Once Broken Faith

FIFTEEN

WE FELL OUT OF the shadows, into the light of my temporary quarters. Tybalt let go, virtually shoving me away as he stumbled to the bed, grabbing the bedpost and holding on for dear life. I staggered to my feet, watching him long enough to be sure he was breathing without obvious distress. He liked to make a show of how invincible he was, how untouchable and eternal, but the truth of the matter was that he’d exhausted himself to the point of death twice while carrying me through the shadows—and while a short run inside Arden’s knowe was nothing compared to some of the jaunts we’d taken, part of me would always be waiting for the day he collapsed and didn’t get better.

It was almost ironic, in a terrible way. I was the one with mortal blood. He should have been the one worrying himself sick over me. But I was also the unbreakable one, thanks to the gifts I’d inherited from my mother; I was the one who’d live no matter what I did to myself. I’m pretty sure we’re tied for deaths these days, although I’ll never tell him if I can help it. Call me paranoid, but I don’t feel like “I got stabbed in the heart and I think there’s a good chance that I died” is the sort of conversation we can have without it devolving into a screaming fight.

“You do have a shorter name,” I said, forcing my voice to stay as light as possible. I moved toward the suitcase I had packed for the occasion. If the High King wanted me to change my clothes, I needed to do it. “I just don’t think you’d be thrilled if I started calling you ‘Rand’ all the time.”

Tybalt shivered, still clinging to the bedpost. “The sound of that name upon your tongue is sweet torture. Would that you could have known him, the man who would not be King.”

“Okay, now you’re starting to freak me out.” I turned back to the bed, leaving my suitcase unopened. I moved to stand behind him, placing my hand flat against his arm. He didn’t lift his head. “Tybalt. Hey. You don’t get this Shakespearean unless something is really wrong. What’s going on?”

“There was a time when I could have said ‘a man was murdered’ or ‘a woman lies dreaming for a century’s time,’ and had that be enough, you know.” He finally lifted his head and turned to look at me. “There was a time when those words would have unlocked an ocean of sympathy, not a shrug and the words ‘today is Thursday.’”

“It’s not Thursday,” I said automatically, before I winced and asked, “So what, is this about me being too flippant?”

“No. No, love, no.” He let go of the bedpost and turned. He grasped my upper arms, holding them tightly enough that I could feel each of his fingers individually. It wasn’t tight enough to bruise, but it came close. “This is about the fact that once we leave this room, I have to go back to holding myself apart from you. When the false queen was setting herself up as your enemy and opponent, I had the luxury of pretending to be an enemy. Anything I did would be taken as humorous, because it would antagonize you. Now . . . I shed the mask that allowed me to protect you when I allied myself with you in the public sphere.”

“So you’re afraid I’m going to get myself hurt . . . ?” I ventured, watching him intently. This side of Tybalt—the side that had buried his first wife, the side that had held him away from me for years, out of the fear that any mortal woman he dared to love would suffer the same fate as Anne—was still new to me. It was no less endearing than the arrogant face he showed the world. The fact that I was allowed to see it at all made it precious to me. But sometimes it was still surprising, the places where his actual insecurities were buried.

He nodded. There was a gravity bordering on pain in his eyes. His pupils had expanded to soak up every bit of the available light; in someone less feline, the resulting effect would have looked drugged. On him, it just made me want to hold him fast and never let go.

Too bad that sort of mercy wasn’t in my job description. “I might,” I said. “I can’t promise anything beyond ‘I’ll do my best to be careful,’ and even that goes out the window if it’s me or Karen, or Quentin, or Arden. I’d take a bullet for my kids because I love them, and I’d take a bullet for my Queen because my oaths say I have to. That’s who I am. I don’t get to change it just because the waters are too deep.”

To my surprise, he chuckled, letting go of one arm and running the knuckles of his right hand down the curve of my cheek. “I love you because of who you are,” he said. “I wouldn’t change a thing, even if it were possible to do so. I hate that we’ve spent so much time among the Courts of your people of late, where I’m as much a hindrance as I am a help.”

