Once Broken Faith

THREE

ARDEN SCRAMBLED TO EXTRICATE herself from Madden’s embrace, wiping the tears from her cheeks with quick, almost shamed swipes of her hand. She positioned herself so that her body blocked Walther and Madden from the High King. It was a noble gesture. It was also a futile one—she was a slender girl, and Madden alone could have made two of her; there was no way she could shield them from Aethlin’s regard—but the fact that she was willing to try made me feel a little better about the situation. A little. Not nearly enough, especially since she wasn’t shielding me.

“Your herald said we should expect you next week, Your Highness,” said Arden. Her voice was thick with tears and worry. “I apologize that I was not prepared for your arrival.”

“Really? It looks to me as though you were taking advantage of every moment you believed you had before I got here,” said High King Sollys. He raised an eyebrow, looking briefly so much like his son that it hurt. This man, tall and regal and terrifying, was Quentin’s future. This was his birthright. No matter how much I enjoyed having him with me, I was only ever going to be a way station on his path to the throne.

If that was dismaying for me as his knight, how did it feel for Dean as his boyfriend? Had they even talked about it? Dating is hard for the children of the nobility. Maybe that’s why they have formal courtships. Putting all those layers of formality and obligation in the way of casual dating made things easier on the heart.

Arden bit her lip, and didn’t move. “Please. I didn’t mean to defy you. I just . . .”

“Madden was elf-shot by an agent of Silences as part of the declaration of war against the Mists,” I said. High King Sollys looked at me. I forced myself to remain casually seated on the bed, resting the bulk of my weight on my hands. Every etiquette lesson I’d ever been given was screaming for me to stand, but that was exactly why I couldn’t do it. If I kept things informal, maybe he’d do the same. “Everyone else who was elf-shot during the failed attempt at a coup has been woken up. He would’ve been, too, if we hadn’t been so quick about telling you what was going on. It was fair.”

“Sir Daye,” said High King Sollys. “Of course you’re involved. I’m not sure whether you know this, but ‘fair’ and royal decrees are rarely acquainted with one another.”

“Maybe they should be,” I said. “He’s awake now. What are you going to do, ram another arrow into his arm to punish Arden for disobeying you? Maybe it’s just me, but that seems kind of extreme, especially since the only thing he ever did wrong was stand by the woman who rightfully inherited the throne in the Mists, instead of supporting the woman who should never have been confirmed as our Queen.”

It was a small but calculated dig. Aethlin flinched as it hit home. When the 1906 earthquake had left King Gilad dead and Arden and her brother in hiding, Evening Winterrose had been right there to present a “lost heir” who could take the throne and stabilize the region. The High King had been dealing with a lot of things when all that went down. By the time he got to the Mists, it had basically been a done deal, and he’d confirmed a pretender. Arden’s life among the humans, beneficial as it may have been for her in some ways, was entirely his doing. I wasn’t going to let him forget that.

“I asked you not to act before I arrived,” he said, looking back to Arden. “As it seems you woke your seneschal while I was being ushered into your halls, you’ve done as I asked. I’ll be more precise in my requests from now on. No one else is to be awoken until we have discussed the proper use and distribution of the elf-shot cure. Do I make myself clear?”

“Yes, sire,” said Arden. She glanced at her sleeping brother, mouth twisting, before she returned her attention to the High King. “You are very generous.”

“And you’re in a difficult position, Queen Windermere. If I seem generous, it’s because, as Sir Daye says, I understand that your current lack of experience with our politics is partially on me. You’re learning as you go. I won’t punish you this time. Or perhaps your punishment will be hosting this conclave. As for you, Sir Daye . . .” High King Sollys turned to me.

I offered him my best, brightest smile. “I should get ice cream and a pony as my reward for preventing another war.”

“You should be commended for your role in preventing the war between the Mists and Silences; we’ll speak of that later,” he said. “Unlike Queen Windermere, you do not have the excuse of ignorance to shield you from your own actions. You knew what I intended by my instructions, and you allowed it anyway.”

“She’s Queen, I’m not,” I said. “I don’t ‘allow’ Arden to do anything. I just try really hard to minimize its impact on the people around me.”

Arden wasn’t saying anything in my defense. I couldn’t blame her for that. If she spoke, she might attract the High King’s attention again, and worse, he might decide to censure Walther or Madden, neither of whom was at fault here.

