Ashes of Honor

THREE

THE SOUND OF THE TELEVISION drifted quietly from the direction of the living room as I stepped into the house, moving to the side to let Tybalt follow. I shrugged out of my jacket, hanging it on the hook next to the door. “Want to take your coat off?” I asked.

Tybalt looked amused. “Coats removed in your presence tend to disappear from my possession.”

“Suit yourself,” I said, unable to keep myself from smiling.

The entryway was narrow enough that having two of us there made it uncomfortably intimate. There was a small table next to the door, covered in junk mail, paperbacks, and less-definable oddities, hinting at the tightly controlled chaos to come. May’s a pack rat, and neither Quentin nor I are much for housework.

“Come on,” I said, starting for the dining room. That was where the clutter reached its peak, since it had bookshelves and a table to gather on.

May was sitting at the dining room table, across from an uncomfortable-looking Etienne, when we entered. It was hard to say what accounted for his discomfort: the mess, my Fetch, or the simple fact of being in my house to begin with. I could tell that May had made an effort to clear the table before sitting down. To someone accustomed to the housekeeping at Shadowed Hills, it probably looked like the whole place needed to be condemned. They both turned at the sound of our footsteps. May smiled, clearly relieved. Etienne started to stand. I waved him down.

“Don’t get up.” I kept walking, heading for the stairs. “Hi, Etienne. Nice of you to drop by. This is exactly what I needed tonight.” Etienne winced. I tried to dial back the sarcasm as I said, “I’m going to change into something less bloodstained and get some coffee. That should give you time to figure out what you’re going to tell me that you weren’t willing to tell Tybalt.”

“Who you brought home with you,” said May. “Hi, Tybalt. Welcome back.”

“May,” said Tybalt, with a courtly nod. “Etienne.”

“Tybalt,” said Etienne neutrally. It’s not that Etienne dislikes Tybalt. Etienne just dislikes chaos, and Tybalt causes almost as much commotion as I do. Sometimes more, when he really sets his mind to it, although my chaos is a little more destructive, if I do say so myself.

It says something about my life that this is the sort of thing I have to think about—and be proud of. “Be right back,” I said.

“October—” began Etienne.

I didn’t stop walking. “I just got home from the police station, and prior to that I was shot multiple times in an alley,” I said. “That means I get to put on clean clothes and make myself a cup of coffee big enough to give me caffeine poisoning before I have to have whatever serious conversation you’re here to have. Does anybody else need anything?”

“I’m good,” said May.

“No,” said Etienne.

“I’d like some coffee,” said Tybalt.

I gave him a sidelong look. “Since when do you drink coffee?”

“Since I had to learn how to make it or risk your endless wrath.”

I had to smile a little at that. “You can fix your own.”

It only took me a few minutes to climb the stairs to my room, drop the disguise that made me look human, and shuck off my blood-drenched clothes, throwing them into the wastebasket next to the door. One more pair of jeans down the drain. I’d need to get one of the hearth-spirits I knew to do something about the holes in my leather jacket. I was willing to get rid of a lot of things, but not that.

I washed the blood off my hands and face in the master bathroom. My reflection was overly pale, even for me; regenerating that much blood had done a number on my system. There was no blood in my hair, for once. I swapped my bloody jeans and T-shirt for clean ones that weren’t full of bullet holes. Then I went jogging back down the stairs and through the dining room to the kitchen, where Tybalt was watching with evident amusement as my half-Siamese cats, Cagney and Lacey, cornered Quentin.

My squire was spooning wet food into cat dishes. He wasn’t doing it fast enough for their liking, because both cats were yowling. Cats are like that. Tybalt cleared his throat. Cagney and Lacey went silent. They turned to face their King and sat, wrapping their tails around their legs. Quentin looked up, relief written across his face.

“Good one, Tybalt,” he said.

“A cat may look at a King,” Tybalt replied, waving away Quentin’s almost-thanks without commenting on it.

“Greetings, Squire,” I said, and ruffled Quentin’s hair. I didn’t have to get on my tiptoes, but it was close. After one more growth spurt, he’d be looking down on me. I guess that’s what you get when you take a teenage boy as your sworn squire. “Is there coffee?”

He looked at me solemnly, doing an admirable job of concealing his annoyance over my hair ruffling, and said, deadpan, “We didn’t want you to kill us all, so May told me to start a fresh pot when Tybalt left to get you.”

“I have the smartest Fetch in the whole world.” I snagged a coffee mug from the rack. “Do you have any clue what Etienne is doing here?”

