One Salt Sea

by Seanan McGuire

  There were so many questions packed into that short, seemingly-simple sentence. What would I do? Would I hand Rayseline over to the justice of the Undersea? To the Queen’s justice? To anyone at all? She and I were close, once, before she was stolen and raised in darkness. It wasn’t her fault that she grew up broken—and sadly, the fact that it wasn’t her fault wasn’t enough to un-break her.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I’m going to prevent this war. I don’t know what that’s going to mean, but I’m going to prevent this war. I need to search her rooms. I need to know if there’s anything here that might help me figure out what’s really going on.”

  Sylvester nodded. Luna wasn’t saying anything. Her eyes were closed, pink lashes unnaturally bright against the stark whiteness of her skin.

  “I . . . appreciate that you did not call us with this news. This is too important for that.” Sylvester sighed. “You have free run of her apartments. Etienne will accompany you and provide anything else you need.”

  “He isn’t needed in the armory?”

  “This is more important,” said Sylvester. “You’ll be sure we know the situation?”

  “I will,” I said, with all the sincerity of a promise.

  “Good.”

  That was my dismissal; it couldn’t have been any clearer. I turned, walking back across the throne room to the doors. They didn’t call me back, and I didn’t turn around. Then the doors swung open, and I left my liege and his lady behind.

  ELEVEN

  TYBALT WAS LEANING against the wall with his arms crossed, watching the pages walk by with their armfuls of weaponry. I stopped in my tracks, struggling with the image of Tybalt looking so at home in Shadowed Hills. He’d always been a part of my life, a figure lurking on the fringes making snide comments and yet somehow, reliably, coming to my rescue when I needed him.

  How long had it taken me to notice that?

  He straightened when he saw me. “I take it you’ve finished?” he asked. There was open concern in his tone.

  “Yeah. I told them.”

  “How did they react?”

  “As well as could be expected.” I sighed, pinching the bridge of my nose. “I need to find Etienne. He’s going to accompany us for the search of Rayseline’s rooms.”

  Tybalt blinked. “Really? Why?”

  “Because otherwise, the Queen could question any evidence you produced,” replied Etienne, stepping through a doorway that hadn’t been there a moment before—a glittering hole in the air that vanished as soon as he was through it. “A changeling with reason to have a grudge against the accused, and a King of Cats with his own agendas? Best not to give her the opening.”

  “I hate politics,” I sighed. “Hi, Etienne.”

  “Countess Daye,” he replied. Tybalt received a nod, which he returned without visible annoyance. It can be hard for the more traditionalist members of the nobility to know how they should address a King of Cats—“Your Majesty” gives them too much credit, but anything else verges on insult.

  Most days, watching Etienne talk to Tybalt would be high comedy, and I’d be the first to break out the popcorn. Unfortunately, I didn’t have time. “You know the way?”

  Etienne nodded. “Sir Grianne will be meeting us there.”

  “Good. Let’s go.”

  Etienne waved his hand, filling the air with the smell of limes and cedar smoke. A glittering hole opened in the wall next to Tybalt. I could see the arched windows of the Torquills’ private hall through the portal. Grianne, another of Sylvester’s knights, was waiting for us there.

  “I love the Tuatha Express,” I said.

  All breeds of fae have their own strange skills. The Tuatha de Dannan are teleporters, capable of opening temporary doors between places. They used to manage the gates between the realms of Faerie, before Oberon sealed them and left the Tuatha looking for something else to do with their time. Most have chosen Etienne’s career path. The rest have Courts of their own, and make pretty decent regents. Some people say they’re just killing time until Oberon returns and puts them all back to work. Stranger things have happened.

  Tybalt and Etienne entered the gate close behind me. There was a moment’s blinding light, like I was stepping between the levels of a knowe—

  —and I was standing in a different hall. Grianne turned in our direction, the glowing spheres of her Merry Dancers spinning in wide circles around her. She didn’t say anything. That wasn’t unusual; I’ve never met a chatty Candela, and Grianne makes most of her race seem positively loquacious.

