NINETEEN

THE SHADOW ROADS WERE as dark and cold as ever, and somehow no less terrifying for the lack of a Baobhan Sith lurking somewhere in the blackness. Tybalt swung me into a bridal carry, a move that was sweetly, painfully reminiscent of the way we always used to run together, back before I had a prayer of keeping up with him. I closed my eyes and did my best to relax against him, feeling the blood that covered my clothing freeze and flake away.

I didn’t know what we were running toward. It was by my own choosing, and I understood that, I accepted that, but it didn’t change the fact that I didn’t know. Were we running toward a consequence or a miracle? I didn’t know. What had seemed easier in the pale light of the false Queen’s knowe seemed like a dire mistake now, as we ran through the dark and the consequences of my choices loomed ahead of me.

Gillian. My Gilly. I didn’t know her as an adult, had barely known her as a child, but I knew her so well as a baby, and those were the images my heart raced for. The first smile, the first word, the first time she’d tried to grasp a pixie in one pudgy fist and I had known, for sure, that she was fae enough to see the magical world around us, not safely insulated from it like her father. The way she’d scowled when she didn’t want to do something, whether it was eating her broccoli or going to bed. The way she’d laughed every time I crossed my eyes. She had been the most magical thing in my world, and if she was gone, she was gone forever. I didn’t know how I was ever going to move past the reality of her absence.

But I’d been moving toward that reality for years, hadn’t I? Since the moment I’d kissed her forehead and pulled eternity from her veins, I had known that one day she would die and leave me. There had been a chance before that—a slim chance, given how thin her fae blood had been, but a chance all the same. When I had asked her to choose which world she belonged to, I had kept my word. I’d listened. I’d given her what she asked for, and in the process, I had taken away her chance at forever.

Maybe things would have gone differently if I’d been able to explain what it meant to be fae, what it meant to be mortal . . . or if Janet hadn’t already been burrowed into Gillian’s life, quietly poisoning her against Faerie. I shuddered, nestling more tightly against Tybalt. So much of this came back to Janet. She had been there all along, and somehow I had failed to see her. Because she was human, and humans didn’t matter in Faerie.

I was becoming as prejudiced as any pureblood, assuming I hadn’t been already.

Tybalt tensed and leapt and the shadows fell away, brightness lancing at my closed eyes. I cracked them cautiously open and blinked when I saw we were in the Luidaeg’s actual living room, rather than in the alley outside.

“She modified the wards for you?” The question sounded stupid even to my own ears. Of course, she’d modified the wards. How else could we have been where we were? Tybalt was a King of Cats, but no King apart from their Firstborn could possibly have the power to tear through the Luidaeg’s defenses.

“She volunteered it; I did not ask,” he said gravely, lowering me to my feet. “I would not waste her favors on such a petty privilege.”

“Which is why you get to have it, kitty,” said the Luidaeg. I turned. She was standing in the kitchen doorway, wiping something thick and black off her hands. The washcloth’s original color was unknowable, thanks to the muck. She smiled wanly as she looked at me. “Covered in blood again, I see. I suppose it’s your signature look. Maybe think about getting a hat or something instead.”

I opened my mouth, intending to make a snide comment. Nothing came out. My lips moved soundlessly, my voice trying to find purchase on the air. The ice on my lashes was still melting, gluing them together, filling the world with a prismatic gleam.

The Luidaeg sighed. “Breathe, Toby. You need to breathe. She’s alive. But we need to talk about what that means.”

I barely heard her final words. “Alive” echoed in my ears, drowning everything else out. I took a step forward, staggered, and collapsed, saved from impact with the floor by Tybalt, who wrapped his arms around my chest and hoisted me back to my feet.

“Can you get her to the couch?” The Luidaeg sounded very far away.

“I can carry her to the ends of the earth.” Tybalt was there with her. I hoped they were having a nice time in whatever strange new land they had discovered. I hoped they would come back and get me.

Alive.

“That won’t be necessary,” said the Luidaeg, with a hint of amusement. “All you need to do is get her to the couch.”

Tybalt half-carried, half-dragged me across the room to the Luidaeg’s couch, an overstuffed antique blotched with mold and leaking stuffing from every seam. He settled me on a cushion, and there was no weakness in the frame or scent of decay. Like so much else about the apartment, the rot was an illusion.

