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?

  TWENTY-FIVE

  IT WAS TWO DAYS before we were all given a clean bill of health and allowed to leave Muir Woods to go home. Jazz had returned before the end of the first day, feeding the cats—and Spike, who had returned from its own adventure none the worse for wear—taking care of Raysel, and calling Raj’s cellphone what felt like every half hour to update May on the state of the house.

  After six hours of constant phone calls, Raj had thrown his hands up and taken the Shadow Roads to Tamed Lightning to get new phones from April, who was always happy to have an excuse to upgrade our household technology to what she considered “acceptable” levels. With this done, he’d gone back to spending all his time with Quentin and Dean, watching them protectively.

  Jin had arrived some twenty minutes behind the Luidaeg, diagnosing us all with varying degrees of iron poisoning—Madden’s hands were the worst actual injury, but I still had enough iron in my system to have killed any two of my companions. Jin had been appropriately horrified, and all but ripped the scabbard away from May, deeming it too dangerous to be out in the world and demanding Arden secure it again right away.

  The scabbard wasn’t the only dangerous thing Janet had been hoarding, and that was why, when we were given permission to leave, the lot of us returned to Berkeley, accompanied by Etienne and Nolan, to go through the cavern beneath her house. Only May and Miranda proceeded onward to San Francisco, letting Chelsea portal them to safety. I suspected this was also Etienne’s way of keeping his daughter away from the possibility of action, but I wasn’t going to argue with him. Not about this. Not now.

  The courtyard looked the same as it always had, perfect and unchanging, save for the cats who lurked in the underbrush and sat on the porch, watching our approach with unblinking eyes. Technically this land had been deeded to Janet, putting her adjacent to but outside Faerie. Kidnapping a King of Cats and a Hero of the Realm sort of called her sovereignty into question, and that was without accounting for the fact that Quentin was the Crown Prince of the Westlands. For the moment, both Shade and Arden were occupying this land.

  The little chicken-legged house watched our approach without moving, shrinking down in its nest and trying to go unnoticed. Danny looked at it and snorted.

  “If nobody wants to take the little hut, I will,” he said. “It’s cute.”

  “And what will your Barghests think of that?” I asked.

  “Probably that it looks like something fun to play with,” he said.

  Dame Altair had convinced Danny to leave us behind with a combination of illusions and compulsion charms, something that the stoic, loyal Bridge Troll was taking very seriously. He’d arrived at Muir Woods only a few hours after our rescue, and hadn’t left since. It was a bit much, if I was being honest, but he was so desperate to make up for what he saw as his failure that none of us were going to order him away.

  As a group, we entered the house. Arden’s guards promptly scattered, going to search all the rooms we hadn’t checked before, while Arden and the others followed me down the stairs in the kitchen, all the way to the basement.

  The smell of blood and iron trapped underground made my nose wrinkle, and Tybalt held my hand a little tighter as we started down the hallway. Walther made us stop at the room where he’d been held with Quentin, long enough for him to go in and retrieve some of the previously abandoned alchemical supplies, but otherwise, we made straight for the cavern, passing empty rooms and dead-end halls without hesitation.

  I didn’t have Walther or Tybalt’s ability to sniff out a trail, but I had bled all through this place, and the scent was enough to guide me easily through the dark. We stepped through the last door into the cavern and Arden started swearing, seeing the treasures of her kingdom piled up like they were the contents of a junk shop.

  Her swearing only got louder as she began going through those shelves. “Some of these things disappeared while my father was King!” she said, sounding endlessly offended.

  “And now they’ve reappeared,” I said. My feet had carried me back to the nest of blankets and tapestries where they’d cut Miranda out of me, a bloody horror in the midst of all these treasures. Tybalt squeezed my hand.

  “Can we burn it now?” I asked plaintively.

  “We can do anything you like,” he replied.

  “Hey!” barked Madden.

  We all turned to look at him. He was standing next to a marble plinth, unremarkable in its surroundings, topped by an ornately carved wooden box. He pointed at it with one shaking finger.

  “This wasn’t here before,” he said, sounding puzzled and almost offended.

  I walked toward the hope chest, Tybalt still holding on to my hand, and tilted my head to the side. “No,” I agreed. “It wasn’t. So what’s it doing here now?”

  “Nasty human lady didn’t come back,” said Madden. “Neither did mean pureblood lady.”

  Janet’s failure to return was news; Dame Altair’s was not. Both she and her brother had been taken captive by Arden’s guard, and were currently in custody, under twenty-four hour watch. They weren’t getting away again.

  The same couldn’t be said for the false Queen. As far as anyone had been able to tell, she’d left the Kingdom as soon as her loyal vassal freed her, leaving him behind to face his fate. Not a very good boss, if you asked me.

