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"Down here?" he asked, and she nodded.
"Indiscreet," was all he said before he hooked his boots in the muddy ledge and carefully walked down the ridge.
Kaye followed him, stumbling along at more or less her own pace.
Green women and men were half immersed in the deeper parts of the stream, androgynous forms rough with bark and shimmery lights.
A few of the creatures saw Roiben and slithered into the pool or back up the bank. There was some whispering.
"Kaye," a voice rasped, and she spun around.
It was the Thistlewitch, sitting on a log. She patted the place beside her. "Things did not go well under the hill."
"No," Kaye said, sitting down. She wanted to put more anger in her voice, but she couldn't. "I almost died."
"Nicnevin's knight saved you, did he not?"
Kaye nodded, looking up to see him, half in shadows, his hands in the pockets of his coat, glowering impressively. It made her want to grin at him, although she was afraid he might grin back and ruin his furious demeanor.
"Why have you brought him among us?"
"If it wasn't for him, I'd be dead."
The Thistlewitch looked in the direction of the knight and then back at Kaye. "Do you know of the things he has done?"
"Don't you understand? She made him do them!"
"I have no desire to be welcome among you, old mother," Roiben said, kneeling down on one knee in the soft earth. "I only wanted to know whether you were aware of the price of your freedom. There are trolls and worse that are delighted to be without any master but their own desires."
"And if there are, what of it?" Spike asked, corning up behind them. "Let the mortals suffer as we have suffered."
Kaye was astonished. She thought back to Lutie's disdain for mortal girls. They were only her friends because of what she was, and not for any better reason than that. Her fingers brushed over the purple plastic covering her legs, letting her nails cut little lines in the vinyl. She had wanted them to be better than people, but they weren't, and she didn't know what they were anymore. She'd been flung back and forth through too many emotions over the past few days, she was hungover from adrenaline, she was worried about Corny and worried about Janet.
"So it's us against them now? I'm not talking about the Unseelie Court, here. Since when are mortals the enemies of the solitary fey?" Kaye said, anger bleeding into her voice, making it rough. She looked at Roiben again, drawing confidence from his proximity, and that worried her too. How had he gone from being someone she half despised to being the one person she was relying on, in the space of mere hours?
Roiben's hand touched her shoulder lightly, a comforting gesture. It amused her how wide Spike's eyes got. She wondered exactly what Spike imagined had passed between them.
"You think like a mortal," Spike said.
"Well, gosh, I did spend every week of my life except the last thinking I was one."
Spike's thick brows furrowed, and he tilted his head to the side, black eyes glittering. "You don't know anything about Faery. You don't know where your loyalties should be."
"If I don't understand, it's because you didn't tell me. You kept me in the dark, and you used me."
"You agreed to help us. You saw the importance of what we were doing."
"We have to tell the solitary fey that Nicnevin was innocent of the sacrifice. This has to stop, Spike."
"I won't go back to being a slave. Not for any mortal. Not for anything."
"But the Unseelie Queen is dead."
"It doesn't matter. There's always another, worse than the last. Don't you dare try to undo this. Don't you dare go around telling tales."
"Or you'll what?" Roiben said softly.
"It's not her place," Spike protested, twisting the long hairs of one eyebrow nervously between his fingers.
