When Sorrows Come

by Seanan McGuire

  I yanked myself away from her, drawing my own knife, all too aware that I was only feet from the High Table and was probably committing some degree of mild treason by daring to fight, even for the sake of protecting myself, but unwilling to stand back and just get stabbed.

  Although when I spun to face her, she didn’t have a knife anymore, and I realized maybe that was because she had already used it to stab something. Dammit. I glanced down, and there was the knife, a simple copper thing with a basic cross hilt, sticking out of my side where a knife definitely wasn’t supposed to be.

  Shock is a hell of a drug. If there was going to be pain—and there’s always going to be pain—it would come later, probably when I tried to pull the damn thing out.

  “This is a new dress,” I snapped, my attention going back to not-Nessa.

  She was getting taller. Taller, and thinner, almost insectile, losing all roundness from her face, arms, and torso, losing all the softness. Her skin was taking on a new shade, becoming a mottled mix of gray and green, patches that seemed to shift in the light, making it harder to focus on the shape of her. Her clothing tore as she grew, exceeding what Nessa’s own body had needed in an outfit, and the ragged pieces began to drop away, even as her teeth sharpened into fangs.

  “Doppelganger,” I said, and started to circle. I only had the one knife, and the urge to pull hers out of my side and add it to my petty arsenal was strong. It was also a bad idea until I could be sure the edge wasn’t serrated. I’ll recover from a little stab wound faster than anyone else alive. Disembowelment takes longer, and I didn’t have the time for that.

  She hissed at me—actually hissed, like some kind of giant lizard—and leapt into the air, a single pump of her legs propelling her high enough to reach the ceiling, where she grabbed onto an amethyst spire and kept on hissing, looking down at the room.

  “Shit,” I said, taking a step backward. “Tybalt? Luidaeg? Anybody got any ideas?”

  “Archers,” said Raj. He sounded almost bored.

  “I was right about that?” Bowstrings twanged around the edges of the room as the royal archers I had only been guessing about released their arrows, firing at the Doppelganger, who sensibly wasn’t there anymore as soon as she saw the arrows flying in her direction. Unfortunately, the arrows were still there, and they were doing what arrows do when they encounter gravity: flying in a high arc toward the center of the room, where they should have embedded themselves in their target, which they missed by a considerable margin, and then beginning to descend.

  “Shit shit shit,” I chanted, dancing backward, out of the area where the arrows were likely to hit. “Chelsea! Nolan! I need portals!”

  “What in the world—” Nolan began.

  “Follow my lead,” said Chelsea. The smell of smoke and calla lilies swirled as she concentrated, and a portal easily ten feet across opened in the air above our heads. Nolan made a small sound of understanding, and a similar, if somewhat smaller, portal appeared above the guards who were still trying to move High Queen Maida out of the way.

  There were other Tuatha in the room, and their mingled magics filled the air as they emulated Chelsea and Nolan. The air above us became a virtual firework show of glittering portals, each showing a little slice of somewhere else. A few of the portals opened onto what I assumed were other spaces inside the knowe. Some showed open forest or meadows, and one showed the parking lot behind a Tim Hortons.

  And the arrows, falling, fell into them, and didn’t come out on our side of things. Instead, they embedded themselves in whatever the portal showed, and no one was hurt. The Tuatha began closing their portals, and I started looking around for the Doppelganger, no longer afraid of being impaled by falling arrows.

  The room was big enough that she was almost impossible to spot, her shifting skin allowing her to blend into whatever part of the ceiling or wall she was now sticking to. “I hate Doppelgangers,” I muttered, and used my knife to open the ball of my left thumb, spilling hot blood into the air. It seemed a little wasteful to go cutting myself when there was already a knife sticking out of my side, but again, disembowelment is hugely inconvenient.

  It was a small cut, already half-healed by the time I got my hand to my mouth. The taste of the blood coated my tongue in an instant, brighter than the lights, sharper than the blade of my knife, eager to do my bidding. Sometimes I think my magic is like an abused dog learning to trust its new owner. It doesn’t fight me the way it used to, but its eagerness to be put to use can be somewhat overwhelming when I’m not properly braced.

