Page 59 of A Divided Duty

By the time I caught up with him, he was back on two legs, bracing himself against a tree as he emptied the contents of his stomach into the briars. I hung back, trying to give him the pretense of privacy, and waited for the gagging to slow before I walked over and began rubbing the small of his back in small, concentric circles.

“Hey, babe,” I said. “Talk to me. You get upset when I don’t talk to you. Show me the same courtesy.”

He straightened, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand, and turned to give me a blank, despairing look. His pupils were mere slits, almost invisible against the striped green of his irises. He looked like a man who’d just seen a ghost. He looked like he was about to topple over.

He looked like something had managed to hurt him deeply, and whatever it was, I wanted to destroy it. My hands itched for my knives.

“One hundred and fifty-eight,” he managed to rasp, before he turned and began retching into the bushes again, clinging to the nearest trunk for balance. There was nothing left in his stomach. That didn’t stop him from trying, heaving hard.

I kept rubbing his back. There didn’t seem to be anything else I could do.

When the retching stopped again, I leaned closer and asked, “One hundred and fifty-eight what?”

“I know the West Coast believes itself to have been the sole target of Michael’s Rides, because he focused here so tightly for the past hundred years or so,” he said, voice dull. “Once he determined where his last daughter had gone to ground, he Rode near her more frequently, seeking her return. It’s easy to believe that all anyone had to do to evade him was be elsewhere. But that was never so.”

“What do you—”

“The first time I heard of Michael’s Rides, I was a kitten in Londinium, and woke one evening to find the court in disarray. Two kits had been plucked from their beds the day before, leaving their parents frantic to find them. But the smell of wax lingered where they had been, and my father ordered that the matter be dropped, lest Michael should hear of our interference and return to take more of his due. They had been my playmates and my friends, inasmuch as my father allowed me to have friends, and I don’t even remember their names.” He scrubbed at his face with one hand, then murmured, more quietly, “I don’t remember their names.”

“I still don’t understand,” I said, but I was dreadfully afraid that I was beginning to.

“I don’t remember their names, but I remember their numbers,” he said. “One hundred and fifty-eight kittens have vanished from my court since I grew old enough to become aware of the threat posed by Blind Michael. One hundred and fifty-eight Cait Sidhe from my court alone, tortured and transformed and finally wiped clean by that monster’s magic. I haven’t seen nearly enough Riders here to account for that number, which means most of them have long since stopped their dancing.”

I winced. “Tybalt, I am so sorry.” I was, too. I had never considered how many people he must have lost, to have been a King for as long as he had, with no way of shutting Michael out of his halls.

“You, of all the people in all the world, have no need to be sorry,” he said. “You not only brought it to a close, you made that number smaller for the first time in my life. You stopped the Rides, October. I already loved you by the time you did that, was already struggling with the reality of my affections, but if I hadn’t, I would have pledged to wed you anyway, solely for that gift to me.”

“Yeah, well, I would have said no if you’d only wanted to marry me because I did something stupidly heroic,” I said. “And I love you, too. And I think … talking to Eutychia gave me an idea. Maybe we can make that number a little smaller again, if any of the children Michael stole from your court are still here.”

The last time I’d been here long enough to think about it, Michael had been alive, and I didn’t have the power or the practice to unweave a spell cast by one of the Firstborn. Now, though … any of his children who still wanted to go home, I could at least offer to help. Maybe I couldn’t help them all. But I could try.

Tybalt nodded, clearly following the direction of my thoughts. “I would like that,” he said. “For now, what do you want to do? We can’t return to the bonfire after leaving the way we did, not without it being seen as a sign of weakness—”

As if in answer, the pocket of my gown began to ring.

I blinked at it for a moment, so startled that I didn’t realize it was my phone at first. It kept ringing, and brought understanding with the sound. I squeaked and dug it out of my pocket, unlocking the screen with a swipe of my thumb.

“Hello?”

“Oh, she does have her phone!” said May. “I told Quentin you probably didn’t, since you would have called home by now if you had it, but I guess he was right and I was wrong. Anyway, where the hell are you? I’ve run through the breast milk in the bedroom, and I’m starting in on the kitchen supply.”

I winced. “Hi, May. I’m sorry I didn’t call. Things have gotten a little messy here.”

“Things are always a little messy when you’re involved. What the hell is going on that’s so important you can’t come home and take over caring for your daughter?”

“Quentin told you Raysel got snatched?”

“He did.” Her tone softened. She had a real soft spot for that girl. I hated to exploit it, but not so much that I wasn’t going to try. “You find her?”

“Not quite. Tybalt and I followed Luna’s trail to Blind Michael’s skerry, figuring she would have taken her daughter to her own mother. She did, but someone else got here first.”

“What?!” May’s voice was an ice pick to my ear.

I winced again. “Luna and Acacia were attacked before we could get here. They were both severely injured. I was able to heal Luna, enough that she’ll live. Whoever led the attack didn’t use the right tools to kill one of the Firstborn: Acacia will be fine. But to heal, she’s rooted herself in the woods.”

“Meaning…?”

“Meaning we don’t have an exit from this place until she wakes up in the evening,” I said. “I’ve been talking to some of the locals, trying to get an idea of who might have known that Luna was planning to abduct her own child. What’s going on there?”