He looked at me for a moment with wide, startled eyes. Then he nodded, silently agreeing to follow my commands, and rolled into the fog, disappearing from view. That must have been enough to qualify as a shadow. The scent of pennyroyal and musk rose, and I knew he was gone, leaving me alone with Dugan.
Dugan Harrow: Daoine Sidhe. Blood magic, illusions, and whatever tricks he might have borrowed from the false Queen. His loyalties were first to power, second to himself, and third, ridiculous as it seemed, to her. He was still trying to be loyal enough to earn her good regard. What he thought that would get him was less clear—although with Daoine Sidhe, it’s so often about what gets them a path to the throne. The false Queen had no spouse, no heirs. Her relationship with the deposed King Rhys of Silences was the closest I’d ever seen her come to caring about another person. Staying close to her, letting her think he was sorry for his attempted betrayal and had become faithful . . . that might seem like a way to one day add “king” to his list of titles.
It was never going to happen. Even if he killed Nolan, Arden would still have her throne, and there was no way she was going to name her brother’s murderer as her heir. But if he didn’t understand the legitimacy of her claim, or if he somehow believed that he could override the decision of the High King and put his own nameless figurehead back in charge . . .
When all else fails, count on the arrogance and corruption of the purebloods. It almost always carries the day. And if there’s one thing I’ve learned about the arrogant, it’s that they really, really don’t like to be mocked.
Tybalt was on the Shadow Roads. He’d be halfway to Muir Woods by now, where he could gather forces to help him help me. Quentin and May, at minimum; Arden and her guards. I only needed to stall for a few minutes.
I pushed myself away from the floor and rose out of the fog, holding my knife in front of me as I turned to sneer in what I guessed was the correct direction. Dugan was standing at the base of the dais, Nolan kneeling in front of him with his hands bound behind his back. Nolan’s eyes were bright with rage. I guess no amount of temporal displacement will make kidnapping seem like anything but what it is.
There were no illusions on him now. Dugan Harrow stood before me revealed, from his dark green hair to the planes of his cheekbones, sharp enough to slice glass. He was handsome, there was no denying that. He was also horrible, rendered such by his own choices, which had stripped every scrap of decency away.
It was hard not to look at him and see exactly what Eira had been hoping to make of her descendants. He was here for power. Everything else was secondary.
“There you are,” said Dugan, sounding satisfied. He held up a rowan sheath, large enough to hold a blade slightly longer than mine. “Do you know what this is?”
“I have a bunch of guesses, but most of them aren’t fit for polite company, and the prince, at least, is polite.” I nodded toward Nolan. “Your Grace. Has he hurt you? I’ll cut off his ears if he’s hurt you.”
“Nothing I can’t recover from, Sir Daye,” said Nolan. “A few bruises. A few scrapes. Some wounded pride. Have you come to take me home?”
“That’s the plan.”
Dugan scowled. “Your attention should remain on me, if you want your precious prince to remain among the living.”
I lifted one eyebrow. “Why? Are you going to threaten stabbings? I love it when people threaten stabbings in front of witnesses. That makes it self-defense and means I’m much less likely to get in trouble for kicking the crap out of you.”
Dugan curled his lip and removed the sheath from his blade. My blood went cold. Nolan paled, leaning away as much as his current position would allow. Naturally. He was closer to the knife. He could probably feel the poison rolling off of it.
Dugan smirked, holding the iron knife up to make sure I saw every cold, pitted inch of it. It looked almost raw, like it had barely been touched by the blacksmith’s hammer. Every inch of me wanted to turn and run, fae instincts kicking in at the worst possible time. “Not so cocky now, are you, Sir Daye? Are you ready to negotiate? Or shall I slit this poor princeling’s throat, and remove one more pretender from the line of the throne?”
“Iron knives are sort of your thing, aren’t they, Dugan? Where do you keep getting them?” My own knife was silver. It would be no match for his. Silver is a soft metal. Fae metalworkers imbue it with layer upon layer of enchantment, making it harder and more capable of holding an edge. Iron would cancel all that out. If his knife hit mine, it would slice through the silverwork like it was butter, and I would be unarmed.
