A Red-Rose Chain

by Seanan McGuire

  “Have all three of them made the Choice?” I asked.

  His nod was brief. “All three of them chose Faerie. Libby encouraged them, although she didn’t know what the consequences would be if they chose the human world. She loves me. She’s loved me since I was just silly old Joe at the library. How could I tell her I would have been forced to kill our babies if they had chosen to be like she was?”

  He sounded so anguished that I almost forgot myself and approached the throne—a diplomatic misstep that would have been hard to recover from. But even my sympathy was mixed with rage. Oberon had created the hope chests to prevent situations like this one, and what had happened to them? They were locked up in treasuries and lost in private collections, and no one could use them for their intended purpose. Amandine could have filled some of that gap, but she’d chosen to hide instead, pretending to be Daoine Sidhe, while countless changelings died of old age or at the hands of their parents when they made the wrong Choice.

  Not all Cait Sidhe offered their children the Choice. Those who did apparently offered it in all its aspects . . . even the fatal ones.

  “You couldn’t tell her,” I said. “Yes, Sire. I can give them the option. It’s painful. It takes a lot out of me—and because of that, I’m afraid I can’t promise to do anything before this war between the Mists and Silences has been averted. But once that’s done, yes. I can let your girls Choose again, and whatever they decide, I can help them make it real.”

  “I’ve always thought my middle daughter could have been a Princess,” said Jolgeir, collapsing backward in his seat and staring at me. “She’s so strong, even with human blood in her veins. Take that away . . .”

  “If she chooses to be fully fae, I’ll help her,” I said. “But not until we avert this war. Or win it, I suppose.”

  “Well.” He looked to Tybalt. “My Court stands with yours. If this war can’t be avoided, the Cait Sidhe of the Court of Whispering Cats will fight for the Mists, and we will win.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Well. Um. Good.”

  We still might go to war. But I was beginning to feel like, if we did, we might stand a chance.

  FIFTEEN

  TYBALT AND I WERE nowhere near the comic book store when we left the Court of Cats. That was normal. I hoped Jolgeir at least had ended up back at his place of business, since otherwise Susie was going to be minding the front of the store for a long damn time.

  “Stupid nonlinear space,” I complained.

  We were standing next to a bright pink storefront that smelled strongly of sugar. Tybalt nudged me onto a bench and vanished inside, returning a few minutes later with a bakery box as violently pink as the business that had produced it.

  “Here,” he said, pressing the box into my hands. “You should eat something before you yell at me. You’ll be able to work up a better head of steam if you fuel yourself.”

  I eyed him sidelong before opening the box. It was full of donuts. That was normal. The donuts were covered in cereal, M&Ms, and in the case of one large maple bar, bacon. I blinked. “Tybalt?”

  “Yes?”

  “You know I’m mad at you, right?”

  “Yes. I intend to apologize, but in this case, I had reasons for bringing you to my old friend without telling you how I believed the discussion would unspool. I—”

  “Stop right there. I didn’t ask you to start explaining yourself, I asked if you knew that I was mad.”

  Tybalt sighed. “Yes. I knew you would be angry.”

  “Okay. So did you take me to Willy Wonka’s donut factory because you were hoping to distract me so much with laughter that I wouldn’t yell at you?” I stabbed a finger at one of the donuts. “Captain Crunch, Tybalt. This donut is covered in Captain Crunch cereal.”

  “I admit it was a small hope of mine, that sugar might lessen your anger,” said Tybalt. “But no, I did not expect to escape your wrath entire. Would not want to, in fact. That was a mean trick I pulled, and I am sorry.”

  I looked around. There were people, human people, strolling past with their own pink boxes, or sitting on the benches nearby, enjoying their donuts. A man was feeding a cruller to a large red macaw, which struck me as probably being unhealthy for the bird. No one was paying attention to us, and why should they? We had replaced our human disguises before we left the Court of Cats. Tybalt was still a handsome man, but his human form lacked the irresistible attraction of his true face, and I was just another brunette in tank top and jeans. We blended.

