Spike stood up in Quentin’s arms, looking more feline than ever in the moment before it leapt down and trotted away from us. It wasn’t heading for the wall or for the horizon; neither of those things existed. It was moving toward something. The three of us stayed where we were, Quentin and I on our feet, May on the invisible ground, poking gingerly at the edges of her wounded stomach with one finger.
She’s a Fetch and I’m Dóchas Sidhe. We’re sisters in every way that counts, but blood doesn’t make that list. She has neither my talent with blood magic nor my healing, although she still heals faster than someone who isn’t indestructible. It would probably take her months to regrow her missing organs. She would regrow them, which put her well ahead of most people.
Spike stopped and looked over its shoulder, chirping an invitation. “Guess the prohibition against looking back doesn’t apply here,” I said, and turned to offer May my hands. “Come on. The rose goblin says it’s time to go.”
“I’m not sure I can walk,” she said, but pushed off against the ground before reaching for me, clinging to my forearms for leverage as she levered herself to her feet. The motion caused another sheet of blood to fall from her wounds, mostly clotted but dislodged by gravity. Something red and meaty fell out along with it, hitting the ground at our feet with a soft plop. We both looked at it. Quentin spoke first.
“Ew,” he said.
“Agreed,” said May. She took an experimental step, slow and unsteady. Her legs held her, and she breathed a sigh of relief. “I’m not sure how this is working, and I’m not going to question it too deeply,” she said. “As long as I can stand on my own, I’m going to be okay.”
“As long as we don’t have to run,” I said. “We’ll get you bandaged up as soon as we have the opportunity.” I don’t carry much in the way of first aid supplies. With the way I heal, I’d never have time to use them. Not that it would have made much of a difference if I’d been carrying an emergency kit; given the size of her wounds, she could have used all the gauze in an emergency room and still gone looking for more.
She leaned heavily on my arm as we moved toward Spike, Quentin following anxiously along behind us, ready to catch her if she fell.
“I’m hurt, not fragile,” she snapped, and promptly winced, adding, “I’m sorry. That wasn’t fair. You’re not the one who hurt me.”
“No, Toby’s the one who dragged you into a hole in the fabric of the universe,” he muttered. When I shot him a sharp look, he shrugged, and said, “It’s the truth!”
“Way to have my back, squire,” I said.
Spike rattled its thorns impatiently at us. We kept walking, May’s blood unpleasantly warm against my hands. Was this how my friends usually felt about me? If so, I had some apologizing to do, because I didn’t like it. Not at all.
When we finally reached the place where Spike waited, it rattled its thorns for a final time before leaping into the empty air and disappearing. There was no hole or visible opening; the rose goblin was simply gone, winking out of view like it had never been there at all.
“Well, if I tore the spell enough to turn the lights on, it’s not so hard to believe that I could also have activated the emergency exit,” I said. “Simon must have gotten in and out at least once, and that means he’d need a door to do it.”
Still bracing May against my side, I took a big step forward, into the exact spot where Spike had jumped. The white empty space immediately disappeared, like we’d crossed the threshold of some unseen room, and we were back on the Rose Road, surrounded by walls of thorns and flowers, the scent of roses in full bloom spreading everywhere.
This wasn’t where we’d left the Road; the roses here were darker, deeper in color, the red trending toward black, and the scent of them was older and wilder, like something that had never seen the inside of a garden. I tried to turn and call to Quentin that it was safe and found myself confronted by an unbroken wall of thorns. He’d have to follow on his own if he was going to follow at all.
Spike trotted a few feet down the Road, then sat and began grooming one of its forepaws, as smug as any cat has ever been since the beginning of the relationship between humans and domesticated felines. Maybe since before that. It’s difficult to say.
There was no sound or rip in the air or anything else to herald Quentin’s appearance. He was just suddenly staggering out of the air and into the rose-scented warmth of the Rose Road, a startled expression on his face. As I’ve taught him, intentionally or no, he immediately turned it into anger, rounding on me.
“You left me!” he shouted. “You were there and then you weren’t there and—and I didn’t know where you were, and you left me!”
“I left you and you followed,” I said. “That was all you had to do. Right now, you have as much information about the situation as we do.”
“What is the situation?” asked May. She sagged a little but didn’t sit down. I guess a butt full of thorns wouldn’t have improved her situation any.
“We keep going,” I said. “But now we know we’re on the right track.”
At least I hoped that was what we knew. All I was sure of was that we had to keep going. We were in deep enough that the only way out was through.
NINE
WE WALKED FOR WHAT felt like forever, mostly in silence, except for the occasional yelp or muttered swear when someone discovered an unexpected thorn with a part of their anatomy. May had almost stopped bleeding by this point, thanks to her blood either running out or clotting so much it couldn’t escape anymore. I wasn’t sure she had enough blood left to allow her heart to beat. It didn’t seem to be slowing her down any. She was unsteady, leaning on me or Quentin when she felt like she was going to fall over, but she was otherwise walking just fine. It was weird as hell, and that’s coming from me.
