One Salt Sea

TWENTY-NINE

WALKING BENEATH THE TOWERING REDWOODS was very much like walking into a forest in the Summerlands: majestic and unspoiled. Only a few undeniable signs broke the illusion of the forest primeval. Wooden walkways wound among the great trees, protecting the forest floor from careless feet, and there was a small gift shop near the entrance, polluting that part of the wood with the smell of human habitation. Tybalt lashed his tail as he glared in that direction, then continued down the wooden path, a dark streak moving through the growing shadow as the night descended.

I kept my hand on the hilt of my knife as I walked, flinching a little every time the bushes rustled. An owl hooted in the distance. The sound was answered by another, deeper hoot, before a chorus of frogs began to sing somewhere in the creek that ran beneath the wooden planks.

The Luidaeg paced next to me, her dark curls almost blending into the background. Her feet were silent, unlike Connor’s or Quentin’s; the two of them alone managed to sound like an entire invading army as their shoes clomped on the walkway. She looked at my face, reading the tension there, before casting a glance back over her shoulder and whispering a word in a language I didn’t recognize. The temperature of the air around us dropped by several degrees, and the sound of their footsteps stopped.

I nodded silent thanks, the need to stay as quiet as possible saving me from the effort of talking my way around the forbidden words, and kept on going.

Muir Woods was designed to retain as much of the spirit of the land as possible, while making it accessible to humans at the same time. They wouldn’t preserve anything they couldn’t appreciate, or so the logic ran; unless they saw the true beauty of California’s wilderness for themselves, they’d never understand why they shouldn’t burn it all to ashes. I’ve never understood that sort of thinking, but this time, it was working in our favor. We’d have been moving a lot slower if we’d been forced to make our own way through the undergrowth.

Tybalt reached a fork in the path and stopped, looking one way and then the other before turning to look at the rest of us. Deliberately, he sat, flattening his ears.

I bit back a sigh. If Tybalt had lost the scent—and he wasn’t a bloodhound, no matter how cheerfully I exploited the keenness of his feline nose—we were going to need to try something else. I looked to the Luidaeg, raising an eyebrow.

She nodded and held out her hand, gesturing for me to give her mine. I didn’t hesitate. Whatever she needed from me, she could have it, if there was a chance it meant we’d be able to get my daughter back.

The Luidaeg raised my hand to her mouth, looking at me solemnly before making a “hush” gesture at Quentin and Connor. They hadn’t been making any noise. All three of us looked at her quizzically, trying to figure out what she wanted.

We were still looking at her quizzically when she opened her mouth and bit me hard enough to draw blood.

I’d been expecting pain—I’ve learned that when I let the Luidaeg take hold of any part of my anatomy, pain is going to follow very shortly—but it still took everything I had to grit my teeth against the urge to scream, or at least squeak. As it was, I made a small, muffled, moaning sound before clapping my free hand over my mouth, stopping anything else from getting free.

The Luidaeg withdrew her teeth from my flesh, studying the resulting puncture wounds for a moment before nodding to herself and letting go of me. Motioning for the rest of us to stay where we were, she stepped off the edge of the walkway and into the creek. Her feet slid into the water without a sound. My blood ran from the corner of her mouth, looking almost like chocolate syrup in the dark.

Chocolate syrup doesn’t sing to my senses. I cradled my wounded hand against my chest, trying not to think about the fact that I was bleeding, or that we were standing here while Rayseline might be torturing my daughter. Connor stepped up beside me, putting a comforting hand on my shoulder. I let myself lean into it, breathing slowly in and out, trying to ignore the smell of blood.

The smell of musk and pennyroyal joined the mingled scents of blood and redwood trees, and Tybalt stepped soundlessly up on my other side, back in his human form. He looked at Connor, and nodded. That was all; just nodded.

The Luidaeg stooped to grab something out of the creek. Then she straightened, holding a dripping, Y-shaped branch in one hand, and climbed back onto the walkway. She held out the branch to me. I took it, giving her a blank look. She mimed grasping the two short ends and holding it out like a—

Like a dowsing rod. Of course. I turned the stick around so that I would be holding it appropriately, only wincing a little as the bark rasped against the wounds made by the Luidaeg’s teeth. My blood ran down the right side of the stick, mixing with the water, as the copper-and-cut-grass smell of my magic started to rise. I wasn’t the one calling it, not on purpose, but I forced myself to relax and let it come. The Luidaeg knew what she was doing. My daughter needed me to trust her.

