Ashes of Honor od-6
Page 12
A smile touched his lips. “Whatever the treaties between your Courts and mine say, you and I both know my nephew is your squire in all but name. You would never have forgiven me if I hadn’t told you of his disappearance. Despite appearances, your forgiveness is important to me.” The smile faded. “Not that this was the whole of my motivation. I dislike being injured, and while none of my subjects were as hurt as I was, it was luck, not skill, that saved them. I would prefer this not happen again, and I would like my nephew returned.”
Luck, and a monarch who was willing to push his weaker subjects out of the way of the onrushing disaster. My imagination has always been vivid. The image of Tybalt wreathed in flames rose in my mind’s eye. I shoved it stalwartly down and asked, “Did Chelsea take him?”
“Not precisely. He was standing between her and her second door when it opened. She ran for what she viewed as safety—as fast as she came and was gone, I doubt she even realized she’d found a possible sanctuary. He was insufficiently swift in getting out of the way, and he was knocked through the opening. It closed before he could pass back through.”
That confirmed what Chelsea had told her mother: she was losing control. I worried my lower lip between my teeth. “Can Raj use the Shadow Roads to get back?”
It was a stupid question. I knew that as soon as I asked it, but Tybalt answered as if it were meaningful, saying, “If he has access to them wherever he is, he hasn’t used them to return.”
“Right.” I took a deep breath, touching the pocket holding the Luidaeg’s charm with one hand. “Where did she open the doors?”
“Cover your mouth again, and I’ll show you,” said Tybalt.
I did as I was told. He led me out of the barn, back into the smoky halls of the Court of Cats. He took my elbow once we were outside, guiding me down the charred hall to a huge solarium. That was where the fire had started; that was where Chelsea first arrived.
Like everything in the Court of Cats, the solarium looked as if it had been on the verge of collapsing when the Cait Sidhe claimed and rebuilt it into a patchwork version of itself. Half the windows were broken and boarded over; the other half were glassless frames that looked out on a seemingly endless succession of rafters and hanging ropes. A room inside a room, which was doubtless somehow inside another room in turn. Faerie has never had much respect for spatial geometry, and the Court of Cats seemed to take a special glee in flaunting that disrespect.
Tybalt led me halfway across the solarium before he stopped, saying needlessly, “This is where the fire began.”
“Yeah,” I said, biting back the urge to start swearing. “I got that.”
There was no trace of Chelsea’s magic, but I didn’t need her magic to tell me that this was where the door had opened. A large section of wall was burnt black. In some places, it was gone, revealing the empty, echoing room that surrounded us. The silver window frames above the hole had been melted by the heat; some of them were splattered on the floor in oracular swirls, while others had maintained their cohesiveness but lost their form, twisting and curving into something that looked like modern art, assuming your definition of “modern art” involved a preschooler and a blowtorch.
The air smelled like fire, molten metal…and blood. Once I started paying attention to it, it became impossible to ignore. I stepped away from Tybalt, moving to a blackened patch on the green marble floor. I knelt there, laying my fingertips against the stone, hearing the blood sing to me through the layers of ash that separated us.
“You died here,” I said, very quietly.
“October—”
“I wasn’t here, and the girl I’m supposed to be finding was, and you died.” I looked up at him, glaring through the tears in my eyes. I left my fingers balanced on the floor, letting his blood sing its song of pain and longing. Longing to live; refusal to let go of the world. Maybe that’s what differentiates the Kings and Queens of Cats from the rest of Faerie. They have a cat’s stubbornness and the power to back it up. So when death says, “Go,” they just refuse.
My heart hurt. My heart hurt so badly, and I was still trying to recover from Connor, and oh, Titania, I couldn’t do this again. The thought startled me. I froze where I was, still glaring.
Tybalt sighed. “I know.” He hesitated before adding, “This is not the time, and this is not the place, and my nephew needs us. But I ask you to consider this. I got better. I will always get better.” He hesitated again—possibly the first time I’d ever seen him pause more than once after he’d decided he was going to say something.
