Ashes of Honor

  Once, the Tuatha de Dannan were responsible for guarding the doors between worlds. It was their duty and their joy, at least to hear them talk about it. They kept each world’s monsters safely contained and prevented wars from spilling from one world into the next. When Oberon sealed the doors, the Tuatha were left with no purpose. But a Tuatha changeling with more power than she knew what to do with, who didn’t know yet what was impossible…

  Chelsea was in real trouble. So were the rest of us.

  Sylvester had managed to coax the Afanc off the car, although it had shattered the rear windshield in the process of getting down. It was flopped on its back in the gravel, letting him scratch its belly. One of its hind legs was waving lazily, like there was also a bit of dog worked into the beaver and crocodile soup of its heritage. “Come meet him!” he called. “He won’t bite.”

  “Says you,” I said, stealing a glance at Etienne. He looked stricken. I suppose hearing me imply that his daughter might have started importing monsters from the deeper realms of Faerie was a bit of a shock. I started forward, gesturing for Quentin to follow. “How’s my car?”

  Sylvester stopped scratching the Afanc as he looked up and grimaced. “I can pay for the repairs.”

  I winced. “That’s not what I wanted to hear.” The Afanc was a lot less scary-looking stretched out on the ground with its tongue lolling. I gave it a thoughtful look, putting off checking my car as long as I possibly could. “Why does it have all those teeth if it’s friendly?”

  “The Afanc is a fish eater, and some of the fish in Tirn Aill are well-equipped to defend themselves,” said Sylvester. “October, what are you doing out here?”

  So Etienne hadn’t told him. Swell. “I’m on a case. We needed a place to park while the sun came up, and when we tried to get back on the road, your beastie was crashed out on the roof of my car.” That was it; I couldn’t put it off any longer. Lifting my head, I looked at the car and cringed.

  I could probably have handled the cracks in the front windshield, and the sudden absence of the rear windshield. I’ve driven worse. But the weight of the Afanc had collapsed the roof of my poor VW bug, pressing it down until the metal actually grazed the tops of the seats. There was no way I could drive the car like that. I’ve lost cars in the line of duty before. Usually, I’m at least driving them at the time. I raked my hair back with both hands, staring at the damage.

  “I’m sorry, October. The Afanc didn’t know.” Sylvester sounded genuinely apologetic. That wasn’t going to fix my car. “I will pay for your repairs.”

  “That’s nice,” I said faintly. “What are you going to do with the Afanc?”

  “Take him back to Shadowed Hills. There’s a lake near the rear wall of the ballroom. We can let him stay there until we find out where he came from.” I turned to blink at Sylvester. He shrugged. “Whoever has lost him must miss him. To keep a creature this magnificent in such good health for so long…it’s a labor of love. I wouldn’t want his owner to worry.”

  Understanding dawned: Sylvester thought the Afanc had escaped from some sort of menagerie. It wasn’t that far outside the realm of possibility. Fae nobles keep all sorts of strange things in their knowes, and exotic pets are popular, even in Faerie. The Afanc would have been the jewel of someone’s collection. It would have been nice to think that he was right. But when I breathed in deeply I could smell the faintest trace of sycamore smoke and lilies, along with a sweet, clean scent, like air that had never known human pollution. The Afanc didn’t come from a menagerie. It came from Tirn Aill.

  I continued turning until I was facing Etienne. When he met my eyes, I raised an eyebrow and waited. He gave a small shake of his head, expression pleading.

  Sometimes I hate being a soft touch. “Can I borrow Etienne before you take the Afanc home? I need to get to the Luidaeg’s. Quentin and I have business with her, and I’d really like to catch her before she goes to bed for the day.” I wasn’t lying, not really. I was just leaving certain things out, like where the Afanc had probably come from.

  “Certainly. If you leave me the number for your mechanic, I can call and arrange both the collection of your car and payment for service.”

  I hesitated. Sylvester has more money than he could spend in a dozen lifetimes, but I sometimes still feel bad about letting him spend it on me. A glance at my wounded car killed the hesitation. If he could afford the repairs, let him. “I don’t have a mechanic, but Danny does.”

  “Then we’ll call Danny and have him call his mechanic.”

  “I appreciate it.” I read off Danny’s number from my cell phone.

  Sylvester didn’t write it down. He just nodded, continuing to rub the Afanc’s belly. I blinked. He smiled. “Come from an era where courtship depends on how much poetry you can memorize, my dear, and you, too, will develop an excellent memory.”

