Sylvester was the first to recover. He had spent the most time with me, after all. “Is something funny, October?”
“The idea of me even attempting a political coup, much less pulling it off,” I said. “I mean, come on, really? I don’t want power. I’ve given up power every time it’s been given to me. I’ve done my best to be responsible for as little as possible, because sometimes I don’t even trust my ability to take care of myself. I’m not a king-breaker. I’m not a scheming vizier waiting for my chance to seize the throne. I’m just trying to get by. That’s all. No big secret plan, no hidden agenda. Survival.”
“You’ve isolated yourself from your liege,” said Aethlin.
I glared at him. “I don’t care if you’re Quentin’s father or not, how Sylvester and I handle our personal conflicts is none of your damn business.”
He raised an eyebrow. “I would have thought my position as High King of the continent where you live might have been more important than the identity of my son.”
“Which just proves that you don’t know me very well,” I shot back. “Yes, Sylvester and I have had our problems, mostly relating to the part where he lied to me for my mother’s sake. I don’t like being lied to by anyone, least of all the people who are supposed to be looking out for me. We’re working things out. Don’t get in the middle.”
“You can see where it would look like you were trying to act independent of his control.”
“I never do anything heroic or stupid unless I’m under someone else’s control,” I said. “I’d be a lot happier if everyone would just leave me alone to eat pizza and watch television, but you people seem to constantly need saving, so here I am.”
Maida looked amused. Aethlin looked unconvinced.
“She had the opportunity to take the throne of the Mists, you know,” said Arden. Everyone turned to her. She looked coolly back. “Once the pretender Queen had been proven false, if October hadn’t forced me to come forward, she could have claimed the throne on the grounds that there was no legitimate heir, and she was the daughter of a Firstborn. No one would have contested her. Probably not even you.”
“That’s true enough,” allowed Aethlin. “It doesn’t change the rest.”
“It changes everything,” said Arden. “If she wanted power, she would have it. She went to Silences on my order. The King and Queen of Highmountain came here on your invitation. She may be a nexus for chaos and disorder, but she’s not a political genius. She can barely dress herself half the time.”
“You’re too kind,” I said dryly, suddenly very aware that I was still wearing a borrowed coat over a shift, and no shoes. “What do you need me to say? Because while I get that this is politically necessary, my fiancé and my squire just woke up, and they probably want me in shouting distance.”
“We need you to say that you have no intent to destabilize the political structure of the Westlands,” said Aethlin.
I shrugged. “Easy. I have no intent to destabilize the political structure of the Westlands. I may do it anyway, but if I do, it’ll be a mistake.”
“October—” began Sylvester.
“No, don’t,” I said. “Look, Your Highnesses, I’m not going to promise never to do something I’m already not planning to do, because I can’t see the future. But I’ve never gone out of my way to hurt anyone who didn’t deserve it. From what I can see, you don’t deserve it. I like you okay, and Quentin loves you. Honestly, I just want to go home, and maybe start planning my wedding.” It no longer seemed quite so abstract. It was something that needed to happen.
“Will you have the wedding in Toronto?” The question came from Maida.
It knocked the wind out of me. I stared at her, my mouth working soundlessly, like the fish I used to be. Finally, I managed to stammer, “W-what?”
“Will you and the King of Cats marry in Toronto, at our knowe?” Maida shrugged. “It would show there was no bad blood between us; that you had the support of the High Throne, and that the High Throne was not set to be a target of your accidental wrath; and it would be nice to host a wedding. It’s been too long.”
Again, I stared at her. My mind was racing. Tybalt’s objection to getting married at Shadowed Hills was twofold: he didn’t like Sylvester, and he needed to avoid looking like he was swearing fealty to the Divided Courts. Getting married in Muir Woods shared the second problem, if not the first. Arden was his equal, not his superior.
But there was no High King of Cats. Getting married in Toronto could solve a lot of things. “I can’t agree without talking to Tybalt, but I’m not opposed to the idea,” I said carefully.
“In that case, I believe we can agree that your actions were necessary and proportionate, and do not represent a pattern of hostility against the nobility of the Westlands.” Maida gave her husband a challenging look. He nodded, and she smiled. “We appreciate your time.”
“Uh, sure,” I said. “Look, about time . . . when are you planning to wake the others? I feel like I should be here for that.”
“Queen Siwan expects to have the potion ready by morning,” said Arden, sounding confident now that she was back on comfortable ground. “They’ll wake Dianda first, so that we can focus our apologies on her, and let her decide what’s to be done with Duke Michel. I’ll wait to wake my brother until after all the guests have gone. He’ll have enough to adjust to without adding in a hundred new faces that he won’t need to remember right away.”
I nodded. “Smart.”
“Yes.” Arden looked down the line to Sylvester.
“Luna is already agitating to have Rayseline woken,” he said gravely. “I would appreciate it if you could be there.”
“Of course,” I said. “Whenever you need me.”
He inclined his head.
“The others who sleep will be dealt with one by one, until all are either awake or sleeping off a sentence that shouldn’t be commuted,” said Aethlin. “It may take years, but by the time we’re done, no one will slumber who doesn’t deserve it.”
