Once Broken Faith

by Seanan McGuire

  “Oh, oak and ash . . .” she breathed.

  “Fix him,” I commanded. “You fixed Holger’s arm. Fix him.” Jin would have been better. Where was Jin? Probably in the damn tower room with Walther and Marlis, avoiding the conclave. Curse her eyes.

  Thank Oberon for intelligent people. Siwan’s expression changed as she realized what I was asking. Offering a quick nod, she knelt and said, “I need flame. Flame, a knife, and as much blood as you’re willing to give to me.”

  “Take it all, I don’t care,” I said, and held up my hand. A knife was slapped into it. I glanced up. The Luidaeg was standing there.

  “Flame I can give you, but it will cost,” she said, speaking fast. She knew as well as I did that we had no time to waste. “Will you pay?”

  The Luidaeg did nothing for free. It wasn’t in her nature, and more, it wasn’t in the rules of her position as the sea witch. I nodded, not bothering to ask her price. Anything she wanted, I would pay. I would pay twice over, if that was what was required to save Tybalt.

  She looked oddly sad as she returned my nod and held out her hands, suddenly full of green marshfire that burned and crackled with a chilly heat. I looked to Siwan.

  “You need to be bleeding now,” she said, voice tight. “I need marigolds, rosemary, love-lies-bleeding, and a handful of fishbones.”

  Arden stepped backward into a portal that opened in the air just in time to accommodate her. Karen took off running, presumably to scavenge supplies from the nearest table. And I did exactly what Tybalt had asked me not to do, and drove the knife through the center of my palm. The pain was excruciating. Watching him struggle to breathe was worse. The pain gave me something to focus on, something I could hate without worrying about whether my emotions were getting in the way of my actions.

  “Keep bleeding,” snapped Siwan, cupping her hands under mine. She began chanting in quick, fluid syllables. The smell of yarrow and sweet cinquefoil rose between us, sketched over the blood.

  “Toby.”

  My name was barely a whisper. I glanced down. Tybalt’s eyes were fixed on me, his jaw trembling with the effort of speech. He smiled when he saw me looking at him. In some ways, that was the worst thing that had happened since all this had started. He smiled, like there was no way this could be my fault; like I shouldn’t have figured it all out sooner, like I wasn’t supposed to save him.

  “I . . . very much . . . wanted to marry you,” he whispered, and closed his eyes.

  My own eyes widened until it felt like the skin around them would tear, put under too much strain by the effort of keeping myself from breaking apart. “No,” I said, and gathered him closer with my free arm, still bleeding for Siwan, the knife jutting from my hand. “No, Tybalt, no, you don’t get to do this. Just because you’re a cat, that doesn’t mean you get to do this. You need to stay. You need to stay with me.”

  Siwan continued chanting. Arden had returned, and she and Karen were throwing things into the flame the Luidaeg held, following the instructions Siwan muttered between phrases. Jin was nowhere to be seen. All I could do was bleed. That’s something I’ve always excelled at. It didn’t feel like it was enough, and so I bent and kissed him, hoping that something in the fairy tales Amandine had read me when I was a child would finally turn out to be true: hoping a kiss might convince him to stay.

  His lips tasted like blood. A red veil slipped over the world, and I saw myself looking down at him, terror and compassion in my eyes. I was so beautiful when he was looking at me. I had never felt like I was that beautiful before.

  This is always how I see you, little fish. The thought was in the blood, amused and pained and quietly furious. He thought he was seeing me for the last time. He was taking as much of me with him as he could, as he left me for the night-haunts.

  I had never been so angry in my life. I raised my head, glancing toward Siwan. The blood in her hands had hardened into balls of what looked like red-frosted glass, all different sizes, none bigger than a cherry. She stopped chanting and looked at me.

  “Get it out of him, now,” she said, and dumped the glass into the flame.

  “Not the way we got it out of you,” said the Luidaeg, before I could move. “Shoving it through will kill him.”

