She tensed but still didn’t lift her face from the floor. I realized, perhaps belatedly, what she was waiting to hear.
“The High King was not harmed; the crown remains where it was placed,” I said. “The High Queen sits her throne, sick with worry for her absent seneschal. I have yet to see the chatelaine, but her magic was fresh in the hall outside your rooms, and I believe her to be unharmed.”
Slowly, Nessa moved, sliding her hands under herself and using them to push her torso away from the floor, slowly moving into a seated position. She kept her head bowed, hair hanging to conceal her face.
“The thing was in my quarters when I returned from my duties in the kitchen,” she said, voice low and dull. “I had to convince the staff to allow your friend to bake a cake in their ovens, to cast stasis spells in the presence of their supplies. It was no easy task, but it needed to be done before the rest could be put in order. And when I went to wash the flour from my hands and wipe the grease from my brow, there was a monster in the place where I should have been safest.” She was beginning to shake. “I lowered my illusions and showed the thing my face with nothing to protect it, and it only laughed. It looked on me and laughed.”
I suppose if your best weapon had always been your face, having someone shrug it off without noticing would be disconcerting. I certainly don’t like it when people shrug off being stabbed, even though I do it all the time. “Doppelgangers don’t see the world the way the rest of us do,” I said. “They look at people as pieces to be stolen, and it wanted to steal you.”
“I know that,” she snapped. “It held iron to my throat and bade me make myself disappear, and then it dragged me through the halls to this room, where it sealed me inside.”
That didn’t answer how she’d been compelled to cast a nigh-unbreakable illusion over the door. Thankfully, Quentin was as curious as I was.
“How did it make you hide the door?” he asked.
Nessa was still for a long moment before she said, anguished, “It told me it had only come to kill the High King, and if I concealed the door, it would spare the High Queen. I’m sure it was treason to do as I was bid. I know my life is forfeit, but the children have been gone so long, and I miss my babies so much, and I was not willing to let a monster make orphans of them if I had the chance to stop it. Ní dhéanfainn dílleachtaí de mo mhuintir.”
She sounded utterly miserable. I shook my head, wet hair slapping against my cheeks. Any curl Stacy had managed to tease into it was gone, done in by the combination of horrible things I’d done to it instead of having dinner.
“No one’s going to be tried for treason,” I said. “You had iron at your throat, you’re allowed to make some bad decisions.”
“Have you been in here this whole time?” asked Quentin.
Nessa made a small sound of distress, but there was no hint of recognition in her tone as she continued, for which I was honestly grateful. The last thing we needed right now was for her to figure out who he was somehow and rat us out to the High King. “Once the door was sealed and hidden, I had nothing to eat and no way to escape. If I wrapped myself in water, I would need nothing else. The illusion I spun at the monster’s command—it was ró-láidir. I had nothing else to give. I still . . .” She made a sound, a small hiccupping sound that was neither a laugh nor a sob, but something trapped in the middle. “I still have nothing more to give.”
Meaning she couldn’t cast an illusion strong enough to protect everyone else from her. Oh, this wasn’t great. “What do you need? What will make you feel better?”
“I need water from the lake where I was born,” she said. “I keep a supply in my quarters.” She raised her head a little, enough for one eye to peek through the curtain of her hair, which was already dryer than my own, as if her body was drinking in the water. “If you could . . . ?”
I wasn’t sure anything that had been in her quarters over the last three days could be trusted, given the circumstances, but I wasn’t going to tell her that. “Hey, Cillian,” I said, voice as light as I could make it. “Can you go and find my aunt for me, please?”
We were only traveling with one person who could arguably be called my aunt, even if I wasn’t stupid enough to call her that to her face. Quentin’s eyes widened. “You think she can help?”
“Based on what she told us earlier, if anyone can help, it’s going to be her,” I said, glancing back at Nessa. “It’s worth a try.”
“All right.” He retreated to the door, where he paused. “Are you sure it’s a good idea for me to leave you alone?”
“Kid, Tybalt’s not going to kill either one of us any more than he already is.”
“Got it,” said Quentin, and nodded decisively before he ducked out the door, leaving me alone with Nessa.
It was almost a relief to be left with someone who didn’t know me or expect anything from me. I sagged where I was, and must have sighed a little, because she looked up through her hair again, a furrow marring her perfect brow.
“You do not like the boy?”
“I love the boy,” I said. “He’s my son by all but blood, and I love the boy so much it scares me, because I’m going to have to give him back to his parents eventually. They didn’t agree to lose him forever when they handed him off to me, and there’s no way for me to keep him. He’s not mine.”
Even when she didn’t know we were talking about Quentin—even when she didn’t really know me at all—it hurt to admit that I was going to lose him. No, not lose; loss implied that he was going to be taken, when anyone who knew me knew I was going to let him go.
And when he came back here, when he stopped being Squire Quentin of no particular name or bloodline and became Sir Quentin Sollys of the Westlands, named and anointed next ruler of our High Kingdom, I wouldn’t even be able to say I missed him. He’d have a place and a family and a world that didn’t have any room left in it for me, and Oberon damn it all, this wasn’t a problem I’d seen coming back when I could have gotten out of this. Back when he’d asked me to be his squire and I’d offered my pathetic list of reasons I was a bad choice for any sort of real responsibility, I had never thought to include “if you’re my squire, I’ll love you too much, and you’ll take a piece of me with you when you inevitably have to leave.”
