A Red-Rose Chain

by Seanan McGuire

  We had been on the bus for about ten minutes when Tybalt pulled the cord, sending a long tone reverberating through the bus. He pulled it again immediately after. The tone was not repeated. Scowling, he pulled twice more before I managed to reach up and snag his arm.

  “No,” I hissed. “The bus knows. Come on.”

  I slid out of the seat, tugging him with me. He came reluctantly, eyeing me the whole time like he was sure that this was some sort of a trick. I didn’t have the time to explain, and raising my voice enough to be heard over the hiss of the bus’ brakes would have meant risking the spell that concealed us, so I didn’t say anything; I just pulled him into the small safe haven of the bus’ rear door, waiting for the vehicle to come to a full stop. There was already a woman standing there. As soon as the doors unlocked, she pushed them open, and we all but fell out of the bus behind her.

  Pulling Tybalt out of the way before we could be trampled by the other commuters, I moved us to the edge of the sidewalk, out of the way. The idling bus engine was loud enough to cover my voice as I said softly, “Hold here. I want to be sure no one followed us.”

  Tybalt nodded. The bus pulled away, and I watched as our fellow riders moved off down the street, some doubling back to get to a destination a short ways behind them, others turning corners or just walking away. In a matter of seconds, they were all either gone or going, and we were alone.

  The sidewalk wasn’t deserted. I scanned the people who remained in view, looking for any who seemed to be distorting the air or accompanied by unexplained glitter trails. Everyone I could see appeared to be human. I relaxed a little, turning back to Tybalt. “I think we’re clear,” I said. “Where to now?”

  “This way,” he said. He started walking, and I walked with him, allowing him to lead me down a side street to a small, tree-lined shopping promenade. It opened on a courtyard packed with food trucks. My stomach rumbled and he paused, smiling. “Hungry?”

  “A little,” I admitted. “Breakfast was a long time ago, and I didn’t get to finish my donut.”

  “These kitchens on wheels are definitely safer than Rhys’ private dining hall; we could stop, if you would like.”

  I shook my head. “I need to eat at the knowe. I basically skipped breakfast, and I’m supposed to be preventing a war, not insulting the King’s hospitality so badly that he invades us twice as hard.”

  “If Arden did not want to risk being invaded, as you say, ‘twice as hard,’ she would have sent someone else.” We emerged onto a stretch of street that I recognized. The alley where we were supposed to meet the others was right up ahead. I felt myself untense. Maybe we were going to make it back to King Rhys’ Court without any serious damage done.

  I should really learn to stop hoping. We stepped into the alley to find ourselves alone . . . but the faint smell of ashes and cotton candy hung in the air. May had been here recently. I stopped, bewildered, and took a deep breath. I could smell the faint, nearly indefinable strains of her heritage, mixed with an overlay of Daoine Sidhe. Fear gripped me in an almost physical hand, squeezing until I felt like all the air was being forced out of my lungs.

  “Tybalt, drop the don’t-look-here,” I said, making no effort to keep my voice down. If May and Quentin were in the alley, I didn’t want them to be surprised by our sudden appearance.

  Tybalt nodded. He clapped his hands, and the spell burst around us, filling the air with the musk and pennyroyal scent of his magic. Not for the first time, I wished that Quentin shared my sensitivity for magical signatures. He could pick up the broad strokes, but there was no guarantee he’d be able to smell the spell from wherever he was and know that we had arrived.

  “Quentin?” I called, taking a step forward. “May? Are either of you here? It’s Toby and Tybalt. You can come out now.”

  There was a scuffling noise from behind the dumpster. I took another step forward.

  “I’m sorry we’re a little late; we had to take the bus in order to get here, and that slowed us down . . .”

  Silence. Then Quentin’s face peeked around the dumpster’s corner, eyes narrowed warily. “How do you take your coffee?” he demanded.