“Yeah, well, maybe after this one, we can have a nice, normal missing persons case,” I said, as lightly as I could. “Or hey, I could take a vacation. Disneyland. We have to go to Southern California anyway, so I can tell King Antonio’s heir what happened to him. I’ve always wanted to go to Disneyland. Mom wasn’t interested, and I never had the money while I was living with Devin.”

“That could be nice,” he said. I must have looked baffled by that reply, because he burst out laughing. “Honestly, October, I’ve been in California since before the Park’s construction. Do you think there’s any possible way I missed the many, many, hundreds of billboards that have been erected and removed since then? I have no idea what one does at Disneyland, but I’m aware of its existence.”

“You didn’t know how to ride in a car,” I said defensively.

He pulled himself up a little straighter. “I’m a King of Cats, with full and open access to the Shadow Roads. Why would I need to know how to ride in a car?”

Now it was my turn to laugh. I started to lean in for a kiss.

There was a sound behind me, like metal being torn, and a scent so faint that it was on the edge of existence, too thin and attenuated to identify. Tybalt blinked, giving me an inexplicably baffled look. I didn’t think; I just acted on instinct, shifting my body a few inches to the side, as if I could shield him from the source of that sound.

The pain followed immediately on the motion, sharp and piercing and somehow new, a pain I had never felt before. It seemed like every time I reached the limits of my body’s experience, someone went out of their way to hurt me in a whole new way.

I knew enough about my body and the way it worked to be certain that there wasn’t time to turn and fight before I succumbed to my injuries. Maybe it was cowardly of me, but I didn’t want Tybalt to attack my attacker only to find that I’d bled out while he was distracted.

“Run,” I hissed, feeling bloody froth burst at the corners of my mouth as I pitched forward into Tybalt, knocking him back in the process. I caught a glimpse of his eyes, now wide and round with shock, before we fell into darkness. He’d clearly seen the blood; he knew I was hurt; he knew I wouldn’t be telling him to flee unless I was also scared. So he fled.

I had never loved him more.

Tybalt carried me through the dark, my lungs aching and the blood freezing on my lips. I hadn’t been able to catch a proper breath before we fell. That, combined with the pain in the left side of my chest, told me that whatever had hit me had probably punctured my lung. Definitely a new one on me, and when combined with the cold and the lack of air, it made it hard to stay awake. I clung to consciousness the same way I was clinging to Tybalt’s shoulders, refusing to allow the deeper dark to claim me. I needed him calm, rational, and not stalking the halls of Arden’s knowe searching for my killer.

We tumbled out of the darkness and into the bright, pancake-scented confines of the Luidaeg’s chambers. She was seated at a large round table with Karen and Quentin, all of them turning toward the sound of our arrival. Karen went pale. Quentin jumped to his feet. And the Luidaeg, bless her, cleared the breakfast dishes to the floor with a sweep of her arm, creating a great clatter of crockery.

“Get her on the table!” she commanded. “Quentin, warm, damp towels, now. Karen, go to my room. Bring me the brown case.” She paused for barely a second, looking between the two of them. “Well? Move.”

“Shouldn’t we get Jin . . . ?” asked Quentin.

“Move!” the Luidaeg howled.

They moved.

Tybalt carried me to the table, lowering me onto my side. Sheets of frozen blood cracked and fell away with every motion, freeing more to seep into my clothing. The Luidaeg grabbed one of the blood crystals before it could hit the floor and pressed it to my lips, like a nurse offering an ice chip to a wounded soldier.

“Suck on this,” she said. “It’ll make you feel better.”

I managed to muster a nod and open my mouth, letting her place the blood on my tongue. It began to warm and soften, and she was right; it did make me feel better. The taste of blood always did. My blood was the best choice in some ways, because it didn’t come with any unwanted, potentially uncomfortable memories: it was mine. I already knew all the secrets it had to tell me.

