One Salt Sea: An October Daye Novel (18 page)

A lump formed in my throat as I looked around. Raysel might have returned from the darkness that stole her, but in a very real way, she never came home.

A tabby-striped tomcat slipped past my feet, nose pressed low to the ground as he stalked through the room. That snapped me out of my momentary freeze. “Etienne, search the wardrobe; Grianne, get the bureau.” I started for the bed.

“What are we looking for?” asked Etienne.

“Anything that shouldn’t be there.” I knelt, peering into the narrow, shadow-filled space between the floor and the bottom of the mattress. If Raysel had kept anything hidden there, it was long gone; the only things I saw were dust bunnies and a few more scraps of wallpaper.

“How specific,” said Etienne, as he started going through the wardrobe.

“I live to serve.” Peeling back the blanket revealed nothing but the mattress, sliced open along the side to allow for the removal of half the stuffing. I reached cautiously through the slit, and found nothing but wadded lumps of silk. “This isn’t a room for two.”

“No,” said Etienne. “Master O’Dell maintained his own quarters.”

“Oh.” I always knew things between Connor and Raysel were less than ideal—I wasn’t even sure the marriage had been consummated, and I’d never quite been able to bring myself to ask—but somehow, I thought they would have shared at least an apartment, if not a bed. That’s what I get for being an occasional idealist, I guess.

Tybalt stalked over to the bureau, letting out an earsplitting yowl. I stood, turning in his direction. “What’s that, Lassie? Timmy’s down the well?”

The look he gave me could have peeled paint. I snickered as I walked over to him, motioning for Grianne to step aside.

“What?”

Tybalt reached out with one paw and tapped the front of the bureau’s bottommost drawer. He meowed again, just to be sure I got the point.

“I’m on it,” I said, and sat down on the floor. “Grianne, a little light down here?” The second Merry Dancer swung into position. “That’s good.”

The drawer stuck a little as I tugged it free. The reason became clear when I looked at its contents: shoeboxes full of rocks. Dozens and dozens of rocks. They looked perfectly ordinary, like they’d been harvested from paths and flowerbeds around the knowe. I picked one up, squinting at it. “Okay, what the hell?”

“She used to pick those up,” Grianne said. The sound of her voice was surprising enough that I turned toward it, the rock forgotten. She shrugged. “When she was walking, and thought no one watched her, she would pick them up from wherever she happened to be. I never asked her why. I doubted she would give me an answer.”

“Yeah, probably not.” I was sickeningly sure I knew what the answer would have been, if Raysel had been compelled to tell the truth. She’d spent so many years lost in the darkness that she must have lived every day afraid the world would fall away again, leaving her alone in the nothingness. Rocks were little things, simple things, and they were
solid
. They were
real
. If they symbolized nothing else, they proved that she was in a place that actually existed.

I put the rock back among its brothers before gripping the sides of the drawer and giving it one last, firm tug. It popped loose and thudded to the floor. I checked the sides and bottom for hidden panels or secret documents, and then pushed it aside. Tybalt gave it a sniff before meowing and crouching to peer into the hole in the bureau.

“I got it,” I said. “If there’s nothing else, you can have thumbs again.”

He yawned, whiskers curling forward in what looked distinctly like amusement. Then he turned and walked away.

“Remember pants,” I called, and reached into the opening, feeling around. My fingers brushed the surface of a wooden box. I lifted it out.

Stickers obscured most of the varnished pine of the box itself, a mix that ranged from cartoon characters I recognized from Gilly’s childhood to more recent bumper stickers and band logos. I remembered giving her some of the older ones, treasures smuggled in from the mortal world. There was no rhyme or reason to the way they were layered; they seemed to have been slapped on entirely at random.

“What do you have?” asked Tybalt, stepping up behind me.

“I don’t know yet,” I replied. Putting down the box, I carefully removed the lid. “Did you remember pants?”

“Blessedly, yes,” said Etienne.

“Good.” The box was filled with scraps of paper that seemed as random as the stickers at first glance. I picked up the first one; a list of chores, written out by one of the house Hobs, clearly intended for a child. Half the chores were crossed off in purple crayon. I bit my lip, digging a little deeper. The crayon was there, about three layers down. I remembered bringing her that, too. “Oh, oak and ash.”

“What is it?” asked Tybalt.

“Her childhood.” I tipped the box out onto the floor. Lists of chores, crayon sketches, dried flowers taped to pieces of parchment . . . all the things I would have expected to find in the dresser drawer of the child she’d been when she was taken. One of the papers landed upsidedown, revealing a block of much tighter, more compressed writing. I picked it up, skimming quickly.

Rayseline’s handwriting never improved much beyond her initial childish scrawl, but it was legible. Almost too legible. She’d turned her scraps into a sort of disassembled diary, one that became more comprehensible as I flipped more and more of them over and shuffled them into something like chronological order.

“Toby?”

“Just a second.”

—understand what they want from me. I don’t think
they
understand what they want from me—

Taken together, they painted the picture of a girl who was terribly angry, both younger and older than she was meant to be, and scared almost out of her mind by the world she’d been thrust back into. The “almost” was the first to go. Etienne was looking at me in silent curiosity, years of training forbidding him to interrupt. Wordlessly, I handed him the paper in my hand. It managed, in just five words, to be the worst one I’d found so far.

Etienne read the slip of paper without comment, passing it to Grianne. Her face remained impassive, but her Merry Dancers flared a brief, sickly red, outward manifestations of her internal dismay. Tybalt was the last to read the paper. Like the others, he didn’t say anything. Just handed it back to me, and waited.

