“Welcome to the Japanese Tea Gardens! Have a nice day,” she said, radiating that odd brand of insincerity that seems bred into gatekeepers of all types. I forced myself to smile and half walked, half staggered onward. It had been a great day for petty thievery—between the gatekeeper and the toll taker, there were at least two people who’d be coming up with short registers at the end of the day. Of course, I’d been rewarded for my tricks with an iron gunshot wound. Who says there’s no such thing as karma?
The paths through the Japanese Tea Gardens are made of narrow, weathered planks. Trees and beds of flowers surround them, occasionally yielding to rock gardens or shallow stretches of water. Bridges punctuate the landscape, some arching up at angles that actually require stairs. It takes a pretty good sense of balance to make it through the Tea Gardens without falling, even if you avoid the bridges. At the moment, balance wasn’t something I had a large supply of. The paths were slippery with water and decay, and the lack of traction nearly knocked me over half a dozen times before I managed to get out of sight of the front gate.
At the base of the moon bridge I gave up, sitting down in a patch of ferns. The movement just made me dizzier, throwing the world into a kaleidoscope dance of water, blood, and shadows. I shuddered, falling forward, and caught myself with my good arm before I could pitch face-first into the water. My reflection rippled in front of me, giving me a clear picture of the situation. My illusions were entirely gone—any tourist coming down the path would find themselves looking at more than they had bargained for—and blood caked my lips and hair, soaking my sweater almost to the waist.
I looked into my own eyes, and knew I was going to die.
One of the koi surfaced to stare at me, breaking my reflection into countless ripples. I looked down at it, almost smiling as I reached out to stroke its head with my numb left hand. It didn’t shy away from the gesture. “Hey, remember me?” I whispered. “Did you miss me? I think . . . I think I may be staying this time ...” The fish sank back below the surface, leaving my fingers dangling in the water. Faint rings of red rippled out from where they touched.
I didn’t even feel my face hitting the pond. Everything was darkness, glorious darkness and the final, perfect absence of pain. It was done, all of it, the running and the fighting and the pain. After everything that I’d gone through, it was finally over, and this time, the waters would carry me home.
FIFTEEN
“TOBY, DON’T BE DEAD, don’t be dead.” It sounded almost like Tybalt’s voice, too distorted and far away to really tell. Water was soaking through my sweater, plastering my hair down against my cheeks; my eyelids were heavy. Too heavy to bother opening. I leaned into the arms that were holding me up and let myself go limp, falling back down into the darkness.
Time passed. How much, I couldn’t say; I only knew that I was rising toward consciousness, and I fought that ascent with everything I had. Waking held pain and duty and too many questions, while sleep held only peace, and the shadows of sunlight on the water. I was done. Sleep was all I wanted now.
You can’t always get what you want. The pain hit without warning. I gasped, opening my eyes in surprise, only to squeeze them shut again as my head began throbbing. What little I’d seen told me next to nothing about where I was, only that there was a roof above me, and that the dim light wasn’t natural. I was inside; I just didn’t know where. Not that it mattered, since I was too weak to move and in too much pain to care. Hopefully, I wasn’t slated to be somebody’s dinner. At least if I was, it would probably help my headache.
A little experimentation showed that I could move my right hand. The ground beneath me was soft, springy, damp to the touch, and faintly warm. I frowned, becoming curious despite myself. Where was I?
Footsteps approached from behind me. I couldn’t run; I couldn’t even make my eyes open again. All I could do was lie there, frozen, as a hand caressed my temples and a soft voice whispered, “She is not yet ready for you. Sleep.”
The blessed dark rose again, reclaiming me.
I dreamed of glass roses and the taste of pennyroyal.
Waking came faster the second time, even if I was no more willing; going back to my body meant going back to the pain, and it had gotten worse while I slept, spreading out from my head and shoulder until every breath caught in my chest. But I was alive. The realization hit me, and I opened my eyes, too startled to play dead any longer. I was alive.