It was getting increasingly difficult to breathe. I closed my eyes, focusing on the soothing taste of the blood. I was in good hands.

“What happened?” the Luidaeg demanded.

“I don’t know!” Tybalt sounded frustrated—and more, he sounded scared, like this was outside his frame of reference. “We were in her room, and there was a sound, like unoiled hinges creaking. She froze. Then she was falling into me, telling me to run. I never saw what struck her. Can you get it out?”

I knew whatever it was had to be still embedded in my back; the pressure on my lung wasn’t getting any better. If anything, it was getting worse, making it harder and harder to pull in a full breath. If I suffocate, will I still heal? I thought, dazedly. I’d drowned once, I was pretty sure—maybe more than once. Something Connor had said to me on the beach, right after I’d returned from the pond . . . I had recovered from those short deaths. What was one more?

One more was one too many. It was a relief when the Luidaeg said, “Yes, but you’re not gonna like it.” Her hand touched my shoulder, skin cool against my own. “Honey, I know you can hear me, and that’s important. The stake that hit you is like a harpoon. There are hooks. The cleanest way to get it out—forgive me, October—the cleanest way is to push it through. It’s going to hurt. It’s going to hurt bad. But it has to be done. Nod if you understand.”

I nodded. It took everything I had left, but I nodded. The Luidaeg took her hand away.

“Good girl. Tybalt, you may want to look elsewhere. Quentin, get ready with those towels.”

That was all the warning I received before she gripped the stake, twisting it and sending bolts of agony through my back and shoulder. Then she shoved, driving it deeper into my flesh. I think I screamed. I think I vomited. All I know for sure is that consciousness slipped away, replaced by blessed black nothingness. True nothingness: there was no pain, no awareness that time was passing, only absence. It was pleasant.

The pain returned, bright and blazing, and accompanied by the feeling of fingers inside my chest, poking through the ruined tissue that had been my lung. I screamed, or tried to, anyway; screaming was difficult without air, and my body was refusing to do anything that might have reinflated the collapsed organ.

“Towel!” snarled the Luidaeg, withdrawing her hand. There was a clattering sound as she dropped something on the table, and pressure was suddenly applied to my chest. It hurt, but in a different way. “Dammit. She’s lost a lot of blood. I need a knife.”

“Why?” Tybalt’s voice. He sounded panicked, and I couldn’t blame him; when the Luidaeg started asking for knives, someone was about to bleed. She wasn’t always careful about her cuts, either, although I liked to think she was careless with me because she knew I’d heal.

I wanted to reassure him. I couldn’t find the air.

“Because I’m going to bleed for her.” Some of the pressure was removed from the towel at my breast. “Come on, kitty-cat. Scratch me, and let me bring her back to you. She’d do the same for me.”

I did do the same for you, I thought. I still couldn’t speak. I wasn’t dead, but I wasn’t getting any air. Everything was turning fuzzy and hard to focus on. My eyelids didn’t want to respond. That wasn’t fair. If I was going to die here, I wanted to see them before I went. I wanted them to know I was saying good-bye.

There was a ripping sound. The Luidaeg hissed, sounding pained. Then something was being shoved against my lips, and the smell of blood was invading my nostrils, so delicious I couldn’t have resisted it if I tried. My mouth opened almost without my bidding, and I was drinking deeply, greedily, pulling at the Luidaeg’s wrist like it was a lifeline. I needed the blood so much that I didn’t think about the consequences until the world was washed in red, and everything changed.

My mother is wearing a gown of thorns and autumn leaves, and there are roses in her hair, and she is beautiful, and she is not listening to me. Her eyes are far away, fixed on the horizon; she would rather hear the wind than my voice. It isn’t fair. I love her so, I suffer for her so, and still she will not hear me, because she is too kind. She has always been too kind. Titania’s children change their songs when she walks in the forest. The monsters come to sit at her feet and adore her, and she does not have to face the reasons that their claws are bloody, that their teeth are sharp. She doesn’t have to see.

