Ashes of Honor od-6

by Seanan McGuire

  “Keep him with you for as long as you have need of him.”

  “I will.” That was a lie, sort of; with my car out of commission, we could really use a personal teleporter. Keeping Etienne around would still have been more trouble than it was worth, especially since we were going to be dealing with Bridget again before this was over.

  Etienne started toward us. He was almost there when Sylvester added, in a mild tone, “I trust you all to tell me what is going on once you feel that it is safe to do so.”

  “Yes, your Grace,” said Etienne, shoulders hunching. He didn’t look back. Maybe he didn’t trust himself to hold his silence if he saw his liege’s face.

  I’m less of a stickler for the rules than Etienne is, and I was having trouble looking at Sylvester without spilling the whole story. “Come on, Quentin,” I said. “We need to get going.”

  “Coming.” He trotted over, waving to Sylvester as he passed him, and reached me at the same time as Etienne.

  “The Luidaeg’s, please,” I said.

  “As you wish,” said Etienne. His hand traced a wide circle in the air, trailing the smell of cedar smoke and limes. A hole opened. Through it, I could see the familiar dirty walls of the alley that led to the Luidaeg’s apartment.

  “Open roads and kind fires,” Sylvester said.

  “Open roads,” I echoed, and stepped through the circle in the air. Quentin and Etienne followed me.

  The three of us were standing in the dim San Francisco alley, miles from Tilden Park, when I realized that I’d managed to leave my sword in the car.

  Well, crap.

  EIGHT

  “THIS WAS AS CLOSE AS I could bring you. The Luidaeg’s actual domain is shielded against teleportation.” Etienne looked around the alley, nose wrinkling. It was an understandable reaction, considering the condition of both the alley and the slice of street visible through the alley’s mouth. The Luidaeg could have lived anywhere she wanted, either in this world or in the Summerlands. She chose a place where the cockroaches were reluctant to live, and she seemed entirely content to stay there.

  “When are you going to tell him, Etienne?” I asked, before he could open a portal to take himself back to Tilden Park. “He knows something is going on, and I won’t lie for you. Omit things, maybe, if it’s necessary. But not lie.”

  “Neither will I,” added Quentin.

  “I wouldn’t ask you to.” Etienne looked down as he said, “I am simply having trouble deciding how best to tell my liege that when he needed me most, I betrayed his trust.”

  “You did no such thing,” I said. “You made a mistake, and now you’re trying to make it right. That’s all Sylvester expects from any of us. That when we make mistakes, we do our best to fix them.”

  “Perhaps that’s what he expects from you, October, but I was his representative in those dark days. I must hold myself to a somewhat higher standard.”

  I sighed. “I’m going to ignore the swipe you just took at my social status, because I know you’re stressed. But you need to tell him sooner rather than later, because I’m not keeping your secrets forever.”

  “I’ll tell him. Just give me time.”

  Time was something we didn’t have much of. I shook my head. “I’ll give you what I can. I don’t know how much that’s going to be.”

  “Hopefully, it will be enough.” Etienne waved his hand through the air, opening a portal back to Tilden Park. He stepped through before I had the chance to say anything else.

  “Always has to have the last word,” I grumbled. “Come on, Quentin. Let’s go see the sea witch.” We turned, and walked down the alley to the Luidaeg’s apartment.

  Her front door was warped and water stained, and it looked like it would fall apart if subjected to the slightest pressure. Appearances can be deceiving, especially when the Luidaeg is involved. I raised my hand and knocked briskly, not hammering, but not gently tapping, either. There was no immediate answer. Quentin and I exchanged a look. The Luidaeg normally opened her door almost instantly, sometimes even before we had a chance to knock. Then again, it was more than an hour past sunrise, and even sea witches have to sleep sometime.

  “I wish we’d been able to stop for the donuts,” said Quentin.

  “You and me both,” I said and knocked again.

  This time, we heard movement on the other side of the door: feet, shuffling down the hall. I lowered my hand, and the door swung open, revealing a sleepy-eyed, apparently human woman with tousled brown hair, tan skin, and freckles warring with the ghosts of teenage acne scars for ownership of her cheeks. She was wearing a blue bathrobe over a floor-length white cotton nightgown. She looked like she couldn’t be more than a few days over seventeen.

