Greyfall launched himself into the air, forgetting me completely.
Then I saw it. First the great blossom began to list atop its stem as though wilting. All of the sidhe had wings and were making their escape.
But Claybriar was still in there.
That’s when the time dilation kicked in. An eternity passed in my mind, but it couldn’t have been more than ten seconds, the whole thing.
I began to stumble toward the clearing, as though there were anything I could do to stop it, but my limbs were trapped in slow motion along with my perception as the whole magnificent column began to tilt eastward and away.
How? Why?
I glanced back at the standing stone. The runes, the delicate designs, had turned as black as dried blood.
I forced myself to charge forward through the snow, too late, too late. Each step took a day, a week. I fought the constraints of time as though it were icy water.
Seven steps, I think, maybe six, before the tower reached about a thirty-degree angle and began to fall in earnest. So fast. Even adrenaline couldn’t make it seem anything but instant.
The sound was unimaginable: the rushing of air against that mass of stone, the cracking and rumbling as it came apart. When it hit the ground, the noise was like the end of the world as vast petals were pulverized, trees were shattered, and everyone in a mile radius was flung like rice on a hot pan.
I lost all control over my body as the tremor hit; I fell face-first into the snow, eastward like the tower itself. The seal on my right shin loosened slightly as I fell, but there was no way to adjust it; I just had to find my way upright again amid pain and the sound of screaming. I stumbled through the snow toward the portal with my skin chafing at every step.
Caryl was there at the Skyhollow portal in her long brown coat, her face nearly the same green as the sky.
“How is this happening?” I screamed at her.
“I don’t know!” she said. “I don’t know!” She put both hands to her head, clutching at her hair. I went to her, embraced her. She was trembling.
A sidhe courtier staggered by, vacant eyed, golden blood dripping from one wing and hissing in the snow. She was close enough to have thrown a rock at us, but neither she nor anyone else was paying any attention to me at all.
Caryl pulled back to look up at me with wide, frightened eyes. “Do you—do you have the—” She couldn’t seem to find the word.
“I don’t,” I said. Mesmerized, I stared at the wounded courtier as she staggered away across the clearing.
I was the author of all this destruction, and no one was even looking at me. I moved my gaze to the vast, rubble-strewn emptiness where once the White Rose had stood. With a shudder, I forced myself to look back at Caryl, tried to think past the sound of screams and sobs.
“Where is Claybriar?” I said, feeling my throat close around his name. It felt colder out here now than when we’d arrived. “Have you seen him?”
“I haven’t,” she said. She was stroking my arm now, her eyes fixed on my face with concern. “Nor Alondra, nor Shock. I’ve been here waiting for you since the guards broke off their pursuit of me.”
“Alondra,” I said. “The tower fell eastward.” My teeth started chattering. Everyone was dead. I’d killed everyone.
“I’ll stay and look for them both,” said Caryl, taking hold of my arms.
“No,” I said. “I have to find Claybriar.”
“You have to get out of here!” Caryl said, giving me a little shake. “Once they stop panicking, you’re the one they’ll be looking for!”
“You’re not safe here either,” I said.
“You always underestimate me. I will find Claybriar. I will find Alondra. I will find Shock, and send him to Skyhollow after you with the vials. But you must go now. If they find you, there will be nothing left that any of us can do to help you.”
“But Claybriar couldn’t have—”
She threw her arms around me fiercely. “I will find him. Be safe. This is not our last meeting.”
At that, she took off across the snow, the swirl of her coat in the icy wind making me think of Winterglass. I watched her for a moment, then turned my gaze back to the rubble, searching for some sign of my Echo. Surely he’d have been smart enough to grab one of those horses, that damned gryphon, something with wings. If he were dead, I’d feel it, wouldn’t I?
I couldn’t think about it. Not unless I wanted to run straight into the rubble, straight into the guards.
I turned to the mural of Skyhollow. Tried to imagine myself there, somewhere warm. But I didn’t want to be there, and the magic knew it.
