“Charming,” said the Ellyllon, sitting up straight as his wings stilled. “I would recommend not moving if you don’t have to.”
“Wasn’t planning to,” I said. We were in a minefield all of a sudden, and I was glad I hadn’t tried the frosting trick here. These wires were thin enough that I would probably have broken a few with the weight of cheap canned frosting, and if there’s a more embarrassing way to get elf-shot, I certainly can’t think of it.
“October!”
I turned. May and Jazz were rushing down the hall, Quentin and Raj close behind them. Quentin, for one, looked like he was on the verge of panic. I guess the possible consequences of gambling his face on me surviving long enough to get married were finally hitting home.
“Stay there,” I said, pulling my hands away from my face and gesturing empathetically for them to keep their distance. “Do not come past the door.”
“Why?” May pulled up short, putting out her arms to stop the others before their momentum could carry them past the threshold. “What’s going on in there?”
“Massive boobytrap,” I said. “It’s not safe to move in here.”
“But you’re moving in there,” said Quentin.
“Believe me, I’ve noticed, and I’m not thrilled about it at the moment, so just give us a second to figure out what to do, okay?”
The Ellyllon had broken several strands when he knelt next to the fallen Candela. I offered him my hand. “Come on, get up,” I said. “Tybalt?”
“As always, I am your faithful servant,” he said, and when I pulled the Ellyllon to his feet, Tybalt was right there to sweep the startled healer into his arms. “You may want to hold your breath,” he said, politely enough, and hurled himself into the nearest patch of shadow, dragging the healer with him.
If his passing broke any further trip wires, their arrows didn’t hit anyone—namely, me. I held perfectly still, looking at the gleaming lines all around my feet, exquisitely aware of how precarious my position was. At any moment, I could set off a trap and be sleeping for a long, long time. And this was only the first room!
Even if the High King’s own seneschal didn’t warrant more than a glorified hotel room, I had to assume there were at least two more rooms here—the bedroom and the bathroom. And there would probably also be closets, and any one of them could be trapped from here to Mag Mell, and she could be in any of them, assuming she was here at all. Nothing said she’d been taken inside the knowe. Maybe she’d been abducted out in the mortal world, where she would have been less protected even in public. Thanks to the night-haunts and the Doppelganger’s use of her magic, I was reasonably sure she was still alive, but that wasn’t necessarily a good thing.
Tybalt and the Ellyllon reappeared in the hallway outside, Tybalt shoving the Ellyllon at May before diving back into the shadows. That was my cue. Careful of the remaining strands, I stooped and lifted the fallen Candela into my arms, positioning us both to keep her from breaking any more pieces of what I could only reasonably call a web as I straightened. She dangled limp and loose against me, and her Merry Dancers slowly began to descend from ceiling level, drifting closer.
“My fiancé is going to come get us,” I said. “He’s going to take us into the shadows, and we’ll be right back. If you come down here, you can come with us, or you can go into the hall, and we’ll come to you.”
The Merry Dancers dropped faster, coming to circle around my head. I smiled at them. That was what I’d been expecting. No one I know of has ever intentionally separated a Candela from their Merry Dancers; no one knows what it would do.
As expected, Tybalt stepped out of the shadows behind me. “Ready?” he asked briskly.
“I am.” I turned, taking a deep breath as I offered him my hand. He took it, looking wryly at the woman in my arms, and shook his head.
“Always on a quest for heroics to be done,” he said fondly as he pulled me toward him.
He shouldn’t have done that.
As he opened the doorway to the Shadow Roads, my ankle hit one of the unbroken strands and it snapped, flinging another tiny arrow across the room. He heard the sound as surely as I did because he froze, hand tightening on mine.
Then the arrow struck his calf and he toppled forward, into the open gateway to the Shadow Roads, pulling me, the Candela, and her Merry Dancers all with him into freezing, airless nothing.
nine
I’d always believed there could be no light in the Shadow Roads, but two things registered at the same time: I was falling, and I could still see, thanks to lambent glow coming from Caitir’s Merry Dancers. I’d dropped her when I lost my balance, and she was lying sprawled on whatever served the Shadow Roads as ground, the Merry Dancers circling wildly in the air above her. They looked distressed. I didn’t know how I could know that, but I did.
