I’ve got shit to do.”
“Luidaeg … ” I hesitated. “Is everything all right?”
The whites of her eyes darkened for a moment, almost vanishing against the ordinary brown of her irises. She blinked and her eyes were normal again; normal, and sad. “Nothing in this world is ever all the way right, October,” she said quietly. “Now get out of here. There are people you need to be looking after.”
“Right,” I repeated, and stepped through the door.
There was no real moment of transition, no distortion or disorientation. It was as easy as stepping through a normal doorway, if you discount the fact that walking through a normal doorway doesn’t usually result in quite that extreme a change in temperature. The Luidaeg’s apartment was warm and dry. Lily’s knowe was moist, and cold enough to border on clammy. I stopped where I was, taking an uneasy breath as I realized what the change in temperature meant.
Lily was gone. And with her out of the picture, the knowe—which had always been sustained almost entirely by her unique sort of magic—was dying.
Marcia spotted me before I trudged more than halfway across the mossy expanse between my point of arrival and the pavilion. She came racing down the pavilion steps, looking small and frazzled in her oversized, obviously secondhand sweater. “Toby! You’re alive!”
“Hey, Marcia,” I said. “Yeah, I’m alive. I’ve just been in hiding. Still am, sort of. I’m not quite ready to cope with the Queen yet. How’s everybody here?”
“Cold,” said Walther, exiting the pavilion at a more sedate pace and walking out to join us. “Hello, October. How are you?”
“I think we’ve already established ‘alive’ as the important thing. How far has the temperature dropped?”
“Far enough. Some of the outlying ponds have already blended back into nothing. It won’t be long now.”
Marcia looked between the two of us, expression openly perplexed. Poor kid. My education was acquired in drips and drabs, either spoon-fed to me by Devin to prepare me for a job or offered up by Sylvester when he realized there was something I needed to know. That was still probably a lot more education than Marcia ever got.
Shadowed Hills was built. Hands shaped it out of the stone and earth of the Summerlands; spells were cast to shore up the walls and define the grounds. Undine don’t build their knowes that way. Undine tie themselves to springs in the mortal realm, and become springs in the fae realm, channeling not water, but the fabric of their personal homes. Without Lily to channel the magic that made her knowe real, it was fading.
“What’s going on?” she asked. “What are you talking about?”
There were a lot of things I could have said. I considered them all, and decided on the hardest thing of all: the truth. “Lily’s gone,” I said. “The knowe’s dying.”
Marcia’s eyes widened, the color going out of her cheeks. In the end, she didn’t cry. She just nodded, shoulders slumping. “I was afraid you’d say something like that,” she said. “Isn’t there … isn’t there anything you can do?”
A choice needed to be made. I could tell her “no.” I could tell her I’d done everything I could to take care of them, I had problems of my own, I had the Queen of the Mists gunning for me and a possible death sentence hanging over my head. I could tell her Lily couldn’t possibly have thought I could really save them.
“Yeah,” I said, looking from her to Walther. He was smiling like the sun. “Has either of you ever been to Goldengreen?”
THIRTY-SEVEN
“WILL OCTOBER DAYE, COUNTESS of Goldengreen, knight errant of Shadowed Hills, please stand forth?”
The herald’s voice was cold. I swallowed as I rose and approached the throne, trying to chase the dryness from my throat. My shoes pinched my feet, making me stumble. It could’ve been worse. I could’ve been wearing heels.
It had been almost three weeks since we ran Oleander to ground: three weeks of sleepless days and anxious nights spent waiting to see what was coming next. Oleander was Simon’s constant companion. If she was there, he should’ve been there, too. But the days passed, and Simon never appeared.
There was no sign of Rayseline. Sylvester looked, but his heart wasn’t really in it—he didn’t want to fight his own daughter, and I couldn’t blame him. It was a fight I was happy to delay, because I was sure that if we found her, we’d find Simon; snakes den together. I wondered if he knew what he’d created when he set out to break his niece. Oleander certainly hadn’t. She’d been surprised as she died, amazed that something she’d helped to craft could really be that unreservedly, killingly cruel.
That’s the thing about children: they pay attention, and they learn. Raysel learned coldness, cruelty, and how to kill. Teaching her those lessons may have been the most foolish thing Oleander ever did, and more than ever, I was glad she’d paid for what she’d done. Sylvester and Luna didn’t deserve this.
Neither did Rayseline. She was an innocent when Oleander took her, and she’d never had a chance to come all the way home. Now she never would. It wasn’t really a surprise when Saltmist sent a herald to announce the formal dissolution of the diplomatic marriage between Rayseline and Connor. Marrying one of your dignitaries to a madwoman was one thing; marrying him to a murderess was something else entirely.
The Queen has never been a patient woman, and the wolves were at Sylvester’s door long before I made my visit to the Luidaeg or moved Lily’s subjects into the deserted front hall of Goldengreen. Sylvester did his best to shield me from the trouble she was causing him. I heard, instead, that Connor was going to be resuming his diplomatic post within the Duchy, that Luna’s health was improving steadily, and that May and Quentin had broken six vases and a crystal ball trying to play hockey in the solarium.
And then one day, I heard that Luna was out of bed.
Jin called Walther a godsend. He was a chemist, not a healer, but his understanding of plants and poisons made it possible for her to take proper care of Luna until Acacia could get there. He told Jin what Luna needed, and Jin made it happen, pulling Luna back from the edge of whatever abyss she’d been facing. Her stolen Kitsune skin was gone, but she would recover. Somehow, watching Sylvester cry as he folded her back into his arms, I thought her recovery was the only thing that mattered.
Sylvester found me in the Garden of Glass Roses two days after Luna woke up. I was plucking the petals from a frosted pink rose and dropping them to the path, listening to the crystalline chimes they made when they landed. He sat beside me, tucking his hands between his knees in an almost guilty posture.
“Hey,” I said, putting the flower down.
“The Queen’s guard was here today,” he said. “She knows you’re here, Toby. She’s not … the Queen is not a stupid woman, and she knows we’re hiding you.” He paused. “She’s known for a while.”
“I’d be more surprised if she didn’t.” I wasn’t frightened anymore—just numb. Everything ends. Lily’s people were safe in Goldengreen. I’d done what I needed to do. “Are they still here? I can go with them.”
“No. We sent them away.”
“What, then?” I leaned back on my hands. I hadn’t expected him to let me go quietly, but I didn’t see much else he could do. She was the Queen of the Mists, and he, for all that he’d been a hero, was just a Duke. She’d take me eventually, unless—a thought hit me, and I froze, eyes widening. “You’re not planning to go to war, are you?”
Sylvester shook his head. “Not quite. We’ve admitted that you’re here. She’s not willing to lay siege to Shadowed Hills; we’re too well-defended, and she knows most of the Kingdom would come to my aid, not hers.”
“The man who would be King?” I said lightly.
“I should hope not.”
“So what are we going to do?”
“We’re going to wait.” He smiled, but his jaw was set in the hard line that I’d long since come to recognize as a sign that he wouldn’t budge. “And then we’re going to go to her and find out how far she’s willing to push this little game.”