I was looking up at a ceiling of woven willow branches, held up by a series of arches that appeared to have grown from the mossy floor. Pixies clustered on every available surface, their shimmering glow lighting the room. The moss beneath me was soaking wet, and as a consequence, so was I. I knew where I was. Lily’s knowe.
The only entrance I know of to the knowe required climbing straight up the steepest bridge in the garden. I was pretty sure I hadn’t done that before I blacked out. I was honestly surprised I’d reached the Tea Gardens at all. “Hello?” I said. My voice came out in a whisper. “Is anybody there?”
“You’re awake.” It was the voice I’d heard earlier, soft, feminine, and faintly worried. “Stay where you are. Do not move. We will fetch her.”
“Got it,” I said, and closed my eyes. Not moving wouldn’t be hard; I doubted my ability to roll over, much less run away. I didn’t hear the speaker leave, but after some indefinite amount of time—minutes or hours, I had no idea—soft footsteps approached, accompanied by the rustle of silk. They stopped just beside my head.
“Hello, Lily,” I said, not opening my eyes. “Sorry to just drop in like this.”
“You are always welcome here,” she chided. Her voice was like water over stones, laced with a Japanese accent. “Even when you do not choose to come, you are welcome.”
“Sorry,” I said, still whispering. I wasn’t sure I could raise my voice if I wanted to. “I got a little banged up.”
“I noticed. Everyone noticed. What did you do to poor Marcia?” A hand touched my shoulder, testing the edge of the wound. Her fingers were cool, and the pain faded where she touched. “She was very upset, and there were mushrooms in the cash register.”
I let out my breath in a hiss, relaxing as the worst of the pain slipped away. “I didn’t have any money, and I needed to get inside.”
“Silly changeling,” she chided. “Does it never occur to you that you could ask?”
“Not my style,” I said, managing a faint smile.
Lily made a clucking noise, like she was scolding an unruly child, but continued stroking my shoulder, fingers leaving trails of numbness behind. I opened my eyes, tilting my head back to watch her. “Hush,” she said, “be still.”
“Yes, ma’am,” I said, watching as she reached over me to pluck a sprig of foxglove from the mossy bank.
Her hands were slim and covered with delicate silver scales, the fingers webbed to the first knuckle. Only her fingernails looked human, and even they were a pale silver-blue. I could see the shadow of her face if I turned my head just right, and memory supplied what vision couldn’t: she was impossibly delicate, with jade eyes and long black hair braided back with willow branches, pale skin decorated by dainty silver-and-green scales. She was beautiful, but it wasn’t human beauty. Even by fae standards, Lily was unique.
“Oh, October,” she said, waving the flowers above my face. “You are my favorite type of puzzle, child—the sort that makes no sense at all. May I help you this time, or would you rather bleed to death over what has passed between us?”
“How did you bring me here?” I asked, looking past the flowers to her face.
“I didn’t,” she said, and smiled. “Blood in the water, remember? When you were brought to my doors, I could let you in, and grant you succor, because of the permission you gave me with that blood. I can do no more unless you grant me your consent.”
“Brought to your doors?” I asked.
“You have more friends than you believe, October. Will you let me help you?”
Undi
ne magic has rules. When I bled in Lily’s waters, I gave her permission to keep me alive; she couldn’t do anything more than that unless I told her she could.
“Of course,” I said, closing my eyes again. With Evening’s curse hanging over me, I couldn’t afford to pass on anything that might be an offer of help.
“Very well, then. For now, rest. I need nothing more of you.” I felt her bringing the foxgloves down to the edge of the wound in my shoulder, brushing them over the worst of the damage. They stung as they touched skin before a cool, anesthetic numbness began to spread outward from their petals. Foxglove is poisonous—lovely, deadly, and probably not the best thing to put in an open wound. Then again, I’d been paying my tolls with mushrooms all day, and I’m not a healer. If Lily thought rubbing foxglove into my shoulder would help me, she was probably right, and even if she wasn’t, she couldn’t do more damage than I already had.
