Ashes of Honor
Page 55
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“Dammit, Tybalt! What gives?”
“I’m afraid I owe you an apology,” said Tybalt, eyes wide. He held up his ball of shadow. Ball of mostly shadow—swirls of bluish light were moving through it, appearing and disappearing like eels swimming in brackish water. “He’s near. Not here, but…near.”
“Where?”
Tybalt nodded toward the nearest tangled wall of rosebushes. “That way.”
“Then let’s go.”
He shot me a surprised look.
I smiled. “I trust you. Now open up those shadows, and let’s bring our boy home.”
Tybalt nodded. Pulling back, he threw his ball of shadow at the roses. It stuck where it hit. Then it dissolved, blackness spreading over branches, thorns, and flowers alike to create a black “doorway” in the wall. I could feel the chill radiating out of it.
There was a time when Tybalt only got me into the shadows by surprising me or jerking me off-balance. That time has passed. I walked with him into the dark willingly, the rose still joining our hands. For a moment, the light of the Rose Road shone in from behind us, illuminating nothing, but making that nothing a little easier to see. Then the way behind us closed, and everything was blackness.
We stopped walking and just stood there in the dark, not moving. I forced myself not to breathe and tried not to shiver too hard. The cold of the Shadow Roads was somehow worse when we held still, as though that immobility really allowed the frost to catch hold and begin gnawing its way inside. Even the blood on my fingers was freezing; I could feel it turning to ice.
Finally Tybalt whispered, “This way,” and pulled me forward. There was a horrible wrenching, twisting sensation, as if the shadows were pushing back against us, as if we were going somewhere we weren’t meant to be. It became almost painful, and still Tybalt kept pulling me forward. I gritted my teeth and kept going, trusting him to know what he was doing. The twisting became a tearing, and the cold became a burn, and just as I was about to scream—
—the darkness broke around us, and the tearing sensation stopped.
Tybalt dropped my hand, letting go of the rose in the process, and bent forward to rest his hands against his knees, panting. I straightened and looked around, still holding the rose. We were…I didn’t know where we were. We were someplace I had never been before. There was one thing I knew, though, all the way down to the core of my being.
This wasn’t the Summerlands.
The sky was the deep, impenetrable blue of true midnight. The stars were bright; I didn’t know any of the constellations. We were near the edge of a cliff; I could see more cliffs gleaming white as bone to either side, descending sharply to the equally white beaches below. They contrasted well with the absolute blackness of the ocean beneath them. Far out on the bay, a lighthouse swept its light smoothly across the waves.
“Where the fuck are we?” I breathed.
“I don’t know,” wheezed Tybalt. “Remind me to beat my nephew for making us come here.”
“No,” I said. I turned to look behind us. The land stretched into a wide moor. Beyond that, hills, some crowned with the familiar, irregular shapes of castles. The air smelled like heather, flowering bloom, peat, and the sea. What it didn’t smell like was the modern world. No pollution, no smog, no traces of combustion engines. Wherever we were, it was a place that had been sealed away long before the technological revolution changed things. “I get to beat him. I figured out how to get us here. That means I have dibs.”
“Why are you an adherent to logic only when it results in the commission of violence?”
“What can I say? I know what I like.” I turned again, this time continuing until I’d completed a slow circle. The lighthouse turned, the waves swept in and out, the sedge on the moor rippled in the breeze…but that was all. Nothing else moved, nothing else stirred. “You’re the one who can sense Raj’s location. Where is he?”
“You make me sound like a machine.”
“You complain when I use you like a bloodhound. This is a step up.” The thorns on Luna’s rose were sharp enough to be a distraction. I pushed it into the tangled mess that was my hair, forcing it down until the flower snagged and refused to move farther. That would keep it until we needed it again.