  “I stopped drinking coffee after I got hit with an evil pie,” I said. “Before that, I took it however I could get it. The more the merrier. Look, do you want a blood sample? That’ll confirm my identity faster than any quiz you can give me, and maybe then you can explain why you’re hiding behind a dumpster instead of greeting me like a normal person.” I couldn’t keep the edge from my voice as I reached the end of my sentence. Something was terribly wrong. Quentin had been my squire long enough to have learned that sometimes bravery gets you killed, but he didn’t hide for no reason. If I didn’t encourage senseless bravery, I didn’t encourage senseless cowardice either.

  “I, too, am happy to give you a taste of my blood, if it means you will be able to relax yourself and tell us what has happened,” said Tybalt. He didn’t step forward, recognizing that Quentin wouldn’t find his presence as comforting as I did.

  Quentin closed his eyes, an expression of relief washing across his face, only to be quickly replaced by bleakness. “Come over here,” he said, and withdrew behind the dumpster again.

  That was when I knew. There was only one reason he could be acting like this, only one thing that could have happened that would explain his skittishness and his sorrow. So I knew, but I still didn’t admit it to myself: not until I had stepped around the dumpster and seen with my own eyes, which had lied to me in the past, when they’d had good enough reason. They weren’t lying to me now.

  May, still draped in the hazy outline of her human disguise, although it was beginning to fray around the edges, was propped against the alley wall like a forgotten toy, limp and unmoving. The arrow protruding from her left shoulder formed a tight seal against the skin: there wasn’t even any blood on her shirt, and wouldn’t be until someone pulled that arrow out. Her eyes were closed, and her chin rested comfortably against her chest. She looked like she had just stopped to take a nap, pausing for a moment before she resumed racing through her life.

  It was really a pity that the nap was going to last for a hundred years.

  My hand was clapped tightly over my mouth. I didn’t remember putting it there, or putting my other hand against the dumpster for balance. All I could see was my Fetch, my sister, lying on the ground in an enchanted slumber that no true love’s kiss or glass coffin could fix.

  “Oh, sweet Oberon,” I said, my voice devoid of strength. “What happened?” Night-haunts were immune to elf-shot. May had even said so.

  Apparently, Fetches weren’t.

  “I don’t know,” said Quentin. He was still standing in the shadow of the dumpster. He looked younger than he had when we left King Rhys’ Court, like all his strength and confidence had been ripped away when the arrow entered May’s flesh. I knew I should put my arms around him, that I should pull him to me and tell him that I was going to find a way to fix this, but I couldn’t make myself move. All I could do was stare at May, so pale and small and unmoving.

  My Fetch was never unmoving. Even when she slept, she tossed and turned and squirmed, like she was secretly a hurricane forced into a girl-body and told to exist as best she could among people who had no idea what it meant to secretly be a weather pattern. But now, thanks to the elf-shot in her shoulder, she could no more move her body than she could turn back into a night-haunt and fly away on the wings she had traded for solidity and size. She had become a Fetch because I was her hero, and because she wanted to warn me that death was coming. Somehow that single, selfless choice had led us here, to this alley, and to silence.

  “October.” Tybalt’s voice was low. “We cannot stay here. We must move.”

  “How can we get her back to our room?” I lowered my hand, turning to look at him. “She can’t hold her breath. You have to be awake to hold your breath. I don’t even know
how to get into the knowe from this side.”

  “Does it matter if she holds her breath?” Quentin’s question was hesitant. I turned to look at him. He bit his lip before saying, “She can’t . . . I mean, she can’t suffocate, right? She can’t die that way. She can’t die at all. So does it matter if she holds her breath?”

  “Not if I go quickly. I will take her first, and return for the two of you, if you can hold yourselves safe that long.” Tybalt spoke slowly, like every word was being ripped out of him. In a way, I suppose they were. He didn’t like leaving me alone when there was any chance I might be in danger, and this was sort of the definition of a bad situation. And at the same time, if he tried to run the Shadow Roads with May in his arms and the two of us holding onto his shirt, he ran the risk of losing us.

