Page 60 of A Killing Frost

“Oof,” I said, and patted her back with one hand.

I like Diva. She’s about Gillian’s age, but unlike my daughter, she grew up within Faerie, aware her parents weren’t human and that that meant she wasn’t either, not entirely. Because her mother had been a Selkie when Diva was born, she’d technically been a changeling until we’d sat down together after the Duchy of Ships, to have me shift her Roane heritage into dominance. Now, she’s as fae as they come, and has a much better grasp of what it means to be Roane than most of her cousins, who didn’t have the advantage of being halfway there before the Duchy.

Diva let go, stepping back and beaming. “I told Mom you’d be coming by,” she said, voice bright, betraying no sign she thought anything was wrong. “She said you had better things to do with your time, but I said that boy was your squire, and there was no way you wouldn’t come to pick him up.”

My blood ran cold. “That boy?” I asked carefully. It said something about how tense I was that I didn’t even point out that she and Quentin were practically the same age—calling him “that boy” made about as much sense as me talking about Danny that way. “Is he here?”

Diva nodded vigorously. “He’s in the kitchen,” she said. “Having chowder with Elsa and Nathan and where are you going? Don’t you want to talk to me?” I’d pushed past her as soon as the word “kitchen” left her lips, barreling across the front room—packed with Roane, many of them holding musical instruments, none of them wearing human disguises—toward the kitchen door.

I hit it with my shoulder, one hand going to the knife at my hip while I was still moving. The three people sitting around the kitchen table looked up from their chowder, blinking in varying degrees of confused surprise. Two of them were Roane, familiar in the vague way that all Roane are familiar to me now, whether or not we’ve been introduced. My magic went into the rebirthing of them. They’re not my descendants, with the exception of Gillian, but my blood knows them all the same, and sings to their presence.

The third was Quentin.

He was wearing a fresh shirt, one without any blood on it, but he looked unharmed—and untroubled, as he dismissed me with a glance and went back to eating his chowder, reaching for the bread bowl at the center of the table and extracting a yeast roll to start dipping in the broth. I stepped fully into the kitchen, letting the door swing shut behind me.

“Quentin,” I said, in as loud and carrying a voice as I could manage without shouting, “what thefuck?”

The two Roane pushed their chairs back and got to their feet, looking at me with obvious alarm. “Is something wrong?” asked one, a girl with hair the color of sun-bleached driftwood and eyes even greener than Diva’s.

“Yeah, my squire’s sitting here eating soup when I’ve been running all over the Bay Area looking for him.” I knew from talkingto Marcia that he’d been at Goldengreen; how could he be this calm when Dean had been transformed into a tree?

Easy: magic. Sometimes that’s the only answer anyone’s going to offer you. I took a deep breath, forcing myself to calm down, and walked toward him.

“Was there a man with him when he got here?” I asked. “A red-haired man with yellow eyes, and a big-ass bow?”

“Yes,” said the other Roane. He looked a little older than Quentin, dark-haired and dark-skinned, and as baffled as his counterpart. “He went down to the shore, but he said Quentin was hungry, and he was right.”

“He’s had six bowls of chowder so far,” said the girl, glancing at Quentin, who was back to eating like he was afraid his food was going to be taken away. Which wasn’t an unreasonable concern, under the circumstances. “Is something wrong?”

“Yes,” I said curtly. “Quentin, I want you to leave the bowl behind and stand up.”

His only response was to pull the bowl closer to himself and start shoveling chowder into his mouth even faster than before, like a starving dog who knew with absolute certainty that once this food went away he was never going to get more, ever, for as long as he lived. I scowled and moved toward the table, sniffing the air.

There, under the smell of chowder and fresh-baked rolls, was a ribbon of smoke. It was subtle; if I hadn’t been looking for it, I would have missed it, and Simon would have gotten away with this.

“He’s under a compulsion,” I said, for the benefit of the two Roane who’d been keeping an eye on him, however unintentionally. “Is Liz home?”

“She’s upstairs, um,” said Elsa.

“Drinking,” said Nathan, more baldly.

Elsa smacked him in the arm. “We’re not supposed to tell outsiders that,” she snapped.

“This is October. She’s beloved of the sea witch,” he said. “She can’t be an outsider anywhere in the presence of the ocean. It doesn’t work that way.”

I sort of wanted to ask him how itdidwork, if I had been somehow adopted by the sea because I spent too much time around the Luidaeg. Was there a membership card or something that I was supposed to flash? But for the moment, Quentin was more important.

“Can you please go tell her I’m here?” I asked, fighting to keep my voice both level and pleasant. The two of them looked unsure. I ground my teeth together, forcing a smile. “Please? I haven’t seen her in a while.”

Casting uneasy glances at Quentin all the while, the two teenage Roane stood and left the kitchen, leaving me alone with my squire. I didn’t have time to do this subtly, not with Simon down at the shore and working on a way to get himself to Saltmist. I drew the knife from my belt, eyes on Quentin the whole time to be sure that he wasn’t about to bolt or throw his chowder at me or something equally stupid.

He didn’t move. When Simon had enchanted him, he’d done so with no functional knowledge of what a Dóchas Sidhe was capable of. He’d forgotten August entirely, and he didn’t remember being my ally or almost-friend, so why would he know the tricks of my bloodline? This spell had been constructed under the assumption that it would be taken down in the normal manner, assuming it was taken down at all.

I ran the edge of the knife along the pad of my thumb, splitting the skin, and waited to start bleeding before sticking my thumb in my mouth, sucking greedily. I wanted as much blood as possible, but I wanted to avoid cutting myself a second time if I could manage it. The smell of copper and cut grass began gathering around me. Quentin didn’t look alarmed; far from it. Quentin didn’t look like he necessarily realized I was still there. All his attention was focused on his chowder.

It seemed odd for Simon to have hit him with such a strong compulsion and given it such a narrow focus, instead of building something more useful and complex. Then again, if Simon was still using Evening’s blood to boost and modify his magic, he might not have meant to hit Quentin that hard. Controlling strength borrowed from a Firstborn isn’t exactly easy, and the few times I’d done it, I’d been working with the blood of a Firstborn who actively wished me no ill will. I couldn’t say the same of Evening.

The wound in my thumb had already healed. I pulled it out of my mouth and swallowed, taking another step toward Quentin as I raised my hand and hooked my fingers, like I was preparing to jerk away a net. In a way, that was exactly what I was doing.

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