Ashes of Honor

The kitchen was as clean as the rest of the apartment. None of the appliances were newer than the early 1970s, but they were all spotless, with no dents or signs of rust. “You want some?” the Luidaeg asked, picking up a kettle and moving to fill it with water from the tap.

“Depends. Is that freshwater or saltwater?”

She cast a wry smile in my direction. “You’re catching on to the way things work. No tea for you. Now what in Dad’s name are you two doing here? Shit’s got to be pretty bad if you’re showing up on my doorstep before I’ve had my beauty sleep.”

I couldn’t think of a way to ease her into the situation, so I didn’t bother: “Etienne has a changeling daughter that nobody knew about, including him. And now she’s missing.”

“So?” The Luidaeg put the kettle on the stove. “Sounds like that saves him the trouble of giving her the Choice.”

“Etienne’s Tuatha.”

“So?”

“So the ‘car trouble’ I mentioned? Was the roof of my car getting smashed in by an Afanc looking for a place to sleep.”

The Luidaeg turned to stare at me. I kept on talking.

“Sylvester assumed it escaped from someone’s menagerie. He’s taken it back to Shadowed Hills until they can track down whoever owns it. But they’re not going to find an owner, are they? That thing came straight from Tirn Aill. Chelsea—Etienne’s daughter—her magic smells like sycamore smoke and calla lilies. I smelled it on the Afanc.”

The Luidaeg paled. That, in and of itself, was terrifying. “It’s happening again,” she said, almost in a whisper. “Oh, sweet Mother, it’s happening again.”

“What’s happening again? Luidaeg, talk to me. I need to know what’s going on. I need to find Chelsea.”

“Oh, you need to find her, all right,” said the Luidaeg. She shook her head. Somewhere in the middle of the gesture, the humanity left her face, acne scars and tan fading away. She was left with a faint mother-of-pearl undertone to her skin…and the freckles. They seemed to be permanent, no matter what shape she took. The Luidaeg can be distressingly protean, and I may never know what she really looks like. I’m not certain I want to. “You need to find her now.”

“How?” asked Quentin. We both turned to look at him. He was frowning. “I know we need to find her. That’s why we’re here. We can’t teleport. How are we supposed to find her?”

I looked back to the Luidaeg. “How bad can this get?”

“Bad,” she said. “I’m assuming you’ve both heard about the changelings who go wrong when their magic comes in.”

“Instead of getting all the limits and none of the power, they get all the power and none of the limits,” I said. “I think everyone’s heard those stories.”

“Yeah, well. Have you ever met one of those changelings?”

“No.” Every changeling I’d ever known, myself included, was magically weaker than their fae parent. The horror stories about uncontrollable changeling magic destroying knowes and burning human cities had always seemed to be just that: horror stories, usually trotted out by pureblood kids who wanted to remind us that we weren’t just less than they were, we were potentially going to go bad.

“So if they’re that rare, why do the stories endure?” asked the Luidaeg. “Faerie is usually happy to forget the bad things. Hell, we practically race to see who can forget them first. Maybe some people don’t like changelings, but shouldn’t they still be happy to forget about the disasters that happened years ago, to somebody else?”

I didn’t say anything. Neither did Quentin. We just waited.

The Luidaeg shook her head. “We remember because when it does happen, when this sort of thing does go wrong, it’s so fucking bad that no one can pretend it didn’t happen. The last time there was a Tuatha de Dannan changeling with the strength to smash his way through the walls Oberon erected between us and everywhere else, it was…bad.”

“Bad ‘well, that sucks’ or bad ‘end of the world’?” I asked, cautiously.

“Bad ‘he punched a hole all the way through to the central lands of Faerie, and some people were never heard from again,’” said the Luidaeg. “I’d tell you to go ask your mother, if I thought she’d be willing to talk to you about it. She was there. She was one of the people who had to seal the door he’d created before it could destroy all the worlds.”

Amandine had been rattling at doors no one could see since she went mad. Maybe she really could see something that the rest of us couldn’t. I frowned. “What happened to the changeling?”

“He died.” The Luidaeg’s tone made it clear that there would be no further discussion of the dead. Her kettle began to whistle. She took it off the stove and opened the nearest cabinet, taking down a mug. “If your Chelsea is that kind of changeling, you’ve got two choices.”

“What are those?” I already half-knew what she was going to say. I was hoping she’d come up with another option.