Sitting upright suddenly felt like too much trouble. I allowed myself to sink into the cushions, that single word—alive, alive, alive—still echoing so loudly that it drowned out almost everything else.

The Luidaeg sighed. “She’s in shock. What fun.”

“Will she be . . .” Tybalt hesitated. “Gillian. Is she . . .” Both times he stopped before the question could fully form, leaving his words to hang in the empty air.

“That’s a conversation I need to have with October, and just because you’re planning to marry her, that doesn’t make you her surrogate for this sort of thing. Don’t you have somewhere to be? Somewhere that isn’t here?” When Tybalt hesitated, the Luidaeg sighed again, angrier this time. “She’s not going to come to harm while she’s in my keeping. You have my word about that. On my own ground, this close to the sea, there’s none among my siblings both living and awake who could take her from me.”

“Quentin and May were elf-shot in the false Queen’s knowe,” he said reluctantly. “October contacted Master Davies before we came here, to ensure he would have his cure prepared for me to collect and carry to them.”

“There you go. Shoo. Go wake the rest of your little gang of fools, and we’ll be here when you get back.”

There was a long pause. Then the smell of musk and pennyroyal washed through the room, and I knew that he was gone. Someone settled on the couch next to me.

“October. Look at me.”

I turned my head, forcing my eyes to focus. The Luidaeg appeared, studying me gravely. Her eyes were green as glass, green as the eyes of the Roane who had been her children, before almost all of them were killed. Evening’s doing. She had already hated her sister, even so long ago as that. The Luidaeg understood what it was to be a mother and bury her children, and more importantly, the Luidaeg couldn’t lie. I seized on that thought with everything I had. The Luidaeg couldn’t lie.

And yet . . . “Alive?” I asked, in a very small voice.

“Yes,” she said. She put her hand, nails still dark with whatever that substance had been, over mine. “October, can you understand what I’m saying right now? We need to have this conversation—we need to have it as soon as possible—but I’m not going to try to explain this to you while you’re checked out. Are you here for this or not?”

“I . . .” I hesitated, trying to figure out my answer. Finally, slowly, I nodded. “I’m here.”

“Good girl.” She reached into the pocket of her overalls, producing a small cut-glass bottle filled with a cherry-red liquid that glittered in the light, catching it and flinging it back in prismatic shards. She held it out to me. “I want you to drink this.”

“What is it?” I asked, already taking the bottle and worrying at the stopper. When the Luidaeg tells me to drink something, I’ve found it easier to just agree. Maybe this explains the amount of time I’ve spent transformed into something I’m not or marooned on roads that were never supposed to be accessible to me, but it’s also the reason I’ve managed to survive for as long as I have. There are worse allies to have in my corner than the sea witch.

“It’s something that will make you feel better.”

I gave her a sidelong look. “Because refusing to tell me what I’m drinking is the way to calm me down.”

“It’s already working, if you’re being sarcastic,” she said. “Drink.”

Arguing with the Luidaeg is like arguing with a mountain: in the end, all you wind up with is a sore throat and an implacable landmark. Only in the case of the Luidaeg, she might wind up turning you into a toad for your impertinence. I drank.

It tasted like cherry syrup mixed with steak sauce—not a pleasant combination—and although it was cold, it sent a wave of warmth through my body, relaxing my limbs and draining the tension from my back and shoulders. I slumped further into the cushions, blinking, as the Luidaeg reached over and plucked the vial from my suddenly limp fingers.

“The paralysis will pass,” she said pleasantly. “Not that you were moving that much before, but this way I know you’ll hold still and listen to me, with the added bonus of helping you regenerate some of the blood you’ve lost.”

“’S not lost,” I managed, through lips that didn’t want to cooperate. “Know exactly where it is.”

“Again, sarcasm. You’re still in there.” She touched my arm. “I’m glad.”

The concern in her eyes was clear enough that my own eyes started to burn with tears. I tried to turn my face away. I couldn’t move. She had locked me into facing her, and despite her insistence that Gillian was alive—despite her inability to lie—it felt like I was standing at the edge of a very high cliff, waiting to step off into nothingness.

