The flowers themselves came in every color of the rainbow and a few colors the rainbow hadn’t received the memo on yet. Some were modern, cultivated roses, blooming in that familiar shape that has sold a million Valentine’s Day bouquets. Others had older, wilder silhouettes, opening in ragged cups or in tiny starbursts. But they were all roses. The air in the clearing was thick with their perfume, and they turned toward Ceres as she walked.
At the center of the clearing was a tiny cottage that might as well have been made of gingerbread for as much as it resembled something that should have housed a fairy-tale witch. The door was held shut by twisted rose boughs, all in a state of full bloom. Ceres stopped in front of the door, raising her hand and waving it across the span of the doorway. The roses promptly furled themselves, becoming tight buds. Then, and only then, the boughs unknotted and pulled away, revealing the actual door one inch at a time.
When the last of the roses retracted, Ceres pushed the door open and looked over her shoulder, smiling at the rest of us. “Enter freely, and be not afraid, for there is nothing that will harm you here.” Then she stepped inside.
“I think that was meant to be reassuring,” I said distantly. “I am not reassured. Tybalt, how about you? Are you reassured?”
“Unlike you, I come from an era where that was a common welcome into someone’s home,” he said. “I am reassured.”
“Ceres usually has lavender cookies,” said Walther. “I am totally reassured.” With that, he went in, leaving us with no choice but to either follow or wait outside for his return.
I have charged headlong into portals, sealed lands of Faerie, and experienced more dangers than any one woman can reasonably be expected to both encounter and survive. I sighed, and stepped into the quaint little forest cottage.
“Huh,” I said a moment later. “It’s bigger on the inside.”
“Many things are,” Ceres agreed. She was on the opposite side of the large parlor, arranging a tea service on a sideboard that appeared to have been designed for exactly that purpose. Despite the size of the room—it was easily bigger than my first apartment, but then again, what wasn’t?—it was modestly appointed, with most of the furniture carved from rosewood, left unpainted to allow the wood’s natural beauty to shine through. I called it a parlor, because I didn’t have a better word for a space that seemed to be receiving room, living room, dining room, and foyer all at the same time.
It was an elegant, economically designed space, and I wouldn’t have found it strange in almost any demesne, if not for one small thing: there was no floor, just hard-pressed dirt that filled the room with its characteristic earthy scent. It mingled with the roses, creating a perfume that was at once common and impossible for any lab in the world to replicate.
“It hasn’t changed a bit,” said Walther happily. He walked over to the table that occupied one side of the room, pulling out a chair and dropping himself into it. There were three covered dishes on the table. After a moment’s consideration, he lifted the center lid to reveal a pile of pale purple cookies, dusted with sugar. “Lavender cookies. Ceres, you’re the best.”
“So you’ve been telling me since you sprouted, but that didn’t stop you from leaving me for a hundred years.” She carried the tea service over to the table and set it down, smiling indulgently as Walther snatched a handful of the purple cookies. He didn’t do anything to them before taking a bite of the first one. Either he trusted Ceres not to poison or bespell us, or she already had him ensnared.
The Blodynbryd didn’t have any sort of enthrallment or persuasion powers, at least not that I was aware of. If they had, Luna would probably have made sure her daughter’s marriage ended in something other than annulment and murder—the annulment on the part of Raysel’s ex-husband, Connor, who was also the one who wound up getting murdered. If Ceres had that sort of power, we were already screwed. I shrugged and walked over to join Walther.
Somehow, despite us both starting at the same time, Tybalt managed to beat me to the table. He pulled out a chair for me. I shot him an amused look and sat, only to find Ceres watching us approvingly.
“Manners are rare in this day and age, or perhaps only in this kingdom,” she said. “Too few people remember that they are the glue that binds our society together. Please, have some cookies. I have tea, or there is lemonade, if you would prefer.”
