“He didn’t smell strange. He smelled young,” Loriana whispered. It was already too late to follow, for she could read his essence fading even now, as the breeze dispersed what was left of him in Faerie into the wind.
“Young…” Tatiana drew a deep breath and closed her eyes, leaning her head back into Loriana’s shoulder, wearing a wide smile as she savored the last of the boy’s scent.
“I’d prefer the other,” said Chrysaliss. “The other one—didn’t you see him? The one who told the young one to ride?” In the fading dusk, her teeth were very white as she smiled and her eyes were very green. “Do you know who he is? I’ve seen him on this side of the border more than once or twice—he’s the first I’d pick at night, too.” The two collapsed on each other in gales of giggles.
Loriana looked up and frowned. The leaves on the trees were quivering and the throb in the air was more palpable. Beneath the branches, the dark pools of shadows began to grow around the trunks. Their bath had been fun, but now it was spoiled somehow and she felt not the slightest desire to get back into the water. “I think we should go home.”
“Why?” Tatiana waded out into the center of the water and peered down into the shallow depths. “You know, if the moon would just rise a bit, I think we could—”
“Tatiana, come back.” Loriana grabbed Chrysaliss by the wrist, as if to prevent her from doing the same. “Come, let’s get out of the water. I think we should go now.”
“But why?” Tatiana flung a few drops of water at them both and grinned. “This stream cuts straight through Shadow. We can follow him, we can find him—and the other one, too. Come, what’s the harm?”
Beneath Loriana’s feet, the ground gave a palpable throb. “What’s that?” asked Chrysaliss, looking down. The throb was growing stronger.
Loriana looked up. The leaves shook visibly and the subtle throb had turned into an audible pulse. “It’s drums,” she whispered. “Goblin drums and they’re not just getting louder, they’re getting closer.”
As if she’d given a signal, a hideous cacophony erupted from somewhere far too close. Chrysaliss wrapped her arms around Loriana, and Tatiana, galvanized, came running out of the water.
The pounding was growing louder. Loriana grabbed for Tatiana’s hand and the three clung to each other. “Which way are they coming?” breathed Tatiana, as they backed up close to the largest of the nearest trees.
The sound was all around them now, shuddering through the ground, rending the air, and Loriana pressed her back against the tree. Up. The word filled her mind with urgency and Loriana looked up. The branches above their heads were bending down. “We have to go up,” Loriana answered as the ground began to quake beneath their feet.
“They’re coming this way,” Loriana said. She reached up, into the welcome of the tree, felt the branch twist itself beneath her hands. The other girls scrambled beside her just as the leading edge of the horde ran across the stream.
The screeches and the screams, the trills and the yelps were all part of some discordant language, she realized, but the drums, so wild and so loud, were disorienting as they filled the air.
“Wait—I’m fall—” cried Tatiana, and she did, slipping off the branch and tumbling to the ground below. She landed with a thump, and as Loriana gazed down in horror, Tatiana was caught up by the goblins. With shrieks of glee at their unexpected prize, they dragged her into their midst, tossing her from one to the other as they ran through the trees.
Her screams faded as the horde swept by. “What should we do?” Chrysaliss whispered.
“Stay here,” Loriana whispered back. The goblins were galloping under the trees now, scrambling like drunken mortals, heady with the noise and the scents. “We’re just going to stay here. And hope they go away.”
“Or that someone finds us.” As if in reassurance, Loriana heard faint, frantic blasts of the horns. “Hear that? Father’s coming.” She squeezed Chrysaliss tight, and the two clung to each other and the trunk of the tree. Loriana pressed her cheek against the papery bark of the ancient birch. But the goblins weren’t going away. They roamed back and forth beneath the trees, pausing every now and then to sniff and peer.
“What’re they doing?” muttered Chrysaliss. “Why don’t they go away?”
“It’s like they’re…like they’re looking for something,” Loriana breathed back. The horns sounded louder, and in the far depths of the wood, Loriana thought she saw distant flashes of the sidhe’s lych-spears. “Or someone.”
“What if they look up?” Chrysaliss whispered. “We should go higher.”
Loriana froze. Like her mother, she despised heights. Beside the squat old birch, its boughs interlaced, a graceful ash soared high.
“Come on,” Chrysaliss was tugging at her, pulling her off the birch and onto the ash. “Come, we have to get higher—higher where they won’t see us—” A clawed hand snaked around her ankle and yanked her down. She disappeared below with a high-pitched scream.
Gasping, Loriana bolted. Across the limbs, light as a wisp, she darted, dashing from branch to branch, following the line of the river that carried her, against all instinct, away from the Forest House. But the horns were louder now, the goblin drums less insistent. She paused to catch her breath in a hollow of a bending willow. The goblin roars were louder, if possible, but she heard the battle trills of the warriors, saw the flashes of light zigzag across the sky like summer lightning. They were fighting somewhere very close, she thought. She curled up as tightly as she could within the hollow, her arms wrapped around her knees, her face tucked down. The sound of her friends’ screaming echoed over and over, and she trembled, bit her lip and tried to stop shaking.
But the smell of burning and wafting smoke choked her and, peering cautiously out, she looked around in all directions. Another noise was rising on the wind, a noise only the sidhe and the trees could hear. It was the screaming of a living tree on fire. Loriana’s gut twisted and nausea rose in the back of her throat. She staggered, clinging to the trunk of the nearest tree, and felt the pain resonate underneath her hand. They all shared it to some degree; they all felt it. And then someone stepped around a tree, a tall figure, pale as a goblin in the sun, carrying what appeared to be something limp and dead.
At first she thought the figure was her father. But it can’t be Father, she thought. But the figure had his walk, his stance, his set of shoulders. Not his hair, for Auberon’s was as copper as her own, and this man’s feathered around his face in coal-black waves, reflecting blue glints in the moonlight. He was mostly naked, but for a pair of torn boots and ragged trews of the kind the mortals wore, and she wondered why he didn’t come up into the trees out of harm’s way like any reasonable sidhe. Intrigued, she watched him as he passed beneath the willow. Swift as a cat she uncurled herself and crept silently just behind him.
He paused, looked up, and seemed to sense her presence. She darted around the trunk as he hoisted himself into the tree. He turned one way, then another, and their eyes met. In the dark, she saw the green gleam of his. “Who’re you?” she whispered.
“I’m Timias,” he replied, and the name made her eyes widen.
This is Timias? Raised by her grandfather, King Allemande, beside her father Auberon, after his own family was slaughtered, Timias was hardly mentioned by anyone at Court, he’d been gone so long. She’d been still a child when he left. He looked like a pale imitation of her father in the starlight.
“Who’re you?”
She opened her mouth to answer, when violent movement in the trees behind him caught her eye. She gasped and pointed over his shoulder as the biggest goblin she had ever seen burst through the trees, running, it seemed, directly at them both.
Timias grabbed her wrist and pulled her up higher into the tree, but not before the goblin spotted them. As the goblin leaped for them