“It didn’t have to be. I made the wrong choices after it was done. I thought if I could bring my daughter home by leaving my wife alone, that she would understand, and forgive me. Instead, all I did was make her a widow as well as a woman in mourning. Amy may forgive me someday, despite everything, but the Luidaeg? The Luidaeg never will.”
The moors had started giving way to forest around us, the hills turning thick and bristly with trees. Their branches reached ceaselessly for the starry sky, their leaves rustling in the wind. The fog had all but dissipated, its purpose fully served. We were truly on the Babylon Road. No turning back now.
“A lot of people seem disinclined to forgive you,” I said.
“I know, and I agree with them,” said Simon. “What I did, I did for the best of reasons. That doesn’t forgive it. If anything, that makes it worse, that a good man might become a villain thinking himself a hero in his heart. Take care, October. Your current quest . . . this is the road that broke me.”
“I’ll take that under advisement,” I said, trying not to show how much his words struck home.
Amandine had Tybalt. There wasn’t much I wouldn’t do to get him back. If she had asked me to kill someone instead of sending me to find my sister, would I have considered it? Would I have agreed to do the things Simon had done? All she had asked me for so far was something I would have been willing to do anyway—but what if this wasn’t the end? What if I found August, brought her back, and was greeted with a smug “for your next task . . .”?
I didn’t know. That scared me.
“We are the sum of our actions,” said Simon. “When desperation sets our course, those actions can blacken with remarkable speed.”
“I know this place,” said Quentin.
I stopped walking.
The forest had closed in around us completely, obscuring the moors. Many of the trees around us had probably been people once. The lady of this land, Acacia, had attempted to transform me into one of them the first time we met, stopping only when I revealed that I knew her daughter, Luna Torquill. The last time I’d checked, Acacia had been in the process of rehabilitating and restoring the victims of her husband’s Rides . . . but Blind Michael had been almost as old as the Luidaeg, and his Rides had spanned centuries. He had stolen hundreds of children. Some of them had died. Others had been broken so completely that their only peace had been found in the forest.
I wasn’t sure whether all of those children could be brought back to their original forms, or whether they would have any place to go if they were. Sometimes lost is lost, even in Faerie. Maybe especially in Faerie.
“This is where we ran,” said Quentin, the color draining slowly from his face. He began, almost imperceptibly, to tremble. “They were following us, and we ran.”
“Hey.” I put a hand on his shoulder. “It’s okay. Blind Michael is dead. I killed him. He’s never going to hurt you again. You understand? You’re safe.”
A hunting horn sounded somewhere in the distance, like the world was trying to make a liar out of me. I flinched. So did Quentin. Only Simon, who had never been on the receiving end of one of Blind Michael’s Rides, remained calm, looking toward the sound with a speculative expression.
“August came through here,” he said. “Do you think she lingered?”
“I think she ran like hell, if she knew what was good for her,” I said. “Lingering is not a good plan when those horns are sounding. Come on.”
I started walking faster, following the flickering light from my candle. It hadn’t gotten any shorter since this journey began. The Luidaeg might have to charge for her help, but she didn’t cheat: when she said she would do something, she did it. This candle was good for fourteen days of travel, and as long as the Babylon Road could get to where we needed to be, it would take us there.
The Babylon . . . “Oh, hell,” I said, and blew the candle out.
Quentin’s eyes went wide. “Toby . . .”
“Why did you do that?” asked Simon, voice suddenly low and dangerous.
“Because we can’t keep walking the Babylon Road without a destination,” I said. “The Luidaeg said she sent August here because there was a changeling who was punching holes in the world. We’ve seen that before, and I’ve heard about that changeling.” Not by name, but when Chelsea had been manifesting the same uncontrolled magic, he had been referenced as part of the reason she needed to be stopped.
The Luidaeg had told me about how my mother had been involved in sealing the hole that changeling made before it could grow wide enough to destroy Faerie. August had been looking for him. I glanced uneasily at Simon.
Suddenly, a lot of things were starting to fall into place, and I didn’t think he was going to like the picture they made when they finished.
“He died,” said Quentin. “The Luidaeg said he died.”
“Right. But if August isn’t in the forest here, it might be because she had him open a door for her.”
“Then all is lost,” said Simon. “We can’t walk up to Oberon and ask him to please unlock the doors, sir, my daughter is on the other side and I need to bring her home. Finding him will be the work of far more than a fortnight.”
“Maybe,” I said. “If Acacia knows something, though—the Rose Road got us to the deeper lands once. I’m willing to bet that the Babylon Road can do the same, if that’s really where we need to go.”
The hunting horn sounded again, closer this time, startling me into flinching.
That was the last straw for Quentin. He’d been holding himself together as well as he could, and he was a brave kid—but he was still, for all that he was tall and broad-shouldered and clever, a kid. This place, that sound, they were the things that haunted his nightmares. I flinched, and he bolted into the forest, running as hard as he could to get away from the sound of everything going wrong again.
“Quentin!” I shouted, and plunged into the trees after him, not bothering to tell Simon to follow. He would, or he wouldn’t. Either way, we were all going to wind up in the same place. I just needed to catch up with Quentin before my squire ran off a cliff or fell down a hole or something equally unhelpful.
The branches tore at my clothes and hair as I ran, slowing me down. They seemed to put themselves into my path on purpose, moving with a slow, malicious intent. That wasn’t as far-fetched an idea as it might seem. Acacia was the Mother of Trees, Firstborn to the Dryads and the Blodynbryd. In her presence, even ordinary trees might have more of a consciousness than the usual.
Quentin was somewhere up ahead, and I could hear Simon crashing through the branches behind me. At least we were staying together.
“Quentin!” I shouted. “Come back!”