I could see, but I was freezing, and I couldn’t breathe. I looked down at Tybalt, his hand still clasped firmly in mine—even drugged into an enchanted sleep, he hadn’t let me go—and saw that he was breathing normally, protected by the natural magic of the Cait Sidhe.
I couldn’t just borrow his power and use it to navigate us out of here. There was too much chance, given the weakness my line was heir to, that I would immediately transform into a cat and be unable to change myself back, or to drag two human-sized bodies out of the darkness with my teeth. Plus, I had to admit, the idea of seeing the memories of the man I was about to marry when he had, once again, every reason to be disappointed in me, was . . . unsettling, at best. I know Tybalt loves me. I know I frustrate him more often than I should. I didn’t need to have it confirmed.
That left Caitir. Candela have access to the same space as the Cait Sidhe, they just travel through it faster and for shorter distances. I crawled toward her, pulling my knife with one increasingly stiff and unresponsive hand. She had elf-shot in her blood, and I would have to be careful of that, but as long as I stayed awake long enough to open a door, it would be all right. It would be fine.
My first cut was shallow and drew no blood. My second was deeper, and I was rewarded with a sluggish trickle of blood that smelled, although probably only to me, incongruously of lemons. I bent and pressed my mouth over the cut, sucking as hard as I could without actually allowing myself to take a breath. My lungs were already beginning to ache.
Caitir’s memories rose up, threatening to overwhelm me. She/I had been honored to be given a directive by her King, to be asked to do something as important as checking on the well-being of his seneschal, Nessa, who was a beloved figure among the courtiers, always fair, always balanced in her judgment. She/I had only been with the High Court herself/myself for a few years, not long enough to build a reputation, but long enough to know she/I wanted to continue to serve—
I forced the memories away, becoming singular once more, and focused on the lemon-bright sweetness of her magic. It was lemon and raspberry, an oddly flavorful combination. I swallowed again. No, not lemon; lemon verbena, which made a little more sense. And as I identified her magic, I understood it, and what it was created to do.
Raising my hand, I traced a circle in the air, and was delighted to see the hallway appear, May and Raj holding Quentin back as he tried to throw himself through the open door to Nessa’s quarters, Jazz standing a few feet behind them, watching helplessly. Out of all of them, she was the one who might have been able to enter safely, as long as she did it in her raven form. And was very, very careful.
And I didn’t have time to focus on that right now, since I still couldn’t breathe, despite the magic I had borrowed from Caitir. The Candela didn’t linger in shadows long enough to need to breathe there, apparently. I scrambled back over to Tybalt, slinging his arm over my shoulders and hoisting him along as I rose into a half-crouch, suddenly grateful that I’d never been overly attracted to tall men. Step by step, I dragged him toward the portal I had opened, unsure whether my growing sluggishness
was cold, hypoxic shock, or the elf-shot in Caitir’s blood beginning to do its work.
The fact that I hadn’t fallen asleep instantly meant it was unlikely to be elf-shot, which usually works in an instant, but maybe the stuff is different when ingested orally and on purpose. Faerie is confusing sometimes, and alchemy is finicky enough to make conditional potions.
I reached the portal and shoved Tybalt through, leaving him to fall in a heap on the hallway floor. The sound made everyone turn. Quentin made a strangled sound at the sight of me standing framed by a circle of borrowed magic against a background of absolute darkness.
I stuck my head out into the hall, where the warmth of normal air was like a slap to the face, and took a deep breath, filling my aching lungs with much-needed air. “We have an elf-shot Candela in here,” I said, quickly. “She’s alive, and I’m using her magic to maintain this portal. Give me a second and I’ll get us both out.” I took another breath, already regretting what I was about to do, and pulled back through the portal, turning toward the Candela.