“I know as much as you do.” Quentin bent to set the cat dishes on the floor. “He just showed up saying he needed to talk to you, and he wouldn’t tell us why.”

There was an anxious note in Quentin’s voice. I paused in the act of filling my mug, glancing back at him. “He can’t take you back to Shadowed Hills,” I said gently. “It’s against the rules, and if there’s one thing Etienne would never ever intentionally do, it’s break the rules.”

“I know,” said Quentin miserably. “I just…”

“I wouldn’t concern myself if I were you.” Tybalt plucked the coffeepot from my hand, topping off my mug before half-filling his own. “I’ve had sufficient dealings with the Divided Courts to know there would be much more pointless discussion before we reached that point. Unless she has been found guilty of some dire crime and has neglected to tell the rest of us, you can no more be removed from her custody than I can sprout wings and fly off to take tea with the Swanmays.”

“Don’t say that where the Luidaeg can hear you, or she’ll take it as a challenge.” I got the milk out of the fridge. “Quentin, you have my word: I will be your knight until your fosterage ends or you’re ready to graduate to a knighthood of your own. And the only people who get to decide when that is are me, Sylvester, and whoever the hell your parents are.”

“Yes, sir,” he said, smiling.

I rolled my eyes as I dumped milk and sugar into my coffee. “Do the dishes,” I said and turned to leave the kitchen. Tybalt paused long enough to fill his mug the rest of the way with milk before following me, chuckling.

When I met Quentin, he was a fourteen-year-old courtier in service to the Duke of Shadowed Hills. Since then, his association with me has gotten him shot, nearly marooned him in Blind Michael’s lands, and made him an accessory to jailbreak from the Queen’s prison. Somehow, this all made me the best choice to stand as his knight. He’s pureblood Daoine Sidhe—a fact his teen-heartthrob looks, bronze hair, and sharply pointed ears makes difficult to disguise even with magic—and he’s been sent to the Bay Area on a blind fosterage. That means I don’t know who his parents are, and he doesn’t tell me. If a couple of unfamiliar Daoine Sidhe ever show up on my porch and start throwing punches, I think I’ll have a pretty good idea why.

May and Etienne were still at the dining room table when Tybalt and I returned with our coffee. “All right, then,” I said. “So what’s so important?”

This time Etienne did stand. “I need to speak with you alone.”

“Um, why?” I asked. “May lives with me. She’s going to hear whatever you say eventually.” Tybalt didn’t live with me, but I had cats, and that was almost the same thing, as far as gossip goes. Anything Cagney and Lacey overheard would be carried straight back to their King.

Etienne sighed. For the first time, I really looked at his face. I’d been right when I read his expression as discomfort, but I’d been wrong when I assumed he didn’t approve of our housekeeping. There was probably some of that in there, too, but it wasn’t everything. “I know you’ll tell your allies what we discuss,” he said. “Just, please. Let me tell you this alone.”

“Sure, Etienne. Sure.” I turned to Tybalt. “Can you wait here until we come back down? I’d like to catch up a little.”

“It would be my pleasure.” Tybalt smiled before taking Etienne’s vacated seat across from May. “I will remain as long as I must.”

“Cool. I’ll shout if we need anything.” With a final nod to May, I beckoned for Etienne to follow me as I turned and left the room.

Etienne remained silent as we walked up the stairs and down the hallway to the bedroom that served as my home office. I glanced back at him. “Are you okay?”

“No,” he said, without hesitation. “I am a long way from ‘okay.’”

“Oh,” I said, opening the office door. “Sorry about the mess.” I clicked on the light before taking a seat at the card table I was using as a makeshift desk. “I promise the chairs are safe. I mean, they haven’t broken yet, and Danny sat in one of them.”

“Where did you find them?” asked Etienne, amazed disgust actually breaking through his shell of discomfort as he stared at the two rickety wooden camp chairs.

“Girl Scout yard sale,” I said. “I’m going to replace them, I just haven’t been able to get to Ikea yet.”

“Ah.”

“Anyway. Take a seat, and tell me what’s up.” I took a gulp of coffee. “You wouldn’t have come all the way out here if it weren’t major.”

“Yes. Major. Yes, I suppose it is, when you put it that way.” Etienne sat on the closer of the camp chairs, running a hand through his brown-black hair. “It’s not as if I drove.”

“Teleporting counts,” I said. Like all Tuatha de Dannan, Etienne could teleport short distances—longer if he was moving between knowes, the hollow hills that conceal the majority of Faerie’s incursions into the mortal world. Traveling from Pleasant Hill to San Francisco would have been a drain, even if it wasn’t a major one. “Look, if you don’t want to talk about whatever this is, that’s fine. I can wait until you do. But I’m going to want to go downstairs and make myself a sandwich.”

