Ashes of Honor od-6

by Seanan McGuire

  Ashes of Honor

  ( October Daye - 6 )

  Seanan Mcguire

  It's been almost a year since October 'Toby' Daye averted a war, gave up a county, and suffered personal losses that have left her wishing for a good day's sleep. She's tried to focus on her responsibilities — training Quentin, upholding her position as Sylvester's knight, and paying the bills — but she can't help feeling like her world is crumbling around her, and her increasingly reckless behavior is beginning to worry even her staunchest supporters.

  To make matters worse, Toby's just been asked to find another missing child... only this time it's the changeling daughter of her fellow knight, Etienne, who didn't even know he was a father until the girl went missing. Her name is Chelsea. She's a teleporter, like her father. She's also the kind of changeling the old stories warn about, the ones with all the strength and none of the control. She's opening doors that were never meant to be opened, releasing dangers that were sealed away centuries before — and there's a good chance she could destroy Faerie if she isn't stopped.

  Now Toby must find Chelsea before time runs out, racing against an unknown deadline and through unknown worlds as she and her allies try to avert disaster. But danger is also stirring in the Court of Cats, and Tybalt may need Toby's help with the biggest challenge he's ever faced.

  Toby thought the last year was bad. She has no idea.

  Ashes of Honor

  (The sixth book in the October Daye series)

  A novel by Seanan McGuire

  For Deborah,

  and all the red-cloaked girls

  who ever left the safest path.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS:

  Book six. Wow. Ashes of Honor has been a delight every step along the way, and a lot of that is due to the people who were there to help me with the process of making it the best book it could be. My first and deepest thanks go to the ever-changing membership of the Machete Squad, whose keen eyes and keener pens have forced me to keep improving, whether I wanted to or not. Special thanks to Michelle Dockrey, Amy McNally, Brooke Lunderville, my mom and sister, and Amy’s friend Patty, who tolerated Toby’s intrusions on our trip to Disney World. I couldn’t have done it without you guys.

  My solemn gratitude goes to my agent, Diana Fox, my editor, Sheila Gilbert, my cover artist, Chris McGrath, and my website design and maintenance team of Tara O’Shea and Christopher Mangum. Thanks also to Joshua Starr, for administrative awesome on the DAW side, and to Deborah Brannon, for administrative awesome here at home.

  Thank you to you, for coming with me this far, for reading, for being a part of this adventure. It has been, and will continue to be, amazing. I’m so glad you’re here.

  My soundtrack while writing Ashes of Honor consisted mostly of Little Blue Egg, by Dave and Tracy, Ceremonials, by Florence and the Machine, Queen of Spindles, by Talis Kimberley, endless live concert recordings of the Counting Crows, and Enchant, by Emilie Autumn. Any errors in this book are entirely my own. The errors that aren’t here are the ones that all these people helped me fix.

  Thank you for reading. Welcome back to Faerie.

  PRONUNCIATION GUIDE THROUGH ASHES OF HONOR

  All pronunciations are given phonetically. This only covers races explicitly named in the first six books, omitting Undersea races not appearing in, or mentioned in, book six.

  Afanc: ah-fank. Plural is Afanc.

  Annwn: ah-noon. No plural exists.

  Bannick: ban-nick. Plural is Bannicks.

  Barghest: bar-guy-st. Plural is Barghests.

  Blodynbryd: blow-din-brid. Plural is Blodynbryds.

  Cait Sidhe: kay-th shee. Plural is Cait Sidhe.

  Candela: can-dee-la. Plural is Candela.

  Coblynau: cob-lee-now. Plural is Coblynau.

  Daoine Sidhe: doon-ya shee. Plural is Daoine Sidhe, diminutive is Daoine.

  Djinn: jin. Plural is Djinn.

  Dóchas Sidhe: doe-sh-as shee. Plural is Dóchas Sidhe.

  Ellyllon: el-lee-lawn. Plural is Ellyllons.

  Gean-Cannah: gee-ann can-na. Plural is Gean-Cannah.

  Glastig: glass-tig. Plural is Glastigs.

  Gwragen: guh-war-a-gen. Plural is Gwragen.

  Hamadryad: ha-ma-dry-add. Plural is Hamadryads.

