One Salt Sea

TWENTY-EIGHT

I WAITED UNTIL WE WERE BACK in the car before I called May. Filling her in only took a few seconds. It would have taken longer, but there were no troops for her to send out, no backup for her to offer. Like it or not, my army was already in the car.

She did try, once, to convince me to call Shadowed Hills. “Let Sylvester send his knights with you,” she begged.

“I can’t wait that long. Etienne can’t open gates for them all—not when we’re not going into a knowe—and if Rayseline’s reached the stage where she’s chopping fingers off the kids she needs to keep alive, who knows what she’s going to do to Gillian.”

May’s silence told me she knew I was right. Finally, she sighed, and said, “Just be careful.”

“If I can,” I said, and hung up. I turned to look at Connor.

“I’m not leaving you, so don’t ask,” he said quietly.

I smiled. “I wasn’t going to. Let me make one more call, and then we’re out of here.” I started to raise the phone again, and stopped as the half-forgotten shell in my jacket pocket began to vibrate. I pulled it out, looking at it in bemusement for a moment before lifting it to my ear. “Hello?”

“Come get me,” said the Luidaeg.

I blinked. “So what, you call me now? This is new.”

“I thought you might appreciate skipping the headache.”

“That’s uncommonly considerate.”

“I have my moments.” The Luidaeg sounded tired. “You’re going to want me for what happens next.”

“Luidaeg, what are you—”

“Did you really think I wouldn’t start keeping tabs on you after the night-haunts came and complained to me about you summoning them again? I heard everything that happened in that apartment, and I’m telling you to come and get me. Now.”

The Luidaeg had neglected to mention her shell could be used as a two-way listening device. Oh, what fun it is, to live in a world where “full disclosure” is something that only happens to other people. “I thought you couldn’t be directly involved.”

“In stopping the war, no. In bringing those kids home . . . yeah. Now stop screwing around and get over here. Don’t worry about the traffic. I’m taking care of it.”

That simple statement was enough to raise a hundred horrific images, some of which wouldn’t have been out of place in a movie about a giant rubber monster rising out of the San Francisco Bay and starting to lay waste to everything in sight. “Luidaeg . . .”

“Not like that. What do you take me for?”

“The sea witch.”

It was her turn to pause, before allowing, “Fair enough. I’ll be outside when you get here. Make it fast.” With that, she was gone. I scowled at the shell before shoving it back into my pocket.

“Looks like we’re making a pickup,” I snarled, and started the car.

“Oh, what fun,” said Connor, deadpan. “Adding the sea witch to today’s field trip is probably the only thing that could make it even better.”

I scowled at him. He shrugged, expression so innocent that I couldn’t help laughing. “Jerk,” I said.

“I have to do something to make you keep me around when this is over.”

I was still laughing when Quentin stuck his head into the front seat, tapping my shoulder to get my attention. “Toby?”

“Yeah?” I glanced his way.

“What you did back there—have you done that before?”

I’d been hoping to put this conversation off for a while. Say, maybe, forever? Forever would have been nice. “Yes,” I said. “Why?”

“It was . . . it was . . .” He paused, clearly searching for the words. Finally, he said, “It wasn’t honorable.”

Oberon spare me from pureblood honor. “I didn’t break the Law, I didn’t really hurt him, and I got the information we needed. He wouldn’t have given it to us any other way. Sometimes, when your options are limited, honor takes a back seat to necessity.” And it had felt good. That was probably the worst part: that I used the things Devin taught me, the way he taught me to use them, and it felt good.

Sometimes I lie to myself a little bit, and pretend that Sylvester was the only man who taught me to grow up. Then things happen—things always happen—and I remember that nothing was ever that simple.

Quentin nodded, expression thoughtful. “Am I going to have to do that?”

“That’s up to you. Someday, you may find yourself in a position where you feel like you don’t have a choice. When that happens, it’s better if you have a way to deal with it. You can only repair your honor if you survive.”

“I guess.” He pulled back into his own seat, brooding. I just drove.

The Luidaeg’s apartment wasn’t far from Bucer’s. She was waiting for us on the corner, looking as human as I’d ever seen her, with her curly black hair bound in untidy braids. Her cable-knit sweater was too big, bagging around her waist and making her look even younger than her human mien normally did. She could have passed for an awkward nineteen year old still getting used to her own skin, as long as whoever she was trying to fool never saw the almost-infinite age in her dark brown eyes.

I pulled up to the curb, idling the engine while Connor opened his door and climbed out, clearly intending to get into the back seat. Quentin was already getting out, grinning as he threw himself toward the Luidaeg. “Luidaeg!” he said, any lingering tension washed away by his joy at seeing the sea witch.

