Page 78 of A Lady’s Guide to Fae Kings

Chapter Twenty

Stepping through the ring brought them to the edge of a narrow causeway made of crooked planks slippery with algae. The air was thick and heavy with green-tinted fog. Willows draped long, silvery leaves over the surface of the boggy water, and between them, the stark silhouettes of bare trees extended gnarled, grasping branches. Shards of mirrors glittered, dangling by threads. Fae eyes peered out.

Pippa could not see the other Tithes, only Lachlan at her side. “You didn’t have to do that.”

“Of course I did,” he replied simply.

As they started to make their way along the planks, Pippa heard something moving in the water, between the reeds and cottongrass. The skeleton of some creature bobbed to the surface, gleaming white. “A riddle wasn’t bad enough?” she asked.

Lachlan glanced at the book in her basket. “A guide to bogs?”

She wrinkled her nose. “I panicked.”

“Very clever of you, actually. Bog folklore is tricky.”

“Something sharp and pointy might have been more clever,” she muttered. “I can’t imagine this is a welcoming sort of bog.”

“You know by now that nothing in Elphame is as it seems.” He stared over the murky mists and shifting waters. “But you have the right of it.”

“Should I mention again that I do not enjoy riddles?”

“No one enjoys riddles,” he said.

There were white calla lilies and yellow irises and purple loosestrifes. Salamanders darted up the trees, scales shining like rainbows. There was a red plant she did not recognize. “Devil’s matchstick lichen,” Pippa read aloud from her book. “I don’t think it’s red enough to claim it as a light shining without fire, do you? Pity. The name was promising.”

A snake slithered by her foot, startling her. Lachlan steadied her, his hand at her elbow. “The snakes are the one thing you don’t have to worry about in here,” he said. “Bog snakes eat moss.”

She exhaled slowly. “Good to know.”

“That, however,” he added without inflection, “is going to be a problem.”

The shriek of a firebird shivered between the branches. Pippa had seen firebirds flying over Lyonesse, but never this big or this angry. Her beak was obsidian sharp and her feathers were red and orange and yellow, with delicate gold. And they were on fire.

They whistled as they burned through the thick air. One of the willows rolled in its roots in a manner that could only be described as insulted. The sparks rose up, hovering. Searching.

Lachlan pulled Pippa inside of a broken tree stump, large enough to accommodate a party of three for tea—if one did not mind glowing spiders the size of one’s foot and webs that clung like honey. There were also ants of a biting variety who did not appreciate the invasion.

The firebird circled closer, hissing and spitting. More feathers fell like burning rain. “She’s protecting her nest,” Lachlan said.

A tree trunk soft with moss lay across the causeway and over the shifting bog. On the end, half hidden behind a veil of willow leaves, was a nest. The eggs were as large as ostrich eggs, and glinted like gold.

Eggs.

An animal with no bones.

Lachlan followed her gaze and groaned. “I remember thinking Librarians were the quiet sort. Instead, you’re all mad.”

“You should stay here,” Pippa suggested. He was still covered in gouges and bruises from the attack by the garden wall. “There’s no reason for both of us to go out there.”

Lachlan looked at her for such a long moment that she shifted from foot to foot, squirming. He tilted her chin up to meet his gaze, the firebird shrieking over their heads, the ground flickering with fire. “Pippa?”

“Yes?”

“I dare you to say that again,” he said quietly, softly. His beauty was darker, his eyes sharper.

She decided not to reply.

“Where you go, I go,” he repeated.