A Red Rose Chain

ELEVEN

I TURNED AND STALKED OUT of the receiving room, leaving King Rhys’ terrible proposal unanswered. Tybalt and Walther were close behind me. We walked in silence until we turned the corner of the hall, passing out of sight of the guards on the door. Tybalt looked at me. I nodded, and he grabbed us both—me by the arm, Walther by the collar—before yanking us onto the Shadow Roads.

We emerged less than a minute later on a narrow pathway lined with pine trees. Walther pulled away and Tybalt let him go, watching with some interest as the alchemist staggered, wheezing, to lean against the nearest evergreen. He didn’t look as frozen as I was, just winded, which leant some credence to my belief that Tylwyth Teg were self-defrosting. It was the only way to explain the stunts they could pull with yarrow branches not ending in frostbite or worse.

Tybalt looked at me gravely, studying my face, before pulling me into an embrace that lasted longer than we’d been on the Shadow Roads.

“That could have gone better,” said Walther, voice still strained from the lack of oxygen. His words seemed to break some temporary spell of peace, bringing us crashing back into a world where time was passing and I had to start thinking about the future.

Damn. Sometimes it was nice to have a few minutes where all I had to do was live in the past. Now I had to go back to living in the present, and since the present seemed to want me dead—again—I would have been just as happy to put that off for a little longer.

I pulled away from Tybalt, turning to face Walther. “I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised,” I said. “We all knew she was here. We knew she’d kill me if she could. I just didn’t expect her to be quite so blatant about it.”

“The ways of the Divided Courts grow more distasteful by the hour,” said Tybalt. “It is a pity you cannot, as you say, introduce a thing that is not present into the blood. I would beg you to come and be a cat with me, and leave this terrible way of doing things behind.”

“I never thought that would sound so tempting.” I tried to run my hand through my hair, only to run into the braids May had put in it earlier. I groaned instead. “I don’t think we should be talking out here. It’s too open.”

“Yes, exactly,” said Walther. “Being out in the open is a form of protection. It’s hard as hell to cast listening charms on living trees, and I haven’t seen any pixies. That means they’d need stationary stones, which I can check for, or something else.”

“I can think of what that something else might be,” I said slowly. “Tybalt, why are we here, specifically? Instead of back in the room?”

“I was aiming for familiarity, and the roads here are not yet as known to me as I would prefer,” he said. “I thought the door would open on something that belonged to one of us.”

I paused, looking at him flatly. “Okay, wow. I knew the Shadow Roads were sort of an art, rather than a science, but I don’t think I needed to know they were that much of an art.”

Tybalt smiled. “As long as we come out of the dark each time, why should you be concerned?”

“I don’t even know where to start.” I walked over to the edge of the brush and knelt, peering into the green. Had something moved in there? It was difficult to tell. “You can come out now,” I said. “We’re not going to hurt you.”

“Who are you talking to?” asked Walther.

“Something else,” I said, and made a little clucking noise with my tongue. “Come on out.”

And they came.

Only one at first, pink-thorned and purple eyed, like something out of a very strange Lisa Frank painting. But three more were close behind it, and three more close behind them, until rose goblins were pouring out of the brush. They rattled their thorns and made inquisitive chirping noises as they surrounded us, sniffing at Walther and Tybalt’s ankles, and at basically everything I had, since I was still crouched almost to their level. Most were within the “housecat” range, size-wise, although a few were substantially larger, big enough to look like exceedingly strange dogs.

“Well,” said Tybalt, sounding faintly nonplussed.

“Told you Spike wanted to check out the locals,” said Walther. He knelt, offering his fingers to one of the larger rose goblins. It sniffed them cautiously before making a delighted chirping noise and leaping into his arms. Walther made an “oof” noise, but managed to catch the rose goblin before its thorns could shred his shirt. He stood, now holding the outsized, thorny creature against his chest. “Well, hello to you, too.”

The rose goblin—which was the same mossy green as peat, with eyes the color of yarrow flowers—pressed itself against his chest, making a happy chirping noise. I raised an eyebrow.

“It seems to know you.”

