The mist cleared.
The three of us were standing at the top of a high, heath-covered hill. The air smelled of salt, peat, and the sea, which only made sense, since I could see bone-white cliffs in the distance, descending toward a black and restless sea. The beam of a lighthouse swept rhythmically across the water, warning the nonexistent ships of the hazards ahead.
Once, those waters would have been alive with Cephali and Merrow. Selkies would have basked on the rocky beaches, cushioned by their folded sealskins. The docks would have teemed with sailors, coming in from the sea and setting their sails to chase down the horizon. This had been a seafaring realm. The castles on the hills, ramshackle silhouettes against the devouring dark, had been the places they returned to when the journey was done, but the whole focus had been on the sea.
“Annwn,” I breathed.
“Again,” muttered Quentin.
Simon didn’t say anything. He just stopped, and stared, honey-colored eyes wide as he tried to drink in everything around us. The smell of smoke and rotten oranges rose around him, underscored with a surprising note of mulled cider as his magic flared in response to his surprise and dismay. He was swallowing hard, over and over again, like he was trying not to cry.
Maybe he was. “Have you ever been here?” I asked, as gently as I could.
“No.” Simon shook his head. “No, I . . . the deeper realms were sealed when I was still an infant, and my parents had intended to wait until my brother and I were older before they made such a journey. My sister, September, visited Mag Mell once. She said it was so beautiful it hurt her, and that she couldn’t imagine staying for more than a moment, because if she did, she would never be able to find it in her heart to leave.”
Annwn didn’t call to me like that, but I wasn’t a pureblood. Part of me was still human, and still wanted the human world more than it wanted anything else. Maybe once that had been burned away by necessity and time, I would feel that way about Annwn and the other realms of deeper Faerie. Right now . . .
Right now, I wanted to get out of here as quickly as I could. “So it looks like old home week is continuing, and we have a problem,” I said grimly.
“What?” Simon looked at me, bemused. “How is this a problem? August was searching for Oberon. The Luidaeg said she had gone to look in the deeper realms. Annwn is a deeper realm. If she couldn’t come back without him, she might still be here.”
There was undeniable hope in his tone, and I couldn’t hate him for that. The fields here grew lush with berries, and the trees were heavy with fruit. There were monsters—Faerie always has monsters—but they weren’t anything a healthy pureblood with her wits about her couldn’t have handled. Most of all, purebloods work differently than humans do. Lock a human or a changeling away, alone, for a hundred years, and they wouldn’t be recognizable when they came back. The human mind is too aware of time. Mortals get bored.
Purebloods . . . don’t. Purebloods know how to disconnect themselves from the world around them, wandering in a dreamlike fog while their brain goes about the business of cleaning and organizing itself in the background. They forget things when they do that—the names of people they loved and lost hundreds of years before, where they grew up, the way their first pets died—but they come back refreshed and bright-eyed and emotionally hale. August might have had trouble finding enough safety to disconnect, but the fact that it had been a hundred years would not, in and of itself, have been enough to do her harm.
No, the issue was Annwn itself. Of course we were in Annwn. It’s always easier to tear something that’s been torn before. Chelsea had ripped her way here in her panic, and been forced to repeat the journey over and over for Duchess Treasa Riordan of Dreamer’s Glass, a xenophobic noble who wanted to establish her own kingdom in the deeper realms, far away from anyone who might want her to do something silly, like sharing. But before Chelsea, a changeling boy whose name we still didn’t know had opened the way.
For August.
Simon was still looking at me, waiting for his answer. I sighed deeply.
“We sort of . . . left some people here,” I said. “They may not be too thrilled to see us. By which I mean there’s a good chance they’re going to try to kill us, on account of how I sort of accidentally exiled them to Annwn with no way home to pick up the rest of their stuff.”
Simon blinked. Several times. Finally, he said the only thing that made sense, under the circumstances: “What?”
“Uh, you know Duchess Riordan?”
“Yes, of course. She’s an unpleasant sort, but at least she’s reasonably straightforward. No knives in the back from that one. Treasa always preferred a good, straightforward frontal attack.”
“Not helping,” I said. “She kidnapped Etienne’s daughter and used her to rip a hole to Annwn, intending to take the population of Dreamer’s Glass out of the mortal world and back into deeper Faerie, where she would presumably be the ruler of all she surveyed, and not have to deal with having neighbors anymore. Only Riordan was going to kill Chelsea in the process, so we rescued her and used her to get home. Stranding Riordan and about half of her people here.”
“And half of her supplies,” said Quentin. “They hadn’t finished bringing their trains through. Also, she was going to keep me as breeding stock. I don’t like her at all.”
Simon’s blink this time was slower, more like he was taking it all in than any marker of active confusion. Finally, he said, “No, I don’t expect you would.”
I took a deep breath. August’s trail led away from the spot where the Babylon Road had deposited us, deeper into the moors. I sighed. “But we have to go that way,” I said, gesturing with my candle. “Let’s just hope we don’t run into any of Riordan’s people, or that if we do, they’re too busy trying to learn how to be an agrarian society to give us any shit.”
“Next time let’s go someplace new, where you haven’t already pissed everybody off,” said Quentin.
“I’ll take that under advisement,” I replied, and started walking.