When Sorrows Come Page 8

  “You say ‘likely’ as if you didn’t arrange the whole thing,” I said. Tybalt shrugged but didn’t contradict me. “And what, are Firstborn like Unitarian ministers? They’re allowed to just say ‘guess you’re married now’ and then you are?”

  “That’s a very crass way of putting it but, essentially, yes,” said Tybalt.

  I stared at him. “The Luidaeg has been right here this whole time,” I said. “Why do we have to go to Toronto? All we had to do was tell her we wanted to be married and we could have been. Ages ago!”

  “She knew of our engagement and did not volunteer. Does that not tell you something of the etiquette in play here? And I know she has informed you of the import of this occasion. She would no more have interfered with something that might improve the lot of her own descendants than she would have voluntarily moved away from the sea. In our case, the pomp and circumstance is the point.” Tybalt sighed and gave me a pained look. “As to why we must go to Toronto, we must go because we agreed to do so. To stand aside now would be to offer grave insult to the monarchy which dictates so much of your life, and always will. Moreover, as I am about to enter politically unusual waters—not uncharted, as Kings and Queens have stepped aside before, myself included—but strange, there will be some argument to be made that they have command over my actions as well once Raj takes the throne.”

  I knew Raj would never be comfortable telling the man who had raised him as uncle and regent what to do, but I hadn’t considered that exiling himself from the Court of Cats could potentially put Tybalt under the control of the Divided Courts. I blinked, looking at the wood-paneled wall. We were walking past the carving depicting the marriage of Sylvester and Luna Torquill, him tall and proud, her wrapped in her stolen Kitsune skin and draped in roses. Seeing her like that made my eyes sting with the threat of tears I knew I wouldn’t shed. I missed the Luna I’d grown up with, the one who loved me.

  That Luna wasn’t dead because she had never really existed at all. But she was gone, and she wasn’t coming back.

  “You’re giving up so much more than I am,” I said softly. “I know you’re worried about offending the High King, but I can make it right with him if I have to. Are you sure you want to do this?” As the words left my mouth, I was briefly gripped with the terrible fear that Tybalt would suddenly agree with me and declare our marriage a bad idea, leaving me alone in the middle of the hall. And then High King Sollys really would have good reason to be mad at me, since his son and heir would never have his real face returned to him, and I would have to go back to the house by myself. It was an impossible, incredibly painful thought, and I had no one else to blame for it.

  Thankfully for my nerves, Tybalt only laughed, low and soft, and put his hand over mine where it rested on his arm, squeezing lightly. “You don’t escape me so easily, and if anyone’s having regrets about this union, I assure you, I am not the one. Calm your concerns, little fish, and we’ll be on our way soon enough.”

  We stopped outside the doors to Arden’s receiving room. They were unattended, maybe because there were guards at the gate. We still hesitated a moment before I shrugged and knocked, the sound echoing through the hall. That was an effect of both acoustics and a clever amplification spell built into the wood itself. One more advantage to big old knowes: they’re not only self-aware, but they’ve also had time for the people who care for them to layer and refine the magic that makes them good homes. It’s a symbiotic relationship. They like to be lived in, and the people who live in them like to be comfortable.

  There was a long enough pause to make me wonder whether the absence of guards was because Arden was elsewhere in the knowe when a voice shouted, “Come on in!”

  So we did.

  Having a queen who spent decades hiding in the human world, hired a changeling as her chatelaine, and hired a Cu Sidhe equally familiar with and comfortable in the human world as her seneschal means that in some ways, Arden runs a more casual court than most. We entered the receiving room to find her sprawled across her throne like it was a coffee shop easy chair, dressed in jeans and a well-worn green hoodie, flanked on the dais by two familiar figures. One of them was expected. The other was not.

  We were in the presence of a queen, however informal she was being. That was her choice, and it shouldn’t impact ours in the slightest. That didn’t stop me from blurting, “Walther, what are you doing here?”

