Much as I love Quentin, sometimes it was easy to forget that he was, and had always been, a pureblood. He didn’t understand what it had been like to be a changeling under the old Queen of the Mists, or what it was still like to be a changeling in most of the world. I took a breath and paused, trying to figure out how to explain things to him.
Tybalt saved me from needing to. “King Gilad was a good man, and one who understood that the changeling children of the Courts are still precisely that: our children. They belong to us, because we create them. While he lived, the Mists were a healthy place for changelings to live—unequal, because equality has never been a priority among the Divided Courts, but still, a place where those of mortal blood could thrive. When he died, his successor began to change that. Rapidly. She reversed all the gains that he had put in place, and quickly created the unhealthiest kingdom in North America for those among us with human blood in their veins.”
“So?” asked Quentin blankly.
“So it was the abuses of the rights of changelings that caused the old King of Silences to get pissed off and invade,” I said. “The dude who currently holds the throne was put there by the old Queen because he agreed with her, and since all their sitting nobility was taken out at the same time, you didn’t get any Duchies like Shadowed Hills, where the people in power said ‘it’s nice that you’re a bigot and all, but we’re going to keep doing what we’re doing, and we don’t care what you say.’ Silences is not a safe place for a changeling to be.”
“Oh,” said Quentin. He hesitated before saying, “That wasn’t part of the history lesson I got.”
“Changelings rarely are, even though we’ve been part of Faerie practically since the beginning,” I said. “Funny thing, that.” We had reached the edge of the woods while we reviewed the history of Silences. It was late enough that there was little to no chance of finding humans there, but I still paused when I saw a figure sitting on the hood of my car. For one giddy second I thought it might be Arden. Maybe she hadn’t run as far as I had feared; maybe she was going to give us our orders and then head back to her knowe to oversee whatever came next.
Then I took another step and realized that the figure, while female, had hair that was too pale and clothes that were far too informal. Tuatha de Dannan can teleport, but they can’t change their clothes magically, as a general rule. If Arden had cast an illusion to make her court clothes look less formal, the smell of her magic would have been filling the parking lot. All I could smell were redwoods, and the sea.
Tia slid off the hood as we drew closer. “I want to come with you,” she announced, without preamble.
“No,” I said.
“How did you get down here ahead of us?” asked Quentin.
“I didn’t have any bipeds to slow me down. A dog moves faster in dense wood than a man. Your cat could have done the same, if he’d been willing to leave you behind.” Tia’s attention swung back to me. “What do you mean, ‘no’? My brother will be asleep for a hundred years. I have the right to know what the woman who claims his fealty is going to do about it.”
“Yeah, you do, but you can wait until she’s back at home before you ask her,” I said. “Arden will be here. I don’t care if I have to carry her myself, she’ll be here.” Tuatha de Dannan are good at running away—something about them being capable of bending space—but slap a blindfold over their eyes and they’re as stuck as anyone else.
Tia frowned at me. “That isn’t good enough.”
“It’s going to have to be,” I said. “I just met you, and you carried in a declaration of war. I pretty much believe that you’re Madden’s sister, but since he can’t vouch for you right now, you’ll forgive me if I don’t hurry to put you in my car.”
Tybalt, bless him, didn’t say anything. I knew how hard that had to be: he was normally one of the most sarcastic people I knew, especially when it came to things like riding in cars with dogs. He just stood there, silently lending support to my position.
The side of Tia’s mouth curled up, exposing her teeth. It was less a sneer than it was a silent snarl, and it had no place on a human-seeming face. “This is unfair,” she said. “My brother isn’t a bad dog, and neither am I.”
“No, and I understand that you’re upset, but right now the best thing you can do for Madden is stay here, in the court that he loves, and make sure everything keeps working the way it’s supposed to,” I said. “Let us take care of finding Queen Windermere and bringing her home. We’ll figure out what’s going on, and we’ll handle it. It’s my job, remember? I’m a hero of the realm. Let me do my job.”
Tia continued to eye me mistrustfully for a few seconds more before her face relaxed, turning into a neutrally mournful expression. “I will sit by my brother’s bedside until you return,” she said. “I will not eat, or sleep, or stray.”
“Um, okay,” I said. “You do that. Just try not to starve yourself or anything, all right? Lowri doesn’t need another crisis on her hands.” I walked past her to unlock the car doors. She didn’t stop me, which was a relief: I had been half convinced that she was going to grab my wrist and resume demanding to come with us as soon as she had the chance.
Quentin and Tybalt got into the car without incident. The last we saw of Tia was her reflection in the rearview mirror as we drove away from Muir Woods, turning ourselves toward San Francisco.
“Where are we going?” asked Quentin.
“Borderlands,” I said. “I can’t think of any better place to start the search.”
“It’s two in the morning,” said Quentin. “They’re not going to be open.”
“I can pick locks, and Tybalt can carry us through the shadows,” I said. “I think we’ll be fine.”
