Page 62 of Be the Serpent

“I’m trying.” The smell of roses was getting too thick for me to tolerate. I sneezed, then blinked at him. “Can’t you smell that?”

“Smell what?”

“Titania’s magic. It’s overwhelming everything.” The vines had mostly obliterated the table when they sprouted from the berry bowl. I gestured to the wreckage. “Breakfast was enchanted, of course. She wanted us to eat it. So, you know, don’t eat the floor bacon.”

Tybalt gave me a withering look. “An unnecessary instruction.”

“Just being cautious. Raj would eat the floor bacon.” I pulled the jar out of my pocket and took another sip, the taste of loam and forest green settling in the back of my throat. The scent of roses receded.

“Yes, but as we’re invoking the children now, Quentin would not,” said Tybalt. “The boy has far too much understanding of his own dignity. He should have been a cat.”

“I’m sure he would have been happy, and wildly destructive, as a Cait Sidhe,” I agreed. With the scent of roses gone, the smell of pancakes was almost overwhelming. My stomach churned. “We need to get back to Muir Woods. I need to talk to Oberon. Can I get a ride?”

“For you, my lady? Anything.” Tybalt took my arm with exaggerated civility that felt like a lingering comment on the way I’d pushed him away before, and together we stepped into shadow.

Again, the air was balmy and breathable. It would be far too easy to get used to the Shadow Roads welcoming me as a trusted traveler, not pushing me away as an outsider. I tried to focus on matching Tybalt’s stride, running through the darkness toward the unseen outline of Muir Woods. If I looked into the blackness, I could see thin threads of magic spreading out around us like a spider’s web, coruscating with colors, bright lines of life and energy directing our steps. We could go anywhere from here. We could run forever, and the shadows would be happy to have us.

No wonder Cait Sidhe were so migratory, territorial without being stagnant about it. Most people find a home and stay there. Tybalt had been King of Cats in at least three places he’d already told me about, and had lived in at least two more without taking a throne, and now he was in San Francisco, and while he was happy with me, we might reach a time when he was agitating to move to Australia or something.

Hopefully not for a good long time. I loved my city, and expected that I always would, even as the mortal side of it was changing into something I barely recognized. The changelings of my generation were going to find ourselves as out of touch as our pureblood parents, in less than a quarter of the time.

The run was so much easier when I wasn’t trying to hold my breath at the same time, and in no time at all, we emerged into the receiving room at Muir Woods.

It was, for once, entirely empty. I let go of Tybalt’s hand and turned, blinking at the unoccupied throne in front of us. “Okay, that’s a little odd.”

“What time is it?”

“I don’t know. Around seven?”

“So the rest of the court will have risen by now, and everyone is no doubt settling in for their evening meal.” Tybalt shrugged, looking at me wryly. “The sky is falling, but the sky is always falling where you’re concerned, little fish. The rest of the world carries on; the courtiers must be fed.”

“Okay, fair enough,” I said, and started for the door. “Come on. Dining hall’s this way.”

“You assume the knowe will not have moved it since the celebration of our marriage, or that I will have forgotten the path?”

“I assume the knowe is feeling charitably toward me after the conversation we had earlier, so yeah, it’s either not going to have moved the room or it’s going to give me a decent pointer on how to get there, and being cool with knowes is sometimes the only thing I’ve got going for me,” I said. “Let me have this.”

Tybalt laughed, shaking his head, and followed me out of the receiving room.

The knowe at Muir Woods was huge, as befitted a royal knowe, easily twice the size of Shadowed Hills, which had previously been the largest knowe I’d ever spent a substantial amount of time in. The best mortal comparison would be the old English manor houses, built less to be a single-family home and more to be at the functional center of a small community. Arden was still building her staff, hiring slowly and cautiously to avoid any of the dangers of running a formal Court, like “oops, all infiltrators” or “whoops, that guy you just hired was secretly loyal to the deposed former monarch,” or my personal favorite, “now your housekeeping staff is made up entirely of people who think changelings are dirty, and judge you mercilessly for allowing them into the knowe.”

Eventually, when the knowe was fully up and running, she’d probably have more than a hundred people living here full-time, not including the courtiers who set up camp in visitor’s quarters and simply refused to leave. As chatelaine, Cassandra would find herself with more and more draws upon her time, until she either stepped down or dedicated herself entirely to the service of the Queen. For the moment, however, it was possible to walk the halls and feel like you were walking through a ghost town. Even including the people who’d come to see Raysel’s trial, the ones I’d brought with me who were still hanging around, and the Browns, we were probably looking at maybe a hundred warm bodies inside the knowe.

Maybe that was why the route to the dining room was so linear. The hall led us straight to a long flight of stairs, winding its way down from the dubious “ground level” of the main floor into the depths of what would have been a canyon if it had actually existed in the mortal world. We reached the bottom at what was probably the equivalent of roughly sea level, stepping off the stairs and into a long open-air corridor lined with trellises dripping with thornless blackberry creepers. The twilight sun cast dreamy shadows over us, crisscrossing our bodies with bands of gold and charcoal.

As always, the stripes looked remarkably natural where they fell on Tybalt’s face, sketching out the stripes he didn’t have in human form. I matched my pace to his, moving a little faster than was comfortable but a lot slower than the urgency of the moment wanted me to.

“Loggia,” he said.

I blinked at him. “What?”

“This type of outdoor hallway. It’s called a loggia. From the Italian, I believe, although all the Romance languages blur together after a while. They spent so much time stealing and twisting words from one another that it could have come from the Sardinian, or the Dalmatian.”

“Now you’re just making things up because you know I don’t know enough to argue with you,” I said. I appreciated the attempt to lift my spirits, at least slightly, even as I knew it wasn’t going to work.

Tybalt held up his hands. “I swear. Dalmatian was spoken in Dalmatia, which corresponds with the area that I believe they call Croatia today.”

“And let me guess, you were King of Dalmatia at one point?” Being married to a man with centuries of impossible stories and random trivia is delightful, but also occasionally exhausting.