When Sorrows Come

by Seanan McGuire

  Caitir smiled wanly but didn’t say anything. That wasn’t unusual; neither was the fact that she’d been silent since we arrived. Candela are terse at best, and that’s usually in times of low stress. Seeing her liege assaulted had to be stressful for her.

  “We will, Your Highness,” said Fiac, and offered a shallow bow.

  “If Tybalt shows up looking for me, tell him we’ve gone to the Library,” I said.

  Walther nodded, as Quentin pulled away from his mother, pausing to kiss her temple before he moved to stand by me. She looked after him, sorrow in her eyes, but didn’t say anything.

  Poor woman was going to need a hug and an extra slice of wedding cake when this was all over, I swear. I offered her a sympathetic smile, then turned to Fiac. “Lead the way,” I said.

  “As my lady says,” said Fiac, and opened the door into the hall.

  We followed him out and away.

  seventeen

  The hall outside the High King’s study was long and gently curving, as pleasant and well-appointed as the rest of the knowe. I scowled as we followed Fiac along it.

  “I’m starting to feel like we’re lost in a mall,” I muttered.

  Quentin hid his smile behind his hand. “Now you understand why I was so disoriented when I moved to Shadowed Hills,” he said. “It was so tiny, I didn’t understand how people could stand being on top of each other all the time. No one had any space.”

  “And yet you moved into my makeshift motel for some ridiculous reason,” I said mildly.

  Fiac didn’t look back, but he did say, in a calm tone, “You do realize I can hear you both. I would take care with what I say. A lie, even from an ally, is likely to ignite my blood.”

  “We aren’t lying to you.”

  “I know. If you were, there would already be blood on the floor.”

  I walked a little faster, pulling up even with him. “I’ve never actually met an Adhene before.”

  He glanced at me. “Then how can you be sure you know what I am?”

  “I’m not actually sure how to describe this honestly, so please try to forgive me if I get this in some way wrong, but my mother was Amandine the Liar, and she drilled me after my Changeling’s Choice, to be sure I could identify all the known children of Faerie by appearance and common attributes,” I said. “My parents have since divorced and I repudiated her, so I don’t know if she’s my mother anymore, but she was when I was younger, and she told me what to watch for in the Adhene.”

  “Why did she do that, I wonder?” Fiac kept his eyes fixed straight ahead as we continued. “Only princes and princesses need that level of tuition to avoid giving accidental offense, and when last I checked, the Last among the First was not considered a princess of any line, not even her father’s.”

  “I don’t know why she did that either. I always just sort of assumed it was normal for pureblood parents. That they made sure their kids wouldn’t embarrass them, or themselves, by getting things wrong in the wider world. By the time I was old enough to start meeting people who weren’t her or the folks at Shadowed Hills, embarrassing her was one of my major goals.”

  “Ah. A rebellious child.”

  I smiled a little. “I guess you could say that. I didn’t want her to be proud of me. ‘Ashamed to admit she was connected to me in any way’ was more of the idea.”

  “Then we may never know her motivation.” Fiac turned down a wider hall. It was substantially more opulent, the ceiling growing high and cathedral-arched, lined with more of those vast panels of amethyst crystal, gleaming in the light they cast on one another. If they ever had an earthquake in this knowe, absolutely everyone was going to get impaled.

  At the end of the hall was a single set of broad double doors, and a small, plain door set off to the left-hand side. Fiac ignored the larger doors, heading for the single. Quentin and I followed.

  Fiac touched the door, murmuring something I couldn’t hear. It swung open, and he stepped through. Quentin and I followed him into a room that consisted entirely of towering bookshelves reaching toward the misty depths of an unseen ceiling. There were no walls. Rolling ladders moved along the shelves seemingly at random, with no one in sight to operate them. Pixies clung to the higher shelves, occasionally chiming, their wings waving lazily as they fanned themselves.

