Sandra wasn’t Faerie, but she had picked up some things in her time as the Duchamp ambassador to the Court. She was making the Goblin King do exactly what she wanted him to.
No enchantment at all.
Marjorie nearly slipped on ice as she pulled me away.
The old fool nearly pulled me down, stopping my slow but steady exit.
But Ev, sly as she was, elbowed me back, moving forward to try and ostensibly fail to help.
She would leverage that to gain some advantage over me.
The fight started, very nearly in the same moment. Troll against Goblin. The Goblin a master combatant, the Troll a physical powerhouse.
But there were two others participating in the fight. As the goblin circled around, old Hildr showed her back to the Goblin King.
A silly mistake, for the Goblin King to try and capitalize on that. He moved forward, and Sandra acted. Drawing a line between the King’s head and Hildr’s hand. Hildr’s blind grope found its mark.
Gallowscream froze. His eyes narrowed, the pupils drawing together into snake-like slits.
The Goblin King remained where he was. The Troll’s hand was cupped around the upper half of his head.
“Shit,” he said. It seemed to dawn on him just how bad his situation was. “Shit!”
“I made promises,” Sandra said. She sounded tired. “A great many promises. I could have Hildr kill you, right here and right now, but there are consequences for breaking my word. I’ll say only this. Leave.”
Hildr let go, and the Goblin King stumbled back.
She didn’t even make him swear.
“You didn’t even make me promise?” he asked, echoing my own realization.
Sandra’s demeanor shifted.
In her gaze, I could make out some of the best portrayals of the Lady Macbeth I’d seen. Stark. Cold. Weary. Aged many times over by one short span of time. Regal and a touch broken.
She appeared a touch unhinged. In that, she found a security that an oath from the Goblin King couldn’t have provided.
One without much to lose.
So much invested in this fight for the Lordship, into the family, and now it was all in shambles. The family no longer trusted her.
But it had been the right play, to let the Goblin King go. To put the power in his hand. Had she made him swear, she might have removed him as a problem, but she would have had to deal with the rest.
These next moments would prove the true mettle of her character.
Oh, how I wondered, in those delicious heartbeats. How would you handle this, Sandra Duchamp?
When she spoke, her voice was clear. “The deal is done. Those who came at our request are now free to leave,” Sandra said. “Contact me in one month’s time if you have grievances, but give me that month to resolve this situation. It is salvageable.”
As clear and simple as the message might have been, her eyes didn’t lose the dangerous gleam.
It hinged on the Goblin King.
Was his spite greater than his gratitude at being spared? Was he willing to pay the cost to personal fortune by returning mercy with viciousness?
How goblin was he?
“Gallows,” the Goblin King spat the word. He turned.
Gallowscream sheathed his blade with enough emphasis to be saying something, before following his King. Hildr noticed and grunted a matching non-word.
A point to Sandra.
There wouldn’t be open slaughter here. Not because of this.
A point, I imagined, to the Thorburn Bogeyman as well. Our blighted Rose. The Duchamps would be intact enough to help him accomplish other things, but not so intact to be a threat.
“Disappointing,” Essylt muttered, in her guise as the young, rotund Abernathy Behaim.
The look old Marjorie shot him was one of shock and indignation. Essylt managed to feign chagrin.
“I would slap you,” Marjorie said, “If I didn’t think it could cause trouble for the family.”
“What family?” Essylt asked.
I had no problem keeping the smile off my face. I made eye contact with Keller, who was dressed up as Chloe Behaim, and I could see the mirth in his eyes.
The older woman’s face had colored with a pink that had nothing to do with the cold.
“Let’s go,” she ordered.
We’d lost our chance to keep watching, but this had reached a conclusion.
Keller elbowed me.
I followed his glance.
A crow?
The Thorburn’s crow man.
Perhaps it is better to write that it was Crone Mara’s crow man?
Ordered to interfere with the enemy. Doing just that.
He met my gaze, then Keller’s.
Bags had been dropped to the roadside so diagrams could be drawn. The crow broke eye contact and climbed up to one open bag.
Displaying an uncanny strength, it emerged with a gun held in its beak.
Moving up onto a spot where a coat had been left folded atop a snowbank. Depositing the gun atop the coat. Moving a cell phone from the coat pocket to the bag the gun had occupied.
As we’d evaded attention, taking advantage of the Duchamp attention being elsewhere, the bird was operating almost in plain sight.
Marjorie continued to drag me away. Both Essylt and Keller started to lag behind, watching.
There was a rare note of admiration in their gazes as they watched.
Things had settled. More in the sense that the individual pieces of a landslide settled in a pile, one piece leaning against the next, ready to continue falling if a key element was disturbed.
This was what I’d come to watch. It exceeded my hopes, even.
Not just the destruction of the Duchamps, but derailing the plan of the Thorburn Bogeyman. They’d loosed something they didn’t entirely understand in the midst of their desperation, and now that something was acting.
Putting a gun in the wrong hand at the wrong time.
The man the cell phone had belonged to picked up his coat. Muscular, tattooed, he seemed comfortable in the cold. The gun slid off the coat as he moved it.
Sandra’s head turned.
She could see connections being manipulated. The man moving to catch the gun, much as she’d moved the Goblin King’s head into Hildr’s meaty paw.
“Look at me!” she called out. “Attention!”
She grabbed her chalice, raising it.
My eyes didn’t leave the man with the blond beard, the diagram drawer, the one who’d owned the gun.
Sandra’s words and presence lacked weight, in this moment. The diagram drawer’s eyes remained on his work, etched on the road. He took too long to focus on the chalice. On Sandra.
Hands went to implements. Recognizing that Sandra was manipulating. Not, perhaps, recognizing that it was for their own good.
A lesser being might have hesitated. Sandra didn’t. She reached for the diagram drawer. Took his attention. Turned his head her way. She had to know that it would make others hostile.
“The hell?” the tattooed man with the gun muttered. The words were loud in the quiet.
The diagram drawer looked away from Sandra for a fraction of a second. She tried to wrest his attention back to her, but he’d seen the weapon.
The crow must have been watching from the beginning, to figure out how to do it. Must have known the man was paranoid, or put some other clues together. A grudge, some other details.
It must have been watching the Thorburns, too, to know how devastating this would be to their plans.
On seeing that he was facing down a practitioner with a gun, the diagram drawer reacted without hesitation, in the time that practitioner was looking down at the weapon.
He drew a knife from inside his coat and used it in the same motion. Slitting the gunman’s throat. He reached for the gun and reclaimed it as the gunman’s free hand went to his throat, in surprise.