  “What will you need from us?” asked Etienne. He closed the portal with another wave of his hand.

  I resisted the urge to answer “More coffee.” Instead, I asked, “Has either of you been in Raysel’s rooms before?”

  “I have,” said Grianne grudgingly, like even that much communication hadn’t been in her plans for the day.

  “Good. I’m going to need you to tell me if anything’s out of place.” The lintel above the nearest door was marked with a circlet of pale pink roses, identifying the rooms beyond as Rayseline’s. I started to step forward, and paused, a feeling of undeniable wrongness washing over me. After squinting at the doorframe for a long moment, I realized what it was.

  There were no wards, either active or inactive. There weren’t even signs that there had been wards set in the past. “Etienne?” I said uncertainly.

  He followed my gaze, and sighed. “The young Mistress Torquill never made much use of her magical gifts. Her quarters have never been warded.”

  “Oh,” I said, cringing inwardly. Wards are complicated magic. They don’t come instinctively, like basic illusions or some racial gifts. Rayseline never had a childhood; she never got the training that was her birthright.

  Out of everyone in Faerie, she might be one of the few who had less of a clue about her own abilities than I did. Something about that struck me as unutterably sad. But there was nothing to be done about it now, and, tragic or not, Rayseline was no longer on the side of the angels. I took a breath to steady myself, trying to dismiss any preconceptions, and stepped past Grianne into the receiving room.

  My first impression was of overwhelming pinkness. Everything was one shade of pink or another—the walls, the rugs, even the upholstery on the chairs. Evening Winter-rose had had a similar decorating scheme for her apartment, but while she’d made it look like a private Valentine, this looked more like a preschooler’s room, one who dreamed in Disney princesses and once-upon-a-times.

  Oh. That was exactly what this was: the room Sylvester and Luna decorated for their precious baby girl. Then she went away, and came back broken. They didn’t know what to change, what would help her heal . . . and so they didn’t change anything at all, and they never taught her about growing up. I don’t think anyone, or anything, ever did.

  There were traces of her adulthood visible around the edges, but not many. Raysel shared this room with the ghost of her own childhood, the little girl who died on the day when she was swept off into the darkness. Her kidnapping was—and is—the case I couldn’t solve. We’re all still paying for it.

  I walked forward, scanning the area. This was a showroom, the entry to a noble’s private space. If Raysel had slipped up, it wouldn’t be here. There were two doors at the back of the room. I indicated them, asking, “Grianne, where do these doors lead?”

  “Bedroom. Washroom.” Each word was accompanied by a Merry Dancer soaring over to bob in front of the indicated door. Grianne paused before adding, “There’s a door from the bedroom to the family’s private garden.”

  “Gotcha.” I started for the bedroom door. “Tybalt, can you shift to cat form and see if anything smells out of place?”

  “Will you never learn that I am not a bloodhound?” he asked without rancor.

  “Nope.” The door was warm under my fingertips, like some unseen sun had been shining on it. I tried the knob. It turned easily, the door swinging open to reveal a darkened room that seemed like a mu
ch better match for Rayseline’s adult character. Heavy drapes were drawn across the windows, blocking any light that might have tried to slip inside. “Grianne?”

  She didn’t answer me, but the Merry Dancer that had been marking the door swooped inside and hovered slightly above head height, brightening to cast a soft white glow through the entire room. I stopped where I was, taking a moment to simply look. This was where Raysel had lived, free from the expectations of her family. This was where she hadn’t been forced to hide.

  The walls had been papered pink, at one point; scraps of wallpaper still clung around the ceiling and near the floor. The rest had been ripped away, revealing smooth plaster. Even some of that had been torn down, leaving bare the rough gray stone of the actual walls. The floor was hard, uncovered oak. Raysel had removed any trace of softness, leaving the room as stark as she could. A standing wardrobe was shoved against one wall, and a simple bureau was up against the other. In the darkest corner of the room, the one farthest from the windows, a twin bed that was practically a cot had been made up with a thin blanket and a single pillow.