The roses continued to darken as we walked, until they were no longer red trending toward black, but were simply black, obsidian roses dancing with captive rainbows, charcoal roses with smoldering hearts, raven-feathered roses whose petals were fringed around the edges. These weren’t roses that could ever have grown on mortal soil. They were more akin to the roses Luna cultivated in her walled gardens.
The thought made me pause and move closer to the wall. Quentin looked at me curiously, but kept his hands on May’s arm, keeping her from falling over, and didn’t ask what I was doing.
“Hi,” I said brightly. “Maeve, right? I’m a friend of your daughter’s. Antigone, I mean. The eldest. A good friend. I helped her bring back the Roane. She’s not sad all the time anymore.”
Keeping my expression bright and guileless, I reached out and closed my left hand around the stem of the nearest charcoal rose. It was as hot as its burning flower implied. The thorns scorched my palm even as they pierced it, and it was all I could do not to shriek and jerk away.
Still, I held on. I’ve gotten to be pretty good at enduring pain. “You may be wondering why we’re here,” I said. “To be honest, given how fetishistic your sister’s eldest daughter is about roses, I’m sort of wondering why this is the road where the Luidaeg called on you, but hey, I’m not one of the Three. I’m not even one of the Firstborn. So what do I know?”
Quentin and May stopped walking. Quentin looked at me, face gone pale as milk. It was dangerously close to looking back, and I had to resist the urge to snap at him.
“I know these are your roses, and I know if you’re still around, you listen to your daughter, and that means there’s a chance you’ll listen to me. I know you want your sister’s eldest daughter to stay asleep as badly as I do, and I know the man I’m trying to find is very invested in waking her up. I know you’re the Winter Queen, I know you’re supposed to be the cold one, but I think . . . I think we got that wrong at some point. I think when we started turning our history into stories, we forgot who the real monsters were, and we started painting them in places where they’d never been. I don’t know
this for sure, but I listen to the way your daughter talks about you, and I think . . . I think you’re kind. I think you care about what happens to Faerie, and what happens to your kids. I don’t know where you are and I don’t know why you don’t come back to us, but I’m asking you now, can you help? Can you get us where we need to be? Please?”
The stem in my hand grew even hotter, until I could no longer hold onto it. I let go and stepped away, the punctures in my hand already scabbing over. Quentin caught me before I could back into May, and I flashed him a quick, grateful look before returning my attention to the wall of roses.
They were moving.
Like the roses in Luna’s greenhouse garden, they were twisting away from us, vines rising up and twining together until they had formed a sort of archway, leading into yet another black hole.
“The last time we jumped in one of those, my Fetch wound up with most of her guts missing,” I said politely.
“Hi,” said May.
“Is there any way we could get some stairs?” Even for me, asking specifics of a missing Faerie Queen was pushing my luck. I summoned up my most winning smile, the one that reliably made Tybalt go very still and ask what I wanted this time. It made my face hurt.
It’s not possible for roses to look amused, but these ones came remarkably close. A vine snaked through the air toward me, curling at the last second and stroking my cheek with surprising gentleness, the thorns somehow avoiding my skin. I kept smiling. Let my face hurt. We were sort of in the presence of my step-grandmother, who had been absent from Faerie for more than five hundred years, and the last thing I wanted to do was make her think I was ungrateful.
More vines uncurled and snaked into the darkness, basket-weaving together to form a latticed staircase that would have to be navigated carefully, but could be navigated, without any further falling. The vine pulled away from my face, its motion already slowing.
“Wait!” I shouted impulsively. May and Quentin both turned to look at me. I swallowed hard, staying precisely where I was, and focused on the roses. “I just wanted to say, before you go . . . I know you didn’t have to help us. I don’t know why you’re staying away, but I know you didn’t have to help us, and we really, really appreciate it.”
The vine flicked in my direction, a small, sharp motion, and finished its withdrawal. I shivered, then started toward the opening.
“Are you sure we should go down there?” asked Quentin. He was learning to rush in, and to risk himself for the sake of the quest, but he was still more cautious than I’d ever been. It wasn’t a trait I was particularly working to beat out of him. He’d make a better High King with at least a small sense of self-preservation.
“Positive,” I said. “The Queen of Faerie opened a door for us. It would be rude not to use it. Big rude. Worse than insulting the Luidaeg rude—and possibly also insulting to the Luidaeg, when she hears about it, since we’ll have wasted her mother’s time. And also, not, because I’d lay pretty good odds that either Simon or the woman he’s been looking for are down there, and I really don’t want to see her. Today, or ever again. Sometimes what we want doesn’t matter.”
“But aren’t we doing all this because you want to get married?” asked May, a note of amusement in her voice.
“You’re pretty free with the backtalk for someone who’s literally gutless right now,” I said, approaching the opening.
“Sometimes guts are in the soul,” she replied piously.
I almost turned to look at her, but it would have meant looking back and breaking the rules of the Rose Road. With the way we’d been running back and forth and chasing Spike, it was something of a miracle that we hadn’t already been kicked off the road for looking back. Instead, I snorted and kept walking, trusting Quentin to guide her onto the stairs.
