Dugan was playing his own game. Every piece we found made me more certain of that. I just didn’t know what that game was quite yet, and until I found out, none of us were safe.
“Gillian,” I said carefully, “I’ll get Miranda for you, and I won’t come around unless you ask me to. You have my word on that. But I need you to think very hard. Apart from the woman you can’t remember clearly, was there anyone strange around the residence hall in the last few weeks? Anyone at all who didn’t feel like they should be there?” If she’d seen him . . .
Gillian began to shake her head. Then she stopped, and asked, very carefully, “Did I really see Jocelyn in that place with all the fog?”
“I’m sorry, honey, but yes, you did.”
“That bitch.” Her expression hardened. “She was always trying to suck up to me, you know? Always asking questions about you, like you were some kind of hero, and not a deadbeat who ran out on her family when things got hard.”
I didn’t say anything. Gillian was part of Faerie now. She would learn the truth soon enough, and this wasn’t the time to try arguing the case for my redemption. “She said something similar when I came looking for you,” I said. “Why do you ask?”
“Because she had a new boyfriend hanging around this past week. I mostly noticed because he was really cute, and I thought he might make a good model for our life drawing class.”
My heart was beating too fast again, and I felt faintly sick to my stomach. If Simon had done this after all—if this was my fault for waking him up—I was going to crawl into my bed and never come out. “What did he look like?”
“Cute,” she repeated. “Um. Tall, skinny, sort of a hipster vibe, like he did all his shopping at vintage stores for ‘the aesthetic,’ but didn’t really know how things went together. He pulled it off, it just didn’t look right, you know?”
“I do.” It was a complaint I had made myself, more than once, when talking about purebloods who didn’t have much contact with the human world. Fashions changed too quickly for them to keep up. Some, like the Torquills, settled on an era and stayed there, dressing well but noticeably dated. Others tried to keep up, with mixed results. “Was there anything else about him that caught your attention? His hair, maybe?”
“Oh, yeah, his hair!”
My heart sank.
“It was this amazing shade of emerald green. I really wish I’d been able to get the number of his stylist. My hair’s so dark that I can’t ever seem to find anyone who can get it to take color.” Gillian hesitated before plucking at a strand of her hair, relaxing a little when she saw that it was still black.
She’d be unhappy when the gray started to appear. But that was a problem for later. “The man you saw with Jocelyn was tall and pretty and had green hair. Are you sure?”
“I notice a good dye job.”
“Okay.” I took a step back. “I need to go. I’ll ask the Luidaeg to let Miranda come up here and talk to you. Please don’t try to take the sealskin off. I’m not sure you could, yet, but if you did, I think you’d probably die. Please promise me you won’t.”
Gillian blinked slowly. Then she nodded. “I won’t.”
“Good.” I turned to go.
“Mom?”
I froze.
“I . . . I’m really angry with you. For leaving, and for being something you never told us about. It impacted my life and I never knew why, and that’s not fair. I don’t know if I’m ever going to stop being angry with you. But thank you. For coming to save me when I needed you. I don’t know what I am now, and I don’t know if I’m going to like being it, but I know I didn’t want to be dead. So thank you.”
I looked over my shoulder, managing the sliver of a smile. “You’re welcome.”
Then I looked away from her and walked, as quickly as I could, to the chamber door. When I let myself out, the Luidaeg was there, waiting for me on the stairs. Her eyes were still sea-glass green, and she was making no effort to conceal her concern. She was just looking at me. Silent, patient as the tide, and equally as eternal.
I burst into tears and threw myself at her, trusting, just this once, that she would catch me. She was my friend and my family, and she would catch me.
And she did. She wrapped her arms around me, murmuring a language I didn’t understand against the curve of my ear, surrounding me in the smell of the sea. I cried into her shoulder until I felt like all the tears had been wrung out of me, leaving me dry as a bone. Only then did I pull away, to find her still looking at me gravely.
“Better?” she asked.
