“Why not right now?” August blurted.
I took a sharp, angry breath, forcing myself to count to ten before I said, “Because right now, I can’t be away from my fiancé without thinking he’s never coming home. Because my Fetch, my sister, keeps breaking down crying, and her girlfriend is afraid to change shapes, thanks to Amandine making her afraid she’ll get stuck that way. Do you understand? Mom left a Raven-maid afraid to fly. The only person in this house who isn’t completely fucked up is Quentin, and honestly, I think he’s hiding how upset he is from me because he doesn’t know if I can take it. My liege won’t let me into his knowe, Simon is missing and possibly a threat again, the Luidaeg has a human-sized pixie and a sleeping police officer in her apartment—I can’t go looking for your father! I may be a hero, but even heroes need to rest. Let me rest.”
August took a step back. “I might go looking for him myself,” she said, and it was a warning, and a threat.
“If you do, I’ll find you, and I’ll bring you home,” I said coldly. “You disappear again, Amandine comes after the people I love. I can’t allow that.”
“I’m not going to be a prisoner because you want to be left alone!”
“Yeah,” I said. “You sort of are. If you don’t like it, convince Mom she isn’t allowed to come here and punish me for your bad behavior. This is between you and my mother. I want no part in it.”
“I won’t forget this.”
“I know,” I said. “Neither will I.”
August glared before turning on her heel and walking away. I watched her go. When I was sure she wasn’t going to come back, I closed the door, letting my forehead rest against the wood. Tybalt stepped up behind me, putting his arms around me again, and lowered his head to my shoulder. We stood there, wounded, frozen, exhausted, and waited for home to start feeling like home again. We waited for the safety to come back.
We were going to be waiting for a very long time.
Read on for a brand-new April O’Leary novella by Seanan McGuire:
OF THINGS UNKNOWN
And as imagination bodies forth
The form of things unknown, the poet’s pen
Turns them to shapes . . .
—William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream
ONE
October 30, 2013
THE WORLD SANG in a coruscating curtain of colors, shades that had no place or purpose outside the comfortable circumference of my tree. Here, I had no body, only the potential to make one when it was needed. Here, I had no tie to time, only the bright and brilliant light of the infinite now. I could stay forever and never tire of the perfection of it all. I could leave any time I wanted to and be as refreshed as if I had stayed a hundred years.
I wonder if death is the same way. I wonder if my mother is surrounded by curtains of light, comfortable and content and willing to remain where she is until something better comes along. I do not think so. I have read everything our scholars have written about the dead, and I have sent Elliot to the Library dozens of times to transcribe texts that touch, however glancingly, upon the night-haunts and the afterlife they represent, and all I know for sure is that whatever waits for us upon our ending is, as yet, undocumented.
Death and I are not close friends. I died once. I am sure of that. Men came to the grove where my first tree had sprouted, back when I was green and growing, roots in the earth and branches in the sky. Human men, with iron in their machines, and in their axes. They should never have been able to get so close to the grove. We were supposed to be protected.
I do not know what failed. I do not know if we were betrayed. I only know that my sisters died screaming as their trees were felled, slaughtered by men who never saw them fall. They were loyal to their Lord and Ladies to the very end, refusing to let themselves appear to their killers. To do so might have betrayed the existence of Faerie, and that would have been against the rules.
True Dryads are not swift thinkers. They do not change their minds quickly, if they change them at all. This is a good thing, when what is wanted is obedience. When I considered myself a true Dryad, I and my sisters had been told over and over and over again that we must never reveal ourselves to mortals. We were told that Dryads who were seen would be transplanted to the Summerlands, where the sun never shines. Our trees could grow there, could even thrive in their slow way, but there would be no more sunbaked bark, no more lazy summer days spent drinking in the goodness of the light.
My sisters feared transplantation more than they feared death, because they understood one and had never been educated on the other. They died thinking they were saving themselves, and perhaps they were, because they died as Dryads, and I, who screamed and ran and risked being seen, I lived as something else.
I am still a Dryad, of a kind. There is no other word to describe me. “Dryad” contains the seed of me, if not the tree, and so Dryad I am, although I no longer know exactly what that means. My roots are silicon and titanium and electricity; my sap is light racing through a thousand bright channels, reaching, reaching, reaching for a sun made of information and power.
My sisters died untransplanted. I found new soil, and I thrived there. I ran from death, and death spared me.
But it did not spare my mother.
She has been away too long. I will have her back again. I am a Dryad, and I am not a Dryad, and if there is one thing I know for sure, it is that nothing is impossible. Not when I can be here, alive, surrounded by this light.
Something touched the edge of my awareness: a keyword tied to my consciousness. Someone was speaking my name. I opened my eyes, making them manifest through the act of asking them to exist, and the light burst around me, and I was gone as surely as if I had never been there at all.