The pain returned, bright and blazing, and accompanied by the feeling of fingers inside my chest, poking through the ruined tissue that had been my lung. I screamed, or tried to, anyway; screaming was difficult without air, and my body was refusing to do anything that might have reinflated the collapsed organ.
“Towel!” snarled the Luidaeg, withdrawing her hand. There was a clattering sound as she dropped something on the table, and pressure was suddenly applied to my chest. It hurt, but in a different way. “Dammit. She’s lost a lot of blood. I need a knife.”
“Why?” Tybalt’s voice. He sounded panicked, and I couldn’t blame him; when the Luidaeg started asking for knives, someone was about to bleed. She wasn’t always careful about her cuts, either, although I liked to think she was careless with me because she knew I’d heal.
I wanted to reassure him. I couldn’t find the air.
“Because I’m going to bleed for her.” Some of the pressure was removed from the towel at my breast. “Come on, kitty-cat. Scratch me, and let me bring her back to you. She’d do the same for me.”
I did do the same for you, I thought. I still couldn’t speak. I wasn’t dead, but I wasn’t getting any air. Everything was turning fuzzy and hard to focus on. My eyelids didn’t want to respond. That wasn’t fair. If I was going to die here, I wanted to see them before I went. I wanted them to know I was saying good-bye.
There was a ripping sound. The Luidaeg hissed, sounding pained. Then something was being shoved against my lips, and the smell of blood was invading my nostrils, so delicious I couldn’t have resisted it if I tried. My mouth opened almost without my bidding, and I was drinking deeply, greedily, pulling at the Luidaeg’s wrist like it was a lifeline. I needed the blood so much that I didn’t think about the consequences until the world was washed in red, and everything changed.
My mother is wearing a gown of thorns and autumn leaves, and there are roses in her hair, and she is beautiful, and she is not listening to me. Her eyes are far away, fixed on the horizon; she would rather hear the wind than my voice. It isn’t fair. I love her so, I suffer for her so, and still she will not hear me, because she is too kind. She has always been too kind. Titania’s children change their songs when she walks in the forest. The monsters come to sit at her feet and adore her, and she does not have to face the reasons that their claws are bloody, that their teeth are sharp. She doesn’t have to see.
“Please,” I say—and the word was jarring enough to knock me back into my own mind, my own present, if only for a moment; the language the Luidaeg spoke wasn’t English, and I shouldn’t have been able to understand it. She said she’d forgotten the first language of Faerie, and she hadn’t lied, because she couldn’t lie, but somewhere deep down, below conscious thought, her blood remembered.
You remember, I thought. Then the blood overwhelmed me again, dragging me back down into memory.
“Mother, please,” I say. “This is foolishness. You know the ritual has been compromised. You have to change it. You have to find another way.”
“Tradition may not seem important to you, my Annie, who saw Tradition born, but it’s not just you we Ride for,” says Maeve. Her voice is summer wind and autumn berries, and I want her to talk to me forever, and I want her to be quiet and listen. “We Ride for our grandchildren, and our great-grandchildren, all the way down to the generations that have never known anything but this. We Ride to consolidate a legend, that someday, when we are gone, you can Ride without us.”
She doesn’t see. She doesn’t understand. She’s as far above me as I am above the fae who swarm around their Firstborn parents, forever limited in comparison, eternally unable to grasp the full consequence of what they do. “Tonight is Hallow’s Eve, Mother. Please. Send someone else to Ride for you. Take the true route elsewhere, or all is lost.”
“My darling girl,” she says, and steps closer to me. Her palm is soft against my cheek. She smells like wild roses and southernwood, like moss and loam and the first day of the fall. I will never love anything the way I love her, not as long as I may live. “The fae folk must Ride.”
I sat up with a gasp, opening my eyes on the room where my friends were waiting. The pain was gone; my mouth tasted of blood, and inexplicably, of roses. I looked wildly around. There was Tybalt, reaching out to steady me, and there was Karen, clutching a brown leather case to her chest, her eyes wide and round as saucers. I turned my head. Quentin and the Luidaeg were standing on my other side. He had an armful of bloody towels, and she was stained red to the elbow with her own blood and with mine. Out of the four of them, only she looked anything other than terrified. She just looked tired.
