Ashes of Honor

to sleep.”

The Luidaeg turned to stare at me. I kept on talking.

“Sylvester assumed it escaped from someone’s menagerie. He’s taken it back to Shadowed Hills until they can track down whoever owns it. But they’re not going to find an owner, are they? That thing came straight from Tirn Aill. Chelsea—Etienne’s daughter—her magic smells like sycamore smoke and calla lilies. I smelled it on the Afanc.”

The Luidaeg paled. That, in and of itself, was terrifying. “It’s happening again,” she said, almost in a whisper. “Oh, sweet Mother, it’s happening again.”

“What’s happening again? Luidaeg, talk to me. I need to know what’s going on. I need to find Chelsea.”

“Oh, you need to find her, all right,” said the Luidaeg. She shook her head. Somewhere in the middle of the gesture, the humanity left her face, acne scars and tan fading away. She was left with a faint mother-of-pearl undertone to her skin…and the freckles. They seemed to be permanent, no matter what shape she took. The Luidaeg can be distressingly protean, and I may never know what she really looks like. I’m not certain I want to. “You need to find her now.”

“How?” asked Quentin. We both turned to look at him. He was frowning. “I know we need to find her. That’s why we’re here. We can’t teleport. How are we supposed to find her?”

I looked back to the Luidaeg. “How bad can this get?”

“Bad,” she said. “I’m assuming you’ve both heard about the changelings who go wrong when their magic comes in.”

“Instead of getting all the limits and none of the power, they get all the power and none of the limits,” I said. “I think everyone’s heard those stories.”

“Yeah, well. Have you ever met one of those changelings?”

“No.” Every changeling I’d ever known, myself included, was magically weaker than their fae parent. The horror stories about uncontrollable changeling magic destroying knowes and burning human cities had always seemed to be just that: horror stories, usually trotted out by pureblood kids who wanted to remind us that we weren’t just less than they were, we were potentially going to go bad.

“So if they’re that rare, why do the stories endure?” asked the Luidaeg. “Faerie is usually happy to forget the bad things. Hell, we practically race to see who can forget them first. Maybe some people don’t like changelings, but shouldn’t they still be happy to forget about the disasters that happened years ago, to somebody else?”

I didn’t say anything. Neither did Quentin. We just waited.

The Luidaeg shook her head. “We remember because when it does happen, when this sort of thing does go wrong, it’s so fucking bad that no one can pretend it didn’t happen. The last time there was a Tuatha de Dannan changeling with the strength to smash his way through the walls Oberon erected between us and everywhere else, it was…bad.”

“Bad ‘well, that sucks’ or bad ‘end of the world’?” I asked, cautiously.

“Bad ‘he punched a hole all the way through to the central lands of Faerie, and some people were never heard from again,’” said the Luidaeg. “I’d tell you to go ask your mother, if I thought she’d be willing to talk to you about it. She was there. She was one of the people who had to seal the door he’d created before it could destroy all the worlds.”

Amandine had been rattling at doors no one could see since she went mad. Maybe she really could see something that the rest of us couldn’t. I frowned. “What happened to the changeling?”

“He died.” The Luidaeg’s tone made it clear that there would be no further discussion of the dead. Her kettle began to whistle. She took it off the stove and opened the nearest cabinet, taking down a mug. “If your Chelsea is that kind of changeling, you’ve got two choices.”

“What are those?” I already half-knew what she was going to say. I was hoping she’d come up with another option.

“You shift her blood all the way in either direction—make her human, or make her fae so that her blood will give her the power blocks she’s missing—or you kill her. She doesn’t walk away from this the way that she is now. Do you understand me? No one who can open a door to Tirn Aill without my father’s permission can be allowed to go free.”

“Why is that so bad?” asked Quentin. “I mean, when Oberon locked the doors, did he know he was going to be gone this long? Maybe people would fight less if they could go home.”

Faerie wars used to be bloody and unpleasant, but they always ended, because eventually the warring parties just went home. When your annoying neighbors live in a different pocket universe, it’s a lot easier to ignore the fact that they never mow the lawn. Locking all the inhabitants of Faerie in two worlds—Earth and the Summerlands—might have made out-and-out conflict rarer, but with nowhere else to go, the warring parties just kept at it until one side was all but annihilated. Just ask the Kingdom of Silences.

“It’s not my place to question my father’s decisions,” said the Luidaeg frostily. Then she sighed, thawing a little as she said, “Without him, Mom, and Aunt Titania to keep the Heart of Faerie under control, the deeper lands are unstable. They’re open to influence, and they’re going to be looking for it anywhere they can find it. If we went back to the deeper lands without them, we’d all wind up dead, trapped, or worse.”

I didn’t ask what “or worse” could be. Faerie is nothing if not creative when it comes to that sort of thing. Instead, I asked, “The Heart of Faerie?”

The Luidaeg didn’t answer. She just looked at me and waited.

Right. “So how are we supposed to find Chelsea?” I asked, dropping the subject. “She can teleport, and we don’t even have a car anymore, thanks to the Afanc.”

“What did you say her magic smelled like?”

“Sycamore smoke and calla lilies.”

“And she’s Etienne’s kid. What does his magic smell like?”

“Um…it smells like cedar smoke and limes.”

“Okay. Okay. Her line…she must be descended through Amorica.” Catching our blank expressions, the Luidaeg sighed. “You know, there was a time when everyone in Faerie knew the descendant lines of the Firstborn. It helped people not get turned inside out when they pissed us off. Amorica and Elton are the Tuatha de Dannan Firstborn. Twins. Amorica’s magic smelled like burning heather—like all the fields in the world were on fire at once. Elton smelled like that same field at dawn, when the dew was heavy and fire seemed impossible. If your missing kid were from Elton’s line, she’d smell like, I don’t know, wet concrete and whatever.”

Quentin and I kept looking at her blankly. The Luidaeg scowled before picking up the kettle and pouring a stream of dark liquid into her mug.

“Did you never consider that maybe—just maybe—your magic said things about you?”

“I knew it usually reflected one or both of your parents somehow and that it could change as you got older, but I didn’t realize it identified your Firstborn,” I said. “Or that the Tuatha had two Firstborn.”

“Yeah, well, ‘had’ is the right word there. Amorica died the first time we went to war against each other— and don’t,” she held up a hand, “ask me why we went to war, or who was on which side. It doesn’t matter now, and it’s one of the questions I’m not allowed to answer.”

“Okay,” I said slowly. “So she’s one of Amorica’s descendants. What does that mean from a practical standpoint?”

“It means I can mix you a tracking potion.” The Luidaeg sipped her tea, grimaced, and set the cup aside before opening her refrigerator and starting to rummage around inside. “You won’t be able to follow her if she gates out of the Summerlands, but at least you’ll be able to tell where she enters and exits.”

“What’s the catch?” asked Quentin.

The Luidaeg’s magic always comes with a price. Both Quentin and I have learned that lesson firsthand. There are people who would say we got off easy—we’re both still breathing, after all—and maybe they’re right. That doesn’t make the Luidaeg’s bills easy ones to pay.

“Well, for one thing, you won’t be able to stop looking until you find her.” The Luidaeg straightened, a jar of unidentified green sludge in each hand. She closed the refrigerator door with a bump of her hip before moving to the counter. “For another thing, if she dies before you manage to catch up to her, you’re going to get it dropped on your head.”

“Like riding the blood all the way to a death?” I asked.