Once Broken Faith

ONE

June 10th, 2013

“I’M SCARED.”

The words were simple: their meaning was complex. My entire life is like that these days. It got complicated almost a year ago, when a wild-eyed woman crashed into the bookstore where I worked and ordered me to take back my father’s throne. Like it was a little thing to ask for, or an easy thing to do, and not just a complicated way of committing suicide.

A year ago, if something sounded simple, it probably was. “Yes, we have that book in stock,” or “no, we only carry science fiction and fantasy,” or “let me ask Alan if he knows.” There were days when I’d been bored, restless, convinced I was meant for something better . . . and on those days, I’d slip into the basement, past the bounds of the illusion I used to keep everyone—even Alan, who owned the place—from realizing I lived there. I’d go into the tiny sanctuary I had carved from the flesh of the mortal world, and I’d wipe the dust from my brother’s lips, and I’d remind myself that boredom was a blessing.

Boredom meant the nameless Queen’s agents hadn’t found us. Boredom meant I wasn’t faced with the choice between running and leaving my sleeping brother alone and defenseless, or staying and risking us both. Boredom was everything. Until October Daye, Knight of Lost Words, daughter of Amandine, bane of my peace of mind, smashed her way in and ruined it all.

I’m going to fuck up the tenses here, because past and present get blurred when you’re talking about more than a century, but I’ll do my best. Here it is:

My father was a King, which made me a Princess born and an orphan before I turned sixteen. It made my brother Nolan a Prince, but there was never any question of who would take the throne; I was the elder by two full years. My magic came in earlier and stronger than his. And when we were children, I was fearless. I treated the world like a game that could be won, and I was going to be Queen someday.

Not that anyone knew. My father was unmarried; my mother, his mistress, hid in plain sight as a servant in his Court. Nolan and I lived in a house by the sea with our nursemaid, Marianne. She disguised us as changelings when she brought us to see our parents, and it was the best of all the wonderful games we played. I was a princess in hiding, ready to dazzle the world by bursting forth fully-formed and ready to rule. Someday. After decades and decades and decades of watching how my father did it, learning from his experiences, and preparing.

No one could have been prepared for the earthquake. It came out of nowhere, shattering the Summerlands and San Francisco in the same blow. When it ended, my brother and I were orphans. It was just the two of us and Marianne, who was old and tired and hadn’t signed up to be our replacement mother. She did the best she could. She taught us to run, and hide, and keep our heads down. She honed our illusions until we reached the limits of what our blood allowed.

It wasn’t enough. There were people who remembered her from my father’s Court, people who’d heard the rumors about Gilad having children and were starting to put two and two together. She had to go. Staying would have gotten us all killed. I knew that, and still I cried the night she said good-bye. Nolan was even worse. He’d been so young when the world fell down. Ten years old when we were orphaned; fourteen when Marianne walked away. He cried until she had to charm him into sleep, because otherwise he would have betrayed our position.

He hit the ground like a sack of potatoes, like he was dead, and I was going to throw myself after him when Marianne grabbed my arm and said, “Wait.”

She’d been my keeper and companion since I was nursing. One of my first memories is her smiling down at me, a rag soaked in milk and honey in her hand. I stopped moving and looked at her, letting the habit of obedience guide what happened next.

Marianne smiled sadly. She was Coblynau; I never knew how old she was, but her face was a maze of wrinkles, and her sorrow showed all the way down to her bones. “Here,” she said, reaching into her pocket and pulling out a handful of driftglass beads strung on a braid of unicorn hair. “I got these from the Luidaeg when you were a baby; they’ve kept you safe until now, and they’ll keep you safe hereafter.”

I gasped. I couldn’t help myself. The Luidaeg’s gifts were never things to take lightly, or to request without dire need. “But Marianne, the cost—”

“Was paid long ago, and I never begrudged it. Here.” She pressed them into my hand. “This is all I have. This is all you have. Be careful, Arden, and never forget that I love you as much as I love my own children. Never forget to stay safe, for my sake, for your sake, for the sake of the Mists.”

Then she was gone, and I was alone with my brother, too young to be a woman, too young to be a surrogate mother to a confused boy still getting the hang of his own teenage years. The Princess who would never be a Queen. My father taught me about ruling, and my mother taught me about hiding, and my nursemaid taught me about running away, and of the three of them, Marianne’s lessons were the ones that served me the best for years, and years, and years. Her lessons got me through the time I spent alone, after Nolan was elf-shot by the false Queen’s forces. She kept me safe.

Until October. Until the challenge, and the crown, and this great barn of a knowe, where the air still sometimes tastes like my mother’s perfume when we let the ghosts out of rooms that have been sealed for more than a century. Until I left my mortal life the same way I left my fae one: not walking away but running, fleeing into a different future. I was born a Princess in hiding. Technically, I grew up the same way. But the way I hid as a child was a glorious game, and the way I hid as an adult was a constant threat, and they are not the same.

The girl I should have grown up to be is never going to sit on the throne of the Mists. That girl died with our mutual mother, in the 1906 earthquake, when palaces that should never have shifted tried to shake themselves to the ground. That girl has neither grave nor night-haunt mannequin to remember her. She only has me, and I hate her sometimes, because she would have been so much better at this than I am. She would have had tutors and secret allies and an army preparing her for the pressures of queenship. She would have been a committee.

I didn’t get any of that. I got good at disposable identities and confusion charms, at lying until potential employers believed me, at moving my elf-shot brother under the cover of night, going place to place in pursuit of the lie of a safe haven. I got a bookstore and a best friend and barely time to catch my breath before October barged in like a changeling battering ram and took it all away.

I’m sure there are people who’d say it was worth it to lose everything and gain a throne, but since I stopped wanting the throne decades ago, I’m not one of them. I want to make my parents proud. I want to keep my brother safe. I can do those things better from the throne of the Mists than I could from the basement of Borderlands.

But some days, most days, that basement felt more like home than this knowe did.

The conclave—my first major political event—had been a success, and they’d left me alone, all of them after it was over and we’d finished waking the majority of the sleepers. October had walked away clinging to her squire and her alchemist and her Cait Sidhe fiancé, checking every five minutes to be sure they were all awake. It would have been funny if I hadn’t been on some level fiercely glad to see it. Sometimes it feels like she doesn’t know how to lose. Maybe it’s small and petty and human of me to want her to understand what it’s like for the rest of us, but I’ve spent more time with humans than I’ve spent with my own kind. I guess a little had to work its way in.

Waking Duchess Lorden had been a more involved process, and had involved finding a way to restrain her without hurting her. We couldn’t afford to offend her any more than she already was—I mean, being elf-shot is pretty damn offensive—but she was likely to wake up swinging, and that woman can hit. In the end, we’d resorted to binding spells to hold her down while Queen Siwan of Silences administered the cure and Dianda’s husband, Patrick Lorden, stood in full view at the foot of the bed. As we’d hoped, the sight of him stopped her from either hurting herself or figuring out how to break the bonds and hurting the rest of us.

The fact that her attacker had been elf-shot for hurting her helped. The fact that he was being left that way until she decided on his punishment helped more. She and Patrick will be enjoying the hospitality of my household for another three days while they decide what to do.

Many of the land nobles are hoping she’ll show mercy, if only so they won’t have to explain why they’d stood idly by as one of their own was dragged away to the Undersea to sleep out his sentence. Personally, I hope she’ll go for the worst punishment she can think of. I don’t want people thinking they can attack each other willy-nilly under my roof.

When did this become my roof? It’s supposed to be my father’s roof. It’s supposed to have been his for the last hundred years. I groaned and dropped my head into my hands.

“I swear, Nolan, I’m scared out of my mind here, and I don’t know what to do.”

The last remaining sleeper didn’t say anything. Hadn’t said anything, in fact, since August fifteenth, nineteen thirty-two. But who’s counting, right? Who measures the days a brother spends in an enchanted sleep, unable to comfort the sister who loves him?

I guess I do.

It doesn’t help that, hello cliché, the last things we said to each other weren’t particularly kind. He hated the false Queen sitting on our father’s throne. He wanted to raise an army and depose her and take our lives back. Maybe it was because I was older and more aware of what we had left to lose, but I wanted to stay safely under the radar, avoiding her attention. He kept saying that if I really wanted to pass unnoticed, I’d move us out of the Kingdom, to someplace where our resemblance to our lost father wouldn’t draw stares on the street, and he wasn’t wrong, and I kept not moving. I was frozen. Like a rabbit that sees the hunter coming, I was frozen.

I should have listened. I should have gotten us the hell out of the Mists. But I was afraid that anywhere we went, we’d be seized on and used as the figureheads of a revolution. Faerie loves nothing like it loves to go to war. Putting the daughter of a dead King back on the throne where she belonged? That was a lovely excuse for a slaughter. If it was going to happen no matter where we were, why should we leave the only place we’d ever called home? I was a coward, and Nolan was burning to prove himself, and it was a combination destined to end in tragedy.

These were the last words he said to me: “I don’t know why you bothered surviving if you weren’t going to live.”

I’d been on my way out the door, heading for the job that was keeping a roof over our heads and food in our mouths. I was serving as the nanny of a local mortal family, using the skills I’d copied from Marianne to support us. She was still saving us, after all those years. I’d thought it was an ordinary day. Nolan was impossible when he got into one of his moods: I hadn’t even tried to talk to him. I’d just left. I hadn’t told him I loved him. I hadn’t said I was proud of him.

I’d just left, and when I came home from work, he’d been gone.

I hadn’t worried right away. Nolan was a young man, headstrong and angry and looking for an outlet. I couldn’t keep him with me all the time, no matter how much I wanted to. But hours had gone by, and he hadn’t returned, until fear had driven me into the night to look for him. I’d gone to his favorite haunts, the places he went when he was angry with me, and I’d searched and searched and searched until I found him. The arrow had still been in his chest, pinning the message from the false Queen to his shirt.

‘Little Princess;

I hope you enjoy my gift. Take it for the opportunity it is, and walk away. I will not be so kind again, to either of you.’

It hadn’t been signed. It hadn’t needed to be. Nolan never hurt anyone in his life. The only person with a reason to attack him or threaten me was the woman holding my father’s throne. Unless I decided to raise an army against her, she couldn’t have me killed without breaking the Law. Threats and intimidation were her best tools. And oh, she used them well. So well that I dragged Nolan home to the boarding house without a word to anyone. We needed to disappear again.

And that’s exactly what we did.

Now here we were, eighty years later, and he was still asleep and I was finally the Queen he’d always wanted me to be. But the things I’d learned as a child were fuzzy and distant; I was making all this up as I went along, and I was terrified of letting him down.