  Thinking about Sylvester courting Luna was like thinking about my parents having sex. I wrinkled my nose. “I’m going to skip dwelling on that one. We’ll have Etienne back to you as soon as we can.”

  “Keep him with you for as long as you have need of him.”

  “I will.” That was a lie, sort of; with my car out of commission, we could really use a personal teleporter. Keeping Etienne around would still have been more trouble than it was worth, especially since we were going to be dealing with Bridget again before this was over.

  Etienne started toward us. He was almost there when Sylvester added, in a mild tone, “I trust you all to tell me what is going on once you feel that it is safe to do so.”

  “Yes, your Grace,” said Etienne, shoulders hunching. He didn’t look back. Maybe he didn’t trust himself to hold his silence if he saw his liege’s face.

  I’m less of a stickler for the rules than Etienne is, and I was having trouble looking at Sylvester without spilling the whole story. “Come on, Quentin,” I said. “We need to get going.”

  “Coming.” He trotted over, waving to Sylvester as he passed him, and reached me at the same time as Etienne.

  “The Luidaeg’s, please,” I said.

  “As you wish,” said Etienne. His hand traced a wide circle in the air, trailing the smell of cedar smoke and limes. A hole opened. Through it, I could see the familiar dirty walls of the alley that led to the Luidaeg’s apartment.

  “Open roads and kind fires,” Sylvester said.

  “Open roads,” I echoed, and stepped through the circle in the air. Quentin and Etienne followed me.

  The three of us were standing in the dim San Francisco alley, miles from Tilden Park, when I realized that I’d managed to leave my sword in the car.

  Well, crap.

  EIGHT

  “THIS WAS AS CLOSE AS I could bring you. The Luidaeg’s actual domain is shielded against teleportation.” Etienne looked around the alley, nose wrinkling. It was an understandable reaction, considering the condition of both the alley and the slice of street visible through the alley’s mouth. The Luidaeg could have lived anywhere she wanted, either in this world or in the Summerlands. She chose a place where the cockroaches were reluctant to live, and she seemed entirely content to stay there.

  “When are you going to tell him, Etienne?” I asked, before he could open a portal to take himself back to Tilden Park. “He knows something is going on, and I won’t lie for you. Omit things, maybe, if it’s necessary. But not lie.”

  “Neither will I,” added Quentin.

  “I wouldn’t ask you to.” Etienne looked down as he said, “I am simply having trouble deciding how best to tell my liege that when he needed me most, I betrayed his trust.”

  “You did no such thing,” I said. “You made a mistake, and now you’re trying to make it right. That’s all Sylvester expects from any of us. That when we make mistakes, we do our best to fix them.”

  “Perhaps that’s what he expects from you, October, but I was his representative in those dark days. I must hold myself to a somewhat higher standard.”

  I sighed. “I’m going to
ignore the swipe you just took at my social status, because I know you’re stressed. But you need to tell him sooner rather than later, because I’m not keeping your secrets forever.”

  “I’ll tell him. Just give me time.”

  Time was something we didn’t have much of. I shook my head. “I’ll give you what I can. I don’t know how much that’s going to be.”

  “Hopefully, it will be enough.” Etienne waved his hand through the air, opening a portal back to Tilden Park. He stepped through before I had the chance to say anything else.

  “Always has to have the last word,” I grumbled. “Come on, Quentin. Let’s go see the sea witch.” We turned, and walked down the alley to the Luidaeg’s apartment.

  Her front door was warped and water stained, and it looked like it would fall apart if subjected to the slightest pressure. Appearances can be deceiving, especially when the Luidaeg is involved. I raised my hand and knocked briskly, not hammering, but not gently tapping, either. There was no immediate answer. Quentin and I exchanged a look. The Luidaeg normally opened her door almost instantly, sometimes even before we had a chance to knock. Then again, it was more than an hour past sunrise, and even sea witches have to sleep sometime.

  “I wish we’d been able to stop for the donuts,” said Quentin.

  “You and me both,” I said and knocked again.

  This time, we heard movement on the other side of the door: feet, shuffling down the hall. I lowered my hand, and the door swung open, revealing a sleepy-eyed, apparently human woman with tousled brown hair, tan skin, and freckles warring with the ghosts of teenage acne scars for ownership of her cheeks. She was wearing a blue bathrobe over a floor-length white cotton nightgown. She looked like she couldn’t be more than a few days over seventeen.

  I knew better. “Hello, Luidaeg,” I said. “Can we come in?”