  I knew better. “Hello, Luidaeg,” I said. “Can we come in?”

  The Luidaeg blinked. “Toby?” She glanced to my companion. “Quentin? What are you two doing here? You didn’t call.”

  “We were going to, but I had car trouble, and it sort of slipped my mind. It’s why we didn’t bring donuts. Please can we come in? There’s something we need to talk about, and I’d rather not do it standing on the porch.”

  The Luidaeg looked at us again and then looked back over her shoulder at the hallway. The door blocked whatever she was looking at. Finally, she sighed. “All right, you can come in—but don’t you dare say a word about the condition of my apartment. I didn’t have time to get ready for company.”

  Considering that the Luidaeg’s apartment normally looked like a cross between a compost heap and the dumpsters behind a Goodwill, that was a terrifying statement. “Sure,” I said. “We won’t say anything.”

  The Luidaeg scowled at me. “Yeah, you will,” she said. Then she turned and retreated into the hall, leaving the door open so we could follow her inside.

  I stepped over the threshold and stopped. Quentin froze beside me, the two of us staring wide-eyed at something even more unexpected than a monster sleeping on top of my car.

  The hall was clean.

  The carpet—visible for the first time in the years that I’d been visiting—was the color of fresh kelp. The walls were cream-colored, decorated with a few judiciously placed fishnets. They filled the air with the pleasant scent of fresh seawater, salty without being briny.

  “Toby…”

  “Yeah, kid. I see it, too.”

  The Luidaeg stopped at the end of the hall, turning back to scowl at us. “Are you going to come inside or not?”

  Quentin and I exchanged a look before stepping into the hall. The door swung shut behind us, and we walked down the hall to the pristine living room. The couches—which had always been splotched with patches of muck and mold before—were clearly antique but well cared-for. There were even a few pictures on the walls, all images of oceans. I recognized one of them as having been taken at Half Moon Bay, near the home of Connor’s family. The Luidaeg has an…interesting…relationship with the Selkie families. They owe her their existence. She’s planning to call in that debt soon, and I’m pretty sure it’s going to involve me.

  “What the hell happened here?” I asked, looking toward the Luidaeg.

  “Like I said, the place isn’t ready for company. If you’d called first…”

  The Daoine Sidhe are illusionists. Maybe that’s why Quentin was the one to say, indignantly, “You mean you’ve been pretending this place was a pigsty all this time?”

  “I never said ‘this place is a pigsty,’ did I?” asked the Luidaeg. “I never lied to you. I’ve never lied to either of you. I just let you think what you wanted to think. If you’d ever asked…”

  I shook my head. “But let me guess. If I’d asked, ‘Is the apartment always like this?’ you would have said, ‘No, sometimes it’s a mess,’ and let me think it just got worse instead of telling me that it was spotless under a glamour.”

  “Yup,” said the Luidaeg. “Or if you’d asked, ‘Don’t you ever clean?’ I would have said I cleaned all the time. Lies and truth are all in how you’re l
ooking at them. That’s something you, out of everyone, should have figured out by now.” She yawned, covering her mouth with the back of her hand. “Now what the fuck do you people want? This is ‘rip your heads off and leave your bodies as a warning to others’ early.”

  Quentin grinned. Apparently, threats of dire physical harm from the Luidaeg made him happy. Weird kid. At least I could take some small pleasure in knowing that I was part of what made him that way. “It’s good to see you, too.”

  “Uh-huh.” She went stomping toward the kitchen. “I’m making some fucking tea.”

  Sometimes I think the Luidaeg uses human profanity as much as she does just because she’s trying to shock me. I ignored it and followed her, with Quentin close behind me.

  The kitchen was as clean as the rest of the apartment. None of the appliances were newer than the early 1970s, but they were all spotless, with no dents or signs of rust. “You want some?” the Luidaeg asked, picking up a kettle and moving to fill it with water from the tap.

  “Depends. Is that freshwater or saltwater?”

