Page 84 of Night and Silence

“So what do you want?”

He looked at me, utterly arrogant and utterly calm, and said, “I want you to restore my lady to her former glory. Return to the pretender’s knowe, release the true Queen from her prison, and pour the sea back into her veins. When she stands before me, whole and hale, I’ll let this little liar go. He and his sister can live a happy life in exile, far from our shores. I have my lady’s word that no harm will come to them if they agree to go.”

“I can’t do that, Dugan.”

He pressed the knife harder against Nolan’s skin. Nolan whimpered. Eyes gleaming, Dugan looked at me and spat, “You can, and you will. If you can restore your whelp, you can restore a queen.”

“I didn’t restore Gillian!”

I hadn’t intended to shout, but the words came out of me barely shy of a scream, echoing through the room, stunning both of us into silence. Nolan held himself rigidly still, clearly struggling to maintain the dignity of a prince while under the touch of the iron knife. I kept my focus on Dugan, hoping he would believe me, knowing that he probably wouldn’t. Believing me would mean admitting that he had failed—that this, all of this, had been for nothing.

“I’m not the one who saved her,” I said, more softly. “I’m not the reason she’s alive. The Luidaeg did that. She wrapped my daughter in a Selkie skin to keep her alive. They can be bonded to humans, if there’s someone to start the process. Gillian isn’t human anymore, but it’s not because I was clever, or quick, or powerful. It’s because the sea witch took pity on her. I can’t save your queen. I never could.”

Dugan stared at me. “You’re lying.”

“I’m not. You have an iron knife to the throat of the Crown Prince in the Mists. If I could do what you wanted, I would do it. If I thought I could lie convincingly enough to make you let him go, I’d do that, too. Why would I stand here saying exactly what you don’t want to hear if it wasn’t the absolute truth? Let Nolan go. If you run, no one but me can follow you. Release him and run, and as long as you don’t come back to the Mists, I won’t help anyone track you down. I’ll swear on the root and the branch and in Oberon’s name, if that’s what you need.”

Dugan wavered, the knife in his hand dipping slightly—enough that I could see the blisters forming on Nolan’s throat. I swallowed hard, trying to keep my chin up, so neither of them would see how frightened I was.

“You’re lying,” Dugan said again, with less confidence this time.

“I’m not,” I said again. “If you let him go, you have my word, I won’t be the one who brings you back here.”

Nolan closed his eyes.

“You have no right to decide who is and is not fit to rule,” said Dugan. “You’re just a changeling. You have no authority to do what you’ve done.”

“And your queen is just a pawn, chosen by a woman who wanted to destroy everything King Gilad had built,” I said. “We could play this game all day. Your time is running out. Go. Once the others get here, this deal is off the table.”

Dugan opened his mouth to reply and froze as the scent of blackberry flowers and redwood bark wafted through the air. I didn’t turn. I didn’t need to.

“Time’s up,” I said, as Arden and her guard moved into position behind me. “Put down the knife, Dugan.”

He looked at me with the calm, resigned face of a man who knew he had nowhere left to go. He had backed himself into a corner. The odds were good that he was going to die here—or worse. The Law only forbade killing, after all. The purebloods were capable of doing so much worse than that, especially when they felt their families were threatened.

“No,” he said calmly. “I don’t think so.”

He pulled the knife away from Nolan’s throat and shoved him forward into the fog. I had time for an instant of relief before I realized what he was going to do.

“No!” I shouted, dropping my knife and breaking into a run, bolting toward him as fast as I could.

I wasn’t fast enough to stop him from slashing the knife across his throat. He fell, the blade still clutched in one hand, and I fell with him, clasping my hands over the wound to keep his blood as contained as possible. It wasn’t enough to stop that same blood from drenching me before I got it damped down, spattering on my cheek and lips.

So much blood. I closed my eyes and licked my lips, tuning out the sound of the people rushing all around me. The red haze of his memories descended, showing him creeping up on Gillian’s car with a potion in his hand, ready to attack and abduct her. I fought my way past it and saw him carrying her clothing into the walled courtyard that belonged to Janet. There was no sense of familiarity there. He was baiting a trap he had been told about by the false Queen, a secret from her reign that she was trying to use against me.

I licked my lips again, struggling not to laugh bitterly. He hadn’t known. He hadn’t known. He hadn’t known Janet was my grandmother, or that she was masquerading as Gillian’s stepmother, or that she owned the courtyard at all. She hadn’t told him, if she even knew. It had been a secret his Queen had been instructed to keep at all costs, and he’d been trying to use it to hurt me. Not stop me, no. Kennis, the courtyard, none of it had been intended to stop me. It was all a game, meant to slow me down and weaken my resolve, to panic me so much that when I finally found my daughter, I’d be willing to do whatever they asked in order to save her.

Save her. We had saved her. She wasn’t the same anymore, would never be the same again, but she had a future now, even if it wasn’t the one she had wanted. Dugan was captive. Nolan was safe. The false Queen was in Arden’s custody, with no allies left to help her get away and come after us again. It was over.

It was over.

Someone pushed me aside, Arden’s people rushing to do what they could to save a man who shouldn’t be saved. I dropped to my knees in the mist, put my hands over my face, and cried. Tybalt knelt beside me, putting his arms around me, but that didn’t change anything. The tears kept coming. He buried his face against my hair, and he cried, too, and everything was over, and everything was different, and I no longer knew what safety was, or what “home” looked like.

I didn’t know anything at all.

TWENTY-THREE

“ARE YOU SURE you want to do this?” May looked across the street to the house where Cliff and his family lived. My family, too. My daughter; my grandmother. Root and branch, had things always been this complicated?