When Sorrows Come

by Seanan McGuire

  Stacy sighed heavily and wrapped her arms around me in turn, and that was that. I almost didn’t hear the door open behind us.

  “You figure out how to tell Toby she’s being an asshole without getting stabbed, or is she in the middle of a murder right now?” asked Kerry genially.

  Stacy pulled away, smiling as she wiped her eyes. “No stabbing,” she said.

  “No stabbing,” I confirmed, turning.

  Kerry was already fully in the room, as relaxed as ever. The only time I’d ever seen that woman look like she wasn’t sure she belonged somewhere, we’d been in the process of crashing a local high school prom, having used way too many illusions and way too much eyeliner to blend in with the human kids around us. It had seemed like a great idea when we’d been safely in Shadowed Hills—go out for a night, get in touch with the mortal side of our shared heritage—but in practice, the lights had been too bright, the music had been too loud, and everyone had talked way too fast for our comfort. We’d ended up sneaking back out again, spending the rest of our rare night of freedom at the local Denny’s, charming the staff into bringing us bottomless pancakes and coffee.

  The woman in the doorway behind her looked a lot less sure of herself. She was dressed much as I was, in a T-shirt and jeans, her tiger-striped arms bare to the world. The stripes continued up the sides of her neck and onto her face, where they cupped her cheeks like fingers. Her hair was a mass of brown-and-gold streaks, surprisingly similar to my own, just more densely pigmented, and she couldn’t have seemed more nervous if she’d been facing a man with a chainsaw.

  Given where she spent most of her time, she probably would have looked less nervous if faced with a chainsaw.

  “Hi,” she said. “I know you probably didn’t invite me, and I wasn’t sure I should come, but I promise I’m not going to try to kill you on your wedding night, so I guess that’s probably better than nothing—”

  “Julie, get in here,” I said, beckoning her forward.

  The door slammed behind her as she hesitantly approached.

  “You’re right. I didn’t invite you. I didn’t invite anyone, technically, since May and Stacy handled all that. Maybe I invited the two of them—”

  “Nope,” said Stacy cheerfully.

  “—but I don’t think so,” I continued. “Tybalt wanted you here because he cares about you, and if I’d been consulted at any point, I would have said I wanted you here, too, as long as you didn’t try to kill me. And you’ve already said you’re not going to do that, so we’re doing pretty well so far.”

  Julie blinked, looking baffled. “But I tried to kill you.”

  “Several times, and I’m not going to lie—I was pretty pissed about that for a long time. And then I stopped and asked myself what I’d do if someone killed Tybalt, and I didn’t feel like it was my fault.” Technically, he’s died a couple of times since we met. But he’s a King of Cats, and sometimes they bounce back. I felt my expression sour. “I’d do a lot worse to anyone who did that than you tried to do to me.”

  “I tried to kill you,” Julie repeated.

  “I’d tell you to join the club, but most of the members are assholes, and I don’t think you’d care for their company.” I smiled warmly. “You’re fine, honestly. I’ve missed you.”

  “And you’re getting married,” said Julie, in much the same tone that she’d been using to remind me of her attempted murder. “To my uncle. Who you hate.”

  Stacy laughed. “You’ve missed a lot, sugar. I don’t think they ever really hated each other the way they tried to let on. They had a lot of mistrust and pent-up stupid to work through, but it was never real hatred.”

  “And now they’re so sweet on each other it’s kind of sickening, and I’m the baker,” said Kerry. “He gets all flowery and romance novel from the Austen era when she’s around.”

  “Actually, I think that’s a little modern for him,” I said.

  “Toby actually tries to get punched less when Tybalt can see,” continued Kerry blithely.

  Julie gasped. “No!”

  “I hate you all,” I said. My three best friends since childhood broke into unified laughter, and the sound was so familiar, so comfortable, that I joined in, unable to resist the urge.

  The door banged open again. Quentin fell into the room, Dean close behind him, both of them breathing heavily.

