Page 94 of Sleep No More

She looked at me speculatively for a moment before she jerked her chin upward in acknowledgment, made a small, almost-neutral sound, and stepped through the open door.

The rest of us followed. No one wanted to spend any more time in that cell than they absolutely had to. Tybalt stayed close to me, with Simon and August following only a little farther back. Raysel and Dean walked behind them, while Garm brought up the rear. As a group we moved into the hall, which was long and narrow, made of plain gray stone lined with more of those iron doors. This wasn’t a show prison, wasn’t the place you put people when you wanted to frighten them before you let them out again. This was where you put the people you wanted to forget about if you possibly could.

There were no sounds apart from our footsteps and our occasionally labored breathing. Simon and Raysel seemed to have taken our time in the iron-drenched confines of the cell harder than the rest of us. Simon especially was breathing more heavily than I liked, and moving slowly, like every step pained him. I stopped to frown at him, trying not to look as panicked as I felt.

“Hey,” I said. “Are you okay?”

His smile was a dreadful thing. “So much better than I was yesterday, or the day before, or four months ago, when you pressed the blood back into my body and compelled my heart to beat. Truly, October, I’m fine, and will only improve from here. I have never had this much to live for.”

The Luidaeg moved to stand next to me, her own face concerned. “The Daoine Sidhe have always been more sensitive to iron,” she said. “I never worked out exactly why it should be so, only that it is. It does their First no more damage than it does to the rest of us, but her descendants burn with it. Dean’s Merrow heritage will have shielded him, at least a little. Simon will suffer.”

“Will they be all right?” I asked. I’d dealt with iron poisoning in myself, in Tybalt, and in Nolan and Dianda, none of whom were Daoine Sidhe.

“They should, if we keep them away from iron long enough for their systems to purge the poison and recover.” She held up her own taloned, blistered hands. “All things heal, with time. Right now, we need to find Titania and stop her from Riding.”

“If this place is modeled off the false Queen’s knowe, there should be a stable.”

“Great.” She looked at me expectantly. “Where is it?”

“I have no idea. You think she invited me to go hunting with her? She would have been happier having an excuse to turn me into a rabbit and go hunting for me.”

“Oh, please, Toby. Think more highly of yourself.” The Luidaeg scoffed. “She’d have turned you into a coyote at the very least. Something she could call vermin and feel good about killing.”

I eyed her. “I can’t tell if that was supposed to be a compliment or not.”

“Good.”

“Excuse me.”

I turned toward the sound of Simon’s voice. He was half-leaning on Dean at this point, one hand on his side, like he was trying to press away a stitch. “I may be able to help.”

TWENTY-FOUR

SIMON HAD BEEN EIRA’S favorite errand boy and general assistant during her Evening Winterrose phase. They had played it quietly enough that his descent into presumed villainy had managed to avoid tainting her in the eyes of the Courts, even though everyone at the ducal level or above had been well aware that he was her man.

Which was why he’d attended quite so many functions at the High Court on her behalf, carrying her wishes and her commands to the ears of the Queen. He’d always been well-mannered and well-spoken, even during the days when he’d been used to carry out despicable acts on her behalf, and had been a beloved fixture at the Court, invited to every party and revel that wasn’t restricted to the upper nobility.

Which meant he knew how to reach the stables. He led us through the halls, a quiet, furtive group, all of us braced for signs of trouble, all feeling the effects of our time exposed to the iron. For me, it mostly seemed to take the form of muscle aches and a pounding head, which was something I was almost used to after the last several days of cascading misery. Dean, who was half-Daoine Sidhe, was slowing down more and more, and blinking too much, like his eyes were drying out.

I was honestly worried about all of them. August and I were recovering more quickly than the rest, our enhanced healing knocking the iron out of our bodies like it was no big concern. It was nice, understanding our magic the way I did now. The memories of the life Titania had created for me prior to the four months we actually lived were already fading into misty nothingness, like a movie I’d seen once but hadn’t particularly enjoyed; those four months, however, were fresh and bright in my memory, and I didn’t think they were going to fade more than any normal memories would have done. They were mine now.

Which was going to make my eventual reunion with Quentin awkward as hell, although not as awkward as my reunion with Gillian. How was I supposed to explain to my semi-estranged daughter that I hadn’t been able to remember her at all? Even in the grips of Titania’s magic, I should have been able to remember my own child.

But then, I hadn’t been able to remember the one I was actually carrying, and the entire Undersea had been sealed away from us. She hadn’t been in Blind Michael’s lands, which hopefully meant that she was with the rest of the Roane in the sea. And I couldn’t be unhappy about that. I wanted her to be safe. She was probably going to be angry with me, and I couldn’t blame her for that, either. This wasn’t the worst thing I’d ever done to her—it wasn’t even something I’d technically done—but it was one more on top of so many others that it was dizzying to think about it more than I had to.

Quentin, on the other hand . . . given the society Titania had designed, it was no real surprise that he would have no respect or compassion for changelings. When I’d first met him in the real world, he’d thought less of changelings just because they were generally less powerful than purebloods. Slapping that attitude out of him had been the work of several encounters and a few life-threatening adventures. This Quentin had never experienced those things. He’d grown up according to the standards of his society, and while I hated it, I couldn’t exactly blame him. We are all vulnerable to the things we hear from the people we trust to take care of us, and he’d been a victim of that vulnerability.

Somehow, I didn’t think he was going to see things the same way when this was all over. I was a changeling. His mother had been born a changeling. His boyfriend was a mixed-blood, something else that Titania had tried as hard as possible to eliminate from her perfect world. Hard as I tried, I couldn’t remember any notable mixed-bloods in her reality except for January, and she’d thrown Jan as far away as possible while keeping her inside the limits of her spell. There had probably been some reason she needed Jan’s existence to keep her reality from crumbling, but I couldn’t think of what it might be, not right now.

The halls were more deserted than I would have expected, and sometimes we would turn a corner and find ourselves confronted with an expanse of misty nothing instead of another corridor. When that happened, Simon would pause, make an unhappy noise, and then try another route, leading us through the knowe in an increasingly labyrinthine pattern.

We took a brief detour by one of the knowe’s kitchens for him to mix up a primitive iron treatment, and our Daoine Sidhe seemed to perk up after that, especially Simon himself. Being able to help the others was almost as medicinal for him as the treatment itself. Thus reinvigorated, we resumed our trek through the halls.

I leaned closer to the Luidaeg as we walked. “Is this going to work?”

“Titania isn’t creating new spaces, which means she’s working with whatever collapsed and wasn’t somehow reclassified as ‘lost,’” she said. “I don’t understand how that magic works. I don’t think anyone does.” She looked speculatively at Tybalt as she said that, clearly waiting for him to contradict her.

Instead, he shrugged. “The magic that takes the lost things to our Court is very old. It may be older than the Cait Sidhe ourselves. I don’t even know if Oberon actually put it in place; it may have simply arisen from the void, a necessary part of Faerie maintaining its own structural integrity. Or maybe it’s a spell so ancient and complex that we no longer understand it, and so we dismiss it as the way things have always worked. Understanding the difference is beyond me.”