“Please,” I say—and the word was jarring enough to knock me back into my own mind, my own present, if only for a moment; the language the Luidaeg spoke wasn’t English, and I shouldn’t have been able to understand it. She said she’d forgotten the first language of Faerie, and she hadn’t lied, because she couldn’t lie, but somewhere deep down, below conscious thought, her blood remembered.

You remember, I thought. Then the blood overwhelmed me again, dragging me back down into memory.

“Mother, please,” I say. “This is foolishness. You know the ritual has been compromised. You have to change it. You have to find another way.”

“Tradition may not seem important to you, my Annie, who saw Tradition born, but it’s not just you we Ride for,” says Maeve. Her voice is summer wind and autumn berries, and I want her to talk to me forever, and I want her to be quiet and listen. “We Ride for our grandchildren, and our great-grandchildren, all the way down to the generations that have never known anything but this. We Ride to consolidate a legend, that someday, when we are gone, you can Ride without us.”

She doesn’t see. She doesn’t understand. She’s as far above me as I am above the fae who swarm around their Firstborn parents, forever limited in comparison, eternally unable to grasp the full consequence of what they do. “Tonight is Hallow’s Eve, Mother. Please. Send someone else to Ride for you. Take the true route elsewhere, or all is lost.”

“My darling girl,” she says, and steps closer to me. Her palm is soft against my cheek. She smells like wild roses and southernwood, like moss and loam and the first day of the fall. I will never love anything the way I love her, not as long as I may live. “The fae folk must Ride.”

I sat up with a gasp, opening my eyes on the room where my friends were waiting. The pain was gone; my mouth tasted of blood, and inexplicably, of roses. I looked wildly around. There was Tybalt, reaching out to steady me, and there was Karen, clutching a brown leather case to her chest, her eyes wide and round as saucers. I turned my head. Quentin and the Luidaeg were standing on my other side. He had an armful of bloody towels, and she was stained red to the elbow with her own blood and with mine. Out of the four of them, only she looked anything other than terrified. She just looked tired.

“How are you feeling?” she asked.

“Like I licked a light socket,” I said. Tybalt was still right there. I allowed myself to lean over until my head was resting against his chest. I didn’t look down at my clothes. To be honest, I didn’t want to know. “What did you give me? What happened?”

“What happened is whoever killed Antonio decided what was good for the gander was good for the goose, and rammed a rosewood spike into your back,” said the Luidaeg. “Pretty good shot, too. They managed to get it more than halfway through. It would have gone farther on its own, but the tip of the thing broke off inside your lung.”

That explained the probing fingers, and the reason they hadn’t been able to wait for me to wake up. With the way I healed, a delay would have allowed my body to close up around the foreign object. Not too bad, if we were talking about a bullet or a bone or something else blunt and easily ignored. The tip of a harpoon, inside my lung? That was something else entirely.

“Wait,” I said. “How did you get in there? Weren’t my ribs in the way?”

“I went under the rib cage,” said the Luidaeg blandly. Quentin made a face. I decided I was glad to have been unconscious when that decision was made. “I got all the bits out, but you’d lost a lot of blood. I had to feed you some of mine to give you the strength to recover.”

“So that woman I saw—”

“Yes, that was my mother, and no, I don’t want to talk about it. Whatever you saw, that is between you and the blood. I won’t answer any questions.” Something in her eyes . . .

“Won’t, or can’t?” I asked.

She threw her bloody hands up in the air. “Is there no end to your questions? Can’t, October, can’t, and won’t, and we’re sort of getting away from the point here, which is that you could have died.”

“Maybe,” I said, and closed my eyes, feeling Tybalt’s chest rise and fall beneath my cheek, reassuringly solid and alive. Then I opened them again, and asked, “How long was I out?”

“Half an hour, end to end,” said the Luidaeg. “The conclave hasn’t started yet, if that’s what you’re worried about.”

