Chimes at Midnight

by Seanan McGuire

  “Have you done something different with your hair?” he asked.

  This time, my laughter sounded a lot more normal. I smiled through the last of my tears, and said, “Yeah. Do you like it?”

  “I could grow accustomed to it, if you chose to keep it this way.” His gaze swung back to Sylvester, going cold. “I might already be accustomed to it, if I had been allowed to come to you sooner.”

  “You have my apologies, Tybalt, and there will be no action taken by myself or by my household to answer your attack upon my person,” said Sylvester, rubbing his throat. “I was wrong to keep you away.”

  “You should never have allowed her to be endangered in the first place!” snarled Tybalt, fangs showing and eyes glinting a dangerous green. “Do not forget, sir, that she was fine in my company.”

  “Except for the whole ‘getting banished’ thing, and all those times in your company when I’ve been stabbed or gutted or poisoned or whatever,” I said, interjecting myself before they could make the situation any worse. “Please. Can you stop? We don’t have time for this. Please.”

  Sylvester looked away. Tybalt remained where he was, and didn’t say anything.

  I sighed. “This is going to be a great night. Sylvester, where’s Jin? Am I cleared to leave? Because I’m leaving either way, but it would be good to have a medical release.”

  “I wish you wouldn’t,” he said.

  “I don’t care. But I’m leaving the car here. I’d bet you a dollar the Queen figures you’re going to keep me locked up while you try to figure out how to wean me off goblin fruit without losing me, and this is the one place in the Kingdom that I’m officially allowed to be after my deadline. So let her assume she’s taken me out of commission.” I bit back a bitter smirk. “I barely even need a human disguise to go out in public right now. Her men won’t recognize me.”

  “You don’t need one at all,” said Quentin softly.

  “What?” I turned my attention to him, and paused, seeing the grief and, yes, terror written on his face. This, right here, was what he’d been afraid of since I started my one-woman crusade against goblin fruit on the streets of my city: I was addicted, I was mostly mortal, and he was going to lose me.

  “If you keep your hair over your ears . . . they’re not even that pointy. You don’t need a human disguise at all.”

  The words were like blows. I’d known that I looked human, but not that I was that far gone. I looked to Tybalt, searching his face for confirmation.

  He nodded.

  “Oh, ash and pine.” I closed my eyes, taking a shaky breath. “Fine. So the Queen’s guards won’t be able to track me by my magic. Let’s see this as a good thing, and go.”

  “Where to?” asked Sylvester.

  “The Library, to start with. Maybe there’s something there about helping a changeling kick a goblin fruit addiction.” If not . . . I had already asked Mags to pull any books on hope chests. I’d been trying to understand how my magic worked. Maybe I could use any information she had for me as a way to find another hope chest and put myself back to normal when I couldn’t do it on my own.

  “I will take you anywhere you need to go,” said Tybalt.

  “I’m coming with you,” said Quentin.

  I wanted to argue with him. I couldn’t do it. With my magic essentially out of commission for the moment, I was going to need all the backup I could get, and he was my squire. He had as much right to be by my side as anybody else, and more than most. “It’s going to be dangerous,” I said.

  “That’s nothing new,” he said. “Besides, my knight is pretty stupid when it comes to danger, and she’s the best role model I have for dealing with the stuff.”

  I smiled a little. “Just so long as you’re aware.”

  “I am.”

  “Okay.” I turned to Sylvester. He looked so miserable, standing there next to the wall, watching us make plans to go away and leave him. He’d lost me more times than anyone else in this room. He’d watched me walk away, and he’d never stopped me, not once. He let me grow up. He knew that he had to give me that much.

  Pulling away from Tybalt, I walked over to Sylvester and hugged him. This might be the last time we saw each other. I wasn’t going to let my anger and his well-intentioned betrayal be the last things he remembered. No matter how deserved that might be, or how wrong he’d been, I loved him too much for that. I always had.

  “Please be careful,” he whispered, before kissing the crown of my head. “I wish you wouldn’t go.”

  “I’ll be as careful as I can,” I said, and stepped back. “Tell Jin where I went, and that I’ll have my phone if she comes up with any brilliant ideas about how to get me through this.”