I felt, rather than heard, the moment when the magic I’d borrowed from her blood ran out and the portal slammed shut again. I grimaced, shuffling toward her, the cold making it increasingly difficult to move. It would be so nice to lie down, just for a few minutes, and let my legs recover . . .
And I would freeze to death, and so would she, and even if my magic resurrected me to suffocate again, hers wouldn’t. She’d die, and she’d take her magic with her, and we’d never get out of here.
Someone grabbed me from behind. I didn’t scream; screaming takes air. I didn’t stab the person either, having sheathed my knife when I was done cutting Caitir. If I dropped it in here, I’d have to gnaw through her shoulder or something to get more blood. Instead, I drove my elbow up and back at the same time, catching my assailant in the solar plexus. They staggered away, and I whirled.
Raj gave me a pained look, face a sketchy outline in the dim glow from the Merry Dancers. “. . . ow,” he said, able to speak in the Shadow Roads the same way his uncle could, by breathing the air that wasn’t there for the rest of us. “Could you not?”
I blinked at him.
“I followed the light,” he said. “I knew roughly where you were, and I just followed the light. Can’t leave my knight to freeze, can I?” His expression shifted from pained to pleading. “Now will you let me get you out of here?”
I nodded and pointed to Caitir. He walked past me, scooping her into his arms and slinging her over his shoulder, and I had never in my life been so glad to see him, or so grateful for the fact that both my boys have gotten taller and stronger as they’ve aged. I hadn’t paid quite as much attention with Raj, since I’d never been allowed to claim him officially as my squire, but he was almost as tall as Tybalt now, with the rangy, defined musculature necessary for a Prince of Cats who was preparing to challenge for his throne. He’d been working out more since Ginevra came to stand regent for him and made the prospect of becoming King devastatingly real.
The Merry Dancers followed their Candela, swirling around Raj’s head as he straightened and walked back over to me, offering his hand. “Hold me fast, and don’t let me go,” he said, a note of caution in his voice.
Raj wasn’t as accustomed to taking passengers through the shadows as Tybalt was, and I didn’t know if he’d ever done two people at once before. I nodded, grabbing onto his hand, and he smiled at me before crouching slightly down, tensing, and leaping into the deeper dark.
I jumped with him, and together, we crashed out of the darkness and into the warm light of the hall. Raj dropped us both when he landed, catching himself on the hallway wall with both hands while he gasped and wheezed. I rolled to a stop against the same wall, my hip pressed to the baseboard, my eyes fixed on the ceiling. The ghosts of Caitir’s memory still rattled their chains at the corners of my mind. They would fade soon enough, as long as I didn’t focus on them strongly enough to make them memories of my own.
“What,” said May, pausing portentously before she continued, “the fuck?”
“Are you hurt?” The first face to appear in my field of vision belonged to the Ellyllon healer, his wings working frantically and spilling glittering dust into the air. “You have blood on your lips. Did you injure yourself?”
“It’s not mine,” I said. My limbs were starting to thaw. Awkwardly, I pushed my way into a seated position, rubbing my aching forehead with one hand. “Check on Caitir. I had to cut her to borrow her magic, and it was dark, so I’m not sure how deep the knife went.”
The healer blinked at me. He wasn’t used to this sort of thing, not having been around long enough to become acclimated to the level of casual chaos that the rest of us live with on a daily basis. There are days when I think Dóchas Sidhe aren’t designed so much to manipulate the workings of the blood as we are to cause problems everywhere we go. It would make a lot of things make a lot more sense if that were the case.
“Um,” he said.
“It’s all right. She’s always like this,” said May, moving to the Ellyllon’s side. “Let my sister think about what she’s done.”
“Um,” he said again, but allowed himself to be led away. Jazz stepped up to take his place.
“Two people got elf-shot, and neither of them was you,” she said.
“Nope.”
“But you did drink an elf-shot victim’s blood,” she said, almost hopefully. “Does that mean you’re going to fall asleep soon?”
