Depending on his skill, it was possible the only sincere look I’d had at his plans was when I punched him, and he’d had no time to settle his thoughts.
Stacy brushed something across my lips, then stepped back. “Open your eyes,” she said.
I did, blinking at her in the exaggerated way I knew she preferred when she was trying to check my makeup.
She pursed her lips, looking thoughtful. “Close them, I need to fix your eyeliner.”
I closed my eyes. “You know, one illusion and all this is handled.”
“I don’t want to cast any more spells around your dress if I can help it, and while Tybalt doesn’t need you wearing makeup to see how beautiful you are—he’s a smart man, he knows who he’s marrying—I expect you to be awake come dawn, and I’d rather your mascara didn’t disappear between one breath and the next. No illusions. Everything that touches you today is real.” She leaned closer as she worked eyeliner along the line of my eyelid, voice low and warm. “This is really happening. He really chose you. You really get to choose him back. Just this once, you get to choose being happy over taking care of all the rest of us. We can take care of ourselves for a little while. So open your eyes.”
This time my rapid blinking was less about showing Stacy her handiwork and more about keeping myself from crying. She raised an eyebrow.
“If you ruin that mascara, you get to sit through this again,” she said.
I blinked harder.
“Good girl.” Stacy stepped back, expression smug as it always was when she made me presentable by her standards. Which had never involved making me look like a proper pureblood but had always involved making sure that they wouldn’t be able to find anything wrong with me.
I finally looked down at my dress, receiving little more from my view at this angle than the impression of arctic white and deep blood red. The smell of roses permeated the fabric, getting stronger when I stood, and the skirt fell gracefully to swirl around my ankles. Not just roses—if I breathed in, I could catch a dizzying array of perfumes that seemed to encompass the magical signatures of half the people I’d met in my lifetime. I blinked again, this time in confusion, as I looked sharply up at the smugly smiling Stacy. She was standing next to May, watching me examine myself.
“You said you didn’t want any more spells around my dress,” I said carefully. “What did you mean by that?”
“I mean I’d wait a while before you start popping out little half-Cait Sidhe Tobys to run around getting into trouble, because no one’s going to give you any cradle gifts, since May and I have been going door to door convincing people to enchant your wedding gown for weeks,” said Stacy. “Pretty much everyone we know who knows how to throw a semi-competent stain-repellent spell gave us one. You could go swimming in the La Brea Tar Pits in that thing and come out spotless.”
I looked down at the dress again, this time with more appreciation. “That’s a lot of magic.”
“Probably the most magical thing you own, so please, for the love of Oberon, try not to set it on fire or accidentally feed it into a wood chipper or anything else like that. It’s protected against stains, not Toby.” Stacy reached out to grasp my shoulders, pressing them in to make me stand up straighter. “Now go get married.”
“Aren’t you coming with me?”
“You have a ride.” She and May exchanged a smirking smile. Neither of them was dressed for the wedding yet, making me suspect their clothes would be more illusionary and less literal than mine. It made sense. You can’t really stain an illusionary dress, but you can’t keep it and let it take up too much space in your closet, either.
Julie moved to open the fitting room door. “You look beautiful,” she said softly as I passed her.
“I appreciate that,” I said, swallowing the forbidden “thanks,” and touched her arm as I stepped back into the main room.
Quentin was waiting there for me, perfectly relaxed in his formal stance, which should have been a contradiction but somehow wasn’t. Maybe that was one of the prince lessons that managed to actually stick, unlike “leave the sea witch alone” and “when it’s time to choose a knight, go for the one who won’t get you almost killed on a regular basis.” His parents would be so proud when they realized he could at least stand like a proper gentleman. He was wearing a wine-colored suit over a stark white shirt, a spray of white violets pinned to his lapel, and he managed not to look like a candy cane. Boy was full of surprises today.
His eyes widened at the sight of me, mouth moving in silence for several seconds before he gave up and just gestured emphatically.
“You look—um.” He paused. “I feel like there’s probably etiquette here that I don’t know.”
“There’s etiquette you don’t know?” My skirt was long enough to brush the floor as I walked, but not long enough—at least in the front—for me to trip on. There didn’t seem to be much of a train in the back, either. Maybe this was one area where the purebloods were somehow more sensible than the mortals they insisted on cribbing half their customs from.
“I was a kid when I went into fosterage,” he objected. “No, I hadn’t already sat down with my parents—or Nessa—for a lecture on exactly what would be expected of me when I chose to get married, only that I would be expected to get married, and stay married to the same woman long enough for her to provide me with at least one heir, if not an heir and a backup. But what that would actually look like? No. And it’s not like I could ask you, and Etienne never even tried to teach me about how marriage works.”
“That’s because Etienne married his human lover in a county clerk’s office for the sake of keeping her paperwork in order, and doesn’t necessarily know anything about pureblood marriage customs,” I said blandly. “They left you here alone?”
“Indeed, no, fair lady, but I thought it best to give you a moment with this complete stranger who will be standing in your son’s place during the ceremony that is to come,” said the warm, familiar voice of Crown Prince Nolan Windermere. I turned, and there he was, leaning against the wall outside the fitting room door, a small smile on his face.
