Home Improvement: Undead Edition

visit the Luidaeg, he needed to be informed.

Quentin wrinkled his nose at me, but didn’t protest again as I turned to study the courtyard. Danny’s Barghests were still sniffing their way around the room. Danny seemed to be keeping a close eye on them, which was a relief; I wasn’t sure how many halls were connected to the courtyard, and I didn’t want to add Barghest hunting to my list of things to do today. May, meanwhile, had wandered into the center of the room and was looking up, studying the Summerlands stars through the crystal panels in the roof. The knowe wasn’t yelling at us yet. That was a nice change. Of course, once Quentin’s spell wore off . . .

“It’s too bad I don’t know where the other exits are from here,” I muttered.

“What?”

“Nothing. Let’s see if we can’t figure out where the lights are.”

I started slowly forward, watching the shadows that collected at the base of the walls for signs that something was going to lunge out at us. Nothing seemed to be moving, but that could just be because we had yet to move far enough away from the door. If Goldengreen was truly tired of our intrusions, it might want to make sure we wouldn’t be able to escape. What a charming thought.

Sylvester always said he could “feel” Shadowed Hills, like a second heartbeat echoing the first. Every other landholder I’ve spoken to said something similar, even Countess April O’Leary of Tamed Lightning, whose ideas of “normal” are heavily skewed by the fact that she’s the world’s only Dryad living in a computer server. They can feel their territory—their knowes, and their lands, are a part of them. All I felt was the creeping fear that Goldengreen might decide to rise up and smash us at any moment. I don’t normally feel that way about parts of my own body, and on the rare occasions when I do, I tend to reach for the ibuprofen.

The floor was uneven, the cobblestones cracked and shifting in their settings. We were going to have some serious repair work to do once we managed to get the lights back on. Evening must have been neglecting her upkeep for years before she was killed—that, or the place had been sustained so entirely by her magic that when the magic was removed, the foundations began to crumble. I hoped that wasn’t the case. My magic can’t hold a candle to Evening’s, not even now that I’m starting to understand what my magic really is, and if I was supposed to power this place, we were going to have a very short residency.

Thinking back, I couldn’t remember the last time I’d been in this room. Evening had a small Court, almost unattended; I hadn’t heard anything about what happened to the denizens of her fiefdom after she died. They must have managed to blend into the Counties and Baronies around Goldengreen without so much as a ripple. I’d asked Sylvester if he could help me find any of them when the Queen first gave me the title to Goldengreen, and he hadn’t been able to name a single one, much less tell me where to look. If anyone out there knew the knowe’s secrets, they weren’t talking to me.

“Toby?”

May’s voice was soft but still pitched to carry. I turned toward it, starting in her direction. “What is it?”

She was standing next to one of the decorative crystal fixtures on the wall. They were shaped like ice cream cones, held to the wall by thin copper loops. I remembered them lit, burning with a calm white light that never flickered or dimmed. She didn’t say anything. She just pointed a quivering finger at the fixture, face gone pale. I blinked at her, confused, before reaching out and unhooking the offending fixture from the wall.

There was a glass dome tucked inside, where it would be normally hidden from view. I unscrewed it carefully, tipping the cone so I could see what was inside.

The dried-out husk of a pixie fell out.

It hit the floor before I had a chance to try catching it, shattering on impact and sending tiny, broken limbs and bits of wing in all directions. I jumped in surprise, cone and dome slipping from my hands and shattering next to the pixie’s remains. Given what they’d contained, I couldn’t find it in myself to be sorry that they were broken.

Raising my head, I gaped at May in horror. “How do you think it managed to get trapped in there? The poor thing must have starved to death. And why didn’t the night-haunts come?”

“They couldn’t get through the glass,” said May. Her voice was just as soft as it had been before, and her eyes were distant, not quite focusing on me. “I don’t think it got trapped in there by accident, Toby. I’m still a Fetch, even if I’m not exactly yours anymore, and I can feel their deaths all through this room. Dozens of them . . .”

Her words sank in slowly. I swept my horrified gaze along the wall, taking note of the crystal fixtures set at regular intervals. She was right; there were dozens of them, once you made a full circuit of the courtyard, and if they’d all contained live pixies at one point . . .

“But the knowe’s been sealed since Evening died,” I said. My words seemed distressingly loud. “She would never have allowed something like that.”

“You always saw the pretty side of the nobles, Tobes,” said Danny, looking back to us. He paused, then added, “No offense, kid.”

“None taken,” said Quentin faintly. He had walked over to stand next to me, staring down at the broken pixie on the floor with horror that mirrored my own. “I’ve . . . I’ve heard of people doing this. Before. It . . . they . . .”

“Pixies aren’t covered under Oberon’s Law,” I finished for him. He nodded, very slightly.

Oberon’s Law forbids the fae to kill each other. It’s the only absolute rule he ever made, and it’s enforced in every Kingdom. Of course, there are loopholes. Killing is allowed during an officially declared war. Changelings aren’t protected by the Law. Cait Sidhe are allowed to kill each other, since that’s a major part of their succession process, and the Law is enforced on the killer of a Cait Sidhe only if the local King or Queen of Cats requests it. Monsters, like Danny’s Barghests, and small folk, like the pixies, are completely exempt from the Law. Kill them all you want. No one will stop you. No one will punish you.

Most of the fae won’t even care.

Kneeling, I scooped the remains of the pixie into my hand. There was no way to avoid all the broken glass. A chunk sliced my forefinger. I stood quickly, hissing through my teeth. I wasn’t fast enough to keep from bleeding on the floor—just a few drops, but every one of them seemed to glow like a tiny star. The Daoine Sidhe work with blood. The Dóchas Sidhe are blood, in some way that I still don’t quite understand.

“Hold this,” I said distantly, pouring the pixie’s dusty remains into May’s hand. It didn’t occur to me to question how she knew to be ready. She was my Fetch for a long time before the bond between us was broken, and she knew how I was likely to react to almost anything. Even things that had never happened to me before.

Kneeling, I lightly pressed my fingertips against the blood that had spilled onto the floor. I was still bleeding, gleaming, sluggish drops that fell to widen the stain. I still didn’t feel the knowe, not really, but when I reached through the blood, I felt something. It was as if Goldengreen were stirring, becoming aware of our presence on a conscious level for the first time.

Of course, I had no way of knowing whether that was a good thing. I pressed my fingers down with a little more force, speeding the flow of blood. The knowe was definitely waking up, some deep, slow process that was too strange and too old for me to really understand.

“Uh, Toby?”

“Hang on, Quentin. I think I’ve got this.”

“No, I don’t think you do,” said May, voice carefully lowered.

I turned toward her, raising my head just in time to see the flock of pixies that had been massing in the hallway door swoop down on us, their wings buzzing in the confined chamber like a million pissed-off mosquitoes on the warpath. I had time for a startled, wordless shout, and then they were on us, blocking out even the faint ambient light with the pressure of their bodies.

NO ONE REALLY knows where the pixies came from. Unlike Faerie’s larger races, all of whom trace their ancestry back to Oberon, Maeve, or Titania, the pixies simply are. Some people say they’re the natural by-product of magic, and I can believe it. Not much else explains the existence of an entire species of tiny, semisentient humanoids with a fondness for roast moth and clothes made out of candy wrappers.