“Lemonade would be fantastic, if it’s not too much trouble,” I said. Tea was complicated for me. Lily—a friend of my mother’s who had become a friend of mine, in the fullness of time—had always insisted on preparing tea when I came to visit her. Sometimes she’d even been able to catch glimpses of my future in her tea leaves. I hadn’t really drunk tea since her death. It was too hard, and I wasn’t up for risking that sort of emotional trauma over a beverage.
Tybalt settled next to me and smiled lopsidedly, revealing the tip of one fang. “Tea would be lovely. I’ve had little enough since I came to the Colonies, lo these many years ago.”
“I always forget how many of the older among us came from somewhere else,” said Ceres. She turned to open a cupboard, and withdrew a pitcher of lemonade, condensation beading on its sides. It was a nice—and necessary—trick. The Summerlands aren’t usually good about being wired to the local electrical grid, which means the locals keep their food cold with either magic or old-fashioned icehouses. Both had their advantages.
“Didn’t you?” I asked.
Ceres smiled. “Yes and no. My father linked his skerry to this land long before anyone from Europe decided to ‘discover’ it. The humans who lived here then gave him a wide berth, and he gave them the same. I spent my childhood wandering these forests, as well as my mother’s. I was the third of their children, you see, and when I was a girl, they were still more open to the idea that someday we would grow up and leave them. Luna was the last of us. None of us realized how tightly Father would cleave to her, once all others were gone, or how far she would have to go to get away. I like to think we would have chosen differently, had we known what it would cost our little sister to choose as we did. But that was long ago, and no one knows for sure.”
“Right,” I said. Walther was still nibbling on his purple cookies. I reached out and took one, turning it between my fingers as I tried to figure out what to say next. Of all the ways I had expected my day to go, fleeing from a homicidal ex-Queen and then taking tea with the second Blodynbryd I’d ever met definitely hadn’t been near the top of the list. “So you were born here?”
“Farther down the coast. I moved here because it was good for my roses, and because I could no longer bear the company of my parents. Even once Silences was settled, Father let me be for centuries. He thought he was punishing me by refusing to let me see his face. He forgot that I did not want to.”
Briefly, I wondered whether we could chart the world’s Blodynbryd by looking for the places where Blind Michael had chosen not to go hunting. I dismissed the thought. It wasn’t my job to organize a family reunion for Acacia, and if the other Blodynbryd were living quiet, untroubled lives, I should leave them alone. Instead, I ate a cookie.
Walther was right. They were excellent.
Ceres finally took a seat at the table, placing a glass of lemonade in front of me, and teacups in front of Walther and Tybalt. There were flecks of mint all through the lemonade, deep green and inviting. I watched as she poured tea for the two men, and then for herself. Sugar and cream had already been placed at the center of the table: she took her tea plain, Walther took his with sugar, and Tybalt, who had once chided me for doctoring my coffee, added enough milk that his tea turned a pale shade of brown.
“So, how is it that you know my dear Walther?” asked Ceres.
“He came to live in the Mists a few years ago, and his first stop was at a knowe that belonged to a good friend of mine,” I said. “She died not long afterward. We sort of bonded over the whole situation. It was nice to have
someone who could understand just how much I missed her.” Lily had even suggested that Walther and I would be a good match at one point—that my mother would approve. We’d never pursued that, for a lot of reasons, but she’d been right about how well we got along. As friends, nothing more.
“As for me, I know who October knows, or else ask the reason why she’s hiding such charming and diverse people from my eyes,” said Tybalt. He took a sip of his tea, bobbing his head in apparent satisfaction, before asking, “And what of you, milady? This is your home, there can be no doubt, but I would have expected a woman of your breeding and manners to have chosen a new home when the government was overthrown.”
“I would have, believe me, but I have been here a very long time, and my children thrive in this climate.” Ceres glanced to an ottoman on the other side of the room. I followed her gaze, and found a pile of rose goblins the size of kittens all mounded up, sleeping peacefully. Ceres continued, “Transplanting all the bushes would require an army of gardeners. To leave, I would have to leave the little ones, and I can’t quite bring myself to do it.”
