A Red-Rose Chain

by Seanan McGuire

  “I was aiming for familiarity, and the roads here are not yet as known to me as I would prefer,” he said. “I thought the door would open on something that belonged to one of us.”

  I paused, looking at him flatly. “Okay, wow. I knew the Shadow Roads were sort of an art, rather than a science, but I don’t think I needed to know they were that much of an art.”

  Tybalt smiled. “As long as we come out of the dark each time, why should you be concerned?”

  “I don’t even know where to start.” I walked over to the edge of the brush and knelt, peering into the green. Had something moved in there? It was difficult to tell. “You can come out now,” I said. “We’re not going to hurt you.”

  “Who are you talking to?” asked Walther.

  “Something else,” I said, and made a little clucking noise with my tongue. “Come on out.”

  And they came.

  Only one at first, pink-thorned and purple eyed, like something out of a very strange Lisa Frank painting. But three more were close behind it, and three more close behind them, until rose goblins were pouring out of the brush. They rattled their thorns and made inquisitive chirping noises as they surrounded us, sniffing at Walther and Tybalt’s ankles, and at basically everything I had, since I was still crouched almost to their level. Most were within the “housecat” range, size-wise, although a few were substantially larger, big enough to look like exceedingly strange dogs.

  “Well,” said Tybalt, sounding faintly nonplussed.

  “Told you Spike wanted to check out the locals,” said Walther. He knelt, offering his fingers to one of the larger rose goblins. It sniffed them cautiously before making a delighted chirping noise and leaping into his arms. Walther made an “oof” noise, but managed to catch the rose goblin before its thorns could shred his shirt. He stood, now holding the outsized, thorny creature against his chest. “Well, hello to you, too.”

  The rose goblin—which was the same mossy green as peat, with eyes the color of yarrow flowers—pressed itself against his chest, making a happy chirping noise. I raised an eyebrow.

  “It seems to know you.”

  “Probably because it does,” said Walther, stroking the goblin’s head. “Rose goblins live until something kills them. For this fellow to be the size it is, it must be a few centuries old. So yes, you have this sort of size to look forward to from your Spike.”

  “Oh, goody,” I said mildly. “I assume I’m correct in calling the rose goblins the ‘something else’ that Rhys is going to use to listen in on us out here?”

  “Probably,” said Walther, and gave his goblin’s head another careful stroke. The goblin chirped happily. “There used to be a few Dryads on the groundskeeping staff. Since no one cuts down a Dryad’s tree if they can avoid it, I’m assuming they’re still here. They’d be able to translate what the rose goblins say, and they’re too naïve for anyone to think that they’re lying.”

  “Right,” I said. Most Dryads were more interested in being trees than they were in being people. They weren’t stupid, but they were . . . distracted might be the best word. Constantly distracted by the strange situations that came with the incarnate condition, and always keeping half their minds back in their tree. Our friend April was a Dryad who didn’t have those issues, but she was also half computer, which made her a bad model to go on. “Is there any way we can convince the rose goblins not to tell the Dryads what we talk about out here? We could go back to the room, but . . .”

  “But if we’re constantly walling ourselves up in there, Rhys is going to figure out that we’re up to something, and he’s going to come looking,” said Walther. “Give me a second.”

  “You speak rose goblin?” I asked. I was starting to feel like I needed a list of who could and couldn’t interrogate my house pets.

  His smile was brief, and amused. “Not quite. But the ones here in Silences . . . we have ways around language.” This time, he sat down on the path, still holding the large rose goblin against his chest. Once he was settled, he transferred it to his lap and began digging through his vest.

  Tybalt put a hand on my arm. I glanced at him. He nodded toward the other side of the path. I nodded in turn, and followed him away from Walther and the gathering of goblins, stopping just before the trees took over. We were still close enough to be together, but by lowering our voices, we could at least pretend to a modicum of privacy.

  “Are you all right?” asked Tybalt.

  I laughed, unsteadily. “Let’s see. The woman we thought was done threatening my life and transforming my jeans into elaborate formalwear is not only still in the business of doing both, but she’s managed to produce a King who’ll back her up—and oh, right, they want to take me apart.”

