When Sorrows Come Page 9

  “No, no, that’s fine,” said Arden, with an airy wave of her hand. “She’s allowed to be a little disrespectful, as long as she’s not doing it to my face. Queens who quash petty rebellion find themselves with much bigger problems on their hands.”

  “I should never have given you those etiquette books,” said Cassandra, moving to stand next to Walther, who slid an arm around her shoulders.

  Of all the things I would never have imagined when I was younger, standing with the Queen in the Mists, joking about the way the Kingdom was run, and not worrying that I was going to be arrested on trumped-up charges or have my clothing transformed into something I didn’t want to wear would have been toward the top of the list. I had never realized how stressful it was to have my monarch despise me until the weight of it had been taken away.

  I was contemplating the feeling when a glowing circle appeared in the air, accompanied by the scent of redwood needles and blackberry brandy, and our people started coming through. Quentin was first, still dragging my bags along with him, followed by May and Jazz, then Raj and Dean, and finally the Luidaeg and a nondescript man with short, goatish horns who could probably have passed for an ordinary Glastig.

  I blinked. Normally, Oberon had antlers that would have put a stag to shame, only somewhat scaled down to account for the fact that he had a human’s neck and cervical damage is not befitting for a King of Faerie. Normally, he was beautiful—terrible and forgettable in equal measure, a predator who drew and rejected the eye at the same time, like a glorious contradiction born to wear the crown. Now, he looked almost . . . normal. Almost like Officer Thornton, the human man he’d seemed to be until I told him that I was bringing him home and broke the ancient geas he had lain upon himself when he left us.

  Still not sure how I feel about that. Both the fact that he had left us voluntarily—not compelled, like either of his queens—and the fact that I had been the one to bring him back, which was apparently the first step in some stupid-ass prophecy about my mother’s descendants. My grandmother had been responsible for breaking Maeve’s last Ride and seeing her lost to Faerie for five hundred years, if not forever, and now it was going to be my job to find her and bring her back. Bully for me.

  I would have been less grumpy if the implication hadn’t been that I was also going to be recovering Titania. Given my experiences with Eira, supposedly her favorite child, I was pretty sure she and I weren’t going to get along, and I was tired of my enemies getting harder to punch as I got better at doing my job. Give me someone who’s not immortal and infinitely powerful, please. As a treat.

  Tybalt reached over and took my hand in his, squeezing tightly, before stepping forward. I followed. “Your Highness,” he said to Arden, and offered her a shallow bow. “You have done our unworthy party a great kindness by offering to begin our journey. We are ready to depart.”

  He didn’t thank her. Thanks are verboten in Faerie, basically taboo save under very narrow, very specific circumstances. Arden smiled understanding, and even as Nolan stepped through his portal and allowed it to collapse behind him, she turned away from us and lifted her hands, sketching a much wider gateway in the air. It glittered and sparked, and Cassandra watched raptly, apparently able to see something in the process that wasn’t visible even to me.

  A portal opened, wider than a door and taller than Danny, who hadn’t come through from the parking lot. I couldn’t blame him for not wanting to spend any more time in our company after being crammed into the car with this motley bunch of fools, and I didn’t know if he’d even been invited to the wedding.

  This was all very disorienting, and that was before the portal clarified into a splash of midnight sky spangled with diamond-bright stars, and a group of strangers standing on a brick promenade. “I can only hold this for a few minutes, so don’t dawdle,” said Arden, a touch of strain in her voice.

  “Oh, we’re quite done with dawdling,” said Tybalt, and stepped through, pulling me with him.

  The others followed, and we were off.

  five

  “October!”

  Kerry’s squeal was high, shrill, and almost jarring in this unfamiliar setting. It had taken us eight jumps, including one performed by Chelsea, who had joined us in Highmountain—her portal had exhausted her but carried us nearly two thousand miles in a single step—and now we were finally in Toronto, standing in the arrival hall of the royal knowe of the Westlands. Like Arden’s knowe in Muir Woods, it had no name, because it didn’t need one; when people said they were going to Court, they didn’t have to specify. Not when they were this close to the royal knowe.

