Ashes of Honor od-6

by Seanan McGuire

  “Something was rotten in the state of Denmark,” I said quietly.

  Etienne laughed a little. It wasn’t a pleasant sound. “If you like. In order to serve properly, I needed time to refresh myself, and I took that time in neutral territory. Places where no Duke or Duchess would take my presence as an insult or an invitation to battle.”

  Neutral spots are rare in the Bay Area. I could only think of two big ones. “I’m going to go out on a limb here and guess that you didn’t spend much time in Golden Gate Park.”

  “No,” said Etienne. “I didn’t.”

  That left Berkeley. An idea was nibbling at the edges of my mind, making me uneasy. “What happened?”

  “I spent a great deal of time in the coffee houses around the University, where no one seemed to notice, or care, if I didn’t match the social norms. I was trying to reeducate myself about modern humanity, so I could travel farther abroad without attracting attention.” Etienne’s lips twisted in what looked like an involuntary smile. “That’s where I met Professor Ames.”

  “Professor Ames?”

  “Bridget. She taught folklore, and she liked to argue with people, about, oh, everything. I think she would have argued about the color of the sky if anyone had been willing to engage her in that particular debate. I don’t even remember how our first argument started—something about some ballad or other, or maybe over the last scone in the case—but it was infuriating and elating at the same time. I found myself looking forward to our arguments. Then I found myself simply looking forward to seeing her.”

  “Oh, Etienne.” Playing faerie bride—being fae, and loving a human—is never easy. Doing it while serving as the Seneschal of a madman would be virtually impossible. “What happened?”

  “What always happens.” His smile turned bitter before fading. “I fell in love with a human woman. I did what I had always looked down on others for doing. I wasn’t sorry then, and I’m not sorry now. I’m only sorry it had to end. Sylvester was getting worse. Jin was having more difficulty getting him to take the sleeping draughts, and it got harder to slip away. Bridget was understanding at first, and then she was angry, and finally, she stopped answering her phone. I went to the campus during her office hours once, to apologize—I knew better than to think I could get her back, not at that point—and there was a sign on the bulletin board saying she was on sabbatical and would be back the next year.”

  “And was she?”

  “I don’t know.” Etienne looked at me, dark eyes full of sorrow. “That was the last time I tried to see her. There wasn’t time after that; it wouldn’t have been fair to either of us. It was the spring of 1996. You’d been gone less than a year. The darkest days were just beginning.”

  I shivered. “I had no idea.”

  “We didn’t exactly advertise.”

  “But…I’m confused, Etienne. What does all this have to do with anything? I mean, that was sixteen years ago. Did Professor Ames track you down?”

  “In a manner of speaking, yes.” Etienne shrugged. The gesture was somehow alien on him, like a coat that didn’t fit quite right. “I gave Bridget a number where she could reach me in an emergency. I was in love. It seemed the thing to do.”

  I stared at him. “You gave her the number for Shadowed Hills?”

  “One of them, yes. I told her it was the office where I worked. There’s a special ring when someone calls from a mortal location; whoever took her call would know to be careful.”

  “And I can’t even change the ringtone on my phone,” I muttered. More loudly, I asked, “So she called you?”

  “Yes. Three hours ago now.” Etienne rubbed his face again. “It seems we were both keeping secrets. I didn’t tell her I wasn’t human.”

  There was only one thing he could say next, and it wasn’t something I wanted to hear. I still prompted him, asking, “And what did she not tell you?”

  “That she was pregnant.” Etienne dropped his hand away from his face, looking at me despondently. “I have a changeling daughter, October. Almost sixteen years old and raised outside of Faerie’s knowledge.”

  I stared at him, stunned into silence.

  Most changeling children have instinctive illusions that make them seem human for the earliest years of their lives. It’s a form of defensive camouflage, like spots on a fawn. But that baby magic shorts out as changelings grow, and a changeling who hasn’t learned to weave a human disguise by the age of six or seven is a danger to Faerie. Secrecy is the only thing that’s kept us alive for so long. Etienne had always played things by the rules and by the book—and now there was a chance that he’d committed the greatest infraction of them all. There was a chance he’d given Faerie away.

