“Right,” I said, and leaned forward, sniffing the rose. Then I recoiled, atavistic revulsion rising in my throat, so strong and fierce that I almost slapped the flower out of his hand. It might have seemed like a melodramatic reaction to something so small, but the rose’s smell was so close to the scent of Evening’s magic that I couldn’t help myself. It lacked the depth and power of her signature. It was just a rose, with no undertones of ice or snow. But I had never smelled a rose like that one, old and deep and somehow primal, the sort of flower that would have grown on a grave in a folksong, or provided the perfume to a figure from a fairy tale.
Walther watched me, assessing my reaction with a faint gleam of satisfaction in his eyes. “Well?” he asked, needlessly.
“That’s the one.” I wiped my mouth with the back of my hand, leaving flecks of dried blood on my lips. That helped a little. “It smells so close to her magic it makes me want to throw up. Where did you find it?”
“In the oldest of my rose gardens, in a corner, where the sun only shines fully for a few months out of the year,” said Ceres. “I’ve thought it dead several times, but always it returns.”
“Yeah, well, it and the woman whose magic smells like it have that in common,” I said, resisting the urge to wipe my mouth again. “That’s the one. That’s the rose that smells like her magic.”
“And you’re sure this is the woman who created elf-shot?”
I hesitated. “Yes and no,” I said finally. “The Luidaeg is the one who told me about her making the elf-shot, and the Luidaeg is sort of laboring under a geas, where she can’t say her sister’s name or identify her directly. But she told me it was her oldest sister who created elf-shot, and Eira Rosynhwyr is her oldest sister. Maybe more importantly, Eira is really hung up on position and power and all that fun stuff, and whoever brewed the first elf-shot designed it to be fatal to changelings when it didn’t have to be. It was her.”
“We need to be sure,” said Walther. “If I brew this wrong, it could do more harm than good.”
“Define ‘more harm,’” I said.
“Elf-shot doesn’t normally kill unless the potion is altered to add poison,” he said. “I’m not worried about turning it fatal, but I am worried about tripping a failsafe and extending the length of time that the sleepers are out.”
I stared at him. “So if we do this wrong, we could put everyone to sleep for even longer? How much longer?”
“How does a thousand years strike you?” Walther shook his head, the lines of weariness in his face suddenly making perfect sense. “This isn’t just some brute force compound. It’s one of the most complicated spells I’ve ever tried to reverse-engineer. I feel like I’m trying to replicate a cobweb from a blurry picture. I can do it—don’t get me wrong—but it’s the hardest piece of work I’ve ever attempted.”
“You were always Daddy’s little prodigy,” said Marlis. Her tone was equal parts amusement and bitterness, like she had spent years coming to terms with her own words. “I was good, but you were better.”
“I had to be,” said Walther. “I was going to break his heart one day, when I told him why I wasn’t going to marry and provide him with heirs. Being the best alchemist I could be seemed like the least I could do.”
Marlis nodded. “You did good. You got out.”
I looked between them, hand going automatically to the pocket where I usually kept my phone—only for me to realize that I didn’t have a pocket, and I didn’t have a phone. I was wearing a blood-drenched ball gown. They aren’t known for their copious storage capacity. “Oh, oak and ash,” I said. “Look, I can confirm that Eira brewed the original potion, but I’m going to need to borrow somebody’s phone.”
“Phone?” asked Ceres blankly.
“Mortals have started carrying portable communication devices,” explained Marlis. “No one in this Kingdom has anything so . . . déclassé and human.”
“See, you say ‘déclassé,’ I say ‘I can order Chinese food without getting out of bed. I resisted at first, too, but the convenience of having one outweighs the irritation of remembering to keep it charged.” I turned to Quentin. “You. I know you have a phone. Fork it over.”
Quentin’s cheeks reddened as he dug into his pocket. “Okay, just don’t go poking around in my files, all right?” He produced a phone that was newer and sleeker than mine, with a glass front. It wasn’t the phone he’d had a few weeks previously. I raised an eyebrow, and he reddened further. “April upgraded me. She said I was shaming Tamed Lightning by carrying around something so out of date.”
“Your phone was less than six months old,” I said, taking the space-age rectangle from his hand.
Quentin shrugged.
The phone wasn’t locked, thankfully, and a sweep of my thumb across the screen woke it up and displayed Quentin’s wallpaper at the same time: a picture of him with Dean Lorden, the current Count of Goldengreen. They were sitting on the dock of Goldengreen’s private beach, Dean with his arm slung carelessly around Quentin’s waist, Quentin with his head resting on Dean’s shoulder.
This wasn’t the time or the place to start grilling my squire on his social life, but I glanced from the picture to him, just long enough to be sure that he got the message that we’d be discussing this later. Quentin nodded, accepting his fate, and I called up the keypad.
Dialing on these new phones with their virtual keys is easy. Using it to channel the spells necessary to reach the Luidaeg is somewhat less so. I drew a starburst pattern across the keys, chanting, “My lover’s gone to sea, to sea, my lover’s gone away; may he come back to me, to me, for this each night I pray.” The smell of cut grass and copper rose in the air around me, strong enough to overwhelm the scent of roses. Only briefly—the roses were already slipping back by the time the spell coalesced and popped like a soap bubble, sending a thin bolt of pain lancing through my head.
I raised the phone to my ear, and heard nothing. That was another thing about those new phones: they didn’t come with dial tones to tell me when my spells weren’t working. But my head hurt, and the smell of copper was still hanging in the air. I waited, until faintly, I began to hear the sound of waves battering themselves against a distant beach. Jackpot.
The sound of the waves grew louder as connections were thrown and magic tunneled its way through the phone lines between me and the Luidaeg. Nobody loves a special effect like a pureblood, and as the Firstborn daughter of Oberon and Maeve, the Luidaeg was about as pure as they came. I counted silently to ten, and had just reached nine when the waves crashed loudly enough to be startling, and the Luidaeg’s voice demanded, “What now?”
“Hi, Luidaeg,” I said. “I’m still in Silences, and I have an awkward question that’s probably going to run up against your geas. Sorry about that.”
There was a pause. “What?”
“I don’t really have time to explain right now. I’m standing in a rose garden with a Blodynbryd named Ceres and a whole bunch of flowers, and King Rhys is probably going to notice that I’m missing pretty soon. So if I could just ask my question, that would be swell.” I didn’t beg or try to convince her that she should tell me what I needed to know. Our relationship had long since progressed past those little formalities.
This time, the pause was longer. Finally, the Luidaeg asked, “Is it important enough to make me answer you?”
“Evening has been elf-shot, Luidaeg. She’s not going to come back just because I ask something that involves her.”
“Spoken like someone who never really knew my sister,” said the Luidaeg. There was no mistaking the bitterness in her voice for anything else. Then she sighed, and said, “All right. Go ahead and ask. If it wakes her, then it’s on your head.”