Page 91 of A Divided Duty

“You’re the one who gave the Riders access to the Thorn Road,” I said.

“My father was a son of Maeve,” she replied, almost serenely. “That road was his to use by right. My own Rose Road runs parallel, and once Mother told me what your candle meant, I realized you would travel there again to return here. All I needed to do was open a passage and let my faithful through. All I had to do was wait.”

“Luna, this is … this is cruel,” I said. “This is worse than cruel. This is wrong.”

“Keeping a family together is never wrong,” she countered. “You may not like my methods, but you would do the same if you were backed into a corner. You would fight the world to save your child from being lost to it.”

I didn’t know what to say to that. I drew my horn knife with my free hand, then shot a glance at Tybalt.

“Find Acacia,” I said sharply. “I’ll protect Raysel for as long as I can.”

They couldn’t kill me: we both knew that. If they tried to turn me into a tree again, I’d just stab myself before the bark could spread beyond my thighs, letting the knife embedded in my body tell him when he’d found me. My knife had been a gift from Oberon himself. Not even Luna would be stupid enough to try stealing it from me. I hoped.

Tybalt nodded. He folded inward on himself, the smell of musk and pennyroyal filling the air, and then he leapt in front of me, tail lashing as he put his ears back and hissed at Luna. It was a warning and a repudiation of her actions, and I could hear the anger it contained.

Message delivered, he turned and raced off into the trees, swiftly disappearing. I moved to put myself back between Raysel and Luna, glaring fiercely. “Normally this is the part where I start stabbing people,” I called. “But it might upset your kid if she saw me gut you like a—” I fumbled for how to finish the phrase. “Like a fish” was too close to home, and “like a pig” felt weirdly sexist. “—like a manticore,” I concluded, going for something dangerous but killable. “And I want your mother to help me get out of here. So I’d really prefer not to stab you if there’s any way around it.”

“Your preferences aren’t the point here,” she said smugly, just as Raysel was yanked away from my back, her fingers spasming as they were ripped from my shoulder. I spun. Two Riders were behind me, one of them holding Raysel under one arm like a kicking, snarling sack of potatoes.

“Athan?” I asked.

The Rider looked at me impassively. “I told you there would be no danger if you left her to her destiny. You claimed to care about the girl. Why have you come here when you knew that it would risk her life to do so?”

Raysel continued to kick and squirm, to no avail. Athan’s grip was too strong.

“Because she didn’t choose this destiny, and she deserves the chance to decide what her life is going to be!” The magic that turned tormented children into Riders rewrote them both body and mind, but while the children could look like anything, from Satyr-Griffin hybrids to Glastig with wings or cow’s tails, the Riders always seemed to follow the basic bipedal body plan shared by humans and Daoine Sidhe. Two arms, two legs, one head. It implied that the spell used to create them layered a second transformation on top of the first, and while I knew that it took multiple Rides with the full Hunt to manifest itself, it couldn’t be rooted as deeply as the first transformation.

“None of us chose either, and our lives are perfect,” said Athan. The second Rider, lurking beside them, said nothing, only leaned menacingly in my direction with their polearm raised, clearly ready to attack if I did anything to stop them.

Sometimes it’s nice to have methods of resistance that don’t involve charging headlong into danger. I raised my knife, dropping my candle to the ground as I opened my hand and ran the blade across it, cutting deep enough that I felt the metal scrape against bone. The pain was immediate and intense, almost as immediate as the blood welling up from the center of my palm.

“What are you doing?” asked Athan, wary.

I brought my hand to my mouth, drinking as deeply as I could before the wound knitted shut and the blood stopped coming. Then I looked at the Riders.

Both of them were wrapped down to the bone in the invasive, penetrating strands of the transformation from the Children’s Hall. As I had hoped when I saw how the walls were still feeding the spell wrapped around Raysel, their spells were tied-off and complete. They would be easier to remove. They would still be exhausting, and a weirdly larger undertaking than even Titania’s spells had been. I was suddenly glad the Lady of Flowers had dismissed the children of Maeve as generally worthless. If she’d been able to learn spell construction from Blind Michael, we might still be snared in her enchantment.

Over the primary transformation spell, however, draped around them like a lacy cloak, was a second spell, this one also constructed of green and gray, but not anchored to their bones. Instead, it was anchored to the first spell, and all the connections were weak ones. This was something I could touch without much effort. This was something I could destroy.

Blood in my mouth and fury in my heart, I reached for the spell-shawl draped around Athan, hooked my mental fingers through it, and hauled as hard as I could, so hard that I could feel it starting to shred even before I had it fully grasped. Threads snapped. Athan screamed. Raysel shrieked, and then I felt her barrel into me, hiding her face against my neck. I wrapped my arms around her as well as I could when I still had a knife in one hand, leaving a bloody handprint on the back of her dress. She clung to me, and I tried desperately not to let her weight distract me as I continued ripping at the spell.

“What are you doing to him?” demanded Luna.

Ah. So Athan was a him, then. Good to know. I kept ripping and tearing, discarding chunks of the spell even as it was crumbling in my hands. I had a long way to go, but I thought I could get there before I burned through the blood I had just swallowed.

Then a spear slammed into my back, shoved through with the kind of force that pierced everything in its path. Raysel squealed, dancing back and letting go of me as the spear emerged from the front of my chest. I opened my eyes in surprise, looking down at it. “Really?” I asked. “Oh, for the love of—”

The spear had collapsed my lung, making it difficult for me to breathe. It had also caused me to start bleeding again, which was surprisingly convenient under the circumstances. I ran my hand across the front of my shirt, then licked my palm.

The remaining threads around Athan sprang immediately into focus, and I resumed my ripping, tearing them away as fast as I could. Lack of oxygen is one of the things that can knock me down, and I was going to be on the ground in short order, which meant I needed to do this fast. So I ripped and ripped, and Raysel ducked around me, shrieking words I couldn’t quite make out at someone I couldn’t see.

I wasn’t turning into a tree. There was that, at least. And as long as Raysel was yelling, she was still here, and that mattered more than almost anything else in the moment.

The final scraps of spell came away, and Athan screamed, full-throated and furious. I opened my eyes, blinking away the black spots that were starting to dance around the edges of my vision.

The massive, terrible Rider was gone, replaced by a Reynard boy no older than sixteen, with gills in the side of his neck and fin-shaped ears that didn’t quite match up with anything I’d seen in the Undersea. His hands were webbed, but his legs were still humanoid, and as he tumbled off the horse he caught himself, then stood, shivering.

The other Rider looked from Athan to me in horror, then hauled on their reins and rode away into the dark, apparently not willing to risk the possibility that I could do it twice.