He did have a point, though. The fae tend to thrive more in the Summerlands, purebloods especially, blossoming in the absence of the omnipresent iron that humans like to work into their designs. Even changelings need to spend a certain amount of time on the other side of the hills to maintain our equilibrium. We don’t get sick or anything if we spend too long in the human world—and that’s a good thing, given that I spent fourteen years as a koi fish in the Japanese Tea Gardens in Golden Gate Park—but we get . . . faded, in a way. We do better when we maintain a balance.
And none of that was enough to make me give up my home in San Francisco, the City by the Bay, land of mists and hills and twenty-four–hour convenience stores. I liked where I lived and I lived how I liked, and sometimes I still struggled a little with the fact that I’d started letting other people in, and that meant I needed to take them into account when making decisions.
It still would have been nice to be included enough to pack my own suitcase.
I sighed, rolling over and burying my face in my pillow. I was sulking. I knew that. I was wallowing in my own hurt feelings, and I needed to stop and get on with my night, especially if I was going to be leaving the Kingdom in the morning. Arden was one more name on the list of people who must have known my wedding date before I did, because there was no possible way for them to take me out of the Kingdom without telling the Queen I answered to.
My eyes snapped open as I rolled over again, pushing myself into a sitting position. Tybalt didn’t like Sylvester. May liked him maybe too much—she had all my memories of a childhood in which he had been the only reliable parental figure, the only person who would bandage my skinned knees without concerns that I might be bleeding on his clothes, the only adult who seemed to reliably give a damn about my survival. Luna and Melly and Lily had all done their best, but they had also held back a little, perhaps out of respect to my mother’s role as my actual mom, perhaps because they weren’t sure what to do with me. Sylvester, though . . . Sylvester had always been there. He had taken care of me when no one else would.
It was Sylvester who had offered me the Changeling’s Choice that brought me fully into Faerie, when my mother had been doing her best to turn me mortal and allow me to die in the course of a natural human lifespan. It was Sylvester who had dried my tears when I wept from missing my human father, who had told me he was sorry for the hurt, but that it was all right for me to miss him, to mourn the life I’d given away when I chose Faerie over the human world.
He hadn’t told me, not for years, that because he was the one who offered me the Choice, he would have been the one to snap my neck if I’d chosen to be human rather than fae. The purebloods try to be kind when they deal with changeling children, even if many of them view us as little better than beasts, but their kindness has limits.
Tybalt wouldn’t have told him. May might still have been too hurt to tell him. Simon would have to know—one more person for the list of people who’d been keeping secrets from me, which I hate, and who was going to have to make it up to me with apologies or cake or something else small but complicated—since he was legally my father and presumably had a part to play in the ceremony, but would Simon have called his brother?
I couldn’t call Sylvester. He was always going to be my liege, but at the moment I was still semi-exiled from the Duchy that had always been my home, so calling him for anything other than an emergency would have pushed the bounds of propriety. I fumbled for my phone and dialed the only other number I could think of, flopping back onto the bed as I pressed the phone to my ear.
The phone rang. And rang. And rang again, until I started to worry about going to voicemail. Naturally, that was when it clicked and a harried female voice with the faintest faded lilt of an Irish accent said, “Bridget Ames’ phone, Bess speaking, office hours ended hours ago, tell me why I’m not taking ten percent off your grade?”
I smiled to myself. “Hi, Bess. It’s Toby.”
Her tone shifted immediately, becoming warm with delight. “October! Is that daughter of mine bothering you again? She’s supposed to be in the kitchen, getting the dishes to order after our supper, but I wouldn’t put it past her to have run off to yours. She says you have faster Internet.”
“We don’t, really. April says Shadowed Hills is her masterwork, and we’re still on San Francisco’s municipal network. Chelsea just likes that we always have snacks.” And she likes spending time with the boys. Not many people her age at Shadowed Hills.
