Chimes at Midnight

  “Right.” Jude stepped behind the counter. Her smile did not reappear.

  “Come on.” Arden gestured for us to follow her with the hand that wasn’t full of firefly. She led us to a small door near the front of the shop and opened it, revealing a narrow flight of stairs descending beneath the building. She started down, leaving us no choice but to follow. Tybalt went last, and closed the door behind himself, cutting the light to almost nothing. Only almost: the firefly in Arden’s hand was glowing brighter than ever. The light seeped through her fingers, lessening the darkness just enough to make it navigable to fae eyes.

  Arden didn’t speak as she walked down the stairs to the basement below. It was a large, cavernous room that appeared to exactly mirror the bookstore over our heads. Support pillars broke up the space, explaining why several hundred paperbacks weren’t crashing down on our heads. Everything smelled of fresh sawdust and old dampness, the clean kind that naturally built up underground. It spoke of growth and potential, not decay.

  “Shield your eyes,” Arden said, and flicked a switch on the wall. Bulbs came on overhead, almost blinding after the darkness. She opened her hand, letting the firefly free, and released her human disguise in the same motion.

  Her magic smelled like redwood bark and blackberry flowers. Her hair was the color of blackberries, so black it was virtually purple, with strange, glossy undertones. Her eyes stayed mismatched, but instead of brown and blue, they were polished pyrite and shifting mercury silver. No wonder a somewhat alien blue had been the best she could do. Those were eyes designed to resist concealment. Her ears were delicately pointed, and her bone structure had changed subtly, but those things were almost afterthoughts. Nothing human had those eyes.

  She glared at us as the firefly circled her head and came to rest once more on her chest. “Who sent you?”

  “The Luidaeg.” I pulled the flask of fireflies out of my jacket pocket, holding it up. Arden gasped. “She thought we might have trouble finding you, so she gave us these.”

  Arden’s surprise quickly faded into wariness. “I don’t believe you.”

  “Of course you don’t.” I tucked the flask away again as I released my human disguise. I smelled pennyroyal, and knew without looking that Tybalt was doing the same thing, both of us trying to convince our reluctant Princess that we meant her no harm. We didn’t look like the Queen’s guards. I was wearing an increasingly dingy ball gown, and Tybalt was the wrong species. “We haven’t been properly introduced. My name is Sir October Daye, Knight of Lost Words, in service to Duke Sylvester Torquill of Shadowed Hills.” I didn’t identify my race. The human in my background would be easy enough for her to see, and for the moment, it was better if I didn’t try to explain the situation with my mother.

  For once, my name brought no flicker of recognition or reminder of things I hadn’t necessarily intended to do. Arden just frowned, and said, “I remember Duke Torquill. He was a nice man.”

  “He still is.”

  “I am Tybalt, King of the Court of Dreaming Cats,” said Tybalt. “I knew your father.”

  “So you said, but what makes you sure he was my father?” Arden focused her frown on him. It was a bit of a relief to see her glaring at someone else. “I never said I was your girl. Maybe I just took you guys down here because I didn’t want you talking crazy in front of Jude. She doesn’t know.”

  “That’s good; mortals shouldn’t,” I said. “You didn’t have to say it. The fireflies know.”

  “You have your father’s eyes,” added Tybalt. “It’s no wonder you had to work so hard to hide yourself. Anyone who knew the King would have looked at you and known you for his child. I am so sorry for your loss.”

  Those words seemed to seal any hope Arden had that we could be convinced she was really Ardith, bookstore clerk, and not Arden, Princess in the Mists. Her face crumpled, tears springing up in her mismatched eyes. “No one said that to us,” she said. “No one knew how much we’d lost. Father was gone, and Mother . . .”

  Understanding hit me. There was an element we’d missed, someone who should have either whisked the children safely out of the Kingdom or backed their claim to their father’s throne. “What happened?”

  “She was one of his servants at the Court,” said Arden. She sniffled. “It was how they made sure no one was suspicious about them spending time together. It was like a game they played. They made sure we knew the rules, so we wouldn’t get mad at Father for refusing to acknowledge her, or mad at Mother for letting him ignore her. It was even fun, sometimes, when she brought us to the Court and made us wear disguises and pretend we were changelings, or servant-children, or fosters. We learned about hiding.” She reached up, touching the corner of her silver-mercury eye, and added, “We had a nursemaid to spin our illusions for us, back then. We didn’t have to depend on our own.”

