One Salt Sea

THIRTY

“RAYSEL—” CONNOR BEGAN. “Shut up, Connor. I have nothing to say to you. As for the rest of you, stay where you are, or the girl dies.” Raysel took a casual step forward. “And you, sea bitch, you have no power here. I am a descendant of Titania, and I deny you the right to stand against me, or to aid those who would. Do you hear and honor my words?”

“. . . yes,” hissed the Luidaeg, fury dancing in her eyes. “I hear and honor your words.” The glance she cast in my direction confirmed my sudden fear: she wouldn’t be able to help us. Power like hers always comes with a price. The phrase Rayseline uttered was apparently part of the price the Luidaeg had to pay.

“Then stand to the side and hold your tongue. This is not your business anymore.” Raysel lifted her chin, jerking it imperiously toward the wall. Silently snarling, the Luidaeg moved as she was ordered, glaring daggers all the way.

“Rayseline.” I tried to put my body between her and my daughter without it being too obvious that I was doing it. If I’d had any doubts about her willingness to kill Gillian before, her own words had destroyed them. “Shut up or the girl dies” didn’t leave much room for argument. “We just want to talk.”

“Talk? You want to talk, so you come skulking through my new home in the dark, carrying weapons, damaging my things? I don’t know what kind of fool you think I am, October, but no one brings the sea witch and the King of Cats when they just want to ‘talk.’ ” Rayseline’s smile slipped, revealing the fury behind it. “You never had any intention of talking. You came to steal, and I don’t take kindly to thieves.”

It took a moment for me to realize that “damaging my things” meant freeing the captive pixies. My stomach rolled. The pixies had vanished the moment Raysel came into the room, diving for whatever cover they could find. One of them was hiding in my hair. Its body was plastered against my neck, wings vibrating with every anxious breath. As for the rest of them . . . I just hoped they could escape before Raysel bottled them up again.

“I don’t think we have the same definition of theft,” I said, struggling to keep my voice as level as possible. “Gillian’s my daughter.”

“She’s your daughter, and my honored guest.” Raysel took another deliberate step forward. “We have so much to talk about, after all. You failed us both. Why, we’re practically sisters, aren’t we?”

Gillian whimpered.

“Shut your mouth,” I snapped, all attempts at reason forgotten in the face of the sudden, fierce need to protect my little girl. “Don’t make this harder on yourself than it has to be. Put down the bow, call off your Goblins, and come quietly. I’ll ask the Queen to go easy on you.”

“That’s not an option. You know that, or you’d never have made the offer.” Raysel shook her head. I thought I saw a flash of regret in her eyes, there and gone in an instant. “Not even the High King could go easy on me now. Could he?” None of us said anything. Fury contorted her face as she turned to aim her bow at Quentin, shouting, “Could he?!”

“No,” Quentin said. I shifted to get a look at him. He was standing with his chin up and his shoulders squared, staring down the length of his nose at Raysel. “But he could show clemency. You didn’t mean to kill the Selkie. You could be granted a sentence other than death.”

“A century decorating some garden as a marble statue doesn’t appeal to me,” she spat. “I chose this. I’ll see it through.”

“Did you choose it, Raysel?” I asked, shifting my weight to put myself a bit more solidly between her and Gillian. “Or did someone offer it to you? We know you didn’t do this alone. What did Dugan promise you? Did he tell you this would make everything better? It won’t.”

Raysel’s fury slipped as she turned back to me, and for a moment, I saw the little girl I used to know in her face, a child trapped within the prison of her own induced madness. “Whether this plan was wise or not, it’s mine now,” she said. “Something had to be. This will be enough.”

“Will it? Or is he just using you to get what he wants?” I shook my head. “No honor between thieves, remember? He’s going to clean up his loose ends, just like Oleander tried to do.”

“Then he’ll die. Just like Oleander did.” The momentary vulnerability passed, replaced by a smug little smile. “I have to thank you, October.” She put a poisonous spin on the word “thank.” “You’ve collected everyone I need to kill in one place. It makes things so much more efficient.”

I was surprised enough that I laughed out loud before I thought better of it. Raysel’s eyes widened, making her look like a startled child. “Do you really think this is everyone you’ll have to kill? Seriously? Oak and ash, Raysel, stop posturing and think. If you want to make this go away, you’re going to have to kill a lot more than just us.”

“There’s my nephew,” said Tybalt calmly, “and a large percentage of my Court.”

“The Duke and Duchess of Saltmist,” said Connor.

“Danny and Walther,” I said, even though I wasn’t sure Danny knew about the dead Selkie. The look of alarm on Raysel’s face was promising; I just had to make it worse. “Oh, and most of Goldengreen.”

“Shut up,” said Raysel, without conviction. She licked her lips, shifting her weight from foot to foot. Her Goblins murmured behind her, starting to look concerned. Maybe they were realizing how unlikely their promised payday really was. “All of you, be quiet.”

“Your parents,” I said.