Bridget is human. She lives in the knowe because her husband, Etienne, isn’t. Neither is their daughter, Chelsea. Bridget didn’t know she was sleeping with a Tuatha de Dannan when she started her original affair with Etienne; considering she’s a folklore professor and still teaches at UC Berkeley despite living in the Summerlands, that’s probably a good thing. It would have been hard as hell for her as an academic to resist the urge to write research papers about her sex life.
The idea was amusing. I smiled again, closing my eyes. “Anyway, as far as I know, your teleporting troublemaker is still at home. The boys just got back from an errand, and Raj is off at the Court of Cats.”
“Having a quiet night in, then?”
“Yeah, just me. Your husband around? I have a question for him.” I could have asked Bridget, but I hadn’t known her for nearly as long, and no matter how she answered, it wasn’t going to irritate me as much as Etienne had the potential to do. I wasn’t looking to make myself angry. I was trying to triangulate how angry I should be. There’s a difference.
Honest, there’s a difference.
“He’s in the kitchen with Chels. I’ll get him for you. Hold on a second.”
“For you, anything.”
There was a clatter as Bridget put the phone down. Having a cellphone inside a knowe is materially different from having a landline only in the absence of the cord. The magic April uses to make the signals work doesn’t always cover the entire knowe, and sometimes calls drop, or become weirdly distorted, or jump from one phone to another—you can be having a conversation with one person and suddenly be connected to someone else in the knowe who just happened to be using the phone at the same time. It’s messy. Leaving the phone somewhere that gets a stable signal is occasionally the only solution.
A minute passed, agonizingly slow in the dimness of my room. There was a scraping sound as the phone was lifted on the other end. “Hello?” said Etienne.
“Planning any upcoming trips?” I asked.
He sighed. “I told them it was a bad idea. I told them you would react poorly. I swear I did. Sometimes I feel as though the people who claim to care about you the most dearly have never actually met you.”
“Uh-huh. And how long have you known?”
“My invitation arrived two weeks ago,” he said.
Two weeks ago. I tried to think back, to remember if there had been any unusual secrecy or caginess, or if May had filled the kitchen inexplicably with pixies. Sometimes she baked cookies for them, but I couldn’t remember anything out of the ordinary.
“Two weeks,” I said flatly.
“October, I’m sorry they chose not to inform you.”
“It’s fine. I assume that if you’ve been invited, Sylvester knows?”
“Yes,” said Etienne. “His Grace is aware.”
He didn’t say anything more. Neither did I, letting the silence stretch between us like an unbreaking thread, waiting him out. It sometimes seems like half of PI work is being quiet and letting other people incriminate themselves. For all his love of the rules and codes that a “proper knight” was meant to live by, Etienne was far less accustomed to holding his tongue when not in the presence of the nobility.
“He is not presently intending to attend,” he said—not blurted, as each word sounded reluctant, but also like he simply couldn’t stand the silence any longer.
I said nothing.
“Da
mmit, October, this wasn’t my idea. I didn’t make or execute the plan.”
I sighed. “But you went along with it. You kept quiet when you knew it was going to upset me, and you went along with it.”
To my surprise, he laughed.
I blinked. “This isn’t funny.”
“Yes, it is. I was your knight, October. I stood responsible for you as you went out of your way to upset, vex, bedevil, bother, and annoy absolutely everyone of any high position in the Mists. I used to wonder if you were using the peerage as a checklist of people to get on the wrong side of. It was my responsibility to teach you honor, comportment, and the courtly graces, and I failed and succeeded in equal measure because I crafted you into the most infuriating creature ever to walk in Faerie. And as it seemed your only goal was, at times, to vex those you felt took themselves too seriously, it seems only fitting that the same fate be visited upon you by those who love you as you are. You have a sister willing to arrange an entire wedding for your sake. You have a man who loves you. Let them love you as best as they know how. They only emulate what they admire.”
The line went dead. I lowered the phone, staring at it for a moment before dropping it onto my chest and staring up at the ceiling. I didn’t call back. There would have been no point.