If I wanted to, I could leave Nolan to sleep out the rest of his time. What was another twenty years? I’d been frantic to wake him when I thought I only had a little while before the cure was banned, but now that the cure was being openly distributed, I could afford to wait. I could give myself the time to figure things out. I could establish myself as a Queen to be feared and respected, not some untrained stranger whose butt had barely hit the throne. I could mature without him . . . and we’d wind up even farther apart than we already were. I’d turned into a different person while he slept. If I left him asleep while I turned myself into a ruler, he might not even recognize me when he finally woke up.

But at least he’d be proud of me. If I was going to be a stranger, why shouldn’t I be a stranger he could respect, and not just a girl with a PhD in running away?

“I wish you could hear me.” I turned the bottle containing the cure—his cure, the potion that would wake him up immediately, instead of in another twenty years—in my hand, watching the way the liquid lapped against the glass. It was pink with streaks of purple and gold, like a sunset, like a future.

“I wish you could tell me what to do.”

Nolan, saying nothing, slept on. After a long pause, I stretched out on the bier next to him, the bottle still held tightly in my hand, and closed my own eyes. Maybe everything would be clearer on the other side of a nap.

TWO

Everything was not, in fact, clearer on the other side of a nap. I opened my eyes, and for one dizzying moment, I had no idea where I was. The room was round, ringed with windows to let the fresh air in. It smelled like redwood sap and rain. I don’t know how the bedding around me stayed so dry; with the fog the way it was in the trees, everything should have been damp all the time. The ceiling was a mural of blackberry vines twining around several small, sleeping animals. A fawn, a rabbit, a unicorn, a bear. The usual menagerie.

I sat up. The bottle was no longer in my hand. My breath sped up and my chest grew tight as I looked around me. It was gone. It was gone. I’d failed him again, I’d lost it somehow, and now he was going to sleep for another twenty years whether I wanted him to or not—

Light glinted off bias-cut glass. I leaned over the edge of the bed. The bottle was on the floor, nestled against the bedpost. I leaned farther down, snatching it off the floor, feeling its reassuring weight settle in my palm. The sky outside the windows hadn’t changed; it was still twilight, the sky painted purple and rose, like a darker version of the liquid that would wake my brother. It’s almost always twilight in the Summerlands.

Carefully, I slid off the bed and walked to the nearest window, pushing the curtains aside. The sky was cloudy, but there were patches where the stars shone through, gleaming bright. Once, this sky was all I knew. These days, I sometimes think I’d trade it all for the light-polluted mortal stars of San Francisco. At least they’d be familiar.

“I’m scared,” I whispered. Nothing answered me, not even the distant jingle of pixie wings. That was probably for the best. Queens aren’t supposed to be scared. Queens are supposed to be calm and steady and prepared for anything. They make the choices. My choice should have been simple. Give the potion to my brother. Open his eyes twenty years early. Let him see how far we’d come, that we didn’t have to run anymore; that we were safe. It would be simple. It would be easy.

So why couldn’t I do it?

I turned away from the window and toward the bed where Nolan slept, silently waiting for me to make my decision. He looked like he’d looked for the past eighty years: peaceful. He had our father’s dark hair, same as me, black in shadow and glinting purple in the light. If he opened his eyes, they’d be mismatched: one the almost-golden color of pyrite, one metallic gray, like liquid mercury. He hadn’t seen the sun in decades, but his skin was still tan, with olive undertones. No one who met me could look at him and not see him for my brother. There had never been any chance of us repudiating each other.

“Would you have been better off without me?” I asked. He could have run, if I hadn’t been there counseling caution and holding him back. He could have made a home for himself in some far-away kingdom, one where no one knew what King Gilad Windermere looked like, one where he could start again. Two children with a dead king’s bone structure and coloration were a target. One was a curiosity. One could disappear where two couldn’t.

And I was the one who’d been old enough to scar instead of healing. I was the one who’d found our mother’s body with a canyon where her throat should have been. Nolan had been with Marianne. He’d always known how Mother ended, but he’d never seen it. It was a little thing in the grander scheme, and yet. He’d never been forced to go to sleep with our mother’s murdered face watching him from behind his eyelids. He’d never walked through the world understanding what would happen to us if we put one foot wrong. He’d known, because I’d told him—over and over and over again—but knowing and understanding aren’t the same thing. Maybe they never can be.

Nolan didn’t answer. Nolan couldn’t answer. Nolan had passed beyond answering decades ago, and if he was going to start answering again, it would either be because I’d dithered for twenty years, or because I’d forced him to drink a potion I couldn’t make and didn’t fully understand.

“I could wait, you know.” My words fell into the silence, filling it, softening its edges. I wanted to open the door and call for Madden, or for Lowri, or for any other member of my court. I wanted someone to tell me what to do. I wanted someone to tell me whether waking my brother was right or wrong.

And that was why I couldn’t ask. I was the Queen now. I had to make these decisions on my own. I walked back to Nolan’s bed, perching on the edge.

“Eighty years is a long time. Twenty more on top of that is nothing. I haven’t even been Queen for a full year, you know? Nine months. That’s not long enough to know what I’m doing. I keep waiting for Jude to call and say my vacation’s over and I need to come back to the store.” Not that she could. I’ve changed phone numbers, addresses, and names. No one from my old life could find me if they wanted to.

I held up the bottle. “So what if I let you sleep for another year, or another five, or whatever, while I get my feet under me? I’ll be a better sister if I’m not busy trying to learn how to queen while I teach you about the Internet. It would be better for both of us if I waited.”

Nolan didn’t answer. Sometimes I wasn’t even sure I remembered what his voice sounded like. Elf-shot is supposed to be the kinder option during wartime, and I guess it is, since it just takes our loved ones away for a century, instead of forever. But a hundred years was long enough to make us into strangers to one another. I’d been less than thirty when he’d gone to sleep. Sometimes I felt like he was more of an idea than an individual.

Sometimes I wonder whether it’s like that for the older ones, too. My father was over three hundred years old when he died. Would he have forgotten us eventually, if he’d been able to live and stay King in the Mists until Nolan and I grew up? It might explain a few things. Memory is a funny thing. It can be worn away if it’s revisited too often, smudged and warped and winnowed down to symbols when it used to be about people, real people, living real lives. If the older fae don’t remember what happened to them when they were young, it makes sense for them to be distant and cold. They have no emotional connections to the world.

I don’t want to be like that. I still don’t know what I want to be, except for maybe a bookstore clerk, and that door is closed to me now. But I was going to find out.

The cork came free of the bottle with a soft popping sound. The smell of roses wafted out, making me want to sneeze. It was almost like the smell of Countess Winterrose’s magic, but not quite right; it was too warm, too comforting, too friendly. This wasn’t a charm that had been designed to hurt people. It only wanted to help.

“I hope you’re okay with this,” I said. “I guess eighty years isn’t as bad as a hundred. I guess I’m not being selfish by waking you up now. I guess . . . I guess I’m lonely, Nolan. I’ve been talking to you for eighty years, and you’ve never answered. I’d like that to change. I’d like you to answer.”

Last chance. I could put the stopper back in, put the bottle in my pocket, and walk away. No one would question me deciding to let my brother sleep out the rest of his enchantment. Well, maybe Toby would. She doesn’t really have a lot of respect for the fact that I’m the Queen and thus technically the boss of her. I’d be upset by that, if not for the part where she doesn’t have a lot of respect for anyone, including the Luidaeg. So it’s not like I’m special. She treats me the way she treats everyone else.

After a decade or two of queening, that will probably offend me. Right now, it’s a relief. No matter how far I rise, there will always be someone standing there to laugh at me.

It didn’t have to be just one person.

“I’ve been so lonely,” I said, and lifted the bottle to Nolan’s lips, pushing down until his mouth opened enough to let me start dripping the cure through, one drop at a time. I didn’t want him to choke.

He swallowed. It was the first time I’d seen him move in decades. I pulled the bottle away and stepped back. The cure worked, I knew that—I had seen it work repeatedly, from Madden to Dianda. Nolan was special to me, but that didn’t make him special to the rules of magic that governed Faerie. If the cure worked for one, it would work for all. He was going to wake up. He was. But with every second that passed without him opening his eyes, I became a little more convinced that something had gone wrong.

Finally, I couldn’t take it anymore. I tucked the bottle into my skirt before reaching out and touching his shoulder as gently as I could, like I was afraid of waking him. But that was silly, wasn’t it? I wanted to wake him. I wanted to wake him more than I’d wanted anything in years.

“Nolan,” I said. “Hey. Can you hear me? It’s your sister. Wake up.”

He made a small noise deep in his throat; a sound of protest, a sound of displeasure. Hearing it woke a hundred “just one more minute” memories, images of a younger Nolan begging me to let him stay in bed when it was time to get up and get the night started. I smiled as tears rose in my eyes. Memory wasn’t as complicated as I’d feared. It was still there. It was all still there. It just needed to be woken up. Like my brother, it just needed to be woken up.

“Come on, Nolan. You’ve been asleep long enough. It’s time to open your eyes.”

“Ardy?”

His voice was the creak of a rusty gate, ragged and shallow and worn. I could have mistaken it for a dream, something I wanted so much that I was imagining it, if it hadn’t been followed by his lashes fluttering against his cheeks before finally—finally!—his eyes opened and he was squinting up at me.

He blinked, and frowned. “Ardy?” he whispered again. “When did you get so old?”

Laughing through my tears, I fell upon my brother and gathered him in my arms, and for the first time since our parents died, I felt like I was on my way home.

THREE

The only person left in the sleeper’s tower was Duke Michel, who had been elf-shot for committing a crime: for the first time in a hundred years, there were no innocent victims of elf-shot in the Kingdom in the Mists. We were free of Eira Rosynhwyr’s poisonous gifts—and more, I was free of the injunction not to use magic in proximity of the cure, which was somewhat unstable, according to the alchemist who’d created it. He was still tinkering, and he promised to have something more reliable by the end of the year, but that was later, and this was now. Nolan’s head resting on my left shoulder, I used my right hand to inscribe a wide arc in the air, opening a portal.

As always, using my magic openly sent a little thrill through me, like I was getting away with something. My powers had never been suppressed, although I’d considered it a few times. There were always underground alchemists working in San Francisco—lean, hungry fae who thought they were going to rival the sea witch one day. They would have been delighted to sell me blocking potions, keeping me from accessing the powers I got from my parents and hence potentially giving myself away. And they would have remembered my face, filed away the scent of my magic, maybe even gone to the Library of Stars to compare it to the census.