Since I wasn’t willing to attack him with what I had, I already functionally was.
“Only a fool refuses to use every tool available to him,” said Dugan.
“A fool, or a man with honor,” I snapped. Muir Woods wasn’t that far from the false Queen’s knowe. Tybalt had to be there by now. He had to be explaining. Arden wouldn’t want to wait—she would want to rush out and rescue her brother as quickly as possible—but Madden would be cautioning her to move slowly, to consider her actions. I didn’t know how much longer I would need to stall. “Does iron make you feel important? Does it make you feel big? I don’t care how much rowan you put between yourself and that shit, it’s going to eat you alive. You’re playing with fire. Or enriched uranium, assuming you even know what that is.”
Dugan sneered. “You talk a good game for someone who’s staying out of range. Not everyone has that privilege.” He grabbed Nolan by the hair, pulling his head back and laying the iron knife across his neck.
Nolan cried out in shock and pain, a look of raw embarrassment washing across his face on the heels of the sound. He didn’t want to show how badly this was hurting him. I wanted to tell him I didn’t think less of him for this, that no one could stay silent in the presence of iron, but I didn’t dare. Anything I said to him, instead of to Dugan, could make things even worse.
“What do you want, Dugan?” I asked, taking a step forward. “Do you want me? I’ll come to you if you’ll let him go.”
“What, so that your little friends can sweep in here and rescue you? No deal, Daye. I’ve heard the stories of what you’ve been up to since the last time we met. I could stab you a hundred times and you’d still get up and walk away. You’re no hostage, especially not against your own good behavior.”
“So what do you want?”
He looked at me, utterly arrogant and utterly calm, and said, “I want you to restore my lady to her former glory. Return to the pretender’s knowe, release the true Queen from her prison, and pour the sea back into her veins. When she stands before me, whole and hale, I’ll let this little liar go. He and his sister can live a happy life in exile, far from our shores. I have my lady’s word that no harm will come to them if they agree to go.”
“I can’t do that, Dugan.”
He pressed the knife harder against Nolan’s skin. Nolan whimpered. Eyes gleaming, Dugan looked at me and spat, “You can, and you will. If you can restore your whelp, you can restore a queen.”
“I didn’t restore Gillian!”
I hadn’t intended to shout, but the words came out of me barely shy of a scream, echoing through the room, stunning both of us into silence. Nolan held himself rigidly still, clearly struggling to maintain the dignity of a prince while under the touch of the iron knife. I kept my focus on Dugan, hoping he would believe me, knowing that he probably wouldn’t. Believing me would mean admitting that he had failed—that this, all of this, had been for nothing.
“I’m not the one who saved her,” I said, more softly. “I’m not the reason she’s alive. The Luidaeg did that. She wrapped my daughter in a Selkie skin to keep her alive. They can be bonded to humans, if there’s someone to start the process. Gillian isn’t human anymore, but it’s not because I was clever, or quick, or powerful. It’s because the sea witch took pity on her. I can’t save your queen. I never could.”
Dugan stared at me. “You’re lying.”
“I’m not. You have an iron knife to the throat of the Crown Prince in the Mists. If I could do what you wanted, I would do it. If I thought I could lie convincingly enough to make you let him go, I’d do that, too. Why would I stand here saying exactly what you don’t want to hear if it wasn’t the absolute truth? Let Nolan go. If you run, no one but me can follow you. Release him and run, and as long as you don’t come back to the Mists, I won’t help anyone track you down. I’ll swear on the root and the branch and in Oberon’s name, if that’s what you need.”
Dugan wavered, the knife in his hand dipping slightly—enough that I could see the blisters forming on Nolan’s throat. I swallowed hard, trying to keep my chin up, so neither of them would see how frightened I was.
“You’re lying,” Dugan said again, with less confidence this time.
