Page 61 of Be the Serpent

“I figured that out when you didn’t attempt to introduce it into our private activities,” he said, extending his claws and beginning to slice through the vines holding me. “I would never have been the one to volunteer it. Cats think poorly of being constrained.”

“Good to know it’s not going to be a fight in the future.” I sniffled again, trying to clear my sinuses. “Titania got away.”

“I figured that out as well, when I got here to find you alone, crying and confined, with no body on the floor. Did she harm you?”

“Turns out she’s not allowed. I don’t think anyone ever taught the Three how to have self-control without a compulsion spell to do it for them.” He continued to slice until I could move my arms again, sliding my silver knife back into its sheath before beginning to cut the vines away from my legs with the antler knife. They shrank away from its touch, showing more awareness than I expect from vegetation, and they charred around the edges where I cut them. “Oberon bound her not to hurt Janet or Janet’s descendants before he banished her from herself. So she can’t hurt me.”

“Meaning she threatened to harm me,” said Tybalt grimly.

I looked up to meet his eyes, shocked. He looked calmly back at me.

“If you told me that someone wanted to destroy me, and I wasn’t allowed to stop them myself for some reason, I would turn my hand against whatever they held most dear,” he said. “It’s not a difficult conclusion to draw. I am her best wedge.”

“Not just you,” I said. “You, and Quentin, and Rayseline, and everyone, except for Gillian and maybe May.” But she hadn’t named Gillian, had she?

When I had removed myself from Gillian’s heritage to protect her, had I rendered her vulnerable to something ancient and terrible? Oh, oak and ash, was being related to me enough to put her in danger again? She was barely coming around to the idea that I might not be the most terrifying thing she’d ever met. I didn’t know if our fragile relationship could survive another blow.

I shuddered, tears bright in my eyes, and kept cutting. The best way to protect my family was to destroy Titania. She wasn’t just threatening to eliminate the Browns; at this point, she was threatening to wipe away everything I cared about, and I wasn’t going to let her. No matter how poorly she’d been treated by Oberon, none of that justified the things she was trying to do now.

“She wants me to bring her the Browns, or find a way to bring her to them, so she can slaughter them all and fulfill the terms of Oberon’s geas,” I said, voice gone flat and cold. “Once she accomplishes that, she can disappear again. Turn into a new iteration of Stacy, grow into someone else entirely, and have a fresh new life.” Turning Titania into a functionally powerless member of the society she had helped to warp into its current shape would have seemed like a fitting punishment, if not for all the innocents who would be hurt or destroyed along the way. If she’d been purely a closed unit, incapable of harming or involving anyone else in her self-destruction, it could even seem like a reasonable, proportionate response to what she’d done.

But she wasn’t a closed unit. No one ever is. If we let her complete this loop of her binding, if we let her go back into Faerie and vanish for another round, we’d have done worse than feeding the four remaining Brown children into the meat grinder of Titania’s demands. We’d have condemned another generation to this level of destruction.

We could be better than this. We had to be better than this.

We just had to figure out how.

FIFTEEN

It took me and Tybalt working together about twenty minutes to get me cut completely free. The vines he slashed through with his claws writhed back into position and resumed grabbing at me within seconds. The ones I cut away with my antler knife stayed charred and withdrawn, apparently afraid to reach out again. The more time passed, the heavier the smell of roses became, as if Titania were preparing to re-manifest.

With the last cut, I fell forward, no longer held upright by the bramble. Tybalt was there to catch me before I could hit the ground. He wrapped his arms around my waist and crushed me against him, holding tight, shivering. I blinked, hugging him back.

“Hey,” I said. “Hey. I’m okay.”

“You always are, aren’t you?” He pulled back, enough to see my face. “I understand why you had to push me away. I could feel her working her way into my mind. She wasn’t commanding me to do anything against my better interests yet, but she was influencing the way her words landed. Given time enough, she could have turned my thinking entirely to her desires.”

“Why is it I can feel a ‘but’ coming?”

“Because you could have come with me.” Tybalt looked at me gravely. “It was obvious she wasn’t going to lay down quietly and allow herself to be destroyed, but by presenting you with a situation you thought you might be able to talk your way out of, she locked you into a pattern of negotiation. If she has Stacy’s memories to pull upon, she knows you better than I do.”

“Not something that many people can say these days.”

His smile was fleeting and shallow. “Indeed. But, October . . . when you opened the shadows and pushed me into the dark, the shock cleared my head. We could have retreated and regrouped, together.”

“I’m sorry.” I ducked my head, unwilling to meet his eyes. “I was hoping . . . ” Hoping what, exactly? I’d been hoping to convince Titania to go away, to give Stacy her body back and let my friend find a way to go back to living her life. I’d been hoping to stop her. I’d been hoping for the impossible.

Or I guess I’d been hoping for some flicker of evidence that my friend was still there, and that, at least, I had received. Stacy was clinging to existence as hard as she could, but she wasn’t going to be able to hold on much longer—and she didn’t want to. Even if we somehow found a way to seal Titania away, she would always be a lingering threat to everything Stacy cared about, and so there was no way to save them both.

Given a choice between surviving as a shadow of herself and saving her family, I already knew what Stacy would decide. It made perfect sense, because it was the same thing I would have decided.

I lifted my eyes back to Tybalt. “I was hoping there might be a way out of this.”

“Is there?”

“If there is, I can’t see it. I’m sorry I pushed you away. I’m protected from her magic and physically almost indestructible. If she’d lashed out against me, I could have survived it. If she’d lashed out at you . . . I can’t survive that, Tybalt. I’m sorry, but I can’t.”

He scowled. “And yet you’d ask it of me. Sometimes I wonder if you’ll ever be able to stretch your sense of martyrdom to include the existence of people who care about you.”