  It was an odd feeling. I wasn’t used to fitting in. Still, I kept my voice low as I leaned closer and said, “You know I would have agreed to help your friend anyway. Why did we need to go with the whole cloak-and-dagger routine? It wasn’t necessary. It made me feel like you thought of me as something to use. Like a tool.”

  The stricken look that flooded his face was too real to have been forced, starting with his eyes and moving outward until every inch of him was washed in regret. “Oh, October. I’m so sorry. I didn’t intend—I knew he would, given time, find his way to that topic. I knew what your answer would be. I also knew that, for him to take that answer as sincere, he had to reach it on his own, and I feared that if I were to prime you for meeting him, you would have done what you do best, and simply offered.”

  “Which would have been too blunt, and left him looking for the catch,” I said slowly.

  Tybalt nodded. “Yes. He’s been here, in this political situation, for a long time. Longer than you or I can imagine—my response to such things has always been to leave, to find another place to be, but he has put down roots and done his best to thrive despite adversity. Such a thing makes a man pleasant to talk to, and wary of things which seem too good to be true.”

  I looked at Tybalt for a moment before reaching into the pink box and pulling out the maple-bacon bar. I offered him the box, as a peace offering, and he took out a chocolate cake donut crowned with a thick layer of Cocoa Puffs.

  “I understand your reasoning, but I don’t appreciate it,” I said, putting the box next to me on the bench. “Please don’t do that again, or if we’re in a situation like this, where it’s genuinely important that I react without prejudice, warn me somehow. Okay? That’s enough to keep me from feeling like I’m being used.”

  “I will do my absolute best,” said Tybalt. “Again, you have my deepest apologies.”

  “It’s okay. We just have to keep doing better, that’s all. Everything is about doing better.” I took a bite of my donut, giving the crowd another look. Most of the people I’d noticed before had moved on, except for the man with the macaw, which was now holding the cruller in one claw and feeding itself. Still, I kept looking. Tybalt and I had been remarkably circumspect in our conversation, saying nothing that violated the provisions against revealing Faerie’s existence, and yet I couldn’t shake the feeling that something was wrong.

  “What is it?” asked Tybalt.

  “I don’t know.” I took a deep breath, but all I could smell was sugar. The lingering taste of maple didn’t help. “Look around. Try to be sort of casual about it. Just . . . tell me if anything seems off to you, okay?”

  Tybalt nodded before leaning over to put an arm around me and kiss me theatrically on the cheek. Then he settled back on the bench, an expression of pure smugness spreading across his face. If I hadn’t been close enough to see the worry in his eyes, I would have believed that he was the happiest man alive.

  After a moment, he murmured, “By the door. There is a man, blue shirt, brown hair. He has walked past three times. Each time he pauses just long enough to see that we remain, and then moves on again. If he’s not watching us, he’s planning to mug us later.”

  “Let’s hope for a mugging,” I said, and shifted to rest my head against Tybalt’s shoulder, pretending to take a bite from my maple bar as I watched the spot he’d indicated. People wandered past, some going inside, others escapi
ng the lure of fried dough and sticky frosting. Almost a minute ticked by, long enough for me to start considering an actual bite of my donut, before the man Tybalt had described appeared.

  He was average-looking, almost to the point of becoming unrealistic. Brown hair, brown eyes, tan skin, and clothes straight out of a Macy’s ad—jeans, a polo shirt, and plain white tennis shoes. The smell of sugar was too strong to let me pick up any hints about his heritage, but now that I was looking, the faint glitter of his human disguise was impossible to ignore. He glanced our way, confirmed that we were still sitting there, and walked on.

  “He’s not of my kind,” murmured Tybalt, voice close to my ear. “If he were, he would have come to announce himself to me. I have no authority here, but I am still a danger to those who would surprise me.”

  “Right,” I replied, equally quietly. The man was continuing onward, apparently following a preset loop. “As soon as he turns that corner, we move. Got it?”

  “Yes.”

  The man turned the corner. We moved.