“Yes.” I wiped my cheeks with the back of my hand. “Tybalt?”
“Here. Waiting for you. He’s anxious, but he never tried to go up the stairs. He knew you needed time.” A smile ghosted across her lips. “You should keep this one. He has a good sense of boundaries.”
“I’m planning to,” I said. “Gillian needs her mother. She needs Janet.”
If my statement surprised the Luidaeg, she didn’t show it. She merely nodded and said, “I’ll fetch her. They can stay here a little longer, while you finish doing what needs to be done, and then I’ll take them to see Liz, so she can start explaining what it is to be a Selkie in this world. I’d do it, but I don’t understand them the way I do the Roane, and the bargain has yet to be brought due.”
“It’s been more than a year.”
“I know.” She looked at me coolly, a thread of black wiggling across her right iris like a worm working its way deeper into the flesh of an apple. “You’re almost ready, and by giving them a year, I forced them to start putting their house in order. They should be prepared to pay by now. They should be grateful I gave them as long as I did. Now. Your cat is waiting for you, and I suppose I should go rouse the traitor, shouldn’t I?”
“Yeah,” I said. Impulsively, I grabbed her hands and squeezed them hard before starting down the stairs, leaving her on the landing, leaving my daughter in the tower room. The world had changed. The world wasn’t changing back.
What remained now was trying, in whatever way we could, to set things right.
TWENTY-ONE
I STEPPED INTO THE LIVING ROOM to find Tybalt perched on the absolute edge of the couch. He knew most of the filth was illusionary, but that didn’t stop him from being disgusted by it. The carpet squelched under my feet. He turned toward the sound, relief washing over his face as he stood in a single, fluid motion and began walking toward me.
He waited to speak until there was barely a foot between us. “Your daughter . . . ? I know she lives, but at what consequence?”
“She’s a Selkie now,” I said, and laughed, tears and hysteria both threatening to break through the sound. “Can you believe it? A Selkie.” A small, terrible corner of my mind reminded me that if Connor and I had stayed together—if his family hadn’t come between us, if I hadn’t chosen Cliff over chasing after him—Gillian might not find any of this strange. She could have grown up knowing that one day a skin would come to her.
But she wouldn’t have been Gillian. Even if I’d given an imagined daughter with Connor the same name, she would have been a different little girl, growing up in a different world. Hindsight is twenty-twenty. That doesn’t mean the things it shows are always better.
“Perhaps she’ll be the first of them the sea witch can allow herself to love, as she didn’t choose it,” said Tybalt, and lightly touched my cheek. There were still shadows in his eyes. The damage my mother had done wasn’t the kind that could be washed away in a single adventure, no matter how hard we both wished it could be. “I am glad she is well.”
“Me, too.” I took a breath, letting myself relax into his touch. It was only for an instant. That instant was enough to make me feel like the rest of this might be something we could survive. “Quentin and May?”
“Awake, and in Muir Woods with the rest. The pretender Queen has been arrested for
her crimes, as has her changeling accomplice. The Baobhan Sith who tried so industriously to devour you has been given a nice new robe and a place to stay while she adjusts to the decade.” He frowned. “I recognize she was a victim here, acting entirely on instinct, but still it galls me that someone with such a taste for your blood should be kept as a guest in your monarch’s halls.”
“Just don’t invite her to stay at the Court of Cats, and we’ll be fine,” I said. I took a step back, less to create distance between us than to make it clear that the moment had passed: we needed to move. “She’ll digest my blood and lose the ability to disguise herself as me soon enough. Are you feeling up to carrying me to Muir Woods?”
“You live, my love, and your daughter lives as well. Right now, I could carry you to Mag Mell if you asked it of me.”
“I’d rather you didn’t. Having the groom collapse from exhaustion before the wedding does no one any good.”
The look of surprise on his face would have been amusing, if I hadn’t known he was, on some level, worried that I wouldn’t want to marry him when he was anything less than perfect. I put my hand on his arm.