  “That makes sense,” I said, not wanting to interrupt the flow of her story, but not wanting her to think I wasn’t listening.

  “When the earthquake came . . . things were falling everywhere. Nolan’s leg was hit when some rocks came out of the wall. I went running, looking for Mother. We weren’t supposed to talk to her when we were at Court. I broke the rules.” For a moment, her expression was a child’s, filled with the quiet conviction that breaking the rules somehow caused everything that followed. “The earthquake was still happening. I found her in one of the bedchambers, where she’d been changing the sheets. She was already . . .” She closed her eyes. “She was gone.”

  I blinked. “Wait. She was dead? Did something fall and hit her?” Some of the chandeliers I’d seen in noble knowes could crush an adult, if the chandelier was falling and the adult was unlucky.

  “No.” Arden opened her eyes. “Her throat was slit. She was murdered. My father was, too. There’s no way he died in the quake. He was Tuatha de Dannan. He was a King. He would have died saving his people, if he died at all. Instead, they said he was crushed. Just crushed. That’s not possible. That’s not my father. Someone killed them, and they would have killed Nolan and me if Marianne—our nursemaid—hadn’t taken us away before anyone realized who we were. So, yes, you found the missing Princess in the Mists. Now please, save my life, and leave.”

  “Oh, oak and ash,” I whispered. People had always suspected that King Gilad was assassinated: Oleander de Merelands was in the Kingdom at the time, and her presence combined with his death was too convenient to ignore. This was as close as we could get to proof without questioning the night-haunts. Arden had been orphaned, and her parents had been murdered. “I’m so sorry.”

  “It was a long time ago,” she said—but her tone made her words into lies. Her voice was shaky and raw, like the deaths had happened only days before. She’d been deferring her grief over a century, and grief deferred can turn toxic. “But that’s why you have to leave. You can’t be here. You can’t ask me to claim the throne. I have nothing left to lose.”

  I paused, a sudden thought striking me. Arden wasn’t an only child. Her brother, Nolan, might not have been Crown Prince, but he was with her during the earthquake, and he went with her into hiding. So why was she only asking us to save her life by leaving? “Arden, where’s your brother?” I asked.

  “You’re very young, aren’t you?” Her reply seemed nonsensical until she continued, saying, “You think you’re the first ones to track me down. Like that could happen. Our parents did their best, but there were always rumors. The lost Prince. The missing Princess. It was a fairy tale waiting to happen, and you know how we love our fairy tales.” She spun on her heel, stalking toward the back of the basement. After four steps, she paused, looking back, and demanded, “Well?”

  “We’re coming,” I said, exchanging a glance with Tybalt. We walked after her, approaching the rear wall.

  The closer we got, the stranger it looked. It was like someone had painted a perfect replica of the actual wall, and then hung the picture in place, using it to hide the fact that the room wasn’t all there. Arden slip
ped her hands into a fold in the air, pulling the illusion open like a heavy canvas curtain. It was a gesture much like the one Tybalt used when he was accessing the Shadow Roads, but with less natural ease: this wasn’t her spell.

  “Marianne’s work,” she said, holding the illusion open for us. “She was Coblynau. She left us with everything she knew we’d need, and then she disappeared.”

  That explained the quality of the illusion. Tuatha de Dannan are passable illusionists, but they’re barely in a league with the Daoine Sidhe, much less the masters. Coblynau are good, and more, can bind their spells into objects. That long-gone nursemaid saved her charges’ lives with the things she’d given them. She had to know it, too. It was the only reason someone who loved the children she was tasked to protect would have left them. Her presence was a danger, and her gifts were the shield her body couldn’t be.

  We stepped through the curtain. Arden followed us through, letting the illusion fall closed again. Viewed from inside, it really was a curtain, a heavy canvas sheet with a slit cut down the middle. A narrow slice of the basement showed through the gap. Arden pinched it closed, sealing us inside.