Tybalt chuckled, still sounding winded, and pushed himself upright. He looked around thoughtfully before stepping away from me, moving off the hard-packed sand at the cliff’s edge to the border of the moor. He bent, plucking a yellow-flowered sprig of broom. “I know where we are,” he said, a wondering edge to his voice. He straightened, turning to offer me the broom like it was the most precious thing the world had ever known. “This is incredible.”
I took the broom—it would have been rude not to—and tucked it behind my ear before asking, “Well? Where are we?”
He stepped closer. The hot smell of pennyroyal and musk baking off his skin overwhelmed even the smell of the sea. “Annwn,” he whispered. “We’re in Annwn.”
My eyes widened as I swallowed my instinctive denial. Chelsea was weakening the walls of the world. The Rose Roads followed their own rules. Who was to say that right now, with all those factors working together, we couldn’t get around the gates Oberon had erected and find our way someplace we absolutely weren’t supposed to be?
Annwn was one of the deep realms. It used to be accessible by sea from half a dozen other homelands and by gate from a few more. It was a port country, worked by seafaring folk, ferrymen and sailors and traders who liked the unpredictability of the land, as wild as the Firstborn who made it, Arawn of the White Stag. It was a verdant farmland, one of the few deep realms that ever knew seasons. And no one had walked there or breathed its heather-sweet air in over five hundred years.
“Whoa,” I said.
“Yes. Very much ‘whoa.’” Tybalt turned, scanning the landscape. Then he pointed out into the moor and said, “There. That’s where we need to go.”
“Because Raj is there or because you want to watch me go tromping around in a field full of sticker bushes?”
He smiled a little, still looking tired. “Oh, don’t be silly, October. This is Annwn. There will almost certainly be thistles.”
“This gets better and better,” I said, and together we tromped into the heather.
We were on a mission—the glow of the Luidaeg’s charm was a constant reminder—but it was hard not to get distracted by the sheer alien novelty of the landscape, a place as unfamiliar to me now as the Summerlands were, when I was a little girl, I could have spent hours just looking at the stars, trying to guess what the people who used to live here made of them. Instead, we had to keep walking, fording through the waist-high brush as we tried to find the place where Raj had gone to ground.
“I’m afraid I owe you an apology,” said Tybalt, eyes wide. He held up his ball of shadow. Ball of mostly shadow—swirls of bluish light were moving through it, appearing and disappearing like eels swimming in brackish water. “He’s near. Not here, but…near.”
“Where?”
Tybalt nodded toward the nearest tangled wall of rosebushes. “That way.”
“Then let’s go.”
He shot me a surprised look.
I smiled. “I trust you. Now open up those shadows, and let’s bring our boy home.”
Tybalt nodded. Pulling back, he threw his ball of shadow at the roses. It stuck where it hit. Then it dissolved, blackness spreading over branches, thorns, and flowers alike to create a black “doorway” in the wall. I could feel the chill radiating out of it.
There was a time when Tybalt only got me into the shadows by surprising me or jerking me off-balance. That time has passed. I walked with him into the dark willingly, the rose still joining our hands. For a moment, the light of the Rose Road shone in from behind us, illuminating nothing, but making that nothing a little easier to see. Then the way behind us closed, and everything was blackness.
We stopped walking and just stood there in the dark, not moving. I forced myself not to breathe and tried not to shiver too hard. The cold of the Shadow Roads was somehow worse when we held still, as though that immobility really allowed the frost to catch hold and begin gnawing its way inside. Even the blood on my fingers was freezing; I could feel it turning to ice.
Finally Tybalt whispered, “This way,” and pulled me forward. There was a horrible wrenching, twisting sensation, as if the shadows were pushing back against us, as if we were going somewhere we weren’t meant to be. It became almost painful, and still Tybalt kept pulling me forward. I gritted my teeth and kept going, trusting him to know what he was doing. The twisting became a tearing, and the cold became a burn, and just as I was about to scream—
—the darkness broke around us, and the tearing sensation stopped.