“Still, you can’t be allowed to flaunt my decrees just because you don’t feel like arguing with your regent,” he said. The corner of his mouth was turning upward, like he was fighting a smile. Somehow, that didn’t make me feel any better. “I’m afraid I must order you to attend the conclave, as you need to understand what your actions could have done. Bring your squire. I’m sure it will be educational for him.”

I resisted the urge to glare. This wasn’t about punishing me: this was about getting Quentin to the conclave without blowing his cover. Never mind that anyone who looked at my squire next to the High King was likely to start asking questions about Quentin’s blind fosterage. There was no way a responsible regent could pass up this kind of learning opportunity for a king-to-be.

“I’ll clear my calendar,” I said, standing and bowing deeply. “So this has been fun and everything, but I’m supposed to be hosting a slumber party for a bunch of teenagers right now, and I’d like to get back to it before they burn my house down. May I be excused?”

“Certainly,” said High King Sollys, with a broad wink. He turned to Arden. “I’m assuming you brought Sir Daye here?”

“Yes, sire,” she said. She scribed a wide arch in the air with one hand. Apparently the injunction against magic was no longer in effect if she wasn’t getting ready to wake her brother. A portal appeared at the center of the room, showing a lovely view of my back yard. It was a good call. The yard was sheltered from mortal eyes, which meant I wouldn’t need to embarrass myself by fumbling with my clumsy illusions in front of the High King, and since it wasn’t inside, she didn’t need to worry about freaking out any of my guests.

“Sir Daye?” said Aethlin, looking back to me. “I believe your road home is open.”

“I see that,” I said. “Mind if I take Walther with me? May’s making cookies. He loves her cookies.”

“You may take the alchemist,” said the High King.

Walther put his wine snifter down on the nearest table and all but bounded to my side, clearly as eager to be out of there as I was. I reached for his hand, ready to pull him through with me, and paused as High King Sollys cleared his throat.

“The alchemist—Master Walther Davies, is it not?” He paused long enough for Walther to nod before he continued, “Master Davies will also be required to attend the coming conclave, as it’s his work that will be under discussion. You will make yourself available to us, yes?”

“Yes, sire,” said Walther, with a quick bow. His voice was tight, and I knew he was thinking about his class schedule, what he could move or pawn off on grad students without endangering his students. Teaching chemistry might seem mundane compared to, oh, being a knight errant of a fae kingdom, but he took it very seriously. That was part of what made him so good at his job, and such a skilled alchemist.

“Good,” said the High King. “You are both excused.”

He was turning back to Arden as I yanked Walther through the portal, which slammed closed behind us. She was probably going to get a lecture, and I was fine with that. She’d disrupted my evening and caused me to be compelled to attend a political event. She deserved to be yelled at a little.

The night air was warm and scented with my neighbors’ honeysuckle, which was blooming so violently that it seemed likely to rip down the trellis where it grew. I let go of Walther’s hand, coughing as I inhaled a great lungful of smoggy mortal air.

“I appreciate the save,” he said, pulling his glasses out of his pocket and putting them on. They were nonprescription, intended to blunt the unnatural blue of his eyes. The color bled through his human disguises, making him seem inhuman no matter how hard he tried. “I had no idea how I was going to get out of that room.”

“I sort of figured,” I said. “Do we need to give you a ride home? May and Jazz don’t know that I’m back yet. I could probably sneak away.”

“I have my own transportation.” Walther reached into his coat and pulled out a bundle of yarrow twigs, holding them up with a wry smile. “It’s a nice offer, but I’d like some time to think about what just happened.”

“Sure,” I said. “Come by any time, and I guess I’ll see you at the conclave, whenever that is.”

He nodded. “See you there.” Then he positioned the bundle of twigs so that it was basically under his butt, kicked off from the ground, and flew away.

Sometimes life in Faerie is deeply, deeply weird. I unlocked the back door and let myself inside.

The kitchen was a disaster zone. Empty pizza boxes were piled on the counter, someone had spilled nacho cheese on the table, and May was in the process of mixing a batch of Rice Krispie treats, if the smell of hot marshmallow was anything to go by. She blinked when she saw me. I blinked back.

“I was gone for less than an hour,” I said. “How did you make this big of a mess? And where’s Jazz?”

