Seanan McGuire - Late Eclipses

The floor was checkered white and black. Even with the Merry Dancers floating overhead, the light was diffuse enough to make the blood all but invisible on the black squares. That didn’t seem to matter, because once I started looking, the blood was practically glowing, seeming like the only source of color in a monochrome world. It didn’t just stand out: it screamed for attention, proclaiming itself in the hopes that I would notice it. The drops in the next square over were smaller, like whoever it was had managed to staunch the bleeding.

“Well?” asked Grianne.

“Regular chatterbox tonight, aren’t you?” I indicated the blood trail. “It picks up here.” Whoever was doing the bleeding was at least trying to conceal it. After that first, probably accidental, series of drops on the white marble, all the blood was on the black. If I were anyone besides my mother’s daughter, I might have missed it altogether.

“Do we follow?” asked Connor.

“You and I do. Grianne—”

“I will find the Duke,” she said solemnly. Her Merry Dancers darted downward, spinning around her, and all three were gone, leaving Connor and me in darkness.

“Gosh, I love teleporters,” I deadpanned. At least I didn’t need the light anymore. The blood still stood out like spots of neon in the darkness. I started to follow the trail across the room, with Connor in my wake.

The blood led to the wall and stopped, save for a smear on the wainscoting. I touched the stain, and the wood slid down under my fingers, revealing another hidden passage in the service halls. More splashes of blood were on the floor there, getting sparser as they vanished into the darkness.

Connor followed me through, and the door swung shut behind us.

THE SERVICE HALL WAS EVEN DARKER than the ballroom, but that didn’t matter; I didn’t need light to see that the trail was getting fresher. I took Connor’s hand, guiding him. My other hand rested on the pommel of my borrowed sword. Sylvester wanted me to stop dying on him, so what did I do? I followed a trail of blood from an unknown source into a dark, enclosed area. There’s a way to increase your life span. All I needed was a hungry dragon to walk behind me and I’d have all the “get dead faster” bases covered.

At least I wasn’t doing it alone. If someone was hurt, we needed to find and help them if we could. It might be one of the other knights. It might even be one of the Hobs. Of course, most people don’t take refuge in dark corners when they’ve been hurt. The Hobs might, since they spent most of their time in those halls, but I doubted it. Whoever was hiding back here probably wasn’t wounded defending the honor of Shadowed Hills.

The hall bent to the left before coming to a dead end. I stopped, frowning at the walls. They looked solid, but I’d stopped believing anything in the place was as solid as it seemed. The doors might be hidden, but they were there, and they didn’t seem to want to be found. “Connor? Which way?”

“Like I’d know?”

“Great,” I muttered, dropping Connor’s hand and leaning forward to touch the wall in front of me. It was dry. So was the left-hand wall. The wall to the right was damp, and my fingers came away sticky. I sniffed them. Blood and flowers. The traces were getting stronger, because I recognized them now: foxgloves, yarrow, and oleander.

How egotistical was it of Oleander to keep killing people with the flower she was named after? “Somebody didn’t get hugged enough as a kid,” I said.

“If we get out of here alive, you can have all the hugs you want.”

“Noted.” I pushed the wall, opening the hidden panel and stepping through into one of the knowe’s many libraries.

The trail of blood picked up right outside the door, standing out starkly against the gray carpet. It was so fresh that the smell was almost cloying; we were moving faster than the person we were following. We followed the blood out of the library and paused in near-unison as we realized that we were standing in front of the door to the Garden of Glass Roses. We’d followed the blood trail all the way through the knowe.

It didn’t make sense unless the person we were following was actively trying to avoid Sylvester’s guards. If they were, the best place to be was somewhere they thought was already clear. The blood trail didn’t enter the garden, streaking down the hall away from us instead. I sped up, grabbing Connor’s wrist to tug him along and around the corner.

The trail ended at another door. This one was mahogany, with a narrow sword carved in place of an eyehole. I recognized it more from rote memorization than actual familiarity; it led to the practice grounds, where members of the Court went for duels or sword-fighting lessons. I hadn’t been there in decades, not since Etienne declared that my training was over. I opened the door and stepped out onto the packed earth of the grounds, Connor close behind me.

I’m not sure what I expected to see: I’d followed the blood trail through the knowe without knowing who I was running to ground. I had a few ideas, but they were all vague, half-formed things … and as it turned out, none of them was even close to right.

Oleander and Rayseline circled each other at the center of the field, each of them holding a knife. Oleander had a hand clamped against her side, shivering with something that looked like it ran deeper and closer to the bone than simple cold as she glared at Raysel. A flask was shattered on the ground between them, its golden contents sinking into the dirt. Oleander came like a snake, bearing her own venomous gifts, and it looked like she’d also been the one to receive them. The illusion that masked her as Nerium was gone, burned away by pain or maybe just released when it wasn’t useful anymore.

Raysel glanced toward us as the door slammed shut. Oleander seized the opportunity, raising her knife and going into a lunge.

“Raysel! Look out!” shouted Connor.

Raysel whipped around, grabbing Oleander’s wrist and stopping the knife in mid-descent. She brought her own knife up at the same time, burying it in Oleander’s stomach. Oleander choked. Rayseline grinned, suddenly looking like the perfect predator—suddenly looking like Blind Michael’s granddaughter.

“Connor, get behind me,” I hissed, wishing desperately that I had my knives, or my baseball bat, or any sort of weapon that I actually knew how to use. A sword was impressive and all, but I was as likely to hurt myself as anybody else.

Raysel took a step back, yanking her knife free and watching with evident satisfaction as Oleander sank slowly to the ground. “Thanks for everything, Auntie,” she purred. Turning, she blew a kiss at Connor. “Thank you, too, lover-boy. Go ahead and fuck your slut for now. Just don’t get too attached. I’ll be back.”

She pulled a vial from inside her bodice, yanking the cork out with her teeth and spitting it at Oleander before downing the vial’s ice blue contents. The dust-andcobwebs scent of borrowed magic rose around her in an instant, carried on a bitterly cold wind. The air seemed to thicken, almost frosting over … and then she was gone, leaving the air to rush into the space she’d left behind.

“Did she just … ?” whispered Connor.

“She did.” I stared at the empty air. “Someone loaned her that spell. Someone—root and fucking branch , who the hell loaned that crazy bitch a teleport spell?”

Oleander raised her head. “Wouldn’t you like to know?” Blood had matted her hair to her forehead, and her dark eyes were narrowed, filled with fury.

“Yes,” I said, not moving. If we were going to save her, it needed to be now. But Oleander was like a snake in more ways than one. She might strike if either of us came into range, just because she could, and there was no way to take her knife away.