  “You need to come with us,” said Quentin, not waiting for us to stop laughing or acknowledge their arrival. “You need to come with us right now.”

  “What? Why?”

  “Caitir’s waiting for you. Come on.” Quentin bolted back into the main room, leaving Dean behind.

  Dean looked at us gravely, and said, “The High King has been poisoned. Please come.”

  I went.

  Caitir—the Candela from before, now fully recovered, Merry Dancers bobbing around her head—was waiting for us. “Alchemist said you’d ridden my blood,” she said. “Means you know I’m me.”

  “Yes,” I agreed. I would have known even without riding her blood. Much like Nessa’s impossible beauty, the Doppelgangers couldn’t mimic a Candela’s magic without access to their blood, and even access to their blood wouldn’t duplicate their Merry Dancers, which are technically separate entities born at the same time as their Candela partner. They die at the same time, too. Caitir would be the last person in this knowe to be replaced.

  “Good. So we’re leaving.” She waved her hand. A hole appeared in the air, and she looked at me expectantly, waiting for me to go through.

  I glanced around the room. It was even more crowded now than it had been earlier, packed with what was starting to feel like every person I’d ever met in my life . . . except for Tybalt.

  “He’s already gone to talk to the guard,” said Dean, catching the direction of my search. Quentin was standing next to Caitir, bouncing on his toes in the anxious need to get moving. “He knows where you’ll be. You’re not running off without telling him.”

  “I appreciate that,” I said, and leapt through the portal Caitir had opened, barely taking the time to catch my breath first.

  Quentin was close behind me, and Caitir close behind him. Our feet never hit the ground. Unlike the long run through the Shadow Roads that always awaited me when Tybalt was in control, this was a swift and terrible passage through the darkness and cold, lit by the flickering glow of the Merry Dancers, which had the time to swirl around us once before we were tumbling into the bright light of what looked like a gentleman’s study.

  Like what seemed to be everything else in this knowe, the walls were furnished in polished maple, with brass fittings and witch-lights burning in verdigrised silver sconces. Books filled the shelves, and while they all looked rarified and old, I recognized a couple of the titles. The High King was apparently fond of high-end leather-bound reproductions of classic science fiction novels. There were worse things he could have been doing with his time.

  Like, at the moment, dying. He was collapsed in the highbacked leather chair behind the desk, clutching his chest with one hand, breath coming in shuddering, uneven gasps. His color had shifted, going from his normal healthy peach to a waxen pallor that was frankly a little unnerving.

  Maida was on one side of him, clutching his hand in her own, watching Walther with the rapt attention of a cobra trapped in a room with a mongoose. Walther had set up his alchemy kit on the desk, sweeping everything that had been placed there onto the floor in the process, and was mixing chemicals and herbs as fast as he could, hands a blur. Cassie stood nearby, one of the witch-lights in her own hands, eyes fixed on the air above it.

  “Cassowary plum,” she said, tone gone dreamy and distant. “Milkweed, eucalyptus, and ground beetle wing. Hercules beetles, species nonspecific.”

  “I brought them, Majesty,” said Caitir. Maida’s gaze snapped to me, like it was following a preset grid. She took
a deep, shuddering breath, shoulders slumping.

  “He’s dying,” she said. “Fix him.”

  “I can’t.”

  “As your High Queen, I order you to fix him.”

  “And again, I can’t.” I shook my head helplessly. “I can put a body back together. I can’t remove poison. I’d have to exsanguinate him, strip the poison out of his blood, and put it all back when I was done, and by that point, he’d be dead, and I’m not actually sure there’s anything I could do about that.”

  Someone coughed in the corner of the room. “Technically true, but close enough to falsehood that it makes my head ache.”

  I glanced sharply to where Fiac lurked. “I’ve managed to raise the dead before, under tightly controlled conditions that might or might not be replicable, and not when I was trying to bring back the High King. The pressure alone might be enough to make things go wrong. Can I raise the dead? Sometimes. Occasionally. Should I raise the dead? Not according to the night-haunts. It’s not something I should be doing casually or something we can count on working every time I decide to give it a go, and it’s certainly not a decent reason to call off a perfectly good alchemist just because hey presto, Toby the magic cure-all walked into the room!”

