“My apologies, sire, if we endangered your enjoyment.” My mocking bow was accentuated by the coffee mug I was still holding in one hand.
Dean laughed. “You should come to visit more often. I think the knowe has missed you. I know the pixies have.”
“I’ve been busy,” I said. That, and Goldengreen, pleasant as it was these days, was altogether too haunted by the memories of my dead friends. As someone else’s home, I could appreciate it and even enjoy being there, for a little while. Anything longer than that, and I was likely to break down crying.
“Still, you’re always welcome here.” Dean took one of the last remaining sandwiches from the tray. “My parents will meet us in the cove-side receiving room. Come with me?”
“There’s a cove-side receiving room?” I asked, putting my mug down on Marcia’s tray and moving to follow Dean into the hall.
“The door was locked when I got here. I guess you didn’t get around to opening it.”
“I guess not.” Or it hadn’t been there when I was in charge of Goldengreen. I’ve long suspected that knowes were not only alive, they were capable of thought, even if the thoughts of a building were incomprehensible to the rest of us. Goldengreen had definitely expressed its preferences to me more than once when it was supposedly mine. Having a new Count who came from the Undersea could have inspired the knowe to form a more direct connection between the land and the water. As long as that was all it did, I was still comfortable walking down the spiraling stone stairway toward the distant sound of water lapping against sand.
There was a large room at the bottom of the stairs, maybe half the size of the central courtyard, with a high ceiling inlaid in quartz and mother-of-pearl. I wondered whether Dean had noticed how similar it was in design to the ceiling in his mother’s arrival chamber, or whether he’d dismissed it as being some sort of architectural standard for rooms like this.
The floor was treated redwood, which required more upkeep than marble but would be less slippery when wet. That was a good thing, since only two thirds of the room actually had a floor. The wood ended at a narrow strip of clean white sand, and then the water began, extending out into the ocean. Everything smelled of clean saltwater and the Summerlands sea, much like the Luidaeg’s apartment.
Tybalt sniffed the air, and smiled. Quentin looked curiously around. “This is a neat room,” he said.
“Yes, it is,” I replied, directing my comment toward the distant ceiling. Everyone deserves a few compliments. Even a building.
The surface of the water rippled, and the sleek black-haired head of Duchess Dianda Lorden of Saltmist broke through. Her husband was a few strokes behind her. Patrick lacked his wife’s natural advantages where swimming was concerned. Honestly, I was impressed he could make the trip at all, even with the aid of the water-breathing potion her Court alchemists brewed for him. Dean grinned and waved when he saw his parents, looking less like a Count and more like an ordinary teenage boy living on his own for the first time.
Patrick stood, waving back, and began wading through the waist-deep water toward us. Dianda remained low, swimming until the water got too shallow, and then pulling herself the rest of the way to the sand. Instead of legs, she had a jewel-toned tail, scaled in shades of purple and blue, which she stretched out as she reclined. Her flukes barely broke the surface.
“Your Grace,” I said, bowing to her. “Patrick.” He was technically the Ducal consort and not the Duke, which made formality a little less important with him.
Not that Dianda looked that formal. Without legs, she didn’t need pants, and her top was made of blue cotton, embroidered around the neck and cuffs with stylized green kelp. “Hello, October,” she said, sunny smile entirely at odds with her sour disposition the first time we met. Then again, at the time, her children were being held hostage, so I couldn’t blame her. “Forgive me if I don’t get up. It’s harvest season for us in the Undersea, and I’ve been in the fields every night for tides. I’m too tired to deal with having legs right now.”
“It’s cool,” I said. “Just don’t expect me to come into the water and say hello.”
“You need to get over your hydrophobia.”
“Hey. I’m standing next to the ocean, talking to a mermaid, not freaking out. I think I’m on my way to recovery.” Just to prove my point, I sat down cross-legged on the edge of the wooden dock, putting us on the same eye level. Quentin did the same. Dean, meanwhile, splashed out into the water and sat down next to his mother, not seeming to care that his jeans were getting drenched. Tybalt stayed a few feet back, well away from the shoreline.
