“I know who took her.” I kept my eyes on the Luidaeg, not wanting to see my companions react. If any of them looked like they didn’t believe me, I was going to start swinging. “I caught a scent in the Baobhan Sith’s lair. Nothing I could follow, but enough to give me an identity.”
The Luidaeg raised an eyebrow.
“I don’t care if it’s impossible. I don’t care if it doesn’t make sense. The false Queen was in that room. She knows about Gillian. She met her, when Gilly was a baby. I took her to Court to present her as my daughter.” Even then, with Gillian’s fae blood as thin as it was, I’d wanted her to be taken care of. I had wanted the purebloods who barely allowed themselves to see me to see her as someone worthy of protection if something happened to me. “Rowan and ice. That was what the room smelled like. And it was fresh. This wasn’t a trail from before she was deposed.”
“I thought you left the imposter queen sleeping in Silences,” said the Luidaeg mildly. Her eyes flicked toward a point behind me, and I knew she was quizzing me for the sake of the others, the ones who hadn’t been there, who didn’t know the way I did.
I could have kissed her, if she wouldn’t have ripped my head off for doing it. “We did. I even had Walther contact them. He says she’s still there. I say she’s not. We can find out what they have in their basement after I bring my daughter home.”
“Home to me,” said Janet. I turned. She was still sitting, but her hands were balled into fists, and she was glaring at me with every ounce of fury she could muster. She locked her eyes on mine. “This changes nothing. You don’t get to take her.”
“She’s a person,” I said. “An adult person, who gets to make her own choices. But yes, I am bringing her home to you, and to Cliff, because she chose to be human, and he never asked to get this tangled up in Faerie. Even though his human wife might as well be one of us.” I paused. “He doesn’t know, does he?”
“Never,” said Janet. “I would never.”
“Good.” I looked back to the Luidaeg. “It’s her, and she has my child, and I don’t know how or why she took her, but I know it’s her.”
“Do you know where she is?” prompted the Luidaeg.
I opened my mouth to answer. Then I paused and dug Jocelyn’s note out of my pocket, unfolding it. “Gillian’s roommate is a thin-blooded changeling. Thin enough not to be having a violent allergic reaction to Janet’s ‘protection charms,’ but strong enough that fairy ointment works on her. She knew more than she should have, and she left me this note.” I shoved it at the Luidaeg. “The old knowe. They’re at the old Queen’s knowe.”
The Luidaeg looked at the note. Then she looked at me and nodded.
“I think you’re right,” she said. “You’d better go.”
I started to turn. Then I hesitated, and said, “Promise me.”
The Luidaeg lifted an eyebrow. “Excuse me?”
“You haven’t said that you’d protect Janet. That means you don’t intend to. I need her safe. Promise me, Luidaeg.” I paused. “You’re my aunt. You’re my blood. Apparently, so is she. I need time to figure out what that means.”
The Luidaeg pinched the bridge of her nose. “Dad preserve me in the face of all his damn heroes. Yes, October, I will protect the woman responsible for my mother being lost to me. Happy now?”
My stomach twisted. I hadn’t really considered that part. “No,” I said honestly. “I’d be happier throwing her in the Bay. But I can’t do that to Gillian. I’ll be back as soon as I can.”
“See that you are.”
I turned then, and bolted for the door, accompanied by the footsteps of my friends as they ran after me. The Luidaeg’s patience wasn’t infinite, and neither were Gillian’s chances.
It was time to bring my daughter home.
SIXTEEN
BEFORE THE POND, before Luna and Rayseline disappeared and Sylvester asked me to bring them home, before my life fell apart, I had been a wide-eyed innocent rambling through the Bay Area, somehow—despite parental neglect and accidental, predatory apprenticeship to a man who never met a pair of hands he didn’t want to exploit—holding on to the idea that Faerie was wonderful and we were lucky to live in a world made of magic. I had been looking for my place in that world, seeking the combination of talent and skill that would make me indispensable to the Courts.
