Night and Silence

by Seanan McGuire

  “Like alchemy,” said Quentin.

  “Surprisingly, yes,” I said. I looked around the room until I spotted a piece of tin foil in one of the trash baskets. “Get the foil. I don’t want any of us touching this thing.”

  “But what is it?” he asked.

  “It’s a collection of herbs specifically designed to repel the fae,” I said grimly. May and I exchanged a look. “There’s no way she would have known how to make this without someone showing her.”

  “Lovely,” muttered May.

  “Yeah,” I agreed, and went back to rooting through the dresser while Quentin wrapped the sachet in foil.

  There was a sachet in every drawer. By the time I closed the last one, my nose was running and my eyes were burning, like the allergy attack I’d never particularly wanted to have. Even worse, my natural tendency to heal from every little thing didn’t seem to be kicking in. If I wanted to go playing with unfamiliar magical items, I could just pay the consequences.

  I was wiping my eyes and trying not to sneeze again when Jocelyn came thundering up the stairs, a denim jacket clutched in both hands. She stopped in the doorway, eyes going wide before her face fell in sudden, sympathetic sorrow.

  “Oh, I didn’t even think,” she wailed. “She’s your daughter and I was just talking about how amazing you are, not how much you must miss her and how scared you must be. Well, don’t you worry. I’ll take you right straight to where they found her car. You can find out everything you need to know.”

  “Here’s hoping,” I said uneasily. She must have taken my red eyes and runny nose as the aftereffects of weeping. Good. Better that than having her figure out the truth. Her blood was thin enough that the charms hadn’t been bothering her, and I didn’t want her to suddenly realize what they were or what they were supposed to have been doing.

  There was nothing in the room to indicate who might have taken Gilly. I didn’t like those sachets, and I desperately wanted to know where they’d come from, but they didn’t feel malicious to me. Whoever had made those for Gilly had been trying to keep the fae away from her. Did that mean she had been in danger? Or did it just mean that she was going to a school where a certain amount of magical thinking was innate in the student body, and someone had managed to get lucky?

  I needed to talk to Bridget. If anyone would know how many of the students had decided they needed to put up wards against Tinker Bell, it would be her.

  Jocelyn continued to beam, smile only wavering for an instant when she saw Quentin slip the foil-wrapped sachet into his pocket. “What’s that?” she asked suspiciously. “I don’t think I’m supposed to let people take things.”

  I refrained from pointing out that she probably wasn’t supposed to let people into the room, either, or leave them alone while she ran off to get her coat. It wouldn’t do us any good to alienate the closest thing we currently had to a lead. “My lunch,” I said. “The dog was getting way too interested in it, and he needs to keep a clear nose.”

  As if on cue, Madden walked over and stuck his nose against the crotch of her jeans in classic canine fashion. Jocelyn laughed shrilly and bent to start patting his head. While she had clearly been able to see through the illusions that made him look like a Golden retriever, she gave no indication she suspected him of being anything other than some kind of fancy fairy dog. The education her mother had given her on the fae had clearly skipped over a few places. Most people aren’t that comfortable petting the Cu Sidhe.

  I nodded toward Quentin while Jocelyn was distracted, signaling him to come forward. He grimaced but did as he was bid, stepping up and putting his hand on Jocelyn’s shoulder.

  “Hey,” he said. “Lead the way?”

  Jocelyn blushed and dimpled as she turned to do exactly that. Quentin followed. I picked up Madden’s leash and looked to May.

  “Don’t-look-here and keep searching,” I said tightly. “I’ll text you with our location.”

  May sighed. “I thought you might say that,” she said. Raking her fingers through the air, she gathered two handfuls of shadows and muttered something under her breath in a language I didn’t know. The air rippled, folding around her. As soon as I looked away, I knew I’d lose track of her. Don’t-look-here spells don’t make people literally invisible. They just make them . . . difficult. Difficult to see, difficult to care about seeing. As long as May didn’t break anything or otherwise call the kind of attention to herself that couldn’t be ignored, she’d be fine.