Finally, he said, “Some of us, October, will not leave you.”
I stared at him. Then I pushed myself to my feet, shaking the chill of his words from my skin, and dipped a hand into my pocket to pull out the Luidaeg’s charm. As I half-expected, it was glowing a brilliant foxfire green, like a Candela’s Merry Dancer, boiled down and concentrated. I held it toward the darkest part of the char. The glow dimmed.
“She didn’t open this door,” I said, and turned, relieved when the motion put Tybalt out of my sight. He was right; this wasn’t the time for that conversation. And he was also right that it was a conversation we needed to have sooner rather than later. Just not now.
The glow didn’t brighten again until I was facing an undamaged patch of wall. Even the cobwebs and ancient, tattered curtains were intact, marking this as one of the few places not touched by fire. I moved in that direction, careful to step around the spots on the floor where blood sang to me of injuries and anger. I didn’t want to get overwhelmed.
The curtains eddied in a half-felt wind as I approached, and I smelled a faint trace of calla lilies under the veneer of smoke. The rest of her magic was buried, blending into the background smell of the fire. That didn’t matter. I had what I needed.
I held the sphere out toward the source of the lily scent. There was a soft sound, somewhere between a sigh and the chiming of a bell, and the sphere changed from foxfire green to lambent white, dimming at the same time, until it seemed as if I had a hand filled with frozen starlight. Emphasis on the “frozen”: as soon as the light changed colors, a chill raced up my arm, wrapping itself around my heart. It squeezed once, long enough to make me gasp, and then it was gone…but the memory remained. Chelsea and I were tied now. No matter what else happened, I had to find her.
“October?” Tybalt’s voice was no closer than it had been a few moments before. He hadn’t moved. Smart kitty.
“Hold on.” I raked my hair back with my free hand, using the movement to cover my shudder, and stepped closer to the wall. The smell of lilies was stronger here. The smell of smoke…wasn’t. I frowned, twisting back around to face him. “I don’t think she opened a door to the Fire Kingdoms.”
“Much as I hate to argue with you, I believe the amount of lava that made an unexpected—and unrequested—appearance proves that the Fire Kingdoms were involved.” His mouth twisted into a shape that was half-grimace, half-smile. “Mortal lava doesn’t dissolve as it cools.”
“I’m not saying they weren’t involved, I’m saying she didn’t open a door to them. She wouldn’t have survived in the Fire Kingdoms for more than a few seconds. And I don’t smell her blood at all. Wouldn’t she have been hurt?” I looked at the dimly glowing sphere in my hand before tucking it back into my pocket. “The Court of Cats is where the lost things go, right? Is there some mechanism that determines what is and isn’t lost?”
Tybalt shook his head. “No. When something becomes ours, it finds its way here.”
“Well, in that case, I’d call a teenage changeling who can’t control her powers pretty damn lost. What if she opened a door looking for a safe place to hide and wound up here? Would anyone have noticed?”
“No members of the Divided Court have ever found the Court of Cats on their own before,” he said, hesitantly.
“Chelsea’s a special case. Maybe when she got lost, she saw the way. That’s all she’d need. Just one signpost telling her which way to go.”
“You brought me here.”
A smile ghosted across his face. “Like Chelsea, you’re a special case. Before today’s excitement, you were the only member of the Divided Courts to walk these halls in centuries.”
“That’s me—defying expectations wherever I go.” I took a breath. “What was this room used for? Why were you in here?”
“It was one of our dining halls. Many of us used it for napping, or for teaching kits to hunt.” Tybalt’s tone became tinged with fond remembrance. If it hadn’t been for the bruise on his face and the smoke in the air, it would have been almost sweet. “There is little more amusing than watching adult Cait Sidhe play rat-catcher in the mortal alleys for the sake of having live things to bring back here.”
That explained why there had been so many Cait Sidhe here to be hurt, if not why Chelsea would have suddenly decided to fill the room with lava. I walked to the worst of the burn, trying not to wince at the way the floor crackled under my heels. Tybalt watched me go, a curious expression on his face, but he didn’t stop me.
