When Sorrows Come Page 27

“The blood?” she said, anxiously.

  “Right, almost forgot,” I said, and pulled my knife. Maida let me go, having enough common sense not to hang on to an armed knight. I offered her an encouraging smile and walked over to Walther. “Jar, please.”

  “Really? What am I, a Container Store?” He still bent to open his valise, pulling out a small glass jar about large enough to hold a cup and a half of liquid. “I assume you’re about to bleed into this, and I don’t want to ask you to fill something large enough that your lurking King of Cats glares at you.”

  “He’s not the only one who’d be glaring,” said Quentin.

  “Appreciated,” I said, and took the jar in my free hand. Unscrewing the lid without stabbing myself was difficult, and Walther didn’t offer to help, the jerk, just watched with the dry amusement of someone who knew he wasn’t about to be bleeding, no matter what.

  Once I had the jar open, I pressed the edge of my knife against my wrist, where experience had shown me the blood would come fast and easy. Then I looked at Maida, to be sure she was watching me. If I was bleeding for her, I wanted her to see it.

  She met my eyes and nodded, very slightly. She understood that no matter what else I was doing, I was hurting myself for her sake, and she acknowledged it. That was all I ever wanted from her, or from anyone, really. For them to see that I was hurting myself on their behalf, and not let them pretend they had no part in it.

  The knife bit into my arm as sharply as it always did, the pain not dulled in the slightest by the number of times I’d cut myself in that exact spot. I healed fast enough not to scar, and that meant I also healed too fast for nerve damage to take hold. That was definitely good in the grand scheme of things, but sometimes I wished it would hurt just a little less. I hissed between my teeth, the sound small. Not small enough to keep Tybalt from catching it. He tensed, moving, not toward me, but toward the High Queen.

  “Do you see what she does on your behalf, on the behalf of all these cursed, divisive, Divided Courts?” he asked, in a low, unforgiving voice. She glanced at him, startled, before her eyes were pulled back to my bleeding arm, as if she couldn’t look away for long.

  The wound was already starting to heal, and the jar was less than half full. I pressed down again, trying to stay focused on my task.

  “I would take her into the Court of Cats if it were allowed,” said Tybalt. “I would ask her to forsake her title among your kind and come to live with me. But alas, the shadows would never welcome her, and so I must set aside my crown for her sake, and come into your rotten, ruined world to live by her side. But never mistake the fact that she is the best of you. She is the fairest flower of Oberon’s garden, and she bleeds for your sake, who would call yourself her better, who has never earned that name.”

  “Why are you angry with me?” asked Maida, finally turning her eyes away from my efforts. “Because I allowed my Firstborn to convince me to send my children away? I’ve been angry with myself for doing that since I did it, and I dare you to sit in front of your own First and do any differently. Because I sit upon a throne? You know how much I gave up to hold that place and call it my own. You know what it cost me better than almost anyone, save maybe for your lady herself, who has forgiven me for more than you ever could. Or is it because my husband was direly injured and she took it upon herself to save him—a favor I did not ask her to bestow, although I would have, had I been there to intercede. Is it because you know that were our positions reversed, she would have been unable to save you, King of Cats, whose magic bends down other paths?”

  “Maman,” said Quentin. “Leave him alone.”

  “He came first to me,” said Maida, and looked at her son with painful longing. Painful because even though I knew he loved her, the look his face reflected back at her didn’t match the degree of affection I could see so clearly on her own, and I had been standing where she was now not all that long ago, watching my child choose another woman over me.

  But unlike Maida and Aethlin, I had never voluntarily sent Gillian away. I put the lid back on the jar and wiped my knife against my hip, further bloodying my already hopelessly-bloodied dress. “Here,” I said, walking across the room to offer it to her. “A mouthful should be enough for anything but a truly mortal wound.”

  “And if the wound is truly mortal?” she asked, gingerly taking the jar.

