When Sorrows Come Page 18

  Once she got done yelling about the stab wound in my side, that was.

  Slowly, I turned and looked at the open door to Nessa’s quarters, showing the frosting-smeared hall and the place where the Satyr’s body had been. In its place, the night-haunts had left a bundle of twigs and straw twined around with dried wildflowers. It was pretty, in a terrible way, and I had to wonder whether that was what lay beneath all of their manikins. If so, January O’Leary was going to have a nasty surprise the first time she got too close to a match . . .

  “Does High King Aethlin have any Bridge Trolls in his service?” I asked abruptly.

  The Ellyllon blinked but nodded. “Three in the guard, two more on the landscaping team,” he said.

  “Good.” I turned to fully face him. “We’re gonna need them. Also, do you have a name? Thinking of you as ‘the Ellyllon’ is getting old, and maybe a little bit insulting.”

  “Galen,” he said, smiling. “As for the Bridge Trolls, I can relay your message to His Majesty, unless you wanted to send the Cait Sidhe boy who came for me . . . ?”

  “Raj is a Prince of Cats, not an errand boy,” I said. “We’ll need to move both Caitir and Tybalt to the infirmary and notify Walther that we need the tincture readied.”

  “I can do that,” said May.

  “Great,” I said. “I’ll stay here and wait for the Bridge Trolls.”

  Galen blinked. “Oh, you meant—well, I suppose now is as good a time as any to—yes, of course.” He bent and scooped Caitir into his arms, wings working overtime to let him stay upright with her weight pressing against him. Raj wasn’t quite as able to lift Tybalt, but with May’s help, they were able to get his arms slung around their shoulders and hoist him to his feet.

  It was wholly undignified, and I found myself half-wishing I’d given in the last time April had tried to talk me into letting her upgrade my phone to something that didn’t fit in my pocket but would take pictures. These would have been great to bring up the next time he laughed at me, however delicately, for tripping over my own feet trying to get into Muir Woods.

  Oh, well. Some moments are meant to be savored, not preserved.

  Jazz and Quentin didn’t move, waiting for me to tell them what we were going to do next. I turned to them, running my hand through my hair, which had managed to escape the last of Stacy’s styling in all the chaos and was increasingly coming to lay loose and flat around my face.

  “Okay,” I said. “The room is heavily booby-trapped. Cillian,” we all knew better than to use Quentin’s real name inside the knowe, where the walls were quite literally listening, “what have you managed to pick up about this Nessa woman? Is there any chance she went willingly with whoever sent the Doppelganger?”

  “No,” he said staunchly. “If she’s gone, it’s because she’s been replaced. She’s completely loyal to my—to the royal family.”

  I gave him a look, trying to communicate that he needed to be more careful. A slip like that in front of the wrong person and I could be up on charges of treason. He shrugged, expression sheepish. He knew he’d messed up, but that didn’t mean he could stop himself from making mistakes. I sighed, allowing my face to soften. I would always forgive him, and he knew it. When he’d called me family, he’d been acknowledging a bond that each of us knew went both ways. Maybe my daughter still didn’t want me in her life, but I could be there for my son.

  Sons, if Raj was to be taken seriously, which he probably wasn’t. It can be hard to tell with him. Cait Sidhe seem to come into the world already speaking fluent sarcasm.

  “And you’re sure she’s that loyal?” I asked.

  He nodded vigorously. “She’s had opportunities to leave, and she’s always refused them. All the core staff—the ones who have access to the private family quarters, who can get near the heirs when they’re home—agree to submit annually to interview by the Court Seer, Fiac, and he’s an Adhene.”

  Adhene can taste lies. They become enraged when people deceive them—sort of like I do, only with more violence and murder. No one with any sense would intentionally lie to an Adhene. Fortunately, they can tell the difference between intentional deceit and repeating someone else’s falsehood, and while they don’t like innocent deception any more than they like the on-purpose kind, they’re pretty good about directing their rage at the right people.