  “See if there’s anything else around here like those sachets,” I said. “I don’t like them. Something’s off about this.”

  If she answered me, it was quiet enough and far enough behind the spell that I couldn’t make it out. I turned and followed the others down the stairs.

  They had just reached the bottom—and more importantly, Jocelyn was just starting to look put out over my absence—when I got there. She relaxed at the sight of me. “I was afraid we’d lost you!” she said chirpily.

  “I’m difficult to lose,” I replied. “Lead the way.”

  Voices around the side of the house alerted me to the location of the missing police as we stepped off the porch and onto the lawn. Jocelyn made a shushing noise and motioned for us to follow her away from the house, waiting until we were a good distance down the sidewalk before she said, “I sort of didn’t tell anyone you were here. How did you get in, anyway?”

  “Magic,” I said.

  Predictably, her eyes lit up. “Oh, wow. Oh, gosh. I can’t wait to tell Mom I met you. Did I tell you she used to know you, when she was my age? She—”

  Jocelyn kept chattering as we walked down the sidewalk, Quentin and I looking carefully in all directions, Madden keeping his nose pressed to the ground like he could sniff out all of Berkeley, like he could solve any mystery if he breathed in deeply enough. I understood the feeling. More and more, my magic was leading me by the nose, telling me what I needed to know as long as I was careful not to catch a cold.

  Of course, right now, my nose was so stuffed up from inhaling that weird herbal mix that I was sort of impressed I could still breathe at all. Gillian had been turning herself into a big walking allergen.

  Allergen . . . “Hey, Jocelyn,” I said casually, interrupting her explanation of this one time her mother had been in San Francisco and saw a real kelpie, “do you have allergies?”

  Jocelyn wrinkled her nose. “I never used to, but they’ve been really bad this semester,” she admitted. Then she brightened. “Why? Are there some sort of magic flowers that bloom once a century getting pollen everywhere? That would explain everything.”

  The way she talked about Faerie was almost endearing. She had the sort of wide-eyed wonder I hadn’t possessed since I was a very small child. It was definitely exhausting. Only the fact that we were at UC Berkeley—a campus which I knew for a fact hosted multiple live-action roleplaying games every week, as well as meetings of the Society for Creative Anachronism—kept me from slapping my hand over her mouth and reminding her, in no uncertain terms, that Faerie is supposed to be a secret.

  Letting her chatter didn’t hurt anything. Anyone who heard her would assume she was talking about something that didn’t exist. Trying to convince her to shut up would draw a lot more attention to us. And maybe if I kept telling myself that, I’d be able to believe it. The habits of secrecy had been so ground into me, for so long, that this felt like I was breaking the rules, even though I wasn’t saying anything forbidden.

  “Not quite,” I said. “I did smell something a little funny in your room, near Gillian’s desk.”

  “Oh.” Jocelyn’s face shuttered itself, expression becoming unreadable. “She doesn’t do drugs, if that’s what you’re asking. She doesn’t do anything. She goes to class, she studies with her friends, and she refuses to talk about anything worth talking about. You know, I asked her about bringing you to campus to see our classes once, a
nd she said she didn’t want anything to do with you? Like anyone could mean that about a hero!”

  My stomach clenched again. I was suddenly grateful for the burning in my eyes. It made it harder for me to tear up.

  Quentin cleared his throat. “Maybe talking like that about Toby’s daughter when she’s missing isn’t really very nice, you know? Do you think you could, I dunno, cut it out?”

  “Oh.” Jocelyn paled. “I’m sorry. I . . . I intended no offense.” If we hadn’t been walking, I’m pretty sure she would have dropped to her knees in her hurry to placate me.

  The more time we spent with this kid, the more I wanted to shake her mother. It was one thing to encourage a thin-blooded changeling to learn more about her own heritage. I had no objection to that. It was something else altogether to teach her just enough to mess her up and then leave her to figure out how to interact with the world. Some of the mistakes Jocelyn was making could get her killed if she made them around the wrong people.