She caught him in a one-armed hug, returning his smile. It was a sincere expression, made all the sweeter by the knowledge of how rare her smiles tended to be. “Hey yourself, kiddo,” she said, letting him go and ruffling his hair. “Dad’s teeth, you’re getting huge. They need to stop feeding you. Dead kids don’t grow much.”

“Sometimes I consider it, but I don’t want to fill out the paperwork for a replacement,” I said. “Come on.”

Connor stayed where he was, blinking as the Luidaeg followed Quentin into the back seat. He looked at me for guidance. I shrugged, and motioned for him to get back in the car. We needed to get moving, and if the Luidaeg wanted to sit with Quentin, that was her business.

Quentin met the Luidaeg after Blind Michael stole Quentin’s human girlfriend. The Luidaeg was the one who gave him the chance to save her . . . by giving her up. He could have hated her for that. I probably would have. Instead, she wound up added to his personal pantheon of people worth trusting. Boys are weird.

I met the Luidaeg’s eyes in the rearview mirror. Her irises were a plain human brown, and mine were the no-color mist gray I inherited from my mother. I scowled, mostly at my own carelessness. Until that moment, I hadn’t actually thought about the fact that I wasn’t wearing a human disguise. Getting Gillian back would be a pyrrhic victory if I betrayed the existence of Faerie in the process.

The Luidaeg lifted her eyebrows, waiting for me to speak.

“Buckle up,” I said, and pulled away from the curb.

“I’ve cleared the roads between here and Muir Woods,” said the Luidaeg. “You can go as fast as you need to. No one’s going to stop us.”

“This is probably where I’m supposed to say ‘neat trick,’ but I can do that with a don’t-look-here and a little fancy driving.” Still, I hit the gas, accelerating to a speed that bordered on unsafe. True to the Luidaeg’s word, there were no other cars in sight as we drove out of her magically-generated mist. “Where is everybody? Please don’t tell me you’ve turned the entire mortal population of the city into pillars of salt. I really don’t know how I’d explain that to the Queen.”

“There’s more than one way to get almost anywhere,” said the Luidaeg. Her tone was dismissive, like casting spells on half the city was no big deal. “People are just choosing those alternate routes tonight. That’s all.”

“What . . . what about the ones who were going places that didn’t have an alternate route?” asked Connor uneasily. He sounded like he didn’t really want to know the answer to his own question. That made one of us.

“They decided to do something else with their time,” said the Luidaeg. “The movie theaters are doing excellent business. Now drive, October.”

Her command was sharp enough that I sped up another ten miles per hour. The buildings outside the car windows were starting to blur and blend together, flickering past too quickly for me to make out individual details. “How do you know you’re going to be needed tonight?” I asked, raising my voice to be heard above the engine.

“Hold a moment.” The Luidaeg rolled down her window. Then she raised her left hand, tracing an elaborate pattern through the space between the seats. The air got suddenly colder, and I tasted saltwater on my tongue. Then the cold and the salt were both gone, taking the sound from outside the car with them. Her window was still halfway down, but there was no rush of air. We might as well have been driving in a hermetically sealed bubble—and for all that I knew, we were.

The Luidaeg met my eyes in the rearview mirror again before she shook her head, saying, “There’s no way of knowing who might be listening in. It’s better to be safe than to be sorry, especially right now.”

“You’re afraid of being spied on?” asked Connor. “That seems a little far-fetched.” He stopped, reddening as if he was just now realizing he’d spoken aloud.

The Luidaeg’s attention swung to him. When she spoke again, her voice was cold, almost without inflection. “I don’t believe I requested your opinion, Selkie,” she said, spitting out the word like it tasted bad. “As for things being ‘far-fetched,’ a year ago, you were a married man, and October here was a half-blood Knight living alone and half in love with the idea of her own death. Now your former wife is wanted for treason, October’s a Countess, her own personal death omen is paying half the rent, and the balance of her blood is a lot harder to read. No one who travels regularly in her company gets to use the term ‘far-fetched’ around me.”

“She’s got a point,” said Quentin, sounding almost cheerful. Having the Luidaeg in the car seemed to have made him feel much better about the whole excursion. That made one of us.

“Still,” I said, feeling like I should contribute, “for someone to be listening in, they’d have to be—”

“I’m not the only Firstborn left in the world. You should know that better than anyone, daughter of Amandine.” She somehow managed to turn the reminder of my mother into an endearment, like being Amandine’s child was a special, magical thing, rather than the source of half the complications in my life. “I don’t believe any of the other First are involved in this—but I can’t be certain. I can never be certain. And unless I absolutely know that none of my siblings are assisting our kidnappers, I can’t assume they’re not.”

