The Iron Sword (The Fae War Chronicles Book 1) Read online

  I wrinkled my nose at her and then wiped my forehead on my already-damp sleeve. The sun’s rays quickly warmed the cool morning air. We turned so that the light fell on our faces, and I felt the warmth sliding over my cheekbones. “So,” I said.

  “Yeah?” Molly sat down cross-legged, lifted her face to the sun and leaned back on her hands, closing her eyes.

  I sat down next to her, brushing the dirt from my palms. “I had a strange dream last night.” Even as I said the words an effervescent suspicion bubbled in the back of my mind, pushing against my thoughts as I tried to gather them into something resembling coherence.

  “Hmm. What kind of dream?”

  In the bright light of the morning sun, speaking about a little glow that came through a tear in the window-screen seemed slightly ridiculous. More than slightly. It seemed absurd—as absurd as peeling out of myself, stretching my soul out of my body. But I had said it was a dream, so I took a breath and forged on. “I dreamed about you, actually. Or something to do with you.” I glanced at Molly. The corners of her lips turned upward in a small smile.

  “Something to do with me?” Molly’s voice lowered, sun-sleepy.

  “Yes. It was kind of strange, because I’ve never really dreamed something so…vividly…before.” And that wasn’t entirely true either, evidenced by a firm feeling that I had, in fact, dreamed like that before, and I’d gone farther even than dreaming. Wisp’s words rose unbidden in my mind: I will come back again, Tess-mortal. And perhaps then I will teach you to venture farther in your dreams again. I shook my head a little to clear it, looking out over the gold-washed trees and rocks.

  “Well, come on then. Please tell me it didn’t involve Austin at all.” Molly opened her eyes and gave me a pleading look. “If it is, I don’t want to hear about it.”

  “I told you,” I said, “it was about you.” I picked up a rock from the trail, hefting it in my palm before tossing it down the slope, watching it tumble end over end before hurtling into a thorny patch of low bushes. “I dreamed that…there was this visitor, and he told me that he had a message for you.”

  “And what would that message be?” As Molly spoke, her head tilted to one side, the pleasant warmth of the sun lulling her into calm.

  I shifted uneasily. “He said to heed the letter from the Lady.” I tensed as Molly opened her eyes and looked at me. I jumped a little as she burst into laughter.

  “Look at you, getting all worked up over a dream,” she said, poking me with one finger. “You made me think it was going to be something horrible, like you dreamt I murdered you or something like that!”

  For a moment I didn’t know what to say, and then the words just spurted out of my mouth, shooting up my spine and across my tongue before I could close my teeth on them. “It wasn’t a dream. I saw the letter.”

  Molly sat up, slowly straightening her back. She laid her hands on her knees very precisely, and turned to look at me with an odd light in her green-gold eyes. “What did you say?” Her words were calm, precise, a smooth counterpoint to the feverish glint in her gaze.

  I took a breath and looked out over the rugged vista for a moment before replying, thinking my words through. “I saw you reading that letter, last night. I know…I know something in it upset you.”

  “It’s none of your business,” Molly said in a cold voice that I had never heard before. The light in her eyes flared. “You had no right to look at that letter.”

  “I didn’t actually read it,” I clarified defensively.

  “You would have, if you’d had time,” she said. “I knew you looked at it. It was folded differently.” Her mouth thinned into an angry line. “You were in a hurry when you put it back into the envelope.”

  “You’re my best friend,” I said. “We look out for each other. We have to look out for each other.” I felt an aching pull just below my breastbone at the look of betrayal on Molly’s face. “That’s why I tried to read the letter,” I continued, hating the thin thread of desperation in my voice. I wanted her to understand. I needed her to understand.

  Molly shook her head and tucked her dark hair behind both ears, both sides at once. “So, Tess, this…dream.”

