Page 53 of A Divided Duty

There was no one there. No one moved; no one lurked in the corners; no one waited to jump me for having the audacity to follow them. I was alone.

This had definitely been the great hall of the keep at one point. The rotten remains of tapestries and coats of arms hung on the walls, their edges tattered and charred, like there had been a fire here that left no other marks behind. A massive oaken table stretched almost the full length of the room, still sturdy enough to support the heaped-up pile of armor that had been dropped on it, still dripping with Acacia’s blood.

A small, despairing sound escaped my lips. I couldn’t help it. The people who’d taken Raysel had clearly known that they would be followed, if not who would be following them; their trail had been so straight and easily followed because they’d known that they were laying it.

It might not have been a trap. It was definitely a trick, and we’d fallen for it.

I moved closer to the table, shifting my candle so that the flame illuminated more of the heap, and inhaled, looking for the scent of magic under the blood. Anything I could learn about the people we were following would be valuable. I breathed in, then promptly started coughing and staggered back from the table, the taste of a dozen disparate magical signatures clinging to the back of my throat like a sticky film I couldn’t quite shake.

I was still coughing when one of the shelves on the far wall swung open and Tybalt crept through, moving with such silent grace that I was sure I wouldn’t have noticed him if I hadn’t been aware that he was coming. His head snapped around at the sound of my coughs, and he hurried toward me, crossing the empty room with a frown on his face and his candle raised high. I waved a hand frantically between us, trying to signal that I was okay.

It didn’t work. He didn’t slow down, and when he reached me he immediately began rubbing my back. “What can I do?” he asked.

I shook my head, managing to wheeze, “I’m fine. Too much magic, too smashed together. The people who took Raysel looked like Riders, and I don’t think it was just the armor. At least some of them were Blind Michael’s victims.”

As soon as I said the words aloud, I knew they had to be true. What’s more, my conviction brought other things into sudden clarity. Like the hunting horn we’d heard when we arrived, and then again when we emerged from the wood. Back when Michael had been here, his Hunt had been able to move freely between the skerry and the Summerlands. That implied they’d had some sort of method for making the transition without direct aid from either him or Acacia.

If the Luidaeg could make candles, who was to say that her brother hadn’t made horns? Solid, physical things that didn’t gutter and go out, but could be blown to open a gateway?

There was no Ride right now. The Riders had nothing to hunt. Acacia would have told us if she’d set them on something outside her own borders. But if they needed to cross over for whatever reason …

“She’s not here anymore,” I said, finally getting my breath back. “They took her somewhere else, and they had time to change their clothes before they did it. This is a dead end.”

“That implies planning,” he said, cocking his head to the side and frowning. “This wasn’t just a crime of opportunity.”

“No, they knew what they were doing,” I agreed. “Rayseline has been abducted both by and then from her mother. Which means we need to talk to Luna.”

Tybalt’s frown only deepened. “Yes,” he agreed. “We do.”

With the keep deserted aside from us, we were able to leave the great hall via the main door and head straight along the hallway. We left the piled-up armor behind. We didn’t have access to a human forensic lab, and I would recognize the magical traces I’d picked up if I encountered them again. Abandoning evidence felt strange. It was still the correct thing to do, given the circumstances. It wasn’t going to hurt anyone here.

Staying close together, we started once again across the moor. We hadn’t gone far before Tybalt stopped, bending forward to put his hands on his knees. “We’re going about this the wrong way,” he said. “I can’t reach the shadows, but I remain faster than you are. Why aren’t we doing things as we customarily do?”

“What do you me—” I asked, my voice being cut off by a startled squeak as he straightened, lunged, and moved to sweep me into a bridal carry, holding me close against his chest. He didn’t pause before breaking into a run, carrying me swiftly toward the forest.

I didn’t squirm too much—I didn’t particularly want to be dropped, especially considering how rough the ground was—but I did move around enough to free my left arm and poke him in the chest. “Hey, what are you doing?” I asked. “This is very undignified!”

“It’s always undignified, you can just see it now,” he countered. “It gets us there faster.”

I couldn’t really argue with that, so I tried to relax, leaning against him and enjoying the strange sensation of being carried while I could actually breathe. That was the strangest part, all things being equal: being held was supposed to be accompanied by an absence of light and air, not wind and starlight. It was actually nice, being carried this way. I relaxed further, sinking into the comfort of his arms, watching the way the shape of our bodies sheltered our respective candles. Their flames flickered and danced in the wind, not going out.

I let my eyes follow the fire, trying to untangle tonight’s sequence of events. How many people could have known that Luna intended to snatch Raysel if she lost her case? It was hard to say for sure. “I’m planning to kidnap my daughter if the queen makes the wrong choice” wasn’t exactly the sort of thing people went around announcing, even to their friends—and it wasn’t like Luna had a lot of friends these days.

Maybe that was part of why she was so desperate for Raysel to come back to Shadowed Hills. She really didn’t have any friends since losing her Kitsune skin, and she and Sylvester didn’t seem very close anymore; maybe she thought that bringing her daughter home would mean she wasn’t alone anymore.

A lot of people forget that their children are people in their own right, with their own ideas about the world. I’d learned that lesson about Gillian in a very hard and undeniable way. All I could do now was hope that the lesson would stick when it came time to let Miranda out of my sight and out into the world. Honestly, I thought that was going to be harder for Tybalt than it was for me. Not only did I have Gillian, but Quentin had been reminding me for years now that I couldn’t do anything for the children in my care but love them, and hope that would be enough.

It had to be enough.

So Luna hadn’t been subtle, but she probably hadn’t gone around announcing her intentions for the night. At the same time, everything about the decorations I’d seen at Shadowed Hills were as good as a confession of what she was intending to do. The writing had been fairly plainly on the wall, and anyone who cared to look would have been able to guess her next moves.

Most of the people I knew at Shadowed Hills were loyal to Sylvester, not Luna. They wouldn’t have helped her to abduct her daughter without his willing participation. But Sylvester hadn’t been involved—had he. Not after our conversation. Not after Simon came to see him. He wouldn’t have dared the risk of losing his brother again, not when he could lose Raysel at the same time. Helping his wife could have left him entirely alone.

So who could possibly have known?

Belatedly, I remembered how badly hurt Luna had been. If I hadn’t shown up when I did, providing the blood she needed to recover, she could have died. Luna wasn’t Firstborn. Killing her wouldn’t require a complicated ritual; it would just require a lucky shot to the heart or throat. So whoever had known what she was doing probably wasn’t her ally.

I still didn’t think Sylvester could have known what was going on. The fact that Luna had been hurt was an even-stronger indication that he hadn’t known: he might not be getting along with her as well as he used to, but she was still the love of his life, and he would never have gone along with any plan that could see her being hurt at all, much less being so severely injured.