Night and Silence
Page 1
DAW Books presents the finest in urban fantasy from Seanan McGuire:
The October Daye Novels:
ROSEMARY AND RUE
A LOCAL HABITATION
AN ARTIFICIAL NIGHT
LATE ECLIPSES
ONE SALT SEA
ASHES OF HONOR
CHIMES AT MIDNIGHT
THE WINTER LONG
A RED-ROSE CHAIN
ONCE BROKEN FAITH
THE BRIGHTEST FELL
NIGHT AND SILENCE
The InCryptid Novels:
DISCOUNT ARMAGEDDON
MIDNIGHT BLUE-LIGHT SPECIAL
HALF-OFF RAGNAROK
POCKET APOCALYPSE
CHAOS CHOREOGRAPHY
MAGIC FOR NOTHING
TRICKS FOR FREE
THAT AIN’T WITCHCRAFT*
The Ghost Roads:
SPARROW HILL ROAD
THE GIRL IN THE GREEN SILK GOWN
*Coming soon from DAW Books
Copyright © 2018 by Seanan McGuire.
All Rights Reserved.
Jacket art by Chris McGrath.
Jacket design by G-Force Design.
Interior dingbat created by Tara O’Shea.
Map by Priscilla Spencer.
DAW Book Collectors No. 1797.
Published by DAW Books, Inc.
375 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014
All characters and events in this book are fictitious.
Any resemblance to persons living or dead is strictly coincidental.
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Ebook ISBN: 9780698183537
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Version_1
For Pamela Dean,
without whom I would never have found my way to this story.
CONTENTS
Also by Seanan McGuire
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Acknowledgments
October Daye Pronunciation Guide
Map of the Kindgoms of the Westlands
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Eighteen
Nineteen
Twenty
Twenty-one
Twenty-two
Twenty-three
Twenty-four
Bonus Novella: Suffer a Sea-ChangeOne
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
About the Author
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS:
Toby’s adventures continue, and with them, my gratitude only grows, because there’s no possible way I could have done this alone. Thank you to everyone who has followed me this far, trusting me to tell a story that’s taking years to finish, but which I have loved every step of the way. Your love for it helps to keep me striving to be the best I possibly can. Toby is my imaginary friend, but you’re the ones who truly allow me to bring her to life.
Writing a book is little bit like fishing: it’s a solitary activity that works better when it’s done with a support structure of some kind. Because of that, my thanks must be extended to all the people who’ve supported me through the writing of Night and Silence, including the Machete Squad, whose tireless efforts make my books better than I would ever have believed that they could be, the entire team at DAW Books, where they tolerate my strangeness with cheerful, if slightly befuddled grace, and the convention team from Penguin-Random House, who have allowed me to hide a startling amount of Diet Dr Pepper behind their booths. Also, huge thanks to all the people who have hosted me all over the world during the writing of this particular chapter of October’s story.
Thank you to my Vixy, who is the star I set my sails by; to my dearest Amy, who is the only siren I would trust to lead me home; the entire Sailor Gods RPG group, whose antics have allowed me to remember what fun it is to tell people a story; the cast of Desperate and Poor, for similar reasons (including the world’s pinkest bard); Brooke, for coming to visit when I needed her most; Shawn, for dinosaur noises; Jay and Tea, for Emma Frost reaction pics; and as always, to the Crowells, for everything. Thanks to Margaret and Mary, for their own sides of the story, to Whitney, for mathematical wonderlands, and to Priscilla, who is simply a delight.
I could never do this without Sheila Gilbert, whose tolerance and kindness define what an editor should be, and Joshua Starr, who answers the phone when I call (even if he doesn’t want to). Diana Fox puts up with more than anyone will ever know, while Chris McGrath brings Toby gloriously to life book after book. I’ve added a new cat to the clowder since our last outing, and Elsie is basically a tortoiseshell hive of wasps that pretends to be a cat. She is perfect. Finally, thank you to my pit crew: Christopher Mangum, Tara O’Shea, and Kate Secor.
My soundtrack while writing Night and Silence consisted mostly of Hadestown, by Anais Mitchell (still), Standing Stones, by Marian Call, The Hazards of Love, by the Decemberists, endless live concert recordings of the Counting Crows, and all the Ludo a girl could hope to have (eternally waiting for a new album). Any errors in this book are entirely my own. The errors that aren’t here are the ones that all these people helped me fix.
Let me show you what’s waiting a little deeper in the woods. I think you’re going to enjoy it.
OCTOBER DAYE PRONUNCIATION GUIDE
THROUGH NIGHT AND SILENCE
All pronunciations are given strictly phonetically. This only covers races explicitly named in the first twelve books, omitting Undersea races not appearing or mentioned in book twelve.
Aes Sidhe: eys shee. Plural is “Aes Sidhe.”
Afanc: ah-fank. Plural is “Afanc.”
Annwn: ah-noon. No plural exists.