Maybe he’s already there, I told myself. Maybe before the palace even fell, he fled the queen’s bedchamber. Maybe he ran to the arms of his less complicated lover, and I’ll find him there, warm and safe in the orange haze.
It was that thought that carried me through.
37
The oasis of Skyhollow Estate was warm and beautiful and oblivious. The change in temperature and ambiance was so extreme that it set me to shuddering all over. I hugged myself, standing for a moment as I fought a wave of nausea and dizziness.
There were some little fey gamboling about on the forest floor; they seemed to recognize me, or at least find me pleasing in some way. A pair of them, one greenish and one brownish, came chittering up to me and reached for my gloved hands. I let them lead me, one skipping along on either side of me, to a little bench that was half-hidden by a partial tunnel of branches and climbing vines. Since it had a good view of the portal, I took a seat.
Beneath the tangled foliage the air was dim and green, and I found myself slowly hypnotized by the faint rustle of plant life and the weird distant calls of fey birds. I slipped off my backpack and set it on the ground near my feet, rolling my shoulders in relief. The snow, the screams, the bleeding wing—it was all just a bad dream.
Everything in Arcadia was a kind of dream, wasn’t it? I pondered this as I stood up and unhooked my shirt from my trousers, pulled them down, and scrunched them at the ankles of my boots so I could remove my already wobbly BK prosthesis. I remembered how shy I’d felt about undressing in Arcadia and absently wondered why. I grabbed the bottle of Dry-Lite from my bag and slathered some on my shin so I could redo the seal. Nothing here was real in the way that my world was; it was all just a projection of group consciousness, right?
Then why was that fey bleeding? Why had everyone agreed to accept that my screwup had destroyed the Seelie palace? If they all wished hard enough, could they bring it back?
Deep in my heart, I knew that wasn’t how it worked. But as I finished readjusting my shin socket, keeping an eye on the portal, I let my mind rest in a pleasant daydream.
“Put your damned pants on!” said a deep rumbling voice behind me.
“Jesus Christ!” I said, startling so violently I hit my head on a branch.
“Ugh,” said Brand. “Bad enough the fey around here just fuck each other left and right all over the forest, I have to look at your ugly wreck of a body now?”
I turned to look at the tea-table-size face of a grinning manticore. “You don’t have to look,” I said. “You’re just a pervert.”
“Seriously, what’s the deal?” he said. “Why are you dropping trou right now of all moments? Shouldn’t we be hightailing it out of here at hurricane speed with Dangerous Contraband? Isn’t that my part in this shenanigan?”
“There were some complications,” I said, carefully replacing my trousers and hooking them to my shirt again. “Best not to go into it.”
“Got the loot, at least?”
“No, that’s part of the complication. I have to wait here for Shock to deliver it.”
“You trust that little runt?”
“That little runt got your body back,” I said defensively, hefting my backpack again. “Worst-case scenario he takes them to his dad instead, and either way Belinda is screwed.” I blinked as I realized something else. “I mean, really screwed. Ev
ery vial he didn’t manage to take just got pulverized. Oh, shit, I really hope he got the right ones.”
“When you say there were complications,” Brand said dryly, “it sounds like you mean everything fell completely to shit.”
“Can we not talk about that?”
“Well, what am I supposed to do? I thought I was going to be in and out of here before Skyhollow spotted me. He’s still not a fan.”
“Yeah, you should probably start thinking about patching up that relationship, given that you kind of live in his territory and swore fealty to his king.”
Brand let out a frustrated growl, his wings rustling slightly.
“Uh, Brand?”
“What.”
“There at the edge of your wings, is that—?”
“Shut up.”
“Are you growing feathers?”
“Shut the fuck up . . . pig face.”
“Pig face? Oh, Brand.”
“Millie!” From the other direction, a high clear cry that brought me to my feet. Alondra was running toward me from the portal. The real Alondra, to judge by the length of her hair, which had come loose from its careful twist.