  Not for the first time, I genuinely regretted the decisions I’d made in the aftermath of Devin’s death. He’d been a terrible person. There was no question of that. He had abused the trust of the kids in his care, all of whom had deserved better. I had deserved better. Dare had deserved better. But by Oberon’s eyes, at least he’d given changelings a place to go and be with people who understood. He had kept them safe from everyone but himself, and that had made him a monster, but it wouldn’t have been able to happen if there hadn’t been a need for the so-called “safety” he provided.

  I should have done more to fill the void left when he’d died. I should have been there. All of us changelings who made it to adulthood with our hearts intact should have been there. And we hadn’t been.

  “None taken,” I said. “Breathe.”

  A faint trickle of color came back into Jocelyn’s cheeks. She kept walking.

  The route she’d chosen took us across a different slice of campus than our walk to the residence hall. Trees blanketed the path, their fallen leaves making our footing treacherous. I inhaled the good green scent of them, trying to chase those awful herbs from my nose. We came around a curve, and the lazily flashing lights of campus police cars ground my heart to a stop.

  Gillian’s car—a solid, dependable-looking sedan, the sort of thing it made perfect sense to send to college with a young woman living away from home for the first time—sat at the middle of a square of caution tape. That was a good thing: it hadn’t been towed or impounded yet. It was also surrounded, first by the officers who were examining it, and then by a ring of onlookers.

  “Hell,” I muttered, coming to a stop. “This is a problem.”

  The residence hall had been the site of vandalism, but not kidnapping. There had been no blood on the glass there, no reason to suspect foul play. Gillian’s car, on the other hand . . .

  This was a real crime scene, not a mere nuisance, and there was no way the police were going to let us anywhere near it.

  Jocelyn pointed at the building beyond the car. “That’s Wheeler Hall,” she said. “That’s where the English Department is. Gillian likes to study in their computer lab. She says it’s more peaceful than studying in our room.” Her tone made it clear that she disagreed with this decision.

  I swallowed my first response, which was to point out that she could have just told us to go to Wheeler Hall and spared us this entire awkward walk. I also swallowed my second response, which would have been considerably less polite. In the end, I forced a shallow smile and said, “Everyone learns differently. You’ve been very helpful. We appreciate it.”

  She beamed and seemed to be waiting for something. I exchanged a glance with Quentin. He shrugged.

  I looked back to her, studying her expression more carefully. For all that she was smiling like a child who’d just ridden her bike without the training wheels for the very first time, there was a calculation going on behind her eyes.

  “Yes?” I said finally.

  “Aren’t you going to thank me?” she asked. The calculation in her eyes grew stronger.

  Understanding dawned. “No,” I said. I didn’t bother keeping the disgust out of my voice. It belonged there. “I’m not in your debt, and I’m not accepting any responsibility for you. You are not my vassal. This was a mean trick, and you should be ashamed of yourself for trying to play it.”

  Faerie’s relationship with gratitude is . . . well, complicated. When so many of your citizens can be bound by a careless word or a casually given promise, saying something as simple as “thank you” becomes dangerous. So it’s forbidden, or at the very least, discouraged. We don’t thank each other. We praise. We say: “that was a nice thing to do.” We flatter. We avoid the direct and inescapable display of gratitude. Naturally, this has caused some people—almost all of them either humans who’ve discovered the existence of Faerie or changelings who’ve been shoved so far to the outskirts that they lost the shape of their own heritage—to decide that saying “thank you” acknowledges an inescapable debt between the one who says it and the one who receives it.

  Jocelyn’s smile guttered out like a candle in a stiff wind, and the calculation in her eyes surged to the forefront, eclipsing everything else. “It was not a mean trick,” she said mulishly. “I only want what I’m owed. That’s all. Gillian’s been sharing a room with me for months, and this is the first time I’ve even seen you. I should have been her best friend by now. We should have been sitting in your kitchen telling stories and learning important things, not standing in this mess, with these,” the sweep of her hand encompassed the paths and buildings around us, and the mass of gawkers who thronged around the caution tape, “people.” There was a sneer in her voice on the last word.