  It was my turn to look away. The tone of Molly’s voice told me that she more than suspected something strange. The silence stretched taut between us, warmed by the morning sun. I pinched some dirt between my fingers, rubbing the grit against my skin as though that would scrub away the uneasiness hovering in my mind. I waited for Molly to continue—I’d already intruded on her enough, it seemed, for a while, with my attempt at reading the mysterious letter under her bed.

  “What exactly did you dream?”

  “You want to know all the details?” I glanced at her in mild surprise.

  “Every last one.”

  I breathed out slowly, picking one of the sparse blades of grass that had struggled through the loose dirt and stones of the trail. “Well. I woke up—in my dream,” I clarified. “I woke up in my dream and there was this little glow outside the window. He wanted me to let him in.” I paused, expecting Molly to ask a question, but she sat with her hands on her knees and said nothing. “So I opened the window. He flew in through a tear in the screen. Then he pulled my hair to get my attention, and sat on my shoulder while he talked to me. He said that I had to tell you to heed the summons, and something about a lady.”

  “The Lady,” Molly murmured. The inflection in her voice reminded me of Wisp’s tone when he had uttered those words…in my dream.

  “He said he would come back,” I said softly, “if I told you to heed the Lady’s summons.”

  Molly looked at me sharply. “Did you tell him your name?”

  “Yes. Well, not all of it. Not my middle name or saint’s name,” I answered truthfully. As a dutiful Catholic, I had chosen a saint to be named after at my Confirmation.

  “At least you have a little protection then,” she said.

  “He told me his name,” I offered. “Whither Wi—“

  “Stop,” Molly hissed, covering my mouth with her hand in a sudden blur of movement. “Their names have power, Tess! It sets off alarm bells in their head and most of the time they’re compelled to come to where you are!”

  When Molly took her hand from my mouth, I stared at her wide-eyed, at a loss for words. “What?” I finally croaked in a hoarse voice. “I don’t…understand, Molly….it was a dream…” But even as I said this I remembered tiny cool hands slipping past my ear, tucking my hair back as I fell asleep, looking back at my sleeping body as I stood in the middle of the loft.

  “There are more things on heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your sciences,” said Molly as she lay back onto the trail, heedless of the stones and the dirt.

  I ignored the fact that she had misquoted Hamlet. “The letter,” I said. “Tell me.”

  Her eyes narrowed, Molly shielded her eyes from the sun with one hand as she turned her head toward me. “Why?”

  “Because,” I said, taking a deep breath and gathering my thoughts again. “Because I’m your best friend and they must have known they could get to you through me. That’s why Wisp came to me last night.” My head spun a little dizzily.

  “There’s a lot I haven’t told you,” Molly said quietly, looking back up into the blue of the morning sky.

  I swallowed. “I don’t care. Tell me.” I reached over and touched Molly’s shoulder. I remembered the balmy summer night sitting under the spreading oak, shadows woven like blankets over our legs and Molly’s secret lighting her up like a lantern. “You’ve been there for me for the past three years. You were there when Liam deployed and I was a wreck…you brought two pints of ice cream to my room and we watched West Side Story three times in a row.”

  A small smile creased Molly’s face. “I remember,” she said, still in that soft voice.


  I waited, stretching my legs.

  “I’ve known I was different,” Molly said, “since I was twelve. Well, before then I knew, but I didn’t understand why all of the other kids’ imaginary friends had suddenly gone away—mine were still there. Trillow and Glira. Glows, like Wisp I think.” Molly’s voice turned dreamy. “Trillow was this lovely little thing, with a glow the color of the sunrise, and Glira was like a tiny star sown into a pocket of night. She didn’t really glow, she shimmered.”

  “What happened?” I said, almost whispering.

  “My teacher referred me to the school psychologist when I kept writing stories about Trillow and Glira. I insisted that they were real. In the end, the only way the psychologist would let me go without a letter to my mother was when I admitted they didn’t exist.” Molly’s shoulders tensed. “They left before I got home from school that day. I never got to say goodbye to them. I thought I killed them, for a long while, until Glira found me at school this past December. She nearly froze her wings off.” She sat up and brushed the dust out of the back of her short hair, slipping a sidelong glance at me. “I won’t think you’re crazy if you don’t think I’m crazy.”

