Page 62 of Sleep No More

Then I was past the memory and into the power. It was a cool power, not cold but cool, like water rushing in a shallow forest stream, warmed by the sunlight that had been shining on it all day long. It was sweet and clear and pure, with no traces of mortality, and as I considered it, I could see the ways I’d need to twist it if I wanted to borrow her line’s gifts for my own. They were right there, ready to be taken, and it felt almost as if the blood was sorry when I turned those gifts aside. I took another mouthful and let go, leaving Grianne free to bind her wounds as I turned my attention back to the tree.

My own power, exhausted as it was, mingled with Grianne’s, all of it bent to the goal of fueling my natural abilities. I reached out again, snarling the fingers of my mind through the remaining threads of the tree, and I pulled, ripping them loose one by one. They tried to tangle around my hands, chilling me to the bone, and still I kept on pulling, fighting against my natural desire to recoil from the pain. I yanked even harder, trying to pull apart knots and sunder connections, and was pulling so hard when the last strand finally snapped that I felt it, physically, as that tether broke. The impact shook me down to the soles of my feet, pain like nothing I’d ever felt before lancing through my head.

With nothing to hold on to, I fell down, of course, the conquering hero landing ignominiously on her ass among the litter on the clearing floor.

SEVENTEEN

AT LEAST I DIDN’T black out, which seemed like a real accomplishment after the day I’d had. I groaned, rubbing my face with my less-bloody hand, and pushed myself back into a sitting position. “Everyone okay?”

No one answered me. That wasn’t a good sign. I dropped my hand, opened my eyes, and stood, scrabbling in the slippery leaf-litter until I managed to get my feet under me. Both Grianne and Ginevra were standing where I’d left them, their faces lit by the shifting light from Grianne’s Merry Dancers. The tree, however, was gone. They were both staring at the place where it had been.

I moved over to join them, the unsteady light of the Merry Dancers making it difficult for me to tell what they were staring at. I blinked, and my eyes adjusted, finally allowing me to see the naked teenage girl crumpled motionless on the ground. Her long black hair was loose and tangled all around her, hiding a considerable amount of her body from view; her ears were round. If someone had asked me, I would have said she was entirely human. But she was there, in a place humans had no reason to be and probably couldn’t survive, and that meant whatever she was, it was probably something I didn’t want to mess with.

And she looked strangely, disturbingly familiar.

“Who is this?” I asked.

“Her name is Antigone of Albany, and we’ve been trying to find her for months,” said Ginevra.

Grianne, as usual, was more succinct. “Sea witch,” she said.

I yelped and danced backward, away from the pair. “Sea witch?” I demanded. “As in—you mean the—the Luidaeg?”

Ginevra nodded. “Yes. She was one of the people Titania had to get out of the way in order to establish her own version of Faerie. The Luidaeg isn’t powerful enough to fight her stepmother’s enchantments forever, but she’s too strong for Titania to just rewrite the way she did almost everyone else. So Titania put her away.”

“You didn’t tell me we were trying to find the”—I dropped my voice, in case my yelling hadn’t already been enough to wake her—“the sea witch.”

“Would you have agreed to help if I had?”

“I barely agreed to help as it was! I’m only doing this because . . .” I stopped. Why was I doing this? I wanted them to leave my family alone, and I wanted these people to be able to go home, but since I also wanted to hold on to the Faerie I knew, where I was happy and loved and understood how things were supposed to work, maybe helping them was a bad idea. It didn’t seem like our two versions of Faerie could exist in parallel. All or nothing, that was the way this went.

Was I only doing this because I was mad at my father for telling me I couldn’t? The thought was dauntingly accurate. Maybe this was all just me throwing a fit about being denied something I didn’t even understand wanting.

“Because you’re a hero,” said Ginevra.

The words sounded perfectly true and utterly false at the same time. I couldn’t be a hero. I wasn’t built for it. I was a changeling. I existed to do laundry and wash dishes and serve Faerie, not save it.

The woman on the ground—the Luidaeg—groaned and pushed herself up onto her elbows, head still bowed.

“Anyone get the license-plate number for that truck?” she asked. “That was a rhetorical question. Please don’t answer. I know what happened.”

“Luidaeg! Are you all right?” asked Ginevra, moving to help her up.

The Luidaeg waved her off. “I’m fine. Sore, pissed, and my mouth tastes like a Macy’s perfume counter, but fine.” She paused then. “You have Toby’s jacket. Why do you have Toby’s jacket? What did my fucking stepmother do?!”

“Toby’s right here,” said Ginevra, gesturing toward me. The Luidaeg turned, following the motion, and I looked directly at the sea witch for the first time.

She still seemed almost dauntingly human, impossibly so, given her setting and surroundings. Little scars dotted her cheeks and chin, the ghosts of acne or pox, and she had freckles across the bridge of her nose. But her eyes were black from side to side, and unlike Li Qin’s eyes, they were predatory and sharp. She looked at me like I was on the menu, like everything was on the menu, and the only limiting factor was how hungry she was at any given moment.

She took a step toward me. I took a step back. She stopped, an expression of slow bewilderment spreading across her face. Then she turned to Ginevra.

“Short version, now,” she said. It wasn’t a request.

“Titania managed to ensnare the Mists and two of the neighboring Kingdoms in a complicated illusion, creating a revised version of reality where Oberon was the one who vanished after Maeve’s Ride was broken, not her,” said Ginevra, quickly. “She rewrote history and built herself the illusion of a perfect pureblood paradise, where there aren’t any so-called beasts and all the changelings know their place. But she didn’t count on the cats.”

“You always were our safety valve,” said the Luidaeg. “Where’s kitty-boy?”

“He can’t really handle looking directly at some aspects of this reality, so he’s off wrangling our allies and not making things worse,” said Ginevra.