  The Luidaeg blinked. “Toby?” She glanced to my companion. “Quentin? What are you two doing here? You didn’t call.”

  “We were going to, but I had car trouble, and it sort of slipped my mind. It’s why we didn’t bring donuts. Please can we come in? There’s something we need to talk about, and I’d rather not do it standing on the porch.”

  The Luidaeg looked at us again and then looked back over her shoulder at the hallway. The door blocked whatever she was looking at. Finally, she sighed. “All right, you can come in—but don’t you dare say a word about the condition of my apartment. I didn’t have time to get ready for company.”

  Considering that the Luidaeg’s apartment normally looked like a cross between a compost heap and the dumpsters behind a Goodwill, that was a terrifying statement. “Sure,” I said. “We won’t say anything.”

  The Luidaeg scowled at me. “Yeah, you will,” she said. Then she turned and retreated into the hall, leaving the door open so we could follow her inside.

  I stepped over the threshold and stopped. Quentin froze beside me, the two of us staring wide-eyed at something even more unexpected than a monster sleeping on top of my car.

  The hall was clean.

  The carpet—visible for the first time in the years that I’d been visiting—was the color of fresh kelp. The walls were cream-colored, decorated with a few judiciously placed fishnets. They filled the air with the pleasant scent of fresh seawater, salty without being briny.

  “Toby…”

  “Yeah, kid. I see it, too.”

  The Luidaeg stopped at the end of the hall, turning back to scowl at us. “Are you going to come inside or not?”

  Quentin and I exchanged a look before stepping into the hall. The door swung shut behind us, and we walked down the hall to the pristine living room. The couches—which had always been splotched with patches of muck and mold before—were clearly antique but well cared-for. There were even a few pictures on the walls, all images of oceans. I recognized one of them as having been taken at Half Moon Bay, near the home of Connor’s family. The Luidaeg has an…interesting…relationship with the Selkie families. They owe her their existence. She’s planning to call in that debt soon, and I’m pretty sure it’s going to involve me.

  “What the hell happened here?” I asked, looking toward the Luidaeg.

  “Like I said, the place isn’t ready for company. If you’d called first…”

  The Daoine Sidhe are illusionists. Maybe that’s why Quentin was the one to say, indignantly, “You mean you’ve been pretending this place was a pigsty all this time?”

  “I never said ‘this place is a pigsty,’ did I?” asked the Luidaeg. “I never lied to you. I’ve never lied to either of you. I just let you think what you wanted to think. If you’d ever asked…”

  I shook my head. “But let me guess. If I’d asked, ‘Is the apartment always like this?’ you would have said, ‘No, sometimes it’s a mess,’ and let me think it just got worse instead of telling me that it was spotless under a glamour.”

  “Yup,” said the Luidaeg. “Or if you’d asked, ‘Don’t you ever clean?’ I would have said I cleaned all the time. Lies and truth are all in how you’re looking at them. That’s something you, out of everyone, should have figured out by now.” She yawned, covering her mouth with the back of her hand. “Now what the fuck do you people want? This is ‘rip your heads off and leave your bodies as a warning to others’ early.”

  Quentin grinned. Apparently, threats of dire physical harm from the Luidaeg made him happy. Weird kid. At least I could take some small pleasure in knowing that I was part of what made him that way. “It’s good to see you, too.”

  “Uh-huh.” She went stomping toward the kitchen. “I’m making some fucking tea.”

  Sometimes I think the Luidaeg uses human profanity as much as she does just because she’s trying to shock me. I ignored it and followed her, with Quentin close behind me.

  The kitchen was as clean as the rest of the apartment. None of the appliances were newer than the early 1970s, but they were all spotless, with no dents or signs of rust. “You want some?” the Luidaeg asked, picking up a kettle and moving to fill it with water from the tap.

  “Depends. Is that freshwater or saltwater?”

  She cast a wry smile in my direction. “You’re catching on to the way things work. No tea for you. Now what in Dad’s name are you two doing here? Shit’s got to be pretty bad if you’re showing up on my doorstep before I’ve had my beauty sleep.”

  I couldn’t think of a way to ease her into the situation, so I didn’t bother: “Etienne has a changeling daughter that nobody knew about, including him. And now she’s missing.”

  “So?” The Luidaeg put the kettle on the stove. “Sounds like that saves him the trouble of giving her the Choice.”

  “Etienne’s Tuatha.”

  “So?”

  “So the ‘car trouble’ I mentioned? Was the roof of my car getting smashed in by an Afanc looking for a place 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.”

  “H
ow?” 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.”