Page 61 of Night and Silence

He sighed. “Can discussion of our past relationship struggles please wait until the current situation has been resolved, and we are not about to die?”

“Um, this is Toby,” said Quentin. “We’re always about to die. When we’re not about to die, we’re still about to be about to die. She’s like a Rube Goldberg machine whose only job is generating life-threatening situations.”

“And I want to know the answer,” said May.

Tybalt sighed again, harder. “Yes, October. Your ‘discovery’ of a lost piece of real estate cost my subjects several very comfortable denning places and forced the entire Court to rearrange itself. Cats do not like being ousted from their territory. I disliked you for a great many reasons, but your actions did not help. Happy?”

“Ecstatic.” An opening appeared between two cars. I slammed my foot on the gas, hurling us through it before it could close again. Quentin, whose driving lessons were recent enough that he understood exactly how dangerous a maneuver that was, whimpered. “So here’s a riddle for you: when the false Queen was removed from her throne and the knowe was sealed, it started to fade back into the shallowing the same way Lily’s did, the way it had been when I found it for the first time. Right?”

“Correct,” said Tybalt carefully, feeling out the word. He knew I was getting at something. He just didn’t know what it was yet. At least he knew me well enough to be fairly sure he wasn’t going to like it.

Clever boy. “Does that mean the deeper parts of the knowe are lost again?”

Surprised, Tybalt opened his eyes and stared at me. Then, slowly, he smiled.

Knowes are fascinating things, half-alive, half-aware, crafted from a combination of real architecture and raw magic. They can sprout rooms like mushrooms after a rain, expanding and contracting to meet the demands of their residents. But every knowe has its anchors, points of absolute reality driven deep into the fabric of the Summerlands and holding the rest of it in place. Bigger knowes, like Muir Woods or Shadowed Hills, may have five or six anchors, in addition to whatever seed point was originally used to “spark” the knowe.

I’ve never built a knowe myself. I wouldn’t know where to begin. But I knew enough to be sure that even as the more publicly accessible parts of the building had started to fade, those anchors would have remained, lost until someone came to open them again.

“Do you have a plan?” asked May. “Or is this one of those situations where you charge in half-cocked and count on things to work in your favor?”

“A little bit of both,” I said. “Feel up to punching me in the nose?”

“Always,” said May.

“Um,” said Quentin.

I grinned and hit the gas harder.

The old Queen’s knowe is anchored to a stretch of San Francisco coastline that has yet to be fully gentrified, meaning there’s even less parking available there than there is elsewhere. I circled the block three times before giving up and cramming the car into a stretch of sidewalk left open in front of a fire hydrant. As long as nothing actually burst into flames, Quentin’s don’t-look-here would mean my car remained unnoticed. If a fire truck needed to access the hydrant, I’d have a whole new set of problems.

At the moment, I felt like I’d welcome all of them. Tickets and towed cars were ordinary things, human things, things that were so much better than immortal grandmothers and impossible enemies. Let me worry about whether the milk has expired and how much the electric bill will be this month. Let me go back to fighting with May about wedding planning and how much I didn’t want to do it. Let this be done.

Let us bring my daughter home.

I undid my seatbelt and twisted to face May and Quentin. “I don’t know how much magic the false Queen can detect, but we know Jocelyn is limited to whatever her fairy ointment can unmask,” I said. “That gets her through most illusions. We’re not identical anymore, but we look enough alike that if you walk in with my squire, covered in my blood . . . ”

“That buys us time,” said May. “What are you going to do with it?”

“Ask Tybalt to carry me into one of the lost parts of the knowe, so I can approach them from behind,” I replied. “They’re not going to expect anyone to be deeper in the structure than they are. The old Queen is too arrogant, and Jocelyn is too ignorant. It can work.”

“Why do I have to go with May?” asked Quentin. “I’m your squire. I’m supposed to be there to support you if you get into trouble.”

“Because May can’t fight, and being impossible to kill is not the same as being invincible,” I said. “She needs someone who knows his way around a blade by her side, in case the false Queen has more support than we realized.” It didn’t seem likely. The members of her Court who had supported her during the coup had either been exiled or stripped of lands and titles as punishment for their crimes, and most of her staff worked for Arden now. They seemed much happier under the leadership of a queen who didn’t treat them like expendable cogs in a beautiful machine. Funny, that.

Quentin looked unconvinced. “I don’t like splitting up. Why can’t we all go with Tybalt?”

“Charmed as I am by your confidence in my abilities, carrying three people through the shadows is a bit beyond me at the moment,” said Tybalt. “I have the strength but lack the conviction. In the shadows, conviction is everything.”

Quentin frowned. “But you can take Toby?”

“The day I cannot carry my heart along the Shadow Roads is the day I am a King no longer, but only a man who has failed himself so profoundly that his days of peace are done,” said Tybalt.

We were all quiet for a moment, staring at him. May shook her surprise off first.

“If you ever want to go into the greeting card business, we can make a mint,” she said. Turning to me, she asked, “So what, I just punch you?”

“In the nose,” I confirmed. “It’s the easiest way to make me bleed.” I shrugged out of my leather jacket, leaving it on the seat. “If we’re right, and this really is the false queen, I’d give even odds she transforms your clothes into something she thinks is more ‘suitable.’ In this case, hope for it. Her magic will obscure yours and make it even harder to tell us apart. You need to distract her as long as poss—”