AllFreeNovel
Share Us
"No!" Kaye gasped. It couldn't be. Roiben had been so far away from the others when she'd used his name. She had barely been able to hear herself. He'd killed all the knights close by, all the ones that could have heard.
"No one else knows it," Nephamael said as though reading her thoughts. "I killed the hob who thought to ingratiate himself with me by giving it over."
"Spike," Kaye breathed. It wasn't a question.
"Rath Roiben Rye, by the power of your true name, I order you to never harm me, and to obey me both immediately and implicitly."
Roiben's intake of breath was sharp enough to mimic a scream.
Nephamael threw back his head and laughed, hand still stroking the chess piece. "I further order that you shall not do yourself any harm, unless I specifically ask you to. And now, my newly made knight, seize the pixie."
Roiben turned to Kaye as Lutie screamed from her pocket. Kaye sprinted for the door, but he was far too quick. He grabbed her hair in a clump, jerking her head back, then just as suddenly let her go. After an amazed moment, Kaye dashed through the door.
"You may be well versed in following orders, but you are a novice at giving them," she heard Roiben say as she ran back into the maze of the library.
Before, she had simply followed Roiben through the winding bookshelves—now, she had no idea where she was going. She turned and turned and turned again, relieved that she didn't see any of the strange secret-keepers. Then, careening past a podium with a small stack of books piled on it, she turned into a dead end.
Lutie crawled out of her pocket and was buzzing around her. "What's to do, Kaye? What's to do?"
"Shhh," Kaye said. "Try to listen."
Kaye could hear her own breathing, could hear pages fluttering somewhere in the room, could hear what sounded like cloth dragging across the floor. No sounds of footsteps. No pursuit.
She tried to draw glamour around her, to color her skin to be like the wall behind her. She felt the ripple of magic roll through her and looked down at her wood-colored hand.
What were they going to do? Guilt and misery threatened to overwhelm her. She put her head between her legs and took a couple of deep breaths.
She had to get them free.
Which was absurd. She was only one pixie girl. She barely knew how to use glamour, barely knew how to use her own wings.
Clever. The word taunted her, the sum of all the things she ought to be and was not.
Think, Kaye. Think.
She took a deep breath. She'd solved the riddles. She'd gotten Roiben out of the court. She'd even more or less figured out how to use her glamour. She could do this.
"Let's go. Please—let's go," Lutie said, settling on Kaye's knee.
Kaye shook her head. "Lutie, there has to be something. If I just think."
They were all faeries. Okay, then she had to think like a human girl. She had to consider things she knew how to do. Lighter tricks. Shoplifting. And she especially had to think about the things that faeries didn't like.
Iron.
Kaye looked back at Lutie. "What would happen if I swallowed iron?"
Lutie shrugged. "You'd burn your mouth. You might die."
"What if I poisoned someone with iron?"
Lutie shifted uncomfortably on Kaye's knee, looking incredulous. "But there's no iron here!"
Kaye took a deep breath and let it out slowly. Her mind was racing ahead too fast, she had to slow down, calm down. There might be iron in the Unseelie Court, part of weapons, certainly, although she had no idea where any of that would be kept. It was all over outside here, everywhere.
She looked down at her body. What did she have that was from Ironside? Her T-shirt, panties, boots… the green frock coat was only glamour, after all.
Kaye unlaced her boots quickly. There was definitely iron in them, obscured from directly touching her skin, but there nonetheless. She pulled them off her feet and looked them over. There was iron in the steel grommets, she could feel the warmth, buried under the black plastic coating. There were steel plates buried in the toe of the boots too, although they would be much too big to use unless she could somehow file them down. Kaye took the knife Roiben had handed her out of her frock-coat pocket and began to pry the soles off the boots. There, as the soles were ripped up and off, were exposed shoe tacks, shiny steel nails so small that that they could be swallowed without anyone the wiser.
