When Sorrows Come Read online

  He set me on my feet and took a step away, breathing heavily. I coughed, leaning forward and putting my hands on my knees as I remembered how to breathe. It wasn’t the easiest thing ever.

  “Well, wasn’t that better than a long drive with our merry band of fools?” I finally wheezed.

  Tybalt laughed. His voice was still thready and strained, but he already sounded better. He straightened, offering a smile as he pushed his hair out of his eyes. There were no ice crystals on him. Someday, I’ll figure out how the Shadow Roads manage to simply chill him, while they put me all the way through the deep freeze.

  “If it grants me more time alone with you before our lives descend into chaos, it can only be of benefit to me,” he said.

  I snorted and straightened in turn, walking over to him. “Liar,” I said.

  He raised an eyebrow. “And why am I a liar?”

  “As if there has ever been a time when our lives haven’t descended into chaos.” I offered him my hand. He took it, tucking it into the crook of his arm as he began leading me deeper into the wood.

  It was early enough that the evening dew hadn’t had time to settle, leaving the wooden paths constructed by the forestry department for tourist use dry and easy to walk along. I still focused on my steps as I thawed out, trying to concentrate on not taking a tumble and landing us both in one of the park’s many rushing streams or piles of poison oak. The signs reminding tourists to stay on the path aren’t only for the protection of the native plant life. Poison oak is one of those experiences I can absolutely do without, and healing fast does not protect me from topical allergens.

  There’s been less of it in Muir Woods since Arden came back, reopened her knowe, and turned the place into a hotspot of fae activity. There are no local Dryads yet—it takes time for their trees to sprout and grow—but Hamadryads, who have the ability to transfer their bond between home trees, have been moving into the redwoods, and Tylwyth Teg like our friend Walther have been encouraging the local plants to grow in ways more beneficial to the Court.

  I guess this could sound like interference with a protected biosphere, and technically it sort of is, but encouraging native ferns and flowers to grow at the expense of the poison oak isn’t the same as digging things up or poisoning their roots. Between the Hamadryads and the Tylwyth, I expected Muir Woods to be free of harmful plant life that wasn’t somehow necessary to the animal inhabitants within the next ten years. And good riddance.

  But right here, right now, it was still a good idea to be cautious. My eyesight isn’t as good as Tybalt’s, and so I let him lead the way, guiding us through the trees until globes of bobbing light began to appear in the branches overhead, glowing pale and lambent and filling the air with something very much like starlight. I hugged Tybalt’s arm closer and kept walking, smiling as the chime of ringing bells announced the approach of the park’s swarm of pixies.

  They swirled around us only a few seconds later, a living storm of Christmas lights, red and blue and green and pink and orange and yellow. They rang frantically the whole time, making sure we noticed them. As if there had been any chance we wouldn’t? I held out my hand, palm upward, and a few seconds later a pixie the color of a Blue Raspberry Jolly Rancher landed there, snapping her wings shut with a decisive chime.

  I smiled at the diminutive figure. Most people view pixies as pests, but thanks to my tendency to get into trouble, I’ve had the opportunity to know them a little better. They’re intelligent, family-oriented people who keep their tiny communities as safe and cohesive as they can in a world that’s built to a scale much too big for them. Poppy, the Luidaeg’s Aes Sidhe apprentice, was a pixie once, before she traded her innate magic to save Simon’s life.

  We don’t do anything simply in this family. Never have, probably never will.

  “Well met,” I said, and the pixie chimed answer, inclining her head in greeting. Pixie voices are too high-pitched for people my size to understand although they can understand us well enough when they want to. I think sometimes they pretend we’re too slow and our voices are too deep just to excuse ignoring the things we ask of them.

  This one was, thankfully, in a more genial mood. She lifted her head and smiled at me, the expression almost imperceptible on her tiny, glowing face.

