What if he didn’t want me once he knew? Of all the endings I’d envisioned for our relationship—and there had been more than a few—me turning mortal was never on the list.
Quentin glanced toward the door. He was holding the flask of fireflies the Luidaeg had given me, and he looked miserable. He relaxed a little as he saw me. “Tybalt?” he said.
Tybalt snarled, starting to turn, and froze when he saw me. I fought back the urge to wrap my arms around myself and retreat. Instead, I met his eyes, bit my lip, and waited.
Slowly, Tybalt lowered Sylvester to his feet and stepped away from him. The guards moved in, helping the Duke stay upright. Sylvester raised a hand to his throat, coughing. Tybalt didn’t seem to notice all this commotion behind him. He was focused on me, and only on me. He took a step forward.
“October?”
He sounded puzzled, not disgusted. That was a start. I nodded, saying, “In the too, too solid flesh.” A bubble of laughter rose unbidden to my lips. It probably made me sound slightly unhinged as it burst into the air. I managed to swallow before it could happen again, and said, “I’d quote ‘Goblin Market’ if I knew the words, but all I can remember is the part that goes ‘we must not look at goblin men,’ and it’s too late for that . . .”
Then, to my shame and surprise, I started crying.
Tybalt didn’t say a word. He closed the space between us in two long steps, gathering me into his arms and holding me as close as if none of this had happened. I clung to him and cried, not caring who saw me. I was past giving a damn if someone wanted to say that I was a weak little changeling who couldn’t handle her own affairs. If there had ever been a time when I needed allies, this was it.
Finally, the tears slowed, and I pulled myself away. Tybalt let go reluctantly, and kept one hand against the curve of my waist, providing me with an anchor. I blinked up at him, waiting to hear what he would say. He narrowed his eyes, looking at me. I bit my lip.
“Have you done something different with your hair?” he asked.
This time, my laughter sounded a lot more normal. I smiled through the last of my tears, and said, “Yeah. Do you like it?”
“I could grow accustomed to it, if you chose to keep it this way.” His gaze swung back to Sylvester, going cold. “I might already be accustomed to it, if I had been allowed to come to you sooner.”
“You have my apologies, Tybalt, and there will be no action taken by myself or by my household to answer your attack upon my person,” said Sylvester, rubbing his throat. “I was wrong to keep you away.”
“You should never have allowed her to be endangered in the first place!” snarled Tybalt, fangs showing and eyes glinting a dangerous green. “Do not forget, sir, that she was fine in my company.”
“Except for the whole ‘getting banished’ thing, and all those times in your company when I’ve been stabbed or gutted or poisoned or whatever,” I said, interjecting myself before they could make the situation any worse. “Please. Can you stop? We don’t have time for this. Please.”
Sylvester looked away. Tybalt remained where he was, and didn’t say anything.
I sighed. “This is going to be a great night. Sylvester, where’s Jin? Am I cleared to leave? Because I’m leaving either way, but it would be good to have a medical release.”
“I wish you wouldn’t,” he said.
“I don’t care. But I’m leaving the car here. I’d bet you a dollar the Queen figures you’re going to keep me locked up while you try to figure out how to wean me off goblin fruit without losing me, and this is the one place in the Kingdom that I’m officially allowed to be after my deadline. So let her assume she’s taken me out of commission.” I bit back a bitter smirk. “I barely even need a human disguise to go out in public right now. Her men won’t recognize me.”
“You don’t need one at all,” said Quentin softly.
“What?” I turned my attention to him, and paused, seeing the grief and, yes, terror written on his face. This, right here, was what he’d been afraid of since I started my one-woman crusade against goblin fruit on the streets of my city: I was addicted, I was mostly mortal, and he was going to lose me.
“If you keep your hair over your ears . . . they’re not even that pointy. You don’t need a human disguise at all.”
The words were like blows. I’d known that I looked human, but not that I was that far gone. I looked to Tybalt, searching his face for confirmation.
He nodded.
“Oh, ash and pine.” I closed my eyes, taking a shaky breath. “Fine. So the Queen’s guards won’t be able to track me by my magic. Let’s see this as a good thing, and go.”
“Where to?” asked Sylvester.
“The Library, to start with. Maybe there’s something there about helping a changeling kick a goblin fruit addiction.” If not . . . I had already asked Mags to pull any books on hope chests. I’d been trying to understand how my magic worked. Maybe I could use any information she had for me as a way to find another hope chest and put myself back to normal when I couldn’t do it on my own.
“I will take you anywhere you need to go,” said Tybalt.
“I’m coming with you,” said Quentin.
I wanted to argue with him. I couldn’t do it. With my magic essentially out of commission for the moment, I was going to need all the backup I could get, and he was my squire. He had as much right to be by my side as anybody else, and more than most. “It’s going to be dangerous,” I said.
“That’s nothing new,” he said. “Besides, my knight is pretty stupid when it comes to danger, and she’s the best role model I have for dealing with the stuff.”
I smiled a little. “Just so long as you’re aware.”
“I am.”
“Okay.” I turned to Sylvester. He looked so miserable, standing there next to the wall, watching us make plans to go away and leave him. He’d lost me more times than anyone else in this room. He’d watched me walk away, and he’d never stopped me, not once. He let me grow up. He knew that he had to give me that much.
Pulling away from Tybalt, I walked over to Sylvester and hugged him. This might be the last time we saw each other. I wasn’t going to let my anger and his well-intentioned betrayal be the last things he remembered. No matter how deserved that might be, or how wrong he’d been, I loved him too much for that. I always had.
“Please be careful,” he whispered, before kissing the crown of my head. “I wish you wouldn’t go.”
“I’ll be as careful as I can,” I said, and stepped back. “Tell Jin where I went, and that I’ll have my phone if she comes up with any brilliant ideas about how to get me through this.”
“I will.”
“Quentin, come on.”
My squire walked over to me. Tybalt took my right hand and Quentin’s left, and we stepped into the shadows, and were gone.
FOURTEEN
WE DIDN’T STEP OUT OF THE SHADOWS: we fell, all of us dragged into an ungainly heap by my collapse. Tybalt wasn’t letting go of me, and Quentin wasn’t letting go of him, and the end result was a total train wreck. I, of course, wound up on the bottom of the pile, but I would have been in bad shape either way. The run had been too much for me. My eyes were frozen practically shut, and I was struggling to breathe.
“October!” Tybalt rolled off me, shoving Quentin out of the way—I heard his faint grunt of protest—before gathering me into his arms. “Breathe, dammit,” he commanded, cradling me close as he tried to warm me with his own body heat. “Toby! Breathe!”
I coughed, breaking the frozen seal on my mouth, and began to take great, choking gasps of air. I didn’t even pretend to be sitting up on my own. I just let Tybalt hold me, and kept focusing on trying to thaw my lungs.