Page 32 of A Divided Duty

I didn’t have an answer for that, because she was right. We’d been able to defeat Titania and unmake her poisoned paradise, but the marks it had left on all of us weren’t going to be nearly so fast to fade. We remembered everything. The people we’d been, the lives we’d lived, every brutally orchestrated piece of what she’d tried to make of us. For Arden, that meant remembering a life where she hadn’t been parted from her brother for eighty years, or forced to flee from Faerie to hide herself in the human world. A life where she’d been able to kill the woman who killed both her parents, exiling herself from her home kingdom but also sleeping peacefully at day, knowing that justice had been done. A life where our neighbors to the south, on Golden Shores, had become surrogate parents of a sort, a family to comfort her in place of the one she’d lost.

Arden was one of the only people whose life in the other world had been a genuine improvement, and it was going to take a while for the bruises it had left behind to fade.

“I suppose,” I said. I couldn’t miss the concerned look Nolan was giving her as she moved toward me, or the way he moved to follow, quick and almost anxious. “Should we get back to the hall?”

“The refreshments will be circulating by now,” said Arden. “People won’t miss us for another ten minutes at minimum.”

It would have been nice to believe that she was right, but I’ve found that people start missing me well before I want them to. And as if to voice that thought without requiring me to, a portal opened in the air off to one side, wafting sycamore smoke and calla lilies into the air. I smelled Chelsea’s magic before she popped out, looking half-frantically around.

She didn’t relax when she saw me, which meant she hadn’t been sent by an over-anxious Tybalt to figure out where I was hiding: if anything, her tension got worse, tears welling up in her eyes as she threw herself through the portal and into my arms.

Arden and Nolan blinked, both of them looking stunned by this new arrival. Chelsea ignored them, clinging to my arms as she babbled, “Can’t find her I tried I went looking and she’s not there not anywhere Toby she’s gone she’s gone she’s gone…”

Anything that involves the phrase “she’s gone” that many times in a row is probably bad, especially now that we have so many people that “she” could apply to. Despite the spike of fear that tried to pierce my heart, logic told me that she wasn’t talking about Miranda: if she had been, Tybalt would have been here first, and I’d already be gone, off to find whoever dared to touch my child and break their hands for even thinking about it. But this was Chelsea, and she was clearly distraught, and really, any questions I had were just a frantic attempt to convince myself that my first guess was wrong, that Luna wouldn’t do this to her own daughter.

I knew the truth. Taking a deep breath, I looked at Chelsea and asked, “Where’s Raysel?”

“I just told you I can’t find her,” half-wailed Chelsea.

“I often cannot find my sister,” said Nolan. “She went out for coffee last night and it was four hours before I could locate her. Perhaps the Torquill girl has gone for coffee?”

“She’s Daoine Sidhe, Nolan: she can’t teleport,” I said. “If she’d just gone for coffee, she would have taken Chelsea with her, and we wouldn’t be having this conversation.”

Chelsea turned to look at him like he had just said the stupidest thing in the history of speech, then turned slowly back to me, eyes still teary and over-bright. “She went … Quentin took her to one of the sitting rooms to catch her breath where she wouldn’t have to look at people. I went to join her, and she asked me if I could find some of the little surprise pithiviers the waiters were handing out. I said sure and I … I…” She stopped talking and started wailing, tears coming hot and fast.

Shit. “Chelsea, whatever happened, this isn’t your fault,” I said firmly. “Whether you were there or not, if someone was going to take her, they were going to take her. What happened?”

“I went for the pithiviers, and when I came back, she was gone.”

“Could she have gotten tired of waiting and gone somewhere else on her own?” asked Arden.

Chelsea shook her head, drooping as she let go and pulled away from me. “I came back and the glass she’d been drinking from was broken on the floor. Raysel never leaves broken glass just laying around. She lives with blood-workers and a baby, she’s too careful for that. And before you ask, she wouldn’t have left it for somebody to step on while she went to find a broom. She would have called for someone to bring her one.”

“That still doesn’t prove—”

“She wouldn’t have left without telling me!” snapped Chelsea, then wilted, pulling back, as she realized that she’d just raised her voice to the Queen in the Mists.

Arden raised an eyebrow but didn’t otherwise comment, just turned to me. “Sir Daye, it appears your ward may be missing. Will you please let us know when you’ve located her safely?”

It was simultaneously a dismissal and permission to go take care of the situation. I gave her a shallow, grateful bow before turning back to Chelsea. “Can you take me to where you left her?”

“I can,” said Chelsea, and grabbed my wrist even as she sketched a portal in the air with her free hand. The smell of her magic rose around us, strong enough to be overwhelming, and then she was stepping through the portal, pulling me along with her.

I looked over my shoulder, getting one last glimpse of the moon-drenched courtyard before the portal slammed shut and we were standing in one of the small parlors off the receiving room. It was decorated in silver and purple, empty save for several plush chairs and a small table on which someone had left a small sandwich tower and a plate of some sort of half-eaten shrimp salad. The smashed glass Chelsea had mentioned was still on the floor, along with a discarded fork.

“See? She was right—”

“Be quiet.” I raised a hand. Chelsea shut up. Closing my eyes, I took the deepest breath I could.

Chelsea’s magic was the most obvious, hanging over everything else like a thick fog. I pushed my way beneath it, and there was the hot wax and crushed blackthorn of Raysel’s magic. It hadn’t been used actively, but she had been here long enough for it to permeate the air where she’d been sitting, settled low and easy, like a purring cat. There were other magical scents beneath that, but they were faded and worn away, left behind by the staff in passing.

And there was one thin ribbon of scent that I couldn’t quite pin down, light and floral, running under everything else. It was strange, definitely magical in nature, but not as deep or complex as I would have expected it to be. I sniffed again, then opened my eyes.

“No one portaled her out of here,” I said. “And if somebody used a compulsion spell, they managed to do it without leaving any traces of their magic behind. I don’t know, Chelsea. I think she may have just walked away for some reason.”

“She didn’t. She wouldn’t. Please, Toby. There has to be something here to find.”

I frowned, then lifted my hand and bit down on the skin at the side of my thumbnail. Healing the way I do means that I almost never have to worry about scarring, and so the skin there stays thin and easy to tear. After only a few nibbles, the cuticle tore and blood smeared onto my tongue, bright-hot and sweeter than I would have thought possible.