  Blood filling my mouth, I closed my eyes and breathed sharply in, looking for the scent of Doppelganger. It was a good thing Nessa, wherever she really was, apparently favored form-fitting clothing; if it had been wearing something more adaptable when it transformed, it would have been able to assume a new face without worrying about the sudden appearance of a naked person in our midst.

  Doppelgangers can only weave illusions when they have access to the blood of the person they’re emulating, and every attempt uses up a little more of that blood up. Either Nessa’s beauty becoming blunted had been an illusion, or the result of an actual physical transformation. It was hard to say without more information. If the Doppelganger was smart, it would have been a transformation, to preserve the blood it had access to.

  I breathed in again, looking for the slick swamp-slime smell of the Doppelganger itself. With the blood amping my magic up well beyond casual limits, it didn’t take me long to find. I opened my eyes, pointing to a seemingly unoccupied space about ten feet from the still-open door. “There!” I yelled. “Right there!”

  Still holding onto the scent, I started running. The knife in my side made that more difficult, the shock wearing off to be replaced by waves of stunning pain. Fuck worrying about disembowelment; I yanked the knife free and flung it away from myself as I ran, hoping I wouldn’t hit anyone. The King’s Court was in a panic, with people running in all directions to get away from the onslaught of arrows, blood, and strange changeling women throwing knives around like it was no big deal. Only the group I’d brought with me was still reasonably calm.

  Emphasis on reasonably. Someone pulled up alongside me as I ran, and I looked to my left to see Tybalt keeping pace with my steps. Some of his normal mien had melted away, leaving him with rather more feline features than he usually chose to display around the Divided Courts. “Scarce here an hour and you’re getting stabbed?” he hissed.

  “Could have been worse,” I said. “Could have kept my mouth shut and let someone who heals more slowly than I do get stabbed.” The knife, which had not been serrated, had left a clean wound that felt like it was already healing.

  Tybalt scoffed.

  I smiled as winsomely as I could while sucking blood off my molars and running across a formal dining room to intercept an invisible hired killer. I wasn’t ready to credit the Doppelganger with being an assassin yet, as it hadn’t tried to stab anyone who was actually politically important. Calling me a tyrant didn’t indicate a high level of intelligence on the creature’s part, and yes, it had probably come prepared to say that as it killed a king, but it could have switched gears if it realized it was stabbing someone much lower on the pecking order.

  Creatures aren’t known for their mental flexibility, and that’s exactly what it was: a creature. Doppelgangers are monsters, born through some strange alchemy of blood and magic and momentary need by one of the Three. They claim no progenitor because they’re no one’s descendant race. They crave chaos, and most of who they are is stolen, at any given moment, from the people they emulate. Without a face to wear and a voice to speak with, the Doppelganger was little more than a dangerous, cornered animal.

  Animals have claws and teeth and can do a hell of a lot of damage when they feel like they have to. We kept running, until we reached the open patch of air that held the swamp-slime scent of the Doppelganger’s bloodline, a
nd I leapt, knife poised to descend, only to feel a clawed foot slam into my middle and knock me backward, away from the fray.

  And it was a fray. Seeing me fly back from a hit of nothing had told Tybalt exactly where the Doppelganger was standing, and the thing suddenly found itself dealing with an entire pissed-off King of Cats who really needed a target for his aggression. Tybalt snarled, claws slashing at the air, and between one hit and the next, the Doppelganger reappeared, bleeding from multiple wounds in its arms and torso and snarling.

  I pushed myself back to my feet, already recovered from both my stab wound and the blow to my middle, and rushed to grab one of the creature’s arms, wrenching it around behind its back. “Hi,” I said amiably. “Care to tell us who hired you?”

  It snarled at me, head snapping forward in an attempt to bite. I punched it in the face. It reeled but couldn’t break my grip on its arm without doing something more drastic than failing to bite me. It raised its free hand to slash, then stopped as Tybalt grabbed it, grasp tight enough that I could hear bones cracking.