That was the wrong card to play. Raysel’s eyes narrowed this time, and her grip on her longbow steadied. “They already chose you over me,” she said, pulling the bowstring tight. “They can rot for all I care.”

I froze. I may be faster than I used to be, but I knew better than to believe I could outrun an arrow. If she let go, I was going down—and worse. Elf-shot is normally small, sized to fit in a handheld crossbow . . . but the tip of Raysel’s arrow glittered poisonously. Clearly, she’d been making some adjustments.

Raysel smiled at the terror on my face. “So maybe killing you won’t make this go away. So what? I’m going to be Queen when the war is over, and there’s plenty of space on the battlefield to arrange for an ‘accidental’ death or two. You’ve given me a list to work from. I’ll just think of it as a challenge before my coronation.”

Still not daring to move, I asked the only question I could think of that might buy us a little more time: “How were you planning to kill the Luidaeg? She’s Firstborn. I only know one person who knows how to kill a Firstborn, and you’re talking to her. If you kill me, the Luidaeg lives.”

“Even the Firstborn can be . . . incapacitated for a little while. I only need a hundred years or so. After that, she can say whatever she likes. I’ll have my throne. She won’t be able to hurt me.”

“Then there’s May, and the night-haunts—I mean, this is a lot of killing.”

Raysel scoffed. “The night-haunts are nothing. I own flyswatters.”

“The Court of Cats will hunt you to the farthest marches and beyond,” said Tybalt. He sounded almost bored. That was a dangerous tone coming from him. A cat that looks bored is a cat that’s getting ready to pounce.

Please, Tybalt, be careful, I prayed silently, unsure, as always, if anyone was listening. There’s no telling what she has on that arrow. Elf-shot, treated with a little something extra to make waking up impossible, if Walther was right.

“I don’t care,” said Raysel. She drew the bowstring back a little farther. Tybalt glanced at me, and nodded, almost imperceptibly. This standoff couldn’t last forever. Raysel’s attention was on me. All I had to do was keep it there.

I said the only thing I could think of that would guarantee I held her attention. “If you’re going to kill us anyway, you should know that Connor and I have been sleeping together since the day I came back from the pond.”

Her eyes narrowed. “Liar.”

“Oh, no. I called him from the motel. He came right over—said you wouldn’t notice, that you were too stupid to see that he was cheating on you.” I took a deliberate step forward, baiting her. “We laughed at you.”

“Liar!” shouted Raysel. Her fingers tensed as she swung her bow up, shifting her aim from my shoulder to my throat.

“She’s telling the truth,” said Connor. Raysel’s aim wavered, like she couldn’t decide which of us she should kill first.

“Now!” shouted Tybalt, and leaped for Rayseline.

He wasn’t moving as fast as I knew he was capable of, but he was still moving fast enough to slam into her before she could react. The impact knocked her off-balance, and she released the arrow, sending it flying to embed itself harmlessly in the ceiling. She shrieked, hitting him with her bow. The Goblins lunged for him, their knives out and gleaming wickedly.

I pulled the pixie from my hair, whispering, “Help us, please,” before hurling it toward Raysel and the others. It rang stridently as it tumbled through the air. That must have been the pixie equivalent of sounding a cavalry charge, because more pixies came swarming from their hiding places, biting and scratching as they dove into the fray.

One of the Goblins went for Quentin, and was promptly dissuaded by a baseball bat to the side of the head. Not to be outdone, Connor drew his own bow and shot the Goblin in the arm. It howled and dropped its knife.

I wanted to help them, but more, I wanted to get Gillian away from all this madness. I turned and knelt by her chair. “Just hold on, baby, I’m going to get you out of here,” I said, starting to saw through the rope binding her ankles.

“Mom? What are those things?” She sounded terrified.

“Close your eyes, Gilly,” I ordered. Tybalt was snarling, which meant he’d probably abandoned at least part of his human form in favor of a cat’s claws and fangs. Even my allies probably looked like monsters to her. “This is all going to be over soon, but I need you to close your eyes, because you don’t want to see this.”

“I don’t understand,” she whispered—but she turned her face away. Thank Oberon for that. She’d already seen too much.

I’d worry about that later. For now, my biggest concern was getting her out of the shallowing alive.

The rope holding her feet gave way. I moved around to the back of the chair. “Just keep them closed, baby,” I said, keeping my tone soothing, like I was trying to coax the toddler I remembered her being back to sleep after a bad dream. “I’m almost done here, and as soon as I’m done, I’m going to take you home. I’m going to get you out of here, and I’m going to take you home.”

“Promise?” she asked, voice barely audible above the sound of fighting. My hands faltered at the work of sawing through the rope, suddenly realizing what she was asking me—and what Raysel had really done.

Gillian had seen Faerie. Her introduction wasn’t the kind most changelings got, but she’d seen Faerie all the same. When Quentin’s human girlfriend was stolen by Blind Michael, the Luidaeg was able to pull her memories of the fae out of her mind, leaving her whole and undamaged by the experience. Katie was human. Katie had that option.