  The space on the other side of the illusion was small, about the size of my bedroom back at the old apartment. A bunk bed was flush with the basement wall. The bottom bunk was a welter of sheets and handmade quilts, and a reading lamp was set up there, gooseneck bent toward the piled-up pillows. Mismatched bookshelves lined the walls, piled with books, DVDs, even VHS and Betamax tapes. There was a stereo system and a television, which was on, quietly playing an episode of some television drama that I didn’t recognize. There hadn’t been any sound from the other side of the curtain.

  A heavy wardrobe took up almost a quarter of the living space, made from what looked like redwood, with a pattern of blackberry vines and dragonflies carved into the doors. It was the nicest piece of furniture in the room, and as such, it immediately caught and held our eyes. It also raised the question of exactly how much Arden could transport when she teleported. That thing had to weigh two hundred pounds, easy.

  She followed my gaze and scowled. “It was my mother’s,” said Arden. “You wanted to know why I don’t want your help reclaiming my throne? Tempting as the idea sounds? Come here.” She walked to the bunk bed, where she stepped onto the lower bunk, holding the upper rail in both hands. I walked after her, and at her silent urging, climbed the ladder so I could see what she was looking at.

  In a way, I already knew what I’d see. But some things must be seen in their own time, and in their own way; some things can’t simply be said. As I looked down at the sleeping body of Prince Nolan Windermere in the Mists, I knew that this was one of those things. He looked almost enough like Arden to have been her twin. He had the same blackberry hair, and the same faintly olive Tuatha skin. His clothing was out of date, making him look like he’d just stepped out of a production of The Great Gatsby.

  “Nolan didn’t like what that woman had been doing to our father’s Kingdom,” Arden said. “He wanted us to come forward during the War of Silences, but we were too young to rule, and we were so afraid. I convinced him to wait a little longer, and see if she’d get better. Maybe she’d turn into the kind of Queen our father wanted me to be, and then it wouldn’t matter that the throne wasn’t mine. As long as someone was caring for the Mists, it would be all right.”

  “But she didn’t,” I said quietly.

  “No. She got worse, and after Silences, she started changing the rules. Our father was never a great advocate for changeling rights,” the look she cast my way was almost apologetic, “but he believed they were a part of Faerie, and they deserved to be treated fairly. When he was alive, Oberon’s Law was applied to the changelings of his Kingdom. He let them hold titles, as long as they never aspired to claim anything greater than a Barony. He was . . . he was fair.”

  I stared at her for a moment before looking back down at Nolan. “That’s not the world I grew up in,” I said.

  Tybalt’s hand landed on my shoulder, squeezing once. I descended the ladder, putting my hand over his and holding him there as Arden began speaking again.

  “Father maintained ties with the Undersea and the Sky Kingdoms. He insisted we treat the Cait Sidhe with respect, because Oberon wouldn’t have given them dominion over themselves if they weren’t worth respecting. He did all those things, and she did none of them. I was scared. Marianne—our nursemaid—was so clear about how important it was for us to hide, and I’d seen Mother’s body. Nolan never did. He wanted us to come out of hiding. He wanted us to take back what was supposed to be ours. He wasn’t scared.” From her tone, she wished he had been.

  “What happened?” I asked.

  “He said we had to go to the false Queen and demand our Kingdom back. I told him he was being foolish, that all he’d do was get us both killed. But Nolan never listened to a word he didn’t want to hear. He slipped out of the boarding house where we were living while I was at work. The pixies led me to him two days later. He was in the bushes in Golden Gate Park, with the arrow still in his chest. They’d used it to leave a note.” A tear ran down her cheek, falling onto the pillow next to Nolan’s head. It probably wasn’t the first.

  “What did it say?”

  “That I was lucky they’d only used elf-shot; that if they saw either of us, ever again, they wouldn’t be so merciful.” She looked up again, eyes hardening. “They would have killed him. I know they would have killed him. But they needed me to know I’d be a fool to stand up to them.”

