Page 47 of A Killing Frost

“I didn’t say you werewrongto think of me that way, just that I’m sorry you have to. Be glad your sister, spoiled brat that she is, doesn’t have the power to curse you for her own amusement. Once a family starts slinging curses and geasa around like party favors, it’s all over but the screaming. So Simon has Quentin. Is he going to hurt the kid?”

I hesitated before saying, “I don’t think so. He seems to think he can use Quentin as leverage to get the elf-shot cure for his mistress.”

The Luidaeg sighed. She knew who I meant as well as anyone could have, and why I was avoiding saying the woman’s name as much as possible. “And how did he decide Quentin was leverage?”

“I told him Patrick Lorden was alive. He bled me to confirm it.”

She made an indignant noise.

“I didn’t think he’d assault me! When you took his sense ofhome, you took any chance that he’d remember Patrick hadn’t died in the earthquake. He didn’t want to believe me, so he took my blood to prove it, and he knew I didn’t have the strength to edit my blood memories. He... saw things. Things he maybe shouldn’t have seen.”

The Luidaeg groaned. “So you gave the failure what he wanted most in the world—you gave him proof his friend was still out there to find—and you gave him the identity of our prince in hiding at the same time. Good show, October. Sometimes I wonder how you haven’t gotten usallkilled just yet.”

Her words stung all the more because I knew they were true. The Luidaeg can’t lie. She can be sarcastic, and she can omit things to force people to fill in the blanks themselves, but she can’t tell an outright untruth. It can make conversations a little fraught sometimes, especially since I know that when she says something casually cruel, she means it.

I paused before saying, in a small voice, “Uncool. I’m just trying to fix things.”

“What, exactly, were you trying to fix by haring off after Simon Torquill without sufficient backup or, I’m guessing, a solid plan for how you were going to deal with him if you found him? I said I needed you to find him. He still doesn’t get his way home back until the terms of August’s debt are fulfilled, which means someonefinds my father.”

I was reminded again that part of why I’d taken off the way I had was to prevent the Luidaeg from ordering me to find her father. No one, hero or not, wants to be ordered to find the missing King of Faerie. I figure someone that infinitely powerful only goes missing because he wants to, and considering what I’ve seen of his kids, I couldn’t blame him. I probably would have done the same thing in his place.

Pinching the bridge of my nose, I said, as patiently as I could manage, “I know that. I also know my debts to you are currently balanced, which means you can’t order me to go looking for Oberon, and I have no intention of going back into debt until after my wedding. Tybalt has been waiting for long enough. He’s starting to think I’ve got cold feet.”

“Don’t you?” She sounded genuinely interested, and the shock of her question was enough to make me pause again. This was a conversation defined by awkward silences, made even moreawkward by the fact that Walther and Cassandra were listening in as intently as they could while pretending not to eavesdrop on my private business. Having friends is awesome and great and never complicated at all. Honest.

“Of course not,” I sputtered. “I want to marry Tybalt. But Patrick Lorden came to see me, and he made sure I knew Tybalt and I couldn’t get married without inviting Simon to the wedding, or we’d give him an opening to claim offense against my household. And Karen had a dream where she saw us on the Rose Roads.” Saying it all aloud, in such simple terms, made me feel a little foolish for haring off the way I had. It had seemed like the right thing to do at the time, and May had agreed at least enough to come with me—but May and I shared enough of the same memories that sometimes, we were fundamentally the same person, and that person could be wrong.

Had this whole thing been a huge mistake? Had I put the people I loved in danger for no good reason, and a lot of really, really bad ones? No. The threat of Simon Torquill, a man who believed manners were best when they were weaponized, turning pureblood etiquette against me and using it to push Eira’s agenda in the wake of my marriage, was all too real. If listening to Patrick and Karen had been a silly decision on my part, it was because I was surrounded by people who lived and died according to silly decisions. I was just following the crowd.

“Toby, remember, Devin talked to me, because he considered me to be in his debt.”

“Weren’t you?” According to Devin, he’d prevented the Luidaeg from being burned to death by an angry mob. He’d been a liar and a thief and a cheat for as long as I’d known him, but he’d never been stupid enough to lie about the sea witch. That’s the sort of choice that gets you killed.

Of course, so was getting into a fight with Eira Rosynhwyr, and he’d done that, too. It was difficult to say whether one of those things had been responsible for putting the gun in the hands of the young changeling who’d shot him, or if that had been on Devin himself. His habit of playing games with the desperate, emotionally fragile children he surrounded himself with might have worked if he’d truly been the Peter Pan figure he’d pretended to be, but reality is never as easy as an archetype.

The Luidaeg snorted. “Please. I’m Firstborn, remember? He stopped me from being burnt at the stake. Literal stake, literal fire. Burning won’t kill one of the Firstborn. It’ll make us uncomfortable as all hell for a while—regrowing your skin isn’t fun, and I don’t recommend you try it any time soon—and we won’t be pretty until our bodies finish putting themselves back together, but it won’t kill us. Not without some very specific ritual steps, and those of us who are still around have gone to great lengths to make sure those rituals aren’t remembered.”

I didn’t even know the necessary steps for killing one of the Firstborn with fire. Iron and silver, I could do, but then, I’ve always had an affinity for stabbing things. Even things I probably shouldn’t be close enough to stab. “Huh,” I said.

“Hedidintervene, and I don’t know if you’ve forgotten this or what, but I was really lonely for a long time.” Her voice took on a peevish note toward the end of the sentence; that wasn’t something she’d wanted to say. Being under a geas that forces you to tell the truth is even less fun than it sounds. “As long as he believed I was in his debt, he was careful about what he asked me, because he didn’t want to accidentally square up our accounts. I think he thought I’d kill him the second he did.” The peevishness faded, replaced by amusement. “So he didn’t ask me to do anything I didn’t want to do, and I got someone to talk to. I would have been furious at you for letting him get himself killed if you hadn’t started coming to see me right afterward. You’re better company than he ever was, and I like you more. But he told me how easy it was to convince you not to marry your mortal man, even when you’d believed you loved him with all your heart. You should have fought like a wildcat, demanded your freedom, and reminded him he didn’t own you anymore. And instead, you just gave in. Why do you think that was?”

“I... we’re getting away from the point. Which is that Simon knows who Quentin is and why he’s important, and he’s planning to use him to get his hands on the elf-shot cure. We can’t let him wake Evening up!”

“Which is why you went to find him in the first place, so he couldn’t use claiming offense as a lever to force you to help him wake her,” said the Luidaeg. “I know. I understand.”

“You do?”

“I do. I’m going to torment you for days when this is all cleared up, because Tybalt isn’t the only one who’s noticed your reluctance to let that boy marry you. But I understand. You thought you were protecting your family—youwereprotecting your family—and there’s not much that matters more to you than that. Get over here, and we’ll figure out what to do next.”

“Yeah, about that...” I glanced at Walther, who was bent over May with a scalpel in his hand, trying desperately to pretend he wasn’t paying attention to anything I was saying. “I’m in Berkeley. At Walther’s office. I’m actually using his phone. And my car is back in Pleasant Hill, and I lost Spike somewhere along the way, and I don’t want to call Tybalt, since I made him stay home while we went looking for Simon, and he’s going to be pissed off that I lost Quentin and let May get elf-shot...”

“Can’t Walther fly you here?”

“No, he’s working on May. The elf-shot Simon used was brewed from plants grown in the sub-realm where your sister’s sleeping.”

“How did you evengetthere?”

“I asked your mother for help.”

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