He was right.
I had spent my childhood rebelling and running away from the establishment, whatever the hell that was supposed to mean. My mother had no title, but she was a landholder, and people had a dismaying tendency to defer to her, for reasons I had lacked the information to understand at the time. My not-quite-father figure was a Duke, and everyone around us either worked for him, swore fealty to him, or both. Thumbing my nose at the people in power had been a way to feel important, even though I wasn’t. Even though I was just another changeling who would never amount to anything.
Only now I was the establishment. I spent time, socially, with kings and queens—was even going to marry one of them. I had been to various kingdoms, sometimes as a diplomat, sometimes as a hero. I was a hero. What I wasn’t was particularly good about keeping my mouth shut when under pressure. Preventing me from knowing when the wedding was going to happen kept me from accidentally blurting it out in front of the wrong person or wrong pixie, who might carry the news back to any of the various people who had reason to wish me or Tybalt ill. This had been a smart way to do things.
I still didn’t like it. I sighed and closed my eyes, letting the dimness of the room and the comfortable softness of my bed lull me into a light doze. Staying where I was sounded even better than a hot shower and was easier on the water bill. It wasn’t a true slumber; my eyes snapped open as soon as the scent of musk and pennyroyal drifted through the air, marking Tybalt’s arrival.
I didn’t move or say anything, just lay there with my eyes open and my phone on my chest, fully clothed and barefoot, staring at the ceiling. There was a soft rustle as Tybalt made his way across the room to the bed. Like all cats, he could move in total silence when he wanted to—and often did. Like most people with sense and compassion, he understood that sometimes sneaking up on your fiancé the hero who usually has a knife with her is not the best possible idea.
“October? Are you awake?”
Upon reflection, I elected not to answer him and kept staring at the ceiling.
The mattress bent as he sat upon the edge, his weight pulling it downward. “I can hear you breathing. I know you’re awake.”
I rolled onto my side, propping myself up on one elbow. “Then why did you bother to ask?”
“It seemed polite.” He looked at me solemnly. I looked back.
Even my residual irritation couldn’t rob me of the ability to enjoy the view. Tybalt was not the most beautiful man I’d ever seen. I live more than half the time in Faerie these days, and we have entire species that have been bred like show dogs for the sole purpose of each generation being prettier than the one before it. That’s sort of a joke but also maybe possibly not since I’m thinking specifically of the Daoine Sidhe. Their Firstborn is exactly the kind of woman who would command her descendants to choose their spouses purely on the basis of how attractive they thought the babies would be.
Cait Sidhe don’t do things that way. Their beauty, when it arises, is entirely natural, the result of good choices and good genes. Tybalt is pale, thanks to living a primarily nocturnal life, with sharp, strong features and the lithe build of a runner or swimmer. He doesn’t need to be a powerhouse, not when he can be fast enough to defeat most opponents without risking a hair on his own head. Plus, I like that I can get my arms around his shoulders without straining.
His hair is brown, more-or-less striped with black depending on his mood and how comfortable he is. Like most Cait Sidhe, he learned to suppress his more animal attributes when he was very young in order to be taken seriously. Most of the time, his feline heritage shows only in his pupils, which are oval and react strongly to the light, and in his incisors, which are larger than the human norm. No whiskers, no tail, no flexible ears.
It’s like at some point we decided, “Hey, we’re immortal magical beings who live in a world of rainbows and miracles. Let’s all conform to the most boring standard we possibly can, okay?” It’s no wonder the fae go to war at the drop of a hat. There’s nothing else for us to do.
His eyes are green, rare for a human but common among the Cait Sidhe, and banded in different shades like the layers of a piece of malachite. I used to find his mouth cruel, before I got permission to start kissing it, and now I find it perfect. So no, he may not be the most beautiful man in the world, but he’s the most beautiful to me.
