Once Broken Faith

NINE

KING ROBINSON’S MAGIC SMELLED of walnut shells and Spanish moss. Its ghost lingered in his blood, like spices dusted over the coppery brightness of the blood itself. I sat on the floor next to his body, knowing the Luidaeg was there to pull me back into myself if I sank too far into the blood memory. More importantly, I knew that Quentin and Karen were watching, and would see it if I lost control. Karen will never be a blood-worker. Her heritage, tangled and strange as it is, doesn’t include any of Oberon’s lines. But Quentin would need to do these things when he became High King, and I refused to be the reason he was afraid of his own magic.

I raised my fingers to my mouth. I tasted the blood. The memory closed around me like a glove, and the world went away.

How dare they act as though this is a simple vote, something to be decided in an afternoon. How dare they pretend this is “diplomacy,” when it’s clear where the High King’s loyalties lie. He’s meant to be so far above us as to serve as an objective party, a judge, jury, and when need be, executioner. How does this stripling queen have such a strong grip upon his ear, when no one knew she existed before she was crowned? Something is wrong. Something is out of true. And I am, by Oberon, going to find out what it is, and put a stop to it before this madness goes any further.

His thoughts were cold but not cruel. From his perspective, something had gone horribly wrong in the Mists, something symbolized by the way the High King dealt with Arden. I didn’t get the impression that he’d been an evil man. Set in his ways, maybe, and more interested in the good of his Kingdom than anything else—but really, what monarch wasn’t going to put the needs of their own people ahead of the rest of the world? That was practically the job description. I swallowed hard, forcing more of his blood into my system, letting the memories pull me down.

I have stepped away from the noise and nonsense of the dining room to be alone with my thoughts. There are no lights in this part of the knowe. I do not need them. Candela have better night vision than most, and my Merry Dancers spin around me, comforting companions. They pulse with their understanding of my unhappiness. They would soothe me, if they could. How lonely other fae must be, in their strange, singular lives!

A noise behind me, like metal being torn. I stop and turn, suddenly dizzy, as if I am out of breath, even though I am breathing normally. Perhaps the meal is ending; perhaps we are about to return to the pointless pretense of diplomacy. I walk back to the dining room.

It is empty. Where has everyone gone? The curtains are drawn.

That tearing-metal sound repeats. I turn, and there is pain, pain like I have never felt. I am falling. I am falling, I am dying, and even death holds no mercy, for I am still alive when the first of my Merry Dancers hits the ground, and I feel it when she shatters—

Gasping, I ripped myself free of his memories before they could drag me down to the actual moment of his death. I hadn’t been weak enough to kill that easily in a while; riding someone else’s blood to the end was still dangerous. Some rules were never intended to be broken. Not by me. Maybe by my mother, but she’s Firstborn, and I’m not. I’ll never be as strong as she is.

Then the Luidaeg was there, placing a hand between my shoulder blades and holding me up, keeping me from falling over. “What did you see?”

“Nothing.” I closed my eyes. My own body felt strange, too small, too female, and too alone. There should have been Merry Dancers swirling around me, their lives connected to my own on a level too deep to explain with words. The feeling would pass. That didn’t mean I enjoyed it. This wasn’t the first time I’d felt out of synch with myself after riding the blood, but it had never been this strong. “He didn’t see the person who killed him, or detect their magic. He heard a weird sound, followed it back to the dining room, and someone he didn’t get a decent look at stabbed him.”

“So it didn’t work?” Quentin sounded disappointed. He also sounded scared. He’d been with me for long enough to understand that sometimes, when the first, safest method of getting information failed, we had to keep going. We had to find another way.

He was right to be concerned. There was always another way, and it was rarely a good idea. “It worked,” I said, opening my eyes and turning toward the sound of his voice. He and Karen had been busy; the table next to them was covered in shining shards of Merry Dancer. Seeing them that way hurt my heart. That, too, would fade; I wouldn’t be mourning for Christmas ornaments forever.

But someone should have been. I gripped the Luidaeg’s arm as I levered myself to my feet. The feeling of strangeness was already fading, replaced by the more usual absolute faith in my own body, which was familiar and comfortable and home.

