A Red-Rose Chain

Tybalt, bless him, didn’t say anything. I knew how hard that had to be: he was normally one of the most sarcastic people I knew, especially when it came to things like riding in cars with dogs. He just stood there, silently lending support to my position.

The side of Tia’s mouth curled up, exposing her teeth. It was less a sneer than it was a silent snarl, and it had no place on a human-seeming face. “This is unfair,” she said. “My brother isn’t a bad dog, and neither am I.”

“No, and I understand that you’re upset, but right now the best thing you can do for Madden is stay here, in the court that he loves, and make sure everything keeps working the way it’s supposed to,” I said. “Let us take care of finding Queen Windermere and bringing her home. We’ll figure out what’s going on, and we’ll handle it. It’s my job, remember? I’m a hero of the realm. Let me do my job.”

Tia continued to eye me mistrustfully for a few seconds more before her face relaxed, turning into a neutrally mournful expression. “I will sit by my brother’s bedside until you return,” she said. “I will not eat, or sleep, or stray.”

“Um, okay,” I said. “You do that. Just try not to starve yourself or anything, all right? Lowri doesn’t need another crisis on her hands.” I walked past her to unlock the car doors. She didn’t stop me, which was a relief: I had been half convinced that she was going to grab my wrist and resume demanding to come with us as soon as she had the chance.

Quentin and Tybalt got into the car without incident. The last we saw of Tia was her reflection in the rearview mirror as we drove away from Muir Woods, turning ourselves toward San Francisco.

“Where are we going?” asked Quentin.

“Borderlands,” I said. “I can’t think of any better place to start the search.”

“It’s two in the morning,” said Quentin. “They’re not going to be open.”

“I can pick locks, and Tybalt can carry us through the shadows,” I said. “I think we’ll be fine.”

When we’d first gone looking for our missing Crown Princess, the trail—augmented by some magical homing fireflies provided by the sea witch—had led straight to an independent bookstore on Valencia, less than a mile from my house. Borderlands Books sold science fiction, fantasy, and horror, which I guess made it a uniquely well-suited place for a fairy princess to go into hiding. Arden had been living in the store’s basement, in a cunningly well-concealed makeshift apartment. Her brother, Nolan, had been there too, sleeping off the slow decades of his own elf-shot poisoning.

The old Queen had been the one to have Nolan elf-shot, in an effort to keep Arden from seeking the throne that was hers by right. It sent a message: “I can hurt you.” Elf-shooting Madden sent the same message. It was difficult not to think that the messages had been penned by the same evil hand.

There was no traffic on the roads, and Valencia Street was pretty well deserted. I pulled up right in front of Borderlands, stopping the engine. “All right, here’s how we’re going to play this,” I said. “I will scout the front of the store for an alarm system. If they don’t have one, I pick the lock and we go in the front door. If they do have one, Tybalt opens a passage through the Shadow Roads, and he and I go straight through to the basement. Either way, Quentin, you’re going to stay with the car.”

My squire gave me a wounded look. “Why?”

“Because I seriously doubt Arden is going to agree to go back to Muir Woods the slow way, and Tybalt doesn’t know how to drive.” I pulled the key out of the engine and passed my keychain over the back of the seat to Quentin. “I’ll call you if I need you to move the car.”

“I think I liked it better before I had my license,” Quentin grumbled. “You didn’t make me play valet nearly as much.”

“Before you had your license, we needed to get May involved if we wanted to have a backup driver,” I reminded him. “Do you really want to go back to that world?”