“Right now, for you? I do. I’m not doing anything. I will be soon, I think—Poppy’s seen a few changelings sniffing around the neighborhood, and that usually means they’re trying to work up the nerve to come and talk to me. But they’re not here yet, and until they are, I’m free.” Her feigned irritation faded as she spoke, becoming easy and relaxed. I smiled to myself.

  The Luidaeg can’t lie, but she can still deceive. She uses illusions and misdirection to shape the world as she wants it to be, and sounding angry when she’s not is one of those techniques. She’s almost always got something to be genuinely pissed off about, thanks to the web of geasa and enchantments that control her life. Her being able to relax around me was a victory beyond words.

  “Okay, so, did Arden tell you about the thefts?”

  “Thefts?” Her voice sharpened.

  “Guessing not. Someone cleaned out the royal vaults while we were all under Titania’s spell, and our charming queen asked me to find her missing stuff. With me so far?”

  “Yes…”

  “After the nonsense at Court last night with the pretender queen disappearing, I went to have a word with Dame Altair about why she’d been targeted—twice. Once to put her in the false queen’s place, and once in an attack on her household, using a stolen scabbard that turns anything metal it touches into iron.”

  The Luidaeg made a disgusted scoffing sound. “My brother Hugleikr created that thing. It’s basically indestructible. We all thought he was an asshole for making it, just because his descendant line was immune to iron, but I won’t deny that it came in handy when Titania’s kids were hunting us through the fens. Being able to make weapons they couldn’t stand against out of rust and shrapnel saved a lot of lives.”

  “It’s not saving lives now. Dame Altair’s footman was killed with iron, according to Arden.”

  “May he rest in the comfort of the root and the branch,” said the Luidaeg gravely.

  “Yeah,” I agreed. “Anyway. Went to Dame Altair’s knowe, and she invited me and Quentin inside to make polite conversation while she poisoned us. I woke up tied to a bed without my weapons, keys, or phone.”

  “That explains the unfamiliar number, I guess.”

  “Can’t call you from a phone I don’t have. I borrowed Dean’s.”

  “So you got away.”

  “We did. It hurt like hell, and I’ve definitely ruined this shirt, but I got loose, freed Quentin, and then found Dame Altair’s accomplice. Bucer O’Malley.”

  “That Glastig kid from Home?” She sounded faintly offended, like she couldn’t believe Dame Altair would stoop so low.

  “Yeah. Also turns out Dame Altair is Dugan Harrow’s sister. Did you know?”

  “I did,” admitted the Luidaeg. “I’m sorry. You didn’t ask, and I couldn’t volunteer the information.”

  “I don’t actually expect transparency from you anymore. I wish I could, but I know why you can’t provide it, and I don’t see any point in making us both miserable by requesting something impossible all the damn time. Okay, so you knew. What’s the story there? Can you tell me?”

  “It’s not protected information, and no one’s asked me to keep the secret,” she said, voice going thoughtful. “She poisoned you after I offered to stand godmother to your child, which can be seen as a slight against me and my ability to protect the pair of you … yeah, I can spin this as selfishness. So.” She paused to take a deep breath. “Dame Altair was born Eloise Harrow, younger sister of Dugan. She married an unlanded second son in Londinium, and the pair of them struck out for America in hopes of being able to move upward in the nobility. She made the crossing, her husband didn’t. Once she got to the Mists, she threw off her widow’s weeds inside of a season, called her brother over to join her, and opened that little knowe she’s so proud of. He stayed there with her until Gilad died, and then appeared in the pretender’s court inside of the year. I don’t think they intentionally hid their relationship, so much as it just didn’t matter for their respective ambitions, whatever those happened to be.”

  “So Dugan could have been feeding her information about what was in the vaults the whole time the pretender was on the throne.” It made a horrible sort of sense. “And for some reason Titania let her keep that information when she spelled us all. Why would she do that?”

