Ashes of Honor: An October Daye Novel

“As always, my dear, you have quite the way with words.” He shook his head. “She came through one door and threw herself into another. I doubt she even realized we were here, or knew that she had entered a place that already had people in it. The fire that followed her was an unintended side effect of her flight, not an attack upon my people.”


I turned to look again at the Cait Sidhe gathered around the edges of the barn. “Is everyone going to see it that way?”

“I don’t know,” he said, with weary calm. “Perhaps, if it weren’t for the rest of what happened when she appeared here.”

My heart was still hanging too low in my chest. Now it felt like my stomach dropped all the way down to my feet. Tybalt had managed to separate me from Quentin by telling me that it was about Raj, and while he might treat me like a cat toy from time to time, he had never, so far as I knew, intentionally lied to me. I shifted slowly to face him and asked the question I was most afraid of:

“Tybalt, where’s Raj?”

He shook his head, and answered, “I don’t know.”

Oh, oak and ash. We were in trouble.





TEN


THE SILENCE OF THE CAIT SIDHE around us suddenly felt a lot more dangerous. I had allies here, people here who owed me their lives, but this wasn’t my place, and I was the second intruder in the course of a day. I took a half step toward Tybalt. “Why did you bring me here?”

A smile touched his lips. “Whatever the treaties between your Courts and mine say, you and I both know my nephew is your squire in all but name. You would never have forgiven me if I hadn’t told you of his disappearance. Despite appearances, your forgiveness is important to me.” The smile faded. “Not that this was the whole of my motivation. I dislike being injured, and while none of my subjects were as hurt as I was, it was luck, not skill, that saved them. I would prefer this not happen again, and I would like my nephew returned.”

Luck, and a monarch who was willing to push his weaker subjects out of the way of the onrushing disaster. My imagination has always been vivid. The image of Tybalt wreathed in flames rose in my mind’s eye. I shoved it stalwartly down and asked, “Did Chelsea take him?”

“Not precisely. He was standing between her and her second door when it opened. She ran for what she viewed as safety—as fast as she came and was gone, I doubt she even realized she’d found a possible sanctuary. He was insufficiently swift in getting out of the way, and he was knocked through the opening. It closed before he could pass back through.”

That confirmed what Chelsea had told her mother: she was losing control. I worried my lower lip between my teeth. “Can Raj use the Shadow Roads to get back?”

It was a stupid question. I knew that as soon as I asked it, but Tybalt answered as if it were meaningful, saying, “If he has access to them wherever he is, he hasn’t used them to return.”

“Right.” I took a deep breath, touching the pocket holding the Luidaeg’s charm with one hand. “Where did she open the doors?”

“Cover your mouth again, and I’ll show you,” said Tybalt.

I did as I was told. He led me out of the barn, back into the smoky halls of the Court of Cats. He took my elbow once we were outside, guiding me down the charred hall to a huge solarium. That was where the fire had started; that was where Chelsea first arrived.

Like everything in the Court of Cats, the solarium looked as if it had been on the verge of collapsing when the Cait Sidhe claimed and rebuilt it into a patchwork version of itself. Half the windows were broken and boarded over; the other half were glassless frames that looked out on a seemingly endless succession of rafters and hanging ropes. A room inside a room, which was doubtless somehow inside another room in turn. Faerie has never had much respect for spatial geometry, and the Court of Cats seemed to take a special glee in flaunting that disrespect.

Tybalt led me halfway across the solarium before he stopped, saying needlessly, “This is where the fire began.”