  A lump formed in my throat as I looked around. Raysel might have returned from the darkness that stole her, but in a very real way, she never came home.

  A tabby-striped tomcat slipped past my feet, nose pressed low to the ground as he stalked through the room. That snapped me out of my momentary freeze. “Etienne, search the wardrobe; Grianne, get the bureau.” I started for the bed.

  “What are we looking for?” asked Etienne.

  “Anything that shouldn’t be there.” I knelt, peering into the narrow, shadow-filled space between the floor and the bottom of the mattress. If Raysel had kept anything hidden there, it was long gone; the only things I saw were dust bunnies and a few more scraps of wallpaper.

  “How specific,” said Etienne, as he started going through the wardrobe.

  “I live to serve.” Peeling back the blanket revealed nothing but the mattress, sliced open along the side to allow for the removal of half the stuffing. I reached cautiously through the slit, and found nothing but wadded lumps of silk. “This isn’t a room for two.”

  “No,” said Etienne. “Master O’Dell maintained his own quarters.”

  “Oh.” I always knew things between Connor and Raysel were less than ideal—I wasn’t even sure the marriage had been consummated, and I’d never quite been able to bring myself to ask—but somehow, I thought they would have shared at least an apartment, if not a bed. That’s what I get for being an occasional idealist, I guess.

  Tybalt stalked over to the bureau, letting out an earsplitting yowl. I stood, turning in his direction. “What’s that, Lassie? Timmy’s down the well?”

  The look he gave me could have peeled paint. I snickered as I walked over to him, motioning for Grianne to step aside.

  “What?”

  Tybalt reached out with one paw and tapped the front of the bureau’s bottommost drawer. He meowed again, just to be sure I got the point.

  “I’m on it,” I said, and sat down on the floor. “Grianne, a little light down here?” The second Merry Dancer swung into position. “That’s good.”

  The drawer stuck a little as I tugged it free. The reason became clear when I looked at its contents: shoeboxes full of rocks. Dozens and dozens of rocks. They looked perfectly ordinary, like they’d been harvested from paths and flowerbeds around the knowe. I picked one up, squinting at it. “Okay, what the hell?”

  “She used to pick those up,” Grianne said. The sound of her voice was surprising enough that I turned toward it, the rock forgotten. She shrugged. “When she was walking, and thought no one watched her, she would pick them up from wherever she happened to be. I never asked her why. I doubted she would give me an answer.”

  “Yeah, probably not.” I was sickeningly sure I knew what the answer would have been, if Raysel had been compelled to tell the truth. She’d spent so many years lost in the darkness that she must have lived every day afraid the world would fall away again, leaving her alone in the nothingness. Rocks were little things, simple things, and they were solid. They were real. If they symbolized nothing else, they proved that she was in a place that actually existed.

  I put the rock back among its brothers before gripping the sides of the drawer and giving it one last, firm tug. It popped loose and thudded to the floor. I checked the sides and bottom for hidden panels or secret documents, and then pushed it aside. Tybalt gave it a sniff before meowing and crouching to peer into the hole in the bureau.

  “I got it,” I said. “If there’s nothing else, you can have thumbs again.”

  He yawned, whiskers curling forward in what looked distinctly like amusement. Then he turned and walked away.

  “Remember pants,” I called, and reached into the opening, feeling around. My fingers brushed the surface of a wooden box. I lifted it out.

  Stickers obscured most of the varnished pine of the box itself, a mix that ranged from cartoon characters I recognized from Gilly’s childhood to more recent bumper stickers and band logos. I remembered giving her some of the older ones, treasures smuggled in from the mortal world. There was no rhyme or reason to the way they were layered; they seemed to have been slapped on entirely at random.

  “What do you have?” asked Tybalt, stepping up behind me.

  “I don’t know yet,” I replied. Putting down the box, I carefully removed the lid. “Did you remember pants?”

  “Blessedly, yes,” said Etienne.