“He couldn’t tell me anything because he didn’t see anything worth telling,” I continued, wiping the blood off my hand and onto my trousers. Black is forgiving in more ways than one. “At the same time, we’re going to have company soon, and maybe he can tell me something I can’t intuit from his blood.”

Quentin’s eyes went wide. Karen looked confused. And the Luidaeg sighed.

“You really want to talk to them again?” she asked. “I’m pretty sure they weren’t kidding when they threatened to eat you. They’re not big jokesters.”

“I saved May’s life. That has to earn me a little tolerance.”

“It’s already earned you a little tolerance. They didn’t eat you the last time they saw you.”

“No, they didn’t, because their leader had something he wanted me to do. I’ve done it. They’ll talk to me.”

The Luidaeg threw up her hands and turned her eyes toward the ceiling. “Dad’s bones, you people never learn. Fine. Do you want me to call them? Maybe they’ll be less hostile if I’m the one who calls.”

“Um, excuse me?” Karen’s voice shook. We all looked at her. She bit her lip, worrying it between her teeth before she asked, “Who are you talking about?”

Oh. “Quentin, maybe you should take Karen back out to the balcony,” I said quietly. “She doesn’t need to see this.”

“That doesn’t answer my question,” said Karen.

“October still believes children can be sheltered,” said the Luidaeg. There was no blame in her tone: she was stating a fact, something plain and simple and immutable. “She forgets to ask herself whether they should. More, she forgets that everyone is a child to someone. Compared to me, you’re all infants.”

I sighed. “Okay. Point taken. We’re talking about the night-haunts, Karen. They’re going to come for King Antonio’s body, which means they’ll know what he knew, and maybe we can get some answers.”

“I hate it when you summon the night-haunts,” said Quentin.

“But I’m not summoning them,” I said. “I’m just going to be here when they show up. Totally different.”

Quentin did not look like he thought this was totally different. Quentin looked at me like this was the worst idea in a long string of bad ideas, stretching back to “hey, I think I might like to be born.” He didn’t say anything. He didn’t need to. The kid has some of the most expressive eyebrows I’ve ever seen. I glanced to the Luidaeg, looking for support.

What I found was vague amusement, and a shrug so expansive that her hand hit the side of my arm. “You’re the hero of the realm here, Toby. I’m just the sea witch. You’re supposed to leave me slumbering in my watery cavern until you need a handy deus ex machina.”

Karen was looking back and forth between us, increasingly agitated. It had only ever been a matter of time before the dam broke. “What’s wrong with you?” she demanded. “There’s a man . . . he’s dead, Aunt Birdie! He’s right there, and he’s dead, and you’re making jokes! How can you do that? It’s mean, and it’s petty, and it’s . . . it’s not fair.” She sounded petulant as only the young ever could.

I missed being that upset by the cruelty of the world. I just couldn’t seem to work up the anger anymore. “You’re right, pumpkin: it’s not fair,” I said, walking over to put an arm around her shoulder. I kept my still blood-sticky hand behind my back. She knew it was there, but that didn’t mean she should be forced to look at it. “Nothing about the world is ever fair. You know that. We joke because we’re not happy either. King Robinson was a jerk, but he didn’t deserve to die, and we can’t bring him back. So we try to make ourselves feel better when we can, because we know the world isn’t going to suddenly turn kind. That sort of thing would take more magic than there is in the whole world.”

“He was a pureblood,” said Karen. The quiet puzzlement in her voice broke my heart to hear. She was so young. The Luidaeg was right that I never asked myself whether children should be protected: I knew the answer. They should be protected for as long as they could be, for as long as our shoulders could bear the weight of the world, because innocence was so fragile, and so easily destroyed. Karen had lost most of hers when Blind Michael had taken her captive. As for what remained . . .

There was so much more of it than I’d ever suspected. And it was so very, very fragile.

“I know,” I said. “Purebloods aren’t supposed to die. When they do, all we can do is try to make sure that justice is done. We’re going to figure out who killed him. I promise.”

It was a foolish promise to make. I’d made worse, and I could hear, distantly, the beating of paper-thin wings against the wind. The night-haunts were coming.

Quentin heard it, too. “Do you want us to go wait somewhere else?” he asked.

