Page 72 of Be the Serpent

He walked a few steps away, stretched, and unfurled into his customary bipedal shape. “October?” he asked. “What happened? Where are we?”

“Hello, Sire,” said Melly, peeking around me. “Welcome to Shadowed Hills.”

Tybalt looked at her dubiously, then back to me. “Well, given that I was on my way to the Court of Cats, having left my lady safely in Muir Woods, this is not what I was expecting from my evening. What’s going on?”

“I’ll explain in a minute,” I said, and stuffed the remainder of the pastry into my mouth before hugging him fiercely, not entirely aware of how much tension was in my shoulders until it drained away, leaving me feeling weak and shaken. I leaned back enough to meet his eyes. “Don’t ever do that to me again.”

“I might be better able to avoid the forbidden activity if you told me precisely what it was,” he said, sounding bewildered.

I glared at him. He kissed my forehead.

“All right,” he said. “Whatever I have done to so unsettle you, I promise it will not be done again.”

“Good.”

Melly started moving. We followed her. She stopped at what looked like a dead end, passing me a fresh pastry before she pressed another decorative flower on the wall.

“I normally would go around the front, but as we’re trying not to be seen, this seems the best approach,” she said, half-apologetically.

The wall swung inward, revealing a slice of the cluttered chambers Etienne shared with his wife and daughter. They were large, as befit the Duke’s seneschal, and they had once been decorated with spare consideration, each item chosen precisely and with intent.

Now, they were crammed with a mix of medieval and modern furniture, one wall dominated by the television April and Chelsea had worked for an entire week getting to function within the knowe, floor a minefield of shoes, game controllers, and misplaced items. It made me happy to see it. After literal centuries, Etienne’s home finally looked like he actually lived there, instead of simply existing.

“I think I hear tea!” chirped a bright voice, a moment before a black-haired head poked around the wall and into the room. Chelsea blinked wide copper eyes at the three of us, standing silhouetted in the door from the service corridor. “. . . huh,” she said, finally, before turning and shouting, “Mom!”

“Did the kitchen forget your jam?” asked Bridget, bustling around the corner and stopping dead. She was a dainty human woman in her mid-forties, and the familial relationship between her and Chelsea was obvious in their shared features, despite her lack of pointed ears or impossibly colored eyes. She was wiping her hands on a dust rag, which she dropped at the sight of us. “October! What are you doing—Melly?”

“Found these in the kitchen, thought you could make better use of them than I could,” said Melly, and set her baskets down on a nearby table clearly intended for that purpose. She had acquired a teapot somewhere along the way—hearth magic, I decided not to ask—and placed it carefully next to the baskets. I had watched this whole process, and would still have sworn she only had two arms. “I believe she needs to speak with your husband, if you’d be so very kind as to fetch him out.”

“Why?” asked Chelsea. “Hi, Toby.”

“Hi, Chels,” I replied, semi-amused, and filched another pastry from the basket. My appetite was returning now that we were away from the smell of onions. “Is your father home?”

“Again, why? I’m guessing you wouldn’t be here unless you needed to get somewhere else very quickly, and you know I can take you farther than he can.”

She was right about that: Etienne was pureblooded Tuatha de Dannan, like Arden and Nolan, and could open portals between two points, but he had a normal Tuatha’s limitations. He couldn’t gate us directly to Muir Woods on his best day, and I wasn’t counting on anyone having their best day at this point. We all seemed to be having a pretty lousy one.

“Before you get down to the weeds of this, I’m back to my kitchen,” said Melly. She leaned in for a quick hug. “See that you come back as promised, with the full story,” she instructed. “I’ll have your supper ready for you whenever you arrive. We’ll take it in the kitchen, properly, and away from prying eyes.”

Then she was gone, closing the door into the service hallway behind her. Bridget walked over to collect the tea set.

“So much for a quiet evening in,” she said, without rancor. “Etienne came home some time ago. Said the Queen was evacuating Muir Woods. Is that correct?”

“Yeah,” I said, ignoring the way Tybalt stared at me. We couldn’t keep this a secret for long, if it even was one now. I took a deep breath, and said, “Titania is back. We’re trying to lure her to Muir Woods so I can help Oberon re-bind her to keep her from hurting anyone.”

Tybalt kept staring. “I’m sorry,” he said, in a half-strangled tone. “My ears clearly deceive me. It sounded as if, in my absence, you agreed to a plan which involved using yourself partially or in whole as bait.”

“No,” I said. He relaxed a little, only to tense again when I said, “We’re using Cassandra as the bait. I’m just going to be the one on deck to tear down Oberon’s binding geas.”

“Just,” he said, in a tone that implied he couldn’t believe what he was hearing. And maybe he couldn’t. I couldn’t entirely believe what I was saying, after all.

“Hold up,” said Bridget. “Titania? Oberon? As in Shakespeare? ‘Fairy, skip hence’? Those people.”

“Yeah, Mom, the Three,” said Chelsea. She shot me a half-guilty look, then said, “I told you Oberon came back. He’s been staying with the sea witch, because he’s her dad and she likes having him around.”

“No one’s supposed to know that, Chelsea,” I said.

“Yeah, like no one’s supposed to know that Quentin doesn’t really want to be High King anymore, and no one’s supposed to know that Dean still tries to breathe water sometimes, so he can go back to Saltmist without feeling like he’s a prisoner? Have you completely forgotten what it was like to be a teenager? We tell each other stuff.” She crossed her arms and frowned at me. “We talk, and we’re not stupid. We know what’s going on.”