  “Good.” The box was filled with scraps of paper that seemed as random as the stickers at first glance. I picked up the first one; a list of chores, written out by one of the house Hobs, clearly intended for a child. Half the chores were crossed off in purple crayon. I bit my lip, digging a little deeper. The crayon was there, about three layers down. I remembered bringing her that, too. “Oh, oak and ash.”

  “What is it?” asked Tybalt.

  “Her childhood.” I tipped the box out onto the floor. Lists of chores, crayon sketches, dried flowers taped to pieces of parchment . . . all the things I would have expected to find in the dresser drawer of the child she’d been when she was taken. One of the papers landed upsidedown, revealing a block of much tighter, more compressed writing. I picked it up, skimming quickly.

  Rayseline’s handwriting never improved much beyond her initial childish scrawl, but it was legible. Almost too legible. She’d turned her scraps into a sort of disassembled diary, one that became more comprehensible as I flipped more and more of them over and shuffled them into something like chronological order.

  “Toby?”

  “Just a second.”

  —understand what they want from me. I don’t think they understand what they want from me—

  —light is always so bright here, the edges of things are so sharp, and they won’t stop talking to me TALKING TALKING TALKING I just want them to all SHUT UP and let me THINK—

  —don’t even know my mother anymore—

  Taken together, they painted the picture of a girl who was terribly angry, both younger and older than she was meant to be, and scared almost out of her mind by the world she’d been thrust back into. The “almost” was the first to go. Etienne was looking at me in silent curiosity, years of training forbidding him to interrupt. Wordlessly, I handed him the paper in my hand. It managed, in just five words, to be the worst one I’d found so far.

  Sometimes I miss the dark.

  Etienne read the slip of paper without comment, passing it to Grianne. Her face remained impassive, but her Merry Dancers flared a brief, sickly red, outward manifestations of her internal dismay. Tybalt was the last to read the paper. Like the others, he didn’t say anything. Just handed it back to me, and waited.

  “I want to see whether I can get these into any sort of real order,” I said, starting to shove scraps of paper back into the box. “I don’t expect them to have a full blueprint for the kidnapping, but . . . well . . .”

  “Any port in a storm,” said Tybalt qu
ietly.

  I glanced at him and nodded. “Yes. Exactly. Come on—let’s finish searching this place. We have a lot to do before tomorrow.”

  We combed through the rest of Rayseline’s bedroom, and found nothing else that seemed relevant. She had a lot of dresses, any one of which probably cost more than I make in a year; she had a lot of broken toys, hidden in the bottom of her wardrobe. I left them where they were, unable to shake the feeling that I had done something wrong by finding them in the first place.

  In the washroom, I found a vial of something pale blue taped to the bottom of her cured-oak bathtub. There was a ribbon taped next to it, holding a dozen shining silver needles in place. I was very careful not to touch their points as I peeled back the tape and added them to the small assortment of things to be taken away.

  The needles were a chilling reminder that Raysel had been working with Oleander de Merelands when she tried to use poison to assassinate Luna. Just wondering what might be on those needles made me feel like running screaming from the room. We didn’t find anything after that, and I was secretly glad; I’d had about as much as I could handle. In the end, I was grateful to take what we’d found—the box, the bottle, the needles, and the drawer of shoeboxes filled with rocks—and leave. I wanted to be gone. Even the Queen’s Court would be a pleasant change after seeing the prison Rayseline had made to replace the one she’d lost.

  Tybalt carried the drawer, leaving me with the rest. I placed the needles and vial in the box of papers, waiting while Etienne opened a gateway back to the receiving hall. Tybalt cast a glance in my direction.

  “Are you all right?”

  “No,” I said. “But right now, that’s going to have to be good enough. Let’s get the hell out of here.”

  “So soon?” He smiled wryly. “I was just becoming accustomed to the décor.”

  That was surprising enough to wring a laugh out of me. I was still laughing as I stepped through Etienne’s gateway, feeling the familiar dip-and-weave as the knowe settled into its new configuration. Tybalt followed half a step behind. Grianne was already gone. I raised an eyebrow at Etienne.