  “Drink until you choke,” I advised. I honestly had no idea how much of my blood she’d need to heal herself, but more was probably a good idea. “And make sure you warn your guard once you’ve vetted them. It’s my blood, so it’s going to be full of my memories, and you might get confused the same way the High King did.”

  “Confused?” asked Chelsea.

  “He thought he was October when he first woke up,” said Maida.

  Quentin laughed out loud. “I wish I could have seen that,” he said. “It would almost have made up for the rest of this.” He turned his back on his father and walked—stalked, really—over to the couch where the rest of the teenagers were sitting, compacting himself onto the arm of the couch with his feet resting on Dean’s lap. Dean didn’t object, just hooked an arm around Quentin’s knees and gave the High King a challenging look, like he was daring the literal regent of the entire continent to say anything about this seating arrangement.

  Dear Oberon, was I training an entire army of disrespectful teenagers who didn’t care who they offered insult to? I hoped not.

  “Chelsea, do you know when you’re supposed to go pick up the next wave of guests?” I asked, more sharply than I intended to.

  “Um . . .” Chelsea pulled out her phone, checking the screen. “Now looks about good. Boys, you wanna come with me?”

  In short order, the teens were trooping toward the door, taking Chelsea’s popcorn bucket with them, leaving me alone with Tybalt, Walther, Cassie, and the two Sollys monarchs. Quentin didn’t say goodbye to either of his parents. His mother looked stung though she didn’t say anything.

  “You can’t tell anyone else he’s here,” I said. “Even with Fiac in the room, you shouldn’t have cause to mention whether or not you know where the Crown Prince is, and if you let us get through the wedding and leave, there won’t be any questions about the validity of the line of succession.”

  “I know,” said Aethlin. He sounded utterly miserable. “Does my son actually hate me? Have I failed so completely as a father?”

  “I don’t think he hates you; I think he’s just a teenager and under a lot of stress and lashing out at someone it’s safe to be mad at. I also don’t think I’m the person you should be asking,” I said. “Take Cassie and Walther with you and start interviewing your staff. We need to know who we can trust, and I need to change my clothes before I go find the others and talk to Nessa.”

  “Nessa?” Maida didn’t bother to conceal her surprise. “Why do you need to talk to Nessa?”

  I glanced at Tybalt and smiled warmly. With everyone else taking care of their respective errands and nothing, for the moment, that demanded our immediate attention, it was time to do a little more toward keeping my word.

  “She still hasn’t shown us the venue, and I need to make sure it doesn’t smell like maple syrup.”

  Tybalt’s look of surprised delight was worth all the possible charges of insurrection in the world.

  fifteen

  The royal kitchens were, unsurprisingly, enormous and much more industrial than I’d expected them to be. Obviously, they couldn’t use steel in a knowe, but every surface was either polished marble or equally polished maple; it gleamed, with the warm, organic slickness that only ever comes to well-oiled and treated wood. It was like walking into the medieval equivalent of one of those Food Network cooking shows May sometimes puts on after midnight when she wants to unwind.

  One entire wall was ovens and stoves and open holes leading to oceans of flame that probably had some reasonable name like “pizza
ovens” or “big fucking baking place,” but looked to me a lot more like gateways into the human concept of Hell. You could burn in one of those open ovens for a long, long time. The opposite wall was all shelves of dry goods, joints of meat hanging on wooden hooks, and closed doors leading into an assortment of pantries. It was dizzyingly expansive, and not made less so by the veritable army of Hobs, Brownies, and Hobgoblins bustling around the sinks and stoves, all of them working at preparing the next meal for the high table.

  I wondered whether there was any chance we’d get to eat this one, or whether our time in Toronto was going to be one long chain of missed opportunities to sit down and stuff our faces like civilized people. Maybe the knowe understood that we really weren’t civilized people and was just trying to save us the embarrassment of me forgetting which fork was supposed to go in my salad versus which fork was supposed to go in the person I was trying to kill.

  One of the Hobs looked up from her work and smiled brilliantly at the sight of us—an emotion I was sure had to be at least somewhat dishonest, since even the Hobs of Shadowed Hills, who genuinely loved me, never looked that happy to have their territory invaded.

