Page 34 of Night and Silence

The burning sensation in my eyes, on the other hand, was gone. I stopped coughing in my surprise and realized I could breathe through my nose. Everything was clear. Everything was fine. Better than fine: everything was normal.

“Not quite, but you’re probably not as far off as you wish you were,” said Walther. He plucked the syringe from my hand. May and Quentin were still coughing. He took their syringes as well. Madden had yet to consume the contents of his. Walther stopped, eyeing him. “You need to swallow it if you want it to work.”

“I don’t know what sort of people you’re accustomed to working with, Master Alchemist,” said Madden, with a glance at me to make it clear that he knew exactly what kind of people Walther normally dealt with, “but I don’t drink things that haven’t been identified.”

“I told you, it’s allergy medication,” said Walther. “You’re not an alchemist. I have neither the time nor the inclination to explain exactly what it is to you. But you need to take it, and soon, or the allergic reaction you’ve been having since you touched that damn sachet is going to keep getting worse. There’s a point past which I won’t be able to help you.”

Madden’s eyes widened. “We’ve been poisoned?”

“In the sense that an allergic reaction is your body treating something that should be harmless as if it were poisonous, yes, and this is why I don’t ever want to be a court alchemist, because when I give you something, you’re supposed to drink it.” Walther sighed. “Don’t argue with me about it, don’t try to make me explain things I’ve never had to explain before, do as you’re told and drink it before I have to tell your liege, ‘I’m sorry, but he needs to be put into a magical coma while he recovers from being stupid.’”

“And here I thought you were a teacher,” said May.

“I teach chemistry. It’s similar to alchemy, but it’s not the same. If it were the same, humans would be turning lead into gold all willy-nilly, and I wouldn’t need to brew half of what I spend my free time brewing.” Walther looked at Madden. “The person who cured elf-shot is telling you to drink. So drink.”

Madden drank.

“Mother of flowers preserve and protect me from the world,” said Walther. He snatched Madden’s syringe. “Toby, you were right. It was a marshwater working. You were also wrong, because it was the kind of marshwater work I don’t think anyone’s used for centuries. Old, deep, nasty stuff. The Scots kale was the key. It’s still sold at farmer’s markets and the like—good source of iron, humans are weird—but nobody uses it in charm work anymore.”

“Why not?” I asked.

“It smells like a boiled fart for most of the drying process, and there are other plants that work just as well. No one’s going to use Scots kale if they have any alternatives.” Walther dropped all four syringes into a plastic bag and sealed it. “This one was designed to repel the fae, first off, and to blind them and stop up their senses, second off. So that burning in your eyes and stuffiness in your nose would have kept getting worse, and worse, and worse, until either something flushed it from your system or you temporarily lost one or more senses entirely. I’ve been dealing with changelings for weeks who were having this exact allergic reaction, and none of them could tell me what they’d touched. I’m betting that if we mapped their movements, they’d all touched your daughter.”

I stiffened. “Maybe reword that a little bit.”

“Sorry.” Walther shook his head. “I mean, they’d all come into contact with your daughter. She’s . . . imagine the entire fae population of this school is allergic to peanuts, and she’s been washing her clothes in peanut butter every morning. She could kill someone if she’s not careful. Do you have any idea where she might have gotten this recipe?”

I stiffened further, until it felt like my spine had been replaced by an oak tree, rigid and unyielding. “You think Gillian did this?”

“Honestly, I don’t know what to think . . . but no one fae made this stuff.” He held up his hands for the first time, showing me the vivid red rash covering his fingers. “It itches like poison oak. The herbs and vegetable components were blended perfectly, and then they were left under at least three full moons to cure. This is master class charm work. It’s nasty and it’s vicious, and I don’t think even a thin-blooded changeling could have done it without hurting themselves so badly that someone would have heard about it. If only the night-haunts.”

It was hard to stop myself from looking at May. The connection between Fetches and the night-haunts isn’t widely known, and they don’t really want it advertised.

“No.” I shook my head. “This isn’t my daughter’s work. There’s no way she could have learned how. I didn’t teach her. Her father has no idea the fae exist. Someone did this.”

“Why?” Madden turned to me, frowning as he spoke. He looked more solemn than he had since this day began. Now we weren’t just looking at my missing child: we were looking at a threat to the kingdom, something that used magic so old and so small that there was no way to see it coming. I would have sympathized with his obvious dismay if it hadn’t made me want to scream. “What possible reason would someone have to wreathe your child, who isn’t fae at all, in charms designed to keep the fae away from her?”

The answer was simple and so, so obvious. “Jocelyn.”

“What?”

“She’s a changeling—she couldn’t have made the sachets, but she could have found the ritual, gone to the Library and looked it up or bought it off some street-witch who cared more about money than they did about keeping something like this contained.” If Jocelyn had done it all, if Jocelyn somehow had access to that impossible courtyard, she wouldn’t even have needed money. A handful of fresh goblin fruit could have paid for anything she wanted in the world. “Pay a human to do it, and plant them all around Gillian.”

“Why?” asked Quentin. “She was so excited to see you.”

“Yeah, and she was sure fast to try to get me to thank her. She knows enough about the rules to use them, but does she understand them? And remember, changelings don’t respond to things exactly like purebloods do. Iron doesn’t hurt us as badly. Dawn hurts us more. Maybe she could clear up her allergies with actual, nonmagical Benadryl. Or maybe she thought it would only repel full fae.”

“Why would she want to repel you, though?” Quentin’s frustration was mounting. Being poisoned tended to do that. “She was so happy to meet you.”

“Maybe she just didn’t want us around Gillian,” said May. “If we hadn’t found the sachet, if we’d just encountered Gilly on campus . . . ”

“You would have felt a strong compulsion to avoid her, probably because every time you got near her, you’d start sneezing,” said Walther. “If this Jocelyn seemed immune, she might even have been able to position herself as a source of information. It’s an unnecessarily complicated plan, but that doesn’t mean it’s a bad one, and these are college students. I watched one of them spend a semester trying to train squirrels to bring him Mountain Dew from the vending machine because he was too lazy to get up and press the button.”

“Did it work?” asked Quentin.

“No, but some other kids broke into the squirrel nests later in the year and found twenty bucks in quarters.”

We were all silent for a moment, considering that image. I shook it off. “Bridget, you know both of them. Any idea how they became roommates?”