I’d just left, and when I came home from work, he’d been gone.
I hadn’t worried right away. Nolan was a young man, headstrong and angry and looking for an outlet. I couldn’t keep him with me all the time, no matter how much I wanted to. But hours had gone by, and he hadn’t returned, until fear had driven me into the night to look for him. I’d gone to his favorite haunts, the places he went when he was angry with me, and I’d searched and searched and searched until I found him. The arrow had still been in his chest, pinning the message from the false Queen to his shirt.
‘Little Princess;
I hope you enjoy my gift. Take it for the opportunity it is, and walk away. I will not be so kind again, to either of you.’
It hadn’t been signed. It hadn’t needed to be. Nolan never hurt anyone in his life. The only person with a reason to attack him or threaten me was the woman holding my father’s throne. Unless I decided to raise an army against her, she couldn’t have me killed without breaking the Law. Threats and intimidation were her best tools. And oh, she used them well. So well that I dragged Nolan home to the boarding house without a word to anyone. We needed to disappear again.
And that’s exactly what we did.
Now here we were, eighty years later, and he was still asleep and I was finally the Queen he’d always wanted me to be. But the things I’d learned as a child were fuzzy and distant; I was making all this up as I went along, and I was terrified of letting him down.
If I wanted to, I could leave Nolan to sleep out the rest of his time. What was another twenty years? I’d been frantic to wake him when I thought I only had a little while before the cure was banned, but now that the cure was being openly distributed, I could afford to wait. I could give myself the time to figure things out. I could establish myself as a Queen to be feared and respected, not some untrained stranger whose butt had barely hit the throne. I could mature without him . . . and we’d wind up even farther apart than we already were. I’d turned into a different person while he slept. If I left him asleep while I turned myself into a ruler, he might not even recognize me when he finally woke up.
But at least he’d be proud of me. If I was going to be a stranger, why shouldn’t I be a stranger he could respect, and not just a girl with a PhD in running away?
“I wish you could hear me.” I turned the bottle containing the cure—his cure, the potion that would wake him up immediately, instead of in another twenty years—in my hand, watching the way the liquid lapped against the glass. It was pink with streaks of purple and gold, like a sunset, like a future.
“I wish you could tell me what to do.”
Nolan, saying nothing, slept on. After a long pause, I stretched out on the bier next to him, the bottle still held tightly in my hand, and closed my own eyes. Maybe everything would be clearer on the other side of a nap.
TWO
Everything was not, in fact, clearer on the other side of a nap. I opened my eyes, and for one dizzying moment, I had no idea where I was. The room was round, ringed with windows to let the fresh air in. It smelled like redwood sap and rain. I don’t know how the bedding around me stayed so dry; with the fog the way it was in the trees, everything should have been damp all the time. The ceiling was a mural of blackberry vines twining around several small, sleeping animals. A fawn, a rabbit, a unicorn, a bear. The usual menagerie.
I sat up. The bottle was no longer in my hand. My breath sped up and my chest grew tight as I looked around me. It was gone. It was gone. I’d failed him again, I’d lost it somehow, and now he was going to sleep for another twenty years whether I wanted him to or not—
Light glinted off bias-cut glass. I leaned over the edge of the bed. The bottle was on the floor, nestled against the bedpost. I leaned farther down, snatching it off the floor, feeling its reassuring weight settle in my palm. The sky outside the windows hadn’t changed; it was still twilight, the sky painted purple and rose, like a darker version of the liquid that would wake my brother. It’s almost always twilight in the Summerlands.
Carefully, I slid off the bed and walked to the nearest window, pushing the curtains aside. The sky was cloudy, but there were patches where the stars shone through, gleaming bright. Once, this sky was all I knew. These days, I sometimes think I’d trade it all for the light-polluted mortal stars of San Francisco. At least they’d be familiar.
“I’m scared,” I whispered. Nothing answered me, not even the distant jingle of pixie wings. That was probably for the best. Queens aren’t supposed to be scared. Queens are supposed to be calm and steady and prepared for anything. They make the choices. My choice should have been simple. Give the potion to my brother. Open his eyes twenty years early. Let him see how far we’d come, that we didn’t have to run anymore; that we were safe. It would be simple. It would be easy.
So why couldn’t I do it?
I turned away from the window and toward the bed where Nolan slept, silently waiting for me to make my decision. He looked like he’d looked for the past eighty years: peaceful. He had our father’s dark hair, same as me, black in shadow and glinting purple in the light. If he opened his eyes, they’d be mismatched: one the almost-golden color of pyrite, one metallic gray, like liquid mercury. He hadn’t seen the sun in decades, but his skin was still tan, with olive undertones. No one who met me could look at him and not see him for my brother. There had never been any chance of us repudiating each other.
“Would you have been better off without me?” I asked. He could have run, if I hadn’t been there counseling caution and holding him back. He could have made a home for himself in some far-away kingdom, one where no one knew what King Gilad Windermere looked like, one where he could start again. Two children with a dead king’s bone structure and coloration were a target. One was a curiosity. One could disappear where two couldn’t.
