I closed my eyes. That was what I’d thought I felt, when I was trying to sort out the shape of the knife jammed into my body. Torin might not have had the time to aim as carefully as he wanted to, but luck had been enough to put his blade right next to my spine, and to hook it through one of my vertebrae.
I’d never had a piece of bone entirely removed from my body before. Academically, I wondered whether it was going to grow back, or whether this would be a step too far for even my magic to deal with. I’d risen from the dead, probably multiple times. I’d healed from injuries that should have been, could have been, and had been fatal. But could I recover from this?
Tybalt hissed, dropping to his knees next to me. “You insufferable woman,” he muttered. I tried to listen through the haze of oxygen deprivation and shock. This was like being back on the Shadow Roads, almost, except that there was light here. There was warmth. There was air, even if I couldn’t reach it. All things being equal, this was a much more pleasant place to die.
A hand cupped my chin, turning my face even further toward the light. I still couldn’t feel anything below my neck. My lungs weren’t even burning, just . . . failing to pull in any additional air. That was going to be a problem very soon. It was probably a problem already.
“You are direly fortunate that I love you,” said Tybalt, and pressed his wrist against my lips.
Blood filled my mouth, bright and hot and brimming with memories that weren’t mine. I swallowed involuntarily, and swallowed again as the act of swallowing seemed to unlock something in my chest, making air feel, if not fully achievable, at least like something that might return to the world one day.
Then the red veil of Tybalt’s memories slammed down over me, and the condition of my own body ceased to be quite as important. It wasn’t like I could feel it anymore.
There’s too much blood.
The baby is coming early—Anne said this evening that she hadn’t felt any kicking in over a day, and she was worried—and now the baby is coming, and there’s too much blood. I’ve never seen a human give birth before, but this can’t be normal. Cait Sidhe women bleed in birthing, and when they do it on two legs, they’re built in so many respects like their mortal counterparts. Surely I would know if there were meant to be this much blood. Surely someone would have told me.
Anne is bleeding, and I don’t know what to do. I’ve never been a healer. The local King of Cats has one at his disposal, but he’ll not give them leave to come to me, may the night-haunts steal the eyes from his skull and leave him lost in his own lands forevermore. The King and Queen of Tremont have already turned me away. None of them will help a human woman deliver herself of a changeling child. The Divided Courts see me as a beast; the Court of Cats sees her as a burden. No one will save her. No one will save either one of them, and there’s too much blood, and Anne can’t stand much more of this—
I sat up with a gasp, air flooding back into my floundering lungs, tingles spreading through my body as it seemed to wake up all around me. The room I was in was small, with a low ceiling and bare wooden walls. It looked more like the hold of a ship than anything else although it wasn’t moving, and there was no smell of saltwater in the air.
What there was was the strong smell of blood, my own and someone else’s, mingled with the musk and pennyroyal scent of Tybalt’s magic. I turned my head. He was sitting on the floor next to my makeshift bed, a strip of canvas wrapped around his wrist, a look of strained terror on his face.
“Pray reassure me that I’ve remained awake long enough to see your recovery, and not lost consciousness from blood loss, only to dream a better ending to our tale than the one reality offers,” he said, in a wan voice.
“You’re awake.” I slid off the pile of canvas and wrapped my arms around his shoulders, not pausing to think about what I was doing. This was not the time for careful contemplation. This was the time to reassure my fiancé, who looked like he was on the verge of throwing up, blacking out, or possibly both. “I’m awake. We’re awake. I promise, we’re awake.”
“Oh, thank Oberon.” He buried his face against my shoulder, letting out a shuddering gasp that became, somewhere toward the end, more of a sob. “Thank Oberon, thank Maeve, thank all the lords and ladies of the Courts that came before us. You can’t do that to me, October. You cannot. I forbid it.”
I might normally have taken umbrage at the idea that he could forbid me to do anything. Under the circumstances, I kept holding on as tightly as I could, breathing in, letting the scent of his skin and his hair and his magic fill my nose until I could almost ignore the smell of blood that underscored everything around us.