  “You cannot allow them to do this thing, of course,” said Tybalt, matter-of-factly.

  “Right, I—” I paused, blinking at him. He had sounded so calm, like we were talking about where to go for lunch, and not whether I was going to be brutally murdered over the course of several days in order to prevent a war. “What?”

  “All my many personal objections aside—and they are many, beginning with my disinterest in marrying a corpse, and continuing onward from there—you cannot allow the king of a demesne famed for its alchemists to have access to any part of your body. Even if your escape requires leaving one or more of us behind, you can’t.”

  Tybalt sounded so serious, and so upset, that I couldn’t say anything to that. I just stared at him.

  He sighed, shaking his head. “I’d tell you to run, if I thought we could get away with it. I’d say to gather up our people, and those things which we cannot bear to lose, and flee for the hills. Do you not understand what they could make of you?”

  “I’m starting to,” I said, in a very small voice.

  Blood-workers—like me, like the Daoine Sidhe—could sometimes “borrow” the magical talents of others through judicious sampling of their blood. Tap a vein and hey, presto, suddenly we could teleport, or transform, or do any number of other things that didn’t come naturally. For us, blood was the ultimate wonder drug, opening all doors and removing all barriers—as long as it was the right blood. But it had its limitations. I had never yet been able to borrow magic from blood that wasn’t coming straight out of a living person. I could awaken memories in dried blood, but that was about it; anything more complicated than a few flashes of the past was beyond me. If you wanted to preserve the magic in a person’s blood, or better yet, if you wanted to make that magic accessible to anyone, not just your local blood-workers, you needed something special.

  You needed an alchemist.

  Alchemists could “freeze” the magic in blood, refining and strengthening it until they found themselves in possession of potions, charms, and powders capable of lending that initial magic to someone else. With a good enough alchemist on your side, you no longer needed a blood-worker: all the magic of Faerie could be at your fingertips for as long as you wanted it to be. And my blood held the power to rewrite a person’s heritage.

  Not enough to make humans out of purebloods or vice-versa, but enough to weaken changelings, turn them human or fae on your whim; enough to strengthen or resolve the confusion that already existed in a mixed-blood’s veins. Both changeling madness and the instability that sometimes came for those with exceedingly mixed heritages were functions of the blood. With fae, you’re not dealing with issues of race; you’re dealing with issues of species, completely dissimilar creatures that could, thanks to magic, somehow interbreed. Children of Maeve reproducing with children of Titania wasn’t like apples mixing with oranges—it was more like apples mixing with cheese graters, or rainbows with hardware stores.

  Magic was enough to make the way Faerie worked possible, but magic couldn’t necessarily make it functional. Changeling madness was proof of that. Mixed-bloods had just as many issues—more, in my experience—but we didn’t talk abou
t them as much, because they were still pure fae, and that made it a politically sensitive subject. Give King Rhys and his nameless mistress access to my blood, and they could parlay it into control of Faerie. I meant that literally. Anyone with human heritage would be in danger of being turned mortal. Anyone who had made peace with the balance of their blood would be at risk of having that peace ripped away.

  Much like I had ripped the false Queen’s peace away, such as it had been, when I had reached in and unraveled the delicate tapestry of her heritage. I still didn’t feel bad about that—she had brought it on herself, in the truest meaning of the phrase—but I was starting to feel bad about what it had revealed to her. She knew how to hurt us now. She knew how to hurt everyone.

  “Oh, oak and ash,” I said, with a shake of my head. “We can’t let them have me.”

  “Or May,” said Tybalt. “I dare say they would be able to do fascinating things with the blood of your lady Fetch, given that there’s nothing else like her in all of Faerie. Whether those things did them any good at all would doubtless matter little to May, after she had been exsanguinated for their pleasure.”

  Across the path, Walther stood. I switched my attention to him. It was better than dwelling on Tybalt’s uncomfortable, if accurate, words. “What’s up?” I asked, loudly enough to be heard.