“At the store; we ran out of ice cream,” said May. “As for ‘how did we make this big of a mess,’ there are five—count them, five—teenagers in the other room who were told that for tonight, they got to be normal. Not in charge of anything, not afraid of anything, not learning how to exist in a strange new world, just normal. So they tore through the kitchen like a buzz saw, made nachos when they realized that we’d foolishly failed to order enough pizza for an army, and now they’re in the living room watching Disney movies.”

Her voice rose a bit on the last two words, breaking like she was struggling not to laugh. My eyes widened. “Oh, sweet Maeve, you’re not serious.”

“I am.” She nodded solemnly. “I am serious. They are enjoying the animated stylings of the Walt Disney Corporation. Dean has never seen a cartoon before.”

“He had Internet in the Undersea.”

“Sure, but he lacked the cultural context to tell him why he should want to waste his time watching movies about things that weren’t real.” May glanced to the kitchen door as she lost her battle against her grin. It spread across her face like she was in the process of becoming a Cheshire cat, until it seemed like she was nothing but the smile. “That poor, unfortunate soul.”

“Yeah, his mother’s going to kill us.” I walked over and stole a finger-scoop of Rice Krispie treat.

Dean’s mother, Dianda Lorden, was the Duchess of Saltmist, the neighboring Undersea demesne. She was also a Merrow, which meant that in human terms, she was a mermaid—just like humans would lump me, Arden, and Walther all under the banner of “elf,” if they knew that we existed. Dianda was amiably violent, as seemed to be the norm among Undersea nobles. She was either going to find us showing her son The Little Mermaid hysterically funny or incredibly offensive and, sadly, I didn’t know which way she was likely to go.

“What happened with Arden?” May sounded concerned. I couldn’t blame her.

“Good job waiting to ask that until I’d been home for five minutes,” I said. I took a breath. “Remember how she said the High King was coming next week, so she needed to wake Madden and her brother up now if she wanted to be certain she’d be able to give them the cure?”

May nodded. “It was less than an hour ago, so yes.”

“She woke Madden up. That was all we had time for before the High King walked in.”

May audibly gasped. “He’s already here?”

“Yeah,” I said grimly. “He’s not going to punish her for waking Madden, but he’s forbidden her to wake Nolan. As for me, my punishment for helping her go against his wishes is attending the conclave—with Quentin. I’m guessing he was planning to convince-slash-command me to do that anyway, since this is the sort of thing Quentin really ought to see. Doesn’t mean I’m thrilled. What’s the dress code for a conclave?”

“Since you’re unlanded and attending as a witness and observer, you should be fine with whatever you’d normally wear to a court function,” said May. “Bring your knife, but be prepared to surrender it at the door.”

“Wouldn’t it be better not to bring a weapon if they’re just going to take it away from me?”

“Not really.” May resumed stirring her Rice Krispie mixture. The marshmallow had begun to set. The treats resisted her machinations. “By bringing a weapon, you show that you’re willing to defend the conclave. By giving it up, you show that you trust your hosts to protect you, and your fellow attendees not to need stabbing. It’s a show of good faith. It also means that if day one goes really well—or really poorly—they might let you keep your knife on day two, because you’ll have earned the right to go armed.”

“Pureblood hospitality gives me a headache,” I grumbled, snatching another piece of gooey cereal.

May shot me a sympathetic look. “It’s designed to be learned over the course of decades and refined over the course of centuries. It’s not your fault that you don’t take to it naturally.”

“I wish you could go instead of me.”

“I’ll probably go in addition to you,” said May. I blinked at her. She shrugged, beginning to spoon her cereal mixture into a serving dish. “Apart from the fact that I was one of the people elf-shot in Silences, I have a long, long memory. None of the people whose lives I consumed had been elf-shot themselves, but some of them had lost friends and loved ones that way. One man, his wife was elf-shot and still decades away from waking when we came for him. He died with her name on his lips, and I put his face on to finish it. Elf-shot is supposed to be merciful, but I’m pretty sure it’s not. I want to see how this goes.”

“Oh.”