“Oh, there’s a cheerful thought,” I said dourly. “How much do you know? Did you start listening as soon as the night-haunts left Goldengreen?”

“No. Not immediately. I knew you were going to call them, and it didn’t seem necessary.” There was quiet sorrow in her voice as she continued, “After you met with Duke Lorden, Mary . . . decided the circumstances were dire enough that she needed to call me with what she’d seen. She was worried that something terrible would happen if I didn’t go with you to Muir Woods.”

“Something terrible?” I asked, hands clenching on the steering wheel. “Something terrible like what, exactly?”

“She didn’t say. I don’t think she knew.” The Luidaeg’s reflection closed her eyes, letting her head rest against the back of her seat. “Mary, Mary, quite contrary. She doesn’t always understand what she sees, only that she sees it, and that what she’s seen can’t be unseen. She used to be more in control of her prophecy. But that was before.”

“Before what?” asked Quentin.

“Before the betrayal of the Roane,” said Connor. His voice was barely more than a whisper. If not for the Luidaeg’s spell shutting out all sound outside the car, I wouldn’t have heard him at all.

I frowned, slanting a glance in his direction. “What are you—”

“That’s a history lesson for another day, October,” said the Luidaeg, her tone leaving no room for debate. She didn’t lift her head or open her eyes as she gestured toward the road in front of us. “Drive. There isn’t time left for anything else.”

“I’m tired as hell of people being oblique and prophetic at me, you know,” I complained, pressing my foot down harder on the gas. “Do you people take some sort of correspondence course on making no damn sense at all?”

“It’s more of a graduate degree, actually,” the Luidaeg replied. I glanced again at her reflection. She was smiling. Only a little bit, but it was there. “I got the best grades in my class.”

“Figures,” I said, and focused on the road.

We were making the trip out of San Francisco at record speed, even for me, and whatever she’d used on the car was much better than an invisibility charm or a don’t-look-here. I didn’t even have to avoid the few other drivers who had somehow managed to avoid the Luidaeg’s misdirection charms and stay on the main roads. They just never happened to be where we needed to be next.

The Luidaeg’s presence was definitely making Connor uncomfortable. He sat, straight-backed, and watched the road ahead of us like he was counting down the miles to his own execution. An air of palpable tension was settling over the car, getting stronger with every minute that passed. We were moving toward a conclusion.

I saw a few cars after we crossed the Golden Gate Bridge into Marin, but the road ahead of us remained as open as ever. I was doing seventy when the phone rang. “Oh, thorns,” I swore, fumbling it out of my pocket and flipping it open with one hand. “Hello?”

“Tobes, hey. I tried what you said. This a bad time?”

“You shouldn’t be on the phone while you’re driving,” said Connor. “It’s against the law.” He sounded faintly alarmed—less, I think, because I was breaking the law, and more because I wasn’t slowing down to compensate for splitting my attention.

I would have needed a third hand to flip him off. I settled for hitting the gas a little harder, and watching him go pale.

“No, Danny, this is a great time,” I said. “We’re on the way to Muir Woods now. Did you get anything out of the rocks?”

“You’re already on the way to Muir Woods? What are you, psychic?”

“No, impatient.” I shook my head, trying to clear away the image of Bucer’s wide, frightened eyes. “What did they tell you?”

“Three of the rocks recognized the smell of redwood—said they missed the big trees. One of ’em also said it missed the water, so I put it in the sink.” He sounded exceedingly pleased with himself as he continued, “They like the environmental cues.”

“Good. Did they give you any other details? Anything we can use?”

“The smallest one remembered redwoods an’ cars. Used to be at the edge of a parking lot. Apparently, it got picked up and put down again by a whole lotta kids, so it remembered Raysel real clear. She was the first one that didn’t put it back.” Danny hesitated. “I, uh, promised I’d put it back when we were done. Is that okay?”

“I’m not going to make you break your word to a rock, Danny.”

“Oh, good,” he said, relieved. “I didn’t think you would. Anyway, second one remembered water, third one remembered bein’ pulled out of the ground.”

“Great,” I said, heart sinking. The first two rocks were useful. The third . . . how many rocks came out of the ground? All of them, that’s how many. “This is very helpful, Danny.”

“No, no, you don’t get it! It remembers bein’ pulled out of the ground, but it wasn’t bottom-down, like in a trail or something!” Danny raised his voice in his excitement, words booming into the cabin. I winced, holding the phone away from my ear. “She pried it out of a wall, a mud wall. Like you get where a trail’s been cut, you know?”