  “Will you light our way to Arden?” I asked. The pixie nodded enthusiastically and launched herself back into the air, wings glowing even brighter than before. She rejoined the swarm, and they all swirled around us like a glittering windstorm before unwinding into a gleaming ribbon that pointed the way toward the knowe.

  Tybalt smiled at me fondly. “I remember finding you arguing drunkenly with one of their cousins over . . . you know, I don’t think I ever found out exactly what you were arguing over. The sort of thing which seems of immense importance to the inebriated, no doubt.”

  I sighed. “I miss being able to get drunk when I wanted to.”

  “I know, little fish. I also know that I would prefer you alive and sober to drunken and dead, and the very thing which prevents your drinking will keep your other choices from stealing you away from me like a thief in the midday sun.” He put his hand over mine, squeezing my fingers briefly. “To every cloud, a silver lining; to every curtain call, an encore.”

  “Sometimes your optimism confuses the hell out of me,” I said. “With everything you’ve been through, I’d expect a bit more bitterness.”

  Tybalt laughed. “I spent enough time very bitter indeed to understand that clinging to joy when I find it is the most essential thing in the world. Part of my coming to understand that is your fault, October. I realized quickly that if I dragged my feet with you, I would wind up weeping at your grave, and I have better things to do with my time.”

  I rolled my eyes. “It’s a good thing you weren’t born in the modern era. You would be the most obnoxious theater kid ever to get completely obsessed with whatever’s hot on Broadway right now. And there’s nothing sadder than a fae theater kid dreaming of Broadway lights.” There’s iron in the groundwater in the Kingdom of Oak and Ash. That’s not a new thing, and the fae were able to scratch out a living there for a long while, but nothing lasts forever, even in Faerie, and as humanity built their great towers higher and higher, and the old cannonballs in the harbor rusted and polluted the shore more and more, it became obvious that anyone with an iron allergy needed to get out of there.

  There are no purebloods or even strong changelings left in New York. Haven’t been since before I was born. The ones who remain are the ones weak enough to handle iron and thrive in its presence, and those who don’t want anything to do with Faerie.

  I used to dream of running away to New York, back before I met Cliff and got knighted. After that, I dreamt of proving myself to Faerie, of earning the right to live a semi-human life and raise my children in peace.

  I failed that time. I wasn’t going to fail again.

  Following the pixies had carried us through the main valley and up the side of a hill, where hikers and tourists who refused to stay on the path had aided erosion and the questing roots of the local trees in creating a ladder of sorts to the top of the rise. Those same hikers and disobedient tourists had doubtless been finding themselves less and less inclined to wander in recent days, repelled from the path they had helped to create by the anti-human charms Arden and her court were adroitly weaving through the trees. I could hear them whispering, if only distantly. They knew, in their unthinking way, that I was allowed to be here.

  I felt a little bad about the fact that reawakening the knowe in Muir Woods was taking a part of a national forest away from the people who came to admire its beauty. Only a little bit, though. The knowe pre-dated the declaration of Muir Woods as protected territory; without fae magic making the loggers and gold-miners a little bit uncomfortable among the trees, they might have kept right on cutting until there was nothing left of the ancient redwoods but the memories o
f the people who’d been here before the Europeans came.

  Maybe it’s hypocritical of me, as someone descended from both European humans and fae, but I’m pretty sure coming to this continent and declaring it our “new world” was the worst thing any of us has ever been a participant in. And I sometimes wonder whether Oberon locking the fae out of the deeper realms and forcing us to jockey for space on Earth and in the Summerlands, after we’d been so long accustomed to infinite room to roam, didn’t have something to do with the human push toward exploration. The fae got here first, following ocean tides and rumors, and the humans who’d been living with our presence for centuries came after us.

  And we’re here now; the damage is done. If we all decamped back to Europe tomorrow, if that were even possible, it wouldn’t put things back the way they were before we crossed the ocean. The forest existed before the knowe; the park, with its endless stream of carefully lured tourists, did not. If Arden could protect the wildness that remained even a little bit with her charms, let her.

