Seanan McGuire - One Salt Sea

“Hold a moment.” The Luidaeg rolled down her window. Then she raised her left hand, tracing an elaborate pattern through the space between the seats. The air got suddenly colder, and I tasted saltwater on my tongue. Then the cold and the salt were both gone, taking the sound from outside the car with them. Her window was still halfway down, but there was no rush of air. We might as well have been driving in a hermetically sealed bubble—and for all that I knew, we were.

The Luidaeg met my eyes in the rearview mirror again before she shook her head, saying, “There’s no way of knowing who might be listening in. It’s better to be safe than to be sorry, especially right now.”

“ You’re afraid of being spied on?” asked Connor. “That seems a little far-fetched.” He stopped, reddening as if he was just now realizing he’d spoken aloud.

The Luidaeg’s attention swung to him. When she spoke again, her voice was cold, almost without inflection. “I don’t believe I requested your opinion, Selkie ,” she said, spitting out the word like it tasted bad. “As for things being ‘far-fetched,’ a year ago, you were a married man, and October here was a half-blood Knight living alone and half in love with the idea of her own death. Now your former wife is wanted for treason, October’s a Countess, her own personal death omen is paying half the rent, and the balance of her blood is a lot harder to read. No one who travels regularly in her company gets to use the term ‘far-fetched’ around me.”

“She’s got a point,” said Quentin, sounding almost cheerful. Having the Luidaeg in the car seemed to have made him feel much better about the whole excursion. That made one of us.

“Still,” I said, feeling like I should contribute, “for someone to be listening in, they’d have to be—”

“I’m not the only Firstborn left in the world. You should know that better than anyone, daughter of Amandine.” She somehow managed to turn the reminder of my mother into an endearment, like being Amandine’s child was a special, magical thing, rather than the source of half the complications in my life. “I don’t believe any of the other First are involved in this—but I can’t be certain. I can never be certain. And unless I absolutely know that none of my siblings are assisting our kidnappers, I can’t assume they’re not.”

“Oh, there’s a cheerful thought,” I said dourly. “How much do you know? Did you start listening as soon as the night-haunts left Goldengreen?”

“No. Not immediately. I knew you were going to call them, and it didn’t seem necessary.” There was quiet sorrow in her voice as she continued, “After you met with Duke Lorden, Mary . . . decided the circumstances were dire enough that she needed to call me with what she’d seen. She was worried that something terrible would happen if I didn’t go with you to Muir Woods.”

“Something terrible?” I asked, hands clenching on the steering wheel. “Something terrible like what, exactly?”

“She didn’t say. I don’t think she knew.” The Luidaeg’s reflection closed her eyes, letting her head rest against the back of her seat. “Mary, Mary, quite contrary. She doesn’t always understand what she sees, only that she sees it, and that what she’s seen can’t be unseen. She used to be more in control of her prophecy. But that was before.”

“Before what?” asked Quentin.

“Before the betrayal of the Roane,” said Connor. His voice was barely more than a whisper. If not for the Luidaeg’s spell shutting out all sound outside the car, I wouldn’t have heard him at all.

I frowned, slanting a glance in his direction. “What are you—”

“That’s a history lesson for another day, October,” said the Luidaeg, her tone leaving no room for debate. She didn’t lift her head or open her eyes as she gestured toward the road in front of us. “Drive. There isn’t time left for anything else.”

“I’m tired as hell of people being oblique and prophetic at me, you know,” I complained, pressing my foot down harder on the gas. “Do you people take some sort of correspondence course on making no damn sense at all?”

“It’s more of a graduate degree, actually,” the Luidaeg replied. I glanced again at her reflection. She was smiling. Only a little bit, but it was there. “I got the best grades in my class.”

“Figures,” I said, and focused on the road.

We were making the trip out of San Francisco at record speed, even for me, and whatever she’d used on the car was much better than an invisibility charm or a don’t-look-here. I didn’t even have to avoid the few other drivers who had somehow managed to avoid the Luidaeg’s misdirection charms and stay on the main roads. They just never happened to be where we needed to be next.

The Luidaeg’s presence was definitely making Connor uncomfortable. He sat, straight-backed, and watched the road ahead of us like he was counting down the miles to his own execution. An air of palpable tension was settling over the car, getting stronger with every minute that passed. We were moving toward a conclusion.

I saw a few cars after we crossed the Golden Gate Bridge into Marin, but the road ahead of us remained as open as ever. I was doing seventy when the phone rang. “Oh, thorns ,” I swore, fumbling it out of my pocket and flipping it open with one hand. “Hello?”

“Tobes, hey. I tried what you said. This a bad time?”

“You shouldn’t be on the phone while you’re driving,” said Connor. “It’s against the law.” He sounded faintly alarmed—less, I think, because I was breaking the law, and more because I wasn’t slowing down to compensate for splitting my attention.

I would have needed a third hand to flip him off. I settled for hitting the gas a little harder, and watching him go pale.

“No, Danny, this is a great time,” I said. “We’re on the way to Muir Woods now. Did you get anything out of the rocks?”

“You’re already on the way to Muir Woods? What are you, psychic?”

“No, impatient.” I shook my head, trying to clear away the image of Bucer’s wide, frightened eyes. “What did they tell you?”

“Three of the rocks recognized the smell of redwood—said they missed the big trees. One of ’em also said it missed the water, so I put it in the sink.” He sounded exceedingly pleased with himself as he continued, “They like the environmental cues.”

“Good. Did they give you any other details? Anything we can use?”

“The smallest one remembered redwoods an’ cars. Used to be at the edge of a parking lot. Apparently, it got picked up and put down again by a whole lotta kids, so it remembered Raysel real clear. She was the first one that didn’t put it back.” Danny hesitated. “I, uh, promised I’d put it back when we were done. Is that okay?”

“I’m not going to make you break your word to a rock, Danny.”

“Oh, good,” he said, relieved. “I didn’t think you would. Anyway, second one remembered water, third one remembered bein’ pulled out of the ground.”

“Great,” I said, heart sinking. The first two rocks were useful. The third . . . how many rocks came out of the ground? All of them, that’s how many. “This is very helpful, Danny.”

“No, no, you don’t get it! It remembers bein’ pulled out of the ground, but it wasn’t bottom-down, like in a trail or something!” Danny raised his voice in his excitement, words booming into the cabin. I winced, holding the phone away from my ear. “She pried it out of a wall, a mud wall. Like you get where a trail’s been cut, you know?”

“So she picked up one rock at the entrance, one rock from a stream, and one rock from the side of a trail?” I brought the phone back to my ear. “Did you get anything else?”