Three
MAY WAS MORE THAN happy to keep Miranda for the evening, and from the way Miranda yanked May’s hair and burbled, she was more than happy to be kept.
Tybalt got dressed and gathered clothes for me while I sat down in the nursing chair with a breast pump to refill Miranda’s supply of ready-meals, a process I didn’t enjoy but was grateful to have as an option.
Having experienced both feeding Gillian when I was more human and now feeding Miranda, I could say decisively that breastfeeding when you heal almost instantly was infinitely preferable to the alternative.
When I was ready to get up, Tybalt had jeans and a black tank top waiting, along with clean undergarments and a pair of sneakers with minimal bloodstains on them.
That was part of how I knew I’d married the right man.
In Faerie, with its weird fixation on putting me into a ballgown whenever possible, I had managed to find a man who liked me better in denim and cotton than he did in silk and lace.
I mean, he liked me best when I wasn’t bleeding, and he’d figured out that clothes I could move in helped to reduce the number of times I got stabbed.
I dressed quickly, retrieving my knives from the bottom of my underwear drawer and my leather jacket from the back of the door.
The jacket had been a semi-intentional gift from Tybalt, a loan when we’d been barely allies, much less friends, which had somehow managed to become permanent.
The knives were gifts as well, two large enough to belt at my waist and use in close combat, one smaller and so impossibly sharp that it could cut through almost anything.
Oh, and did I mention that one was made from Oberon’s antler, while the smallest had been a gift from the sea witch?
Yeah. When it comes to knives, I’m pretty well prepared.
Pretty well prepared, and incredibly grateful that our only resident small child wasn’t walking yet. I’d need to find a more-secure storage spot before too much longer. I shrugged my jacket on and left the room to find my husband and get moving on.
Tybalt was in the living room, lounging on the couch in front of the darkened television.
Spike was next to him, no longer small enough to fit in his lap and smart enough not to force the issue while being covered entirely in thorns.
It was cat-sized when it came to live with me.
These days, it’s closer in size to a border collie, although it’s still cat-shaped, in addition to being a construct of living rose thorns that rattles like a castanet when it moves.
It lifted its head to look at me, bright yellow eyes narrowed with contentment.
“Yes, buddy, you have your people,” I said, leaning down to run a hand over its head, careful to stroke with the grain of the thorns, rather than against. I heal fast, but pain still hurts.
“I know that’s what you like best of all.
We’re going to head over to Shadowed Hills so I can talk to Sylvester. You want to come with us?”
I’ve never been entirely sure just how smart Spike is. It understands English well enough to follow basic commands—and sometimes not so basic commands, depending on its mood. It protects its people, and it’s managed to lead me out of a few tight spots. It looked at me, cocked its head, and chirped.
“No, Miranda’s staying here with May,” I said, guessing from the way it was looking at my empty arms that it was asking about the baby.
It met my eyes and shook itself, rattling loudly.
“Suit yourself,” I said. “Tybalt, I’m ready. You going to ride with me or get there on your own?”
“I was rather hoping, since it was just the two of us, that we could take a route not involving cars,” he said. “It’s been a while since we’ve run the Shadow Roads together.”
“Yeah, because the Shadow Roads don’t think I need air.”
“They like you better now, since you’ve traveled them under your own power.”
I paused to inhale. “Tybalt, roads having opinions about me is one of the last things I need. I already have to contend with buildings having opinions about me. Can we skip the deep philosophy if I agree to take the shadows with you?”
He smiled, looking smug as he rose from the couch. “I’m sorry. All I heard just now was ‘Yes, Tybalt, we can take the Shadow Roads.’”
“Yes, Tybalt, we can take the Shadow Roads,” I said obligingly, and he stepped closer, sweeping me into his arms with a single practiced motion, holding me so close that I could smell the pennyroyal-and-musk scent of his magic.
With a quick grin that exposed the tips of his fangs, he stepped backward, into the shadow cast by the edge of the couch.