  “Go,” I said. “We’ll be here.”

  Tybalt nodded once before walking over and scooping May into his arms. She dangled limp, with no muscular resistance or rigor to keep her in place. As I watched, he gently lifted her head, bracing it against his chest to keep from hurting her. Then the shadows against the alley wall parted like a curtain, and he stepped through and was gone.

  I frowned. Something was wrong—apart from the obvious, which was very wrong, and almost enough to keep me from noticing subtleties. I crouched, looking at the place where May’s body had been propped. There were no other arrows. Either our archer had managed to catch her on the first shot, or whoever it was had been careful to clean up after themselves. We still had an arrow, since there was one embedded in my Fetch’s arm, but it would have lost much of its potency when its poison rubbed off into her blood. Tracking the person who mixed the spell would be easier with an arrow that hadn’t been used.

  There were no footprints, either. The dryness I had been so happy about when Quentin fell in the alley was a problem now. At least mud and wet ground would have increased the odds of someone leaving a trace of themselves behind.

  “Toby?” Quentin’s voice was hesitant, like he was afraid of interrupting me. “Did you find something?”

  “Not yet,” I said. I had to struggle not to snap at him, but he didn’t deserve that. He was the one who had found her lying there—I paused, turning to look at him. “Why didn’t you call me when you found her? I had my cellphone.”

  “If someone was able to track May back to this alley and put an arrow in her, they had to have been following us,” he said. “I didn’t want to bring you back here if it meant they might get you, too.”

  “That was brave and stupid,” I said. “You should have hidden yourself and called me. Next time, you call me, understand? You’re my squire. It’s my job to protect you, not the other way around.”

  “I thought we protected each other,” he said, in a very small voice.

  I thawed, just a little. “We do, honey. But sometimes you have to remember that it’s my job to protect you. It’s basically the most important thing a knight does for their squire. We teach you how to be better knights, sure, but that doesn’t matter if you’re dead.” I turned back to the alley wall. Something was wrong with this picture, something apart from the obvious. It was gnawing at me, biting down with sharp little teeth and refusing to let me go.

  It was almost hard to imagine how carefree we’d been when we were first all together in this alley. Tybalt and I were going to meet his friend, Quentin was going to the bookstore, and May was going to—

  “The laundry.” I straightened up, feeling as if I had just been electrified. “She didn’t have the laundry bag when Tybalt picked her up, and it’s not here. Did she leave it at the dry cleaner’s? Do you know which dry cleaner’s she went to?”

  “They’re right up the street,” said Quentin.

  “Do you have the name?” I pulled out my phone. When he blinked, I said, “If I send you to check and stay here, I feel like a coward. If I go to check and leave you here, Tybalt loses his shit when he gets back to find me gone. Neither of these is a good thing. So I’m going to pretend I’m a normal person, and call them.”

  “I . . . that makes really good sense,” he said. “Sunshine Cleaners, on West Burnside.”

  “Got it.” I dialed information, and when the polite, faintly robotic voice of the computer-generated “operator” picked up, I gave the address. Thirty seconds later, the phone was calling the cleaner’s for me. Sometimes I really do feel like we’re living in the future, and just haven’t fully accepted everything that means.

  “Sunshine Cleaners, we put the sun back in your shirts,” said a voice that clearly felt it had better things to do with its time than answer phone calls, even if it was being paid to pick up the phone.

  “Hi, this is October Daye. My sister, May, was supposed to drop off some laundry for me a few hours ago, and I was just wondering if you were able to get the stains out of my dress? I really love that dress.” I tried to match the voice’s disinterest with earnest need-to-know. Standing in the alley where my Fetch had been elf-shot and pretending that the most important thing in my world was laundry.