  When did everyone around me get so fragile? I turned my attention to the spike in Tybalt’s chest, moving to wrap my hands around it. The knife jutting from my palm made the motion impossible to finish. With a snarl, I ripped it loose and tossed it aside, not even waiting for the wound to close before I grabbed the rosewood stake and began to haul. Splinters bit into my palms, drawing more blood. I let them. Anything that could help me now was welcome; anything that could make this a little bit easier, a little more possible, was something to be absolutely desired.

  The hooks on the harpoon caught and tore at his flesh as I pulled. I would have done anything to take that pain away from him. Anything.

  Tybalt still wasn’t moving. I couldn’t be sure, as I wrested the stake loose and dropped it to the floor beside me, that he was breathing. I also couldn’t allow myself to dwell on that thought. If I decided he was lost—if I let myself lose hope—then I was going to be finished, and this time, I wasn’t sure I’d be able to find the strength to start over. My heart had been broken too many times. It no longer had the capacity to heal the way it once had. The rest of me might be immortal at this point, but my heart? No. That was wearing out.

  The stake left a hole in Tybalt’s chest that seemed deep as a well, at least for the split-second that it was empty. Then blood rushed in to fill the space I’d created, flooding everything in red.

  And Tybalt stopped breathing.

  I didn’t think. I didn’t pause. I just moved, taking a deep breath and clamping my mouth down over his. The taste of blood filled the world, almost choking me. I pulled back and pushed down on the side of his chest that didn’t have a hole in it, trying to keep his heart beating as I forced air into his lungs and then pushed down on his chest again and again, doing everything I could to make him stay. Sweet Titania, let him stay.

  Every time our lips touched, the memories were there, rushing over me, overwhelming me. Not all of them held my face—that would have been too much to bear—but there were so many of them. I saw Raj as a little boy, kitten-gangly and unsure, and was stunned by the depth of the love Tybalt had felt for that child, even when he’d known that Raj’s father, Samson, hungered for his throne. I saw a red-haired woman with golden Torquill eyes, heard Tybalt’s voice whispering September like a prayer, and knew her for his first love; I saw a dark-haired woman with nothing fae about her, and knew her for his first wife. His entire life was there, written in the blood drying on his lips, and I kept on breathing for him, for both of us, because I couldn’t let him go. I couldn’t. I couldn’t.

  Siwan was chanting again. Breathe in, breathe out. The taste of blood, and the laughter of a girl with calico hair.

  The smell of my own magic rose around us, cut-grass and copper and an overlay of iced yarrow, like a frozen field. Breathe in, breathe out. The taste of blood, and a flash of my face, weary and bruised with iron poisoning, accompanied by a sudden, crushing terror that added even more weight to the terror I was already feeling.

  Breathe in, breathe out.

  Tybalt coughed.

  I pulled back, heart hammering in my chest, and watched wide-eyed as he coughed again, before taking a deep, half-choked breath. The pit in his chest seemed to be getting shallower by the second, displacing the blood pooled there. Siwan was still chanting, her hands pressed to the base of his ribs—as close as she’d been able to get to the wound before without actually reaching inside of him. He was healing. He was getting better.

  He was healing. I stiffened. My body was designed for that sort of magically accelerated recovery, and it still left me dazed and dizzy from the calories it burned. I looked frantically at the circle of people that ha
d formed around us, seizing on Arden as the one who would need the least explanation.

  “I need a gallon of cream and a bowl of raw salmon,” I called, struggling to keep my words clear and concise enough that she would be able to understand them. Then I gave up, and shrieked “Now!” so loudly that the effort hurt my throat again, if only for a moment.

  Arden looked surprised. Then she raised her hand and swept a circle in the air, disappearing through it. The scent of redwood sap attempted to overwhelm the smell of blood, but failed, disappearing completely into the red.

  That brief distraction had been long enough for the hole in Tybalt’s chest to become a shallow divot. New skin was forming over the wound, healing by the second. It was going slower now. The magic Siwan had been able to coax from my blood was running out fast—maybe too fast. There was internal damage as well, and I wasn’t sure there had been time for all of it to heal before the surface started closing. I turned to her, pleading mutely.