  The space was familiar and strange at the same time. We had stepped through the final portal in upstate New York, and emerged into a palatial, echoing room with walls of polished curly maple, inlaid with panels shaped from the largest amethyst geodes I had ever seen, their raw crystal surfaces immaculate and glittering in the light that radiated from their cores before spreading to cover and obscure the ceiling. It felt simultaneously like we were standing in a forest and in a place that had been shaped by hand. The floor was polished amethyst, more smoothed than the crystals of the walls, but still clearly natural.

  The room was big enough to host a ball, and the fact that they were using it for new arrivals implied things about the rest of the knowe that made me faintly uncomfortable. I looked to Quentin. He was staring raptly at the nearest geode, a look of heartbreaking youth and nostalgia on his face, and in that moment, I wanted nothing more than to gather him in my arms and tell him it was all going to be all right.

  “Penny and I used to play floor hockey in here,” he said, voice low enough not to carry. “In our socks, with an orange ball. I haven’t thought about that orange ball in years . . .”

  I put a hand on his shoulder. “It’s always hard when you come home after a long time away.”

  It was going to be even harder for him, since he was coming home looking like a complete stranger, and he wouldn’t be able to admit who he was to anyone without potentially getting both of us in serious trouble. “Allowed the Crown Prince to sell his face to the sea witch,” not exactly in the big book of good knightly behavior.

  Footsteps approached from the far side of the room, which was a neat trick, as there were no visible doors. They drew closer, and two of the vast wood panels peeled apart and swung seamlessly inward, revealing themselves to have been perfectly carved into the shape of two interlocking maple trees, complete with delicately pronged leaves. I swallowed several snarky comments about leaning too hard into the aesthetic. I was already insulting the crown by showing up in their knowe in jeans and a sweatshirt, with all my luggage. I didn’t need to insult them out loud.

  A woman walked through the opening, and the paneled trees swung shut again behind her. Even knowing they were there, they still vanished completely once they were closed. Maybe they only actually existed when they were open.

  The woman drew closer, and I found myself looking away from her, unable to force my eyes to focus on her face, which was so impossibly lovely that it made me feel bad about myself even before I had taken in its details. How could I expect Tybalt to marry me when she existed? It didn’t even matter if she was available. She was proof that women could be so infinitely more than I was that she made me extraneous to any needs my lover could possibly have had.

  Describing her is literally beyond my capacity because she was too beautiful, and it crossed a line into the kind of beauty the mind is not fully meant to comprehend. Her skin was a few shades darker than the polished maple around her; her hair was a dark, glacial blue, almost as if it had somehow been scooped from some body of living water, and it fell to her waist in a cascade of curls, unbound and effortless. Her ears were pointed, and her fingers were long, and that was where my eyes refused to sully her any further with their attention, turning resolutely and irresistibly away.

  “Nessa,” murmured Quentin, voice low
, intended for my ears only. “She’s my father’s seneschal, and one of the Gwragedd Annwn.”

  A lake maiden? That explained the beauty. Gwragedd Annwn are meant to be seen at a distance great enough to blunt the impact of their appearance, which can be literally deadly if they’re not careful. Indeed, as she drew closer, Nessa wove her fingers through the air the way I always did when I was casting a human illusion and pulled a veil of nothingness down over herself. There was a brief sensation, like a soap bubble being popped, and I was suddenly able to look at her without the almost irresistible urge to look away.

  To be honest, I had always expected the Gwragedd Annwn to be . . . more. That degree of aversion could come from particularly pretty Daoine Sidhe when they went without any masks at all. I’ll get better when I give up the last of my humanity, but for now, occasionally being unable to look at someone seems like a small price to pay.

  She was still beautiful, and her hair was still impossibly blue, but she didn’t hurt my heart by existing anymore. She had blunted herself somehow, making herself comprehensible in the same way Oberon made himself ordinary, not an illusion so much as it was a reduction, a necessary lessening to fit within the limitations of this world.