Tybalt dropped my hand, letting go of the rose in the process, and bent forward to rest his hands against his knees, panting. I straightened and looked around, still holding the rose. We were…I didn’t know where we were. We were someplace I had never been before. There was one thing I knew, though, all the way down to the core of my being.
This wasn’t the Summerlands.
The sky was the deep, impenetrable blue of true midnight. The stars were bright; I didn’t know any of the constellations. We were near the edge of a cliff; I could see more cliffs gleaming white as bone to either side, descending sharply to the equally white beaches below. They contrasted well with the absolute blackness of the ocean beneath them. Far out on the bay, a lighthouse swept its light smoothly across the waves.
“Where the fuck are we?” I breathed.
“I don’t know,” wheezed Tybalt. “Remind me to beat my nephew for making us come here.”
“No,” I said. I turned to look behind us. The land stretched into a wide moor. Beyond that, hills, some crowned with the familiar, irregular shapes of castles. The air smelled like heather, flowering bloom, peat, and the sea. What it didn’t smell like was the modern world. No pollution, no smog, no traces of combustion engines. Wherever we were, it was a place that had been sealed away long before the technological revolution changed things. “I get to beat him. I figured out how to get us here. That means I have dibs.”
“Why are you an adherent to logic only when it results in the commission of violence?”
“What can I say? I know what I like.” I turned again, this time continuing until I’d completed a slow circle. The lighthouse turned, the waves swept in and out, the sedge on the moor rippled in the breeze…but that was all. Nothing else moved, nothing else stirred. “You’re the one who can sense Raj’s location. Where is he?”
“You make me sound like a machine.”
“You complain when I use you like a bloodhound. This is a step up.” The thorns on Luna’s rose were sharp enough to be a distraction. I pushed it into the tangled mess that was my hair, forcing it down until the flower snagged and refused to move farther. That would keep it until we needed it again.
Tybalt chuckled, still sounding winded, and pushed himself upright. He looked around thoughtfully before stepping away from me, moving off the hard-packed sand at the cliff’s edge to the border of the moor. He bent, plucking a yellow-flowered sprig of broom. “I know where we are,” he said, a wondering edge to his voice. He straightened, turning to offer me the broom like it was the most precious thing the world had ever known. “This is incredible.”
I took the broom—it would have been rude not to—and tucked it behind my ear before asking, “Well? Where are we?”
He stepped closer. The hot smell of pennyroyal and musk baking off his skin overwhelmed even the smell of the sea. “Annwn,” he whispered. “We’re in Annwn.”
My eyes widened as I swallowed my instinctive denial. Chelsea was weakening the walls of the world. The Rose Roads followed their own rules. Who was to say that right now, with all those factors working together, we couldn’t get around the gates Oberon had erected and find our way someplace we absolutely weren’t supposed to be?
Annwn was one of the deep realms. It used to be accessible by sea from half a dozen other homelands and by gate from a few more. It was a port country, worked by seafaring folk, ferrymen and sailors and traders who liked the unpredictability of the land, as wild as the Firstborn who made it, Arawn of the White Stag. It was a verdant farmland, one of the few deep realms that ever knew seasons. And no one had walked there or breathed its heather-sweet air in over five hundred years.
“Whoa,” I said.
“Yes. Very much ‘whoa.’” Tybalt turned, scanning the landscape. Then he pointed out into the moor and said, “There. That’s where we need to go.”
“Because Raj is there or because you want to watch me go tromping around in a field full of sticker bushes?”
He smiled a little, still looking tired. “Oh, don’t be silly, October. This is Annwn. There will almost certainly be thistles.”
“This gets better and better,” I said, and together we tromped into the heather.
We were on a mission—the glow of the Luidaeg’s charm was a constant reminder—but it was hard not to get distracted by the sheer alien novelty of the landscape, a place as unfamiliar to me now as the Summerlands were, when I was a little girl, I could have spent hours just looking at the stars, trying to guess what the people who used to live here made of them. Instead, we had to keep walking, fording through the waist-high brush as we tried to find the place where Raj had gone to ground.