“I need to pay more attention to my surroundings,” I said with a blink.
He laughed. “This is perhaps the one day of your life where no one, not even my sister, is allowed to fault your inattention. We have no white horse for you to ride, no fine chariot to carry you to your groom, but we have me, and I would be overjoyed to fill their role.” He pushed away from the wall, offering me his arm. “Please.”
“Are white horses and chariots the standard here?” I asked, moving to put my hand in the crook of his arm as Quentin moved into position behind me, stooping to pick up the back of my dress, which must have been dragging on the ground more than I realized.
Oh, well. Magic intended to repel bloodstains can handle a little dirt.
“White horses were, once,” said Nolan, face falling. “Before our time in the Westlands began, white horses carried a maid to marriage or a man to sacrifice. After Maeve’s Ride was shattered, we let them fall to the wayside, favoring carriages instead. A wedding carriage can be a glorious thing when constructed from the right materials, but I hope a Prince will suffice.”
“Always,” I said as I smiled warmly at him.
“Then, if my lady is prepared, let me take her to her king,” said Nolan. He waved his hand through the air, transcribing an archway. On the other side was the not-a-room we’d seen before, all trees and shimmering sky, and the smell of the wind. It smelled of snow and roses, but somehow that didn’t remind me of Evening at all. She had no place here.
This place was ours.
Nolan led me through the archway, Quentin following behind. Both of them stepped away once we were on the other side, Quentin dropping the train of my dress as he moved up to stand beside me.
“All right, this isn’t about to turn into some patriarchal bullshit about g
iving me away, is it?” I asked. I couldn’t see the platform from where we were standing, or the chairs, but from the sounds drifting back to us, they were full. Our guests had arrived.
“No,” he said, offering me his arm. There was a faint rush of air as Nolan gated himself away again, presumably to join the rest of the attendees. “I walk you to the fork where you decide which road you’re going to take, and then I go sit down.”
“Which road?”
“There are three roads to Faerie. I’m pretty sure I know which one you’re going to take, but I’m not allowed to influence you. It’s always a squire, a child, or a young relative who escorts the bride to the roads, and then she has to go on alone.”
I frowned. “This is gonna be a lot of pureblood bullshit, isn’t it?”
“It is,” he said, with a solemn nod. Then he grinned. “Shouldn’t have married a king, I guess. Even the Cait Sidhe know what a state wedding looks like. Or, if you had to marry a king, you should have taken more of an interest in the arrangements.”
“Are you punishing me for not caring more about my own wedding?” I asked, disbelieving.
Quentin shrugged. “At least you get to choose who you’re going to marry,” he said, voice going soft. “No one’s going to tell you that you have to marry another Dóchas Sidhe, or that you have to make sure it’s a marriage where you not only get children, but you get a clear line of paternity.”
My breath caught in my throat. I kept moving mechanically forward, following his lead. He’d told me several times that things weren’t that serious between him and Dean—and maybe they were and maybe they weren’t, but who was to say what they could have been if he hadn’t been destined to be High King one day, taking a throne that had to be held, one way or another, with blood? He had known his future since he was old enough to understand what a crown was for. A crown was for him. With all of its perks and obligations, it was going to rest on his head, and he was going to carry the weight of it in every choice he ever made. It could be centuries. It could be the day after he reached his majority.
I put a hand over his where it rested on my arm, squeezing lightly. “I’m sorry,” I said. “That was ungrateful of me. I know you have expectations to live up to, and I appreciate you explaining this to me, since Tybalt’s happy to watch me stumble through it without a map.”
“He says you do that to him all the time,” said Quentin. The path bent beneath us. I was starting to realize Nolan had dropped us off a lot farther from the site of the ceremony than I’d initially thought. “When you choose your road, I’ll stay behind, and your next escort will see you to the place where your groom is waiting. If you had the higher title, Tybalt would be the one making this walk to you. Too bad ‘my mother was Firstborn, and also awful’ doesn’t supersede ‘actual king.’ ”
“I mean, that’s probably a good thing, all things considered,” I said. “Can you imagine Arden’s reaction if I was in a position to pull rank on her?”
Quentin laughed. The path bent, and then split, dividing into three distinct routes deeper into the glade.
The first of them was broad and pleasant, extending away across a wide expanse of grass and wildflowers. Lilies grew along the path’s edges, and a figure waited there, barely too far away to see, waiting for me.
The second was narrow, choked with thorny briars that dripped with roses redder than my gown, whiter than the violets at Quentin’s lapel. There was no way anyone could walk that way without bleeding. Another figure waited there, distant and obscure.
The third path was the same width as the one I already stood on, winding down a mossy, ferny bank into the shadows of the evergreen trees. A third figure waited there, as impossible to see clearly as the other two. I looked at Quentin, raising an eyebrow.
“So what, I just pick one? What happens to the two I don’t pick?”