The fae world is an easier place to be anonymous than the human world. There’s no question of that. But that doesn’t mean it’s safe.

Nolan lifted his head, blinking at me in confusion. He only seemed to have two expressions at the moment—confused and bewildered, which were subtly different. I couldn’t have distinguished them on anyone else, but he was my brother, and his face was so much like mine that it was like looking into a mirror.

“Ardy?” he said blankly.

“Hey,” I said, smiling to cover my increasing distress. Madden had been back to normal within seconds of waking. Dianda had come to swinging and ready to murder people—which, for her, was also back to normal. So why was Nolan taking so long to recover?

He’d been asleep so much longer than they had. This was probably perfectly normal. Master Davies had just forgotten to warn me, that was all.

“Where are we?”

My smile froze, turning rigid. “Nolan, we’re home. This is home. We got it back.”

His confusion wasn’t going away. If anything, it was getting deeper. “Home?”

“Come on.” I stood, pulling him with me. He stumbled in the process of getting his feet under him, but in the end, he did it. I had to take that as a good sign. It was a good sign, wasn’t it? Wasn’t it?

Nolan let me pull him through the portal, which closed behind us with a faint pop. He looked around the new room, eyes skipping over the bed, wardrobe, and writing desk without recognition. He turned to me, and in the same blank tone, asked, “Where are we?”

“Home,” I repeated. His tone might be staying the same, but mine wasn’t: the desperation was creeping in around the edges, coloring everything I said. Something was really wrong. “This was your room when we came to visit Mother at Court, remember? That’s your bed.” Like all Coblynau furniture, it was enchanted to grow with its owner; the bed he’d slept in as a child was still long and wide enough to cradle him now that he was an adult.

“Bed,” Nolan breathed, showing his first sign of recognition since he said my name. He pulled away from me, less walking under his own power than staggering drunkenly to the bed.

I watched in horror as he collapsed onto it, falling facedown into the pillows. “Nolan?”

He didn’t respond.

“Nolan!” I ran to his side, rolling him over, so his face was turned toward the ceiling and he wouldn’t suffocate. His chest was rising and falling like a normal sleeper’s, without the slow, drugged tempo of the elf-shot. I shook him. He didn’t open his eyes. I shook him harder, and still, he didn’t open his eyes.

“Nolan?” My voice cracked, becoming young and shrill in my throat. I felt like the girl I’d been when I found him in the bushes, the arrow in his chest and blank serenity on his face. I hadn’t felt like her in years. She’d been so innocent. She’d truly believed, deep down, that we’d suffered enough; that the world would start being kinder. The world still wasn’t being kinder.

I took a step backward, my hand sculpting an arch in the air behind me and opening a portal to the veranda. Madden was there, going over the household records and trying to figure out what we had too much of versus what we didn’t have enough of. It was one of his tasks as Seneschal, at least until I hired a Chamberlain—something I’d been in no hurry to do. Madden knew me. Madden understood me, and that was something I couldn’t put a price on.

Madden wouldn’t judge me.

Taking one last look at my slumbering brother, I whirled and fled through the portal, stumbling from the sweet-scented air of the bedroom into the cool Summerlands night. Globes of witch-light lit the veranda, bobbing a few inches below the living, mossy canopy that kept the area dry even during heavy rainfall. Madden sat at the largest of the three round tables, a pair of comically small spectacles balanced on the tip of his nose. His head snapped up when my foot hit the floor; by the time I had reached the table, he was on his feet, arms up to catch me.

“Ardy, what’s wrong?” he demanded.

Hearing my nickname from one of the two people in the world allowed to use it brought tears to my eyes, where they hung, stinging and hot, refusing to fall. “Something’s wrong with Nolan,” I said, burrowing into Madden’s arms, allowing myself a split-second where I wasn’t a queen; I was just Arden Windermere, the girl without a kingdom, without a crown, without a brother to comfort her. “I woke him up, but he’s not awake. He barely knows me. He barely knows where he is.”

“Where is he now?”

“In his room.” Madden knew where that was: he’d helped me prepare it once we knew it was both possible and permissible for me to wake my brother. We’d wiped away dust and cleared away cobwebs, and—for a little while—I’d allowed myself to dream of a future where things started going right for me. My lips twisted into a bitter line as I continued, “Asleep. Again. He was awake less than five minutes before he passed out. What did I do wrong?”

“I don’t know.” Madden didn’t do anything to soften his words. He didn’t need to. He was my best friend and my seneschal and the only person who’d known who I was before October came along and ruined everything. He’d never cared that I was a princess, and now he didn’t care that I was a queen. He just cared that I was his Ardy, and I was in pain.

There are people in my Court who think he’s disrespectful, and maybe I’d agree with them if I’d grown up as the girl they want me to be. But I didn’t, and I find his willingness to be my friend before he’s my subject more refreshing than anything else in the world.

I pulled away from him, wiping my eyes with the back of my hand. “I need to talk to the alchemist,” I said. “Where is he?”

“Uh.” Madden looked at his wrist. His watch—a cheerful, brightly-colored thing with Mickey Mouse printed on the strap—was charmed eight ways from Sunday to keep mortal time even when we were in the Summerlands. It’s a necessary affectation. He still works at the Borderlands Café, slinging mochas and looking sad when Jude asks whether he’s heard from me. He doesn’t like lying to her any more than I liked disappearing from the face of the world, but his position leaves him with time to interact with the human world, and mine doesn’t. Even when I’m not doing anything, I’m being a queen, and being a queen means staying where my people can find me.

“It’s almost midnight,” said Madden. “I’m pretty sure there aren’t any classes at midnight, but I don’t know. I did all my college stuff online.”

“He’s not in the knowe?”

“No.” Madden looked deeply regretful. “He went back to work this morning while you were asleep. You had the potion, you had your brother, and you’d said you didn’t want any of us there while you woke him up.”

“Do you know where his office is?”

“Yes, but—”

“Where is it?”

Madden frowned. “Ardy, I don’t think this is the best idea. You should send someone. Send me. Send Lowri. She has a car.”

“She has a rusty piece of junk that needs about twenty thousand dollars’ worth of work before it’ll be shitty enough to sell for scrap,” I said. “I’m going. Where’s his office?”

“He’s in the UC Berkeley Chemistry Building. I really don’t like this.”

“Something is wrong with my brother.” I grabbed a fistful of air. It writhed against my fingers, protesting my intentions. Tough. I twisted it into a human disguise, throwing the features of the woman I’d spent so many decades pretending to be over my own. The weight of her was comforting. I’d been Ardith Heydt for years; longer, really, than I’d been Arden Windermere. I was better at being a bookstore clerk than I was at being a queen.

The one thing we’d always had in common was our brother. Nolan, who’d been the focus of my life since his birth, regardless of which version of me—lost princess, retail worker, or newfound queen—I was allowing myself to be. I straightened, forcing myself to breathe.

“Madden, you have the knowe until I return. If anyone needs me, try to fix whatever their problem is, and if you can’t, tell them to come back tomorrow. I’m busy for tonight.”

He sighed. “All right. Just be careful, Ardy. I don’t want you to get hurt.”

“Too late for that,” I said. “Years and years too late for that.”

A sweep of my hand opened a window between the balcony and a copse of trees on the UC Berkeley campus. I touched the tip of my ear, verifying that my illusion was solid, and stepped through.

FOUR

The air in the mortal world was thicker, flavored with gas fumes and pesticides and pollution. I breathed in deeply, filling my lungs. This was what home was supposed to smell like. This was where I belonged.

Stupid duty. Stupid bloodline. Stupid inheritance.

It was late enough that the campus was virtually deserted. Somewhere in the trees an owl hooted, protesting my sudden appearance; something rustled in the bushes, too small and quick to be human. That was a relief. Somehow I didn’t think High King Aethlin would be too thrilled if his newest and least-prepared queen was the one who betrayed the existence of Faerie to the human world. We’d managed to stay under the radar for centuries. I wasn’t going to be the one who gave us away.

When nothing else moved, I started walking. My skirt wasn’t the smartest choice for the tree-peppered UC Berkeley grounds, but my illusion was cosmetic only; it hadn’t changed the structure or length of my clothes. Transforming them would have taken too much out of me, especially when I was transporting myself—and hopefully, soon, Master Davies—between Berkeley and Muir Woods. My range is average for one of the Tuatha de Dannan. I can manage a hundred miles on a good day, if I’m aiming for a target that isn’t super precise, like “somewhere in the trees on campus” or “in Muir Woods,” as opposed to “this exact square foot of clover.” I can do three or four jumps a night if they’re that distance, and a lot more if they’re not. But my power is as limited as anyone else’s, and there was no sense frittering it away on unnecessary tactile transformations.

The campus was like a midnight dream, quiet and verdant and intermittently lit by flickering energy-efficient streetlights. Pixies darted overhead, not many, but enough to make it clear that I wasn’t alone. As always, I wondered if they recognized me, or if they cared. Pixies aren’t smart enough to know who’s in charge—or maybe they’re smart enough to realize it doesn’t matter. As long as they have wings, they can get away, and they don’t have to get sucked into the bullshit we mire ourselves in. Maybe the pixies are secretly the smartest things in Faerie, and the rest of us will never know.

I hadn’t been to UC Berkeley in years. My last visit had been during the early nineties, when Madden had lured me away from the used bookstore where I was working long enough to come to a place named the Bear’s Lair and hear a scrappy young mortal band called the Counting Crows play a set. They’d been out of tune; the lead singer had been so drunk that he’d barely been able to stay on his feet for the last three songs; it had been one of the best nights of my life. We’d laughed and cheered and sung along, even though we didn’t know half the lyrics, and it had been perfect. I’d been avoiding campus ever since.

When you live a life like mine, you learn that it’s best to leave the good things alone. If you give the world a chance to ruin them, it’ll take it. Every single fucking time. Case in point: I was alone, and there was no music, and no beer, and no beautiful mortal men to watch admiringly with my best friend. There was just me, and the silence, and the knowledge that this night was going to overwrite the one I’d treasured for so long. That was just the way it was going to be. Again. Always.

The chemistry building was locked. That wasn’t a problem. I peered through the glass, confirming that no one was inside before I waved my hand in the air and opened a portal. I stepped through and the door was behind me, glass unbroken, lock unpicked. It was an elegant, impossible solution to a very mortal problem. Even if I’d been here to rob the place—which I wasn’t—and even if they’d decided to spring for cameras, no security guard would have believed the footage. The illusion I was wearing would keep them from tracking me down to ask how I’d done it, and Faerie was not going to be revealed by what looked like a glitch on the tape.