I thought of all the people who might be woken, and what they might be deserving of—especially Simon Torquill. But that was Sylvester’s problem, not mine, and all of this was a problem for another day. “That’s good,” I said. “May I go?”
“You may,” said the High King. I curtsied deeply to the four of them—my liege, my Queen, the parents of my squire, the people who had called this conclave and changed our world forever—and turned as I straightened, moving toward the door. There were people waiting for me out there, people who I had thought were going to be lost for a long, long time, who were magically, gloriously still with me. So I was going to go and be with them.
Out of everything in the world, that was the only thing that really mattered. Everything else was just stage dressing. They were the show.
You are for dream and slumbers, brother.
—William Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida
ONE
June 10th, 2013
“I’M SCARED.”
The words were simple: their meaning was complex. My entire life is like that these days. It got complicated almost a year ago, when a wild-eyed woman crashed into the bookstore where I worked and ordered me to take back my father’s throne. Like it was a little thing to ask for, or an easy thing to do, and not just a complicated way of committing suicide.
A year ago, if something sounded simple, it probably was. “Yes, we have that book in stock,” or “no, we only carry science fiction and fantasy,” or “let me ask Alan if he knows.” There were days when I’d been bored, restless, convinced I was meant for something better . . . and on those days, I’d slip into the basement, past the bounds of the illusion I used to keep everyone—even Alan, who owned the place—from realizing I lived there. I’d go into the tiny sanctuary I had carved from the flesh of the mortal world, and I’d wipe the dust from my brother’s lips, and I’d r
emind myself that boredom was a blessing.
Boredom meant the nameless Queen’s agents hadn’t found us. Boredom meant I wasn’t faced with the choice between running and leaving my sleeping brother alone and defenseless, or staying and risking us both. Boredom was everything. Until October Daye, Knight of Lost Words, daughter of Amandine, bane of my peace of mind, smashed her way in and ruined it all.
I’m going to fuck up the tenses here, because past and present get blurred when you’re talking about more than a century, but I’ll do my best. Here it is:
My father was a King, which made me a Princess born and an orphan before I turned sixteen. It made my brother Nolan a Prince, but there was never any question of who would take the throne; I was the elder by two full years. My magic came in earlier and stronger than his. And when we were children, I was fearless. I treated the world like a game that could be won, and I was going to be Queen someday.
Not that anyone knew. My father was unmarried; my mother, his mistress, hid in plain sight as a servant in his Court. Nolan and I lived in a house by the sea with our nursemaid, Marianne. She disguised us as changelings when she brought us to see our parents, and it was the best of all the wonderful games we played. I was a princess in hiding, ready to dazzle the world by bursting forth fully-formed and ready to rule. Someday. After decades and decades and decades of watching how my father did it, learning from his experiences, and preparing.
No one could have been prepared for the earthquake. It came out of nowhere, shattering the Summerlands and San Francisco in the same blow. When it ended, my brother and I were orphans. It was just the two of us and Marianne, who was old and tired and hadn’t signed up to be our replacement mother. She did the best she could. She taught us to run, and hide, and keep our heads down. She honed our illusions until we reached the limits of what our blood allowed.
It wasn’t enough. There were people who remembered her from my father’s Court, people who’d heard the rumors about Gilad having children and were starting to put two and two together. She had to go. Staying would have gotten us all killed. I knew that, and still I cried the night she said good-bye. Nolan was even worse. He’d been so young when the world fell down. Ten years old when we were orphaned; fourteen when Marianne walked away. He cried until she had to charm him into sleep, because otherwise he would have betrayed our position.
He hit the ground like a sack of potatoes, like he was dead, and I was going to throw myself after him when Marianne grabbed my arm and said, “Wait.”
She’d been my keeper and companion since I was nursing. One of my first memories is her smiling down at me, a rag soaked in milk and honey in her hand. I stopped moving and looked at her, letting the habit of obedience guide what happened next.
Marianne smiled sadly. She was Coblynau; I never knew how old she was, but her face was a maze of wrinkles, and her sorrow showed all the way down to her bones. “Here,” she said, reaching into her pocket and pulling out a handful of driftglass beads strung on a braid of unicorn hair. “I got these from the Luidaeg when you were a baby; they’ve kept you safe until now, and they’ll keep you safe hereafter.”
I gasped. I couldn’t help myself. The Luidaeg’s gifts were never things to take lightly, or to request without dire need. “But Marianne, the cost—”
“Was paid long ago, and I never begrudged it. Here.” She pressed them into my hand. “This is all I have. This is all you have. Be careful, Arden, and never forget that I love you as much as I love my own children. Never forget to stay safe, for my sake, for your sake, for the sake of the Mists.”
Then she was gone, and I was alone with my brother, too young to be a woman, too young to be a surrogate mother to a confused boy still getting the hang of his own teenage years. The Princess who would never be a Queen. My father taught me about ruling, and my mother taught me about hiding, and my nursemaid taught me about running away, and of the three of them, Marianne’s lessons were the ones that served me the best for years, and years, and years. Her lessons got me through the time I spent alone, after Nolan was elf-shot by the false Queen’s forces. She kept me safe.