“So she picked up one rock at the entrance, one rock from a stream, and one rock from the side of a trail?” I brought the phone back to my ear. “Did you get anything else?”

“Not really,” said Danny. “Rocks aren’t so good with time, and everything else they had to say was about how much they don’t like the shape stuff’s been in since the big shake.”

“The big shake?” I asked blankly. “What the hell are they talking about?”

“The earthquake in nineteen-oh-six,” said the Luidaeg. She leaned forward, close enough to the phone for Danny to hear her when she asked, “Did the rocks say they cried when the towers fell?”

“What—” I began.

Danny’s answer cut me off: “Yeah, they did. You know what that means? Who is this, anyway?”

“It’s a pleasure to finally get the chance to speak with you, Mr. McReady. You can call me the Luidaeg.”

Silence fell on Danny’s end of the line. Looking amused, the Luidaeg sank back into her seat. Finally, Danny asked, “Toby? Was that really the sea witch just there? On the phone? Talking to me?”

“Yeah, Danny, it was. She’s not wearing a seat belt, either.” I shot a sharp look at her reflection in the rearview mirror. She looked quietly amused. “Call if you get anything else out of those rocks, okay? We’re almost to Muir Woods. I’m going to need both hands if we don’t want to drive off the edge of a cliff.”

“Open roads, and I’ll call.”

“Good. Hug the Barghests for me.” I couldn’t thank him, and so I just hung up, handing the phone to Connor as I turned my focus back to the road. The closer we got to Muir Woods, the less developed the land around us became. Housing developments and strip malls had already given way to half-hidden private driveways and tiny general stores with rickety wooden porches. The smell of the redwoods was seeping in through the vents, filling the entire car with the living green memory of something older and cleaner than the modern human world.

The lack of human development also meant a lack of concern among the local wildlife. Wild turkeys casually strutted along beside the road, their scrawny brown chests fluffed out like little avian gangsters. We startled a pair of deer as we came around a blind curve in the road, and I hit the brakes just in time to keep from getting Bambi pâté all over the windshield.

“Whoa,” said Quentin.

“My thoughts exactly.” I glanced over my shoulder. “Everyone all right back there?”

The Luidaeg, who was still not wearing a seat belt, didn’t look like our sudden stop had perturbed her in the least. “Fine,” she said. “Keep driving.”

I kept driving, more slowly now that we were on the treacherous roads marking the final approach to Muir Woods.

The Muir Woods National Monument was established to protect one of the last old-growth redwood forests in the state of California. It’s kept open to the public, as much to remind them why the forest is important as for any other reason. “These used to be everywhere in California,” said Connor suddenly. “Just about this whole part of the state was redwoods.”

“So why’d they cut them down?” asked Quentin.

“I don’t know.”

“Because they could,” said the Luidaeg. “Parking lot’s just ahead, Toby.”

“Good.”

I pulled around the last corner between us and the designated parking area and hit the brakes, swearing as I saw the gate blocking the entrance. Heavy chains held it shut. According to the posted sign, the park closed at sunset.

“Wait here,” said the Luidaeg, and climbed out of the car.

“What’s she doing?” asked Quentin.

“At this point? I have no idea.”

The Luidaeg walked to the locked gate and lifted the padlock that held the chains in place. She tapped it twice with her index finger, and it popped open, letting the chains fall loose. The Luidaeg unhooked them and swung the gate open.

She smiled into my window as I drove slowly past her, commenting, “Once you’ve pried open the gates of Tirn Aill with nothing but a headache and a stick, padlocks are surprisingly uncomplicated.”

“Uh, sure,” I said. She waved me to the nearest parking space, following the car as I pulled in and killed the engine.

I stretched as I got out of the car, taking a deep breath of the clean, redwood-scented air. I still wasn’t wearing a human disguise. In a place like this, where humans have done their best to step lightly and leave few traces behind, that felt appropriate. Connor and Quentin did much the same, even as they started scanning the woods around us.

Too bad we weren’t there to sightsee. “Quentin, I have a baseball bat you can use,” I said, brushing past the Luidaeg as I moved to open the trunk. “Connor, I don’t actually have any weapons for you—”

“That’s quite all right,” said Tybalt, from a point immediately behind my right shoulder. “I assumed that would be the case, and brought extra.”

I jumped, but managed not to embarrass myself by shrieking like a girl. Instead, I turned, finding myself eye-to-eye with Tybalt. He smiled with his usual easy arrogance, but I could see the concern in his eyes.