I didn’t know which office belonged to Master Davies. I didn’t need to. Most of them were dark, their doors locked against the night; of all the doors along the hall, only one was cracked enough to let a sliver of light escape. It showed the scuffs and muddy footprints on the linoleum. The janitorial staff probably didn’t come until closer to morning.

As I drew closer, I heard voices from inside.

“—tried to explain that actually, I do need to show up for classes once in a while if I want a shot at tenure, but you know Toby.” The alchemist: Master Davies. Tylwyth Teg, originally from the Kingdom of Silences, currently living in the Mists and hence subject to my laws.

Wry laughter followed his words. “Oh, man, do I know Toby.” The voice was unfamiliar: the subject material was not. I sometimes thought half of my reign was going to be spent trying to explain October to people who didn’t have any context on her, and hence assumed we were all screwing with them.

“Did you know she elf-shot herself on purpose?”

“See, and here I was thinking there was something stupid left that she hadn’t done. Stop disillusioning me.”

“Sorry.”

I felt like I was intruding. But my brother was unwell, and I was Queen in the Mists, and it was time for me to make my presence known. I stepped into the sliver of light, reaching for the partially-open door at the same time.

It opened to reveal Master Davies sitting at his desk, and a woman sitting on his desk. They were both wearing human disguises—only sensible, if they were going to hang around with the door unlocked—and I didn’t recognize her at all. Sadly, that didn’t necessarily make her a newcomer to the Mists. My kingdom was large, and I’d spent more time avoiding it than I had going door to door and meeting the people whose fealty was technically mine to command.

The woman blinked at me. So did Master Davies. Then, in a tone that was pleasantly polite without being friendly, he said, “I’m sorry, but office hours happen before the campus is closed for the night. Is there something else I can help you with?”

It was the first time he’d spoken to me like I was a person, instead of just a crown. My illusions aren’t strong enough to change my voice, and so I hesitated, enjoying the feeling of being part of the scene, instead of holding myself above it.

The girl slid off the desk, landing lightly on her feet. Her hair was brown-blonde, darkening to black at the tips, and somehow didn’t look dyed. She was softly rounded, wearing cut-off denim shorts and a tank top that left her belly bare. Not the sort of clothes one wears to visit a professor at midnight—not unless the visit is a lot more social than professional. And she’d admitted to knowing October. I took a breath, and took a guess.

“I need you to return to Muir Woods with me,” I said. Master Davies’s expression went blank. I felt bad about that, I genuinely did, but I couldn’t stop. Not when Nolan needed me. “Something’s wrong with the elf-shot cure. My brother woke, but he didn’t stay that way.”

“Your Highness.” Master Davies stood and bowed, looking at the floor as he continued, “You do me too much honor by coming to me here on campus. I would have gladly come had you called.”

“It would have taken longer,” I said.

The woman looked between us, her eyes getting wider and wider. They were an unprepossessing shade of blue, the sort of thing no one would choose for an illusion unless they were natural. She was dressing up, but only in the most textile of senses. She wanted him to see her for herself, or as close as was possible under the circumstances.

“Wait,” she said. “Is this—I mean, are you—I mean—oh, shit.” Her cheeks flared red. “I just swore in front of the new Queen, didn’t I?”

“You did,” I said, unable to smother my amusement completely. It was sort of a relief. Humor makes the bad times easier to bear, even if it never lasts long enough to make a real difference. “Don’t worry. We don’t have any rules against that. I think because my father probably didn’t realize that humans had profanity. He was sheltered like that. Also, that’s exactly what October said when she met the High Queen. Clearly, you know her.”

“Ah,” said Master Davies. “Queen Windermere in the Mists, I’d like you to meet my friend Cassandra Brown. Cassandra is a student here.”

“Not one of his,” she hastened to clarify. “Nothing inappropriate is going on. We were just catching up.”

“Brown,” I said. “Are you related to Karen?”

Cassandra looked startled. “She’s my sister. How did you . . . ?”

“She came to my conclave. She seemed nice. A little shy, but I’d be shy, too, if I had one of the First accompanying my every move. Are you an oneiromancer?” Karen Brown’s powers were the kind that appeared only rarely, and even more rarely in changelings.

“No, ma’am. I mean, Highness. I mean . . .” She stopped, a frustrated look crossing her face. “I have no idea how to do this. I’m just a changeling. I’m not supposed to know how to do this. If I leave right now, will you pretend this never happened?”

I paused. Something about her tone told me she was holding something back. It might be nothing. So many things were really nothing, when looked at in the light of day. But if there was a chance she was withholding information that the alchemist had shared with her . . .

“I’m afraid not,” I said. “I need you both to come with me.”

“Cassandra’s not part of this,” protested Master Davies.

“My brother is unwell,” I said. “That means my heir is unwell. The security of the kingdom requires you both to come with me now.”

“Toby’s not even here,” muttered Cassandra. “How the hell am I in trouble when Toby’s not even here?”

I ignored her and swept my hand in an arc through the air, opening a portal to the upstairs hallway of my knowe. I didn’t want to drop us in the receiving room, where my servants might see. Most of the household staff was on loan from the local nobles, and that meant if I wanted to keep Nolan’s condition a secret, I needed to keep them from suspecting anything. The alchemist reappearing after I’d dismissed him would certainly be suspicious enough to make people start talking.

Master Davies looked at the portal with dismay. Like Cassandra, he couldn’t believe this was happening to him. Unlike Cassandra, he’d been raised in a royal household, and knew better than to express his displeasure aloud.

Belatedly, I realized I didn’t remember his first name. I was already falling into the habits of queenship. And if it got me my brother back, I didn’t care.

“After you,” I said.

Master Davies paused to pick up the valise containing his alchemical supplies before stepping through the portal. Cassandra exhaled when she saw him appear on the other side, casting one last, anxious glance at my face before following him through. I went after her, and the portal closed behind me.

The servants had been here recently. The hallway smelled of wood polish and fresh blackberry flowers. Master Davies shoved his hands into his pockets and released his human disguise, adding the scents of ice and yarrow to the mixture. Mostly yarrow. He didn’t remove his glasses. I knew they were cosmetic, but they seemed to be making him feel better, and I didn’t want to push it. I was already pushing him hard enough.

Cassandra, in contrast, was looking around with open-mouthed amazement. She reached up to push her hair behind her ears, releasing her illusions in the same gesture; they dissolved in a wash of grapefruit and turpentine, revealing the tufts of black-and-brown fur crowning her dully pointed ears. I frowned. I’d never seen ears like that anywhere in Faerie, and while I might have forgotten many of the points of queenly etiquette, I’ll never forget the nights I spent with Marianne, her calm, steady voice drilling me on the things I’d need to know to recognize all the denizens of our vast and varied land. Whatever her heritage was, I didn’t know it.

Master Davies cleared his throat. “Your Highness? Where is your brother?”

“This way,” I said, and pulled my regard away from Cassandra’s ears as I turned.

The room where Nolan slept was a short distance down the hall. The lock was open; the knob turned easily under my hand. I pushed the door open and stepped aside, letting Master Davies get a look at his patient.

Nolan was exactly where I’d left him. His chest rose and fell with more vigor than was normal for a victim of elf-shot, but that was the only indication that the cure had been administered; from the way he was lying there, he might as well have still been under the original spell.

“Your Highness.” Master Davies’ voice snapped me out of my contemplation of my brother. I turned to him. He looked at me gravely. “I need a sample of your brother’s blood to determine what’s happening. Is this going to distress you? Do I need to ask you to leave the room? I will.”

He had that authority. Alchemists and healers could command monarchs in the course of treating their patients. It was a small twist in the archaic rules that bound us all, intended to protect our healers from the wrath of people like me. I stared at him, not sure whether I should be grateful that he was worried about my delicate sensibilities, or whether I should start screaming and never stop.

I settled for neither. “I worked in retail during the holiday season, and I’ve met October more than once,” I said, barely managing to keep myself from snarling. “I can handle a little blood.”

“Even when it’s your brother’s? I don’t want to fight with you, Highness, or find myself banished because you don’t like what I have to do in order to do my job.”

I took a deep breath. That didn’t do much to make me feel better. I took another one. Finally feeling calm enough to speak without yelling, I said, “I’m staying. You have my word that nothing you do in the course of helping my brother will be held against you.”

“Heard and witnessed,” said Cassandra. I glanced at her, surprised. She shrugged. “You pick things up.”

“I guess you do,” I said.

Master Davies moved toward the head of Nolan’s bed, pausing to put his valise down on the bedside table and begin rummaging through it. His hands seemed to dip deeper than the bottom of the bag. That was an easy charm, for some fae; treat the leather, spell the stitches, and produce something that was bigger on the inside than it was on the outside. Like a TARDIS doing double-duty as a book bag.

He produced an antique silver scalpel and a glass bowl barely larger than the tip of his thumb. After glancing nervously in my direction, he bent and nicked the side of Nolan’s jaw. It was a clever place to conceal a cut; if not for the fact that Nolan hadn’t needed to shave in eighty years, it could have passed for part of his normal morning routine.

The cut wasn’t deep, but it was enough. A few drops of blood welled up. Master Davies used the blunt side of the scalpel to direct them into the dish. Straightening, he put the scalpel down next to his valise and waved his hand over the blood, chanting something quick and sharp in a language I thought was probably Welsh. The smell of his magic rose again, stronger than before, chilling the room by several degrees. I shivered. Cassandra didn’t. She was staring at the air above the blood, eyes slightly unfocused, like she was looking at something I couldn’t see.

I frowned. Something was wrong here. Something was—

“Oh, oak and ash.” Master Davies’ voice was hushed. My head snapped around, attention going back to him. He was pinching the bridge of his nose with his free hand, the smell of ice and yarrow hanging heavy in the air. He looked like a man defeated.

And Nolan was still asleep.

“Master Davies?” I had to fight to keep my tone level. I nearly lost the battle. “What is it?”

“The elf-shot—” he began, and stopped, thinking better of whatever he’d been about to say. Carefully, he put the dish containing my brother’s blood down next to the scalpel and turned to face me, folding his hands behind his back. “Your Highness, the cure I developed was intended to treat elf-shot. Do you understand what that means?”

Irritation washed through me like acid. “It means my brother is supposed to wake up.”

“Yes, it does. But more, it means that I was able, with the assistance of Sir Daye, to brew a tincture specifically designed to counter a sleeping charm developed by Eira Rosynhwyr.”

