Once Broken Faith (October Daye #10)(87)
Conversation at the table stopped when I dropped myself into the chair between Tybalt and Patrick. “I thought you needed to avoid being seen with us too much,” I said. “Shouldn’t you be sitting at the high table?”
“I needed to avoid arriving with you, or having my status overtly twined with yours,” said Tybalt mildly. He began buttering a roll. “I will not be the last to hold my position, and did not wish to unduly handicap my successor by implying that the Court of Dreaming Cats owed some debt of fealty to the throne of the Mists. Now that everyone understands that I’m not domestic, I will do as cats have always done, and sit where I like. Besides, the conversation among Kings and Queens is dull as dishwater. Hence all the common men in Will’s plays.”
“He’s a fucking dumbass, but his heart’s in the right place,” said the Luidaeg. “So, Toby, how goes the systematic alienation of every noble on the West Coast? Get yourself banned from any new kingdoms yet? I understand the Kingdom of Copper is a great place to never go.”
“They won’t be sending me invitations to tea anytime soon, but I think I’ve mostly managed not to get myself banned from entry,” I said. I looked around, frowning. “Where’s Walther?”
“Things got a little shouty at the conclave,” said Quentin. “Then they got a lot shouty. Then they got screamy, with a side order of shrieky. Walther and Marlis are having dinner up in the room with the sleepers, supposedly so they can help Jin check on everyone’s condition, but really, I think, because Walther was afraid somebody would dump something on him.”
“Oh,” I said. The rolls looked good. My stomach rumbled, reminding me that with one thing after another, I hadn’t eaten nearly as much as I’d bled since getting out of bed. I snagged one, taking the butter knife out of Tybalt’s hand, and focused on the Luidaeg again. “So when I get out of here, I’m going to be checking my own blood memories for anything that seemed out of place when we first got to the conclave this evening, but this seems like a good time to ask: what can you tell me about fairy rings?”
The Luidaeg sat up straighter, blinking in surprise. Her eyes changed color with each blink, going from driftglass green to foam white, then to solid black, and finally back to their original shade. “Fairy rings? Why are you asking me about those?”
“The monarchs from Golden Shores brought them up during their questioning. Supposedly, fairy rings can move stuff through time?”
“Sort of,” said the Luidaeg. She was still looking thoughtful. “Subjectively. It’s . . . not that simple.”
“So how simple is it?”
“A fairy ring is a stepping stone. A fairy ring takes someone or something and freezes them for however long they need to be kept still. It’s not time travel. It’s not jumping from one era to another. It’s just . . . a pause, before things continue on their normal course. It feels like moving forward in time to the people who’ve been affected, because they were paused.”
There was a clink. I turned to Tybalt. He had dropped his fork and was staring at the Luidaeg, pupils reduced to slits and cheeks gone pale. I reached over and touched his arm. He jumped, gaze flicking to me for a moment before his attention returned to her.
“Would it look . . . to someone on the outside of the ring, would it look like the person had just stopped for some reason?”
“Yes,” said the Luidaeg. “That’s part of why they were never as popular as elf-shot. With elf-shot, you put the person to sleep for a hundred years. You can move them, hide them, do whatever you need to with them. With a fairy ring, they’re stuck in the circle. As soon as the magic powering the spell is exhausted, time will start moving for them again. Until then, unless you want to break the ring, you have to keep an eye on them to make sure nothing disturbs the spell. Any time a human wandered into the woods and wandered out a hundred years later, some poor sap had been punished with watching a mortal spend a century standing perfectly still. You can’t even draw mustaches on the people, for fear that you’ll knock them out of alignment and start the clock again.”
“The way Antonio described the shadows shifting,” I said. “It wasn’t someone teleporting him. Time was passing outside the ring, and when the ring was broken—for whatever reason—the shadows looked like they had moved.”
“It happened to you, too,” said Tybalt. I turned to blink at him. He was still watching the Luidaeg, but he was speaking to me; that much was very clear. “We were in your chambers. You were about to kiss me. Do you remember?”
“I got stabbed right before I could,” I said. “That sort of thing is pretty hard to forget.”
“You stopped.” He finally turned to look at me. “You were leaning in, and then you stopped. Not long—only a few seconds—but long enough for me to notice.”
“Oh.” Oh. I remembered the confused look on his face, the way he’d suddenly been staring at me. It couldn’t have been a long pause without him becoming alarmed, but any pause at all would have been strange, given the situation. “Did you see anything? Smell anything?”
“I saw you go still, and I was focused on that,” said Tybalt. “I think I would have noticed someone standing behind you.”
“Not if they were in a chained fairy ring, under a don’t-look-here,” said the Luidaeg. We both turned to her. She shrugged. “Set up two rings. One for your target, one for yourself. Tie them together. Set the spell so that the first ring will break when the second ring is activated, and cast the don’t-look-here just before you step into the first ring.”