  “I will.”

  “Quentin, come on.”

  My squire walked over to me. Tybalt took my right hand and Quentin’s left, and we stepped into the shadows, and were gone.

  FOURTEEN

  WE DIDN’T STEP OUT OF THE SHADOWS: we fell, all of us dragged into an ungainly heap by my collapse. Tybalt wasn’t letting go of me, and Quentin wasn’t letting go of him, and the end result was a total train wreck. I, of course, wound up on the bottom of the pile, but I would have been in bad shape either way. The run had been too much for me. My eyes were frozen practically shut, and I was struggling to breathe.

  “October!” Tybalt rolled off me, shoving Quentin out of the way—I heard his faint grunt of protest—before gathering me into his arms. “Breathe, dammit,” he commanded, cradling me close as he tried to warm me with his own body heat. “Toby! Breathe!”

  I coughed, breaking the frozen seal on my mouth, and began to take great, choking gasps of air. I didn’t even pretend to be sitting up on my own. I just let Tybalt hold me, and kept focusing on trying to thaw my lungs.

  “Is she okay?” Quentin, somewhere off behind me.

  “I forgot how badly the Shadow Roads used to treat her.” Tybalt sounded guilty, like this was somehow his fault, and not the Queen’s for sending someone to hit me in the face with a pie full of goblin fruit.

  A pie. Sweet Oberon, could we get any more slapstick if we tried?

  Giggling made breathing harder, but it made me relax, which helped. I sat up straighter, scraping the ice from my eyelashes. “I’m okay,” I said, the wheeze in my voice revealing my words as lies. I coughed again before offering my hands to Tybalt, letting him pull me off the floor. “Really. I’m okay.”

  “Are you sure?” he asked. I realized with a start that I couldn’t make out his expression through the gloom. Humans aren’t equipped to see in the dark the way fae are. I really was running blind.

  “I’m sure,” I said, looking around the defunct bookstore. It was, if anything, even more decrepit-looking in the dark; the shelves were just blurs. Even the pixie dust was gone. Its faint glow would have been a real blessing, but humans can’t see pixies, either. Not without fae ointment. Maybe Marcia would give me some. “Quentin, can you get the door? I’m never going to find it on my own.”

  “On it,” he said, and moved past us, a pale smudge against the dark bookshelves.

  Tybalt took my arm. I didn’t pull away. In my current condition, I needed the help.

  “Are you truly sure that you’re all right?” he murmured, pitching his voice too low for Quentin to hear.

  “No,” I whispered back. “But for right now, I have to be. So let me be all right. Please.”

  “Ah.” He sighed, hand tightening on my arm. “As you say.”

  I flashed him a smile—he’d be able to see it, even if I couldn’t see him—and let him guide me to where Quentin was waiting for us. I could see the bookshelves behind him, but no matter how much I squinted, there wasn’t even the glimmer of an illusion.

  “Here,” he said.

  “Yeah.” I stopped walking, pulling Tybalt to a halt. “Tybalt, you’d better pick me up.”

  “Why?” I could hear his frown.

  “Because I can’t even tell there is an illusion here, which mea
ns it’s probably going to be really hard for me to walk through the spell that covers the doorway. Faerie doesn’t like it when humans wander in willy-nilly. It’ll be easier if you carry me.”

  There was a moment of silence as we all considered the ramifications of my current condition. I was just this side of out of Faerie. Then Tybalt shifted his hold so that his arm crossed my back, and hoisted me up into something uncomfortably close to a parody of a bridal carry. I closed my eyes. He stepped forward, and the world did a sickening dip and weave around me while what felt like thousands of gnats gnawed at my skin, creating an itching, stinging sensation that made me want nothing more than to rip myself free and run like hell.

  I wanted to run more than I wanted another bite of goblin fruit. That realization was a relief—I could still find things I wanted—and I held to it tightly as he took another step, carrying us out of the thin barrier zone between the mortal world and the Summerlands. Then we were inside the knowe, and the biting sensations stopped, replaced by the familiar disorientation of breathing air that had never been touched by the Industrial Revolution.

