Page 33 of Be the Serpent

“Only when she can get away with it,” I said. “Her bindings are very specific, and she can help her friends when she can justify her actions as selfish. In this case, I’m guessing the fact that she’s taken Karen as an apprentice means getting you into the knowe qualified as a selfish act, and the rest of us just got helpful spillover.”

“But I could see the door the whole time.”

“Yeah. I don’t know how to explain that.” Or how we’d been enchanted in the first place. The moment when I’d collapsed on the Safeway floor seemed like the most probable time for this to have all started, even if the illusions Quentin and I had both been wearing at the time made it difficult to pinpoint.

I paused, blinking. My head didn’t hurt. My headache had gone away when the Luidaeg hit me with an egg, which was a ridiculous sentence to even think, and yet seemed to be the actual situation. Right, so the Llangefni screen had been connected to the headache, and getting rid of one had resolved the other.

“Where are Mitch and my children?”

“Simon?”

“We took them to the children’s quarters,” said Simon. “They’re largely unoccupied at the moment, as there are no young children in residence, and they seemed like the safest place for people who were experiencing distress.”

“What do you mean, ‘experiencing distress’?” Stacy’s voice was getting louder, and she looked like she was on the verge of starting to yell at people. “October, what is happening? What is going on? How did I wind up in that Safeway? I don’t remember leaving my house. I was making pancakes, and then you were calling me, and I was at the store. Did I walk that whole way?”

Okay, so the Luidaeg’s egg-throwing party had cleared up the compulsion spell. What fun. “All good questions.” I said. “Stacy, why weren’t you asking these things before?”

“None of them seemed important before!”

So she’d never lost sight of Faerie, only of the things that actually mattered. Everything about this just got more and more concerning. “Simon, you go ahead and lead us to the children’s quarters. I don’t know the way, and I don’t think we want to spend any more time wandering aimlessly than we absolutely have to.”

Stacy glared. “No, we don’t,” she said, voice sharp. “Take me. To my family.”

“Of course.” Simon moved to the front of our little group, continuing along the hall with the rest of us in pursuit. I fell to the back to walk with Stacy.

She was glancing rapidly from side to side, studying every aspect of the hall around us. The carvings on the walls were showing a procession of funerals, bas reliefs of night-haunts on leaf-husk wings filling the swirls of the scrimshaw sky. It was morbid and unnerving, and I brushed the wall with my fingertips as we walked along.

“Hey,” I murmured. “Do you think you could maybe dial it back a bit? You’re pouring it on a little thick, and it’s not particularly kind.”

The next set of carvings showed the founding of the Kingdom, Gilad’s parents moving through the redwoods, the knowe opening. Ordinary, calm, children’s-museum glimpses of history. I smiled at the wall.

“That was cool of you, and I appreciate it.”

I returned my eyes to the front to find Stacy looking at me oddly. I shrugged.

“I don’t know if not being allowed to say thank you extends to the architecture, but I try to err on the side of caution,” I said. “I don’t want to offend the knowes.”

“You are so weird,” she said, but fondly, like the expression of my weirdness was a welcome distraction from her concern. “Toby . . . what’s going on? Why are we in Muir Woods? Why didn’t I care before this?”

“I think you didn’t seem to care because the thing that was keeping the rest of us from seeing Faerie or accessing our magic properly was keeping you from reacting the way you should have,” I said, as delicately as I could. “I knew you cared. You just couldn’t access the feeling directly.”

Stacy looked, if anything, even more alarmed. “How does a spell keep me from feeling something?”

“I don’t know. How does a pill keep someone from being depressed, or tired, or anything else? Brains are weird and complicated, and if you can use science to change the way they work, of course you can use magic to do the same thing.” Magic and science have a lot of overlap in their results, especially where biology is concerned. If there’s a magical equivalent of nuclear fission, I don’t want to know about it.

“Oh.” She thought for a few seconds. “Well, I care now. Toby, what’s going on?”

“Today was the formal Court where we discussed whether or not to wake Raysel,” I said.

She gasped. “Oh, Toby! I wanted to be there. I’m sorry I couldn’t be there.”

“It’s all right. I didn’t ask you to come.” I hadn’t asked her mostly because I’d known that if I asked, she’d show up, and if things had gone poorly, I hadn’t wanted one more witness to our failure.

“Still.”

She squeezed my hand, and I smiled at her, feeling terrible at the same time. Her daughter was dead, and here I was letting her reassure me, rather than getting to the point. “Karen was there, with the Luidaeg, and Cass was there in her role as Arden’s chatelaine, and they both had some sort of . . . I don’t know. Some sort of attack, and started screaming that something was wrong. So Tybalt and I went to the house.”

“Did something happen? Toby, are the kids okay?”