A Killing Frost
Page 21
Clothing aside, she looked the way I’d always assumed a Queen would look when I was a little girl: she was beautiful, with hair so deep a red that it became almost black, like the hearts of those charcoal roses, missing only the slumbering fire to make the comparison complete. Her eyes were mismatched, one glacial blue and one silver bright as mercury, and her ears were sharply pointed, because she hadn’t bothered to don a human disguise before opening a portal between two known, safe locations. She looked at me and frowned.
“So you’re the reason I’m playing taxi service tonight?” Arden shook her head. “Why are you all bloody this time?”
“I’m not,” I protested. “At least not compared to normal, and none of it’s mine. And you’re playing taxi service because . . . actually, I don’t know why you’re playing taxi service. I assumed the Luidaeg would call Etienne and ask him to come get me.” When I said it out loud like that, I didn’t know why I hadn’t called Etienne. I’d reached the point of asking the Luidaeg for help, and after that, I’d just trusted her to take care of things.
Maybe that wasn’t the best habit to be in, but it was mine, and I was holding onto it.
Arden shifted her attention to Cassandra. “I know you’re off-duty until morning, but can you pick up paper towels on your way home? Nette ‘accidentally’ left them off the shopping list again, and I’m tired of not being able to clean up my own spills.”
“Will do,” said Cassandra, nodding. She was in service to Arden’s Court as chatelaine, meaning she was responsible for the smooth running of the household. It’s a position rarely filled outside of large holdings, and Arden’s Court barely qualified yet—she’d only taken her father’s throne a little over two years ago, and she was taking her time building a household she could trust. Eventually, Cass would be in charge of dozens of servants and courtiers. For the moment, she was handling a skeleton crew, large enough to keep the knowe running and to welcome visiting dignitaries, but not too much more.
It was probably her position under Arden that had freed her to begin seeing Walther, if Stacy was really that opposed to her children dating. It was such an odd thing to try to reconcile with everything I knew about my old friend, but if anyone was likely to know the truth here, it was Cassandra. Parenthood makes us into different people. There were times when all I wanted to do with my own daughter was find a room with no doors or windows that I could lock her inside, to keep her safe from the rest of the world, forever. It ached, how much I loved her, and how little she wanted to do with me.
“Who’s Nette?” I asked.
“New housekeeper,” said Arden. “She’s a Hob, and very good at her job, but she feels like purebloods shouldn’t depend on human fripperies, and that as a queen, I’m above wiping up my own spill when I knock over a wineglass. Are you ready to go? I was in the middle of doing absolutely nothing when the Luidaeg called and told me to put pants on. I don’t get to do absolutely nothing nearly as often as I used to. I’d like to get back to it.”
“I’m ready,” I said, and stepped close enough for her to link her arm through mine. She tugged me with her as she stepped back through the circle, and Walther’s office was gone, replaced by the familiar confines of the Luidaeg’s living room.
Arden wasn’t a member of the Luidaeg’s inner circle, even if she was apparently sufficiently indebted to the sea witch that the Luidaeg felt comfortable using her as a taxi service. Consequently, the illusions that kept the apartment from looking as nice as it actually was were all back in place. It wasn’t lying if the Luidaeg never referenced it aloud.
The air smelled like a marsh at low tide, thick and salty and tinted with decay, until I had to take shallow breaths through my mouth to stop myself from gagging. Illusion or no, the smell was strong enough to make me lose my lunch, and I needed it to stay inside me, since I had no idea when I was going to eat again. Patches of luridly colored mold ate away at the carpet, furnishings, and wallpaper, and maritime trash was strewn in random piles around the floor, sometimes half-submerged in shallow puddles that had collected below the leaks in the roof. A cockroach the length of my palm skittered from a crack in the baseboard up to squirm into the gap between window and wall.
The Luidaeg was nowhere to be seen. But she must have lowered her wards in order for Arden to open a portal inside the apartment. Arden herself was looking around, nose wrinkled, making faint gagging sounds in the back of her throat.
“I’m gonna go,” she said. “All I was asked to do was get you here, and I did that, so my debts are discharged for tonight. You’ll tell me what this was all about when you’re finished, right?” It wasn’t a request. Arden isn’t my liege, but she takes her duties as Queen in the Mists very seriously, and she likes to know what’s going on inside her kingdom.
“Of course,” I said, and she was gone, stepping back through another circle in the air, this one providing a glimpse of a plushly appointed suite that looked very different from either the Luidaeg’s apartment or Walther’s office.
The portal closed. Something rustled behind me. I turned to see the Luidaeg stepping out of the kitchen, drying her hands on a white rag. “It’s a little much, huh?” she said, almost apologetically. “Sorry about that. I hadn’t been counting on company tonight, and so I threw it up in a hurry when I realized Arden would be coming here. I’ll take it down.” She snapped her fingers, and all the illusions in the room fell away.
