Once Broken Faith (October Daye #10)(104)

I tried to go limp as I fell, hoping it would minimize the pain of my impact with the ground, which was rushing up on me faster and faster, becoming a black sheet that blanketed my vision and blocked out everything else.

This is gonna suck, I thought.

Then I hit the ground, and everything disappeared.





TWENTY-ONE


CONSCIOUSNESS CAME ON LIKE a flipped switch: one moment I wasn’t in the world, and the next moment I was. There was no pain. That was probably a good sign. While I was pretty sure that it was possible for me to experience such profound trauma that I lost the ability to feel pain, one little fall from an impossible height wasn’t going to be enough to do it.

I opened my eyes.

The ceiling was redwood, spangled with the cutout shapes of stained-glass stars in blackberry purple and deep sea blue. Matching shades covered the lights, keeping them from becoming too bright. I blinked twice, and decided to skip the whole process of testing my body to see whether it still worked. Either it did, or it didn’t. There were no other options.

I sat up. A wave of dizziness swept over me, forcing me to throw my hand to the side to brace myself. It hit a softly padded surface. I looked down. I was sitting on a bed, sheets beneath me and patchwork quilt atop me. I was also clean. There was no blood on my clothing, which had been changed while I was asleep, replaced by a simple white cotton shift with a drawstring neck. Tiny blackberry flowers had been embroidered around the neck, white on white, virtually invisible save for the tiny pops of yellow at their centers. I was still in Muir Woods, then. Arden seemed to have an almost compulsive need to spatter blackberry symbolism on everything she owned, just to make sure people knew it was hers. I couldn’t blame her for that, considering how long she’d been exiled from her family’s throne. Sure, I would have done the claiming with a label-maker, but to each their own.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” I turned toward the voice and found a slim, short woman with pale skin and sharp features standing in the doorway, arms crossed and dragonfly wings beating a mad tattoo in the air behind her. A sleek, short-cropped pageboy haircut framed her face in black silk, making her look like the poster girl for medical responsibility. “You need to lie back down, now.”

“Hi, Jin,” I said, pushing the quilt back. My legs were bare, although my shift extended to mid-thigh—long enough for decency. I rotated my left ankle experimentally. It moved smoothly and without that little catch that it had been showing before. “Did I rebreak my ankle? Where were you before?”

“I went out the window when they came in. Unlike some people, I can fly. Toby, I need you to look at me.” There was something wrong with her voice. I had heard her in distress before; had heard her struggling to save a patient who she thought was not going to willingly stay. I had never heard her sound so serious. Startled, I looked back at her.

Jin wasn’t frowning, exactly. Her expression was one of profound and absolute sorrow. I felt myself go cold. “Toby—”

“When did he die?” The question came out surprisingly even. My voice didn’t shake. My voice didn’t do anything. The words fell between us like stones in a wall, and part of me knew that this had always been the way things had to be. I didn’t get the happy ending, the man who loved me and the bouquet of roses in my hand. The world has never, never been that kind. Not where I’m concerned.

Jin blinked, sorrow fading into confusion. “When did who die?”

“Tybalt. That’s why I was screaming for you before, remember? So you could try to save him?” He’d lost so much blood. It was easy to forget that for other people, blood loss was a dangerous problem, not just an inconvenience to be fixed with Pop Tarts and protein. I’d become so accustomed to being invulnerable that I’d allowed myself to believe everyone I cared about was, too.

Maybe if Verona hadn’t interrupted her. Maybe if she’d been allowed to work. Maybe if we’d gotten the elf-shot into his arm a little sooner.

You can hang the stars on maybe, but they won’t light up the sky.

“Oh, sweet Titania, Toby, no.” Jin’s face relaxed as she understood. “Tybalt is fine. I was able to patch up his remaining injuries and give him a potion to help regenerate the blood he lost. He may be sore when he wakes up, but he’s alive. He’s going to be perfectly healthy. There won’t even be a scar.”

I stared at her. “What?”

“Tybalt is recovering. He’s still asleep because the conclave isn’t over, and we don’t have permission from the High King to wake anyone, but he isn’t going to die.”

None of this made sense. “Then why—”

“You died.”

I froze.

Jin kept talking. “I saw you fall. I was hiding on the roof of the tower, trying to decide whether it was safe to go for help, and when you came out of the window, I went after you. You landed at the base of the tower, and you were . . . you were broken, October. I don’t have the words for what I saw when I looked at you, except to say that I never want to see anything like that again. I didn’t rebreak your ankle. You did, when you fell. You broke . . . I think you broke every bone in your body, and even a few that shouldn’t have been breakable. You shattered yourself.”

“Oh.”

“Yours wasn’t the only body there, but you were the only one still breathing. I don’t know how you were still breathing. You should have been dead before I could reach you. I was trying to figure out how to move you when Queen Windermere appeared. The pixies had gone to find her.” Jin shook her head. “I gave you an anesthetic, and we carried you back into the knowe. It took me three hours to set your bones, Toby. Three hours. It was like doing a jigsaw puzzle.”