  They don’t usually hang around noble courts voluntarily. Either Aethlin had something on this Fiac, or he was a better king than I had ever guessed he might be.

  “Nessa proved her loyalty to this house over and over again,” continued Quentin, looking down at his feet. “She would never have let a monster in voluntarily or agreed to laying traps in her rooms, and now she’s missing, and I don’t know . . . I don’t know . . .” He trailed off, sounding miserable.

  “Hey.” I put a hand under his chin, pushing gently until he lifted his head enough to meet my eyes. “Hey. I saw the night-haunts.”

  “You—what, again?” He was almost sputtering. That was a good thing. If he was upset about my behaving recklessly, he wasn’t focusing on a missing woman who might have been important to him, before his family had been convinced to send him away.

  Will Eira ever be held accountable for all the damage she’s done, not only to me, but to all of Faerie? I don’t know, but sweet Oberon, I hope so.

  And I hope I’m part of the accounting.

  “I saw the night-haunts,” I repeated, keeping my eyes locked on his. They were all wrong—they were supposed to be a deep, almost startling blue, like the Atlantic off the Canadian coast, but they were a pale dustbowl brown, the color of the sky over the ghost towns of Kansas—but they were still his eyes, still Quentin’s eyes, and he was all I saw looking back at me. “They came to claim the dead, as is their due, and Nessa was not among them. She wasn’t part of their number. She’s the reason I stayed and was silent, so they would come while I was there. They told me she was still alive for us to find, and they did it without saying a single word. I swear to you, by the root and the thorn, the ash and the oak and the rowan and the rose, that she is not yet among the night-haunts, and if she lives, we’ll find her. We’ll find her.”

  “Thank you,” he whispered, and threw himself into my arms.

  He had never been this affectionate before—or at least not this demonstrative. I didn’t know whether that was because Banshees were genuinely more emotional, or if it was because, for the first time in his life, he didn’t feel the weight of the crown to come pushing down on him and preventing him from standing unburdened. I wasn’t sure it mattered in the moment. I just put my arms around that boy, who would be a man soon enough, who would be so far beyond me that looking for him would be like scanning the sky for a single star, and I held him.

  I held him like I was never going to be asked to let him go.

  After a moment, he began to relax against me, accepting the hug as the sincere offer it was and not something I was required to give. I let my chin rest atop his head, breathing in the scents of the hall. The gorse and vetiver scent of his magic was the closest and strongest, of course, since I was literally holding him against me; under it was the raspberry and lemon verbena of Caitir, still strong because I had been using her magic so recently.

  The scents under that were more faded. I could smell the traces of Tybalt’s magic, and Raj’s, and May’s, all familiar and comforting—the scents of home. I could smell the sunbaked feathers and cool fog of Jazz’s magic, which was subtle and hard to pin down, but part of the atmosphere I lived in on a daily basis, and thus welcome.

  The scents layered under the mingled scent of family were harder to identify because they were more blurred, but I kept breathing as I pinned them down one by one for further examination. White mountain heather and celandine poppies was High King Aethlin, and chestnut rose and moss was our poor doomed Daoine Sidhe. Pitch and burnt hay was probably the Satyr, given how st
rong it was, and that it only smelled like it had traveled in one direction, here, not here and back like the High King or the other two guards, both of whom had left their own scent trails behind.

  It was a complicated, layered web of perfumes, and picking them apart was like trying to separate the layers in a croissant without tearing them, but I’ve had a lot of practice with this sort of weird magic trick in the last few years, and so I lifted them away from each other and filed them, one by one, matching them to their owners until all that remained was a scent of indefinable decay which I immediately identified as the Doppelganger, and two unfamiliar magical signatures.

