Page 45 of When Sorrows Come

Nessa held tight to the Luidaeg’s hand as we walked, ignoring the startled looks we got from passing locals. Anyone who knew her also knew what had happened, and clearly didn’t understand how she could be walking so calmly with a group of strangers. But as long as she was with the Luidaeg, she was calm, and we could use that.

The door to my temporary quarters was open, and voices, raised in argument, drifted out into the hall.

“—one good reason why I shouldn’t go and find her?” Tybalt sounded incredibly collected, almost calm, which didn’t match up with his volume, which had a strained quality that told me it had been creeping steadily upward for some time.

“Because you’ve just been elf-shot and you’re going to be wobbly for a while,” said Walther, reasonably. “If I didn’t carry theelf-shot counter whenever I was going anywhere with Toby, you’d still be unconscious while I finished brewing, so I think you can afford to take a little time to recover.”

“Because she’sfine,” said Raj, sounding bored. “She’s Toby. She’s always fine.”

Oh, I teach the worst lessons to my squires. Whether I mean to or not, I’m forever in the process of breaking them.

“Because the sea witch is with her, and that means we need to be more worried about everyone else in this knowe, and possibly everyone along this seaboard, than we are about the indestructible king-breaker,” said Nolan.

“Because the air says she’s right outside in the hall,” said Cassandra.

There was a pause. We walked a little faster.

Not fast enough: Tybalt appeared in the doorway, gripping the frame with one white-knuckled hand, clearly recovered from the elf-shot, although he was still paler than I liked. The strained look around his eyes was probably more attributable to me than being woken from a century-long sleep before the alarm went off, and I had a split second to feel bad about that before he was sighing my name like it was an undiscovered sonnet by Shakespeare and flinging himself the last few feet between us.

I braced for the collision, opening my arms, and when he slammed into me, it was a very mutual embrace, his arms locking around my torso and mine around his shoulders. He buried his face in the damp but drying tangle of my hair, taking a deep, shuddering breath.

“Come on, kid,” I heard the Luidaeg say to Nessa. “Let’s take you to meet the rest of this sideshow of ridiculous horrors. They’re going to be a few minutes.”

“I’ll see you inside,” said Quentin.

As soon as we were alone in the hall, Tybalt pulled back, sliding his hands up to press against the sides of my jaw as he studied my face. “You weren’t there,” he said. “The last thing I remembered was opening the shadows, and then sleep claimed me, and I had been pulling you with me to the other side, and I woke up, and youweren’t there.”

“You fell into shadow,” I said, voice soft. “Carrying me and Caitir. Candela can access the Shadow Roads on their own, and I can borrow magic from blood. I didn’t dare try yours, not withelf-shot in your system and your memories likely to make me lose control of your magic, and so I had to use hers to open us a gate out of the Shadow Roads. I’m not hurt. Out of the three of us, I’m the only one who wasn’t hurt.”

“I’m supposed toprotectyou,” he said, hiccupping with the effort of not sobbing. He leaned forward, resting his forehead against mine. “I’m supposed to protect you, and I let myself drop you in the dark, alone, with no way out.”

As afraid as I had always been of being stranded on the Shadow Roads, how much more afraid must he have been, knowing them the way he did, understanding them as intimately as only a King of Cats could. I reached up and gripped his wrists, holding his hands where they were.

“I got out,” I said, voice low. “You don’t always have to protect me, as long as you want to keep trying. The trying is what matters, and when we fell into the dark, I had two ways out. You, and her. I used her because it was safer for me, because I’m going to make it to our wedding.”

He laughed, a little unsteadily. “Am I?”

“Of course you are. You’re the King of Cats, and you’re my fiancé, and I think there’s a very good chance at this point that you’re my one true love.” I smiled at him, as earnestly as I could. “We’re going to be the sort of story people write ballads about, only we’re not going to end with either one of us lying in a shallow grave somewhere, because I flat-out refuse to let that be the last verse for us. You’re going to be at the wedding. You get to make me deal with whatever pureblood bullshit you’ve dredged out of your ancient books of etiquette, and see me in my wedding dress, which I know is going to be gorgeous, because you have much better taste in clothing than I do, and is also going to be covered in blood before the end of the ceremony—”

“I have already taken that into account,” he said, sounding much more composed.

“I knew you would. Now, are we good? This time, I didn’t run off and endanger myself without you.”

“No, I endangered you quite enough for the both of us.” His expression darkened a bit, but didn’t return to its earlier misery, and that was more than good enough for me.

“Excellent. So let’s go see how chaotic things are in our room—you didn’t think we’d have actual privacy before the wedding, didyou?” I let go of his wrists. “You’re too smart to have made a mistake that massive.”

Tybalt scoffed and let me go, taking a step away before capturing my hand in his and pulling me along with him into the room where our friends—and Nessa—were waiting.

And boy howdy, were they waiting. They seemed to cover every available surface, making me feel abstractly as if I’d just walked into a drama club meeting from one of the terrible teen movies that Chelsea liked to co-opt my living room in order to watch. Her mother didn’t care for cinema of any kind, and Etienne apparently had a tendency to become completely enraptured by moving media, making him the binge-watcher to end all bingers. I thought that was hilarious, but apparently straining my friend’s marriage because I thought it was funny wasn’t appropriate, so the works of John Hughes and Kenny Ortega got to dominate my television instead of theirs.

Weirdly, Tybalt didn’t seem to mind the teen movie festival intermittently spinning up in our living room. When I’d asked him about it, he’d just laughed and said it was payback for the number of Shakespeare productions he made the kids sit through.

So walking into a scene from one of those movies was startling, but not as jarring as it could have been. The teenagers had claimed one of the short couches, the four of them piled on it like so many puppies, personal space forgotten in their rush to make sure no one sat on the floor. Raj hadn’t bothered switching to cat form before sprawling across Quentin and Dean’s laps, while Chelsea was perched on the back of the couch with one leg over each sitting boy’s shoulders, twisting a lock of Quentin’s hair between her fingers.

Walther and Nolan, on the other hand, were both on the floor, Walther slouched and Nolan as ramrod straight as if he were settled in a proper throne. Cassandra, interestingly enough, wasn’t sitting with her boyfriend; instead, she and her mother were sitting on another of the short couches. Kerry was bustling around the room, offering cookies to anyone who didn’t already have one. Which was everyone, meaning either the cookies had just come out or they were really, really good.

May and Jazz were standing, leaning against each other, both blessedly awake. Nessa and the Luidaeg were already seated on the last of the short couches, Nessa leaning into the sea witch like sheknew no other comfort in this world. Oberon was leaning against the wall between the two couches, still in his nondescript “I don’t matter, don’t pay attention to me” guise. They all looked around when Tybalt and I stepped inside, and I offered them a wan smile.

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