SIXTEEN

BEFORE THE POND, before Luna and Rayseline disappeared and Sylvester asked me to bring them home, before my life fell apart, I had been a wide-eyed innocent rambling through the Bay Area, somehow—despite parental neglect and accidental, predatory apprenticeship to a man who never met a pair of hands he didn’t want to exploit—holding on to the idea that Faerie was wonderful and we were lucky to live in a world made of magic. I had been looking for my place in that world, seeking the combination of talent and skill that would make me indispensable to the Courts.

What I had found was that purebloods are, by and large, not curious people. There are exceptions, of course, but those exceptions almost always seem to come after too much exposure to the mortal world, where things happen fast and don’t leave room for introspection. For most purebloods, taking a hundred years to solve a riddle is perfectly reasonable, because they have a hundred years to take. For me, a hundred years was out of the question. I had started off like the Nancy Drew knockoff I believed myself in my heart to be, finding lost things and solving little mysteries. By human standards, I’d been bumbling at best, untalented and inept at worst. But by fae standards, I had been a miracle worker from day one, because I was willing to try. The lost could be found. The broken could be fixed.

And then the Queen—the Queen! The actual Queen of the Mists, the pureblood to end all purebloods, even if her heritage was more mixed than some of the courtiers seemed to think was appropriate—the Queen herself had put out the word that she was seeking a new knowe. The one she had was collapsing in on itself as the shallowing that sustained it rotted away.

Now, I could see that for the warning sign it had been. Her knowe had collapsed because it hadn’t been properly rooted and she didn’t have the power to sustain it, and King Gilad’s knowe was sealed, inaccessible until Arden was found. At the time, though, it had seemed like the greatest opportunity of my short life. All I had to do was find a new knowe for the Queen, and I would be in her good graces, finally accepted as an equal to the purebloods who surrounded me—and best of all, finally able to be sure Gillian would be safe.

Then a woman named Dawn had been found dead by her “sister,” Evening Winterrose, and somehow a simple real estate search had turned into a hunt for a murderer, following the trail through hidey-holes and dead ends all across San Francisco. In the end, I’d found the man who held the knife, and better yet, I had found a place in the mortal world where the veil between Earth and the Summerlands had been worn thin as paper, ready to be punctured by a steady hand.

That hand could never have been mine. But when the Queen had followed me to the shore, I had felt invincible. I had felt like I could do anything, forever. She had touched the weak spot I had found, and it had torn wide, revealing a hall with marble floors and a ceiling like the sky itself. Whoever had constructed this knowe had long since abandoned it, and I was the one who brought it back to Faerie. Me.

I had earned a knighthood for that week’s work, and the eternal enmity of a woman who had been unable to make herself accept that changelings could do anything of use. She had demanded a ceremony—archaic even for Faerie—during which I gave up all claim to the knowe in exchange for letting my title go uncontested. Sylvester had shaken his head and said she reached too far, that as a Duke, he could knight anyone he pleased once they showed themselves worthy, but my eyes had been full of stars, and they had been blinding me. The Queen knew who I was. The Queen. How could anything ever go wrong for me again?

Sometimes I wish I could travel back in time and shake myself briskly until all the stupid falls out. Except that if I hadn’t been such a fool when I was younger, I wouldn’t have the life I have now. Warts and all, it’s mine, and I love it.

Tybalt had his eyes closed and was clutching the handle above the door, a clear response to the fact that I was driving at unsafe speeds through the streets of San Francisco. I glanced at him, asking conversationally, “The Court of Cats is where the lost things go, right? Whether they’re part of Faerie or not?”

“We have access to the lost places, yes,” he said, not opening his eyes. “If you are about to tell me we have become lost, you should get a map. I refuse to open my eyes until we exit this traveling death trap.”

“Did you have access to the false Queen’s knowe before I found the door?”

He hesitated before saying, “Yes.”

“Is that part of why you used to be so pissed at me all the time?”

He sighed. “Can discussion of our past relationship struggles please wait until the current situation has been resolved, and we are not about to die?”

“Um, this is Toby,” said Quentin. “We’re always about to die. When we’re not about to die, we’re still about to be about to die. She’s like a Rube Goldberg machine whose only job is generating life-threatening situations.”

“And I want to know the answer,” said May.