Bannick: ban-nick. Plural is “Bannicks.”
Barghest: bar-guy-st. Plural is “Barghests.”
Blodynbryd: blow-din-brid. Plural is “Blodynbryds.”
Cait Sidhe: kay-th shee. Plural is “Cait Sidhe.”
Candela: can-dee-la. Plural is “Candela.”
Coblynau: cob-lee-now. Plural is “Coblynau.”
Cu Sidhe: coo shee. Plural is “Cu Sidhe.”
Daoine Sidhe: doon-ya shee. Plural is “Daoine Sidhe,” d
iminutive is “Daoine.”
Djinn: jin. Plural is “Djinn.”
Dóchas Sidhe: doe-sh-as shee. Plural is “Dóchas Sidhe.”
Ellyllon: el-lee-lawn. Plural is “Ellyllons.”
Folletti: foe-let-tea. Plural is “Folletti.”
Gean-Cannah: gee-ann can-na. Plural is “Gean-Cannah.”
Glastig: glass-tig. Plural is “Glastigs.”
Gwragen: guh-war-a-gen. Plural is “Gwragen.”
Hamadryad: ha-ma-dry-add. Plural is “Hamadryads.”
Hippocampus: hip-po-cam-pus. Plural is “Hippocampi.”
Kelpie: kel-pee. Plural is “Kelpies.”
Kitsune: kit-soo-nay. Plural is “Kitsune.”
Lamia: lay-me-a. Plural is “Lamia.”
The Luidaeg: the lou-sha-k. No plural exists.
Manticore: man-tee-core. Plural is “Manticores.”
Naiad: nigh-add. Plural is “Naiads.”
Nixie: nix-ee. Plural is “Nixen.”
Peri: pear-ee. Plural is “Peri.”
Piskie: piss-key. Plural is “Piskies.’
Puca: puh-ca. Plural is “Pucas.”
Roane: row-n. Plural is “Roane.”
Satyr: say-tur. Plural is “Satyrs.”
Selkie: sell-key. Plural is “Selkies.”
Shyi Shuai: shh-yee shh-why. Plural is “Shyi Shuai.”
Silene: sigh-lean. Plural is “Silene.”
Tuatha de Dannan: tootha day danan. Plural is “Tuatha de Dannan,” diminutive is “Tuatha.”
Tylwyth Teg: till-with teeg. Plural is “Tylwyth Teg,” diminutive is “Tylwyth.”
Urisk: you-risk. Plural is “Urisk.”
ONE
December 22nd, 2013
Night and silence—who is here?
—William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
YOU CAN SAY WHAT you like about San Francisco, but one thing is eternally clear: it’s a city that could only have been built by human hands.
The fae, faced with a landscape made almost entirely of hills and dells, with very little flat, arable land between natural obstacles, would have shrugged their shoulders, waved their hands, and either turned the entire thing into a range of beautiful crystalline spires, accessible only by twisting spiral stairways, or flattened it into a perfect pastoral meadow, ready to be planted with whatever their homesteader’s hearts desired. In other words, extremes. The fae like to traffic in absolutes, not this mucky, glorious middle ground.
San Francisco is a city of hills and valleys, impossible slopes and ridiculous workarounds, with residential streets so narrow that trying to park becomes an eternal game of slow-motion chicken interspersed with wide tourist boulevards designed to present everything in the best possible light. It doesn’t help that so much of San Francisco burned down in 1906, allowing city planners to design half of the metro area according to a reasonable, sensible grid system, while the remaining slices of old San Francisco . . . weren’t. And still aren’t, and never will be, since the odds of the city burning down again are, thankfully, pretty slim.
This does make San Francisco a challenging place to do my job, since the terrain is frequently working against me. My name is October Daye. I’m a knight errant in service to the Court of Shadowed Hills and, by extension, in service to the Kingdom in the Mists. Worse, I’m a named and recognized hero of the realm. All this is a fancy way of saying that when fae problems impinge on the mortal world, it’s on me to take care of them before they accidentally reveal the existence of Faerie to the mortal world. We’ve been in hiding for a long time. “A flying hedgehog slammed into my front window” is not how we want to be discovered.
Hence my evening. Quentin, Danny, and I had been running around a residential neighborhood for more than two hours, moving as quietly as we could in an effort not to wake the neighbors. They weren’t our neighbors, thankfully. If one of us did make too much noise and wake them up, we could make an excuse about a lost dog or something and run, secure in the knowledge that we’d never see them again.
Humans are good at sleeping through ordinary night noises. Blame it on centuries of diurnal living. They tend to write off things that go bump in the night as overenthusiastic raccoons rummaging in their trash. The noises we were apt to make weren’t quite as ordinary, and humans are substantially less inclined to ignore pointy-eared strangers running around outside their kitchen windows. Especially when those strangers are waving butterfly nets over their heads like a bunch of weirdoes.