And I was the one who’d been old enough to scar instead of healing. I was the one who’d found our mother’s body with a canyon where her throat should have been. Nolan had been with Marianne. He’d always known how Mother ended, but he’d never seen it. It was a little thing in the grander scheme, and yet. He’d never been forced to go to sleep with our mother’s murdered face watching him from behind his eyelids. He’d never walked through the world understanding what would happen to us if we put one foot wrong. He’d known, because I’d told him—over and over and over again—but knowing and understanding aren’t the same thing. Maybe they never can be.
Nolan didn’t answer. Nolan couldn’t answer. Nolan had passed beyond answering decades ago, and if he was going to start answering again, it would either be because I’d dithered for twenty years, or because I’d forced him to drink a potion I couldn’t make and didn’t fully understand.
“I could wait, you know.” My words fell into the silence, filling it, softening its edges. I wanted to open the door and call for Madden, or for Lowri, or for any other member of my court. I wanted someone to tell me what to do. I wanted someone to tell me whether waking my brother was right or wrong.
And that was why I couldn’t ask. I was the Queen now. I had to make these decisions on my own. I walked back to Nolan’s bed, perching on the edge.
“Eighty years is a long time. Twenty more on top of that is nothing. I haven’t even been Queen for a full year, you know? Nine months. That’s not long enough to know what I’m doing. I keep waiting for Jude to call and say my vacation’s over and I need to come back to the store.” Not that she could. I’ve changed phone numbers, addresses, and names. No one from my old life could find me if they wanted to.
I held up the bottle. “So what if I let you sleep for another year, or another five, or whatever, while I get my feet under me? I’ll be a better sister if I’m not busy trying to learn how to queen while I teach you about the Internet. It would be better for both of us if I waited.”
Nolan didn’t answer. Sometimes I wasn’t even sure I remembered what his voice
sounded like. Elf-shot is supposed to be the kinder option during wartime, and I guess it is, since it just takes our loved ones away for a century, instead of forever. But a hundred years was long enough to make us into strangers to one another. I’d been less than thirty when he’d gone to sleep. Sometimes I felt like he was more of an idea than an individual.
Sometimes I wonder whether it’s like that for the older ones, too. My father was over three hundred years old when he died. Would he have forgotten us eventually, if he’d been able to live and stay King in the Mists until Nolan and I grew up? It might explain a few things. Memory is a funny thing. It can be worn away if it’s revisited too often, smudged and warped and winnowed down to symbols when it used to be about people, real people, living real lives. If the older fae don’t remember what happened to them when they were young, it makes sense for them to be distant and cold. They have no emotional connections to the world.
I don’t want to be like that. I still don’t know what I want to be, except for maybe a bookstore clerk, and that door is closed to me now. But I was going to find out.
The cork came free of the bottle with a soft popping sound. The smell of roses wafted out, making me want to sneeze. It was almost like the smell of Countess Winterrose’s magic, but not quite right; it was too warm, too comforting, too friendly. This wasn’t a charm that had been designed to hurt people. It only wanted to help.
“I hope you’re okay with this,” I said. “I guess eighty years isn’t as bad as a hundred. I guess I’m not being selfish by waking you up now. I guess . . . I guess I’m lonely, Nolan. I’ve been talking to you for eighty years, and you’ve never answered. I’d like that to change. I’d like you to answer.”
Last chance. I could put the stopper back in, put the bottle in my pocket, and walk away. No one would question me deciding to let my brother sleep out the rest of his enchantment. Well, maybe Toby would. She doesn’t really have a lot of respect for the fact that I’m the Queen and thus technically the boss of her. I’d be upset by that, if not for the part where she doesn’t have a lot of respect for anyone, including the Luidaeg. So it’s not like I’m special. She treats me the way she treats everyone else.
After a decade or two of queening, that will probably offend me. Right now, it’s a relief. No matter how far I rise, there will always be someone standing there to laugh at me.
It didn’t have to be just one person.
“I’ve been so lonely,” I said, and lifted the bottle to Nolan’s lips, pushing down until his mouth opened enough to let me start dripping the cure through, one drop at a time. I didn’t want him to choke.
He swallowed. It was the first time I’d seen him move in decades. I pulled the bottle away and stepped back. The cure worked, I knew that—I had seen it work repeatedly, from Madden to Dianda. Nolan was special to me, but that didn’t make him special to the rules of magic that governed Faerie. If the cure worked for one, it would work for all. He was going to wake up. He was. But with every second that passed without him opening his eyes, I became a little more convinced that something had gone wrong.
Finally, I couldn’t take it anymore. I tucked the bottle into my skirt before reaching out and touching his shoulder as gently as I could, like I was afraid of waking him. But that was silly, wasn’t it? I wanted to wake him. I wanted to wake him more than I’d wanted anything in years.
“Nolan,” I said. “Hey. Can you hear me? It’s your sister. Wake up.”
He made a small noise deep in his throat; a sound of protest, a sound of displeasure. Hearing it woke a hundred “just one more minute” memories, images of a younger Nolan begging me to let him stay in bed when it was time to get up and get the night started. I smiled as tears rose in my eyes. Memory wasn’t as complicated as I’d feared. It was still there. It was all still there. It just needed to be woken up. Like my brother, it just needed to be woken up.