Tybalt sighed again, harder. “Yes, October. Your ‘discovery’ of a lost piece of real estate cost my subjects several very comfortable denning places and forced the entire Court to rearrange itself. Cats do not like being ousted from their territory. I disliked you for a great many reasons, but your actions did not help. Happy?”

“Ecstatic.” An opening appeared between two cars. I slammed my foot on the gas, hurling us through it before it could close again. Quentin, whose driving lessons were recent enough that he understood exactly how dangerous a maneuver that was, whimpered. “So here’s a riddle for you: when the false Queen was removed from her throne and the knowe was sealed, it started to fade back into the shallowing the same way Lily’s did, the way it had been when I found it for the first time. Right?”

“Correct,” said Tybalt carefully, feeling out the word. He knew I was getting at something. He just didn’t know what it was yet. At least he knew me well enough to be fairly sure he wasn’t going to like it.

Clever boy. “Does that mean the deeper parts of the knowe are lost again?”

Surprised, Tybalt opened his eyes and stared at me. Then, slowly, he smiled.

Knowes are fascinating things, half-alive, half-aware, crafted from a combination of real architecture and raw magic. They can sprout rooms like mushrooms after a rain, expanding and contracting to meet the demands of their residents. But every knowe has its anchors, points of absolute reality driven deep into the fabric of the Summerlands and holding the rest of it in place. Bigger knowes, like Muir Woods or Shadowed Hills, may have five or six anchors, in addition to whatever seed point was originally used to “spark” the knowe.

I’ve never built a knowe myself. I wouldn’t know where to begin. But I knew enough to be sure that even as the more publicly accessible parts of the building had started to fade, those anchors would have remained, lost until someone came to open them again.

“Do you have a plan?” asked May. “Or is this one of those situations where you charge in half-cocked and count on things to work in your favor?”

“A little bit of both,” I said. “Feel up to punching me in the nose?”

“Always,” said May.

“Um,” said Quentin.

I grinned and hit the gas harder.

The old Queen’s knowe is anchored to a stretch of San Francisco coastline that has yet to be fully gentrified, meaning there’s even less parking available there than there is elsewhere. I circled the block three times before giving up and cramming the car into a stretch of sidewalk left open in front of a fire hydrant. As long as nothing actually burst into flames, Quentin’s don’t-look-here would mean my car remained unnoticed. If a fire truck needed to access the hydrant, I’d have a whole new set of problems.

At the moment, I felt like I’d welcome all of them. Tickets and towed cars were ordinary things, human things, things that were so much better than immortal grandmothers and impossible enemies. Let me worry about whether the milk has expired and how much the electric bill will be this month. Let me go back to fighting with May about wedding planning and how much I didn’t want to do it. Let this be done.

Let us bring my daughter home.

I undid my seatbelt and twisted to face May and Quentin. “I don’t know how much magic the false Queen can detect, but we know Jocelyn is limited to whatever her fairy ointment can unmask,” I said. “That gets her through most illusions. We’re not identical anymore, but we look enough alike that if you walk in with my squire, covered in my blood . . . ”

“That buys us time,” said May. “What are you going to do with it?”

“Ask Tybalt to carry me into one of the lost parts of the knowe, so I can approach them from behind,” I replied. “They’re not going to expect anyone to be deeper in the structure than they are. The old Queen is too arrogant, and Jocelyn is too ignorant. It can work.”

“Why do I have to go with May?” asked Quentin. “I’m your squire. I’m supposed to be there to support you if you get into trouble.”

“Because May can’t fight, and being impossible to kill is not the same as being invincible,” I said. “She needs someone who knows his way around a blade by her side, in case the false Queen has more support than we realized.” It didn’t seem likely. The members of her Court who had supported her during the coup had either been exiled or stripped of lands and titles as punishment for their crimes, and most of her staff worked for Arden now. They seemed much happier under the leadership of a queen who didn’t treat them like expendable cogs in a beautiful machine. Funny, that.

Quentin looked unconvinced. “I don’t like splitting up. Why can’t we all go with Tybalt?”

“Charmed as I am by your confidence in my abilities, carrying three people through the shadows is a bit beyond me at the moment,” said Tybalt. “I have the strength but lack the conviction. In the shadows, conviction is everything.”