“Probably because it does,” said Walther, stroking the goblin’s head. “Rose goblins live until something kills them. For this fellow to be the size it is, it must be a few centuries old. So yes, you have this sort of size to look forward to from your Spike.”

“Oh, goody,” I said mildly. “I assume I’m correct in calling the rose goblins the ‘something else’ that Rhys is going to use to listen in on us out here?”

“Probably,” said Walther, and gave his goblin’s head another careful stroke. The goblin chirped happily. “There used to be a few Dryads on the groundskeeping staff. Since no one cuts down a Dryad’s tree if they can avoid it, I’m assuming they’re still here. They’d be able to translate what the rose goblins say, and they’re too naïve for anyone to think that they’re lying.”

“Right,” I said. Most Dryads were more interested in being trees than they were in being people. They weren’t stupid, but they were . . . distracted might be the best word. Constantly distracted by the strange situations that came with the incarnate condition, and always keeping half their minds back in their tree. Our friend April was a Dryad who didn’t have those issues, but she was also half computer, which made her a bad model to go on. “Is there any way we can convince the rose goblins not to tell the Dryads what we talk about out here? We could go back to the room, but . . .”

“But if we’re constantly walling ourselves up in there, Rhys is going to figure out that we’re up to something, and he’s going to come looking,” said Walther. “Give me a second.”

“You speak rose goblin?” I asked. I was starting to feel like I needed a list of who could and couldn’t interrogate my house pets.

His smile was brief, and amused. “Not quite. But the ones here in Silences . . . we have ways around language.” This time, he sat down on the path, still holding the large rose goblin against his chest. Once he was settled, he transferred it to his lap and began digging through his vest.

Tybalt put a hand on my arm. I glanced at him. He nodded toward the other side of the path. I nodded in turn, and followed him away from Walther and the gathering of goblins, stopping just before the trees took over. We were still close enough to be together, but by lowering our voices, we could at least pretend to a modicum of privacy.

“Are you all right?” asked Tybalt.

I laughed, unsteadily. “Let’s see. The woman we thought was done threatening my life and transforming my jeans into elaborate formalwear is not only still in the business of doing both, but she’s managed to produce a King who’ll back her up—and oh, right, they want to take me apart.”

“You cannot allow them to do this thing, of course,” said Tybalt, matter-of-factly.

“Right, I—” I paused, blinking at him. He had sounded so calm, like we were talking about where to go for lunch, and not whether I was going to be brutally murdered over the course of several days in order to prevent a war. “What?”

“All my many personal objections aside—and they are many, beginning with my disinterest in marrying a corpse, and continuing onward from there—you cannot allow the king of a demesne famed for its alchemists to have access to any part of your body. Even if your escape requires leaving one or more of us behind, you can’t.”

Tybalt sounded so serious, and so upset, that I couldn’t say anything to that. I just stared at him.

He sighed, shaking his head. “I’d tell you to run, if I thought we could get away with it. I’d say to gather up our people, and those things which we cannot bear to lose, and flee for the hills. Do you not understand what they could make of you?”

“I’m starting to,” I said, in a very small voice.

Blood-workers—like me, like the Daoine Sidhe—could sometimes “borrow” the magical talents of others through judicious sampling of their blood. Tap a vein and hey, presto, suddenly we could teleport, or transform, or do any number of other things that didn’t come naturally. For us, blood was the ultimate wonder drug, opening all doors and removing all barriers—as long as it was the right blood. But it had its limitations. I had never yet been able to borrow magic from blood that wasn’t coming straight out of a living person. I could awaken memories in dried blood, but that was about it; anything more complicated than a few flashes of the past was beyond me. If you wanted to preserve the magic in a person’s blood, or better yet, if you wanted to make that magic accessible to anyone, not just your local blood-workers, you needed something special.

You needed an alchemist.

Alchemists could “freeze” the magic in blood, refining and strengthening it until they found themselves in possession of potions, charms, and powders capable of lending that initial magic to someone else. With a good enough alchemist on your side, you no longer needed a blood-worker: all the magic of Faerie could be at your fingertips for as long as you wanted it to be. And my blood held the power to rewrite a person’s heritage.