“Not all your little ones are rose goblins,” said Walther quietly.
Ceres looked to him and smiled. “No. Not all of them. I was tutor to the children of the Davies and Yates lines—heirs to the throne and born stewards, the lot of them. I expected young Walther here to be a court alchemist by now, brewing love tinctures and potions to clear up the complexion.”
“Love tinctures are unethical, and the mortals make this stuff called ‘Proactiv’ these days. It does a decent job with the pimples,” said Walther, sounding amused. “I teach chemistry to human kids, and I do alchemy for the people who need it. It’s a good life, Aunt Ceres. I like it. Promise.”
“As you say,” said Ceres. She was smiling as she turned her attention back around to me. “The rose goblins would have been difficult, even impossible, to transplant in their current numbers, and I would have needed to find a place where the ground was fertile and the climate was kind. And as Walther reminds, not all my charges were so easy to move. Some still slumber in the castle deeps, waiting for the day they are released from durance vile.”
“Not so vile,” said Tybalt. “Elf-shot does not dictate dreams.”
“No?” Ceres raised an eyebrow, looking at him. “Can we be so sure of that? Many are the methods to force sleep, and I would not be surprised if at least one came complete with unquiet dreams.”
“My niece is an oneiromancer, and she hasn’t said anything about people who’ve been elf-shot having nightmares,” I said. “That doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen. Nightmares are ordinary things that can happen to anyone, and I guess you could make a type of elf-shot that forced them.” It seemed like a form of torture to me—and it was, really. There was no other word that described being trapped in a realm of unending nightmares, with no way of waking up.
“I haven’t forgotten them,” said Walther quietly. “I’ve never forgotten them. I’m keeping my word, Aunt Ceres.”
“Good,” said Ceres.
I looked between the two of them, frowning. “Somebody want to fill the rest of us in? Because I have no idea what’s going on right now.”
“When I left, I promised Aunt Ceres that I’d find the counteragent to elf-shot,” said Walther. “There’s always a counteragent. It’s just a matter of figuring out what it is. I’ve been working for the last hundred years on a way to wake the sleepers up. I’m almost there, I am. If I could just find someone who knew who brewed the original tincture—”
“Eira Rosynhwyr,” I said, without thinking. Walther and Ceres turned to stare at me.
Tybalt took another sip of tea.
A moment passed, and then Walther asked, slowly, “What do you mean?”
“Eira Rosynhwyr is the Daoine Sidhe Firstborn, and she was the first person to make elf-shot. The Luidaeg said so.” She hadn’t mentioned Eira—better known as “Evening”—by name. I’d been forced to put the pieces together myself, a little bit at a time, due to the geas the Luidaeg was laboring under. She couldn’t tell lies, but there were things she couldn’t say out loud. “She’s the reason the stuff’s fatal to changelings. According to the Luidaeg, it didn’t have to be. Eira’s just a bitch.”
“You . . . I . . .” Walther stopped. Then he started to laugh, shaking his head slowly from side to side. “Of course you know who created elf-shot. Of course. And why would you have told me? It’s not like I ever asked.”
“You didn’t,” I said.
“I don’t suppose the Luidaeg also told you what Eira’s magic consisted of, did she? What the elements of it were?”
It had taken me years to realize that most people in Faerie weren’t as sensitive to the distinct elements of a person’s magic as I was. Knowing someone’s magic was part and parcel of knowing their bloodlines, which made it as easy as breathing for me. “She didn’t, but I’ve met the woman. Her magic smelled of roses and snow.”
“What kind of roses?” Walther leaned forward, expression eager.