  One, which smelled of bitter almond and carnation, came and went over and over again, and had been this way no more than a few days before our own arrival. The other was limestone and creeping thistle, and it was complicated, thick enough in the air even after all this time that I could tell its owner had been here frequently enough to wear a groove into the world, but absent now for several days. It still clung, but it was fading. It would be gone soon enough.

  “I’ve got her,” I said dreamily, letting my arms fall to my sides. Quentin kept hugging me for another second or so before he let go in confusion.

  “Got who?” he asked.

  “Nessa,” I said. “I think I’ve found her magic.”

  “How could you find her magic? You’ve never met her.”

  His confusion was understandable. All blood-workers can smell magic to some degree, and I’ve always been good at it, but it was only recently that I’d started to understand it well enough to make it something more useful than a party trick. I’m more fae right now than I’ve ever been before in my life, the consequence of entering a transformational trance when I had nothing but myself to transform, and that’s heightened everything, including my sense of the magic around me.

  For Quentin, magical signatures were simple things. They could be smelled, they could be tracked, but they could also be confused. He would smell the heather in his father’s magic as identical to his own, while for me the two couldn’t have been more different without one of them becoming something other than floral. Magic is unique. Give me a hundred people who smell of roses, and I’ll still be able to tell which one of them wove which spell.

  “The Gwragedd Annwn were born in Wales,” I said. “There’s a lot of limestone in Wales, and creeping thistles grow there. That wouldn’t be enough, if this weren’t a short hallway with two apartments at the end of it. A Welsh-based magical signature this strong outside of Nessa’s rooms? That’s got to be hers. The other signature’s owner was here much more recently, probably recently enough that they were here last night at the very latest. Hers has been missing for about—” I inhaled again, even though I already knew the answer. Sometimes you want that moment of explaining to a room full of captive nobles how the murder was committed. Sometimes you want to be theatrical. “—I’d say three days since she was here last. That’s got to be her.”

  Three days would match up with the amount of time needed to prepare rooms for visitors and get all the security arrangements in place, but more importantly, it would also come after the hard work of convincing the kitchen staff to allow Kerry to touch their equipment had been performed. Doppelgangers can perform an exquisitely accurate impersonation of the person they’re pretending to be, as long as it doesn’t require them to pull up anything beyond surface memories. There was no possible way a Doppelganger would have been able to perform that negotiation, and yet Kerry was baking, so someone had done it.

  I opened my eyes. Quentin was staring at me with something like hope and something like resignation in his eyes. Or maybe that was exactly the blend he was trying to contain.

  “You’re sure?” he asked.

  “I’m sure.” I turned to Jazz.

  She held up her hand before I could open my mouth. “I know, I know,” she said. “Stay here. And where, pray tell, are you going?”

  “I’m going to follow this trail to wherever it leads me, and Cillian’s going to come with me, and if Nessa isn’t there, we’ll come back,” I said. “When Galen comes back with the Bridge Trolls I asked for, ask them to go into Nessa’s quarters and trigger or deactivate any traps they find. They should avoid the tripwires in the hall, because those are apparently connected to ‘I’ve already been caught, may as well kill everyone’ poison pouches, but the threads in the main room just set off elf-shot.”

  “And Bridge Trolls can’t be elf-shot, because their skins are too thick,” said Quentin, stating the obvious.

  Well, he had more emotional connection to the situation than I did. For me, this was an abduction and possible planned assassination that had had the bad taste to get in the way of my dinner appointment. For him, it was a missing woman who had been a part of his life since infancy, who he had apparently missed while he was in California.

  I’d never put too much thought into the fact that Quentin would have had friends, acquaintances, even enemies before the start of his fosterage, but he’d had the time; he’d spent his entire childhood and the beginning of his teenage years in these halls. I’d met Stacy, Kerry, and Julie all before I turned thirteen, and we’d stayed friends well into adulthood. No matter what else changed, I’d been able to hold onto my gang of four. There was a time when I would have called them the most important people in my life and meant it. So why hadn’t I dug too deeply into the idea that Quentin might have had friends he wanted to see again, or even that shining specter, the first love, waiting somewhere in Canada?

