Page 72 of Silver and Lead (October Daye #19)

TWENTY-FOUR

A RDEN INSISTED ON TAKING us all immediately back to Muir Woods to receive medical attention.

I would have protested louder than I did, but the Cait Sidhe agreed to stay behind and secure the courtyard, with Shade taking temporary command of the entire group.

A gathering of mortal cats is called a colony or a clowder, but watching her patrol the edges with her lieutenants close behind her, all of them feline form and fierce, I could think of a better word for a group of Cait Sidhe.

A pride. Like mortal lions, they were as terrifying as they felt the need to be, and more than capable of making their wishes known.

Arden opened a portal back to her knowe and I stepped through, Tybalt close behind, with May and Quentin following him while Madden came through with Arden herself.

When the portal closed we were standing in her throne room, empty and echoing in the absence of the Court.

The baby gave one small, confused cry, then subsided. I looked at her anxiously.

“Shouldn’t babies cry more than this?” I asked. “May?”

“She’s early, and we know she was exposed to the iron; I’m sure it’s fine,” she said, walking over to stand near me and peer down at the baby, who was staring at the world with open eyes.

“Can we get Jin to come and look her over?” I asked.

“Etienne is already going to get her,” said Arden. “Duke Torquill will surely allow for the loan of his healer in the service of his knight.”

“Duke Torquill can eat me if he wants to argue about whether he wants to provide necessary medical care to his niece and her newborn child ,” snapped Quentin.

I turned to look at him, surprised by his outburst. For all that his frustration with Sylvester had been growing for some time, he was usually too attached to the rules of courtly behavior to be so openly scornful.

He met my eyes challengingly, still wobbly from his own blood loss and earlier injuries, and I decided not to say anything. If he wanted to make this the hill he was willing to die on, so be it. Jin was coming anyway.

Then hands were gripping my arm, and Tybalt was guiding me to a chair, easing me down into it with exquisite care. I looked up at him, then blinked and grinned.

“You still have blood on your cheek,” I said.

“Don’t worry,” he replied. “It’s not mine.”

I kept smiling as I chuckled and looked around the room.

We looked like we’d survived a war. Madden, in particular, was covered in blood and scratches, in addition to the blisters on his hands.

May was almost as bloody as he was, while Walther and Quentin looked mostly intact, if you ignored the way Walther was startling at every sound and Quentin was swaying where he stood.

“I’m going to kill my grandmother,” I said philosophically, tilting my head back to look at Tybalt again. “I hope you’re all right with that.”

“If you must do so, you’re committing to locating Maeve, as she was the one to curse Janet into immortality,” he said. “Without her blessing, the woman lives.”

“I’ve found two of the Three. What’s one more?” I looked down at the baby. “Look what we made.”

“She’s perfect,” said Tybalt.

“I don’t know yet whether she’s going to take after you or me, but I know there’s no humanity in her,” I said. “My magic… she’s fully fae. Already.”

“Then she was meant to be,” he said. “Forgive a foolish father for not being too angry that his daughter was designed to live forever.”

“I won’t,” I said. I sniffed the air, but there was so much blood and magic around us that I couldn’t pick out anything about hers. That would be a surprise for another hour.

The throne room doors slammed open and I tensed, whipping around to see who had just arrived.

The Luidaeg stalked into the room. She still looked mostly like a human teenager, but her hair was unbound, falling around her face in thick, wavy curls, and her gown looked like it had been carved from the abyssal depths, blacker than anything else in the world, except at the edges, where it turned as translucent as the water that it was.

Her face was twisted into an expression caught almost exactly between rage and grief.

Then she caught sight of me and it shattered, falling away to leave her momentarily exposed. In that moment, she looked heartbroken and older than any mountain left in the world, like the personification of all the centuries we’d scattered behind us on the path from there to here.

“Toby?” she asked, and her voice was a whisper and a shout at the same time. What little conversation had resumed after the doors slammed open died.

“Hi, Luidaeg,” I said, mustering a faint smile. “Come meet your goddaughter.”

“I am going to kill you,” she said, striding across the room.

“Unless you have a timeline on that now, I already knew that,” I said. “I’m guessing Karen talked to you?”

She looked at me, eyes still black with grief, and nodded.

“I didn’t say anything to Karen that wasn’t true while I was saying it,” I said. “I really thought I was going to die. But I should have known better, and trusted my team to get me through the impossible.”

“Yeah, yeah, you have good people who care about you,” said the Luidaeg. She held out her arms. “Give me the baby.”

What had been an obscenity from Janet and Dame Altair was a homecoming from the sea witch. I gingerly passed our daughter to her, and she pulled the baby to her chest, looking down at her face with a bittersweet, heartbreaking flavor of awe.

“Do you know her name yet?” asked the Luidaeg.

“We hadn’t really talked about it much,” I said, grimacing. “We were both trying to convince ourselves that there was going to be a baby. And after the last few days, I feel like the name I was going to suggest is in bad taste, so—”

“No,” said the Luidaeg. “No, that’s her name. It always was.”

I sighed heavily. “Sometimes I forget how insufferable Seers can be,” I said.

The Luidaeg looked at me and smiled. “Yeah, we’re good that way.”

“If you knew she was a girl, why didn’t you say something before?”

“Because the future is very rarely absolute,” she said, sobering again.

“She was always a girl… if she lived. She was always going to be my goddaughter, if you lived. There were too many ‘ifs’ in the air until Karen came to me and they all collapsed, and then she was a girl and my goddaughter and an orphan inside of the year. Then I was raising her alone, and making enemies everywhere I went, and it was terrible, and I like this future better. But her name is still her name, and you should get on with it.”

“Right,” I said, slowly. I tilted my head back, looking at Tybalt.

“What do you think of ‘Miranda’? It’s Shakespearean and I don’t know any fae by that name.

Janet’s been using it for centuries, so it’s technically a family name for me, because of my potentially evil, definitely kidnapping-prone grandmother. ”

“She tries to steal our child and so you’d name her in the woman’s honor?” he asked, disbelieving.

“She failed,” I said, shrugging. “I still like the name.” I liked the fact that Tybalt’s own birth name was caught in the middle of it, mired like a butterfly in amber, where we could find it any time we needed to look.

“It’s not a month,” he said.

“I’ve never been all that wedded to that naming scheme,” I said, and he laughed, and Miranda yawned, and we were together, my strange little family. We were safe, and we were together, and we were going to be all right.

Isn’t that what always matters?