Night and Silence

by Seanan McGuire

  Lucky me, it had been us. I could feel the ice forming on my eyelashes and in my hair as the tips of my ears and fingers started going numb. I didn’t know how the Baobhan Sith had been able to survive in here for as long as she had, but I knew I couldn’t pull off the same stunt. If I didn’t get pulled back into the real world soon, I was either going to suffocate or freeze. Maybe both.

  The speed with which I heal means that most forms of death are somewhat impermanent for me. Break my bones, slit my throat, drown me, I’ll get back up again as soon as I’ve had a chance to knit myself back together. Kill me in the Shadow Roads, though . . .

  If I suffocated and froze to death at the same time, would I recover? Would I want to? I could be lost here forever, freezing and choking, only to wake up and do it all over again. Maybe dying here would mean dying for good. And then Gillian would be lost forever, and Tybalt would . . .

  Tybalt would break. After what Mom had done to him, if he lost me in a place that should have been his to control, he would break. I couldn’t let that happen. I needed to survive for so many reasons, and only a few of them were me.

  The Baobhan Sith shrieked, the sound thin and reedy in the attenuated atmosphere. That was all the warning I got before she charged again. This is a bad idea, I thought, and held my ground, waiting for the sound of screaming to draw close. When I judged that she was only a few feet away I dropped my arms, giving her free access to my throat and chest.

  She slammed into me with all the force of a cannonball, her fangs clamping down on my shoulder, ripping me open like it was of no consequence. Unlike her, I bore the assault in silence. I couldn’t scream without air.

  But I could bleed.

  Ice formed on the blood trickling down my chest and arm, turning the hot liquid sharp and painfully cold. I closed my eyes. It changed nothing, but I was counting on that blood, and I needed to offer no resistance. The Baobhan Sith drank, and I bled, and the edges of my awareness started to get fuzzy, like the world was slipping away.

  Tybalt roared in the distant dark, furious and desperate. That was all the warning either I or the Baobhan Sith had before he ploughed into her, ripping her teeth out of my shoulder and freeing another hot gout of blood.

  So much for the Luidaeg’s sandwich, I thought, among the blank spots that were starting to colonize my mind. Freezing to death isn’t supposed to hurt much. Neither is bleeding to death, or suffocation. If I was shooting for “painless,” I had managed to find the trifecta.

  Arms slid under my butt and shoulders, scooping me up and cradling me close. I was still bleeding heavily enough that Tybalt’s shirt was going to be ruined. I was willing to bet he wouldn’t mind, under the circumstances.

  “Hold on, October, for the love of Maeve, hold on,” he said, and broke into a run.

  I tried to count the seconds, but they slipped away like eels, darting off into the dark. I settled for struggling to remember not to breathe. There was nothing here for me. If I exhaled, all I would be doing was losing the last of the air in my lungs, and the freeze would follow. I couldn’t let that happen. So I held my breath, and Tybalt ran, and then we were breaking into the light, into the bright and burning light. I cracked my eyes open, dislodging the ice on my lashes. We were in a deserted ballroom with cloth over the furniture and cobwebs covering the ceiling.

  Tybalt ran for the nearest sheet-draped couch, an overstuffed thing like something out of a Regency romance, and all but threw me onto it, his hands fluttering from my face to my frozen hair to the wound on my shoulder. He didn’t quite touch it, but pulled back, looking even more anxious. I took a shallow breath. It was good.

  “It’ll heal,” I rasped.

  His eyes snapped back to my face. “You must stop doing this, little fish, unless you intend to be the death of me.”

  “You saved me.” I lifted one hand to trail my fingertips against his cheek. His skin was warm. It was almost impossible to believe we had been in the same place. “I wasn’t scared. I never am, when you’re there to save me.”

  “My October,” he said, and turned his head to kiss my palm. “The death of me.”

