The goblin made a trilling noise. Ceres smiled.
“Excellent. You are very dear.” She set the goblin back on the ground. It took off like a shot, vanishing into the brush as Ceres straightened. Making a beckoning gesture, she started down the path. “Come,” she said again.
Tybalt and I exchanged a glance. Walther was already following her. It was my experience that he was a pretty good judge of character, and once we knew where we were going, I could always ask Tybalt to go back and tell Quentin and May what was going on. I shrugged and, together, we followed.
Ceres led us along the pine-choked path for about a hundred yards before she turned and stepped onto a narrow dirt trail winding through the forest. As before, Walther followed her, and so Tybalt and I followed him, trusting that whatever their relationship was, it wouldn’t cause him to lead us to our certain doom. Maybe that was overly optimistic of me, but I felt like I had earned a little optimism after the day that I’d had.
The trees closed around us like a curtain. The trail was covered in pine needles, and we couldn’t avoid stepping on them, causing the rich, syrupy scent of pine to become even stronger, until it was like we were walking through the distilled essence of Christmas. I’ve always liked that smell, which is a good thing; if I hadn’t, I would have been sneezing and cursing my life choices before we were halfway through the wood.
Rose goblins flickered through the underbrush, their thorny faces seeming to bloom like strange flowers as they peeked back at us. None of them stayed long enough for me to pick out individual features—just thorns and bright, floral colors, and those vivid, staring eyes. Ceres moved through the wood like it had been designed for her private use, and in a way, it had. Her mother, Acacia, was the Firstborn of both the Dryads and the Blodynbryd. When she spoke to the forest, the forest responded. Ceres might not have quite such a close connection to the trees, but she was a relative, however distant, and they seemed to respect her.
I wasn’t so lucky, and I was walking through a pine forest in a formal gown. At first I tried to keep my skirt from dragging on the ground, but I gave it up as a bad idea before we’d gone very far. Either the palace laundry would be able to save it or they wouldn’t. I didn’t give much of a damn either way. Although I was going to miss those jeans.
Tybalt shot me an amused look after the third time I had to wrestle one of my sleeves back from a tree. “You know, in all my years, I’ve never known a woman with such talent for wearing unsuitable finery into the wilderness.”
“Really?” I eyed him dubiously. “You’re going to tell me no Cait Sidhe woman has ever wound up in the woods while she was dressed for Court?”
“No. But if you were a Cait Sidhe woman, you would have removed your gown by now.”
I didn’t have an answer for that. Tybalt laughed as my cheeks flared red.
“I do so appreciate knowing that I can still make you blush,” he said.
Any answer I might have given died as the trail ended, widening out into a clearing straight out of a Disney movie. It was small, perfectly round, and even more perfectly designed. Pine trees created the edges, but they were barely visible under the rioting roses that climbed them, treating them as a natural trellis and pathway to the sky. High overhead—easily fifteen or twenty feet—those roses reached out and twined themselves together in a series of gravity-defying lover’s knots, creating a latticework of living branches. It shouldn’t have been possible . . . but Ceres was Blodynbryd, just like her sister, and I had seen Luna do quite a few impossible things with her roses.
The flowers themselves came in every color of the rainbow and a few colors the rainbow hadn’t received the memo on yet. Some were modern, cultivated roses, blooming in that familiar shape that has sold a million Valentine’s Day bouquets. Others had older, wilder silhouettes, opening in ragged cups or in tiny starbursts. But they were all roses. The air in the clearing was thick with their perfume, and they turned toward Ceres as she walked.
At the center of the clearing was a tiny cottage that might as well have been made of gingerbread for as much as it resembled something that should have housed a fairy-tale witch. The door was held shut by twisted rose boughs, all in a state of full bloom. Ceres stopped in front of the door, raising her hand and waving it across the span of the doorway. The roses promptly furled themselves, becoming tight buds. Then, and only then, the boughs unknotted and pulled away, revealing the actual door one inch at a time.
When the last of the roses retracted, Ceres pushed the door open and looked over her shoulder, smiling at the rest of us. “Enter freely, and be not afraid, for there is nothing that will harm you here.” Then she stepped inside.
“I think that was meant to be reassuring,” I said distantly. “I am not reassured. Tybalt, how about you? Are you reassured?”
“Unlike you, I come from an era where that was a common welcome into someone’s home,” he said. “I am reassured.”
“Ceres usually has lavender cookies,” said Walther. “I am totally reassured.” With that, he went in, leaving us with no choice but to either follow or wait outside for his return.
I have charged headlong into portals, sealed lands of Faerie, and experienced more dangers than any one woman can reasonably be expected to both encounter and survive. I sighed, and stepped into the quaint little forest cottage.
“Huh,” I said a moment later. “It’s bigger on the inside.”
“Many things are,” Ceres agreed. She was on the opposite side of the large parlor, arranging a tea service on a sideboard that appeared to have been designed for exactly that purpose. Despite the size of the room—it was easily bigger than my first apartment, but then again, what wasn’t?—it was modestly appointed, with most of the furniture carved from rosewood, left unpainted to allow the wood’s natural beauty to shine through. I called it a parlor, because I didn’t have a better word for a space that seemed to be receiving room, living room, dining room, and foyer all at the same time.
It was an elegant, economically designed space, and I wouldn’t have found it strange in almost any demesne, if not for one small thing: there was no floor, just hard-pressed dirt that filled the room with its characteristic earthy scent. It mingled with the roses, creating a perfume that was at once common and impossible for any lab in the world to replicate.
“It hasn’t changed a bit,” said Walther happily. He walked over to the table that occupied one side of the room, pulling out a chair and dropping himself into it. There were three covered dishes on the table. After a moment’s consideration, he lifted the center lid to reveal a pile of pale purple cookies, dusted with sugar. “Lavender cookies. Ceres, you’re the best.”
“So you’ve been telling me since you sprouted, but that didn’t stop you from leaving me for a hundred years.” She carried the tea service over to the table and set it down, smiling indulgently as Walther snatched a handful of the purple cookies. He didn’t do anything to them before taking a bite of the first one. Either he trusted Ceres not to poison or bespell us, or she already had him ensnared.
The Blodynbryd didn’t have any sort of enthrallment or persuasion powers, at least not that I was aware of. If they had, Luna would probably have made sure her daughter’s marriage ended in something other than annulment and murder—the annulment on the part of Raysel’s ex-husband, Connor, who was also the one who wound up getting murdered. If Ceres had that sort of power, we were already screwed. I shrugged and walked over to join Walther.