As if that thought were the key, the magic locked into place, and the dowsing rod in my hands twitched drowsily to life. It pulled, hard, toward the path up ahead. I started in that direction, holding the dowsing rod straight out in front of me. The others followed, fanning into a rough diamond formation: Quentin right behind me, Tybalt and Connor walking side by side, and the Luidaeg bringing up the rear.

All of them looked like they really wanted something they could hit. Anything that tried getting the jump on us in this forest was going to have a nasty surprise when it realized what it was dealing with.

The dowsing rod’s pull led us down one path after another, until I found myself starting up a series of mud-and-timber “stairs” cut into the side of the mountain. We were about halfway up when Quentin grabbed my elbow, bringing our whole procession to a stop. I turned to frown at him, and he indicated a hole in the muddy bank beside us. A place where someone had recently pried loose a rock. We were getting close to our destination.

I nodded and started forward again, moving a little more cautiously as the dowsing rod urged me to continue ever forward. My hand wasn’t bleeding anymore, but it didn’t need to be, because the blood I’d already spilled was singing so strongly. Gillian was my daughter, blood of my blood, and the dowsing rod was taking us straight to her.

The pull stopped abruptly, my spell shattering. I stumbled, nearly dropping the now-quiescent dowsing rod. The others stopped in turn, all of them scanning the underbrush for signs of the shallowing we’d come here to find. All but the Luidaeg. She pushed me gently aside as she walked up to a vast redwood with a trunk so big around that it could have been hollowed out and used as a home for a family of four. Leaning forward, she pressed one palm flat against the bark of the tree, and spoke the first words I’d heard any of us utter since she spelled Quentin and Connor’s footsteps into silence:

“I know where we are now. I’m sorry you’ve been alone for so long. I should have guessed, when you blocked my scrying. You’re still protecting the King, aren’t you? It’s all right now. You can let us in.” She paused before adding, with the air of someone who was confessing a great secret, “Arden lives.”

A ripple seemed to pass through the trees around us, briefly filling the air with the sea-sweet smell of salt and something fainter, less distinct, like a woman’s perfume left open in a sealed room for a hundred years. It was gone before I could figure out exactly what it was.

The Luidaeg pulled her hand away from the tree, smiling sadly. “Thank you,” she said . . . and the tree opened where her hand had been, the bark fading into nothing and leaving a dark tunnel behind. She looked back to the rest of us. “Hurry. I don’t know how they’ve been abusing the knowe to get inside, but I can’t hold this door for long.”

I nodded. “We’re moving.” I gestured for the others to follow me, and drew my knife as I slipped past the Luidaeg, into the door in the tree.

Entering a shallowing isn’t quite like entering a proper knowe. The separation between the worlds isn’t as pronounced, and the disorientation passes faster. This passage was even more subtle than the norm, since the air in Muir Woods was already so clean, and the night was already so silent. We moved from the mortal world into the fringes of the Summerlands without missing a step. The Luidaeg’s spell of silence must have broken when she spoke, because I could hear our footsteps again, little scuffs against the hard-packed clay of the tunnel floor.

There were no sounds but our footsteps as we walked through the dark of the shallowing. The clay under our feet gave way to smooth gray stone. I shivered and sped up. We were getting closer to the children—we had to be. This was the place, and this was the type of stone I’d seen through Dean’s memories. They had to be somewhere up ahead, waiting for rescue.

And then there was light.

It was subtle at first, the faintest decrease in the darkness surrounding us. It grew brighter until I could see the walls of the tunnel without needing to be right up against them. There was a corner just ahead; whatever was casting the light had to be on the other side. I sped up, sticking close to the wall in case someone was waiting with a lantern and a crossbow. When I reached the corner, I stopped, listening. There was no sound. Gripping the hilt of my knife a little tighter, I stepped forward.