  I was yelling by the time I finished. On a moment’s reflection, I realized I didn’t care. Sometimes, yelling is the right thing to do.

  Quentin stepped around me, grimacing as he glanced over at Fiac, and hurried to kneel beside his mother, who wrapped him in a tight embrace. So tight that for a moment he went a little cross-eyed, looking like he couldn’t quite remember how to breathe.

  “My chest hurts,” he said, pulling away and pressing two fingers to the base of his sternum. “Why does my chest hurt?”

  “That’s the wail trying to break loose,” said Walther. “Don’t let it. Swallow it down. Kick a wall or punch yourself in the dick or whatever you have to do to keep it from getting away.”

  “I’ll probably wail if I punch myself in the dick,” said Quentin dubiously.

  “Yes, but it won’t be the same wail,” said Walther. “When a Banshee wails because they feel it, not because they’re hurting, people die. If you wail, there won’t be anything else I can do. It’ll curdle the alchemy and break Cassandra’s prophecy into shards.”

  Quentin looked deeply alarmed, as did Maida. Fiac stayed in his corner, looking distraught but disinterested, like he couldn’t understand exactly why a Banshee wailing would be a bad thing.

  Interesting. “So if he wails, the High King’s doomed to die?”

  “Yes,” said Walther. “So whatever you do, swallow that urge. Don’t let your magic out. Don’t let it take form. Not right now. Not with everything that’s at stake.”

  “Someone else could be dying right now,” said Fiac. “If the boy screams, who’s to say the death will fall on the High King?”

  “This is an interesting debate, but it doesn’t seem like the most important thing we have to deal with at the moment,” I said, a little louder and a little more stridently than I needed to. “What the hell happened here?”

  “We were interviewing the staff,” said Maida, still clutching Aethlin’s hand like she thought she could be the reason he stayed in this world. It was impressive, given how hard she was clinging to Quentin at the same time. She wasn’t letting go of her family if she could possibly help it. “This is Aethlin’s private office. He conducts much of the household business here. We had a full complement of guards; we took all precautions . . .” She sounded less like she was trying to convince me, and more like she was trying to convince herself.

  “Did something happen?” I asked, and immediately felt foolish. Clearly, something had happened. Clearly, the High King had been poisoned.

  Thankfully, Maida didn’t seem to notice my gaff. She shook her head. “No,” she said plaintively. “Everything was normal. Aethlin was speaking with Hiram, one of the palace historians. He’s been with our household since the Kingdom was founded. If someone was attempting to infiltrate the scribes, he would be the place to start. They’ve been friends a long time. Aethlin relaxed when he entered the room. He sat down, and leaned back in his chair, and his hands were resting on the desk, and . . .”

  She started to sob, great, racking gasps that shook her entire body. I turned to Walther.

  “Contact poison?” I asked wearily.

  “Contact poison,” confirmed Walther. “The desk blotter. You shouldn’t touch anything in this room without asking me first. I’ve found three different poisoned surfaces. They’ve been expecting to be found out long enough to have been making preparations.”

  “Makes sense, since their fake Nessa went down pretty publicly.” I moved still closer, staying slow, so as not to alarm Maida. She looked like she was as close to snapping as Aethlin was to dying, which was closer than I liked. Turning toward Fiac, I said, in a loud, clear voice, “I am October Christine Daye, Knight of Lost Words, here by invitation, and am not working for any hostile power or attempting to undermine the High King in any way. Although I may tell him he’s being an asshole when he’s being unreasonable, which he seems to be fairly frequently. For example, it would be really unreasonable of him to die right now, thanks.”

