8. Chapter Eight

Chapter Eight

S omerset had been wrong.

The Winter Court was already there.

And not just a handful of minor dignitaries either. Winter had sent one of their dukes to Belling, and he’d come all the way to Yule’s domain to express his displeasure. The slender man, dressed all in charcoal gray leathers, sat flanked by four of his court, two at either shoulder, at one end of a long, scarred oak table. At the other end Jars sat stiffly in an ornate carved chair. He only had Stúfur to back him up, the Yule Lad’s shoulder propped against the chair as he leaned on it.

The scene put Somerset’s hackles up. It looked easy, familiar. Somerset thought he could trust Stúfur, but he’d thought the same of all his brothers at one point and been proven wrong.

“Is this a bad time?” Somerset asked as the door swung shut behind him. He stripped his coat off and tossed it into a nearby booth. “We could come back.”

Belling’s new duke turned to look Somerset up and down. Apparently it didn’t impress, because he curled his lip before he turned back to Jars.

“Are your servants always so free with their tongues?” he asked.

The jab made Stúfur snort, and one of the duke’s advisors leaned in and muttered something to him. It could have been that the duke had just called one of the Yule Lads a servant —Somerset didn’t care, but some of his brothers were more conscious of their dignity — or that he’d turned his back to one of Winter’s most feted killers. Whatever it was, the duke didn’t care for it. He stiffened and hunched his shoulders up toward his ears, then stood up in one graceful, flowing movement.

“I see I am mistaken,” he said smoothly as he sketched a brusque bow in Somerset’s direction. “It’s no mere servant, it’s the Saintmaker himself. The most selfless of Yule’s retainers.”

The title was new, the insult wasn’t.

Winter had never believed that Somerset had raised one Santa to office with no hidden motives. The fact they couldn’t see what his angle was had only convinced them it was even more mercenary than they’d thought.

It looked like doing it twice hadn’t changed Winter’s mind about him.

That, more than anything else, was why no one could know about him and Dylan. Somerset might wear his own feelings on his sleeve where the newest Santa was concerned, but it would be dangerous if they knew Dylan returned them.

“I prefer Somerset, and if I—” he started, but Jars’s voice interrupted him before he could finish.

“And not alone,” he said. He reached for his crutches and levered himself clumsily to his feet as he dipped his head toward Dylan. “Santa. We’re honored that you were able to finally make it. After all, as Duke Caolán pointed out, the Yule Lads simply serve Yule. It’s Santa Claus who rules it.”

Dylan was suddenly the focus of everyone’s attention.

“That’s OK. Please don’t get up.” Dylan gestured clumsily for Jars to stay where he was. “I can’t stay long.”

Jars sighed and lowered himself stiffly into the chair. He propped his crutches against the table and leaned back.

“Of course,” he said. “I’m sure there’s a lot left to do for you to get ready for the Eve. How fare the reindeer? Are they in good condition for the night’s work?”

There was a pause, just long enough for Jars to look pleased with himself .

“I think they’re enjoying their reindeer games,” Dylan said. “Which is important, after last year. We don’t want to run over anyone else’s grandma.”

He laughed. So did Stúfur. No one else had spent enough time in the mortal world to get the reference. There was a flash of stiff, restrained horror in Jars’s eyes, although he controlled his expression enough that it didn’t show on his face.

Still enough of a servant of Yule to care about that, then.

“That was—” Dylan started to explain.

Somerset nudged him to shut him up. It probably wouldn’t help them find Alice, or uncover the traitor, but the idea of giving Jars an ulcer was funny.

“ That’s Santa?” Duke Caolán said. He sounded as offended as a child who’d seen a department store Santa take his beard off. “He doesn’t look much like Santa.”

The advisor on his left chuckled from behind unparted, dark red lips. He patted Caolán’s arm.

“Witty as always,” he said. A sharp glance made the other three advisors nod and murmur in agreement.

Caolán’s mouth twitched at the corner, and he moved his arm away. It seemed the young duke had enough about him to not enjoy being pandered to.

“They promised me I wouldn’t have to grow a beard,” Dylan said. “I specifically asked about that beforehand.”

Jars raised a sandy eyebrow in response to that. “I don’t believe that was a binding condition,” he muttered.

His jab was ignored as Caolán cracked an actual smile at Dylan’s remark. He gestured across the table to some empty chairs.