Quentin frowned. “But you can take Toby?”

“The day I cannot carry my heart along the Shadow Roads is the day I am a King no longer, but only a man who has failed himself so profoundly that his days of peace are done,” said Tybalt.

We were all quiet for a moment, staring at him. May shook her surprise off first.

“If you ever want to go into the greeting card business, we can make a mint,” she said. Turning to me, she asked, “So what, I just punch you?”

“In the nose,” I confirmed. “It’s the easiest way to make me bleed.” I shrugged out of my leather jacket, leaving it on the seat. “If we’re right, and this really is the false queen, I’d give even odds she transforms your clothes into something she thinks is more ‘suitable.’ In this case, hope for it. Her magic will obscure yours and make it even harder to tell us apart. You need to distract her as long as poss—”

Her fist caught me square in the face, snapping my head back and bringing a hot gush of blood flowing down my lip. I straightened, staring at her, and she punched me again. There was more blood this time, May’s cupped hands under my chin to catch it. When the blood slowed, she took her hands away and ran them down the front of her shirt, leaving gory handprints behind. She looked at them and beamed.

“Now we’re twinsies,” she said.

“Oh, root and branch, what is wrong with you people?” moaned Quentin.

“More than we have time for,” I replied. “My sword’s in the trunk if you wanted to take it, May. For show.” My own swordsmanship lessons had reached the point where I mostly didn’t stab myself—mostly. The weapon was too big and too unwieldy for me after a lifetime of smaller tools, and the majority of problems in the mortal world can’t be solved with a sword. That’s the sort of thing that gets the cops called.

“Got it,” she said. She grabbed a handful of air. Her human disguise shimmered, becoming identical to mine. “Quentin, you’re with me.”

“So I heard,” he muttered, and gave me one last, anxious glance before following her out of the car.

Tybalt and I stayed where we were as May retrieved my sword from the trunk, belting it to her waist. She and Quentin hurried away down the street, toward the cave-side entrance to the false Queen’s knowe. That was the one anchor point she had shored up herself. If any of them was still holding fast, it would be that one.

Tybalt touched the bare skin of my arm. I glanced at him.

“I am loath to admit this, but I’m afraid,” he said. “What if I can’t keep you safe?”

“Then you let me keep you safe for a change,” I said. I pulled my keys out of the ignition and pocketed them, offering him my best hopeful smile. “I’ve had some practice. Now let’s go bring my daughter home.”

“Indeed,” he said.

We got out of the car, one of us on either side, and met on the sidewalk. Tybalt took my hand, leading me to the narrow alley between two shops. We stepped into the shadows together, fingers tangled in a lover’s knot. The darkness parted like a heavy curtain, allowing us to pass through into the freezing dark beyond.

The Shadow Roads are always cold and airless for me, but this time, when Tybalt ran, I ran with him, my feet pounding against ground I could neither see nor fully identify. It was too yielding to be stone and too firm to be wood, some unknown substance that existed only in the deepest dark. Trying to figure out what it could be was a distraction, something to keep me from focusing on the fact that I was running blind as my lungs began to ache, warning me of the lack of oxygen.

Tybalt could breathe here, somehow, if not as well as he could in the real world. That was part and parcel of the Cait Sidhe connection to the Shadow Roads. Knowing that helped me keep running. If I ran out of air, he would pick me up and carry me the rest of the way to the exit. Dignified? No. But when has survival ever been about dignity? He would never let me die in here. He would never let me go. As long as I held onto his hand—

Something slammed into me from behind, furious and screaming through the infinite dark of the shadows. I fell, my hand wrenched out of Tybalt’s. Whatever the ground was made of, it was rough enough to scrape my cheek as I slid across it, half the remaining air knocked out of me on impact.

I rolled onto my back, instinctively covering my face with my forearms. Just in time, too: my attacker glanced off them, what felt like talons biting into my flesh. The Baobhan Sith. Tybalt had been wrong when he said she had made her escape by now. She’d been here the whole time, lurking in the shadows, waiting to attack whoever happened across her.

Lucky me, it had been us. I could feel the ice forming on my eyelashes and in my hair as the tips of my ears and fingers started going numb. I didn’t know how the Baobhan Sith had been able to survive in here for as long as she had, but I knew I couldn’t pull off the same stunt. If I didn’t get pulled back into the real world soon, I was either going to suffocate or freeze. Maybe both.

