TWENTY-ONE

I STEPPED INTO THE LIVING ROOM to find Tybalt perched on the absolute edge of the couch. He knew most of the filth was illusionary, but that didn’t stop him from being disgusted by it. The carpet squelched under my feet. He turned toward the sound, relief washing over his face as he stood in a single, fluid motion and began walking toward me.

He waited to speak until there was barely a foot between us. “Your daughter . . . ? I know she lives, but at what consequence?”

“She’s a Selkie now,” I said, and laughed, tears and hysteria both threatening to break through the sound. “Can you believe it? A Selkie.” A small, terrible corner of my mind reminded me that if Connor and I had stayed together—if his family hadn’t come between us, if I hadn’t chosen Cliff over chasing after him—Gillian might not find any of this strange. She could have grown up knowing that one day a skin would come to her.

But she wouldn’t have been Gillian. Even if I’d given an imagined daughter with Connor the same name, she would have been a different little girl, growing up in a different world. Hindsight is twenty-twenty. That doesn’t mean the things it shows are always better.

“Perhaps she’ll be the first of them the sea witch can allow herself to love, as she didn’t choose it,” said Tybalt, and lightly touched my cheek. There were still shadows in his eyes. The damage my mother had done wasn’t the kind that could be washed away in a single adventure, no matter how hard we both wished it could be. “I am glad she is well.”

“Me, too.” I took a breath, letting myself relax into his touch. It was only for an instant. That instant was enough to make me feel like the rest of this might be something we could survive. “Quentin and May?”

“Awake, and in Muir Woods with the rest. The pretender Queen has been arrested for her crimes, as has her changeling accomplice. The Baobhan Sith who tried so industriously to devour you has been given a nice new robe and a place to stay while she adjusts to the decade.” He frowned. “I recognize she was a victim here, acting entirely on instinct, but still it galls me that someone with such a taste for your blood should be kept as a guest in your monarch’s halls.”

“Just don’t invite her to stay at the Court of Cats, and we’ll be fine,” I said. I took a step back, less to create distance between us than to make it clear that the moment had passed: we needed to move. “She’ll digest my blood and lose the ability to disguise herself as me soon enough. Are you feeling up to carrying me to Muir Woods?”

“You live, my love, and your daughter lives as well. Right now, I could carry you to Mag Mell if you asked it of me.”

“I’d rather you didn’t. Having the groom collapse from exhaustion before the wedding does no one any good.”

The look of surprise on his face would have been amusing, if I hadn’t known he was, on some level, worried that I wouldn’t want to marry him when he was anything less than perfect. I put my hand on his arm.

“Come on, Tybalt,” I said. “Take me to see the queen.”

“It would be an honor.” He swept his arm under my legs, lifting me into the bridal carry that seemed to be the easiest method for conveying me through the dark, and stepped into the shadows before I could say anything else.

Most of the time, I preferred to run the Shadow Roads by his side, when we had to use them at all. It was easier on him if he wasn’t trying to carry me while he ran, and I preferred to know that I was at least technically in command of my own fate, even if a simple fall could mean being lost forever in the darkness. He could see. As long as I could hold my breath, he’d be able to backtrack and find me. Or at least I liked to tell myself that, since it made the whole experience a little less upsetting.

Ice formed on my skin and in my hair, gluing my eyelashes together, caking on my lips. I snuggled closer to the comforting warmth of him—the man I had chosen, who had chosen me; the man I was going to marry, no matter what the world threw at us—and tried to focus on the sound of my heartbeat, which thundered in my ears.

I should have put the pieces together sooner. I blamed my concern for Gillian and my rapid blood loss. Even for me, it had been a hard day. But the false Queen didn’t have many allies left. Rhys—I wasn’t sure of the title for a deposed puppet King, other than maybe “loser”—was still asleep in Silences. Her guards worked for Arden now, who treated them better than her nameless predecessor ever had. Her courtiers were scattered throughout the Kingdom, retreating to their home demesnes in disgrace. It would be a long time before any of them could gather enough influence to win themselves a place in Arden’s Court. Really, Dugan had been the only logical person to have been helping her.

The signs had been there all along. The scent of cinnamon and cardamom; the involvement of secrets that were meant to be kept at the royal level, which his time with the false Queen could easily have revealed to him. Gillian’s description of Jocelyn’s supposed “boyfriend” only confirmed what I’d already been virtually certain of.

“Almost there,” murmured Tybalt. “Brace yourself.”

I did, snuggling closer still, and held my breath as we burst into the warmth and light of the mortal world. The scent of redwood trees assailed my nose; we were in Muir Woods. I took a deep, whooping breath, cracking the ice on my lashes as I opened my eyes and beheld a strip of late afternoon sky framed by redwood branches. In the distance, someone laughed, a warm, comfortable sound. The sound of tourists in a state park, who saw no reason to worry that anything might go wrong.