“They head for the wedding and probably give you shit about it later, even though this is sort of the definition of an uninformed choice.” Quentin shrugged. “The Luidaeg says that in state weddings like this one it used to be only the right path that led to the wedding, and the other two would lead you up and down for a hundred hours before dropping you back where you started to try again. I know it must be true if she says it, but that seems like a really lousy way to deal with something that’s going to keep half the local nobles from doing their jobs until it’s over. But whatever, we’re not as hung up on being timeless creatures of forest and fen as we used to be.”
He stopped at the point where the paths diverged, pulling his arm away and offering me a small smile. “This is where I go.”
“What if I don’t want you to?”
“Why, Sir Daye, are you proposing?” I must have looked absolutely horrified, because he laughed, shaking his head. “Not an option. I’ll be at the end, along with everyone else who loves you.”
Then he turned and walked away, leaving me alone with three unmarked paths, any one of which would lead me to my future. “This is fun,” I said, and glared at the air. “Some warning would have been nice.”
Faerie and the human world have interacted for as long as they’ve both existed, brushing up against each other and sometimes striking sparks. I recognized the scene in front of me, even if I had never expected to face it quite so literally. It was from the ballad of Thomas the Rhymer, lover of the Faerie Queen—although the ballad doesn’t say which one; I’ve always suspected Maeve, if only because it doesn’t shy away from the bloody nature of Faerie—the point when he faced the three roads that would define his destiny.
What a ridiculous, pretentious, pureblood thing to build a wedding ceremony around. I shook my head. “Do you see the narrow road, so thick beset with thorns and briars? That is the path to righteousness, though after it but few inquire.”
I looked to the next path. “And see you next the broad, broad road that lays across the lily lawn? That is the path to wickedness, though some call it the path to heaven.”
The last path was the simplest, winding down into the ferns and the dark. “And see you not the bonnie road that winds about the ferny bank? That is the road to fair Elfland, that you and I this night must take.”
There was a time when I would have run down that broad lily road without a second thought, trying to move faster than my own demons, racing ahead without looking back. There were dangers there, I knew, and for all that it would be the easiest journey, it would also be the least satisfying.
There was also a time when I would have rejected any road that wouldn’t punish me for walking it, when I would have thought a little blood—or a lot of blood—was the least I could pay for pushing my way toward a future where I could actually be happy. I was working on that. It wasn’t easy, and the urge to self-destruct was probably always going to be with me, as worked into my DNA as everything else about who I was, but I was trying. That makes all the difference.
The third road, the road that symbolized Faerie, was the only one I could legitimately take. I knew that, taking a step toward it even before I finished admitting to myself that my choice had been made before I got here. Then I paused, looking back at the other two. Last chance to change my mind.
I was standing here in a wedding dress and a thrice-damned corset, and I wanted to pretend the last chance to change my mind wasn’t already years behind me? I’d been given every opportunity in the world to walk away. I’d even taken a few of them. The people who loved me had never been willing to let it stick, and I can only be fetched back so many times before I start to think that maybe I’m not allowed to leave. “Sorry,” I called, hoping the two people waiting to escort me down the paths I wasn’t taking would hear me, and plunged onward, stepping onto the path that wound down the ferny bank.
“This is the road to fair Elfland, and also to my fucking wedding,” I said, as the trees closed in above me and locked away the light. Everything was darkness and silence under the bran
ches, lit only by the dim glow of tiny white mushrooms half-hidden by fern fronds. The smell of peat and loam rose around me, kicked up by my feet. Maybe this was the wrong road after all. Maybe I’d made the wrong choice, and now I was going to be lost in the woods forever.
Tybalt would never have approved a wedding plan, no matter how traditional, that involved losing me. He’d have given in and agreed to my increasingly broad hints about the county clerk before he would have agreed to any plan where he might not end up with a wife. So this had to be as standard as Quentin said it was. That didn’t mean I was going to wander around in the dark and lose the path. I stopped where I was instead, planting my hands on my hips, and said, “I know you’re there. I was promised an escort no matter which way I went. This is my wedding night. I don’t know how you purebloods do things, but in the human world, what the bride says during her wedding goes, and I say get your butt over here.”
A familiar voice laughed in the dark, low and warm and essentially kind, not mocking at all, before a globe of witch-light sprung into life above the outstretched palm of a pale-skinned, red-haired man in a suit identical to Quentin’s, even down to the sprig of white violets on his lapel. The light glinted sparks off of his honey-gold eyes, and for a moment—not a long one, but a bright and beautiful one—he was the man I knew he couldn’t possibly be: my liege, Sylvester.
Then he smiled, and it was Sylvester’s face, but it wasn’t, had never been, Sylvester’s smile. There was a time when I’d been able to confuse them. I couldn’t anymore.
“Hi, Simon,” I said. “I’m guessing you’re here to lead me to the next part of the wedding? How many of these weird-ass side quests do I have to do while I’m wearing a corset? Since I’m assuming you jumped through every hoop in creation when you married my mom.” His marriage to Patrick and Dianda Lorden had basically been the equivalent of “do you wanna? Cool, do you wanna?” delivered by the Luidaeg, skipping over all the formal protocols in favor of getting things done as quickly as possible.
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