He was clearly done with Court business for the night, having exchanged whatever he’d worn to visit Ginevra for a shirt advertising Shakespeare & Co. Books in Berkeley. Sometimes his endless dedication to Shakespeare in all clothing choices gets old, but it makes him happy, and it’s not like I’m exactly vying for Faerie’s best dressed over here.
“So,” he said, with a small but audible sigh. “You know.”
“That I’m apparently getting married tomorrow? Yeah, you could say that I know. You could also say that I’m unhappy about being left in the dark about the one thing I explicitly said I wanted to be informed of. I’ll get over it. You may have to give me a little while, and some assurance that Kerry’s already working on the cake, but I’ll get over it.”
“I know you dislike secrets—” he began.
I held up a hand to stop him. “A surprise birthday party is a secret. A surprise public proposal is a bad idea. A surprise wedding is an affront.”
“You said all aspects were up to us,” he said, pivoting to a slightly safer place in the conversation. “You said you had no opinions.”
“I also said you should tell me where to be and trust me to be there,” I said. “You sort of dropped the ball on that one.”
He sighed. “I wanted to avoid a diplomatic incident if at all possible, by preventing the monarchs through whose territory we are to travel from sealing their borders—against either one of us.”
I blinked. That was a wrinkle I hadn’t considered.
Kings and Queens of Cats are territorial even by fae standards, and they don’t coexist. Ginevra’s father, Jolgeir, is the King of Cats in Portland, Oregon. When Raj takes his throne properly, she’ll have to choose between going home and challenging her father to a fight—potentially to the death—or striking out to find a territory that doesn’t currently have a ruler. Either way, she can’t go home and return to the way her life was before she discovered she had a Queen’s potential running in her blood.
To reach Toronto, Tybalt would have to pass through the territories of every Cait Sidhe monarch between here and there, and unlike the Kings and Queens of the Divided Courts, who would treat us like temporary, somewhat unwelcome guests, he could have been faced with challenges.
“I don’t heal like you do, little
fish,” he said. “I would prefer not to come to your bower broken and bleeding and already half-dead. I would offer you a poor wedding night if I did. Had word gotten out too soon of our planned nuptial date, the chances of someone deciding they had the time to assemble a challenge would have been higher than anyone wishes to take, myself included. This way, we will pass through like riders in the night, swift as anything and twice as difficult to catch or corner.”
“How are we getting to Toronto?” I sat fully up, and politely didn’t comment on the look of profound relief on Tybalt’s face. Had he really been expecting me to sulk that hard? Well, maybe I would have, if not for Etienne slapping some sense into me. I can be petty when I want to be. I try my best to avoid the urge.
“Sir Etienne has agreed to the loan of his daughter for the greater distances,” he said. “Otherwise, we will be depending on the kindness of each successive Kingdom to carry us along. The High King insists this is how he and his wife travel when the need strikes them, and that all his vassals will be obliging.”
Somehow, I doubted they were going to be as obliging for a king-breaker and a King of Cats as they were for the High King and Queen of the Westlands, but that was a problem for the future. For tomorrow, apparently. “Okay. Do I need to pack?”
He blinked. “Is that all? My punishment for conspiracy is allowing you to select whatever horrors you desire from the black hole you refer to as a wardrobe?”
I reached over and socked him lightly in the shoulder. “Be nice, or I’ll decide to be mad at you after all. My wardrobe doesn’t contain any horrors.”
The corner of his mouth twitched. “No. Merely bloodstains and suspicious slash marks.”
“Is it my fault I have a very stab-able face?”
“Yes,” he said dryly. “As it is not your face, but rather, your actions, which generally inspire the stabbing, I have to conclude that it is absolutely your own fault. I wish it weren’t, as it means to accept you as you are is also to accept that you will occasionally come home covered in blood and act as if I’m being unreasonable for being upset about it, but I cannot change the world with wishing. I’ve tried many a time before, and almost always, getting what I wanted would only have made me less than the man I am.”
When Sorrows Come Page 5