A Red-Rose Chain

Tybalt raised an eyebrow. “How flattering of him,” he said, voice flat.

“And on that note, we’re out of here,” I said, taking Tybalt’s arm. “Quentin, you’re with me. Lowri, you have my number. Call if anything changes.”

“I will,” she said.

“Good.” I started for the door, pulling Tybalt along with me. He came without resistance, and Quentin followed close on our heels. That wasn’t what I’d been expecting to spend my night doing—I’d sort of been planning to go home and watch some television after we dealt with the Mauthe Doog—but that just goes to show that I shouldn’t allow myself to expect things. I’ll always wind up disappointed.

I paused in the clearing outside the knowe, sniffing the air to see whether I could pick up any traces of the person who had shoved Madden though the portal. There weren’t any. How long magic lingers depends on a lot of factors, including how powerful the spell was and how much time the person using the magic spent in the area. Whoever opened the portal for Madden had done it from a distance, and might never have set foot in this clearing in their life. They’d left me nothing to work with, and that just aggravated me further. I stormed onward, down the hill and into the park.

We were almost to the exit when Tybalt asked, “Did you intend to take the arrow and its associated message with you? I assumed you had, but as you now seem too angry to be rational, I thought it bore asking before we had gotten much further.”

I looked down at the parchment scroll and unbroken arrow still clutched in my left hand, and shook my head. “No, but now that I have them, I’m going to put them to good use,” I said. “Walther’s an alchemist, and if we’re on the verge of war, I’m not going to feel bad about drafting him. He may be able to extract something from these that will tell me more about who left them here, and since we have next to no information on Silences right now, that’s data we very much need.” Walther Davies was Tylwyth Teg, an alchemist, and a chemistry teacher. He’d been a big help to me more than once. He wasn’t as fond of charging headlong into danger as I was, but if I needed lab work done, he was more than happy to act as my private forensics department. In many ways, he was more useful than an actual forensics team could possibly have been. Human police don’t know how to look for magic.

Yes. A stop at Walther’s, or at least a phone call, was definitely in the cards, after we had managed to locate Arden and get her back to her own court. If we were going to war, we were going to have our Queen front and center.

“Silences plans to march upon us,” said Tybalt. “They used to be a Kingdom in the holding of the Tylwyth Teg. It’s entirely possible Walther has ties to the area, and has simply chosen never to discuss them.”

“I don’t know that I would have discussed them, given the way their current government came to power,” I said. The War of Silences was something I had only ever heard mentioned by the older fae, usually in hushed, haunted tones. “I’ve never been there. Given the reasons for the last war, it didn’t seem like a good place for someone like me to go for a vacation.”

“I know that Silences invaded the Mists, and I know that the current King was chosen by the false Queen after their old monarch was overthrown, but I thought it was just a territory dispute,” said Quentin, stepping around a large fern that had decided to overgrow the path. He frowned at me, looking honestly puzzled. “Why would that be a bad place for you to go?”