May was my Fetch: a night-haunt who had consumed the blood of the living and transformed into a duplicate of that person when the time came to play death omen. She’d expected her long, long life to end when she became my mirror, and she’d done it anyway, because the night-haunts lived vicariously through the people whose corpses they ate, and the last person she’d consumed had been a girl named Dare. Like me, Dare had been trained as a street thug by Devin, a modern day Fagin crossed with Peter Pan. Unlike me, she’d never been able to escape the gravity of his attention. Dare died thinking I was her hero, and that thought had been enough to influence the night-haunt who took on the bulk of her personality. She had chosen to die a second time, all for the sake of warning me that my own life was coming to an end.

Under normal circumstances, May would have appeared, I would have died, and she would have vanished, dissolving into mist and the smell of rain. Instead, my mother, Amandine, had intervened, changing the balance of my blood for the first time in my adult life. Somehow, that had cleansed the elf-shot that was killing me from my body, and transformed me just enough to break the tether tying May’s existence to my own. She was something unique now, a Fetch with nothing to bind her. And while the bulk of her memories were taken from either me or Dare, sometimes she’d say things to remind me that she was so much older.

I sighed. Speaking of things that were older . . . “Do you have everything under control down here? I think I need to give the Luidaeg a call, let her know what’s happening, and tell her the High King is in town.” She might already know. She was often surprisingly well-informed—or not so surprisingly, given that she was the sea-witch, Firstborn daughter of Maeve, and fully capable of grilling the local pixie population for news. Still, she’d appreciate hearing it from me, and it was always good to avoid getting on her bad side.

“Go, go,” said May, making a shooing gesture with her free hand. “I can control the ravening hordes for a while longer. I think they’re enjoying the lack of adult supervision.”

“You’re the best,” I said, and grabbed one more chunk of Rice Krispie treat before leaving the kitchen and heading up the stairs to my room.

San Francisco is one of the most expensive cities in the world, and getting worse as the tech boom moves more and more multimillion-dollar human companies into the business district. Jazz owns a secondhand shop in Berkeley. May works there occasionally, when Jazz needs the help, and spends the rest of her time doing whatever strikes her fancy. My PI work brings in a reasonable amount, although very few nobles ever think to pay me for knight errantry. Quentin mostly eats whatever appears in the fridge and spends his time learning how to be a better ruler. So how is it that we’re able to afford a two-story Victorian near Dolores Park, in a rapidly gentrifying neighborhood?

Simple: my liege, Duke Sylvester Torquill, has been in the Bay Area for centuries, and owns enough land in San Francisco to make the snootiest of human tech millionaires sit up and salivate. We live rent-free, and the foundation he’d established to handle mortal upkeep of his properties paid the taxes. It’s a sweet setup. It would be even sweeter if I didn’t feel so guilty about it. Sylvester and I were . . . not estranged, exactly, but not exactly speaking to each other, either.

He’s my liege. He’s supposed to be straight with me. He’s supposed to be the person I could trust no matter what. And he’d destroyed that in the name of keeping a promise he’d made to my mother before I’d even been born. He hadn’t lied to me according to pureblood standards, which were often more fixated on the letter of the law than on anything else, but as far I was concerned, a lie of omission was still a lie. He’d withheld a lot of information from me—information that could have helped me understand my past and protect my future—and he’d done it because he cared more about his word to Amandine than about his word to me. Maybe I have trust issues. I think I’ve earned them. That doesn’t change the fact that Sylvester, who I had trusted with everything, had still been willing to betray me.

No matter how I currently felt about Sylvester, I loved our house. It was home. I’d been trying to find my way home for a long, long time.

My cats, Cagney and Lacey, and my resident rose goblin, Spike, were curled on the bed when I stepped into my room. Of the three of them, only Lacey bothered to open an eye, although she didn’t move. They had clearly fled before the onslaught of teenage invaders, and had no interest in doing anything that could bring them back into the line of fire. I smiled at them as I closed the bedroom door.

“It’s okay, guys,” I said. “Nobody’s going to follow you up here.”

Lacey closed her eye.

Pulling out my phone, I sat on the edge of the bed and dialed a long string of numbers, tracing a spiral pattern from one to five and then back out again. The smell of cut-grass and copper rose around me as my magic responded to the intent in my gesture. I lifted the phone to my ear, listening to the silence.

“To market, to market, to buy a fat hen,” I chanted. “We’ll cook it and then we’ll be hungry again, which is why I really appreciate the easy availability of KFC in the modern world.”

