Seanan McGuire - Ashes of Honor

“Where the fuck are we?” I breathed.

“I don’t know,” wheezed Tybalt. “Remind me to beat my nephew for making us come here.”

“No,” I said. I turned to look behind us. The land stretched into a wide moor. Beyond that, hills, some crowned with the familiar, irregular shapes of castles. The air smelled like heather, flowering bloom, peat, and the sea. What it didn’t smell like was the modern world. No pollution, no smog, no traces of combustion engines. Wherever we were, it was a place that had been sealed away long before the technological revolution changed things. “I get to beat him. I figured out how to get us here. That means I have dibs.”

“Why are you an adherent to logic only when it results in the commission of violence?”

“What can I say? I know what I like.” I turned again, this time continuing until I’d completed a slow circle. The lighthouse turned, the waves swept in and out, the sedge on the moor rippled in the breeze…but that was all. Nothing else moved, nothing else stirred. “You’re the one who can sense Raj’s location. Where is he?”

“You make me sound like a machine.”

“You complain when I use you like a bloodhound. This is a step up.” The thorns on Luna’s rose were sharp enough to be a distraction. I pushed it into the tangled mess that was my hair, forcing it down until the flower snagged and refused to move farther. That would keep it until we needed it again.

Tybalt chuckled, still sounding winded, and pushed himself upright. He looked around thoughtfully before stepping away from me, moving off the hard-packed sand at the cliff’s edge to the border of the moor. He bent, plucking a yellow-flowered sprig of broom. “I know where we are,” he said, a wondering edge to his voice. He straightened, turning to offer me the broom like it was the most precious thing the world had ever known. “This is incredible.”

I took the broom—it would have been rude not to—and tucked it behind my ear before asking, “Well? Where are we?”

He stepped closer. The hot smell of pennyroyal and musk baking off his skin overwhelmed even the smell of the sea. “Annwn,” he whispered. “We’re in Annwn.”

My eyes widened as I swallowed my instinctive denial. Chelsea was weakening the walls of the world. The Rose Roads followed their own rules. Who was to say that right now, with all those factors working together, we couldn’t get around the gates Oberon had erected and find our way someplace we absolutely weren’t supposed to be?

Annwn was one of the deep realms. It used to be accessible by sea from half a dozen other homelands and by gate from a few more. It was a port country, worked by seafaring folk, ferrymen and sailors and traders who liked the unpredictability of the land, as wild as the Firstborn who made it, Arawn of the White Stag. It was a verdant farmland, one of the few deep realms that ever knew seasons. And no one had walked there or breathed its heather-sweet air in over five hundred years.

“Whoa,” I said.

“Yes. Very much ‘whoa.’” Tybalt turned, scanning the landscape. Then he pointed out into the moor and said, “There. That’s where we need to go.”

“Because Raj is there or because you want to watch me go tromping around in a field full of sticker bushes?”

He smiled a little, still looking tired. “Oh, don’t be silly, October. This is Annwn. There will almost certainly be thistles.”

“This gets better and better,” I said, and together we tromped into the heather.

We were on a mission—the glow of the Luidaeg’s charm was a constant reminder—but it was hard not to get distracted by the sheer alien novelty of the landscape, a place as unfamiliar to me now as the Summerlands were, when I was a little girl, I could have spent hours just looking at the stars, trying to guess what the people who used to live here made of them. Instead, we had to keep walking, fording through the waist-high brush as we tried to find the place where Raj had gone to ground.

True to Tybalt’s prediction, there were thistles scattered through the heather and broom, their bright purple flowers only providing a little bit of warning before their prickles bit into my ankles or hands. “I think the landscape is out to get us,” I muttered, after the fifth stealth attack.

“Almost certainly,” said Tybalt. “A knowe, allowed to go fallow, will lash out at one who enters it. Why should a realm be any different?”

That gave me pause. When I went to claim the knowe at Goldengreen, it fought back. Not because it wanted to be left empty but because it was hurt. It had been abandoned, left alone, and it was angry. Our hollow hills are alive, in their own slow way, and just like any living thing, they have feelings. Why would a realm be any different?

Answer: it wouldn’t. “Oak and ash,” I muttered. “I hope Raj is okay.”

“As do I,” said Tybalt.

We walked faster after that. The moor seemed endless, but eventually the brush began to thin, the formerly hard-packed ground turning soft and marshy under our feet. Tall stands of bulrush made their appearance, some of them growing higher than Tybalt’s head. Finally, Tybalt stopped, looking straight at one of the patches of bulrush.

“All right,” he said. “You may emerge. Quickly, if you please; the ground is damp, and I would prefer not to sink.”

There was a moment of silence. Then the bulrushes rustled, and a boy-sized missile flung itself at us, zigging at the last moment to slam into me. If Tybalt hadn’t been standing there so calmly, I might have reacted with violence. As it was, I simply braced myself, and when Raj made impact, I wrapped my arms around him, letting him bury his face against my shoulder.

“You came you came you came,” he was saying, the words so fast and jumbled-together that they were practically a chant. “I didn’t think—I wasn’t sure—I didn’t know—”

“Hey. Hey!” I unwrapped my arms and grabbed his shoulders, pushing him out to arms’ length. He went reluctantly, but he went. That was all I could ask for. “We’ll always come. You got that? If we have to move heaven and earth—”

“Or find a route into a realm that’s been sealed for centuries,” interjected Tybalt.

“—we will,” I finished. “Do you understand me? We’ll always come for you, Raj. You’re family. We look out for our own.”

Raj nodded, eyes wide and swimming with tears. Then he ducked out from under my hands and slammed into me again, resuming his embrace. At least he didn’t start chanting again. I looked over his head to Tybalt.

“We got him,” I said.

Tybalt nodded. “Indeed. Allow him his distress. Even for a Prince, this must have been…trying.” He looked around. “I know where we are, and I doubt I would have taken this so calmly at his age.”

The idea that Tybalt was ever a teenager was almost enough to make me start laughing. Instead, I snorted and said, “Now that we have him, we should probably be getting out of here.”

Raj pushed himself back enough to look up at me. “How?” he asked, an edge of panic in his voice. “I tried and I tried, and I couldn’t find the shadows. They wouldn’t come.”

“That’s because there has been no King here to remind them of their place,” said Tybalt.

“Besides, we had help.” I pulled the rose from my hair, only wincing a little when the thorns sliced my fingers. Healing fast has its perks, but it also means I never get numb; I had fully recovered from my first bout with the thorns, and round two hurt even more, if that was possible. “Luna opened a Rose Road for us. Hopefully, we can figure out a way to pry it open again from here.”

“Hopefully?” echoed Raj. “You mean you don’t know?”