A Red-Rose Chain

  I raised the phone to my ear, and heard nothing. That was another thing about those new phones: they didn’t come with dial tones to tell me when my spells weren’t working. But my head hurt, and the smell of copper was still hanging in the air. I waited, until faintly, I began to hear the sound of waves battering themselves against a distant beach. Jackpot.

  The sound of the waves grew louder as connections were thrown and magic tunneled its way through the phone lines between me and the Luidaeg. Nobody loves a special effect like a pureblood, and as the Firstborn daughter of Oberon and Maeve, the Luidaeg was about as pure as they came. I counted silently to ten, and had just reached nine when the waves crashed loudly enough to be startling, and the Luidaeg’s voice demanded, “What now?”

  “Hi, Luidaeg,” I said. “I’m still in Silences, and I have an awkward question that’s probably going to run up against your geas. Sorry about that.”

  There was a pause. “What?”

  “I don’t really have time to explain right now. I’m standing in a rose garden with a Blodynbryd named Ceres and a whole bunch of flowers, and King Rhys is probably going to notice that I’m missing pretty soon. So if I could just ask my question, that would be swell.” I didn’t beg or try to convince her that she should tell me what I needed to know. Our relationship had long since progressed past those little formalities.

  This time, the pause was longer. Finally, the Luidaeg asked, “Is it important enough to make me answer you?”

  “Evening has been elf-shot, Luidaeg. She’s not going to come back just because I ask something that involves her.”

  “Spoken like someone who never really knew my sister,” said the Luidaeg. There was no mistaking the bitterness in her voice for anything else. Then she sighed, and said, “All right. Go ahead and ask. If it wakes her, then it’s on your head.”

  “Did Eve—did Eira create elf-shot?” The correction pained me, just a little, but I wanted to leave as much distance as possible between the woman I had believed to be my friend and the Firstborn that she had turned out to truly be. I had lived my entire life in the shadows of Faerie’s giants, and I had never even known that they were there.

  “Ah.” The Luidaeg paused, taking a deep, slow breath, like she was trying to center herself. Then she said, “Yes. Father wanted a weapon that wouldn’t kill. He wanted to know that we’d still be here when he came looking for us. And she—the person you’re asking about—said she had just the thing. A period of sleep, for reflection, followed by waking renewed and refreshed and ready to face the world more fairly. She made it sound like some sort of vacation.”

  “You told me it didn’t have to be deadly to changelings,” I said carefully.

  “That was her own little twist on the formula,” said the Luidaeg. The bitterness was back, and stronger than ever. “She was happy to preserve our brothers and sisters, because Father wanted it, but human-born? They were worse than useless in her eyes. So she made sure that for them, there would be no slumber. Only death.”

  “Okay.” I closed my eyes. “That was what I thought.”

  “Toby . . .” The Luidaeg sounded hesitant. That was unusual enough to make me open my eyes again. “Are you about to do something stupid?”

  “Well, that depends.” I looked at my allies: Walther and Ceres, with their hands full of roses; Marlis, with her bloody arm; Quentin and Tybalt, who I would have willingly followed into the Heart of Faerie itself, if that was what was required of me to keep them safe. “How much common sense do you think I have?”

  “Oh, for fuck’s sake. Just try not to die, all right? No one gets to kill you but me.” The line went dead.

  I lowered the phone, holding it out for Quentin to take. He didn’t quite snatch it from my hand, but it was a close thing. With this small, centering transaction done, I looked to the others, and said, “I was right about who created elf-shot, and I’m right about the rose. You have everything you need. What do we do now?”

  Walther smiled, just a little. “Now’s when things get interesting.”

  NINETEEN

  “WHEN YOU SAID THINGS were going to get interesting, I thought you meant you were going to do a lot of complicated alchemy, not that we were going to break into Rhys’ private morgue,” I hissed, staying close to the wall. Tybalt had stepped into the Shadow Roads, returning in short order with a tank top and jeans from Old Navy. Literally from Old Navy: both had still had the price tags attached. They were the right sizes, too, which had earned him a speculative look. He had answered with a smirk, and I had gone behind a curtain of hanging roses to change my clothes while he got rid of my bloody dress.

