I watched her go to her cart, which her bodyguards had turned around while we were inside. The Redcap had done the same with my carriage.
The two sets of guards tried not to show that they were watching the others too much. I got into the black carriage so that it rocked on its springs and slumped back into the seat. I pulled the brim of my cap down, folded my arms, and told the Redcap, “Drive.”
Perhaps wisely, he didn’t say a word to me. He clucked to the not-horse, and clip-clop we went down the clearing streets. The shadows were cooling off the streets as the sun went into the west, and people who remained outside had the look of those in a hurry to get somewhere safe.
Body removal had been a problem. Most of the people who died in the open had been collected by now, but there simply wasn’t the time or space to deal with them all. There were mass graves being dug somewhere out west of town, but the dead didn’t have priority over bringing in supplies for the living, so the faintest taint of death was in the air almost anywhere you went. They kept finding remains in the wreckage of buildings, in nooks and crannies where people had crawled off to die.
The first two weeks had been positively ghoulish.
Now it was just a fact.
The carriage passed into some deep shadow that gathered beneath some tall buildings, and when it came out into the next column of setting sunlight, the seat next to me was occupied.
Mab, the Queen of Air and Darkness, ruler of the Winter Court, satprimly in the seat next to me, dressed in white pants, silvery heels, and a winter-blue blouse. She wore a broad-brimmed summer hat and black plastic sunglasses that reflected the colors of sunset in a deep blue and purple spectrum. She was beautiful like few beings I had ever seen, and her lips were rich and soft-looking and the color of frozen mulberries.
The air around her was chill. It was like sitting next to an open refrigerator.
The Redcap turned enough to touch the brim of his cap and incline his head to her, then went back to driving.
“Barely adequate, my Knight,” Mab said in a calm, cool voice.
I didn’t move or react. “Gee. And here I was, longing for your approval.”
She didn’t move her head, but the weight of her gaze on me was palpable nonetheless. “Time is fleeting,” she said. “We have little to spare in preparation. This alliance is part of that preparation.”
“For what?” I asked.
One corner of her mouth twisted. “The next great conflict. The vampire wields a great deal of power among the mortals. That influence will be critical to my efforts. You must secure her…cooperation. By whatever means necessary.”
“Lara likes girls, too. Go seduce her yourself.”
“There are days when you say inane things,” Mab said. “And then there are days when you run your mouth and remind me how utterly young and witless you can be. I have a Knight for a reason, fool.”
“I’m not looking to get myself an addiction on top of my other problems,” I said. “And the way I am right now, I don’t think I’d be particularly healthy for Lara, either.”
“Mmmm,” Mab said, nodding her chin once. “True. You are currently more useless than you have generally proven in the past.”
The way she said “useless” made me shift uncomfortably in my seat.
“You are not irreplaceable,” she reminded me in a quiet voice.
“I’m not invincible, either,” I replied in a dull tone. “I went to war just like you wanted me to. There’s a cost for that.”
“Perhaps it was too high to be borne,” she suggested in a very lovely, very poisonous voice.
I glowered at her from beneath the brim of my cap. “Perhaps I let Ethniu out and you can dance with her again,” I said. “Perhaps if anything happens to me, that’s already set up with Demonreach. Perhaps that’s the real reason I went out there before this first date.”
Mab’s face turned slowly toward me. She stared for a long moment.
“Finally,” she said. “You are at least learning something, my Knight.” She turned back to face front and was silent for a moment more. “You will give yourself to Ms. Raith. If not now, then later. But it will happen.”
I let out a light breath through my nose.
“Time will tell,” Mab said smoothly. “Meanwhile, you have another task.”
“Oh?”
She nodded. “King Etri of the Svartalves knows that you have somehow concealed Thomas Raith from him,” Mab said. “He has demanded that I give him your head in compensation for the loss of Raith.”
