Ashes of Honor
Page 57

“Just stay on my shoulder and hold on,” I said, and began to walk. Tybalt kept pace beside me. Our fingers, still clenched around the stem of Luna’s rose, were tangled up enough that we were almost holding hands, if your definition was generous enough. I found myself wishing for a generous definition. Ears red, I tore my eyes away from the rose and looked toward the Luidaeg’s charm, instead.
It was still glowing starlight neutral.
“I hope Quentin’s having better luck than I am,” I said.
Raj meowed.
“He’s back at Tamed Lightning, waiting to see if Chelsea—that’s the girl who accidentally knocked you into Annwn, and she’s going to be really sorry, once she stops being freaked out and ripping holes in everything—shows up there. He’ll call me if she does.” Both my hands were full. I frowned and added, “Not that I’m sure how I’m going to answer my phone if that happens.”
“Always the practical one,” said Tybalt. He stopped walking, pulling me to a halt as well. “This is where we entered.”
“Are you sure?”
He shot me an amused look. “I find it refreshing when I notice the smell of blood before you do, little fish. It reminds me of old times.”
“I don’t think I enjoyed them as much as you did,” I shot back, and breathed in. Now that I was looking, I could see splashes of blood on the thorns, and smell the mingled traces of Tybalt and myself. “How do we get out of here?”
Tybalt considered for a moment before he said, “Let go.”
It made sense. It fit what Luna had told us to do. I still frowned before nodding. “I guess so,” I said, and opened my hand. Tybalt did the same, and we watched as the rose fell, a little more slowly than normal—gravity apparently doesn’t work the same way on magical roses—to land on the thorny ground.
Then the Rose Road collapsed around us, fading into nothing in an instant, and we were back on the lawn at Shadowed Hills, standing on a low hill. The vegetable garden was in front of us, and even the clean air of the Summerlands smelled dirty somehow, tainted by proximity to the mortal world. After Annwn, the pristine seemed polluted.
Tybalt reached out with his bloody left hand and wrapped it around my bloody right one, this time twining our fingers properly, with no rose to get in the way. My cuts were already healing. His weren’t, and he held me all the same. Raj was purring again; the Luidaeg’s charm was still glowing pale and inert.
“Well,” I said, looking at the garden, where Luna and her staff were still working. “That’s not something I do every day.”
Tybalt just laughed.
SEVENTEEN
LUNA LOOKED UP before scrambling to her feet, nearly upsetting her basket of strawberries. “You’re back!” she exclaimed. Her gaze flicked to our bloody hands, then to the cat sitting on my shoulder. Where her eyes settled, however, was on the sprig of broom behind my ear. Her skin was already the stark white of newly fallen snow. Somehow, she still managed to go pale.
“Where have you been?” she asked, voice down to a whisper.
“Annwn.” I didn’t have any hands free, and so I had to disentangle my fingers from Tybalt’s in order to reach up and pluck the broom from my hair. I held it out toward Luna. “No people, lots of hedges.”
Her fingers trembled as she walked forward and took the broom from me. “This isn’t possible,” she said. Her head snapped up. “It isn’t possible.”
“We have a Tuatha changeling tearing holes in things,” I said. That seemed safe enough. She wasn’t going to jump straight from “Tuatha changeling” to “Etienne.” I wouldn’t have. Sylvester might, if Luna told him about this, but it was a risk I had to take. “Raj got sucked through one of those holes. That’s why we needed the Rose Road. We were hoping we could find a way to track him if we could get between the Summerlands and the islets. We found it.”
“Mixing magic often has its unexpected rewards,” said Tybalt.
Luna didn’t say anything for several minutes, but her eyes were suspiciously bright as she stared at the sprig of broom. Finally, she said, “I was there when Grandfather evacuated Annwn. It was never a populous land; most of those who lived there immigrated to escape their lives in other, more rigidly ruled places. They wept when the walls were sealed. I think some of them are crying still…” She shook herself as though she was trying to clear away a memory she’d never wanted to keep. “You shouldn’t have been there. Those doors were sealed for a reason.”
I looked at her—my liege’s wife, a woman I once thought of as a second mother—and all I felt was tired. The fractures between us started forming when she knowingly sent me to die in her father’s land. They’ve only grown deeper since then. Luna comes from a different Faerie, an older one, and I don’t understand it. It’s as alien to me as the Summerlands would be to Bridget. Watching Luna’s reaction to a bit of broken broom, I realized I was glad. I didn’t want to understand that world.
“My nephew was on the other side of those doors,” said Tybalt frostily. “I was not willing to leave him stranded to salve your sense of what is and is not proper.” He turned to me. “I should return him to my Court. His father will be worried.”
“I’m coming with you,” I said, almost before I realized I was going to. Tybalt blinked. I smiled. “I need a way back to Tamed Lightning, remember? I left the car there.”
“Ah, yes,” he said. “Expediency.”
“October, surely you can’t intend—” began Luna.
I looked back toward her. “Luna, I am begging you, think before you finish that sentence. I’m tired, I’m covered in blood, and I’m probably not going to get a nap for a long time. So don’t tell me not to rattle any more doors looking for our missing changeling. I owe it to her parents to bring her home.” To her parents, and to Faerie itself if the Luidaeg was correct in her warnings.
Luna frowned, rose-pink eyebrows furrowing. “You should leave well enough alone.”
Frustration overwhelmed my good sense, and I snapped, “Raj wound up on the other side of those doors because of the changeling I’m looking for. You say your grandfather sealed those doors? Well, she’s unsealing them, and she’s going to get a lot of people killed if I don’t stop her.” Luna gaped at me, and she was still gaping as I offered my hand to Tybalt. “Let’s go.”