When we’d first gone looking for our missing Crown Princess, the trail—augmented by some magical homing fireflies provided by the sea witch—had led straight to an independent bookstore on Valencia, less than a mile from my house. Borderlands Books sold science fiction, fantasy, and horror, which I guess made it a uniquely well-suited place for a fairy princess to go into hiding. Arden had been living in the store’s basement, in a cunningly well-concealed makeshift apartment. Her brother, Nolan, had been there too, sleeping off the slow decades of his own elf-shot poisoning.
The old Queen had been the one to have Nolan elf-shot, in an effort to keep Arden from seeking the throne that was hers by right. It sent a message: “I can hurt you.” Elf-shooting Madden sent the same message. It was difficult not to think that the messages had been penned by the same evil hand.
There was no traffic on the roads, and Valencia Street was pretty well deserted. I pulled up right in front of Borderlands, stopping the engine. “All right, here’s how we’re going to play this,” I said. “I will scout the front of the store for an alarm system. If they don’t have one, I pick the lock and we go in the front door. If they do have one, Tybalt opens a passage through the Shadow Roads, and he and I go straight through to the basement. Either way, Quentin, you’re going to stay with the car.”
My squire gave me a wounded look. “Why?”
“Because I seriously doubt Arden is going to agree to go back to Muir Woods the slow way, and Tybalt doesn’t know how to drive.” I pulled the key out of the engine and passed my keychain over the back of the seat to Quentin. “I’ll call you if I need you to move the car.”
“I think I liked it better before I had my license,” Quentin grumbled. “You didn’t make me play valet nearly as much.”
“Before you had your license, we needed to get May involved if we wanted to have a backup driver,” I reminded him. “Do you really want to go back to that world?”
Quentin blanched. “I’ll drive.”
“Good squire.” I grabbed a handful of shadows from the roof of the car, weaving them into a makeshift human disguise. The smell of cut grass and copper rose to fill the cab, only to be beaten back by the smell of mu
sk and pennyroyal as Tybalt did the same. His disguise was much better than mine: he looked like an actual human, while I just looked blurry and somewhat less pointy than I usually did. I didn’t want to spend the magic or time to spin something more believable, not when we were going to be spending at most five minutes on the street.
“If you see anything unusual, or if the police come by and seem too interested in why you’re sitting here, drive away,” I said, before opening my door. “I don’t want you casting a don’t-look-here on the car. You may need that magic later.”
Quentin nodded. He didn’t argue. That was good. I wasn’t sure I could handle arguing with him right now.
The last thing I wanted was another war—and when I said “another,” I really meant “my first.” The only other time in my lifetime that the Mists had almost gone to war, I had managed to avert it by finding the missing sons of the local Undersea Duchess. This time, I didn’t think there was going to be an answer that easy.
Tybalt met me on the sidewalk. We moved toward the bookstore together, only to find a small, carefully displayed sign in the front window cautioning us that the property was protected by a local alarm company. “Oberon’s ass,” I muttered. “So much for picking the lock. I’d been hoping to avoid this, but—Tybalt? Could you?”
“It will be difficult, as my pride has been wounded by your hopes to avoid my contribution, but I think I can manage,” he said, with a hint of amusement. “Take a deep breath.”
I did. He took my hands and pulled me with him as he fell gently backward, into the shadows that pooled around the bookstore door. We toppled into absolute blackness, second only to the absolute cold that suddenly surrounded us. The Shadow Roads were lightless, airless, and most of all, freezing. They’re among the most accessible of the secret paths that run through Faerie, and strange as it might seem, they’re also among the gentlest: the Rose Roads are almost impossible to access, and roses have their thorns; the Blood Roads will drain you dry and leave your body as a warning to others. Nothing comes without a price. Not even passage.
We fell through another wall and back into the world of warmth and air, although not much more light: we had emerged in the Borderlands basement, where there were no windows to cut the darkness. I was just glad we weren’t standing on the stairs.
I put out my hand, finding Tybalt’s chest, and pressed my palm flat against his shirt. He froze, understanding my intent without a single word needing to be spoken. I smiled despite the situation. How I loved that man. Not bothering to close my eyes, since I couldn’t see anything anyway, I sniffed the air.
Blackberry flowers and redwood bark. Arden was here.
“Arden, it’s October and Tybalt,” I said, letting my hand fall away from Tybalt’s chest. There was no point in trying to sneak up on her. If she didn’t know it was us, we might spook her, and I had no idea where she’d go from here. If she did know it was us, well . . . we still might spook her. It was hard to say. “We need to talk to you. Can you please come out?”
There was a long pause—long enough that I began to worry that I’d misinterpreted the scent of her magic. Maybe she had been here for so many years, casting illusions in an enclosed space, that the smell had worked its way into the walls. Then the air on the other side of the room seemed to crack open, revealing a thin band of extremely low light, like the glow from a nightlight. It was still enough to make me squint and turn partially away after the darkness of the past few minutes.
“Why did you follow me?” Arden’s voice was tense and tight. I didn’t need to see her face to know that she was a flight risk. Maybe she always would be. “Get out of here.”
“We came to bring you back to your court, Your Highness,” I said, stressing her title so hard that it became a weapon. “I understand that this is all sort of overwhelming for you, but it’s overwhelming for everybody. Lowri is trying to hold things down—she’s doing the ‘temporary seneschal’ thing, in the absence of better options—but we need you there. We need you deciding how the Mists will respond.”
