Page 74 of The Unkindest Tide

“The edge, it’s—”

“Yeah.” I’d seen the spikes before they’d been sheathed in my body—in my spine, which definitely hadn’t been intended for this particular purpose. There was a reason I hadn’t asked him to pull it out before we ran. If he’d taken the time to work it free of my flesh, we might both be dead by now. And with my luck, being dead would have stuck with him and not with me, leaving me alone again. “It’s going to hurt like hell, and you’re probably going to see some pieces of me that you never wanted to. It’s all right. You’re not the one hurting me. Torin is. You’re the one helping me get better.”

He hesitated before saying, “You’re awake and coherent. Could you remove it yourself?”

“I don’t have the leverage.” The ice on my lashes was melting. I still didn’t open my eyes. I didn’t want to see the look on Tybalt’s face, which was doubtless unhappy enough to make me reconsider my stance on removing the knife from my own back. All I’d be able to do was hurt myself worse. No: this was the only way.

“I’ll need to put you down.”

“Where are we?”

“I . . . believe . . . this is the local manifestation of the Court of Cats,” said Tybalt. “It’s small, and there’s no scent that would alert me to the presence of a King or Queen, but it’s stable all the same, and I believe we should be safe here, for now.”

“Great. So get this thing out of me.” There was something wrong with the knife. It wasn’t just the pain, which was coming in bigger waves now that the ice was melting and leaving my already raw nerves exposed to the air; it was the shape of it, the way it felt tangled with flesh and bone and . . .

Oh. Oh, yes; that would be a problem. I squeezed my eyes a little tighter shut and added, in a small voice, “Please.” Silently, I added still further, Forgive me.

There was a long pause, as if Tybalt could hear everything I wasn’t saying. Then, gently, I was lain on my side, stretched out on what I thought might be a pile of canvas sacks. The things that got lost in a floating Duchy would have to be different than the things that got lost on the land. Although maybe the Court of Cats here also had access to shipwrecks, vessels lost at sea and thus technically within their purview? They could drain the rooms they added to their slowly evolving architecture, and the dampness would fade. Or maybe they focused on air-filled rooms, or chambers that had somehow never been opened to the sea. Maybe—

The feeling of the knife being jerked out of my spine was a pain like nothing I’d ever felt before or wanted to feel again. Pain has flavors, and I’ve become something of an unwitting connoisseur of the many terrible forms that it can take. The dull, aching throb; the pointed sear; the jabbing agony. This was something greater than any of them. This was something so big and terrible that it somehow managed to cross from pain into numbness and back again. I’d intended to hold my breath when the moment came, to keep back what air I could in case the worst happened. The pain was so big it knocked every bit of air out of me, leaving me wrung-out and gasping.

And then I couldn’t breathe, because nothing below my neck was responding to my commands. Even the pain was gone, cut off so abruptly that it left a great, aching chasm in my awareness. It was like the sensation of having a rotten tooth pulled, only in this case, the tooth was my entire body.

“Oh sweet Maeve.” Tybalt’s voice was barely more than a horrified whisper. “October, I think I’m holding a piece of your spine.”

I closed my eyes. That was what I’d thought I felt, when I was trying to sort out the shape of the knife jammed into my body. Torin might not have had the time to aim as carefully as he wanted to, but luck had been enough to put his blade right next to my spine, and to hook it through one of my vertebrae.

I’d never had a piece of bone entirely removed from my body before. Academically, I wondered whether it was going to grow back, or whether this would be a step too far for even my magic to deal with. I’d risen from the dead, probably multiple times. I’d healed from injuries that should have been, could have been, and had been fatal. But could I recover from this?

Tybalt hissed, dropping to his knees next to me. “You insufferable woman,” he muttered. I tried to listen through the haze of oxygen deprivation and shock. This was like being back on the Shadow Roads, almost, except that there was light here. There was warmth. There was air, even if I couldn’t reach it. All things being equal, this was a much more pleasant place to die.

A hand cupped my chin, turning my face even further toward the light. I still couldn’t feel anything below my neck. My lungs weren’t even burning, just . . . failing to pull in any additional air. That was going to be a problem very soon. It was probably a problem already.

“You are direly fortunate that I love you,” said Tybalt, and pressed his wrist against my lips.

Blood filled my mouth, bright and hot and brimming with memories that weren’t mine. I swallowed involuntarily, and swallowed again as the act of swallowing seemed to unlock something in my chest, making air feel, if not fully achievable, at least like something that might return to the world one day.

Then the red veil of Tybalt’s memories slammed down over me, and the condition of my own body ceased to be quite as important. It wasn’t like I could feel it anymore.

There’s too much blood.

The baby is coming early—Anne said this evening that she hadn’t felt any kicking in over a day, and she was worried—and now the baby is coming, and there’s too much blood. I’ve never seen a human give birth before, but this can’t be normal. Cait Sidhe women bleed in birthing, and when they do it on two legs, they’re built in so many respects like their mortal counterparts. Surely I would know if there were meant to be this much blood. Surely someone would have told me.

Anne is bleeding, and I don’t know what to do. I’ve never been a healer. The local King of Cats has one at his disposal, but he’ll not give them leave to come to me, may the night-haunts steal the eyes from his skull and leave him lost in his own lands forevermore. The King and Queen of Tremont have already turned me away. None of them will help a human woman deliver herself of a changeling child. The Divided Courts see me as a beast; the Court of Cats sees her as a burden. No one will save her. No one will save either one of them, and there’s too much blood, and Anne can’t stand much more of this—

I sat up with a gasp, air flooding back into my floundering lungs, tingles spreading through my body as it seemed to wake up all around me. The room I was in was small, with a low ceiling and bare wooden walls. It looked more like the hold of a ship than anything else although it wasn’t moving, and there was no smell of saltwater in the air.

What there was was the strong smell of blood, my own and someone else’s, mingled with the musk and pennyroyal scent of Tybalt’s magic. I turned my head. He was sitting on the floor next to my makeshift bed, a strip of canvas wrapped around his wrist, a look of strained terror on his face.

“Pray reassure me that I’ve remained awake long enough to see your recovery, and not lost consciousness from blood loss, only to dream a better ending to our tale than the one reality offers,” he said, in a wan voice.

“You’re awake.” I slid off the pile of canvas and wrapped my arms around his shoulders, not pausing to think about what I was doing. This was not the time for careful contemplation. This was the time to reassure my fiancé, who looked like he was on the verge of throwing up, blacking out, or possibly both. “I’m awake. We’re awake. I promise, we’re awake.”

“Oh, thank Oberon.” He buried his face against my shoulder, letting out a shuddering gasp that became, somewhere toward the end, more of a sob. “Thank Oberon, thank Maeve, thank all the lords and ladies of the Courts that came before us. You can’t do that to me, October. You cannot. I forbid it.”

I might normally have taken umbrage at the idea that he could forbid me to do anything. Under the circumstances, I kept holding on as tightly as I could, breathing in, letting the scent of his skin and his hair and his magic fill my nose until I could almost ignore the smell of blood that underscored everything around us.

“I’m okay,” I whispered. “I’m okay, I’m okay, I’m here and I’m awake and I’m okay. I swear to you, I’m okay.”