Hrokr looked at his father. He looked at the horses circling Titania. Then he looked directly at Ellie and me.
Something shifted again. Something slippery and both planned yet heavily dependent on the moment. Something utterly trickster.
Hrokr darted for Bloodyhoof. He was up on the stallion’s back with his hands curled in the horse’s mane before the other magicals could respond.
Arne yelled his son’s name. Angry magic flared around Magnus. And Titania saw her opening.
She sidestepped and swung her arm in a wide circle. All the crystalline magic of her armor and antlered helmet, all the icy colors and the sharp facets, swung with her arm.
She opened a portal.
The first horse that jumped through ran straight at Bloodyhoof. The second ran at Arne. The third at Magnus. The fourth toward the Percherons. The fifth Titania mounted.
The sixth ran up the hill toward Ellie and me.
This stallion was a tall, willowy creature with a sleek greenish-champagne coat. A bridle of silver and gold gleamed around his muzzle. A shroud followed behind the beast like the gossamer sheets of a specter, and he was too thin, too skeletal, to be a true horse.
Titania had called up nightmares. Death horses.
Ellie looked at the barn, then back at the ghost horses circling Magnus’s three.
The horses snorted. They whinnied and reared and pawed at each other like fighting mustangs. The elves shot bolts at Titania, who sent them right back.
I twisted Ellie behind me and pulled us out of the way of the charging stallion. He slowed, but not fast enough, and jumped the fence to keep from running into it.
We couldn’t go to the barns. We couldn’t go toward the fight.
Ellie grabbed my hand and pulled me west along the fence, toward the other buildings. “This way,” she said.
Hrokr, all his self-disappointment dancing across his god-face, looked at us from Bloodyhoof’s back. Alfheim’s Loki elf had unleashed something he hadn’t meant to unleash. He’d tried to be better, to tame his chaos, but Loki is what Loki does.
And he might get his father killed.
How long could they fight like this? How long before the other elves noticed? Or Oberon? Ellie was right; we had to get out of here. I followed her along the fence.
“Our King will prevail.” Sal said it as if she carried no doubt about Arne’s fighting capability.
I wasn’t worried about Arne and Magnus, or Titania, either. I was worried about Hrokr. About his responses to all this. And about other fae showing up.
We had a twelve-mile trip back to the lake as the crow flies, and we needed to make it before the cottage closed up for the night. If we couldn’t find another horse enchanted enough to cross into the veil, we’d have to run it. I could, but I wasn’t sure about Ellie.
Hrokr leaned toward Bloodyhoof’s ear. A bit of magic moved from the elf to the horse. And Magnus’s prize stallion reared up one last time and broke east, away from us and the fight.
“Hrokr!” Arne’s magic flared up toward the sky as he watched his son ride away.
Magnus’s magic also flared.
“Enough!” Arne bellowed.
The flash that followed hit the ghost horses menacing the Percherons. It hit the one menacing us as it turned to jump back over the fence. It hit the two harassing Arne and Magnus.
All the ghost horses vanished. All except the one Titania rode.
The hit from Arne’s magic almost knocked her off the back of the horse. She righted herself quickly, rolling up into a squat as her ghost stallion circled.
She turned toward us. Her hand rose. She pointed.
Her ghost stallion charged up the hill.
“No no no!” Ellie sprinted along the fence. There had to be a place for her to hide. There had to be.
My mate magic was gone but the love was still there. So were the longing and the need and the deep, core-knotting terror that this might truly be the end.
All those edge things one would expect when one dances on the surface of a bubble.
I must have blinked. Or maybe the shifting between elven order and fae chaos hit me again. Because I didn’t remember stepping between Titania’s charging stallion and the woman I loved.
I lowered my shoulder and held Sal out in front of me like a bar. If I got under the stallion’s neck and low enough on his chest, I might be able to flip him. Sal pushed out a tilted shield spell very much like the one Arne had used earlier. She was not backing away from this fight. We had this.
The air directly above the fence line shimmered. Bloodyhoof manifested mid-jump, as if the fence was his own portal edge, Hrokr on his back and all his energy focused on the charging fae stallion.
Bloodyhoof rounded on his front legs, sidestepping and swinging around his hindquarters, and slammed side-to-side into Titania’s stallion hard enough that a concussive wave of magic so bright I cringed hit me full in the face.
Troubles. Loneliness. The weight of expectations and the found momentary freedom of tricking one’s way out of one’s bonds. Then the wave was gone.
I sucked in my breath. Was that Hrokr? Loki? Titania? I had no idea. I blinked away the flash.
The ghost stallion vanished.
Bloodyhoof stood over me. Hrokr leaned down, his hand extended to help me onto the stallion, but he spoke to Ellie. “Let’s go!”
I looked over my shoulder. She blinked, also stunned by the flare of magic. She wasn’t more than ten paces farther down the fence line. Maybe eight. But she was too far away for me to reach her quickly.
Hrokr hadn’t thought things through once again. He hadn’t taken into account that Titania had already proven her portal magic still operated here. That she could move around at will, and easier than the elves.
The Queen’s stallion manifested, once again, in mid-jump over the fence. His front legs hit the muddy ground directly behind Ellie and he stepped forward, his hindquarters coming
