Damn. Sometimes it was nice to have a few minutes where all I had to do was live in the past. Now I had to go back to living in the present, and since the present seemed to want me dead—again—I would have been just as happy to put that off for a little longer.
I pulled away from Tybalt, turning to face Walther. “I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised,” I said. “We all knew she was here. We knew she’d kill me if she could. I just didn’t expect her to be quite so blatant about it.”
“The ways of the Divided Courts grow more distasteful by the hour,” said Tybalt. “It is a pity you cannot, as you say, introduce a thing that is not present into the blood. I would beg you to come and be a cat with me, and leave this terrible way of doing things behind.”
“I never thought that would sound so tempting.” I tried to run my hand through my hair, only to run into the braids May had put in it earlier. I groaned instead. “I don’t think we should be talking out here. It’s too open.”
“Yes, exactly,” said Walther. “Being out in the open is a form of protection. It’s hard as hell to cast listening charms on living trees, and I haven’t seen any pixies. That means they’d need stationary stones, which I can check for, or something else.”
“I can think of what that something else might be,” I said slowly. “Tybalt, why are we here, specifically? Instead of back in the room?”
“I was aiming for familiarity, and the roads here are not yet as known to me as I would prefer,” he said. “I thought the door would open on something that belonged to one of us.”
I paused, looking at him flatly. “Okay, wow. I knew the Shadow Roads were sort of an art, rather than a science, but I don’t think I needed to know they were that much of an art.”
Tybalt smiled. “As long as we come out of the dark each time, why should you be concerned?”
“I don’t even know where to start.” I walked over to the edge of the brush and knelt, peering into the green. Had something moved in there? It was difficult to tell. “You can come out now,” I said. “We’re not going to hurt you.”
“Who are you talking to?” asked Walther.
“Something else,” I said, and made a little clucking noise with my tongue. “Come on out.”
And they came.
Only one at first, pink-thorned and purple eyed, like something out of a very strange Lisa Frank painting. But three more were close behind it, and three more close behind them, until rose goblins were pouring out of the brush. They rattled their thorns and made inquisitive chirping noises as they surrounded us, sniffing at Walther and Tybalt’s ankles, and at basically everything I had, since I was still crouched almost to their level. Most were within the “housecat” range, size-wise, although a few were substantially larger, big enough to look like exceedingly strange dogs.
“Well,” said Tybalt, sounding faintly nonplussed.
“Told you Spike wanted to check out the locals,” said Walther. He knelt, offering his fingers to one of the larger rose goblins. It sniffed them cautiously before making a delighted chirping noise and leaping into his arms. Walther made an “oof” noise, but managed to catch the rose goblin before its thorns could shred his shirt. He stood, now holding the outsized, thorny creature against his chest. “Well, hello to you, too.”
The rose goblin—which was the same mossy green as peat, with eyes the color of yarrow flowers—pressed itself against his chest, making a happy chirping noise. I raised an eyebrow.
“It seems to know you.”
“Probably because it does,” said Walther, stroking the goblin’s head. “Rose goblins live until something kills them. For this fellow to be the size it is, it must be a few centuries old. So yes, you have this sort of size to look forward to from your Spike.”
“Oh, goody,” I said mildly. “I assume I’m correct in calling the rose goblins the ‘something else’ that Rhys is going to use to listen in on us out here?”
“Probably,” said Walther, and gave his goblin’s head another careful stroke. The goblin chirped happily. “There used to be a few Dryads on the groundskeeping staff. Since no one cuts down a Dryad’s tree if they can avoid it, I’m assuming they’re still here. They’d be able to translate what the rose goblins say, and they’re too naïve for anyone to think that they’re lying.”
“Right,” I said. Most Dryads were more interested in being trees than they were in being people. They weren’t stupid, but they were . . . distracted might be the best word. Constantly distracted by the strange situations that came with the incarnate condition, and always keeping half their minds back in their tree. Our friend April was a Dryad who didn’t have those issues, but she was also half computer, which made her a bad model to go on. “Is there any way we can convince the rose goblins not to tell the Dryads what we talk about out here? We could go back to the room, but . . .”
“But if we’re constantly walling ourselves up in there, Rhys is going to figure out that we’re up to something, and he’s going to come looking,” said Walther. “Give me a second.”
“You speak rose goblin?” I asked. I was starting to feel like I needed a list of who could and couldn’t interrogate my house pets.
His smile was brief, and amused. “Not quite. But the ones here in Silences . . . we have ways around language.” This time, he sat down on the path, still holding the large rose goblin against his chest. Once he was settled, he transferred it to his lap and began digging through his vest.
Tybalt put a hand on my arm. I glanced at him. He nodded toward the other side of the path. I nodded in turn, and followed him away from Walther and the gathering of goblins, stopping just before the trees took over. We were still close enough to be together, but by lowering our voices, we could at least pretend to a modicum of privacy.
“Are you all right?” asked Tybalt.
I laughed, unsteadily. “Let’s see. The woman we thought was done threatening my life and transforming my jeans into elaborate formalwear is not only still in the business of doing both, but she’s managed to produce a King who’ll back her up—and oh, right, they want to take me apart.”
“You cannot allow them to do this thing, of course,” said Tybalt, matter-of-factly.
“Right, I—” I paused, blinking at him. He had sounded so calm, like we were talking about where to go for lunch, and not whether I was going to be brutally murdered over the course of several days in order to prevent a war. “What?”
“All my many personal objections aside—and they are many, beginning with my disinterest in marrying a corpse, and continuing onward from there—you cannot allow the king of a demesne famed for its alchemists to have access to any part of your body. Even if your escape requires leaving one or more of us behind, you can’t.”
Tybalt sounded so serious, and so upset, that I couldn’t say anything to that. I just stared at him.
He sighed, shaking his head. “I’d tell you to run, if I thought we could get away with it. I’d say to gather up our people, and those things which we cannot bear to lose, and flee for the hills. Do you not understand what they could make of you?”
“I’m starting to,” I said, in a very small voice.
Blood-workers—like me, like the Daoine Sidhe—could sometimes “borrow” the magical talents of others through judicious sampling of their blood. Tap a vein and hey, presto, suddenly we could teleport, or transform, or do any number of other things that didn’t come naturally. For us, blood was the ultimate wonder drug, opening all doors and removing all barriers—as long as it was the right blood. But it had its limitations. I had never yet been able to borrow magic from blood that wasn’t coming straight out of a living person. I could awaken memories in dried blood, but that was about it; anything more complicated than a few flashes of the past was beyond me. If you wanted to preserve the magic in a person’s blood, or better yet, if you wanted to make that magic accessible to anyone, not just your local blood-workers, you needed something special.