TWENTY-FOUR
SIMON HAD BEEN EIRA’S favorite errand boy and general assistant during her Evening Winterrose phase. They had played it quietly enough that his descent into presumed villainy had managed to avoid tainting her in the eyes of the Courts, even though everyone at the ducal level or above had been well aware that he was her man.
Which was why he’d attended quite so many functions at the High Court on her behalf, carrying her wishes and her commands to the ears of the Queen. He’d always been well-mannered and well-spoken, even during the days when he’d been used to carry out despicable acts on her behalf, and had been a beloved fixture at the Court, invited to every party and revel that wasn’t restricted to the upper nobility.
Which meant he knew how to reach the stables. He led us through the halls, a quiet, furtive group, all of us braced for signs of trouble, all feeling the effects of our time exposed to the iron. For me, it mostly seemed to take the form of muscle aches and a pounding head, which was something I was almost used to after the last several days of cascading misery. Dean, who was half-Daoine Sidhe, was slowing down more and more, and blinking too much, like his eyes were drying out.
I was honestly worried about all of them. August and I were recovering more quickly than the rest, our enhanced healing knocking the iron out of our bodies like it was no big concern. It was nice, understanding our magic the way I did now. The memories of the life Titania had created for me prior to the four months we actually lived were already fading into misty nothingness, like a movie I’d seen once but hadn’t particularly enjoyed; those four months, however, were fresh and bright in my memory, and I didn’t think they were going to fade more than any normal memories would have done. They were mine now.
Which was going to make my eventual reunion with Quentin awkward as hell, although not as awkward as my reunion with Gillian. How was I supposed to explain to my semi-estranged daughter that I hadn’t been able to remember her at all? Even in the grips of Titania’s magic, I should have been able to remember my own child.
But then, I hadn’t been able to remember the one I was actually carrying, and the entire Undersea had been sealed away from us. She hadn’t been in Blind Michael’s lands, which hopefully meant that she was with the rest of the Roane in the sea. And I couldn’t be unhappy about that. I wanted her to be safe. She was probably going to be angry with me, and I couldn’t blame her for that, either. This wasn’t the worst thing I’d ever done to her—it wasn’t even something I’d technically done—but it was one more on top of so many others that it was dizzying to think about it more than I had to.
Quentin, on the other hand . . . given the society Titania had designed, it was no real surprise that he would have no respect or compassion for changelings. When I’d first met him in the real world, he’d thought less of changelings just because they were generally less powerful than purebloods. Slapping that attitude out of him had been the work of several encounters and a few life-threatening adventures. This Quentin had never experienced those things. He’d grown up according to the standards of his society, and while I hated it, I couldn’t exactly blame him. We are all vulnerable to the things we hear from the people we trust to take care of us, and he’d been a victim of that vulnerability.
Somehow, I didn’t think he was going to see things the same way when this was all over. I was a changeling. His mother had been born a changeling. His boyfriend was a mixed-blood, something else that Titania had tried as hard as possible to eliminate from her perfect world. Hard as I tried, I couldn’t remember any notable mixed-bloods in her reality except for January, and she’d thrown Jan as far away as possible while keeping her inside the limits of her spell. There had probably been some reason she needed Jan’s existence to keep her reality from crumbling, but I couldn’t think of what it might be, not right now.
The halls were more deserted than I would have expected, and sometimes we would turn a corner and find ourselves confronted with an expanse of misty nothing instead of another corridor. When that happened, Simon would pause, make an unhappy noise, and then try another route, leading us through the knowe in an increasingly labyrinthine pattern.
We took a brief detour by one of the knowe’s kitchens for him to mix up a primitive iron treatment, and our Daoine Sidhe seemed to perk up after that, especially Simon himself. Being able to help the others was almost as medicinal for him as the treatment itself. Thus reinvigorated, we resumed our trek through the halls.
I leaned closer to the Luidaeg as we walked. “Is this going to work?”
“Titania isn’t creating new spaces, which means she’s working with whatever collapsed and wasn’t somehow reclassified as ‘lost,’” she said. “I don’t understand how that magic works. I don’t think anyone does.” She looked speculatively at Tybalt as she said that, clearly waiting for him to contradict her.
Instead, he shrugged. “The magic that takes the lost things to our Court is very old. It may be older than the Cait Sidhe ourselves. I don’t even know if Oberon actually put it in place; it may have simply arisen from the void, a necessary part of Faerie maintaining its own structural integrity. Or maybe it’s a spell so ancient and complex that we no longer understand it, and so we dismiss it as the way things have always worked. Understanding the difference is beyond me.”
“So no one knows,” I concluded. “Swell. Is there a reason Titania’s not making new spaces?”
“She’s always been more about refinement than creation,” said the Luidaeg. “Mom did most of the intentional creation, back when it was the going thing. And what Mom didn’t make, Dad had a tendency to cobble together, to make sure everything kept working properly.”
“If Titania didn’t create, what did she add to Faerie?”
“She bore many of the First, and her children were by and large successful, if only because they were so good at killing off the competition,” said the Luidaeg bluntly. “And they shaped Faerie in her image. Mom could build a bench. Titania would decorate it, turn it into something people would fight and die to protect. Creation isn’t the only worthwhile pursuit, and right now, we should be glad of that, because if she were more inclined to make her own things instead of repurposing what belongs to others, we’d be in even more trouble than we already are.”
Simon was ahead of us, reaching for a door that looked simpler than most of those we’d passed, plain, sanded wood with a pattern of briars carved around the edges. He paused with his hand on the knob, looking back over his shoulder.
“If she was able to recover anything of the grounds, they should be here,” he said. “If not . . .”
“The grounds were in the Summerlands, and even as the knowe collapsed, they should have been stable enough to remain,” said the Luidaeg, in what was probably meant to be a reassuring tone. “Go ahead.”
Simon nodded and opened the door.
On the other side was a wide stretch of green, wisps of fog dancing around the edges, but no more than would have been expected on a chilly morning. There was no visible sun, only an endless expanse of watercolor gray, clouds blocking out most of the sky. Light still filtered through, watery and pale, but warmer than moonlight would have been. Simon stepped outside, and the ground held his weight. The rest of us followed close behind him.