Chimes at Midnight od-7 Page 13

  “I’ll be right there,” Tybalt assured me, and began to dial.

  I turned and walked toward the courtyard. That was my best hope of finding Dean fast. If I was going to run this fire drill, I wanted to run it right. Maybe it was cliché to hide the Crown Princess of the Mists in the only County in San Francisco whose regent had ties to the Undersea, but this was my first planned rebellion against the throne, and I was flying by the seat of my pants. Those pants said “go where she’s likely to find allies.”

  Even if this didn’t work out, I had little doubt the Undersea would be happy to take Arden and Nolan in, hiding them where the Queen could never reach them. I snorted with suppressed amusement. Me, October “I was a fish for fourteen years” Daye, advocating that someone go hide with the mermaids. I guess some traumas get better with time. That, or they wind up buried under newer, bigger problems.

  Dean was running across the courtyard when I stepped inside. His eyes widened when he saw me, and he stumbled to a stop. “What’s going on?” he demanded.

  “Do you want the long version or the short version?”

  “The pixies and bogeys are going out of their minds! I don’t really understand them—”

  “Who does?”

  “—but Marcia ran off when they started freaking out, and she hasn’t come back, and now you’re here! What’s happening?”

  I took a deep breath. “Marcia is in the bathroom with one of your unexpected guests, who needed to throw up after teleporting us both across the city. Tybalt is in the hall with another, who isn’t throwing up, largely because he’s been elf-shot.”

  “Tybalt’s been elf-shot?” asked Dean blankly.

  “No, the other guest has been elf-shot. Tybalt’s fine. He’s calling Raj to pick up Quentin and bring him here. Sylvester is also on the way.”

  Dean frowned. “Anyone else?”

  “No, that’s it for now. Only you should probably call your parents back, because they’re going to want to be here for this particular debriefing.”

  Dean’s frown deepened, growing more suspicious. “Why is that?”

  In for a penny . . . “Because the guest in the bathroom with Marcia is Crown Princess Arden Windermere in the Mists, and the elf-shot man in the hall is her younger brother, Nolan. They’re here because we need—I need—Arden to take her throne back, and she has good reason to be afraid for her life if the Queen hears about her. I figured we might find allies in Goldengreen. Or, if not, we might at least find a fast ship to very, very far away.”

  “I hate sailing, and I’m supposed to close the bookstore tomorrow. Jude’s going to be pissed if I don’t show up,” said Arden. I turned. She was standing in the doorway. Marcia was a few feet behind her, still looking pale. Arden, meanwhile, smiled wanly and walked forward to offer Dean her hand. “I’m told you’re the Count who currently holds this demesne. We appreciate your hospitality.” She cast a glance my way. “I’m definitely going to need to hear the story of what happened to Countess Winterrose. I thought that old spider would be squatting here until the stars burned out.”

  “She died,” I said.

  “Short story,” said Arden. She turned back to Dean. “I’m sorry to barge in on you like this. October said this might be a safe place to go, and we never went out into the open. No one could have seen us.”

  Dean blinked, first at Arden, and then at the hand she was offering him. Finally, he took a step backward and bowed. His form wasn’t what I’d have expected from a courtier raised on land, but his posture was good, and his spine curled in the perfect mixture of deference and civility. Courtly manners aren’t identical throughout Faerie. They’re still recognizable, whatever form they take.

  “If you are who October indicates you to be, I am your servant,” he said, straightening. “If you are not, you are still welcome here. Any friend of hers is a friend of Goldengreen.”

  Arden blinked mismatched eyes in visible surprise before withdrawing her hand. “I guess I’m a little out of touch.”

  “A hundred years among the mortals will do that, I understand,” said Tybalt, walking in behind us. He was carrying Nolan slung over his shoulder like a sack of slumbering potatoes. “Where might I deposit this gentleman? I am loath to drop a potential Prince a second time, but he is remarkably heavy for one who has not eaten in decades.”