“You’re going to start asking questions and demanding proof in a second, and I’d like this to be over before that happens, so let’s go,” she said. “Yes, she’s alive. I want you to understand what a miracle that is, all right? I want you to comprehend how impossible it is for your daughter to still be a part of this world. When my sister created elf-shot, she did it to curry favor with our parents—‘look, see, we don’t have to kill each other anymore. Aren’t I clever? Aren’t I the absolute best?’”

Her voice spiked on the word “best,” becoming the sound of glass breaking. She paused, catching her breath. When she continued, she sounded calmer . . . and sadder.

“It didn’t have to be fatal to changelings. That was her little extra twist, her way to make sure that when there was a war, only the ‘right’ people would come off the battlefield. We can’t go to war the way we used to when the world was younger, when there was more space for us both in and out of Faerie. Back before we decided to go into hiding from the humans, we could fill valleys and cover mountains, and every kingdom with changeling citizens would send them to the frontlines, because why shouldn’t they? A changeling couldn’t be a landholder or a noble or an alchemist or a court seer, but they could take an arrow like any pureblood. And if they didn’t come back, after my sister’s work was done, that added a sense of . . . of reality to the wars. A hundred fatalities were a hundred fatalities. Never mind that the hundred bodies you’d buried were the hundred you never wanted in the first place.”

I frowned, and managed to ask, “What does . . . ?”

“Peace, October.” She touched my arm again. “I’m getting there. Please let me get there. I need you to understand what happened here today.”

I couldn’t nod, but I could stop fighting to speak and lean into the cushions. She smiled a little, clearly seeing this for the acquiescence it was.

“In order to make elf-shot fatal to changelings, she had to make it fatal to mortals. One follows the other. And that would have been enough, but she also wanted it to hurt, October, she wanted it to hurt so badly, because how dare we? How dare we bring humanity into our world, in however dilute a form? How dare we waste love that should have been reserved for better things on finite creatures? She never had a lot of love in her to spare. She didn’t understand how the rest of us could spend it so freely. She never understood a lot of things. So she didn’t just make a poison. She made a work of art.” The Luidaeg paused. “It kills changelings and it kills humans. But it kills changelings because it attacks everything in them that’s mortal, while the parts of them that are fae struggle to fight back, to go peacefully to sleep as the potion intends. It takes its time. That’s why changing the blood allowed your mother to save you and allowed you to save Gillian the first time she was elf-shot. The potion moves so slowly that any half-competent blood-worker can challenge it in a changeling. Even my sister had her favorites. Even my sister understood the value of being able to save a grandchild whose parents had never intended for them to be there. Changelings happened early in Faerie, and they kept happening, and she needed to be able to save them. Humans . . . ”

The Luidaeg paused again. This time when she continued, her voice was harder. “Humans have always been disposable, and she had no interest in being called upon to save them. Elf-shot was designed to look for traces of fae blood and, upon failing to find them, to rip through the body as quickly as possible. To shred and tear and destroy. Her ideal would be a world in which it was literally impossible to cure elf-shot poisoning in a human, because there wouldn’t be time. Did you ever wonder why I never cured elf-shot? Why none of the people who’ve come to me across the centuries ever thought to say ‘oh, sea witch, why don’t you give me a way to wake my loved ones from their enchanted sleep’?”

I took a deep breath and managed to nod, very slightly. Her answering nod was deeper.

“It’s because they did ask me. And I couldn’t do it. There aren’t many limits on what I can accomplish if I’m being paid, but that is one of them. I can’t counteract my sister’s work, any of it. I could never have been the one to unmake elf-shot. So when you sent your lover to me with your child dying in his arms, I didn’t have a cure that would work for her, human child that she was. The alchemist’s cure couldn’t work without something fae to latch onto.”

I closed my eyes. She’d been lying to me after all, somehow breaking all the rules in an attempt to be kind. I should have been expecting it. I should have known we’d never make it through this intact.

She touched my arm. “She was dying, and there was nothing I could do, and then I stopped thinking about what was possible and started thinking about what was right. Letting her die wasn’t right. She’s family. You’re only my niece—not much, compared to all the siblings and children I’ve buried—but it’s been a long time since I’ve had even that much. You’re my niece and she’s your child and letting her die was wrong. I don’t like to be wrong.”

