A Red-Rose Chain

  The light didn’t reach past the door. I heard Quentin mutter something, and the smell of heather and steel briefly overwhelmed the smell of Marlis’ blood. Then a small ball of light drifted over my head to hover in front of me, bobbing in the air a few inches below the ceiling, which looked rough and rocky, like it had been carved from the body of the earth. I glanced back at Quentin, slanting him the briefest of smiles. He smiled back, although the expression did nothing to remove the tight lines around his eyes. He was worried. That was good. Failure to be worried when following a strange woman down a dark tunnel would have shown a deep and catastrophic lack of self-preservation, and I wanted to keep him around for a little longer.

  Marlis was visible up ahead of us. I focused on walking, silently cursing her for grabbing us while we were in transit from the King’s company, and not waiting until after we had reached our quarters and had the chance to change our clothes. My shoes were sensible, but my dress was ridiculous. Formal gowns were not designed to be worn in underground tunnels—and I was becoming increasingly sure that when we had stepped through that door, we had transitioned from the stately, manicured halls of Silences to something older and rougher, probably intended as an escape route if things went poorly.

  Marlis stopped. When we reached her, she was standing next to another door, this one made entirely of rose brambles. It was clearly Ceres’ work, and Marlis was just as clearly unhappy about the idea of opening it. There was no doorknob or keyhole.

  I’d seen doors like that one before. Blind Michael—Ceres’ father—had used them in his stables, probably courtesy of his wife, Acacia, who was the Firstborn of both the Dryads and the Blodynbryd. “Does it need your blood, specifically, or will any blood do to open it?” I asked.

  Marlis jumped, like she had forgotten that we were there. “Any blood will do,” she said. She was speaking in a normal conversational tone now: apparently, we had moved outside the sphere of the King’s surveillance. That, or we had moved deep enough into his trap that she no longer needed to pretend to be quiet. “Only a member of our family can open the door to the tunnel, but Aunt Ceres’ roses are less picky. They don’t care who bleeds for them.”

  Behind me, Tybalt sighed. I smirked. He was clearly anticipating my next move, and while he didn’t approve, he wasn’t going to stop me.

  “Let me,” I said, and reached into the brambles. As I had halfway expected, they writhed, repositioning themselves around my hand, before driving their thorns like needles into my skin.

  Healing quickly doesn’t mean I don’t feel pain. If anything, it means the opposite. I don’t get nerve damage and I don’t build up scar tissue: I can recover so fast from an injury that I experience it again for the first time while it’s still ongoing. It seems like a blessing, and it has been, in a great many ways—I would never have been able to live this long if it weren’t for the fact that I can bounce back from things that should by all rights have killed me. But sometimes, when it seems like the pain is never going to end, I wish I’d gotten a different suite of magical talents from my mother. Like the power to avoid situations that end with me willingly jamming my arm into a door made entirely from animate, apparently angry rose briars.

  The thorns bit into my flesh until it felt like they were touching the bone. I gritted my teeth, asking, “Does it always do this?” I tried to keep my voice from shaking. If Tybalt or Quentin decided I was in trouble, they might come into range of the door. I didn’t need to deal with multiple people being attacked by the architecture.

  Marlis didn’t answer with words. She just raised her arm and rolled down her sleeve, showing me the hundreds of tiny white scars pocking her skin. Some of them were old and almost faded, while others were glossy and as pale as birch bark.

  Seeing them both made me feel better about what the door was currently doing to my arm, and made me worry once again about whether we were walking into a trap. Marlis had been under Rhys’ spell for a hundred years, and some of those scars were substantially fresher than that.

  She must have seen the doubt in my eyes, because she lowered her arm, rolling her sleeve back down, and said, “He couldn’t hold me all the time. Even when I was dosing myself, it’s dangerous to layer loyalty over loyalty. Sometimes, I came back to my senses. Never for long—never long enough to decide that I could run, that I could leave my family and go. But long enough for me to do certain things that needed to be done.”

