Page 65 of Sleep No More

EIGHTEEN

I CAME TO SPRAWLED ON the ground, which was cold and hard. Someone was kicking me rhythmically in the hip. I opened my eyes and blinked up at the starry sky before pushing myself into a sitting position. For once, I was smart enough to keep my mouth shut as I looked frantically around, trying to take stock of the situation.

Well, I wasn’t tied up, or in another cell somewhere, and I didn’t seem to have acquired any new bloodstains that I could see. The ground was so hard because it was made of stone, not earth. A layer of straw covered it; not enough to soften the surface, but enough to show that someone had at least tried. The person kicking me was Grianne, who smiled and stooped to offer me her hand when she saw me sit up.

“Hit the ground hard,” she said. “Didn’t wake up. So we moved you.”

“Moved me where?”

She shrugged and gestured behind her, to a low stone building that looked like it had seen better days. Hell, it looked like it had seen better centuries. The roof was thatch, with holes big enough to climb through—or fall through, if you were reckless enough to try climbing on that rickety mess of sticks. Beyond it I could see the red glow of a bonfire. We appeared to be in a similar building, this one entirely sans roof.

“Gin thought you’d be upset if you woke up in the middle of a party; said I’d watch you,” she said.

I took her hand, letting her pull me to my feet. “I appreciate it,” I said. “I wouldn’t have liked to wake up alone.”

She shrugged, reclaiming her hand.

I looked at her thoughtfully. Of my three current companions, Grianne was the one who knew me in this world, not in whatever strange world they came from. “Can I ask you something?”

She nodded.

“Do you think we should save their Faerie?”

“Don’t know,” she said, with another shrug. “I like me well enough. Like my friends. Like the Duke I serve. Even like you. Might not be me in their Faerie. But the way they talk, there’s lots of people missing. All the shifters. The whole Undersea. And there’s the changelings. It’s not supposed to be this way for you. Shadow Roads are collapsing. Don’t like that. Think we might need their Faerie.”

“So you think their version of Faerie is better.”

“Didn’t say that. Said I don’t know. Because I don’t. I can’t. Maybe you can, if you look at enough blood memories. Maybe you can tell me.”

I blinked at her. “I don’t think I’ve ever heard you talk that much.”

She shrugged for a third time, and didn’t say anything more, just started for the light on the far side of the stone building. I took a beat to collect my thoughts, then followed her, trying not to get left behind.

We rounded the building, and beheld the source of the light: a massive bonfire had been erected in what looked a lot like a medieval town square, wood piled high and burning bright. All around it, figures in armor were gathered, some sitting on hay bales, others standing, tankards or joints of roast meat in their hands. They chatted easily, apparently at rest. The ones not wearing helmets were . . . difficult for me to look directly at. Their features were subtly distorted from what I expected to see, as if they had been cobbled together from members of different descendent lines. Horns and fangs and gills where they didn’t belong met my eyes from all directions.

For all of that, they weren’t entirely monstrous: as with everything in Faerie, there was a strange beauty to their tatterdemalion forms, one echoed in the faces and shapes of the children who ran wild around the bonfire’s edges, their limbs bare and their bodies clad in patchwork rags that looked like they’d been harvested from a dozen different time periods. The stories said Blind Michael’s Hunt stole children, and either this was the proof or the refutation: looking at those children, I could think of no place in Faerie they belonged but there.

Two tall chairs had been set up on a platform to one side of the circle. The first of them held a tall man with skin streaked like the bark of an ash tree, auburn hair, and horns like a young stag’s. The outline of his body flickered as I looked at him, now powerfully built as any of the warriors, now thin and almost bony. I couldn’t tell which was true. In the moment, it didn’t matter.

The woman next to him had skin as yellow as a daffodil, and her hair was a mass of gold and brown roots that writhed and restyled itself constantly, never stilling. A scar ran down one side of her face, from just below to eye to her chin, pulling the side of her mouth up in a permanent sneer. She was still beautiful, and she sat in that simple wooden chair as if it was the grandest throne in all of Faerie.

The Luidaeg stood in front of them, saying something I couldn’t hear, her hands moving fast as she gestured to emphasize her point. Ginevra was with her, silently observing.

Grianne bumped her shoulder against mine as she stepped past me into the bonfire’s light. It wasn’t an accident; when I looked sharply up, she was looking at me, eyes calm.

“Think a lot hangs on what you decide you’re going to do next,” she said. “Make some decisions.”

Then she was gone, joining the crowd of impossible people in their easy gathering. None of them blinked twice at the sight of her; one of them handed her a tankard, and she laughed at something I was too far away to hear.

I stepped farther back into the shadows. I wasn’t ready for this. I wasn’t ready for any of this. I was no stranger to the Firstborn—I was raised by one—but the sea witch was her own level of monster, and Blind Michael was the horror we used to threaten naughty children. Supposedly, he snatched misbehaving changelings out of their beds in the middle of the day, saving their parents the embarrassment of knowing them. The children he took were never seen again. I’d been too old for him to target for years, but the fear was there. The fear had always been there.

I shivered, starting to turn away, and yelped as something slammed into me from the side, moving fast through the darkness. I stumbled, not quite falling over as I realized what had hit me was a girl about my age, tall and gawky, long-limbed and underfed. She clung to me like I was the rescue rope she’d been waiting for since time began, and I stared at her with wide eyes, not sure how I was supposed to deal with this.

Unlike the people around the fire, she wasn’t patchwork at all: she was Daoine Sidhe, with freckles across the bridge of her nose and a face rendered ashen and pale by the distant firelight. I couldn’t see the color of her hair or eyes, but the shape of her face and the points of her ears were dead indicators for her descendant line. I tried to push her off me, and she started to cry.

That was new. I’d never made a pureblood cry before. I froze, unable to figure out what to do next.

“I knew it I knew it I knew if I just waited long enough you’d come for me I knew it,” she said, voice shaking. “I knew it I knew you wouldn’t forget about me.”