To be fair, we are a bunch of weirdoes. It’s just that we were a bunch of weirdoes on a mission, and I didn’t want that mission to involve yet another run-in with the local police. I think they’re getting tired of my face. I know I’ve long since gotten tired of theirs. And, really, waking the neighbors was less of a concern than what would happen if we were still outside when the sun came up and burned away all our illusions. That would be when we declared ourselves officially screwed.
As if we weren’t screwed already. Because so much of San Francisco is built on impractically steep hills, many residential streets are connected by narrow alleys which serve as conduits for the stairways lain along the line of the hills. Some of the stairs are stone, some of the stairs are wood; all of the stairs are maintained by the local residents, and that means most of the stairs are death traps. No two steps are the same height, making them a constant tripping hazard, and half the wood stairways have at least one stair that’s been rotted through for a decade without anyone getting around to fixing it.
In case that wasn’t bad enough, a damp wind had blown in from the Bay, and all the stairs were slippery. The night had been an adventure, and I was not in an adventurous mood.
Danny—our designated driver for the evening, and one of my staunchest, most indestructible allies—propped his butterfly net against his shoulder and frowned. “I’m just sayin’, maybe you’d feel better if you actually learned to open up about your feelings,” he said, voice deep and gravelly enough to have come from a concrete mixer instead of from a man.
The impression wasn’t far off. Despite the illusion which made him look like a reasonably nonthreatening human man, Danny is and has always been very far from human. Like most Bridge Trolls, he stands easily seven feet tall, with skin the color and consistency of granite. He’s as difficult to injure as your average mountain, which is one of the many things that makes him such desirable backup when I’m called upon to do knight errantry in the local cities.
I heal fast, but it’s easier on my wardrobe if I have something—or someone—I can duck behind to keep myself from being hurt in the first place. That’s a very healthy attitude on my part, especially considering how often my friends and allies accuse me of having a self-destructive streak.
Unfortunately, those same friends and allies seemed to be too busy focusing on my latest set of problems to see how proactive and mature I was being. I glowered at him.
“I don’t want to talk about this right now.”
“You didn’t want to talk about it in the car, either.”
“Quentin was in the car.”
Danny scowled down his nose at me. “He’s not a kid anymore. You know that better than anybody.”
“Tell me about it,” I grumbled. My squire, Quentin Sollys, had been a dandelion-haired bundle of limbs, manners, and annoying points of etiquette when he’d initially forced his way into my life—and I do mean forced. I hadn’t been looking for a squire. I hadn’t been looking for someone to take care of. I certainly hadn’t been looking for a teenage boy to eat all my groceries and complain when I was out of ice cream. I’d somehow managed to acquire all three of those things in one body, and it had turned out to be surprisingly wonderful and exactly what I’d needed.
Until I’d learned he was the Crown Prince of the Westlands, aka, “all of North America.” That had been less wonderful, since sudd
enly it wasn’t just my squire I was shoving merrily into danger as a learning experience, it was the future of my entire continent. Not that the knowledge had stopped me for long. What’s a squire for, if not testing for traps?
And he’d continued growing up the whole time, going from a kid whose biggest romance had been the hand-holding and kissing kind with a human girl from a local high school to full-on dating one of the local Counts. Trying to have the sex talk with my squire was not an experience I wanted to repeat. That meant never taking another squire, and honestly, I was fine with that if it meant sparing myself the squirming indignity.
“So how about you actually talk for a change, and not go looking for excuses?”
I pinched the bridge of my nose. “You really think this is the time?”
“I ain’t seeing a better one.” Danny shrugged like a landslide. “I also ain’t seeing any magical flying piggies, so I guess we can take a few minutes to talk about the elephant in the room.”
“There are too many nonexistent animals in that sentence, Danny.” I dropped my hand. “We’re not looking for pigs, we’re looking for hedgehogs. Totally different.”
Specifically, we were hunting for arkan sonney, a fae creature originally found in Avalon. They aren’t supposed to exist in the mortal world. They certainly aren’t supposed to infest upscale San Francisco neighborhoods. Unfortunately, a changeling named Chelsea Ames lost control of her powers about two years ago, and “supposed to” no longer reliably applies. Chelsea’s father, Etienne, is Tuatha de Dannan, and she inherited his teleporting magic without inheriting his control, or the natural limitations that would have kept her from opening doors Oberon wanted closed.
Chelsea’s lack of limitations might have been okay, had she not come to the attention of a local Duchess with an interest in expansion. Duchess Riordan had decided to use Chelsea to rip open doors to deeper Faerie, which Oberon had sealed for a thrice-damned reason.
It wasn’t pretty, but in the end, Chelsea survived, Riordan got her just desserts, and we wound up with a minor monster problem. Because, see, open portals go both ways, and Chelsea hadn’t exactly been watching to make sure none of the local wildlife followed her through. Being fae creatures, some of our unwanted guests had proven incredibly adept at concealing themselves, and we only found out they were in the mortal world when they popped out and scared the locals.