“I just got stabbed. I have so many better things to worry about.” I pushed myself upright. The motion forced me to touch the table, and my hands skidded in the jellied blood. The smell of it made me hungry and turned my stomach at the same time. “There was a sound like tearing metal. Everything jumped. I don’t think it’s a teleporter.”

“No?” The Luidaeg raised an eyebrow. “How’s that?”

“Whoever it was can’t have been in the room before they attacked, or Tybalt would have smelled them. Unless they were Folletti, and then they wouldn’t be using rosewood.” Folletti were sky-fae, and used swords of hardened wind, as invisible as they were. Rosewood was too easy to see to be a Folletti weapon. “There was no lingering magic smell, which means any spells were cast outside the room. I think whoever it is, they’re somehow pausing things. Making everything stop for a few seconds, and using the time to get into position.” I looked at the Luidaeg expectantly.

She raised her other eyebrow. Then, firmly, she shook her head. “I know what you’re asking, and no. There’s no race in Faerie with that ability. Either you’re wrong, or someone is using some sort of alchemy or a mixed spell to do this.”

“So we don’t even know where to start,” I said. “Fun. Fine.” I swung my feet around to point them at the floor. More blood squished beneath me. I winced. “I need clothes.”

“Yes, you do. What’s more, you need a shower.”

“I don’t have time for a—wait. There’s a solution.” I turned to Tybalt—blood-soaked and still unsettled, judging by the faint stripes on the sides of his face. He was having trouble holding to the more human aspects of his current form. That was a sign of either relaxation or stress in the Cait Sidhe, and given the situation, and the amount of blood on his clothes, I wasn’t betting on the former. “Elliott is here. Go to Arden, find out where he’s staying, and get him.”

Tybalt blinked. “Why am I doing this exactly?”

“Because we don’t have time to shower before we need to go back to the conclave, and I’m not ready to go back to the room where someone tried to murder me.” The scene of King Antonio’s death, and the absence of a magical signature in the room right after I’d been stabbed, told me that going back wasn’t going to help us: not enough to put off cleaning up and reporting the attack to the High King. “Elliott’s a Bannick. He can have all this blood gone in a flash.”

“I don’t want to go,” said Tybalt. “I will, but I want you to understand how unkind it is for you to ask this of me.”

“I do,” I said solemnly.

He looked to the Luidaeg. “If you allow her to come to further harm . . .”

“Don’t threaten me, kitty, I’m outside your weight class,” said the Luidaeg. “Go.”

Tybalt pulled his lips back, showing her his teeth. Then he turned and ran for the shadows in the corner of the room, leaping into them and disappearing. I looked longingly at the place where he’d been. With everything that was going on, I didn’t like anyone going off alone. Not even Tybalt.

“Toby.”

I turned toward the sound of the Luidaeg’s voice. “Yes?”

“You could have died. You know that, don’t you? You’re not invincible. Hard to kill, yes, but unbreakable? No.” She looked at me gravely. “You need to be more careful.”

“All I did was go to my room to change my clothes,” I protested. “I shouldn’t have needed to be careful.”

“Yet here you are, doused in blood again, with the memory of my fingers pressed into your lung,” she said, and shook her head. “You have to take care of yourself. Replacing you would take a long time, and frankly, I don’t want to go to the trouble.”

I frowned. “Replacing me? For what?”

“I don’t want to talk about it, and besides, your suitor is incoming,” said the Luidaeg. Sure enough, the smell of musk and pennyroyal wafted through the room not a second later. I turned to see Tybalt standing there, empty-handed. I blinked.

“Tybalt?” I asked uncertainly. “Is everything all right . . . ?”

“No. You’re covered in blood again. No day which includes you covered in blood can be termed ‘all right.’” He shook his head. “I simply put to your Queen that perhaps it was better if she fetch the Bannick, as otherwise, a King of Cats dressed in crimson would be stalking her halls, and that might concern her guests. She agreed discretion was the better part of valor, and will be here shortly with your cleaner.”