  “Easy enough to mask dreams of treasure as just that—dreams. Wrap them up in veils and turn them into children’s stories, so Altair didn’t know what she was really sending her little thief after. People have done more for less. How did she find O’Malley?”

  “He was already on his way back up the coast when everything got weird. He came back to the Mists, she recruited him. Only it turns out he’s still a shitty little thief at heart, and while he was stealing for her, he was also stealing from her—skimming off the things she didn’t specifically ask him to get, which means anything she didn’t know about may be out in the wild. She caught on, and had him tied up, too.”

  The Luidaeg sighed heavily. “You released him, didn’t you?”

  “He could have useful information about where things are, and why Dame Altair felt the need to poison me, although I didn’t know about Dugan when I released him, and her being the sister of someone who’s tried to hurt my family before probably has something to do with it. We got out of her knowe, and on the way, we saw Dugan. He used another of those borrowed blood charms to teleport away—and how long do those things last, anyway? Doesn’t stolen magic have a shelf life?”

  “Fae flesh doesn’t rot, fae blood doesn’t curdle, and charms made from either will stay fresh for centuries if that’s what their use requires.”

  “Great,” I said sourly. “Anyway, we fled the knowe and went back to my house, which is where I get really homicidal.”

  “What happened?”

  “We got there to find Altair and Harrow were already in the house, disguised as me and Quentin. And when I realized what had happened, I turned around and walked away.”

  “Glastig got you, huh?”

  “Yeah,” I admitted. “Marcia realized I wasn’t acting right and mixed me some sort of weird concoction that knocked me out of it, and Quentin’s fine now too, but I don’t know whether Bucer’s going to be stupid enough to try something like that again. He seems awfully worried about his own skin.”

  “What does Altair think he stole?”

  “The hope chest.”

  The Luidaeg breathed in sharply, the world’s smallest sound of surprise. I held my tongue, giving her a second to recover her wits.

  That second passed. More followed, a cascade of seconds rolling down the slope of her silence, until I couldn’t wait any longer: “Luidaeg?”

  “You couldn’t have started by telling me that Goldengreen was missing?”

  For a dizzy moment, I thought she was talking about the knowe. Then I remembered that the hope chests all had proper names, once upon a time, and the one that had been in the kingdom vaults was Goldengreen, the namesake for the county where we now stood. Its importance was such that Evening had named her county after it, to brag about the fact that it was in her care. Now, even with the hope chest gone, the name endured.

  “I wanted you to understand the whole situation,” I said. “She turned on Bucer when it wasn’t there.”

  “But it really wasn’t there?”

  “Not when he broke into the vaults, or so he says. I haven’t been able to check the truth of what he’s been telling us quite yet.”

  “Uh-huh.” Glass clattered in the background, the sound heavy and somehow threatening, like it was a portent of something much larger. “Out of everything that could go missing, you don’t think it’s strange that the thing Altair is most concerned about getting her hands on would be the hope chest?”

  “No. It’s not strange.”

  “Explain.” Her voice had turned icy.

  “The false queen still thinks she can recover the Siren blood I took away from her. Dugan is her man, and Altair is his sister. If Dame Altair somehow remembered the vault, she may have also remembered that the hope chest was important to elevating her family standing in some way. After the enchantment broke, retrieving the hope chest for her brother and helping the false queen escape would have seemed like a perfect opportunity to get in the good books of someone their family is already connected to. They have her, I’m sure of it. Everything Altair said about her attacker’s magic could also be true of Dugan’s, and nothing she said was a lie. She was just describing her brother while she pointed at Simon.”

  And she was going to pay for that, just as soon as I had the opportunity to hand her the bill. I was still getting used to the idea of having Simon in my life on a permanent basis. I didn’t need some assholes taking him away from me.

  “All right, so why are you calling me?”

  “I need your help.”

  “Help how? You know I need specifics, Toby, or I can’t do anything.”

