Nine
IT DIDN’T TAKE LONG for me to recover my wits. I reached back with my free hand, tangling my fingers tightly through Tybalt’s.
“You need to stay with me, and stay on the path,” I said. “No matter what you think you see or hear out in the brambles, neither of us belongs to Maeve, and I wouldn’t put a little light trickery past the things that call this Road home. Understand?”
“You sound so calm,” he said, moving even closer to me. In contrast, he sounded entirely unsettled. “How do you sound so calm?”
“Because this is how I’ve felt every time you pulled me into shadow from the day we met,” I said.
“This Road doesn’t know or care for you, just like your Road doesn’t know or care for me.
We just keep moving forward, and we hope that given time, Faerie will realize we’re trying to do the right thing.
Sometimes that’s the only defense we have. ”
Tybalt nodded, the motion felt more than seen as his jaw brushed my hair. “So we keep going?”
“So we begin.”
I started walking, and Tybalt moved with me, our candles keeping us from walking with no idea what was in front of us.
As with every other time I’d been here, the path was something that could be followed.
It twisted and wound, but it was smooth and clear, and as long as we didn’t get too complacent and miss a root or something, we could keep moving forward without any real difficulty.
The thorns pressed close on all sides, presenting a constant danger, and while I wouldn’t normally worry overmuch about a thorn briar, I didn’t know whether these thorns in specific might have some sort of poison or magical defenses.
We had a cure for elf-shot. That didn’t mean we had a cure for whatever these briars might do.
Keeping this firmly in mind, I stepped carefully, and tried to maintain a steady pace, not creating any openings for the Road to exploit.
And everywhere, hanging over everything, was the smell of roses.
It was light at first, almost incidental, but it got heavier and thicker with every step we took, accompanied by a chilling in the air, like the season was shifting rapidly toward autumn.
I’m not ashamed to say that it took me a distressingly long time to realize why that might be happening.
I froze between one step and the next, foot still lifted to continue forward, and swore softly. Behind me, Tybalt tensed.
“What is it?” he asked. “What’s wrong?”
“We’re not alone,” I said. “I need you to keep walking, stay calm, and don’t let go of my hand.”
“Why not?” He sounded suddenly cautious, and honestly, that wasn’t the worst reaction he could have had.
“Because even though she’s asleep, I swear she can sense weakness.” I kept walking, and the air kept getting colder, until I saw ice forming on the nearby thorns.
Tybalt seemed to realize what that meant, because he hissed. Not the sharply indrawn breath of being cut by a Firstborn with a shell knife, but the true, furious hissing of a threatened feline.
“Exactly,” I said.
The thorns began thinning around us, pulling back as we entered a clearing.
Not just a clearing, the clearing, the one where Evening Winterrose—Eira Rosynhwyr—was sleeping away her term of enchantment.
She was down here so that no one could wake her, not without knowing where she was and convincing her sister to give them access.
Even this was closer to the rest of Faerie than I would have preferred.
Give me a nice maximum-security prison somewhere, a place with thick stone walls between her and everything else.
Maybe then I could trust that she’d stay gone.
Probably not, though.
The clearing spread out around us, circular and ringed in thorns, and I reminded myself that there was no better prison for the eldest daughter of Titania than a Road opened by Maeve for her children’s use.
Titania hadn’t even been able to reach the real Eira when she built her little fantasy world, and had been forced to create a stand-in, because this place was the next best thing to impermeable.
And at the center of the clearing, on a bier made of thorns, inside a coffin made of glass, was Eira Rosynhwyr.
As always, she was beautiful beyond measure, with skin as white as snow, hair as black as pitch, and lips as red as blood.
All the colors of the deepest winter, woven together into a singular figure whose face and form were crafted with equal perfection.
Hers was the kind of beauty that hurt the heart, that demanded comparisons that everyone else would inevitably fail.
Not that Eira cared. Awake or asleep, she was the most beautiful thing in the room, and that was all that had ever really mattered to her.
Not much of one for feelings, her. Or for playing fair.
She had been the one to create elf-shot, and was still unhappy about being affected by it.
The rest of us were meant to play by the rules, but not Eira.