“Raj found you,” I said. My voice was lower than it had been when I was shouting to be heard by the people still getting out of the car. It felt like louder words had never escaped my lips.

“He did,” Tybalt agreed. “I was with my subjects, searching for our missing mice, and the rats that stole them.”

“Did you find anything?” I asked.

His expression darkened. “More, and less, than I wanted to,” he said. He dipped a hand into his pocket and produced what looked at first like a children’s toy—a bunch of dried sticks tied together with ribbon and string. I frowned at it, not sure what I was seeing.

Then the Luidaeg gasped. Her eyes went black from one side to the other as she pushed her way between us, grabbing the bundle and clutching it against her chest. Her sudden fury would almost have been amusing, if the air around us hadn’t been getting steadily colder. “Where. Did. You. Get. This?” she demanded, biting each word off into its own separate sentence.

“From the hand of a slain Goblin soldier,” replied Tybalt. He held his ground, somehow managing to meet the Luidaeg’s eyes without flinching. “He told me it had been given as a sign of faith by those who hired him.”

“Does somebody want to tell me what it is, since we’re all getting upset about it?” I asked.

The answer came from a surprising quarter: Quentin, who was standing off to one side, staring at the artifact with a look of nauseated awe on his face. “It’s a hand of bones,” he said. “Someone gave the Goblins a hand of bones?”

“What in Oberon’s name is a hand of bones?” I wasn’t asking now; I was demanding.

My tone caught the Luidaeg’s attention. She turned to face me, still clutching the bundle against her chest. The things I’d taken for sticks before rattled against each other, and something in the sound sang to me, telling me that yes, these things had once known blood. “A hand of bones is a promise to the land,” she said, voice tight. “Each piece comes from the hand of a former reigning monarch—one who no longer reigns, for whatever reason. The night-haunts leave the bones of the hand behind for us, to mark the fall of a regent. This,” she touched a bone that looked like all the others around it, “came from the hand of King Gilad, who ruled the Mists before your current Queen stepped up to claim his empty throne.”

“Okay, that’s charming, but what does it have to do with anything?” I stalked to the back of the car and unlocked the trunk. My baseball bat was on the top. I grabbed it, tossing it to Quentin. “What does a hand of bones do?”

“They mark a promise made on a Kingdom’s throne,” said Quentin. He hugged the baseball bat against his chest, shaking his head. “If the Goblins had that, it’s because someone made them a promise on the Mists. What were they promised?”

Tybalt looked past the Luidaeg, looking straight into my eyes as he said, “Goldengreen. The ones who hired the Goblins promised that, when the war was done and the Kingdom was theirs, the Goblins would have Goldengreen, and respectability.”

“My house is not for sale,” I said. I gave the grisly trophy the Luidaeg held another look, and asked, “Did the Queen give it to them?”

“No.” Tybalt’s answer was quick. “The Goblin who . . . surrendered . . . it to me described a woman with red hair, and a dark-haired man who stood behind her, in the shadows, watching.”

“Rayseline,” said Connor wearily. He walked toward Tybalt, holding one hand out, palm up. “You said you brought weapons?”

“It seemed rude not to bring enough for everyone.” Tybalt produced a crossbow from inside his coat and passed it to Connor, along with a leather-wrapped packet of arrows. “I look forward to fighting beside you.”

Connor looked at him like he couldn’t quite figure out whether Tybalt was messing with him or not. Tybalt looked back with an expression of complete sincerity. Finally, Connor nodded. “It will be an honor,” he said, and turned away.

The Luidaeg gave the hand of bones one more angry look before tossing it into the backseat of the car and slamming the door. “We should be moving,” she said. “Time isn’t standing still while we mess around down here.”

“No, it’s not,” I said. Looking back to Tybalt, I asked, “Is it just you?”

“For now,” he said. “Raj is bringing the knights from Shadowed Hills. I understand your reluctance to wait for them, but a little last-minute cavalry never hurt anyone. My subjects stand watch at Goldengreen, and at your apartment, in case this is a diversion of some sort.”

“Good thinking.” I shut the trunk. “I’m glad you came.”

“No other places beckoned half so sweetly,” said Tybalt. “I’ll keep watch as we go.” He half-bowed, and was gone in a swirl of pennyroyal and musk. I looked down at the tabby tomcat now standing by my feet.

“Well?” I asked. “Were you going to take point or not?”

Tail high, he turned and trotted toward the open parking lot gate. I looked at the others.

“Come on. Let’s go get my daughter back.” Not waiting to see if they’d follow, I started after Tybalt. One way or another, this was going to end.