A hallway with oak-paneled walls and the same stone floor extended on the other side of the corner. That wasn’t what caught my attention. The light was coming from a lantern hanging from a hook on one wall, and it seemed to be moving. I took a step closer, and realized that it was lit, not with a candle or an oil wick, but with three live pixies. They were crammed into the tiny glass rectangle, leaving them with barely enough room to move their wings. Quentin’s breath hissed through his teeth as he saw them, and Tybalt scowled. Connor looked away.

“Well?” whispered the Luidaeg, stepping up behind me. “What do you want to do about that? We can’t have them alerting Rayseline to our presence. And we could use the light.”

“Hang on.” I stepped forward and took the lantern down from the wall, bringing it close to my face. The pixies inside looked at me with mingled hope and terror. Keeping my voice low, I said, “I need your help. We need to have light to find the people who put you in this lantern. If I let you out, will you stay and help us?”

The pixies eyed me suspiciously before turning to each other and starting to speak in their rapid, high-pitched language. Finally, the smallest of the three turned to me and nodded, folding her arms to punctuate the gesture.

“Here goes nothing,” I whispered, and opened the panel on the side of the lantern.

All three pixies immediately flew out, performing an elaborate series of aerial acrobatics in the narrow confines of the hall. Then they turned and zoomed over our heads, vanishing into the hallway up ahead.

“Oh, good call,” grumbled Connor.

“Wait.” The pixies in Goldengreen were pests, thieves, and tricksters . . . but they kept their word. I had to hope these pixies would do the same.

The seconds ticked by. I was about to admit defeat and move on into the dark when the light came racing back along the tunnel, and our three pixies flew back into view—now joined by six of their cousins. Quentin grinned.

“They just wanted to get their friends out,” he said.

“Let’s hope Rayseline wasn’t using one of those lamps,” said the Luidaeg . . . but she was smiling to herself as one of the pixies landed on her shoulder. The other pixies found perches on the rest of us, their multicolored wings casting a soft glow through the hall.

“Come on,” I said, and started walking again.

The pixies stayed with us as we made our way through the darkened hall, pausing only to free more of their people from lanterns. The sight of them crammed in there was enough to turn my stomach, and only intensified my need to find Gillian as soon as possible. Pixies are essentially defenseless when they’re not swarming. Using them as living light bulbs wasn’t just wrong; it was unnecessarily cruel. There are plenty of spells and plenty of candles in the world.

We’d been walking through the shallowing for a good ten minutes when we came to the end of the hallway. A large oak door filled most of the final wall, standing ever so slightly open. I gestured to Connor, who nodded and slotted an arrow into his crossbow, raising it to shoulder height. Quentin and Tybalt stepped back, pressing themselves against the wall. Only the Luidaeg stayed where she was, arms folded, scowling.

I crouched, making myself as small a target as possible, and pushed the door slowly open. Then I straightened, all caution forgotten, as the scene in front of me made my mouth go dry and my blood start to boil all in the same instant.

Gillian was sitting in front of me, dressed in bloodstained sweatpants and an over-sized T-shirt. She wasn’t sitting up on her own; no, she was held upright by loops of rope, tied into thick knots and binding her to a heavy chair. Her ankles were tied to one of the chair legs, and her hands were bound behind her. She raised her head at the sound of the door opening, and her eyes widened when she saw me standing there. We must have looked like something out of a fantasy novel to her, all pointed ears and inhuman eyes, surrounded by the constantly-moving swirl of the pixies.

“M-Mom?” she whispered, her voice raspy and dry. “Is that—are you—Mom?”

“Oh, baby.” I took a step into the room, trusting the others to watch for any dangers. All I wanted was to get to Gillian as fast as possible, to cut her free and hold her, and never, never let her go. “It’s going to be okay, I promise.”

“Mom . . .” She swallowed hard, the gesture seeming to take everything she had. Then she whispered, in a barelyaudible voice, “Run.”

“It’s too late for that,” said Rayseline, her voice coming acid-sweet and oily from the hallway. We all turned, even the Luidaeg, to see her standing behind us with a longbow in her hands, an arrow nocked and ready to fire. Four Goblins stood behind her, their weapons raised. “It’s been too late for quite some time, don’t you think?” Her smile was radiantly bright. “I’m so glad you could come to my party. We’re all going to have so much fun together.”