“Come on, Tybalt,” I said. “Take me to see the queen.”
“It would be an honor.” He swept his arm under my legs, lifting me into the bridal carry that seemed to be the easiest method for conveying me through the dark, and stepped into the shadows before I could say anything else.
Most of the time, I preferred to run the Shadow Roads by his side, when we had to use them at all. It was easier on him if he wasn’t trying to carry me while he ran, and I preferred to know that I was at least technically in command of my own fate, even if a simple fall could mean being lost forever in the darkness. He could see. As long as I could hold my breath, he’d be able to backtrack and find me. Or at least I liked to tell myself that, since it made the whole experience a little less upsetting.
Ice formed on my skin and in my hair, gluing my eyelashes together, caking on my lips. I snuggled closer to the comforting warmth of him—the man I had chosen, who had chosen me; the man I was going to marry, no matter what the world threw at us—and tried to focus on the sound of my heartbeat, which thundered in my ears.
I should have put the pieces together sooner. I blamed my concern for Gillian and my rapid blood loss. Even for me, it had been a hard day. But the false Queen didn’t have many allies left. Rhys—I wasn’t sure of the title for a deposed puppet King, other than maybe “loser”—was still asleep in Silences. Her guards worked for Arden now, who treated them better than her nameless predecessor ever had. Her courtiers were scattered throughout the Kingdom, retreating to their home demesnes in disgrace. It would be a long time before any of them could gather enough influence to win themselves a place in Arden’s Court. Really, Dugan had been the only logical person to have been helping her.
The signs had been there all along. The scent of cinnamon and cardamom; the involvement of secrets that were meant to be kept at the royal level, which his time with the false Queen could easily have revealed to him. Gillian’s description of Jocelyn’s supposed “boyfriend” only confirmed what I’d already been virtually certain of.
“Almost there,” murmured Tybalt. “Brace yourself.”
I did, snuggling closer still, and held my breath as we burst into the warmth and light of the mortal world. The scent of redwood trees assailed my nose; we were in Muir Woods. I took a deep, whooping breath, cracking the ice on my lashes as I opened my eyes and beheld a strip of late afternoon sky framed by redwood branches. In the distance, someone laughed, a warm, comfortable sound. The sound of tourists in a state park, who saw no reason to worry that anything might go wrong.
I blinked. There was no weight of a don’t-look-here on us, and I hadn’t been wearing a human disguise while I was at the Luidaeg’s. “Oh. Shit.”
Tybalt blinked in turn. “What do you—”
“Illusions. Now.” His eyes widened in understanding. He didn’t quite drop me, but he put me down with more vigor than was technically necessary, both of us grabbing for the strands of shadow running through the air. His gestures were more refined than mine, elegance in motion, like he was dancing. I, on the other hand, was a magical wrecking ball, grabbing at whatever power I could find and yanking it down over myself like a shroud.
The smell of cut grass and bloody copper rose around me, twining and tangling with Tybalt’s musk and pennyroyal. A verbal spell would have risked attracting too much attention: the sun wasn’t down yet, and while the path where we’d emerged wasn’t on the main thoroughfare—thank Oberon—Muir Woods is a popular tourist attraction. The place was probably thronging with mortals who’d have serious questions about why our ears were pointy and our eyes were funny if they happened to come around the right corner at the wrong time.
The spell crashed down to cover me, knocking more ice loose without chasing the freeze from my skin. I gasped, as much from the strain of casting a silent illusion as from the shock of its presence. Shaking the shreds of magic from my fingers, I turned to Tybalt.
He was watching me with what I could only call fond indulgence, his features blunted and his eyes dimmed by the illusion he had designed for himself. “I will never tire of watching you do that,” he said.
“What? Panic?”
“No. Enchant yourself in my presence. It is a small vulnerability, but as it’s what our circumstances allow to us, I shall accept it for the gift that it is.”
“Weirdo,” I said fondly. Then I sobered. “We need to get to Arden.”