“Dean said you wanted to talk about King Gilad.” Patrick sat down on the dock as well, although he chose the other side of his wife. We made a funny little line, like a beach party gone weirdly wrong. “I’m a little confused about why you’d need to. Gilad was a great man, and a good friend, but he’s been dead for a long time.”
“Yeah, I know. That’s why I wanted to talk to the two of you. And, well. There’s another thing.” I took a deep breath. “I’ve been banished from the Mists.”
Dianda frowned. “What?”
“The Queen banished me for trying to get her to stop distributing goblin fruit. I went to the Luidaeg, and she told me to ask about King Gilad. I don’t know what talking about the Queen’s father is supposed to accomplish, but . . .”
“It would help if he had been her father,” countered Dianda, frown fading into her more customary scowl.
I stared at her. “Wait—what?”
“Di . . .” said Patrick warningly.
“No. Don’t use your ‘honey, play nice’ voice on me. If she’s looking into Gilad because of that spindrift bitch who claimed his throne, I’m going to tell her the truth.” Dianda turned back to me. “She’s not Gilad’s daughter. I don’t know what kind of whaleshit political insanity went on up here when she stepped forward—I was busy rebuilding my own Duchy at the time—but there’s no way she’s a Windermere.”
“The earthquake did massive damage in Saltmist,” said Patrick. “Our air-breathers were trapped for months while we made repairs, and our water-breathers were busy cleaning up the gardens, rebuilding the farms, and a hundred other things. I didn’t even know Gilad was dead until after his memorial.”
“What do you mean, there’s no way she’s a Windermere?” I asked. “Is it because she’s a mixed-blood? Gilad was never married—”
“My own children are mixed-bloods,” said Dianda. “I have no issues with her heritage. Just with the fact that her heritage contains no Tuatha de Dannan. And Gilad Windermere was a pureblooded Tuatha de Dannan.”
I didn’t say anything. I just gaped at her, feeling like an idiot.
As a Dóchas Sidhe, I have a gift for determining the makeup of someone’s blood. All blood-workers can do it, to one degree or another, but I’m what you might call an untrained savant when it comes to identifying the elements of a person’s fae heritage. The Queen of the Mists had Sea Wight, Siren, and Banshee blood . . . and not a drop of Tuatha de Dannan. I should have realized that she wasn’t related to King Gilad years ago.
“Could the Tuatha have been removed from her?” asked Tybalt, before I could recover the capacity to speak. “There is at least one hope chest in the Kingdom. There is also Amandine to be considered.”
Hope chests could change the balance of an individual’s blood. So could my mother—and so could I. “Mom might have been able to, I guess,” I said slowly, “but why would anyone want to keep three different bloodlines and give up a fourth? It doesn’t make sense.” The more mixed a person’s fae heritage is, the more likely it is that they’ll become either physically or mentally unstable. Some types of fae don’t play nicely, and when you’re talking about people who can exist on the bottom of the ocean or in the heart of a volcano, the fighting can be very literal. Almost every mixed-blood I’ve ever known eventually snapped, driven to madness by the conflict living inside their own veins.
One day, I was
going to offer to shift the Lorden boys all the way to either Daoine Sidhe or Merrow. One day. But Daoine Sidhe and Merrow were both descendants of Titania, which made the boys more likely to be stable than a mixture of Titania and Maeve. And once a decision like that is made, it can’t be taken back. I wanted to give them time to figure out who they were and where they wanted to be before I made them any promises.
“Amandine never laid hands on that girl,” said Dianda. “When we came to her Court to offer our regrets and our aid, she was already holding herself apart, and your mother was nowhere to be seen. She made it clear that the Undersea was not welcome in the Courts of the land. We left after that. We had our own tides to tend.”
“So if Mom didn’t mess with the Queen’s blood, there’s honestly no way she could be Gilad’s daughter.” The Queen of the Mists, my old nemesis, the woman who once tried to have me executed for murder . . . she wasn’t even rightfully our ruler?