“How are you feeling?” she asked.
“Like I licked a light socket,” I said. Tybalt was still right there. I allowed myself to lean over until my head was resting against his chest. I didn’t look down at my clothes. To be honest, I didn’t want to know. “What did you give me? What happened?”
“What happened is whoever killed Antonio decided what was good for the gander was good for the goose, and rammed a rosewood spike into your back,” said the Luidaeg. “Pretty good shot, too. They managed to get it more than halfway through. It would have gone farther on its own, but the tip of the thing broke off inside your lung.”
That explained the probing fingers, and the reason they hadn’t been able to wait for me to wake up. With the way I healed, a delay would have allowed my body to close up around the foreign object. Not too bad, if we were talking about a bullet or a bone or something else blunt and easily ignored. The tip of a harpoon, inside my lung? That was something else entirely.
“Wait,” I said. “How did you get in there? Weren’t my ribs in the way?”
“I went under the rib cage,” said the Luidaeg blandly. Quentin made a face. I decided I was glad to have been unconscious when that decision was made. “I got all the bits out, but you’d lost a lot of blood. I had to feed you some of mine to give you the strength to recover.”
“So that woman I saw—”
“Yes, that was my mother, and no, I don’t want to talk about it. Whatever you saw, that is between you and the blood. I won’t answer any questions.” Something in her eyes . . .
“Won’t, or can’t?” I asked.
She threw her bloody hands up in the air. “Is there no end to your questions? Can’t, October, can’t, and won’t, and we’re sort of getting away from the point here, which is that you could have died.”
“Maybe,” I said, and closed my eyes, feeling Tybalt’s chest rise and fall beneath my cheek, reassuringly solid and alive. Then I opened them again, and asked, “How long was I out?”
“Half an hour, end to end,” said the Luidaeg. “The conclave hasn’t started yet, if that’s what you’re worried about.”
“I just got stabbed. I have so many better things to worry about.” I pushed myself upright. The motion forced me to touch the table, and my hands skidded in the jellied blood. The smell of it made me hungry and turned my stomach at the same time. “There was a sound like tearing metal. Everything jumped. I don’t think it’s a teleporter.”
“No?” The Luidaeg raised an eyebrow. “How’s that?”
“Whoever it was can’t have been in the room before they attacked, or Tybalt would have smelled them. Unless they were Folletti, and then they wouldn’t be using rosewood.” Folletti were sky-fae, and used swords of hardened wind, as invisible as they were. Rosewood was too easy to see to be a Folletti weapon. “There was no lingering magic smell, which means any spells were cast outside the room. I think whoever it is, they’re somehow pausing things. Making everything stop for a few seconds, and using the time to get into position.” I looked at the Luidaeg expectantly.
She raised her other eyebrow. Then, firmly, she shook her head. “I know what you’re asking, and no. There’s no race in Faerie with that ability. Either you’re wrong, or someone is using some sort
of alchemy or a mixed spell to do this.”
“So we don’t even know where to start,” I said. “Fun. Fine.” I swung my feet around to point them at the floor. More blood squished beneath me. I winced. “I need clothes.”
“Yes, you do. What’s more, you need a shower.”
“I don’t have time for a—wait. There’s a solution.” I turned to Tybalt—blood-soaked and still unsettled, judging by the faint stripes on the sides of his face. He was having trouble holding to the more human aspects of his current form. That was a sign of either relaxation or stress in the Cait Sidhe, and given the situation, and the amount of blood on his clothes, I wasn’t betting on the former. “Elliott is here. Go to Arden, find out where he’s staying, and get him.”
Tybalt blinked. “Why am I doing this exactly?”
