Nine #3
We started to hear signs of life as we drew nearer to the bonfire: armor rattling, feet running, and voices raised in conversation, not loud enough that I could make out what they were saying, but loud enough that it was clear we were walking into a group of at least twenty people, maybe more.
I’ve never been entirely clear on how many people were left in Blind Michael’s lands after he died.
Acacia was there, I knew, and the Riders, along with all the children who’d been too far transformed to be returned to their homes.
That could have meant almost anything, from under a dozen to almost a hundred.
When I’d been there under Titania’s spell, the impression I’d gotten was closer to the latter figure, but that had been inflated by all the people Titania had hurled there in order to make her cobbled-together world work.
I really didn’t know what we were looking at.
Then we reached the wall and I had to make a choice. Rather than trying to sneak or skulk, I stood up straight, holding my candle firmly in front of me, and walked around the corner to where the occupants of the bonfire would be able to see me.
At the same time, I saw them. There were about two dozen, equally divided between hulking figures in armor and smaller, lither shapes whose outlines didn’t follow any of the forms I would have expected from being a part of greater Faerie.
Daoine Sidhe with gills and Tuatha de Dannan with leathery bat wings stood alongside fae with the spaded hands of moles and the bristling spines of echidnas, all of them turning slowly to look at us.
Silence fell, broken only by the sound of the fire crackling in the center of the clearing.
Then one of the armored figures stood, clanking all the way, and turned to walk off through a gap in the wall.
Still, no one said a word. Acacia wasn’t there: the tall chair where she would have been was empty.
The chair that once belonged to Blind Michael had been removed.
When it was Acacia’s time to sit by her fire, she would sit there alone.
Tybalt reached over and took my hand, not speaking, and I held on as tightly as I could without cutting off his circulation.
“Hi,” I said brightly to the gathering. “I’m Toby, this is Tybalt, and we’re here to see Acacia. Is she in?”
“We know you,” said one of the unarmored figures. “You killed our Lord. Twice.”
Oh. That was probably not good. “The first time was in self-defense,” I said. “The second time wasn’t real. I’m sorry, but that was an illusion.”
“We are so very grateful to you,” the figure continued, and bowed. All around the bonfire, the others did the same, folding forward one by one in a show of respect and supplication. I blinked, eyes going wide as I tried to take this in.
“Oooo-kay,” I said. “But is Acacia in?”
The armored figure that had left before returned through the same gap, returning to their seat before bowing along with all the others. I shot Tybalt a bewildered look. He shrugged, seeming as baffled as I felt.
Then a new figure appeared in the gap in the wall, and concern fled.
She was tall, slender the way a willow is slender—unyielding and strong, designed to stand up against any storm.
Her skin was a pale daffodil yellow, and her brown-and-yellow hair hung like roots around her shoulders, twisting and knotting of its own accord.
She was wearing a long dress of green and yellow tatters, and her wings—broad, soft-looking moth’s wings—hung half-mantled behind her, like she was still deciding whether she should stay or fly away.
She stared at me, apparently shocked by my appearance.
I stared back, equally confused by hers.
She looked … smoothed out, almost, perfected in a way that made no sense.
She was already Firstborn. She didn’t need to be flawless.
Even the scar on her face was gone, replaced by an expanse of smooth skin that I had never seen without an illusion in the way.
“October?” she asked, taking a step toward me.
“Hi, Acacia,” I said. I could smell blood, hot and fresh and close, so very close.
I couldn’t see it, but I had a decent idea of where it was coming from.
Like so much in Faerie, it carried more information for my nose than the injured party probably understood.
This blood was underscored with roses, heady, wild roses, the kind that died out in the mortal world centuries ago.
Not as old or as wild as some of the roses I’d smelled, but wild enough to catch my attention.
I smelled blood and roses, and Acacia, who was still gaping at me, was wearing an illusion.
“But I just—I only—How did you get here so quickly?”
“Wait, what?”
“I only sent for you a few minutes ago,” she said, shaking her head in disbelief. “How did you find a way here so fast?”
“I didn’t—I didn’t come because you called for me,” I said. “Tybalt and I went to the Luidaeg to barter for passage here because we thought Luna might have come here with her daughter.”