  She cast a wry smile in my direction. “You’re catching on to the way things work. No tea for you. Now what in Dad’s name are you two doing here? Shit’s got to be pretty bad if you’re showing up on my doorstep before I’ve had my beauty sleep.”

  I couldn’t think of a way to ease her into the situation, so I didn’t bother: “Etienne has a changeling daughter that nobody knew about, including him. And now she’s missing.”

  “So?” The Luidaeg put the kettle on the stove. “Sounds like that saves him the trouble of giving her the Choice.”

  “Etienne’s Tuatha.”

  “So?”

  “So the ‘car trouble’ I mentioned? Was the roof of my car getting smashed in by an Afanc looking for a place to sleep.”

  The Luidaeg turned to stare at me. I kept on talking.

  “Sylvester assumed it escaped from someone’s menagerie. He’s taken it back to Shadowed Hills until they can track down whoever owns it. But they’re not going to find an owner, are they? That thing came straight from Tirn Aill. Chelsea—Etienne’s daughter—her magic smells like sycamore smoke and calla lilies. I smelled it on the Afanc.”

  The Luidaeg paled. That, in and of itself, was terrifying. “It’s happening again,” she said, almost in a whisper. “Oh, sweet Mother, it’s happening again.”

  “What’s happening again? Luidaeg, talk to me. I need to know what’s going on. I need to find Chelsea.”

  “Oh, you need to find her, all right,” said the Luidaeg. She shook her head. Somewhere in the middle of the gesture, the humanity left her face, acne scars and tan fading away. She was left with a faint mother-of-pearl undertone to her skin…and the freckles. They seemed to be permanent, no matter what shape she took. The Luidaeg can be distressingly protean, and I may never know what she really looks like. I’m not certain I want to. “You need to find her now.”

  “How?” asked Quentin. We both turned to look at him. He was frowning. “I know we need to find her. That’s why we’re here. We can’t teleport. How are we supposed to find her?”

  I looked back to the Luidaeg. “How bad can this get?”

  “Bad,” she said. “I’m assuming you’ve both heard about the changelings who go wrong when their magic comes in.”

  “Instead of getting all the limits and none of the power, they get all the power and none of the limits,” I said. “I think everyone’s heard those stories.”

  “Yeah, well. Have you ever met one of those changelings?”

  “No.” Every changeling I’d ever known, myself included, was magically weaker than their fae parent. The horror stories about uncontrollable changeling magic destroying knowes and burning human cities had always seemed to be just that: horror stories, usually trotted out by pureblood kids who wanted to remind us that we weren’t just less than they were, we were potentially going to go bad.

  “So if they’re that rare, why do the stories endure?” asked the Luidaeg. “Faerie is usually happy to forget the bad things. Hell, we practically race to see who can forget them first. Maybe some people don’t like changelings, but shouldn’t they still be happy to forget about the disasters that happened years ago, to somebody else?”

  I didn’t say anything. Neither did Quentin. We just waited.

  The Luidaeg shook her head. “We remember because when it does happen, when this sort of thing does go wrong, it’s so fucking bad that no one can pretend it didn’t happen. The last time there was a Tuatha de Dannan changeling with the strength to smash his way through the walls Oberon erected between us and everywhere else, it was…bad.”

  “Bad ‘well, that sucks’ or bad ‘end of the world’?” I asked, cautiously.

  “Bad ‘he punched a hole all the way through to the central lands of Faerie, and some people were never heard from again,’” said the Luidaeg. “I’d tell you to go ask your mother, if I thought she’d be willing to talk to you about it. She was there. She was one of the people who had to seal the door he’d created before it could destroy all the worlds.”

  Amandine had been rattling at doors no one could see since she went mad. Maybe she really could see something that the rest of us couldn’t. I frowned. “What happened to the changeling?”

  “He died.” The Luidaeg’s tone made it clear that there would be no further discussion of the dead. Her kettle began to whistle. She took it off the stove and opened the nearest cabinet, taking down a mug. “If your Chelsea is that kind of changeling, you’ve got two choices.”

  “What are those?” I already half-knew what she was going to say. I was hoping she’d come up with another option.