  “Hello,” she said, and her accent was pure Nova Scotian, thick as maple frosting and just as delicious. “Welcome to the seat of the Westlands. We’ve been expecting you. In the name of His Royal Majesty, High King Aethlin Sollys, and his honored consort, High Queen Maida Sollys, it is my honor to extend to you the hospitality of this house for the customary seven days as we host and house your nuptials.”

  Her gaze fell on the Luidaeg, drawn there by whatever force guides terrible mistakes and misassumptions. She smiled, and it was a lovely thing, despite the illusion that brought her down to the level of the rest of us. “Sir Daye, I presume?”

  Quentin stiffened beside me, his body going rigid under my hand. So something about that greeting—casual and friendly as it was—didn’t sit right with him. Well, it didn’t sit right with me either, mostly because I didn’t feel like watching the Luidaeg commit murder in the royal knowe of the Westlands.

  “What was your first clue, the fact that I’m wearing electrical tape in my hair like some sort of fashion-deficient mortal teenager, or the absence of a bra?” The Luidaeg sounded as startled as I felt.

  Nessa kept smiling in the face of such obvious rudeness, her gaze flickering to Oberon, who loomed next to the Luidaeg like some sort of marble obelisk doing a poor job of pretending to be a fae man of indeterminate bloodline, the horns on his forehead implying that he was probably some sort of Satyr or Glastig cross. One thing was for sure: he was no Cait Sidhe.

  Nessa tried anyway. “King Tybalt?” she ventured. “We are very grateful to you for accepting Queen Maida’s offer to hold your wedding here.”

  That was when Kerry’s squeal split the air and saved us all from a situation that could easily have gone from embarrassing and faintly humorous to horrific in an instant, judging by the looks on Tybalt’s and the Luidaeg’s faces. Oberon, for his part, looked more politely baffled than anything else. He wasn’t going to carpet the room with the little Gwragedd Annwn’s entrails. That was good. At this rate, there was going to be a line.

  Pretty much our entire group turned toward the sound of Kerry’s jubilant yell. She had appeared through another of those puzzle-piece doors on the opposite side of the room. She bounced to her toes and waved vigorously, then launched herself in our direction like a friendly, chubby, hug-seeking missile.

  May stepped forward to take the first hit like the sister-slash-Fetch-slash maid of honor she was, wrapping her arms around the barreling Kerry and allowing the momentum of the impact to spin them halfway around, Kerry’s feet actually leaving the floor in the process. Nessa blinked, bemused, as May laughed.

  “Wrong Daye!” she chided, letting Kerry go. “Not the bride!”

  “There are no bad Dayes in this week,” said Kerry, and launched herself at me.

  She had bled off some speed in her little dance with May, and the impact didn’t spin me around, just knocked me back a step. As always, Kerry was short, solid, and as much pure muscle as she was fat. Like most Hobs, she had long since decided the best way to approach the world was head-on with a smile on her pretty, round-cheeked face.

  Her hair was a wild cascade of dark brown curls streaked liberally with white—a sign that she’d been baking, not of age, since she’s as much a changeling as I am and still looks like she’s in her mid-twenties. She’s probably more of a changeling than I am at this point, after everything I’ve done to change the balance of my own blood. Kerry is still three quarters, the way she was born, daughter of a Hob mother and a half-hob changeling father she never knew and never particularly wanted to. She made her choice, and she’s always been happy with it.

  Not much of one for second thoughts and regrets, our Kerry.

  “I told you I’d bake your wedding cake one day, and wait until you see it, you’re going to swoon and sigh and tell that brute of a man you think you’re marrying that you’re terribly, heartbreakingly sorry for his loss, but you have to marry the cake instead,” she said, barely pausing to catch her breath. “The sugar work alone should get me knighted.”

  “Being knighted is more trouble than it’s worth, believe me,” I said, laughing. Quentin sighed and nodded his agreement. His own knighthood was still a few years off, but he had already more than learned the cost of it.