Until October. Until the challenge, and the crown, and this great barn of a knowe, where the air still sometimes tastes like my mother’s perfume when we let the ghosts out of rooms that have been sealed for more than a century. Until I left my mortal life the same way I left my fae one: not walking away but running, fleeing into a different future. I was born a Princess in hiding. Technically, I grew up the same way. But the way I hid as a child was a glorious game, and the way I hid as an adult was a constant threat, and they are not the same.
The girl I should have grown up to be is never going to sit on the throne of the Mists. That girl died with our mutual mother, in the 1906 earthquake, when palaces that should never have shifted tried to shake themselves to the ground. That girl has neither grave nor night-haunt mannequin to remember her. She only has me, and I hate her sometimes, because she would have been so much better at this than I am. She would have had tutors and secret allies and an army preparing her for the pressures of queenship. She would have been a committee.
I didn’t get any of that. I got good at disposable identities and confusion charms, at lying until potential employers believed me, at moving my elf-shot brother under the cover of night, going place to place in pursuit of the lie of a safe haven. I got a bookstore and a best friend and barely time to catch my breath before October barged in like a changeling battering ram and took it all away.
I’m sure there are people who’d say it was worth it to lose everything and gain a throne, but since I stopped wanting the throne decades ago, I’m not one of them. I want to make my parents proud. I want to keep my brother safe. I can do those things better from the throne of the Mists than I could from the basement of Borderlands.
But some days, most days, that basement felt more like home than this knowe did.
The conclave—my first major political event—had been a success, and they’d left me alone, all of them after it was over and we’d finished waking the majority of the sleepers. October had walked away clinging to her squire and her alchemist and her Cait Sidhe fiancé, checking every five minutes to be sure they were all awake. It would have been funny if I hadn’t been on some level fiercely glad to see it. Sometimes it feels like she doesn’t know how to lose. Maybe it’s small and petty and human of me to want her to understand what it’s like for the rest of us, but I’ve spent more time with humans than I’ve spent with my own kind. I guess a little had to work its way in.
Waking Duchess Lorden had been a more involved process, and had involved finding a way to restrain her without hurting her. We couldn’t afford to offend her any more than she already was—I mean, being elf-shot is pretty damn offensive—but she was likely to wake up swinging, and that woman can hit. In the end, we’d resorted to binding spells to hold her down while Queen Siwan of Silences administered the cure and Dianda’s husband, Patrick Lorden, stood in full view at the foot of the bed. As we’d hoped, the sight of him stopped her from either hurting herself or figuring out how to break the bonds and hurting the rest of us.
The fact that her attacker had been elf-shot for hurting her helped. The fact that he was being left that way until she decided on his punishment helped more. She and Patrick will be enjoying the hospitality of my household for another three days while they decide what to do.
Many of the land nobles are hoping she’ll show mercy, if only so they won’t have to explain why they’d stood idly by as one of their own was dragged away to the Undersea to sleep out his sentence. Personally, I hope she’ll go for the worst punishment she can think of. I don’t want people thinking they can attack each other willy-nilly under my roof.
When did this become my roof? It’s supposed to be my father’s roof. It’s supposed to have been his for the last hundred years. I groaned and dropped my head into my hands.
“I swear, N
olan, I’m scared out of my mind here, and I don’t know what to do.”
The last remaining sleeper didn’t say anything. Hadn’t said anything, in fact, since August fifteenth, nineteen thirty-two. But who’s counting, right? Who measures the days a brother spends in an enchanted sleep, unable to comfort the sister who loves him?
I guess I do.
It doesn’t help that, hello cliché, the last things we said to each other weren’t particularly kind. He hated the false Queen sitting on our father’s throne. He wanted to raise an army and depose her and take our lives back. Maybe it was because I was older and more aware of what we had left to lose, but I wanted to stay safely under the radar, avoiding her attention. He kept saying that if I really wanted to pass unnoticed, I’d move us out of the Kingdom, to someplace where our resemblance to our lost father wouldn’t draw stares on the street, and he wasn’t wrong, and I kept not moving. I was frozen. Like a rabbit that sees the hunter coming, I was frozen.
I should have listened. I should have gotten us the hell out of the Mists. But I was afraid that anywhere we went, we’d be seized on and used as the figureheads of a revolution. Faerie loves nothing like it loves to go to war. Putting the daughter of a dead King back on the throne where she belonged? That was a lovely excuse for a slaughter. If it was going to happen no matter where we were, why should we leave the only place we’d ever called home? I was a coward, and Nolan was burning to prove himself, and it was a combination destined to end in tragedy.
These were the last words he said to me: “I don’t know why you bothered surviving if you weren’t going to live.”
I’d been on my way out the door, heading for the job that was keeping a roof over our heads and food in our mouths. I was serving as the nanny of a local mortal family, using the skills I’d copied from Marianne to support us. She was still saving us, after all those years. I’d thought it was an ordinary day. Nolan was impossible when he got into one of his moods: I hadn’t even tried to talk to him. I’d just left. I hadn’t told him I loved him. I hadn’t said I was proud of him.