  “You shift her blood all the way in either direction—make her human, or make her fae so that her blood will give her the power blocks she’s missing—or you kill her. She doesn’t walk away from this the way that she is now. Do you understand me? No one who can open a door to Tirn Aill without my father’s permission can be allowed to go free.”

  “Why is that so bad?” asked Quentin. “I mean, when Oberon locked the doors, did he know he was going to be gone this long? Maybe people would fight less if they could go home.”

  Faerie wars used to be bloody and unpleasant, but they always ended, because eventually the warring parties just went home. When your annoying neighbors live in a different pocket universe, it’s a lot easier to ignore the fact that they never mow the lawn. Locking all the inhabitants of Faerie in two worlds—Earth and the Summerlands—might have made out-and-out conflict rarer, but with nowhere else to go, the warring parties just kept at it until one side was all but annihilated. Just ask the Kingdom of Silences.

  “It’s not my place to question my father’s decisions,” said the Luidaeg frostily. Then she sighed, thawing a little as she said, “Without him, Mom, and Aunt Titania to keep the Heart of Faerie under control, the deeper lands are unstable. They’re open to influence, and they’re going to be looking for it anywhere they can find it. If we went back to the deeper lands without them, we’d all wind up dead, trapped, or worse.”

  I didn’t ask what “or worse” could be. Faerie is nothing if not creative when it comes to that sort of thing. Instead, I asked, “The Heart of Faerie?”

  The Luidaeg didn’t answer. She just looked at me and waited.

  Right. “So how are we supposed to find Chelsea?” I asked, dropping the subject. “She can teleport, and we don’t even have a car anymore, thanks to the Afanc.”

  “What did you say her magic smelled like?”

  “Sycamore smoke and calla lilies.”

  “And she’s Etienne’s kid. What does his magic smell like?”

  “Um…it smells like cedar smoke and limes.”

  “Okay. Okay. Her line…she must be descended through Amorica.” Catching our blank expressions, the Luidaeg sighed. “You know, there was a time when everyone in Faerie knew the descendant lines of the Firstborn. It helped people not get turned inside out when they pissed us off. Amorica
and Elton are the Tuatha de Dannan Firstborn. Twins. Amorica’s magic smelled like burning heather—like all the fields in the world were on fire at once. Elton smelled like that same field at dawn, when the dew was heavy and fire seemed impossible. If your missing kid were from Elton’s line, she’d smell like, I don’t know, wet concrete and whatever.”

  Quentin and I kept looking at her blankly. The Luidaeg scowled before picking up the kettle and pouring a stream of dark liquid into her mug.

  “Did you never consider that maybe—just maybe—your magic said things about you?”

  “I knew it usually reflected one or both of your parents somehow and that it could change as you got older, but I didn’t realize it identified your Firstborn,” I said. “Or that the Tuatha had two Firstborn.”

  “Yeah, well, ‘had’ is the right word there. Amorica died the first time we went to war against each other—and don’t,” she held up a hand, “ask me why we went to war, or who was on which side. It doesn’t matter now, and it’s one of the questions I’m not allowed to answer.”

  “Okay,” I said slowly. “So she’s one of Amorica’s descendants. What does that mean from a practical standpoint?”

  “It means I can mix you a tracking potion.” The Luidaeg sipped her tea, grimaced, and set the cup aside before opening her refrigerator and starting to rummage around inside. “You won’t be able to follow her if she gates out of the Summerlands, but at least you’ll be able to tell where she enters and exits.”

  “What’s the catch?” asked Quentin.

  The Luidaeg’s magic always comes with a price. Both Quentin and I have learned that lesson firsthand. There are people who would say we got off easy—we’re both still breathing, after all—and maybe they’re right. That doesn’t make the Luidaeg’s bills easy ones to pay.

  “Well, for one thing, you won’t be able to stop looking until you find her.” The Luidaeg straightened, a jar of unidentified green sludge in each hand. She closed the refrigerator door with a bump of her hip before moving to the counter. “For another thing, if she dies before you manage to catch up to her, you’re going to get it dropped on your head.”