  There didn’t seem to be anyone there. I looked both ways down the endless row of books before turning to look at Fiac. “Is this a capital-L Library?” I asked. “From the way you were saying it before, I assumed it was, and this looks like one, but if it’s just a small-l library, I don’t want to break any rules.”

  “This is the Library of Stones,” said Fiac solemnly. “The first High King Sollys granted them space and connection to the knowe’s magic in exchange for Library cards for himself and his Queen, and for the highest-ranking members of his household.”

  “So you have one, and the chatelaine, who I still haven’t seen, has one, and who else?”

  “In the normal course of things, the Crown Prince, once he returns home and agrees to take up his royal duties,” said Fiac, resolutely not looking at Quentin. I hoped the kid was proud of the fact that he’d managed to make an Adhene skirt the truth. “We’re all allowed guests, when using the entrance through the knowe. The entrance on the mortal side moves around the province, although I understand it mostly stays in Toronto. The Librarian is uncommonly fond of mortal coffee.”

  Maybe that was an attribute shared by all Librarians. The Librarian we knew in San Francisco, Mags, was also fond of coffee. I smiled a little. “None of this makes sense to poor, provincial little me, you know. Where I come from, Libraries are considered independent of all noble ties, and don’t answer to Kings or Queens.”

  “Oh, that’s true here as well.” Fiac touched one of the rolling ladders as it passed. It paused, vibrating, then reversed and rolled off in the other direction. “The High King has no authority within the Library. When he walks these walls, he is merely a man, and the Librarian treats him as such.”

  I blinked. “Then why . . . ?”

  “When this knowe was opened, the political situation along the Eastern coast was much more dangerous than I think you can understand,” said Fiac. “Death was common, war was constant, and chaos reigned in both the human and fae worlds. The American Revolution rendered the streets hazardous, and shops which seemed safe and stable today could be ashes and memory tomorrow. He offered the Librarian a stable doorway into the Summerlands, with no need to fear insurrection or collapse leading the Library to become unmoored. They can be lost easily, if their connections are severed, and the Library of Stones contained a great deal of information that was deemed too valuable to risk. The first High King kept his word, and never attempted to use the Library for political ends, and so when his son took the throne, the Librarian willingly renegotiated the treaty to maintain the same terms. It is assumed she will do the same, if she retains power, when young Quentin comes into his ascension.”

  “Has it been the same Librarian the whole time?”

  “No, there have been several Librarians in the time the Library has been anchored here. They change every fifty years or so, either due to retirement or because they’ve transferred to another Library. The Libraries prefer to keep their staff well-informed, which means moving them between locations from time to time.”

  All knowes are alive and self-aware. The Library knowes are weird enough that it made sense they might be able to tell their Librarians what they wanted and see to it that their will was carried out.

  “Huh,” I said.

  The ladder came rolling back along the line of shelves, now carrying a dainty woman in a floor-length pink velour bathrobe with white bunnies embroidered all the way around the hem. Her sleek black hair was gathered into a messy braid that fell down her back in snarls and puffs of tangled strands, capped at the bottom with a sparkly rhinestone butterfly cl
ip. She looked more like a teenager who’d been raiding May’s closet than a Librarian, and I blinked.

  “Sorry, sorry,” she said, hopping off the ladder, which rolled on into the dark without her. “I was in the children’s section, and you know how those picture books can get.”

  She was even wearing pink bunny slippers. The corner of my mouth twitched with an involuntary smile.

  Fiac bowed. “Librarian Yenay,” he said solemnly. “These guests would like to speak to you on matters of history and the records you have custody of.”

  “Seneschal Fiac,” said the Librarian, voice much lighter. “Do any of them have Library cards?”

  “Nope, although I’ve been a patron of the Library of Stars in the Mists,” I said. “Hi. My name is—”

  “Sir October Daye, Knight of Lost Words, most recently known of the Dóchas Sidhe, proof that Amandine the Liar can fail to do her duty more than once without attracting the vengeance of Oberon himself, oh, yes, I know who you are,” said the Librarian. “I’m Yenay Ng, and this is my Library.”