  He’d given up so much more than just his face for the opportunity to attend my wedding. He’d given up his homecoming, and the reunion that could have followed it, in a kinder, less dangerous world. He’d given it up for me.

  Well, that being the case, I could find one missing woman for him.

  “Got it,” said Jazz. “And after they’ve defused all the traps?”

  “If any of them likes to watch mortal crime dramas, they can search for clues, and I’ll be very grateful to them when I get back,” I said. “If not, just ask them to come back out into the hall and not touch anything. I’ll be back as soon as I can. Cillian, you’re with me.”

  Quentin fell into step beside me as I started down the hall, chin tilted slightly up so I could keep sniffing the air for traces of Nessa’s magic. I felt like some sort of weird bloodhound, and for the first time I really appreciated how annoying Tybalt must have found my tendency to assume that because he was a cat, he could track people by smell alone. I mean, he could, but it looked silly, and it wasn’t as easy as it sounded.

  “I’m glad you’re letting me help,” said Quentin.

  Oh, I did not need another distraction while I was trying to do something silly and kind of difficult. “Of course, kiddo,” I said. “You’re my . . . you’re mine. I’ll always let you help . . . when it doesn’t mean getting us both killed. Where’s Dean?”

  I was hoping the question would distract him enough to let me focus. Instead, he huffed a sigh.

  “Since his dads won’t be here until tomorrow, the Luidaeg said he didn’t have parental permission to do anything stupid and dangerous until they showed up.” He sighed heavily, looking put-upon and briefly betraying his age. “I think she just doesn’t want to deal with Dianda if something goes wrong.”

  “She’s a smart one, that sea witch,” I said. “I don’t want to deal with Dianda either, honestly. Or with Patrick looking disappointed in me.” I didn’t mention Dean’s other father, who isn’t related to me at all, but is legally my father, too. Our laws are complicated and sort of stupid sometimes, which is all the more impressive considering they supposedly don’t exist.

  We have one law, Oberon’s Law, which forbids us to kill each other unless it’s during a time of formally declared war. Or unless the person being killed is a changeling since the Law doesn’t protect us. It doesn’t protect humans, either, which is one of the
many reasons the fae don’t make good neighbors. Now that I have actual access to Oberon—when the Luidaeg lets anyone get near him, which isn’t often—I’ll have to ask him why he set things up that way. Excluding changelings from the Law basically guaranteed that we’d never be anything more than second-class citizens in a world where we were already disadvantaged by our own mortality.

  Everything else is custom and agreed-upon practice, but it’s not actually law, and if you try to say it is, people get pissed. Suggesting that maybe Faerie needs a few more laws to keep us from making each other miserable all the time, and you might as well have suggested the nobility be forbidden to wear clothing when conducting formal courts.

  That might not be the worst thing. Court would almost certainly be shorter.

  Anyway, the small-L laws of Faerie are more like . . . traditions everyone has decided to treat as absolutely inviolate. Since the big-L Law says changelings don’t count as people for purposes of whether or not you’re allowed to kill them, they have no standing under those traditions, and when my mother went out and got herself knocked up by a human man, it was treated as an immaculate conception. My father, quite literally, didn’t matter to the situation. And since she was still married to Simon Torquill at the time, I was considered his daughter when I was born. We have no blood in common save for Oberon’s; he’s a distant descendant, while I’m a direct granddaughter. But if Faerie had an organ donor registry, he’d be the first person my doctor called.

  Simon and I have a complicated history, to understate things so dramatically that they barely make sense. He’s my liege lord’s brother, and the man who turned me into a fish for fourteen years for the crime of getting too close after he literally kidnapped his brother’s wife and young daughter. I didn’t find out until years later that he’d done it because the person who was giving him his orders had wanted him to kill me to remove me from the playing field. I was more human then. He could have done it.