Late Eclipses od-4

by Seanan McGuire

  I smelled blood.

  I was raised Daoine Sidhe. That particular lie worked mostly because Daoine Sidhe know blood, and so do my mother and I. Blood has spoken to me since the day I was born, and with the changes Mother made in me, I could almost hear it screaming. I turned, walking toward the “sound” of the blood. My breath was tight in my chest, and my ears were ringing. Oak and ash, how was I supposed to live like this?

  And then it didn’t matter, because three red drops stained the dais next to Luna’s throne. Blood. Fresh blood, or fresh enough, anyway.

  “Toby?” said Connor, uncertainly. “What is it?”

  “Blood.” I knelt. “Can’t you see it?”

  “No.”

  “Nor I,” added Grianne.

  I ignored them, running a finger through the largest drop. The blood was still warm, fresh enough to come up in a slick red smear. It smelled like copper and fear, with a sharp floral undertone I couldn’t quite identify. I took a deeper sniff and sneezed, my nose protesting against whatever that underlying flavor was.

  “It’s either Oleander’s or one of her victims,” I said, standing and wiping my hand against my pants. Connor nodded. Grianne, who was watching me with a mixture of wariness and amazement, did the same.

  “Ah,” said Grianne softly.

  “I think it’s poisoned; I can’t ride it safely.” It would have been wonderful to know who’d been hurt, but with Oleander loose, anything that smelled of flowers was likely to be poisoned. Even as little poison as could be in those three drops of blood might be enough to kill me. “On the bright side, whoever did the bleeding may be dead already.”

  It’s never a good sign when I’m hoping to find a corpse. Connor grimaced, while Grianne cracked a brief smile, apparently seeing the irony. I echoed it back to her as I started scanning the area around us for more traces of blood.

  The floor was checkered white and black. Even with the Merry Dancers floating overhead, the light was diffuse enough to make the blood all but invisible on the black squares. That didn’t seem to matter, because once I started looking, the blood was practically glowing, seeming like the only source of color in a monochrome world. It didn’t just stand out: it screamed for attention, proclaiming itself in the hopes that I would notice it. The drops in the next square over were smaller, like whoever it was had managed to staunch the bleeding.

  “Well?” asked Grianne.

  “Regular chatterbox tonight, aren’t you?” I indicated the blood trail. “It picks up here.” Whoever was doing the bleeding was at least trying to conceal it. After that first, probably accidental, series of drops on the white marble, all the blood was on the black. If I were anyone besides my mother’s daughter, I might have missed it altogether.

  “Do we follow?” asked Connor.

  “You and I do. Grianne—”

  “I will find the Duke,” she said solemnly. Her Merry Dancers darted downward, spinning around her, and all three were gone, leaving Connor and me in darkness.

  “Gosh, I love teleporters,” I deadpanned. At least I didn’t need the light anymore. The blood still stood out like spots of neon in the darkness. I started to follow the trail across the room, with Connor in my wake.

  The blood led to the wall and stopped, save for a smear on the wainscoting. I touched the stain, and the wood slid down under my fingers, revealing another hidden passage in the service halls. More splashes of blood were on the floor there, getting sparser as they vanished into the darkness.

  Connor followed me through, and the door swung shut behind us.

  THIRTY-FIVE

  THE SERVICE HALL WAS EVEN DARKER than the ballroom, but that didn’t matter; I didn’t need light to see that the trail was getting fresher. I took Connor’s hand, guiding him. My other hand rested on the pommel of my borrowed sword. Sylvester wanted me to stop dying on him, so what did I do? I followed a trail of blood from an unknown source into a dark, enclosed area. There’s a way to increase your life span. All I needed was a hungry dragon to walk behind me and I’d have all the “get dead faster” bases covered.

  At least I wasn’t doing it alone. If someone was hurt, we needed to find and help them if we could. It might be one of the other knights. It might even be one of the Hobs. Of course, most people don’t take refuge in dark corners when they’ve been hurt. The Hobs might, since they spent most of their time in those halls, but I doubted it. Whoever was hiding back here probably wasn’t wounded defending the honor of Shadowed Hills.