Including my own. A ribbon of cut grass and copper mixed with the oceanic scent of the Luidaeg’s magic, dispelled as easily as if it had been one of her own spells. More easily, probably, since her magic was an order of magnitude stronger than my own.
Without the illusions making it look decrepit, the apartment was quite nice, and would have looked perfectly normal occupied by a mortal family or a changeling like myself. The couch against the wall had been reupholstered recently, and the only signs of poor housekeeping were a few small holes in the fabric of the Luidaeg’s favorite overstuffed armchair. There were no cockroaches. Since I’d seen her eat them before, that always confused me a little; either there were real roaches that she somehow hid when her illusions were down, or the Luidaeg liked to snack on illusions. Either way, it was considerably easier to breathe with the stench gone.
The Luidaeg herself didn’t change. As far as I’ve been able to determine, she never uses illusions to conceal her face; shapeshifting is enough to let her make any alterations she feels the situation demands. She looked like a girl in her late teens, skin pocked with old acne scars and dusted with freckles, dark, curly hair gathered in twin pigtails and tied off with electrical tape. She was wearing a pair of denim overalls, and no shirt or shoes. She looked perfectly normal. That was the most frightening thing about her.
I sagged at the sight of her, which had long since become comforting. “I need to find Simon before he hurts Quentin,” I said.
“We already know he hasn’t contacted the Queen,” said the Luidaeg. I blinked. She smirked. “What, you think I called Queenie for fun? There were plenty of people who could have given you a ride without involving Kitty. Calling her meant confirming Simon hadn’t gone to Muir Woods without starting a panic.”
“She could have decided not to tell you,” I said.
The Luidaeg snorted. “Not so much. She has to come when I call—choices are for people who don’t need to ask me for favors—but she would have argued more, or sounded more upset, if I’d been pulling her away from something important. Simon has yet to make his grand appearance.”
“That’s good,” I said. “That means there’s a chance we can catch him before he drags anyone else into this. Unless he jumped straight to looking for Patrick . . .” I trailed off. “Goldengreen. He would have seen that in my memories, too. He could be on his way to the knowe, and Dean won’t know he’s coming.”
“Before you work yourself up again, I need you to take a moment, take a breath, and tell me exact
ly what happened.” The Luidaeg folded her arms. “I know you’re worried. I know you have damn good reason to be worried. I also know that I’m better at helping you when I understand what you’re asking me to do. Start at the beginning and tell me what happened.”
I opened my mouth to yell at her about wasting my time, caught myself, and shut it with a snap. The Luidaeg likes me. I’m probably her favorite living niece. She’s also said, repeatedly, that she’s going to kill me one day, and the Luidaeg can’t lie. Her patience isn’t infinite. Pushing my luck could bring “one day” into the present a lot faster than anyone liked.
“Tybalt decided we needed to have a proper date for once,” I began, and explained what had happened at Cat in the Rafters, going back to add more detail when prompted, although the Luidaeg stopped blessedly short of asking what we’d actually eaten for dinner. I think I might have screamed.
When I reached the part about Patrick and Dianda approaching our table, she leaned forward, suddenly intent. “And they said they could fix the situation? They said they could make sure Simon was better after this?”
“Not in so many words,” I said, casting my mind back to the conversation. It had been a lot of blood loss and panic ago, and the details were already getting fuzzier than I liked. “Dianda said she’d hoped he was going to leave Mom, and Patrick said I had to invite him to the wedding or risk him claiming insult against me, which Tybalt seemed to think was a genuine enough concern that he agreed to let me go.” He hadn’t been happy about it, but if he’d really wanted to stop me from leaving without him, he could have done it. No question. Having an immortal boyfriend who can walk through the shadows to find me wherever I go would be upsetting and unsettling, if I didn’t like it so much.
“Hmm,” said the Luidaeg thoughtfully. “I think they may have found a solution.”
“What’s that?”
“I don’t want to say until I know for sure. Guessing is too close to lying sometimes.” She shook her head, beginning to pace in the living room in front of me. “So they interrupted your date and you decided to go haring off without any real support, is that correct?”
“No,” I said. “Karen called before dinner and told me about her dream, that I’d succeed if I took May and Quentin with me, so that’s what I did. You know, my indestructible sister and my squire, whose job it is to go with me when I do things like this. I didn’t want to come to you, because Karen had already told me I wouldn’t, and I was worried you’d say that if I wanted help finding Simon, I’d have to agree to kill him for you.”
The Luidaeg scowled. “You should have thought better of me and worse of her. She’s still in training; she can still be wrong. If you’d considered that, we might have been able to avoid some of this mess.”
“Maybe,” I said. “I don’t know one way or the other. So we started out by going to Shadowed Hills, and asking Luna to open us a Rose Road, so that we could get back to where your sister is sleeping.”
“Is that when you decided to trade in half your humanity for a nice dinette set?”
I flushed, resisting the urge to tug my hair down over my ears. “Is it that obvious?”