“No, you don’t,” she said, an edge of hysterical laughter in her words that set my teeth on edge. If she panicked, if she ran . . . “I don’t know what I’m doing. I can’t do this.”
“Begging your pardon, Queen Windermere, but none of us know what we are doing when we begin,” said Tybalt. “It is the role of each monarch to find their way, and the way of their people, even when the world seems set against them. We have no choice.”
“But see, I do have a choice,” said Arden. “I could abdicate. I could step down. This could all be someone else’s problem, and the people I care about would stop being hurt.”
“Once.” The word was cold, heavy with fury, and it took me a moment to realize that I was the one who had spoken it.
“What?” Arden sounded confused. “What do you mean?”
“I said, once.” I took a step toward the narrow sliver of light that hung in the basement air. I could see Arden’s face when I moved. She was framed by darkness, by the two pieces of the illusion that protected her little bolt-hole here in the bookstore basement. It was just magic painted on canvas, but it had kept her hidden for years, before I came and dragged her out of her chosen obscurity.
I had wanted to feel guilty about it when it happened, but I had had no real choice: the Kingdom had needed her. And she had accepted it. She had taken her oaths before the High King of the Westlands, and she had addressed her people. She had promised to do better. She’d promised. Faerie isn’t fair, but we take our promises very seriously.
“You get to make that threat once,” I said, taking another step forward. “You get to play that card once. You get to imply that your throne, your people, your Kingdom are somehow less important than your personal comfort once, and you just got your shot. Boo-hoo, Madden is asleep. That sucks. I’m going to miss him until he wakes up. But he will wake up, because the people that attacked him used elf-shot. They did that for a reason. They did it because they wanted to scare you. You’re really going to let them win?”
“You have no idea what you’re talking about,” Arden spat. The smell of blackberry flowers and redwood bark began to gather in the basement air.
I lunged forward, wrenching the two sides of the illusion apart and revealing the small, shabby apartment where our Queen had spent so many years. Arden, still in her fancy royal gown, gaped at me. I grabbed her hands before she had a chance to move, pinning her in place. She couldn’t open a portal without moving them. She was trapped.
“You’re not going anywhere without me, Your Highness,” I snapped. “If you open a portal, you’re taking me through, or you’re not going. This isn’t a conversation that you get to run away from.”
“Unhand me,” she said, and her voice was frozen anger and Arctic command. It was the voice of a Queen.
“If you’re running away, you’re not the Queen in the Mists anymore,” I said. “I don’t have to listen to some random bookstore clerk who doesn’t want to do her thrice-damned job because it turns out that being in charge is sometimes difficult. If you’re not running away, then yeah, I’m probably going to get punished for touching you without permission. I’m cool with that. Do whatever. But don’t run, Arden. Don’t do this to your people, and don’t do it to yourself. We deserve better. You deserve better. The Mists deserve better.”
Arden stared at me for a moment, eyes wide and shocked. Then, weakly, she tugged against my hands, and said, “You can let go now.” The commanding tone was gone, replaced by resignation and shame.
“You won’t run?” I asked.
“I won’t run.”
I let go.
Arden took a step back, wrapping her arms around herself so that her hands were pinned against her body, where I couldn’t grab them again. That was all right. I had never seen her open a teleport gate without using her hands. I knew she was capable of it—I had borrowed her mag
ic once, to save both of our lives—but most people fall into patterns with their spells and find it difficult to deviate. By hiding her hands, Arden was promising she wasn’t going to run.
“I can’t do this, Toby,” she said, looking down at the floor. Her shoulders slumped, making her the perfect picture of defeat. “When you told me I had to . . . that I had to come and be Queen, I thought you were kidding at first, and then I thought maybe I could do it. Maybe I could finally live up to my father. I know he has to be disappointed in me. So I tried. Isn’t that enough?”
“Maybe in the mortal world,” I said. “That isn’t how things work for us, and you know it. You’re Queen in the Mists. The High King accepted you. The knowe of your father opened for you. You’re stuck with the job, Arden. It’s yours until you die, or you have kids to pass it off to. That’s how this works.”
“What’s more, you knew that when you accepted the crown,” said Tybalt, voice pitched low. “None of us who are raised in the halls of power can come to adulthood ignorant of what we will one day be expected to become. You were not an innocent. You were not tricked. You were a princess born, and have aged into what you were always meant to be.”
I noticed that he didn’t use the word “grown.” Arden still hadn’t grown fully into her position—if she had, we wouldn’t have been standing in the basement of a human business, trying to convince her to come home. She was still growing. I just hoped we’d all survive long enough for her to finish the process. “We don’t have anyone else,” I said. “The false Queen was a vindictive bitch before we knocked her off your father’s throne and put you in her place. If she gets this Kingdom back, everyone who moved against her is going to be in a lot of trouble. And the changelings . . . oak and ash, the changelings. She never defended us. She never raised a hand to welcome us into Faerie. But at least for most of us, she never stood against us the way she did right after she took the throne. Power mellowed her. We were allowed to exist. You really think she’s going to stay that understanding after the way I helped you take your throne?”