I rose from the bench, moved as quickly as I could to meet her. She threw her arms around me, almost knocking me over, which would have really pissed me off as I’d just gotten my leg straightened out. Couldn’t deny I was kind of glad to see her, though. I patted her awkwardly on the shoulder.
“I thought maybe you’d been squished,” I said.
She just sobbed for a minute, and I dutifully stroked her hair, which smelled a little like green apples.
“I was already running,” she said hoarsely, “before it started to fall.”
“Did you happen to see Claybriar?”
“Yes!” she said, pulling back to gaze up at me, her wet long-lashed eyes full of something like awe.
“What happened?”
“Dawnrowan saved him!” she said. “I saw them falling! She wasn’t strong enough to fly holding him, but her arms were around him and her wings were just—” She demonstrated, flapping her arms wildly. “They fell, really slow, and I ran, thinking, I don’t know, that I’d catch them? But she hit the ground before I got there, turned so he landed on her. She broke her leg! I didn’t even know she had bones! Claybriar fixed it.”
“Jesus. What about him, is he all right?”
“Not a scratch, from what I could tell! But I was afraid the guards would spot me, so I just . . . I ran!”
“Caryl? Shock? Where are they?”
“I’m not sure.”
“How did this even happen? I don’t understand.”
Alondra sobered immediately. She stepped away, her eyes dark and full of fear. “Tjuan showed up,” she said.
“What the hell?”
“No, not Tjuan. I’m sorry. The facade. It pushed me down and out of the way and then touched the stone.”
“Oh my God . . . Elliott? Why?”
“I don’t know that it was Elliott! He didn’t say anything!”
I rocked back and forth, hugging myself. “Could it have been Qualm? But no, he’s locked in the book. And nobody else had a link to that body.”
“Why would Elliott do that, though?” Alondra said.
“Well, he—he was angry,” I said. “But I didn’t think he’d gone full-on fucking dark side. We’ll sort it out later. Let’s just get you out of here safely.”
Alondra wrung her hands. “Are you sure? I can wait here with you. . . .”
“No. You go with Brand back to—”
But as I turned, I saw that Brand was gone.
“Welp, there goes my ride. What the hell?”
Brand must have seen what I only noticed a moment later, Duke Skyhollow approaching with several members of his retinue.
I shared a panicked look with Alondra, but when I looked back at Skyhollow, he had spotted us and was clearly delighted. Right, they didn’t have CNN in Arcadia. Nimbly the duke picked his way through the foliage with occasional assistance from his servants, and once he stood before us, he gave me a sweeping bow.
“Rewelcome,” he said. “Is the Claybriar-king accompany?”
I looked at Alondra again.
“You’d better tell him,” she said. “It’s not like he won’t find out anyway, and you may as well get some honesty points.”
I felt my weird breakfast bread threatening to make a reappearance, but I steeled myself and turned to face the duke.
“Something terrible has happened,” I said. “The White Rose has fallen.”
“Fallen?” Skyhollow echoed, uncomprehending.
“The queen was injured, but she’s fine now. Claybriar is fine. The Seelie Court seems to have mostly come out all right. But the building itself is . . . it’s gone. A rogue Unseelie spirit destroyed it.”
“Destroyed?” Skyhollow echoed. He still seemed to have no idea what I was talking about.
I looked at Alondra. She just shrugged at me as if to say, I don’t know this guy from Adam. I looked back to Skyhollow.
“I can . . . show you?” I said. I tapped my skull with one forefinger. “If you want to . . . look in my head.”
“Aye!” said Skyhollow. “I look. No use, your wordings.”
I closed my eyes, forced myself to see it again, tried to seal off the horror I’d felt, the guilt, everything but the visual. The listing of the blossom, then the great stem tilting, tilting, and then crashing to the earth.
When I heard Duke Skyhollow suck in his breath, I opened my eyes. He looked faint.