Not enough to make humans out of purebloods or vice-versa, but enough to weaken changelings, turn them human or fae on your whim; enough to strengthen or resolve the confusion that already existed in a mixed-blood’s veins. Both changeling madness and the instability that sometimes came for those with exceedingly mixed heritages were functions of the blood. With fae, you’re not dealing with issues of race; you’re dealing with issues of species, completely dissimilar creatures that could, thanks to magic, somehow interbreed. Children of Maeve reproducing with children of Titania wasn’t like apples mixing with oranges—it was more like apples mixing with cheese graters, or rainbows with hardware stores.

Magic was enough to make the way Faerie worked possible, but magic couldn’t necessarily make it functional. Changeling madness was proof of that. Mixed-bloods had just as many issues—more, in my experience—but we didn’t talk about them as much, because they were still pure fae, and that made it a politically sensitive subject. Give King Rhys and his nameless mistress access to my blood, and they could parlay it into control of Faerie. I meant that literally. Anyone with human heritage would be in danger of being turned mortal. Anyone who had made peace with the balance of their blood would be at risk of having that peace ripped away.

Much like I had ripped the false Queen’s peace away, such as it had been, when I had reached in and unraveled the delicate tapestry of her heritage. I still didn’t feel bad about that—she had brought it on herself, in the truest meaning of the phrase—but I was starting to feel bad about what it had revealed to her. She knew how to hurt us now. She knew how to hurt everyone.

“Oh, oak and ash,” I said, with a shake of my head. “We can’t let them have me.”

“Or May,” said Tybalt. “I dare say they would be able to do fascinating things with the blood of your lady Fetch, given that there’s nothing else like her in all of Faerie. Whether those things did them any good at all would doubtless matter little to May, after she had been exsanguinated for their pleasure.”

Across the path, Walther stood. I switched my attention to him. It was better than dwelling on Tybalt’s uncomfortable, if accurate, words. “What’s up?” I asked, loudly enough to be heard.

“The rose goblins here remember me, which is always nice,” said Walther. “I was starting to feel like a ghost.” He was still holding the big one against his chest. The others surged around his ankles, moving like a strange and landlocked tide. Some of them were stropping up against him, using the odd, hopping dolphin-like stance that Spike always used when it wanted to show affection without actually breaking my skin.

“That’s weird,” I said, trying to keep my tone neutral. “I’m used to people being a little better with the visual perception.”

Walther looked faintly uncomfortable. “I didn’t grow up the way people expected me to is all. Anyway: the rose goblins remember me, they’re not huge fans of the new management, and they’ll keep whatever we say secret from King Rhys. In exchange, they’d really like your rose goblin to come out and play. They don’t get to meet many cuttings from Luna.”

Cuttings . . . I blinked. “That’s right: rose goblins are cuttings from a Blodynbryd. Luna’s the only one I’ve ever met. Who did these come from?”

“Me,” said a light, pleasant voice, faintly accented with the echoes of Wales. Its owner followed it out of the trees a heartbeat later, stepping out onto the path and offering a dazzling smile in my direction. “Hello. It’s lovely to meet you.”

She was tall, slim, and facially so similar to Luna that I would have known them as sisters even if there’d been some other option. Her skin was a fascinating shade of silvery purple, and her hair was almost exactly the same shade at the root. It darkened as it fell down her back in a waterfall of curls, ending in a purple deep enough to seem virtually black. Her eyes were bright pink, the color of primroses, with a thin ring of pollen yellow around the irises.

“Um, hi,” I said. “You’re . . .”

“Blodynbryd, yes,” said the woman. “My name is Ceres. You would be?”

“I’m October Daye; this is Tybalt,” I said.

“A pleasure to meet you both,” she said. A smile suffused her face as she reached over to caress Walther’s arm. “Any who travel with my dear Waltrune are friends to me.”

Walther looked briefly panicked. The panic faded, replaced by profound embarrassment. “It’s ‘Walther’ these days, Aunt Ceres,” he said.