  “You should be so lucky.” I sat up, sending more ice cascading away from my body. My head spun. Even I have limits, and I was finding them fast. “Ow. Okay. Are we in the knowe?”

  “We are, but you need time to recover. We should—”

  “We should get moving. May and Quentin didn’t stop to play with the Baobhan Sith. They’re already inside, and the false Queen is only going to believe that May is me for so long.” If she believed it at all.

  Without her Siren blood, she couldn’t compel them to fight each other—she was Banshee and Sea Wight now, and nothing else—but she could hurt them. She had run the kingdom for over a century, and she had always demonstrated powers that none of her bloodlines possessed. Meaning she was a borrower, using charms and tinctures to access the magic of others. We might have driven her from her knowe and into the Kingdom of Silences, but we’d never found her store of potions. I hadn’t even thought to look. We had been dealing with the ascension of a new queen and the collapse of the old queen’s knowe.

  Now she was back, and there was no telling what she had access to, or what she could do if we gave her the chance. I stood by the choice to send decoys. That didn’t mean I was going to leave them without backup.

  “You should lie still,” Tybalt snapped. “I don’t know how much blood you lost in there.”

  “I still have blood in my body,” I said. “I’ll be fine.”

  He stared at me. Then, to my surprise, he smiled.

  “You will never change, will you?” he asked, offering me his hand.

  I took it, sliding to my feet. The outline of my body remained on the sheet, etched in pinkish ice-diluted blood. “I wasn’t planning to,” I said. “Now come on. We need to find Gillian and get to our people.”

  “The knowe is not fully awake,” he said, following me across the ballroom floor. “Pieces may be missing.”

  “We can work with that,” I said. When we reached the doors, I paused, putting my hand against them, and said, “My name is Sir October Daye. This is my friend, Tybalt, King of the Court of Dreaming Cats. I’m the one who found you after the last time you’d gone to sleep. I’m sorry I helped a bad woman claim and hold you. I didn’t mean to. We can let you rest after this, until no one remembers that she ever had any power over you. But right now, we need to find my daughter. A human girl. The bad woman has taken her. Can you help us find her?”

  “You’re talking to the walls again,” said Tybalt.

  “Don’t knock what works,” I said. Returning my attention to the door, I added, “Please?”

  The door swung open.

  The hall on the other side was too plain to have been the approach to a ballroom of this size. It was more suited to use by the servants, helping them to move through the knowe without being seen. I shot Tybalt a smug look and hurried down it, with him at my heels, until we reached another door.

  This one led to an abandoned kitchen. The fires were dead, the chopping tables were deserted. It was a strange, silent world. I paused, darting into one of the pantries, and emerged a moment later with a turkey leg the length of my forearm. Tybalt raised a brow.

  “How . . . ?”

  “Stasis spell,” I replied. “I’ve been raiding the kitchens at Shadowed Hills since I was a kid. The big knowes always keep the pantries full, in case someone important wants to demand, I don’t know, roast cockatrice at three o’clock in the afternoon.” The fae equivalent of the middle of the night.

  The wound on my shoulder itched as I started gnawing on my prize, the edges finally starting to heal. Tybalt shook his head.

  “Sometimes I forget the depths of your misspent youth,” he said.

  “I was never the best thief in the Mists, but the best trained me,” I said.


  We kept walking. Beyond the kitchen was the library, and beyond that was a spiral staircase, winding downward. The “windows,” such as they were, provided crystal portholes into the ocean beyond the shore. The water glowed a pale, pearlescent blue, and through the glass we could see all manner of strange fish, both fae and mortal, swimming idly by. Tybalt frowned again, eyeing them.

  “The Undersea must have been very eager to curry favor, to have allowed such an intrusion into their territory,” he said.

  “That, or they really, really wanted to be sure they’d have a weak point to attack if it actually came to war.” I pointed to the nearest “window,” shaking my head. “Dianda could punch that thing to shards in under a minute, and she’s their duchess. Imagine what an actual soldier could do.”