  Hippocampus: hip-po-cam-pus. Plural is Hippocampi.

  Kelpie: kel-pee. Plural is Kelpies.

  Kitsune: kit-soo-nay. Plural is Kitsune.

  Lamia: lay-me-a. Plural is Lamia.

  The Luidaeg: the lou-sha-k. No plural exists.

  Manticore: man-tee-core. Plural is Manticores.

  Naiad: nigh-add. Plural is Naiads.

  Nixie: nix-ee. Plural is Nixen.

  Peri: pear-ee. Plural is Peri.

  Piskie: piss-key. Plural is Piskies.

  Pixie: pix-ee. Plural is Pixies.

  Puca: puh-ca. Plural is Pucas.

  Roane: row-n. Plural is Roane.

  Satyr: say-tur. Plural is Satyrs.

  Selkie: sell-key. Plural is Selkies.

  Shyi Shuai: shh-yee shh-why. Plural is Shyi Shuai.

  Silene: sigh-lean. Plural is Silene.

  Tuatha de Dannan: tootha day danan. Plural is Tuatha de Dannan, diminutive is Tuatha.

  Tylwyth Teg: till-with teeg. Plural is Tylwyth Teg, diminutive is Tylwyth.

  Undine: un-deen. Plural is Undine.

  Urisk: you-risk. Plural is Urisk.

  So shall she leave her blessedness to one,

  When heaven shall call her from this blessed darkness,

  Who from the sacred ashes of her honor

  Shall star-like rise…

  —William Shakespeare, King Henry VIII

  ONE

  June 3rd, 2012

  THE NIGHT SKY OVER SAN FRANCISCO was a patchwork mixture of starry black and cloudy gray, all of it washed out by the ambient light drifting up from the city below. It was a tourist’s dream of California summer, perfect as a postcard—and like all postcards, it wasn’t telling the full story. I pressed myself in closer to the wall of the alley, one hand on my knife, and waited.

  I didn’t have to wait for long. Voices drifted down the alley, speaking in the weird mix of whisper and shout that teenagers have used since the dawn of time when trying to be subtle. There was nothing subtle about these kids, but they would never have believed that. They were playing things oh-so-cool, and they thought they were untouchable. In a perfect world, they would have been. In a perfect world, they would have been allowed to have their little rebellions and take their little risks, and nothing would ever have touched them.

  We don’t live in a perfect world. We never have. And on nights like this one, it seems like we never will.

  The kids approaching my hiding spot didn’t know it, but I’d been watching them for weeks, ever since I took a trip downtown to investigate reports of a courtier selling pieces of his liege’s treasury. The rumors turned out to be true—he got banished, I got paid, and nobody walked away happy—but that wasn’t the worst of it.

  On the way to a meeting with his fence, the courtier had kicked aside a glass jar that someone had left discarded near the base of a garbage can. It fell on its side and rolled to a stop against a nearby wall. The smell of its contents assaulted my nostrils, and I immediately forgot about my job. I had something far more dangerous to worry about.

  I crept toward the jar as cautiously as I would have approached a venomous snake, finally crouching a few feet away. I could see smears of purple clinging to the glass—not that I needed the visual. This close, the smell was unmistakable. No changeling who’s ever lived on the wrong side of the tracks could fail to recognize the smell of goblin fruit, even if we’d never smelled it before. And, Oberon help me, I’d smelled it before.

  Goblin fruit
grows naturally in some realms of Faerie. It’s a sweet narcotic for purebloods, intoxicating without being physically addictive—although it’s definitely habit-forming. Anything that changes the way you feel is habit-forming, as anyone who’s ever dealt with someone who says, “It’s not addictive, really,” while reaching for their next fix can tell you. A pureblood with a serious goblin-fruit problem may spend a lot of time high, but that’s about it. They’ll still be able to do their jobs, maintain relationships, and put up a good front.

  Changelings and humans have a different reaction. For us, goblin fruit creates a level of addiction that no mortal drug can match. People try to dilute it or cut it with other fruits—hence the ever popular use of jam as a delivery mechanism—but the end result is always the same: dependency leads to craving, craving leads to madness, and madness leads, inexorably, to death.