  The hall bent to the left before coming to a dead end. I stopped, frowning at the walls. They looked solid, but I’d stopped believing anything in the place was as solid as it seemed. The doors might be hidden, but they were there, and they didn’t seem to want to be found. “Connor? Which way?”

  “Like I’d know?”

  “Great,” I muttered, dropping Connor’s hand and leaning forward to touch the wall in front of me. It was dry. So was the left-hand wall. The wall to the right was damp, and my fingers came away sticky. I sniffed them. Blood and flowers. The traces were getting stronger, because I recognized them now: foxgloves, yarrow, and oleander.

  How egotistical was it of Oleander to keep killing people with the flower she was named after? “Somebody didn’t get hugged enough as a kid,” I said.

  “If we get out of here alive, you can have all the hugs you want.”

  “Noted.” I pushed the wall, opening the hidden panel and stepping through into one of the knowe’s many libraries.

  The trail of blood picked up right outside the door, standing out starkly against the gray carpet. It was so fresh that the smell was almost cloying; we were moving faster than the person we were following. We followed the blood out of the library and paused in near-unison as we realized that we were standing in front of the door to the Garden of Glass Roses. We’d followed the blood trail all the way through the knowe.

  It didn’t make sense unless the person we were following was actively trying to avoid Sylvester’s guards. If they were, the best place to be was somewhere they thought was already clear. The blood trail didn’t enter the garden, streaking down the hall away from us instead. I sped up, grabbing Connor’s wrist to tug him along and around the corner.

  The trail ended at another door. This one was mahogany, with a narrow sword carved in place of an eyehole. I recognized it more from rote memorization than actual familiarity; it led to the practice grounds, where members of the Court went for duels or sword-fighting lessons. I hadn’t been there in decades, not since Etienne declared that my training was over. I opened the door and stepped out onto the packed earth of the grounds, Connor close behind me.

  I’m not sure what I expected to see: I’d followed the blood trail through the knowe without knowing who I was running to ground. I had a few ideas, but they were all vague, half-formed things … and as it turned out, none of them was even close to right.

  Oleander and Rayseline circled each other at the center of the field, each of them holding a knife. Oleander had a hand clamped against her side, shivering with something that looked like it ran deeper and closer to the bone than simple cold as she glared at Raysel. A flask was shattered on the ground between them, its golden contents sinking into the dirt. Oleander came like a snake, bearing her own venomous gifts, and it looked like she’d also been the one to receive them. The illusion that masked her as Nerium was gone, burned away by pain or maybe just released when it wasn’t useful anymore.

  Raysel glanced toward us as the door slammed shut. Oleander seized the opportunity, raising her knife and going into a lunge.

  “Raysel! Look out!” shouted Connor.

  Raysel whipped around, grabbing Oleander’s wrist and stopping the knife in mid-descent. She brought her own knife up at the same time, burying it in Oleander’s stomach. Oleander choked. Rayseline grinned, suddenly looking like the perfect predator—suddenly looking like Blind Michael’s granddaughter.

  “Connor, get behind me,” I hissed, wishing desperately that I had
my knives, or my baseball bat, or any sort of weapon that I actually knew how to use. A sword was impressive and all, but I was as likely to hurt myself as anybody else.

  Raysel took a step back, yanking her knife free and watching with evident satisfaction as Oleander sank slowly to the ground. “Thanks for everything, Auntie,” she purred. Turning, she blew a kiss at Connor. “Thank you, too, lover-boy. Go ahead and fuck your slut for now. Just don’t get too attached. I’ll be back.”

  She pulled a vial from inside her bodice, yanking the cork out with her teeth and spitting it at Oleander before downing the vial’s ice blue contents. The dust-andcobwebs scent of borrowed magic rose around her in an instant, carried on a bitterly cold wind. The air seemed to thicken, almost frosting over … and then she was gone, leaving the air to rush into the space she’d left behind.

  “Did she just … ?” whispered Connor.

  “She did.” I stared at the empty air. “Someone loaned her that spell. Someone—root and fucking branch, who the hell loaned that crazy bitch a teleport spell?”