  “So who did come back?” I asked.

  Madden looked to Arden for permission, then picked up the hope chest, turning it over in his hands like he thought our reverse thief might have left a note.

  The smell of wild roses filled the air as he disturbed the handful of rose petals that had been scattered under the hope chest. I gasped. I knew that smell. I knew those roses.

  Maybe whoever returned the hope chest had left us a note after all.

  Read on for a brand-new October Daye novella

  by Seanan McGuire

  SEAS

  AND SHORES

  Copyright © 2025 by Seanan McGuire

  SEAS AND SHORES

  February 1, 2016

  But truth is truth: large lengths of seas and shores

  Between my father and my mother lay …

  —William Shakespeare, King John

  THE HOSPITALITY OF DEAN’S knowe was as pleasant as it had ever been, but my recent memories painted the place as the property of Countess Evening Winterrose, my former owner and forever nightmare. October’s presence leavened it somewhat, reminded me that this was the place where I had been reunited with my Patrick, where I had been reborn in love and family’s embrace. But soon enough, she had to depart from us on her own errands, and I was left in my stepson’s company, with no one to play buffer between us or distract me from the decades of memory the knowe contained.

  Dean looked at me, making no effort to conceal his own discomfort. That helped, somewhat: I wasn’t the only one on the verge of violating etiquette with my squirming. “Is there anything I can do to make your time here more comfortable?” he asked.

  “I should eat something before I undergo my journey,” I said. “I have both the potion that will allow me to breathe underwater, and one half of a coral scallop’s shell. When I enter the water, it will send a pulse to its partner, and Anceline will come to meet me and tow me down into the depths.”

  Dean nodded, as if all of this was completely reasonable—and to him, perhaps it was. We were two sides of the same coin, and had far more in common than most people realized. He was the son of a Merrow who couldn’t breathe below the waves; he had been sheltered but confined in Saltmist, unable to live freely until he made the choice to leave. Now he was the captain of his own destiny, able to go where he liked and do as pleased him, but was denied the ability to return home without aid.

  I had been supposedly free when I lived in the Mists. All my chains had been invisible ones, gifted to me by the woman I called mistress and locked with my own hands, for the sake of finding and protecting my beloved daughter. For me, true freedom had come in Saltmist, where I couldn’t leave the safety of the knowe without magical aid, but no one sought to claim or control me. I was allowed to live, work, and love as I desired, and that mattered more than all the open spaces that had ever been.

  It would have been nice to live closer to my younger daughter, but I knew Dean felt much the same about his parents and his younger brother, all of whom were denied to him by his choice of residence. We were part of the same strange, separated family, and as long as we shared that commonality, we could be friends, or at least not enemies.

  “Marcia is in the kitchen,” he said. “She would be more than pleased to make you something before you begin your journey.”

  “Marcia,” I said politely. “She’s the changeling who stands as your seneschal, no?”

  “Yes,” said Dean, shooting me a challenging look. “Are you going to object to her bloodline?”

  “No,” I said, putting up one hand to ward off his visibly burgeoning offense. “My younger daughter is a changeling. It seems likely my first grandchild will be as well. I, myself, was born a changeling child, and I have no objection to the interlacing of mortality with Faerie’s roots. It might serve us well, to have less time to conspire against the future.”

  Dean blinked, visibly taken aback. “I … was unaware of that piece of your past.”

  “Most are. My brother prefers that we not speak of it. I don’t know whether he’s ashamed of our mother or whether his wife has asked him to keep it as quiet as he can, but the reality of our origins has long been as veiled as he can bring it to be. For too long, I allowed him the deception—it seemed to hurt no one, and both our mothers have long since stopped their dancing, the one from mortality’s sting, the other from the pains of war. I only wanted to be sure that I was thinking of the right person when I spoke of your seneschal. It is … surprising for a landed noble to allow one of the thin-blooded such a high position within his court. I respect you for the choice.”

  “It wasn’t really a choice,” said Dean. “Marcia sort of came with the title. She’d been filling the same role for Toby, and I figured well, if she’s good enough for the bravest person I’ve ever met, she’s got to be good enough for me.”

  “Then I will be honored to receive a meal from her,” I said gravely. “Has the kitchen remained where it was when I was last here?”

  “This isn’t Shadowed Hills,” said Dean. “I’m not hiding anything, and so my knowe isn’t either. It’s opened a few new rooms, according to people who’d know, but it hasn’t really moved any of the old ones.”

  “Excellent,” I said, and offered him a shallow bow before turning to leave the courtyard and proceed to the hall that would lead me to the kitchen.