“Sit,” he said. “Even if you can’t stay long, you should know why we are here. It does involve you.”

Dylan glanced at Somerset. That would do nothing to quell the “Saintmaker” murmurs, but Somerset could live with them. He nodded slightly and followed Dylan over to the table.

He pulled a chair out for Dylan and held it for him. Then he pulled another for himself. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Jars’s mouth crimp in annoyance.

“What the fuck?” Stúfur objected. “He can sit down, but I have to stand here like I’ve got piles?”

“You sit like a slut,” Jars said .

Stúfur screwed his face up in confusion. “What the fuck does that mean?” he asked. “I sit like a normal person.”

Somerset leaned back and hung his arm over the back of his chair. “No,” he said. “Jars is right.”

That got him an offended look from Stúfur. He smirked back. It was good for Stúfur to remember that he wasn’t the only asshole in the family.

“Enough,” Dylan said, the edges of the word clipped with irritation. It caught the corners of the empty room with a soft, authoritative echo.

It shut all three of them up. Stúfur thought better of whatever he’d been about to say so thoroughly that his teeth clicked audibly as he shut his mouth.

At their end of the table, Winter’s representatives looked…the range ran from taken back to angry. With the scale weighted more at anger. Oddly enough, when Somerset glanced at Jars, his brother looked…pleased.

“Enough indeed,” one of the courtiers said abruptly. She was lush-bodied for the Courts, with feathery blond hair and muted ink coloring in her forearms and throat. Her shirt gaped open as she leaned forward, revealing the upper slopes of her breasts and just how far down the ink ran. Pale eyes snapped as she glared at Somerset and then jabbed a finger at him. “When you walk in here with your attack dog unleashed. You forget your place , Yule’s man.”

It was an insult, a very old one from back when Yule only needed a mortal man for one short, bloody run. The history was probably lost on Dylan, but from the way his eyes narrowed, the tone wasn’t.

“Which is?” Dylan asked.

The woman peeled her upper lip back from her teeth like a dog. Her gums were freckled like a dog’s, too. “Under the dirt,” she said. “It’s where mortal men spend the longest.”

Caolán held up a hand to quiet her.

“Merula might be harsh, but she isn’t wrong. We’re here because of Yule’s interference in one of our—”

The woman shoved herself to her feet. Her fingers dug into the table, long, perfectly manicured nails sharp enough to gouge splinters out of the seasoned wood.

“Interference?” she spat. “That witch’s bastard violated every treaty and agreement forged between Yule and Winter when he walked into my fort. Or has Yule written new laws and we, now, are the supplicants? ”

She looked around as if she expected someone to answer, her face twisted into an ugly approximation of innocence.

Somerset leaned back in the chair and crossed his arms. He caught the quick sidelong look that Dylan gave him, the flicker of his gaze from Somerset’s shoulders down to his chest. It probably wasn’t the ideal time, but Somerset still let himself appreciate that, since this meeting was about to get ugly.

“Is this about the changeling?” he asked.

Merula’s mouth twisted, her lips folded in as they caught on her teeth. Her hands, still braced on the table, clenched, and the skin split. It was her eyes that gave her away, though. The quick, shifty glance at Caolán that clearly didn’t want him to hear the answer.

“He is valued,” she said. “Useful. How long were you gone, Saintmaker, and what catastrophe fell on us in those times?”

It was Dylan who flinched at that, with his soft, mortal heart.

“That is—”

Somerset twisted the corner of his mouth up as he interrupted. “Santa did die,” he pointed out, then glanced up the table at his brothers. “No offense.”

It was Stúfur who snarled and lunged at him, Jars who grabbed his sleeve and dragged him back.

“Not in front of the nice people,” Jars said.

Stúfur yanked his arm away, ripping the seam of his shirt open, and stepped back

“And I didn’t break any treaty,” Somerset said once he was sure he wasn’t about to get sucker-punched. “I had every right to be at Demre and Hill’s. I had an invite.”

The Court representative with the lush red lips leaned forward. When he blinked, a sliver of a membrane flicked sideways across his eyes. He didn’t look much like Enid, but he hailed from the same place. His fingers were soot-black too, the nails cracked and red from the forge, but the stain ran all the way up under his sleeves.

No Irish Spring soap for him.