  Walther Davies, alchemist and chemistry professor and once potential heir to the throne of the Kingdom of Silences, lifted his head and smiled, languid and smug as the cat who got the canary. And I’m marrying a cat. I know that expression pretty damn well.

  “Coming to your wedding as the escort of Miss Cassandra Brown,” he said, indicating Arden’s chatelaine with a lazy wave of his hand. “If I honestly believed you had been in any way involved with sending out the wedding invitations, this is where I’d be offended at you for not thinking I ranked my own.”

  “And this is where I would remind you that bringing our own alchemist could be seen as an insult to the High Throne,” said Tybalt mildly. “Be glad we embraced the modern concept of the ‘plus one.’ When I was young, no one who hadn’t been thoroughly vetted and approved would have even been considered to be allowed within a hundred feet of a royal wedding, much less the disowned scion of a royal house.”

  Walther snorted. “I wasn’t disowned, please. I forsook my claim to the throne. I offer about as much threat to the Sollys line as Cassandra does.”

  I made a noncommittal humming sound. High Queen Maida was born a changeling, daughter of a fae man and a human woman. She gave up her mortality in order to marry Crown Prince Aethlin, and that had eventually placed her at the head of a continent. No small trick, for someone mortal-born, and not something commonly known. But it made Walther’s statement funnier than he probably intended it to be.

  “Regardless, the High Queen herself agreed to the practice of including ‘plus one’ on the invitations,” said Tybalt. “Bringing you ourselves would have been an offense. Bringing you as Cassandra’s escort avoids insult, puts you close enough to call upon if the need arises, and is the tactically sensible choice.”

  “He’s right, you know,” said Arden. “I haven’t been doing this as long as he has, or as long as the Sollys family has, and even I would blink if a visiting dignitary, invited or not, wanted to bring their own alchemist.”

  “You sent me to Silences,” said Walther.

  “Because you used to live there,” said Arden. “That connection made your presence logical. Sending you literally anywhere else could be construed as an insult, and I’m not up for insulting random monarchs this week.”

  She snapped her fingers. The smell of redwood sap and blackberry flowers rose around her, along with a slight sparkle in the air, and she was gone, leaving her throne empty.

  That’s a trick not all Tuatha de Dannan can pull off. Most of the time, they use their teleportation magic to open doorways they can step through or allow other people to use. What Arden had just done was effectively open a doorway beneath herself to fall through, without doing any of the usual hand gestures or being able to see her destination. I raised an eyebrow, quietly impressed.

  It was nice to have a queen who didn’t actively want me dead. It was even nicer to see her starting to relax and blossom into the person she should have been able to be all along. I would never have tried to take her years in the human world away from her—they were too vital a piece of her identity, and they mattered—but I did enjoy seeing her become as casual about her magic as the rest of the nobles I’d known.

  The smell of redwood sap wafted from behind us. I turned, and there was Arden, now wearing a floor-length blue velvet dress that hugged her figure as it plummeted toward her feet, the color calling the purple highlights to the surface of her hair. I nodded approvingly.

  “When’d you learn the quick-change trick?” I asked. “Y
ou have an army of Hobs behind a screen somewhere?”

  “Hush,” she said. “It’s an illusion, but you’re not supposed to comment on it. I hope you’ll be more polite while you’re in Toronto.”

  “Doubtful,” I said brightly.

  “I wish I could come,” she said. “I appreciated the invitation, even if we all knew I wouldn’t be able to use it.”

  “It was the polite thing to do,” said Tybalt gravely. I actually appreciated his reminding people that he’d been the one to put the guest list together. It might mean he got credit for things like sending Arden an invite—but he deserved that credit, as he’d done it, and I might well have gone “she can’t attend, why make her sad by reminding her of that fact?” and just not sent the invitation at all. More, it meant people would view the more questionable guests, like the Luidaeg and the Crown Prince in the Mists, through the lens of a King of Cats, not the lens of a known king-breaker. It was better for everyone this way.

  Honestly, it was.