  “Marcia.” Dean looked to his seneschal. “Please prepare a guest chamber for the Princess’ brother. Meanwhile—” Whatever Dean was intending to say was lost as two teenage boys burst through the doorway, both of them moving at a speed that was probably unsafe when there were other people involved. Quentin managed to skid to a stop, his shoes making an unpleasant scraping noise on the cobblestones. Raj seemed like he was on a collision course with Arden until Tybalt reached out with his free hand and grabbed his nephew by the scruff of his neck, bringing him to an abrupt halt.

  I didn’t bother hiding my smile. “Hi, boys,” I said. “Welcome to our party.”

  “Did you really find the Princess?” Raj demanded, twisting in Tybalt’s hand as he tried to get a better look at Arden. “Let me down, I want to see!”

  “He was never this willful before you came along,” said Tybalt mildly.

  “Liar,” I replied. Raj was a Prince of Cats. “He’s always been this bad. Raj, calm down. There’s enough stupid political intrigue for everybody.”

  Raj stopped squirming. Tybalt let him go, and he brushed himself off, going from hyperactive kitten to feline royalty in an instant. He turned to Arden. “Hello,” he said. He didn’t bow. Cait Sidhe bow to members of the Divided Courts only when they want to, and a wayward Princess he’d only just met didn’t rate. Instead, he looked at her, taking her measure with his eyes.

  Arden might not have remembered all her courtly manners, but she clearly knew how to be looked at by a cat. She crossed her arms, raising an eyebrow, and eyed Raj right back, giving as good as she got. Like Quentin, Raj was growing like a weed, although she wouldn’t appreciate that the way that I did. When I first met him, he was a half-starved refugee in Blind Michael’s lands. Now he was a tall, thin teenage boy who somehow managed to avoid “gangly” in favor of looking like he was going to be snapped up to model jeans at any moment. His hair was russet red tipped with brown, like an Abyssinian cat’s, and his eyes were the green of leaded carnival glass. He looked nothing like Tybalt—they weren’t blood relatives—but after spending so much time around the Cait Sidhe, there was no way for me to look at him and not see the subtle marks of power that labeled him as a Prince.

  “Hello,” said Arden finally. She extended her hand again. Unlike Dean, Raj took it. “Arden Windermere.”

  “Raj.” He shook once, then reclaimed his hand and looked to Quentin, apparently waiting to see what was going to happen next. I followed his gaze. I was as curious as he was.

  Much to my surprise, Quentin neither bowed nor offered his hand. Instead, he cocked his head, studying Arden. His gaze was franker than Raj’s had been, like he was looking for something specific. Finally, he asked, “Was King Windermere your father?”

  “It was a long time ago, so I never got a paternity test, but as far as I’m aware, yes,” she said. She looked almost amused. “My brother looks just like him. We both have his eyes. Our mother always swore we were his fault. So I’m assuming he was my father.”

  “Okay,” said Quentin. He bowed—not as formally as Dean had, but with a goodly measure of propriety. “It is a pleasure to meet you, milady.”

  “This is my squire, Quentin,” I said. “Let me know if he bothers you. I’ll slap him upside the head until he stops.” I paused before adding, “Raj is also sort of my squire, but mostly, he’s Tybalt’s heir. I also have slapping rights where he’s concerned.”

  Raj wrinkled his nose. Tybalt looked amused.

  Dean, meanwhile, rubbed the back of his neck, and said, “This all seems a little, well. Lighthearted. If we’re actually doing what I think we’re doing.”

  Marcia stepped
back into the room. I hadn’t even seen her leave. “I’ve prepared a room for the Prince,” she said. “My Lord, your parents are on their way. They should be here shortly, if you wanted to receive them in the cove.”

  “That’s a good idea,” said Dean. He rubbed the back of his neck one more time before asking, “Tybalt, can you . . . ?”

  “I will join you by the water,” said Tybalt, and turned, following Marcia out of the room. I watched him go. Nolan’s head banging against the middle of his back only detracted a little bit from my customary admiration of his ass.

  I turned back to the others. Dean met my eyes and grimaced.

  “You really don’t have a plan, do you?” he asked.

  “Not as such,” I admitted. “But I have a Princess, and that’s better than I was doing a few hours ago. Let’s go see your folks.”

