All he had ever wanted was for me to be happy, and for us to have the chance to be together. We were never going to get the second. Why shouldn’t I do whatever I could to achieve the first?
Sylvester looked like he was wavering. I pressed on. “High King Sollys was able to pardon me for what I did to Blind Michael. That was only a few years ago. I can testify on Raysel’s behalf. I can tell them the combination of her biology and what was done to her as a child meant she wasn’t in her right mind when she killed Connor—she didn’t know what she was doing, she just knew that she was in pain and needed it to stop. She won’t do that again.”
“How can you be so sure?”
“Because I took the Blodynbryd out of her. Her blood isn’t at war with itself anymore. She’s going to need counseling, and honestly, we should ask Karen if she’ll help Raysel audition therapists before we wake her up, so she’ll already have somebody standing by to give her a helping hand, but she isn’t going to do what she did again. Please. I can help you help her, but I need you to help me first.”
Sylvester was still. He looked at me impassively, and for a moment I thought I had pushed too far. Then, wryly, he smiled.
“You are your mother’s daughter, no matter how much you may hate me saying that, especially right now,” he said. “You know what I want most in the world, and you’d offer it to me if it meant I gave you what you wanted.”
My stomach churned. Was he right? Was I doing to him what Amandine had done to me, taking hostages against his heart for the sake of my own desires?
Yes. And no, because if he’d ever asked me to help with Raysel’s defense, I would have done it, no strings attached. It was just that we hadn’t really been speaking, and I hadn’t really been thinking about it. I had been selfish, but not cruel.
“I’ll help you with Rayseline’s defense no matter what, Sylvester; you only ever had to ask me,” I said, fighting to keep my voice level. “But I need Simon now, and I need you, my liege, to help me. Will you help me?”
Sylvester closed his eyes. “Yes,” he said. “I will.”
I didn’t say anything. I just stepped forward and put my arms around him, resting my head against his chest, and waited for Raj to come with the potion that would change the world.
SIX
ELF-SHOT HAS BEEN A problem in Faerie for so long that some knowes, like Queen Windermere’s in Muir Woods, have dedicated rooms for its victims, places where sleepers can dream away the century of their sentence without getting dusty or being shoved into a closet and forgotten. Others, like the now-deposed King Rhys of Silences, kept their elf-shot sleepers in the dungeon, which to be fair, was a large, often unused space, but was not the nicest place for a hundred-year nap.
Shadowed Hills split the difference. They don’t have a dedicated room, but they have plenty of space, thanks to the eccentric and unpredictable geometry of the place. I knew Rayseline was asleep in a glass coffin in one of her mother’s greenhouses. The imagery of it made me a little uncomfortable, especially since the inventor of elf-shot, Eira Rosynhwyr, is sometimes considered the progenitor of the Snow White story.
Sylvester led us through a maze of hallways and empty rooms. A few looked like they’d been sealed for decades; dust coated the floors, a stain on the normally impeccable work of the housekeeping staff, marked with footprints along the path from door to door. Most of the prints were clearly Sylvester’s. He didn’t say anything, and so neither did the rest of us. We just followed.
May looked even shakier than I felt. Her eyes were red, and she flinched from every sound like she no longer had the ability to process danger. She’d lived for uncounted centuries as a night-haunt, feeding on the memories of others, her face and thoughts ever-changing to fit the parade of Faerie’s dead. I had no doubt that she had loved before, but always secondhand, always borrowed from someone else’s life and death. In many ways, Jazz was her first love. I was as scared as she was—maybe more, because I had lost lovers; I knew that I could fail and they could die—but I at least had the cold comfort of knowing this wasn’t the end of the world, no matter how much I might wind up wishing it had been.
Only Quentin looked halfway like himself. Sad, yes, withdrawn, yes, but still himself. He was going to have to be the levelheaded one through what came next . . . and I was the one who’d done most of his training.
May Oberon have mercy on us all.
Etienne and Grianne brought up the rear. Neither had said anything about the fact that we were on our way to wake Simon, who had betrayed Shadowed Hills and Sylvester more conclusively than anyone else in the world. Maybe they didn’t feel it was their place. Or maybe they just understood that making this harder than it had to be wasn’t going to do anyone any good, and might lead to me breaking somebody’s nose.
Sylvester opened another door. The hallway on the other side looked like something from a haunted house, all rickety, splintering wood and cobwebby corners. The floor was scuffed, a threadbare runner rug stretching down the center like a pathway to doom. I blinked.
“I honestly thought Melly would skin anyone who let part of the knowe get this bad,” I said.
“The staff is not allowed in this area,” said Sylvester stiffly. “I don’t know how much you know about how a knowe is built.”
“Not much,” I admitted.
He walked through the door. We kept following.
“It begins with intent,” he said. “Intent and power. The maker must convince the Summerlands to yield, as a gardener convinces the soil to yield before the seed. That was part of what drew me to Luna, when we met. I was building my garden walls, and she already had the spade in her hand. She seemed perfectly suited to understanding what I would face—and she did. Oh, she did. She didn’t know much about the process of construction, but she forgave me when the foundations took me away from her. She tended her roses, and she waited for me.”
This seemed to be less about knowe construction and more about his relationship with Luna. I didn’t say so. We were still moving, and he wasn’t stalling; he was just filling the silence, an impulse I understood all too well. The instinct to whistle past the graveyard is standard to everything I’ve met with enough intelligence to understand what it is to dread the consequences of their actions.
“You walk into the Summerlands, you find the place you’re going to stake your claim, and you mark it. You go into the mortal world, and you find the place where you want the intersection to occur. You gather your magic and your strength, and you cut a hole between the worlds for the sake of what’s to come. Then you build. You build a beginning. So much of the beginning has to come from your own hands.” He touched a wall, trailing his fingers along it as he walked. “I was never a carpenter.”
Suddenly, the shoddiness of the hall made a lot more sense. “You built this?”