Tybalt hissed through his teeth at the sight of her coffin. “How did she get this down here?” he demanded.
“She didn’t,” I replied. “Take a better look.”
He leaned closer to the bier, then swore under his breath as he saw the truth.
The glass panes of the coffin were ice, pure and shining and formed out of the chill in the air, the cold turned solid; the lines of metal connecting them were loops of briar, gone straight and dark with frost. Her coffin was made from the miasma of her presence, nothing more.
“I always wondered how those storytellers conceived of the glass coffin,” he said, finally. “Horrible thing that it is.”
“Every bit of this is horrible,” I said, and kept walking.
Tybalt stole several glances back at Eira as we passed her, but she didn’t move, sunk deep in her enchanted sleep, and the briars of her bier, while they twitched, didn’t reach out and grab for us, only twined protectively around their charge, restless as sleeping cats in the presence of predators.
The air began to warm again as the loops of thorn that surrounded the Road returned to their former profusion, closing on us from all sides, until we were walking down the narrow, hardpacked path that had led us here to begin with.
Our candles were still burning cleanly, barely an inch shorter than they’d been when this journey started. And we moved on.
After we’d been walking long enough that Eira’s clearing had faded into the distance, Tybalt leaned forward and asked, voice gone soft, “Are we sure the Luidaeg will see us home again?”
“We are,” I said. There was a time when I wouldn’t have been, but after everything we’d been through, the Luidaeg had more than earned my trust. She cared about me, in her own way, and even if she hadn’t, she cared about Miranda.
She loved that little girl as she could love very few of the reborn Roane, most of whom had been Selkies before they were bound to their new lives.
I’d heard from Diva and Elizabeth that she was spending more time at the shore, playing with the children who had never made the Selkie’s bargain, getting to know the foundations of her new descendant line, and I was happy for her.
She had been alone and hurting for so long, she deserved a little joy now that she had a chance of finding it.
But regardless of any of that, I trusted her to see me home, and back to my daughter.
I didn’t have a choice.
Tybalt made a noncommittal noise, but didn’t ask again, just walked close enough to me that I could smell the magic baking off his skin and feel the warmth of his body against my own.
I didn’t say anything about his proximity.
If anything, I was glad to have him close.
I didn’t marry him because I didn’t want him nearby.
The thorns began to thin again, becoming something less densely tangled.
A few clusters of heavy fruit, similar to but not identical to blackberries, began to appear in the nearby shadows.
I glanced at them but left them alone. Even the fae shouldn’t eat faerie fruit without knowing what it is.
It didn’t smell as compellingly delicious as goblin fruit, but that didn’t mean it wouldn’t do me harm in some other unpredictable way.
Then the thorns fell away before us, and we were stepping out onto a large, flat space, mud packed down until it became barely softer than stone, and facing a tall wall made of tree trunks bound together and stabbing into the sky.
Torches had been mounted on the outside of the wall, and their flame was flickering, orange, and smoky.
I looked up, seeing neither window nor watchtower.
Tybalt stopped beside me, scowling. “Now what are we intended to do?” he asked.
“Get inside, I assume.” I stepped forward, hammering the side of my fist against the wooden wall. “Hello, the watch!” I shouted. “This is Sir October Daye, sent by Antigone of Albany, here to speak with the Lady of the Skerry!”
My words echoed like I’d been shouting down a well, distorted and louder than they should have been, then faded as they were swallowed by the night. I stepped back again.
Tybalt looked at me. “Was that the desired result?”
“Yes. No. I don’t really know what I was hoping for. Maybe a door opening and someone popping out to invite us inside? That would be a nice start.”
Nothing happened. I made a grumbling noise and started walking down the length of the wall, looking for a door, a gate, any sort of variance that might indicate a way inside. There weren’t any. It was just a solid wooden barrier, extending from here to forever.
Finally, frustrated, I stopped under one of the torches and thrust my candle upward, the flame licking against the base of the torch itself.
Tybalt made an interrogative noise, but cut himself off before he could form actual words.
And the flames on the torch leapt higher, while the smaller flame atop my candle did its best to set the wood alight.
Tybalt gasped. “Toby. Look.”