  I might have done better to stay behind the roses. When I came out, Walther had been waiting with his full kit and a basket of cut flowers. The basket had been pressed into my hands, and Ceres had done what only a Blodynbryd can do, and opened the Rose Road into Rhys’ knowe. All of which led to us walking through a narrow tunnel made entirely of thorns, trying to navigate our way into the heart of Rhys’ knowe without dropping back into the Summerlands proper. Ceres wasn’t going to be able to open a second Road to get us out—she had remained behind in her garden after opening the tunnel. I couldn’t blame her for that. If she got elf-shot for treason, who would take care of her flowers, or the surviving members of the former royal family? She had responsibilities in this Kingdom that needed her to remain above reproach.

  But, Maeve’s eyes, we all had responsibilities. Tybalt had a Court to care for; Quentin was going to be the King someday; Walther had his students, who would never know what had happened to him if he disappeared while on a sabbatical to Portland. As for me, I had the people who were walking through the rose-scented darkness by my side, and at least a dozen more who counted on me to be there to save them. I didn’t sign up to be a hero. It just happened. That didn’t mean I could pretend it didn’t matter.

  Marlis had also stayed behind. She needed to bandage her wounds, clean off the blood, and prepare to return to the receiving hall, where she would stand right in front of King Rhys and act as if nothing unusual was happening in the knowe. I didn’t envy her the task. I just hoped she was an incredible actress. If she so much as hinted to the King that something was up, we were all going to get caught—and this time when he charged us with treason, there wasn’t going to be any miracle save. He’d have us dead to rights . . . or maybe just dead.

  “We’re almost there,” said Walther. He was walking at the front of our uneven little line, while Tybalt walked at the back, leaving me and Quentin in the middle. I would normally have been offended by the implication that I couldn’t take care of myself, but in that moment, I was just glad that someone who knew the way was taking point. I didn’t need to bring up the rear; there was no one I trusted more than Tybalt to hold that position.

  “Why did we agree to this again?” I asked.

  “Because I may need your blood to quicken the spell, depending on how complicated the counteragent turns out to be,” said Walther. “And I’m doing the final mixing in the dungeon because I need to be able to use this tincture immediately. Anything that has to be chilled to work isn’t going to sit well.”

  “I know nothing about alchemy,” I said.

  “I know,” said Walther. “That’s why you have to trust me.”

  We walked on in silence after that, until Walther held up a hand, signaling for the rest of us to stop. He was looking at a stretch of thorny wall that looked exactly like the thorny wall all around it. “We’re here,” he said, and reached out to touch a single thorn with the tip of his index finger. The smell of his blood, faint but unmistakable, wafted back to tickle my nostrils as the brambles began to unwind.

  “Please tell me that wasn’t all that was required to unlock the other door,” I grumbled.

  Walther shot me a quick, tightly amused look. “No, that one takes sacrifice, and intent. This is a one-way door. It doesn’t demand a
s much.” The brambles were still unknotting themselves, opening a narrow slit in the side of the Rose Road. I couldn’t see anything through the opening; it was like it looked out on absolute blankness.

  “That’s encouraging,” said Quentin. It was the first time he had spoken since we’d left the garden.

  “Look at it this way, young squire: if we plummet into unending blackness, we will be falling into shadow,” said Tybalt. “Stay close to me, and I will be able to yank the three of us onto a more suitable Road before anyone is hurt.”

  “Three?” asked Walther.

  Tybalt looked at him flatly. “If you lead us into unending blackness, I feel less than obligated to rescue you.”

  “Fair enough,” said Walther. “I guess that means I’m going first.” He slipped through the opening, and was gone, taking the faint but lingering scent of blood with him.

