We tumbled out of the darkness and into the bright, pancake-scented confines of the Luidaeg’s chambers. She was seated at a large round table with Karen and Quentin, all of them turning toward the sound of our arrival. Karen went pale. Quentin jumped to his feet. And the Luidaeg, bless her, cleared the breakfast dishes to the floor with a sweep of her arm, creating a great clatter of crockery.
“Get her on the table!” she commanded. “Quentin, warm, damp towels, now. Karen, go to my room. Bring me the brown case.” She paused for barely a second, looking between the two of them. “Well? Move.”
“Shouldn’t we get Jin . . . ?” asked Quentin.
“Move!” the Luidaeg howled.
They moved.
Tybalt carried me to the table, lowering me onto my side. Sheets of frozen blood cracked and fell away with every motion, freeing more to seep into my clothing. The Luidaeg grabbed one of the blood crystals before it could hit the floor and pressed it to my lips, like a nurse offering an ice chip to a wounded soldier.
“Suck on this,” she said. “It’ll make you feel better.”
I managed to muster a nod and open my mouth, letting her place the blood on my tongue. It began to warm and soften, and she was right; it did make me feel better. The taste of blood always did. My blood was the best choice in some ways, because it didn’t come with any unwanted, potentially uncomfortable memories: it was mine. I already knew all the secrets it had to tell me.
It was getting increasingly difficult to breathe. I closed my eyes, focusing on the soothing taste of the blood. I was in good hands.
“What happened?” the Luidaeg demanded.
“I don’t know!” Tybalt sounded frustrated—and more, he sounded scared, like this was outside his frame of reference. “We were in her room, and there was a sound, like unoiled hinges creaking. She froze. Then she was falling into me, telling me to run. I never saw what struck her. Can you get it out?”
I knew whatever it was had to be still embedded in my back; the pressure on my lung wasn’t getting any better. If anything, it was getting worse, making it harder and harder to pull in a full breath. If I suffocate, will I still heal? I thought, dazedly. I’d drowned once, I was pretty sure—maybe more than once. Something Connor had said to me on the beach, right after I’d returned from the pond . . . I had recovered from those short deaths. What was one more?
One more was one too many. It was a relief when the Luidaeg said, “Yes, but you’re not gonna like it.” Her hand touched my shoulder, skin cool against my own. “Honey, I know you can hear me, and that’s important. The stake that hit you is like a harpoon. There are hooks. The cleanest way to get it out—forgive me, October—the cleanest way is to push it through. It’s going to hurt. It’s going to hurt bad. But it has to be done. Nod if you understand.”
I nodded. It took everything I had left, but I nodded. The Luidaeg took her hand away.
“Good girl. Tybalt, you may want to look elsewhere. Quentin, get ready with those towels.”
That was all the warning I received before she gripped the stake, twisting it and sending bolts of agony through my back and shoulder. Then she shoved, driving it deeper into my flesh. I think I screamed. I think I vomited. All I know for sure is that consciousness slipped away, replaced by blessed black nothingness. True nothingness: there was no pain, no awareness that time was passing, only absence. It was pleasant.
The pain returned, bright and blazing, and accompanied by the feeling of fingers inside my chest, poking through the ruined tissue that had been my lung. I screamed, or tried to, anyway; screaming was difficult without air, and my body was refusing to do anything that might have reinflated the collapsed organ.
“Towel!” snarled the Luidaeg, withdrawing her hand. There was a clattering sound as she dropped something on the table, and pressure was suddenly applied to my chest. It hurt, but in a different way. “Dammit. She’s lost a lot of blood. I need a knife.”
“Why?” Tybalt’s voice. He sounded panicked, and I couldn’t blame him; when the Luidaeg started asking for knives, someone was about to bleed. She wasn’t always careful about her cuts, either, although I liked to think she was careless with me because she knew I’d heal.
I wanted to reassure him. I couldn’t find the air.
“Because I’m going to bleed for her.” Some of the pressure was removed from the towel at my breast. “Come on, kitty-cat. Scratch me, and let me bring her back to you. She’d do the same for me.”
I did do the same for you, I thought. I still couldn’t speak. I wasn’t dead, but I wasn’t getting any air. Everything was turning fuzzy and hard to focus on. My eyelids didn’t want to respond. That wasn’t fair. If I was going to die here, I wanted to see them before I went. I wanted them to know I was saying good-bye.
There was a ripping sound. The Luidaeg hissed, sounding pained. Then something was being shoved against my lips, and the smell of blood was invading my nostrils, so delicious I couldn’t have resisted it if I tried. My mouth opened almost without my bidding, and I was drinking deeply, greedily, pulling at the Luidaeg’s wrist like it was a lifeline. I needed the blood so much that I didn’t think about the consequences until the world was washed in red, and everything changed.
My mother is wearing a gown of thorns and autumn leaves, and there are roses in her hair, and she is beautiful, and she is not listening to me. Her eyes are far away, fixed on the horizon; she would rather hear the wind than my voice. It isn’t fair. I love her so, I suffer for her so, and still she will not hear me, because she is too kind. She has always been too kind. Titania’s children change their songs when she walks in the forest. The monsters come to sit at her feet and adore her, and she does not have to face the reasons that their claws are bloody, that their teeth are sharp. She doesn’t have to see.
“Please,” I say—and the word was jarring enough to knock me back into my own mind, my own present, if only for a moment; the language the Luidaeg spoke wasn’t English, and I shouldn’t have been able to understand it. She said she’d forgotten the first language of Faerie, and she hadn’t lied, because she couldn’t lie, but somewhere deep down, below conscious thought, her blood remembered.
You remember, I thought. Then the blood overwhelmed me again, dragging me back down into memory.
“Mother, please,” I say. “This is foolishness. You know the ritual has been compromised. You have to change it. You have to find another way.”
“Tradition may not seem important to you, my Annie, who saw Tradition born, but it’s not just you we Ride for,” says Maeve. Her voice is summer wind and autumn berries, and I want her to talk to me forever, and I want her to be quiet and listen. “We Ride for our grandchildren, and our great-grandchildren, all the way down to the generations that have never known anything but this. We Ride to consolidate a legend, that someday, when we are gone, you can Ride without us.”
She doesn’t see. She doesn’t understand. She’s as far above me as I am above the fae who swarm around their Firstborn parents, forever limited in comparison, eternally unable to grasp the full consequence of what they do. “Tonight is Hallow’s Eve, Mother. Please. Send someone else to Ride for you. Take the true route elsewhere, or all is lost.”
“My darling girl,” she says, and steps closer to me. Her palm is soft against my cheek. She smells like wild roses and southernwood, like moss and loam and the first day of the fall. I will never love anything the way I love her, not as long as I may live. “The fae folk must Ride.”