The magic gathered and broke around me, and the silence was replaced by the soft, distant sound of waves lapping against the shore of some tropical lagoon. I leaned back on the bed and waited.

There was a click, and suddenly a woman’s voice was in my ear, snarling, “Who is this, and why am I not juggling your internal organs right now?”

“Hi, Luidaeg; it’s Toby,” I said. “Got a moment?”

“Toby!” Her tone shifted, becoming warm—even welcoming. We hadn’t always been friends, but our relationship was, at this point, built on a foundation of mutual respect and saving each other’s asses. That was enough to buy me a positive reception. “Quentin’s sleepover party is tonight, isn’t it? Why did you call it that, anyway? It’s not like they’re going to sleep.”

“Human teenagers don’t usually sleep during these parties either,” I said. “It’s an excuse for them to hang out in their pajamas, eat lots of junk food, and not have to worry about going outside. Call it an artifact of my weird upbringing and let it go.”

“Right,” she said. “If I ever needed more proof that you were Dad’s descendant, you filling your home with those kids would do it. That’s heroism of the stupid kind. Please tell me you’re not calling because you want me to come over and help you deal with them. I’d just turn them all into axolotls until the sun came up.”

“Peaceful, but probably stressful,” I said. The Luidaeg can’t lie. That meant she could turn both my resident and visiting teenagers into axolotls. I wasn’t even sure what those were, but I was pretty sure I didn’t like the idea. “That’s not why I’m calling.”

“No? What impossible quest are you planning to embark on now?”

“I’m skipping the impossible quest in favor of attending the High King’s conclave to discuss what’s going to happen with the elf-shot cure.” I explained the situation in quick, terse sentences, leaving nothing out, but not embroidering either. The Luidaeg didn’t like it when people danced around the point. I guess a few millennia of listening to lies, bullshit, and pointlessly florid pureblood etiquette had eroded her patience.

When I was done, she said, “Well.”

“Yes.”

“That’s a thing.”

“Yes.”

“A thing which is actually happening.”

“Probably.”

“You realize I’ll be showing up to watch the fireworks, right?”

I sat up a little straighter. “What?”

The Luidaeg sighed. “Much as I hate my sister—and trust me, no one hates my sister like I do—she’s still Firstborn. Elf-shot was her gift to our father, to curry favor with him when she was out of his good graces. I applaud unmaking it. I think this is a good thing. But that doesn’t mean I can sit by while the work of one of the First is unmade, and not at least come for the sake of witnessing the process. I won’t speak on her behalf. I won’t try to suppress this cure. I’m still going to come, and watch, and see.”

The Luidaeg was the eldest among the Firstborn. Almost everyone I’d ever met was afraid of her, and with good reason: she was terrifying when she wanted to be. Having her at the conclave would make a lot of people very uncomfortable. That alone would make the proceedings more entertaining, at least for me. But if the Luidaeg was planning to show up . . .

“Should we be worried about other Firstborn deciding they need to come sit in the audience?”

She was quiet for a moment before she said, “Acacia might. She’s been getting out more, and I know that some of Blind Michael’s Riders have been elf-shot and locked away by people who didn’t see any other means of protecting their children. She could come just to see if she’ll be able to free the last of her husband’s victims. Your mother isn’t likely to show up, if that’s what you’re worried about. Amandine never considered herself Firstborn, and she doesn’t care enough about the work of her elder siblings.”

“I don’t know if I’m worried about seeing Mom so much as I just really, really don’t want to.”

“If she does decide to come, that’ll give me the opportunity to drag her away by the ear and ask what the fuck she thinks she’s doing. It’ll be okay, Toby. This isn’t an army marching on the Mists. This isn’t a case you have to solve. It’s just a bunch of nobles coming to puff their chests out at each other and try to look important. Do what I do. Bring popcorn.”

I smiled. Maybe it was weird to be reassured by the words of a woman who could remember the rise and fall of almost every mortal civilization, but my life has never been particularly normal. “Okay,” I said. “See you there.”

“Yup,” she said, and hung up.

I lowered my phone, looking at it thoughtfully for a moment before I stood. The kids probably didn’t want my company, but May might, and there were Rice Krispie treats. It was time to focus on the ordinary, for as long as the world allowed.