“Indeed, we do,” he said, and offered me his arm. Together, newly apparently human and no more out of place than any other tourists, we stepped out of our isolated corner of the park and started down the path toward the far wall.
Muir Woods is what so much of California used to be: lush and green and virtually untouched by human hands. The paths that wind through the ancient trees have been designed to be as unobtrusive as possible, allowing humans to see the redwoods without necessarily damaging them. When a sequoia falls, downed by time or rot or forest fire, it’s allowed to stay where it lands, slowly rotting and feeding the living world around it. Everything smells of good green growth, of running water, of the sea. If the entire mortal world were like Muir Woods, we would have no need for the Summerlands. We could just stay in the trees and be happy.
Of course, the entire mortal world was like Muir Woods, once, and look where that got us.
The humans I’d been worried about running into strolled along the main boardwalk, some in couples, others in family groups. A small child pointed in awe at a bright yellow banana slug while a park employee watched unobtrusively off to one side, ready to step in if the animal were put into danger. A woman pushed an older man in a wheelchair. Several people pushed strollers. The only unusual thing about me and Tybalt was the way I had my hand resting on the crook of his elbow, rather than tucked into his hand.
I could fix that. Loving a man several hundred years older than me has meant adjusting to a little anachronism in my daily life, but he still knew how to hold hands. I tangled my fingers into his, and he glanced at me, first startled, then smiling.
“Your hands are cold,” he said.
“Yours aren’t.”
“The shadows have learned to love me in their own way. I apologize that they may never feel so very generous toward you.”
“I’m not Cait Sidhe.” I shrugged as we walked, as fast as we dared, toward the wooden stairway that would take us to the path toward Arden’s knowe. “I’m okay with the idea that the shadows won’t love me, as long as you do.”
“The act that could strip away my love for you has never yet been committed, nor is its commission a thing I have any cause to fear,” said Tybalt.
I snorted. “Now you sound like a romance novel again.”
“Sometimes it is the best of ways to sound.” He glanced at me. “My recent a
bsence has been . . . ”
“I know why you were gone.”
“Your knowing doesn’t change the fact that I’ve allowed precious hours to slip by without spending them in your company. I am ashamed of how afraid I am. Still, I am afraid. It seems I should have shaken this concern away, as I have shaken off so many others, but . . .” He shook his head. “My people. Raj. You. It has been a very long time since I feared failure for any reason other than the damage to my pride. Your mother showed me that I am vulnerable, and I did not much care for the feeling.”
I squeezed his hand. It was the only thing I could think of. I did wonder whether our appearance in the mortal areas of the park, where we would have to walk quietly and without attracting attention to reach the knowe, had been due to the road ending or due to some possibly subconscious desire on his part. Sometimes it seemed like our lives never left much room for serious conversation that didn’t include someone trying to kill one or both of us. Quentin and May were awake; Gillian was safe with the Luidaeg; the false Queen was in custody. This might be the last real pause we got.
But Dugan was still out there somewhere, and Arden didn’t know about him, or how dangerous he could potentially be. We could walk slowly enough to be overlooked. We could steal a few minutes to talk about our feelings. Anything more than that was for later, when our enemies had, however temporarily, been subdued.
Sometimes I really miss the days when my biggest concern was whether I’d be able to afford fresh milk for my coffee. Then I consider the gains I’ve made—my home, my friends, my weird and chosen family—and I remember that the past is only rosy because of all the blood that was in my eyes.
“Something will have to change,” he said softly. “I fear it might be me.”
We had reached the stairway. We climbed it in silence, still holding onto each other, until we reached the hard-packed dirt trail that ran around the edge of the basin containing the tallest of the trees. Side by side, we walked to the base of an ancient redwood whose roots had carved a series of natural “steps” out of the hill. After that, it was a simple matter to wait for the mortals around us to pass. Once we had a clear moment, I dropped Tybalt’s hand and started upward.