Karen was an oneiromancer. She could see the night-haunts any time she wanted to, just by visiting my dreams, or May’s. It might be better for her to see them in the flesh, not colored by whatever nightmare they were flying through.

“No,” I said. “Stay.” I turned toward the open balcony door. So did the others.

We waited as the air grew hazy with fragile, half-seen wings, and the night-haunts streamed into the room. The flock moved like smoke, buffeted by an unseen wind. The frailer, more faded night-haunts stuck to the middle, where they could be protected by the bodies of their more solid kindred. The night-haunts around the edges of the flock were doll-sized replicas of Faerie’s dead, wearing heartbreakingly familiar faces and forms, turned alien and strange by the tattered wings that grew from their backs, by the emotions hanging frozen in their eyes.

The flock circled the room twice, wings buzzing, searching for danger. None of us said anything. We simply waited to see what the night-haunts would do. Karen shivered against me but didn’t pull away. Finally, the night-haunts landed on one of the long banquet tables, the shadowy central figures clustering together while the others shielded them with wing and body. One night-haunt—slightly taller than some of the others, with eyes as purple as wildflowers, and the face of a decadent, black-hearted Peter Pan—stepped forward, eyes fixed on the Luidaeg.

“Auntie,” said the night-haunt, and his voice was the voice of Devin, my old mentor and first lover, and hearing it was like sandpaper on my soul. I had seen this night-haunt every time I’d faced the flock since Devin’s death, and it never stopped hurting. “Why do you come between us and our prey? The flock must feed. We’ve lost two to the wind in the last year.”

“Father did you no favors when he bound you,” said the Luidaeg. “Hello, Egil.”

He bowed, only half mockingly. “It’s been a long time.”

“Indeed, it has.”

I still said nothing. It was easy to forget that the night-haunts had lives aside from the ones they stole from Faerie’s dead. Sometimes they seemed to forget, too. But they were purebloods, even when they wore changeling faces: their mother had been one of the Luidaeg’s sisters, and they had been born predators, intended to devour fae flesh, which would never rot under normal circumstances. Without the night-haunts, we would never have been able to hide our existence from the human world. It was just that at first, they’d preferred the taste of the living. They’d been a scourge upon our kind, eternally hungry, fast and fierce and unstoppable . . . until Oberon changed them, binding them to eat only the dead. Without the lives they took from the blood we left behind, they had nothing. They would fade, and fade, until they became the only purebloods in Faerie who could die of natural causes.

Fae died rarely. The night-haunts were always there.

The night-haunt with Devin’s face—Egil—was joined by another, this one shorter, stockier, and wearing the face of my dead Selkie lover, Connor O’Dell. I didn’t know this night-haunt’s true name. I wasn’t sure it would have helped if I had. He turned to face me, sadness and longing in his eyes. The night-haunts got more than just form from the blood. They got memory, emotion, even personality, to a certain degree. Connor had died to save my daughter. He’d died loving me. And now he was a night-haunt, and I was in love with another man.

“Hi, Toby,” he said.

“Hi,” I replied, keeping my arm around Karen. That didn’t feel like enough, and so I continued, “I kept my promise. I stopped the goblin fruit.”

Egil laughed. He sounded so much like Devin that I shivered. “You did, and you knocked down a monarchy to do it. Oh, October, I wish I’d understood what a glorious disaster you were when I was alive. I would have used you to undermine the world, and laughed while it was burning.”

“I can’t tell whether that was meant to be a compliment or not,” I said. “Either way, I did what I promised, and now I need a favor.”

Both night-haunts blinked at me. So did several others, some of whom had faces I recognized. Others were foreign to me. Death was rare in Faerie, but not so rare that I was present every time it happened. Thank Maeve for that. If I’d been the sole cause of death in Faerie, High King Sollys would have locked me up and thrown away the key.

“We told you once that we would eat you if you kept summoning us,” said Egil. “What makes you think that’s changed?”

“Well, first, I didn’t summon you. The body under the table did. Second, I did you a favor. You don’t want there to be any chance I could claim you were in my debt, do you?”

Egil narrowed his eyes. “I take back what I said. You’re too destructive to be trusted. What do you want from us?”

“I want something that should be pretty easy to give, all things considered. I want you to feed on the dead king, and then let me talk to whoever gets his memories. I need to know if there’s anything he saw that I wouldn’t know how to interpret when I saw it in his blood.”