  She shook her head. “Our bodies aren’t like yours. We’re not made to do this. I can’t treat him twice in quick succession; he wouldn’t survive.”

  “Arden is bringing meat, cream—”

  “And that would be the answer, if he were like you. He’d be able to rebuild what he’s lost, and keep healing. He’s not you. He needs to recover on his own.”

  I turned back to Tybalt. He was still breathing, but he seemed to be having trouble; his breath kept catching, and the pain in his expression was obvious. I reached out with one shaking, blood-smeared hand, smoothing the hair back from his face. He opened his eyes. Not all the way, but enough that I could see him looking at me. I forced myself to smile.

  “Hey,” I said. “How are you feeling?”

  “’Tis not as deep as a well or as wide as a church door, but it will do,” he whispered, voice rasping.

  I wrinkled my nose. “Don’t do that. Don’t quote Shakespeare at me when you think you’re going to die.”

  “He was a lovely man. You would have liked him.” Tybalt winced, but didn’t close his eyes. “Little fish, what did you do?”

  I would normally have objected to him using that name for me twice in quick succession, but he hadn’t used it the first time: the memories stored in his blood had done that. It was a name born of aggravation and affection, and I’d never been so glad to hear it. “Just a little blood,” I said, letting my bloody fingers rest against his cheek. “You were hurt. We helped.”

  “I hate to disillusion you, but I’m still hurt.” He grimaced. “Quite badly. I feel as if some things have been knocked askew. I am . . . afraid I won’t be able to make it to the wedding.”

  “Over my dead body.” The smell of blackberry flowers intruded. I looked up. Arden was pushing through the crowd, a tray in her hands. I shifted so I could prop Tybalt’s head up on my leg. “I need you to try and drink as much of this milk as you can. If you can eat, do that too, but you’re going to drink.”

  “October—”

  “Drink it.” I shook my head. I was shivering uncontrollably. Finding a way to make it stop would have been too much trouble. Instead, I waited for Arden to come closer, and reached up to take the bowl of milk from her tray. It was unpasteurized, thick, with cream hanging heavy at the top. I lowered it to Tybalt’s lips.

  He gave me a dubious look. Breathing was clearly getting harder for him.

  “Please.”

  He drank.

  He drank all the milk, and when I took the plate, he managed to force down a few mouthfuls of fatty salmon, chewing thoroughly before he swallowed. Finally, he sagged against me.

  “As last meals go, I could have been offered worse, but I beg you, no more,” he whispered. “Something is broken. Toby . . .”

  “You need time to heal. We need access to better magic. We need to find Jin and get her to put you back together.” I looked up at Arden, the plate of salmon still clutched in my hand. It should have seemed comic, but under the circumstances, it was just sad. “Arden. He needs time.”

  She blinked at me, clearly not understanding. Tybalt took a sharp breath. He clearly did.

  “Please,” I said. “He needs time.”

  “He needs time that won’t kill him,” said the Luidaeg, and pushed past Arden to kneel at Tybalt’s other side. She moved her hand in the air in a quick but complicated movement. When she was done, an arrow rested in her palm. It was short, no more than five inches in length, with a shaft of black wood too warped and riddled with thorns to have ever flown. The fletching was owl feather and dried leaves, and the tip was obsidian black, gleaming with oily rainbows.

  Looking at Tybalt solemnly, the Luidaeg said, “I promise this is of my own making, and that it carries nothing more than the sleeping spell it was intended to spread. No poison, no tricks, no lies. You’ll wake when your time is done, and we’ll have had the time to heal you.”

  “What if they find against the cure?” asked Tybalt, his eyes darting to me.

  In that instant, I knew why he was worried. I forced myself to smile. “I’ll be here,” I said. “I’ll burn the mortality out of myself if I have to, and I’ll be immortal, and I’ll be here. For you, forever. Just don’t leave me now.”

  “You know I’ve never wanted—”

  “Don’t tell me what to do,” I hissed, my smile dying. “Stay with me. Whatever it costs, stay with me.”

