Page 73 of Sleep No More

Dean looked horrified. “But that means you’d be taken away from everyone else,” he said. “And August wouldn’t want that, either. Not the real August. Not the one who’s been living with my parents. Peter—he’s our little brother—talks about her. He says she’s really nice, and she likes him a lot, she’s always playing fair and making him feel welcome and she wouldn’t take you away from us. She wouldn’t take you away from your family just because she wants to keep the family Titania made up to punish us.”

I shrugged. “August doesn’t know any of that. I don’t know any of that, not really. Sure, you say it, but maybe we’re enemies and have always hated each other. How can we be sure we won’t hate each other again if the spell is broken?”

“There’s an easy answer for this,” said the Luidaeg, and called over her shoulder to where Acacia and Raysel were standing, heads close together as they spoke in low voices, “Hey, ’Cayci! What do you remember about the last four months?”

“I was with my husband and our youngest daughter, and everything was fine, except for his strange reluctance to comfort me when I was cold,” she said. “I loved him very much. I remember that. I know now that I haven’t loved him in a long time, that I didn’t grieve him when he died, but for those four months . . . I loved him.”

“There.” The Luidaeg turned back to me, the expression of triumph on her face almost masking her concern. “Whatever else happens, you’ll remember the four months as you lived them. You say you love her? Then you have to let her be who she actually is. If she loves you as much as you say she does, she’ll do you the same favor.”

Dean abruptly paled. “My parents . . .”

“Are fine,” said Ginevra. “I had to practically threaten your mother before she’d agree to stay below. I was not trying to babysit her and Tybalt when we didn’t know how this was going to go. Strange as it probably sounds to you, this”—she waved a hand, indicating the gloomy hall around us—“is the best-case scenario. We’ve managed to find Toby and the Luidaeg, and while Titania’s certainly going to be responsible for some hefty therapy bills going forward, she doesn’t appear to have physically harmed anyone. If anything, she set up a logical situation, and then she let people wind up where it made sense for them to be if that was the way the world had worked all along. Cait Sidhe don’t exist anymore? Fine, all the Cait Sidhe are in the Court of Cats. The Undersea’s been cut off for a hundred years? Okay, anyone who was underwater when the spell came down is cut off, and anyone who couldn’t have been born if not for the Undersea gets shunted here, to Blind Michael’s skerry, where everyone knows time works differently than it does everywhere else. You could have been here, exactly as you are, for a century. You don’t prove anything about the Undersea’s continued existence.”

“She always was more dedicated to looking clever than she was to doing the work to actually be clever,” said the Luidaeg. She looked at me again, slow and measuring. “You should sleep while you can. You need it more than you know, and there’s not going to be much time for sleep once we get back to the mortal world. Everything’s going to happen really fast once it starts happening. And you’re going to have to figure out which side you want to be standing on when the dust finishes settling.”

“Is that a threat?” I asked, uneasily.

She shook her head. “No. I sort of wish it were, because then it would be something I could make good on, but no. It’s just a statement of fact. There are a lot of people out there who love you, and not all of them will be as patient as I am. We still have a little time for you to sort your shit out and get on the right side of this question. Now if you’re done eating, get some rest.”

I frowned and rose, pushing gingerly back from the table. Acacia and Raysel were still deep in conversation, and neither of them looked up as I approached. I cleared my throat. Acacia finally raised her head, blinking slowly.

“Yes?” she asked.

“Is there a place where I could, you know, lie down for a while?” I asked. “Please? I’m tired, and even the sea witch says I need to sleep.”

“Of course,” she said, and touched Raysel lightly on the shoulder, saying, “I’ll be right back,” before she moved to lead me to a small door on the far wall. Opening it, she gestured me through ahead of her.

“It’s nice to see you again, even if you don’t remember the last time you were here,” she said. “You don’t visit often enough.”

“I’m . . . sorry?” I ventured. “I wish I remembered you. I wish I remembered a lot of things.”

“Well, tomorrow is another day, as the mortals say, and perhaps soon you’ll smash my mother’s mirror into pieces.” Her expression was suddenly fierce as she walked across the chamber we had entered, adjusting the pillows on a large bed that was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen simply because it existed.

“Don’t you mind, ma’am?” I asked, following her to the bed.

“Mind what?”

“That we’re opposing your mother.” The question was ill-fitting in my mouth and set up a strange twisting in my gut. Even the thought of opposing my mother’s will was an uncomfortable one. I couldn’t remember ever having told her no, even when I’d been a child and inclined to a degree of stubbornness ill-befitting a changeling.

Of course, according to everyone around me right now, those memories were all lies made up by the Summer Queen, and I couldn’t trust them.

If I hadn’t already had a headache, the contradiction would almost certainly have given me one.

“Ah,” said Acacia. “I opposed my mother a long, long time ago, when I fell in love with a son of Maeve and allowed him to spirit me away to a kingdom of his own creation. This was a beautiful place once, before my Michael sank too deeply into the poisoned mire of his own heart. We planted a glorious garden together, he and I, when he was not yet a monster. My mother never forgave me for that. She said that until I cast him from my bed and my side, I was no child of hers, and now that he’s gone to the ground and the grave, lost to us forever, what does she do? She recreates him in an innocent boy’s body, and sets him beside me again, as if he still belonged there. As if she had the right to sculpt my bridal bed. No, I don’t care if you tear down everything she’s made. A garden planted in poisoned ground will bear only toxic fruit. Burn it all for all I care.”

She smiled at me then, before she turned to walk away.

“Pleasant dreams, October,” she said, and she was gone, and I was alone.

TWENTY

MY DREAMS WERE STRANGE and tangled things. I ran through mazes of grasping vines, following the sound of my sister’s laughter, until it became the sound of weeping. I rounded a corner in the maze, and there was Tybalt, sitting on a bench beside a decorative garden pond, his face in his hands, his elbows on his knees. I stopped running.

“Why are you in my dream?” I asked, challenging.

Lowering his hands, he looked at me. Without anger, without hate, with only sorrow and love in his eyes. “Because, little fish, a man is allowed to weep for the loss of his heart,” he said.

Gasping, I sat upright in my bed, one hand clutching my middle and the other at my chest, as if I could keep my hammering heart inside with the force of my denial. It worked, to the degree that my heart stayed inside of my body. It didn’t work, in that it kept on aching.