When I reached the point I judged to be the origin of the blaze, I closed my eyes, breathing in deeply. All I smelled was smoke. I sighed, hand going to the knife at my belt.
It always comes back to blood.
My mother’s line, the Dóchas Sidhe, draws power from blood in a way that no one else in Faerie does. Unfortunately for me, that means there’s no one to teach me what it is I can do and how I’m supposed to go about doing it. Oh, some of the lessons the Daoine Sidhe use for their children apply to me—that’s how I was able to pass for Daoine Sidhe for so damn long—but it’s like trying to eat soup with a fork. Just because a few things work out, that doesn’t mean you’re going about them the right way.
My mother knew how to use her magic. She could have shown me the way to use mine. She didn’t. So that’s one more thing for the long list of things my mother didn’t do, one more thing for me to figure out by guesswork and luck.
Goody.
I keep my knife sharp for situations just like this one. I ran the blade across the knuckles of my left hand, cutting barely deep enough to draw blood. The wounds were already starting to scab over as I brought my fingers up to my mouth. I didn’t open my eyes.
The taste of blood chased everything else away—the smoke, the scent of Chelsea’s magic, everything. Then every other trace of blood in the room rose, threatening to knock me on my ass. I forced myself to keep breathing. My magic rose around me, cut grass and copper barely sharp enough to distinguish itself from blood. The taste of blood receded, seeming to know what it needed to do, and a dozen more magical signatures announced themselves, ghostly memories of spells long since cast and illusions long since dispelled.
“Chelsea used her magic there and there.” I pointed blindly, eyes staying closed as I fought to focus through the overlapping traces left by the Cait Sidhe. Tybalt would see what I was pointing at. “She didn’t use it here. She didn’t come anywhere near here.”
“What are you saying?” Tybalt’s voice drew closer. His footsteps weren’t even whispers in my self-imposed darkness. If he hadn’t been speaking, I would never have heard him coming.
“Chelsea didn’t open this door.” I ducked my head, breathing in deep. There was the faintest distant trace of apples and snowdrops—but then it was gone again. “I…she didn’t. I’m sure she didn’t. There’s a ghost of her magic here, but it’s too thin. She didn’t do this.”
“Then who did?” The question was softly asked, and all the more dangerous for its seeming gentleness. Tybalt was merciless in the defense of his people. If Chelsea hadn’t opened the door that burned his Court…
“I don’t know.” I opened my eyes, meeting his frown without shying away. “Believe me, if I knew, I would tell you. Nobody gets to kill you but me.”
“I should not find that so comforting. Tell me, if you can’t tell who did, how do you know it wasn’t the girl?”
“Because I can follow her magic across the room, and she never came near this wall.” I swallowed, clearing the taste of blood from my mouth. The spell burst, and the scent of old magic faded, mercifully taking the memory of all the blood that had been spilled here along for the ride. For just a moment, it was as if my senses had been set back to where they used to be, when blood magic was the tool of last resort and not the one thing I had to truly depend on. “Whoever opened the door onto the fire used a blood charm, which is how I know anyone opened a door here at all—but Chelsea didn’t do this.”
Blood charms are almost exclusively the domain of the Daoine Sidhe, which didn’t explain how someone had been able to replicate the Tuatha door-opening power with one—unless they’d used Chelsea’s blood in the mix, which would also explain why her magic seemed to be spread unevenly around the room. Whoever had her wasn’t above bleeding her.
Tybalt breathed out slowly. Then he nodded. “For her sake, I am glad. Cait Sidhe justice can be cruel,” he said. “For mine…I am troubled.”
“Yeah,” I said quietly. “If it wasn’t her, who was it?”
We stood in that flame-blackened room, looking at each other. Someone had snatched Chelsea. Someone was pursuing her, for reasons we still didn’t know. And whoever it was, they were able to follow her into the Court of Cats, and they didn’t care who got hurt.