  “Right,” I said. The thorns dug deeper. Then, as if they had finally found the key they were looking for, the briars began to loosen, finally unspooling and dropping away. I pulled my arm, now effectively shredded, out of the thorns. The smell of my blood washed over the smell of Marlis’ blood, concealing it. That was almost a relief. My blood was at least familiar, and didn’t take as much effort to block out.

  Speaking of blood . . . I raised my hand to my mouth and sucked the blood off my wrist, centering and strengthening myself. There was no sense in letting it go to waste when it was right there. I didn’t even need to cut myself.

  “You’re bleeding on your dress,” observed Quentin. He sounded unhappy, but not shaken. Me bleeding all over everything was practically normal these days.

  “I’ll give it to Tybalt to dispose of on the Shadow Roads,” I said, the blood making my voice sound positively giddy. The thorn door was still opening, unwinding itself one knot at a time. It was a slow process that was probably supposed to look impressive, but really just made me wonder what would happen if someone ever got cornered down here. An escape route that took too long to open was almost as bad as no escape route at all. “I never liked this dress anyway.”

  “Ah, but you see, I did, which is why I will be concealing it in the local Court of Cats, to recover later,” said Tybalt. “I’m sure May will be able to get the blood out, once she wakes, and will have some fascinating things to say about your heritage while she works. I treasure the idea of hearing her insult you.”

  “Right now, so do I,” I said. I looked toward Marlis. She was staring at my arm, eyes huge in a suddenly pale face. I glanced down. The blood covering my arm was thick and bright, but it was possible to see the unbroken skin beneath it. I ran my clean palm across the arm, wiping a swath of blood away, and held it up for her to see. “Good as new,” I said. “Can we start moving again, or do you have a door that requires a kidney?”

  “Nothing heals that fast,” she said.

  “Faerie always changes,” I replied. I wiped my bloody palm on my dress. Let May enjoy a real challenge for once.

  “I . . . I see,” said Marlis. “This way.” She turned and dove through the opening created by the retracting vines, which had barely pulled back far enough to let her through. I followed, gathering my skirts close to keep them from getting snagged. Getting the blood out was going to be hard enough without adding physical damage to the dress itself.

  Quentin and Tybalt followed me, Tybalt swearing softly as he navigated the space between the thorns. Quentin’s little ball of light continued to dart ahead of us, brightening the tunnel until I could make out the finer details of the walls. They were as roughly hewn as the ceiling, and glittered here and there with flecks of pyrite and quartz. We were walking through the body of the Summerlands, surrounded by stone, and I wasn’t sure whether that was comforting or terrifying.

  “You said this would have signaled the Cu Sidhe, Cait Sidhe, and Huldra once,” I said. “How tightly tied were they to your wards?”

  “The Cu Sidhe and the Huldra were tightly tied; the Cait Sidhe had access as a courtesy, and so they wouldn’t turn against us,” said Marlis. “There were never many of them, anyway. Cats don’t stay where there are so many dogs.” She smiled, just a little, seemingly lost in the pleasure of having unfettered access to her own memories, and the feelings that went with them.

  A pale light began to filter through from ahead, different in both quality and quantity from the small, bright
glow of Quentin’s ball. He snapped his fingers and it guttered out, leaving the presumably natural brightness to guide us. We were close enough to the exit that there wasn’t much change. We continued forward, until we stepped out of the mouth of the tunnel and into a garden taken straight from a botanist’s dream.

  The sky overhead was a smooth sheet of velvet black spangled with so many stars that they chased away the deepest of the shadows, casting the entire world into a crystalline twilight. The air smelled so strongly of roses that I almost lost track of the smell of blood—both my own and Marlis’. Everyone around me could have been casting spells and spinning illusions, and I probably wouldn’t have been able to tell. The smell of roses was too strong.