  Oleander raised her head. “Wouldn’t you like to know?” Blood had matted her hair to her forehead, and her dark eyes were narrowed, filled with fury.

  “Yes,” I said, not moving. If we were going to save her, it needed to be now. But Oleander was like a snake in more ways than one. She might strike if either of us came into range, just because she could, and there was no way to take her knife away.

  “It’s good to want things. Don’t worry, it’s safe; you can laugh all you want,” she hissed. “I brewed the poison on her blade myself, and this wound might have been fatal even without it. I trained her well. I shape my tools in more than just bottles.”

  I motioned for Connor to stay where he was and stepped forward, keeping my hand on the pommel of my sword. I didn’t care how wounded she was; if she moved, I’d kill her. “Do you want us to call for help?” I asked.

  “No. No, I don’t think so.” She laughed, unwinding her arms from around her middle. The skin of her hands and forearms was dark and slippery with blood. “Look.”

  There was a deep slash across the front of her tunic, lower than the wound we’d seen Raysel deliver. The edges parted as she moved, revealing a wound too long and deep to be anything but mortal. The last time I saw anyone cut that deeply it was January, Countess of Tamed Lightning, and she was already dead. Oleander’s black clothing kept the blood from showing until it hit the ground, but that didn’t matter. I could smell it.

  “It could be healed if it were just a wound,” she said. “With the poison, all that’s left for me is dying. I’m good at what I do. Or I was. They’ll never forget my name. In a thousand years, they’ll still be whispering about me. The lives I took. The kingdoms I felled. I’m immortal.” And she smiled.

  “Look out!” shouted Connor.

  It was pure instinct—instinct, and long years spent walking the line between “impulsive” and “embalmed”—that caused me to respond to his cry by ducking, whirling around, and drawing my sword, holding it in front of my face the way I would normally hold my baseball bat. The real Oleander’s dagger glinted off the pommel, sending a spray of sparks into the air between us. She’d swapped herself for an illusion while we were distracted by Raysel’s disappearance. If her decoy had held my attention for just a few seconds longer …

  Oleander pressed down, putting as much weight as she could onto the blade of her knife. “You’re coming with me,” she snarled. “I’m not leaving here without one last kill.” She pushed down a little harder with each word. Her eyes were glassy, the pupils huge. She was in shock and falling deeper as her body raced to see what would kill her: blood loss or the poison burning in the blood that remained. Only her age and the strength of her magic were still allowing her to throw illusions, and Maeve only knew how long that would last.

  She was weak, and she was making one major, unavoidable mistake: she was applying the amount of pressure she’d need to knock down someone six inches shorter than I actually was. I gathered myself, tensing, and shoved her away as hard as I could. She staggered back about four feet, eyes widening with surprise, and disappeared.

  “Oh, great,” I muttered, as I straightened and moved the sword into a defensive position. “It’s time for crazy bitch illusionary hide-and-go-seek.” The smell of her blood was still heavy in the air.

  The smell of her blood. I closed my eyes, trying to relax. With as much as she was bleeding, she had to be the strongest blood marker in the area. Let her disappear. I’d still find her—there. I whirled, raising my sword back, and heard, again, the clank of metal on metal. She withdrew as quickly as she’d come, leaving me tense and waiting.

  We repeated that pattern twice more—turn, parry, retreat. The fourth time, she came at me too fast for a simple block to stop. She’d been fighting for centuries, and I barely knew one end of a sword from the other. I didn’t know how else to stop her, and so I swung at the air as hard as I could, putting all my weight behind the blade.

  It hit resistance. I opened my eyes.

  Oleander was visible again, staring in wide-eyed amazement at the sword driven deep into her side, almost bisecting the older of her wounds. Her knife toppled from her fingers as she raised her head to stare at me, and she dropped to her knees on the hard-packed dirt, hands starting to scrabble uselessly against the hilt.

  Connor stepped up behind her, the bow he’d taken from the armory in his hands. He had an arrow notched and ready to fire. Placing the tip against the back of her neck, he said, pleasantly, “Make one wrong move, and I swear to Maeve, I’ll shoot you.”

