“She will also be set against the Court of Cats, of that I am sure,” said Tybalt. “She cannot raise a hand to me directly, but there are things she could do, if she came back to power. Purebloods have always been fond of controlling mortal legislation. There could be culls of the feral cat colonies, restrictions placed upon the humans who claim to own us, even closures of local shelters and rescue organizations. She could easily destroy my Court, all without crossing the lines that Oberon once drew.”
I glanced at him, startled. What he was saying made sense—so much sense that I had no doubt it was true—but I had never considered it before. Sometimes I can get so wrapped up in Faerie that I forget how dependent we still are on the mortal world, and how many purebloods know how to work it to their advantage. It’s odd how good they are at pulling those strings. These are people who don’t understand telephones or cars or cable television, but if you show them something and say “this makes you powerful,” they’ll figure it out. My liege, Sylvester Torquill, owns enough real estate in the Bay Area to make him a millionaire a dozen times over; his court employs a small army of accountants and investors to keep that money moving and prevent attracting attention. And he’s by no means unique among the truly long-lived.
It’s weirdly easy to underestimate the purebloods, to think that their power ends at the boundaries of their courts. That’s a good way to get into a whole lot of trouble.
“What do you want me to do?” demanded Arden. “I’m painting targets on everyone I care about!”
“Be better,” I said. “That’s what we want from you. We don’t want you to be perfect, and we don’t want you to be above reproach, but we want you to make an effort. We want you to be our Queen.”
Arden looked at us both for a long moment. Then she turned to look at the little living space behind her. Everything was still there, except for the carved redwood wardrobe that had once dominated an entire side of the room. She must have moved that to Muir Woods as soon as she got settled there. The wardrobe had belonged to her mother. It made sense that she would want it with her. But the rest—the television, the small rack of videos, the ancient, roughly-constructed bunk bed—were all still in their places.
“It was simpler when I lived here,” she said. “I kept Nolan from getting covered in cobwebs. I made coffee when I worked at the café, and sold books when I worked at the bookstore. Jude and Alan were always nice to me. I miss them. I miss knowing that as long as I did my job and kept my head down, they would have my back. I miss Ripley. I miss my life. You know that’s what you took away from me, right? You took away my life.”
“We gave you back the life that was supposed to be yours all along.” I shook my head. “Change sucks. No one’s going to argue about that. Change is hard and painful and sometimes we wind up losing things we wanted to keep forever. You can’t go back to the life you had when you lived here. You made promises. It’s time to keep them.”
Arden looked at me for a moment before looking down at the floor. “Everything got so hard when you showed up.”
“I have a talent for complicating situations,” I said. “Your Highness, will you please return to Muir Woods before poor Lowri has to organize a response to a declaration of war with no one to support her?”
“Yes,” said Arden. “You’re coming with me.”
I had been expecting that. I still raised an eyebrow and asked, “Why?”
“Because you put your hands on me without permission, and that means you have to be punished,” said Arden. There was a smile in her voice that unnerved me as she continued, “Don’t worry. I know exactly what I’m going to do to you.”
She lowered her arms before raising one hand and tracing a circle in the air. The smell of blackberry flowers and redwood bark rose as the portal opened, showing the entry hall at her knowe in Muir Woods. “If you would come with me?” she said.
When a Queen tells you to come with her, there isn’t much room for argument. I pulled my phone out of my pocket and pushed the button for Quentin’s number. When he answered, I didn’t wait for him to say anything: I just said, “Bring the car to Muir Woods,” and hung up, putting the phone away again. Taking a deep breath, and with Tybalt beside me, I walked through the portal, and toward whatever punishment my loyalty had earned me.
FOUR
I WAS SITTING ON THE trunk of a fallen redwood only feet away from the open doors of the Queen’s knowe, wondering whether I could find myself a new career, when Quentin came racing up the side of the hill. He stopped when he saw me, his eyes going wide as he took in my slumped, despondent posture. Tybalt was standing a short distance away, giving me my space. That, more than anything, explained Quentin’s cautious approach. If Tybalt, who was rarely afraid of anything, was standing out of hitting range, I was a clear and present danger to everyone around me.
