Page 33 of When Sorrows Come

Tybalt was only a step or so behind me, navigating the hall with a Cait Sidhe’s grace. I paused when I reached the Candela. She was lying on her side, face toward the wall. Unlike the Satyr, her eyes were closed, and there was no blood. There was also no broken glass. The carpet around her was plush and clean. I looked up.

There, clustered together in a corner like frightened puppies, were her Merry Dancers.

Which meant that Caitir, whatever else she was, wasn’t dead.

“Tybalt,” I said softly, and elbowed him in the side, pointing. He followed my finger, eyes widening as he saw what I was pointing at.

“Oh,” he said, voice hushed. “I see.”

“Yeah.” Dammit. I should have asked that last guard to stay behind rather than escorting the High King to safety. We needed someone who knew the knowe well enough to tell us how to get to their infirmary. “I know this is asking a lot of you—I understand that—but will you go and ask Maida where we can get a doctor in this place? I don’t want to touch Caitir until she’s been looked at by someone with actual training, but I don’t know how long she has without intervention.”

The look Tybalt gave me was anguished. “Your request is reasonable, little fish, and I hate you for making it,” he said. Then he grabbed my shoulders and turned me to face him, staring at me for a long moment before he pulled me close and kissed me.

It was the kind of kiss that usually gets described as “last.” He kissed me like the world was ending and he was never going to have the chance to kiss me again, like he knew that the moment he left, I was going to do something genuinely foolish.

“I will berightback,” he said, and stepped into shadow, and was gone, leaving me alone with the unconscious and the dead.

I sighed, closing my eyes and tilting my chin upward, toward the ceiling. I stood there, perfectly still in this room that smelled of blood and poison and unfamiliar magic, and said quietly, “It’s all right now. I’m alone, but that’s not going to last.”

The whisper of wings almost too soft to hear rustled around me, and a voice I knew all too well and didn’t know at all spoke from the air immediately in front of me. “You don’t belong here.”

“Hello, Gordan.” I opened my eyes and tilted my chin down, looking at the Barbie doll-sized figure that hovered in front of myface, tattered autumn-leaf wings beating frantically to keep it aloft. “You don’t either. You died in California. Why so far from home?”

“The dead go where they please, and I had no interest in joining a flock that would intersect so often with the one that held your loved ones.” She had a face deeply seamed with lines, like crevasses in rock or wrinkles on the face of a human, and a short, spiky shock of bone-white hair. I hadn’t seen her since the day she died.

Technically, I wasn’t seeing her right now. The night-haunts wear the faces and carry the memories of our dead, but theyaren’tour dead. They are a questionable immortality, one that lasts only as long as the lives they carry. As Gordan, this night-haunt might get fifty years before she needed to feed again.

Other members of her flock weren’t so lucky. Some of them had forms as solid and realistic as hers. Others were charcoal sketches, bleached-out ghosts held aloft by the vibration of ephemeral wings. Faerie’s dead. Not as common as they’d been when we still went to war at the drop of a hat, but still... too common for comfort.

At least this flock was far enough from home that there was only one face I recognized, even if it was the face of a woman who had tried to kill both me and Quentin, whohadkilled several people I was now sublimely fond of.

She glanced at my feet, then back up. “No protective circle,” she said. “Nothing to keep you safe from us. Youdare...?”

“You’re not allowed to consume the living,” I replied. “And I didn’t summon you. The dead did. They’ve been poisoned.” Maybe that was an unnecessary explanation, but better too much than not enough when it came to something like this. “I can’t ride their blood. I can’t ask them anything. I was hoping you could.”

I’m not the Luidaeg. I can lie. These bodies held no secrets for me; I’d seen them both die, done in swiftly and painfully by poison. Learning the exact nature of that pain wouldn’t help me. But I could see the flock now, and the solid members were few enough that I could pick them out easily, lacking a crowd to hide themselves behind.

And not a one of them had a face beautiful enough to stop a heart, or long blue hair, or perfect breasts.

Nessa wasn’t here.

Gordan’s haunt looked at me suspiciously. “So you risked ourwrath just to ask a few questions?” she asked. “I know what you’ve done. I know you brought back everyone I killed. It should have been impossible, but you did it, Liar’s daughter. Why let us come at all?”

“I was able to raise the dead that time because it was a unique situation,” I said. “It involved a lot of blood. These people were poisoned, and if I drank enough of their blood to even attempt to bring them back, it would poison me, too. I don’t know if I could recover from that.”

“So your own life is more important than theirs? Typical.” She laughed, shrill and bitter, and several of the more faded members of the flock took that as their cue. They dove for the bodies, and I tilted my face away, so I wouldn’t see what came next.

A corpse was too much for a single night-haunt to consume. The meal would be shared out amongst the hungriest of them. I didn’t know how they chose which one would wear the face of the dead, and I didn’t want to know. That felt like a secret too far for the living to carry. Instead, I focused on the night-haunt with Gordan’s face.

“Everything that lives wants to survive,” I said. “I never claimed to be any different.”

“No, but your actions claimed it for you,hero.” She spat the word like it was the worst slur imaginable, like she had never said anything so disgusting. “Changeling filth, pretending at the place of your betters—but not as changeling as you were, are you? You’ve been shedding your humanity while you dally with kings and queens, climbing the social ladder in ways that were never available to the rest of us. Well, all are equal among the dead. We had the answer all along. All Faerie ever had to do to change itself for the better was end.”

I looked at her, this tiny being who wore the face of a woman who had tried her best to murder me when such was still entirely possible, and all I felt was pity. She’d died thinking her mortal blood made her less than everyone around her; they’d told her it was so, sometimes openly, sometimes in quiet, cruel little ways, and she’d believed them. Now she carried that belief on autumn wings among the dead, and for all that she said the dead were equal, they couldn’t be, not when those thoughts still weighed her down.

“I am sorry not to die for the sake of someone I don’t know, andyour ideals,” I said. “I am also not sorry in the slightest, because Iammaking Faerie better. I save lives. I fix things. I shore up the walls when the tide is coming in, and I bring the lost ones home. I do the things a hero is meant to do, and if those things can’t always include the impossible, I can live with that. Besides, saving all the dead would mean starving the flocks, and regardless of the faces you wear and the prejudices you carry, you’re alive, too.”

The night-haunts might spend their lives effectively in exile from the rest of Faerie, unable to join in our kingdoms or community, bound by Oberon himself to be scavengers when otherwise they would devour us in their endless hunger, but they’re alive. They exist because they live and they live because they exist, and that’s the kind of contradiction Faerie thrives on.

---