Once Broken Faith (October Daye #10)(110)
“Not everyone’s going to get it,” she said. “People who were sentenced to sleep for their crimes will still need to wait and wake up the usual way, and we’re sure as shit not going to go onto Mom’s old Road to wake my sister. I’ll find a way to ward her away from Karen. Kid deserves a break. But the innocent and the targeted and the accidental, them, we can wake up.”
“When?” I let her go, taking a step back. “When are we waking them up?”
“Arden is trying to decide how they’re going to wake the Prince. Guess he’s sort of a big deal.” The Luidaeg nodded toward Nolan, making sure I knew which of the available princes she meant. “And I’m pretty sure they’re planning to buy all the sushi in San Francisco and wake Dianda up as part of a formal apology to the Undersea. Siwan is figuring out the materials they’ll need, and she’s coming up here to wake her nephew in a little bit. Says she wants him to help her get everything in order.”
I nodded slowly. “And Quentin and Tybalt . . . ?”
“That’s why I’m here.” She held up her empty hand. “Nothing up my sleeves.” She closed her hand. When she opened it again, a glass potion bottle on a long silver chain dropped to dangle near her elbow. At my shocked look, she smirked, and asked, “You really thought some wet-behind-the-ears alchemist would come up with an elf-shot cure and I wouldn’t demand samples? Walther will be able to help his aunt brew a fresh batch, but I didn’t figure you’d be big on patience. You’ve got three doses there. Enough for all three of the boys.”
“I can’t . . . I don’t . . . I mean . . .” I stammered to a stop, took a deep breath, and said the only thing that seemed even halfway sufficient: “Thank you.”
“Yeah.” She seemed almost sad as she held the pendant out to me. “I guess you’d have to.”
I wanted to ask what she meant by that. I didn’t want to know. I held the potion bottle in my hand, feeling the cool glass getting warmer where it pressed against my skin, and looked from one bier to another. I needed to wake one of them before the other. But which one?
The Luidaeg rolled her eyes. “Oh, for Mom’s sake. Feed it to your kitty, and give the rest to me. I’ll wake up the kid and the alchemist. They don’t want to see you sucking face first thing out of their coma anyway.”
Thanking her again would have been excessive and potentially dangerous. I bobbed my head in silent understanding and turned back to Tybalt. His lips were parted. That seemed like a prompt. I pulled the glass stopper out of the potion bottle and leaned forward, pressing the rim to his lips. Then, keeping my movements slow and easy, I tipped the bottle upward until a third of the liquid trickled into his mouth.
He wasn’t choking. That was a good sign. I turned to hand the bottle to the Luidaeg.
When I looked back to Tybalt, his eyes were open. He seized immediately on my face, eyes widening as his hand scrabbled on the bier, looking for mine. I gave it to him, and he clutched my fingers tight. The color was already starting to come back into his cheeks, slow but steady, as Jin’s magic woke and finished its healing.
“October?” he asked, and his voice was raspy, and the sound of it mended something in my heart that I had thought was broken forever.
“Hi,” I whispered.
“Your hair. It’s still brown.” He reached up with his free hand, running his fingers through my hair before bringing them to rest against the tapering curve of my ear. Then he smiled. “You didn’t have to change for me.”
I knew instantly what he meant, and nodded, raising my hand to curl over his, keeping him in place. “The conclave just ended. They voted to wake up everybody who isn’t asleep for good reason.” I could hear Quentin stirring behind me—his squawk of indignation, and the Luidaeg’s pained exhale as he threw his arms around her neck. Everything was normal, then. Playing out exactly like it was supposed to.
Tybalt nodded slowly. “I feel . . . better.”
“Jin was here.”
“Ah. That explains it.”
I was going to have to tell him about what had happened with Verona and Kabos, how they’d manipulated Minna and used her as their murder weapon. He needed to understand why all this had happened, and how it was that I’d found myself hauled out of a tower window and plummeting to my death. He wasn’t going to like that. Hell, I didn’t like it. But he was awake for me to tell, and right here and now, that was more than enough for me.
I bent to kiss him, quick and glancing, and left our hands joined as I twisted to cast a smile at my newly reawakened squire.
Things were getting back to normal.
TWENTY-THREE
THINGS WERE NOT GETTING BACK to normal. There was no version of normal I could envision where I would save the day—nearly getting killed in the process—awaken my lover, my squire, and my friend, and find myself not eight hours later standing in front of the High King and High Queen of the Westlands, the Queen in the Mists, and Duke Sylvester Torquill, listening to them deciding my fate.
Some days it’s not worth crawling out of the shallow woodland grave, I swear.
“Be that as it may,” Aethlin was saying, “she has now been present for the deaths of two monarchs, responsible for the replacement of two others, and directly responsible for the death of one of the Firstborn. These are issues we must consider.”