I opened my eyes and stared at her. The feeling was coming back into my limbs, accompanied by a new strength, as if I hadn’t been bleeding for most of the day. I sat up, resisting the urge to grab and shake the most powerful individual I knew. “What are you saying?”

“My youngest daughter’s name was Firtha.” The Luidaeg looked at me with calm, steady eyes. “She was clever and cunning, and she died without having children of her own because my sister—my damned sister—put knives in the hands of humans and told them they could find their route to immortality through the bodies of my babies. Unlike me, she can lie. She was hoping to kill my children and see me kill the humans who wore their pelts in my rage, so she could paint me extinguisher of my own descendant line. She knew there’d be no immortality for the killers of the Roane. But I am . . . I’m not nice, October. I was never made to be nice. I’ve still tried, all the long days of my life, to be kind when I can. I have striven for mercy. I was merciful. I was . . . perhaps more merciful than anyone knew.”

She turned her face away, looking out the window on the other side of the room, the window that showed a ceaseless view of the surging tide. “My sister’s patsies killed my children, and their children killed them, when they came home with bloody hands and sealskins thrown across their shoulders. The children of my children’s killers saw their own deaths in the blood running down their parents’ backs, and they tried to save themselves. My sister thought I would be unable to show enough kindness to find my way to cruelty. She thought I’d kill them. And instead, I kept them, as many of them as I could. But there were . . . losses, especially in the first years, when the Selkies were still learning what it meant to be what they had become. The man who wore my Firtha’s skin broke his own neck jumping from a cliff. The woman who inherited the skin was caught and killed by human fishermen. The girl who inherited from her chose not to have children at all, so when she died, there was no one waiting for the skin to pass to them. It came back to me, instead. A few of them have, over the years. A few of them have come home.” The Luidaeg looked back to me. “Do you understand?”

This time, the numbness in my lips and tongue had nothing to do with any potions. “She has no fae blood left in her,” I said. “What you’re saying . . . it’s impossible.”

“I’m the sea witch. The ocean in my veins and the ocean in yours is so similar as to be identical. I can’t do what you can do, because the blood all looks the same to me. Such small adjustments are beyond what I can narrow my magic to achieve. But when I poured the blood price of my children into their skins, I wasn’t doing anything narrow, anything small. I was refusing the remaking of the world. So, no, it’s not impossible. It’s not easy. It’s well within my power.”

My mouth felt like a desert. My head spun. “She’s . . . she’s really alive?”

The Luidaeg rolled her eyes. “Mom’s teeth, didn’t I say that to begin with? You know I can’t lie. You’re lucky I don’t get insulted and turn you into a coral reef for the next thirty years. Yes, she’s really alive. She’s not the same. She can’t be the same for at least a century, which is going to put a crimp in any plans she had for a human life, but she’s alive. That’s more than anyone else could have done.”

I burst into tears. I wanted to ask for details, to ask where she was, to ask anything that wouldn’t run the risk of offending the Luidaeg, but I couldn’t do it. All I could do was sit on the couch and sob brokenly, my vision going blurry and my chest going tight.

Then arms surrounded me, pulling me close, and the Luidaeg’s voice was in my ear, whispering, “Shh, Toby, shhh, it’s all right. You can cry for her without mourning for her now. It’s going to be all right.”

The tears, now that they’d been set free, refused to stop coming. They were a hot flood of misery, and I was being swept away. I grabbed hold of the Luidaeg’s sheltering arms and held on for dear life, trusting her to be my rock against the terrible tide.

Lips still pressed against the curve of my ear, she said softly, “When you feel better, when you’re ready to stop crying and start coping, I need you to remember this: you are still in my debt for so many, many things, but you are not in my debt for this. You didn’t ask me to save her. Even your kitty didn’t speak the words. I saved her because I know what it is to bury a child—a hundred times over, I know—and because I’m selfish, Toby, I’m so much more selfish than any of you ever give me credit for. I would have swallowed the sea if they’d let me. I wanted someone who could carry Firtha’s skin into the world again, and you gave me that. You owe me for every favor I’ve ever done you. You owe me nothing for your daughter.”