  Dropping the maple bar back into the pink box—which I regretted leaving, I really did, but we couldn’t slow ourselves down with almost a dozen donuts, no matter how weird they were—I pushed myself off the bench. Tybalt rose at the same time, grabbing my hand, and together we took off across the little plaza and down the street, nearly knocking several bystanders over in our rush to get away. We weren’t being subtle; if our observer wanted to ask where we’d gone, plenty of hands would be pointed in our direction.

  That wasn’t going to be a problem. We turned a corner, running onto an empty stretch of street, and Tybalt grabbed my hand. He didn’t bother telling me what was going to happen next: I already knew, and had time to take a deep breath before the world dropped away and we were running through the dark. It only lasted for a few seconds. Then we were back in the mortal world, in a parking lot behind what looked like a large grocery store. Tybalt stopped, his heels skidding in the gravel. I ran on for another few feet, using my momentum to turn myself around and start scanning for signs that we had been followed.

  The only signs of motion came from the crows picking at the grass on the edge of the pavement. There was no guarantee that they weren’t working for King Rhys—living in Faerie means never knowing what is or is not spying on you—but they were far enough away that I was pretty sure they couldn’t hear us.

  “Don’t-look-here, Tybalt, now,” I said, voice tight. My fingers were itching to go for my knife. I didn’t mind being watched while we were in the Court of Silences. I had expected that; it was part and parcel of being a diplomatic attaché to a Kingdom that didn’t want me. But the fact that we were being followed out into Portland itself, and followed by people who could track us even after we had passed through the Court of Cats? That wasn’t good. That showed a level of dedication to keeping me under surveillance that made me uncomfortable in ways I couldn’t even put into words.

  Tybalt nodded. He pressed his hands together, rattling off a quick line of what sounded like Middle English. The smell of pennyroyal and musk rose and burst around us as he separated his hands, reached over, and grabbed my wrist. “Keep hold of me,” he said. “It works better when the spell doesn’t need to labor across open ground.”

  I raised an eyebrow. “And there’s nothing in that casting about wanting to minimize my chances to go off and get myself hurt?”

  He rolled his shoulders in a shrug. “I admit your nearness is a convenient side benefit, but no. I wanted to make the spell as strong as possible. That meant accepting certain limitations.”

  “Okay.” I stepped closer. He switched his grip on my wrist to something a little less awkward. “Where are we?”

  “Half a mile from our last known location, give or take a bit. We’re too far from the alley where we are meant to meet with the others, if that’s the true core of your question. We’ll need to take the Shadow Roads again.” He frowned a bit as he spoke.

  I gave him a sidelong look. “How much are you wearing yourself out? You’re not a taxi service, Tybalt, and I don’t want you hurting yourself just because you’re trying to keep me safe. I’m harder to kill than you think I am.”

  “Having been at your deathbed twice, I tend to disagree.”

  “Having seen you dead, I don’t think you get to claim the moral high ground here.” I looked around again, and sighed. “All right. I have a solution. I don’t think you’re going to like it very much, and I don’t much care.”

  Tybalt gave me a sidelong look. “What is this solution?”

  “We’re going to walk until we find a bus stop with a bus that’s going in the right direction. Then, when the bus comes, we’re going to get on behind whatever passengers are coming on or off, and we’re going to make our way across Portland like ordinary people.”

  Tybalt blinked slowly, looking like he couldn’t quite believe what he was hearing. “You want to take the bus,” he said.

  “Yup,” I said. “I know, it’s pedestrian and plebeian and lots of other things that start with the letter ‘p,’ but it also works. Buses are designed to get people from one place to another. And more, if Rhys sent whoever it is that’s following us—and I think we can both agree that’s what’s going on here—then he’s never going to dream we would take the bus.”

  Tybalt blinked at me again, even more slowly than before. Then, almost against his will, he began to smile.

  “Very well,” he said. “Take me to your bus.”

  The nearest bus stop was about a block away, on a corner where the pavement was cracked and the trees were less well-tended than the ones near the donut shop. I guessed that meant we’d been downtown before, and were now somewhere out near the fringes of the city. There was a map of the bus routes served by this stop, and one of them was definitely the one we wanted. That was good. There was no one at the bus stop. That was bad. I sighed, checked the direction of the bus we needed to take, and started walking again.

