“Aw, Kerry.” We had never been as close as I was to Stacy, in part because Kerry had been the only one of the four of us with a loving family of her own. I had Mom, who was distant at best and neglectful at worst, seeming to view me as an inconveniently animate houseplant when not sitting me down and drilling me on the finer parts of courtly etiquette—a process that in hindsight seemed more and more baffling as this night went on. What had she been preparing me to become by drilling me on forms of address and types of fae, but not teaching me what were apparently normal elements of a fae wedding?
What had her end goal been?
I shook the question aside and focused on my new husband, who was continuing to add things to his plate. Much more meat than he’d put on mine, and he’d managed to find some sort of scallop thing that hadn’t made it into my assortment of offerings. I leaned over and plucked a scallop off his plate, ignoring his wounded expression as I popped it into my mouth.
“Sorry,” I said unrepentantly. “We’re married now. That means we have to share.”
“Does it?” he asked, replacing the scallop with another from the table. “If it means you eat, I suppose I can tolerate thievery.”
I took the hint and ate some of the asparagus from my own plate, swallowing before I said, more gently, “Hey. You still haven’t answered my question.”
“You ask so many, little fish, I can’t be expected to keep track of all of them.”
“Come on. It’s really important to you that everyone is okay with the fact that we got married. Why? Help me understand. Please.”
Tybalt sighed, shoulders slumping, before he turned to face me. “I had thought I was concealing my motivations better than it seems I was.”
“You married me because you like me, and part of why you like me is that I pay attention to you,” I said. “There’s nothing wrong with that. People like it when other people pay attention to them. But it means I’m harder to hide things from than you think I am—especially when you might as well be waving a semaphore and shouting ‘I’m unhappy about something, ask me what.’ ”
“It’s unfair to say that I’m unhappy,” he objected. “We have managed to be successfully wed, and have already collected four of the seven blessings.”
“Is there some sort of etiquette about that?”
“We are not allowed to leave the reception until all seven have been received, or we have verified that the seventh is in the keeping of someone who we do not wish to speak with,” he said. “It seems unlikely, however, as that list consists solely of your liege, and he would have been compelled to present his blessing, even after it had been rejected.”
“Who was responsible for assigning them? And don’t think I haven’t noticed you trying to distract me.” I ate another rice ball. “I’m a professional detective. I can notice things.”
“That was part of the wedding planning that I was not allowed to participate in, so I believe the assignments would have been handled by your sister and your squire.”
“Explaining why they managed to rope the Luidaeg in, and why Sylvester wouldn’t have made the list.”
The crowd was beginning to thin. I glanced around, and realized that small cabaret-style tables had appeared around the edges of the room, leaving the center free to serve as what I was increasingly concerned would eventually become a dance floor. About half of them were occupied, people taking their plates and retreating from the throng.
“Over there,” I said, pointing, before I started making my way toward the nearest open table. One nice thing about being in a dress so white that it virtually glowed and kept shedding rose petals everywhere I walked: people could see me coming. They not only got out of my way, but when a few of them saw me heading purposefully toward the table with a plate in my hand, they turned and went looking for someplace else to sit. All four of the table’s chairs were still open when we got there.
“Oof,” I said, sitting with some difficulty. The dress fit perfectly, and a properly laced corset wasn’t actually uncomfortable, but it restricted my ability to bend enough that I was probably going to need Tybalt to help me back up.
He seemed to realize that at the same time I did, because he put his plate down and said, “I’ll just go fetch us some drinks before we—”
“No,” I said calmly, and gestured to his seat. “I think we’re good.”
Tybalt looked at my face, sighed, and sat.
“All right. Now will you please, before Kerry brings out the cake or someone starts trying to get us to dance, tell me why it’s so important to you that other people approve of me as a bride and you as the man I’m marrying? You know I never cared. As long as I wound up married to you at the end of the day, I was going to be happy.”
“I do,” he said quietly. “And I know the Luidaeg explained to you why it couldn’t work the way you wanted it to. I would have been happy to avoid all of this pomp and circumstance, if the decision had been solely mine. But I’ve seen what happens when parts of Faerie turn against themselves, and I understand the consequences that can follow on from even the simplest and most innocent of actions. I was first a King of Cats in Londinium, my father’s Kingdom, where my sister and I lived in peace for many decades. There, I watched a family tear itself apart because the idea that a child might live whose veins contained the blood of both the Cait Sidhe and the Daoine Sidhe was too much for them to bear.”
I’d heard some of this before, in bits and pieces over the nearly three years we’d spent as an official couple, and the four years before that that we’d spent as increasingly close friends. It was still unusual for him to string it all together into a coherent whole, and so I nodded, and said nothing, letting him work his way through whatever he needed me to hear.
“After that, I went to a Kingdom called Armorica in what you would probably recognize as the Brittany region of France. It still endures, both Brittany and Armorica itself; Kingdoms rise overnight and fall to the tune of centuries, when they fall at all. Even when the people who control them change, the common element tends to insist on a certain amount of continuity.”