  The walk to the cove-side receiving room was less disorienting this time, since it was no longer totally unfamiliar. Raj and Quentin, on the other hand, gaped. They’d both essentially lived in Goldengreen while it was mine, and they’d done more exploring than I had, since, well, they were teenage boys and I wasn’t. For them, the existence of an unfamiliar hallway was both a delight and an insult to their skills.

  Arden walked more slowly than Dean and the boys. I fell back to pace her, walking alongside her in silence for a little while before I asked, “Are you okay?”

  “Yes,” she said. Then she laughed unsteadily. “No. No, I am not okay.”

  “You want to talk about it?”

  She waved a hand, indicating the walls. “When I got up this morning, I wasn’t planning my return to Faerie to be quite this . . . now. Or ever. You’re all very nice, and I’m sorry if this seems rude, but you haven’t shown me anything that makes me think we can take the throne. You’ve got what, a King of Cats, a couple of kids, and some changelings? No offense.”

  “None taken,” I lied. Ahead of us, Dean stiffened. He’d clearly heard Arden lumping him in with the “kids.” “Look. We’re sorry to drag you into this. But aren’t you tired of hiding?”

  “Yes,” she admitted. “That doesn’t mean I’m tired of living. The one seemed like the best way to accomplish the other.”

  I sympathized with her, I really did. There was a time when I did my best to get the hell out of Faerie—and my best was never anything close to Arden’s, which removed her from our world for the better part of a century. Maybe longer, depending on how involved she’d been before Nolan got elf-shot. Faerie is huge and complicated and frankly scary if you’ve been living in the mortal world, where the laws of physics don’t change from hour to hour and the inanimate doesn’t take sides.

  But that didn’t mean I’d let Arden walk away from her duty. Maybe that was ironic—me, October Daye, the woman who once said destiny could go screw itself if it insisted on trying to make me play its reindeer games—but I didn’t care. Arden was the Princess in the Mists. Unless she took the throne, nothing was going to change, and I was going to be banished. Neither of those things was okay with me, and that meant she was going to do her job.

  I didn’t scold her. Instead, I said, “We have more allies than you think. I sort of collect them. You might be surprised by how much of the Kingdom will side with us once they know who you are.”

  “You’re going to need an army,” said Arden, a note of well-worn bitterness in her tone.

  Her voice carried. As we stepped off the stairway into the receiving room, Dianda Lorden, Duchess of Saltmist, stood from where she’d been sitting at the edge of the water. The scales covering her tail fell away, replaced by legs wrapped in blue canvas trousers. She was dressed like a pirate preparing to board a merchant ship. No romance here; just solid, serviceable clothing. Patrick stood next to her, his own clothes quietly echoing hers . . . and behind them stood what looked like a regiment of sea-folk. Merrow and Selkies, Cephali and Naiads, and beyond them in the water, the vast forms of the Cetacea.

  “Will this army do?” asked Dianda.

  Arden’s widened eyes provided all of the answer we needed.

  ELEVEN

  BRINGING THE UNDERSEA INTO THE PICTURE meant another round of introductions, none of which managed to top Arden meeting Dean for awkwardness, although all of them came with some measure of sizing up. Arden looked uncomfortable, the Undersea guards looked murderous—nothing new there—and Dianda looked murderously hopeful, like this was the opportunity she’d been waiting for since King Gilad died. I guess it’s not every day you get invited to overthrow the ruler of the neighboring Kingdom and get away with it.

  “At least I hope we get away with it,” I muttered, picking at the ribbons snarled in my hair. I had retreated to stand near the wall while Dianda introduced her people to Arden. This was Dean’s County, not mine. Let him handle the tricky political bits. I just didn’t want to get dripped on by the admittedly damp representatives of the myriad Undersea races.

  Where I went, Quentin inevitably followed. It’s been that way for years, so it wasn’t a surprise when he trailed after me. I elbowed him as best I could with my hands full of hair.

  “Don’t you want to hang out and learn about the politics and stuff?” I asked. “Hell, it’s an opportunity to get to know a Princess. Isn’t that supposed to appeal to your inner romantic or something?”

