Nope. Cantaloupe. I squinted at the glass after my first sip. Sparkling cantaloupe wine was a bit outside my experience.
Either misinterpreting or willfully ignoring the cause of my confusion, the Luidaeg said, “Nothing served here today is going to hurt you. All the menus were run through me, as well as through your friends, to be sure that we’re not dishing up goblin fruit pie or something equally ridiculous.”
“I wasn’t worried about that,” I said. “This is just a little odd, is all.”
“Melon wine used to be a lot more common, before humans refined their palates down to the point where most of them only view grapes as a viable base for wine. Since there were inevitably going to be a bunch of kids here, the wine list was set to have corresponding botanicals, in order to make sure they’d have something to drink.”
“Mmm,” I said, and took another drink. This really sounded more like a way to make sure the kids could sneak as much wine as they wanted, as long as they didn’t actually filch an entire bottle to do their drinking from, but since all of them had parents present, even Quentin, I didn’t have to worry about it for once.
All of them except for Gillian. I wasn’t sure whether she’d come with the Lordens or at the request of the Luidaeg, but either way, Janet wasn’t here, and Cliff couldn’t be here, since he had no idea Faerie even existed. If she decided to get hammered, I was going to be the one expected to take responsibility.
I took a larger gulp of melon-flavored wine. It wasn’t unpleasant, once you got past the strangeness of it all. The Luidaeg watched, with evident amusement.
“You know, sometimes it feels like I should be able to see the gears whirring inside that empty bowl you call a brain,” she said. “Did you just think to ask yourself how your wayward daughter got here?”
“Mm-hmm,” I said. “I’m sorry, I was a little busy before, what with the whole needing to get married, prevent the overthrow of the rightful government of the Westlands, and oh, right, not die in the process.”
“As if you’ve been that easy to kill in years,” scoffed the Luidaeg, snagging her own wineglass from a passing server. Its contents were electric yellow rather than peach, and I couldn’t for the life of me imagine what she was about to drink.
“If we could not weigh the relative merits of killing my wife before I’ve managed to see her through our honeymoon, that would be an excellent wedding gift,” said Tybalt dryly.
The Luidaeg rounded on him. “You say that sort of shit because you know most people will just go ‘oh, he’s old-fashioned, he talks like he bought a bunch of extra syllables at the vocabulary store, he doesn’t mean anything by it,’ but I’m older than you are, and I know you didn’t just imply that I was going to hurt my niece. You practically worshipped that butcher’s boy when he walked the boards in London. You know better than to say such things at a wedding.”
Tybalt blinked. “My apologies, lady sea-witch.”
“Yeah, yeah, it’s always apologies instead of common sense with you people.” She grumbled but she sipped her wine, and I knew the moment of danger, if it had been danger and not just the appearance of danger, had passed. She glanced back to me. “You sure you want to keep this one? Might not be the smartest move you ever made.”
“Oh, it was,” I said firmly. “He’s the best choice possible.”
“If you say so. As to how the girl got here, which I believe was the question you weren’t asking in the first place, Elizabeth felt it would be appropriate for the Roane of Half Moon Bay to send someone to observe the ceremony, and show there were no hard feelings between the colonies and you, since you were responsible in large part for the destruction of their way of life.”
“That’s a uniquely uncharitable way of putting things,” I said, only slightly stung.
She shrugged. “Liz can be a uniquely uncharitable lady when she wants to be. She wasn’t always like that, but I guess finding out your lover is secretly the sea witch and will never look at you the same way again after you’ve draped yourself in the flensed skin of her murdered child has a hardening effect on the psyche.”
I frowned. Elizabeth Ryan was the leader of the former Selkies who lived in Half Moon Bay, California, a colony that functioned more like the inevitable, dysfunctional end result of my tendency to bring home every broken doll from the Island of Misfit Toys and give them a bedroom. It was a family as much as anything else, and like any good family, it stuck together.