I held my silence until Quentin was closer. Then I lifted my head off my hands, leaving my elbows resting on my knees, and said, “I need to ask you a question, and I need you to give me an honest answer. Not the answer you think I want to hear, and not the answer you want to be true, but the actual answer. All right?”
“All right,” said Quentin uncertainly.
“I’m not kidding, Quentin. If you lie to me, I will kick your ass all the way back to Toronto.”
“All right,” said Quentin again. He sounded more confident this time. If he was getting ready to lie to me, at least he was planning to do it with conviction.
“Would your father approve of you accompanying me to Silences right now? Because guess who’s just been appointed the ambassador in the Mists.” I jerked a thumb toward my chest. “Arden seems to think the best way to negotiate peace with a Kingdom that hates changelings is to send in your most irritating changeling knight.”
“And her Cait Sidhe fiancé, pray do not forget that,” said Tybalt. There was an edge to his words. “If you attempt to creep out while you think I am not looking, you will come to direly regret your actions.”
I leaned back until I caught his eye. “We’ve gone over this. I’m expected to bring a retinue. Since you’re a monarch in the Mists, you can either come as a King of Cats and thus officially throw your Court of Cats in with the Divided Courts, or you can stay here and not commit your people to a war they don’t want any part of.”
“I threw my lot in with the Divided Courts when I threw my lot in with you, and I will not take it back,” said Tybalt tersely. “I mean to accompany you, whether you will it or no.”
“He’s getting all Shakespearean,” I said, leaning forward and looking back to Quentin. “That means he’s coming with me. The question is, are you?”
“I . . . I don’t know,” said Quentin slowly. “I think this may actually be one of those situations where I need to call home and ask my dad. I can see where me being involved with negotiating a cease-fire could be really useful later on, you know? But I think my parents will be pissed off if I wind up sleeping for a hundred years.”
“Most people’s parents would be,” I agreed, and stood. “Come on. We need to get back to the house and tell May what’s going on. You need to call your folks, and I need to call the Luidaeg. She should know that I’m about to leave the Kingdom.”
Quentin blinked. “If we’re just going to turn around and go home, why did you have me drive all the way out here? I could’ve met you at the house.”
“Because I will not be accompanying you upon this leg of your journey,” said Tybalt. “Even as you must inform your companions of your intent to travel—”
“Is it really my intent if I’m doing it against my will?” I asked.
Tybalt rolled his eyes and continued without missing a beat: “—I must inform my Court that I will be away for a short time, pursuing a guarantee of their safety. I can convince them to be patient. Kings are not so vital in the day-to-day operation of a healthy Court that they will not let me go. Some may even be re
lieved by my absence, however brief. It can be difficult to feel as if you are truly wild when there is a keeper forever watching over you.”
I blinked. In all my dealings with the Court of Cats, I had never stopped to think about it that way. The Cait Sidhe made up part of their Court, but the rest consisted of runaway house pets, feral cats, and the changeling children of the Cait Sidhe themselves. Anyone who’s ever known a cat knows how much they prize their independence. As King, Tybalt was essentially cast in the role of caretaker. He set rules, provided food for the weak and defenseless, settled disputes, and generally did all the things for the Cait Sidhe that they didn’t want to do for themselves.
In an entire Court of the free, the King was the only one who was captive.
“Are you going to leave Raj in charge?” I asked.
Tybalt snorted. “No, for a great many reasons. He is not ready. He will be ready soon. Until that day arrives, I will not leave him on my throne. There is too much chance that his returning it to me would be seen as weakness, and prevent him from later claiming it as his own. I will leave Gabriel and Opal as my representatives. Gabriel has been of my guard for long enough that his presence will be accepted, and Opal is more adept at using the telephone than most of my people. Alazne is old enough now that she can be coaxed into one form over another if her mother puts in sufficient effort.”