“Ah,” she said. “My apologies; it’s been so long since you bothered to visit that I’m afraid I’m not so well-informed as to what you wish to be called, or when, or by whom.” The look she leveled on him was pure aunt.

I couldn’t help myself. I burst out laughing. Both Walther and Ceres turned to look at me. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” I said. “You just really reminded me of Luna for a moment. But in a good way, honest.” I wasn’t sure how much gossip from the Mists had traveled this far up the coasts, and I didn’t want to start my association with the second Blodynbryd I’d ever met by implying that I disliked her.

Gossip is interesting. In the human world, thanks to cellphones and the Internet, a rumor can travel around the world in less time than it takes to check your facts. In Faerie, for all that we have people who can teleport or fly, it still takes a little longer—mostly because very few of us have figured out how to turn on our cable modems. It’ll probably change in the next decade or so, as more and more changelings start setting up data centers within their lieges’ knowes, but for right now, it was entirely possible that Ceres didn’t know about my fight with her sister.

Ceres smiled. “Mother’s youngest rose. I hear she’s back in her proper pruning these days? No longer twisting herself into topiary for the sake of appearances?”

“Yes,” I said. “She’s Blodynbryd again.”

“That’s good.” Ceres tilted her head to the side, frowning speculatively. “October . . . I know I’ve heard that name before.”

“It’s a month in the current calendar,” said Walther. His note was mild, and a little dry, like he wasn’t being helpful so much as seizing on an opportunity to be sarcastic. “Has been since the Romans got hold of the thing.”

“I keep abreast of current events, you naughty child,” said Ceres, shooting him a look before swinging her attention back to me. “You’re the one who killed my father, aren’t you?”

Oh, great: this again. Killing Blind Michael was something I didn’t regret in the slightest. It was also something I was going to be dealing with for the rest of my life, if the last several years had been any guide. “I did,” I said.

“Good.” Her nod was brief and firm. “He was a good man once, but that was so long ago that only the roses remember. Mother has been to visit me twice since he died. Twice, after centuries without more than a whisper on the wind! Our family owes you a debt that can never be repaid, no matter how long we may struggle to do exactly that. Thank you for what you have done for us. Truly.”

I blinked at her, nonplussed. Apparently, growing up surrounded by Firstborn didn’t instill the same dislike for saying “thank you.”

Ceres wasn’t done. She stooped to pick up one of the rose goblins that crowded the path, glanced in the direction of the distant castle, and said, “Come. I would sit with you. I would share tea and stories with my family’s savior, and with her friends.” She kissed the rose goblin’s head, making no effort to avoid the angle of its thorns. If I’d done that, I would have sliced my mouth open, but she barely seemed to notice. The goblin made a low purring sound. “As for you, my little spy, go tell the king I have found his wayward diplomats. Paint the picture of a woman greatly troubled, overcome with the duties of her position. The better your portrait, the better your rewards shall be. Do you understand?”

The goblin made a trilling noise. Ceres smiled.

“Excellent. You are very dear.” She set the goblin back on the ground. It took off like a shot, vanishing into the brush as Ceres straightened. Making a beckoning gesture, she started down the path. “Come,” she said again.

Tybalt and I exchanged a glance. Walther was already following her. It was my experience that he was a pretty good judge of character, and once we knew where we were going, I could always ask Tybalt to go back and tell Quentin and May what was going on. I shrugged and, together, we followed.

Ceres led us along the pine-choked path for about a hundred yards before she turned and stepped onto a narrow dirt trail winding through the forest. As before, Walther followed her, and so Tybalt and I followed him, trusting that whatever their relationship was, it wouldn’t cause him to lead us to our certain doom. Maybe that was overly optimistic of me, but I felt like I had earned a little optimism after the day that I’d had.

The trees closed around us like a curtain. The trail was covered in pine needles, and we couldn’t avoid stepping on them, causing the rich, syrupy scent of pine to become even stronger, until it was like we were walking through the distilled essence of Christmas. I’ve always liked that smell, which is a good thing; if I hadn’t, I would have been sneezing and cursing my life choices before we were halfway through the wood.