“Just because you bank there,” he said. The words were crisply enunciated, even though the red lips never parted. “Doesn’t mean you are welcome.”

“Demre?” Somerset asked.

“Hill.”

“Ah.” Somerset paused for a second as he considered his next words. He’d told Dylan he didn’t have time for a war, but what he was about to do could start one if he phrased it wrong. “They flew Yule’s standard and raised our regalia. By the treaty between Summer and Winter, where the wreath is hung and the effigy laid out is Yule’s.”

Hill’s mouth parted briefly. The tongue that poked out briefly was blackened and pocked.

“He lies,” Merula scoffed. She threw her bloody hands up in exasperation. “And if about this, about what else. He was the one who brought news of the red man’s death, and had his suckling pig replacement on a leash.”

Her eyes flashed to Dylan, and she smiled.

“No offense,” she mocked with cloying sweetness.

Dylan shrugged. “I’ve been called worse,” he said.

Somerset went to touch his knee, to remind him of their standing agreement not to smart mouth the wrong people, but quickly stalled the gesture when he caught Jars watching. He curled his fingers into his palm, nails sharp against calloused skin, and hoped he’d picked the right threat to fend off. While he did that Dylan turned to Caolán.

“I don’t know what all that means,” he said. “But it was a Christmas party. There were decorations, a tree, and some guy dressed like…well…me, I guess. Why does that matter?”

Caolán looked grim. He bit his thumbnail, caught himself, and pulled his hand away from his mouth.

“Merula,” he said as he turned to look at her. “Did you know about this?”

“I… That’s…” Merula stumbled awkwardly over her words. She stopped and pulled herself up to her full height, her shoulders back and chin up. “I knew nothing of that, but so what if there was? It was a prank, and one amongst mortals as mortals are prone to do. What harm is there?”

Caolán slammed his fist on the table. “Do not try to play the innocent. You know well enough what harm,” he snapped. “Your representative overstepped, and thanks to him, now so has Winter in coming here to demand recourse for what turns out to be our own wrongdoing.”

“There were our kind there,” Somerset said. No one was happy with that news. “A redcap. A wolf.”

The other three dignitaries looked at each other in almost perfectly synchronized shock and then leaned forward to mutter insistently at their duke. He tried to listen to them, but the overlapped advice finally made him shrug them off.

“Enough,” he snapped. “Hold your tongues, in your laps if need be. Stekkjarstaur, we acted in ignorance of all the facts, but as Merula says, no harm was done. ”

Jars rubbed his jaw. His thumb audibly rasped on stubble. His lean, tanned face was pulled into an expression of practiced diplomacy, but his eyes glittered with enjoyment. Yule served Winter; that arrangement had benefited them all over the years. But just as Winter chafed, sometimes, to be beholden to the human’s love of a holiday; so did Yule to wear that yoke.

“A bold claim,” he said. “When a woman under Yule’s protection was taken, and it was one of Winter’s wolves who drew Sainted blood in the street. The same wolf, Santa?”

Everyone looked at Dylan. He shrank back in the chair and rubbed his arm absently.

“I—” he started to say, then caught himself. “I’m not sure I should answer that without talking to—”

“Answer enough,” Caolán said. “What gelt does Yule ask?”

Jars mugged uncertainty as he leaned back in the heavy carved chair. He rubbed his chin in thought as he glanced from Somerset to Stúfur.

“We—”

Before he could tell them, Merula made a strangled sound of rage and lunged over the table. The skin flayed back from her fingers to reveal bony claws, and her mouth split at the corners to reveal the wet red interior and flat spade teeth.

Somerset unceremoniously shoved Dylan out of the way. The man and chair toppled over and hit the ground with a yelp and a crack. At the head of the table, Jars lurched to his feet—easily enough this time, Somerset noted with a mental snort—and braced one hand on the table.

“You fucking dare ?” he demanded. Angry red color flushed his cheekbones, and the muscles in his shoulders clenched under his shirt. “In our own halls?”

He gritted his teeth and flipped the table lengthwise. Bottles and glasses shattered on the floor, one of the Winter Court dignitaries gave an undignified yelp, and Merula smacked face first into the wooden surface. She went flying and hit one of the neglected stripper poles with a smack. The troll-rated bar caught her right in the middle of the back, and she was the one who folded.