  At least it was better lit here, even if I couldn’t see a direct source of the illumination. That meant pixies, or witch-light, or something else my eyes couldn’t handle. Tybalt put me down without being asked. I kept hold of his elbow as we walked, afraid of being lost in the stacks. Somehow, I didn’t think the Library would be very open to helping me. Not now. Not as I was.

  We stepped out into what I couldn’t help thinking of as the Library’s living room. Mags was there, sitting on a stool that allowed her to fan her wings without worrying about hitting them against anything. She was flipping through a photo album, but looked up when she heard our footsteps. Heard my footsteps, really; Tybalt was silent, and Quentin was only a little louder. Her eyes widened and she set the photo album aside, sliding off the stool.

  “What happened?” she breathed, staring at me.

  “I got hit in the face with a pie,” I said.

  Mags stopped, blinking. “You got . . . hit in the face with a pie,” she repeated. “I . . . what? I’m sorry, but I’ve been in charge of this Library for a long time. I’ve seen a lot of really ridiculous things. I lived in Wales. And there is no way being hit with a pie should have turned you human.”

  “It was a really evil pie,” I said. Mags looked at me blankly. I shook my head. “It was a goblin fruit pie, and it turns out that since goblin fruit is more addictive and effective for humans, and lucky me, I come from a race that can change the balance of fae blood—normally, anyway, I can’t do a damn thing right now—so since I’m part human, I turned myself more human while I was drugged out of my mind, in order to enjoy the goblin fruit more. Now I’m stuck. I’m addicted, I’m starving, but the idea of trying to eat anything but goblin fruit makes me want to throw up. We could really use a miracle right about now.”

  “Miracles aren’t exactly a Library specialty,” she said. “Could you . . . what do you mean, can change how human you are?”

  “Remember that thing about Mom being Firstborn?”

  Mags nodded.

  “That’s what I got out of the deal. I’m Dóchas Sidhe. We’re blood-workers, to the point where we’re basically living hope chests. Only Mom never taught me anything, so I was hoping you’d have a book on hope chests that could help me understand what I do and how it works. I guess that’s more important now than ever, since I need to find a hope chest. If I don’t get less human in a hurry, I’m going to have problems.” I already had problems.

  “Oh.” Mags took a step backward. “I pulled the book for you earlier. Let me get it.” Then she was gone, running into the stacks. I knew that she had to be leaving a trail of pixie-sweat behind her, but I couldn’t see it, and part of my mind kept trying to insist that her wings were fake, just cellophane over pipe cleaners. That wasn’t good. The human mind instinctively rejects Faerie, because it’s safer that way. Only if I started rejecting Faerie, I was going to be in a world of hurt.

  “We need to find me some fae ointment,” I said, directing the comment toward Tybalt. “Can you go to Goldengreen and—”

  “No.” The word was said flatly, and with absolute conviction. There was no getting around it. “I will not leave you again. Do not ask me. When we are done here, I can take you there. But I will not leave you.”

  “Okay.” I touched his arm. “I’m sorry.”

  “No.” Tybalt shook his head, and for a moment, I wished for the dimness of the bookstore. At least there, I wouldn’t have been forced to see the anguish in his eyes. “I’m sorry. I should never have left you.”

  I was trying to formulate an answer to that—one that would explain how wrong he was without making light of his obvious distress—when Mags came trotting out of the stacks, a blue volume in her arms. “Found it!” she called. “Sorry about the wait. I had it in your pull, but well. Sometimes the books migrate when they feel they’ve been out of their sections for too long, and then I have to figure out where they’ve shelved themselves.”

  “It’s okay,” I said. “Also, I wish that didn’t make sense.” I took the book she offered to me, looking at the cover. There was no illustration. There wasn’t even a title. It was just plain blue silk—no. I rubbed my thumb over the spine. Plain blue samite. Metallic threads wove in and out of the blue, adding liquid glints of platinum and silver. “Who’s the author?”

  “Antigone of Albany. She was one of the Firstborn, before they took titles in place of names. I don’t know which one she became. The histories are very unclear on that period.”

  “Huh. Okay.” I started toward the couches. “I guess I have some reading to do.”

