Page 75 of Night and Silence

“I really hope you’re not planning to sit here and use me as a sounding board for all your half-baked theories,” said the Luidaeg blandly. “I would have thought you’d be asking to see your daughter by now. I’m tired of taking in your refugees, by the way. If this doesn’t stop happening all the damn time, I’m going to start charging you rent.”

“And I guess I’ll pay it.” I stood, my knees still wobbling like they weren’t sure they wanted to hold me up. Then I paused, looking around the empty living room. “Where’s Janet?”

“Given everything, I think I’d be justified in saying ‘hanging out with the other cockroaches,’ but no. She’s in the parlor. I wanted her to have some time to herself to think about what she’s done, and to not be under my damn feet. And thank Dad for that. If she’d been here when your kitty came running in with the littlest Carter . . .” The Luidaeg shuddered theatrically.

I frowned. “What do you mean, ‘Carter’?”

“Fae don’t have surnames,” said the Luidaeg. She looked at me like she was waiting for the other shoe to finally drop. “Why would we have a family name when the shape of our ears tells people who we’re descended from? And then there’s the issue where every member of any given descendant race is technically related to all the others but keeps marrying them anyway, and the more time we’ve spent with humans down the centuries, the less we’ve wanted to think about that. So where do the family names come from? The Torquills and the Sollys and the Lordens? Humans bring their names with them, and they leave them behind when we strip their blood away. Dad’s idea. He didn’t think it was fair to change people’s heritage and not let them keep something of where they’d come from.”

The thought of a human marrying into the Lorden family was as terrifying as it was delightful. Humans can’t generally breathe water. Then again, neither could Patrick, and Dianda was doing a reasonably good job of keeping him from drowning. “So ‘Carter’ is because . . . ?”

“Family names have changed since Janet’s day. She’d be a Carter now. Place names and all that.” The Luidaeg stood. “We’re getting distracted again. Do you not want to see your daughter?”

I hesitated. Then, in a voice so small I barely recognized it as my own, I whispered, “I’m afraid to.”

“Oh, mo laochain,” she said, voice twisting around the unfamiliar syllables like a rose through a trellis. She put her arms around me and drew me close, into the sea-salt smell of her, until my face was pressed to the cool skin of her shoulder. “We’re all afraid. That’s what it is to be a mother. We’re all afraid.”

I started to cry again. She held me until I was done, and then she pulled away, her hand still grasping mine, and led me down the hallway toward my daughter.

TWENTY

THE LUIDAEG’S APARTMENT ISN’T a knowe in the traditional sense. The door is easy to find, and I’ve never had the feeling that I was crossing between worlds when coming and going. And despite all that, the more I’ve learned about her living arrangements, the more I’ve been convinced that something is going on that violates the usual laws of topology.

The layout seemed simple the first time I was there: a long hallway lined with doors, the whole thing usually cloaked in an illusion that made it seem like a polluted shore at low tide, ending in a foul-smelling living room with a kitchen off to one side. Since then, I’ve discovered a back door leading to a patch of swampland in the Summerlands and the existence of at least one additional hall connecting to a guest room. So it wasn’t as much of a surprise as it could have been when the Luidaeg opened a door to reveal a staircase winding gently upward, like something from a tower in a fairy tale. There was no way it could have been accommodated by the architecture of her actual building. As I followed her onto the steps, that didn’t seem to matter.

There were windows located on both sides of the stairwell as we climbed, filling the air with a gentle, shifting light. No matter how hard I squinted, I couldn’t see anything beyond that light. Everything was a colorless gray that could have been mist, or clouds, or even frothy water. I was still squinting when the Luidaeg put her hand on my arm. I glanced up at her, startled.

She shook her head. “Don’t,” she said. “The things you could see aren’t things you want to see. Just keep walking.”

“Sometimes I think spending time with someone they used to write cautionary tales about is bad for my health.”

The Luidaeg laughed. “Honey, if you knew how many of those stories I’m in, you’d never leave your house again.”

“Sometimes I don’t want to leave my house anyway,” I admitted. I glanced over my shoulder. The curvature of the stairs meant the door at the bottom was long since out of sight. “The wards will still let Tybalt in, right?”

“As long as he doesn’t abuse my charity, I won’t close them against him, and that man could track the scent of you across an ocean if he had to.” The Luidaeg kept walking. “He’ll be back. As soon as he’s finished taking care of whatever mess you’ve made so that you don’t have to, he’ll be back.”

I wanted to feel bad about that, about running out on my friends and allies while there was still work to be done. The false Queen needed to be taken to Arden and forced to stand trial for what she’d done—and we still didn’t even know the full scope of what that was. Dugan was out there somewhere, unseen and only half-suspected. Kennis was a living citizen of Faerie who’d been used as a booby trap. I wanted to believe she was the only one. Somehow, I couldn’t quite manage it.

I couldn’t quite manage feeling bad, either. Losing Gillian had long been one of my greatest regrets, a shining centerpiece in a long chain of things I’d failed to protect, or do, or be. Now she was waiting at the top of this staircase, her life changed forever by something she had never chosen, something I’d tried to protect her from. It didn’t matter that I wasn’t the one who’d forced her into Faerie. This was still my fault. She already hated me. What if this was the moment when I really lost her forever, and we were trapped in the same world, unable to go back to the polite distance that had kept my heart from breaking up until now?

The Luidaeg smacked me on the shoulder. I turned to her, eyes wide and startled.

“Stop,” she said, not unkindly. “You’re chasing the tide again, and you’re never going to catch it.”

“Excuse me?”

“Your head. It’s got its own undertow, you know, and if you swim too deep, it can suck you down. You can’t chase the tide. You need to stay on the shore and let it come to you.” She shook her head. “I’m not going to tell you that everything is going to be fine. I wouldn’t do it even if I was still allowed to lie. Some things are too cruel even for a sea witch. But I will tell you that what’s on the other side of that door is never going to be as bad as the undertow in your own mind.”

I blinked. We had reached the top of the stairs. A closed door with a rounded top and a seashell design subtly worked into the wood waited in front of us, set into a frame that gleamed faintly in the light, like it had been dusted in pearl. I reached for the handle, then hesitated, looking back at the Luidaeg.

“Where are we?” I asked.

“You’re stalling,” she said. “We’re in my home. I live here. I’ve lived here for a very long time. Now go and see your child. Do what I can no longer do. Be a mother.”

I swallowed, and it felt like I was forcing a stone down my throat, something hard and unyielding that scratched my flesh as it passed. Then I grasped the handle, which moved easy under my hand, pushed the door open, and stepped inside. The door swung closed behind me.

The Luidaeg didn’t follow.