  Then, still smiling, she said, “Your friends are at the tables in the back,” and I saw the frozen edge of terror behind her smile. The Luidaeg must have introduced herself, then. That made things make a lot more sense. People with more of a concept of their own mortality than I and my friends tend to possess get a little weirded-out when Firstborn walk in and announce themselves just for the sake of a sandwich.

  And to be fair, we’re only that mellow about certain Firstborn. Three, to be precise, out of the six I’ve met so far, but Eira is unpleasant enough to make up for ten of her kinder siblings.

  “Cool,” I said. “Do we need an escort?”

  “No, no,” she said, shaking her head. Then, in case there had been any question about her nerves, she added, “Please. Be our guest.”

  I realized all the other kitchen staffers were watching us warily, like mice all too aware that a snake had just slithered into the room. I reached back to take Tybalt’s hand, answering her smile with one of my own. If mine had a few too many edges, well, hers was about as sincere as Evening complimenting a changeling’s hairstyle.

  “Appreciated,” I said. “Do you know where Kerry is?”

  Her smile turned even more strained, crumbling around the edges like a riverbank during a rainstorm. “She has commandeered one of the cold pantries, and demanded—quite imperiously, might I add—that we not allow you anywhere near it, or tell you precisely which one she’s in, as you are not allowed to see the cake before the wedding.”

  “Really?” I asked, amused, and glanced toward Tybalt. “Is this a weird pureblood thing? Because with humans, it’s the dress that the groom isn’t supposed to see ahead of time, not the cake and the bride. And since my groom designed my dress, I think we’ve already opted out of most of the traditions, and you told me I’d get to approve the cake.”

  “Far be it from me to override a Hob where hearthcraft is concerned,” he said, with no sign of remorse. If anything, he looked amused.

  “I don’t know if it’s a tradition where you come from, ma’am, but when a stranger commandeers part of my kitchen, I do whatever seems likely to keep them calm and not damaging things and might convince them to leave slightly sooner than they would be otherwise inclined to do.” The Hob shook her head. “The High Queen herself requested we allow the use of our space, and so we allow it, but permission is not the same as approval. Please. Your friends are waiting.”

  I knew a dismissal when I heard one, no matter how politely it was couched. “Gotcha,” I said, with a small mock salute. I grabbed Tybalt’s hand, pulling him along with me as I followed the Hob’s gesture toward the back of the banquet hall-sized room.

  “Have you seen the cake?” I asked, once I judged we were safely out of hearing range. “She’s not, like, sculpting an animated model of Godzilla out of fondant or something, right?”

  “Not as such,” he said, sounding a little shaken. “We discussed flavors and design once, and I showed her the early sketches of your gown, and then she said she would take care of everything and I shouldn’t worry my pretty little head about it and went away. Should I have pressed the matter further? I wasn’t concerned until this moment.”

  “No, I’m sure it’s fine.” It felt frivolous, to be concerned about my wedding cake in the middle of a possible coup, but for the first time, it wasn’t my responsibility to stabilize a kingdom alone. There were other people with the skills and authority to handle the current phase of the problem, and while they would probably call on me once we reached the “people getting stabbed and doing lots of bleeding” part of the proceedings, the fact of the matter is that I’m a blunt instrument. Sometimes a situation needs a scalpel.

  We kept walking toward the indicated back of the room, continuing for what seemed like an utterly unreasonable amount of time for us to still be in a kitchen. Almost every workstation was occupied, even down to a row of dishwashers scrubbing serving platters and rinsing out goblets. They all watched us suspiciously as we passed, but none of them asked where we were going or challenged our right to be there.

  I remembered the way Oleander de Merelands had been able to infiltrate Shadowed Hills, under the guise of a serving girl, and the Barrow Wight girl who had stood as servant of the former King and Queen of Highmountain. In both cases, they had been able to cause a remarkable amount of trouble by being beneath the notice of the people they were trying to hurt. I made a note to myself to remind Aethlin that interrogating the staff had to include all the staff, not just the ones he thought were important enough to matter.