  “Please hold.” There was a clunk as the phone was set down. I heard rustling. Then the phone was picked up again, and the same bored voice said, “No one named after a month has dropped anything off today. Either your sister sucks at doing her chores, or you need to call another cleaner. Have a nice day.”

  The connection went dead. I lowered my phone, turning to look at Quentin. “She didn’t drop off the laundry, and she’s been elf-shot,” I said. “You know what this means?”

  “Yeah,” he said, looking miserable. “King Rhys has an awful lot of your blood, and May’s going to be asleep for a hundred years. Toby, what are we going to do?”

  I looked at him, and I didn’t have an answer.

  SIXTEEN

  WE EMERGED FROM THE Shadow Roads into the master bedroom of the diplomatic suite. May was already stretched out on the bed. Spike was curled on her chest, thorns flat with distress. Walther was standing next to her, crouching as he trimmed the ends of her hair into a small bowl. He stopped and straightened when he heard my butt hit the floor. Spike made a whining sound, but didn’t move.

  This time it was Quentin who managed to keep his balance, largely by grabbing hold of the bedpost and hanging on for dear life. Only Tybalt—winded and wheezing—remained upright, his baleful glare going to Walther as the only moving target in the room.

  Walther was unmoved. “Good, you’re back,” he said. “I need you to come help me extract this arrow.”

  “Rhys sent people after us into the city, and they got the laundry, which means they have a lot of my blood,” I replied. “What can they do with it?”

  “Whatever they want,” said Walther. “Now come help me. We have too many emergencies to deal with them all at the same time, and I can’t start trying to provide May with medical treatment until I have the arrow out.”

  I picked myself up from the floor. “I hate this Kingdom,” I announced. “I hate everything about it. There is nothing in Silences that I do not hate.”

  “Noted, and under the circumstances, not offended,” said Walther. He handed me a piece of red leather. “Wrap this around the shaft and push as hard as you can. The idea is to force the arrow out through the back of her shoulder, not yank it toward us. That could break her collarbone, and she’s going to have enough problems without adding broken bones to the mix.”

  I narrowed my eyes at him, even as I followed his instructions. “You’re calm.”

  “I’m furious, and I’m scared out of my mind,” said Walther. “May’s my friend. Don’t mistake my calm for anything other than anger, and the need to focus.”

  “Got it.” I pushed down. The arrow slid through her flesh with sickening ease. I could feel it break the skin on the other side. I stopped pushing. “Now what?”

  “Let go.” Walther waited until my hands were clear. Then he reached over, shifted the leather up slightl
y, and twisted until the remaining shaft snapped in two, leaving the part with the fletching in his hand. He offered it to me. “I’m assuming you’ll want to confront the King about shooting her. This proves the elf-shot came from his armory.”

  “I know how to read arrows,” I said. “Still, I appreciate it. This is probably better than carrying the whole arrow into the presence of the King.” Angry as I was, I didn’t want to give him an excuse to try and arrest me again—and I knew that the false Queen would be more than happy to encourage him to do it. She’d hated me even before I took her crown away. I couldn’t imagine how much she had to hate me now.

  Then again, maybe I didn’t need to. I watched Walther lift Spike off of May’s chest. The rose goblin whined as it slunk off to the side, thorns rattling. Walther lifted her halfway into a sitting position before he reached around with his leather washcloth, wrapping it around the point of the arrow. It came free of her flesh with a wet sucking sound that turned my stomach. He placed the arrow on the nightstand, still wrapped in red leather, and eased May gently back down to the bed. Spike immediately leaped back onto her chest.

  “I’ll wrap and bandage her shoulder, and I have some herbs that will help to prevent infection,” he said.

  “What about the antidotes you were working on?” I asked. May wasn’t moving. I felt like I couldn’t breathe. I heard Tybalt move up behind me, but he didn’t say anything or put his hands on me, and for the first time, I was grateful for his restraint. If he tried to offer comfort, I would break, and then I wouldn’t be any good to anybody.