Lily started chanting in Japanese. The anesthetic coolness spread further, dulling the feeling in my arm and neck as the air filled with the scent of water lilies and hibiscus flowers. When the chant was done, she pressed her hand against my cheek, and said, “The world will wait for you, and be here on your return.”
That was all the permission I needed. I sighed and stopped fighting to stay awake, letting myself drift away, back into the dark.
Lily’s been a part of my life for as long as I can remember; longer than Sylvester, even, and that takes some doing. Mom used to take me to the Tea Gardens when we were still playing human, putting Daddy off with excuses about “girl time.” Lily was always there, glad to see us, but watching my mother with a wariness I didn’t understand until much, much later. Lily watched her because it’s hard to trust a faerie bride: they’re building a life on lies, and they’ll deny anything that gets in their way.
She was still there when I left the Summerlands. I toyed briefly with going to serve her instead of Devin, but Devin’s offer was flashier, more exciting, and I was my mother’s daughter; I was looking for excitement. Still, we stayed close, and her doors remained open to me, right up until the day things went wrong . . . for both of us.
I went to Lily a few days after I broke free of the pond, still in shock and half hysterical with grief. I wanted to know why she hadn’t saved me. I learned more than I’d bargained for.
“He placed walls around my fiefdom,” she said. “I was lonely, October, so lonely, and my magic is for growth and healing, not transformation. I couldn’t save you, child. I could only keep you as comfortable as the water would allow. I’m sorry.”
Lily was as much Simon’s prisoner as I was because for fourteen years, the world forgot she’d ever existed. The residents of her fiefdom scattered, suddenly homeless and not able to understand why. She was closer to dead than I was until the spell broke, because at least they remembered to mourn for me. I couldn’t hate her for things that Simon did to both of us. We had something very much in common: someday, we were going to make Simon Torquill pay.
The taste of hibiscus flowers called me out of memory and back to my body. I sighed and opened my eyes, blinking. The pain was gone. So was my shirt, along with the rest of my clothing; I wasn’t wearing anything except the strips of moss and willow bark Lily had wrapped around my wounded shoulder. Swell. I’m not body-shy—it’s hard to grow up in the Summerlands, where clothes are solidly optional, and stay body-shy—but that doesn’t mean I enjoy nudity. Naked people are, by definition, unarmed.
Bracing my right elbow against the ground, I levered myself into a sitting position. The motion made my head spin. At least my headache had faded: it was only half as bad as it had been before. Lily was kneeling a few yards away, dipping something in the water of a small pond. Now that my eyes were focusing, I could tell that the rustling noise came from her heavy silk robes; they were dark green and embroidered in white and silver with a pattern of sinuous dragons. A pair of pixies rested on the ebony chopsticks holding her hair in place, throwing flickering shadows over her face.
“Move slowly,” she said, rising and walking over to kneel beside me. “I have done my best, but the human in you protests the intrusion of magic, and the iron blocks me further. I can do no more.”
“Sorry; wasn’t my idea,” I said, moving my arm experimentally backward. The bandages on my shoulder pulled, and I winced. Lily clucked her tongue, starting to dampen the poultice with a silk sponge. The water soothed away most of the soreness, but not all of it. I wasn’t surprised she couldn’t heal me all the way: she was fighting iron, and I had no right to expect a miracle. If she’d been anything less than an Undine in her own realm she probably wouldn’t have been able to do as much as she had. None of that stopped me from being disappointed as I realized how extensive the remaining damage was. It wasn’t enough to cripple me—I’d still have use of the arm, even while it was healing—but it was going to make my job an awful lot harder than it had been before.
Guess that’d teach me to be careless. I looked to Lily, and smiled as earnestly as I could while disappointed and hurting. “It’s a pretty good job.”
She waved one fine-webbed hand, dismissing my words. Anything that smacks of saying “thank you” is unsteady ground in Faerie. “It is no more and no less than hospitality demands. Really, October, there wouldn’t be any need for this sort of thing if you would just stop jumping in front of bullets.”
“I’ll try to remember that.”
“Good.” The gills under her jaw fluttered, and I felt a sudden pang of concern. She was trying to hide it, but I knew her well enough to see how worn out she was.