“I want to see whether I can get these into any sort of real order,” I said, starting to shove scraps of paper back into the box. “I don’t expect them to have a full blueprint for the kidnapping, but . . . well . . .”

“Any port in a storm,” said Tybalt quietly.

I glanced at him and nodded. “Yes. Exactly. Come on—let’s finish searching this place. We have a lot to do before tomorrow.”

We combed through the rest of Rayseline’s bedroom, and found nothing else that seemed relevant. She had a lot of dresses, any one of which probably cost more than I make in a year; she had a lot of broken toys, hidden in the bottom of her wardrobe. I left them where they were, unable to shake the feeling that I had done something wrong by finding them in the first place.

In the washroom, I found a vial of something pale blue taped to the bottom of her cured-oak bathtub. There was a ribbon taped next to it, holding a dozen shining silver needles in place. I was very careful not to touch their points as I peeled back the tape and added them to the small assortment of things to be taken away.

The needles were a chilling reminder that Raysel had been working with Oleander de Merelands when she tried to use poison to assassinate Luna. Just wondering what might be on those needles made me feel like running screaming from the room. We didn’t find anything after that, and I was secretly glad; I’d had about as much as I could handle. In the end, I was grateful to take what we’d found—the box, the bottle, the needles, and the drawer of shoeboxes filled with rocks—and leave. I wanted to be gone. Even the Queen’s Court would be a pleasant change after seeing the prison Rayseline had made to replace the one she’d lost.

Tybalt carried the drawer, leaving me with the rest. I placed the needles and vial in the box of papers, waiting while Etienne opened a gateway back to the receiving hall. Tybalt cast a glance in my direction.

“Are you all right?”

“No,” I said. “But right now, that’s going to have to be good enough. Let’s get the hell out of here.”

“So soon?” He smiled wryly. “I was just becoming accustomed to the décor.”

That was surprising enough to wring a laugh out of me. I was still laughing as I stepped through Etienne’s gateway, feeling the familiar dip-and-weave as the knowe settled into its new configuration. Tybalt followed half a step behind. Grianne was already gone. I raised an eyebrow at Etienne.

“Sir Grianne had duties elsewhere,” he said, closing the gate with a crisp motion of his hand. “I shall give her your regards, if you would like.”

“Yeah, I’d like that.” I looked down at the things I was holding. “Look, I hate to ask you to do this, but can you—”

“I will inform His Grace of our findings, and make him aware that you’re removing them for further study.” Etienne’s gaze darted toward the throne room doors. “He’ll ask where you’ll be. He’ll ask when you’ll know anything.”

“Yeah, well. I’m going to be at the Queen’s Court at dusk tomorrow. She’s agreed to let me question the staff. And at some point, I’m going to be visiting Saltmist. I need to search the boys’ rooms.”

“Can you be reached?”

“I have
got
to get a phone.” The urge to rake my hair back was thwarted by the things in my hands. I settled for blowing my bangs out of my eyes. “If you need me, call the apartment. I’ll check in regularly, and May can pass along any messages.”

“I suppose that will have to be sufficient.” Etienne sighed. “This is a twice-cursed mess, October.”

“Oh, believe me, I know. But I’ll do the best I can to bring it to a resolution that doesn’t kill us all.”

“I’ll hold you to that,” said Etienne, and bowed before turning to walk slowly toward the throne room doors. He was moving like that to give us time to get out of the area before Sylvester could call me back. I know an escape when it’s offered to me, and I took it without hesitating. Nodding toward the end of the hall to signal Tybalt to follow, I started briskly for the exit.

It was long past time to get moving. The world wasn’t going to hold still while I caught up with it.

T
YBALT WAITED UNTIL THERE WAS a corner and half a hallway between us and Etienne before asking, “So now what happens?”

“Now I call Walther and ask him to analyze the contents of the vial,” I said, nodding toward the box I was carrying. “I’m willing to bet that it’s poison, but I’d like specifics. I’m going to check with the Luidaeg to see if she’s arranged that meeting with Dianda. After that, I’ll head for the Queen’s Court, and . . .” I sighed. “After that comes whatever comes after that. I can’t be any more specific. A nap might be nice.”

“It’s a beginning,” said Tybalt. “Whatever comes next, we’ll confront it. There’s nothing more than that to be done.”

I smiled a little. “Deal.”

Tybalt smiled back. It was nice how normal that was starting to seem to me.

The stream of pages and courtiers heading for the ballroom grew thicker as we moved through the knowe. Their burdens had grown more obviously awkward; they’d had time to empty the lighter parts of the armory, stripping away the arrows, daggers, and chain mail shirts that blocked the serious weapons of war. I suppressed a shudder as a Candela staggered by, half-bent under the weight of a Bridge Troll-sized shield.

Purebloods are immortal, but they can be killed. Faerie wars used to decimate the population so much that entire races died out, becoming legends even to the fae. We kill each other when the excuse seems good enough—as if there’s any excuse good enough to justify killing something that was meant to live forever. The Luidaeg once said, in a moment of particularly black humor, that nature made us territorial and temperamental because otherwise we’d have overrun the world within five generations. Times like this made me wonder if she was right.

No one came to stop us or wave good-bye as we stepped out the exit and into the warm air of the mortal night. Everything smelled green, like the mustard flowers and tall grass that grew all throughout Paso Nogal Park. It was the kind of night that makes war seem impossible, even when you know that it’s inevitable. I sighed and started down the hill, with Tybalt pacing alongside me. His presence was reassuring. I’m not used to being uneasy in Shadowed Hills, but with the threat of war so close at hand, I couldn’t help but wonder about the shadows too deep for me to see into. Having Tybalt there made it easier; if anything attacked me, I wouldn’t be fighting it off alone.