Most of the Ryans had become Roane during the great binding at the Duchy of Ships, and of the ones who hadn’t, most of them had chosen to remain Selkies, preferring the flexibility of mortality. It wouldn’t be an option forever, and eventually they’d have to be bound to their skins in order to fulfill the Luidaeg’s promise to her descendants. For the moment, though, they were living their lives as they wanted to and believed right.
Elizabeth had been responsible for taking Gillian in and arranging for the bulk of her education when my daughter had first been draped in her own Selkie skin to save her life from the elf-shot that had been in the process of rapidly killing her. The other Selkies hadn’t been too thrilled about that. They believed all Selkie skins belonged with the clans by right of blood, time, and suffering, and they hadn’t taken kindly to the discovery that the Luidaeg had been in a possession of a certain number of held-back pelts—what they’d referred to as “the Lost Skins,” pieces of her own history that she hadn’t passed to other hands.
One of those skins had saved my little girl. Gillian had worn the skin belonging to Firtha, the Luidaeg’s own youngest daughter, before it had been bound permanently to her flesh, transforming her from Selkie and skinshifter into one of the previously lost, lamented Roane. She and I had barely spoken since then. Partially, I thought, it was because every time I got anywhere near her, Faerie beat the crap out of her and stole her metaphorical lunch money.
If my mother did as much damage to my life just by existing as I’ve managed to do to Gillian’s, I would have found a way to legally divorce myself from her bloodline a long damn time ago, is all I’m saying.
“Why would Liz send Gilly?” I asked. “I mean, it’s not like I have that many allies among the colony, but sending your newest member seems a little bit like—”
“Acquiescing when the sea witch makes a single reasonable request of you, that you send a specific person as your representative to her niece’s wedding, may seem like an onerous burden to some, but other, sensible people understand that it’s not so much ‘a request’ as ‘a way to get slightly further into my good graces, which is a place you want to occupy now that you’re immortal and technically belong to me.’ ” The Luidaeg smiled, showing me what felt like every one of her teeth in the process. “Liz is a smart lady who made one massive, life-changing mistake when she was younger. She knew better than to tell me no.”
“Did she tell Gilly where she was sending her?” Please don’t let my daughter be attending my wedding under false pretenses. Please don’t let her hate me even more because the Luidaeg decided that having her here would make me happy.
Please don’t let me be a bad person for being happy even if Gillian had expected to find herself at some sort of tax summit or property hearing or really anything other than my wedding. At least this way, she got cake. They don’t usually have cake at tax summits.
“She knew,” said the Luidaeg. “Please credit me with half a sliver of common sense, would you? Now, I need to get going. Dad’s been unchaperoned at the buffet for longer than I’m entirely comfortable with, and I’d rather not lose him. But before I go . . .”
She paused and took a deep breath, her eyes shifting colors from green to deepest black. I tensed.
“May you never regret the promises you made today, and may you never have cause, either now or in the future, to recant them,” said the Luidaeg solemnly. “That’s the formal blessing, and here’s the informal one, because this w
hole ‘seven regimented blessings’ thing is ridiculous and a little Christian in some ways, which means we shouldn’t be insisting on it, as immortal creatures of Faerie, so: when the time comes, may you stand before the Heart of Faerie with no regrets and no remorse for the choices you have made. May you keep each other as close as you can, and never forget who you are.”
She turned then and walked away without saying goodbye, leaving us both to blink blankly and bemusedly after her. I looked to Tybalt.
“Not normal?” I guessed.
He shook his head. “Not normal,” he confirmed.
“I mean, neither is the part where we’ve mostly been standing here and letting people come to us,” I said. “Not for a mortal wedding, anyway. We’re supposed to move around and mingle more than this, and I’d like to hit the buffet before the child swarms clear things out completely.”
I didn’t necessarily want to commit myself to an endless stream of small talk and canapes—although I wouldn’t say no to one of the trays of what looked like bacon-wrapped asparagus that I had seen passing by—but I also didn’t want to accidentally cause someone offense at my own wedding.
