When Sorrows Come

by Seanan McGuire

  Not that I minded. Honestly, it was kind of cute. It made me feel . . . it’s difficult to explain how it made me feel when Tybalt relaxed enough in my presence to let his more animal traits show through. The first time I heard him purr, I thought I might die of joy on the spot.

  Faerie isn’t always the kindest place to live and, from what I understand, it never has been. We’re all descendants of the same Three, but somewhere along the line we went from treating one another like one big family to making war whenever possible, setting up artificial hierarchies to determine who was better or more important than who. I’m not complaining about the fact that we figured out there were too many of us to all live like siblings—it would have made dating complicated, and marriage basically impossible—but there’s literally no reason for any kind of fae to behave as if they’re somehow better than any other. All our streams run from the same source, as it were.

  There was a time, before Oberon’s original disappearance—an event which fractured Faerie for centuries, and is still fracturing Faerie today, thanks to his continued refusal to tell anyone that he’s back—when changelings were rare and almost feared. Sometimes the blending of fae and human blood can lead to people called merlins, mortal beings who can tap into immensely powerful faerie magic without any of the costs or limitations faced by true fae. There was a war. The purebloods lost. After that, they were a lot less inclined to go stepping out with the local human population, wanting to avoid another merlin uprising. And in the absence of changelings, they’d needed to find something else to hate.

  I wasn’t there, obviously. I was born in the 1950s, not the 1500s. But Tybalt is older than I am, and he remembers those days all too vividly. Without changelings, the other purebloods had turned a lot of their prejudices and smug judgments on the members of the fae community who carried clearly animal attributes—including the Cait Sidhe. They’re still viewed as savage and uncouth even today, when there are changelings all over the place. Tybalt learned to suppress his feline side in order to be respected and treated like the king he is. Watching him learn that I wouldn’t judge him when he let himself relax has been a joy and a gift that I’m grateful for every single night.

  I’ll be even more grateful when his adopted nephew, Raj, comes of age and is able to formally claim the throne of the local Court of Cats. Until that happens, Tybalt is technically still King of Dreaming Cats, his crown held in stewardship by Ginevra, a Princess of Cats and daughter of the King of Whispering Cats in Silences. His loyalties will remain at least partially divided between me and his people until Raj is mature enough to challenge him and win.

  I honestly think Raj would win if he challenged Tybalt tomorrow; Tybalt would go easy on him, out of love and concern and the need to be rid of his position, and it would undermine Raj’s entire rule. Raj knows it, too. That’s why neither of them is pushing for the challenge to happen any faster than it needs to.

  At least with Raj and his regent holding the Court, Tybalt has been freed to functionally move into my house. Even better, despite being older than the United States of America, which is something I do my best not to dwell on more than absolutely necessary, Tybalt doesn’t hold with any of that puritanical human nonsense about a bride needing to be “pure” on her wedding day. Not that that ship hadn’t sailed long before he proposed to me—and long before he and I were anything but enemies. I have a teenage daughter, Gillian, who lives with the Roane in Half Moon Bay, trying to figure out her place in Faerie without the specter of her deadbeat mother-turned-hero of the realm hanging over her.

  My family life is a little complicated.

  Of course, that doesn’t make me special. For example, as we’ve been working on the guest list for the wedding itself—taking into account people like Arden, who would love to be there, but can’t attend, due to the fact that it would leave her Kingdom without a queen in the event that one of our neighbors went “great, the king-breaker’s out of town, let’s use this opportunity to invade”—my squire has presented an unexpectedly massive problem.

  Quentin has been with me for a little over five years, supposedly learning how to be a proper knight, which doesn’t really make sense when looked at with an objective eye, since most of the time, I’m about as proper as a kick to the groin. Sir Etienne, who was responsible for the bulk of my training, gets this look of horrified dismay on his face whenever anyone reminds him that he trained me and now I’m a hero and isn’t he proud? He is not proud—unless it’s of the fact that I’m somehow still breathing. I never really grasped the courtly graces or knightly manners, and my sword fighting technique is basically “pretend it’s a baseball bat and just keep swinging until the ball stops moving.”

  To be fair to Etienne, he’s not the one who taught me how to swing a sword. That was my liege, Duke Sylvester Torquill, Simon’s brother and Duke of Shadowed Hills. He was teaching me the rules of proper sword fighting when things got . . . complicated between us. We’re currently not technically speaking to each other, mostly because his wife has decided I’m the enemy. The last time I saw either of them was at the formal court where they petitioned Queen Windermere for permission to wake their daughter, Rayseline, from her current state of elf-shot slumber.

  The permission was denied, somewhat unexpectedly, by the Luidaeg, who’s been showing up for court more often since her father came back. I assume it’s because she’s waiting to see whether Mom will follow up her “secretly Firstborn” bombshell by pointing out that Oberon is once more walking among us. But who knows for sure? The Luidaeg is old enough to have witnessed continental drift in real time, and the reasons she does things are sometimes difficult for people less long-lived to follow. I’m not even a baby to her. I’m barely a fetus. And if she wants Rayseline Torquill to sleep a little longer, that’s what’s going to happen.