  The High King’s mouth seemed to twitch for a moment, although it was difficult to tell, under the circumstances, whether he was trying to smile or grimacing in pain. Fuck. Since Fiac wasn’t attacking me, I moved closer to the High King, holding up my hands to make sure Maida saw I was unarmed. There were no guards in the room.

  “Where’s the guard?” I asked.

  “I asked them to leave,” said Walther. “I’m doing delicate work, and I didn’t need a bunch of jocks freaking out because their liege was trying to die. They were upsetting Cassandra. They were upsetting me. We’re safe enough in here, between her watching the air for changes and Fiac standing guard. More bodies in the room only complicates things.”

  “He was fine. He was fine, and then he wasn’t fine. It all happened so fast.” Maida sniffled, and I realized how close she really was to breaking into tears. “I didn’t want to send the guards away, but Fiac and your alchemist both said it was safer for us to be in a closed room where we knew everyone was safe and who they said they were, and their first responsibility is to the High King, not the High Queen. And I think the guards felt bad for not somehow detecting the poison before he could be exposed.”

  “No one will attack him again while I still breathe,” said Fiac. “I should have been faster the first time. I will be faster if it happens again.” His lips set into a thin line. “I will be much faster.”

  I wouldn’t have wanted to be the next person to attempt to kill the High King. Fiac looked like he was about ready to break anyone who tried. “As soon as Aethlin fell, I gave him the blood you’d given me,” said Maida. “I thought it would make him better, but it didn’t make him better.”

  “It did, however, stop him from getting any worse,” said Walther, eyes on his braziers and beakers as he added a pinch of this and a dash of that to one or the other. His valise was open, revealing a dizzying array of tiny bottles and jars, none bigger than a few ounces, most visibly at least partly full. “So kudos for that. You did no harm, and you may have saved yourself from a sedition charge. If this is where you want to suddenly remember the High King’s evil grand vizier who you just forgot to tell us about until now, that would be great.”

  “Why do we always jump to ‘vizier’ as the title for the evil member of the court?” asked Cassandra. She and Walther exchanged a look, said in unison, “Racism,” and went back to work.

  “No . . . no one in my husband’s council would want to harm him. Most of them served here when they were younger, learning how governance is done, and then returned to serve again when they failed to inherit. He doesn’t elevate unfairly or put people into positions they aren’t suited for simply because of their titles.�
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  “Sounds more functional than the human government,” I said. “But clearly, someone holds a grudge, against both of you. We’re finding Doppelgangers all over your knowe, and this attack was an obvious attempt to incriminate you.”

  Maida looked confused. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean when a Doppelganger attacked in full view of the court, they did it with a knife, while they were standing next to someone who’s pretty well known for preferring knives to just about any other kind of weapon,” I said.

  “Because any other kind of weapon would keep the violence at a sensible distance, and we can’t be having that,” said Quentin.

  I ignored him. “And when a Doppelganger attacked in a small room with a limited number of people, it used another knife, and went for a quick kill that could easily have been overlooked and would have left no time for even the fastest healer to work. And now, when the High King has been attacked in his private rooms, they used poison.”

  “Traditionally a feminine means of murder,” said Walther, holding up a glass beaker and swirling its contents, a thoughtful look on his face. “Maybe that’s sexist—probably that’s sexist—but if a King dies alone in a room, and he dies by poison, everyone will assume the Queen did it. No matter how much proof you provide that she didn’t.”

  Maida looked horrified. “I would never . . .”

  “We know that, and we know you didn’t, but if you hadn’t had my blood ready to go and the poison had killed him, would the court have agreed?” And given the timing, would it have mattered? The Luidaeg was here for our wedding: even if Oberon stayed silent and hidden in plain sight, all she had to do was declare the High Queen’s innocence and any debate would be immediately ended.

  Only I knew the world didn’t really work that way. Everyone would listen to her, sure, because failure to listen to one of the Firstborn is a good way to wind up very, very dead, and then we would leave, and no one would actually believe Maida hadn’t killed her husband to claim the throne. Her reign would be destabilized, and by its very nature, brief.