Page 6 of The Innocent Sleep

The Divided Courts are a confusing place indeed. I was to set my crown aside because I could never have chosen a vassal over my lady: in that, Sylvester and I were aligned. But his insistence on holding his position when he knew he would always place Luna above those who put their lives in his hands was inexplicable to me. Almost as inexplicable, the fact that Queen Windermere allowed it.

Still, Arden was a reasonable enough woman, and her affection for October was well established, if often leavened with frustration—a mixture I understood quite well where my lady was concerned. I threw myself back into the shadows and raced for Muir Woods, forcing myself to keep moving even as my lungs began to ache and my legs began to protest the distances I had already traveled on this evening, the blood I had already shed. The battle with Titania felt very distant now, the sort of thing that had happened to another man in another lifetime. But in truth it had only been a few hours, and my body marked the time, even if my heart could not.

The mortal side of Muir Woods was open when I arrived, stepping out of the shadows in a far corner of the parking lot. Most of the spaces were full; none of the cars I saw were October’s. I shook the shards of my brief, irrational hope away and walked toward the park entrance, where a human ticket-taker waited to admit me.

A quick expenditure of magic later, and he believed a slip of paper I had picked up from the gutter during my approach was a valid access pass. I walked on, not sparing any attention for the human tourists who had come to gawk at the natural wonders of the state around them. They had their lives; I had mine. There was no reason for us to intersect, not in this moment.

Muir Woods looked much as it always did, and that normalcy was like a balm for my frazzled nerves as I followed the pathway through the trees to the curving hillside walk that would allow me access to Arden’s knowe. It took me three passes to find the trail worn into the briars, the roots of towering redwoods forming a natural staircase up. I wrapped a don’t-look-here spell around myself and began the climb, safely sheltered from the eyes of any watching humans.

The air brightened and deepened around me, turning fresher and cleaner than anything remaining in the mortal world, and I breathed deeply as I stepped off the root stairway onto the level ground above.

And then I froze. The tree that should have housed the entrance to Arden’s knowe was gone, leaving a rotten stump where it should have been. I approached slowly, staring at the moss-patched, spongy wood. The break was neither recent nor clean. The remains of the tree were still there, mounded over with growth and reclaimed by the forest, but from the appearance of everything around it, it had fallen decades before. Maybe as long ago as the Earthquake.

For October to disappear was a personal tragedy but well within the realm of the possible. For the Luidaeg to go missing at the same time was suspicious, and terrifying. For the Queen in the Mists and her entire knowe to vanish was something else altogether.

The world was broken. October was gone, everything was out of order, and none of this was ever going to make sense.

My legs were abruptly too weak to hold me up any longer. I shuffled to the nearest log and sat, my knees giving out halfway through the motion. Shock was very clearly setting in.

There were so many other places I could go looking, but what was the point? I had already visited the most likely and found them deserted. October would never have done this to me on purpose; whatever had happened, it must be outside her control, huge and terrible and inescapable. I put my hands over my face and my elbows on my knees, trying to concentrate on breathing through the panic. On anything other than the looming feeling that the sky was about to fall, and everything I knew and loved was going to be ripped away.

Or already had been. I was starting to remember more about the moments right before the light. Specifically, I remembered the smell of roses. Roses have always been a common element of magic, more common than most others. I’m not my little fish, to pick a person’s magic apart and name the precise origins of its every aspect; tell her someone’s magic smells of apples and she can tell you what type of apple, where it was grown, and whether it comes fresh from the tree or has been doctored in some way. Her line is uniquely sensitive to the markers of another’s magic.

I can’t do what she can do, but I can remember the smell of roses. October’s mother smelled of roses, as did her sister. As did Evening, may she sleep forever in the shadows.

As did Titania.

That thought was like a key unlocking everything else. I sat suddenly upright, staring into nothingness as I remembered October screaming, and Titania’s appearance in the doorway.

