Dianda was a duchess, but somehow that hadn’t been enough to make her taking a second husband into a formal state wedding. Sometimes I question my life choices.
“Once upon a time, six quests, each more difficult than the last, culminating in the identification of your future spouse amongst a room of people enchanted to look exactly like them.” I must have looked appalled, because his smile softened, and he added, “Honey and bees were a common part of the wedding ceremony in those days. A sweetened kiss was the easiest way to locate your intended. But the mortal world demands swiftness and simplicity both. I’m assuming your first escort told you that all three paths would lead to your groom?”
“He had to, or I wouldn’t have been willing to go along with it.”
“There you are.” He sounded smug. “This is your only trial, if allowing me to walk you to the ceremony is such a trial.”
“And hey, it matches up nicely with a human tradition.”
“Mmm?” Simon looked politely interested, raising an eyebrow in question.
“My father escorting me to the altar,” I said, and took his arm. Maybe there wasn’t an altar—if there was anything religious about this ceremony, it was going to be a total surprise to me—but there was a wedding, and this was a cultural touchpoint I understood.
And it was worth it for the slow understanding and then acceptance on Simon’s face. He put his hand over mine, holding me in place, and began to walk along the path, leading me deeper into the tangle of trees.
“I know I’m not,” he said. “I would have liked to have been, but my own choices closed that door before it ever could have opened between us and left it to my brother to fill the place that should have been mine as much as he was willing to—which was never enough for me. On the rare occasions when I came close enough to see his interactions with you, it burned me not to be allowed to step in and offer you the support you so clearly yearned for. You have done, in the balance of things, an excellent job of raising yourself. That task should never have fallen upon your shoulders. But I was gone, and your mother . . .”
He paused, catching his breath. “I knew, even in August’s infancy, that your mother was no fit mother to anyone. She tried—she was better for August, I think, than she ever bothered to be for you—but she has her limitations, and I worried, when I saw you playing in my brother’s halls, that you would be heir to all of them with no one else to leaven her presence. But you have done incredibly well, and I would bear the title you offer me with pride, not only in the legality of things, if I had any right to it.”
I hugged his arm impulsively as we walked. “And that’s why you can have it for as long as you want it,” I said. “We’ve had our issues,” that was putting it incredibly mildly, “but I think we wound up in the best possible place. You’re never going to be my dad, but you can be my father for as long as you want to be. I chose your line, after all. Faerie says I’m yours.”
Simon pulled his arm away and turned me to face him, kissing my forehead before he dropped his witch-light into my hands. “Then I’m yours as well, and as your father, I tell you that your heart is waiting.”
“You don’t mean that literally, right?” Things can be periodically and ridiculously literal in Faerie. My way home—a complicated tangle of memories and motivations that binds me to the person I am now, and not any of the other people I might have been able to become—is apparently a city pigeon that sleeps somewhere behind my sternum. He could mean that my actual heart had been replaced with a stone or a lump of bread or an empty jar when I wasn’t looking, and now I’d have to fight a dragon or something to get it back.
Simon laughed. “No. it’s just one of those things you say to a woman on her wedding day when you want to sound supportive of her life choices—which, believe me, I am. I always assumed that old cat would find a way into the family one way or another, and if he couldn’t marry my sister, my daughter is just as good.” He paused. “I suppose that sounds strange, given your human roots.”
I smiled beatifically up at him. “Actually, it sounds exactly right.”
“Then go,” he said. “Get married. Be happy. You’ve earned it.”
Somehow, we had reached the end of the path. It felt like it had taken forever. It felt like it had taken no time at all. The sound of voices was louder than ever, screened off by only the last layer of the trees, and the branches that spread to block them from my view—and me from theirs. I took a deep breath.
I stepped through.
nineteen
Simon followed me out of the trees, moving toward an open seat at the front of the shallow amphitheater. It felt like every seat was filled, and most of them with people I recognized. A reasonable number of the guests were wearing the High King’s livery, which told me he’d held back a certain number of spaces for his own courtiers; that was fine, as long as they’d been vetted. It wasn’t like we’d been forced to snub anybody due to a lack of space.
The others I didn’t recognize occupied about a quarter of the seats, all clustered together. They were dressed the closest to human, in tattered and patchworked finery, leather jackets and denim vests alongside corsets and opera jackets, their faces striped and spotted, their hair much the same. The Cait Sidhe of Toronto were in attendance to see one of their own married to a knight of the Divided Courts, and that made me a little nervous, even as I was relieved to know Tybalt wasn’t doing this without the support of his own kind.
There were only a few faces I would have liked to see who weren’t present, and all of those absences were at least somewhat expected. Arden wasn’t there, being unable to leave her Kingdom; neither was Queen Siwan of Silences, or their current Crown Prince. My mother was also blessedly missing. She hadn’t been invited, I knew that much; hers was the only name I had personally struck from any possible list, and thanks to the fact that I’d chosen Simon in the divorce, she couldn’t even claim offense at her exclusion. Officially, we no longer had any relation to each other, and she had no right to expect an invitation.