I’d been so broken when I came back from my exile in the pond, so convinced that no one was ever going to really love me and I was never going to really love anyone, ever again. I’d been a fool.
Nessa’s frown deepened before she ducked her head again. “I’ve never had children,” she said. “Men of the Gwragedd Annwn are rare, and no one else can lie with us past the dawn without fear of being struck dead when the sun comes up and our illusions come down. It seems like a great challenge, to allow your heart to rove freely outside your body, and not spend all your time kept rigid by fear. If you are the woman whose marriage I was to facilitate, I know you have a child of your body, as well as this boy who is the child of your heart, yes?”
“So you do know who I am, then.”
Nessa scoffed. “As if anyone could not know who you are? King-breaker and chaos-chosen, who’s been overthrowing regimes up and down the Pacific coast as if it were some sort of wild game. The High King speaks of you with both admiration and horror. I think you know where my boy is.” Her tone changed on her last sentence, becoming sterner, almost demanding. She didn’t raise her head, however. She wasn’t threatening me.
“I don’t know what you mean,” I said carefully.
“The Crown Prince was sent to the Mists for his fosterage,” she said. “I’m not meant to know that, but I knew the woman who came to make your kingdom’s case to the High King and Queen. I had seen her before, when good King Windermere died, and it was necessary to name a successor to his place.”
I blinked. I hadn’t heard about Evening actually traveling to Maples when Gilad died, and I knew the High King hadn�
��t come to us. He would never have placed her puppet on the throne if he had. Anyone who looked at the false Queen could tell in an instant that she wasn’t Gilad’s daughter, as she had claimed to be; she was of a completely different bloodline, for one thing, and she looked nothing like him. Also she was terrible, but if Faerie had a rule about not handing terrible people thrones, we’d have a lot fewer Kings and Queens.
“She traveled here in the aftermath of the earthquake, carrying King Windermere’s bequeathments and begging his daughter be allowed to take the throne despite the challenges against her. He had never married, you see, and her mother was of mixed blood, which carried almost as much stigma in those days as human blood. Since the hope chests have been lost, one after another, it has become more and more difficult to correct a course once it has been etched in blood and bone.”
That made sense. I nodded before realizing that she couldn’t see me with her head bowed. “Yeah, okay,” I said. “That was Evening. She’s sort of . . .” I paused. I couldn’t call her the worst anymore, not after dealing with my own mother over the past year or so, but I couldn’t call her anything much better. “. . . awful,” I finished.
Nessa laughed. “Yes, awful. She came, and she spoke to the King and Queen, and when she left, they were different than they were. The King had always been far too aware of how his own parents died, at an assassin’s hands, and he restructured his guard in the wake of her time here, dismissing the soldiers who remembered what it was to fight and replacing them with the untried children of the nobility. He seemed to care less for his own legacy. And then she came again, although I advised against allowing her, and they sent my boy into fosterage, even though they had always promised him they would never do such a thing. They took him away and left us with barely the time to say farewell. I was hoping he might accompany you to your marriage.”
“Why would you think that?”
“Sollys heirs are drawn to heroism. He would have gravitated toward you as a moth flies toward a flame, looking for his own immolation.”
I wasn’t sure how I felt about that description. Luckily, I didn’t have long to dwell on it, as voices drifted in from the hall.
“—this way, come on!”
“Slow down, kid, I don’t rush.” The Luidaeg sounded more amused than anything else. Good. This was going to be easier if she wasn’t already in a rotten mood. “I’m too old to rush. I did my last rushing in the 1500s. Didn’t want to hang out too close to a bunch of humans who’d gone and contracted the Black Death. Humans were filthy during the 1500s. I don’t know how we got any changelings out of that century. Yuck.”
“I left Toby alone and armed with someone she doesn’t already know.”
“Yes, so you’ve said, multiple times. I still don’t rush. It’s not in my nature.”
Quentin appeared in the doorway, a worried expression on his face. I had no idea how large the knowe was, but even assuming it was only the size of Goldengreen, he must have taken at least part of the trip at a dead run to be back so soon. I made a mental note to be properly impressed once I knew the actual distances involved.
“They’re in here,” he called, over his shoulder.
“Anyone bleeding?” The Luidaeg managed to make the question sound almost academic, like she didn’t particularly care about the answer one way or another. She appeared behind him, once again wearing her human teenager disguise: overalls, no shirt, no bra, electrical tape in her hair. She paused to take in the sight of me sitting on the floor in my drenched gown, next to a virtually dry Nessa. I raised one hand, wiggling my fingers in a small wave.
“Hey,” I said.
“Hey,” she replied, and stepped around Quentin, into the room. “So why exactly am I here?”
“Nessa spent the last three days in some sort of big, weird water bubble,” I said. “At least, three days is the best guess I have so far for how long she spent there. Could have been longer if this has been brewing for more time than we currently think. Before she bubbled herself up, her captor forced her to cast an unbreakable illusion and hide the door.”