  Arden clapped her hands together like a classroom monitor trying to clear away chalk dust. “All right, where’s the rest of your band of freaks and weirdoes? I’m ready to get this show on the road.”

  “Given traffic, probably halfway across the Golden Gate Bridge,” I said. At her blink, I explained, “We had more people than we had comfortable room for in the car, so they’re all riding with Danny, while Tybalt and I took the Shadow Roads. It’ll probably be another twenty minutes before they get here.”

  “. . . huh,” she said, after a moment’s pause. “You know, I’ve been locked up in this knowe long enough to forget traffic is a real thing, and not just something they invented for the movies to add dramatic tension to a moment that otherwise wouldn’t have any. Twenty minutes, you say?”

  “Plus however long it takes them to walk across the woods,” I said.

  “Right, right. Cassandra?”

  “Yes, Your Highness?”

  Arden made a face but didn’t say anything. A knowe has to reach a certain size before a proper chatelaine is needed—Shadowed Hills doesn’t have one, and I’m not sure the false Queen ever bothered—so when Cassandra took the job, there’d been no one standing ready to train her in what it entailed. But the Brown kids have always been resourceful, and she’d found a way to get her training, even if it was just from old books and talking to people like Etienne. She knew every rule and loophole of her position, including when it was appropriate to be irreverent and when it wasn’t. Clearly, this was one of the “wasn’t appropriate” moments.

  “Please go to the gates and ask my brother to remove himself to the parking area,” said Arden. “The rest of our guests will be arriving soon and should be allowed to skip the walk.”

  “Yes, Highness.” Cassandra bounced to her feet, pausing only long enough to press a kiss to Walther’s temple, then trotted toward the door, moving fast and purposefully.

  Walther watched her go, not bothering to pretend he wasn’t studying the way her butt moved in her reasonably tight trousers. When he realized I was watching, he shrugged, offering me a wry smile. I shook my head.

  It doesn’t come up as often as it used to, thankfully, but I spent fourteen years transformed into a koi fish and abandoned in the ponds at the Japanese Tea Garden in Golden Gate Park. That was the end of my attempt to play faerie bride and live a happy life in the mortal world; I had gone on a simple reconnaissance mission, tracking Simon Torquill in an effort to find out whether he’d been involved in the disappearances of Luna and Rayseline, and had found myself lost to the world for more than a decade. During that time, my own child had gone from a toddler who thought I hung the moon and stars to a teenager who believed I’d willingly abandoned her in order to run off and live a life of carefree childlessness.

  Gillian hadn’t been the only kid I abandoned, just the only one who actually belonged with me. Cassandra had been almost five years old when I went into the pond, and part of me still had trouble accepting her as a grown adult who had the absolute right to be romantically interested in my friends. Faerie makes age gaps complicated. When you’re going to have forever, do you really care if one partner is twenty and the other is two hundred? I know that. I also know the age difference between me and Tybalt is much greater than the one between her and Walther, who’s roughly my age. And it doesn’t always help.

  Other things that don’t help: Stacy, my best friend since childhood, and Cassandra’s mother, doesn’t approve of her dating anyone at all, age-appropriate or no. According to Cassie, Stacy doesn’t want any of her kids dating, which feels a little weird to me, since Cassandra, Karen, and Andrew are all old enough by human standards to be going out with other kids. Karen and Andrew are probably still a little young for anything more than holding hands and asking for rides to the movies, but there’s no good reason their mother should react so negatively to the very idea.

  I looked around. “Where’s Madden?”

  “I gave him the night off,” said Arden. I blinked at her. She shrugged. “He wasn’t invited to the wedding, and his boyfriend has been reminding him recently that working for a queen doesn’t mean neglecting his home life.”

  “You know, that’s the first thing I’ve heard either of you say to imply that Madden’s boyfriend is fae.” Madden is Cu Sidhe, one of the faerie dogs as Tybalt is one of the faerie cats, and he works at a café not far from the house, keeping roughly diurnal hours for the sake of the job that pays his bills, all so he can serve in the Queen’s Court all night.