  Everyone matters. If there’s one thing I’ve learned from how hard Evening and her ilk have tried to convince me I don’t matter, it’s that everyone matters. The alternative is a world where no one matters, and since I know that isn’t true, “everyone” is the only option we have left.

  Finally, after far more walking than was reasonable, we reached a corner and turned it to see a series of rough-hewn essentially picnic tables, probably set up for the use of the kitchen staff themselves when they took breaks from their work, or as a staging area for banquets in the process of being delivered. The tables were far from full, being extensive enough to easily seat at least fifty people, but as they held the rest of our party, plus Nessa, and a remarkable number of serving trays of cold cuts, cheese, and sliced fruit, I didn’t care.

  “Toby!” called Stacy, catching sight of us. Then she got a better look at me, and sighed. “Where in the world is your dress? You shouldn’t have taken that off without help.”

  “I do know how to work a zipper,” said Tybalt, in a primly offended tone.

  I laughed, patting him on the arm. “I had help, and my jeans seemed like a better choice if people were going to be stabbing me.” Which meant they were always a better choice for me, given how much time I spent bleeding.

  As a child, the idea of wearing comfortable, mundane clothing inside a royal knowe would have been unthinkable, not least because the false Queen had been so fond of transforming whatever I was wearing into something she liked better. Even when I showed up in gowns originally commissioned by my mother, intricate assemblies of rare fabric and layered enchantment, there had been a decent chance the false Queen would change them around me, asserting her control of the situation through the cut and color of my underpants. It was amazing how long I’d gone thinking that was normal, that monarchs were always careless and capricious with the lives of their subjects.

  And then I’d met Arden, who hadn’t been a queen for long, but who had learned the art at the feet of her father, who was widely regarded as the best king the Mists has ever had. Arden, who didn’t abuse her people for fun, and who wore jeans and sweatshirts when she wasn’t officially on-duty. Not that a queen was ever distinct from her throne, but sometimes she
was speaking officially as the crown and sometimes she was just Arden, amused and exasperated by her attempts to teach her staff about toaster pastries.

  If Arden could wear jeans, so could I.

  “I left it in the dressing room,” I said, before Stacy could get even more upset over its absence. “It’s beautiful, and I’m sure the staff Bannicks will be able to get the blood out. If they can’t, we just take it home with us, and Elliot will be delighted to take care of it.” I brought Elliot’s fiancée—now wife—back from the dead. He’d be happy to do my laundry for the rest of my life if I asked him to. Then I paused, blinking. “And what is that on your head?”

  She was wearing a headband of sorts, one festooned with red plastic roses, sequins, and tiny plastic pearls, with a short veil glued down in the middle. It was tacky. It was ridiculous. May beamed across the table at me.

  She didn’t have a headband, but she did have a gaudy button that said, in large, cheerful letters, “Here comes the bride!” “Do you like it?” she asked. “We got one of the Tuatha to open a gate to the local party supply store for us and got bachelorette party swag for all the decoys.”

  I sighed, not having the heart to tell her that after an assassination attempt on the High King, we probably weren’t going to need any decoy brides. When May gets the opportunity to decorate something, she tends to go all in.

  Stacy huffed, sitting back on the bench where she’d settled herself and folding her arms. Narrowing her eyes slightly, she asked, “Where’s my daughter?”

  “Cassie is with the High King and Queen, assisting in the interrogation of their private guard,” I said. She narrowed her eyes further, and I sighed. “She’s a Seer, Stace. I know you don’t want her to be, I know you don’t want her to be anything that attracts the attention of the nobility, but she’s my niece, she’s brilliant, and she’s a Seer. All the wanting in the world won’t change that.”

  “I don’t like this,” said Stacy. “Mitch is coming with the rest of the children. You’re not going to let them go off with the High King, are you?”