He had a point. He wasn’t as bloody as I was—abattoirs weren’t as bloody as I was—but he had more than a few streaks of dried and drying blood smeared on his arms, shirt, and even the line of his jaw. He’d been holding me while I was bleeding out, and there were consequences for that. There were always consequences for that.

I finished the process of standing, leaving the blood-drenched table behind, and walked the few steps to where Tybalt was waiting. Then I put my arms around him, and held him fast, letting him breathe in the scent of me. The muscles in his back and shoulders began to unknot. He wasn’t the only one here in need of comfort; Karen almost certainly needed a hug, and Quentin was never going to get used to seeing me this way. But both of them were still clean, and even with Elliot incoming, I didn’t want to cover them in blood if I could help it. Tybalt was already a mess. He needed me enough that he didn’t care.

There was a faint rushing sound, and the scent of blackberry flowers and redwood bark. I looked over my shoulder. There was Arden, dressed in a white velvet gown with a chain of silver blackberries wrapped around her waist, forming a low belt. Elliot was next to her, gazing at the blood-splattered room with an expression somewhere between horror and delight. And Li Qin was next to him, wearing a black dress stitched with green-and-silver circuitry. She looked thoughtful.

“You brought company,” I said, letting go of Tybalt and shifting so my back was to his chest. He put his arms around my waist, holding me there. I didn’t bow. Under the circumstances, it didn’t seem important.

“My daughter, Elliot’s liege, insisted I promise to keep an eye on her people while she could not,” said Li Qin. “I accompanied him because things have a tendency to become unnecessarily exciting in your presence.”

“And because you wanted to see what the big deal was,” I said.

Li Qin shrugged, expression unrepentant. “I’m curious. What can I say?”

“Nothing. I’d be curious, too.” I looked to Elliot. “Can you clean this up? I’m supposed to be coming to the conclave with the rest of you, and I can’t do it looking like an extra from Carrie.”

“Wow,” he said. “I thought there was a lot of blood the last time I saw you, but this is . . . wow. Do you bathe in the stuff? How often do you have to buy new clothes?”

“Not intentionally, and way too often, although in this case, the hole in the back of my bodice is going to be a much bigger problem than the blood,” I said. “Can you clean it up? Please? It’s drying, and that feels exactly as gross as you’d think.”

“I try not to think about how that sort of thing feels,” said Elliot. “Close your eyes and hold your breath.”

I closed my eyes. Taking a deep breath was easy, and I reveled in it, enjoying the feeling of my lungs inflating without any foreign bodies getting in the way. Then I braced myself, flashing Elliot a thumbs-up.

The smell of lye rose in the air a heartbeat before a hot, soapy wave hit me, washing over me like some sort of bizarre waterpark attraction. The pressure of it knocked me back against Tybalt, who was making a thin, angry noise deep in his chest. He didn’t mind showers, especially when I agreed to share them with him, but he was still a cat, and like most cats, he wasn’t a big fan of being doused. Then the wave broke, leaving us as dry as if it had never existed. I opened my eyes.

The room, which had always seemed clean, was now spotless. The glass glittered, the hardwood floors gleamed, and the blood was gone, leaving no trace that it had ever been there in the first place. I pushed myself back to my own feet, glancing back to check on Tybalt before I turned to Elliot, preparing to tell him what a good job he’d done. Then I stopped.

He was staring at the Luidaeg, eyes very wide and filled with tears. She was looking back at him, an expression of profound regret on her face. She looked so genuinely sad that it hurt to see her that way.

“I don’t . . .” he began. He stopped, took a breath, started again. “I don’t know the forms for this, but I know you’re a daughter of Maeve. Are you . . . ?”

“I’m sorry, but no,” she said. “You’re not mine.”

“Oh,” said Elliot, in a hushed voice.

“His name was Dobrinya. I haven’t seen him in centuries. I don’t even know if he’s still alive. I hope he is. He was among the sweetest of my brothers. But you’re not mine.”