  It felt strange not to be running. But there was no blood trail here, and Gillian had no magic for us to follow. Letting the knowe lead us was the best option we had. If we were walking into a trap, we would find a way out of it. We always did.

  There was a door at the bottom of the stairs. I hesitated. Then I handed Tybalt my turkey leg, grasped the knob, and opened it.

  The hallway on the other side was familiar, stretching out for what looked like forever. The walls were mist-colored marble; the ceiling was a blue so dark that it became virtually black, blending into the shadows at its edges. White marble pillars held the whole thing up, as much for show as any architectural reality. My breath caught in my throat, choking me.

  This was the first place we had seen when the false Queen had pried the knowe open, calling it back from whatever sleep waited for our hollow hills when we didn’t need them anymore. The walls had started to bleed fog as she had led the way along the hall, softening the lines of the pillars and blanketing the floor, erasing it. So why weren’t they doing it now?

  The answer was obvious, when I stopped to think about: they weren’t bleeding fog because it would have attracted attention, and I had done something the old Queen would never have thought to do. I had asked the knowe for help.

  Knowes don’t always like the people who hold them. They don’t have to. Power keeps them open, and power keeps the throne. But the king is the land in Faerie, and when the king is the land, the land gets to have opinions just like a person would. The false Queen’s knowe liked me, even though she didn’t. Buildings have always been among my biggest fans.

  I reclaimed my turkey leg from Tybalt, caressing the nearest wall with my free hand as we resumed walking. I was eating as fast as I could, bolting down roast meat without doing more than the most cursory job of chewing. Taking time to eat in this sort of situation felt frivolous, but the wound at my neck still itched, and there was enough blood on my clothing to make it clear that I needed to replenish my veins before I was forced to open them again. Even my body can’t build something out of nothing.

  “Please don’t choke to death,” said Tybalt, voice low. His feet made no sound on the marble floor, unlike my own. If anyone heard us coming, it wouldn’t be because of him. “I would be distraught if I had to contend with your corpse before I could even call myself a decent widower.”

  “Sweet talker,” I said, around another mouthful of turkey.

  He smiled faintly. We walked on side by side until we reached a closed, filigree-laden door. The patterns were abstract as ever, the echo of wind and waves and the distant rolling lines of what could have been hills or dunes. They might have held the secret of who had opened this knowe in the first place, whose hands had done the crafting and whose tears had sealed the doors. There wasn’t time to worry about that now.

  “Sorry about this; I’ll come back and clean it up if I can,” I said, bending to set my turkey bone in the corner with as much respect as I could muster. “If I can’t, if I’m dead or something, maybe you could let some pixies in? They’d be happy to clean it up for you.” They could also keep the knowe open, assuming it wanted to be. They’re always looking for safe places to build their houses and raise their children, and while much of Faerie might think they’re vermin, they love their homes. They defend them.

  I glanced at Tybalt. He nodded. I opened the doors.

  The central receiving hall was a fairy-tale nightmare of white marble and vaulted ceilings, everything shrouded in thick, cloying mist. The scent of rowan and ice hung over everything like a warning. We were behind the central dais. Voices drifted in our direction, one raised in irritation, the other cool, calm: the voice of a woman who thought she had everything under control.

  “You promised me they’d be here by now! Why aren’t they here?”

  “Patience, Jocelyn. One would think you had been raised by wolves and not by mortals. Even humans understand the importance of manners.”

  “I’m tired of this. I want what I was promised.”

  “You’ll have it. You’ll have everything.”

  I looked at Tybalt and pointed to the right side of the dais before making an exaggerated shooing motion. His eyes narrowed as he nodded understanding. He didn’t like splitting up, but he saw the sense in it.

  Where were May and Quentin? The seaside entrance led directly to this room. They should have been here by now, taunting the false Queen, throwing her off-balance. The fact that they weren’t here was bad.