“Someone help him,” I said to his retinue. I don’t know if anyone understood me, but someone did move in time to catch him as his knees buckled.
He was deadweight, though; there was nothing to do but lower him to the forest floor. I had my gloves on, so I knelt beside him and took his hand.
“Alondra,” I said quietly. “Take the road back to the Gate. Get yourself safe. I’ll stay with the duke while I wait for Shock.”
Alondra nodded, looking teary again, and I watched for a moment as her rounded form slipped away through the undergrowth, eventually disappearing into the tangled green.
Then I looked down at Duke Skyhollow. He stared up at the forest canopy, his green mask-marking standing out sharply against his sudden pallor. Tears like mercury pooled in his alien eyes, and he returned the pressure of my hand only weakly.
“I’m so sorry,” I said. “I’m so sorry this happened.”
He grew paler and paler; his breathing became shallow; his gaze was unfocused. He really did not look well. I looked up at his courtiers, hoping one of them could tell me what to do, but they were slowly backing away from him with expressions of horror, as though he were a stranger bleeding out on the forest floor.
Was he bleeding? I checked him over briefly but could see no wound to explain why he was looking more and more like a corpse every moment.
Then I remembered what Claybriar and Shock had said, about fey “choosing their endings.” Could they do that? Just decide to die? Check out of existence the way you would a motel? If so, that looked a hell of a lot like what was happening here.
“Your Grace!” I said sharply, seizing his jaw in one hand to turn his face toward me. His gaze still didn’t focus. “Snap out of it! The king and the queen are both still alive! What would they think of you, if you just lie down and die right now? Who would even rule Skyhollow after you? This is a terrible ending!”
His eyes focused on my face now, at least, but even at his best, the duke had never been all that great at understanding me. This was definitely not his best. I couldn’t tell if any of my words were actually getting through; he continued to lie there, pale and limp. I leaned over him, gave him a little shake.
“Please,” I said. “I can’t carry the weight of this, too. Please.” Tears of frustration stung my eyes; one slipped free down my cheek.
His eyes found focus, tracked the tear’s path. Slowly he lifted an arm, reached his hand toward me, caught
the tear; it slipped over the backs of his fingers. His curiosity was as tyrannical as a child’s; he brought his hand to his lips for a taste.
The expression on his face sent one of the little commoners nearby into a fit of chittering giggles.
“Bitter, right?” I said. “And salty. I could have told you that.”
Strangely, his color looked better, as though his curiosity had reminded him that he was alive, but he still made no move to get up. It gave me an idea, though. I pulled off my backpack, rooted through it until I found the little travel sewing kit at the bottom. I used one of the needles to prick my middle finger, pried his mouth open as though I were giving medicine to a baby, and gave my finger a squeeze directly into it.
“Sorry,” I said. “I know it’s gross, but I need you to understand me.”
He shuddered and made an even worse version of the previous face. Then he drew in an audible breath, and his eyes widened.
“Ah!” he said, a sort of pained rapture coming over his face. “All my long memory, laid out before me, all the words of your tongue remembered, and the way of laying them in a line. I could tell the tale of my life from beginning to end.”
“As much as I’d love that,” I said, “it’s more important to me that you get up and stop acting like you’re about to die.”
He turned his head and met my eyes, more grave than I’d ever seen him. “We are all dead,” he said. “The sidhe are finished.”
38
I knelt on the forest floor there in the oasis of Skyhollow, next to the supine body of its lord, and felt my heart crack like glacial ice.
“What do you mean?” I said. “What do you mean the sidhe are finished? Are they all just going to . . . lie down and die? Because of a building?”
“Some may,” said the duke. He rolled to one side, weakly propped himself on an elbow, and looked at me with an intensity that I found reassuring after his blank stare of before. “But most will not. Most will continue living, and their sorrow will fade. The memory of fey is short. But each time they return to where the White Rose once stood, and find only its ruin, they will become more certain that this is the way it has always been.”
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