If I was distressed, Quentin was downright distraught. “That’s not right,” he said. “She should never have been allowed to do that. The High King—”
“They never called for the High King, and he was busy elsewhere when this happened.” Patrick shrugged. “North America is large, Quentin. It’s more than one man, even a man like High King Sollys, can oversee. Sometimes he has to take the Kingdoms at their word. When the Mists said all was well here, he spent his attention where it seemed more needed.”
For a moment, Quentin looked like he was going to protest. Then he sighed, sagging, and said, “I don’t like politics.”
“Then you are a very wise boy,” said Tybalt.
“No one likes politics,” said Dianda. “On the plus side, it gives me a lot of excuses to shout at people. I like that part.”
“Mom’s great at shouting,” said Dean.
“Hang on,” I said, raising my hand in a futile signal for quiet. I was still reeling from the idea that the Queen of the Mists wasn’t our rightful ruler. If I didn’t focus on something, I was going to scream. “How can you all be so calm about this?”
“Because we’ve had a long time to deal with the knowledge,” said Dianda. “King Gilad was a good ruler, and she has done her best to undermine his legacy at every turn. He believed in maintaining strong ties with the Undersea; she cut them as soon as she could. He believed changelings had a place in fae society, that we owed them that much, since we were their parents and originals. She did her best to banish changelings from the Courts. She even took us to war against the Kingdom of Silences because they dared to protest the way the changelings here were being treated. I’m so sorry she’s banished you. You are always welcome in the Undersea.”
There was a moment of silence as we all considered Dianda’s words. Finally, I sighed. “Great. I guess I know what we’re going to be doing this week.”
“What’s that?” asked Quentin.
I tried to smile. It came out feeling more like a grimace. Maybe that was a better reflection of my feelings. “We’re going to overthrow the Queen.”
SIX
WE EXCUSED OURSELVES AFTER THAT. Once it had fully sunk in that the woman who had banished me wasn’t the legitimate ruler of the Mists, there was really nowhere else for the conversation to go. Dean needed some time with his parents. We needed to go home and reassure May and Jazz that we hadn’t been arrested, deported, or worse.
It was another quiet drive. We were nearly back to the house before Quentin asked, “Toby? Are we really going to overthrow the Queen of the Mists?”
Tybalt looked at me out of the corner of his eye, clearly interested in my answer. I took a deep breath and held it for a few seconds before letting it out and nodding. “I don’t know. But I’m going to try.”
“Who would you put on the throne?” asked Tybalt mildly.
“See, there’s the stumper. She has no kids, and even if she did, they wouldn’t have a legitimate claim, since she doesn’t have a legitimate claim. She was able to take the throne because there was no known heir. The Windermere line died with King Gilad. I guess that means she’d be as valid a Queen as anyone, if she could get the High King to confirm her as the start of a new royal line, but she’s been on the throne so long . . .”
“If she knew she wasn’t King Gilad’s heir, and she took the throne anyway, that’s treason,” said Quentin. “We could tell the High King now.”
“If we can prove she wasn’t Gilad’s heir, sure,” I said, feeling even more daunted by the scope of this potentially treasonous notion. In the mortal world, contesting someone’s claim to a throne after a century had passed might have seemed excessive. In Faerie, it was likely to be filed under “guess it’s Tuesday.” “But we need something more concrete than the word of the changeling she’s just banished if we want the High King to take this seriously. If we make a false accusation, we won’t live to make a true one.”
“So we find proof,” said Quentin.
“I do enjoy a challenge,” said Tybalt.
We were quiet for the rest of the drive home. Cagney and Lacey—my half-Siamese cats—were sitting in the kitchen window when we pulled into the driveway. They looked at us disapprovingly as we got out of the car. “You’d think dating a King of Cats would get them to cut me a little slack,” I said.
Quentin snorted. “Are you kidding? The cats probably think you’re a social climber.”
“Something like that,” said Tybalt.
“I hate you both,” I said, walking to the back door. I unlocked it, pushing it open and calling, “It’s us. Where is everybody?”
“We’re in the dining room!” May called back.
We found them sitting at the dining room table. May was cutting pictures out of a magazine. Jazz was armed with a hot glue gun, a plaster unicorn head, and a box of artificial gems in various colors and sizes. I stopped in the doorway. “Do I want to know?”
