One Salt Sea: An October Daye Novel

The Luidaeg withdrew her teeth from my flesh, studying the resulting puncture wounds for a moment before nodding to herself and letting go of me. Motioning for the rest of us to stay where we were, she stepped off the edge of the walkway and into the creek. Her feet slid into the water without a sound. My blood ran from the corner of her mouth, looking almost like chocolate syrup in the dark.

Chocolate syrup doesn’t sing to my senses. I cradled my wounded hand against my chest, trying not to think about the fact that I was bleeding, or that we were standing here while Rayseline might be torturing my daughter. Connor stepped up beside me, putting a comforting hand on my shoulder. I let myself lean into it, breathing slowly in and out, trying to ignore the smell of blood.

The smell of musk and pennyroyal joined the mingled scents of blood and redwood trees, and Tybalt stepped soundlessly up on my other side, back in his human form. He looked at Connor, and nodded. That was all; just nodded.

The Luidaeg stooped to grab something out of the creek. Then she straightened, holding a dripping, Y-shaped branch in one hand, and climbed back onto the walkway. She held out the branch to me. I took it, giving her a blank look. She mimed grasping the two short ends and holding it out like a—

Like a dowsing rod. Of course. I turned the stick around so that I would be holding it appropriately, only wincing a little as the bark rasped against the wounds made by the Luidaeg’s teeth. My blood ran down the right side of the stick, mixing with the water, as the copper-and-cut-grass smell of my magic started to rise. I wasn’t the one calling it, not on purpose, but I forced myself to relax and let it come. The Luidaeg knew what she was doing. My daughter needed me to trust her.

As if that thought were the key, the magic locked into place, and the dowsing rod in my hands twitched drowsily to life. It pulled, hard, toward the path up ahead. I started in that direction, holding the dowsing rod straight out in front of me. The others followed, fanning into a rough diamond formation: Quentin right behind me, Tybalt and Connor walking side by side, and the Luidaeg bringing up the rear.

All of them looked like they really wanted something they could hit. Anything that tried getting the jump on us in this forest was going to have a nasty surprise when it realized what it was dealing with.

The dowsing rod’s pull led us down one path after another, until I found myself starting up a series of mud-and-timber “stairs” cut into the side of the mountain. We were about halfway up when Quentin grabbed my elbow, bringing our whole procession to a stop. I turned to frown at him, and he indicated a hole in the muddy bank beside us. A place where someone had recently pried loose a rock. We were getting close to our destination.

I nodded and started forward again, moving a little more cautiously as the dowsing rod urged me to continue ever forward. My hand wasn’t bleeding anymore, but it didn’t need to be, because the blood I’d already spilled was singing so strongly. Gillian was my daughter, blood of my blood, and the dowsing rod was taking us straight to her.

The pull stopped abruptly, my spell shattering. I stumbled, nearly dropping the now-quiescent dowsing rod. The others stopped in turn, all of them scanning the underbrush for signs of the shallowing we’d come here to find. All but the Luidaeg. She pushed me gently aside as she walked up to a vast redwood with a trunk so big around that it could have been hollowed out and used as a home for a family of four. Leaning forward, she pressed one palm flat against the bark of the tree, and spoke the first words I’d heard any of us utter since she spelled Quentin and Connor’s footsteps into silence:

“I know where we are now. I’m sorry you’ve been alone for so long. I should have guessed, when you blocked my scrying. You’re still protecting the King, aren’t you? It’s all right now. You can let us in.” She paused before adding, with the air of someone who was confessing a great secret, “Arden lives.”