“I’m okay,” I whispered. “I’m okay, I’m okay, I’m here and I’m awake and I’m okay. I swear to you, I’m okay.”
Tybalt pulled away, far enough to rest his forehead against my own and look into my eyes. His pupils were narrowed to slits, despite the dimness of the room around us, making him look alien and terrified at the same time—both accurate descriptions, in their own way.
“When I pulled the knife from your back, it carried a piece of your spine with it,” he said. “Bone never meant to see the light, brought into the open. You stopped moving, stopped breathing. I thought . . .” He shuddered, like a horse that had been ridden too hard before being stabled by a careless owner. “I thought you were leaving me. Please, October, I beg. Don’t leave me so soon. I know you cling to your mortality out of love for your father and concern for yourself, and I know it means you may leave me, one day, whether you will it or no, but please. Not so soon as this.”
“I’m not planning to leave you,” I said. “I’m not ever planning to leave you. I’m not going to say I’m sorry for jumping in front of that knife, because if it did that to me . . .” I let my voice trail off.
Every kind of fae has their own strengths and weaknesses. Cait Sidhe, like Tybalt, are shapeshifters and fierce fighters and graceful illusionists, able to hide themselves from prying mortal eyes without struggle. But they don’t heal the way I do. They don’t bounce back from what should be mortal injuries. They heal faster than humans, sure, but that’s not enough. Past a certain point, that’s nowhere near enough.
Tybalt let out a shaky breath that sounded almost like a laugh as he pushed the hair back from my face with blood-tacky fingers. “I cannot fault you for wanting me to stay and order you to stay in the same breath. But please, October, please. My heart can’t take much more of this.”
“I know.” I put my hand over his, holding it there for a moment before looking around. “This is the Court of Cats.”
“A sliver thereof, yes,” he said. “There are sufficient Cait Sidhe in this place that they’ve called it into being. I’ve not seen any sign of a King or Queen to anchor the place to the Shadow Roads; odds are none of the resident cats have ever been here, nor ever shall be.”
That explained the dusty emptiness of the room around us, and the way it seemed to blur around the edges, like it was barely holding itself to this level of reality. I pulled away, turning to peer into the corners, then looked back to him.
“Would this happen to the San Francisco Court if you didn’t have Raj to take over?”
Tybalt nodded. “Given enough time, yes. The Shadow Roads are stable there from long use, and as long as my subjects stayed within the Court, it would not collapse upon them. But if they ever left it standing empty, it would seal itself, reducing in size, until it vanished entirely.”
Like the knowe in Muir Woods. It had been sealed after Gilad’s death, and reopened fully only when Arden asked it nicely. I could have counted its rooms on the fingers of both hands in those first days. Now, I had no idea how big the place was, and it seemed to get larger all the time, expanding according to some private blueprint designed by its original owners and shaped by Arden’s specific needs.
The king is the land. In Faerie, everything else may be negotiable, but i
t remains unchangeable and essential that the king is the land.
I took a deep breath. “Torin attacked us just as I was about to tell you my suspicions about the Selkies. Did you notice?”
Tybalt raised an eyebrow. “I realize you’ve just lost a great deal of blood and a portion of your spine, but do you honestly think I might have overlooked your being attacked? There are things I can’t miss, no matter how much it might help my peace of mind to do so.”
“I know you noticed the attack.” I pushed his shoulder, trying to seem playful. All I actually succeeded in doing was make him look concerned, as my shove barely stirred him, while sending another wave of exhaustion washing through me. I grimaced. “Sorry about that.”
“Never apologize for showing weakness to me.” He grabbed my hand and brought it to his lips, kissing my fingers lightly. “It is a true honor, that you feel me safe enough to do so.”
“Safe. Right.” I took a deep breath. “I think Torin had been following us for a while. We know the Undersea has their own alchemists; someone could easily have bottled the Cephali camouflage for him, if he wanted to listen in on us with his own ears.”