  Quentin snorted. “If you’re going to ask two questions in a row, could you not end them with ‘stuff’ and ‘something’? It makes you sound . . .” He stopped, apparently realizing there was no good way to end that statement. Finally, he mumbled, “Princesses aren’t that exciting. I’ve met princesses before.”

  “Uh-huh.” I balled up a ribbon, flicking it at him before starting on the next one. “Where did you meet a Princess?”

  “Not here.” He folded his arms, looking back to the gathering.

  That meant that he’d probably met a Princess somewhere in Canada, and that telling me would give away too much about where he came from. Pressing the subject would have been rude, and so I didn’t try, asking instead, “What did you find at the Library after we left?”

  “Lots of stuff about the history of the Kingdom of the Mists. The Kingdom was founded by Denley and Nola Windermere; they had two children, a daughter, who died before she could be named—a curse was suspected, but never proven—and Gilad, who was basically raised in a bubble.”

  “They probably felt like that was the only way he’d live to take the throne.” I shook my head. “Does anyone royal ever die a natural death?”

  “Statistically speaking, no,” said Tybalt, stepping out of the shadows beside me. I didn’t flinch. Years of putting up with his sense of humor even before we started dating have left me surprisingly desensitized to people sneaking up on me that way. It’s probably going to get me killed one of these days.

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “I was not in the Mists before Gilad’s reign, but it was common knowledge that his parents had been murdered. I would not be surprised if it was done to make room for someone else’s political agenda. Gilad was a young King. He had not been given sufficient time to prepare before he took his place.” He moved to stand behind me, pushing my hands away as he began delicately unwinding the ribbons from my hair. “The trouble with killing old Kings in hopes that young ones will be more easily controlled is that young Kings are frequently headstrong and angry over their change in status. They refuse to listen to reason, and they are not always as weak as they are expected to be.”

  “Did anything indicate that King Gilad was involved with the conspiracy that killed his parents?” I asked, dropping my hands to give Tybalt room to work.

  Quentin shook his head. “Kind of the opposite. Apparently, the High King had to coerce him into taking the throne, because he didn’t want to rule in the Kingdom where his parents had died. And then, once he was in charge, he was a good King. Not everybody liked him, but everybody agreed he was as fair as it was possible for him to be.”

  “Faerie isn’t fair,” I s
aid, automatically. My eyes strayed back to the water, where one of the Cephali was bowing to Arden. She looked discomforted by the whole situation. I guess having an octopus person bow to her wasn’t a normal thing back at the bookstore. “Did the books say anything about him having children?”

  “They said he was really private. He didn’t like anyone knowing what he was doing, or where he was going when he didn’t have to be formally before the Court. Some people said he was arrogant, but most of them thought he was sad. He was all alone. He never had any lovers the Court knew about.” Quentin followed my gaze to Arden. “But there was nothing to say that he didn’t have children.”

  “She does look like her father,” said Tybalt. “Even if I had not known, I would have suspected, once I saw her eyes.” He pulled another ribbon from my hair. “The question becomes, is she prepared for what lies ahead?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “She looks pretty unhappy to me.”

  “Where did you find her, anyway?” asked Quentin.

  “There’s a bookstore on Valencia,” I said.

  “I know. Dog Eared Books.”

  “No, there’s another one. It’s called Borderlands. They have a café.” I paused before adding, in my most portentous tone of voice, “It sells coffee, and I had no idea it was there.”

  Quentin turned back to me, eyes going very wide. “Wow. Whatever spell she’s been hiding under, it’s a doozy.”

  “I know, right? She’s been hiding in plain sight this whole time. Hiding and hoarding all the coffee.” I shook my head. Tybalt’s fingers promptly snagged in my hair, and I winced, going still again. “She’s been living in the basement with her brother. He’s upstairs now. The Queen had him elf-shot sometime in the 1930s, and any chance Arden was going to lead an uprising on her own died when he went to sleep. I guess we could wait another decade or two for him to wake up, but somehow, I doubt the Queen is going to put up with me lurking around the borders of her Kingdom until then.” Not to mention all the changeling children who’d become addicted to goblin fruit before that could happen—and once they were addicted, they were as good as lost.