“Looks broken to me,” said the Luidaeg.
“I am a breaker of the unbreakable,” I said, aiming for the level of pompous portent that Tybalt could put into asking for a toaster waffle.
The Luidaeg snorted. “Sure, kiddo, keep telling yourself that. So if the illusion’s been broken, the problem is . . . ?”
“She spun a really strong illusion and then spent three days in a bubble with nothing to eat and I’m guessing no real sleep to speak of,” I said. “She can’t spin the illusions that would make her safe to be around without water from the lake where she was born, and that’s in her quarters, which are heavily boobytrapped, and which the Doppelganger has had unfettered access to for at least three days.”
“Oh, is that all?” The Luidaeg came fully into the room, walking toward Nessa, who kept her head bowed and her face hidden behind her hair. The Luidaeg bent, touching the top of Nessa’s head with surprising gentleness before grasping her upper arms and pulling her, carefully but inexorably, to her feet.
“I’ll hurt you,” cautioned Nessa.
“You won’t,” said the Luidaeg, and released her arms, reaching out to move Nessa’s hair delicately aside. She had angled the Gwragedd Annwn so Quentin and I still couldn’t see her face, but we could see the Luidaeg’s as she looked into Nessa’s eyes. Her expression softened, her own eyes bleeding from the muddy blue-brown she favored toward their true—or trueish, it’s hard to tell when you’re talking about the Luidaeg—clear glass green.
“There you are,” she said, with absolute and unmistakable fondness in her tone. “Now I have to ask, Nessa, daughter of Donal, son of Tosia, daughter of Ismene, called Black Annis by those who speak of her in this modern world, will you consent to my concealing your splendor from those it might harm? Even knowing you will have to trust me to remove my own working?”
Nessa stiffened, not pulling away, but clearly startled. She started to raise her hand, then appeared to think better of it and stopped with it somewhere around the level of her heart. “You . . . you’re . . .”
“I am,” the Luidaeg affirmed.
“Then is . . . Ismene?”
“No,” said the Luidaeg, with deep and genuine sorrow. “Your First died as she was rumored to have died, when Conláed hunted her through marsh and fen with fire in his hands and murder in his unthawed heart. His own death followed on his heels, but not fast enough to save my sister.”
Nessa sighed, deep and slow. “And they . . . they know?” she asked, with a little gesture of her head toward me and Quentin. In that moment, I believed she could find the strength to drown us both if she felt like it would keep the Luidaeg’s secret and was glad beyond measure that she wasn’t going to have to.
The Luidaeg followed Nessa’s gesture, her eyes lighting on me. Then she smiled, a bright, earnest expression that would have seemed entirely alien on her face not all that long before. When I’d met her, she had been an angry, bitter woman living in self-imposed isolation on the edge of the sea, where she could watch the descendants of the people who’d slaughtered her children without ever being a part of their lives, where she could hold her breath and let the world pass her by.
Now, she was still angry, and she was still bitter, and she had good reason to be both of those things. But she was also thawing out, one tiny bit at a time, mellowing into the warm, generous woman she must have been before Titania and her descendants had committed truly monstruous acts in their efforts to make her Faerie’s greatest monster. Protective and kind, within the limits of her geasa.
All she’d ever wanted was a family.
“They know exactly who I am,” she said, attention going back to Nessa. “Better than anyone has in centuries, and the best part is, they don’t care. The kid beat me at chess last week.”
I glanced at Quentin. He h
adn’t told me that.
The Luidaeg continued, “Me, the sea witch, terror of the tides, he beat me, and he didn’t even have the common sense to look ashamed of himself. Called me an old woman and said I should learn some gambits invented in the last century because he knows who I am, and he knows what I am—and he’s not afraid of me. Now, normally, I’d have to charge you for an illusion, but in this case, both of the people behind you owe me debts for favors done, and I need them alive so I can collect. That means hiding your pretty face from the world is an act of selfishness, and I’m still allowed to be selfish, thank Mom. So, will you allow it?”
“It would be an honor,” said Nessa, sounding faintly awestruck.
The Luidaeg laughed. Her magic began to gather, the smell of the sea, brackish and sweet at the same time, a living contradiction. The corners of the room darkened and swelled with unspeakable power, and what felt like a wave of pressure crashed down on all of us, weighing and compressing the room as the spell was finished and the magic broke. The Luidaeg took her hands away from Nessa’s face.
“There you go,” she said. “Perfectly safe, until I release you. I will have to charge you if you want your lake water purified and rendered safe for use, but the price will be small—a lock of hair, or a rude word said in the High King’s presence. I swear to you, the price will be small.”
Nessa nodded to the Luidaeg and turned to face the rest of us. She looked like the illusion of herself the Doppelganger had worn, the woman robbed of her supernatural power to hurt us with a glance. She sagged slightly, wobbling, and I realized how tired she had to be. This was a woman who had been ambushed in her home, taken captive, and held herself in magical stasis for three days while believing she was responsible for the death of her liege.
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