The speed with which I heal means that most forms of death are somewhat impermanent for me. Break my bones, slit my throat, drown me, I’ll get back up again as soon as I’ve had a chance to knit myself back together. Kill me in the Shadow Roads, though . . .

If I suffocated and froze to death at the same time, would I recover? Would I want to? I could be lost here forever, freezing and choking, only to wake up and do it all over again. Maybe dying here would mean dying for good. And then Gillian would be lost forever, and Tybalt would . . .

Tybalt would break. After what Mom had done to him, if he lost me in a place that should have been his to control, he would break. I couldn’t let that happen. I needed to survive for so many reasons, and only a few of them were me.

The Baobhan Sith shrieked, the sound thin and reedy in the attenuated atmosphere. That was all the warning I got before she charged again. This is a bad idea, I thought, and held my ground, waiting for the sound of screaming to draw close. When I judged that she was only a few feet away I dropped my arms, giving her free access to my throat and chest.

She slammed into me with all the force of a cannonball, her fangs clamping down on my shoulder, ripping me open like it was of no consequence. Unlike her, I bore the assault in silence. I couldn’t scream without air.

But I could bleed.

Ice formed on the blood trickling down my chest and arm, turning the hot liquid sharp and painfully cold. I closed my eyes. It changed nothing, but I was counting on that blood, and I needed to offer no resistance. The Baobhan Sith drank, and I bled, and the edges of my awareness started to get fuzzy, like the world was slipping away.

Tybalt roared in the distant dark, furious and desperate. That was all the warning either I or the Baobhan Sith had before he ploughed into her, ripping her teeth out of my shoulder and freeing another hot gout of blood.

So much for the Luidaeg’s sandwich, I thought, among the blank spots that were starting to colonize my mind. Freezing to death isn’t supposed to hurt much. Neither is bleeding to death, or suffocation. If I was shooting for “painless,” I had managed to find the trifecta.

Arms slid under my butt and shoulders, scooping me up and cradling me close. I was still bleeding heavily enough that Tybalt’s shirt was going to be ruined. I was willing to bet he wouldn’t mind, under the circumstances.

“Hold on, October, for the love of Maeve, hold on,” he said, and broke into a run.

I tried to count the seconds, but they slipped away like eels, darting off into the dark. I settled for struggling to remember not to breathe. There was nothing here for me. If I exhaled, all I would be doing was losing the last of the air in my lungs, and the freeze would follow. I couldn’t let that happen. So I held my breath, and Tybalt ran, and then we were breaking into the light, into the bright and burning light. I cracked my eyes open, dislodging the ice on my lashes. We were in a deserted ballroom with cloth over the furniture and cobwebs covering the ceiling.

Tybalt ran for the nearest sheet-draped couch, an overstuffed thing like something out of a Regency romance, and all but threw me onto it, his hands fluttering from my face to my frozen hair to the wound on my shoulder. He didn’t quite touch it, but pulled back, looking even more anxious. I took a shallow breath. It was good.

“It’ll heal,” I rasped.

His eyes snapped back to my face. “You must stop doing this, little fish, unless you intend to be the death of me.”

“You saved me.” I lifted one hand to trail my fingertips against his cheek. His skin was warm. It was almost impossible to believe we had been in the same place. “I wasn’t scared. I never am, when you’re there to save me.”

“My October,” he said, and turned his head to kiss my palm. “The death of me.”

“You should be so lucky.” I sat up, sending more ice cascading away from my body. My head spun. Even I have limits, and I was finding them fast. “Ow. Okay. Are we in the knowe?”

“We are, but you need time to recover. We should—”

“We should get moving. May and Quentin didn’t stop to play with the Baobhan Sith. They’re already inside, and the false Queen is only going to believe that May is me for so long.” If she believed it at all.

Without her Siren blood, she couldn’t compel them to fight each other—she was Banshee and Sea Wight now, and nothing else—but she could hurt them. She had run the kingdom for over a century, and she had always demonstrated powers that none of her bloodlines possessed. Meaning she was a borrower, using charms and tinctures to access the magic of others. We might have driven her from her knowe and into the Kingdom of Silences, but we’d never found her store of potions. I hadn’t even thought to look. We had been dealing with the ascension of a new queen and the collapse of the old queen’s knowe.