  Devin never allowed goblin fruit at Home. We had kids who were hooked on just about every conceivable chemical, from pot and pills to cocaine, heroin, and things they mixed up in the back room. Some kids got high huffing concentrated pixie-sweat, or smoking Dryad leaves. Devin viewed it all with benevolent indifference—he didn’t care what we put into our bodies, as long as we were able to do our jobs. But he had a zero-tolerance policy for goblin fruit. Any kid who showed up with sticky fingers and starry eyes was booted, no second chances, because he knew better than any of us that once the fruit had hold of you, it never let you go.

  When Oberon locked the doors to the deeper realms of Faerie, the goblin fruit problems should have gone away, since the berries only grow in the soil of Tirn Aill, Tir Tairngire, and the Blessed Isles, and no one’s been to any of those places in centuries. Unfortunately for people who don’t like seeing changeling kids waste away on a diet of jam and dreams, clever gardeners from the lands where goblin fruit grew naturally brought plenty of soil and seedlings with them when they left. The stuff’s gotten rarer since then—and thank Oberon for that—but there are still people who use it for their own ends, and a little bit goes a long away.

  All of which led to me standing in a dark alley, waiting for a bunch of teenage changelings to reach me. It had taken me weeks to figure out who the dealers were, as opposed to the ones who were just feeding their own habits. I still didn’t know who was supplying them. If this had been going down in Shadowed Hills, I might have been able to ask my liege for backup, but here, I was in the Queen’s territory, and I was on my own.

  Purebloods won’t regulate goblin fruit because it’s not a threat to them. Why should they ban a sweet berry that gives them lovely dreams? The fact that it also blows changeling brains out is irrelevant to them.

  A globe of light drifted past my position. One of the dealers was a half-Candela girl in her late teens. If her Merry Dancers were here, so was she, and that meant I was in the right place. I pushed away from the wall, releasing the don’t-look-here spell that had been hiding me from view. “You kids lost?” I asked.

  There were five of them. They stopped where they were, staring at me with varying levels of hostility and confusion. It was the Candela girl who stepped forward and spoke first. “I remember you. You’re the girl who got us all kicked out of Home.”

  “I remember you, too,” I said. She’d grown since the time I saw her at Devin’s, getting taller and paler as her Candela heritage asserted itself. She’d also gotten thinner, becoming a walking skeleton draped in the winding shroud of her own skin. That was the goblin fruit at work, eating her alive even as it showed her the most beautiful things she’d ever seen. “Didn’t Devin teach you to stay the hell away from this shit?” I gestured toward her backpack, which bulged with small, cylindrical shapes.

  Her eyes widened briefly. Then they narrowed, and she spat, “Why do you care what Devin taught us? You got him killed. You got us all tossed out on the street. What Devin taught us keeps us alive.”

  “And he taught you to peddle drugs to kids?” The other dealer in this group was a gangling teenage boy with hedgehog spikes in place of hair. Another survivor of Home. I swung my glare toward him. “You, too. You both know better than this.”

  “Says the girl who got out,” said the Candela.

  Her words stung because they were supposed to. Once, I was just like them, and while I never stooped to peddling drugs, I did a lot of other things that I’m not proud of. That was with Devin to protect me—and while he might have abused me in some very profound ways, he made sure I had a roof over my head, food in my stomach, and backup if I needed it. Without Devin and Home, the kids who’d been in his care were scattered to the streets. I’d tried to keep tabs on them for a little while, but Devin taught us all to be good at disappearing. At the end of the night, maybe I didn’t try as hard as I could have.

  “Hey, girl who got out,” said the spiky boy. “You bring anybody with you?”

  I hesitated. The boy smirked. At that point, he’d know if I lied, and so I told the truth: “No.” The fact that this was a bad idea was beginning to occur to me. There were five of them, and while I’m pretty good at one-on-one, the bad guys never charge you one at a time in real life. I kept my hand on my knife. “I came here to tell you to stop. Selling goblin fruit to changelings is not okay.”

  “It’s not illegal.”

  “That doesn’t make it right.”

  “You know what does make us right?” asked one of the other kids, one of the ones I’d never seen before I started this ill-advised stakeout. “Strength of arms.”