  I took a deep breath. “Luidaeg, can you please come to Goldengreen and bind Bucer’s magic so he can’t influence us again? I need to take Quentin back to the house and get Altair and her trashy brother the hell out of there before somebody gets hurt. I’ll call Arden, too, to get more backup on the ground, but I can’t risk leaving Bucer here to hurt Marcia and Dean, and I can’t take him anywhere with me if he can change my mind without my noticing.”

  “That passes outside the scope of selfishness. Hold on.”

  There was a clunking sound, followed by silence. I frowned at the phone, looking over my shoulder to where the others waited for me to finish. Quentin gave me a quizzical look. I shrugged. He turned back to Dean.

  “Hello?” I tried. “Luidaeg, are you there?”

  “This would have been so much more impressive if you’d been patient for another ten seconds, you know,” said the Luidaeg, walking into the courtyard. She was back in her customary overalls and heavy boots, with strips of electric tape holding her hair in twinned ponytails over her shoulders. She looked more human than anyone else in the room, even Marcia, and she was carrying a canvas shopping bag over one shoulder. She nodded to the others as she walked over to me. “Dean. Quentin. Marcia.” When she got to Bucer she paused, then smiled, showing a full mouthful of razor-sharp shark teeth. “Bucer. I thought you were well quit of this kingdom. Maybe you should have been.”

  He paled, taking a half-step back. The Luidaeg snapped her teeth at him with an audible clicking noise, laughing at his expression of sheer terror.

  “I didn’t know you were coming,” I said.

  She finally focused on me. “I don’t have to tell you everything I’m doing,” she said. “This was just easier if I could do it in person. Give me your wrist.”

  I hung up Dean’s phone and stuck it in my pocket before holding out my right arm, wrist tilted toward the ceiling. She nodded approvingly, taking hold of my hand and tilting it a little further toward her.

  “You asked for a way to protect yourself and those around you from the Glastig’s magic,” she said. “You fear for the safety of your family, and so you bargain with the sea witch. Is this true?”

  I nodded, meeting her eyes, which had gone as white and wild as seafoam. There was no trace of a pupil, but I knew she was still watching me. It was evident in the small motions of her head, the corrections of her gaze. She knew exactly where I was. Still, she didn’t say anything, evidently waiting for me to say something.

  “It’s true,” I said.

  “How much will you pay?”

  “Whatever you require, as long as it offers no harm to my child,” I said.

  She smiled. “Good girl,” she said, sounding incredibly pleased with my reply. “The first price my geas offered me would have had the baby in my arms rather than yours, and we could both have grappled with that nightmare for the rest of your life. Instead, I can offer you another option. I’ll give you what you ask of me, and you’ll give me blood—”

  I’d done that before. I smiled, starting to agree, and she cut me off.

  “—and bone,” she finished. “I’ll lay you down and slice you open, and I’ll have your ribs for my own, taken one by one from the willing. Do you agree?”

  I’d lost bits of bone before, and they’d always grown back. But the process was excruciatingly painful, and I wasn’t going to pretend to be excited about the idea. Still, I forced myself to nod.

  “I agree,” I said. “Blood, and bone, both given freely to you, to be used as you see fit—but not until after the baby is born.”

  “I can throw in a small freebie,” she said. “They won’t be used against you or your blood, either by me or by any who come seeking them. I’ll use what you give me in ways that won’t harm your family.”

  I sighed, relieved. “That’s … good to hear,” I admitted.

  “Wait before you say that,” she said, and drove her suddenly taloned forefinger into the space between the bones of my wrist, splitting flesh and skin in the same gesture. It ached like acid. When she pulled her talon from the wound, the skin was blackened around the edges, and didn’t start to heal for several seconds, giving the blood plenty of time to well up and spill over.

  The Luidaeg took a step back. “All our distinctions are artificial ones,” she said, voice calm. “Water magic and blood magic are the same thing, because blood is nothing more than an isolated ocean. We prison the tides in our veins and pretend to be independent islands. We are water.”