  “The rose goblins here remember me, which is always nice,” said Walther. “I was starting to feel like a ghost.” He was still holding the big one against his chest. The others surged around his ankles, moving like a strange and landlocked tide. Some of them were stropping up against him, using the odd, hopping dolphin-like stance that Spike always used when it wanted to show affection without actually breaking my skin.

  “That’s weird,” I said, trying to keep my tone neutral. “I’m used to people being a little better with the visual perception.”

  Walther looked faintly uncomfortable. “I didn’t grow up the way people expected me to is all. Anyway: the rose goblins remember me, they’re not huge fans of the new management, and they’ll keep whatever we say secret from King Rhys. In exchange, they’d really like your rose goblin to come out and play. They don’t get to meet many cuttings from Luna.”

  Cuttings . . . I blinked. “That’s right: rose goblins are cuttings from a Blodynbryd. Luna’s the only one I’ve ever met. Who did these come from?”

  “Me,” said a light, pleasant voice, faintly accented with the echoes of Wales. Its owner followed it out of the trees a heartbeat later, stepping out onto the path and offering a dazzling smile in my direction. “Hello. It’s lovely to meet you.”

  She was tall, slim, and facially so similar to Luna that I would have known them as sisters even if there’d been some other option. Her skin was a fascinating shade of silvery purple, and her hair was almost exactly the same shade at the root. It darkened as it fell down her back in a waterfall of curls, ending in a purple deep enough to seem virtually black. Her eyes were bright pink, the color of primroses, with a thin ring of pollen yellow around the irises.

  “Um, hi,” I said. “You’re . . .”

  “Blodynbryd, yes,” said the woman. “My name is Ceres. You would be?”

  “I’m October Daye; this is Tybalt,” I said.

  “A pleasure to meet you both,” she said. A smile suffused her face as she reached over to caress Walther’s arm. “Any who travel with my dear Waltrune are friends to me.”

  Walther looked briefly panicked. The panic faded, replaced by profound embarrassment. “It’s ‘Walther’ these days, Aunt Ceres,” he said.

  “Ah,” she said. “My apologies; it’s been so long since you bothered to visit that I’m afraid I’m not so well-informed as to what you wish to be called, or when, or by whom.” The look she leveled on him was pure aunt.

  I couldn’t help myself. I burst out laughing. Both Walther and Ceres turned to look at me. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” I said. “You just really reminded me of Luna for a moment. But in a good way, honest.” I wasn’t sure how much gossip from the Mists had traveled this far up the coasts, and I didn’t want to start my association with the second Blodynbryd I’d ever met by implying that I disliked her.

  Gossip is interesting. In the human world, thanks to cellphones and the Internet, a rumor can travel around the world in less time than it takes to check your facts. In Faerie, for all that we have people who can teleport or fly, it still takes a little longer—mostly because very few of us have figured out how to turn on our cable modems. It’ll probably change in the next decade or so, as more and more changelings start setting up data centers within their lieges’ knowes, but for right now, it was entirely possible that Ceres didn’t know about my fight with her sister.

  Ceres smiled. “Mother’s youngest rose. I hear she’s back in her proper pruning these days? No longer twisting herself into topiary for the sake of appearances?”

  “Yes,” I said. “She’s Blodynbryd again.”

  “That’s good.” Ceres tilted her head to the side, frowning speculatively. “October . . . I know I’ve heard that name before.”

  “It’s a month in the current calendar,” said Walther. His note was mild, and a little dry, like he wasn’t being helpful so much as seizing on an opportunity to be sarcastic. “Has been since the Romans got hold of the thing.”

  “I keep abreast of current events, you naughty child,” said Ceres, shooting him a look before swinging her attention back to me. “You’re the one who killed my father, aren’t you?”

  Oh, great: this again. Killing Blind Michael was something I didn’t regret in the slightest. It was also something I was going to be dealing with for the rest of my life, if the last several years had been any guide. “I did,” I said.

  “Good.” Her nod was brief and firm. “He was a good man once, but that was so long ago that only the roses remember. Mother has been to visit me twice since he died. Twice, after centuries without more than a whisper on the wind! Our family owes you a debt that can never be repaid, no matter how long we may struggle to do exactly that. Thank you for what you have done for us. Truly.”