“Because we don’t have time to shower before we need to go back to the conclave, and I’m not ready to go back to the room where someone tried to murder me.” The scene of King Antonio’s death, and the absence of a magical signature in the room right after I’d been stabbed, told me that going back wasn’t going to help us: not enough to put off cleaning up and reporting the attack to the High King. “Elliott’s a Bannick. He can have all this blood gone in a flash.”
“I don’t want to go,” said Tybalt. “I will, but I want you to understand how unkind it is for you to ask this of me.”
“I do,” I said solemnly.
He looked to the Luidaeg. “If you allow her to come to further harm . . .”
“Don’t threaten me, kitty, I’m outside your weight class,” said the Luidaeg. “Go.”
Tybalt pulled his lips back, showing her his teeth. Then he turned and ran for the shadows in the corner of the room, leaping into them and disappearing. I looked longingly at the place where he’d been. With everything that was going on, I didn’t like anyone going off alone. Not even Tybalt.
“Toby.”
I turned toward the sound of the Luidaeg’s voice. “Yes?”
“You could have died. You know that, don’t you? You’re not invincible. Hard to kill, yes, but unbreakable? No.” She looked at me gravely. “You need to be more careful.”
“All I did was go to my room to change my clothes,” I protested. “I shouldn’t have needed to be careful.”
“Yet here you are, doused in blood again, with the memory of my fingers pressed into your lung,” she said, and shook her head. “You have to take care of yourself. Replacing you would take a long time, and frankly, I don’t want to go to the trouble.”
I frowned. “Replacing me? For what?”
“I don’t want to talk about it, and besides, your suitor is incoming,” said the Luidaeg. Sure enough, the smell of musk and pennyroyal wafted through the room not a second later. I turned to see Tybalt standing there, empty-handed. I blinked.
“Tybalt?” I asked uncertainly. “Is everything all right . . . ?”
“No. You’re covered in blood again. No day which includes you covered in blood can be termed ‘all right.’” He shook his head. “I simply put to your Queen that perhaps it was better if she fetch the Bannick, as otherwise, a King of Cats dressed in crimson would be stalking her halls, and that might concern her guests. She agreed discretion was the better part of valor, and will be here shortly with your cleaner.”
He had a point. He wasn’t as bloody as I was—abattoirs weren’t as bloody as I was—but he had more than a few streaks of dried and drying blood smeared on his arms, shirt, and even the line of his jaw. He’d been holding me while I was bleeding out, and there were consequences for that. There were always consequences for that.
I finished the process of standing, leaving the blood-drenched table behind, and walked the few steps to where Tybalt was waiting. Then I put my arms around him, and held him fast, letting him breathe in the scent of me. The muscles in his back and shoulders began to unknot. He wasn’t the only one here in need of comfort; Karen almost certainly needed a hug, and Quentin was never going to get used to seeing me this way. But both of them were still clean, and even with Elliot incoming, I didn’t want to cover them in blood if I could help it. Tybalt was already a mess. He needed me enough that he didn’t care.
There was a faint rushing sound, and the scent of blackberry flowers and redwood bark. I looked over my shoulder. There was Arden, dressed in a white velvet gown with a chain of silver blackberries wrapped around her waist, forming a low belt. Elliot was next to her, gazing at the blood-splattered room with an expression somewhere between horror and delight. And Li Qin was next to him, wearing a black dress stitched with green-and-silver circuitry. She looked thoughtful.
“You brought company,” I said, letting go of Tybalt and shifting so my back was to his chest. He put his arms around my waist, holding me there. I didn’t bow. Under the circumstances, it didn’t seem important.
“My daughter, Elliot’s liege, insisted I promise to keep an eye on her people while she could not,” said Li Qin. “I accompanied him because things have a tendency to become unnecessarily exciting in your presence.”
“And because you wanted to see what the big deal was,” I said.
Li Qin shrugged, expression unrepentant. “I’m curious. What can I say?”
“Nothing. I’d be curious, too.” I looked to Elliot. “Can you clean this up? I’m supposed to be coming to the conclave with the rest of you, and I can’t do it looking like an extra from Carrie.”