There was a momentary silence, broken only by the endless dead-leaf rustle of the night-haunts opening and closing their wings. Finally, almost cautiously, the night-haunt with Connor’s face said, “If you leave this room, we won’t be here when you come back. We won’t wait for you.”

“I know.”

“You’ll have to watch us feed.”

“I know that, too.” I glanced to Quentin and Karen. “The others can leave if they need to, but I’m going to stay. I need answers.”

“I want to see,” said Quentin, which seemed brave but ill-thought-out to me. I didn’t say anything. He was going to command a continent someday. The night-haunts who patrolled North America would be subjects of his, as much as anyone else was. Maybe it would make a difference if they felt they were allowed to speak to the High King. They certainly didn’t feel that way now.

“If Quentin’s staying, so am I.” Karen’s voice shook. I turned to frown at her.

“Sweetheart, are you sure?”

She looked at me with cool, bleach-blue eyes, and nodded. “I can handle anything he can handle. Maybe more. He doesn’t spend his days walking through other peoples’ nightmares.”

I wanted to tell her she didn’t have to be strong for me, that I’d love her no matter what. I wanted to remind her that Quentin was older than she was, and that she didn’t have to compete with him. I did neither of those things. Karen was a changeling. I knew what that meant. She was going to spend her whole life trying to prove she was as good as the purebloods around her, and now that more and more people knew about her oneiromancy, she was going to be fighting to be sure they understood she wasn’t there to be controlled. If she wanted to be her own person, she would have to be stronger, better, and capable of standing up to more than anyone around her, or they’d use her blood against her. Every time.

No one in this room would try to do that to her, but that didn’t matter. If you wanted to be steel, you had to be steel every day of your life, until it came naturally; until you no longer had to beat yourself bloody trying to achieve it.

“All right,” I said, and turned back to the night-haunts. “You can go ahead and feed.”

“Ah, milady grants permission!” Egil sketched a mocking bow, his wings rattling like plastic bags rolling down a gutter. Then he straightened, smile fading, and turned to speak to the flock.

The language he used wasn’t English, or Welsh, or anything else I recognized, but it suited the strange accent that sometimes crept into May’s words, the one she only had when she was reaching past the memories she’d received from me and Dare. It was an old language, I knew that much, sweet and fluid and filled with vowel sounds that more modern languages had tucked away as too hard on the ear.

The Luidaeg stepped up next to me. “We had our own language once,” she murmured, in English. “Mother spoke it, when she talked to the children who spent less time around humanity. But it was easier to use the words the mortals had. They were lords of language in those days, spreading across the world and naming everything they saw as quick as a blink. We’ve never been fond of doing labor that we didn’t have to do for ourselves. My tatterdemalion nieces and nephews may be the only native speakers of Faerie left in the world.”

“Can you understand them?” asked Quentin.

“No.” She shook her head, a sweet, bitter smile on her lips. “Words you don’t use fall away and are forgotten. I can’t even speak it in my dreams.” Looking to Karen, she smiled less ruefully, and added, “Don’t try to check that. You won’t like what you find in my head.”

“I don’t like what I find in your sister’s head,” said Karen.

“That’s because her sister is a murderous, psychopathic bitch, and you shouldn’t spend any time in her brain that can be avoided,” I said. “If evil is contagious, your mother will kill me.”

Karen snorted.

The night-haunts stopped speaking.

I turned to see the flock rise, moving like smoke across the water, and descend on the body of King Antonio Robertson. The more solid night-haunts, the ones whose bodies were firm and whose faces were clear, formed an outer ring around the body. The next tier was slightly less solid. They seemed to waver, but I could pick out individual features, like the curve of an ear or the color of an eye. It would have been possible to describe those night-haunts to an artist and get something a family member might be able to identify. And at the center . . .

At the center were the night-haunts who looked like shadows, so faded that their bodies seemed to have no weight or substance. They were the idea of fae, the concept of solidity, and they couldn’t stay as they were forever; the first stiff wind would rip them into nothingness. Then even those parted, easing a ghost toward the body. The night-haunt they’d chosen to eat first seemed to flicker with every step it took, barely holding itself together. The flock guided it to the skin of King Robinson’s neck.