  “It’s very . . . misty,” I said. “The walls don’t look like they’ve quite committed to the idea that they need to keep existing when no one’s looking at them.”

  “That’s one of my favorite things about the place,” said Yenay, and looped her arm through mine. Her skin was a remarkably clear medium brown, so smooth it was like she had no pores, and her eyes were black from one side to the other, lacking the aura of vague menace that the Luidaeg took on when her eyes were in the same state. “I mean, that, and somehow I can always find fresh donuts in the breakroom, when I can find the breakroom at all. Sometimes it doesn’t exist because someone wants me to eat more salads.” She tipped her head back to yell her final words at the ceiling. Then she shrugged. “But breaking in a new Librarian has got to be frustrating, so I guess it’s okay if this one wants me to last for a little while. Come on.”

  She started leading me between the shelves. Quentin, who didn’t want to be left alone with Fiac, followed.

  “So what is it our humble Library can do for a daughter of Amandine the Liar?” she asked brightly. “I’ve seen the biography you helped Magdaleana Brooks write of her. Lots of pieces missing. Plenty of room for an update if you wanted to make one.”

  The Libraries trade in information, and for a Librarian, knowing something no one else knows is sort of like getting a gift card to Willy Wonka’s factory, along with permission to buy as much candy as they can carry. It’s a big deal. “I can’t give you any secrets about my mother,” I said. “Those are promised to the Library of Stars.”

  She turned to me so I could see her pout. “Well, then, what do you have to bargain with? I assume there must be something, or you wouldn’t be here looking for information.”

  “I can tell you where the other Dóchas Sidhe is.”

  Yenay blinked, pout fading into a look of profound confusion. “But August Torquill was lost in 1906, when she went looking for Oberon himself, at the behest of the sea witch,” she said. “She was bade not to return until her quest was complete.”

  “That’s true.”

  Her eyes widened. “You mean . . . you mean she found Oberon?”

  The Libraries are independent of the Kingdom structure, immune to the word of Kings and Queens, but they’re still part of Faerie, and that means they have to answer to someone. That someone is and has always been Oberon himself. If he had returned, their days of independence were over.

  For some reason, that hadn’t been a big enough concern to occur to me before now, at least in part because I still didn’t have permission to tell anyone he was back.

  “No,” I said carefully. “She did not find Oberon. But I found her, at the request of Amandine the Liar, and I was able to work with her father and the Luidaeg to bring her safely home. She’s living with her father in the Undersea demesne of Saltmist, having chosen him in the divorce.”

  “Hmmm,” said Yenay. “Human interest angle is strong—I wish we had a better way of saying that, but since we decided to go all-in on stealing language from the mortals, I don’t really have an easy-to-follow way to construct the phrase ‘fae interest angle.’ That’s just word salad. But anyway, people will be interested in hearing how she came back, given how long she was missing, and how little we know about her. Don’t suppose you’re down for narrating another biography?”

  Giving Mags the information she’d asked for about my mother had been a relatively painless process, although I probably needed to talk to Janet and then talk to Mags again—it was time for a second edition now that we knew who my grandmother was. But Mom had given up her right to privacy when she spent my entire childhood keeping secrets from me. As far as I was concerned, she no longer had any reason to expect me to stay quiet about private matters.

  August, though . . . August was a different case. We weren’t what I’d call friends, but we were sisters, and we’d chosen the same side during the divorce. We were both daughters of Simon Torquill in the eyes of Faerie. I had no doubt that meant something, in the tangled and self-contradictory web of rules and traditions that increasingly governed my life. I didn’t want to cross any lines I didn’t know existed.

  “Sorry,” I said, honestly. “August’s life story is only on the table if she puts it there. But I can tell you the parts that involved me. Maybe that’s enough to buy the information I need. Maybe it’s not. I don’t really know. I don’t think I’m asking for anything that valuable.”