  There was just one piece missing. “So…if your daughter is sixteen, her baby magic must have failed years ago. Why did Bridget call you now? What changed?” I paused, then asked the big question: “How did you not know?”

  “I never asked,” said Etienne. He smiled—the small, painful smile of a man who suddenly saw what he had been doing wrong for years. “All the people I paid to check on her, all the pixies and sprites I bribed…I never asked them to check for a child, and I never went myself. I didn’t know the girl existed because I never asked.”

  “Oak and ash,” I breathed. “And…why now?”

  “Bridget called because our daughter is missing.” Etienne sat up a little straighter, looking me in the eyes. “She vanished this afternoon, on her way home from school—and I do mean ‘vanished.’ Her friends said she was there one moment and gone the next. Bridget assumed, quite reasonably, that the faeries had finally found her. She called me screaming, begging for the return of her little girl. She knew exactly what I was, even down to the name of my race.”

  “Maybe you shouldn’t have dated a folklore professor,” I said.

  “Maybe not,” said Etienne. “Regardless, I did, and we had a child together, and now that child is missing. She may have been taken. She may have finally found the magic she was heir to and not known how to control it. Either way, I am here to hire you. Please, October. I need you to find my daughter.”

  Oh, oak and ash. This wasn’t going to end well.

  FOUR

  I STARED AT ETIENNE. He must have been expecting that reaction, because he didn’t bat an eye. He just looked back at me, waiting for me to get it out of my system.

  If I’d been asked to list the ten people most likely to have an affair with a human, Etienne wouldn’t have come anywhere near making the cut. And if I’d been asked to make a list of the people I could see fathering an accidental changeling, Etienne wouldn’t have made the top fifty. Like most Tuatha, he loved rules, and the rules said that sort of behavior wasn’t allowed. But Sylvester had been out of his mind with fear and grief, leaving Etienne to hold things together by himself, and that had changed the rules. Tired men make mistakes when they’re looking for a place to rest. Etienne wasn’t human, but he was still a man.

  May’s laughter drifted up the stairs, reminding me that time was passing. Whatever had happened to Etienne’s daughter wasn’t going to unhappen just because I was busy staring at her father. “Etienne—”

  “I’ve already rehearsed every objection you might make. I have answers to them all. Please. Can’t we just skip that part and reach the point where you agree to help me? My daughter is alone out there. Time is of the essence.”

  He was wrong about one thing: she probably wasn’t “alone out there.” Teenage girls run away from home sometimes—I was a prime example of that—but they don’t usually vanish in broad daylight. If she’d disappeared that abruptly, the odds were good that someone made her disappear. I hate missing children cases, and that’s probably why the world keeps handing them to me. Reality is nothing if not malicious where I’m concerned.

  Instead of arguing or objecting, I asked a simple question: “Why me?”

  “Because you were the one who dared to go up against Blind Michael. When the sons of Saltmist were taken, you we
re the one who brought them home. And because my daughter is…she’s…”

  “She’s a changeling,” I said. “You want me, instead of one of the other knights, because you think I’ll be more understanding of the fact that she’s not a pureblood.”

  He didn’t say anything. He didn’t have to. He just nodded.

  “I’m going to regret this, but…okay,” I said. I picked up my mug and downed its contents in a single long gulp. The coffee was hot enough to burn my throat a little, but I didn’t let that worry me; I’m a fast healer. I set the empty mug aside. “What’s her name?”

  “Chelsea.” He said her name like it was some strange, undiscovered country, one that had disappeared from maps a thousand years ago. The wonder in his voice would have been touching if we’d been talking about a baby and not a missing half-human teenager. As it was, it was just a little sad.

  “You said she disappeared on her way home from school. Do you know what school she attends?” He wouldn’t have a picture, since he hadn’t known she existed before she went missing, but every school keeps photos of its student body. Breaking into the office couldn’t be that hard. It would be easier than breaking into Bridget and Chelsea’s house, since schools tend to be closed at night, and that’s when I do the bulk of my petty larceny.