  The knowe doors were standing open when we followed the pixies over the rise at the top of the hill, propped wide to show the impossible hall that extended from the middle of a towering redwood tree. Faerie’s relationship to physics is often casual at best, and sometimes it consists of Faerie promising to call when physics knows it never will. A slender Glastig woman in royal livery stood to one side of the doors, leaning on her polearm perhaps slightly more than was strictly appropriate for someone who was supposedly on duty.

  In contrast, the Tuatha de Dannan man across from her was standing at a level of attention that would have impressed even Etienne, normally the most rule-abiding person I know. This man had dark hair that held highlights of improbable blackberry purple, and he wore the royal livery like he’d never voluntarily worn anything else in his life, pride and contentment radiating quietly off of him.

  Neither of them seemed to notice our approach, the woman being preoccupied with watching the pixies, the man staring appropriately and fixedly ahead on a straight line. That’s why I’ve always hated guard duty. We could make it all the way to doors of the knowe before they knew they weren’t alone.

  Or we could have if I hadn’t immediately stepped on a twig, snapping it beneath my foot with a soft cracking sound. It wasn’t loud, as such things went. In the silence of the forest, it was a gunshot, and the reaction of the two sentries was immediate.

  The woman, Lowri, shifted positions without straightening as she turned to face us and smiled, her face framed by the shaggy locks of her hair and the curving rise of her horns. Glastig are sort of like Satyrs, only they got less of the sturdy solidity of goats, and more of the finicky animal bits. They’re also, technically, water fae—in the old days, they supposedly hid their cloven hooves under long skirts and sawed their horns off close to their skulls so they could lure innocent people into ponds and drown them.

  Before I learned how much time and energy Eira and her siblings had dedicated to demonizing the children of Maeve, I would have believed a legend like that without question. Now I had to wonder how many people the Glastig actually drowned, and how many had been dumped on the riverbank for someone to find and draw the logical conclusions about. It’s hard to say, but there aren’t many Glastig left. Their numbers got thinned before the dawn of the modern era, and the ones who are left are usually like Lowri, selling their services to any noble court that will offer them a measure of protection.

  I’d first met her in the service of the false Queen of the Mists, the woman who’d taken Arden’s crown and rightful place on the throne after the death of our last King, Gilad Windermere. Unlike most of the false Queen’s followers, Lowri had been doing it for protection and place, not because she believed any of the vile things that woman said about changelings and the value of purebloods in our society. And when it became clear that the Queen she served was no true monarch, Lowri had been happy to join our ramshackle revolution and throw her lot in behind the true heir.

  I liked her a lot. She was nice to talk to, told absolutely filthy jokes, and didn’t take either herself or her job too seriously, although she was devoted to the monarchy. Which probably explained why she was on duty with the Crown Prince in the Mists, Nolan Windermere.

  Nolan turned more slowly than she did, but his response was the same—a smile—although in his case, he did it without abandoning his rigidly proper posture. “My darling sister told me you’d be coming tonight,” he said. “I suppose congratulations are in order, and I hope His Majesty won’t take offense if I offer them first to Sir Daye?”

  “Not at all,” said Tybalt.

  Older purebloods can seem like travelers stranded out of time to people as young as I am: they carry the memories and mannerisms of decades, even centuries, before I was born. In Nolan’s case, that impression is accurate and very literal. He was elf-shot in the 1930s and spent roughly eighty years asleep before his sister arranged to have him woken before his hundred years were up. Maybe those last twenty years wouldn’t have made much of a difference to someone who’d already slept through the creation of the Internet, the dawn of cellphones, and the entire computer revolution, but Arden had wanted her brother back, and as Queen in the Mists, she’d had the resources to make it happen. So she did.

  Nolan has been adjusting slowly to this strange new century. Arden’s been helping as much as she can, and her chatelaine, my honorary niece, Cassandra, has been doing her part. Cassie is a changeling, a grad student, and about as modern as they come. I’d be hard pressed to think of anyone better-suited to helping someone adapt to living in the present day.

