“She means us, Toby,” called Marcia. Her voice was surprisingly steady, given the circumstances. “We’re the vermin, and she wants to kick us out of our home.”
“Uh-uh, little girl,” said Evening, half-turning. “This is my home. You’re merely the raccoons that moved into the attic while I was away.”
“Your curse nearly killed me,” I said. “You’re telling me you didn’t even mean to do that? That you were never really in danger?”
“You know, October, it’s considered rude to carry on multiple conversations at one time,” said Evening, attention shifting back to me. “Yes, I was attacked, yes, I cursed you, yes, I lived. I’m terribly sorry if my brief convalescence has inconvenienced you in some way. It was only three years. Barely enough time for moss to grow, and yet I come back to find you puffed up on ideas of heroism, and these people living in my knowe. It’s enough to make me sick. Things are going to have to change around here, starting in this room.”
“It’s not your knowe anymore, if it ever was,” said Dean.
Evening sighed, tilting her head back until her face was pointed at the ceiling. “You see what I have to deal with?” she demanded. “Uppity changelings and mouthy mixed-bloods, and for what? To have the proper order of things restored? Faerie has become a madhouse, and I seem to be the only guard left on the asylum staff.”
I frowned. Evening had never been particularly nice to me—“nice” wasn’t really in her vocabulary—but she’d never been this outright cruel before. She’d always looked down on me for being a changeling, of course. That was normal among the purebloods, and I’d barely noticed it at the time.
Maybe my standards had improved since then.
“He’s right,” I said. “This is his knowe. Actually.”
Evening lowered her head, turning a blank-eyed look on me. “How do you reach that conclusion, October dear?”
“Goldengreen is a fiefdom of the Kingdom of the Mists,” I said. “That has never been questioned, and you swear your fealty to the throne. When you died—and everyone believed you were dead, whether or not that was true—the County passed to me, as payment for services rendered. I passed the County to Dean Lorden, as part of a peace brokerage between the Kingdom of the Mists and the Undersea Kingdom of Leucothea. It was acknowledged by the then-Queen of the Mists, who was later found to be illegitimate, and then acknowledged again by Queen Arden Windermere in the Mists, after she officially took her father’s throne. So by any line of title you care to follow, this knowe is Dean’s. The High King might be willing to uphold your claim to the fiefdom, since you’re not dead and all, but you’d have to ask him.”
“I see,” said Evening, sounding faintly stunned. Her eyes narrowed as she considered me. “You’ve changed a great deal in these past three years, October. I didn’t expect it of you, not at this late date. You seemed bent on a life of glorious mediocrity, like your mother.”
“Yeah, well, I owe it all to you,” I said. My stomach was churning. I couldn’t decide whether I wanted to laugh, cry, hug her, or throw my knife at her head. Evening was the one who’d helped me when I’d first returned from the pond. She’d been the one to take me to a motel and talk me through those horrible days when I didn’t know what year it was or whether I would ever see my family again. She’d forced me back into Faerie by getting herself killed, and I both loved and hated her for that. Now here she was, standing in front of me, and I had no living idea what I was supposed to do next.
And then there was the body in the courtyard. Thinking of that pale, slightly curled hand reminded me of the sealed wards, and the feeling of being slapped out of the Shadow Roads by a stronger magic than that of a King of Cats running through his own domain.
My fingers tightened on the grip of my knife.
“I see,” said Evening, apparently picking up on the gesture. “If that’s how things are to be, then that’s how things are to be. A pity. I had hoped we could do this without fighting. I did so enjoy being your friend, October.” She raised her hand, the smell of snow and roses rising faster this time, until it filled the room.
I braced myself, preparing to grab whatever spell she threw at me and fling it back at her. It had worked with Simon; maybe I could do it again. To my surprise, she simply turned, flicking out her hands like she was trying to dry them off. Dean wobbled. Then, without fanfare, he and all his subjects—except, inexplicably, for Marcia—fell backward, into the water. Marcia cried out, dropping to her knees and trying to lift her liege’s head out of the water.
Evening turned back to me and smiled. “There we are. You can be angry with me, attack me even, for the crime of leaving you, but you’ll be leaving all these people to drown. Or you can play the hero, rush to their aid, and know that I will simply walk away unchallenged. The choice is yours.” She started walking calmly toward me.
I gaped at her, unable to process what was happening. The Evening I’d known would never have—but as I was coming to learn, I didn’t know a lot of people as well as I’d always thought I did. Marcia was still crying, an increasing edge of hysteria coloring her voice as she struggled to keep Dean from drowning. No one was helping the rest of them. No one was going to help the rest of them if I didn’t do something.
“Damn you, Evening,” I snarled, and ran past her to the water. Marcia was sobbing as I pulled Dean out of her arms and hauled him up onto dry land. “Get the next one!” I barked, pausing only long enough to check that he was still breathing before I splashed back out to grab the next of the floating bodies.
I heard the sound of footsteps on the redwood deck behind me stop for a moment, and Evening’s voice said, “I’ll be back later, to discuss the matter of my missing property. If you survived my binding, you must have found it.” The footsteps resumed.
I had other things to worry about. Evening’s spell seemed to have slowed the breathing of the people it affected, at least a little; that was the only reason no one drowned before Marcia and I could finish dragging almost a dozen unconscious fae back to safety. She bent forward, resting her hands on her knees as she struggled to catch her breath. I turned and looked back toward the stairs.
Evening was gone. That wasn’t much of a surprise.
I walked down the stretch of beach to Dean and nudged him with my toe. “Wake up,” I snapped. “I have no idea what’s going on, but you need to open the wards before your mother starts attacking the walls with a kraken or something.” I could feel the emotional collapse nudging around the edges of my consciousness, prodding me with the reminder of everything I’d paid to be standing here in shoes filled with water, trying to wake up a teenage Count. He was barely older than Quentin . . . I nudged him harder, trying to swallow the lump that was forming in my throat. “Wake up.”
Dean groaned.
“Guess that worked,” I said, and took a step back. “Hey. Count Lorden. Drop the wards, I need to talk to your mother.”
“Wha’?” Dean opened his eyes, blinking at me. Then he bolted upright, feeling around in the sand until his hand hit his trident. He pulled it to his chest, virtually aiming it at me. “What happened? Who was that woman? Where is she?”
“What happened was—don’t point that thing in my direction unless you want me to shove it somewhere that isn’t medically recommended—that woman was Evening Winterrose, former Countess of Goldengreen, and she . . . she left.” With no more fanfare than that, my knees gave out, dropping me onto my butt in the sand. My feet wound up back in the water. Somehow, that seemed like the least of my concerns. “She hit you all with some kind of knockout spell so that I’d have to choose between stopping her and saving you, and she left.”
“Toby?” The voice was Marcia’s, but it seemed very far away. The numbness that had been protecting me since Dianda dragged me out of the water was finally cracking into pieces and falling away, leaving me feeling naked and exposed to the elements. “Are you okay?”