“October . . .”
“The Luidaeg not telling me things I can sort of understand. She’s Firstborn, she’s under all these geasa, and she didn’t meet me all that long ago. I like to think we’re friends now, but I didn’t grow up with her. You, on the other hand . . .” I raised my head again, meeting his eyes. “Why do you keep secrets from me, Sylvester? You’ve been the closest thing I’ve had to a father for most of my life. I would have died for you. I almost did die for you, more than once. And you kept things from me, and those things keep getting the people I care about hurt. Hurt bad, in some cases. Why?”
He sighed. “I’m sorry,” he said again.
I waited almost a minute before I realized he was done: that was all he intended to say. My eyes widened. “That’s it? You’re sorry? Nothing else? No reasons or justifications or explanations? Just ‘I’m sorry’ and we’re done?”
“Yes,” he said, raising his chin. “I’m sorry I hurt you. It was never my intent. But I don’t feel any need to justify myself.”
I stared at him. “Maybe you don’t,” I said finally. “Maybe that’s the only answer you have to give me. But oak and ash, I’d hoped for more.”
The doors swung open, saving me from needing to hear his response, and Luna walked into the room. She was moving with a calm sort of serenity that made me want to shake her and demand to know why she was wasting my time when she knew that I needed her help. Jin came in after her, and she was running: the petite Ellyllon was moving as fast as her legs allowed, which was almost comic, given her 1940s pin-up girl looks and the gauzy mayfly wings on her back. They buzzed constantly, speeding her along.
“I need to introduce you to my friend Mags,” I said when Jin got close enough to hear me. I straightened up, stepping aside. “Tybalt got blasted with a spell that tried to choke the life out of him. I managed to cut it off, but he suffered some minor wounds in the process, and—”
“What do you mean, ‘cut it off’?” she demanded, even as she sank to her knees in the puddle of semi-coagulated blood and began ripping Tybalt’s shirt off. Normally, I took great interest in things that involved removing Tybalt’s clothing. Under the circumstances, I moved aside and let her work.
“I used my knife to slice the knots holding the spell together, and then I ripped the rest of it away with my bare hands,” I said, aware as I spoke that my words probably sounded like absolute nonsense. My headache wasn’t helping.
“Was he still wrapped in the spell at the time?” asked Jin. Her wings snapped open, sending a spray of pixie-sweat over the three of us.
“Yes,” I said.
“He’s got magic poisoning. Back away and let me work.” The way she turned her head made it clear that she was done talking to me: Tybalt was her patient and her first priority, and the rest of us could go hang.
I closed my eyes for a split-second, allowing myself a silent moment of gratitude, before opening them and turning toward Luna. She was standing next to Sylvester, as pristine and untouched by the chaos around her as he was, while Tybalt, Jin, and I were surrounded by blood. There was probably something about the symbolism there that I should have caught on to sooner.
Live and learn, I guess. “I need you to use this key and open me a road,” I said, thrusting it toward her. “I think your Rose Road can get me there, if you follow the map.”
Luna blinked, her pink eyebrows rising toward her hairline. “Opening roads is difficult,” she said. “I’ve done it for you before, but never without cost. Why would I do this for you now? I owe you nothing.”
“You owe me nothing but your life,” I corrected harshly. “When I saved you from the salt poisoning—you remember the assassination attempt that your daughter thought was a good idea—I didn’t ask for any reward, because Sylvester is my liege and it was the right thing to do. Well, that assumed that everyone was playing fair. Turns out no one here was playing fair but me. I saved your life, Luna Torquill, and more, I killed your father. I set you free. Now open this door for me, or I will make you sorry that you even considered refusing my request.”
She looked at me for a moment with those strange, pollen-colored eyes, and in that moment I could almost see the Luna who had loved me, once, before things got so complicated between us. Then she extended one bone-white hand and said, “Give me the key.”
I straightened, walking away from Jin’s murmuring and Tybalt’s silence. Every step I took left another bloody smear on the ballroom floor, and that seemed somehow exactly right. I held the key out in front of me; Luna took it, turning it over in her hand.
“This belonged to my grandmother,” she said.
“Which one?” I asked.
Luna’s head snapped up, eyes narrowing for some reason. Then, with no further fanfare, she shoved the key into the air between us. The bottom half vanished, like it had been placed in a lock I couldn’t see.
“My debts are paid,” she said, and turned the key sharply to the left, pulling at the same time.
What opened wasn’t exactly a door, but it wasn’t exactly a portal either: it was a hole in the world. Through it, I could see darkness. Not blackness—blackness would have implied an absence—but darkness, green, wet, living darkness, where things could slither unseen by the eye and unknown by the heart.
“You asked for this,” said Luna. “Now go.”
I held out my hand.
She narrowed her eyes as she pulled the key out of the air and slapped it into my open palm. “I hope this is everything you think it’s going to be, because it has cost you more than you can know.”
“If you mean I’m no longer in your good graces, Your Grace, I’ve known that for a while.” I pocketed the key. “Love you can spend like currency isn’t really love. Take care of him, Jin.” I glanced back over my shoulder to Jin and Tybalt. “I’ll be back soon.”
There was no way of knowing what the air would be like on the other side of the not-a-door still hanging open in the air. I took a deep breath, shoving the key into my pocket, and jumped through into darkness.
TWENTY-TWO
MY FALL WAS shorter than I expected; I’d only been dropping through space for what felt like a few seconds when my feet hit the spongy ground and I fell, rolling out of control until I slammed up against what felt like a stone retaining wall. The impact knocked the wind out of me, something that even my accelerated healing couldn’t prevent. Wheezing, I used the wall to pull myself back to my feet and peered into the dark, trying to see what was around me.
At first, I couldn’t see anything. Then, as I blinked and strained, the darkness seemed to pull back, growing lighter and lighter until it had achieved a sort of midnight quality, still unlit, but somehow bright enough to let me see. There was no color in the world. I would have needed to be less human to rate color, given the circumstances.
The forest around me was overgrown, the trees fat with sap and dripping with moss, creeping vines, and thorn briars of a type I’d never seen before. Some of them had spines more than two inches long, making them look less like plants and more like torture devices waiting to be used. The air—and there was air, breathable and ripe with the smell of the growing world—was hot and humid. For the first time, I found myself glad not to be wearing my leather jacket. It would have been unbearable, and I would have been afraid to take it off. I had the feeling that when things were lost in this forest, they tended to stay that way.