Ashes of Honor: An October Daye Novel

by Seanan McGuire

  “Me?” Luna blinked again. “Why me?”

  “We need access to the Rose Road,” I said. “It’s sort of an emergency.”

  As a Blodynbryd, Luna had access to the Rose Roads, which ran, near as I could tell, between the Summerlands and places where the walls of the world had worn thin. I had taken the Rose Road from Shadowed Hills to the Luidaeg’s apartment once, and once into Blind Michael’s lands. Those places weren’t necessarily lost—in fact, they were, by definition, found. They were also outside the normal passages of Faerie. If we wanted to find Raj, we needed a miracle. This seemed close enough for me. I might as well risk it all on the liminal spaces.

  Luna’s eyes widened, pink eyelashes making her expression of shock almost comic. It’s taken me a long time to get used to her new coloring, snow white and rose red where she used to be shades of brown. Sometimes, it’s still a little strange. “What do you need the Rose Road for?”

  “We’ve sort of misplaced Raj. I think if we can get between realms, we might be able to get a fix on him.” I hoped, anyway.

  Luna frowned. “I can’t just open a road with no end. You have to have a destination.”

  Destination. Right. “Send us to your mother,” I suggested.

  “I don’t know…” said Luna uncertainly.

  “Milady of Roses, you know October wouldn’t ask if it were not of direst importance,” said Tybalt. He smiled hopefully. “Please? It would be a great favor, to both of us, and I am sure all will be made clear, given time enough.”

  Time enough, and us managing not to die. “Please?” I echoed, trying my hardest to look ingratiating. I probably managed to look deranged.

  Fortunately for me, Luna has always been responsive to derangement. “If you get yourself killed, Sylvester will never forgive me,” she said. That was when I knew I’d won. If she was making dire statements about what I could or couldn’t do to myself on the Rose Road, she was going to send me.

  “I know,” I said.

  “Just so long as you do.” She bent to retrieve her gardening shears from the basket of strawberries. She opened the shears, using them to snip off a foot-long lock of her pink and red hair. The smell of roses was suddenly strong, and grew stronger as she shook the cut hair.

  Somewhere in the middle of the motion the curl straightened, taking on overtones of green. And then it wasn’t hair anymore, but a long-stemmed white rose. She held it out to me. I took it, managing not to wince when the inevitable thorns bit into my fingers. The edges of the petals began turning red, the color spreading inward like blood spreading through white silk.

  “Both of you,” she said, gesturing for Tybalt to take hold of the rose as well.

  “As you like,” he said, and wrapped his fingers around mine. The red began spreading faster, taking on a deeper hue. The smell of pennyroyal and musk rose around us, and I realized that the other things I smelled—roses, and fresh grass, and blood—weren’t just part of being in the garden. Luna’s rose-red magic was rising, and my own cut grass and bloody copper was answering the call.

  “Breathe in,” said Luna. Tybalt and I did as we were told. “Good. Now breathe out, turn around, and start walking.”

  It was no surprise to turn and see the gateway, even though there had been nothing there but grass when we arrived. It was shaped like a wicker trellis, with red and white roses growing around it in such vulgar profusion that they almost concealed the structure underneath. Beyond them, a tunnel enclosed by roses stretched into the distance. The only safe place to walk was the narrow dirt path between the creepers and the thorns, and even that was occasionally crossed by fallen branches, making the way hazardous to all but the most cautious traveler.

  “Walk quickly, but walk with care,” said Luna. “Don’t look back. If you look back, you’ll have to go back the way you came or risk falling off the Road, and I won’t be able to retrieve you if you wind up somewhere you didn’t mean to be.”

  “Got it,” I said. “Is there anything else we need to know?”

  “Don’t let go of the rose until you’re off the Road, and don’t let it out of your sight until you’re absolutely sure you’re not going to need it anymore.”

  “I do so love how all magic comes with its share of dire warnings and unclear requirements,” sighed Tybalt. “It’s like being on the stage, only there’s no director, and the understudies have all died of typhus.”