  “Would you like me to go get some coffee?” asked Quentin.

  “No, I’m good,” I said, without thinking. Then I froze, and turned to look into the horrified faces of Tybalt and Quentin, both of whom were staring at me like I’d said the unthinkable. In a way, I had. “Crap,” I said, intelligently.

  For possibly the first time since I discovered the bittersweet blessing that is caffeine, I didn’t want a cup of coffee. Normally, I didn’t just drink the stuff: I practically breathed it, using it as a substitute for everything from a balanced diet to sleep. I could drink—and had drunk, on more than one occasion—a pot before I even opened my eyes in the afternoon. And I didn’t want any. Worse than that, the thought of putting coffee in a cup and raising it to my mouth filled me with revulsion, like it was the most disgusting idea anyone had ever had.

  “Goblin fruit replaces everything you love,” said Tybalt. There was a tremor in his voice, the sort of thing I would have dismissed once as a trick of my imagination. I bit my lip as I looked at him. He didn’t look away. “Everything,” he repeated.

  “That’s a big word,” I said. It included my family, my duty . . . and him.

  “I know.”

  “Then we’ll have to finish this fast.” I sat down heavily on the couch, sending dust puffing from the cushions. “Mags, do you have any other books that might help us? Like, maybe the rehab guide from Goblin Fruit Anonymous?”

  “I can look,” she said.

  “Quentin, go with her, see if she needs help carrying anything. Maybe we’ll get lucky.” I didn’t bother telling Tybalt to go. He wouldn’t have listened, and I didn’t want him leaving me. Not when he had that tone in his voice, like he should have known better than to believe anything could go right for very long.

  “Okay, Toby,” said Quentin, and handed the flask of fireflies to Tybalt before following Mags into the stacks. I opened the blue book and started to read, not looking up even when Tybalt came and sat beside me, curled so close that I could feel his body heat. He placed the fireflies on the table, where they added just that extra edge of light. I leaned slightly to the left, just enough that my shoulder was resting against his, and continued reading.

  The first chapter was a history of the hope chests—when and why they were made, and why Oberon thought they were necessary. He
made the first as a gift for Titania, to allow her to manage her own Court. The others had been created later, and their makers were lost to history. It was all stuff I’d heard before, and none of it was particularly relevant until I got to the end.

  I sat up a little. Tybalt tensed beside me.

  “What is it?” he asked.

  “Listen to this,” I said, and read, “‘When the last of the hope chests was crafted, Oberon gathered them, and gathered also his children, and the children of his Queens, to ask what they would do with such power as those chests contained. Five were given to the best of them, and five to the worst of them. One was given to the author of this book, for safekeeping, and one to her direst enemy, for sake of balance. The hope chests exist to keep Faerie in balance. Forget that at your peril.’”

  Tybalt frowned at the page. “I don’t see why this excites you.”

  “Oberon gave the hope chests to the Firstborn, right?”

  “According to this text, yes.”

  “Well, we have more Firstborn around here than you can shake a stick at. Maybe someone we know has a hope chest, and we’ve just never asked.” Not Mom. She was too young, as Firstborn went, and she didn’t need one. Acacia, maybe, or the Luidaeg . . . “Maybe there’s an index that says who got which chest.” I flipped to the back of the book.

  “You never could have been a scholar, could you, little fish?” Tybalt toyed with a lock of my hair, his voice turning contemplative.

  I kept flipping. “I never wanted to be. Research is boring if it doesn’t end in hitting—ha! There is an index. Oberon bless the Type A personalities of the world.” I ran a finger down the list of names, looking for one that I knew. Then I stopped, and blinked. “Whoa. That’s weird.”

  “What is?”

  “The Mists is a pretty recent Kingdom, right? It’s younger than Mom, and she’s younger than the hope chests.”

  “I believe that to be correct, yes.”

  “So why is Goldengreen listed in here?” I flipped forward in the book again, stopping when I got to the page indicated by the index. It was an illustration of a hope chest that I knew all too well. It was the only one I’d ever seen, and the intricacy of its carvings weren’t something I’d forget any time soon. Feeling dazed, I lowered the book to let Tybalt see.