And they were stairs, made of woven rose briars, the thorns tucked down and under, so that when I stepped onto the first tread, nothing jabbed into my foot. It was solid enough to hold my weight without protest. “You’re safe to follow,” I called, and took another tentative step downward, into the gloom.
It wasn’t darkness, exactly, especially not when compared to the infinite dark inside Simon’s reality bubble. It was more like a natural, heavy gloaming, when the sun was down and the moon was hidden behind the clouds. I could see better than I expected, something which caused me to blink several times before attributing it to my recently shifted blood. Fae have excellent night vision when compared to humans, which makes sense, given that they’re nocturnal by nature. The more fae I’ve become, the harder it’s gotten for me to get out of bed in the morning. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.
At least my head had almost stopped hurting as my body recovered from what I’d involuntarily done to it. It was nice to know that I wasn’t going to be punishing myself forever, although I sort of dreaded what was going to rise around me the next time I actually needed to call on my own magic, instead of using the edges of someone else’s. When I was a kid, teetering on thin-blooded thanks to what my mother had done to me, it had smelled of fresh cut grass and cleanly polished copper, and that was still the scent I thought of as my own.
The more I trended toward fully fae, the bloodier that copper became. My spells were going to be blood and grass before much longer, and I wasn’t sure how I felt about that. Uncomfortable, mostly. Very, very uncomfortable.
The stairs wound downward in a gentle curl, like the twining of a fern frond, surrounded by walls of roses. Still black—some of the light came from the glowing centers of the ones with charcoal petals—and still lovely. Their perfume hung heavy in the air, which was the other problem. My mother’s magic is blood and roses. If I had to cast anything here, it would smell like my mother was coming, and that was the last thing we needed.
Quentin and May stepped onto the tread next to me, May’s arm slung around Quentin’s shoulders so that he could support her. They both looked at me. “Down?” asked Quentin.
“That seems like the best option we’ve got,” I said. “Also, the Luidaeg’s mom made this path for us. It would be unthinkably rude not to use it.”
He grimaced. “Could you stop saying that?”
“Why? It’s true.”
“Maybe. Maybe it’s not. Either way, it makes me really uncomfortable to think Maeve is still out there—close enough to hear when you call for help—and not coming home. She’s supposed to come home.”
“I don’t know,” said May. “Her sister raised her kids to kill as many of Maeve’s descendants as possible, her husband refused to rein Titania in even as she was advocating for mass murder, and she wound up pulled into some unknown void or something when Toby’s grandmother broke her last Ride. If I were her, I might not want to be any closer to Faerie right now either.”
“Let’s not remind the nice Faerie Queen who I’m descended from when we’re standing on her magical staircase and she might still be listening okay?” I started descending a little faster. “I don’t want to take another big fall today.”
“At least this time we’d be able to see where we were going to land before we hit the ground,” said Quentin, with forced brightness. “That’s something, right?”
“I think May lacks structural integrity as it is. We’d wind up carrying her home in two pieces, and I don’t know how we’d stick them back together. It’s weird enough to be walking around with her while she doesn’t have a middle.”
“You think that’s weird, try not having a middle,” said May.
Quentin looked alarmed. “Don’t say that to Toby! She might actually try it.”
“I wouldn’t be able to try it for long.” Spike went trotting past us, descending the stairs with a rattle of thorns. “I’d heal too quickly.”
“Yeah, yeah, brag about how fast you can grow a liver.”
We continued gently teasing each other about May’s injuries and my tendency toward self-des
truction as we followed Spike down the stairs. A thick fog began to gather, making it difficult to see more than a few feet in front of ourselves. Still, we kept on going, until I stepped down onto the next tread and realized I was standing on solid ground.
“Guys, I think we found the bottom,” I said, and turned to help May and Quentin off the stairs. Wherever we were, we weren’t on the Rose Roads anymore.
As soon as we were all clear of the stairway, it pulled away from the ground, rolling itself up like the world’s most elaborate rope ladder. It took the smell of roses with it, somehow removing it entirely from the air, until all I could smell was the hot, humid vitality of the primal, fog-draped forest surrounding us.
The fog was thick and white and cool, at odds with the heat of the air around us. It felt like I was standing in someone’s description of Florida. Trees appeared through the fog as sketched charcoal lines, dark against the whiteness. Thinner, looping lines told me where the briars were. Nothing visibly moved out there in the gray, and that was a good thing. I’d only been here once before, and then I’d had the Luidaeg to protect me from this place’s natural dangers.
Quentin moved closer to me, seeking comfort in the presence of something he knew would stand between him and even a rumor of danger. “Where are we?” he asked, voice barely above a whisper.
“You know how Blind Michael had his skerry?” I asked.
Quentin nodded silently.
“Well, this is like that, only it doesn’t belong to Blind Michael. It belongs to your Firstborn.”
There was a long pause before he said, in a deeply unhappy tone, “What.”
Well, that wasn’t the reaction I’d expected. I turned to face him. “What’s the problem? You knew we were on our way to find Simon, and that might mean finding her. We need to know she’s still asleep.”
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