Alazne was the only survivor of Gabriel and Opal’s first litter. Her three siblings had been killed when Oleander de Merelands poisoned the meat supply of Tybalt’s Court. It had been touch and go for Alazne for a long time, but she was finally growing out of her early medical issues, and into the rest of her long, long life as a pureblood Cait Sidhe. She was a good kid.
“Sounds good,” I said. “Meet us back at the house?”
“As soon as I may,” he said. “Should you need to relocate in the interim, please leave a note of some sort. I would hate to have to go looking for you.”
I smiled. “Will do.” I stood, leaning over to kiss him quickly before I started walking toward Quentin, and away from the knowe. “Come on, kiddo. Let’s go home.” A faint waft of musk and pennyroyal from behind me told me that Tybalt was gone. It was time for us to be gone as well—time, and past time.
Quentin was quiet as we navigated the hill back down to the park, and walked through the park to the lot where my car was waiting. He stayed quiet—uncharacteristically so—as we got into the car. I cast a quick don’t-look-here and started the engine, pulling out onto the main road. I glanced at him a few times, but decided to wait until we were on the freeway. If he hadn’t at least turned on the radio by then, I would ask him what was wrong.
We reached the freeway with the silence still hanging between us like a knife on a string. I cleared my throat. “Okay, what’s wrong?”
“I don’t want to let you go without me.” His voice was very small. “I hate that you have to treat me like . . . I never wanted you to know. Not until I was ready to leave my fosterage and take my family name again. I didn’t want you to treat me differently.”
“Oh,” I said.
Quentin was the Crown Prince of North America. One day, he would control the continent. And I hadn’t known that when he became my squire. He’d been sent to Shadowed Hills on a blind fosterage, which meant that no one other than Sylvester had known who his parents were, and that none of the rest of us were allowed to try to find out. For a long time, I’d assumed he was minor nobility at best, since his parents seemed perfectly cool with letting him become a changeling’s squire and run around the Mists getting shot at and hanging out with the sea witch. It had been . . . well, a shock to discover that actually, his parents thought spending time with me would make him a better King one day.
“I’ve tried really hard not to treat you any differently,” I said carefully. “It’s been difficult sometimes. But you still have to do the dishes when it’s your turn, and I took you to fight the big black dogs without going ‘oh no, I could hurt the Crown Prince.’ Honestly, I would have wanted you to stay behind even before I knew—I would probably have insisted. It’s only the fact that you’re going to be High King someday that makes me think this is something you should see.”
“It still feels like I’m being punished for being a prince,” he said.
“Let me ask you something. If this had come up while you were still concealing your identity from me, and if I had been temporarily out of my senses enough to ask you to come along, would you have been willing to just grab your things and follow me to Silences? Or would you have called home and asked your parents if they’d mind?”
His silence was answer enough. He would have checked in. That was reassuring—it meant I hadn’t completely converted him to my particular school of “go ahead, rush straight into danger, it’s fun.” It also put a lot of past events into a new perspective. If he’d been checking in all along, the High King and Queen must have really believed in the idea of preparing their heir for anything.
“So see? The only thing that’s changed is that now I ask you to call them, rather than you having to sneak around and do it behind my back. I’ve never been happy about hauling you into danger, and I’ve never pretended to be.” I flashed him a quick smile. “I think this is a good thing. I like it when we’re not keeping as many secrets.”
Quentin smiled hesitantly back. “I guess so.” He paused before asking, “So why is Arden making you go to Silences? I mean, it’s not like you have any ambassadorial experience.”