Too much of this was unfamiliar. Fae marriages aren’t uncommon; most of the nobility, at least, tends to marry relatively young, to give them as much time as possible to secure an heir and legitimize their claim to whatever position they’re insisting is theirs by right. It’s just that when people live for centuries and have a glacially slow birth rate, “uncommon” can mean “we have one once every decade, it’s been a real bridal boom around here.” I couldn’t remember Amandine ever taking me to attend a pureblood wedding when I was small.
As if summoned by the turn of my thoughts, May swam through the crowd with Jazz trailing after her and a plate in one hand. “This is all sort of surreal, isn’t it?” she asked. Jazz laughed, almost sardonically, and May glanced over her shoulder at her dark-haired girlfriend, unmistakable affection in her eyes. “I’ve already had to promise a little birdie we both know that when we get married, it won’t be anywhere near this big a deal.”
“Did she finally say yes?” I asked.
“Okay, one, fae etiquette is as opposed to proposing to your girlfriend at your sister’s wedding as human etiquette is, and even though I’ve asked her several times to marry me, actually asking again would count as a proposal, so no, I didn’t do that. And two, she was the one who brought it up.”
That was encouraging. I handed Tybalt my wine glass and turned, beaming, to sweep May into a hug. “That’s wonderful!” Jazz had been remarkably resistant to all May’s attempts to propose, of which there had been many. It had been reaching the point of becoming almost comical.
I can’t really blame anyone for not wanting to join our increasingly improbable family. But they made each other happy, and if there was one thing I had learned, it was that when something or someone makes you happy, you should do your absolute best to hold onto it for as long as you possibly can, because one day, you’re going to blink and it’s going to be gone.
Jazz smiled at me as I propped my chin against May’s shoulder, the expression sweet and oddly shy, like she wasn’t sure how I was going to react to her actually going along with my Fetch’s matrimonial dreams. I let May go and transferred the hug to Jazz instead, who squawked before wrapping her arms around me in turn. Unlike most of the guests who were even remotely associated with the bridal party, she wasn’t wearing red; instead, she had opted for a pink and gold lehenga embroidered with tiny gold and platinum ravens. The band of feathers that kept her anchored to Faerie was woven into her braid, pulled over one shoulder and fitting perfectly with the rest of her attire.
“I can’t wait for you to be my sister,” I informed her, and she laughed, voice low and close to my ear.
“I thought you might have filled those slots by now,” she said. “What with all the unexpected family you’ve pulled out of the woodwork.”
“What? Never.” I let go. “May was unexpected, but an absolute improvement on no sisters at all.”
“I feel vaguely as if I should be offended by that,” said May.
Tybalt laughed. “If we all got offended by every clumsy thing my lady said, we’d never have any time to sleep.”
I stuck my tongue out at him. He snorted.
“Dignified.”
“That’s why you love me. That, and all the opportunities I give you to learn fun new ways to get blood out of fabric. You’d be bored senseless without me and you know it.”
He blinked, then smiled, much more softly. “Yes,” he said. “I would be.”
I looked back to Jazz. “I still don’t really have August. I mean, we’ve met several times, and I know who she is, but I don’t know who she is. I don’t know if I’m going to like that person, ever, or if our mother damaged her so badly that she’s never going to be someone I can understand or get along with. Or maybe Simon and the Lordens can help her heal, and she’s still not going to be someone I get along with, because no one gets along with everyone. Turns out it’s not a requirement that everybody be friends, no matter what the cartoons try to tell us.”
May gasped theatrically. “What? You mean the Care Bears lied to me?”
I decided to ignore her. “So I really only have one sister you’d be stacked up against, and since she’d get a wife out of the deal, I think she’s fine with sharing the title. That’s why she keeps proposing.”
“All right,” said Jazz, and smiled at me as I pushed her out to arm’s length. “The next time she proposes, which will not be in Toronto, under any circumstances, I’ll say yes. But just because you’ve all worn me down.”