  “No,” I said. “I’m sorry, Arden, but no. They didn’t need you to know. They weren’t being merciful. They needed you to be afraid. If they’d really wanted to show you that you were too weak to defeat them, they would have killed your brother. They left him alive because they wanted you scared, not angry. The War of Silences happened in the 1930s, and judging by his clothes, that’s how long he’s been asleep. That means he’ll wake up soon. Do you want to tell him they won? That they made you sit out the fight because they told you bad things would happen if you didn’t?”

  Arden looked at me solemnly. Then she looked down at her brother, reaching out to wipe an imaginary smear of dust away from his cheek. “Father did everything he could to protect us,” she said.

  “It’s time for you to pay him back,” I said. “It’s time for you to protect his Kingdom.”

  “Your Kingdom,” said Tybalt.

  Arden shook her head. “We’ve been safe because we’ve been invisible. We have no allies. We have no resources. My brother’s been elf-shot. Where could we possibly go?”

  I blinked. And then, slowly, I smiled. “Princess,” I said, “I know someone who would very much like the opportunity to meet you.”

  TEN

  THE REDWOOD-SCENTED PORTAL closed behind us as Arden and I stepped into the darkened hall of Goldengreen. Arden staggered, looking winded. I offered a hand to steady her.

  “Easy,” I said. “It’s been a while since you’ve had to take passengers.” Not to mention the strain of teleporting into someone else’s knowe, where the wards wouldn’t recognize her. We’d probably just broken half a dozen rules of etiquette, as well as a few prohibitions against trespassing, but I wasn’t as concerned about that. Dean would understand once he saw who I was bringing with me. We wouldn’t have been able to get inside at all if I hadn’t been the keeper of Goldengreen at one point—and most teleporters couldn’t have made the journey without knowing their destination. She was strong.

  I hoped that was going to be a good thing.

  Arden shrugged off my hand, looking around us. “Where’s my brother?”

  “He and Tybalt should be right behind us,” I said. It had been hard to convince Arden to take me while Tybalt carried Nolan, but the division was necessary. No matter how strong she was, she couldn’t open a portal big enough to get four people safely across the city. The trouble was, since Nolan was asleep, he wouldn’t know not to breathe on the Shadow Roads. That meant taking the l
ong way around, through the Court of Cats, to give him time to thaw.

  A swarm of pixies raced down the hall, scattering off in all directions to avoid hitting us. Rather than flying on, they clung to the walls and tapestries, scolding in shrill, bell-like voices. A female whose wings and body were glowing a bright daisy yellow stopped to hover in front of my nose, shaking her finger and scolding me in a high, chiming voice.

  “Hey, I couldn’t ask permission before we came,” I protested. “Don’t worry. Count Lorden will approve once I have a chance to explain.”

  “I’m glad to hear you’re planning to explain,” said a voice.

  “Hi, Marcia.” I sighed with relief, turning my back on the pixie as I faced her. “I’m sorry to burst in like this, but we couldn’t go outside; the Queen’s guards know what my human disguise looks like. Tybalt should be arriving with another guest any minute now. Again, sorry for the lack of advance warning. Things have been a little crazy.” I paused, blinking. “Marcia?”

  The quarter-blooded changeling was staring at Arden, blue eyes gone so wide and normally rosy cheeks gone so pale that for a moment, I was afraid she was going to pass out. Then she shook her head, smile returning, and stepped forward to offer her hand. “I’m sorry. I didn’t catch your name.”

  Arden took a breath, and said, “I am Princess Arden Windermere, rightful heir to this Kingdom, and I am about to be sick.” She sounded apologetic about that last part. I suppose princesses aren’t supposed to puke. “Do you have a bathroom I can use?”

  Not the most regal greeting ever, but Marcia took it in stride, offering Arden her arm. “Right this way, Your Highness, and while you’re settling your stomach, I’ll tell the Count you’ve arrived.” She cast a half-panicked look over Arden’s shoulder at me. “He’ll be surprised to hear that he’s hosting such a royal guest.”

  I shrugged, mouthing “Sorry.”

  “I’m not particularly royal anymore.” Arden took Marcia’s arm. Apparently, now that Marcia knew her real name, she fell into the category of “trust, because there’s no other option.” It was pragmatic of her, although it may have had something to do with her apparently urgent need to vomit. As she was led down the hall, I heard her ask, “Do you have any crackers?”