“Apologies, First,” said Elliot, turning his face resolutely away. He reached up to wipe his eyes, trying to make the motion seem unobtrusive. He failed, but it was a valiant attempt. “I just never expected to stand so close to you. To any one of you.”

“I know,” she said. “You did good.”

Elliot visibly swelled with pride, finally looking at me. “You need to stop doing this sort of thing,” he said.

I shook off my surprise. It had been so long since I’d seen someone dealing with their first Firstborn encounter that I’d almost forgotten what it looked like. “Why should I stop? You do such a good job of fixing it.” I glanced down at myself. The blood was gone. So were the holes in my clothing. Even my bodice had been relaced, although the laces weren’t pulled tight; that would have knocked the air out of me, and that’s never good when you’re surrounded by a giant wave of magical water. I looked up again. “The High King told me to change my clothes. You think he’ll be cool with me having them magically steam-cleaned instead?”

“No,” said Arden immediately. “You need to wear something they haven’t seen before. It’s the only way you’ll be taken seriously.”

“Oberon save me from the purebloods and their rules,” I muttered. “All right: I’m going to need an escort back to the room I’m supposed to be sleeping in, since all my clothes are there.”

“Actually, no—you won’t,” said the Luidaeg. She turned and took the brown case from Karen, who had observed everything in silence, eyes wide and face drawn. She looked like she couldn’t decide whether she wanted to be terrified or amazed. That was a combination I was very well-acquainted with.

Setting the case on the table, the Luidaeg opened it and began rooting through a welter of scraps. Finally, she pulled out a piece of coppery spider-silk. The edges were ragged, but the lightning jag remains of the embroidery that must have covered the entire piece of fabric were still visible. She walked over and held it out to me.

“Here,” she said. “Now strip.”

“Uh.” I glanced at Quentin. As I had expected, his cheeks were so red that he could have replaced Rudolph as the lead reindeer for Santa’s sleigh. “I’m going to go with ‘no.’”

The Luidaeg rolled her eyes. “When you people learned all this modesty shit from the humans, I may never figure out. There’s a screen in the bathroom. Go get it, stand behind it, and strip.”

“Why am I stripping?” I asked. Quentin was blushing harder all the time. I was starting to wonder if the Luidaeg missed the sight of blood all over everything, and was trying to make my squire explode.

“Because you need to change your clothes.” She narrowed her eyes. “Unless you want to argue with the sea witch?”

I groaned, throwing my hands up in the air. “Sure, now you get all dire and terrifying, because you want something. Why can’t you be dire and terrifying when people are stabbing me? That’s when I need you to be dire and terrifying.”

“The bathroom’s over there,” she said, pointing.

I stopped complaining and went.

The bathroom, as she called it, was bigger than my living room, and contained a recessed tub that would have given me nightmares if it had been full. If the Luidaeg hadn’t been attending the conclave, this would probably have been the room assigned to Patrick and Dianda; she could have gone swimming in that tub. The promised screen was propped against the wall next to a large rack of soaps, bath oils, and baskets full of bath salts. I grabbed it, hoisted it up onto my shoulder, and returned to the main room, where the others were waiting.

“That is the biggest bathtub I’ve ever seen,” I said, putting the screen down.

“So glad to know that your pedestrian concerns continue to take priority,” said the Luidaeg. “Now strip.”

Arguing with her wasn’t going to get me anywhere. I unfolded the screen, stepped behind it, and began removing my clothes, trying to pretend I wasn’t sharing the room with my regent, my squire, a sea witch from the dawn of time, and an easily amused Duchess with a penchant for rewriting the luck of others. Tybalt, Elliot, and Karen were almost irrelevant; none of them made me that nervous, at least where nudity was concerned. Finally, I stepped out of my trousers, and called, “Done!”

“Great. Hold the cloth in front of you, hold your breath, and close your eyes.”

I did as I was told. I’d come this far. What was a little more ridiculousness?