  “There’s no more damage to be done,” she said, in a faint, almost thoughtful voice. “No more damage, no salvation. One more of Faerie’s glorious monsters lost.”

  “If you’d left us alone—” I began.

  “You’d have sent some hero after me, given time enough. I killed, I die. At least I killed like a monster kills, instead of with iron, and dying by inches. That’s Titania’s way, the Queen who stands in darkness and screams about her light. My poisons are kinder.” Oleander touched the sword’s pommel gently. “This is how it should end. They won’t remember the way I died, but they’ll remember how I lived, forever. I was the monster under your bed, wasn’t I? I’ll be the monster waiting for your children.”

  “Be still,” I said. “Sylvester will be here soon.”

  “I suppose you want me to think you told him where you were going?” Her laughter was harsh, punctuated by gasps. “I know better.”

  “Why did you do this?” Grianne would have found the others by now, and she’d left us recently enough that her Merry Dancers would be able to lead her straight back to us. The cavalry was coming. That might not matter, because Oleander was fading fast.

  “There’s only one person I’d tell, and neither of you is her.” She shuddered, her hand dropping away from the sword. “This ends here.”

  “Who are you waiting for?” I asked. “The Duke?”

  “That dandy fool? No.” She laughed again, bitterly. “I’ve finished my business with that one. I’m waiting for the one who got away.”

  The one who … I froze. “You’re waiting for October.”

  “Yes,” she said. “Bring her, and maybe I’ll tell you. Bring me Amandine’s heir.”

  They always ask for the one thing you don’t want to give. “I’m here,” I said.

  She opened her eyes and frowned, looking at me. “I’m dying. I’m not stupid.”

  Scratch that idea. “I’m under an illusion spell.”

  “So drop it.”

  “I can’t. It’s Gwragen crafting.”

  Her frown remained. “Liar.”

  “I’m not lying! I just—”

  “It’s her,” said Connor, quietly. “On my skin, it’s her.”

  “Don’t make oaths for her sake, Connor,” I snapped. “She doesn’t deserve it.”

  Oleander suddenly smiled. It was the kindest expression I’d ever seen on her
face. “You are Amandine’s daughter. Only her children ever manage that sort of self-righteous disgust.”

  “Children?” I echoed. “What are you talking about? Why are you here?”

  “The Duke’s little daughter invited me.” Her smile didn’t waver. “Oh, I hurt her once, and it seems she held more of a grudge than I knew, but she still invited me, because I had something she wanted. I had the power to make the ones who failed her suffer. I may have helped to break her, but you, October, you and your kind … you’re the ones who let me do it.”

  “It wasn’t like that.”

  “Of course you can say that. You’re sane.” Oleander sighed. “Sometimes I wonder how that marshmallow of a man spawned someone so beautifully insane. But I really made her, didn’t I? Sylvester’s flesh, my heart. A fair return for what your mother stole from my Simon—what she stole from me.” Her voice was weakening. It wasn’t going to be much longer. Musingly, she added, “I should be grateful. Without her theft, without her desertion, he’d never have been mine to break.”

  I knelt, careful to stay out of reach. “I’d kill you if you weren’t already dying.”

  “A rich sentiment from a woman who drove a sword through my gut, Amandine’s daughter. At least my death is my own.” The fierce lucidity was fading from her voice, leaving it cracked and broken. “You don’t even know how much you’ve lost, do you?”

  “Fourteen years, a husband, and a daughter. I have a pretty good idea.”

  “Like that matters? Mortality ends. We did you a favor.” Oleander’s laugh tapered into a bubbling cough. “We should have killed you then.”

  “You tried.”

  “We almost succeeded. It was a game.” She sighed. “A wonderful game. I wasn’t ready to stop playing.”

  “Well, you just lost.” I didn’t feel sorry for her anymore. She’d admitted to kidnapping Raysel; not in so many words, but still an admission. Whatever she was getting, she’d earned it.

  “The game is just beginning. I was only a piece on the board.” She sighed again, slumping backward. “Not even the strongest piece, although I tried so hard to take her.”