooth, which was visibly crooked.
“Shadowhunter,” he hissed. “How unusual for one of your kind to wander into our realm.”
Dru raised her chin and did her best to look at him with haughty disdain. She wondered for a moment if she should mention that her brother Mark was the consort of the Unseelie King—but without knowing if she was in Seelie or Unseelie lands, she realized that might cause more trouble than it solved.
“We have a truce,” she said, instead. “The Accords forbid you from harming me, or any Shadowhunter.”
To her dismay, the goblins only chuckled. “Oh, a truce, a truce indeed,” Snaggle said. “To honor our truce, should we not break bread together?”
From a bag that hung at his side, he pulled a hunk of what was undeniably bread. A thick chunk of it, with a brown crust, and more than a little grubby.
Dru shook her head. “This is not my first faerie rodeo, buddy,” she said. “I’m not eating that. Or drinking anything you offer me, either.”
Snaggle’s lips split in an unpleasant grin. “You seem to think you have more choice than you do, mortal girl.”
He held the bread out to her. Dru jabbed the torch at him. “Get back.”
Snaggle tossed the bread to the ground. “Seize her,” he snarled. “Take her to Mother Hawthorn.”
Dru’s blood went cold. Mother Hawthorn. She knew the name, knew it meant these were wild fey, not bound by the Accords. She saw the weapons flash in the hands of the other goblins, and slid her palm down her side, reaching for her seraph blade—
“Stop.”
The word was like the crack of a whip. It echoed through the tunnel. The goblins froze, staring, and so did Dru, as a figure emerged from the thickest shadows.
He was tall and slim, with hair the color of silver and snow.
He wore ivory and black, like a chessboard come to life.
His clothes were clearly faerie workmanship: they had that quality of being both natural and richly luxurious.
A black velvet cloak, embroidered with silver thread, soft boots, a silk tunic with mother-of-pearl buttons, open at the throat.
He must be fae nobility, Dru thought, staring: his ears were slightly pointed, but he otherwise looked almost human.
Only no human was that beautiful, with features so clearly carved, delicate and masculine at the same time.
He did not look much older than Dru, though it was hard to tell age with faeries.
He swept a dispassionate look across the clutch of huddled goblins. “I see you are up to your usual troublemaking, Snaggle,” he said. “Though I don’t know why they don’t call you Missing Nose—honestly, that tooth of yours seems like the least of your concerns.”
“My lord Prince,” said Snaggle. “We were just—”
“I know what you were just,” said the faerie prince.
(A prince? Dru thought. Though there were a variety of sons of the old Unseelie King running about, if she recalled correctly.
Still. What on earth was a prince of Faerie doing here, in some outpost of the wild fey?) “And you can abandon the idea. This Shadowhunter is under the protection of my Court now.” He flashed a look at Dru.
His eyes—they were a deep clear green. Like the sea glass Julian loved.
“I suggest you scatter, or face the consequences.”
Snaggle hissed. “Mother Hawthorn won’t like you threatening us.”