“August, quick,” I snapped, as the Luidaeg thrust the key into the air, where it hung, trapped by nothingness. My sister looked at Amandine for a moment longer, heartbreak in her eyes, before she turned and ran to me, all but throwing herself into my arms.
I closed them around her, even as Tybalt moved to stand beside me, glaring at Amandine with everything he had. “C’mon, Aug,” I said. “Let’s go rescue our father. Oh, and Amandine? We made the right call in the divorce. I hope when you stop your dancing, you do it entirely alone and finally able to understand why.”
I turned away from her, arms still around August, to where the Luidaeg had pulled open a doorway in the open air.
“You can’t stop this,” called Amandine. “You can’t save him.”
“Watch us,” I said, and pulled August with me as I stepped through the door into the dark.
We only fell a few feet before we landed on the path. This time, I didn’t lose my balance. Tybalt dropped down a few moments later, Dean and Raysel close behind, followed by the Luidaeg and Garm. Once we were all through, the door above us slammed, and the Luidaeg pushed through the rest of us, throwing balls of witch light overhead as she walked. They illuminated more of the tangled, thorn-draped forest than I’d seen on previous visits, making it brutally clear just how much of this space had been designed to be impassable. We would stay on the path or pay the price.
We stayed on the path.
I peeled August’s arms away as I moved to follow the Luidaeg, and she whimpered, scrabbling to get a grasp on me. I took a breath to steady myself, trying to remember the life Titania had woven for us to “live” together; the real August had gone on her own quest and failed it, winding up exiled in Annwn for over a century of solitude and struggle. This August thought she was struggling when she ran out of cream for her morning tea, or when she got a streak of mud on her walking gown. She had no idea what it was to live outside of Amandine’s walled garden.
I pushed her away but kept my hands on her shoulders, looking her full in the face as I said, “If we want to rescue our father, we have to walk now. We have to follow the Luidaeg, and trust that she knows where we need to go to intercept the Ride. All right?”
“She’s trying to do this the right way, which means the traditional way when you’re talking about one of the Three, which means she’s going to be following the established routes,” said the Luidaeg from ahead of us. “It was always about the route, almost as much as the Ride itself. It’s why she couldn’t just kill the Cait Sidhe. She needed the Shadow Roads to stay stable. We can take the Thorn Road to the Moorland Trail, and cut from there to the route she’s riding. She has to go the long way around. Even if her company was mounted and ready to go when we intercepted them, she had to grab Simon and get him onto a horse. That means they can’t be too far ahead of us.”
“I thought her sacrifices had to have seven years of paradise,” said Dean. “Simon didn’t get that.”
“No, but Titania’s illusions told the people she’d entangled that they had been living whatever life she scripted for them for however long she needed them to have been living it. The real Simon knows he’s making his own paradise now, that he’s living a better and more honest life beneath the sea, but a Simon who doesn’t remember leaving Amandine? Who doesn’t realize he has choices? For him, seven years with his beloved wife and daughters—the one he feels he failed and the one he never got the chance to care for, in the service of the woman who once promised to protect him—that would seem like paradise. Paradise doesn’t have to be real. It just has to be believed.” The Luidaeg’s tone was grim, unforgiving. “That’s what Titania has always done best. She makes people believe her. Little miscalculation on her part, though: Simon knows now that what he had wasn’t paradise. He doesn’t believe her anymore.”
“So the Ride will fail?” The idea that it would all fall apart no matter what we did was an appealing one.
Sadly, the Luidaeg shot that possibility down without missing a beat. “She can’t have been certain we’d break the spell protecting him from her when we did; she must have had a backup sacrifice. She can change directions in the middle if she has to. It just won’t be as convincing, and the Heart may not give her as much power as she wants. So she might only remake half of Faerie in her own image.”
“We are not letting her sacrifice our father!” said August.
“Glad you’re with the program, sis,” I said, and walked faster. “Now come on. We need to go kick a Queen of Faerie in the teeth.”
“Violence is so rarely the answer, but right now, it feels right,” said Tybalt.
I laughed, and we kept walking, through the narrow pathway through the thorns, until the air changed around us, becoming cool and thick with fog, scented with peat and fresh water and the slow vegetable rot of a place that had been decaying since the moment it began. The ground beneath our feet remained firm and stable, but dropped off into murky bog only a few steps away. I glanced at the Luidaeg as she tossed another ball of witch light into the air, illuminating undulating marsh broken with stands of reeds and patches of luminously glowing lilies.
Some things moved among the vegetation. I made the conscious decision not to look too closely.
“The Moorland Trail,” she said, sounding pleased.
“This looks more like a bog to me.”
“People used to use the word ‘moor’ to refer to low-lying wetlands as well as remote hillsides,” she said. “Language changes. The underpinnings of Faerie don’t. My siblings and I used this as a shortcut, and some of them anchored their skerries here. Ismene and Hirsent and others who liked the freedom of the fens. You can’t get here unless you’re already on one of the older roads and already know the way.”
I glanced at Tybalt. “And see, I thought you were all special because you had a secret shortcut through the Summerlands.”
He frowned at me. “I’m not sure how I’m meant to respond to that. Are we back to teasing each other, or are we still upset about this whole situation?”
“I can’t tell you what to feel, but I was teasing. Being grim right now doesn’t get us where we’re going any faster.” I looked to the Luidaeg. “I still don’t see how Titania can take him.”
“My father protected people you think of as family, and if she can argue with the magic that he doesn’t make the cut, regardless of whether it’s in this world or our own, she can at least begin to Ride,” she said. “She hasn’t touched him. She didn’t put him on the horse. If you’re being technical—and believe me, she is—she doesn’t touch him until she feeds him into the Heart, and that’s powerful enough to undo my father’s work, if it decides it likes the deal she offers.”
I blanched. “Okay, that’s awful, for one, and I’m still not sure what happens when we break the Ride, for two.”
“A very good question. Luidaeg?”
“Finally getting around to asking what you need to know, eh?” The Luidaeg looked back over her shoulder at us. “Anyone with a vested interest in a sacrifice can try to intervene, and if they succeed, the Ride is broken. But the Heart was primed when Titania led the first steed of her company onto the first leg of the trail. It’s going to expect a sacrifice. When Mom’s Ride was broken, she was compelled to go in Tam Lin’s place, and could no more resist the calling of her own origin than our children can resist us. Even though she had to go, I like to think she would have fought if she hadn’t believed that she’d be released in seven years, when the sacrifice came around again.”