The shadowy night-haunt stopped. The only sound was the rustle of a hundred wings, and my own breath, which seemed impossibly loud in my own ears. The shadowy night-haunt sniffed the air. And then it opened its mouth, revealing teeth that would have been better suited to some deep-sea horror, and sank them into the dead King’s neck.

That was the signal for the rest of the flock to move, swarming over the body like so many leaf-winged piranha. I fought the urge to clap my hand over Karen’s eyes. I fought the urge to clap my hand over my eyes. They ate like beasts, ripping and tearing at the flesh in front of them, moving with such furious hunger that they left nothing behind. When blood was spilled, they were right there, lapping it up, even lifting it out of the fabric of the carpet and stuffing it into their mouths. When they hit bone, they just kept right on eating, chewing down until there was nothing for them to consume but dust and shadow.

The flock pulsed, beating like a heart, and was still. The weaker night-haunts seemed stronger now, thicker and more distinct, even if they still had no coherent faces. The night-haunts like Egil, like the one who wore Connor’s face, had been the last to eat; they looked no different. Most of their sustenance was coming from the lives they had already consumed, and would be for years, if I was correct in my understanding of how they were able to survive on scraps as rare as the dead of Faerie.

The flock parted. King Antonio Robinson, now reduced to the height of a Barbie and accented with autumn-leaf wings, walked to the front. He looked . . . lost. There was no other word for the confusion on his face, or the way his eyes darted from side to side, seeking some explanation. Finally, he settled them on me.

“The changeling knight,” he said, a slight sneer in his voice. I couldn’t be offended. Maybe if he’d been alive, I would have been, but now . . . I couldn’t blame a dead man for his prejudices. It felt somehow unfair. “I . . . am I dead?”

“He’ll be disoriented for a time,” said Egil, his tone so much like Devin’s. Devin had been a bad man, in so many ways, but he’d always taken care of the ones who needed him. Even if he hurt us, he kept us safe from the rest of the world. “Ask your questions. After you do, we’ll be gone.”

“Okay,” I said, and focused on the night-haunt with Antonio’s face. “You’re a night-haunt now. You’ll start remembering that soon, if eating a life is anything like riding the blood. But yes, you died. I’m sorry. You have stopped your dancing.”

“Where are my girls?” He turned to look to either side of himself, searching the air. “Why can’t I find my girls?”

My heart sank. Antonio had been Candela. The night-haunts hadn’t taken everything for a change; not everything had been food to them. “Merry Dancers don’t transition that way, I guess. I’m sorry. They broke when you died.”

“Ah.” His eyes closed. He made no effort to conceal his pain. I was almost grateful for that. If he could hurt that badly over a pair of dancing lights, he truly was King Antonio, if only until the first rush of blood memories began to fade.

He opened his eyes again, and looked at me. “Why are you speaking to me, changeling knight? I was above you when I lived, and am below you now that I do not. Shouldn’t you shun me, refuse to acknowledge the reality of me, leave me for ballad and for bone?”

“There’s a phrasing I haven’t heard in years,” murmured the Luidaeg.

I ignored her. It was a specialized skill, and one I had better control of than most. “I rode your blood before the night-haunts came,” I said. “I didn’t see what killed you. I thought you might have picked up on something I wouldn’t realize was important.” I had been a voyeur in his life. He had lived it. “Please, can you tell me what happened?”

Antonio looked at me for a moment before he said, “You’ll need to do something for me.”

Of course a pureblood king who couldn’t think of me as his equal would have demands, apart from the natural “avenge me.” I should have known. “What do you want?”

“My wife has never been my queen. I wanted her to have safety and the freedom to move through the world as she liked. She never desired the pleasures of a throne. I want you to go to her. I want you to tell her, ‘you are a widow now.’ I want you to tell her that our son will rule in my stead. He’s young, yet. Too young for such a burden. My seneschal will help him. My seneschal will probably also try to assassinate him.” He smirked, looking more at ease now that he was talking about backstabbing and betrayal. “My boy is quick and clever. He’ll learn. He’ll adapt. And he’ll be a better king than I ever was.”

“Where can I find her?” I asked.

