Page 104 of The Innocent Sleep

“Could we, then?” I asked. Raysel shifted behind me, joining Garm at my back, half-hiding herself from Titania’s view.

“You only rose against me because of what I took from you,” she said. “What if I could offer you something even better? What if I could give you paradise?”

“I’m not breaking the circle.”

“No, but you involved yourself in the ritual, and that makes you mine if I want you,” she said, and snapped her fingers.

The world twisted, shifted around us, and I was no longer standing in a circle of blazing white. Instead, I was sitting in the rafters of a theater I hadn’t seen for centuries, high above a stage on which mortal men walked through their places, reciting their lines.

And I was not alone. Someone was coming along the rafter behind me. I turned, and beheld the human form of my sister, Colleen, two cats cradled in her arms—one tabby, one tuxedo. Jill and Cailin, both of whom had been dead almost as long as I’d been gone from Londinium.

“I could give you back all the cats you’ve lost,” said Titania’s voice, soft and sweet and beguiling. “All the way back to the beginning. I could remake Faerie so that they never left you, and all you need to do is convince one person to let go of their rider. What’s a squire compared to a sister? Compared to three sisters, all alive and hale and home with you?”

I closed my eyes to the sound of Titania’s laughter, and didn’t move, even as I felt the rafter beneath me twist into something new again, until her voice became the patter of running water and children laughing. I opened my eyes, and I was in the small village square we’d constructed within Londinium’s Court of Cats after I became King. Only one of my sisters was there, Colleen, sitting on the edge of the fountain and watching her daughter, Cailin—named for our lost eldest sister—chase her friend Chalcedony around and around.

Both girls were giggling wildly, overcome with the joy of being young and wild and alive. I looked at their faces, and hated Titania all the more, because this moment had been shaped from my memories of the last months before Chalcedony’s death. Why she thought she could tempt me with ghosts, I didn’t know. I had no desire to become my own haunting.

“This isn’t real,” I said.

Colleen turned to look at me. “It could be,” she said. “Only let her have the power she seeks to remake the world into something better, and it could be. The present is no paradise, Rand. Trade it for everything we should have been able to have together. Bring back the lost, and let the Court of Cats be the power it was intended to be when Oberon decreed it.”

I sighed.

“I miss you,” I said. “You have no idea how much I miss you, Colleen. Some days I dream of nothing more than making the journey to Londinium, to see if you still rule, or to ask whoever holds our throne now what became of you. Leaving you saved us both, and yet I regret it to this moment. You were my first family, my sister in all ways, and I am sorry, but I cannot give you what she asks for through your lips. Our time is past. The world has moved on.”

Her expression soured. “You won’t save us, then.”

“I don’t know that you need to be saved.”

“And her?” She gestured, almost violently, to Chalcedony. “Need I remind you how she died?”

I grimaced. “I remember.”

“But still you won’t choose us. You won’t choose your real family, or Faerie. Fine, then. May you have the future you deserve.”

I knew it wasn’t Colleen speaking. I knew it, and still I closed my eyes and turned my face away. Damn Titania, for showing me these things. Damn her for trying to make me feel like this was on me, and not on her terrible machinations.

A hand touched my arm. It was soft and gentle, and there was no scent of magic, but there was a scent of woodburning fire and boiled cabbage, of rough, mortal-made lye soap, and coal smoke in the air. My shoulders slumped and I turned my face away, not quite willing to see what I knew Titania was trying to tempt me with now.

“I won’t,” I said, desperately. “I won’t, you won’t lure me with this, please, don’t make me look.”

“Too ashamed, even now, to admit that there was a time when you would have chosen a human life before Faerie, when you turned your back on everything you had been raised to hold dear? Too ashamed of your youthful failings to even look at her face?” This time, Titania’s laughter was mocking. “I could give her back to you, you know. I could even make you mortal, if you wanted to live alongside her as a part of her temporary world. Let you have an ending.”

“I won’t see you defile her memory in this way,” I said, voice cold. “I refuse. You may have caught me in your little ritual, but you and I would both know it for a lie.”

“It doesn’t have to be. I can change the world. Why won’t you let me change the world? Your path to the present day is littered with the bodies of the women you failed to save. I’m not going to hurt October, or the child she carries. Her mother has already agreed to raise the babe as if it were her own. You could save someone you think past saving. And all you have to do is pull one person away from someone who agreed to Ride for me. All you have to do is compromise.”

The hand on my arm and the smell in the room changed at the same time, the smell of smoke and cabbage replaced by pine-pitch and apple blossoms, the warmth and slightest roughness of the hand’s fingertips replaced by smoother, cooler skin.

“Tybalt?” said September.

I sighed as I turned and finally opened my eyes. I was standing in a room that had never once been mine to enter, walls draped in silk and velvet, red and gold and glorious, and there, in front of me, was yet another dead woman. September Torquill was wearing a gown of white and red, and it was no real surprise that it was like a parody of October’s wedding dress, roses and lace designed for another woman’s tastes, another woman’s needs.

“If I’d chosen you, I’d still be alive,” she said, voice thick with sorrow and sincerity. “I made a mistake. She’s offering to let me take it back—she’s offering to let you take me back. Please. Change the world just this once. Save me.”

“At what cost? It won’t be the real September.”

“But it will! I linger with the night-haunts yet, faded but still present, and she could restore me to my proper place. She could remake everything. All you have to say is yes.”