Ashes of Honor

“You have an uncanny ear for the things I most wish you would forget, while willfully and continually forgetting the things I wish you would remember,” said Tybalt dryly. “I had a choice, when Raj’s parents brought him to me. I could do as they asked, take him as a nephew and let them stay by his side. Or I could do as my father taught me, take him as a son, raise him as my own, and drive them as far from my territory as I could.”

“Oh.” We kept walking. Finally, I said, “I don’t like Raj’s dad. He’s kind of an asshole. But I’m glad you let him stay with his son. I think it says something good about your character.”

“I appreciate your approval,” said Tybalt. Then he laughed. “Had I known it was as easy to get as all that, I might have confessed my softheartedness years ago. Really, October, you should provide a list of ways to reach your good side. It would be a kindness beyond measure.”

“I’m not that complicated,” I protested.

“As someone who has to deal with you on a regular basis, I beg to differ,” said Tybalt. “At times, I suspect you’re doing it intentional—” He stopped in the middle of the word. He stopped walking at the same time, jerking me to an unexpected halt. The rose thorns bit deeper into my fingers. I yelped.

“Dammit, Tybalt! What gives?”

“I’m afraid I owe you an apology,” said Tybalt, eyes wide. He held up his ball of shadow. Ball of mostly shadow—swirls of bluish light were moving through it, appearing and disappearing like eels swimming in brackish water. “He’s near. Not here, but…near.”

“Where?”

Tybalt nodded toward the nearest tangled wall of rosebushes. “That way.”

“Then let’s go.”

He shot me a surprised look.

I smiled. “I trust you. Now open up those shadows, and let’s bring our boy home.”

Tybalt nodded. Pulling back, he threw his ball of shadow at the roses. It stuck where it hit. Then it dissolved, blackness spreading over branches, thorns, and flowers alike to create a black “doorway” in the wall. I could feel the chill radiating out of it.

There was a time when Tybalt only got me into the shadows by surprising me or jerking me off-balance. That time has passed. I walked with him into the dark willingly, the rose still joining our hands. For a moment, the light of the Rose Road shone in from behind us, illuminating nothing, but making that nothing a little easier to see. Then the way behind us closed, and everything was blackness.

We stopped walking and just stood there in the dark, not moving. I forced myself not to breathe and tried not to shiver too hard. The cold of the Shadow Roads was somehow worse when we held still, as though that immobility really allowed the frost to catch hold and begin gnawing its way inside. Even the blood on my fingers was freezing; I could feel it turning to ice.

Finally Tybalt whispered, “This way,” and pulled me forward. There was a horrible wrenching, twisting sensation, as if the shadows were pushing back against us, as if we were going somewhere we weren’t meant to be. It became almost painful, and still Tybalt kept pulling me forward. I gritted my teeth and kept going, trusting him to know what he was doing. The twisting became a tearing, and the cold became a burn, and just as I was about to scream—

—the darkness broke around us, and the tearing sensation stopped.

Tybalt dropped my hand, letting go of the rose in the process, and bent forward to rest his hands against his knees, panting. I straightened and looked around, still holding the rose. We were…I didn’t know where we were. We were someplace I had never been before. There was one thing I knew, though, all the way down to the core of my being.

This wasn’t the Summerlands.

The sky was the deep, impenetrable blue of true midnight. The stars were bright; I didn’t know any of the constellations. We were near the edge of a cliff; I could see more cliffs gleaming white as bone to either side, descending sharply to the equally white beaches below. They contrasted well with the absolute blackness of the ocean beneath them. Far out on the bay, a lighthouse swept its light smoothly across the waves.

“Where the fuck are we?” I breathed.

“I don’t know,” wheezed Tybalt. “Remind me to beat my nephew for making us come here.”

“No,” I said. I turned to look behind us. The land stretched into a wide moor. Beyond that, hills, some crowned with the familiar, irregular shapes of castles. The air smelled like heather, flowering bloom, peat, and the sea. What it didn’t smell like was the modern world. No pollution, no smog, no traces of combustion engines. Wherever we were, it was a place that had been sealed away long before the technological revolution changed things. “I get to beat him. I figured out how to get us here. That means I have dibs.”

“Why are you an adherent to logic only when it results in the commission of violence?”