“Come on, Nolan. You’ve been asleep long enough. It’s time to open your eyes.”
“Ardy?”
His voice was the creak of a rusty gate, ragged and shallow and worn. I could have mistaken it for a dream, something I wanted so much that I was imagining it, if it hadn’t been followed by his lashes fluttering against his cheeks before finally—finally!—his eyes opened and he was squinting up at me.
He blinked, and frowned. “Ardy?” he whispered again. “When did you get so old?”
Laughing through my tears, I fell upon my brother and gathered him in my arms, and for the first time since our parents died, I felt like I was on my way home.
THREE
The only person left in the sleeper’s tower was Duke Michel, who had been elf-shot for committing a crime: for the first time in a hundred years, there were no innocent victims of elf-shot in the Kingdom in the Mists. We were free of Eira Rosynhwyr’s poisonous gifts—and more, I was free of the injunction not to use magic in proximity of the cure, which was somewhat unstable, according to the alchemist who’d created it. He was still tinkering, and he promised to have something more reliable by the end of the year, but that was later, and this was now. Nolan’s head resting on my left shoulder, I used my right hand to inscribe a wide arc in the air, opening a portal.
As always, using my magic openly sent a little thrill through me, like I was getting away with something. My powers had never been suppressed, although I’d considered it a few times. There were always underground alchemists working in San Francisco—lean, hungry fae who thought they were going to rival the sea witch one day. They would have been delighted to sell me blocking potions, keeping me from accessing the powers I got from my parents and hence potentially giving myself away. And they would have remembered my face, filed away the scent of my magic, maybe even gone to the Library of Stars to compare it to the census.
The fae world is an easier place to be anonymous than the human world. There’s no question of that. But that doesn’t mean it’s safe.
Nolan lifted his head, blinking at me in confusion. He only seemed to have two expressions at the moment—confused and bewildered, which were subtly different. I couldn’t have distinguished them on anyone else, but he was my brother, and his face was so much like mine that it was like looking into a mirror.
“Ardy?” he said blankly.
“Hey,” I said, smiling to cover my increasing distress. Madden had been back to normal within seconds of waking. Dianda had come to swinging and ready to murder people—which, for her, was also back to normal. So why was Nolan taking so long to recover?
He’d been asleep so much longer than they had. This was probably perfectly normal. Master Davies had just forgotten to warn me, that was all.
“Where are we?”
My smile froze, turning rigid. “Nolan, we’re home. This is home. We got it back.”
His confusion wasn’t going away. If anything, it was getting deeper. “Home?”
“Come on.” I stood, pulling him with me. He stumbled in the process of getting his feet under him, but in the end, he did it. I had to take that as a good sign. It was a good sign, wasn’t it? Wasn’t it?
Nolan let me pull him through the portal, which closed behind us with a faint pop. He looked around the new room, eyes skipping over the bed, wardrobe, and writing desk without recognition. He turned to me, and in the same blank tone, asked, “Where are we?”
“Home,” I repeated. His tone might be staying the same, but mine wasn’t: the desperation was creeping in around the edges, coloring everything I said. Something was really wrong. “This was your room when we came to visit Mother at Court, remember? That’s your bed.” Like all Coblynau furniture, it was enchanted to grow with its owner; the bed he’d slept in as a child was still long and wide enough to cradle him now that he was an adult.
“Bed,” Nolan breathed, showing his first sign of recognition since he said my name. He pulled away from me, less walking under his own power than staggering drunkenly t
o the bed.
I watched in horror as he collapsed onto it, falling facedown into the pillows. “Nolan?”
He didn’t respond.
“Nolan!” I ran to his side, rolling him over, so his face was turned toward the ceiling and he wouldn’t suffocate. His chest was rising and falling like a normal sleeper’s, without the slow, drugged tempo of the elf-shot. I shook him. He didn’t open his eyes. I shook him harder, and still, he didn’t open his eyes.
“Nolan?” My voice cracked, becoming young and shrill in my throat. I felt like the girl I’d been when I found him in the bushes, the arrow in his chest and blank serenity on his face. I hadn’t felt like her in years. She’d been so innocent. She’d truly believed, deep down, that we’d suffered enough; that the world would start being kinder. The world still wasn’t being kinder.
I took a step backward, my hand sculpting an arch in the air behind me and opening a portal to the veranda. Madden was there, going over the household records and trying to figure out what we had too much of versus what we didn’t have enough of. It was one of his tasks as Seneschal, at least until I hired a Chamberlain—something I’d been in no hurry to do. Madden knew me. Madden understood me, and that was something I couldn’t put a price on.
Madden wouldn’t judge me.
Taking one last look at my slumbering brother, I whirled and fled through the portal, stumbling from the sweet-scented air of the bedroom into the cool Summerlands night. Globes of witch-light lit the veranda, bobbing a few inches below the living, mossy canopy that kept the area dry even during heavy rainfall. Madden sat at the largest of the three round tables, a pair of comically small spectacles balanced on the tip of his nose. His head snapped up when my foot hit the floor; by the time I had reached the table, he was on his feet, arms up to catch me.