Now she was back, and there was no telling what she had access to, or what she could do if we gave her the chance. I stood by the choice to send decoys. That didn’t mean I was going to leave them without backup.

“You should lie still,” Tybalt snapped. “I don’t know how much blood you lost in there.”

“I still have blood in my body,” I said. “I’ll be fine.”

He stared at me. Then, to my surprise, he smiled.

“You will never change, will you?” he asked, offering me his hand.

I took it, sliding to my feet. The outline of my body remained on the sheet, etched in pinkish ice-diluted blood. “I wasn’t planning to,” I said. “Now come on. We need to find Gillian and get to our people.”

“The knowe is not fully awake,” he said, following me across the ballroom floor. “Pieces may be missing.”

“We can work with that,” I said. When we reached the doors, I paused, putting my hand against them, and said, “My name is Sir October Daye. This is my friend, Tybalt, King of the Court of Dreaming Cats. I’m the one who found you after the last time you’d gone to sleep. I’m sorry I helped a bad woman claim and hold you. I didn’t mean to. We can let you rest after this, until no one remembers that she ever had any power over you. But right now, we need to find my daughter. A human girl. The bad woman has taken her. Can you help us find her?”

“You’re talking to the walls again,” said Tybalt.

“Don’t knock what works,” I said. Returning my attention to the door, I added, “Please?”

The door swung open.

The hall on the other side was too plain to have been the approach to a ballroom of this size. It was more suited to use by the servants, helping them to move through the knowe without being seen. I shot Tybalt a smug look and hurried down it, with him at my heels, until we reached another door.

This one led to an abandoned kitchen. The fires were dead, the chopping tables were deserted. It was a strange, silent world. I paused, darting into one of the pantries, and emerged a moment later with a turkey leg the length of my forearm. Tybalt raised a brow.

“How . . . ?”

“Stasis spell,” I replied. “I’ve been raiding the kitchens at Shadowed Hills since I was a kid. The big knowes always keep the pantries full, in case someone important wants to demand, I don’t know, roast cockatrice at three o’clock in the afternoon.” The fae equivalent of the middle of the night.

The wound on my shoulder itched as I started gnawing on my prize, the edges finally starting to heal. Tybalt shook his head.

“Sometimes I forget the depths of your misspent youth,” he said.

“I was never the best thief in the Mists, but the best trained me,” I said.

We kept walking. Beyond the kitchen was the library, and beyond that was a spiral staircase, winding downward. The “windows,” such as they were, provided crystal portholes into the ocean beyond the shore. The water glowed a pale, pearlescent blue, and through the glass we could see all manner of strange fish, both fae and mortal, swimming idly by. Tybalt frowned again, eyeing them.

“The Undersea must have been very eager to curry favor, to have allowed such an intrusion into their territory,” he said.

“That, or they really, really wanted to be sure they’d have a weak point to attack if it actually came to war.” I pointed to the nearest “window,” shaking my head. “Dianda could punch that thing to shards in under a minute, and she’s their duchess. Imagine what an actual soldier could do.”

It felt strange not to be running. But there was no blood trail here, and Gillian had no magic for us to follow. Letting the knowe lead us was the best option we had. If we were walking into a trap, we would find a way out of it. We always did.

There was a door at the bottom of the stairs. I hesitated. Then I handed Tybalt my turkey leg, grasped the knob, and opened it.

The hallway on the other side was familiar, stretching out for what looked like forever. The walls were mist-colored marble; the ceiling was a blue so dark that it became virtually black, blending into the shadows at its edges. White marble pillars held the whole thing up, as much for show as any architectural reality. My breath caught in my throat, choking me.

This was the first place we had seen when the false Queen had pried the knowe open, calling it back from whatever sleep waited for our hollow hills when we didn’t need them anymore. The walls had started to bleed fog as she had led the way along the hall, softening the lines of the pillars and blanketing the floor, erasing it. So why weren’t they doing it now?

The answer was obvious, when I stopped to think about: they weren’t bleeding fog because it would have attracted attention, and I had done something the old Queen would never have thought to do. I had asked the knowe for help.