  When he offered me first congratulation, it wasn’t to slight Tybalt. It was to reflect the etiquette as he had learned it, where the woman, if there was one, was the first to receive appreciation of her upcoming marriage. We confused the issue a bit, what with Tybalt being a King and me being a Knight rather than a Lady, but he was trying.

  “In that case.” Nolan bowed to me, so deeply it looked as if his forehead brushed his knees. “Congratulations on the occasion of your marriage, and may the blessings piled upon your house be so vast the roof is in danger of collapse before you can get the wedding party to safety.”

  I blinked. Then I looked to Lowri, who was barely managing to cover her expression of delighted amusement, and then to Tybalt, who just seemed pleased. Ah. So this was another pureblood thing, then, and not something I needed to worry about.

  “Cool,” I said. “And like, if the roof does fall in, we’ll be sure to have a roofer on standby.”

  There was a long pause, during which I began to worry I had said something wrong or violated some ancient code of etiquette I lacked the context to understand. Then Nolan burst out laughing, loud and genuine, and I relaxed.

  “You’re marrying a spitfire, and I hope you’ll enjoy her as much as both of you deserve,” he said, clapping Tybalt hard on the shoulder. Tybalt bore the impact stoically, even looking somewhat pleased. I realized this might be the most positive contact he’d ever had with an acknowledged Crown Prince of the Divided Courts—Quentin didn’t count. Even before I’d broken him, he’d been under blind fosterage and thus had no title to speak of. Thankfully.

  I have no idea what the process of telling someone you have to refer to by title to wash the dishes looks like, and I honestly don’t want to know.

  Tybalt smiled. “I can promise you, I intend to do precisely that,” he said, and clapped Nolan on the shoulder in turn.

  That appeared to complete whatever archaic ritual of manly bonding they were playing out. Nolan straightened, almost but not quite returning to his ramrod stance, and said in a plummy, formal tone, “I congratulate you on the occasion of your marriage, Your Majesty, and for all that follows. May the Three who made us all bless your bridal bed with the rarest of rewards, and may your nights be fruitful and long.”

  “As you say,” said Tybalt, and offered Nolan a shall
ow, almost shocking bow before starting for the open door. I blinked, then scurried after him.

  Normally, I’m the one who goes striding through every open door without stopping to explain what I’m trying to accomplish, although I’m usually doing it bloody and heavily armed. This time, I was just trying to avoid mortally offending anyone before we even made it out of our home kingdom.

  “Did the Crown Prince just say he hopes you get me pregnant?” I asked in a low voice. The knowe’s entrance hall was long, paneled with carved wood panels that showed important moments in the kingdom’s history. They had a tendency to change based on what was happening around them—that’s one of the nice, if occasionally frustrating, things about knowes. They’re alive, even if not everyone believes that, and at least somewhat self-aware, and that means that as long as they have the resources to do it, they can redecorate on a whim. Sometimes it’s charming.

  Other times, like tonight, it’s an excuse to show me every major wedding, as judged by a building, ever to have happened in the kingdom. One nice thing about it: my acts of bone-stupid heroism featured less heavily than they usually did.

  “It is a traditional blessing for a pureblood’s wedding,” said Tybalt. “You should expect far more interest in the condition of your womb and its potential contents than you are accustomed to in the next several days.”

  “No one asked Dianda about her womb,” I grumbled.

  “Ah, but when the Duchess Lorden took a second husband, she had already been a hundred years with her first, and borne him two sons, both fine and strong and suitable in the eyes of the land,” said Tybalt. “Further, her wedding was something of a surprise to all assembled and should not form your basis for comparison to our own. If we had declared our intent to wed immediately on the heels of a divorce, and had the ceremony spontaneously performed by one of the Firstborn, we would have been permitted to skip over a great deal of the pomp and ceremony which is likely to attend us.”