NO ONE WAS EVER going to accuse Treasa Riordan of being understated. Her ducal knowe in Dreamer’s Glass had been a bordello-level confection of tapestries, impossible hanging lights, and velvet. Mostly white velvet, which seemed like an extra level of cruelty for the cleaning staff to deal with. Here . . .
Despite having been stranded in Annwn for less than a year and a half, Riordan had taken the time to decorate to her own standards. A thick carpet patterned with irregular cracks covered the floor, like we were walking over an inexplicably plush broken mirror. Tapestries covered the walls, even as they had in Dreamer’s Glass, showing Riordan taming Annwn one wolf and raging river at a time. Globes of greenish light bobbed along the ceiling, bright enough to lead the way.
Simon dropped back, falling into step beside me, and murmured, “None of this is real, of course.”
“What?” I gave him a sidelong look, trying to figure out what he meant.
“Oh, the castle is real: the candle showed us that. But carpet? Tapestries? That dress? Please. Treasa trades on illusion even more than most of our kind. She’s always felt entitled to live above her station. Some of the things around us will be spun from transformation spells. Others will be light and shadow, nothing more. Tread carefully.” Simon shook his head, the motion tight and restrained, like he was hoping it could go unnoticed. “She’ll be hungry for the real, after spending so much time surrounded by the fictional.”
“I can hear you, you know,” called Riordan, still walking ahead of us—far enough ahead to give Simon an excellent view of her butt, which might as well have been poured into her dress, while staying close enough that there was no chance we’d get away.
“It would be rude to talk about you if you couldn’t hear, milady,” said Simon, in an ingratiating tone. “Truly, I’m in awe of how much gold you’ve been able to spin from the straw of this place. If I didn’t know you of old—and if I weren’t such a keen illusionist myself—I would no doubt have taken all these baubles for real, material things. It’s impressive work.”
“It should be,” said Riordan. For a moment, the fa?ade of calm cracked, and I could hear the strain that lurked beneath. “I’ve had to do almost all of it myself. My people are great at telling me what I want to hear, not so good at spinning a spell to convince a broken wall to play at being a complete one. But it doesn’t take much skill to hold a shovel.”
Luna would probably have said differently. I held my tongue, breathing in the scents surrounding us.
Dreamer’s Glass was like most modern demesne: mixed. The days of only Daoine Sidhe in one place and only Bridge Trolls in another have pretty much ended, although there are exceptions—Dryads still keep mostly to themselves, for example, since it’s difficult for them to remember that other people can’t just retreat into their trees when they don’t want to be seen. Riordan’s subjects included Daoine Sidhe, Tuatha de Dannan, Selkies, Satyrs, and a dozen more types of fae. I tasted them all on the air of her castle, along with a thick, constant overlay of Folletti, the sky fae she used as her personal guard.
Folletti are functionally invisible much of the time. I breathed in a little deeper to reassure myself that we weren’t surrounded, and stiffened as the scent of August’s magic hit me, harder than ever. She had been here. She had been right here.
“What made you choose this castle when there are so many?” someone asked—I asked. That was my voice, however distant it seemed. I was wrapped in the memories implicit in the air, in the taste of magic going back decades. August had been right here. Not just in Annwn. In this castle. My sister had walked these halls, exiled and alone, and no one had come to save her.
A thread of memory tickled the back of my mind: me, in these halls, looking for Quentin and Etienne after Riordan’s forces had taken us captive. I had breathed in then, and tasted Dóchas Sidhe on the wind. I had assumed I was detecting myself.
I had been wrong.
“Someone managed to stay behind when Oberon shut the doors,” Riordan replied easily. “When we came to scout the land, we found a couple of dozen old manor houses and castles with the roofs caved in and the floors unsafe, and then we found this place. There wasn’t anyone in it, or we might have had a fight on our hands, but whoever they were, they’d managed to keep the foundations sound while they waited for me. I’d love to give them a token of my appreciation, if you have any idea who that might have been.”
Simon glanced at me, his expression betraying the early signs of alarm. He might not have my ability to detect magic, but he knew who our mystery handyman was likely to have been, and he didn’t want me betraying her to Riordan. Which made sense. As far as Riordan knew, we were here looking for something my mother had misplaced, not for my living and self-misplacing sister.
Simon was good with his words. He might not have the Luidaeg’s practice at talking around the truth, but he knew how to say what he had to and not a syllable more. I could learn a lot from him, if I were willing to spend that much time in his company. So far, I wasn’t.
Riordan led us down a long hallway to a dining hall with vaulted ceilings and stained glass windows that shattered the ambient light coming from outside into a panoply of rainbows, beautiful and brilliant and surprisingly bright, given how dark it was.
“Wait here,” she said. “I’ll gather my people, and a feast will be held in your honor. It’s not every day we have visitors here in this impassable, inaccessible place.” She smiled like a throat being slashed, all vigor and violence, and she was gone, heading out the door and away.
Simon turned to Quentin and me. “Quickly, hide us,” he said, tone leaving no room for argument.
Quentin blinked and raked his fingers through the air, singing a lilting line from some folksong about dolphins swimming in a harbor. It was sweet. It was sad. It was accompanied by the smell of steel and heather, and by a don’t-look-here spell crashing down on us with such intensity that I flinched.
“Quentin, what the hell?” I asked, resisting the urge to rake the spell out of my hair like it was a veil of cobwebs.
“I don’t know!” he said, eyes wide.
“Every realm generates its own ambient magic, and Annwn is no exception,” said Simon. “Treasa and her people are waking the land by being here. It wants to help.”
“So the more fae there are, the stronger their magic will become?” I asked.
Simon shook his head. “If it were that simple, we might never go to war again. No: with none to use its magic, Annwn stagnated. Now that it has residents again, the land is waking, and putting forth the amount of magic that its entire populace once needed. As the number of residents rises, the strength of the spells will die back to more reasonable levels.”