  I crossed my heart with one finger. “Promise.”

  “People have always asked whether I’m adopted.” Molly shrugged. “Turns out I am. In a sense.”

  I blinked a few times, trying to process the information.

  “I’m adopted. But,” she said, holding a hand up, “I’m still family. Apparently my mom and dad are really my aunt and uncle.”

  “All this was in the letter?” I asked, aghast at finding out something so earth-shattering in an anonymous letter.

  “No.” She shook her head, dark hair shimmering in the bright sunlight. “I found out last Christmas. Glira told me.”

  “Your…glow friend.”

  “Yes. Well, she hinted at it, and then she told me where to find some pictures in a shoebox in the closet. When I showed the pictures to my mom, it was…hard.” Molly shuddered even in the bright sunlight. “They were pictures of me when I was a baby. And I’m with this woman who looks like my mom, but different. Darker hair, paler skin.” Molly brushed her own pale skin, her own dark hair. “On the back of the pictures it always said ‘Annalise and Molly.’ So I knew it was me.” She took a breath. “Mom’s younger sister was named Annalise.”

  “Why would it be so strange for your mom to have pictures of you and her sister?” I asked, unable to help myself.

  “Because Annalise has been dead for twenty years, and when I showed the pictures to my mom, she pretended like she didn’t remember, like she’d never seen Annalise before. It took me ten minutes to convince her that I knew it was her sister in the photo.”

  “But she told you about Annalise, didn’t she?” I said.

  “No,” Molly said, “that was my grandmother. My mom never talked about Annalise, and I figured it was because she just couldn’t. Too sad, I guessed.”

  “What did your grandmother tell you?” I prompted.

  “She told me that I was Annalise’s daughter, that none of the rest of the family knew except for my dad, because Annalise didn’t know who the father was and she died in childbirth. Annalise hadn’t been speaking to my grandmother for a few years when I was born.”

  “You seem so calm about all of this,” I said in wonder. I didn’t know what I’d do if I found out I was adopted, but Liam and I looked so much alike that sometimes we were asked if we were twins.

  Molly stood and offered me a hand, pulling me up from the trail. She stood looking out over the thickets of brambles and the pale dirt, listening to the intermittent sounds of birds chirping and other small animals rustling about in the bushes and trees. “What other choice do I have?” she said. “And that’s not all, Tess. When I came back from a run one day, I saw her putting the shoebox into the fireplace. She burned all the pictures.” Molly’s face twisted with bitterness. “She burned the only piece of my real mother that I’d ever had. And when I asked her about it, she just acted like she’d never done it.”

  I found myself blinking again, as if that could get my mind to work faster. “I really don’t know what to say.” I couldn’t reconcile the memory of Mrs. Jackson standing in front of the mirror at the cabin, wiggling the mascara onto her lashes with concentration, with the idea of burning pictures, flames erasing faces that had once been loved.

  We began walking down the hill, retracing our running route.

  “You don’t have to say anything,” Molly reassured me. “You know, you’re the only other person that I’ve told. I can’t tell Austin, and my mom and dad pretend like they have no memory of it…like if they wish I’m their real daughter hard enough, all of this will go away.” She grinned, a feral glint to her teeth and hardness in her spark-lit eyes.

  “So…how does this mysterious letter fit in?” I asked. “When I opened it, I thought for a minute it was blank. And then the writing showed up.”

  Molly laughed. “You must have some Fae blood way back in your family tree, Tess.”

  “Fae,” I said, more to test the word out than anything else. “Why do you say that?”

  “Because anything that’s Fae-written only reveals itself to those with Fae blood.”

  “Maybe it thought I was you.”

  Molly shrugged. “Maybe.”

  I thought for a moment, scuffing my sneaker against the gravel as we walked up the next hill. “That means you have Fae blood, then?”