  With that, all the kids except the Candela produced guns and knives from inside their coats or from their belts. I took a step backward, trying to keep my expression neutral.

  Oh, shit, I thought. “It doesn’t have to go down like this,” I said.

  “Sure it does,” said the spiky boy, and shot me in the shoulder. The bullet went clean through. I screamed, but I didn’t fall.

  Thanks to the vagaries of fae biology, I heal fast. Pain still hurts. I clapped a hand over my shoulder, rocking backward. The pressure made it hurt worse. I didn’t let go. Blood loss won’t kill me, but it makes the world fuzzy and unpleasant in a way that I can’t say I’m fond of.

  “She didn’t ‘go down,’” said the Candela, putting a mocking spin on the words she was quoting. “Shoot her again. I want to see her—urk.” The sentence ended not with a threat but with the small, strangled sound of someone having her trachea forcibly crushed.

  “Have we reached the point where my intervention will not get me shouted at for being a meddling tomcat who doesn’t respect the boundaries of others?” Tybalt stepped out of the shadows behind the Candela, tightening his hand around her throat. “I ask to be polite, you realize. There’s no way I’m walking away.”

  Relief washed over me. “Hi, Tybalt,” I said, hand still clamped over my shoulder. “Good to see you, too.”

  “Isn’t it always?” Tybalt gave the Candela a shake. She made a gurgling noise. “Strange taste in company you have these days.”

  The kids looked confused as to who they should be aiming their guns at. Some settled on me, some on Tybalt, and others wavered back and forth between us. “I don’t like goblin fruit on my streets,” I said. “I hoped I could talk them into taking up a safer hobby than drug dealing.”

  “Always the optimist.”

  “I try.”

  Our casual conversation was the last straw for the boy with the hedgehog spines. “You sellout bitch!” he screamed, and shot me twice more, this time in the stomach. Then he turned and ran, the other kids pelting after him—all except the Candela, who was still held fast in Tybalt’s hand.

  I was a little too distracted by the pain in my belly to care where they were going, or what they were going to do when they got there. I looked down at myself and made a small gulping sound very similar to the one the Candela had made, watching blood run in ribbons through the fabric of my jeans. The gunshot wound in my shoulder had already closed over. That was good; it freed both my hands to press against the newer wounds, struggling
to stay upright as the world hazed gray and black around me.

  “October!” There was a horrible crunch as Tybalt flung the Candela girl into the wall. Then he was lunging for me, catching me before I could hit the ground. The smell of blood was everywhere. “Toby. Toby? Toby, don’t you do this. Don’t die. Please. I can’t allow…you wouldn’t dare…”

  “I’m fine,” I whispered. The bullets had gone clean through. Maybe I wasn’t fine yet, but I would be, if I could just be still. “Go after them.”

  “If you think I’m going to leave you, you’re—”

  “Right. I’m right.” I gathered my magic around me, and it leaped to obey, already half-summoned by the sheer amount of blood that I was shedding. I’m Dóchas Sidhe. For me, all magic is blood magic. “Go after them. Make them understand that goblin fruit isn’t welcome here. I’ll meet you at the house.”

  “Fine.” He spat the word at me like a curse and let me go, leaving me sitting on the alley floor while he raced off into the darkness.

  I sat for a moment. Then I lay backward on the cold pavement, closing my eyes. The smell of blood was everywhere, and my hands were sticky with the stuff. Somehow, that bothered me more than the fact that my shirt and jeans were ruined. I was still bleeding. That was a problem. How much blood does the body hold, anyway?

  Answer: not enough. I took a deep breath, pulling more magic out of the air, and forced it down again, trying to press it into my skin. I wasn’t sure exactly what I was doing, but I didn’t have any better ideas, and I didn’t want Tybalt to come back and find me dead in the alley. It would be cruel of me to do that to him after swearing that I’d be fine.

  The magic sank into my skin, and the burning around the bullet holes faded to a dull ache as my body finally started focusing on the twin issues of lead poisoning and physical trauma. The sensation of muscle knitting itself back together wasn’t exactly what I’d call pleasant, but I gritted my teeth and didn’t move until the pain had faded. I touched my belly with one sticky hand and found only equally sticky skin.