ELEVEN
WE STEPPED FROM THE SHADOWS onto the hard-packed earth edging the creek that runs through the heart of the UC Berkeley campus. The creek’s small footbridge shielded us from mortal eyes; between that and the hanging ivy threatening to block the sun, we could practically have pitched a tent and had a cookout down there.
“I should go.”
“I wish you didn’t have to.” I turned to Tybalt. He was standing in the deepest part of the shadow. I could still see the bruise on his cheek and the exhaustion in his slumping shoulders. “Are you sure you don’t want a cup of coffee or something?”
“Your love of artificial stimulants will be the death of you one day,” he said, a smile turning up the corners of his lips. “I must attend to my Court, and you must attend to matters here. I will find you when I have the freedom to do so.”
“Okay,” I said reluctantly. The smell of pennyroyal and musk rose as he opened the door onto the Shadow Roads, and he was gone, leaving me alone.
If any of the students who saw me emerge from beneath the bridge thought it was strange, they kept their thoughts to themselves. This was UC Berkeley. Strange women in leather jackets with ash-stained hands probably crawled out from under their bridges all the time. The student body continued about its business, and I continued on mine.
Even if Walther didn’t have anything useful for me yet, he had my squire, and I wanted him back. Quentin was a smart kid, and that extended to going where I told him to go, as long as he didn’t think I was trying to be heroic and self-sacrificing. “Walther had better have coffee on,” I muttered, and kept walking.
As a junior faculty member, Walther barely rated an office. He didn’t rate one that was easy to find. It was located in a maze of twisting hallways that seemed to have been designed by an architect who dreamed of one day having a real Minotaur lurking to devour the unwary. No legendary Greek monsters leaped out to grab me as I walked, finally stopping in the open doorway of a small, cluttered room that held two legendary monsters of its own. I rapped my knuckles against the doorframe.
“If one of you doesn’t have coffee for me, I’m going to be cranky,” I announced.
Walther and Quentin had been bent over something on the counter. They straightened and turned at the sound of my voice. Walther smiled. Quentin didn’t bother with the preliminaries. He grabbed a paper cup and trotted over to me, holding it at arm’s length.
&nb
sp; “Here,” he said. “Coffee.”
“And thus am I reminded why I allow you to live,” I said. The coffee was cold and the “creamer” had never seen the inside of a cow, but I didn’t care. The caffeine was all I needed. I lowered the cup after chugging a third of its contents, asking, “What’s our status?”
“Come in, come in,” said Walther, beckoning me forward. “And close the door.” His glasses were askew, and his hair was mussed. Not enough that anyone who didn’t know him would notice, but Walther worked very hard to maintain his superficial “I am the perfect professor” appearance. Mussed hair didn’t go with that ideal.
“Long night?” I asked, doing as I was bid. The office was considerably dimmer once the light from the hall was blocked. All the overheads were off, leaving us in a room that would have been substantially too gloomy for mortal eyes.
Good thing none of us had mortal eyes. I sipped my coffee as I walked across the room, drinking more slowly now that the first rush of caffeine was in my system. With the ambient light blocked by the door, it was apparent that whatever Walther was working on was glowing faintly, like a light stick the morning after Halloween. It was a steady glow, at least, and not a candlelight flicker. I hate candles.
“I was already here when you called, tinkering with some personal projects. You just focused me,” said Walther. He turned back to the counter. “I’m not technically supposed to be here today, but I knew no one else was using my office, so I just kept going.”
“He took a break for breakfast,” said Quentin helpfully.
“I bet he did.” By the time Quentin got to campus, he was probably so focused on food that he could have convinced an invading army to stop long enough to get some oatmeal and bacon. Teenage boys are good that way. “Is it safe to assume we’re all standing here in the dark because you managed to make something we could use?”
“I wouldn’t use the word ‘safe’ when talking about this stuff, but yes.” Walther picked up a beaker with excruciating care. He was wearing heavy gloves, and he still looked uncomfortable holding the thing. It was half-full of a viscous liquid glowing a soft, somehow menacing shade of orange. I looked at it and had absolutely no desire to get any closer.