  She raised her bloody hand, and the blood dripping from my injured wrist rose with it, floating off the floor and away from my skin as it danced like ribbons in the air between us. My skin was finally knitting back together, whatever she’d done to slow my recovery fading. She apparently had enough blood for her purposes, because she didn’t cut me again, just twisted her hand back and forth like she was trying to wind yarn around her fingers.

  The blood responded to her motions, swirling closer and resolving into four discrete ribbons, each one about an inch wide and several feet long. They stayed bright red and arterial, not drying or browning.

  “Bucer, I need you,” she said, sounding bored.

  “Uh, no, I’m good over here,” said Bucer.

  The Luidaeg turned to face him. Her eyes, white only a moment before, were suddenly as black as the depths of the sea, captive slices of void surrounded by skin. She pursed her lips, visibly unhappy.

  “I will ask one more time,” she said, in a voice like ice breaking on a frozen river. “Bucer O’Malley, come here.”

  He swallowed hard and walked toward her on unsteady legs, hooves clacking against the floor. As he drew closer, she held her hand out and waited for him to offer her his arm. Bucer shrugged and turned to show her that his arms were bound behind him, making it impossible for him to do as she was asking.

  “Sorry, ma’am. I’m a prisoner,” he said. “I can’t accommodate your request.”

  The Luidaeg scoffed and snapped her fingers. The chains on his arms fell away in an instant, wood and silver both transmuted into saltwater.

  I scowled. The Luidaeg raised an eyebrow and offered him a slow smile, then beckoned him forward again.

  “We needed him tied up,” I said.

  “This will be better,” said the Luidaeg. “Trust me.”

  And I did. Oberon help me, I did.

  Bucer shot me a look, clearly miserable, and took the last few steps to reach her before he held his arm out as she was asking.

  “I’m not—you know I won’t—Toby’s different from the rest of us,” he babbled. “I can’t heal like she does.”

  “I know,” said the Luidaeg. She didn’t stab him like she’d stabbed me, only grasped his wrist and pulled him toward her before using the edge of her thumbnail to lay the skin of his wrist open. She didn’t cut him as deeply as she’d stabbed me, and while he certainly bled, it was slower, more controlled. She waited until she judged he’d bled enough, then reached over and pinched off an inch or so from one of the ribbons she’d crafted from my blood, laying it across his wound.

  Adding blood to blood only makes things bloodier, and for a moment, I couldn’t see what she’d done. Then she rubbed her thumb across the site of the injury, and there was nothing there but skin. She let Bucer go, stepping back.

  “You’re done for now,” she said.

  He nodded and fled, hurrying back to the others like he thought they were the last source of safety in his world. He even ducked halfway behind Quentin, using my squire as a shield.

  The Luidaeg raised both hands, and Bucer’s blood rose from the floor, becoming a broad, flat ribbon before splitting in two. She spread her arms, fingers splayed, and the ribbons of blood danced through the air around her, becoming three-strand braids, his blood and mine tangling tight together until the weave was done.

  “Hold out your arms,” said the Luidaeg. “You, too, Quentin, if you want to be included in the protections.”

  I did as she bid, as did Quentin. Bucer kept his arms firmly by his side until she glared at him again, then raised them up.

  Dean also raised his arms. Marcia didn’t. I shot her a confused look, and she shook her head.

  “Seeking protection implies that you’ll need to be protected from something,” she said. “I’m going to stay right here inside Goldengreen, and I’m not going to need to be protected from anything within these walls. I’m good. Don’t waste your magic on me.”

  “All right,” said the Luidaeg. She looked at the four of us. “Eight it is.”

  Turning back to her two floating braids of blood, she brought her hands together in front of her, making a scissoring motion with the first two fingers of each hand. The ribbons split into four equal parts each, and a flick of her fingers sent them floating over to us. They wrapped around our wrists, unsettlingly warm against our skin, drew themselves tight enough to be snug but not tight enough to be uncomfortable, and popped like soap bubbles. The blood fell away in a red haze, leaving bracelets of willow wood behind.

  I raised my hand, blinking at the bracelet circling my wrist. “This is your protection?” I asked.