“I know that,” I snapped. “You tested Nolan’s blood before, to make sure he’d been hit with a variation of the charm that your cure could fight.”

“And he was, and it did,” said Master Davies. “The problem is . . . people have been tinkering with the recipe for elf-shot since it was created. Some of them were trying to make it kinder. Others were trying to make it worse. Do you know who brewed the elf-shot that felled your brother?”

“I wasn’t exactly in a position to ask when it happened,” I said.

“Yes, of course. My apologies.” He took a deep breath. “The elf-shot itself was a standard recipe. As close to generic as you can get without changing the way it works. But it was hiding a secondary charm, something related, yet not the same.”

“A second sleeping spell?” I asked, aghast. “Can you do that?”

“Could I do that? Absolutely. It would be child’s play. Elf-shot is so dominant in the blood while it’s active that it can be used to hide all manner of things. The alchemist who brewed this spell tucked it behind the elf-shot, and keyed it to consciousness. The second spell might as well not have existed until your brother woke.”

This time, despair washed through me, chasing away the irritation. “So he’s going to sleep for another hundred years, or until you find another cure?”

“I’m afraid not,” said Master Davies. “This isn’t elf-shot, which—cruel as it is—comes with certain protections. Someone who’s been elf-shot doesn’t need to eat or drink. They don’t even really need to breathe. Elf-shot in its purest form was designed not to break the Law.”

“So what are you trying to say?” I wanted to go to my brother, grab his hands, and hold onto him so tightly that there was no possible chance he could slip away. I was failing him again. I was a queen now. I had our father’s crown and our father’s knowe, and I was going to have our father’s failures, too, because I wasn’t going to save Nolan.

I had never been able to save Nolan.

“This is a more traditional sleeping spell, the sort of thing people used to cast on each other before we had elf-shot.” Master Davies grimaced. “Remember that elf-shot was a kindness once. It was a slumber people could wake up from. This is just . . . it’s just sleep.”

“He’ll die,” said Cassandra. She sounded horrified. The emotion was so simple, so pure, that I had to blink back tears. She was as young as she looked. She was still capable of being shocked by how cruel Faerie could be. “Dehydration, starvation . . . you can’t sleep forever.”

Master Davies glanced at her. Then he looked at me, and his expression hardened. “Maybe not,” he said. “But you can sleep for a while before you have medical consequences, and we don’t need much more than that. The charm isn’t dangerous in and of itself. It’s what it does that’s bad. Your Highness, how do you feel about larceny?”

I blinked at him. Then, as hope dawned, I smiled.

FIVE

One convenient thing about spending so much time living in the human world: I not only knew the location of all the local urgent care centers, but I knew which ones were in good enough financial shape to handle a few losses. Better yet, I knew where the security cameras were. Street fae and changelings—the sort of people I was likely to be dealing with, the ones who thought I was like them, who’d never had enough interaction with the Courts to figure out that maybe I looked a little too much like our dear lost King Gilad—didn’t usually have much disposable income, much less health insurance, and sometimes they needed to be able to manage their own long-term care. I’d lifted my share of antibiotics, IV bags, and syringes over the years.

One gate and we were inside an urgent care clinic halfway down the Bay, one where the clientele could afford discretion and the nurses could afford coffee breaks. They weren’t understaffed and overworked like the people at County. It was easier to steal certain supplies from the big hospitals for exactly that reason—chaos forgives a lot of ineptitude—but I didn’t like doing it, also for that reason. A facility that was already stretched thin couldn’t afford to lose things.

But this was for Nolan. If Master Davies had directed me to the smallest, most underfunded clinic in the Bay Area and told me to steal every drop of morphine they had, I would have done it. My brother mattered more to me than all the strangers in California.

As soon as we were inside, Master Davies dropped a don’t-look-here on the three of us and murmured something in Cassandra’s ear. She nodded, and they took off in different directions. There wasn’t time to wonder what they were up to. I had my own shopping list to fill. Bags of saline solution; needles; tubing. I filled my arms with my brother’s salvation, hoping either Master Davies or Cassandra had some medical training. I’ve done my share of petty theft, but I’d never been the one trying to keep body and soul together until a healer could be called.

A healer. The thought was like a bulb coming on in a dark room. I stiffened, nearly dropping my stolen goods. Jin. She worked for Sylvester; he’d loaned her to me during the conclave, and I was sure he’d loan her to me again if I asked. I could bring her to Muir Woods and have her monitor Nolan’s condition. I could—

I could ask her to sit there and cure his dehydration, over and over again, saturating the area with magic, while Master Davies tried to mix a countercharm to something he couldn’t identify yet. She wouldn’t make things better. She could make things worse. It was amazing how fast I was falling back into the habit of thinking of magic as a cure-all, and it never had been.

“Damn,” I muttered, and grabbed another bag of saline.

Master Davies and Cassandra were waiting when I returned to the hall. Cassandra had an IV stand and a bag of first aid supplies. Master Davies had a brown canvas satchel that he must have pilfered from somewhere, packed full of small bottles. I frowned. He didn’t meet my eyes.

“We should go,” he said.

Right. If my new court alchemist—and there was really no question whether I’d be offering him the job after this; I was virtually obligated to do so—wanted to have a painkiller addiction, that was on him. It was better than goblin fruit, at least. I waved my hand through the air. The portal opened again, and we were gone, stepping back into Muir Woods.

My head began to ache as soon as the portal closed behind us. I hadn’t overexerted myself yet, but I was on the cusp of it. “I can make one more jump tonight, and that’s assuming you don’t mind taking the bus back,” I cautioned. “I haven’t got the sort of range I had when I was younger.”

“You’ll get it back,” said Master Davies, releasing his don’t-look-here. We were in the hall again, outside my brother’s room. That hadn’t been intentional on my part; I’d been trying to get us back to Nolan as quickly as possible. Exhaustion was messing with my aim.

He opened the bedroom door. Cassandra and I followed him inside. For a few moments, everything was simple. Master Davies told us what to set up and where to put it; we did as we were told, hanging bags of saline, helping him run tubes from the equipment to my brother. He seemed to know what he was doing. That was reassuring. If it had been entirely up to me, things would have gotten ugly.

“Thank Oberon for gravity,” he said, turning Nolan’s arm over and rolling up his sleeve. “If we needed electricity to operate an IV, we’d have bigger problems.”

“I still have the generator you brought in to power the lights up in the tower,” I said. “We could use that.”

“I don’t like using generators in the Summerlands when I have a choice.” The needle in his hand slid under the skin of my brother’s arm, so quickly that it was like a magician’s trick. Different from real magic, but reassuring all the same. “The smell upsets me. It’s like I’m profaning something holy.”

“You’re a nerd,” said Cassandra. There was a deep fondness in her tone. He didn’t seem to notice.

For her sake—for his sake—I hoped he’d notice it soon. Immortality is hard enough without spending it alone. “Nerd or not, whatever you need, you’ve got it. I want my brother back. You have the resources of my kingdom at your disposal.”

Master Davies turned to look solemnly at me. “I’m not going to insult you by asking whether you mean that. Instead, I’m going to ask you to leave.”

I stared at him. “What? No.”

“Yes. I need to analyze his blood. I need to figure out the roots of this spell, and I need peace and quiet while I do it. So I need you to go. Take Cassie with you. She can help with anything you need that isn’t this.”

“Yeah,” said Cassandra. Her eyes were on the air above Nolan’s arm, unfocused again, like she didn’t know what she was looking at. She was frowning. That was what really stood out. She had good reasons to be nervous—she was locked in a small room with the Queen in the Mists and the Crown Prince, even if it was sometimes difficult for me to remember that those august personages were me and my brother—but she didn’t have reason to frown like that.

“What are you looking at?” I asked.

Cassandra jumped, flinching away from me. “Nothing,” she said.

She was lying. I knew she was lying, and sadly being queen didn’t come with magical truth-sensing abilities, so there was no way for me to prove it. “You keep looking at something,” I insisted. “If you know something . . .”

“I don’t know anything,” she said. “I’m not an alchemist, and I’m not pre-med. I’m a physics major. A tired, hungry physics major who wasn’t planning to be in the royal knowe tonight, so I’m a bit freaked out right now, your, um, splendidness.”

“Not a standard form of address, but we’ll roll with it,” I said, and sighed, running a hand through my hair. “Master Davies, we’ll be in the kitchen if you need us. Cassandra, if you’ll come with me, I can help with the ‘hungry’ part of your problem.”

She cast an anxious glance at Master Davies before turning back to me. “Lead the way,” she said.

There was no more reason to stay, and quite a few reasons to go. I led her to the door, and out into the hall. The last thing I saw before the door swung shut was Master Davies leaning over my brother, the scalpel once more in his hand. Then the wood blocked my view, and I was grateful.

A hand touched my arm. I turned to find Cassandra looking at me with the sort of honest, uncalculated concern that I hadn’t seen since the last time I’d talked to Jude. “He’ll figure it out,” she said. “If there’s anyone who can do it, it’s Walther. The man works miracles in his spare time.”

“Walther,” I echoed. She looked at me quizzically, and I shrugged, feeling sheepish. “I couldn’t remember his first name, and it seemed rude to ask when I was already asking for his help.”

Cassandra’s laugh was bright and surprised. “Oh, that’s awesome. No, really. You’re just a normal person with a crown, not some sort of, like, mystical fairy superhero.”

“See, that’s what I keep trying to tell people, but they keep bowing anyway.” I started down the hall, beckoning for her to follow me. “The kitchen’s this way.”

“Great.” Cassandra trotted to catch up, rubbernecking shamelessly as we walked. I took a moment to look where she was looking, trying to see the knowe through her eyes.

October thought—and had explained to me, at great length—that knowes were alive, capable of changing and rearranging themselves on a whim. I didn’t think she was wrong, exactly, but I thought she was discounting the work of the many craftsmen and artisans who had poured their hearts and souls into the very walls.

If the knowe is alive, it’s because so many people bled and dreamt and spent their magic like water to wake it up. I liked to think it knew that, on some level; that it remembered my father, and my grandparents, who had done everything they could to make it grander, and more worthy of being the seat of the Mists, which had been the largest, grandest Kingdom in the West for so long.

The hall was sparsely decorated, leaving the focus on the carved redwood walls. Panels set at eye level told the story of my family’s time in the Mists, carved in a style that was half-representative, half-symbolic. I didn’t think my grandmother had actually coaxed the moon down from the sky to light her way when she was courting my grandfather, for example, but I was sure it had felt that way, at least to her.

