The Unkindest Tide (October Daye #13) - Seanan McGuire Page 0,170

and I already knew that if I could only keep her safe, if I could only see her to the trees, I would die knowing I’d accomplished something. I had been someone’s hero.

It wouldn’t be enough to make my father proud of me. Nothing short of a throne and a crown and the willingness to let him speak through me, like a king was merely a puppet for another’s will, would ever make him proud of me. But it would make my mother proud, I thought. It would make her curl her tail in sorrowful pleasure, because her son had been brave before he died, had been something other than a useless and weak-willed princeling without the sense to save anyone else.

And then there was Helen. She spoke to me kindly but without reverence, like I was anyone, like I was no one, like everyone deserved to be spoken to that way. I wasn’t sure she knew what the Court of Cats was, much less that she ought to be respectful of my place in it. I knew almost nothing about her, but I knew that she was clever and kind and deserved to survive this. I wanted to survive this.

I wanted us both to survive.

We ran, and the rocks bit at our feet and the thorns whipped at our heels, and behind us I could hear the pounding of hooves and the sounding of horns, and then it wasn’t Helen holding my hand at all, it was Quentin, and I had lost her, and I was going to lose him as well, sacrificing them both to this dark and terrible place, and all for the sake of getting away, alone again, Prince of Cats, Prince of Nothing—

I sat up with a yowl, eyes open, and had never been so relieved to find myself inside a cage. And then I fell over, the drugs in my system robbing me of balance and stability. I meowed petulantly, tail lashing, and forced myself to sit up. It was a slow, difficult process. My legs were clumsy as a kitten’s, and my paws felt like they were five times too big for my body. I looked down, suddenly afraid that I had regressed in age while I was drugged into slumber. My body was as I expected it to be, save for the bandage wrapped around my paw and the tube that slithered beneath it.

Once again, I considered the virtues of biting at the tube until it came free. This time, my head, while still fuzzy, was clear enough for me to reason against it. If I bit at the tube, they would replace it, possibly with something sturdier or fastened to a part of my body I couldn’t reach. This place would have to close eventually. The humans would have to go home to eat, and sleep, and do whatever else humans did behind closed doors. I could wait until they were gone before I freed myself.

The drugs that kept the pain at bay were in the tube—the same drugs that kept my head too fuzzy for me to reach the Shadow Roads. Once I removed the tube, my head would clear and I would be able to escape.

I hoped. There were several flaws in my plan, including the fact that I had no idea how much pain I would actually be in once I stopped my medication. If I was too badly hurt, the shadows might not come at my command, or worse, might come and then refuse to carry me all the way home, dropping me into some limitless void from which I would never be freed.

Cait Sidhe have been lost on the Shadow Roads before. Not Princes, not usually, but the weaker ones who can’t control their magic well enough to control their destinations. Their bodies litter the hidden tunnels and dead ends of the darkness, and it can be centuries before they’re found and brought back into the light, exactly as they were before they fell. No: the risk was too great. If I couldn’t be sure of controlling my passage through the shadows, I couldn’t take the chance of being lost. Quentin, Chelsea . . . Helen. None of them would ever know what had become of me.

That wasn’t entirely true. Uncle Tybalt would know, would smell my magic and my fear hanging in the frozen air the next time he stepped onto the Shadow Roads. Even if he couldn’t find my body, he’d carry word of