Rose goblins flickered through the underbrush, their thorny faces seeming to bloom like strange flowers as they peeked back at us. None of them stayed long enough for me to pick out individual features—just thorns and bright, floral colors, and those vivid, staring eyes. Ceres moved through the wood like it had been designed for her private use, and in a way, it had. Her mother, Acacia, was the Firstborn of both the Dryads and the Blodynbryd. When she spoke to the forest, the forest responded. Ceres might not have quite such a close connection to the trees, but she was a relative, however distant, and they seemed to respect her.

I wasn’t so lucky, and I was walking through a pine forest in a formal gown. At first I tried to keep my skirt from dragging on the ground, but I gave it up as a bad idea before we’d gone very far. Either the palace laundry would be able to save it or they wouldn’t. I didn’t give much of a damn either way. Although I was going to miss those jeans.

Tybalt shot me an amused look after the third time I had to wrestle one of my sleeves back from a tree. “You know, in all my years, I’ve never known a woman with such talent for wearing unsuitable finery into the wilderness.”

“Really?” I eyed him dubiously. “You’re going to tell me no Cait Sidhe woman has ever wound up in the woods while she was dressed for Court?”

“No. But if you were a Cait Sidhe woman, you would have removed your gown by now.”

I didn’t have an answer for that. Tybalt laughed as my cheeks flared red.

“I do so appreciate knowing that I can still make you blush,” he said.

Any answer I might have given died as the trail ended, widening out into a clearing straight out of a Disney movie. It was small, perfectly round, and even more perfectly designed. Pine trees created the edges, but they were barely visible under the rioting roses that climbed them, treating them as a natural trellis and pathway to the sky. High overhead—easily fifteen or twenty feet—those roses reached out and twined themselves together in a series of gravity-defying lover’s knots, creating a latticework of living branches. It shouldn’t have been possible . . . but Ceres was Blodynbryd, just like her sister, and I had seen Luna do quite a few impossible things with her roses.

The flowers themselves came in every color of the rainbow and a few colors the rainbow hadn’t received the memo on yet. Some were modern, cultivated roses, blooming in that familiar shape that has sold a million Valentine’s Day bouquets. Others had older, wilder silhouettes, opening in ragged cups or in tiny starbursts. But they were all roses. The air in the clearing was thick with their perfume, and they turned toward Ceres as she walked.

At the center of the clearing was a tiny cottage that might as well have been made of gingerbread for as much as it resembled something that should have housed a fairy-tale witch. The door was held shut by twisted rose boughs, all in a state of full bloom. Ceres stopped in front of the door, raising her hand and waving it across the span of the doorway. The roses promptly furled themselves, becoming tight buds. Then, and only then, the boughs unknotted and pulled away, revealing the actual door one inch at a time.

When the last of the roses retracted, Ceres pushed the door open and looked over her shoulder, smiling at the rest of us. “Enter freely, and be not afraid, for there is nothing that will harm you here.” Then she stepped inside.

“I think that was meant to be reassuring,” I said distantly. “I am not reassured. Tybalt, how about you? Are you reassured?”

“Unlike you, I come from an era where that was a common welcome into someone’s home,” he said. “I am reassured.”

“Ceres usually has lavender cookies,” said Walther. “I am totally reassured.” With that, he went in, leaving us with no choice but to either follow or wait outside for his return.

I have charged headlong into portals, sealed lands of Faerie, and experienced more dangers than any one woman can reasonably be expected to both encounter and survive. I sighed, and stepped into the quaint little forest cottage.

“Huh,” I said a moment later. “It’s bigger on the inside.”

“Many things are,” Ceres agreed. She was on the opposite side of the large parlor, arranging a tea service on a sideboard that appeared to have been designed for exactly that purpose. Despite the size of the room—it was easily bigger than my first apartment, but then again, what wasn’t?—it was modestly appointed, with most of the furniture carved from rosewood, left unpainted to allow the wood’s natural beauty to shine through. I called it a parlor, because I didn’t have a better word for a space that seemed to be receiving room, living room, dining room, and foyer all at the same time.

