“You’re not the master here, Annie,” said Acacia, moving toward us with Raysel by her side. “But yes, you do. Lovely as it is to have my daughter home, I want her here because she chooses to be, not because someone else chose to put her here. And I want her to know my grandchild.”
“Even if I don’t really want to talk to her right now, it sucks to have your mom forget who you are,” said Raysel.
“Great, so we have our field trip,” said the Luidaeg. “We head for Shadowed Hills, we ask Sylvester for help, and if he refuses, we unbind him immediately. He’ll help us once he understands what’s been done to him.”
“Excuse me,” I said. She turned to look at me, eyebrows raised.
“Wasn’t sure you knew those words,” she said. “Yes, Toby?”
“How is Uncle Sylvester going to help us?”
“He was a hero once, just like you are in my reality, and he’s going to be pissed. But he’s still a noble, which means he’ll have access to whatever knowe Titania is using as a base for her Ride. And he’ll be able to tell us who he remembers that he didn’t remember five minutes before, and who he doesn’t remember being dead or missing, which should help us find the other Brown kids.”
“If there is anyone else,” I countered. “Why are you so sure he’ll be able to tell us something we don’t know?”
“Because I’m hoping he’ll know where my mother is, even if he doesn’t realize it,” said the Luidaeg. “Oberon and Titania were both inside the radius of Titania’s spell, along with half a dozen Firstborn and your maternal grandmother, about whom the less said, the better. We’ve been gathering in the Mists for more than a century, and whatever pulled the rest of us there, it will have pulled her too. Mom was in range. We look for the people who should be there but aren’t, and then we figure out where Titania put them, and we’ll find my mother.”
“What if she doesn’t want to be found?”
“Well, then, we better pray we can break Titania’s Ride without Maeve’s help, the way Janet Carter broke my mom’s, because otherwise, we’re all a little more fucked than we were yesterday, and maybe her world becomes the real one after all.” The Luidaeg looked at me levelly. “No pressure.”
Nope. No pressure there.
TWENTY-ONE
THE ACT OF OPENING a road out of Blind Michael’s lands was remarkably anticlimactic after everything we’d already been through. Acacia walked us through the hall until she found a yarrow-banded door, the hinges black with candle smoke and time, and pried it forcibly open, revealing the knowe at Shadowed Hills. After that, we simply . . . stepped through, passing into the Summerlands in the blinking of an eye.
The door swung shut behind us, and we were alone in the forest behind the manor, the sky overhead a pale, bruised shade of twilight that made it impossible to guess the actual time, the lights of the knowe glittering through the trees.
The Luidaeg squared her shoulders. “All right,” she said. “Sir Grianne, if you would let the household know we’re here?”
Grianne nodded, bowed, and did a backward somersault into air, vanishing, her Merry Dancers blinking out with her as she passed onto the Shadow Roads. The rest of us clustered around the Luidaeg, a motley bunch if I’d ever seen one, waiting for her to come back.
Seconds crawled by. A circle opened in the air and Sir Etienne stepped through, Grianne close behind him. “October, you’re all right,” he said, with visible relief, before sweeping me into an embrace.
I froze, going stiff. Nothing in my experience up to this point had prepared me to be embraced by Sir Etienne, who had always kept me at a more-than-polite distance.
Always, before he took me to meet his daughter.
Awkwardly, I relaxed enough to pat him on the shoulder. “I’m fine,” I said. “Is everything okay with you? Is Chelsea . . .” I wasn’t sure how to finish that question, and so I didn’t. I just trailed off, letting it hang in the air.
“She’s very sorry for what she did,” he said. “She was in pain, her thoughts were in a jumble, and she reacted instinctively. The spell shattered even as she pushed you away. We’ve been able to find no traces of enchantment.”
“You didn’t notice them before.”
He looked abashed. “True enough, but—she seems truly to have been released. Now she asks us about people we don’t know, and speaks of a world we’ve never seen, and I don’t . . .” He stopped, finally seeming to notice my strange companions, looking at each of them in turn without any sign of recognition. I heard Raysel’s sharp intake of breath. The Luidaeg put a hand on her shoulder.
“Don’t know what to do?” asked Ginevra. “Yeah, we’ve all been experiencing that a lot since this all started.”
“Can you help us?” I asked, before the Luidaeg could jump in and say something terrible that would make him run away and sound the alarms. Oh, I was pretty sure she wouldn’t mean to. She was just so accustomed to everyone knowing who she was and why they needed to be afraid of her that she didn’t stop to think before she spoke.
And I would not be the one telling her that. People who criticize the Firstborn don’t tend to have long and healthy lives. People who criticize Maeve’s Firstborn, when the ones we remember at all tend to have been immortalized as monsters, well . . . I have to assume that would be even worse.
“After what you did for me, I owe you anything you care to ask for,” said Etienne fervently. “Chelsea is safe now, or will be, once she can stop speaking of a world that never was. Whatever you need.”
“See, that’s part of the problem,” I said. “The world you say never was—it existed. Up until four months ago, it existed. And these people are trying to bring it back, before this world becomes the only one there is.” I tensed, waiting for the explosion.
To my profound surprise, it didn’t come. Instead, Etienne seized my hands, holding them tightly. “Truly?” he asked.
I nodded. “Yeah. That’s what they want to do.”
“Do you think they can?” He gave them a more careful, measuring look.
“The skinny teen in the dress made of dead leaves is the sea witch, so yeah, I’m going to say they stand a chance,” I said. Behind me, the Luidaeg smirked and raised one hand in a short wave.
Etienne paled. “The . . . the sea witch?”
“It’s been a long night. We need to see Uncle Sylvester as soon as possible, because we’re sort of on a timetable. What day is it?”
Etienne blinked, looking even more confused than he had a moment before. “Moving Day, of course. The sun rose in the mortal world about two hours ago.”
So around nine o’clock in the morning on Halloween, then. We were almost out of time.
“Right,” I said. “Okay. We need to see Uncle Sylvester. You’re his seneschal. Can you get us an audience? Any sort of time with him?”
“Melly and Ormond have been handling the Moving Day duties,” said Etienne. “I believe he’s available now, but you can’t be seen moving through the knowe, especially with a band of strangers. Not everyone is as well inclined toward you as I am, and the Queen’s men have been here inquiring as to your whereabouts. Grianne, stay with them. I’ll be right back.”