“Red ones,” I said. “Not wild roses—cultivated ones, although they don’t smell like the kind of hothouse roses you can get today. It’s like they’re an early kind of garden rose? Walled gardens. Ones where people could breed and breed their flowers, and not worry about how they would thrive in the outside world.” I stopped, unsure how much further I could go—and how much further I would want to.
Tybalt had put down his tea and was looking at me, eyebrows raised. “I’d always wondered how it was that you could insist that everyone’s magic was so different, when you said the same words over and over again. Roses and pine trees and all the flowers of the forest. But if you know them that intimately, then there really is no wonder.”
“I don’t know them all that intimately,” I protested. “I have to think about it to start getting details like that.” Tasting Evening’s blood had probably also helped, but I didn’t need to bring that up. It wasn’t something I was proud of.
“Still, that should be more than sufficient detail to let me find the roses in question,” said Ceres. I gave her a blank look, and she smiled. “All the world’s roses are brought to Portland. Didn’t you know? We have a thing the mortals call a ‘test garden,’ where the new cultivars are coaxed to open for the sun and show their secrets clearly as a morning breeze. They grow the new, but they treasure also the old—and there are roses none of them can explain, roses that seem to have arisen naturally around the corners of their carefully planned plots, their delicately designed gardens. My siblings and I, we have played at curators in a great museum, coaxing long-past roses from our bodies and planting them where they have the chance to flourish.”
It took me a moment to realize what she was saying. Finally, I ventured, “So you’re saying my old red rose might be growing somewhere in the gardens?”
“I would stake my eye on it.”
The phrase was unnerving, and not just because of who her father was. Some of the old pureblood oaths involved staking an eye, a hand, even a heart—and when the oaths were broken, it was generally expected that the person who made them would actually give up those body parts. There’s a reason swearing on the physical has fallen out of favor, replaced by the cleaner, safer swearing on the abstract. “Okay,” I said. “What good would that do us?”
“If Ceres can find the right kind of rose—the kind of rose you say this Eira woman’s magic smelled like—then I can use that, and I can figure out the counterformula for elf-shot.” Walther put down his last cookie, leaning forward. There was an unfamiliar intensity in his eyes. “I can do it. I can wake them up.”
I blinked before looking to Tybalt, only to find that he was blinking, too, looking as nonplussed as I was. Elf-shot was . . . elf-shot wasn’t supposed to be forever. It was the holding pattern of the fae world, the injury that took enemies out of the fight for a long time without actually breaking the Law
and killing them. It wasn’t something that could be undone by one alchemist with access to the proper rose garden. That wasn’t possible.
But then, when has Faerie ever settled for the possible? “I’ll do my best to make sure you have the right rose, but I can’t promise anything,” I said, looking back to Walther. “This isn’t something I’ve done before.”
“Narrow it down to ten and I can take it from there,” he said. “I—”
The cottage door slammed open, and Marlis stormed into the room, half-drawing her sword. “Get away from my aunt!” she shouted.
Well, hell. And things had been going so well.
TWELVE
“MARLIS, DEAR HEART, PLEASE don’t threaten my guests: it’s neither proper nor polite, and I raised you better than that,” said Ceres. She picked up her tea and took a dainty sip, as if to emphasize how calm she was. She wasn’t being attacked: she was having some people over for tea. I admired her serenity, even as I tried to decide whether she’d be pissed off if I hit Marlis with a teapot. I didn’t have any better weapons at hand, except for Tybalt, and I didn’t want to kill the girl.
“They shouldn’t be here,” snarled Marlis, glaring daggers at the rest of us. “They’re here on the King’s sufferance, and that sufferance does not extend to troubling you!”
“How’d you know we were here, Marley?” asked Walther, reaching for another lavender cookie. The pink ones and the yellow ones were still relatively untouched, but he’d eaten nearly a dozen of the purple cookies. “All the rose goblins are either here with us, or they’re off telling the King all about how Ceres is leading us astray and shouldn’t be interrupted. You shouldn’t have been able to find us.”
A Red-Rose Chain Page 19