  “Far be it from me to sound as if I am eager to ‘catch the bus,’ but where are we going?” asked Tybalt. “That was a bus stop. I saw it with my own two eyes.”

  “Then you also saw that we were the only people there,” I said. “Buses don’t stop everywhere along their route. They stop to pick people up, and they stop to let people off. Bus driver isn’t going to be able to see us, remember? There’s no guarantee anyone would want to get off at that stop, so we need to find a place where there’s someone waiting. Hence the walking. We’ll come to the next bus stop on the route within a few blocks.”

  Tybalt threw his free hand into the air, shooting a beseeching glance upward to the sky. I managed not to laugh, but it was a near thing, and I only made the effort because I knew he wasn’t trying to be funny. “How do mortals function in a world grown so complex?” he demanded.

  “One day at a time,” I said. “Now come on.”

  The next bus stop was on a slightly nicer stretch of road, reinforcing my belief that we had wound up in a part of town that was, if not bad, at least a little bit neglected. There were people at this one, three of them, standing in the weary, not too close clump known to bus riders everywhere. Tybalt and I slipped into position behind them, careful to stay just far away enough that we didn’t upset the delicate balance of the bus stop. The don’t-look-here Tybalt had cast would keep people from noticing us, but it didn’t render us invisible. Blending in mattered, and would make the burden on the spell lighter, which would help it to last longer.

  According to the schedule, the bus was slated to arrive about eight minutes after we did. I pointed out the time to Tybalt, who nodded understanding. “See?” I whispered, keeping my voice low. “You’re a natural.”

  I didn’t need to bother. Bus riders are a rare breed, aware of their surroundings but also aware that they’re about to share a vehicle with a bunch of strangers, vague acquaintances, and people they have no actual interest i
n knowing. As long as we kept our voices down and didn’t seem inclined to murder anyone, we would have been semi-invisible to these folks even without the magic that made us that way.

  It was nice, actually. I used to ride the San Francisco buses frequently, before I got a private parking spot and a boyfriend who could break the laws of linear space. I won’t pretend it was my favorite thing in the world, but it was familiar. The Portland bus system doubtless had its own quirks and oddities—every bus system does—but it was still public transit, with all the little slings and arrows that such a thing is heir to. Call me weird, but it was relaxing to spend some time doing something so beautifully mundane.

  The bus pulled up only three minutes after the sign said it was due. The waiting passengers pushed themselves forward, and we pushed forward with them, me hauling Tybalt by the hand. Our don’t-look-here spell kept the driver from seeing us well enough to demand that we pay, but also kept him from closing the door on Tybalt’s leg. He did flip the lever as soon as Tybalt was clear, so that the doors hissed closed dangerously close to his ankles, but that was only to be expected. On some level, the bus driver knew we were there, we were fare jumpers, and hence, we were the enemy.

  I pulled Tybalt down the center aisle as the bus rumbled away from the curb, finding us an empty seat to snuggle into. I put him on the inside, by the window. “See the cord?” I murmured. “That tells the bus someone wants to get off. When you start seeing things you recognize, yank it, and the driver will know he needs to take the next stop.”

  “But we’re invisible,” he whispered back.

  “Not to the bus,” I said. “Trust me.”

  Tybalt nodded, looking like he wasn’t sure about all this, and turned his attention to the window. Portland scrolled by outside, greener than its Californian equivalents, but otherwise similar, in the way of modern cities built on the West Coast, where the weather is milder and the chance of earthquakes is higher. It’s a delicate balance that has defeated more architects than anyone can say, resulting in a lot of single-story homes that might as well have “please don’t fall down” stenciled across them in electric yellow. But for all the similarities, there were differences as well: different sorts of gingerbread and decorative wainscoting on the houses, different sorts of quirky independent businesses sandwiched between the chain stores and the municipal buildings. If there was a Portland style, I couldn’t recognize it well enough to describe it yet—and at the same time, I knew we weren’t in San Francisco anymore.