“I can’t hurt you,” she had said. “But I can make you someone else’s problem.”

And after that, to me: “I don’t think there’s a place for you in what I’m doing.”

That was when everything had gone red, then white, and I had been alone in the Court of Cats, disoriented, with no idea how I’d come to be there.

I stood. So this was Titania’s doing, then. I felt a little foolish at having taken so long to put it together, but in my defense, I had been very deeply in shock, and could be forgiven for a little panic when faced with the First among us all.

The Luidaeg was missing, and with her, one presumed, Oberon, as the man had been in her keeping and company since his return. I wasn’t sure how much help he would have been anyway: he’d shown very little inclination to be anything more than a silent presence, making things awkward without making them better. I had always assumed that Oberon’s return, should I live to see it, would somehow improve Faerie, or at least try. Instead, what we had was an absent father figure who just happened to be in the room.

Perhaps the answer was in finding another among the Firstborn. They couldn’t match Titania for power, but they might be able to see the traceries of her machinations. Whatever this was, they were the ones who stood a chance at unraveling it.

Still seated, I began running down a silent count of the Firstborn I knew, and who claimed them. There was the Luidaeg, of course, famously a daughter of Maeve and already eliminated through sheer virtue of her absence. For all that I knew, Hirsent still haunted the hills of Armorica, terrorizing the unwary and threatening the unwise. She wouldn’t be pleased to see me again, and anyway, she was a daughter of Maeve as well.

Two of the daughters of Titania I knew of were entirely inaccessible to me, Eira because she was elf-shot and asleep on a road I could not reach, not even through my shadows, and Acacia because she dwelt in the skerry created by her late husband, separate from the Summerlands and all but exiled for most purposes.

Amphitrite, on the other hand . . .

Amphitrite was a daughter of Titania, named and claimed and honored as such, and she had danced at my wedding and given us a good and generous gift. She was well inclined toward me, or at least toward my lady, and might be able to tell me what was wrong, that I might set it right. I stood, the need to speak with her burning in my breast, and turned a slow circle as I recovered my bearings.

Muir Woods was originally chosen to serve as the royal seat of the Mists for many reasons, not least of which is its proximity to the water. Only three miles separate the state park from Muir Beach, which is popular with human tourists and fae alike. It’s not the best place for meeting with Merrow or Selkies, as privacy can be difficult to come by. It is, however, home to several lovely, abrupt drop-offs, land giving way to water in gloriously sheer cliffsides.

I needed one of those now. I finished my turn and broke into a run, heading as swiftly as I could into the surrounding forest. As I ran, I shifted forms, trading bipedalism for the swiftness of four strong legs and the keenness of feline senses. When even that proved too slow for my hammering heart, I leapt into the shadows and let them carry me ever more quickly to my destination.

The next time I emerged from the shadows, it was onto the high overlook from which visitors might view great swaths of the Pacific Coast in a glance. Luck was with me: while the beach far below was spattered with people, the overlook was empty upon my arrival, none of the current visitors having chosen the dizzying heights and often strong winds of the overlook itself. I still stepped as far back from the edge as I could before shifting into two-legged form. Once that was done, I cast a notice-me-not around myself. The last thing I needed now was to accidentally activate the protective instincts of nearby humans.

While it was more than possible to fall from the overlook, it had been built with the expectation of curious children and careless tourists, and was thus set some distance back from the actual end of the coastal cliffs. I climbed up onto the overlook rail, the salt-tinted air slapping at my face and my hair blowing wild in the Pacific wind as I stepped down on the other side. The ground there was rocky and uneven, not intended for passage, barred to casual wanderers by the sternly-worded signs of the local park service.

Those signs were intended for humans, not for me. I ignored them as I picked my way closer and closer to the sea, choosing each step with absolute care, until I was standing where the land dropped away, replaced by the endless frothing expanse of the sea. It was so far away. It seemed as if anyone who fell from here would fall forever.