Page 36 of When Sorrows Come

Someone grabbed me from behind. I didn’t scream; screaming takes air. I didn’t stab the person either, having sheathed my knife when I was done cutting Caitir. If I dropped it in here, I’d have to gnaw through her shoulder or something to get more blood. Instead, I drove my elbow up and back at the same time, catching my assailant in the solar plexus. They staggered away, and I whirled.

Raj gave me a pained look, face a sketchy outline in the dim glow from the Merry Dancers. “...ow,” he said, able to speak in the Shadow Roads the same way his uncle could, by breathing the air that wasn’t there for the rest of us. “Could you not?”

I blinked at him.

“I followed the light,” he said. “I knew roughly where you were, and I just followed the light. Can’t leave my knight to freeze, canI?” His expression shifted from pained to pleading. “Now will you let me get you out of here?”

I nodded and pointed to Caitir. He walked past me, scooping her into his arms and slinging her over his shoulder, and I had never in my life been so glad to see him, or so grateful for the fact that both my boys have gotten taller and stronger as they’ve aged. I hadn’t paid quite as much attention with Raj, since I’d never been allowed to claim him officially as my squire, but he was almost as tall as Tybalt now, with the rangy, defined musculature necessary for a Prince of Cats who was preparing to challenge for his throne. He’d been working out more since Ginevra came to stand regent for him and made the prospect of becoming King devastatingly real.

The Merry Dancers followed their Candela, swirling around Raj’s head as he straightened and walked back over to me, offering his hand. “Hold me fast, and don’t let me go,” he said, a note of caution in his voice.

Raj wasn’t as accustomed to taking passengers through the shadows as Tybalt was, and I didn’t know if he’d ever done two people at once before. I nodded, grabbing onto his hand, and he smiled at me before crouching slightly down, tensing, and leaping into the deeper dark.

I jumped with him, and together, we crashed out of the darkness and into the warm light of the hall. Raj dropped us both when he landed, catching himself on the hallway wall with both hands while he gasped and wheezed. I rolled to a stop against the same wall, my hip pressed to the baseboard, my eyes fixed on the ceiling. The ghosts of Caitir’s memory still rattled their chains at the corners of my mind. They would fade soon enough, as long as I didn’t focus on them strongly enough to make them memories of my own.

“What,” said May, pausing portentously before she continued, “thefuck?”

“Are you hurt?” The first face to appear in my field of vision belonged to the Ellyllon healer, his wings working frantically and spilling glittering dust into the air. “You have blood on your lips. Did you injure yourself?”

“It’s not mine,” I said. My limbs were starting to thaw. Awkwardly, I pushed my way into a seated position, rubbing my aching forehead with one hand. “Check on Caitir. I had to cut her to borrow her magic, and it was dark, so I’m not sure how deep the knife went.”

The healer blinked at me. He wasn’t used to this sort of thing, not having been around long enough to become acclimated to the level of casual chaos that the rest of us live with on a daily basis. There are days when I think Dóchas Sidhe aren’t designed so much to manipulate the workings of the blood as we are to cause problems everywhere we go. It would make a lot of things make a lot more sense if that were the case.

“Um,” he said.

“It’s all right. She’s always like this,” said May, moving to the Ellyllon’s side. “Let my sister think about what she’s done.”

“Um,” he said again, but allowed himself to be led away. Jazz stepped up to take his place.

“Two people got elf-shot, and neither of them was you,” she said.

“Nope.”

“But youdiddrink an elf-shot victim’s blood,” she said, almost hopefully. “Does that mean you’re going to fall asleep soon?”

“I know we’ve always worried about that, but no, I don’t think so.” I rubbed my forehead again. “I think I got little enough of it that I’m going to be okay. Walther should probably still give me something prophylactic.”

“Nice use of ‘prophylactic,’ ” chirped May. “And it doesn’t matter either way, because even if she falls asleep, she didn’t get elf-shot, so you don’t take the betting pool.”

“Aw, nuts,” said Jazz.

“You are all weirdoes,” I said, and that was when Quentin slammed into me, wrapping his arms around my shoulders and yanking me close. It was like being hugged by a particularly enthusiastic tsunami, and after a moment of confusion, I relaxed and hugged him back.

“I see how it is,” said Raj. “I grab you and you assault me. Cillian grabs you, and he gets a hug. I know which kid you actually give a damn about,Mom, and it’s not me.”

“Go to your room,” I said, looking past the tangled scrim of Quentin’s hair that covered my eyes to where Raj stood, smirking. I patted Quentin on the back with one hand, trying to give him the time to collect himself, then blinked. “Hang on—betting pool?”

“On whether you make it to the wedding,” said May. “So far, you’re doing pretty well.”

“Two people are dead, the groom has been elf-shot, the seneschal ismissing, and I have to explain to Kerry why I used upalmost an entire container of her canned frosting for no apparent reason,” I said flatly. “I’m not sure how you class that as ‘pretty well.’ ”

“You’ve really skewed my sense of normalcy,” said May.

Quentin finally let go of me, glaring. “I thought you weredead,” he said. “We all saw Tybalt fall, and we know you can’t navigate the Shadow Roads by yourself.”

“Luckily, I had a Candela with me to borrow from.” I looked past him to where the Ellyllon was kneeling next to Caitir. “She’s going to be okay, right? It’s just elf-shot?”

“The fact that I now live in a world where the word ‘just’ can precede ‘elf-shot’ is a genuine miracle, for which we should be thanking Oberon on a daily basis,” he said, looking up from his patient. “That being said, yes, it appears that she has been elf-shot, and should wake in a hundred years, or upon administration of the counter-tincture, whichever comes first.”

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