It was an elegant, economically designed space, and I wouldn’t have found it strange in almost any demesne, if not for one small thing: there was no floor, just hard-pressed dirt that filled the room with its characteristic earthy scent. It mingled with the roses, creating a perfume that was at once common and impossible for any lab in the world to replicate.

“It hasn’t changed a bit,” said Walther happily. He walked over to the table that occupied one side of the room, pulling out a chair and dropping himself into it. There were three covered dishes on the table. After a moment’s consideration, he lifted the center lid to reveal a pile of pale purple cookies, dusted with sugar. “Lavender cookies. Ceres, you’re the best.”

“So you’ve been telling me since you sprouted, but that didn’t stop you from leaving me for a hundred years.” She carried the tea service over to the table and set it down, smiling indulgently as Walther snatched a handful of the purple cookies. He didn’t do anything to them before taking a bite of the first one. Either he trusted Ceres not to poison or bespell us, or she already had him ensnared.

The Blodynbryd didn’t have any sort of enthrallment or persuasion powers, at least not that I was aware of. If they had, Luna would probably have made sure her daughter’s marriage ended in something other than annulment and murder—the annulment on the part of Raysel’s ex-husband, Connor, who was also the one who wound up getting murdered. If Ceres had that sort of power, we were already screwed. I shrugged and walked over to join Walther.

Somehow, despite us both starting at the same time, Tybalt managed to beat me to the table. He pulled out a chair for me. I shot him an amused look and sat, only to find Ceres watching us approvingly.

“Manners are rare in this day and age, or perhaps only in this kingdom,” she said. “Too few people remember that they are the glue that binds our society together. Please, have some cookies. I have tea, or there is lemonade, if you would prefer.”

“Lemonade would be fantastic, if it’s not too much trouble,” I said. Tea was complicated for me. Lily—a friend of my mother’s who had become a friend of mine, in the fullness of time—had always insisted on preparing tea when I came to visit her. Sometimes she’d even been able to catch glimpses of my future in her tea leaves. I hadn’t really drunk tea since her death. It was too hard, and I wasn’t up for risking that sort of emotional trauma over a beverage.

Tybalt settled next to me and smiled lopsidedly, revealing the tip of one fang. “Tea would be lovely. I’ve had little enough since I came to the Colonies, lo these many years ago.”

“I always forget how many of the older among us came from somewhere else,” said Ceres. She turned to open a cupboard, and withdrew a pitcher of lemonade, condensation beading on its sides. It was a nice—and necessary—trick. The Summerlands aren’t usually good about being wired to the local electrical grid, which means the locals keep their food cold with either magic or old-fashioned icehouses. Both had their advantages.

“Didn’t you?” I asked.

Ceres smiled. “Yes and no. My father linked his skerry to this land long before anyone from Europe decided to ‘discover’ it. The humans who lived here then gave him a wide berth, and he gave them the same. I spent my childhood wandering these forests, as well as my mother’s. I was the third of their children, you see, and when I was a girl, they were still more open to the idea that someday we would grow up and leave them. Luna was the last of us. None of us realized how tightly Father would cleave to her, once all others were gone, or how far she would have to go to get away. I like to think we would have chosen differently, had we known what it would cost our little sister to choose as we did. But that was long ago, and no one knows for sure.”

“Right,” I said. Walther was still nibbling on his purple cookies. I reached out and took one, turning it between my fingers as I tried to figure out what to say next. Of all the ways I had expected my day to go, fleeing from a homicidal ex-Queen and then taking tea with the second Blodynbryd I’d ever met definitely hadn’t been near the top of the list. “So you were born here?”

“Farther down the coast. I moved here because it was good for my roses, and because I could no longer bear the company of my parents. Even once Silences was settled, Father let me be for centuries. He thought he was punishing me by refusing to let me see his face. He forgot that I did not want to.”

Briefly, I wondered whether we could chart the world’s Blodynbryd by looking for the places where Blind Michael had chosen not to go hunting. I dismissed the thought. It wasn’t my job to organize a family reunion for Acacia, and if the other Blodynbryd were living quiet, untroubled lives, I should leave them alone. Instead, I ate a cookie.

Walther was right. They were excellent.