The Luidaeg said something else, more softly this time. That was the only warning I received before a wall of hot, soapy water cascaded over me, leaving me gasping. Then I realized I could feel corset stays pressing against my sides. I looked down. The copper scrap had become a strapless, corseted gown. The skirt was loose enough for me to run in, cut mid-calf in the front and extending to the floor in the back. The whole thing was covered in that delicate forked lightning embroidery, giving the impression that I’d just walked out of the heart of a storm. There were even shoes, flats, made of leather that was the same beaten-gold color as the lightning.

“Well?” said the Luidaeg. “Come out.”

I came out. “How?” I asked, gesturing to the dress.

“Bannick magic repairs what it cleans,” she said. “Normally, that means patching and mending, but if you set up the right conditions—like, say, a piece of spider-silk cut from the gown of a dignitary at a conclave similar to this one, several centuries ago—you can sometimes convince the magic it should recreate the clothing out of whole cloth. You can keep the dress, by the way, assuming you don’t manage to bleed all over it. I have no use for that sort of thing.”

“And the shoes?”

“No outfit is complete without shoes, earrings, and, if necessary, gloves.”

I looked down. The gloves were tucked into the top of my bodice. I pulled them out and pulled them on, managing not to grimace at the feeling of the silk wrapping tight around my fingers. “Happy now, Fairy Godmother?”

“Ecstatic,” she said, somehow drawing the word out until it was four syllables long and packed with bitterness. “I won’t tell you to be home before midnight. Just try not to get stabbed again.”

“I’d prefer she try not to get stabbed in the first place,” muttered Tybalt darkly.

The Luidaeg turned on him. “You, get out,” she said—not unkindly, which was a nice change. “You need to get to the conclave without the rest of us if you don’t want to damage that independence you cats prize so much. They can’t start without Arden, but they’ll start without you. Hurry along.”

Tybalt cast me one last, pained look. Then he was gone, stepping back into the shadows and pulling them around him like a curtain, becoming nothing but the memory of a man.

The Luidaeg wasn’t done. She turned to Arden, and said, “Now’s your turn to play taxi. Get us to the conclave.”

Arden blinked, raising her eyebrows. “I’m the Queen here.”

“And I am clearly coming around too often and putting up with too much of your monarchist bullshit, because you seem to have forgotten the essential fact that I. Will. Fuck. You. Up.” The Luidaeg took a step toward Arden. Her eyes were suddenly black, and while her features hadn’t shifted, there was an element of menace to them that hadn’t been there a second ago. She didn’t need to change her form to be as brutal and mercurial as the sea. “Familiarity may breed contempt, Your Highness, but I recommend you find a way to shake off that tendency, because you have no power over me, no authority to command my actions, and no reason to expect my good will. Now, are you going to be a smart girl and open a door for us, or am I going to remind you why even the rulers of the Divided Courts listen when the Firstborn decide to speak?”

Arden had gone white. She didn’t say anything, simply sketched an archway in the air with her hand. It opened, smelling of blackberry flowers, to reveal the stage in the arcade. Then she curtsied to the Luidaeg. Curtsied deeply, until her forehead was almost pressed against her knee, revealing the swan’s-wing slope of her back, graceful and vulnerable in her white gown. The Luidaeg stepped forward, resting her fingertips against Arden’s spine. Arden shivered.

“Don’t mistake me for a friend because I sometimes choose to be friendly,” said the Luidaeg. “Don’t pretend you have some sort of control over what I do. I’m Firstborn. That means something. Even here, even now, in this washed-out mockery of Faerie, that means something. If you forget again, I’ll have to leave you with something to remember me by. So please, Arden. Because I loved your father, in my own way, in my own time, don’t make me remind you.”

She stepped through the portal, onto the stage, leaving the rest of us to stare, silently, after her. For a long moment, no one could find anything to say. Then Karen, of all people, cleared her throat.

“I want to go home,” she said.

Li Qin snorted. “Don’t we all,” she said, and followed the Luidaeg’s trail.