  “On that charming note, see you later, Luna. Here’s hoping we don’t die.” I kept a firm grip on the rose as I started forward. Tybalt walked alongside me, his steps paced to mine, and together we passed through the archway. I heard it close behind us. We were on the Rose Road, and we were alone. The only question was what we were going to do next.

  SIXTEEN

  I DUG THE LUIDAEG’S CHARM from my pocket as we walked, holding it in front of me. It was still in its neutral state, although the reflections off the roses around us tinted it pale pink. “Chelsea’s not near here,” I said. “Do whatever hoodoo you need to do to know if Raj is nearby.”

  “Hoodoo?” said Tybalt, sounding amused. “I’m the King of Cats, October, not the King of Goblins.”

  “And you don’t live in a labyrinth, but that doesn’t mean you can’t make like a Henson character and start scrying for our missing boy. Also, how have you even seen that movie? Does the Court of Cats have cable?” I kept walking. “This thing will eventually dump us in Acacia’s backyard. I’m hoping we can get a lead on one or both of the kids before we get there.”

  “But Chelsea is your priority.”

  “No,” I said. “Raj is. Chelsea’s in trouble, but she can get herself out of it. Raj is somewhere he can’t get out of. I don’t leave people behind.”

  There was a moment of silence. I risked a glance to the side. Tybalt was watching me, an odd, thoughtful expression on his face. He looked away when he saw me looking.

  “Well, then, I suppose I must rise to your example.” He waved his free hand in the air, the smell of pennyroyal swirling around us before converging in the space just above his palm. He cupped his hand, and a globe of what seemed to be solidified shadow dropped into it. “Here. This will tell us if there is only a thin wall between me and my nephew.”

  “Good.” I kept walking. “Hey. Can I ask you a question?”

  “My dear October, we are bound by an enchanted rose made from the hair of a Duchess, and my blood is covering your hand. You can learn anything you wish to know about me merely by licking your fingers.” Tybalt laughed a little. “Yes. You may ask me a question.”

  “Back in the Court of Cats, you said you made a mistake when you took Raj as a nephew. What did you mean?”

  “You have an uncanny ear for the things I most wish you would forget, while willfully and continually forgetting the things I wish you would remember,” said Tybalt dryly. “I had a choice, when Raj’s parents brought him to me. I could do as they asked, take him as a nephew and let them stay by his side. Or I could do as my father taught me, take him as a son, raise him as my own, and drive them as far from my territory as I could.”

  “Oh.” We kept walking. Finally, I said, “I don’t like Raj’s dad. He’s kind of an asshole. But I’m glad you let him stay with his son. I think it says something good about your character.”

  “I appreciate your approval,” said Tybalt. Then he laughed. “Had I known it was as easy to get as all that, I might have confessed my softheartedness years ago. Really, October, you should provide a list of ways to reach your good side. It would be a kindness beyond measure.”

  “I’m not that complicated,” I protested.

  “As someone who has to deal with you on a regular basis, I beg to differ,” said Tybalt. “At times, I suspect you’re doing it intentional—” He stopped in the middle of the word. He stopped walking at the same time, jerking me to an unexpected halt. The rose thorns bit deeper into my fingers. I yelped.

  “Dammit, Tybalt! What gives?”

  “I’m afraid I owe you an apol
ogy,” said Tybalt, eyes wide. He held up his ball of shadow. Ball of mostly shadow—swirls of bluish light were moving through it, appearing and disappearing like eels swimming in brackish water. “He’s near. Not here, but…near.”

  “Where?”

  Tybalt nodded toward the nearest tangled wall of rosebushes. “That way.”

  “Then let’s go.”

  He shot me a surprised look.

  I smiled. “I trust you. Now open up those shadows, and let’s bring our boy home.”

  Tybalt nodded. Pulling back, he threw his ball of shadow at the roses. It stuck where it hit. Then it dissolved, blackness spreading over branches, thorns, and flowers alike to create a black “doorway” in the wall. I could feel the chill radiating out of it.

  There was a time when Tybalt only got me into the shadows by surprising me or jerking me off-balance. That time has passed. I walked with him into the dark willingly, the rose still joining our hands. For a moment, the light of the Rose Road shone in from behind us, illuminating nothing, but making that nothing a little easier to see. Then the way behind us closed, and everything was blackness.

