Once Broken Faith (October Daye #10)(131)

“Magic-burn?” asked Walther sympathetically. His hand dipped into his pocket, coming up with a small white bottle, which he offered to me. “Here. This will help.”

“Alchemy?” I asked. I took the bottle without waiting for his answer. Magic-burn is the worst. I would have taken just about anything to make it stop.

“Close,” he said. “Aspirin.”

I laughed. Then I winced as the laughter made my head hurt worse. “Ow,” I said again, and dry-swallowed two aspirin.

Through all of this, Madden was keeping himself busy with glaring at Walther and Cassandra. “I still don’t understand why you’re here,” he said. “You could have stayed home. Safe. Let your vassals do this for you.”

“Can’t,” I said, giving him what I hoped would be a reassuring pat on the arm. “She’s going to charge for this. You know she’s going to charge for this. They’re my subjects, not my vassals—although we’re going to be talking about permanent positions after all this is finished—and I can’t ask subjects to pay in my place.”

“I would,” said Madden.

“I know you would,” I said. I smiled at him, as earnestly as the pain in my head would allow. “That’s why you don’t get to. You’re my best friend. I need us to stay as close to equal as we possibly can, under the circumstances, and that means you don’t throw yourself on any grenades for me. You’re here to make sure I get home after whatever happens. They’re here because Walther needs to get the countercharm, and Cassandra’s helping him.”

And because I might need a Seer to find the Luidaeg’s house. She was rumored to live in this part of the city, where the gentrification ran headlong into the urban decay, forming a strange band that could go from absolutely modern to crumbling and antique in the space of a single block. I liked the older parts of the City, the ones that didn’t feel like they were changing so damn fast, but this neighborhood had always unnerved me. It didn’t feel slow. It felt frozen, like time was standing still in this little slice of dockside real estate.

I looked to Cassandra. She winced. “I’m not Google Maps,” she said.

“You’re the closest thing we’ve got,” I said. “Tell me which way to go.”

“How should I know?”

“Ask the air.”

Cassandra took a deep breath, looking like she was going to argue. Then she sighed, tilted her head back, and looked at the empty, foggy air for a long moment. “That way,” she said, jabbing a finger at the nearest alley. “We need to go that way.”

“And if you’re wrong?” asked Madden.

“I guess we find out when the muggers appear,” snapped Cassandra.

Walther put a hand over his mouth to smother his laughter. I rolled my eyes.

“This is going to be a fun night,” I said.

“This has already been a fun night,” said Cassandra.

I couldn’t argue with that. We started walking.

The sidewalks here were interesting. I found myself staring at them, trying to puzzle out what about them was so off. The sound of our footsteps was the only thing breaking the silence.

The only thing. No one was tripping, or stubbing their foot on cracked pavement, or walking on broken glass. I stopped and gave a crack an experimental kick. It was there—I could feel its edges—but somehow it didn’t catch my foot. It was like the sidewalks had been enchanted to make them safer.

They probably had been. The sea witch lived here. I’d known since my days with Marianne that she wasn’t evil, just compelled to do things she didn’t want to do; I’d known since starting to deal with October that she was protecting my city and my subjects, in her own occasionally brutal way. Things had gotten pretty bad under the custodianship of the woman who’d stolen my father’s throne. Without the Luidaeg, things would have gotten even worse.

It was a sobering thought. I started walking again, catching up with the others. Cassandra hesitated from time to time, gazing off into the distance before choosing our next turn. Either we were going to get to the Luidaeg, or we were going to be attacked by mortal muggers who thought we were a bunch of foolish club kids wandering too far from the bright lights of downtown. We all had our human disguises on, and we made a motley bunch: Walther in his professor’s clothes, Cassandra the coed, Madden the barista, and me, Queen in the Mists, in my blue jeans and Borderlands Books hoodie, with my hair tucked behind my rounded human ears. If not for the fact that my brother was in trouble, it would have been almost relaxing. We were just out, walking, enjoying a beautiful night, not running a Kingdom. Not wearing a crown. We were people.

The scholars who like to have accurate notes about such things think Oleander de Merelands was the one who killed my parents; that she slit my mother’s throat and did some terrible thing to my father, using the earthquake as cover. The people who care about “who” and “why” have lots of notes, and some of them have shown up at my Court, trying to show them to me. The people who want history to make sense don’t seem to understand that it doesn’t matter who killed him; what matters is he died, and he took us all with him to the grave. The person I am now is not who I would have been, had my father lived. The person my brother would be when he woke—and he was going to wake—was not the person he would have been, either. Every death is a massacre.