Her face twisted more around the bony jut of her shifted skull as she screamed and slid down onto the ground, her limbs twitching jerkily.

The rest of the Winter Court delegation scattered as the table crashed down where they’d been. Caolán swore furiously at his people as they dragged him backward. None of them paid him any attention .

Somerset bent down, grabbed Dylan by the collar of his coat, and hauled him back onto his feet.

“You OK?” he asked.

He didn’t get an answer right away. Dylan just looked dazed as he blinked at the chaos around him. Blood dripped from his nose. He must have cracked it on the floor as he went down.

“Did you hit your head?” Somerset asked. He palmed the back of Dylan’s skull and worked his fingers through tangled brown hair in search of a head injury.

“What? No. I didn’t,” Dylan protested. He tried to squirm away, but Somerset ignored that.

Stúfur joined them, his knives already out. He gave Dylan a once-over and then Somerset a hard look.

“In the middle of a fight?” he said. “Can you keep your hands off him for five minutes?”

The jibe made Somerset twitch. It didn’t look like anyone had heard, but that was just luck.

“Not the time,” he said as he shoved Dylan at his brother. “Get him somewhere safe.”

“Done,” Stúfur said as he scruffed Dylan by the collar before he could squirm away. Then he hesitated a beat as he glanced toward Jars as their eldest brother smacked a bottle out of his way with the butt of his crutch. “Maybe he’s not—”

“Go.”

Stúfur acknowledged the order. He tightened his grip on Dylan’s collar.

“Come on,” he said. “You don’t want to see this anyhow. You can’t even cope with a Sunday roast. This will turn your stomach.”

“We just talked about this,” Dylan protested as he tried to wriggle out of the coat. “You can’t just shove me somewhere and let me out once a year.”

He managed to get one arm out. Before he could get any further, Stúfur stooped slightly and hoisted him up over his shoulder. The strangled noise that came out of Dylan as his head dangled around Stúfur’s knees was probably a curse, but it was hard to tell.

“Don’t tempt us,” Stúfur said as he hooked his fingers into the back pocket of Dylan’ jeans. “Human rights are a really recent thing for us.”

He hefted Dylan up into a better position on his shoulder and ignored the attempt to punch him in the kidneys.

“Watch your hands,” Somerset growled at him sourly as he turned back to the fight. He only got a low, dirty laugh from Stúfur in response.

Asshole.

The closed-lip courtier raised his stained hands. The floor cracked open, the polished wooden planks splintering as they broke, and smoke belched up through the crevices. It was thick and greasy, sour with the smell of metal and stone, and it clotted into the shape of thick-shouldered goblins with blank faces and broad spade-like hands. Sparks dripped off them like sweat as they raced forward, barely visible in the smog their creator had raised.

One latched onto Somerset’s leg, and he swore. It was hot enough to scald through his jeans, and it dug at his stomach with blunt, hard fingers. Somewhere in the smoke he heard Jars spit out an old, ear-burning oath that had enough power behind it to make the smoke eddy.

Somerset gritted his teeth and grabbed the construct by the nape of the neck, scorching his fingers, and let his magic run down its arm into it. Frost cooled the burn on his palm and soaked into the thing through its skin. The sparks died as it cooled, and it slowed as its limbs hardened and went rigid.

Dead it was just slime and char. It crumbled to gritty dust in Somerset’s grip.

He wiped his hand on his hip. Habit made him reach for the wind, but it was too far away. It liked the Yule Lads well enough, but not enough to come inside. Damn. That just left the hard way.

Smoke caught in his lungs as he took a deep breath, sticky enough to cling. He spat the taste out of his mouth along with his brother’s name.

“Jars,” he yelled. “If I hold them off, can you clear the room?”

There was a grunt from the smoke, and the dense body of a construct flew past Somerset and cracked in half against a wall. Viscera made of liquid metal and coal dropped out to cool in a ghoulish pile on the floor.

“I wasn’t the one who had to retire,” Jars shouted back. “You just do your best.”

Somerset made a guttural, annoyed noise in the back of his throat as he stalked into the smoke. Until last year—when a missing Santa, the threat of a lost Christmas, and Dylan’s inability to keep his mortal ass out of trouble had dragged him back in—he’d thought his days of watching his brothers’ backs were done.