  Anyway, my squire has presented a surprising level of difficulty where my wedding is concerned, because he’s part of an ancient system of free babysitting called “blind fosterage,” wherein children who need to learn the customs of another kingdom or who are considered to be at high risk for assassination are sent off to spend some time being nameless and serving in someone else’s court. It’s an archaic tradition, but it keeps the kids busy and out from underfoot. And alive, which is sometimes the hardest part when you’re talking about the children of titled nobility.

  When Quentin’s parents sent him away, they wanted to be absolutely sure no one would recognize him, which is why he wound up fostered to a relatively unremarkable Duchy on the other side of the continent from their home knowe. In Toronto. Because my squire, who can’t remember to take his own damn clothes out of the dryer before they wrinkle, is actually the Crown Prince of the Westlands.

  Yeah. I wasn’t too thrilled either, when I first found out.

  It might not have been such an issue now if his looks were different. When I first met him, he had hair the color of a dandelion that had just gone to seed, white-blond and fluffy, but as he’s gotten older, his hair has gotten darker to match the hammered bronze color of his father’s. He looks even more like both his parents put together, not less, and there’s no way I can take him anywhere near Toronto without him being recognized. And that’s a problem.

  Everyone agrees that I can’t get married without taking my squire, even Tybalt. It would be a massive insult, for one thing. It’s also quite simply not going to happen. He’s the son I never had, and while it may have taken me a while to admit that to myself, I love the kid too much to leave him out of something this important. Eventually, he’ll have to return to Toronto and go back to Crown Princing around, instead of slumming it out here with me. Until that happens, though, he’s family, and family doesn’t get left behind.

  He also can’t come to Toronto with us. If he did, he’d be recognized immediately, and since part of the point of blind fosterage is keeping kids from being assassinated, telling the world where he is would be a bad thing. Eve
n if “where he is” happens to be the upstairs bedroom of a known king-breaker.

  We’d been experimenting with having Garm, one of Sylvester’s other knights, cast an illusion to make Quentin look like someone else. Gwragen illusions are functionally unbreakable. Unfortunately, they need the caster to stay at least remotely nearby, and Garm and I have never had a close enough relationship for him to be particularly interested in attending my wedding. Honestly, I couldn’t blame the guy for wanting to stay as far away as possible. He was pretty sure someone was going to wind up dead, and so was I, knowing my track record. So we needed to find another solution, and time was running out.

  It was all enough to make my head hurt—and make me grateful that other people were handling most of the details.

  It was early evening, and the house was quiet. Rare these days, but pleasant when it happens, as long as it doesn’t last too long. I start getting twitchy when I don’t know where my people are. Tybalt had gone to the Court of Cats shortly after he woke up, saying he needed to check in on Ginevra and make sure Raj wasn’t making her pull out all her whiskers.

  Jazz, May’s live-in girlfriend, is a Raven-maid, one of the few truly diurnal types of fae. She’d been up for hours, spending most of them at her antique store on Telegraph Avenue, and May often left early to pick Jazz up from work.

  For definitions of “pick up” that we all understand mean “meet at the store and then take the BART back from Berkeley.” My Fetch doesn’t drive, and we’re all safer that way.

  Quentin had been out since sometime after midnight the night before, having gone to spend the night with his boyfriend at Goldengreen. Dean Lorden is probably technically my brother now, which I try not to think about when I have a choice in the matter, but since my legal father married Dean’s parents—both of them—I think that makes us family. And the tree gets more confusing, and the list of wedding invitations gets longer.

  I rolled languidly out of bed, stretching my arms up over my head and enjoying the silence. Both my ancient half-Siamese cats cracked their eyes open to watch me go, but didn’t stir themselves enough to get up, or even lift their heads. I leaned over to rub Cagney between the ears, and she favored me with a vast yawn.

  “Good girls,” I said fondly. Spike, our resident rose goblin, was off somewhere doing whatever it did when I stayed in bed too long for its tastes. Probably rooting around in the garden. It seems to like sleeping under the rosemary, and since it keeps the rats away, that’s fine by me. None of us are sure how it keeps getting outside; the cats are indoor only, and we’re careful about windows.

  Not only to keep the cats from getting out. To keep any of the nasty surprises that proliferate in Faerie from getting in.

  I made my way out of the room and into the hall, heading for the stairs. May always makes coffee, and sometimes waffles, before she goes off to meet Jazz. I don’t get any benefits from caffeine these days—my system clears itself too quickly for most substances to have any effect—but I like the flavor. And Tybalt is forever pleading with me to eat more. I could start the night by making us both happy.

  When I reached the kitchen, the hoped-for coffee was in the pot, a plate of something I suspected of being scones, if not waffles, was on the counter under a tea towel, and someone was talking in soft tones on the back porch. I stopped, turning toward the sound with narrowed eyes.

  Call me paranoid, but since something usually is out to get me, I think I’m allowed.