  “I…no, I’m sorry. I don’t.” Etienne shook his head. “Bridget didn’t tell me much. Mostly, she just swore at me. She said I had no right to steal her daughter, not when I’d been gone since before Chelsea was even born. If there’s a pejorative term for faerie that Bess doesn’t know, I’d be surprised. I think she used them all on me tonight.”

  I managed to keep a straight face despite his use of the proper Irish diminutive for Bridget. I wasn’t even sure he knew he’d done it. “Right. Do you know where they live?”

  “Yes.”

  “Really?” I pushed a pen and paper across the table to him.

  “I may have fallen out of touch, but I have always known where Bridget was,” said Etienne, taking the pen and paper and scrawling down a street address. Catching my expression, he added defensively, “I never went there. I watched her on campus from time to time, and I had my spies, but I left her with her privacy. I just wanted to be sure that she continued well.”

  And somehow you managed to never check closely enough to notice that she had a kid with pointed ears? I thought, before inwardly slapping myself. We don’t see the things we don’t want to see, and mothers are nothing if not inventive when it comes to hiding the truth about their children. Look at my mother. She managed to hide the truth of my race from practically everyone for more than fifty years, raising me as Daoine Sidhe when nothing could make me anything but Dóchas Sidhe—a direct descendant of Oberon, and a natural magnet for trouble. If Mom could pull off something like that with half of Faerie looking over her shoulder, it wasn’t hard to believe that Bridget could find a way to hide a changeling girl no one was looking for to begin with. It was harder to believe we were ever going to see that girl alive again.

  “Wait—you said you watched Bridget ‘on campus.’ Does that mean she’s still at UC Berkeley?”

  “Well, yes,” said Etienne. “I believe she’s currently the head of their Folklore Department.”

  “Why am I not surprised to learn that Berkeley has a Folklore Department?” I picked up the paper where he’d written Bridget and Chelsea’s address. I glanced at it to be sure that I could read his handwriting, which was perfect enough to border on calligraphy, before folding it in half and tucking it into the pocket of my jeans. “Do you remember Walther?”

  “Your friend the alchemist?” Etienne frowned. “Of course I remember him. He helped save the Duchess Torquill’s life. We owe him a debt of gratitude.”

  Trust Etienne to see things in terms of obligations. “Walther teaches chemistry at UC Berkeley. I bet he’d be willing to check on Bridget if I asked. He might be able to get some pictures of Chelsea from her.” Which would neatly avoid the possibility of my getting arrested for breaking and entering on a high school campus. “Plus he can sound out her emotional state. She may have been able to hide a changeling from us for sixteen years, but mothers can be unpredictable when their children are in danger. The last thing we want is for Bridget to go to the media saying that the faeries stole her baby.”

  Etienne’s frown melted into a look of sheer horror. “No one would believe her. They would think grief had driven her mad.”

  “Do you want to bet your life on that?”

  He didn’t answer me.

  “I didn’t think so.” I stood, picking up my empty mug. “I’ll do this for you, Etienne. I’ll find her. But I have a few conditions, and if you’re not okay with them, you’re going to need to find somebody else.” I was bluffing. He’d know it, too, if he stopped to think about it. There are a lot of things that I’m capable of. Leaving children in danger isn’t one of them.

  “Anything,” he said. “Whatever you ask for.”

  Oak and ash, he really was desperate. In Faerie, that sort of promise can get you killed. “You have to pay my operating costs. I can’t take any other cases while I’m working on this.”

  “Done,” he said.

  I raised an eyebrow. “I haven’t even told you what I charge.”

  Etienne half-smiled. “I’ve had a great deal of time to invest in the mortal world, October. Will two thousand dollars a day be sufficient to purchase your full attention?”

