“I want him to help me willingly.” I’d been the person forced to embark on someone else’s quest before: I hadn’t enjoyed it. Maybe I wasn’t ready to forgive Simon; maybe I still wanted him to pay for what he’d done to me. I hadn’t figured out my own feelings quite yet. None of that meant I wanted to drag him, unwilling and fighting me, into my problems.
Sylvester was still for several seconds before he sighed heavily and said, “I will bind him only enough to keep him from hurting you.”
“Quentin—”
“Is not family. I am sorry, but I can protect only one of you in this specific fashion.”
“I’ll be fine,” said Quentin.
Sylvester continued to look at me gravely. “Trust me?” he asked.
“I do,” I whispered, and took a step back, letting him go.
He nodded once, accepting my implicit permission to continue, and turned back to his brother. Leaning forward, he pressed his cut thumb against Simon’s. The smell of daffodils and dogwood flowers was suddenly everywhere, filling the air until it should have become cloying. Somehow, it wasn’t. Somehow, it was exactly right.
“Simon Torquill, I bind you,” said Sylvester. Each word was a brick slotting into a wall, building it high and strong against the world. “By my blood and my bones, I bind you.”
I clapped a hand over my mouth. I had heard those words before. Not spoken by him, no: spoken by Evening Winterrose, when she cursed me to find the person who’d attacked her—supposedly killing her—or die trying. It was a traditional form. It only made sense that the mother of the Daoine Sidhe would have taught it to her children, who would have taught it to their children, all the way down to Sylvester. But oh, it hurt to hear.
“By the root and the branch, the rose and the tree, I bind you,” he continued, not seeming to notice my dismay. “By our mother, by our father, by the name we share, I bind you. For the crimes you have committed against me, you owe restitution, and this is what I ask of you. Raise no hand against Sir October Daye, daughter of Amandine. Break no blade and cast no spells against her, lest your tongue be stilled and your hands be silenced. Harm her not, or know no peace. By all that I am and all that you are and all the mercies of our missing Lord and Ladies, I bind you, brother. May Oberon have mercy, for I will not.”
The spell gathered tight in the air above Simon, filling the air so completely that for a moment, I couldn’t breathe. It was almost visible, a haze of white and pale gold, like the flowers that comprised it. The spell twisted, growing thinner and thinner, until it was a thread, before wrapping itself tightly around Simon’s body.
This was what a geas looked like when it was cast. This was how a person was bound. I gasped again, this time dropping my hand.
Sylvester straightened, pulling his thumb from his brother’s. Both wounds had healed. Somehow, that wasn’t a surprise.
The door opened.
I turned to watch as Etienne stepped into the room, with Raj close behind him.
“The Prince of Dreaming Cats,” Etienne said, formal to the last.
Raj looked like he had regressed years, becoming the twitchy, arrogant child he’d been when we met. Like May, he flinched from every sound. Unlike her, he glared at the world, daring it to challenge his authority, wrapped in his own self-importance like a veil. With Tybalt missing, he was in charge of the Court of Dreaming Cats, at least until someone came along and challenged him. He wasn’t a King yet. Their succession didn’t work that way. But if someone else figured out that San Francisco’s cats no longer had a King, he might have to take the crown, and all our careful plans would be disrupted. So would his life. And none of that accounted for the fact that Tybalt was all the family he had left. If he died . . .
Tybalt wasn’t going to die. Neither of them was going to die. We were going to get them back, no matter what it took. No matter what I had to do to accomplish it. We were going to get them back.
“Hey,” I said. “Did you get the stuff?”
Raj pulled a glass vial out of his pocket, holding it up for inspection. The liquid inside was pink, purple, and gold, like something a small child would think looked delicious.
“Good,” I said. “Bring it here.”
“You don’t get to give me orders,” he said, but he brought the bottle anyway, dropping it into my outstretched hand with a quick, sidelong glance at my face, like he was looking for my approval.
He already had it. I allowed myself the flash of a smile, holding it just long enough for him to see, and said, “Yeah, but I’m so good at it.” I looked around the room. There was no one here who was wholly unfamiliar to Simon. More importantly, there was no one here that he would see instantly as an enemy, except for maybe his brother—and he had to know that if his brother was there when he woke up, he was probably going to live. Sylvester could hate him. He couldn’t kill him, or watch while someone else did it. He wasn’t that kind of hero.
“Do you want me to do it?” asked Sylvester.
“It should be me; I’m the one who’s forcing you to let this happen,” I said, and turned to Simon, crouching down enough to put myself on a level with his prone form. He looked so much less dangerous like this, when he was unconscious and not in a position to ruin anybody’s day. And I was about to wake him up.
A hand landed on my shoulder. I glanced back. Sylvester was standing there, ready to defend me.
That helped. Gingerly, I raised the bottle to Simon’s lips and tipped it until the liquid trickled into his mouth. He swallowed, an automatic reflex not normally found in elf-shot victims. That was the magic in Walther’s work, already starting to reactivate the body.
I pulled the bottle away, stood, and waited. Not for long. By the time I had counted silently to ten, Simon’s breath had quickened, moving from enchanted sleep onto the borders of wakefulness. I counted five more, and he twitched, his previously injured hand opening and closing.
He opened his eyes.
Silence reigned for several more seconds before Simon said, in a perplexed tone, “Is this the old knowe? Root and branch, it looks like it’s going to collapse at any moment.”
No one answered him.
He pushed himself into a sitting position, moving easily, without any visible aftereffects from his enchanted nap. He was still looking at the ceiling, maybe because he didn’t want to see who else was in the room. I couldn’t blame him for that. He had to be half-wondering whether he was experiencing his last moments of freedom for another hundred years, before Sylvester had him seized and thrown into the nearest available dungeon.
“I think it is,” he said. “I remember doing the joins in that ceiling. Terrible work. I was never meant to be a carpenter. Anyone who said I was, well, they were lying. Hello—” He finally looked down, and his voice caught, hitching before he finished, barely above a whisper, “—brother. And October. October, what are you doing here?”
“Simon,” said Sylvester, and his voice was ice, his voice was a killing frost sweeping across the land. There was no love there. Listening to him, it seemed impossible that love could ever live there again. “Look at me.”