  “True, we should figure out what you want me to pull before I get down to barter.” Yenay cast a sour look over her shoulder at Fiac. “Blame these people. They act like we’re the Kingdom’s private Library because of where we’re anchored, and half the time they’re sending their people here looking for the latest bestseller or really weird erotica. I don’t care what gets people hot and bothered, I don’t judge, but if Cait Sidhe are your thing, why not just date one, instead of reading about someone else doing it?”

  “I’m marrying one later today,” I said, fighting the urge to smile.

  “Oh, right, the King of—fuck, what’s he King of these days? Man’s had so many crowns I lost track somewhere on the other side of the Atlantic. Doesn’t that mean he’ll have to give up his throne? I bet he’s relieved. Everything I know says he never wanted to be King of anything in the first place. But yeah, I knew that. Anyway.” Yenay let go of my arm and stepped away, waving her hands across her chest at the same time. Her bathrobe melted away, replaced by an equally pink-and-white dress that seemed to be made almost entirely from intricately interwoven strips of ribbon. Her braid adjusted itself at the same time, wisps and flyaways replaced by smooth perfection. The butterfly clip remained.

  “I am Yenay Ng, chosen Librarian of the Library of Stones,” she said, with sudden solemn gravity. “What is your request?”

  “I need to see the original proclamation declaring the Kingdom of Maples as the seat of the High Kingdom of the Westlands and dissolving the original crown,” I said. “I need to know exactly what was said in the process of making the first High King Sollys into, well, the first High King Sollys.”

  Yenay blinked. “Why didn’t you just say so? The Kingdom’s founding documents are basically public domain, or they would be, if we had any concept of the public domain. Wait here.” She turned and dashed off into the stacks before I could reply.

  “She didn’t really leave you room to say so,” said Quentin, stepping up next to me.

  I glanced at him. “I get the feeling she gets talked over a lot. Tends to make people talk faster to make it hard to interrupt them.”

  “Huh.”

  “Shyi Shuai aren’t that common in the Westlands. Finding one not working as a Court Seer is a little weird.”

  Quentin snorted.

  I glared. “What?”

  “Toronto has one of the largest Chinese populations outside of China,”
he said. “And unlike the Mists, we didn’t try to burn their Chinatown down with all of them still locked inside. Our Shyi Shuai never left.”

  “Huh.” A whole community of luck-bending fae. Maybe there was a reason the Kingdom of Maples—and by extension, the High Kingdom of the Westlands—had enjoyed more than two centuries of relative peace and prosperity.

  Fiac loomed up beside me. “I understood you had a Shyi Shuai standing as a temporary Duchess in your home Kingdom.”

  I jumped. “Man, we are gonna bell you. Don’t sneak up on people!” I pressed a hand to my chest, trying to calm myself. “Li Qin, yeah. She took up temporary regency of Dreamer’s Glass when Duchess Riordan vanished.” I knew exactly where Treasa Riordan was, and I hoped she liked it in Annwn, because as far as I was concerned, she could rot there. I certainly wasn’t going to lead the expedition to get her back.

  “So you know they still exist.”

  Unlike the Roane, the Shyi Shuai had never been rumored extinct, just rare. “I do.”

  “We are very fond of Yenay. If she chose to leave the Library, we would find her a place in the archives, or working with the scribes. Whatever she desired. But she seems to enjoy the relative obscurity of serving the Library’s whims, and she treasures her time with the books.” Fiac continued looking straight ahead. “Please do not confuse autonomy with a lack of loyalty.”

  “I generally try not to.” Yenay came rushing back through the stacks, clutching a leather-bound ledger to her chest. She didn’t look distressed; on the contrary, she looked very nearly jubilant, as if she hadn’t expected her evening to be so interesting.

  “I found what you were asking for,” she said brightly, thrusting the ledger at me before pausing, blinking, and pulling it back again. “But they weren’t big on consistent spelling in the eighteenth century, so you probably can’t read it. Would you like me to tell you what it says?”

  “That might be for the best,” I agreed.