  People. Oh, oak and ash, people. Jocelyn wasn’t saying anything that was actually forbidden—she sounded like an ordinary college kid being weird rather than anything more dangerous—but she was going to get there, now that she was angry, and I didn’t know what to do about it.

  From the stricken look on his face, neither did Quentin. His eyes were getting wider and wider, and he was staring at Jocelyn like she was a nightmare he’d never considered could be real. Madden whined, pressing against my leg.

  Jocelyn’s eyes narrowed, her lower lip pushing out into a pout. “You owe me,” she repeated.

  “That strikes me as unlikely, Miss Lewis, but if you’d like to come see me during office hours, we can discuss the school’s mechanisms for settling grievances.” The new voice was female, haunted by the ghost of an Irish accent, like the speaker had been in California for so long that even her vowels were applying for citizenship.

  My shoulders, locked tight with stress and fear, relaxed just the smallest bit, and I turned, a weary smile on my face. “Hi, Bridget,” I said.

  “Didn’t expect to see you here this morning,” she replied, giving me a quick nod while most of her attention remained fixed on Jocelyn. “Miss Lewis? Don’t you have something else you should be doing? Something elsewhere?”

  Jocelyn looked back and forth from Bridget to me, eyes wide and mouth hanging open. Catching herself, she closed it with a snap, and spat, “I should have known you were working together to keep me out. I should have known. I hope you rot.”

  She spun on her heel and stalked away before any of us could reply, hurrying to get the last word in. We let her. If it meant she would actually leave, she could have the last word, the last sentence, the last soliloquy. I didn’t need it as much as I needed this to be over.

  “Well,” said Bridget into the pause that followed. “That was bracing. Now what in the world are you doing here?”

  I stared at her, and I couldn’t think of a single thing to say.

  FIVE

  SILENCE STRETCHED BETWEEN US. The students who’d come to watch the police at work talked and pointed, not noticing our dismay. The wind rustled through the leaves and the sound of cars drifted ov
er from the nearby neighborhoods, but in that moment, I would have sworn that everything else in the universe had simply stopped. The world was frozen, or it should have been. It should have shown at least that much respect.

  Slowly, Bridget frowned. “Toby? What’s wrong?”

  I shook my head.

  Bridget had applied the fairy ointment to her eyes more lightly than Jocelyn had, and with a defter hand, blending it into her makeup so that it added a certain shimmer but didn’t make her look quite so much like she had an addiction to glitter gel. It helped that her supply was almost certainly more refined than Jocelyn’s. Her husband, Etienne, is Sylvester Torquill’s seneschal, and as such, has access to the finest ingredients in the duchy. Even if he can’t mix the stuff himself, he can give the components to Bridget, who can pass them along to Walther. Walther isn’t just one of the best alchemists I’ve ever known, he’s something of a social activist among the fae and has been working for decades to make simple alchemical tinctures accessible to changelings and fae who live outside the Courts.

  It’s an admirable thing to do. It’s even more admirable considering that now that his aunt is back on the throne of Silences, he could easily go home and live the pampered, privileged life of a court alchemist, adored by his people for his part in getting their Kingdom back, wanting for nothing. Instead, he chose to stay in the Mists, to stay at UC Berkeley, and to keep supplying people like Bridget with the fairy ointment they need to be a part of our world.

  Bridget isn’t a changeling. She’s as human as they come, a fact evidenced by the traces of gray at her temples. When she married Etienne, she got a special dispensation from the crown to continue working in the mortal world while also living with him at Shadowed Hills. It helped that she had made it clear that she wouldn’t move to Shadowed Hills if it meant giving up her job, and where she goes, Chelsea goes. Etienne loves his wife, but he dotes on his daughter.