  Molly shrugged again. “Probably. I don’t know for sure, though. Trillow and Glira just taught me a lot about the Fae, when I was little and we would play games out in the trees. It all came rushing back when Trillow found me at school. I thought I’d forgotten it all when I decided they weren’t real.”

  “So tell me what the letter said,” I prodded again.

  “Wisp already told you. It was an order.”

  “An order from whom?”

  Molly sighed in exasperation. “If you’d just let me talk, I’ll explain, and then you won’t have to ask so many questions. It was a summons to the Unseelie Court, a writ signed by the Queen of the Court. I don’t know what they want with me, but they set a deadline.”

  “And when is that?”

  “Tonight.”

  I raised my eyebrows. “They aren’t messing around, these faeries.”

  “No. Apparently not. I think they tried to get Glira to carry a message, but she lost it.”

  We crested another hill and the path wound its way through copse of trees. Their dry leaves rattled slightly in the breeze, a sound that somehow seemed foreboding to me.

  “So the Fae of the Court are different than Wisp and Trillow?” I asked, curious now after having gotten over the initial shock of the whole idea.

  “Yes. They’re all Fae, but the Court Fae prefer to be called the Sidhe. That’s the polite name, anyway. And of the Sidhe, there’s the Seelie Court and the Unseelie Court. As far as Trillow would tell me, the Seelie Court love the day, and the Unseelie Court prefer the night. That’s all I could really get out of her. She likes the Seelie a bit more, I think, because they give her shiny things when she runs errands for them. Glira, though, is more of an Unseelie sympathizer.”

  “Sympathizer,” I repeated.

  “I’ll let Wisp or Trillow try and explain it,” Molly said. “I don’t understand it all myself.”

  “You’ve had ten years to think about all this,” I pointed out. “If you don’t understand it after all that time, how am I supposed to understand it before tonight?”

  Molly stopped. “What about tonight?”

  I stood up tall, using my height to what advantage I could as I looked down at my best friend. “Well, I’m coming with you.” I tried to sound firm.

  “Coming with me where?”

  �
��To the Unseelie Court. Or wherever it is you’re going.”

  “I hadn’t thought of actually going.”

  I frowned, taken aback. “Why not?”

  She turned to face me and crossed her arms. “Because the Sidhe are not the cute little fairies you see in children’s books, Tess. They aren’t pretty little glows like Trillow and Glira and Wisp. They’re the dangerous ones. They don’t follow the rules of our world and they don’t particularly care when mortals get hurt.”

  “Do you really have a choice?” I asked.

  Molly looked out over the dusty hills, her eyes distant. “Probably not.”

  “So then why are they bothering with you? Why do they think you’re so important?”

  “And why are you asking so many goddamn questions?” Molly turned her gaze to me, her eyes hot as coals. “I’m trying to navigate this mess, and I was working it out just fine on my own, until you stuck your nose into the letter. Now they know about you, Tess, and I have to worry about you, too.” She pointed a finger at my chest. “You think this is all well and good, a fun little diversion from school and thinking about Liam dying in Afghanistan.”

  I gasped a little, feeling as though she had punched me.

  “But it’s not, Tess. It’s not a game. I’m not the heroine and I don’t need a sidekick. I told you the story, so just leave it alone.” Her cat-like eyes radiating anger, she turned and stomped her way down the hill, leaving me breathless at the top.

  A moment hung suspended, balancing on the wave of shock enveloping me. Then anger flared in my chest, as warm as the fire that Molly’s family had built in the fire-ring on the hilltop. “You don’t get to decide!” I shouted after Molly. “Damn it, I’m your best friend. You don’t get to push that away!”

  I saw Molly pause at the bottom of the hill. Her hands went still by her sides. Then she took one step forward, and another, slowly walking away from me. I ran down the hill, slipping on a stone and falling hard. But I scrambled up and slid down the rest of the way, ignoring the burning pain in my palms and knees. “Molly!” I grabbed her arm and she went still.