  “Wrong answer,” I said.

  The king’s guard was moving into position around us, but hesitantly, as if they weren’t sure who they were supposed to be arresting. If this was the best the Westlands had to offer, maybe we were in more trouble than I thought.

  “The Doppelganger, you jerks,” I snapped, gesturing toward the monster in question with my chin. It was still struggling against us, frantic to escape, and as we held on, it began to shift in our hands. Its arms grew no thinner, but they did grow rounder, softer with the natural fattiness of a mammal’s body. The creature itself shortened and straightened, long blue hair cascading down its back.

  “Please,” pled the Doppelganger, in Nessa’s voice. “Please, they’re hurting me. Please.”

  “You can look directly at her from only a few feet away, and your eyeballs aren’t melting,” I said, voice low, to the nearest of the guards. “You know that isn’t right.” She was beautiful in this shape, yes, but it wasn’t the sort of beauty that left a trail of corpses in its wake. It wasn’t the beauty she’d been wearing when she came to greet us. This was beauty within the normal ridiculous standards of Faerie, which could be painful, but not fatal.

  “Nessa has served here faithfully for fifty years,” said the guard, wresting his eyes away from her with what looked like palpable effort. “She deserves to be treated gently.”

  “And if you’ve known her for fifty years, then you know this isn’t Nessa,” I said. “We’ll find her if she’s still alive. You have my word on that. And if she’s stopped her dancing, we’ll find what the night-haunts left for us, and we’ll make sure her family knows to mourn.”

  The Doppelganger-turned-Nessa seemed to realize its ploy wasn’t working, maybe because it’s harder to play the innocent ingénue in front of people who’ve just watched you change shapes and stab a visiting dignitary. She turned and hissed at me, displaying a set of teeth an anglerfish would envy.

  “Got it,” I said genially, and shoved her at the guard. Two of them grabbed her arms before she could react to her momentary freedom. I pushed my hair out of my eyes, suddenly aware of the mess I’d made of all Stacy’s hard work. “Oh, Stacy’s gonna kill me,” I groaned.

  “Not just Stacy,” said Tybalt. I turned. “I don’t fault you for having suspicions,” he said, “but did you consider, even for an instant, the possibility of voicing them to someone in a position of authority? Not simply as an aside to me in the hall, but precisely and privately?”

  “Given how quick she was to pull that knife, I think I did the right thing,” I said. “She was planning to kill someone.” Sic semper tyrannis—thus always to tyrants—that’s the sort of thing someone who’s come to kill a king is primed with.

  “You couldn’t have known that,” said Tybalt.

  “True,” I agreed. “If she hadn’t pulled a knife, she would have either blown her cover trying to argue with me, or I would have sniped at her until she did, and she would have been arrested without anyone getting hurt. But we needed her not to be wandering around the knowe as an unmarked danger, and we really needed her not to replace one of us.”

  Tybalt looked uneasy at that. “Not an option I would have preferred,” he admitted.

  “So let’s not fight, please.” The guards were still standing there, restraining the Doppelganger, which now looked entirely like a naked Gwragedd Annwn woman—only not quite. She was wearing no illusions, and still her beauty failed to assault the eye. Yes, she was a gorgeous, naked woman, but she didn’t hurt to look at. Doppelgangers can emulate form, face, voice, and even certain mannerisms, picking them up from the people they copy. They don’t need blood to do it, either. Transformation is water magic, and wherever they come from, they’ve always been assumed to have more of Maeve in them than anyone else.

  But because they don’t have to use blood to fuel their transformations, they can’t naturally use other forms of magic. If they have access to their target’s blood in the beginning, they can use it to replicate that person’s magic, but doing that will use up the blood, like taking shots of some illicit energy drink. When the blood runs out, what they’ll have left is what comes naturally to them—shapeshifting, mimicry. This wasn’t Nessa, but it had been near her at some point, long enough to bleed her for its initial transformation. Without more of her blood, it couldn’t achieve that level of accuracy again.