It should have been too small to cover us both, but as soon as he entered it, it expanded, unfolding and spreading like a curtain, until we were suspended in absolute darkness and unending cold.
Why do the Shadow Roads have to do their best impression of the endless void of space?
I don’t know. I know they have structure; I’ve seen the spells that craft and control them, and there are walls, a ceiling, a floor.
But you’d never know it to look at them.
Only Cait Sidhe can see in the space occupied by the Shadow Roads.
More importantly, only Cait Side can breathe there.
I kept my mouth tightly shut and flexed my nostrils like I was underwater, keeping the air I already had inside me where it belonged.
Me still cradled in his arms, Tybalt broke into a run.
I closed my eyes and snuggled against him, trusting him to get us where we needed to go.
He understood the shadows and how to navigate them better than anyone else in the kingdom, and by this point, we were both used to the process of transporting me.
The cold was still less extreme than it used to be, although I wouldn’t call it any warmer.
It was a fascinating contradiction, and it gave me something to think about that wasn’t my impending conversation—my thoughts kept trying to call it a confrontation, which I absolutely refused to allow—with my semi-estranged liege.
It didn’t help that Titania’s version of Faerie had muddied the already-murky waters between us, rewriting our relationship to be “depressed, mentally collapsing uncle and browbeaten niece with chronically low self-esteem,” rather than our usual “liege lord and knight.” In her world, we’d been close—I’d been some of the only family he had left in the world, and he’d been one of the few people who treated me like I almost actually mattered.
But in this world, he’d lied to me and hidden truths about my own identity like they were his to conceal, like I didn’t need to know who and what I really was.
Things would have been so much easier for me if I hadn’t spent so much time trying to force my magic to behave like I was a Daoine Sidhe.
Daoine Sidhe pull their magic from flowers; I pull mine from blood.
The three root sources of fae power vary and blend, but what you can do is very much dependent on where your magic stems from.
Sylvester watched for years as I struggled with flower magic, and never told me why I was so incapable of mastering it.
He chose my mother’s secrets over my well-being.
And for that, I might never be able to forgive him. I don’t like being lied to.
But I might not have allowed myself to be angry about the ways he’d failed me if he hadn’t pushed me away at his wife’s request. Everything was so tangled with us, so twisted up and tied together.
I wasn’t sure there was a clean way out of the labyrinth that was our past together, both actual and imagined.
I loved him. I was so angry with him that I could scream.
And both those states existed at the same time, and both of them made it impossible for the other to fade away.
My lungs were just starting to burn, and I could feel the unpleasantly familiar sensation of ice freezing my eyelashes together, when I felt Tybalt slow down, then jump.
He landed in a place where there was air, and a soft, warm breeze that rubbed against my cheek like a welcoming hand.
I squirmed enough to free one of my hands, beginning to wipe the ice out of my eyes even as he was setting me on my feet.
I wiped the last of the ice away and opened my eyes, unsurprised to find that we were in Paso Nogal, the mortal park that hosts the door to Shadowed Hills.
Knowes occupy physical space; it’s just not necessarily physical space in the mortal world.
They’re built in the Summerlands, where they can be grand halls, manor houses, even palaces.
But the main body of the knowe itself is sort of burrowed into the substance between the Summerlands and Earth, occupying all three places and none of them at the same time.
They’re all anchored to points on the human side of things, usually hills and forested groves and the like, to keep them from crumbling into the void between worlds.
Door in the human world, physical shell in the fae world, ever-shifting, geometrically negotiable substance in the membrane between worlds. Make sense?
No, not to me, either. There’s a reason I’m a Hero, and not a knowe-weaver.
But we can’t have humans just stumbling into our hollow hills, which is why most of them require the physical equivalent of a graduate-level riddle to access if you’re starting from the mortal world. I looked to Tybalt. “Are we outside because they changed the wards?”
To my surprise and relief, he shook his head. “No,” he said. “I just thought it might be better to approach as guests, not simply to trample our way inside. Since we’re attempting to appeal to the Duke’s good nature.”
“All right,” I said. “Follow me.”