“It’s never going to be the same after this, you know,” said Ginevra, pressing the tip of her claw to the meaty pad at the base of my thumb. I realized what she was going to do just before she flexed her hand, driving the claw in deep. The pain was immediate and electric, and didn’t fade, as she kept her claw in the wound to stop it from healing. “Even if we can’t disenchant you, you’re always going to know the world you’re living in and the life you’re living is a lie. And that you’re hurting people by refusing to let it go.”
“But I’d be hurting people if I did let it go,” I said, voice strained, and tugged my hand back toward me. “You can take your claw out now.”
She did. Blood welled up, more blood than I’d ever seen before, and all of it mine. I cupped my hand and angled my thumb to let as much of the blood as possible run into my palm, keeping it from being lost on the forest floor. It was inevitable that some would drip down and feed the hungry soil, but no matter how friendly Ginevra wanted to say Maeve was toward me—and that idea was one more horrifying thing added to a whole parade of them—I wasn’t excited about the idea of leaving a piece of myself behind.
I raised my hand to my lips and took a mouthful of blood. The effect was electric. A few drops had been enough to make me feel like I could fight the world; the amount I’d been able to get from the back of my hand when April cut me had set my skin on fire. This much blood, though—I could do anything. I could fight not just the world but Titania, and I could win. I knew that was the heady rush of power talking, and not anything real, but it was still a dizzying feeling.
I pushed down the blood memories that threatened to rise and overwhelm me, refusing to let them show me anything else from a world I didn’t know and still wasn’t sure I wanted to know, closed my eyes, and looked into the forest.
It was nothing but darkness, shot through with occasional sparks of brilliant green that sparked blue and red, burning bright as anything. It was like I was looking into an infinite mine of fire opals, their red banked back behind the cool colors of the water, and it was beautiful. The longer I looked, the more of those firefly sparks lit up the blackness. I raised my hand again, sipping the last of the cooling blood out of the hollow of my palm as I slowly turned, trying to take in the entire landscape around me.
There, far in the distance, I caught a spark of pink iridescence. It was so unlike the opal green that it stood out like a beacon, and I took a step toward it before I realized that maybe walking into a dark forest filled with thorns with my eyes closed was a bad idea. I opened my eyes as I dropped my long-healed hand back to my side, wiping the last of the blood onto my kirtle, and pointed with my other hand.
“We go that way,” I said. “I’ll probably need to bleed again before we get there, but we go that way.”
Neither Ginevra nor Grianne questioned me, just fell into step behind me as I started for the nearest trail that seemed to go in the right direction. Grianne’s Merry Dancers swirled around and ahead of us, lighting up the landscape and helping me keep my footing. Fae are nocturnal by nature, and purebloods can see in the dark incredibly well. As a changeling, my night vision is considerably less acute. As in, sometimes I walk into walls in the tower, and I’ve lived there all my life, meaning I at least know the walls are there.
The Merry Dancers seemed to realize I needed the extra help, because one of them was almost always directly ahead of me, lighting the way as we moved deeper into the forest.
The path wound and looped back on itself, but kept traveling in something close to a direct line in the distance we needed to go. It was what Father used to call a “desire path” when we went down to the edge of the swamp to see the pixies who nested there; a path that wasn’t made because someone decided to put a path there, but because it was such an easy way to go toward something desirable that people and animals walked that way over and over again, until their feet pounded the earth down and made it harder for things to grow there. The force of their wanting cut channels in the world.
He used it both as a way to explain the natural trails and to remind August and me not to get too set in our thinking. If we followed our desire paths too many times, nothing would be able to grow there. He didn’t want that for us.
I couldn’t see the colors in the darkness anymore, and after we’d gone a good distance deeper into the thorn-choked trees, I turned to Ginevra. “I need more blood,” I said.
“I wish there was another way,” she replied, even as she extended her claws and reached for my hand.
“So do I,” I said, and stuck my bleeding finger into my mouth as I turned back in the direction we’d been traveling.
There, closer but still distant, was the tangle of iridescent pink. I nodded, pointing before I opened my eyes, to be sure I had the angle right, and said, “This way.”
We resumed.
The forest around us was quiet but not silent. Things rustled in the dark, little things moving through the brush or high in the branches, bigger things stepping their delicate way through the trees. I didn’t get the feeling we were in danger, and I didn’t know how we were supposed to get out of there, and so I kept on walking, moving toward our unseen goal.
A thick white fog began rising from the ground, getting denser and denser until it reached our waists and the ground was a distant, unseen dream. It was cool enough to chill my legs, even as my upper body still sweltered in the humid heat. If I could have transformed my leather jacket into leather pants, I would have done it, just to try and balance the two conflicting climates.
Grianne’s Merry Dancers continued to light our way, while Ginevra stuck close. It was almost sweet, how dedicated she was to making sure I didn’t get hurt, even if I knew it was because of the woman she wanted me to retrieve my memories of being, and not because of anything about me as I was. She was clearly afraid of that Tybalt person, and with good reason, from what I’d seen so far.
Onward we walked, until the path widened out into another clearing, this one dominated by a bier made of briars that had wound themselves together until they formed a structure taller than I was. Grianne’s Merry Dancers rose to bob in the air above it, and I saw just the edge of what looked like a glass coffin nestled there. Grianne frowned, a slow, bewildered expression.
“How?” she asked. “I saw her last week. She’s not supposed to be here.”
Ginevra and I both turned to her. “She who?” asked Ginevra.
“The Rose of Winter,” said Grianne, sounding utterly bewildered.
I looked back to the bier, straining for any sign that my father’s beloved patron was in the coffin at its peak.
“Oh. Her.” Ginevra sounded utterly repulsed. “She’s one of the people who’s in the world right now when she can’t be. Some of them are dead. Some of them are just imprisoned. She’s elf-shot and sleeping in a skerry, but I thought it was hers, made for the Daoine Sidhe, not an extension of the Thorn Road. It’s not like real estate is fixed here. Something must have moved when Titania rewrote the world. Just don’t touch the bier, and don’t say her name. Whatever puppet version of her you’ve been dealing with, you do not want to meet the real thing.”
“Why not?”
“I know you won’t believe me now, Toby, but where I come from, she’s just about your least favorite person in the world, and she’s been responsible for a good number of the things that have hurt you and the people you care about. The woman you know is a fantasy of Titania’s, and is probably an idealized version of the real thing. This is the one our world decided was too dangerous to wake up.”