Ceres finally took a seat at the table, placing a glass of lemonade in front of me, and teacups in front of Walther and Tybalt. There were flecks of mint all through the lemonade, deep green and inviting. I watched as she poured tea for the two men, and then for herself. Sugar and cream had already been placed at the center of the table: she took her tea plain, Walther took his with sugar, and Tybalt, who had once chided me for doctoring my coffee, added enough milk that his tea turned a pale shade of brown.

“So, how is it that you know my dear Walther?” asked Ceres.

“He came to live in the Mists a few years ago, and his first stop was at a knowe that belonged to a good friend of mine,” I said. “She died not long afterward. We sort of bonded over the whole situation. It was nice to have someone who could understand just how much I missed her.” Lily had even suggested that Walther and I would be a good match at one point—that my mother would approve. We’d never pursued that, for a lot of reasons, but she’d been right about how well we got along. As friends, nothing more.

“As for me, I know who October knows, or else ask the reason why she’s hiding such charming and diverse people from my eyes,” said Tybalt. He took a sip of his tea, bobbing his head in apparent satisfaction, before asking, “And what of you, milady? This is your home, there can be no doubt, but I would have expected a woman of your breeding and manners to have chosen a new home when the government was overthrown.”

“I would have, believe me, but I have been here a very long time, and my children thrive in this climate.” Ceres glanced to an ottoman on the other side of the room. I followed her gaze, and found a pile of rose goblins the size of kittens all mounded up, sleeping peacefully. Ceres continued, “Transplanting all the bushes would require an army of gardeners. To leave, I would have to leave the little ones, and I can’t quite bring myself to do it.”

“Not all your little ones are rose goblins,” said Walther quietly.

Ceres looked to him and smiled. “No. Not all of them. I was tutor to the children of the Davies and Yates lines—heirs to the throne and born stewards, the lot of them. I expected young Walther here to be a court alchemist by now, brewing love tinctures and potions to clear up the complexion.”

“Love tinctures are unethical, and the mortals make this stuff called ‘Proactiv’ these days. It does a decent job with the pimples,” said Walther, sounding amused. “I teach chemistry to human kids, and I do alchemy for the people who need it. It’s a good life, Aunt Ceres. I like it. Promise.”

“As you say,” said Ceres. She was smiling as she turned her attention back around to me. “The rose goblins would have been difficult, even impossible, to transplant in their current numbers, and I would have needed to find a place where the ground was fertile and the climate was kind. And as Walther reminds, not all my charges were so easy to move. Some still slumber in the castle deeps, waiting for the day they are released from durance vile.”

“Not so vile,” said Tybalt. “Elf-shot does not dictate dreams.”

“No?” Ceres raised an eyebrow, looking at him. “Can we be so sure of that? Many are the methods to force sleep, and I would not be surprised if at least one came complete with unquiet dreams.”

“My niece is an oneiromancer, and she hasn’t said anything about people who’ve been elf-shot having nightmares,” I said. “That doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen. Nightmares are ordinary things that can happen to anyone, and I guess you could make a type of elf-shot that forced them.” It seemed like a form of torture to me—and it was, really. There was no other word that described being trapped in a realm of unending nightmares, with no way of waking up.

“I haven’t forgotten them,” said Walther quietly. “I’ve never forgotten them. I’m keeping my word, Aunt Ceres.”

“Good,” said Ceres.

I looked between the two of them, frowning. “Somebody want to fill the rest of us in? Because I have no idea what’s going on right now.”

“When I left, I promised Aunt Ceres that I’d find the counteragent to elf-shot,” said Walther. “There’s always a counteragent. It’s just a matter of figuring out what it is. I’ve been working for the last hundred years on a way to wake the sleepers up. I’m almost there, I am. If I could just find someone who knew who brewed the original tincture—”

“Eira Rosynhwyr,” I said, without thinking. Walther and Ceres turned to stare at me.

Tybalt took another sip of tea.

A moment passed, and then Walther asked, slowly, “What do you mean?”