“Shallcross would have had his work cut out for him if he’d somehow managed to overthrow the High King,” I agreed.
“Shallcross would have cast the entirety of the Westlands into war,” said Tybalt, tone dark. “The other High Kingdoms would have taken his claim of illegitimacy on the part of the Sollys line as a sign that we could not be trusted to govern ourselves, and invaded before his heralds could return home. Especially since I doubt they would have had such an accommodating assemblage of Tuatha de Dannan and neighboring monarchs to assist them in reaching their destinations.”
“Yeah, probably not so much.”
“You haven’t seen Faerie go to war, October. I have, more than once, and it’s never a sweet story for the survivors. In Armorica, I learned what it was to build a kingdom on the foundations set by war.” His gaze was very far away. “Their founders had slain one of the Firstborn, and been cursed for their actions. The shifting kinds, Cait Sidhe and Cu Sidhe and Selkies and all the rest, we had been scoured from the land, put to death to preserve the sensibilities of the Daoine Sidhe who held the throne.”
I blinked at him, utterly horrified. “They killed them?”
“Yes.”
“Not during a declared war or anything else that they could use to justify it to themselves? Just killed them?”
“Again, yes.” Tybalt took a sip from his wine glass and grimaced. “They hunted them down like beasts, not to be too flippant about it, for beasts they were and beasts they were regarded, and the fact that they were thinking children of Faerie mattered not at all to the ones who held the swords. We were collateral damage in a curse that had been meant to punish only a few, and I will never know how many lines and lives were ended, how many stopped their dancing.”
He gazed at something beyond me, something I su
spected only he could see. “I went to many lands after Armorica, but those were the Kingdoms that showed me how cruel the Divided Courts could be to the shifting kind, who dared to take more after Oberon than his pretty, static queens.”
The thought of someone calling Maeve, who was supposedly the most protean of the Three, static, would have been funny under any other circumstances. I didn’t laugh.
“In Ash and Oak, I thought I had found a Kingdom that would not punish me for my beginnings. They allowed and accepted those of us who danced between forms, and they did so without question or challenge. Before the iron came, New York seemed set to be a paradise. I was not a part of the convocation which seated the High Kingdom, but had I been, I would have argued for Shallcross’s side. I am not ashamed of that, even now that we know I would have been wrong. I thought it might be my home forever. I even considered sending word to my sister in Londinium, asking her to set her crown aside and follow me across the ocean for the sake of her freedom, and our family.”
I blinked, and still said nothing. This was something he needed to finish on his own.
“I met my Anne in Ash and Oak. It may seem odd to sit at my own wedding supper, odd as it is to my remembrance of tradition, and think fondly of my first wife, but she was a glory, and I continue to say that you would have liked her.”
“From what I’ve seen of her in your memories, I think you’re probably right,” I agreed. “She seemed like my kind of lady. No common sense or sense of self-preservation.”
“I like my women attracted to danger and my men eminently practical,” said Tybalt, with his first real flicker of humor since we’d settled at our table. “And of course, I now prefer you to either, as you are my singular and forever wife.”
“Good save,” I said, with a wide smile.
“Anne and I met in the mortal world, courted in the twilight of the Court of Cats, wed with the full acceptance and understanding of my people, and had no congress with the Divided Courts. They were disinterested in my comings and goings as one of the Cait Sidhe, having judged us to be beneath and below them in their own assessment, and because we had nothing to gain from their company, I did not question it, or attempt to change the situation.”
A slow dread was beginning to gather in my stomach. “Was King Shallcross the one . . .”
“No.” Tybalt shook his head. “I was not a King in Ash and Oak, merely a Prince without a crown, and so I lacked the authority to speak to the King of the Divided Courts. My suit never reached so far as his attention. But when it became clear that my Anne’s pregnancy was going poorly and she would not survive the birth, when I understood that I would have to be the beggar at the gate if I wanted any hope of saving her, I went to his Court. To the Baron who claimed ownership of the borough where we lived, with the full intent to go to the Duke above him if necessary, to continue pressing forward until I was able to save her.”
“And they told you no.”
“The Baron laughed at me for even attempting to ask.” Tybalt still sounded wounded by this, even centuries after the fact. Some wounds never fully heal, even if they stop being quite so visible as they used to be. “He said there was no reason for him to intervene on behalf of beasts who lay down with beasts, and if we wanted to rut, we should be prepared to pay the consequences. He said some other things that were even less flattering, in their own cruel way, and refused to arrange an audience for me with his superior. When I attempted to speak to the man on my own, I was rebuffed in no uncertain terms, and by the time I had found a way to enter his Court without being stopped, it was too late. Anne’s condition was too pronounced. In the end, I was given the choice that was no choice: I could either stay with her as she suffered in her labors, and hope we might have a better outcome than all logic said was coming, or I could continue in my quest to change the unchangeable. I stayed with my wife.”
“I’m sorry.”