  Arden pays her staff, having a better understanding of the economics of the modern world than most purebloods, thanks to having lived in it for such a long time, but Madden, like most Cu Sidhe, is loyal to a fault. He’ll stay at that café until it closes or burns to the ground, whichever comes first.

  “He’s not,” said Arden, and laughed at the expression on my face. “They’re gay men living in the Castro District. Madden isn’t breaking any rules when he tells Charles he works for a queen. Chuck just assumes my queenship is a little more socially granted and involves more pancake makeup.”

  Keeping Faerie secret from humanity is sometimes straightforward and sometimes really, really weird. I blinked several times before shaking my head and turning my attention to Walther.

  “Were things this strange in Silences?” I asked.

  He laughed. “I don’t really know,” he said. “I was still a princess when I was there, and they kept me and my sister pretty well insulated from the places where things got really weird.”

  I nodded. “Right.”

  Walther was never a girl, for all that people looked at him and assumed he was; he knew he was a boy from the time he was old enough to understand there was a difference between the two categories and that he was supposed to fall into the one most people didn’t put him under. He’d still been a princess, with the rules and restrictions assigned to the role by our often archaic, surprisingly functional society. There was a reason he’d been so willing to repudiate his claim to the throne, rather than insisting on his rights as an exiled member of a fallen royal family, and a further reason he hadn’t gone back to Silences when his parents retook the throne. He was happy here, with the people who loved him and did our best to understand him and had never once insisted he wear a fancy dress with lace frills to catch the eye of a neighboring prince.

  “I took the advance crew through their portal about two hours ago,” said Arden, attention on Tybalt. “By the time you get to Toronto, Stacy will have October’s toilette laid out and ready for whatever’s needed, and Kerry will be most of the way to finishing the cake.”

  “How many busloads of people are we sending to Canada?” I asked.

  “Only three,” said Tybalt, sounding slightly abashed. “The first, ours, and those who come later. It seemed more efficient to do it in multiple passes.”

  “ ‘More efficient’ is a phrase we use for car
repairs and feeding hungry teenagers, not for getting guests to our wedding,” I said.

  “Too late now,” he replied.

  I made a scoffing sound and turned to Walther, silently pleading for backup. He shook his head instead, brushing his hands against his linen trousers.

  “Sorry, Toby, but you abdicated this throne, you don’t get to complain when the people you gave it to don’t do things exactly the way you would have done them.” He grinned as he walked over to us. “It’d be like me going back to Silences and complaining about the way Marlis is handling her duties as a princess of the court. It was my circus until I sold my shares, and now they’re not my monkeys anymore.”

  “I hate you,” I informed him.

  “There’s everybody’s favorite hero of the realm.” He kept smiling, intensely white teeth managing to make his eyes seem even more unrealistically blue. Being an alchemist meant he’d never needed to worry about whether his teeth were white enough. The eyes, in contrast, were all natural.

  Many of the more similar types of fae can be distinguished by their eyes. Tylwyth Teg have eyes so blue they offend the sky, usually paired to very blonde hair. Before his hair darkened, Quentin could have passed as Tylwyth with a little extra illusion to brighten his irises. It was sort of a miracle that Walther didn’t have more issues with his students falling in love with him—or maybe he did, and he just had ethics to balance the issues out. The only person I’d ever known him to be romantically involved with was Cassie, and she wasn’t a chemistry major, keeping her safely out of his classes.

  Think of the devil: Cassie came trotting back, surrounded by a fresh swirl of pixies. “Nolan is heading to the parking area to watch for your party,” she informed me. “Lowri says she doesn’t need backup. She can watch the door alone since, quote, ‘Her Majesty has seen fit to invite all the troublemakers over at the same time, so there’s no one left to ruin my night.’ She was laughing when she said it, so I don’t think it was intended as treason, but I can go order her to arrest herself, if you’d like.”