“I’m not,” I said again. “If you let him go, you have my word, I won’t be the one who brings you back here.”
Nolan closed his eyes.
“You have no right to decide who is and is not fit to rule,” said Dugan. “You’re just a changeling. You have no authority to do what you’ve done.”
“And your queen is just a pawn, chosen by a woman who wanted to destroy everything King Gilad had built,” I said. “We could play this game all day. Your time is running out. Go. Once the others get here, this deal is off the table.”
Dugan opened his mouth to reply and froze as the scent of blackberry flowers and redwood bark wafted through the air. I didn’t turn. I didn’t need to.
“Time’s up,” I said, as Arden and her guard moved into position behind me. “Put down the knife, Dugan.”
He looked at me with the calm, resigned face of a man who knew he had nowhere left to go. He had backed himself into a corner. The odds were good that he was going to die here—or worse. The Law only forbade killing, after all. The purebloods were capable of doing so much worse than that, especially when they felt their families were threatened.
“No,” he said calmly. “I don’t think so.”
He pulled the knife away from Nolan’s throat and shoved him forward into the fog. I had time for an instant of relief before I realized what he was going to do.
“No!” I shouted, dropping my knife and breaking into a run, bolting toward him as fast as I could.
I wasn’t fast enough to stop him from slashing the knife across his throat. He fell, the blade still clutched in one hand, and I fell with him, clasping my hands over the wound to keep his blood as contained as possible. It wasn’t enough to stop that same blood from drenching me before I got it damped down, spattering on my cheek and lips.
So much blood. I closed my eyes and licked my lips, tuning out the sound of the people rushing all around me. The red haze of his memories descended, showing him creeping up on Gillian’s car with a potion in his hand, ready to attack and abduct her. I fought my way past it and saw him carrying her clothing into the walled courtyard that belonged to Janet. There was no sense of familiarity there. He was baiting a trap he had been told about by the false Queen, a secret from her reign that she was trying to use against me.
I licked my lips again, struggling not to laugh bitterly. He hadn’t known. He hadn’t known. He hadn’t known Janet was my grandmother, or that she was masquerading as Gillian’s stepmother, or that she owned the courtyard at all. She hadn’t told him, if she even knew. It had been a secret his Queen had been instructed to keep at all costs, and he’d been trying to use it to hurt me. Not stop me, no. Kennis, the courtyard, none of it had been intended to stop me. It was all a game, meant to slow me down and weaken my resolve, to panic me so much that when I finally found my daughter, I’d be willing to do whatever they asked in order to save her.
Save her. We had saved her. She wasn’t the same anymore, would never be the same again, but she had a future now, even if it wasn’t the one she had wanted. Dugan was captive. Nolan was safe. The false Queen was in Arden’s custody, with no allies left to help her get away and come after us again. It was over.
It was over.
Someone pushed me aside, Arden’s people rushing to do what they could to save a man who shouldn’t be saved. I dropped to my knees in the mist, put my hands over my face, and cried. Tybalt knelt beside me, putting his arms around me, but that didn’t change anything. The tears kept coming. He buried his face against my hair, and he cried, too, and everything was over, and everything was different, and I no longer knew what safety was, or what “home” looked like.
I didn’t know anything at all.
TWENTY-THREE
“ARE YOU SURE you want to do this?” May looked across the street to the house where Cliff and his family lived. My family, too. My daughter; my grandmother. Root and branch, had things always been this complicated?
Yes. I’d just been better at pretending they weren’t.
“The Luidaeg says she’ll be able to let Gillian and Janet come home in a few more hours,” I said. “I need to start getting our story straight.” Because that was the problem, now, wasn’t it? Gillian hadn’t made the Changeling’s Choice, not really, and she wasn’t a changeling anymore. She was a Selkie. She had the right to play fairy bride, and if she wanted to change the rules to make it a game of fairy daughter instead, she was allowed.
Cliff could never know what had happened to her. Like his lover and his wife before her, his daughter was going to spend the rest of her life lying to him, and one day, the three of us would stand at his funeral, draped in illusions that made us look older and other than we were.