“It was long ago. Even if she had lived, she was mortal. No matter what, she’d be gone by now, and I like to think that in that better world, you and I would still have found each other. More swiftly, perhaps, as I would have been so much less damaged, and less inclined to project that damage onto changeling shoulders that never deserved to carry it. But all I have just said, all that I have lived through, is the reason I’ve been so set upon our wedding being a spectacle that could not be overlooked. Even aside from the Luidaeg’s reasons, which were excellent, and I agreed with her when she expressed them to me, I wanted this so no one could ever look at you and think you were lesser for marrying a beast.”
I leaned across the table and put my hand over his, folding down my fingers so that he would have to pull if he wanted to be free of me. He met the motion with a fragile smile.
“You’re not a beast; you’re a part of Faerie, same as I am,” I said. “No matter what shape you are, you’re the man I love, the man I married, and the man I’m planning to be married to for the rest of my life.”
“Which will be very, very long,” he said.
I smiled back at him. “Yes. Very, very long. Long enough for us to learn every frustrating truth about each other, and figure out all the reasons they don’t matter. I’m in this for keeps, Tybalt. Or whatever I’m supposed to call you now.” I scowled and poked one of my remaining rice balls with the tip of a finger. “I don’t approve of changing names just because you got married.”
To my relief, Tybalt laughed. “Well, I changed names the first time I became a King, and Raj will do the same when he makes the crown his own, and not merely a borrowed ornamentation. It is a way to differentiate between someone who will one day carry the burden and responsibility of the crown, and someone who already has those things upon their shoulders. It’s meant to tell those who knew us as children, subject to the whims and wills of our parents, that we have grown beyond the coddling of the cradle.”
“So what is your name now?”
“Technically, unless I choose another, Rand. The name I was given as a kitten, by my mother, who I never knew.”
I frowned. “That seems contradictory.”
“You know it was unusual for me to allow Raj’s parents to remain with him in my Court?”
“I do.” And he’d been poorly rewarded for that allowance, with Raj’s mother dying at the hands of Oleander de Merelands, and Raj’s father using our relationship as a lever by which to raise up a rebellion against him. Some Cait Sidhe didn’t care for the idea of a King who loved a member of the Divided Courts, and were happy to follow a man who could never be King if he promised to return them to a world where they could know, for a fact, that they were in charge.
“My father . . .” He grimaced. “My father was a poor bearer of the title. My own children will not be raised in such a manner.”
“You’ve told me this before,” I said quickly, trying to suppress the little thrill of delight I felt every time he reminded me he wanted to have children of his own. I wanted that too, more than anything. Being here in Toronto had been one long reminder that the boy who was my son in all but blood would eventually need to go back to his actual parents, the woman who bore him and the man who’d never been afforded the opportunity to raise him. Call me selfish, but I wanted a kid I didn’t have to give back to anyone else. I loved Gillian. Thanks to the combination of Evening, Simon, and Janet, she’d grown up thinking I was a heartless deadbeat who’d abandoned her as soon as I’d realized motherhood wasn’t always easy or fun, and I’d only been her mom for a few years before that happened.
Much like Quentin with Maida, I was always going to be her mother, but another woman was always going to be her mom. It was too late for me to win that title back. So yeah, I wanted kids of my own, kids I could stay with and be there for and find entirely different ways of screwing up with.
“They won’t,” I said, as reassuringly as I could. “For one thing, with the way my bloodline seems to behave, your kids are going to be m
ore Dóchas Sidhe than anything else.”
His smile was brief but utterly sincere. “I can’t wait to meet them.”
“I can. I know we both want kids, but I’d like to wait to get anyone else involved in our lives until things have calmed down a little bit, and I’m not spending quite so much time nearly getting myself killed.”
“Oh, look,” said Tybalt, deadpan. “Who’s that over at the buffet? Is that the sea witch and her father? And have they managed to call the Firstborn of the Merrow out of the tide to help them raid the shrimp cocktail?”
There was a shriek from the other side of the room, high and giddy and surprised, like a teenage girl getting home from school to discover that the new car in the driveway is for her to keep, no kidding, no strings attached. I twisted to look over my shoulder. Pete and the Luidaeg were in fact standing by the buffet, and Pete had her arms locked around Oberon’s shoulders and her face buried against his collarbone, her own shoulders shaking with what could have been either laughter or tears. A plate of what looked like spaghetti was spread across the floor at Oberon’s feet, having apparently been knocked out of his hands when his daughter embraced him.
Everyone around them was ignoring them, as if this weren’t happening. The Luidaeg was standing back and watching the pair, a tolerant expression on her face.
“You know, I can’t decide whether the Luidaeg put the whammy on all our wedding guests, or whether they’re just smart enough not to stare at one of the Firstborn when she’s having a moment.” I turned back to my husband and my plate, picking up another rice ball. It was still hot. The stasis charms on the food really were top-notch. “How did she get here, anyway? I didn’t see her at the wedding.”
“Judging by the number of people in this clearing, some of our guests skipped the ceremony in favor of the reception.”
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