Ginevra, Raj’s regent, was also absent. That made sense; with Raj and Tybalt both here, the Court was her responsibility, and it wasn’t like we knew each other well enough for her to care one way or the other. Her father, Jolgeir, wasn’t there either, probably because, as Portland’s King of Cats, travel wasn’t really in the cards for him. Dianda wasn’t there, but both her husbands and both her sons were.
What mattered more was the people who were there. My friends; my family. They filled the seats, a descending series of tiers leading me to the platform at the front, where Tybalt was waiting for me, alone in front of a beautiful, terrible woman I still somehow recognized as the Luidaeg.
She had no illusions left to keep her concealed from our eyes. The tricks she played with her appearance and environment were some of the only lies she had left to her, and so she played them constantly, protean and mercurial even in the presence of the people who loved her. I had never seen her entirely unveiled before. That didn’t matter. There was no one else she could have been, and no possible way she could have been concealing herself, not when she was suddenly so much more completely who she’d always been.
She was taller, built less like a gawky human teen and more like the woman that teen could, given time and a series of miraculous wins in the genetic lottery, become. Her hair, still dark and curly, was no longer an indeterminate shade between black and brown, but the bruised blue-black of the deep ocean at midnight, even down to the silvery glints the light struck every time she moved her head. She saw me, and she smiled, her perfect lips stretching back to reveal the serrated shark’s assortment of her teeth.
Tybalt was wearing a nicer version of the suit both Quentin and Simon had been dressed in, more perfectly tailored to him, and—here I had to swallow the urge to laugh—with red leather trousers, rather than the heavy linen the others had worn. Well, if you know what makes your bride-to-be happy,
why not roll with it? He was tense, his posture oddly anxious, and he didn’t seem to have noticed me yet.
No one had. I looked around the gathering again, wondering how I could be standing here in the whitest dress ever known to man or fae, without them noticing my presence. Then I caught the eye of the tall, antlered figure standing behind the rear row of chairs, and I understood.
Oberon looked at me and smiled. Then he nodded, and the moment shattered into shards, raining down around us. Someone moved to my left. I flinched, hand going to the knife that wasn’t at my hip.
“It’s okay,” said August. She was wearing a long, form-fitting gown in the same color as Simon’s suit. “No need for stabbings on your wedding night, not from me. I was just told to bring you this.” She thrust a mixed bouquet of red roses, white violets, glowing starflowers, and fern fronds into my hands, then winked and dashed away before I could say anything.
Lacking an August to stare at, I settled for blinking at the flowers I was suddenly holding, then pulling them closer to my body, securing the bouquet with both hands. I had the feeling that dropping this one would go poorly for me. The way to the front was clearly delineated, continuing onward from where I was standing. As no one else seemed to have seen me, I stayed still. As I did, August hurried to the front and took the open seat next to Simon, setting her head against his shoulder. That seemed like as good a cue as any, especially since there wasn’t any music.
I started walking. There was a strange feeling, like someone was standing on the train of my dress. I looked back over my shoulder. The entire back of the gown was covered in roses, starting at my waist and extending down to the hem. The ones highest up were as snowy white as the fabric around them, but the lower they dipped, the redder they became, until the roses at the bottom were the deep, virulent red of freshly dried blood. Those roses were unraveling endlessly, leaving a carpet of rose petals behind me as I walked.
I smiled and faced forward again, shaking my head. Of course, Tybalt had played stupid tricks with my dress. What’s the point of having an enchanted wedding dress if you can’t use it as an infinite rose generator? And it wasn’t like my dress was even the most ridiculous piece of enchanted clothing on display.
No, that honor went to the Luidaeg, who was wrapped in what looked for all the world like a slice of the sky, taken during the aurora borealis. The colors swirled and danced all around her torso like a living oil slick, never stopping, never stabilizing. It was a gorgeous effect. Her ridiculous dresses generally were.
No one stood as I passed them. That custom was apparently human enough not to have caught on here. I saw a few more people in the red suits and dresses—May and Stacy each had one, as did the man who looked heart-stoppingly like Simon Torquill, but absolutely wasn’t. He was sitting alone, and he offered a wan, wavering smile when he saw me, like he wasn’t sure I’d want it. I smiled back, as sincerely as I’d ever done anything.
We might not be close right now, but the day I couldn’t return a smile from my liege was going to be the day I died.
Tybalt finally glanced in my direction when I was about ten feet away. He froze, the tension leaving his shoulders as his pupils expanded, swallowing his irises completely. He just stared at me.
I stared back, somehow afraid to do anything else, like this was his last chance to realize he’d made a terrible mistake and take steps to correct it. Who in their right mind would want to give up a crown and a kingdom for a changeling with no sense of self-preservation, who needed dozens of stain-repelling charms on her own wedding dress just to keep it from getting drenched in blood?
But I kept walking. If he didn’t change his mind soon, I wasn’t going to give him the opportunity.
