Twenty
TWO WEEKS LATER, TYBALT, Quentin, and I stood in Arden Windermere’s receiving hall.
It was all but empty, leaving only us, Arden, and Cassandra in attendance.
Raysel was off with Chelsea, seeing some sort of summer concert at the amphitheater near Shadowed Hills; Sylvester was supposed to meet them there, which both meant Etienne was probably being dragged to the concert, an image I found disproportionately funny, and also meant that Sylvester was going to be paying for everything.
I was honestly just glad they were hanging out with their fathers.
For Raysel, especially, being willing to see Sylvester was almost as big a step as being willing to go to the concert in the first place.
She’d spent the first week after we brought her home effectively locked in her room, except when she had bad dreams so severe that she wound up creeping down the hall and crawling into bed with Tybalt and me.
You know it’s awful when sleeping in a room with a baby is better than sleeping in your own bed, behind protective silencing charms.
Still. It had worked out okay. Tybalt understood why she was seeking reassurance, and turned himself into a cat whenever she came looking for comfort, curling up on the pillow between us and purring loudly.
Between him, Cagney, and Lacey, the purrs became almost a white-noise machine in their own right.
Miranda hadn’t seemed to mind our new part-time roommate.
She slept, she woke up, she fussed, she ate, she slept again.
My milk hadn’t been given sufficient time to dry up, and while my breasts ached for the first few days after we got home, it hadn’t been bad enough to warrant much beyond a grumble.
May had waited until the end of the week to book her spa day, cajoling Raysel into going with her.
That had really been the first sign that things might eventually get back to normal, or what passed for normal around our place.
If Raysel was willing to go out at all, she was starting to feel safe again. That was really what mattered.
Quentin was naturally surly about having missed most of the adventure, a condition made worse when Chelsea decided to tease him about how she’d effectively been my squire in his absence.
Those two were going to be trouble. And Etienne was going to kill me, eventually.
Well, at least I wouldn’t be able to say that I hadn’t seen it coming.
And if he hadn’t seen it coming by now, he was woefully refusing to look.
Luna hadn’t been back since our return. As far as anyone knew, she was still in her father’s skerry, and given how furious her mother had been, she might no longer be independently mobile.
I couldn’t quite find it in myself to be worried about that.
Maybe a few hundred years as a tree would help her get over whatever it was that she was trying to deal with, and even if it didn’t, at least that would be a few hundred years where I didn’t need to worry about her.
Sylvester couldn’t initiate a divorce until she was able to answer it, but honestly, he didn’t seem to want to.
He was as angry with her as all the rest of us, and I wasn’t sure he was capable of forgiving her for hurting their daughter, but he still loved her all the same.
As for Eion and Melly, Eion had been expelled from the kingdom, as I’d predicted, and had gone back to the Golden Shore to beg Theron and Chrysanthe for sanctuary.
His family, who had done nothing wrong, had stayed behind for the time being, choosing safety over uncertainty.
I was fairly sure they’d go after him once he was settled.
I did feel bad for him. He’d suffered something no child should ever have had to go through, and then had Titania’s choices layered on top of that, making a breakdown all but inevitable.
I had to wonder how many more Eions we’d be seeing as fae whose returned memories stirred up long-forgotten traumas lashed out and broke things. Fortunately, that was a problem for Arden to deal with, at least until they crossed the line into needing a hero. Proactivity isn’t in my job description.
Melly, despite everything, was still at Shadowed Hills, although she’d been demoted and now served under the staff she’d once commanded.
Kerry and Ormond had both vouched for her, and Kerry had even returned to the knowe to work in the kitchens and keep an eye on her mother.
Everyone agreed that what she’d done was wrong, but Sylvester understood the lengths a parent would do to in order to reclaim their children.
As long as she stayed out of his way and did her job without causing any further problems, he was content to let her continue operating the household.
Raysel, surprisingly enough, felt the same way.
She wasn’t sure she’d ever be going back to Shadowed Hills on a full-time basis, and even if she did, it wasn’t like she interacted with the kitchen staff very often when she was there.
Knowing that Luna had been behind the whole thing made the information Melly had passed to the Riders less important.
And all of this led to us, here, the remains of our Westmoreland candles in our hands, waiting for the queen to speak. She looked at me, expression infinitely weary as she tried to puzzle her way through my latest request.
“You want to go back to Blind Michael’s lands,” she said, each word spoken with slow deliberation. “The place where you keep getting turned into a tree, stabbed, and held captive. And you want to do it on purpose.”
“I’ve never had all three of those things happen at the same time, but yes,” I said.
“I was able to free one of Michael’s Riders from his control.
I don’t know how many more of them could still be saved, at least enough to return them to the state they were in before they Rode.
I may not be able to get most of them any closer to who they used to be.
But there are also trees who used to be children. They might be easier to rescue.”
Arden’s mismatched eyes momentarily widened. “Are you telling me we might still be able to bring some of the children Blind Michael stole home?”
“I don’t want to say that anywhere their remaining family members might hear me, but yes, there’s a chance,” I said. “I just need to go back.”
“And I am not allowing her to go without support, or at least someone to pull the knives out of her back should things go poorly,” said Tybalt, voice flat.
“She’s my knight. I can do this for her,” said Quentin. He was holding his own candle—more of a tealight, really—which he had bartered from the Luidaeg for the very fairy tale payment of bringing her rampion from one of the vegetable gardens studded around the skerry.
“I wanted a salad,” she’d said, when asked about the strangeness of her price.
“This isn’t really us asking for permission as much as it’s me telling you where we’re going,” I said.
“Duke Torquill holds my oaths. He’s already said he doesn’t mind.
I just needed you to know so you wouldn’t come looking for me if anything comes up in the next few days.
May is home with Miranda. She’ll be keeping an eye on the house until we’re back. ”
“All right,” said Arden, reluctantly. “I hope … I hope this goes as well as you want it to. I hope you can bring some of them back to us.”
“I hope so too,” I said.
“Open roads and kind fires, Sir Daye,” she said. “And to your companions, may all the winds that blow above us guide you.”
“We’ll be back soon,” I said, and tapped my candle with my thumb. The wick promptly lit itself, as did Tybalt and Quentin’s, and together, the three of us walked into the forming fog, back into the land of nightmares, to bring the lost and missing children home.
Being a hero’s not all bad.