“She did,” said Acacia. She stepped backward, back through the gap in the wall, and beckoned for us to follow her. “Come.”
We came.
The rest of Blind Michael’s former subjects remained clustered around the fire as we followed Acacia away, heading for the main hall.
Closer, I could see how anxious she was, how her hair was curling and uncurling in tight, almost-involuntary motions.
She flicked her wings closed and then open again, sending a spray of what looked like pixie-sweat into the air. I coughed, fanning it away.
“Acacia, what’s going on?” I asked.
“I had hoped you might come to visit when the baby was born,” she said. “I know we’re not friends, but I get lonely here with only my late husband’s subjects to share my nights. They aren’t great conversationalists.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, more awkwardly than I’d intended. “I’ve been pretty busy, and getting here isn’t easy for me.”
“No. I didn’t expect it would be.” She glanced at Tybalt. “And this is the husband I’ve heard so much about?”
I couldn’t imagine when she would have heard all that much about him; we hadn’t even been dating yet when Blind Michael had held me prisoner, and I certainly hadn’t been in a position to talk about my allies all that much at the time.
I didn’t say any of that, only nodded, and said, “King Tybalt of the Court of Dreaming Cats.”
She turned her full attention on him, looking him slowly up and down. “Malvic’s line, from the look of him. My baby brother always did leave his mark on his descendants. Such a waste, that.”
I blinked, then frowned. Acacia had seemed to miss many of the prejudices Titania inculcated in her children. If she shared her mother’s dislike of the more “bestial” fae, I was not going to be happy about learning it.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“Only that Malvic would have loved to see his children grown and having children of their own, all without trading in his stripes. He was uncommonly proud of the fact that he had so many. I never saw the point, but then, I wasn’t going to say so to him, now was I?”
Acacia smiled, a trifle wistful, and kept leading us onward, passing the large central building that I had assumed would be our destination. Interesting.
“Acacia, why did you send for me?”
She ignored the question, or seemed to, for several seconds; she continued moving forward, and didn’t answer me.
Then, just as I was considering repeating myself, she said, “You were right about Luna. She arrived here an hour or so ago, dragging Rayseline with her. The poor child was unconscious. The Rose Roads aren’t always kind to those of flesh and blood, and Luna had done nothing to ease her daughter’s passage.
I can’t entirely blame her for the way she is.
I was no great prize as a mother. But I like to think that I would have noticed one of my children struggling to breathe. ”
There wasn’t much that I could say to that, and so I ignored it, focusing on the part I might be able to do something about. “She was unconscious? Was she otherwise unhurt? Did Luna tell you that Raysel is my responsibility until her term of offense is finished?”
“Offense,” said Acacia thoughtfully. “I remember when that was a new idea, the thought that you could harm someone with bad behavior as easily as with a sword. Father was the one to suggest nonviolent solutions to such disagreements. Before that, we’d been perfectly happy to just turn each other into inconsequential things and then smash them with rocks.
He pointed out that while we might recover from such rough treatment, our descendants wouldn’t, and it was wasteful to keep crushing them as quickly as we created them. ”
Funny words from someone who’d just been insisting that she would be a better parent than her own child.
“Acacia, what’s going on?”
She fanned her wings open wide, then snapped them shut again, hard enough to kick another spray of pixie-dust into the air.
“Luna came with her child,” she said. “She came to me for help. She came to me because she understood that she had made a mistake, and wanted me to make it better for her. She wanted me to be a mother one more time and solve my child’s problems before they could become too large to overcome.
You understand, don’t you, October?” She was almost pleading, and the sound of it was enough to send shivers down my spine.
She was desperate. I just didn’t know why.
“Acacia,” I said. “Please. Stop talking around the problem and just tell me what’s going on.”
“This is going on,” she said, whirling to face me and dropping her illusion at the same time.
I froze, feeling my heart sink toward my toes. Beside me, Tybalt did much the same. The two of us stared at her, unsure what to say, how to react … even how to feel about what we saw.
Because I had been right about the source of the blood, and Acacia was not all right.