Gillian wasn’t human. Gillian didn’t.

Changeling children can live human until their powers manifest, or until they know too much. Katie’s mind wanted to reject Faerie, because it wasn’t hers. Gillian, on the other hand, belonged to Faerie, at least a little bit; she would never let the memories of something that big, that integral, go. She’d drive herself crazy trying to figure out what was missing from her mind.

If I got Gillian out of here—when I got her out of here—I was going to have to do the thing I’d thought I had managed to avoid completely. I was going to have to give her the Changeling’s Choice. The one where, if she chose Faerie, she would never see her father again . . . and if she chose human . . . if she chose human . . .

I bent my head, redoubling my effort to cut the ropes that held her. She wouldn’t choose human, that was all. She couldn’t choose human. Because if she chose human, I’d have to kill her, and then I’d have to break Oberon’s Law myself. If Raysel’s actions forced me to kill my own daughter, I’d strangle her with my bare hands, and go to the Iron Tree without regrets. And that couldn’t happen. I wouldn’t let it happen. My daughter would choose Faerie.

I was less than halfway through cutting the ropes around Gillian’s wrists when Quentin’s shout of pain made me raise my head again. Every instinct I had told me to go to him, to do a knight’s duty to her squire. I risked a look at the fight. Tybalt was holding off two Goblins, the three of them moving so fast that it was almost impossible to tell where one ended and the next began. Not all of the blood I tasted in the air was theirs. I hoped their weapons weren’t poisoned. A third Goblin was lying on the floor, his black blood turning everyone’s footing unsure even as it filled the room with the stink of tar and molten rock. He’d been casting a spell when he was killed, reaching into the limited arsenal of Goblin magic for something he never had the chance to finish.

Raysel and Connor were off to one side, circling one another. They both had their bows raised, waiting for the opportunity to strike. I would have needed to be blind to miss the hatred in her expression, or the sorrow in his. He didn’t love her. But he didn’t mean to fail her, either.

Quentin was backed into a corner, the fourth Goblin prodding at him with a long spear. My squire was already bleeding from several puncture wounds in his side and shoulders. He’d lost his baseball bat at some point; it was lying on the floor, well out of his reach. The pixies were trying to help by darting in and slashing at the Goblin’s eyes, but he just batted them away, his attention remaining focused on Quentin. Quentin, meanwhile, was having more and more trouble keeping the spear at bay.

I only stared for a second before I made my decision. I straightened, pausing to kiss Gillian’s cheek and say, “No matter what you hear, do not open your eyes, understand me? Do not open your eyes.” I didn’t wait for her to answer. I was already running across the room, dodging fallen pixies and broken arrows as I charged toward the Goblin who was harrying my squire.

Quentin pressed himself farther back against the wall when he saw me coming, forcing the Goblin to close in just that tiny bit more. The Goblin chuckled as he advanced, clearly believing his quarry was finally pinned. He never saw me coming up behind him, swinging my knife in an arc designed to plant it firmly between his ribs.

Raysel saw me running. In less time than it took for me to bury my knife in the Goblin’s back, she abandoned her standoff with Connor, whirling to release her arrow in Gillian’s direction.

Connor shouted something that was drowned out by the scream of the Goblin I’d just stabbed. I turned to see him drop his bow, throwing himself in front of my daughter. The arrow caught him high on the right side of his chest, going all the way through before the fletching on the end stopped it. Connor looked down at it with an almost comic expression of surprise . . . and then he fell, hitting the floor in a boneless heap.

“Connor!” I shouted, and ran toward him.

I was still running when Raysel pulled another arrow from her belt, fitting it into place, and drew back her bowstring. Tybalt was suddenly behind her, another of her arrows in his hand. He jammed it into the back of her arm, and she fell.

But she released her arrow first.

The sound of Raysel’s bow hitting the floor was surprisingly loud, given everything else that was happening in the room, and the smell of her blood—Daoine Sidhe and Kitsune and Blodynbryd; a mixture that should never have been possible, made possible by Luna’s desperation and a Kitsune girl’s sacrifice—filled my mouth for an instant before it was chased away by another, more urgent flavor. Human blood, spiced, ever so slightly, with Dóchas Sidhe.

Her arrow should have gone wild. Every ounce of logic, of fairness, in the world said that her arrow should have gone wild. Raysel was still falling as I stumbled to a halt, feeling myself go cold. I recognized Gillian’s blood the second it hit my tongue, even though I’d never tasted it before. Quentin shouted something, and another Goblin hit the floor a split second before Raysel did. I barely noticed.

I was too busy staring at Gillian, and at the arrow protruding from her left shoulder. Her eyes were still closed, and her head was lolling forward until her chin brushed against her chest. All the tension had gone out of her, leaving her collapsed like a boneless doll.

And it didn’t look like she was breathing.