Healing spells are tiring, even when you’re not fighting against iron.
“Lily, you okay over there?”
“I am tired, October, nothing more. It will pass.” She smiled, creasing the scales around her mouth. “Now, tell me, why did you have to be pulled from my pond? You were bleeding all over my fish.”
“Because you’d miss me if I died?” I shrugged. “Just a thought.”
“You may be right,” Lily said, smile fading. “What happened?”
She deserved to know, even if I didn’t want to tell her. Forcing myself to look her in the eye, I took a deep breath and started from the beginning.
Telling the whole story took less time than I expected, all of it passing in rapid flurries of words. It was a relief to say some of it aloud, here, where Lily’s control meant there was no risk of eavesdroppers. The close urgency of the events was already gone, reducing them to simple facts. Lily listened, expression growing grim as I explained more and more of the last fairy tale that Evening Winterrose would ever be a part of. By the time I reached the end, her lips were pressed into a thin, hard line. “It seems you’ve had a busy week,” she said.
“Not my choice.”
“Even so.” She rose, inclining her head toward me. “I will return with tea and, I think, a robe for you to wear. You will rest here a while before I allow you to leave. Foolish child.”
She stepped onto the water and was gone, leaving only the faint scent of hibiscus and water lilies in her wake.
“Swell,” I said, and flopped backward into the moss to wait.
SIXTEEN
THE ROBE LILY BROUGHT fit pretty well, even if it left me feeling more exposed than I’d been before. Nudity is fine—not my favorite thing, but fine. Clinging silk robes meant for someone six inches shorter are less fine. The hem stopped at mid-thigh, and the neckline barely covered my chest. To make matters worse, or at least more mortifying, the whole thing was a rosy shade of cream: taken as a whole, I felt like the star of some demented piece of fantasy porn.
The poultice swaddling my left shoulder would kill that idea pretty quickly. I could move the arm more easily than when I first woke—changelings don’t recover as fast as purebloods, though we bounce back faster than humans—but I wasn’t sure the improvement would be enough. I couldn’t move it fast enough to do anything useful, and heavy lifting was definitely out of the question for a few days. I wouldn?
??t have worried about it before people started shooting at me. Now that they’d started, I had plenty of reason to worry.
Whoever killed Evening and set a Redcap on my trail wasn’t going to back off. If there’d been any chance of that, it died when the man started taking shots at me on a public street. Whatever the game was, I was in it until it was over.
Lily kept moistening the moss around the poultice, refusing to let me move more than I had to in order to reach my tea. The combination of my body’s natural defenses and Undine water was helping, but movement wasn’t easy. I hadn’t even been able to help her wash the blood out of my hair. She’d pulled it into a braid when she was done, tying it off with a strip of fabric torn from my irreparably stained blouse. I still looked like hell, but it was one of the outer circles, and the fact that I didn’t seem likely to drop dead any second was a definite improvement.
“Drink this,” said Lily, handing me another cup of tea. “It will help.”
It smelled like rosehips and hibiscus, just like the last eleven batches. I took it, asking, “Am I going to be done drinking this stuff any time soon?” I understood the logic. The tea was helping me recover the blood I’d lost, and it was forcing Undine water into my system at the same time. That was fine. It didn’t make the idea of drowning in syrupy floral tea any more appealing.
Lily gave me a stern look. “You’ll be done when I say you are.”
“Right.” I took a sip, grimacing. There was a good reason for me to drink the tea. Still, I would’ve killed for a cup of coffee.
More gently, Lily said, “I’m sorry if I’m fussing, October, but I don’t wish to see you killed for your hastiness. Not if I can help you by keeping you here.”
“I’m not being hasty, Lily. I have a job to do.” The Undine take a long, slow view of time. To Lily, a year and a day were very much the same.
“You’re not? Does that mean you had to be fished out of the viewing pool over nothing? How curious. I should have realized you’d intended to collapse there from exhaustion and overabuse and insisted you be put back again. I apologize.”