“It helps us stay calm,” said Jazz, hot gluing a bright purple teardrop to the unicorn’s cheek.
“How did it go?” asked May.
“The Luidaeg told me to talk to people who’d known King Gilad before he died,” I said. “So we went to Goldengreen to talk to the Lordens.”
“And?” prompted May.
“Dianda and Patrick were happy to talk to us about King Gilad,” I said. “The trouble is, that just made things worse.”
May frowned. “How could they make things worse than ‘we have a goblin fruit problem and I’ve been banished from the Kingdom’? Is the Undersea being attacked by giant squid?”
“I think the giant squid thing is pretty much normal for them, but no. According to Dianda, the Queen of the Mists isn’t King Gilad Windermere’s daughter. Which means she’s not legitimately our Queen; she’s been holding a throne that wasn’t hers for all these years, and no one did anything about it.”
“Which goes a long way toward explaining her policies regarding the Undersea,” noted Tybalt. “Most of the nobility on land was behind her, or was mysteriously absent. I doubt our sea-going cousins would have been so accommodating.”
Jazz yelped. I turned. She was sucking the side of her thumb. “Sorry,” she said, voice muffled by her hand. “I got distracted listening to you and hot glued myself to my unicorn.”
“Right. See, this is why I don’t think anyone in this house should be allowed to use power tools.” I shook my head. “Anyway, now we need to figure out how to prove that Dianda is right about the Queen. And we have to do it all in three days, since otherwise I’m going to be committing treason by correspondence course.”
“We all are,” said May. I blinked at her. She laughed, a little wearily. “Do you honestly think Jazz and I will be staying if you go? Oh, and Quentin? He may be fostered to Shadowed Hills, but he’s your squire. He goes where you do, unless you decide to leave him behind.”
“Which you’re not going to do,” said Quentin quickly.
“I have a Court to tend to,” said Tybalt. My heart sank a little, even though I had already known that would be his ans
wer. Then, to my surprise, he continued, “It will take me some time to hand my duties off to Raj. When that is done, I will find you.”
I turned to stare at him. “What . . . ?”
“I am a cat, October. I have a sense of duty, because I am also a man, but no cat can be held down by duty forever. Eventually, we must go where we wish to be, not where we are told.” Tybalt smiled slightly at the expression on my face. “A simple banishment is not enough to see you quit of me, little fish.”
“Is it just me, or is getting hot in here?” asked May, causing Jazz to break into a peal of laughter. I wrinkled my nose at her, but I was secretly relieved. I would have either thrown myself at him or blushed myself to death in a few more seconds, and neither of those was a great option.
“You are all evil.” I slicked the wisps of hair that had escaped their net of ribbons back from my face with both hands, releasing the illusion that had been making me look human in the same gesture. “Okay. We have three problems. If the Queen of the Mists isn’t supposed to be in charge, who is? How do we find them? And how do we depose a sitting monarch who has her very own private army?”
“Remember when our biggest problem was ‘who turned the laundry pink’?” asked May. Then she sighed. “Yeah. Me neither.”
“Your guess is as good as mine on all of these topics,” said Tybalt. “Even in my misspent youth, I never attempted to depose a monarch of the Divided Courts. Only my father, and I doubt our means of succession would hold in the Courts of Oberon.”
“Probably not, but . . .” I paused. “Maybe we don’t need to guess about any of this.”
“What?” said May.
“What?” echoed Jazz and Quentin.
“Li Qin has a Library card.” I dug my phone out of my jacket pocket. “Maybe she can get me a temporary pass or something.”
Tybalt blinked. “That is a surprisingly thoughtful, nonviolent solution.”
I stuck my tongue out at him as I scrolled through my contact list, finally locating the entry for Li Qin Zhou, current acting regent of Dreamer’s Glass. She was the widow of Countess January O’Leary of Tamed Lightning, and the adoptive mother of Countess April O’Leary, also of Tamed Lightning. She was also the only person I knew who might be able to get me into the local Library.