  I sighed. “There’s only one way out. Come on.” I stepped through the opening after Walther. There was a moment of disorientation, like I was riding an extremely fast, totally dark elevator—

  —and I was standing on a rough cobblestone floor, surrounded by gray granite walls. Stone biers studded the room, spaced out like display cases in a strange museum. There were at least a dozen of them, each with their own motionless figure lying atop them—the jewels in these inhumane displays. Walther was standing next to the nearest bier, his head bowed and his hands clenched into fists. I spared a glance behind me and, seeing that there was no opening, stepped out of the way. My instincts were correct: Tybalt and Quentin appeared out of thin air a second later.

  Tybalt stopped as soon as he had his bearings, looking warily around the room. “This is dangerous,” he said, eyes narrowing. “Do what needs to be done, and let us be away from here.”

  “I still don’t understand why we couldn’t start with May,” I said, walking over to Walther. I stopped when a few feet away, feeling my stomach drop toward my feet. I put a hand over my mouth, unsure of what I could possibly say in response to the scene in front of me.

  The woman who was sleeping on the bier, her hands folded over her chest and a faint grimace on her otherwise peaceful face, couldn’t have been anyone but Walther’s mother. The shape of her cheekbones, the subtle composition of her features, even the angled points of her ears, they all mirrored his like some sort of sideways mirror. She looked more like Marlis than she did like him, but together, the three of them formed a family unit so unbelievably clear that there was no point in pretending it wasn’t there.

  She was dressed in the pseudo-Medievalist fashion so common among the Courts, and if her gown was a hundred years out of fashion, I certainly couldn’t tell; one of the side effects of choosing all your clothes like you were getting ready to put on an extremely classy production of Camelot was that everything became subtly timeless, impossible to measure. But there were smears of dust at the corners of her eyes, like whoever was responsible for cleaning her hadn’t been as careful as they should have been, and I had no trouble believing that she’d been asleep for a century or more.

  Her right leg ended at the knee, leaving that side of her skirt to fall straight down and puddle on the table. Walther followed my gaze to her missing lower limb. Then he looked back up, reaching out to carefully wipe the dust away from her eyes with the side of his thumb.

  “We’re starting here, and not with May, because if I’m not exactly right, no one will notice,” he said. “Everyone in this room is already expected to sleep for a century. More than a century—as long as Rhys is in power and willing to keep putting them under. So if I test my tincture on one of them, and they don’t wake up, we haven’t lost anything. If I test it on May and put her to sleep for a thousand years, you’ll probably kill me.”

  “Walther, I’m so sorry.” The words seemed awkward and out of place. They were the only things I had to offer. I had known that his family was here, sleeping, but I’d never thought too hard about it, because there hadn’t been anything I could do. Now . . . this was his mother. I didn’t even like my own mother most of the time, and I couldn’t imagine what it would do to me to know that she might never wake up again.

  “I can’t start with my aunt or uncle, because we’re going to need them to challenge for the throne before the High King,” he said. “My cousin Torsten is next in line to be King, so I can’t start with him either. Mother was never the best alchemist in our family, but she was always the most adventurous. I remember her turning her hair purple when I was a kid. She laughed and said fashion couldn’t come before science, not if we wanted to understand what we did. She was the first one I told when I really started to understand that I was supposed to be a boy, because I knew she wouldn’t say ‘let’s just cast a transformation spell and make it all better.’ She’d tell me to use my alchemy, to do it myself and make it permanent. Because she believed in me.”

  “We don’t have to start with her,” I said softly.

  “Yes, we do,” he said. “If I don’t wake her up, I can try again. I can find the right formula, I can wake up my father, and together, we’ll be able to undo whatever it is I’ve done. But if I start with him and I’ve got it wrong, there’s no one I can safely try to wake who will actually be able to help me save him. She has to come first.”

  I couldn’t tell how much of his logic was sincere and how much was his need to see his mother again, to feel her arms around him and hear her voice telling him it was going to be okay. In the end, it didn’t matter. He was the alchemist: he was the one who understood the risks, and the possible costs, of what we were about to do. All I could do was follow his lead. “What do you need from me?”