  I moved toward the door as quietly as I could, all but holding my breath as I strained to hear. Purebloods have sharper-than-human eyesight, and mine is pretty damn good, but most fae whose ears are just pointed, not furred or flexible, have human-level hearing. All I could make out was that one was higher than the other, and the higher voice was entirely unfamiliar.

  People don’t normally hang out on my porch talking without a good reason. I stopped, still straining to listen.

  The deeper voiced person laughed, and I relaxed, because that voice, at least, I recognized. Dean had been coming around the house almost since we moved in, and his visits have only grown in frequency and length since he and Quentin officially started dating. I would have started making jokes about paying rent if anyone in the house had actually been paying for the dubious pleasure of living there. Thanks to a generous gift from Sylvester before he stopped acknowledging me, I own the place free and clear, with the exception of our yearly property taxes. I knew Dean’s laugh.

  The higher voiced person laughed in answer, and I frowned again. Why was Dean bringing a stranger around the house? It didn’t make sense.

  The easiest way to solve a mystery is to run straight toward it and knock it into as many pieces as possible. I shrugged, still frowning, and opened the door.

  Dean was standing on the porch with his arms wrapped around a teenage boy I didn’t recognize, kissing him like he thought the world was going to end as soon as he stopped. The boy had his fingers tangled in Dean’s hair and was kissing him just as hungrily. I froze, staring at the pair of them. Neither one seemed to notice me standing there. I wouldn’t have been able to slide a sheet of paper between them if I’d been inclined to try—and I wasn’t so inclined. I was a lot more likely to slam the door and walk away.

  The fae don’t have a very strong attachment to a lot of human concepts about relationships. They’ve managed to creep into our culture, largely due to changelings like me, who come away from our mortal parents with lots of weird ideas, but that doesn’t make them popular or widely adopted. Most nobles wind up in marriages with the potential for biological children because that’s how you hold onto the throne your ancestors fought and possibly died to secure for your family line, but that’s about where we stop putting restrictions on people.

  The majority of fae, if asked to label themselves by modern human terms, will go with “bisexual,” because the gender of their partners matters a lot less than the fact that everyone is there to have a good time. With shapeshifters and transformation magic and people who are literally trees for half the year running around, even “gender” can get a little bit vague and is rarely discussed outside of private conversations. Marriages may be two people, or three, or more—the largest stable marriage I’ve ever encountered was five people, all of them perfectly content with the arrangement.

  It doesn’t make much sense to me. I’m still human enough to be an absolute prude by fae standards, and I don’t share. But as long as everyone’s happy, or at least satisfied, Faerie doesn’t care, and so I do my best not to care either.

  But one thing Faerie does tend to be fairly strict about is loyalty. When the fae make promises, we expect them to be kept, and we don’t handle it well when they’re not. Dean and Quentin had never mentioned being in an open relationship to me, and we talked enough that I was sure I’d know if they were seeing other people.

  My stepbrother was cheating on my squire on my own kitchen step, and I didn’t know what to do about it.

  The two of them pulled apart, and I found my voice, demanding stridently, “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

  They turned to face me, Dean’s eyes going wide as he realized they had an audience, the stranger’s cheeks flushing a surprisingly vibrant red. He was paler even than my mother, almost the same shade as a sheet of paper, with dust-colored hair and brown eyes that managed to be a few shades lighter, like grimy cobwebs. His ears were sharply pointed, although not at an angle that would have betrayed Daoine Sidhe heritage. I breathed in, tasting the balance of his blood on the evening breeze.

  Banshee, from one end to the other, with no traces of anything else.

  “Sorry,” said Dean. “We thought you’d be out.”

  “Oh, so you’ve done this before?”

  The two of them exchanged a look, Dean’s eyes getting even wider—if that was even possible—before the blood drained out of his cheeks. He whipped back around to face me.r />
  “This isn’t what you think,” he said, words coming out in a staccato burst with no real space for breath between them.

  “Really? Because what I think is that you want me to slap you upside the head before I call my father and tell him to tell your mother what you’re doing.”

  The stranger burst out laughing. It was a high, musical sound, and when he spoke a moment later, it matched the bright tenor of his voice.

  “I’m so sorry,” he said. “We should have considered how this would look, but we really didn’t think you’d be home.”

  I blinked at him.

  “Talk faster,” I suggested. “I don’t have a very long temper right now.”

  “Isn’t it the fuse that’s normally measured in length?” asked the stranger. “You’re the one who’s supposed to be good at human idiom.”

  Dean was still pale, but stayed quiet, watching his new fling grill me. I scowled at both of them.

  “Right now it’s everything, so explain yourselves before I start stabbing.”

  “Fine, fine, but you have to let me mess with May when she gets home.” The stranger held his hands up, palms toward me. “I know you want me to be able to come to the wedding without causing a major diplomatic incident, so I went to the Luidaeg and asked her if she could help me. I owe her a favor now, but this is permanent until she gives me the counteragent, so now I can come and see you get married like a good squire. I just have to be careful not to stub my toe and yell too loudly, or I could shatter all the crystal in Toronto.”