  The sight of them was even stronger. They grew everywhere around us, spiraling out in a wheel of colorful blooms and thorny boughs. Some climbed trellises or tangled themselves around statuary, while others grew in vast, fragrant bushes. I recognized many of the varieties from my visits to Luna’s gardens. There was even a plot of my beloved glass roses, the starlight lancing through their petals and casting colored shadows on the soil below them. Other varieties were new to me, roses that glowed blue like swampfire or burned with actual fire, somehow sustaining their own flame without being consumed. I couldn’t count the varieties in front of me. All I could say was that they were beautiful beyond measure, each in their own unique way.

  “Good; you made it.” Ceres appeared from behind a trellis as casually as if we were at her cottage, and not at some secret rose garden at the end of a long tunnel. She was carrying a red rose in each hand. Both had the wide, loose-looking petals that I associated with wild roses, rather than the tight swirl of cultivated blossoms. “Marlis had no trouble finding you, I trust?”

  “Marlis nearly got herself gutted by my fiancé when she surprised us, but apart from that, it went just fine,” I said mildly.

  Ceres raised an eyebrow. “I would have expected you to be the sort of woman who did her own gutting, after the things Walther has told me about you.”

  “I normally would be, but she grabbed me first, so I had time to get over my surprise.” I rubbed my hands against my dress again, trying to get rid of the tacky feeling of blood drying on my skin. “Where are we?”

  “My own test garden. I cultivate my roses here, in privacy, and plant what grows well around my cottage for others to enjoy.” Ceres stepped closer, holding her two roses out toward me. “Smell these.”

  I raised an eyebrow. “That’s why we’re here? So I can smell a couple of roses? No offense, but I could have done that in my room, without bleeding all over everything in sight.”

  “Aunt Ceres, I told you: you can’t be mysterious with Toby, all it does is piss her off.” Walther emerged from a cluster of rosebushes. He looked tired, but there was a light in his eyes that I recognized from my visits to his office. He was an alchemist before he was anything else, and alchemists thrive in the presence of puzzles. “Hi, Toby. Can you please smell those not at all mysterious roses for me, and tell me which one smells more like the rose we’re looking for?”

  “For you, yes,” I said. I stepped forward to where Ceres waited, and sniffed the roses in her hands, first the right, and then the left. Then I frowned. “Neither one of these is right. They smell great, but they don’t smell like her.”

  “I told you,” said Walther. He sounded oddly triumphant for someone who had just had both his roses rejected. “You can’t trick Toby’s nose. It’s weird, but it works.” He opened the pouch attached to his belt and withdrew a third rose. It was smaller than the others, only half-open, and while the petals were red, they were patchy and bruised-looking, like it hadn’t been grown to be picked and hadn’t been prepared to be separated from its bush. He held it out toward me, almost reverently. “Smell this.”

  “Right,” I said, and leaned forward, sniffing the rose. Then I recoiled, atavistic revulsion rising in my throat, so strong and fierce that I almost slapped the flower out of his hand. It might have seemed like a melodramatic reaction to something so small, but the rose’s smell was so close to the scent of Evening’s magic that I couldn’t help myself. It lacked the depth and power of her signature. It was just a rose, with no undertones of ice or snow. But I had never smelled a rose like that one, old and deep and somehow primal, the sort of flower that would have grown on a grave in a folksong, or provided the perfume to a figure from a fairy tale.

  Walther watched me, assessing my reaction with a faint gleam of satisfaction in his eyes. “Well?” he asked, needlessly.

  “That’s the one.” I wiped my mouth with the back of my hand, leaving flecks of dried blood on my lips. That helped a little. “It smells so close to her magic it makes me want to throw up. Where did you find it?”

  “In the oldest of my rose gardens, in a corner, where the sun only shines fully for a few months out of the year,” said Ceres. “I’ve thought it dead several times, but always it returns.”

  “Yeah, well, it and the woman whose magic smells like it have that in common,” I said, resisting the urge to wipe my mouth again. “That’s the one. That’s the rose that smells like her magic.”

  “And you’re sure this is the woman who created elf-shot?”

