A Red-Rose Chain

The phone wasn’t locked, thankfully, and a sweep of my thumb across the screen woke it up and displayed Quentin’s wallpaper at the same time: a picture of him with Dean Lorden, the current Count of Goldengreen. They were sitting on the dock of Goldengreen’s private beach, Dean with his arm slung carelessly around Quentin’s waist, Quentin with his head resting on Dean’s shoulder.

This wasn’t the time or the place to start grilling my squire on his social life, but I glanced from the picture to him, just long enough to be sure that he got the message that we’d be discussing this later. Quentin nodded, accepting his fate, and I called up the keypad.

Dialing on these new phones with their virtual keys is easy. Using it to channel the spells necessary to reach the Luidaeg is somewhat less so. I drew a starburst pattern across the keys, chanting, “My lover’s gone to sea, to sea, my lover’s gone away; may he come back to me, to me, for this each night I pray.” The smell of cut grass and copper rose in the air around me, strong enough to overwhelm the scent of roses. Only briefly—the roses were already slipping back by the time the spell coalesced and popped like a soap bubble, sending a thin bolt of pain lancing through my head.

I raised the phone to my ear, and heard nothing. That was another thing about those new phones: they didn’t come with dial tones to tell me when my spells weren’t working. But my head hurt, and the smell of copper was still hanging in the air. I waited, until faintly, I began to hear the sound of waves battering themselves against a distant beach. Jackpot.

The sound of the waves grew louder as connections were thrown and magic tunneled its way through the phone lines between me and the Luidaeg. Nobody loves a special effect like a pureblood, and as the Firstborn daughter of Oberon and Maeve, the Luidaeg was about as pure as they came. I counted silently to ten, and had just reached nine when the waves crashed loudly enough to be startling, and the Luidaeg’s voice demanded, “What now?”

“Hi, Luidaeg,” I said. “I’m still in Silences, and I have an awkward question that’s probably going to run up against your geas. Sorry about that.”

There was a pause. “What?”

“I don’t really have time to explain right now. I’m standing in a rose garden with a Blodynbryd named Ceres and a whole bunch of flowers, and King Rhys is probably going to notice that I’m missing pretty soon. So if I could just ask my question, that would be swell.” I didn’t beg or try to convince her that she should tell me what I needed to know. Our relationship had long since progressed past those little formalities.

This time, the pause was longer. Finally, the Luidaeg asked, “Is it important enough to make me answer you?”

“Evening has been elf-shot, Luidaeg. She’s not going to come back just because I ask something that involves her.”

“Spoken like someone who never really knew my sister,” said the Luidaeg. There was no mistaking the bitterness in her voice for anything else. Then she sighed, and said, “All right. Go ahead and ask. If it wakes her, then it’s on your head.”

“Did Eve—did Eira create elf-shot?” The correction pained me, just a little, but I wanted to leave as much distance as possible between the woman I had believed to be my friend and the Firstborn that she had turned out to truly be. I had lived my entire life in the shadows of Faerie’s giants, and I had never even known that they were there.

“Ah.” The Luidaeg paused, taking a deep, slow breath, like she was trying to center herself. Then she said, “Yes. Father wanted a weapon that wouldn’t kill. He wanted to know that we’d still be here when he came looking for us. And she—the person you’re asking about—said she had just the thing. A period of sleep, for reflection, followed by waking renewed and refreshed and ready to face the world more fairly. She made it sound like some sort of vacation.”

“You told me it didn’t have to be deadly to changelings,” I said carefully.