“It seems risky,” said Tybalt. “As we saw, the one who follows is the one who risks being hurt.”
“Yes, but Torin’s an Undersea noble, not a land noble,” I said. “They take a lot more risks on a regular basis. They have to, culturally speaking, if they want to hold onto their fiefdoms. I don’t think he could ask anyone to risk getting hurt on his behalf, not if he wanted them to respect him enough to keep following where he led. Especially not with Dianda still insisting on her innocence.”
“She might not be.”
“I’m sorry—have you met Dianda? He might have been able to blackmail her into lying and claiming she’d committed treason if he had the boys, but Dean and Peter are safe with Patrick, and there’s no way she’d take his word for it if he said he was going to hurt them. He’d have to show her proof. He doesn’t have proof. She’s got to be resisting whatever he wants her to do, and that’s slowing him down.”
“Why do you think he has a time limit on prosecuting treason?” Tybalt asked.
“Pete left as soon as he got here, because she doesn’t like to involve herself in Merrow affairs,” I said. “Okay, fine. That works. But what if Torin’s not actually here to involve himself in Merrow affairs?”
Tybalt frowned. “Now you’ve lost me.”
“Torin has never made a claim on Saltmist before. It’s pretty clear he and Dianda’s parents had a ‘just until we get some heirs’ marriage. Right?”
“I suppose.”
“So he never expected to get Saltmist through legitimate means. He filled the duchy with troops who are loyal to him, and he expected Dianda’s people to go along with it because that’s how things are done in the Undersea, but honestly, why now? Dianda has left Saltmist before. He could have taken the Duchy during my bachelorette party, or when she was in Goldengreen having dinner with Dean. Honestly, if he wanted her to give up easy, he should have taken it one of those times. Peter can breathe water. Peter can take care of himself. Patrick can’t. She would have given in and done whatever he wanted, if her husband was in danger.”
Tybalt frowned slowly. “Perhaps he didn’t desire it before now.”
“Please.” I waved a hand. “You don’t assemble a force like the one we saw in Saltmist overnight, not even in the Undersea. You don’t decide to gamble everything on a whim—and he is gambling everything. Dianda isn’t going to forgive this.”
“Merrow fight. Perhaps this is their equivalent of a family squabble.”
“Except, again, he involved her children. Can you honestly tell me you’d forgive any Cait Sidhe who endangered our kids in an ordinary dominance challenge?”
Tybalt froze. For a long moment, he stared at me, eyes wide and strangely, painfully hopeful. Finally, he asked, in a small voice, “You would consider having children with me?”
I managed, barely, to suppress my wince. It helped that I still felt shaky from blood loss, which made most of my responses a little sluggish. “I don’t think this is the time for that conversation, do you?”
“No. No, of course not. I simply . . .” He kept looking at me, hope still bright and visible in his eyes. “I never thought you would want that with me.”
We were in an unstable Court of Cats. An enraged Merrow was stalking the Duchy of Ships, and since we still didn’t know his exact motives, we had no way of knowing whether he was going to try taking his fury out on our friends and loved ones. Somewhere on the nearby sea, two Firstborn were deciding whether or not they were going to come back and help us. This wasn’t just not the time for a serious talk about our relationship, this was practically the textbook definition of the worst time possible.
But there’d been a time, not that long ago, when I’d been afraid I was losing Tybalt forever, thanks to my mother’s unwanted interference in our relationship. Faerie doesn’t have anything as sensible as a modern conception of therapy; every inch of ground Tybalt had gained back, he’d gained by leaning on his friends and trusting that we were telling him the truth when we said that we still loved him, treasured him, and wanted him to be a part of our lives. And yeah, a lot of that heavy lifting fell to me, as the woman who was planning to marry him. Whether or not this was a good time didn’t matter nearly as much as the fact that he was vulnerable, and had been for quite some time.