“I know we’ve always worried about that, but no, I don’t think so.” I rubbed my forehead again. “I think I got little enough of it that I’m going to be okay. Walther should probably still give me something prophylactic.”
“Nice use of ‘prophylactic,’ ” chirped May. “And it doesn’t matter either way, because even if she falls asleep, she didn’t get elf-shot, so you don’t take the betting pool.”
“Aw, nuts,” said Jazz.
“You are all weirdoes,” I said, and that was when Quentin slammed into me, wrapping his arms around my shoulders and yanking me close. It was like being hugged by a particularly enthusiastic tsunami, and after a moment of confusion, I relaxed and hugged him back.
“I see how it is,” said Raj. “I grab you and you assault me. Cillian grabs you, and he gets a hug. I know which kid you actually give a damn about, Mom, and it’s not me.”
“Go to your room,” I said, looking past the tangled scrim of Quentin’s hair that covered my eyes to where Raj stood, smirking. I patted Quentin on the back with one hand, trying to give him the time to collect himself, then blinked. “Hang on—betting pool?”
“On whether you make it to the wedding,” said May. “So far, you’re doing pretty well.”
“Two people are dead, the groom has been elf-shot, the seneschal is missing, and I have to explain to Kerry why I used up almost an entire container of her canned frosting for no apparent reason,” I said flatly. “I’m not sure how you class that as ‘pretty well.’ ”
“You’ve really skewed my sense of normalcy,” said May.
Quentin finally let go of me, glaring. “I thought you were dead,” he said. “We all saw Tybalt fall, and we know you can’t navigate the Shadow Roads by yourself.”
“Luckily, I had a Candela with me to borrow from.” I looked past him to where the Ellyllon was kneeling next to Caitir. “She’s going to be okay, right? It’s just elf-shot?”
“The fact that I now live in a world where the word ‘just’ can precede ‘elf-shot’ is a genuine miracle, for which we should be thanking Oberon on a daily basis,” he said, looking up from his patient. “That being said, yes, it appears that she has been elf-shot, and should wake in a hundred years, or upon administration of the counter-tincture, whichever comes first.”
I raised an eyebrow. “Do I get a vote? Because I was just in her memories, and I’m reasonably sure she’d prefer the counter-
tincture to missing the season finale of Canada’s Got Talent.”
“She does like her modern media,” agreed the Ellyllon, rising and moving to kneel again, this time beside Tybalt. He leaned forward as he pried one of Tybalt’s eyes open, peering into it. “Yes, again, elf-shot. Both should be fine.”
A knot I hadn’t been allowing myself to admit I felt untied itself somewhere behind my sternum, in the birdcage enclosure of my ribs. “I’m grateful to hear that,” I said, forcing my voice to stay steady. “Walther will be able to treat and wake them both—he’s our—”
“Walther Davies?” asked the Ellyllon, wings buzzing again, this time with excitement. “The alchemist who first developed the treatment for elf-shot? The man who woke the sleepers? I know who he is, I just never expected him to be willing to travel here with you. No offense intended, ma’am, I know your marriage is an event of some significance, but an alchemist of his stature—surely it must be difficult for the Mists to spare him.”
I turned my face away to hide my smile. “Indeed,” I said. There was no point in telling the man that Walther had yet to allow Arden to name him her court alchemist, even though there was no one else available to take up the position. Until he had tenure, he said, his first fealty had to be to the University of California’s Berkeley campus, where he spent his days teaching mostly mortal students what he called “new and better ways to poison themselves.”
He was on a tenure track, so he’d probably let her convince him sometime in the next few years, but until then, he was staying stubbornly exactly where he was, freelance alchemist and chemistry professor, officially unaffiliated with any Court except for the one Tybalt and May occasionally jokingly accused me of putting together in my living room.
As if. I would be the worst liege. Everyone’s duties would be based around whose turn it was to pick up the pizza this week.
“I would be honored to share the treatment of these patients with Master Davies,” said the Ellyllon, as I finally picked myself up off the floor and shook my skirt out, amazed at how little blood was on the fabric. Stacy was going to be so proud of me.
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