“Wow,” he said. “I thought there was a lot of blood the last time I saw you, but this is . . . wow. Do you bathe in the stuff? How often do you have to buy new clothes?”
“Not intentionally, and way too often, although in this case, the hole in the back of my bodice is going to be a much bigger problem than the blood,” I said. “Can you clean it up? Please? It’s drying, and that feels exactly as gross as you’d think.”
“I try not to think about how that sort of thing feels,” said Elliot. “Close your eyes and hold your breath.”
I closed my eyes. Taking a deep breath was easy, and I reveled in it, enjoying the feeling of my lungs inflating without any foreign bodies getting in the way. Then I braced myself, flashing Elliot a thumbs-up.
The smell of lye rose in the air a heartbeat before a hot, soapy wave hit me, washing over me like some sort of bizarre waterpark attraction. The pressure of it knocked me back against Tybalt, who was making a thin, angry noise deep in his chest. He didn’t mind showers, especially when I agreed to share them with him, but he was still a cat, and like most cats, he wasn’t a big fan of being doused. Then the wave broke, leaving us as dry as if it had never existed. I opened my eyes.
The room, which had always seemed clean, was now spotless. The glass glittered, the hardwood floors gleamed, and the blood was gone, leaving no trace that it had ever been there in the first place. I pushed myself back to my own feet, glancing back to check on Tybalt before I turned to Elliot, preparing to tell him what a good job he’d done. Then I stopped.
He was staring at the Luidaeg, eyes very wide and filled with tears. She was looking back at him, an expression of profound regret on her face. She looked so genuinely sad that it hurt to see her that way.
“I don’t . . .” he began. He stopped, took a breath, started again. “I don’t know the forms for this, but I know you’re a daughter of Maeve. Are you . . . ?”
“I’m sorry, but no,” she said. “You’re not mine.”
“Oh,” said Elliot, in a hushed voice.
“His name was Dobrinya. I haven’t seen him in centuries. I don’t even know if he’s still alive. I hope he is. He was among the sweetest of my brothers. But you’re not mine.”
“Apologies, First,” said Elliot, turning his face resolutely away. He reached up to wipe his eyes, trying to make the motion seem unobtrusive. He failed, but it was a valiant attempt. “I just never expected to stand so close to you. To any one of you.
”
“I know,” she said. “You did good.”
Elliot visibly swelled with pride, finally looking at me. “You need to stop doing this sort of thing,” he said.
I shook off my surprise. It had been so long since I’d seen someone dealing with their first Firstborn encounter that I’d almost forgotten what it looked like. “Why should I stop? You do such a good job of fixing it.” I glanced down at myself. The blood was gone. So were the holes in my clothing. Even my bodice had been relaced, although the laces weren’t pulled tight; that would have knocked the air out of me, and that’s never good when you’re surrounded by a giant wave of magical water. I looked up again. “The High King told me to change my clothes. You think he’ll be cool with me having them magically steam-cleaned instead?”
“No,” said Arden immediately. “You need to wear something they haven’t seen before. It’s the only way you’ll be taken seriously.”
“Oberon save me from the purebloods and their rules,” I muttered. “All right: I’m going to need an escort back to the room I’m supposed to be sleeping in, since all my clothes are there.”
“Actually, no—you won’t,” said the Luidaeg. She turned and took the brown case from Karen, who had observed everything in silence, eyes wide and face drawn. She looked like she couldn’t decide whether she wanted to be terrified or amazed. That was a combination I was very well-acquainted with.
Setting the case on the table, the Luidaeg opened it and began rooting through a welter of scraps. Finally, she pulled out a piece of coppery spider-silk. The edges were ragged, but the lightning jag remains of the embroidery that must have covered the entire piece of fabric were still visible. She walked over and held it out to me.
“Here,” she said. “Now strip.”
“Uh.” I glanced at Quentin. As I had expected, his cheeks were so red that he could have replaced Rudolph as the lead reindeer for Santa’s sleigh. “I’m going to go with ‘no.’”