They died long before I was born, victims of the long, slow dance of regicide. It was because of them that my father chose to hide the fact that he had children of his own. He knew what happened to kings and queens. I sometimes thought that they had saved my life by dying. There’s no amount of gratitude that makes up for that. But I still wish I’d had the chance to meet them.

“You don’t do your own dusting, right?” asked Cassandra. “Because if you do, you should quit.”

“I’m not allowed to quit,” I said.

“Who says?”

“October.”

Cassandra snorted. “Naturally. Aunt Birdie is great at telling other people to step up and do their duty, but did she hold onto her County? Nope. Passed it off to the first out-of-town noble she could find.”

“Aunt Birdie?” I asked blankly.

“Toby,” she said, and laughed at my expression. “My mom’s her oldest friend. They were kids together. She’d be my godmother if we did that sort of thing. As it is, she’s the first adult I remember who wasn’t my mom or dad. When I was little, I couldn’t pronounce ‘October,’ so I called her ‘Birdie,’ and it stuck inside the family. Sometimes I forget anybody calls her anything else.”

“Ah,” I said. “Your family lives . . . ?”

“In Colma. We’re not sworn to any specific demesne, if that’s what you’re not asking. Mom’s thin-blooded, Dad’s half and half, and no one ever wanted us. Not until Karen started walking in dreams.” She grimaced. “A Firstborn asshole kidnaps half my siblings and half the Courts in the Bay Area start banging on the front door offering to save my sister from a life of useless peasanthood. They sort of forget that we’re not serfs anymore. We have jobs. We do stuff. We’ve been politely turning them down for years. Now that Karen’s started hanging out with the Luidaeg, maybe they’ll listen.”

“The sea witch does seem to have taken an interest,” I said, as neutrally as I could. “I don’t know whether that’s a good thing or not.”

“Karen doesn’t seem to mind.”

We had reached the first stairway. I started down, Cassandra trailing behind. “You’re studying physics?”

“Yeah. Do you, uh . . . shit. There’s no way to say this that isn’t super rude, so I’m going to go with it. Do you know what that means?”

I smiled a little, wryly. “I may be a pureblood, but I’ve spent the last hundred years in the mortal world. I know about physics. I watched the moon landing on TV along with everyone else on my block. I even know how to program a VCR.”

Cassandra looked at me blankly. I rolled my eyes.

“I promise you, references used to stay topical for longer. I know how a cell phone works, okay? Does that prove I’m down with the modern world?”

“What did you do for a hundred years among the mortals?”

I shrugged. The stairs ended in a narrower, less extravagant hallway. The walls were still carved redwood, but the ceiling was straight, not domed, and there were no flowers. “A lot of things. I was a seamstress for years, before it got hard to make a living that way. I worked as a nanny for wealthy mortal families for a while, until they started wanting references and proof of identity. A few odd jobs, and then, in the 1950s, I discovered I liked selling books. So I’ve been a bookseller for the last sixty years. I’m good at figuring out what a person might like to read, and convincing them to give it a chance.”

“Huh,” said Cassandra. “You know, when Aunt Birdie said she’d found the lost princess, I was expecting something more, I guess . . .”

“Disney on Ice?” I smiled faintly. “I can do my best, but I’ll never be the kind of girl who willingly stands in front of the glitter cannon.”

“Boom,” said Cassandra, deadpan.

I laughed. It was a relief. Nolan was asleep, but Master Davies—Walther—was going to find a way to wake him up, and everything was going to be okay. It had to be. I’d already lost more than I could stand to lose. One more thing would be too much.

We arrived to find the kitchen occupied by two Hobs, one standing on a stepstool at the sink with her arms buried in soapy water, the other sitting on a box and peeling potatoes. They froze at the sight of me and Cassandra standing in the doorway. I forced a smile.

“Hi,” I said. “Pretend we’re not here.”

The two Hobs continued to stare. Finally, the seated Hob lowered her knife and said, “I’m not sure we can do that, Highness.”

“Why not?”

The question came from Cassandra, and it was enough to make all three of us turn to look at her. She shrugged.

“This is the kitchen,” she said. “This is your space, right? I mean, a queen’s a queen even when she’s peeling potatoes, but you have to have a certain amount of authority here, or what would stop princes and princesses and the like from just rampaging through the place sticking their fingers in scalding water and ruining soufflés? If Queen Windermere wants to sit and have a sandwich or something, that’s proof that you’re doing your jobs awesomely.”

“Really?” asked the potato peeler, looking dubious.

“Really,” said Cassandra. “She feels safe here, being incognito and feeding her guests. By which I mean me. I’m starving.”

The two Hobs exchanged a look. The dishwasher focused on me.

“You would truly not be offended, Highness?” she asked.

“As long as you don’t mind me making myself a sandwich while you keep working, I’d be overjoyed,” I said. They were starting to look uncomfortable again, so I added, “Remember, I grew up here. I know where everything is. I like making my own sandwiches.”

“If you say so, Highness,” said the dishwasher.

Neither of them looked happy, but they weren’t arguing, and they went back to their respective tasks as I led Cassandra to the kitchen table, only pausing occasionally to shoot uncomfortable glances in our direction, like they were expecting me to start yelling about dereliction of duty.

“Wow,” said Cassandra, voice pitched low. “Is it always like that?”

“Oh, this was mild,” I said. “They’re kitchen staff. They don’t expect to have to deal with me on a daily basis, and so they don’t really have a script to follow. Watch me try to talk to the guards if you want a laugh. They’re so busy bowing that they don’t hear half of what I say.”

“Putting the fun back in feudalism.”

“Something like that.” I looked at the rest of the kitchen. The shelves were well-stocked; preservation spells meant pastries and pies could be baked days before they were needed. Roast meat could be frozen at the perfect level of doneness and kept that way indefinitely. “What did you want to eat?”

“I don’t know,” said Cassandra. “I really would be happy with a sandwich.”

“Got it,” I said. “Be right back.”

My childhood raids on the kitchen had been hasty things, Nolan giggling at my side while Marianne watched tolerantly from the door, ready to sound the alarm if it looked like we were going to be caught. Mostly they’d been focused on cookies and cakes, the sort of easily-snatched sweets that defined a child’s world. That had still necessitated a certain understanding of where things were kept. Since the knowe had been sealed for a century, it wasn’t like the place had been remodeled.

I found a dish of sliced beef and carried it back to the table, dropping it in front of her. “Hang on,” I said, while she was still blinking in bewilderment at the massive amount of meat. My second pass garnered bread, cheese, mustard, and something purple and spicy-smelling that I suspected of being beetroot ketchup. Fae cooking can get odd sometimes.

I spread the rest of my pilfered wares in front of her with a deadpan, “Ta-da.”

“I’m not going to eat all this,” said Cassandra.

“I wouldn’t expect you to.” I settled across from her. The thought of eating made me feel sick. The slowly-growing ache in my temples told me I didn’t actually have a choice. Food is one of the only things that helps combat magic-burn. Food, and rest, and if Walther needed me, I was going to be there for him. Rest wasn’t going to be an option for me until my brother was awake.

Slowly, I began assembling a sandwich, starting with a healthy smear of the beetroot ketchup. Fortune favors the bold.

“I am coming here for lunch from now on,” said Cassandra, shaking off her shock and starting to put her own sandwich together. She was a healthy eater, judging by the amount of meat she piled on her bread. “If this is how your pantry is always stocked, I may move in.”

“We’d be happy to have you, as long as you didn’t mind being put to work,” I said. Cheese went onto the beetroot; meat went onto the cheese. It was an automatic process, but it made me feel better. Human or fae, queen or commoner, a sandwich went together in the same order. “I’m so understaffed that I keep wishing there were a temp agency that served noble households.”

“I don’t know that there’s anything I could do here.”

“You might be surprised. Most of these jobs, no one actually knows how they’re done. They just sort of happen. Half the households around here have conflated their Seneschal and their Chamberlain, which is great if you can get away with it, but when you’re talking about a knowe as big as this one . . . it’s not gonna work forever.”

Cassandra raised an eyebrow. “Because the difference is . . . ?”

“Seneschal runs the non-household side of the knowe. My schedule, organizing balls, keeping our records accurate, updating the local Library whenever we have a chance so the record never falls out of true, all that fun bullshit. The Chamberlain runs the household. Kitchen, cleaning staff, laundry. The positions are frequently combined at the County level and below. Ducal houses can go either way. Royal houses? You need both. There’s too much for one person to do.”

“So if I ever need a job, you’ll have a place for me.”

“Exactly.” I took a bite of my sandwich. The beetroot wasn’t bad. Strange, but not bad. Swallowing, I asked, “How did you and Walther meet?”

Cassandra raised her eyebrow again. “Small talk now?”

“I’m trying to distract myself. Humor me. It’s this or I pace back and forth in front of my brother’s room until I wear a hole in the carpet, and I don’t think that would be good for anyone.”

“Right,” she said. “Well, we met on campus. I’m not in any of his classes, but we tend to be in the same buildings. We’re both disguised as humans, of course, so it’s possible I would have missed him entirely if not for his grad student, Jack.”

“What did the grad student do?”

“He’s a friend of one of the girls from my study group. Apparently, Aunt Birdie came by while Jack was on campus, and Jack thought she was dating Walther—as if. I mean, he’s sweet and funny and cute and everything, but he’s not her type.”

“Too academic?”

“Insufficiently Tybalt.” Cassandra smirked. “She’s had a thing for kitty since she came back from the pond. Maybe not instantly, but I’d say within six months of her return. She’d come over on Friday night to have a drink with my folks and spend half the time complaining about what Tybalt had been doing during the week. I’m pretty sure Mom and Dad had a bet going about when she’d finally give in and start dating him.”

“But you recognized her from Jack’s description,” I guessed.

“Exactly. I mean, how many grumpy, stressed-out brunettes named ‘October’ can there be in the world? I’m hoping the answer is ‘one.’ Any more than that would be too many. Jack said she was visiting his advisor, so I went to welcome said advisor to the ‘October Daye Occasionally Ruins My Life’ club, he asked if I wanted to grab a beer, and we’ve been hanging out ever since.”

It was difficult not to look at her, look at him, and see the age difference as a problem. It would have been, in the human world—assuming it had even been possible. The word for humans as old as Walther is “dead.” But Faerie has different rules, and she hadn’t actually said her interest in him was romantic. She’d just chosen clothes that would draw attention to her figure and a human illusion that would call attention to her eyes. Both of those could have been coincidence. I didn’t think so. And it was none of my damn business. I was Queen, not babysitter to the kingdom.

“He seems nice,” I said neutrally. “He’s a good alchemist. I don’t think I’ve ever known someone who could accomplish what he’s been able to do already.”