  I hesitated. “Yes and no,” I said finally. “The Luidaeg is the one who told me about her making the elf-shot, and the Luidaeg is sort of laboring under a geas, where she can’t say her sister’s name or identify her directly. But she told me it was her oldest sister who created elf-shot, and Eira Rosynhwyr is her oldest sister. Maybe more importantly, Eira is really hung up on position and power and all that fun stuff, and whoever brewed the first elf-shot designed it to be fatal to changelings when it didn’t have to be. It was her.”

  “We need to be sure,” said Walther. “If I brew this wrong, it could do more harm than good.”

  “Define ‘more harm,’” I said.

  “Elf-shot doesn’t normally kill unless the potion is altered to add poison,” he said. “I’m not worried about turning it fatal, but I am worried about tripping a failsafe and extending the length of time that the sleepers are out.”

  I stared at him. “So if we do this wrong, we could put everyone to sleep for even longer? How much longer?”

  “How does a thousand years strike you?” Walther shook his head, the lines of weariness in his face suddenly making perfect sense. “This isn’t just some brute force compound. It’s one of the most complicated spells I’ve ever tried to reverse-engineer. I feel like I’m trying to replicate a cobweb from a blurry picture. I can do it—don’t get me wrong—but it’s the hardest piece of work I’ve ever attempted.”

  “You were always Daddy’s little prodigy,” said Marlis. Her tone was equal parts amusement and bitterness, like she had spent years coming to terms with her own words. “I was good, but you were better.”

  “I had to be,” said Walther. “I was going to break his heart one day, when I told him why I wasn’t going to marry and provide him with heirs. Being the best alchemist I could be seemed like the least I could do.”

  Marlis nodded. “You did good. You got out.”

  I looked between them, hand going automatically to the pocket where I usually kept my phone—only for me to realize that I didn’t have a pocket, and I didn’t have a phone. I was wearing a blood-drenched ball gown. They aren’t known for their copious storage capacity. “Oh, oak and ash,” I said. “Look, I can confirm that Eira brewed the original potion, but I’m going to need to borrow somebody’s phone.”

  “Phone?” asked Ceres blankly.

  “Mortals have started carrying portable communication devices,” explained Marlis. “No one in this Kingdom has anything so . . . déclassé and human.”

  “See, you say ‘déclassé,’ I say ‘I can order Chinese food without getting out of bed. I resisted at first, too, but the convenience of having one outweighs the irritation of remembering to keep it
charged.” I turned to Quentin. “You. I know you have a phone. Fork it over.”

  Quentin’s cheeks reddened as he dug into his pocket. “Okay, just don’t go poking around in my files, all right?” He produced a phone that was newer and sleeker than mine, with a glass front. It wasn’t the phone he’d had a few weeks previously. I raised an eyebrow, and he reddened further. “April upgraded me. She said I was shaming Tamed Lightning by carrying around something so out of date.”

  “Your phone was less than six months old,” I said, taking the space-age rectangle from his hand.

  Quentin shrugged.

  The phone wasn’t locked, thankfully, and a sweep of my thumb across the screen woke it up and displayed Quentin’s wallpaper at the same time: a picture of him with Dean Lorden, the current Count of Goldengreen. They were sitting on the dock of Goldengreen’s private beach, Dean with his arm slung carelessly around Quentin’s waist, Quentin with his head resting on Dean’s shoulder.

  This wasn’t the time or the place to start grilling my squire on his social life, but I glanced from the picture to him, just long enough to be sure that he got the message that we’d be discussing this later. Quentin nodded, accepting his fate, and I called up the keypad.

  Dialing on these new phones with their virtual keys is easy. Using it to channel the spells necessary to reach the Luidaeg is somewhat less so. I drew a starburst pattern across the keys, chanting, “My lover’s gone to sea, to sea, my lover’s gone away; may he come back to me, to me, for this each night I pray.” The smell of cut grass and copper rose in the air around me, strong enough to overwhelm the scent of roses. Only briefly—the roses were already slipping back by the time the spell coalesced and popped like a soap bubble, sending a thin bolt of pain lancing through my head.