Stepping out of the haunted house of the false Queen’s knowe was a relief greater than I could possibly have anticipated, like a weight being lifted off my shoulders. I stood straighter, taking in a deep breath of the sweet, loam-scented air.
“This way,” said Simon, and gestured for us to keep following as he set out across the green.
“Has this always been here?” I asked, hurrying to keep up.
“For as long as I’ve known the knowe,” he said. “I’m a bit surprised you’re not familiar, given the story of how you found this place.”
“I found it, I didn’t claim it,” I said. “And it’s not like I was exactly welcome to wander around and explore after I surrendered it to the Queen.”
Not that I was sorry to have given it away. I’d received a knighthood for my trouble, and that had saved my bacon more times than I could count. Without it, my life would have been very, very different. More like the life I’d just escaped from than the one I’d actually lived.
Little things really can change everything. I pulled my jacket a bit more tightly around myself, shutting out the chill, and reminded myself how much I liked the little things. Sometimes they’re all that matters.
The fog reduced our easy visibility to about twenty feet in all directions, and the low, crumbling form of the Queen’s knowe was soon swallowed up by the gray, leaving us walking through a seemingly endless meadow. I watched Simon closely. He didn’t look anxious or lost; if anything, he looked like he knew exactly where we were going.
That made one of us. The others were still flagging. The blisters on the Luidaeg’s hands stood out livid and angry against her skin, red and engorged. They looked like they would burst under the slightest pressure. Garm was lagging farther and farther behind, while Raysel and Dean had put their animosity aside enough to lean on each other, keeping their legs from giving out. Tybalt kept pace with me, expression grim, and I knew that at the slightest sign of danger, he’d be pulling me onto the Shadow Roads.
August would never forgive him for that. I wasn’t sure he cared that much about what my sister thought, but I cared.
“Who could she be using as a sacrifice?” I asked.
“Can’t be a child of Maeve, which means May’s safe,” said the Luidaeg. “She’s been around long enough that she has some Titania-descendant memories mixed up with everything else in that nightmare she calls a head, but while that gives Titania a claim, it doesn’t change who she belongs to. Jazz is protected for the same reason.”
“Raj is of Erda’s line,” said Tybalt. “Are the children of Oberon so protected?”
“No,” said the Luidaeg grimly. “He could be a candidate. So could Quentin. She wants this one to hurt you, Toby, and that means she’s going to be looking at the people you actually care about.”
“So Mom’s in the clear.” Even with four months of fresh memories clustering my mind, I couldn’t work up much affection for the woman who had borne me but never once been able to love me.
“Probably,” the Luidaeg agreed. “Taking Amandine wouldn’t hurt you enough. Neglectful parenting as a form of self-protection isn’t exactly a new one on me, but it’s one I could have happily gone another hundred years without seeing again.”
“How do we stop her?”
“There are two ways to stop a Ride. If it hasn’t started yet, and you can grab her sacrifice and spirit them away, that should do it,” she said. “They’re supposed to receive seven years of paradise before they go to the Heart. Seven years where they get anything and everything they want handed to them without argument, because they’re doomed to die, and that makes them special, at least in the short term. She’d have to tear down her whole illusion and cast it again to give someone new seven years of paradise after she’s already tricked someone into remembering things that way.”
“Which just puts us right back where we started,” objected Dean.
“Yeah, but the sacrifice would be out of immediate danger, and it wouldn’t be Halloween anymore; she’d have to keep the spell stable until Beltaine to have another shot at Riding,” said the Luidaeg. “And now the cats know what to do, and they can do it a lot faster. She can’t remove them from the equation entirely, not with the amount of Dad in them, and they’ll always get loose. Even if we have to replay this bullshit, we’d still have a chance.”
“You’re talking about my wife and child as if losing them would be a small thing,” snarled Tybalt.
The Luidaeg turned on him. “I never said that was the only option here, or the best one. But it is one way to stop a Ride, and there’s the possibility it could weaken Titania just long enough to give us time to try to find my mother or father, or to come up with another way to break the spell.”
“And if it doesn’t work out that way?” The thought of going back into the deep waters of Titania’s enchantment turned my stomach. I’d already missed four months with my family. Four months of understanding and nurturing my pregnancy. My bloodline, which the baby shared at least in part, recovered quickly enough from any sort of damage that I didn’t expect the neglect to be an issue, but that wasn’t what worried me the most. “Even if we stop the Ride now, Titania controls the spell. She’s going to remember everything that’s happened. There’s nothing to keep her from changing the rules, making it so the cats are seen as a deadly threat instead of a defeated enemy, or putting me somewhere Tybalt won’t be able to find me. Like Dean said, we’d be right back where we started.”
“Or much worse,” Tybalt said. “As soon as you give birth, there’s nothing to stop her from taking our child. And by the time the next Ride comes . . .”
He didn’t finish, but he didn’t need to.
“Then there’s no other choice,” I said, looking around at the others. No one else spoke. “We have to break the Ride.” I turned back to the Luidaeg. “How do we do it?”
I glanced to the side quickly. “If we stop her sacrifice and she recasts the spell before we can stop her, it’s going to hurt,” I said. “But it’s the sort of hurt we can recover from, while her pulling this off sounds like the sort of thing we don’t recover from. We don’t give her time to start the Ride. If we can intervene early, we do it.”
The Luidaeg snorted. “Great, glad we’ve got that settled, then,” she said, clearly ready to be getting on with things “Once the Ride begins, you break it by pulling the rider down and holding them as tightly as you can while she tries to use them against you. I don’t know if she’ll go the classic transformations route or what—Mom’s Ride is the only one that was ever successfully broken. She’s more likely to use illusions as a weapon than actual physical change.”
“Either way, this is going to suck, and either way, we grab that rider and we end this,” I said, grimly.
Tybalt caught my arm. I turned to look at him, blinking.
“There is no ‘we,’” he said, voice rough. “Your grandmother was pregnant when she interceded with Maeve’s Ride, and she lost the baby for her efforts. You will be staying back, and allowing us to break this ritual.”