Page 67 of When Sorrows Come

“Actually, I think that’s a little modern for him,” I said.

“Toby actually tries to get punched less when Tybalt can see,” continued Kerry blithely.

Julie gasped. “No!”

“I hate you all,” I said. My three best friends since childhood broke into unified laughter, and the sound was so familiar, so comfortable, that I joined in, unable to resist the urge.

The door banged open again. Quentin fell into the room, Dean close behind him, both of them breathing heavily.

“You need to come with us,” said Quentin, not waiting for us to stop laughing or acknowledge their arrival. “You need to come with usright now.”

“What? Why?”

“Caitir’s waiting for you. Come on.” Quentin bolted back into the main room, leaving Dean behind.

Dean looked at us gravely, and said, “The High King has been poisoned. Please come.”

I went.

Caitir—the Candela from before, now fully recovered, Merry Dancers bobbing around her head—was waiting for us. “Alchemist said you’d ridden my blood,” she said. “Means you know I’m me.”

“Yes,” I agreed. I would have known even without riding her blood. Much like Nessa’s impossible beauty, the Doppelgangers couldn’t mimic a Candela’s magic without access to their blood, and even access to their blood wouldn’t duplicate their Merry Dancers, which are technically separate entities born at the same time as their Candela partner. They die at the same time, too. Caitir would be the last person in this knowe to be replaced.

“Good. So we’re leaving.” She waved her hand. A hole appeared in the air, and she looked at me expectantly, waiting for me to go through.

I glanced around the room. It was even more crowded now than it had been earlier, packed with what was starting to feel like every person I’d ever met in my life... except for Tybalt.

“He’s already gone to talk to the guard,” said Dean, catching the direction of my search. Quentin was standing next to Caitir, bouncing on his toes in the anxious need to get moving. “He knows where you’ll be. You’re not running off without telling him.”

“I appreciate that,” I said, and leapt through the portal Caitir had opened, barely taking the time to catch my breath first.

Quentin was close behind me, and Caitir close behind him. Our feet never hit the ground. Unlike the long run through the Shadow Roads that always awaited me when Tybalt was in control, this was a swift and terrible passage through the darkness and cold, lit by the flickering glow of the Merry Dancers, which had the time to swirl around us once before we were tumbling into the bright light of what looked like a gentleman’s study.

Like what seemed to be everything else in this knowe, the walls were furnished in polished maple, with brass fittings and witch-lights burning in verdigrised silver sconces. Books filled the shelves, and while they all looked rarified and old, I recognized a couple of the titles. The High King was apparently fond of high-end leather-bound reproductions of classic science fiction novels. There were worse things he could have been doing with his time.

Like, at the moment, dying. He was collapsed in the highbacked leather chair behind the desk, clutching his chest with one hand, breath coming in shuddering, uneven gasps. His color had shifted,going from his normal healthy peach to a waxen pallor that was frankly a little unnerving.

Maida was on one side of him, clutching his hand in her own, watching Walther with the rapt attention of a cobra trapped in a room with a mongoose. Walther had set up his alchemy kit on the desk, sweeping everything that had been placed there onto the floor in the process, and was mixing chemicals and herbs as fast as he could, hands a blur. Cassie stood nearby, one of the witch-lights in her own hands, eyes fixed on the air above it.

“Cassowary plum,” she said, tone gone dreamy and distant. “Milkweed, eucalyptus, and ground beetle wing. Hercules beetles, species nonspecific.”

“I brought them, Majesty,” said Caitir. Maida’s gaze snapped to me, like it was following a preset grid. She took a deep, shuddering breath, shoulders slumping.

“He’sdying,” she said. “Fix him.”

“I can’t.”

“As your High Queen, Iorderyou to fix him.”

“And again, I can’t.” I shook my head helplessly. “I can put a body back together. I can’t remove poison. I’d have to exsanguinate him, strip the poison out of his blood, and put it all back when I was done, and by that point, he’d be dead, and I’m not actually sure there’s anything I could do about that.”

Someone coughed in the corner of the room. “Technically true, but close enough to falsehood that it makes my head ache.”

I glanced sharply to where Fiac lurked. “I’ve managed to raise the dead before, under tightly controlled conditions that might or might not be replicable, and not when I was trying to bring back the High King. The pressure alone might be enough to make things go wrong.CanI raise the dead? Sometimes. Occasionally.ShouldI raise the dead? Not according to the night-haunts. It’s not something I should be doing casually or something we can count on working every time I decide to give it a go, and it’scertainlynot a decent reason to call off a perfectly good alchemist just because hey presto, Toby the magic cure-all walked into the room!”

I was yelling by the time I finished. On a moment’s reflection, I realized I didn’t care. Sometimes, yelling is the right thing to do.

Quentin stepped around me, grimacing as he glanced over at Fiac, and hurried to kneel beside his mother, who wrapped him ina tight embrace. So tight that for a moment he went a little cross-eyed, looking like he couldn’t quite remember how to breathe.

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