Ashes of Honor

“I said I made a mistake when I took Raj as a nephew, and not as a son.” Tybalt turned to face me. “Chelsea was here.”

I raked my hair back with one hand. “I thought that was what was going on. Couldn’t you have led with that, maybe? Since you know I’m looking for her?” Or maybe you could have led with the fact that, somehow, she managed to get you killed…

“I’m sorry,” he said, with apparent sincerity. “I didn’t think.”

Julie made a theatrical gagging noise before flouncing away, getting out of arm’s reach before either of us could decide to smack her.

“I liked it better when she was trying to kill me all the time,” I muttered, and took another look around the barn. Some of the Cait Sidhe in the hayloft were bleeding, but only a little; there was nothing as bad as the injuries I’d tasted in the room where we arrived. “So what happened?”

“Chelsea opened a door.” Tybalt’s expression turned grim. “I doubt she meant to do so; I doubt she even knows what she’s doing. I knew it was her only because I can’t imagine two terrified, half-human girls are presently ripping holes in the fabric of Faerie. If they were as common as all that, this wouldn’t be the first time I’d seen one.”

“Opened a door to where?” I asked.

“One of the Fire Kingdoms.”

I blinked at him. He nodded, and said nothing more.

Faerie is divided into four realms. The Land Kingdoms, where most of the fae I know live. The Undersea, home of Merrow and Selkies and stranger things, accessible only to those who can breathe water or are willing to learn how. The Oversky, anchored in the clouds and even more alien than the Undersea; most people can learn how to swim, and scuba gear is reasonably easy to acquire. Flying suits are a little bit harder.

And then there are the Fire Kingdoms, domain of salamanders and Kesali, Teine Sith and Djinn. No one goes there unless they can survive in a river of lava, and even some of the fae races that can live in the Fire Kingdoms choose not to, since no one’s been able to figure out how to get cable in the middle of a volcano.

“Oh,” I said, slowly. “Crap.”

“As always, my dear, you have quite the way with words.” He shook his head. “She came through one door and threw herself into another. I doubt she even realized we were here, or knew that she had entered a place that already had people in it. The fire that followed her was an unintended side effect of her flight, not an attack upon my people.”

I turned to look again at the Cait Sidhe gathered around the edges of the barn. “Is everyone going to see it that way?”

“I don’t know,” he said, with weary calm. “Perhaps, if it weren’t for the rest of what happened when she appeared here.”

My heart was still hanging too low in my chest. Now it felt like my stomach dropped all the way down to my feet. Tybalt had managed to separate me from Quentin by telling me that it was about Raj, and while he might treat me like a cat toy from time to time, he had never, so far as I knew, intentionally lied to me. I shifted slowly to face him and asked the question I was most afraid of:

“Tybalt, where’s Raj?”

He shook his head, and answered, “I don’t know.”

Oh, oak and ash. We were in trouble.

TEN

THE SILENCE OF THE CAIT SIDHE around us suddenly felt a lot more dangerous. I had allies here, people here who owed me their lives, but this wasn’t my place, and I was the second intruder in the course of a day. I took a half step toward Tybalt. “Why did you bring me here?”

A smile touched his lips. “Whatever the treaties between your Courts and mine say, you and I both know my nephew is your squire in all but name. You would never have forgiven me if I hadn’t told you of his disappearance. Despite appearances, your forgiveness is important to me.” The smile faded. “Not that this was the whole of my motivation. I dislike being injured, and while none of my subjects were as hurt as I was, it was luck, not skill, that saved them. I would prefer this not happen again, and I would like my nephew returned.”

Luck, and a monarch who was willing to push his weaker subjects out of the way of the onrushing disaster. My imagination has always been vivid. The image of Tybalt wreathed in flames rose in my mind’s eye. I shoved it stalwartly down and asked, “Did Chelsea take him?”

“Not precisely. He was standing between her and her second door when it opened. She ran for what she viewed as safety—as fast as she came and was gone, I doubt she even realized she’d found a possible sanctuary. He was insufficiently swift in getting out of the way, and he was knocked through the opening. It closed before he could pass back through.”

That confirmed what Chelsea had told her mother: she was losing control. I worried my lower lip between my teeth. “Can Raj use the Shadow Roads to get back?”

It was a stupid question. I knew that as soon as I asked it, but Tybalt answered as if it were meaningful, saying, “If he has access to them wherever he is, he hasn’t used them to return.”

“Right.” I took a deep breath, touching the pocket holding the Luidaeg’s charm with one hand. “Where did she open the doors?”

“Cover your mouth again, and I’ll show you,” said Tybalt.

I did as I was told. He led me out of the barn, back into the smoky halls of the Court of Cats. He took my elbow once we were outside, guiding me down the charred hall to a huge solarium. That was where the fire had started; that was where Chelsea first arrived.

Like everything in the Court of Cats, the solarium looked as if it had been on the verge of collapsing when the Cait Sidhe claimed and rebuilt it into a patchwork version of itself. Half the windows were broken and boarded over; the other half were glassless frames that looked out on a seemingly endless succession of rafters and hanging ropes. A room inside a room, which was doubtless somehow inside another room in turn. Faerie has never had much respect for spatial geometry, and the Court of Cats seemed to take a special glee in flaunting that disrespect.

Tybalt led me halfway across the solarium before he stopped, saying needlessly, “This is where the fire began.”

“Yeah,” I said, biting back the urge to start swearing. “I got that.”

There was no trace of Chelsea’s magic, but I didn’t need her magic to tell me that this was where the door had opened. A large section of wall was burnt black. In some places, it was gone, revealing the empty, echoing room that surrounded us. The silver window frames above the hole had been melted by the heat; some of them were splattered on the floor in oracular swirls, while others had maintained their cohesiveness but lost their form, twisting and curving into something that looked like modern art, assuming your definition of “modern art” involved a preschooler and a blowtorch.

The air smelled like fire, molten metal…and blood. Once I started paying attention to it, it became impossible to ignore. I stepped away from Tybalt, moving to a blackened patch on the green marble floor. I knelt there, laying my fingertips against the stone, hearing the blood sing to me through the layers of ash that separated us.

“You died here,” I said, very quietly.

“October—”

“I wasn’t here, and the girl I’m supposed to be finding was, and you died.” I looked up at him, glaring through the tears in my eyes. I left my fingers balanced on the floor, letting his blood sing its song of pain and longing. Longing to live; refusal to let go of the world. Maybe that’s what differentiates the Kings and Queens of Cats from the rest of Faerie. They have a cat’s stubbornness and the power to back it up. So when death says, “Go,” they just refuse.

My heart hurt. My heart hurt so badly, and I was still trying to recover from Connor, and oh, Titania, I couldn’t do this again. The thought startled me. I froze where I was, still glaring.