Page 106 of The Innocent Sleep

“You spend half your time in my house, I have this much authority.”

Raysel, having picked up on the numbers and the fact that someone would have to carry the sea witch, hurried to lever August up, wrapping the unconscious woman’s arm around her shoulders. Simon looked unimpressed but didn’t object, not wanting to scare the girl. He moved to lift the Luidaeg, October looking like she couldn’t decide between helping him and helping Raysel.

In the end, the Luidaeg won out, and she stepped over to help him.

Between the five of us, we were able to get our four fallen off the ground. We were, however, still in the middle of nowhere. I reached for the Shadow Roads, finding them easily, then turned to Dean.

“You carry one of those mobile phones, yes?”

“Yes,” said Dean uncertainly.

“Do you have it with you?”

“Yes,” he said again, and shifted his grip on Garm so that he could reach one hand into his pocket, producing a small metal-and-glass rectangle. “The battery’s half-dead.”

“It’s been four months,” said Simon.

“April wanted to make sure we didn’t lose touch just because Toby dragged us off on a wild goose chase,” said Dean. “My phone’s good for almost a year, if I’m not doing anything major with it. All I’ve been doing since this started is taking pictures and reading things I already had downloaded.”

“Please don’t explain what that means,” I said. “Can you send a text to Raj, please?”

“Sure?” Dean lowered Garm carefully back to the ground, then began tapping away. A moment later, his phone buzzed, and he raised his eyebrows. “Okay, Raj says Ginevra just came back, and all the other cats are unconscious. He seems pretty freaked out.”

“As he should be,” I said. “Tell him the Ride is broken and that we’re somewhere deep in the Summerlands. I can’t transport you all via the Shadow Roads. It’s not safe to take anyone unconscious through that route, and I refuse to take October into the cold.”

“Hey,” she objected.

I ignored her. “So we’re going to have to walk until we find a way out of here, which may take a while. Please let him know that we’re all alive.”

I wasn’t going to claim that we were all okay. Not yet. That status was reserved for some point in the future, when we were all safe in our homes and no longer dealing with the aftermath of chaos.

Dean resumed tapping at the screen, then glanced up. “Raj asks if there’s anything he can do.”

“Not unless he knows someone who can perform a location spell powerful enough to find us in the deep wilds,” I said. “Does anyone have the key?”

“The Luidaeg had it last,” said Raysel. “I didn’t see what happened to it.”

“And as I doubt any of us wants to search her pockets, that means no,” I said. “Fine. Let’s go.”

We started walking, slow and unsteady. Everyone was still dealing with iron poisoning; the spell’s aftereffects rendering half our number unconscious didn’t make this any easier. Quentin was a dead weight in my arms, and I wished I had a blanket or something to cover him with; he deserved more dignity than this. At least he was breathing normally. While we might not know how long the backlash of Titania’s spell would last, it didn’t seem to have done any physical damage.

I was honestly more concerned about the Luidaeg. She had been more affected by the iron in the dungeons than she’d admitted to any of us, and I would have been willing to wager that her current state had more to do with how much magic she’d performed without a chance to clear the poison from her system. Firstborn are hard to kill. How hard are they to damage, really? It wasn’t a question I’d had much cause to contemplate.

Although it was going to be a question in the future. Amandine had to die for what she’d done. Not just Simon, but Quentin, and telling Titania that she’d be willing to raise my child as her own. She had signed her own death warrant with that decision, and if she had any sense at all, she knew it.

We staggered on, across the seemingly endless fields, the sky shining dark above us, until we reached the forest’s edge. I paused there, sniffing the air.

Yes, I still smelled bonfires in the distance. We might be far from any habitations, but not so far the wind couldn’t reach. And if the wind could reach, we could get there.

“This way,” I said, trying to sound confident, and kept walking.

The nature of our respective burdens meant that October couldn’t pace me, not without leaving Simon to carry the Luidaeg alone. I was, in all honesty, grateful for the silence. Once we were alone, we would have a great deal to discuss, beginning with how much I had missed her and ending with how angry I was that the moment she had been restored to herself, she had gone charging right back into danger. I didn’t expect her to change. I expected her to remember that she was endangering more than just herself, no matter how good she believed her reasons to be.

On and on we walked. The journey was simultaneously nerve-racking and uneventful. The sky was black and endless. The forest was dark and filled with shifting shadows and strange noises, owls calling out across the miles and foxes cackling in the deep distance. What forms those creatures would actually take remained unrevealed, as they avoided us much as we avoided them.

Garm, who had been able to perceive the changed world if not break through the changes on his own, was the first to start to stir. He groaned and twitched, becoming harder to carry, until finally he opened his eyes and began to stumble along, trying to regain his footing. Dean stopped walking, letting Garm steady himself. Garm groaned, rubbing his face with one hand.

“I feel like I just took a brick to the head,” he said, sourly.