Page 36 of The Innocent Sleep

Her eyes snapped open immediately, and she rolled onto her back, staring at me. “Tybalt?” she squeaked, after a moment’s stunned silence.

“To my occasional deep regret and frequent relief, yes,” I said. “May?”

“As long as I stay inside the Library, yeah,” she said. “When I try to go outside, I start becoming Mai again, and she doesn’t have any of May’s memories, not even the ones I got from Toby.”

“Does this make any sense to you?” asked Garm.

“Strangely, yes,” said Magdaleana. “Now shush, and let them talk. If you have research to do, I can direct you to the stacks.”

“No, that’s fine,” said Garm. “This is way more interesting.”

I was sure it was, but my attention was far too focused on May to spare any for him. She was still staring at me, gray eyes wide and wounded in her half-familiar face. She looked like October had before she’d been forced to burn quite so much of her mortality away. Not like the woman I’d married, but very like the woman I’d fallen in love with.

“Do you know what happened?” she asked.

“According to Amphitrite, and supported by the Librarian and Sir Garm, Titania has rewritten the world to remove the pesky little parts outside her control,” I said. “This is Faerie as written in her image. The Cait Sidhe are considered extinct, locked in our Courts with only the royal cats able to come or go. Changelings are intentionally bred to serve noble houses. October lives with August in Amandine’s tower. Simon has been swept into this grand delusion as well. The Lordens are beside themselves with worry and rage.”

“But Toby’s okay,” asked May. “I mean, except for the abusive, narcissistic mother situation she’s been thrown back into. That part’s not great. Have you seen Jazz at all? Or the boys?”

“Raj is in the Court of Cats. Quentin is at Shadowed Hills. Rayseline is nowhere to be seen and, as Sylvester apparently never married her mother, may be, like you, impossible and exiled to some out-of-the-way place where Titania can forget about her.”

“And no Jazz?”

Silent, I shook my head.

May swallowed hard. “Okay. Okay. She’s fine, I’m sure she’s fine. She’s a big girl, can take care of herself, and from what I understand, Titania hasn’t been hurting anyone—not by pureblood standards, anyway. She’s just pushing us around like pieces on a game board.”

“That matches with what I’ve seen.”

“Then we need to figure out how to win.” She laughed, just a little, sounding unmoored. “That’s normally Toby’s job. But here we are, both of us on our own.”

I tilted my head. “Should I go seeking your lady?”

“No,” she said, with surprising fierceness. I blinked. She sighed. “She won’t know me. You can’t bring her here, and I can’t go to her. Knowing where she is would only make it worse for me.”

“Ah,” I said. “And for me, the uncertainty would be the worst thing of all.”

“I may be able to help with the figuring out how to win,” said Magdaleana, stepping forward again. She was holding a large, cloth-bound book that she must have picked up when I wasn’t looking. “After I found May in the stacks and the Gwragen of the region began showing up to read old history books, I started doing some of my own research. Puca aren’t common anymore, and haven’t been for a long time; we’ve historically been one of the first targets when Faerie’s existence has become too blatant for the humans to ignore, thanks to our inability to conceal ourselves. If something was going truly awry, I needed to know about it.”

I frowned. “And?”

“And Titania has done this, several times in the past, usually when she didn’t get her way about something she felt was important. It takes a lot out of her, and she can’t sustain it forever, as it effectively has to be recast every day, when the sun comes up and starts punching holes in the edges of her spell. The people who’ve been put on record after one of these enchantments ended have reported odd dreams followed by waking with memories of things that never happened cluttering their minds, only to fade as the night went on. If you’re going to try approaching someone under the illusion’s control, I’d suggest doing it as close to dawn as possible, for a better chance of success. It wears on her. The longer and larger the spell, the heavier it becomes, until eventually she has to try putting it down.”

“When does that happen?”

“If this is meant to be a short-term punishment, any moment. It’s already got to be draining her reserves. Given May, however, and the confinement of the Cait Sidhe, and the fact that apparently people believe the Undersea was destroyed in the 1906 Earthquake? As if that makes any sense at all, it’s an entire realm, and it’s very large, one earthquake isn’t going to be enough to wipe it out—”

“Mags,” said May, tone sharp as she nudged the other woman back toward the point.

“What? Oh. Sorry. As I was saying, this doesn’t feel temporary. This feels like Titania aiming for a permanent revision. Which means she needs a way to fuel it, to keep it from collapsing in on itself.”

“That would make sense,” I agreed, tersely.

“I think she’s intending to anchor it to the Heart of Faerie on Moving Day. Samhain is the next stop on the wheel of the year, and if Titania can Ride, as the Queens used to, before Maeve was lost . . . if she makes her sacrifice to the Heart as the old ritual intended, she’ll be able to pull enough power to anchor her spell into the Heart itself. It’ll be powered by the raw force of Faerie, and it’ll spread like a virus, until it covers the entirety of our world.”

“No pressure,” said May cheerfully.

I stared at Magdaleana. “Moving Day.”