  Two thousand dollars a day was nearly four times my normal rate. “Very sufficient,” I said. I almost felt bad about taking that much of his money, but if he was paying me, I wasn’t creating a debt between us. I liked Etienne treating me with respect because we were both in Sylvester’s service, not because I had a giant favor to hold over his head. That was how the purebloods did business. That kind of thing wasn’t for me.

  “Good,” he said. “What else?”

  “No secrets, no surprises. If Bridget calls again, I need to hear about it. If you remember something that doesn’t seem important, you need to tell me about it anyway, and you need to tell me immediately. I don’t care if it’s the middle of the day—call and wake me if you have to.” Privately, I didn’t think that was likely; if this case was like most, I wasn’t going to be sleeping much until it was over. “Right now, we don’t know what is or is not going to matter.”

  Etienne frowned. “I don’t understand.”

  “We’re hoping Chelsea disappeared because she figured out how to do that teleporting trick you’re so good at, and maybe she did. That’s our best case scenario, since it would just mean we needed to figure out where she teleported to, go there, and get her back.”

  “And if it’s not the case…?” asked Etienne, slowly.

  “If that’s not the case, then someone saw an unprotected teenage girl and grabbed her. Human kidnappers, we’re risking exposure. Fae kidnappers, who knows what they want her for?” A lot of things can be done with young, inexperienced changelings. I managed to find people who would spare me from the worst of them—and that’s saying something, considering Devin. That doesn’t mean I escaped knowing what they were.

  Etienne blanched. “If you’re trying to frighten me, you’re doing an excellent job.”

  “That’s good. I want you to be frightened, because I want you to understand that this is going to be hard. Maybe we’ll find her tonight, maybe she just ditched her friends because she’s upset over a boy, and she’s camped out at the Denny’s on Market Street, too pissed to go home and too scared to go anywhere more interesting. Maybe this will all seem like a bad dream tomorrow.”

  “Then why—”

  “But even if Chelsea is found safe and sound, Oberon willing, you’ll have to deal with the fact that she exists, and her mother—her human mother—knows about Faerie. You broke cover, Etienne. I mean, that’s…that’s something even I’ve never managed to do.”

  “You’ve certainly tried hard enough,” he muttered, but the growing horror in his tone told me I w
as getting through. He’d come to me because he knew I had a track record of dealing with lost kids and because an undocumented changeling was a political hot potato no one higher in the food chain would dare to touch. Sylvester couldn’t get involved without punishing Etienne for his carelessness. The Queen would love an excuse to punish a knight in Sylvester’s service and, by extension, Sylvester himself. That left me.

  What Etienne hadn’t done was stop and really think about what was about to happen. Because everything in his life, absolutely everything, was going to change. “When I find Chelsea—if I find Chelsea—you know what has to happen.” He looked away. I raised my voice, saying, “Etienne, you need to tell me you know what has to happen. This is the last thing you have to agree to.”

  “She has to be given her Choice,” he said, in a voice that was suddenly very soft.

  “Yeah.” I sighed. “She does.”

  The Changeling’s Choice was established by Oberon as one of the ways for Faerie to protect itself. It’s supposed to be the defining moment in a changeling’s life. It’s the day their fae parent sits down with them and asks them to decide where they belong: Faerie or the mortal world. If they choose Faerie, they’re whisked away to the Summerlands. Their human parent will never see them again, and they’ll be raised the way I was, always an outsider, always held apart, but still a part of Faerie. If they choose the mortal world…

  Everything mortal dies. That’s the main difference between humans and the fae. If our changeling children choose to live as humans, we have to kill them. That’s the price of playing faerie bride. At least, that used to be the price—my own daughter, Gillian, was able to choose humanity and walk away, but only because of what I am.

  Dóchas Sidhe can’t just read blood: we can change it. I turned my own daughter mortal, and the Luidaeg wiped her memory, making her forget she’d ever had anything to do with Faerie. But Gillian was only a quarter-blood, if that. Maybe more importantly, she’d been raised in the human world by her human father, with no influence from me. Making her forget Faerie was easy. Chelsea, on the other hand…