Page 65 of Be the Serpent

Tybalt frowned at me. “You’re right, little fish, but I don’t want to go.”

“And I don’t want you to go, but I want us both to survive this, and that sometimes means doing things we don’t want to do. I love you. I’ll do my best not to get myself killed before you come back. All right?”

“Not in the least,” he said, and ducked forward to kiss me firmly before he turned, ran, and leapt into a patch of deepest shadow, vanishing in a swirl of pennyroyal and musk perfume. I turned my attention back to the others. Arden and Nolan were watching me with varying degrees of anxiety; Cassandra was watching the air above my head, and seemed perfectly serene. I eyed them.

“What?” I asked. “I can be apart from the man for more than five minutes. Titania’s teeth, I was apart from him for fifty years!”

“Can you please not swear by my mother?” asked Cassandra.

“Can we not call her your mother?” I countered. “She killed your sister. She’s destroying your family. She doesn’t get the title.”

The receiving room door opened, and for the second time in one day, the Luidaeg stepped inside. Oberon was right behind her, his antler fully regrown, a dour expression on his face.

“You’re not drenched in blood, so I’m going to guess things went better than I would have wagered,” said the Luidaeg, letting the door swing closed and sauntering toward me. “You’re also not crying, so I’m going to guess you didn’t put a knife through the woman’s heart.”

“Hey, Luidaeg,” I said, wearily. I glanced to Oberon. “No. No murder, not yet anyway. But she’s made it pretty clear that there’s going to be a whole bunch of it, one way or another. Either I help her wipe out the Browns, or she comes for everyone I’ve ever loved while she’s still trapped in this liminal ‘not myself, and not Stacy either’ place. Can you unbind her, Sire?”

Oberon blinked. “I could,” he said. “If I wanted to.”

“Well, then, I damn well need you to want to,” I snapped. “There are four children’s lives at stake.”

“Not a child,” said Cassandra.

“Three children and a physicist,” I amended. “If you unbind Titania so she doesn’t have to kill Stacy’s children to be herself again, she won’t have to kill anyone.”

“And the balance will still be shattered, as Maeve is absent,” said Oberon. “I’ve called for her, to no avail. I fear she is lost to us.”

“Not so much,” said the Luidaeg. Everyone turned to look at her, and she pointed at me. “October over here called on Mom for help a little while back, and Mom answered. She’s alive. She’s just not showing her face right now.”

“And with the way everything else has been going, she’s probably somewhere nearby,” I said sourly. “You know, for a family that doesn’t get along very well, you guys sure do love living in each other’s pockets. Better be careful or people will start to think you like each other.”

Oberon looked at me impassively. “As you say. But with my Lady of Roses bound and half-aware, and my Lady of Tides still walking roads unknown, we run the risk that unbinding the Summer Queen will cast Faerie completely into chaos. I was able to bind her only because I caught her entirely unaware, and she had no time to defend against me. She won’t be dropping her guard so complacently again. If I unbind her, I won’t have the time to bind her again before she does as she will.”

“One shot at this, gotcha,” I said. “If I can lure her into an ambush, can you stop her so she can’t move?”

“So you can put those blades of yours through her heart, as you did to my son?” asked Oberon. “I will not help you kill my wife, and I will not help you destroy Faerie. There is a simpler way.” He looked at Cassandra, a world of meaning in his eyes.

I considered, not for the first time, the virtues of stabbing Oberon. Sure, I’d been planning for the first possible opportunity, but who was to say I couldn’t make my own opportunity? Fortune favors the bold.

Cassandra, meanwhile, backpedaled away from him, raising her hands. “Oh, no,” she said. “Faerie needs us.”

“What?”

“It’s getting clearer now that things are out in the open. I couldn’t see a lot of things before, because there was a shadow over Mom, standing in the way. The shadow’s gone now. So’s Mom.”

“Oracles cannot chart the movement of the Three,” said Oberon. “We are beyond you.”

“Charming,” I said. “Cass, continue.”

“Eat another sandwich and I will.”

I ate another sandwich. She looked pleased with herself.

“Good Auntie. Now, as I was saying: something bad happened a long time ago, and Faerie lost almost all of her oracles, all at once. The ones we still have are trying to hold things together, but they don’t have the numbers. Bringing back the Roane helped. I don’t think anything short of time travel would have helped enough. There’s something bad coming, and unless we can help to unsnarl it, a lot of people are going to get hurt. Really badly. You need us. Right now, I think you need us more than you need her.”

She looked directly at Oberon, smiling a little. “You know why we can’t see you? Why you’ve always been standing outside the lines of prophecy? It’s because you’re too big. When a human weatherman talks about the next few days, they don’t say ‘Oh and also, the sun is going to continue to be a massive flaming ball of incandescent gas.’ Their forecasts take the sun into account as a matter of course. As far as the future is concerned, you’re an environmental hazard, not a person. You make things too hazy to follow. When Mom was around, things got hazy whenever she was involved. Guess we know why now. But it’s why we all knew something bad was going to happen this week, without knowing exactly what, or when, or how to step around it. And I’m telling you, Sire, right here and now, that Faerie is making oracles because she needs us. She needs us to see what’s coming next. And she needs that clarity of vision a hell of a lot more than she needs the woman who murdered my baby sister in cold blood.”

“You are a child,” said Oberon ponderously. “It isn’t your place—”