“Eira Rosynhwyr is the Daoine Sidhe Firstborn, and she was the first person to make elf-shot. The Luidaeg said so.” She hadn’t mentioned Eira—better known as “Evening”—by name. I’d been forced to put the pieces together myself, a little bit at a time, due to the geas the Luidaeg was laboring under. She couldn’t tell lies, but there were things she couldn’t say out loud. “She’s the reason the stuff’s fatal to changelings. According to the Luidaeg, it didn’t have to be. Eira’s just a bitch.”

“You . . . I . . .” Walther stopped. Then he started to laugh, shaking his head slowly from side to side. “Of course you know who created elf-shot. Of course. And why would you have told me? It’s not like I ever asked.”

“You didn’t,” I said.

“I don’t suppose the Luidaeg also told you what Eira’s magic consisted of, did she? What the elements of it were?”

It had taken me years to realize that most people in Faerie weren’t as sensitive to the distinct elements of a person’s magic as I was. Knowing someone’s magic was part and parcel of knowing their bloodlines, which made it as easy as breathing for me. “She didn’t, but I’ve met the woman. Her magic smelled of roses and snow.”

“What kind of roses?” Walther leaned forward, expression eager.

“Red ones,” I said. “Not wild roses—cultivated ones, although they don’t smell like the kind of hothouse roses you can get today. It’s like they’re an early kind of garden rose? Walled gardens. Ones where people could breed and breed their flowers, and not worry about how they would thrive in the outside world.” I stopped, unsure how much further I could go—and how much further I would want to.

Tybalt had put down his tea and was looking at me, eyebrows raised. “I’d always wondered how it was that you could insist that everyone’s magic was so different, when you said the same words over and over again. Roses and pine trees and all the flowers of the forest. But if you know them that intimately, then there really is no wonder.”

“I don’t know them all that intimately,” I protested. “I have to think about it to start getting details like that.” Tasting Evening’s blood had probably also helped, but I didn’t need to bring that up. It wasn’t something I was proud of.

“Still, that should be more than sufficient detail to let me find the roses in question,” said Ceres. I gave her a blank look, and she smiled. “All the world’s roses are brought to Portland. Didn’t you know? We have a thing the mortals call a ‘test garden,’ where the new cultivars are coaxed to open for the sun and show their secrets clearly as a morning breeze. They grow the new, but they treasure also the old—and there are roses none of them can explain, roses that seem to have arisen naturally around the corners of their carefully planned plots, their delicately designed gardens. My siblings and I, we have played at curators in a great museum, coaxing long-past roses from our bodies and planting them where they have the chance to flourish.”

It took me a moment to realize what she was saying. Finally, I ventured, “So you’re saying my old red rose might be growing somewhere in the gardens?”

“I would stake my eye on it.”

The phrase was unnerving, and not just because of who her father was. Some of the old pureblood oaths involved staking an eye, a hand, even a heart—and when the oaths were broken, it was generally expected that the person who made them would actually give up those body parts. There’s a reason swearing on the physical has fallen out of favor, replaced by the cleaner, safer swearing on the abstract. “Okay,” I said. “What good would that do us?”

“If Ceres can find the right kind of rose—the kind of rose you say this Eira woman’s magic smelled like—then I can use that, and I can figure out the counterformula for elf-shot.” Walther put down his last cookie, leaning forward. There was an unfamiliar intensity in his eyes. “I can do it. I can wake them up.”

I blinked before looking to Tybalt, only to find that he was blinking, too, looking as nonplussed as I was. Elf-shot was . . . elf-shot wasn’t supposed to be forever. It was the holding pattern of the fae world, the injury that took enemies out of the fight for a long time without actually breaking the Law and killing them. It wasn’t something that could be undone by one alchemist with access to the proper rose garden. That wasn’t possible.

But then, when has Faerie ever settled for the possible? “I’ll do my best to make sure you have the right rose, but I can’t promise anything,” I said, looking back to Walther. “This isn’t something I’ve done before.”

“Narrow it down to ten and I can take it from there,” he said. “I—”

The cottage door slammed open, and Marlis stormed into the room, half-drawing her sword. “Get away from my aunt!” she shouted.

Well, hell. And things had been going so well.