Ashes of Honor

SIXTEEN

I DUG THE LUIDAEG’S CHARM from my pocket as we walked, holding it in front of me. It was still in its neutral state, although the reflections off the roses around us tinted it pale pink. “Chelsea’s not near here,” I said. “Do whatever hoodoo you need to do to know if Raj is nearby.”

“Hoodoo?” said Tybalt, sounding amused. “I’m the King of Cats, October, not the King of Goblins.”

“And you don’t live in a labyrinth, but that doesn’t mean you can’t make like a Henson character and start scrying for our missing boy. Also, how have you even seen that movie? Does the Court of Cats have cable?” I kept walking. “This thing will eventually dump us in Acacia’s backyard. I’m hoping we can get a lead on one or both of the kids before we get there.”

“But Chelsea is your priority.”

“No,” I said. “Raj is. Chelsea’s in trouble, but she can get herself out of it. Raj is somewhere he can’t get out of. I don’t leave people behind.”

There was a moment of silence. I risked a glance to the side. Tybalt was watching me, an odd, thoughtful expression on his face. He looked away when he saw me looking.

“Well, then, I suppose I must rise to your example.” He waved his free hand in the air, the smell of pennyroyal swirling around us before converging in the space just above his palm. He cupped his hand, and a globe of what seemed to be solidified shadow dropped into it. “Here. This will tell us if there is only a thin wall between me and my nephew.”

“Good.” I kept walking. “Hey. Can I ask you a question?”

“My dear October, we are bound by an enchanted rose made from the hair of a Duchess, and my blood is covering your hand. You can learn anything you wish to know about me merely by licking your fingers.” Tybalt laughed a little. “Yes. You may ask me a question.”

“Back in the Court of Cats, you said you made a mistake when you took Raj as a nephew. What did you mean?”

“You have an uncanny ear for the things I most wish you would forget, while willfully and continually forgetting the things I wish you would remember,” said Tybalt dryly. “I had a choice, when Raj’s parents brought him to me. I could do as they asked, take him as a nephew and let them stay by his side. Or I could do as my father taught me, take him as a son, raise him as my own, and drive them as far from my territory as I could.”

“Oh.” We kept walking. Finally, I said, “I don’t like Raj’s dad. He’s kind of an asshole. But I’m glad you let him stay with his son. I think it says something good about your character.”

“I appreciate your approval,” said Tybalt. Then he laughed. “Had I known it was as easy to get as all that, I might have confessed my softheartedness years ago. Really, October, you should provide a list of ways to reach your good side. It would be a kindness beyond measure.”

“I’m not that complicated,” I protested.

“As someone who has to deal with you on a regular basis, I beg to differ,” said Tybalt. “At times, I suspect you’re doing it intentional—” He stopped in the middle of the word. He stopped walking at the same time, jerking me to an unexpected halt. The rose thorns bit deeper into my fingers. I yelped.

“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.

True to Tybalt’s prediction, there were thistles scattered through the heather and broom, their bright purple flowers only providing a little bit of warning before their prickles bit into my ankles or hands. “I think the landscape is out to get us,” I muttered, after the fifth stealth attack.

“Almost certainly,” said Tybalt. “A knowe, allowed to go fallow, will lash out at one who enters it. Why should a realm be any different?”

That gave me pause. When I went to claim the knowe at Goldengreen, it fought back. Not because it wanted to be left empty but because it was hurt. It had been abandoned, left alone, and it was angry. Our hollow hills are alive, in their own slow way, and just like any living thing, they have feelings. Why would a realm be any different?

Answer: it wouldn’t. “Oak and ash,” I muttered. “I hope Raj is okay.”

“As do I,” said Tybalt.

We walked faster after that. The moor seemed endless, but eventually the brush began to thin, the formerly hard-packed ground turning soft and marshy under our feet. Tall stands of bulrush made their appearance, some of them growing higher than Tybalt’s head. Finally, Tybalt stopped, looking straight at one of the patches of bulrush.

“All right,” he said. “You may emerge. Quickly, if you please; the ground is damp, and I would prefer not to sink.”

There was a moment of silence. Then the bulrushes rustled, and a boy-sized missile flung itself at us, zigging at the last moment to slam into me. If Tybalt hadn’t been standing there so calmly, I might have reacted with violence. As it was, I simply braced myself, and when Raj made impact, I wrapped my arms around him, letting him bury his face against my shoulder.