What I had found was that purebloods are, by and large, not curious people. There are exceptions, of course, but those exceptions almost always seem to come after too much exposure to the mortal world, where things happen fast and don’t leave room for introspection. For most purebloods, taking a hundred years to solve a riddle is perfectly reasonable, because they have a hundred years to take. For me, a hundred years was out of the question. I had started off like the Nancy Drew knockoff I believed myself in my heart to be, finding lost things and solving little mysteries. By human standards, I’d been bumbling at best, untalented and inept at worst. But by fae standards, I had been a miracle worker from day one, because I was willing to try. The lost could be found. The broken could be fixed.
And then the Queen—the Queen! The actual Queen of the Mists, the pureblood to end all purebloods, even if her heritage was more mixed than some of the courtiers seemed to think was appropriate—the Queen herself had put out the word that she was seeking a new knowe. The one she had was collapsing in on itself as the shallowing that sustained it rotted away.
Now, I could see that for the warning sign it had been. Her knowe had collapsed because it hadn’t been properly rooted and she didn’t have the power to sustain it, and King Gilad’s knowe was sealed, inaccessible until Arden was found. At the time, though, it had seemed like the greatest opportunity of my short life. All I had to do was find a new knowe for the Queen, and I would be in her good graces, finally accepted as an equal to the purebloods who surrounded me—and best of all, finally able to be sure Gillian would be safe.
Then a woman named Dawn had been found dead by her “sister,” Evening Winterrose, and somehow a simple real estate search had turned into a hunt for a murderer, following the trail through hidey-holes and dead ends all across San Francisco. In the end, I’d found the man who held the knife, and better yet, I had found a place in the mortal world where the veil between Earth and the Summerlands had been worn thin as paper, ready to be punctured by a steady hand.
That hand could never have been mine. But when the Queen had followed me to the shore, I had felt invincible. I had felt like I could do anything, forever. She had touched the weak spot I had found, and it had torn wide, revealing a hall with marble floors and a ceiling like the sky itself. Whoever had constructed this knowe had long since abandoned it, and I was the one who brought it back to Faerie. Me.
I had earned a knighthood for that week’s work, and the eternal enmity of a woman who had been unable to make herself accept that changelings could do anything of use. She had demanded a ceremony—archaic even for Faerie—during which I gave up all claim to the knowe in exchange for letting my title go uncontested. Sylvester had shaken his head and said she reached too far, that as a Duke, he could knight anyone he pleased once they showed themselves worthy, but my eyes had been full of stars, and they had been blinding me. The Queen knew who I was. The Queen. How could anything ever go wrong for me again?
Sometimes I wish I could travel back in time and shake myself briskly until all the stupid falls out. Except that if I hadn’t been such a fool when I was younger, I wouldn’t have the life I have now. Warts and all, it’s mine, and I love it.
Tybalt had his eyes closed and was clutching the handle above the door, a clear response to the fact that I was driving at unsafe speeds through the streets of San Francisco. I glanced at him, asking conversationally, “The Court of Cats is where the lost things go, right? Whether they’re part of Faerie or not?”
“We have access to the lost places, yes,” he said, not opening his eyes. “If you
are about to tell me we have become lost, you should get a map. I refuse to open my eyes until we exit this traveling death trap.”
“Did you have access to the false Queen’s knowe before I found the door?”
He hesitated before saying, “Yes.”
“Is that part of why you used to be so pissed at me all the time?”
He sighed. “Can discussion of our past relationship struggles please wait until the current situation has been resolved, and we are not about to die?”
“Um, this is Toby,” said Quentin. “We’re always about to die. When we’re not about to die, we’re still about to be about to die. She’s like a Rube Goldberg machine whose only job is generating life-threatening situations.”
“And I want to know the answer,” said May.
Tybalt sighed again, harder. “Yes, October. Your ‘discovery’ of a lost piece of real estate cost my subjects several very comfortable denning places and forced the entire Court to rearrange itself. Cats do not like being ousted from their territory. I disliked you for a great many reasons, but your actions did not help. Happy?”