“Do you want me to go in with you?”
“Who would you tell him you were? He knows I don’t have a sister.” I offered her a shaky smile. “Besides, I need to get this done so that Tybalt and I can get back to Muir Woods. Wouldn’t want to miss the train to Silences.”
May looked unsure. “I guess.”
The false Queen of the Mists was definitely not asleep in the Kingdom of Silences, no matter what Walther’s family said: she was in one of the towers at Arden’s knowe, awake and under constant guard. Lowri had been placed in charge of that particular duty, since there was no concern she had any lingering loyalty to her former mistress. Really, the only concern with Lowri was that she might “accidentally” spit in the false Queen’s food. Once I was done talking to Cliff, I was going to be accompanying Madden, Tybalt, and a small detachment of Arden’s guard to Silences to find out what they actually had in their custody.
Big fun. Bigger fun, by far, than talking to the man I had once believed was the love of my life about why his daughter wasn’t home yet.
I took a deep breath. “Here goes nothing,” I said, and started across the street.
The doorbell was still echoing when Cliff jerked the door open, panting slightly with the exertion of running from wherever he’d been in the house. His eyes flicked from me to the empty spaces on either side of me, and his face fell, fleeting hope dying before it could bloom.
“October,” he said.
There was a time when he spoke my name with love. There was a time when he looked at me like I was the most beautiful woman in the world, like I was Helen of Troy and he was ready to launch a thousand ships to save me. That time passed years ago, and as I looked at him now, all I felt was pity, and a little regret that he no longer believed he could lean on me.
Then again, when I’d needed saving, he hadn’t exactly broken out the fleet. “Breathe, Cliff,” I said. “Gillian is fine.”
He froze. Every inch of him seemed to have been transformed suddenly to stone, leaving him incapable of anything beyond standing there and staring at me. “How . . .” he managed. Then: “Where. Where is she? October, where is my daughter?”
“Our daughter is with Miranda, receiving a medical examination from my Uncle Sylvester’s private physician.” I looked at him steadily. “She’s fine. Sh
e’s alive, she’s relatively unhurt, and she should be home soon.”
Cliff sagged in the doorway. My “rich Uncle Sylvester” has always been a constant in our relationship: a man of unclear relationship to my family whose money was virtually infinite, and who allowed me to do odd jobs for cash when necessary. The fact that Uncle Sylvester had never paid my bills or put me through college had seemed more like tough love than cruelty, back then, and even now, Cliff was clearly prepared to believe I had access to a man who could afford his own private doctor.
That was good, because I was lying. Janet and Gillian were still with the Luidaeg, and it was going to be quite some time before I felt like reintroducing my daughter to my liege, much less to the members of his Court. Sylvester was family to me, in his sideways Faerie way. I wasn’t ready for Gillian to look at him and judge what she didn’t understand.
“She’s all right,” he said, words slow and heavy and deliberate.
I nodded. “She’s all right.”
“She’s . . . you’re sure?” He stepped forward, grabbing me by the shoulders, his large hands engulfing the curve of my upper arms. “You’re not lying to me to soften the blow. You’re sure she’s all right.”
“She’s fine,” I said firmly. “Shaken, yes, absolutely. She had a real scare, and she’s probably going to need some time to recover. I’ve turned everything I found over to the authorities, and I’m sure they’re going to find the jerks who thought this would be a funny prank.”
Cliff’s expression hardened. “Prank,” he echoed.
“They’d heard about her being kidnapped while she was still in high school.” This was the hard part. This was the part that cast blame, however deserved, on me.
If not for Jocelyn’s burning need to be a part of Faerie—with blaming Gillian for not wanting to be—there would have been nothing for Dugan and the false Queen to grasp hold of. They might still have been able to get to Gillian, but with Janet’s anti-fae charms everywhere, it would have been a lot harder, and a lot sloppier. The dangerous side of hero worship is stalking and obsession, and I had been Jocelyn’s hero.
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