  We stopped walking and just stood there in the dark, not moving. I forced myself not to breathe and tried not to shiver too hard. The cold of the Shadow Roads was somehow worse when we held still, as though that immobility really allowed the frost to catch hold and begin gnawing its way inside. Even the blood on my fingers was freezing; I could feel it turning to ice.

  Finally Tybalt whispered, “This way,” and pulled me forward. There was a horrible wrenching, twisting sensation, as if the shadows were pushing back against us, as if we were going somewhere we weren’t meant to be. It became almost painful, and still Tybalt kept pulling me forward. I gritted my teeth and kept going, trusting him to know what he was doing. The twisting became a tearing, and the cold became a burn, and just as I was about to scream—

  —the darkness broke around us, and the tearing sensation stopped.

  Tybalt dropped my hand, letting go of the rose in the process, and bent forward to rest his hands against his knees, panting. I straightened and looked around, still holding the rose. We were…I didn’t know where we were. We were someplace I had never been before. There was one thing I knew, though, all the way down to the core of my being.

  This wasn’t the Summerlands.

  The sky was the deep, impenetrable blue of true midnight. The stars were bright; I didn’t know any of the constellations. We were near the edge of a cliff; I could see more cliffs gleaming white as bone to either side, descending sharply to the equally white beaches below. They contrasted well with the absolute blackness of the ocean beneath them. Far out on the bay, a lighthouse swept its light smoothly across the waves.

  “Where the fuck are we?” I breathed.

  “I don’t know,” wheezed Tybalt. “Remind me to beat my nephew for making us come here.”

  “No,” I said. I turned to look behind us. The land stretched into a wide moor. Beyond that, hills, some crowned with the familiar, irregular shapes of castles. The air smelled like heather, flowering bloom, peat, and the sea. What it didn’t smell like was the modern world. No pollution, no smog, no traces of combustion engines. Wherever we were, it was a place that had been sealed away long before the technological revolution changed things. “I get to beat him. I figured out how to get us here. That means I have dibs.”

  “Why are you an adherent to logic only when it results in the commission of violence?”

  “What can I say? I know what I like.” I turned again, this time continuing until I’d completed a slow circle. The lighthouse turned, the waves swept in and out, the sedge on the moor rippled in the breeze…but that was all. Nothing else moved, nothing else stirred. “You’re the one who can sense Raj’s location. Where is he?”

  “You make me sound like a machine.”

  “You complain when I use you like a bloodhound. This is a step up.” The thorns on Luna’s rose were sharp enough to be a distraction. I pushed it into the tangled mess that was my hair, forcing it down until the flower snagged and refused to move farther. That would keep it until we needed it again.

  Tybalt chuckled, still sounding winded, and pushed himself upright. He looked around thoughtfully before stepping away from me, moving off the hard-packed sand at the cliff’s edge to the border of the moor. He bent, plucking a yellow-flowered sprig of broom. “I know where we are,” he said, a wondering edge to his voice. He straightened, turning to offer me the broom like it was the most precious thing the world had ever known. “This is incredible.”

  I took the broom—it would have been rude not to—and tucked it behind my ear before asking, “Well? Where are we?”

  He stepped closer. The hot smell of pennyroyal and musk baking off his skin overwhelmed even the smell of the sea. “Annwn,” he whispered. “We’re in Annwn.”

  My eyes widened as I swallowed my instinctive denial. Chelsea was weakening the walls of the world. The Rose Roads followed their own rules. Who was to say that right now, with all those factors working together, we couldn’t get around the gates Oberon had erected and find our way someplace we absolutely weren’t supposed to be?

  Annwn was one of the deep realms. It used to be accessible by sea from half a dozen other homelands and by gate from a few more. It was a port country, worked by seafaring folk, ferrymen and sailors and traders who liked the unpredictability of the land, as wild as the Firstborn who made it, Arawn of the White Stag. It was a verdant farmland, one of the few deep realms that ever knew seasons. And no one had walked there or breathed its heather-sweet air in over five hundred years.

  “Whoa,” I said.