Even the ones he liked got on his nerves, and Jars…well, he was still pretty sure Jars was a traitor. So Somerset had to keep him alive, just to put a knife to his throat once he could prove it.

He stooped down, grabbed the back of a knocked-over chair, and swung it up to bat a lunging construct out of the air. It went flying. Another one took its place. Hot pincers grabbed the back of Somerset’s thigh, the smell of burned denim and meat as it crisped sickly sweet as it rose up around him. The chair broke on its next swing. He was left holding a splintered rod as thick as his wrist, and threw it like a spear at the next sickly gray shape he saw.

The close-mouthed Winter courtier who’d called the smoke out made a choked noise of surprise as the roughly made projectile went into his throat. He clutched at it with both hands, the dark blood that oozed up scorching the wood as he staggered back.

Somerset paused for a breath to see if the summoner being injured dissuaded his creatures at all. It didn’t. He flicked his hold-out knife out of the wrist sheath and reached back to jab into the creature attached to his leg. The blade punched easily through the thing’s skull, but then got stuck in the sticky morass of cooling goo in there.

Somewhere in the smoke, Jars said something and cold struck like a nail through Somerset’s bones. It was the first bite of a winter storm, the bitterness before the blow.

He tossed the dead construct and knife away together. They went rattling over the floor.

Jars said the second word and the smoke started to sink toward the ground under the weight of what was to come. The cold had splinters in it. A static squawk came from the speakers, and a sped-up, throaty vocal cover of “Deck the Halls” blasted out.

Somerset braced himself.

It wasn’t a word that came next, just the smack of Jars’s crutch against the floor. The ground underfoot shook again as thick fingers of ice splintered out from Jars’s feet. Steam hissed from the crevices the courtier had opened as the ice packed them. The smoke froze and fell to the ground as smuts of soot.

The ice crawled on, thick frost-crusted vines of it that bunched and twisted as they formed a hedge around the Court’s delegation. Or maybe it was more of a cage.

“You couldn’t just yell?” Somerset asked, voice pitched to carry over the music. That had been Jars’s gift from their ma, a yell that could level a herd of sheep or rattle the rocks off a mountain. The ice was old magic, Yule magic, from books that only he’d ever bothered to crack open. “You had to break out the big guns?”

Jars, weight tilted to the side as he braced himself on one crutch, gave Somerset a sour look and spat out a mouthful of splintered ice and blood.

“I wanted to make a point,” he said.

“What? That you could read? ”

Jars’s crutch was frozen to the ground in front of him, the butt of it encased in a thick chunk of milky ice where it had first burst up through the ground. He grabbed the shaft just under the worn cuff and yanked. The ice held, the crutch buckled and broke. Jars twisted it free and swung the truncated length up onto his shoulder.

“That just because Christmas got cute, doesn’t mean we did,” he said.

“Oh, I think they know that,” Somerset said. He reached back to check the burn on his thigh. The scorched denim felt crispy, the skin underneath wet. “They’ve met you, after all.”

Jars ignored that as he limped across the ice-patched floor, weight listed heavily to the side onto his remaining crutch.

Behind the thicket of ice, Caolán shrugged off the last two retainers. He pulled himself up straight and glowered at the Yule Lads.

“What is this?” he demanded. “Has Yule forsworn itself?”

Somerset traded an annoyed look with Jars, momentarily in agreement despite their differences. Elves. This was why no one liked them.

“You started it,” Jars pointed out. “If it is to be war, it was Winter’s duke who violated guest-right and all our treaties.”

The weight of that accusation was enough to make the last two members of Caolán’s entourage blanch. They traded worried looks and picked at Caolán’s sleeve for a word. He shrugged them off and crossed his arms.

“I don’t see your blood on my hands,” he said. “Can you say the same?”

Cocky little sod.

Before either Yule Lad could respond, the more persistent of the two retainers—a seal-eyed woman with freckles the size of dollar coins—tugged on Caolán’s arm hard enough to make him stagger. He flushed and turned on her in annoyance.

“ What ?” he snapped.

She blinked at him, unfazed, and then turned liquid black eyes toward the bent stripper pole.

“Where has Lady Demre gone?” she asked.

Everyone turned to look. The myrkálfar lay where he had fallen, in a puddle of dark blood, but the broken body of the woman was gone.

“Fuck,” the two Yule Lads and a Duke of the Winter Court said at the same time.