My tears, which had been tapering off, redoubled. Whatever she had asked for saving Gillian, I would have paid it without a second thought. I would have returned to the pond for another seven years; I would have put a dagger through my own heart. I had never considered that this might be something she could, or would, do for free.

The Luidaeg stroked my hair and murmured soothing words, some in English, some not, until I calmed down enough to sit up and wipe my eyes, chasing the prisms from the edges of my vision. I looked at her and blinked, swallowing a gasp.

She still looked more like a human teenager than anything else, and her eyes were still a clear driftglass green, like pieces of a broken bottle that had been tumbled by the tide. But her hair was an oil slick, filled with shifting rainbow colors painted over the black, and her clothes had changed, becoming a ruffled white shirt like a cascade of foam and a pair of dark blue hose. She quirked an eyebrow when she saw me looking.

“Yes?” she asked.

“How do you do that?” I blurted. Her eyebrow climbed higher. I continued, “The clothes thing. The false Queen always used to do that to my clothes, but even when she was part-Siren, she never should have had transformation magic like that.”

“Your brain is a fascinating place,” said the Luidaeg dryly. “It’s old sea magic. Not common on the land, I’ll grant you, although the Hamadryads might be able to teach you a thing or two.”

“So Sea Wights can do it?”

“No,” the Luidaeg admitted. “But it would have been easy enough to buy from one of the Asrai or Fuath. Easy as it is for land fae to borrow from the blood of one another, it’s a hundred times simpler for those born to the water.”

“Sometimes you talk like a riddle,” I grumbled, wiping my eyes again. “If transformation magic isn’t something native to her bloodlines, why would she be so obsessed with using it? Where’s the benefit?”

“I really hope you’re not planning to sit here and use me as a sounding board for all your half-baked theories,” said the Luidaeg blandly. “I would have thought you’d be asking to see your daughter by now. I’m tired of taking in your refugees, by the way. If this doesn’t stop happening all the damn time, I’m going to start charging you rent.”

“And I guess I’ll pay it.” I stood, my knees still wobbling like they weren’t sure they wanted to hold me up. Then I paused, looking around the empty living room. “Where’s Janet?”

“Given everything, I think I’d be justified in saying ‘hanging out with the other cockroaches,’ but no. She’s in the parlor. I wanted her to have some time to herself to think about what she’s done, and to not be under my damn feet. And thank Dad for that. If she’d been here when your kitty came running in with the littlest Carter . . .” The Luidaeg shuddered theatrically.

I frowned. “What do you mean, ‘Carter’?”

“Fae don’t have surnames,” said the Luidaeg. She looked at me like she was waiting for the other shoe to finally drop. “Why would we have a family name when the shape of our ears tells people who we’re descended from? And then there’s the issue where every member of any given descendant race is technically related to all the others but keeps marrying them anyway, and the more time we’ve spent with humans down the centuries, the less we’ve wanted to think about that. So where do the family names come from? The Torquills and the Sollys and the Lordens? Humans bring their names with them, and they leave them behind when we strip their blood away. Dad’s idea. He didn’t think it was fair to change people’s heritage and not let them keep something of where they’d come from.”

The thought of a human marrying into the Lorden family was as terrifying as it was delightful. Humans can’t generally breathe water. Then again, neither could Patrick, and Dianda was doing a reasonably good job of keeping him from drowning. “So ‘Carter’ is because . . . ?”

“Family names have changed since Janet’s day. She’d be a Carter now. Place names and all that.” The Luidaeg stood. “We’re getting distracted again. Do you not want to see your daughter?”

I hesitated. Then, in a voice so small I barely recognized it as my own, I whispered, “I’m afraid to.”

“Oh, mo laochain,” she said, voice twisting around the unfamiliar syllables like a rose through a trellis. She put her arms around me and drew me close, into the sea-salt smell of her, until my face was pressed to the cool skin of her shoulder. “We’re all afraid. That’s what it is to be a mother. We’re all afraid.”

I started to cry again. She held me until I was done, and then she pulled away, her hand still grasping mine, and led me down the hallway toward my daughter.