“Ecstatic.” An opening appeared between two cars. I slammed my foot on the gas, hurling us through it before it could close again. Quentin, whose driving lessons were recent enough that he understood exactly how dangerous a maneuver that was, whimpered. “So here’s a riddle for you: when the false Queen was removed from her throne and the knowe was sealed, it started to fade back into the shallowing the same way Lily’s did, the way it had been when I found it for the first time. Right?”
“Correct,” said Tybalt carefully, feeling out the word. He knew I was getting at something. He just didn’t know what it was yet. At least he knew me well enough to be fairly sure he wasn’t going to like it.
Clever boy. “Does that mean the deeper parts of the knowe are lost again?”
Surprised, Tybalt opened his eyes and stared at me. Then, slowly, he smiled.
Knowes are fascinating things, half-alive, half-aware, crafted from a combination of real architecture and raw magic. They can sprout rooms like mushrooms after a rain, expanding and contracting to meet the demands of their residents. But every knowe has its anchors, points of absolute reality driven deep into the fabric of the Summerlands and holding the rest of it in place. Bigger knowes, like Muir Woods or Shadowed Hills, may have five or six anchors, in addition to whatever seed point was originally used to “spark” the knowe.
I’ve never built a knowe myself. I wouldn’t know where to begin. But I knew enough to be sure that even as the more publicly accessible parts of the building had started to fade, those anchors would have remained, lost until someone came to open them again.
“Do you have a plan?” asked May. “Or is this one of those situations where you charge in half-cocked and count on things to work in your favor?”
“A little bit of both,” I said. “Feel up to punching me in the nose?”
“Always,” said May.
“Um,” said Quentin.
I grinned and hit the gas harder.
The old Queen’s knowe is anchored to a stretch of San Francisco coastline that has yet to be fully gentrified, meaning there’s even less parking available there than there is elsewhere. I circled the block three times before giving up and cramming the car into a stretch of sidewalk left open in front of a fire hydrant. As long as nothing actually burst into flames, Quentin’s don’t-look-here would mean my car remained unnoticed. If a fire truck needed to access the hydrant, I’d have a whole new set of problems.
At the moment, I felt like I’d welcome all of them. Tickets and towed cars were ordinary things, human things, things that were so much better than immortal grandmothers and impossible enemies. Let me worry about whether the milk has expired and how much the electric bill will be this month. Let me go back to fighting with May about wedding planning and how much I didn’t want to do it. Let this be done.
Let us bring my daughter home.
I undid my seatbelt and twisted to face May and Quentin. “I don’t know how much magic the false Queen can detect, but we know Jocelyn is limited to whatever her fairy ointment can unmask,” I said. “That gets her through most illusions. We’re not identical anymore, but we look enough alike that if you walk in with my squire, covered in my blood . . . ”
“That buys us time,” said May. “What are you going to do with it?”
“Ask Tybalt to carry me into one of the lost parts of the knowe, so I can approach them from behind,” I replied. “They’re not going to expect anyone to be deeper in the structure than they are. The old Queen is too arrogant, and Jocelyn is too ignorant. It can work.”
“Why do I have to go with May?” asked Quentin. “I’m your squire. I’m supposed to be there to support you if you get into trouble.”
“Because May can’t fight, and being impossible to kill is not the same as being invincible,” I said. “She needs someone who knows his way around a blade by her side, in case the false Queen has more support than we realized.” It didn’t seem likely. The members of her Court who had supported her during the coup had either been exiled or stripped of lands and titles as punishment for their crimes, and most of her staff worked for Arden now. They seemed much happier under the leadership of a queen who didn’t treat them like expendable cogs in a beautiful machine. Funny, that.
Quentin looked unconvinced. “I don’t like splitting up. Why can’t we all go with Tybalt?”