  “Yes. Very much ‘whoa.’” Tybalt turned, scanning the landscape. Then he pointed out into the moor and said, “There. That’s where we need to go.”

  “Because Raj is there or because you want to watch me go tromping around in a field full of sticker bushes?”

  He smiled a little, still looking tired. “Oh, don’t be silly, October. This is Annwn. There will almost certainly be thistles.”

  “This gets better and better,” I said, and together we tromped into the heather.

  We were on a mission—the glow of the Luidaeg’s charm was a constant reminder—but it was hard not to get distracted by the sheer alien novelty of the landscape, a place as unfamiliar to me now as the Summerlands were, when I was a little girl, I could have spent hours just looking at the stars, trying to guess what the people who used to live here made of them. Instead, we had to keep walking, fording through the waist-high brush as we tried to find the place where Raj had gone to ground.

  True to Tybalt’s prediction, there were thistles scattered through the heather and broom, their bright purple flowers only providing a little bit of warning before their prickles bit into my ankles or hands. “I think the landscape is out to get us,” I muttered, after the fifth stealth attack.

  “Almost certainly,” said Tybalt. “A knowe, allowed to go fallow, will lash out at one who enters it. Why should a realm be any different?”

  That gave me pause. When I went to claim the knowe at Goldengreen, it fought back. Not because it wanted to be left empty but because it was hurt. It had been abandoned, left alone, and it was angry. Our hollow hills are alive, in their own slow way, and just like any living thing, they have feelings. Why would a realm be any different?

  Answer: it wouldn’t. “Oak and ash,” I muttered. “I hope Raj is okay.”

  “As do I,” said Tybalt.

  We walked faster after that. The moor seemed endless, but eventually the brush began to thin, the formerly hard-packed ground turning soft and marshy under our feet. Tall stands of bulrush made their appearance, some of them growing higher than Tybalt’s head. Finally, Tybalt stopped, looking straight at one of the patches of bulrush.

  “All right,” he said. “You may emerge. Quickly, if you please; the ground is damp, and I would prefer not to sink.”

  There was a moment of silence. Then t
he bulrushes rustled, and a boy-sized missile flung itself at us, zigging at the last moment to slam into me. If Tybalt hadn’t been standing there so calmly, I might have reacted with violence. As it was, I simply braced myself, and when Raj made impact, I wrapped my arms around him, letting him bury his face against my shoulder.

  “You came you came you came,” he was saying, the words so fast and jumbled-together that they were practically a chant. “I didn’t think—I wasn’t sure—I didn’t know—”

  “Hey. Hey!” I unwrapped my arms and grabbed his shoulders, pushing him out to arms’ length. He went reluctantly, but he went. That was all I could ask for. “We’ll always come. You got that? If we have to move heaven and earth—”

  “Or find a route into a realm that’s been sealed for centuries,” interjected Tybalt.

  “—we will,” I finished. “Do you understand me? We’ll always come for you, Raj. You’re family. We look out for our own.”

  Raj nodded, eyes wide and swimming with tears. Then he ducked out from under my hands and slammed into me again, resuming his embrace. At least he didn’t start chanting again. I looked over his head to Tybalt.

  “We got him,” I said.

  Tybalt nodded. “Indeed. Allow him his distress. Even for a Prince, this must have been…trying.” He looked around. “I know where we are, and I doubt I would have taken this so calmly at his age.”

  The idea that Tybalt was ever a teenager was almost enough to make me start laughing. Instead, I snorted and said, “Now that we have him, we should probably be getting out of here.”

  Raj pushed himself back enough to look up at me. “How?” he asked, an edge of panic in his voice. “I tried and I tried, and I couldn’t find the shadows. They wouldn’t come.”

  “That’s because there has been no King here to remind them of their place,” said Tybalt.

  “Besides, we had help.” I pulled the rose from my hair, only wincing a little when the thorns sliced my fingers. Healing fast has its perks, but it also means I never get numb; I had fully recovered from my first bout with the thorns, and round two hurt even more, if that was possible. “Luna opened a Rose Road for us. Hopefully, we can figure out a way to pry it open again from here.”