“You mean despite things not working exactly as you want them to.”

I glanced at the kitchen Hobs. They were still hard at work, but I knew they were listening. That was one thing Marianne had worked hard to drum into my skull, reinforced by years of working retail in the mortal world: the staff was always listening. Especially if it looked like they weren’t. I would forget that at my own peril.

“Yes,” I said, keeping my tone forcibly light as I turned back to Cassandra. “Even despite that, he’s done amazing things. A cure for elf-shot is just . . . I never thought I’d see it in my lifetime. And him living in the Mists means it reflects well on me that he accomplished it, even if he was in Silences at the time.”

“Are we, like, friends with Silences now?”

“I probably shouldn’t send October to visit any time soon, but I think we are.” I took another bite of sandwich, and swallowed before saying, “We put the rightful ruling family back on the throne. We corrected a profound wrong. The whole coast is healthier now, and Queen Siwan is grateful for our help, even as she hopes that we don’t need to do any more diplomacy in her presence for a long, long time.”

Cassandra leaned closer, lowering her voice conspiratorially as she asked, “Did you do that on purpose? Send Aunt Birdie because you knew she’d mess things up in the best way possible, I mean?”

“Honestly, I was just mad that she’d touched me without permission.” I smiled wryly. “I guess I’m getting used to this queen thing after all.”

“What?” Cassandra blinked. “What do you mean?”

“Oh, I know this is all ‘poor little rich girl’ of me, but . . . I gave up expecting to be Queen in the Mists a long time ago. I’d adjusted to the idea that I wasn’t going to have the opportunity, and then I’d adjusted to the idea that I wasn’t going to have the responsibility. I figured I’d spend the next few centuries selling books, or whatever comes after books, and not worrying about anything outside my immediate sphere. When October showed up at the bookstore where I was working, I hated her a little. She forced me to take a job I’d given up on wanting.”

“That must have been hard,” said Cassandra.

“You know what’s funny? The hardest thing is remembering not to thank people.”

She cocked her head to the side. “Come again?”

“I worked in retail. ‘Thank you, have a nice day’ is such an automatic thing for me that I might as well have a pull-string in my back. I thanked the staff something like a dozen times my first week here. They were all volunteers, half of them were from the old Queen’s Court, none of them had any idea what kind of ruler I was going to be, and I was thanking them. Some left as soon as I said the words. I don’t think they’re ever coming back.”

“I . . . wow.” Cassandra began to laugh helplessly. “Please don’t take this the wrong way, but holy shit, Toby actually did it. She went and got us a changeling queen.”

I blinked. “Come again?”

“You don’t sound totally pissed. That’s a good sign. Look.” She took a deep breath, getting her laughter under control. “You’re a pureblood, absolutely. I mean, if you weren’t, there’s no way you’d be Queen now. It’s a pretty simple logic problem. But you have the same problems interacting with fae society that I do. It’s not natural to you. You’re not really a changeling. That doesn’t mean you’re one of them.”

This time, my blink was slower, and accompanied by another bite of my sandwich. Chewing gave me time to think. “Huh,” I said finally. “I . . . that makes a lot of sense. Maybe if I think about it that way, I won’t feel so damn out of place all the time.”

“I live to serve.”

“Good, because I want you to come work here.”

Cassandra’s eyes went wide. “I didn’t mean it literally.”

“You need to learn to watch your mouth around royalty, then.”

“I can’t imagine why I wouldn’t have picked that lesson up in elementary school.” She shook her head. “I can’t come work for you. I have college, I have a job—”

“What do you do?”

“I’m a clerk at Rasputin Records on Telegraph.”

“So that’s what, slightly better than minimum wage?” I waited for her to nod before I said, “I can pay you thirty dollars an hour, and if you don’t have a car, I can pick you up wherever you want.”

“What, you mean the,” she made a circling motion with her hand, “thing? And how are you going to pay me? My bank doesn’t take fairy gold.”

“Funny thing: neither did the BART system. I’ve been working mortal jobs for a hundred years, and I’ve been socking it all away against a time when I might actually want to buy something. If the imposter who stole my family’s throne had ever thought to check with Wells Fargo, she would have found me a long time ago.”

Cassandra raised her eyebrows. “So, what, you’re loaded?”

“Let’s just say that I never need to worry about money.” I shrugged. “I can pay you. I can work around your school schedule. And I can give you a room here, if you were thinking it might be nice to get out of your parents’ house. That maybe you’re ready to start dating without worrying about them waiting up for you.”

Her cheeks flared red. “Am I that obvious?”

“No, but I’m that observant, and he’s cute. A little nerdy for my tastes, I’ll admit. Still cute.” I took one more bite of my sandwich before putting it down. “I’m not asking you to swear fealty on the spot. Just give me a try.”

“What would I be doing? I’m twenty-two, studying for my physics degree, and have basically no skills applicable to a noble household. Unless you wanted me to peel potatoes, and you already have someone for that.”

“I want you to translate for me.” Her shocked expression made smiling easier. “You know how purebloods are. Honestly, right now, you probably know better than I do. And you can explain to people that sometimes the Queen says the wrong thing out of habit without it coming off as condescending. I’ll need you less as I learn more, and who knows? You might find that you like working for me. Having a scientist on the staff wouldn’t be a bad thing.”

“What happens when I get my degree and want to go off and, you know, do physics? I’m going to figure out what magic is. That means I’m going to need resources.”

“First, again, rich. You get your degree and convince me this is a question worth answering—and I think it is—I can set you up with your own lab. A legit one, even. There’s a computer company in the South Bay, Tamed Lightning, that’s a part of my demesne. I can get them to help us make you look totally normal, and you can do your work on my dime. If we become the kingdom where all the big breakthroughs are made, I won’t complain. Second, even if you don’t want to feel beholden, do you really expect me to believe that a tenure-track position won’t mysteriously open up the second you want it? Changeling or not, you’re fae. Someone will make it happen for you. Don’t try to convince me you’d refuse it because you want to earn it. You’re a changeling, you’re a woman, and you eat like someone who knows what it is to be hungry. You’ve already earned it by living this long.”

“Huh,” said Cassandra, after a long pause. “I’d ask whether you’d practiced that, but I just met you, so I’m assuming the answer is ‘no.’”

“I had a lot of time to learn how people work,” I said.

Cassandra laughed, and reached for her sandwich.

SIX

We finished eating, and then we finished drinking our mugs of tea, and then the kitchen staffers were looking at us with a mixture of dismay and confusion that made me think it was time to move along. They’d never tell us it was time to leave—I wasn’t sure they were allowed to tell me to leave, since it was my kitchen, my knowe, and most of all, my kingdom—but they weren’t comfortable having us here.

Cassandra moved to pick up her dishes as we stood. I raised a hand, signaling for her to stop. She looked at me, bewildered.

“We need to take our dishes to the sink,” she said.

“If I didn’t already know you lived at home, that would be enough to confirm it,” I said. “We can’t take our dishes to the sink. I mean, we could, but it would be a dire insult to my staff, and they’d either decide they’d done something wrong or that I was showing another place where I couldn’t be a proper queen.”

Cassandra blinked. “So we leave the dishes?” she ventured.

“We leave the dishes,” I said.

We left the dishes. We walked past the relieved staff—who were at least trying not to look like they were happy we were finally getting out of their space—and into the hall, where Walther was waiting. I stopped. Cassandra stopped. An awkward silence fell.

Finally, Walther said, “I looked inside, but you seemed happy with your tea and your, you know, girl talk, and I didn’t want to interrupt.”

My heart sank. Good news would have had him interrupting us without hesitation. Good news would have had him trumpeting it from the rooftops, because good news would have meant he could go home. “What is it?”

“Do you want to talk about that here?”

No. I did not. I didn’t want to talk about it anywhere. I wanted it to go away, to not exist. I wanted my brother back, and I—by Oberon—did not want to keep my composure any longer. “Let’s go back to the room.”

Walther nodded. He didn’t look relieved. If anything, he looked sad. He really didn’t want to tell me whatever he was going to say next.

We walked silently down the hall. Either the kitchen staff had sent out some alert or the knowe was between shifts, because we didn’t see anyone as we made our way to the room where Nolan slept. Madden was responsible for organizing the household staff, with assistance from Lowri; there was no reason for me to know who was going to be where, or when they were going to be there. I still felt a little bad, like I was letting my people down on some profound level by not keeping track of them.

I was deflecting, trying to turn my anxiety on a target that was less personal and less painful, than my brother. And knowing that did nothing to make me feel better. Understanding my own mind doesn’t stop it from hurting me.

Walther went into my brother’s room. Cassandra and I followed. The table next to Nolan’s bed had become a tiny alchemical laboratory, complete with a bubbling vial of pinkish liquid propped over a ball of lambent blue witch-light. It was the sort of scene that would have seemed like something out of a dream, once, but which was becoming more and more commonplace as I settled into my new life. It was the sort of scene that left little room for hope.

“What’s wrong?” I asked, eyes on my brother as Walther shut the door behind us. “Why can’t you wake him up?”

“Alchemy isn’t the solution to every problem,” said Walther. His voice was low, his words deliberate. He was trying not to upset me. Fat lot of good that was going to do him. I was already upset, and getting more upset by the second. “I can counteract most charms and potions, if I have a sample of the original potion or know the magical signature of the person who brewed it. I can ease certain spells. But I can’t change the laws of magic.”

“So?” I whirled to face Walther. “This was a charm, you said so yourself! Fix it!”

“It’s in his blood,” he said. “It spent almost a century masked by elf-shot, aging, maturing, changing. And now it’s mixed into his body, and I can’t separate it out enough to pick it apart. I don’t know who brewed it. I don’t know what I’m looking for. Give me a year and I might be able to make some headway. A night is not enough.”

“A year will be too long,” I snapped. “He’ll die.”

“Not necessarily; we can get someone in here who understands care for long-term coma patients,” said Walther. “It’s not perfect, but . . . I don’t like telling you this any more than you like hearing it. There’s nothing I can do.”

“We could elf-shoot him again.”

“I don’t know how it would interact with the awakened sleeping charm. It could kill him.”

I took a breath to answer, and stopped as I saw Cassandra’s face. She was gazing at the air above his bubbling beaker, her eyes unfocused and her lips slightly parted, like she was focusing so hard on whatever it was she saw that she couldn’t spend the energy to keep them closed. My eyes narrowed.

“Okay,” I said. “This is what’s going to happen. You’re going to tell me whatever it is you’re not telling me, and you’re going to do it right now. In exchange, I will not have you both thrown in the dungeon until I forget about you.”