“Don’t you want to marry me?” asked May.
“I do,” said Jazz. “I’m just scared, because I’ve been waiting for her mother,” she gestured to me, “to come charging in and ruin everything again.”
“Yeah, well, she doesn’t get to do that anymore,” I said. “She’s not my mother anymore, and this is the end of us discussing her on my wedding night. I’m going to go hit the buffet. Do either of you want anything?”
May was looking at Jazz the way the swarm of teenagers looked at the very concept of cake, and I got the feeling they’d both prefer it if we went away. I grabbed Tybalt by the hand and dragged him away from the pair, heading across the floor at a decent clip. It was easier than I would have expected, given both the fit of my corset and the volume of my skirt, but since I’d already fought a pitched battle and saved a High Kingdom in this dress, I shouldn’t have been surprised.
“Sweet Maeve, I love this dress,” I muttered.
Tybalt glanced at me, apparently startled. “Really?”
“Well, yeah. I mean, you designed it, right? I’d expect you to have designed it with some concept of what I might actually like.”
“I did,” he said. “But you have not historically liked anything that could be considered formalwear, much less a gown. Stacy and May both warned me, in no uncertain terms, that you were going to object to the corset, and probably to other aspects of the gown.”
“So you kept it a secret to keep me from arguing with you about the roses?”
Tybalt’s cheeks reddened. “They’re traditional,” he said. “Not obligatory, but the rose is a symbol of all of Faerie, and shared by all of our Three. I wanted anyone who looked upon you to know, without question, that our union was favored of Faerie, even if I was unable to tell them precisely why.”
“It’s really important to you that people be cool with us being married, isn’t it?”
We had reached the buffet as we walked, a fact which appeared to relieve Tybalt immensely, as it gave him something to do with his hands. He began loading up a plate with small items and rather more vegetables than he, as an obligate carnivore, was usually inclined to eat.
“It is essential,” he said, voice low.
“I don’t understand why.�
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“I’m sure Kerry would be able to tell you the nature and provenance of every item on this table,” he said, scooping some miniature arancini onto the plate, still not looking at me. “I am not quite so well-versed in the catering menu, nor am I all that acquainted with what you will willingly consume, aside from pizza, cookies, and the occasional burrito. You need to sit down for more proper meals.”
“Hey, I also eat frozen waffles and scones,” I said. “As long as someone else does the cooking and the dishes, I’m happy with just about anything. And I eat a lot of sandwiches.”
He gave me a sidelong look that showed his disapproval with that defense. “The sandwich is a gambler’s repast, not a meal fit for a hero who insists on running off and continually getting herself stabbed. But I’ll make an effort to cook more often.”
“You can cook?”
He turned to face me, thrusting the plate into my hands. “I do realize the times have changed, and that the nobility are not as a rule expected to do for themselves, but I was not always a King, and when I was younger, a man of my station who could not cook was likely to find himself starving more often than not. My recipes may be outdated to your modern sensibilities, but I assure you, they do exist.”
“Outdated meaning . . . ?”
“More turnips than modern cuisine seems to focus upon, less tomato.”
“European, then. Okay, cool.” He still didn’t look like he wanted to answer my earlier question. As he started putting together a smaller plate for himself, I picked up one of the arancini and popped it into my mouth. The crust was crisp and still steaming, the interior hot without being scalding. The wonders of hearth magic. No one ever burns their tongue unless they’ve managed to offend the chef, and when that happens, you generally know what you’ve done.
“Mushroom and beef stock,” I said, after swallowing. “Really nice.”
“Kerry will be pleased. She had some concerns, given your famed disregard for the needs of the flesh, that her contribution to the wedding would be less well-regarded than Stacy’s. Attempts to reassure her that as she was not the Maid of Honor—a quaint mortal custom which both of them nonetheless seemed to understand intimately—she was not expected to contribute equally did not calm her as much as I had hoped.”
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