“You came you came you came,” he was saying, the words so fast and jumbled-together that they were practically a chant. “I didn’t think—I wasn’t sure—I didn’t know—”

“Hey. Hey!” I unwrapped my arms and grabbed his shoulders, pushing him out to arms’ length. He went reluctantly, but he went. That was all I could ask for. “We’ll always come. You got that? If we have to move heaven and earth—”

“Or find a route into a realm that’s been sealed for centuries,” interjected Tybalt.

“—we will,” I finished. “Do you understand me? We’ll always come for you, Raj. You’re family. We look out for our own.”

Raj nodded, eyes wide and swimming with tears. Then he ducked out from under my hands and slammed into me again, resuming his embrace. At least he didn’t start chanting again. I looked over his head to Tybalt.

“We got him,” I said.

Tybalt nodded. “Indeed. Allow him his distress. Even for a Prince, this must have been…trying.” He looked around. “I know where we are, and I doubt I would have taken this so calmly at his age.”

The idea that Tybalt was ever a teenager was almost enough to make me start laughing. Instead, I snorted and said, “Now that we have him, we should probably be getting out of here.”

Raj pushed himself back enough to look up at me. “How?” he asked, an edge of panic in his voice. “I tried and I tried, and I couldn’t find the shadows. They wouldn’t come.”

“That’s because there has been no King here to remind them of their place,” said Tybalt.

“Besides, we had help.” I pulled the rose from my hair, only wincing a little when the thorns sliced my fingers. Healing fast has its perks, but it also means I never get numb; I had fully recovered from my first bout with the thorns, and round two hurt even more, if that was possible. “Luna opened a Rose Road for us. Hopefully, we can figure out a way to pry it open again from here.”

“Hopefully?” echoed Raj. “You mean you don’t know?”

“Look at it this way, kiddo. At least now, if you’re going to be stranded, you’re not going to be stranded alone. Plus, hey, think about all those empty castles. We can totally take one over. Paint the whole thing pink.”

Raj smiled a little. “Where are we going to get pink paint?”

“We’ll improvise. We’re clever that way.” I tightened my hand on the rose, getting as many thorns to pierce my skin as I could. The smell of cut grass and copper filled the air. I looked toward Tybalt. “What’s our shadow status?”

“I can feel them, but I haven’t been here long enough to anchor them properly.” He frowned. “This is an…interesting dilemma, I must admit.”

“Then let’s do this the hard way.” I held my hand out to him, half the rose stem protruding from my fist in invitation. He nodded and closed his hand around it. The smell of Luna’s magic suddenly mingled with our own, as the Rose Road we had so recently stepped off of remembered that we had been going somewhere.

I wasn’t sure it would work. Luna had told us not to drop the rose, not to leave the path. But we never dropped the rose—it was on me the whole time—and we didn’t leave the path, not really. We just took a shortcut through the shadows and the brush, something idiots in fairy tales have been doing since the beginning of time.

Maybe it was the fairy tale impossibility of our situation; maybe it was the blood in the air giving me the strength to push while Tybalt pulled. Whatever it was, the smell of roses got stronger, and the wicker trellis wove itself together in front of us, opening on the long, rose-lined tunnel.

“Fantastic,” I breathed. “Raj, take hold of my jacket. I don’t want to lose you in here.”

“I have a better idea,” he said. He stepped back, jumped into the air, and landed on my shoulder as an Abyssinian cat, the smell of pepper and burning paper clinging to his fur. He wrapped his tail around my neck, yawning in that casual way cats have, and settled down to purr loudly in my ear.

“Sure, I’ll carry you,” I said. I looked to Tybalt. “Is he this respectful to you?”

“Believe it or not, my dear, he’s more respectful of you than he is of almost anyone else.”

I glared. Tybalt laughed, and kept laughing as we stepped onto the Rose Road.

The binding Oberon used to seal the deep realms must have been incredibly strong. We were barely through the door when it slammed behind us, with a ripping, tearing noise that made it sound like the whole thing had been torn right out of existence. I forced myself not to look back, mindful of Luna’s warning that looking back could screw everything up. Raj had no such compunctions. I felt him twist as he stared at whatever was behind us. He meowed, somehow managing to make the sound bewildered.

“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.