I blinked. There was no weight of a don’t-look-here on us, and I hadn’t been wearing a human disguise while I was at the Luidaeg’s. “Oh. Shit.”

Tybalt blinked in turn. “What do you—”

“Illusions. Now.” His eyes widened in understanding. He didn’t quite drop me, but he put me down with more vigor than was technically necessary, both of us grabbing for the strands of shadow running through the air. His gestures were more refined than mine, elegance in motion, like he was dancing. I, on the other hand, was a magical wrecking ball, grabbing at whatever power I could find and yanking it down over myself like a shroud.

The smell of cut grass and bloody copper rose around me, twining and tangling with Tybalt’s musk and pennyroyal. A verbal spell would have risked attracting too much attention: the sun wasn’t down yet, and while the path where we’d emerged wasn’t on the main thoroughfare—thank Oberon—Muir Woods is a popular tourist attraction. The place was probably thronging with mortals who’d have serious questions about why our ears were pointy and our eyes were funny if they happened to come around the right corner at the wrong time.

The spell crashed down to cover me, knocking more ice loose without chasing the freeze from my skin. I gasped, as much from the strain of casting a silent illusion as from the shock of its presence. Shaking the shreds of magic from my fingers, I turned to Tybalt.

He was watching me with what I could only call fond indulgence, his features blunted and his eyes dimmed by the illusion he had designed for himself. “I will never tire of watching you do that,” he said.

“What? Panic?”

“No. Enchant yourself in my presence. It is a small vulnerability, but as it’s what our circumstances allow to us, I shall accept it for the gift that it is.”

“Weirdo,” I said fondly. Then I sobered. “We need to get to Arden.”

“Indeed, we do,” he said, and offered me his arm. Together, newly apparently human and no more out of place than any other tourists, we stepped out of our isolated corner of the park and started down the path toward the far wall.

Muir Woods is what so much of California used to be: lush and green and virtually untouched by human hands. The paths that wind through the ancient trees have been designed to be as unobtrusive as possible, allowing humans to see the redwoods without necessarily damaging them. When a sequoia falls, downed by time or rot or forest fire, it’s allowed to stay where it lands, slowly rotting and feeding the living world around it. Everything smells of good green growth, of running water, of the sea. If the entire mortal world were like Muir Woods, we would have no need for the Summerlands. We could just stay in the trees and be happy.

Of course, the entire mortal world was like Muir Woods, once, and look where that got us.

The humans I’d been worried about running into strolled along the main boardwalk, some in couples, others in family groups. A small child pointed in awe at a bright yellow banana slug while a park employee watched unobtrusively off to one side, ready to step in if the animal were put into danger. A woman pushed an older man in a wheelchair. Several people pushed strollers. The only unusual thing about me and Tybalt was the way I had my hand resting on the crook of his elbow, rather than tucked into his hand.

I could fix that. Loving a man several hundred years older than me has meant adjusting to a little anachronism in my daily life, but he still knew how to hold hands. I tangled my fingers into his, and he glanced at me, first startled, then smiling.

“Your hands are cold,” he said.

“Yours aren’t.”

“The shadows have learned to love me in their own way. I apologize that they may never feel so very generous toward you.”

“I’m not Cait Sidhe.” I shrugged as we walked, as fast as we dared, toward the wooden stairway that would take us to the path toward Arden’s knowe. “I’m okay with the idea that the shadows won’t love me, as long as you do.”

“The act that could strip away my love for you has never yet been committed, nor is its commission a thing I have any cause to fear,” said Tybalt.

I snorted. “Now you sound like a romance novel again.”

“Sometimes it is the best of ways to sound.” He glanced at me. “My recent absence has been . . . ”

“I know why you were gone.”

“Your knowing doesn’t change the fact that I’ve allowed precious hours to slip by without spending them in your company. I am ashamed of how afraid I am. Still, I am afraid. It seems I should have shaken this concern away, as I have shaken off so many others, but . . .” He shook his head. “My people. Raj. You. It has been a very long time since I feared failure for any reason other than the damage to my pride. Your mother showed me that I am vulnerable, and I did not much care for the feeling.”

I squeezed his hand. It was the only thing I could think of. I did wonder whether our appearance in the mortal areas of the park, where we would have to walk quietly and without attracting attention to reach the knowe, had been due to the road ending or due to some possibly subconscious desire on his part. Sometimes it seemed like our lives never left much room for serious conversation that didn’t include someone trying to kill one or both of us. Quentin and May were awake; Gillian was safe with the Luidaeg; the false Queen was in custody. This might be the last real pause we got.

