Summer’s Crossing by Julie Kagawa Page A

Summer Queen raised her arms, glamour whirling and snapping about. “Stop him!” she called again, as the hedge lions, hounds, unicorns and other topiaries stirred, then leaped off their bases with howls and roars. “Go!” shrieked the queen, flinging out a hand. “Find the Winter prince. Hunt him down and tear him to pieces!”
    The bushes roared and scattered into the maze. I heard yelps and screams coming from the center of the courtyard as the nobles’ party was rudely interrupted. Titania waited a moment, and then turned on me.
    â€œI will find him!” she snarled, eyes flashing electric blue in the darkness. “He will pay for this humiliation! Goodfellow, call the guards, the knights, the servants. Alert the rest of Arcadia. The Winter prince will not leave this court alive!”
    I bowed. “Certainly, my queen,” I drawled. “And may I suggest squads of at least four to six knights if you’re going to have them looking for ice-boy? Unless you want to find frozen shish kebabs littering the halls all the way to the wyldwood. Ash is pretty handy with that sword.”
    Titania’s eyes glowed as she raised her hand. With a flash of lightning, the smell of burned earth and smoke rose up from the ground, and the Summer Queen was gone.
    I took a deep breath and clenched my fists to stop the shaking. Final stage, complete. That was easier than I thought. Now…if only the other part went off without a hitch…
    â€œNice performance, Goodfellow,” said a voice at my back.
    I turned wearily as Ash stepped out of the shadows of the maze, still wearing his disguise as a Summer knight. He carried a sleeping child, held tightly to his chest. Vi snored softly, smears of blue frosting around her mouth. With the amount of sleeping powder she’d gorged on tonight, she would probably be out for several hours. All that flirting with the huge troll cook in the kitchen, just to sneak the powder into the frosting mix, hadn’t gone to waste at least.
    â€œOh, good, you found her.” I tried to grin at him, but I was feeling oddly tired at the moment. “Yeah, it was quite the performance, wasn’t it? Good enough to fool a faery queen and the entire Summer Court. This will probably go down in history.” Ash didn’t smile, and I sighed. “So, how much of that did you hear?”
    â€œEnough.”
    â€œThat so?” I gave him a half-weary, half-challenging look. “And do you have anything to say about that, ice-boy?”
    â€œNo.” He shook his head solemnly. “You said what you had to. You did what was required to get the job done.”
    â€œOh? That’s awfully generous of you, Prince.”
    â€œNone of it was a lie, Goodfellow.” Ash gave me a hard stare. “Nothing you said or did was against your nature. That’s why Titania believed you so quickly. I would have believed it, too.”
    I sighed. “Good to know where I stand,” I muttered, and scrubbed a hand over my eyes. “Well, come on then, ice-boy. Let’s get out of here before Titania catches your doppelganger and finds nothing is holding him together but twigs, string and a bit of your hair. With all the commotion going on, it should be easy to sneak out nice and quiet.”
    Not entirely. Thanks to my little Ash clone, the Summer Court was in chaos, scrambling over each other looking for him, but our escape wasn’t entirely without problems. We ran into a lion topiary that needed to be cut down, and ice-boy’s disguise finally shattered when he drew his sword to battle the creature. Of course, right after that, we ran into a squad of Summer knights and played a rousing game of catch-me-if-you-can before we finally escaped into the hedge. With the knights hot on our heels, I led us down a twisting tunnel of bramble that got smaller and smaller until it abruptly came to an end.
    Ash muttered a curse and looked around as