Etienne sighed deeply. “October, please. This is hard for me. I know it’s in your nature to needle, but please, just this once, can you try to restrain yourself?”

“I do better when I know what I’m restraining myself for, Etienne,” I said. “If you want me to help you, you need to talk to me.”

“I don’t know how.” He closed his eyes, tilting his head back until his face was almost pointed at the ceiling. “I’ve made a terrible mistake.”

“That’s a start. What kind of mistake?”

Etienne was silent.

I bit back a groan. “Do we have to play hot and cold, here? You came to me, not the other way around. I didn’t force you to be here.”

Etienne was still silent.

“Look, did you kill somebody? That you didn’t intend to kill, I mean. Because I would count that as a mistake.”

“What?” His chin snapped down, eyes opening. “No!”

“Now we’re getting somewhere. Did you steal something? Piss off a member of the nobility? Break an oath?”

“Perhaps the last.” He rubbed his face with his hand. “I may have endangered my oaths, if not broken them entirely. I don’t know yet.”

I gaped at him. “Root and branch, seriously? When?”

“The spring after you disappeared.”

That was more than sixteen years ago. I nearly dropped my coffee, but saved it at the last moment as I demanded, “What?!”

“If I broke my oaths, I did so the year after your disappearance, when the Duchess and her daughter were…lost to us.” Etienne spoke slowly. “The Duchy was in chaos. The Queen offered no succor, and the Duke…the Duke was…”

“Mad,” I said. “He was mad, Etienne. I’ve heard the stories.”

“I endured them,” he snapped, anger kindling in his voice. “You weren’t here during Luna’s absence, October. I was. You didn’t see Sylvester at his worst. I did. I served as his Seneschal during those dark years, Oberon help me, and I did it out of loyalty, and duty, and love. Do you understand that much?”

“I would have been there if I could,” I whispered. The “dark years” of Luna’s absence corresponded to my own imprisonment as an enchanted koi in Golden Gate Park’s Japanese Tea Gardens. Not a place I ever meant to wind up.

Etienne took a deep breath, composing himself. When he spoke again, his voice was steady. “I know. Please believe me when I say I do not blame you. What happened to you was horrible, and we should have found a way to bring you home long before you escaped on your own. That doesn’t change the fact that you weren’t here. You never saw Sylvester raving at shadows, all but grieving himself to death, while the rest of us fought to keep Shadowed Hills alive and healthy long enough for him to find his own way home.”

I shuddered. Sylvester’s more than my liege. He’s my friend. Even knowing how bad things were for him when Luna and Raysel were missing, hearing it from Etienne hurt more than I would have guessed possible. “Okay. I get your point. I wasn’t there.”

“Sometimes…” Etienne paused, sighing again, before he pressed on: “Sometimes, when it got to be too much for any of us to take, Jin would brew something to make him sleep. Never for more than a day or two. Just enough to let the rest of us recover our strength and brace against the storms we knew were yet to come.”

“You drugged him?” I asked, almost before the thought finished forming. “Etienne, that’s…that’s…”

“It was necessary for the health of the Duchy and the health of the Duke,” he said. “He knows everything. He gave us his forgiveness long ago.”

I took a breath, trying not to dwell on the thought of how bad things must have been. For Jin to even consider it…it must have been a relief for everyone in the Duchy when their Duke wasn’t awake to terrorize them. I loved him too much for that idea not to break my heart. “Fine,” I said, pushing the images away. “So Jin would knock him out long enough to let the rest of you get some sleep, is that it?”

“We didn’t just sleep. We lived our lives.” Etienne rubbed his face. “I never stayed in the Duchy while the Duke slumbered. I ran. Like a coward, I ran. Grianne knew where to find me and could send her Merry Dancers if I was needed home, and I needed…I needed to be away from all the madness. If only for a little while.”

“Something was rotten in the state of Denmark,” I said quietly.

Etienne laughed a little. It wasn’t a pleasant sound. “If you like. In order to serve properly, I needed time to refresh myself, and I took that time in neutral territory. Places where no Duke or Duchess would take my presence as an insult or an invitation to battle.”

Neutral spots are rare in the Bay Area. I could only think of two big ones. “I’m going to go out on a limb here and guess that you didn’t spend much time in Golden Gate Park.”

“No,” said Etienne. “I didn’t.”

That left Berkeley. An idea was nibbling at the edges of my mind, making me uneasy. “What happened?”