  My foot hit something buried in the fog on the floor, and the situation went from bad to worse. I knelt, trying to be as quiet as I could, and fanned the fog away from May’s sleeping face. She was wearing a ballgown I’d never seen before, a confection of heather gray and soft lilac, and any hope that the false Queen might have mistaken her for me died at the sight of those colors. The false Queen always dressed people as she considered suitable. She had never dressed me like a cloud. Usually, she dressed me more like an abattoir.

  The pallor of May’s gown made it easy to see the arrow protruding from her abdomen, short and blunt and dangerous. Her chest was rising and falling in the easy rhythm of the sleeping: elf-shot. The false Queen had hit her with elf-shot.

  Even now that we had a cure for the stuff, I was still damn tired of it.

  I straightened and resumed my cautious forward movement. Quentin was probably asleep somewhere in the mist on the other side of the dais, similarly dressed for a party that was never going to happen, that he was never going to attend.

  “They should be here by now.” Jocelyn again, her voice descending into a whine.

  The false Queen sighed heavily. “They’ll come. We have something October can’t possibly resist. Don’t we, Gillian, dear?”

  There was a sound, like flesh striking flesh, and a whimper. I hadn’t heard it in years. It didn’t matter. The sound bypassed my brain and lanced straight for my heart, breaking it and lacing it back together in the same moment. All thought of stealth or subtlety fled my mind as I drew my knife and broke into a run, flinging myself around the front of the dais.

  The false Queen of the Mists turned her head, looking at me with moonstruck eyes as cold as light reflecting off the water, and smiled.

  “Hello, October,” she said. “So nice of you to join us.”

  SEVENTEEN

  THE FALSE QUEEN HAD clearly put a great deal of time and thought into this moment, staging everything to make the biggest possible impact. She was standing at the center of the dais, dressed in a gown of dark blue silk that darkened to black where it pooled at her feet, shimmering with oil-slick rainbows that almost distracted from her skin, which was as pale and faintly blue as the flesh of a drowned sailor. Her hair—fine, straight, and white as sea foam—was pulled over her shoulder and allowed to fall in a tangled line all the way to her feet.

  Jocelyn stood behind her, dressed in a blue linen version of that same gown, looking for all the world like a child playing in her mother’s closet. She was beaming, triumphant and cruel, as if she had finally been given her heart’s desire.

  And on the ground, at the false Queen’s feet, was Gillia
n.

  She was on her hands and knees, panting, a red mark on one cheek where the false Queen had slapped her. There was blood on her clothing, and one sleeve of her sweatshirt was torn, revealing the scrapes beneath. She looked . . .

  She looked amazing. She was injured and terrified, surrounded by things she didn’t know or understand, and she was still struggling to keep herself upright, refusing to give in to fear. My brave, beautiful girl.

  “Let her go,” I snarled. “You have no right—”

  “She has no rights, thanks to you,” purred the false Queen. “The rights of changelings may be negotiable, but the rights of mortals? Those are nonexistent. I could slice her into pieces and hang them from every tree in the Mists, and I would have done nothing wrong in the eyes of anyone who matters. Even your precious pretender queen can’t claim I’ve broken the Law by taking her, because the Law was never intended to protect her. She’s no better than a beast in the field, ready for the slaughter, and you did this to her.”

  She grabbed Gillian’s arm, wrenching it behind her back. Gillian moaned, pain and exhaustion in equal measure, and my heart broke again. If this didn’t stop soon, there was going to be nothing left of me.

  “But I am a merciful Queen,” continued the false Queen. “I understand that everyone makes mistakes. Everyone lies. I’ll give her back to you, if you return what you stole from me.”

  “Do it, Mom,” moaned Gillian, seeming to see me for the first time. The desperation in her eyes was something no mother should ever have been forced to see. “Whatever you took, whatever you stole, just let her have it. Please.”

  “I can’t,” I whispered. Louder, I said, “I can’t. What you’re asking for is impossible.”