Chimes at Midnight

“Well, can I have my burrito?” She held out her hand. “And, well, you want to tell me what’s going on? You look like you’ve just seen a ghost, and you wouldn’t have come here like this, fresh from Court and with an entourage, because you thought I wanted a burrito. You’re not stupid enough to think I wouldn’t realize something was up.”

“Gee, you sure know how to make a girl feel good.” I straightened, dug her burrito out of the sack, and passed it to her. There was another burrito labeled “chicken w/o beans.” I handed it to Tybalt before taking a deep breath, putting the bag down on the kitchen table, and saying, “We finally found proof that the goblin fruit is killing changelings. At least a dozen so far.”

“You found a body and waited until the night-haunts came, didn’t you?” She took a bite of her burrito, foil and all. Her teeth had turned sharp at some point, more like a shark’s than a human’s.

“Yeah,” I confirmed quietly.

The Luidaeg took another foil-covered bite of burrito and swallowed without chewing before she said, “They must really like you, or they’d have killed you by now. So the stuff is killing changelings. We knew it would, eventually.”

“I went to the Queen of the Mists. I had to tell her.”

“You what?” The Luidaeg lowered her burrito, the color draining out of her eyes until they were the color of green driftglass, weathered and worn down by the sea. “Mom’s tits, Toby, are you stupid?”

“I had to know if she knew.”

“Let me guess: she did.”

“She’s the one who’s been distributing it.” The depth of loathing in my voice didn’t surprise me, although maybe it should have. At some point in the drive, my dislike of her had solidified into hatred. She was a murderer, even if Oberon’s Law didn’t see her that way.

“And? Kings and Queens need money, too, and people like their drugs too much to care about whether or not they’re going to be fatal. Hell, sometimes ‘it will kill you’ is the main appeal.”

“It’s too fast,” said Quentin. We all turned to look at him. He shrugged. “Almost nothing is addictive just because you taste it once. Goblin fruit doesn’t give people a choice. You could make someone a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, if you wanted to be a jerk. And there’s no way to quit. It doesn’t seem . . . I dunno, fair.”

“Faerie isn’t fair, kid, and if you don’t know that, it’s high time you learned it.” The Luidaeg shook her head. “Fair was never on the table.”

“It’s not right,” I said, suddenly annoyed by her casual dismissal of Quentin’s concerns. “It’s endangering Faerie. Even if ‘fair’ was never a consideration, survival was. Is. As long as we’re stuck in the human world, we can’t afford the risks goblin fruit encourages people to take.”

“Better,” said the Luidaeg, and took another bite of burrito.

I was warming to my subject. “How are they even growing the stuff? You can’t cultivate goblin fruit in the mortal world. You can barely grow it in the Summerlands without a dedicated team of horticulturists who don’t have hobbies. Walther tried to cultivate a bush, just so he could chart the life cycle, and he gave up when even doing the whole thing inside Goldengreen didn’t make the berries germinate.”

“Where does goblin fruit grow naturally?” asked the Luidaeg.

“Tirn Aill, Tir Tairngire, and the Blessed Isles.” The answer was automatic. Back when I lived with my mother, I spent hours being trained on the names of all the lands of Faerie, even the ones that I would never live long enough to see.

“Uh-huh. And they’ve been sealed for centuries, right?”

“Yes, but during the exodus, people brought soil and stuff. I just don’t understand why it hasn’t all been used up by now. I mean, how long does a pot of dirt from the Blessed Isles stay a pot of dirt from the Blessed Isles, and not a pot of dirt from Marin?”

The Luidaeg smiled. “Now you’re asking better questions. Here’s the deal with goblin fruit: it keeps showing up on the street because purebloods with the space and magic to grow the bushes like the berries. And where there’s a market, people will find a way to get to the product. I hate the shit. It wreaked hell with the Selkie community about two hundred years back, and I don’t like anything that screws with the Selkies. But I wasn’t able to stop people from selling it, just drive them off my territory. With the Queen backing them and with me in semi-retirement, there’s nothing standing in their way.”

“Yeah.” The Luidaeg didn’t like anything that screwed with the Selkies, except for the Luidaeg. They were her property, in a messed-up way, because they existed due to the horrible murder of most of her descendants. I tried not to think about that too hard. “Are you going to come out of retirement?”

“Can’t. Wish I could, but I can’t.” The Luidaeg shook her head. “I withdrew for a reason. Don’t ask me about it. It’s one of the things I’m not allowed to tell you.”