  Tybalt nodded fractionally. “Then yes. Let it be done; let me rest.”

  I leaned down to kiss him. He kissed me back, and I could have stayed that way forever, threats of violence and the taste of blood be damned. He wasn’t going to leave me. I was home.

  The tension went out of him, his lips going dead beneath mine. I gasped and pulled back. His eyes were closed; he was limp and motionless, and the Luidaeg’s arrow protruded from his shoulder, the tip buried just deep enough to break the skin. I turned to look at her. She looked solemnly back.

  “You would have fucked around and kept on promising to wait for him and all that bullshit, and you wouldn’t have been able to get anything done,” she said. There was no accusation or blame in her tone. Everyone around us was silent, too stunned to speak. She shook her head. “I need you moving. There was an attack. Find out who. Find out why. Stop this.”

  Stop this: yes. It needed to be stopped. I paused to kiss Tybalt one last time—his forehead, and not his distressingly slack lips—before standing. The knife I’d used to cut my palm was gone, lost somewhere in the blood slick covering most of the floor. I turned to Arden.

  “I need a sword. Mine’s in the trunk of my car, and I can’t go outside like this.” Even if I hadn’t been covered in blood, I couldn’t afford to waste the time.

  “Take mine.” The voice was Sylvester’s. I turned. He had unstrapped the scabbard from around his waist, and was offering it to me. I raised my eyebrows, and he said, “You couldn’t come armed because the nobility might take offense. The outside nobles couldn’t come armed because it would have been a declaration of war. I live here. This is my home. I’ll die here. No one, not even my queen, can tell me not to carry my father’s sword.”

  “Fine,” I said, and reached out to snatch the scabbard from him. It was difficult to get the belt to fasten around my waist. Not only was I substantially thinner than he was, but my hands were so thick with blood that my fingers kept slipping and sticking as I fumbled with the buckle. It didn’t matter. Nothing mattered except finding the person who’d hurt Tybalt, and making them understand that they’d made a mistake. A huge mistake. Maybe the last mistake they would ever make.

  I looked to Arden. Aethlin and Maida flanked her, one on either side, like they could catch their newest vassal if she fell. Maida’s cheeks were flushed, and Aethlin kept stealing glances at the blood covering the floor. They looked like alcoholics trying to choose between an AA meeting and a bender. I was willing to bet I could find the same look on ever
y Daoine Sidhe in the room. Blood held power, and secrets, and the blood of a King of Cats was a rare treat.

  “Don’t let anyone touch his blood,” I said, voice cold and angry. “He has a right to his privacy.” I’d seen too much, and I was probably closer to him than anyone else in the world. No, not probably: I’d seen his ghosts. I was the last one he loved enough to share them with.

  “I won’t,” said Aethlin. “He’ll be looked after.”

  “Good.” I let my eyes shift to Tybalt. They would move him soon, clean him up, and consign him to that quiet attic room where the sleepers lay, waiting for their wakeup calls to come. A day or a hundred years, it wouldn’t matter; he’d sleep through them all the same, not dying, but not getting any better, either, not without outside help. Jin would know what to do, how to put him back together. She would make sure that he lived, and when he woke up, I would be here waiting for him. Whether that wait was at the expense of my thinning humanity would be determined by what the gathered kings and queens of North America decided about the cure. If they decided not to use it . . .

  Raj was going to be very surprised to learn that he was King now.

  This stake wasn’t quite like the one that had hit me: it was more like a thick spear, designed for throwing. It had hit Tybalt in the chest while he was seated, and it had gone in squarely, not at an angle. That implied a hard throw from nearby. I moved to stand behind his seat, crouching and narrowing my eyes. There was no table behind us; it was a clear walkway, intended to leave room for the servants who were working the dinner. I straightened and walked around the table, stopping when I was on the opposite side from Tybalt’s place. I looked back once, aligning myself, before beginning slowly forward, my eyes trained firmly on the ground.

  Here was where the Luidaeg had walked to her own seat. Here was where the servants had passed. And here . . . I crouched down.