What mattered was that he was mine.
“Not right this second, no,” I said. “But once we’re married? Once Raj is the King of Dreaming Cats, and you’re free to be my husband and figure out what you want to do with your days? I think yeah. Yeah, I do. If you do.”
This was not the time or the place for this conversation. But Tybalt’s face lit up, suddenly relieved, relaxed, rejoicing, and I knew there had never been a better time, or a better place, for any of this.
“They’ll be amazing,” he said. “You’ll see. Any child of ours could be nothing less.”
“That’s what I’m afraid of,” I said. “Now can we focus? Please?”
“My apologies.” Tybalt cleared his throat, getting himself back on task. “So you’re posing the theory that Torin acted, not because he desired Saltmist, or to undermine his sister, but because he wished to . . . what?”
“Distract us,” I said. “Which I guess means keep us from focusing on the Selkies. But why would someone from the Undersea want us not to focus on the Selkies? They’re a security risk. They always have been. They have human friends, human family members, their skins can be stolen—and they’re not like Swanmays or Raven-maids. If someone puts on a Selkie skin, they change. That’s a huge gap in our ability to stay secret.”
“Rayseline stole a Selkie skin. She didn’t change.”
“No one ever said she used it. If she had . . . it was a mask for her, but she never asked it for transformation.”
“She infiltrated Saltmist.”
“There are other ways of breathing water.”
Raven-maids and Raven-men transform using feathered cloaks. They’re born with them, coming into the world with bands of pinfeathers set into a strip of leather tied somewhere around their bodies. They can be caught like any other skinshifter, and if someone takes their cloak away—in Jazz’s case, the cloak is more of a hair ornament, but the concept holds—they’re functionally mostly human until they get it back. The keyword there is “mostly.” A Raven without a cloak is still immortal. They won’t age or die of natural causes. They don’t need fairy ointment to see the traceries of Faerie moving around them. They can handle iron, and I’ve always assumed that’s both why they exist, and why they’re largely confined to the Oversky: when a piece of iron finds its way into the Cloud Kingdoms, they need someone who can get rid of it. Having people who can put their fae natures on and off like a, well, cloak of feathers . . . that’s useful.
But if a human or a changeling found a Raven-maid’s cloak and tied it in their own hair or slung it around their own shoulders, they wouldn’t become fae. They’d just be thieves and earn the undying enmity of the skies. Selkies worked differently, because Selkies hadn’t occurred naturally. They’d been created. The rules weren’t the same.
They were a security risk. What Rayseline had done to get into Saltmist proved that. I couldn’t imagine any pureblood in a position of power looking at them and thinking things were fine as they were. Killing them had been out of the question in the beginning, because they belonged to the Luidaeg, and then as that information had been lost or forcibly forgotten, the Selkies had been incorporated, rightly or wrongly, into the Law. But now the Luidaeg was ready to clean up her own mess, and someone was trying to stop us by creating complication after complication to make it impossible to follow through.
“Why would anyone object to bringing back the Roane?” I asked.
Tybalt sat upright, eyes widening. Then, slowly, he said, “I’ve met Roane before. They’re rare, but not extinct, and I had some dealings with the Undersea when I was younger. The first I ever met was a woman named Naia, who came to the Court of Londinium to warn the populace of a terrible fire that was to come. She could see no way for it to be turned aside, and the potential loss of life was great enough that she was willing to leave the Undersea to bring us a warning we couldn’t easily ignore.”
“Like Mary,” I said. “The Roane woman who came to see me when the Lorden boys were missing. The one who worked for Dianda and Patrick.” A stab of guilt lanced through me. I hadn’t even thought to look for Mary when I’d been in Saltmist. All my attention had been focused on finding Peter.
“It’s said the Roane could foresee everything except their own destruction; that death was the one true mystery the world had to offer them,” said Tybalt. “We came here so that you and the Luidaeg could return them to the seas in the numbers they once knew.”
The Unkindest Tide Page 31