But Dugan was still out there somewhere, and Arden didn’t know about him, or how dangerous he could potentially be. We could walk slowly enough to be overlooked. We could steal a few minutes to talk about our feelings. Anything more than that was for later, when our enemies had, however temporarily, been subdued.

Sometimes I really miss the days when my biggest concern was whether I’d be able to afford fresh milk for my coffee. Then I consider the gains I’ve made—my home, my friends, my weird and chosen family—and I remember that the past is only rosy because of all the blood that was in my eyes.

“Something will have to change,” he said softly. “I fear it might be me.”

We had reached the stairway. We climbed it in silence, still holding onto each other, until we reached the hard-packed dirt trail that ran around the edge of the basin containing the tallest of the trees. Side by side, we walked to the base of an ancient redwood whose roots had carved a series of natural “steps” out of the hill. After that, it was a simple matter to wait for the mortals around us to pass. Once we had a clear moment, I dropped Tybalt’s hand and started upward.

As we walked, I wove my hands in and out of the air, tugging on it, teasing it, making it clear who I was and where I was going. Some knowes, like Shadowed Hills, require complicated rituals to find the door. Others, like the false Queen’s fading home, only need people to make it past the repulsion charms and general environmental unpleasantness. Arden’s knowe split the difference. She didn’t want humans wandering in unwittingly—obviously—but she also didn’t want to be inaccessible to her subjects. There were several approaches, some easier than others, and all of them required a certain series of gestures or syllables to tell the boundary that you were approaching with the queen’s own approval.

The world shivered around me, illusions adjusting themselves to show me what I needed to see. Glowing mushrooms appeared among the underbrush, and some of the banana slugs took on an even brighter glow, the consequence of eating both the fungus and the leaves dusted with pixie sweat. A flock of pixies swirled by overhead, wings chiming. I waved at them.

Behind me, Tybalt snorted. “I fully expect a battalion of them to appear at our wedding to hold your veil and demand shares of the cake.”

“It’s cute how you think I’m going to wear a veil,” I countered, and he laughed.

That sound was more encouraging than anything else could have been. It put a spring into my step, and in what felt like no time at all, I was cresting the top of the hill. The doors to Arden’s knowe were standing open, flanked as always by two guards in her livery—including, I was pleased to see, Lowri.

She waved when she saw us. I hurried across the clearing, waiting until I was close enough to talk to her without shouting before I said, “Tell me everything you can about Dugan Harrow.”

Lowri blinked. “I . . . what?”

“Dugan. Do you remember him?”

“Um, yes.” Her chuckle was dark and caustic. “I don’t know about you, but I tend to remember it when people try to stab my liege with iron knives. I was part of the band that arrested him and threw him into Her Maj—I mean, the false Queen’s dungeons.”

It occurred to me that I had no idea what the group noun for a bunch of guards was supposed to be. That had never seemed like a hole in my education before. “Was he one of you?”

“Him? No.” Her nose wrinkled. “The false Queen didn’t want her guards to be knighted. Most nobles, they can’t wait to show off this bunch of wee titled fools they have carrying swords in their name, but her? She was happier if we served only at her convenience and couldn’t go running off somewhere else even if we’d wanted to. He was never the type who wanted to get his hands dirty, but even if he had been, she’d never have allowed him to join the guard, because he came with a title. He’d never have needed her enough for her to believe his loyalty.”

“What was his title?”

“Baron.” She wrinkled her nose. “No land, no manners, but oh, he could lord it over us like anything—begging your pardon.” The last was a hasty addition as she finally seemed to register that the man behind me, in his jeans and plain green shirt, was Tybalt. “Not everyone with a title is terrible. Please don’t assume I meant yourself.”

“I try never to assume anything other than praise is a reference to me,” he said mildly. “It prevents misunderstandings.”

I rolled my eyes but kept my focus on Lowri. “So he was a jerk.”

“Even before he tried to stab his mistress in the heart, yes.” Her expression turned wistful. “Far be it from me to wish harm on another, but we might be in a better place, as a kingdom, if certain events had occurred more quickly.”

“I don’t know,” I said. “If she’d died without an heir, High King Sollys would have been forced to name someone else to take the throne, and we would never have gone looking for Arden. Awful as it was getting here, I sort of feel like this may be the best-case scenario.”

Lowri’s cheeks flushed. “I hadn’t considered that.”

“It’s okay. What happened to Dugan? After he was arrested, where did he go?”

“The false Queen had him taken to the dungeons. You remember the dungeons.”

Did I ever. They’d been so soaked with iron that both Tybalt and I had come close to dying. He’d actually reached the point of begging me to shift my own blood away from fae, so I would be human enough to survive. He’d expected me to do it, too, to take an escape hatch that was only available to me and leave him to die. We’d gotten out. We’d been lucky, and we’d had access to magic that Dugan, as a pureblooded Daoine Sidhe, could never have accessed.