“I spent a great deal of time in the coffee houses around the University, where no one seemed to notice, or care, if I didn’t match the social norms. I was trying to reeducate myself about modern humanity, so I could travel farther abroad without attracting attention.” Etienne’s lips twisted in what looked like an involuntary smile. “That’s where I met Professor Ames.”

“Professor Ames?”

“Bridget. She taught folklore, and she liked to argue with people, about, oh, everything. I think she would have argued about the color of the sky if anyone had been willing to engage her in that particular debate. I don’t even remember how our first argument started—something about some ballad or other, or maybe over the last scone in the case—but it was infuriating and elating at the same time. I found myself looking forward to our arguments. Then I found myself simply looking forward to seeing her.”

“Oh, Etienne.” Playing faerie bride—being fae, and loving a human—is never easy. Doing it while serving as the Seneschal of a madman would be virtually impossible. “What happened?”

“What always happens.” His smile turned bitter before fading. “I fell in love with a human woman. I did what I had always looked down on others for doing. I wasn’t sorry then, and I’m not sorry now. I’m only sorry it had to end. Sylvester was getting worse. Jin was having more difficulty getting him to take the sleeping draughts, and it got harder to slip away. Bridget was understanding at first, and then she was angry, and finally, she stopped answering her phone. I went to the campus during her office hours once, to apologize—I knew better than to think I could get her back, not at that point—and there was a sign on the bulletin board saying she was on sabbatical and would be back the next year.”

“And was she?”

“I don’t know.” Etienne looked at me, dark eyes full of sorrow. “That was the last time I tried to see her. There wasn’t time after that; it wouldn’t have been fair to either of us. It was the spring of 1996. You’d been gone less than a year. The darkest days were just beginning.”

I shivered. “I had no idea.”

“We didn’t exactly advertise.”

“But…I’m confused, Etienne. What does all this have to do with anything? I mean, that was sixteen years ago. Did Professor Ames track you down?”

“In a manner of speaking, yes.” Etienne shrugged. The gesture was somehow alien on him, like a coat that didn’t fit quite right. “I gave Bridget a number where she could reach me in an emergency. I was in love. It seemed the thing to do.”

I stared at him. “You gave her the number for Shadowed Hills?”

“One of them, yes. I told her it was the office where I worked. There’s a special ring when someone calls from a mortal location; whoever took her call would know to be careful.”

“And I can’t even change the ringtone on my phone,” I muttered. More loudly, I asked, “So she called you?”

“Yes. Three hours ago now.” Etienne rubbed his face again. “It seems we were both keeping secrets. I didn’t tell her I wasn’t human.”

There was only one thing he could say next, and it wasn’t something I wanted to hear. I still prompted him, asking, “And what did she not tell you?”

“That she was pregnant.” Etienne dropped his hand away from his face, looking at me despondently. “I have a changeling daughter, October. Almost sixteen years old and raised outside of Faerie’s knowledge.”

I stared at him, stunned into silence.

Most changeling children have instinctive illusions that make them seem human for the earliest years of their lives. It’s a form of defensive camouflage, like spots on a fawn. But that baby magic shorts out as changelings grow, and a changeling who hasn’t learned to weave a human disguise by the age of six or seven is a danger to Faerie. Secrecy is the only thing that’s kept us alive for so long. Etienne had always played things by the rules and by the book—and now there was a chance that he’d committed the greatest infraction of them all. There was a chance he’d given Faerie away.

There was just one piece missing. “So…if your daughter is sixteen, her baby magic must have failed years ago. Why did Bridget call you now? What changed?” I paused, then asked the big question: “How did you not know?”

“I never asked,” said Etienne. He smiled—the small, painful smile of a man who suddenly saw what he had been doing wrong for years. “All the people I paid to check on her, all the pixies and sprites I bribed…I never asked them to check for a child, and I never went myself. I didn’t know the girl existed because I never asked.”

“Oak and ash,” I breathed. “And…why now?”

“Bridget called because our daughter is missing.” Etienne sat up a little straighter, looking me in the eyes. “She vanished this afternoon, on her way home from school—and I do mean ‘vanished.’ Her friends said she was there one moment and gone the next. Bridget assumed, quite reasonably, that the faeries had finally found her. She called me screaming, begging for the return of her little girl. She knew exactly what I was, even down to the name of my race.”

“Maybe you shouldn’t have dated a folklore professor,” I said.

“Maybe not,” said Etienne. “Regardless, I did, and we had a child together, and now that child is missing. She may have been taken. She may have finally found the magic she was heir to and not known how to control it. Either way, I am here to hire you. Please, October. I need you to find my daughter.”

Oh, oak and ash. This wasn’t going to end well.