Then I was standing in front of him, and he was reaching tenderly out to take the bouquet I was holding. “These, I believe, are mine,” he said, and I let the flowers go, not knowing any better. His smile grew. Letting him have the bouquet was apparently the correct choice. He turned, handing the bouquet to Quentin, who had suddenly materialized beside him.
“My lady’s gift to us,” he said solemnly. Quentin bowed, to both of us, and disappeared back into the rows of chairs. Tybalt took my hands.
“I knew you’d be a natural at this,” he said.
“Convinced many clueless brides to wear a corset for you?” I asked blandly.
“Only you,” he said, voice soft. “Only you.”
I knew I wasn’t his first wife—that honor went to a mortal woman named Anne, who had died long before I was born—but it was somehow nice to know that this was his first formal pureblood wedding. Maybe I have a romantic streak after all.
“If you’re ready for me,” said the Luidaeg. “We can get started.”
We turned to face her. And that was when the archers hidden in the trees opened fire, with a cry of, “For Ash and Oak!” that reverberated around the trees. One arrow hit me in the upper arm, embedding itself deep into the muscle. Three more bounced off the bodice of my wedding dress, not even snagging the fabric in the process.
Tybalt yowled, the angry, animal sound of a tiger unexpectedly injured. I whipped back around to face him. Another arrow was in his shoulder, and he was clutching it, trying to stop the blood that was pumping out between his fingers. “Don’t pull it out,” I yelled, while ramming the arrow that was sticking out of my own arm the rest of the way through to the other side.
He shot me an irritated look. “I wasn’t intending to pull it out,” he snarled. “I know how arrows work.”
“Thank Maeve for that.” I winced as the arrowhead broke the skin again, before reaching behind myself and snapping it off, making it easier to yank the arrow out of my arm without ripping the muscle even worse in the process. I crouched slightly, looking around.
The archers had apparently figured out that elf-shot wasn’t a great weapon against us, since we just kept waking people up, and had been firing into the crowd with intent to wound. Several of our guests had arrows sticking out of them, although none of them looked more than superficially hurt. Aiming hadn’t been high on the priority list when they came to ambush us, making me suspect that half of them—or more—weren’t archers at all, but Doppelgangers who had managed to replace members of the guard.
Suddenly, the bad archery at the arrival banquet seemed a lot less inexperience and a lot more the desire not to shoot one of their own. Aethlin needed to take a serious look at his staffing.
The Luidaeg turned, eyes once again solidly black from side to side, hair starting to rise around her head like she was floating in the deep waters of the abyss, where no light could reach and no warmth could penetrate. There was an arrow jutting out of her belly, and as I watched, the dark sky of her dress wrapped around it and pulled it under, and it was gone.
Oh, and she was pissed.
“You would dare?” she asked, in a tone that was light, almost philosophical, and completely out of line with her appearance. She raised one hand, almost lazily, and a literal wall of black, brackish water appeared in front of her. She lowered her hand and the wall surged forward, a tidal wave knocking the first row of archers away.
She wasn’t the only one reacting with violence. Simon was on his feet, hands working rapidly as the smell of smoke and apple cider rose in the air. One of the archers screamed and collapsed, body convulsing as it twisted into a new shape. Next to him, Patrick was shielding Dean and Peter with his body, keeping his sons away from the fight. Of the four, only Simon was injured, an arrow jutting from his side, and he was using the blood, dipping his fingers into it before gesturing again.
Sylvester, sword in hand, was leading a small group of knights and other physical fighters toward the archers, who were starting to look unsure about their choices. Someone was going to get hurt, worse than many of my guests already had.
As if that thought was an invitation, one of the courtiers blurred and vanished, becoming a vast red
-and-white–furred dog that flung itself into the row of archers, snapping his jaws down on the throat of the nearest. Two more dropped their bows and drew their short swords, advancing on him.
I looked toward the back of the crowd. Only a few seconds had passed, and Oberon hadn’t moved. He was watching the scene, an expression of deep sorrow on his face. All the rage I used to harbor for the man came rushing back. How dare he leave us alone? How dare he say “just don’t kill each other” and walk away, like that was going to be enough to keep his children safe from each other?
He could have stopped so much pain, so much death, so much suffering, and instead, he’d left us to our own devices. And now that he was back, he still wasn’t stepping in to protect the people who needed him.
“Well, fuck that,” I said, and stormed away from the platform, heading for the archers. Two of them managed to notch arrows and fire them at me. They bounced off the fabric of my dress, clattering harmlessly away. I smiled grimly to myself as I kept advancing. Apparently, if something is sufficiently stain-resistant, it’s also puncture-resistant. I was going to have some bruises, but those would heal even faster than arrow wounds would have. Bonus: they would keep my blood on the inside of my body, which Tybalt seemed to find reassuring. This was his wedding night as well. He deserved a little reassurance.
Roars and snarls marked the progress of the Cait Sidhe contingent. I kept pressing forward, nearly stumbling over the body of a man in royal livery. A member of the actual guard, then, and not one of the protean imposters. An arrow jutted from his throat at an almost jaunty angle, and his eyes were open, staring at the sky.
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