Page 38 of When Sorrows Come

“Hey.” I put a hand under his chin, pushing gently until he lifted his head enough to meet my eyes. “Hey. I saw the night-haunts.”

“You—what,again?” He was almost sputtering. That was a good thing. If he was upset about my behaving recklessly, he wasn’t focusing on a missing woman who might have been important to him, before his family had been convinced to send him away.

Will Eira ever be held accountable for all the damage she’s done, not only to me, but to all of Faerie? I don’t know, but sweet Oberon, I hope so.

And I hope I’m part of the accounting.

“I saw the night-haunts,” I repeated, keeping my eyes locked on his. They were all wrong—they were supposed to be a deep, almost startling blue, like the Atlantic off the Canadian coast, but they were a pale dustbowl brown, the color of the sky over the ghost towns of Kansas—but they were still his eyes, still Quentin’s eyes, and he was all I saw looking back at me. “They came to claim the dead, as is their due, and Nessa was not among them. She wasn’t part of their number. She’s the reason I stayed and was silent, so they would come while I was there. They told me she was still alive for us to find, and they did it without saying a single word. I swear to you, by the root and the thorn, the ash and the oak and therowan and the rose, that she is not yet among the night-haunts, and if she lives, we’ll find her. We’ll find her.”

“Thank you,” he whispered, and threw himself into my arms.

He had never been this affectionate before—or at least not this demonstrative. I didn’t know whether that was because Banshees were genuinely more emotional, or if it was because, for the first time in his life, he didn’t feel the weight of the crown to come pushing down on him and preventing him from standing unburdened. I wasn’t sure it mattered in the moment. I just put my arms around that boy, who would be a man soon enough, who would be so far beyond me that looking for him would be like scanning the sky for a single star, and I held him.

I held him like I was never going to be asked to let him go.

After a moment, he began to relax against me, accepting the hug as the sincere offer it was and not something I was required to give. I let my chin rest atop his head, breathing in the scents of the hall. The gorse and vetiver scent of his magic was the closest and strongest, of course, since I was literally holding him against me; under it was the raspberry and lemon verbena of Caitir, still strong because I had been using her magic so recently.

The scents under that were more faded. I could smell the traces of Tybalt’s magic, and Raj’s, and May’s, all familiar and comforting—the scents of home. I could smell the sunbaked feathers and cool fog of Jazz’s magic, which was subtle and hard to pin down, but part of the atmosphere I lived in on a daily basis, and thus welcome.

The scents layered under the mingled scent of family were harder to identify because they were more blurred, but I kept breathing as I pinned them down one by one for further examination. White mountain heather and celandine poppies was High King Aethlin, and chestnut rose and moss was our poor doomed Daoine Sidhe. Pitch and burnt hay was probably the Satyr, given how strong it was, and that it only smelled like it had traveled in one direction, here, not here and back like the High King or the other two guards, both of whom had left their own scent trails behind.

It was a complicated, layered web of perfumes, and picking them apart was like trying to separate the layers in a croissant without tearing them, but I’ve had a lot of practice with this sort of weird magic trick in the last few years, and so I lifted them awayfrom each other and filed them, one by one, matching them to their owners until all that remained was a scent of indefinable decay which I immediately identified as the Doppelganger, and two unfamiliar magical signatures.

One, which smelled of bitter almond and carnation, came and went over and over again, and had been this way no more than a few days before our own arrival. The other was limestone and creeping thistle, and it was complicated, thick enough in the air even after all this time that I could tell its owner had been here frequently enough to wear a groove into the world, but absent now for several days. It still clung, but it was fading. It would be gone soon enough.

“I’ve got her,” I said dreamily, letting my arms fall to my sides. Quentin kept hugging me for another second or so before he let go in confusion.

“Got who?” he asked.

“Nessa,” I said. “I think I’ve found her magic.”

“How could you find her magic? You’ve never met her.”

His confusion was understandable. All blood-workers can smell magic to some degree, and I’ve always been good at it, but it was only recently that I’d started to understand it well enough to make it something more useful than a party trick. I’m more fae right now than I’ve ever been before in my life, the consequence of entering a transformational trance when I had nothing but myself to transform, and that’s heightened everything, including my sense of the magic around me.

For Quentin, magical signatures were simple things. They could be smelled, they could be tracked, but they could also be confused. He would smell the heather in his father’s magic as identical to his own, while for me the two couldn’t have been more different without one of them becoming something other than floral. Magic is unique. Give me a hundred people who smell of roses, and I’ll still be able to tell which one of them wove which spell.

“The Gwragedd Annwn were born in Wales,” I said. “There’s a lot of limestone in Wales, and creeping thistles grow there. That wouldn’t be enough, if this weren’t a short hallway with two apartments at the end of it. A Welsh-based magical signature this strong outside of Nessa’s rooms? That’s got to be hers. The other signature’s owner was here much more recently, probably recently enough that they were here last night at the very latest. Hers hasbeen missing for about—” I inhaled again, even though I already knew the answer. Sometimes you want that moment of explaining to a room full of captive nobles how the murder was committed. Sometimes you want to be theatrical. “—I’d say three days since she was here last. That’s got to be her.”

Three days would match up with the amount of time needed to prepare rooms for visitors and get all the security arrangements in place, but more importantly, it would also comeafterthe hard work of convincing the kitchen staff to allow Kerry to touch their equipment had been performed. Doppelgangers can perform an exquisitely accurate impersonation of the person they’re pretending to be, as long as it doesn’t require them to pull up anything beyond surface memories. There was no possible way a Doppelganger would have been able to perform that negotiation, and yet Kerry was baking, so someone had done it.

I opened my eyes. Quentin was staring at me with something like hope and something like resignation in his eyes. Or maybe that was exactly the blend he was trying to contain.

“You’re sure?” he asked.

“I’m sure.” I turned to Jazz.

She held up her hand before I could open my mouth. “I know, I know,” she said. “Stay here. And where, pray tell, are you going?”

“I’m going to follow this trail to wherever it leads me, and Cillian’s going to come with me, and if Nessa isn’t there, we’ll come back,” I said. “When Galen comes back with the Bridge Trolls I asked for, ask them to go into Nessa’s quarters and trigger or deactivate any traps they find. They should avoid the tripwires in the hall, because those are apparently connected to ‘I’ve already been caught, may as well kill everyone’ poison pouches, but the threads in the main room just set off elf-shot.”

“And Bridge Trolls can’t be elf-shot, because their skins are too thick,” said Quentin, stating the obvious.

Well, he had more emotional connection to the situation than I did. For me, this was an abduction and possible planned assassination that had had the bad taste to get in the way of my dinner appointment. For him, it was a missing woman who had been a part of his life since infancy, who he had apparently missed while he was in California.

I’d never put too much thought into the fact that Quentin would have had friends, acquaintances, even enemies before the start ofhis fosterage, but he’d had the time; he’d spent his entire childhood and the beginning of his teenage years in these halls. I’d met Stacy, Kerry, and Julie all before I turned thirteen, and we’d stayed friends well into adulthood. No matter what else changed, I’d been able to hold onto my gang of four. There was a time when I would have called them the most important people in my life and meant it. So why hadn’t I dug too deeply into the idea that Quentin might have had friends he wanted to see again, or even that shining specter, the first love, waiting somewhere in Canada?

He’d given up so much more than just his face for the opportunity to attend my wedding. He’d given up his homecoming, and the reunion that could have followed it, in a kinder, less dangerous world. He’d given it up for me.

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