Page 42 of The Innocent Sleep

“Have you any contacts within the Air Kingdoms?” When she looked at me in bewilderment, I shrugged. “It seems that storms would be part of their domain as well as part of your own. If the barrier extends to the bottom of the sea, perhaps the Air Kingdoms could tell us how high it goes.”

“Even if we had a way to communicate with them, would knowing even make a difference?” demanded Patrick. “We’re bugs in a jar. Being able to determine exactly how big the jar is doesn’t change that we can’t get out, or that some of our people are outside where we can’t get to them.”

“Titania’s power is not infinite,” I said. “We think we’ve figured out her plan, and Moving Day is when she’ll put the next phase of it into action. She can’t push the borders of this spell any farther until we reach that point—can’t, or won’t. Perhaps she could, but at the cost of some fidelity.”

Patrick’s face screwed up like he was going to start yelling at me. Then he stopped and sagged, resignation wiping the fury away. “You’ve seen them.”

Dianda looked sharply over at him, then back to me. “What?” she asked, a dangerous note in her voice.

Upsetting her wasn’t something to be done lightly, or, if possible, at all. I stood my ground, refusing the sensible urge to retreat.

Patrick did not refuse the less-sensible urge to advance. He moved toward me, managing to seem menacing in a way I had never previously seen from the man. It didn’t suit him. He was not a figure made for menace. “He’s seen them. There’s no way he’d be standing here calmly talking about phases and limits if he didn’t know where they were.”

Ginevra lowered the towel, clearly prepared to jump into the fray if it came to that. I raised a hand, motioning for patience.

“Patrick is right,” I said, and watched as Dianda’s eyes narrowed and the helpful readiness drained out of her face, replaced by stony chill. It was like watching a storm roll in over a previously calm and clement sea, and a good reminder that the undertow was always present, if not always in evidence.

“I haven’t seen all of them,” I continued. “But October . . . I found her, and she’s well. Titania has put her in Amandine’s tower.”

“With Amandine?” asked Dianda.

I nodded. “It seems Titania couldn’t imagine a better way to torture my wife than placing her back in the company of the mother she despises.”

“And Simon?”

This was going to be the tricky part. I took a careful breath, delaying for a few precious seconds, before I said, “There as well, as is August, and returned by Titania’s whims to the service of the Countess Winterrose, who once more has dominion over Goldengreen. As the Cait Sidhe were sealed into our Courts, May was sealed into the Library of Stars; it seems Titania has removed the impossible people from her reality, placing them in safe, secluded locations. Dean would be one of those. I don’t believe she’ll have harmed him, physically. I don’t know where he is.”

“But we know Simon is back in the company of two of the women who tortured him for decades,” said Patrick, voice low and dangerous. “Is Oleander . . . ?”

“Of Oleander, there has thankfully been no sign,” I said, grateful to have at least that much good news to give them. “I think even Titania saw that Faerie was better off without her.”

“Not only that,” said an unfamiliar voice from behind me. The speaker had an Irish accent, several centuries removed from what the modern island sounded like, mixed with something unfamiliar, something sharp-edged and brisk. It was an odd blend, like one of October’s sandwiches, two things that shouldn’t have worked together and yet somehow did.

I turned. A Roane woman had emerged from the pool at the center of the room and was standing behind me, water sheeting from her clothes and a distant, dreamy expression on her face. Her hair was gold and her eyes were blue, deep and drowning and inhuman, even though the color could just as easily have belonged to a mortal swimmer. Something about the way her irises were shaped shifted her slightly outside of what humanity considered possible.

“The Lady of Flowers cloaks herself in lies because she cannot endure what is,” she said. “She hates and fears those who see what yet may come to pass, and hates us all the more because she’s never once been able to find the precise pattern to dance between the raindrops. She always winds up getting wet. It’s why she nudged and implied and hinted until her children, who only wanted to please her, agreed to close our eyes eternally. It’s why she allowed so many cruelties. The Peri, for all that it’s not what they’re best remembered as in this world of now and nothing, saw as clearly as any did, when they turned their eyes to the future. She would never have considered calling one of their kind back from beyond the border of death, not even to make those who’ve stood against her suffer.”

“Mary,” said Patrick. “You know you don’t have to be here. We can handle—”

“The ebb and flow of ordinary tides, my Pat, but not the aching undertow of the ones we swim through now. I think you take too much after your source, sometimes; you don’t want the prophet present when she might speak prophecy that you’ll dislike.” Her words were not unkindly said, but they had a quiet accusation to them that even I could hear.

Patrick heard it much more clearly than I did. He shied back, seeming almost ashamed.

The Roane woman—Mary—fixed her attention on me, and began to approach, steps as slow and measured as her voice. “You won’t like them either, King of Cats. So many crowns, stretching back so far, and not a single one of them won out of wanting. You are a king of necessity and service. You don’t know what it is to sit idle. But it seems you’ll need to learn.”

“Mary, what are you saying?” asked Dianda.

“There’s no guarantee you sail this ship safe to harbor. Once the Three get involved, the future refuses to clarify, stays as cloudy as a mariner’s morning. But this I can tell you: nothing changes from here to Moving Day. Not for them. You can throw yourselves against the cliffs of their isolation, but they remain where and who they are. They’re not your loved ones, not right now; the Summer Queen has made them over in other images, and they won’t know you. Move too soon and you might lose them.”

“If it were only October, I might be able to wait; she’s a hero, after all,” I said, forcing my voice to stay level. “But she doesn’t walk alone.”

“Oh, the baby?”

“Yes, the baby.” We hadn’t told anyone. There hadn’t been time to tell them. But it wasn’t really a surprise that this strange Roane woman would look at me and know.

“I wouldn’t worry,” she said, and walked past me to Dianda, taking her hands and looking her square in the eye as she continued. “So long as she can eat and sleep and care for herself, the babe will be more than hale.”

I frowned, no longer sure that I was the one being addressed. “They don’t seem to be starving her. From what little I’ve seen, August would never allow it.” I had been to watch from outside the tower walls more times than was advisable, sitting in the tall grass at a reasonable distance and staring at the girls as they went about their business. While August was more likely to sniff at flowers as October gathered herbs or pulled weeds, she was also likely to braid flowers into her sister’s hair, or bring October fruits gathered from the other side of the garden. There seemed to be true affection there. Whether created by the illusion or no, they both believed it, and that made it real enough for the moment.