Knowes don’t always like the people who hold them. They don’t have to. Power keeps them open, and power keeps the throne. But the king is the land in Faerie, and when the king is the land, the land gets to have opinions just like a person would. The false Queen’s knowe liked me, even though she didn’t. Buildings have always been among my biggest fans.

I reclaimed my turkey leg from Tybalt, caressing the nearest wall with my free hand as we resumed walking. I was eating as fast as I could, bolting down roast meat without doing more than the most cursory job of chewing. Taking time to eat in this sort of situation felt frivolous, but the wound at my neck still itched, and there was enough blood on my clothing to make it clear that I needed to replenish my veins before I was forced to open them again. Even my body can’t build something out of nothing.

“Please don’t choke to death,” said Tybalt, voice low. His feet made no sound on the marble floor, unlike my own. If anyone heard us coming, it wouldn’t be because of him. “I would be distraught if I had to contend with your corpse before I could even call myself a decent widower.”

“Sweet talker,” I said, around another mouthful of turkey.

He smiled faintly. We walked on side by side until we reached a closed, filigree-laden door. The patterns were abstract as ever, the echo of wind and waves and the distant rolling lines of what could have been hills or dunes. They might have held the secret of who had opened this knowe in the first place, whose hands had done the crafting and whose tears had sealed the doors. There wasn’t time to worry about that now.

“Sorry about this; I’ll come back and clean it up if I can,” I said, bending to set my turkey bone in the corner with as much respect as I could muster. “If I can’t, if I’m dead or something, maybe you could let some pixies in? They’d be happy to clean it up for you.” They could also keep the knowe open, assuming it wanted to be. They’re always looking for safe places to build their houses and raise their children, and while much of Faerie might think they’re vermin, they love their homes. They defend them.

I glanced at Tybalt. He nodded. I opened the doors.

The central receiving hall was a fairy-tale nightmare of white marble and vaulted ceilings, everything shrouded in thick, cloying mist. The scent of rowan and ice hung over everything like a warning. We were behind the central dais. Voices drifted in our direction, one raised in irritation, the other cool, calm: the voice of a woman who thought she had everything under control.

“You promised me they’d be here by now! Why aren’t they here?”

“Patience, Jocelyn. One would think you had been raised by wolves and not by mortals. Even humans understand the importance of manners.”

“I’m tired of this. I want what I was promised.”

“You’ll have it. You’ll have everything.”

I looked at Tybalt and pointed to the right side of the dais before making an exaggerated shooing motion. His eyes narrowed as he nodded understanding. He didn’t like splitting up, but he saw the sense in it.

Where were May and Quentin? The seaside entrance led directly to this room. They should have been here by now, taunting the false Queen, throwing her off-balance. The fact that they weren’t here was bad.

My foot hit something buried in the fog on the floor, and the situation went from bad to worse. I knelt, trying to be as quiet as I could, and fanned the fog away from May’s sleeping face. She was wearing a ballgown I’d never seen before, a confection of heather gray and soft lilac, and any hope that the false Queen might have mistaken her for me died at the sight of those colors. The false Queen always dressed people as she considered suitable. She had never dressed me like a cloud. Usually, she dressed me more like an abattoir.

The pallor of May’s gown made it easy to see the arrow protruding from her abdomen, short and blunt and dangerous. Her chest was rising and falling in the easy rhythm of the sleeping: elf-shot. The false Queen had hit her with elf-shot.

Even now that we had a cure for the stuff, I was still damn tired of it.

I straightened and resumed my cautious forward movement. Quentin was probably asleep somewhere in the mist on the other side of the dais, similarly dressed for a party that was never going to happen, that he was never going to attend.

“They should be here by now.” Jocelyn again, her voice descending into a whine.

The false Queen sighed heavily. “They’ll come. We have something October can’t possibly resist. Don’t we, Gillian, dear?”

There was a sound, like flesh striking flesh, and a whimper. I hadn’t heard it in years. It didn’t matter. The sound bypassed my brain and lanced straight for my heart, breaking it and lacing it back together in the same moment. All thought of stealth or subtlety fled my mind as I drew my knife and broke into a run, flinging myself around the front of the dais.

The false Queen of the Mists turned her head, looking at me with moonstruck eyes as cold as light reflecting off the water, and smiled.

“Hello, October,” she said. “So nice of you to join us.”