“To everyone? Probably not. But I know you pretty well, and your ears are sharper than they’ve ever been. Your eyes are whiter around the edges. Your cat’s going to notice, too, so if you don’t want him to say anything, better put yourself back to the way you were before.”
I hadn’t even stopped to ask myself whether I could do that. I flexed my fingers, feeling the magic move under the surface of my skin. It would be easy enough; it was a small adjustment on the face of things, more a minor tweak than anything else.
Tybalt had asked so earnestly when I was going to give up my humanity, not because he wanted to change who I was, but because he didn’t want me to leave him. It was hard not to respect that. He loved me. I loved him. Couldn’t I love him enough to be immortal for his sake? Difficult as I was to kill the way I was, I was pretty sure old age was the one exception to my current invulnerability. I still had a way to leave everyone I loved.
“No,” I said, slowly lowering my hands. “I don’t think I’m going to do that.”
“Ah.” The Luidaeg smiled like I had just passed some particularly difficult test in an unexpectedly clever way. “Why did you do this?”
“Sylvester said he’d only let me talk to Luna if I’d talk to Rayseline first, about whether or not she was ready for them to wake her up,” I said. “Every other time I’ve been able to speak to someone who’s asleep or enchanted, it’s been because I was changing their blood. There’s nothing left in her to change. I guess my magic needed something to grab onto, and it grabbed onto itself.”
“That’s not a great habit to get into. You’re going to run out of humanity sooner or later, and you never know when being able to make yourself more resistant to iron or immune to certain types of spells might be an advantage,” she said.
I blinked at her. The idea of humanity as an active advantage had never occurred to me. “Trust me, it’s not something I was planning to do on a regular basis. Shifting my blood is painful, and I’m not very good at it, which makes it hard to do things with any sort of precision. And it’s not like anyone can teach me how to do better.”
“I know Amy won’t, but your sister might be able to,” said the Luidaeg, as casually as if that wasn’t the most ludicrous thing in the world. August and I weren’t friends. We were only sisters on a technicality. She certainly wasn’t going to teach me how to better control the magic we’d inherited from our mother. The Luidaeg looked at my expression and shook her head. “I know you hate her. Believe me, I have a lot of experience with hating sisters. I don’t expect you to be her friend. But she may be the only other person in the world right now who understands how to use the tools you’ve been given, and that understanding is powerful. It could help you. At some point, one of you is going to need to swallow your pride and figure out how to get through this. So you went to Shadowed Hills, and you burned out half of your remaining humanity in order to talk to Rayseline. What did she say?”
I blinked, almost startled by the sudden shift back to the original topic. “Um. She’s willing to wake up, if I’m willing to testify for her. I think they’re finally going to give her the cure. Luna came in. She opened a Rose Road for us, and she banished me from Shadowed Hills. I’m not welcome in my own liege’s halls until she changes her mind, and I don’t think she’s going to. From there, we followed Spike into the roses. He found an opening, and we went through it, and we fell, all the way to the ground in a pitch-black little bubble-realm. The one where Simon had kept Luna and Raysel. He’d anchored it to the Rose Roads.”
“The failure was always good at borrowing and bending magic, when he had access to the blood that held it, and he had Luna,” said the Luidaeg grimly. “Go on.”
“I broke the realm enough that we were able to get out of it, and then I . . . I called on your mother, and she answered. Luidaeg, Maeve answered me.” I stared at her in brief and burning awe. Now that I wasn’t actually in the moment, the importance of it was settling across my shoulders like a heavy shawl, weighing me down. “She was listening, and she helped us.”
“Mom always listened to travelers. She said her sister wouldn’t do it, and her husband could only hear the ones who belonged to him, so it fell on her,” said the Luidaeg. “No one ever said the Three were dead—or, sorry, no one who would know what the hell they were talking about ever said they were dead. I’m sure someone, somewhere, said it at least once.”
I frowned. “If you’re sure, how is that not lying?”
“I walked it back before it could hurt me, and I didn’t intend to lie when it came out of my mouth, and I’m not the topic right now—you are, and where Simon may have taken Quentin. I want that kid back as badly as you do. I don’t have so many friends that I can afford to act like any of them are expendable.”
“She’s always done that when she slept,” said the Luidaeg. “She’s not the only one of us, either. You know how the King is the land in the Summerlands? Well, it’s worse for a Firstborn in their own realm. When Cailleach Skerry was mine to call my own, it would flood and surrender itself to the sea every time I slept. After my children died, the waters failed to recede, and it was lost. I wonder if it’s going to come back now that the Roane are home again. As long as the mist remains thick and unchanging, my sister is safely unconscious.”
“I’m surprised it wasn’t cold. She’s a winter-thing, isn’t she?”
The Luidaeg hesitated, and then said, “That’s a very human way of looking at the seasons. Remember that Titania was the Summer Queen. She’s a creature of feast and harvest, growth and plenty . . . and decay and destruction. The summer isn’t only about good things. Humans just think of it that way because they fear the cold. Roses don’t bloom as well in winter. Apples don’t ripen. My sister was always a summer creature.”