“Funny thing: I don’t think anyone in the current nobility does,” I said grimly. “Sylvester is busy in Shadowed Hills, and he’s our most experienced hero. If we actually go to war, Arden is going to need him here to organize the troops. Li Qin is a scholar. April is . . . April is April. Even if she could travel that far, she’s more likely to accidentally start a war than intentionally prevent one. We could ask Saltmist to loan us someone, but they don’t really do diplomacy, unless you count Dianda going ‘stop hitting yourself’ over and over again. There may be some diplomats in Wild Strawberries or Deep Mists or someplace, but none of them will have seen any action since the War of Silences, when they were working for the woman who’s now trying to declare war on the rest of us.” Simon Torquill had been a diplomat, once upon a time: that was part of why he had a title but no lands. As the less martial of the brothers Torquill, it was his job to solve problems before they got out of hand and required Sylvester to come along with an army. Unfortunately, Simon was asleep, and was going to stay that way for a century. He wasn’t going to help us with this war.
Sometimes I think Faerie goes to war as much because we can’t find anyone who’d rather talk things out as for any other reason. Diplomacy is not a valued skill among the Courts. Most of our nobles would prefer to do the dance of manners and then slide a knife between someone’s ribs. It’s more fun than actually discussing trade sanctions and why it’s rude to kill your neighbors.
“Okay, I guess, but why you?” asked Quentin. “You’re . . . not really that diplomatic.”
“You mean I’m a blunt instrument being sent to do a scalpel’s job,” I said. Quentin nodded. I shrugged. “When I found Arden, she and I had an argument about how to handle things. I sort of grabbed her without her permission. So she’s punishing me.”
Quentin looked suitably horrified at the idea that I had grabbed the Queen in the Mists without her consent. He shook it off and pushed on, saying, “Maybe, but she’s not stupid. If she thought that punishing you like this would result in a war, she wouldn’t do it. So she must think you can argue your way out of a war.”
“I did it once, I guess,” I said dryly, before leaning forward and turning on the radio. “I want to think. Feel free to critique my taste in music.”
“I always feel free to do that,” said Quentin, and promptly changed the station.
He was right about one thing: if Arden wanted me to be the ambassador in the M
ists, she had to think it would somehow benefit the Kingdom. It was too specific to be a punishment she’d come up with on the spot. Fine, then. How could I benefit the Kingdom? Well, I could yell at the King of Silences until he agreed not to go to war. Awkward, but potentially effective. I could try to talk some sense into the former Queen of the Mists. I could—
Wait. “Quentin, do ambassadors get diplomatic immunity?”
“Yes,” he said. “It’s the only way to prevent assassinations at major court functions. Not that it actually prevents them, but it makes them less common than they would be otherwise. No one wants to deal with a dead body on the dessert cart.”
“And people say I’m desensitizing you to violence,” I said. “So here’s a theory for you: Arden is sending me because this way I’ll have diplomatic immunity, which means the King of Silences can’t arrest me on the spot. That gives everyone back here time to come up with a better plan for getting through this alive. In the meanwhile, we’re in Silences with the former Queen, who hates me. That means she’s a lot more likely to lose her temper and do something that violates hospitality.” Which I would probably survive, given my own nigh-indestructability.
It was only nigh, not complete, which meant I wasn’t entirely comfortable with this plan, but I could see the logic. If my presence could provoke the former Queen into doing something inappropriate, we might be able to call this whole thing off—High King Sollys couldn’t prevent his subordinate kingdoms from going to war, but he could step in if one of them broke the rules of engagement. Of course, I could get stabbed a few dozen times in the process. Sadly, as I had come to learn, sometimes being a pincushion is my purpose in life.
The kitchen light was on when I pulled into the covered parking space next to our house. We lived in a beautiful old Victorian that had been purchased by Sylvester Torquill shortly after it was constructed, and used as a rental property until the day I agreed to let him move me into something safer than my apartment. Most of the neighbors hated us in an offhand sort of manner, since we had twice the space they did, plus a parking area and a small yard—all things virtually unheard of in modern-day San Francisco. I was sure they’d change their minds if they knew how much I’d bled to earn that house.