  “I suppose I’d be a fool to try to change you now, when I’ve already admitted my affection for the woman you are naturally,” grumbled Tybalt, and moved into position beside me, putting one hand on my waist. On the side where I hadn’t been stabbed. He had a tendency to avoid the location of recent wounds, no matter how often I reassured him that once I was externally healed, I was internally healed as well, and he couldn’t do any further damage.

  “You would,” I agreed, with a small smile, before focusing on the guards. “Why are you still standing here?” I asked. “You need to get her somewhere secure, with a door that locks and a guard who doesn’t navigate purely by sight.”

  “You don’t have the authority to order an arrest in my knowe,” said High King Aethlin, voice uncomfortably close. I looked behind me, and there was the ruler of the Westlands, a sword in his hand and an expression on his face that managed to mingle exasperation, concern, and amusement. He didn’t look angry, and there weren’t any arrows sticking out of him, and that was about as far as the positives went.

  He turned his attention to the guards. “Take the Doppelganger to the dungeons,” he said, firmly, managing to make it sound like this was all his idea, and not the inevitable conclusion of the evening’s events. “Do not harm the creature more than it already has been, but do not allow it to escape.”

  The Doppelganger hissed and struggled as it was dragged out of the room. It didn’t budge from its Nessa disguise. Apparently, the new plan was to let anyone the guards passed in the knowe see that they were dragging a naked, defenseless, unarmed woman away.

  Charming. With the danger of the Doppelganger removed, I was free to focus my attention on the potentially greater, if less immediate, danger of the High King. I turned to face him, dipping into a low curtsy—which coincidentally put my hands on a level with my sheath and allowed me to put my knife away before Aethlin took offense at my waving it at him.

  “Your Highness,” I said gravely. “You have my abject apologies for the disruption to your dinner.”

  “I think if anyone’s supposed to be apologizing here, it would be me, who allowed a Doppelganger to infiltrate my knowe without detection.” He frowned then, looking pensive. “It seems odd, that such could be successfully done before one of the Firstborn.”

  “Is the nature of the sea witch well known here, against the shore of the Atlantic?” If she had been in contact with the Roane of Beacon’s Home as recently as the 1700s, she might still be a familiar danger to these peo
ple, but Faerie, for all that it’s full of people who make octogenarians look like infants, doesn’t have as much in the way of institutional memory as you might expect. Purebloods forget things, quickly, when they can’t see them anymore. It’s like true object permanence is one of the costs of immortality.

  “Well enough.”

  “Then you understand that unless you make a bargain with her and meet whatever price she chooses to set for you, she can no more offer you protection while she walks your halls than a mountain can offer protection to the creatures who scurry on its sides.” I saw Oberon’s failure to act as a slightly bigger problem, but since the false Nessa hadn’t even forced him to give a fake name, I had no way of mentioning that without outing him, and I wasn’t willing to do that. Not even to the High King.

  “I remember the stories spoke of bargains, but I don’t understand why the absence of one would cause her not to act.”

  “The bindings that control her are tight ones, woven by someone even greater than she is.” And, apparently, even Oberon couldn’t remove them since she was still bound. “Unless you bargain with her—something I do not recommend—she can’t help you.”

  He blinked. “The stories I’ve heard about you include several bargains with the sea witch.”

  I struggled not to glance at the table where Quentin sat, living proof of another bargain. “Yes, and that’s why I’m one of the people most qualified to tell you not to do it. She can’t refuse you if you ask her, and it . . . it isn’t kind to impose on your guests in such a way. You can, of course, if you really want to—it’s not like I can stop you—but it’s not kind.” I shrugged helplessly. “That’s all.”

  “How did you know Nessa had been replaced?” asked the High King, apparently abandoning the idea of asking the Luidaeg for her protection. I was grateful for that. She told me once that she could only do things for free when she could somehow spin them around to being selfish, and I didn’t see a way that protecting a monarch she didn’t answer to could be selfish.