He gave me the address: a street in Anaheim, far from the bustle and decay of Hollywood, close to Disneyland. Arden’s parents had had a similar arrangement, with her mother raising her and her brother in the shadows of her father’s court, never admitting that they were his heirs, for fear they would be harmed. I had to wonder how many hidden princes and princesses we had scattered around the Westlands, tucked away by parents who’d learned the hard way that accepting a crown was a good way to limit your life expectancy.

When this was over, I was going to have a long talk with High King Sollys about the way the nobility took care of their children.

“I’ll find her,” I said. “Now please. What do you remember?”

“I was angry. That woman from the water—a Merrow, married to a Daoine Sidhe. Can you imagine? Their children must be so confused.” He shook his head, disgust written across his features. “She said her eldest son was a Count upon the land, and that one day her youngest would be a Duke beneath the waves. As if that were something to be proud of. When they tear themselves apart trying to be one thing or another, they’ll drown the world.”

“I was there when you started yelling at Dianda,” I said, voice carefully neutral. “Where did you go after that?”

“Just down the hall. I wanted to clear my head. I wasn’t gone for long—minutes, only—I planned to come back, make my apologies, even if I didn’t mean them, and maintain my standing within the conclave. But when I returned to the dining hall, there was no one there. It was like I’d been gone for hours.”

The sound. “I heard something, when I rode your blood.”

“My wife doesn’t believe in using magic to preserve food.”

The statement was odd enough that for a moment, I didn’t know what to say. “Um, okay,” I offered finally.

Antonio looked at me like I was beneath contempt. “It would be a waste of her skills. She uses a mortal invention instead. Tin foil. Have you heard of it?”

I bit my lip to keep from laughing as I nodded. “Yes. I’ve encountered the stuff.”

“There’s this sound when she tears off a sheet . . . I heard it. From this room. And then the shadows jumped.”

Wait. “What?”

“My Merry Dancers were never still, and their light meant the shadows were never solid. They didn’t have the opportunity to freeze.” He looked at the shadows around him, expression growing grim. “The world flickered like a candle. I never knew how much I would miss it until it was over.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “But what do you mean, the shadows jumped? Did they actually come for you?” I hadn’t noticed anything like that. I had been hoping Antonio could reveal some motive or facet of the situation that his blood hadn’t given me, but moving shadows seemed a bit big for me to have missed.

“No, you stupid girl,” he said. “They shifted, as if my Merry Dancers had been moved. Which is quite impossible.”

But it wasn’t impossible for something else to have moved. “I heard the sound twice when I rode your blood,” I said. “Once here, once in the hall. Does that match with what you remember?”

The night-haunt who had been King Antonio nodded.

“One last question, and then you can go,” I said. “Do you know anyone who might have wanted you dead?”

His laughter surprised me. “Oh, you simple changeling creature,” he said. “I was a king, and a good one. Everyone wanted me dead.”

Egil took his arm. “We must away,” he said. He snapped his wings open, launching himself upward, into the air. Antonio was pulled along, and other night-haunts moved to support him, holding him in the air until the instincts of his new body took hold, and his wings began to work. Silently, those of us who were still among the living watched the dead flying away, until only the night-haunt with Connor’s face remained.

“October,” he said.

I turned to him. I didn’t say anything. I didn’t know what to say. I still felt guilty when I saw him, as if his death had been entirely my fault, and not the result of his own actions. I was grateful for those actions—I always would be—but I hadn’t asked him to die for my daughter. He had chosen to do that entirely on his own.

“Egil won’t thank you for stopping the goblin fruit. His memories of being Devin are too strong, and he blames you for letting the stuff into his streets in the first place, after he died. I’ve talked to the changelings who died because they got hooked, and they wanted me to tell you that they’re grateful, and they don’t share his anger. The flock is not your friend. The flock will never be your friend, not until you join us, and fly with us, and belong to us. But the flock isn’t your enemy, either.” He paused. Then he smiled, that old, familiar smile, the one that used to greet me when I woke up. My heart clenched. I loved Tybalt more than I would have believed possible, but that didn’t mean I didn’t miss Connor. He’d been my friend before he was my lover. I don’t think I’ll ever get used to losing friends.

“I’ll see you soon,” said the night-haunt with Connor’s face, and launched himself into the air, and left me alone with the living.