  I blinked at her, nonplussed. Apparently, growing up surrounded by Firstborn didn’t instill the same dislike for saying “thank you.”

  Ceres wasn’t done. She stooped to pick up one of the rose goblins that crowded the path, glanced in the direction of the distant castle, and said, “Come. I would sit with you. I would share tea and stories with my family’s savior, and with her friends.” She kissed the rose goblin’s head, making no effort to avoid the angle of its thorns. If I’d done that, I would have sliced my mouth open, but she barely seemed to notice. The goblin made a low purring sound. “As for you, my little spy, go tell the king I have found his wayward diplomats. Paint the picture of a woman greatly troubled, overcome with the duties of her position. The better your portrait, the better your rewards shall be. Do you understand?”

  The goblin made a trilling noise. Ceres smiled.

  “Excellent. You are very dear.” She set the goblin back on the ground. It took off like a shot, vanishing into the brush as Ceres straightened. Making a beckoning gesture, she started down the path. “Come,” she said again.

  Tybalt and I exchanged a glance. Walther was already following her. It was my experience that he was a pretty good judge of character, and once we knew where we were going, I could always ask Tybalt to go back and tell Quentin and May what was going on. I shrugged and, together, we followed.

  Ceres led us along the pine-choked path for about a hundred yards before she turned and stepped onto a narrow dirt trail winding through the forest. As before, Walther followed her, and so Tybalt and I followed him, trusting that whatever their relationship was, it wouldn’t cause him to lead us to our certain doom. Maybe that was overly optimistic of me, but I felt like I had earned a little optimism after the day that I’d had.

  The trees closed around us like a curtain. The
trail was covered in pine needles, and we couldn’t avoid stepping on them, causing the rich, syrupy scent of pine to become even stronger, until it was like we were walking through the distilled essence of Christmas. I’ve always liked that smell, which is a good thing; if I hadn’t, I would have been sneezing and cursing my life choices before we were halfway through the wood.

  Rose goblins flickered through the underbrush, their thorny faces seeming to bloom like strange flowers as they peeked back at us. None of them stayed long enough for me to pick out individual features—just thorns and bright, floral colors, and those vivid, staring eyes. Ceres moved through the wood like it had been designed for her private use, and in a way, it had. Her mother, Acacia, was the Firstborn of both the Dryads and the Blodynbryd. When she spoke to the forest, the forest responded. Ceres might not have quite such a close connection to the trees, but she was a relative, however distant, and they seemed to respect her.

  I wasn’t so lucky, and I was walking through a pine forest in a formal gown. At first I tried to keep my skirt from dragging on the ground, but I gave it up as a bad idea before we’d gone very far. Either the palace laundry would be able to save it or they wouldn’t. I didn’t give much of a damn either way. Although I was going to miss those jeans.

  Tybalt shot me an amused look after the third time I had to wrestle one of my sleeves back from a tree. “You know, in all my years, I’ve never known a woman with such talent for wearing unsuitable finery into the wilderness.”

  “Really?” I eyed him dubiously. “You’re going to tell me no Cait Sidhe woman has ever wound up in the woods while she was dressed for Court?”

  “No. But if you were a Cait Sidhe woman, you would have removed your gown by now.”

  I didn’t have an answer for that. Tybalt laughed as my cheeks flared red.

  “I do so appreciate knowing that I can still make you blush,” he said.

  Any answer I might have given died as the trail ended, widening out into a clearing straight out of a Disney movie. It was small, perfectly round, and even more perfectly designed. Pine trees created the edges, but they were barely visible under the rioting roses that climbed them, treating them as a natural trellis and pathway to the sky. High overhead—easily fifteen or twenty feet—those roses reached out and twined themselves together in a series of gravity-defying lover’s knots, creating a latticework of living branches. It shouldn’t have been possible . . . but Ceres was Blodynbryd, just like her sister, and I had seen Luna do quite a few impossible things with her roses.