  Walther offered me a wan smile. “I’m going to need you to bleed for me.”

  “That’s something I can do.” I looked toward Tybalt and Quentin, who were standing quietly a few feet away. Neither of them looked happy with our situation. Neither of them was telling me not to help. I think we all knew that ship had sailed long ago, and not one of us had been on board.

  “Good. It’ll be a few minutes.” Walther opened his kit, beginning to unpack it one piece at a time on the edge of his mother’s bier. Some of the things were familiar—mortar and pestle, little jars of assorted herbs, syringe. Other pieces were strange to me, weights and presses and oddly-shaped vessels that didn’t hold anything but potential. The rest of the world seemed to drop away from him as he bent over his work.

  I turned and walked back to Tybalt and Quentin. “I don’t know how long this is going to take, and I’m not comfortable being unarmed, or leaving May by herself,” I said. “Tybalt, do you think you can get Quentin back to our room, and come back here with my knife?”

  Tybalt scowled. “No good ever comes from sending me away.”

  Quentin looked resigned, and a little relieved, like this was the answer he’d been hoping for but hadn’t quite dared to suggest. “She’s right. Someone should be with May, and if things go wrong here, I probably shouldn’t be caught where the alchemy is happening. My parents would be pissed if I wound up getting elf-shot.”

  “You’ve left me on my own several times since we got here, and I’ve been fine,” I said, leaning up to kiss Tybalt on the cheek. “Just trust me, okay? I need my knife, and May needs someone to protect her. I can take care of myself in the nice, empty dungeon until you make it back.”

  “You tell me you no longer yearn for death, but sometimes, you do things that make it difficult to believe you,” said Tybalt. He had the resigned tone that meant he was going to do what I was asking, thank Maeve. Quentin was looking more uncomfortable by the minute, and the threat of discovery was making me twitchy. I didn’t want to get the Crown Prince of the Westlands busted for treason if I could help it.

  When I first found out Quentin was going to be High King someday, I had promised him I wouldn’t let the knowledge make me treat him differently. For the most part, I’d kept my word. But there were certain th
ings that had made me unhappy when he was just my untitled squire, and now that I knew who he really was, they were unbearable. Situations like this made the list.

  “I love you, too,” I said. “Quentin, stay with May; don’t let anyone in.”

  “Got it,” he said. “Don’t do anything completely stupid, okay?”

  “I’ll do my best,” I said. Quentin smiled tightly as Tybalt took him by the arm. Then my boyfriend and my squire stepped backward into the shadows, and they were gone, leaving only the faint scent of musk and pennyroyal hanging in the air.

  I walked back to the bier where Walther was working, standing silently off to one side and watching as he mixed powders and liquids, ground rose petals in a mortar, and generally worked his own quiet brand of magic. There are races in Faerie that are uniquely well suited to the art of alchemy—Tylwyth Teg, Kitsune, Huldra—but anyone can learn it, if they’re willing to put in the time, and even the races with a natural talent require years of training and practice before they can really claim to be skilled alchemists. Walther had been practicing for more than a century. He had reshaped his body with his art, and he was a living testament to what kind of alchemist he had become.

  At the same time, he was trying to unmake a spell first woven by one of the Firstborn, a spell that had been used throughout Faerie for millennia without being broken or undone. He was going to need every bit of skill he possessed, and then some, if he wanted to make this work.

  “Toby?”

  The sound of his voice snapped me out of my thoughts. I looked up. “Yeah?”

  “It’s time.” He held out a scalpel. Its edge glittered too softly to be stainless steel; it was silver, as sharp and pure as any fae dueling blade. “I don’t need much.”

  “I’ve got plenty.” I took the scalpel from his hand, testing the weight of it before I brought it down across my arm, cutting lengthwise to get as much blood as possible before my body started to heal. He held out a chalice, and I bled into it, turning my face away. I still don’t like the sight of blood, despite how often I bleed. One more thing to thank my own mother for.