Seanan McGuire - Ashes of Honor

“Look at it this way, kiddo. At least now, if you’re going to be stranded, you’re not going to be stranded alone. Plus, hey, think about all those empty castles. We can totally take one over. Paint the whole thing pink.”

Raj smiled a little. “Where are we going to get pink paint?”

“We’ll improvise. We’re clever that way.” I tightened my hand on the rose, getting as many thorns to pierce my skin as I could. The smell of cut grass and copper filled the air. I looked toward Tybalt. “What’s our shadow status?”

“I can feel them, but I haven’t been here long enough to anchor them properly.” He frowned. “This is an…interesting dilemma, I must admit.”

“Then let’s do this the hard way.” I held my hand out to him, half the rose stem protruding from my fist in invitation. He nodded and closed his hand around it. The smell of Luna’s magic suddenly mingled with our own, as the Rose Road we had so recently stepped off of remembered that we had been going somewhere.

I wasn’t sure it would work. Luna had told us not to drop the rose, not to leave the path. But we never dropped the rose—it was on me the whole time—and we didn’t leave the path, not really. We just took a shortcut through the shadows and the brush, something idiots in fairy tales have been doing since the beginning of time.

Maybe it was the fairy tale impossibility of our situation; maybe it was the blood in the air giving me the strength to push while Tybalt pulled. Whatever it was, the smell of roses got stronger, and the wicker trellis wove itself together in front of us, opening on the long, rose-lined tunnel.

“Fantastic,” I breathed. “Raj, take hold of my jacket. I don’t want to lose you in here.”

“I have a better idea,” he said. He stepped back, jumped into the air, and landed on my shoulder as an Abyssinian cat, the smell of pepper and burning paper clinging to his fur. He wrapped his tail around my neck, yawning in that casual way cats have, and settled down to purr loudly in my ear.

“Sure, I’ll carry you,” I said. I looked to Tybalt. “Is he this respectful to you?”

“Believe it or not, my dear, he’s more respectful of you than he is of almost anyone else.”

I glared. Tybalt laughed, and kept laughing as we stepped onto the Rose Road.

The binding Oberon used to seal the deep realms must have been incredibly strong. We were barely through the door when it slammed behind us, with a ripping, tearing noise that made it sound like the whole thing had been torn right out of existence. I forced myself not to look back, mindful of Luna’s warning that looking back could screw everything up. Raj had no such compunctions. I felt him twist as he stared at whatever was behind us. He meowed, somehow managing to make the sound bewildered.

“Just stay on my shoulder and hold on,” I said, and began to walk. Tybalt kept pace beside me. Our fingers, still clenched around the stem of Luna’s rose, were tangled up enough that we were almost holding hands, if your definition was generous enough. I found myself wishing for a generous definition. Ears red, I tore my eyes away from the rose and looked toward the Luidaeg’s charm, instead.

It was still glowing starlight neutral.

“I hope Quentin’s having better luck than I am,” I said.

Raj meowed.

“He’s back at Tamed Lightning, waiting to see if Chelsea—that’s the girl who accidentally knocked you into Annwn, and she’s going to be really sorry, once she stops being freaked out and ripping holes in everything—shows up there. He’ll call me if she does.” Both my hands were full. I frowned and added, “Not that I’m sure how I’m going to answer my phone if that happens.”

“Always the practical one,” said Tybalt. He stopped walking, pulling me to a halt as well. “This is where we entered.”

“Are you sure?”

He shot me an amused look. “I find it refreshing when I notice the smell of blood before you do, little fish. It reminds me of old times.”

“I don’t think I enjoyed them as much as you did,” I shot back, and breathed in. Now that I was looking, I could see splashes of blood on the thorns, and smell the mingled traces of Tybalt and myself. “How do we get out of here?”

Tybalt considered for a moment before he said, “Let go.”

It made sense. It fit what Luna had told us to do. I still frowned before nodding. “I guess so,” I said, and opened my hand. Tybalt did the same, and we watched as the rose fell, a little more slowly than normal—gravity apparently doesn’t work the same way on magical roses—to land on the thorny ground.

Then the Rose Road collapsed around us, fading into nothing in an instant, and we were back on the lawn at Shadowed Hills, standing on a low hill. The vegetable garden was in front of us, and even the clean air of the Summerlands smelled dirty somehow, tainted by proximity to the mortal world. After Annwn, the pristine seemed polluted.

Tybalt reached out with his bloody left hand and wrapped it around my bloody right one, this time twining our fingers properly, with no rose to get in the way. My cuts were already healing. His weren’t, and he held me all the same. Raj was purring again; the Luidaeg’s charm was still glowing pale and inert.

“Well,” I said, looking at the garden, where Luna and her staff were still working. “That’s not something I do every day.”

Tybalt just laughed.

LUNA LOOKED UP before scrambling to her feet, nearly upsetting her basket of strawberries. “You’re back!” she exclaimed. Her gaze flicked to our bloody hands, then to the cat sitting on my shoulder. Where her eyes settled, however, was on the sprig of broom behind my ear. Her skin was already the stark white of newly fallen snow. Somehow, she still managed to go pale.

“Where have you been?” she asked, voice down to a whisper.

“Annwn.” I didn’t have any hands free, and so I had to disentangle my fingers from Tybalt’s in order to reach up and pluck the broom from my hair. I held it out toward Luna. “No people, lots of hedges.”

Her fingers trembled as she walked forward and took the broom from me. “This isn’t possible,” she said. Her head snapped up. “It isn’t possible .”

“We have a Tuatha changeling tearing holes in things,” I said. That seemed safe enough. She wasn’t going to jump straight from “Tuatha changeling” to “Etienne.” I wouldn’t have. Sylvester might, if Luna told him about this, but it was a risk I had to take. “Raj got sucked through one of those holes. That’s why we needed the Rose Road. We were hoping we could find a way to track him if we could get between the Summerlands and the islets. We found it.”

“Mixing magic often has its unexpected rewards,” said Tybalt.

Luna didn’t say anything for several minutes, but her eyes were suspiciously bright as she stared at the sprig of broom. Finally, she said, “I was there when Grandfather evacuated Annwn. It was never a populous land; most of those who lived there immigrated to escape their lives in other, more rigidly ruled places. They wept when the walls were sealed. I think some of them are crying still…” She shook herself as though she was trying to clear away a memory she’d never wanted to keep. “You shouldn’t have been there. Those doors were sealed for a reason.”

I looked at her—my liege’s wife, a woman I once thought of as a second mother—and all I felt was tired. The fractures between us started forming when she knowingly sent me to die in her father’s land. They’ve only grown deeper since then. Luna comes from a different Faerie, an older one, and I don’t understand it. It’s as alien to me as the Summerlands would be to Bridget. Watching Luna’s reaction to a bit of broken broom, I realized I was glad. I didn’t want to understand that world.