“Yes,” I said tightly.

“She left him there for a fortnight. Long enough for him to soften, for him to start listening to what she had to say.” Lowri shook her head, expression clearly disapproving. “It’s torture. You know, the humans forbid it? They have more laws than we do, and half of them are about not hurting each other. Sometimes, I think they have the right of it.”

“You’re not alone in that,” I said. “What happened after a fortnight?”

“She let him go.” Her expression twisted, going from simple disapproval to outright disgust. “He tries to kill her in full view of the Court, and she lets him go. Like it was nothing to be concerned over; like it was ordinary. He’s a Baron, yes, but he’s not from a powerful family, he doesn’t stand at the center of some great web of obligations. She let him go because she wanted to, and not because she had to.”

“That’s about what I thought,” I said.

Iron is poison, in every sense of the word. It kills magic. It burns fae flesh. It distorts the world, making time slow down and then dissolve like sugar into water, so that everything that happens has been happening forever, and anything that came before the iron seems inconsequential. I don’t have many regrets about the increasingly fae balance of my blood, but my increased sensitivity to iron is one of them. The mortal world can be dangerous for someone who can’t stand the touch of a major metal.

After almost two weeks in the false Queen’s dungeon, Dugan would have been willing to agree to anything if it meant he got to walk away. Anything. Like eternal loyalty, the kind that can be compelled with an oath or geas. The fact that he was helping her now made sense when I saw it in that light. And if she’d somehow convinced him she had a shot at retaking her throne . . .

Too many people had seen him attack her. The only way he was ever going to rise to true power was if she was the one to lift him up. As a Daoine Sidhe, encouraged by his Firstborn to ambition, the temptation to try must have been too great to resist.

“Where’s Arden?” I asked.

To her credit, Lowri barely flinched at my use of the queen’s proper name. “In the salon with your people. I believe they’re waiting for you.”

“Got it. It was good to see you.”

“Open roads,” she replied.

“Kind fires,” I said, and walked through the doors with Tybalt by my side. This was almost over. I just had to hang onto that. This was almost over, and soon, we would be going home.

We walked along the length of the receiving hall. The guards flanking the door motioned to the left when they saw us coming, and we reoriented ourselves, walking on. It seemed to work like that every time we came to a juncture: we would approach and a servant or guard or courtier would appear, quietly indicating the way we were supposed to go. It was all running smoothly, and I thought I could see Cassandra’s hand in the elegance of it all.

As Arden’s seneschal, Madden was in charge of serving as her good right hand when she couldn’t be present to make a decision pertaining to her kingdom. As chatelaine, Cassandra filled the same role on a smaller level, making decisions for the household. Cassandra had grown up in a house full of younger siblings, all attending human schools during the day while their parents were asleep. She was very good at organizing things as unobtrusively as possible.

One silent turn at a time, we came to a part of the knowe I had never seen before, a wide, sunny parlor with panes of colored glass in place of a ceiling and bright carnival sheeting on the walls. Couches and loveseats dotted the floor, and household servants moved between them, offering sandwiches and cups of lemonade.

Arden and Nolan were seated together on one loveseat, while Madden sat in an oversized armchair, his feet tucked up under his body. May sprawled across an entire loveseat by herself. Quentin, who had been stalking a serving girl with a tray of sandwiches around the edges of the room, broke into a broad smile when he saw us.

“Toby!” He trotted in my direction as the others were still turning to look our way. His smile faded as he got closer. “Gillian. Is she . . . ?” He stopped.

The room seemed to be holding its breath. May, especially, looked like she was on the verge of breaking down in tears. I shook my head in quick negation.

“No,” I said. “No, she isn’t dead, no, she isn’t dying, no, she isn’t going to spend the next hundred years asleep. She’s . . . she’s going to have some adjusting to do, but she’s going to live.”

Even the servants had stopped moving as they listened to me. I kept my focus on Quentin and May, my family, the ones who needed to know this.

“She’s going to be a part of Faerie now,” I said.

There was a crash. We all turned. One of the serving men had dropped his silver tray, scattering drinks and appetizers across the floor at his own feet. He was staring at us, eyes wide and angry. His hair was brown, his eyes were green, and there was a glimmer in the air around him, like he was hiding something, like he was hiding himself.

I smelled cinnamon.

“I knew you were a liar,” snarled the servant. “I knew you just didn’t want to fix what you had broken. Well, you’re going to fix it now.” He lunged, grabbing Nolan around the neck and flinging a small vial at the floor in the same motion. Then he stepped backward, jerking the prince into the hole that had opened in the air, and was gone.