“Charmed as I am by your confidence in my abilities, carrying three people through the shadows is a bit beyond me at the moment,” said Tybalt. “I have the strength but lack the conviction. In the shadows, conviction is everything.”
Quentin frowned. “But you can take Toby?”
“The day I cannot carry my heart along the Shadow Roads is the day I am a King no longer, but only a man who has failed himself so profoundly that his days of peace are done,” said Tybalt.
We were all quiet for a moment, staring at him. May shook her surprise off first.
“If you ever want to go into the greeting card business, we can make a mint,” she said. Turning to me, she asked, “So what, I just punch you?”
“In the nose,” I confirmed. “It’s the easiest way to make me bleed.” I shrugged out of my leather jacket, leaving it on the seat. “If we’re right, and this really is the false queen, I’d give even odds she transforms your clothes into something she thinks is more ‘suitable.’ In this case, hope for it. Her magic will obscure yours and make it even harder to tell us apart. You need to distract her as long as poss—”
Her fist caught me square in the face, snapping my head back and bringing a hot gush of blood flowing down my lip. I straightened, staring at her, and she punched me again. There was more blood this time, May’s cupped hands under my chin to catch it. When the blood slowed, she took her hands away and ran them down the front of her shirt, leaving gory handprints behind. She looked at them and beamed.
“Now we’re twinsies,” she said.
“Oh, root and branch, what is wrong with you people?” moaned Quentin.
“More than we have time for,” I replied. “My sword’s in the trunk if you wanted to take it, May. For show.” My own swordsmanship lessons had reached the point where I mostly didn’t stab myself—mostly. The weapon was too big and too unwieldy for me after a lifetime of smaller tools, and the majority of problems in the mortal world can’t be solved with a sword. That’s the sort of thing that gets the cops called.
“Got it,” she said. She grabbed a handful of air. Her human disguise shimmered, becoming identical to mine. “Quentin, you’re with me.”
“So I heard,” he muttered, and gave me one last, anxious glance before following her out of the car.
Tybalt and I stayed where we were as May retrieved my sword from the trunk, belting it to her waist. She and Quentin hurried away down the street, toward t
he cave-side entrance to the false Queen’s knowe. That was the one anchor point she had shored up herself. If any of them was still holding fast, it would be that one.
Tybalt touched the bare skin of my arm. I glanced at him.
“I am loath to admit this, but I’m afraid,” he said. “What if I can’t keep you safe?”
“Then you let me keep you safe for a change,” I said. I pulled my keys out of the ignition and pocketed them, offering him my best hopeful smile. “I’ve had some practice. Now let’s go bring my daughter home.”
“Indeed,” he said.
We got out of the car, one of us on either side, and met on the sidewalk. Tybalt took my hand, leading me to the narrow alley between two shops. We stepped into the shadows together, fingers tangled in a lover’s knot. The darkness parted like a heavy curtain, allowing us to pass through into the freezing dark beyond.
The Shadow Roads are always cold and airless for me, but this time, when Tybalt ran, I ran with him, my feet pounding against ground I could neither see nor fully identify. It was too yielding to be stone and too firm to be wood, some unknown substance that existed only in the deepest dark. Trying to figure out what it could be was a distraction, something to keep me from focusing on the fact that I was running blind as my lungs began to ache, warning me of the lack of oxygen.
Tybalt could breathe here, somehow, if not as well as he could in the real world. That was part and parcel of the Cait Sidhe connection to the Shadow Roads. Knowing that helped me keep running. If I ran out of air, he would pick me up and carry me the rest of the way to the exit. Dignified? No. But when has survival ever been about dignity? He would never let me die in here. He would never let me go. As long as I held onto his hand—
Something slammed into me from behind, furious and screaming through the infinite dark of the shadows. I fell, my hand wrenched out of Tybalt’s. Whatever the ground was made of, it was rough enough to scrape my cheek as I slid across it, half the remaining air knocked out of me on impact.
Night and Silence (October Daye) Page 24
