The room twisted again, and he was shirtless and panting, a knife in each hand as he glared at us. Then he lunged, clearly aiming for our throats. I grabbed his arm and pulled it down, forcing him to stab me in the shoulder instead. It hurt, but it wouldn’t do any real damage, and as I twisted my body away from him, I took the knife with me. He snarled and slashed at August, who danced back in bewilderment.
“Give it up, Simon,” I snapped, pulling the knife out. “You know stabbing us doesn’t do anything worth writing home about. Having unbreakable daughters makes physical violence a little pointless.”
August caught his second knife in her arm and pirouetted away, pulling it out of his hands. We exchanged a look, nodded, and jumped on top of him, forcing him to the ground and pinning him in place.
We were still there when the room shifted again and we were back on the hillside, white light all around us, on top of Simon. He blinked up at us, face pale, and said, “I don’t know why I— I’m so sorry—”
And then he caught fire, blazing up like a brand beneath us. I screamed, tightening my arms against the urge to recoil. August almost let go. I grabbed her arm at the last moment, yanking her down into the inferno.
The last time this had happened in my presence, I’d been the one burning, and it had been easy to overlook how hard it is to hold on to something that’s literally trying to melt the flesh from your hands and arms. No wonder Janet lost the baby. She was only mortal, after all. Her body couldn’t take the strain.
I held on as tightly as I could, and just as I was reaching the limits of my endurance, the flames blew out and Simon was sprawled in the grass beneath us, once more bipedal, and himself.
And stark-ass naked, which was a little horrifying under the circumstances. August and I both recoiled, finally letting go, and I spared a glance for her. She was charred and broken, skin split to show red, raw flesh beneath, and even as I watched, she was healing, skin smoothing out and knitting back together.
“Simon?” I asked.
“October,” he croaked.
I didn’t have a cloak to wrap around him, and so I shrugged out of my jacket and eased it around his shoulders, lifting him into a sitting position. He sagged against me. I twisted to look toward the others, craning my neck for a glimpse of Quentin.
Raysel saw me looking and said, swallowing hard, “Quentin’s okay. Dean and the Luidaeg, they have him.”
I nodded and turned my attention back to Simon. I could feel my own skin knitting back together, like ants running across my body, tissue repairing itself at an incredible rate. August, who looked almost fully recovered, was clinging to Simon and sobbing. The white light blazed all around us.
And on the other side of it, someone was screaming.
I let go of Simon when I realized that, standing slowly and turning to face the sound. Titania was still mounted on her horse, hands wrapped around the pommel as she bent forward and howled in fruitless fury. She wasn’t saying anything, just shrieking.
Finally, she sat upright and pointed at the circle with one shaking finger.
“You have made an enemy of me on this day, and you will live to regret it,” she said.
The sky above her company was lighting up in cascading rainbows, like the Summerlands had looked at the aurora borealis and decided to show those mortal light shows what real dramatics looked like. Slowly, Titania took the reins of her horse in her hands and turned its head to the west, then resumed her ride. The others rode after her. The lights got brighter and brighter, until they were almost blinding, then flared with silent iridescence and disappeared, leaving only darkness and stars behind.
“She’ll be back,” said the Luidaeg wearily, stepping up behind me. “She always comes back. But we’ll have time.”
That was all she had time for before August and Garm wailed and collapsed. A moment later, Dean shouted, “Luidaeg? Luidaeg?! Quentin fainted!”
The Luidaeg smiled. “We win,” she said, and crumpled, motionless, to the ground.
TWENTY-SEVEN
“I’M PREGNANT, NOT INJURED,” I complained, as Tybalt swept me off my feet and held me against his chest. At least he’d let me drive the car to Muir Woods. Jin, who had been keeping a very close eye on me for the past three months, had finally managed to convince him that driving was safer for me than taking the Shadow Roads: they might be back down to their normal degree of hostility, but they still didn’t care for my presence, and that much cold and asphyxiation wasn’t good for the baby.
Tybalt, who would have been happier if I’d agreed to spend the remainder of my pregnancy locked in the house and not going anywhere more dangerous than the grocery store, had been reluctant to believe that strapping myself into a human construction powered by internal combustion could be safer than his magic, but in the end, Jin had managed to wear him down. “October’s a remarkably safe driver for someone who’s destroyed as many cars as she has,” she had said. “She had a good reason every time. Just keep her from having good reasons, and you’ll be fine.”
Because giving him permission to monitor me at all times was definitely better for my nerves.
“No, and I won’t allow you to become injured tonight,” he replied sharply, starting toward the entrance to the redwoods. “Arden wishes to see you, and you cannot refuse. But I can insist that you be escorted at all times.”
“I love you, you nerd,” I said, and let my head rest against his shoulder.
It was nice to be carried, after all. My feet ached when I stood for too long, and the thought of climbing all the way into the knowe under my own power wasn’t a very pleasant one. Oh, I would have done it, if Arden had required it of me: it had been three months since what most people now referred to as “the incident,” when they admitted it had happened at all, and this was the first time she’d called a full court and expected me to attend.
As a Hero of the Realm, I wasn’t exactly allowed to turn her down. Even though winter in Muir Woods wasn’t my idea of a good time, and I would have been happier in my living room, watching BBC Shakespeare recordings with Tybalt and listening to May puttering around the kitchen. Three months hadn’t been nearly enough time to fully reacclimate to normal. I wasn’t done yet.
Titania’s Ride had well and truly broken, and when she had answered the call of the Heart, her spell had shattered. The screaming and fainting inside our circle in the immediate aftermath had been the spell rebounding on the people it still affected. It had cascaded through the Kingdom, and through the afflicted neighboring Kingdoms, knocking everyone unconscious in the backlash.
Lots of people had learned a lot of things about themselves in the aftermath of that spell. Not all of those things were good ones. Etienne, for example, had learned that he would have tried to be there for Chelsea if he’d been aware of her existence earlier. But Quentin had learned that without early exposure to better ways of looking at the world, he would have been susceptible to some very toxic strains of pureblood ideology. He was seeing Helen’s therapist now, trying to work on the damage that understanding had done. He woke up screaming less often than he had in the beginning. That was better than nothing.
Sylvester had been forcibly reminded that when he was cut off from his family, he sank into depression and despair, but that some people would stand by him all the same. And Arden had learned that, had things gone ever so slightly differently during the 1906 earthquake, she could have been a happy exile, living for the moment because she didn’t quite believe in tomorrow.