  “Then I’ll take a nice little barony somewhere, especially if it comes with a nice little baron to keep my bed warm at night.” Kerry leered, the expression rendered almost comic by her obvious affability, then whirled toward May, who was standing next to Jazz and watching our interplay with amusement. “And you! Second Daye extension! I’ll have you remember that I promised to bake your wedding cake as well and give me the chance to show how incredibly deep the well of my skills extends sooner than later!”

  May blinked. Jazz leaned around her, a polite smile on her face.

  “Am I also allowed to leave my potential spouse for a cake?” she asked.

  “You, I like,” said Kerry. “You’ll have a bride’s cake of your own. It’s a foolish custom when you’re paying for it, but when you have a master baker offering their labor for free, you may as well have as many cakes as you can squeeze out of the kitchen. Which reminds me, the kitchen is gearing up for dinner, and Stacy’s asked me to tell you she’ll need at least twenty minutes to deal with,” she waved her hands vaguely in the direction of my torso, “all of this. That means you’re on the clock!”

  Then she was off again, pausing only long enough to kiss Chelsea loudly on the cheek before she was heading back to the door she’d entered through, a cheerful whirlwind that left a cloud of flour in her wake.

  I looked to Tybalt. “I thought you said I’d have a chance to object to the cake.”

  He shrugged apologetically and spread his hands. “That’s between you and Kerry.”

  Meaning that, no, there wouldn’t be a chance to object to the cake. Oh, well. I should have expected that. I turned, in silent unison with everyone else, to Nessa. She grimaced before forcing a smile, clearly trying to recover her dignity.

  “Not Sir Daye, then?” she asked of the Luidaeg, who laughed.

  “Not in the slightest, although we are related,” she said. Since she was still projecting humanity with the focused determination only the Firstborn can seem to manage, the impression she was giving was that she was a cousin from the fae side of my family who had just decided to take the Tuatha express across North America out of nothing more than familial loyalty.

  “Oh,” said Nessa, sounding baffled. Then: “I am so sorry, miss. I intended no insult, to any of you.”

  “None is taken,” said Tybalt. “I, the actual groom to be, apologize for allowing it to go on so long. It was uncouth of us not to correct you immediately and spar
e you this embarrassment. Now, I presume you were sent to escort us to our quarters for the duration?”

  “Of course, of course,” said Nessa, clapping her hands together in what looked very much like relief. “If you would all do me the favor of following me?”

  “Sure thing,” I said and, when she started moving, fell in easily behind her. Tybalt stayed close by my side, and Quentin stayed at my heels. I glanced back at him. He hadn’t said a word since Nessa got close enough to hear him, which seemed a little odd, since his voice had changed along with the rest of him. It wasn’t like she was going to hear him speak and go, “You’re the Crown Prince!” and accuse us all of treason.

  So far as I’m aware, hearing through illusions is not a power possessed by any corner of Faerie. Seeing through illusions is, for pureblooded Cait Sidhe, and smelling through illusions certainly is, but hearing? Not so much. And this wasn’t an illusion, anyway. This was a total transformation, binding to the bottom of his bones, and it wasn’t going to break so easily.

  I still reached back and gave his shoulder a reassuring squeeze, earning myself a grateful look. Whatever was bothering him, it was really bothering him.

  Nessa led us back through the widest of the puzzle-piece doors, into a long hallway as paneled in maple and amethyst as the first had been. Catching my confusion at the aesthetic, she gave me a tour guide’s practiced, polished smile, and said, “Ontario is famous for our maple trees, which are an emblem of Canada the world over, and of course, amethyst is our provincial stone. When the royal seat of the Westlands was being settled upon, it came down to a question between the Kingdoms of Maple or Ash and Oak.”

  I hadn’t heard the technical name of the Kingdom comprising most of Ontario in so long that it threw me for a second. The High Throne has been in Toronto for so many years that the Kingdom is almost forgotten, grouped in with the rest of the High King’s holdings. “Guess we got lucky there, since we had to abandon Ash and Oak,” I said.