Cassandra didn’t react. She kept staring at the empty air.

Walther sighed before reaching over and touching her shoulder. “Hey,” he said. “Come back. You need to come back now.”

She jumped, giving a convulsive full-body shudder as she turned to face him. “What?”

“You zoned out for a second,” said Walther, gaze darting toward me, like he was trying to assess my reaction. No, not like: that was exactly what he was doing. I’d seen that look before, usually from shoplifters who were hoping they could put one over on me.

I wasn’t a retail employee anymore, allowed to back off and let my manager handle things. I was the goddamn Queen, and they were going to listen to me. “That’s not what happened.” Keeping my voice level was a fun challenge. I was not rising to meet it. “Something is going on. Tell me what is going on.”

“Cassie,” said Walther. His hand was still on her shoulder. “It’s your call.”

“Why do people say that kind of shit?” I planted my hands on my hips. “Now I know there’s something going on. No one makes a call about saying nothing.”

Cassandra sighed, looking from Walther to me and finally, almost longingly, back to the air above the beaker. Then she looked down at her feet and said, “I was telling the truth when I said I wasn’t an oneiromancer. I can’t move through other people’s dreams or use them to tell the future.”

“But . . . ?” I prompted.

“But I wasn’t telling the whole truth.” She glanced up, searching my face before she said, “I’m an aeromancer. I read air.”

“Air,” I said flatly.

“The motion of air. Yes.”

“Air is invisible.”

“Not to me.” She turned to the beaker again. “Not when I look at it right. Light and dust and wind, they all move in the air, and they tell me the future. It’s easiest by candlelight, but I can’t light candles in my house anymore. Not after everything that happened with Blind Michael. It upsets my youngest sister too much.”

“Wait.” I dropped my hands. “I’m trying to understand. You’re a Seer. You . . . See things. And where you See things is in the way air moves.”

“Yes.”

“Your sister is a Seer, too. She Sees things in dreams.”

“Yes.”

“But you’re both changelings.” My frustration was threatening to bubble over. “That doesn’t make sense. Seers are—they’re incredibly rare! My father didn’t have a Court Seer, because he couldn’t find one! His parents had a Shyi Shuai in their Court, but she didn’t See the future as much as bend the luck to make it do what she wanted, and maybe that’s what got them killed, since Shyi Shuai always get backlash. How the hell are you and Karen Seers? You can’t be.”

“Well, we are.” Cassandra shrugged. “Karen was the one who showed me. She didn’t know what she could do until Blind Michael took her. After that . . . it was like the dead bastard had woken her up by putting her to sleep. She watched the way I watched the air, and she started telling me how to interpret it. You want humbling? Try having your baby sister teaching you how do something that feels like it should be as natural as breathing, but somehow isn’t. I See things. My sister Sees things.”

“I . . . okay. Okay. I am going to stop arguing with reality, because it never gets me anywhere, and just beg you, please. Tell me what we need to do to wake my brother up. I need him. I need . . . I need my family back, and he’s the only one left for me to save. Please.”

Cassandra grimaced, reluctance written plainly across her features. “Can you get me a candle?”

“I have one in my bag,” said Walther.

“Of course you do,” said Cassandra, with the ghost of a smile. “Will someone turn out the lights?”

“I’ve got it,” I said.

The knowe wasn’t wired for electricity, but we knew how to mimic it. Most of the rooms were lit with a marsh-charm that looked a lot like witch-light without requiring each bulb to be lit independently. I turned the dial next to the door. The tubes feeding the charm into the room went cold, and the light dimmed before flickering out, so only Walther’s witch-light provided any illumination. He handed Cassandra a candle before dousing that light as well. Everything was darkness. The starlight creeping in around the edges of the curtains cast the walls into vague relief, more an idea of architecture than anything clearly seen. That was all.

There was a brief flare as Cassandra lit a match and held it to the wick of her candle. She had sunk into a cross-legged position on the floor while I couldn’t see her, and her hair fell around her face like a curtain as she bent over the flame. It would have been easy to assume that she was staring at the fire. I took a step closer, and saw that she was staring at the air above it, her eyes unfocused again, darting back and forth as she followed the motion of something only she could see.

“The first sword didn’t come from the stone; it came from the sea,” she said, voice hollow and distant. “They called it a lake, later, when they were trying to contain its power, but it was sea-forged and sea-drawn, and its blade knew brine before it knew blood. Sharp it was, and cold it was, and unforgiving, always.”

“What?” I demanded.

A hand touched my shoulder. Walther. I tensed, ready to remind him that touching queens without permission was never a good idea. He caught my eye and shook his head.

“I’m sorry, Highness, but you need to let her work,” he said, voice low—he was trying not to distract her. “She can use the wind to scry, and that’s clear, just like Karen can walk in lucid dreams, but when you ask her to See, what you get is images and ideas. We’ll interpret them when she’s done.” Unspoken: This is what you asked for. This is what you wanted.

I forced myself to calm. I nodded. He withdrew his hand.

“She gave the sword away. She gave so many things away. Some for good and some for ill, but oh, she gave them all away.” Cassandra sighed. “So many things, and yet she can’t forsake the water. She never set the sleepers sleeping, never plumped their pillows or made their beds. Still, people came to her and asked for clever trinkets, and she had to say them yea. She never had a choice. Not since she chose once, and all her choices were taken away.”

Silence fell. Cassandra tilted her head to the side, like she was looking at something she didn’t understand. Finally, she said, “They asked and she said ‘yes.’ She has to say ‘yes.’ That’s why she hates us for asking. She gives and she gives and she gives, and we built a world on the idea that thanking her for what she’s already given is against the rules. We built a world on never being grateful, because we were entitled to everything we got. She’s the one who bottled the moon. She’s the one who refined the stars. She’s the one we have to talk to. But there will be costs. There are always costs. There have to be. It’s the only way we ever thank her. With our tears.”

She pitched forward, hands hitting the floor on either side of the candle. The motion was so swift that the wind it generated blew out the flame, casting us into total darkness. A wisp of smoke rose through her hair, paradoxically visible.

“Ow,” muttered Cassandra.

I leaned over and turned the lights back on. They trickled into life, revealing Cassandra unmoving on the floor. Walther was watching her, lips thin, face drawn.

“You okay?” he asked.

“No,” she said, and raised her head, offering him a shaky smile. “You know, I think I’d prefer to have been an oneiromancer. At least Karen gets to go to bed before she beats the crap out of herself.”

“Do you remember what you said?”

She looked at me and nodded. “I do. I don’t understand it, but I remember it.”

“Sadly, I understood it,” said Walther. “There’s only one woman I can think of who has to help when she’s asked, who resents basically everyone, and who always charges for her favors. She doesn’t do anything for free. I’m not sure she can.”

“Who?” I asked.

“The Luidaeg,” he said.

Silence fell.

SEVEN

The Luidaeg. The sea witch. The terror of the fens. The woman who had, not a week ago, stood in my place, enjoying the hospitality of my home, and told me that while familiarity might breed contempt, I should never make the mistake of thinking she was a tame monster. She would end me if she was given half the chance.

And yet. And yet.

And yet it was because of her that I’d survived to reach adulthood. Without the charms Marianne had purchased from her, the false Queen would have tracked me down long ago and put me into the ground with my parents. Without the Luidaeg supporting October, I would still have been in the bookstore—and when Nolan’s elf-shot had worn off on its own, the secondary sleeping charm would have killed him for sure. It was only the fact that I’d woken him early that had allowed us to discover it existed, much less start looking for a cure.

The fact that according to Cassandra, the Luidaeg had also brewed the sleeping potion hidden under the elf-shot, was almost beside the point. I knew she hadn’t had a choice. That was one of the things Marianne had been very clear about, back when I’d been a child and she’d been teaching me about the kingdom that would one day be mine.

“The Luidaeg is the oldest of Maeve’s daughters, firstborn among Firstborn,” she’d said, Nolan asleep with his head on her knee and me sitting on the floor in front of her, her hands moving through my hair, braiding and binding, tying elf-knots in every lock. I could barely remember my mother’s face, but I would always remember Marianne’s hands, and the sound of her voice by firelight, when she meant safety, when she meant home.

“She was born so long ago that time has no meaning; it’s a name and a number, and it barely matters, because she was happy then, my sweet girl, she was at peace. She and her sisters kept to the fens, to the places where land met sea, and they kept their own counsel, and they made their own peace. But time will have its due. She buried both her sisters, and she saw her powers bound by her father’s other wife, turned to the cause of service. She does what she’s asked, and she dies a little more inside with every gift she grants. That’s why she asks for voices and for peace and for the sound of a baby’s laughter. She charges dear not out of cruelty, but as a plea to be left alone.”

“But why?” I had asked. I’d been so young back then, and those times with Marianne had been my favorites: when she sat behind me and braided my hair, and I could close my eyes and pretend that if I turned around, we’d look alike. That I would change, or she would change—it didn’t matter—and she’d be my mother, and it wouldn’t be just me and Nolan anymore. “If she can do anything, shouldn’t she want to?”

“If she had a choice in the matter, she might want to, but that was the beauty of the binding lain upon her by Oberon’s Summer Queen,” had been Marianne’s reply. She’d tied off my braid, and finished her story with her hands resting on my shoulders. “Go to her and ask her the price of her tongue, her heart, her bed, and she’s bound to tell you. Ask her what it would cost to have your throne back, and she’ll draw you up a bill of sale. She is the answer to all our problems, if we’re willing to force them upon her. She charges dear, so dear, because she’s done so many things she’d never want to do. She’ll do so many more before that binding is undone, if ever it is. The Summer Queen wove her workings well.”

The night had been warm and her hands had been soft and I had gone to sleep not long after that, leaving her to carry me to bed, the way she’d carried my brother. Marianne had been a Coblynau, and strong enough to shift the world in its foundations if she needed it to move.

I missed her so much. I probably always would.

My head exploded in a kaleidoscope of pain as I stepped through the latest—and last—of the gates I’d opened since the sun went down. This was it: I’d hit my limits. I staggered, and Madden caught me, shooting a venomous glare at Cassandra and Walther. They had been the first ones through, in part because I was afraid the gate would close before we could all use it, and they were better suited to being stranded in mortal-side San Francisco in the middle of the night than I was. I didn’t even carry a wallet anymore, much less a working BART card.

“Ardy?” he asked. “You okay?” It probably shouldn’t have been a surprise that he’d insisted on joining us when I’d gone to tell him what we were doing. I was sort of sorry he had. I appreciated the company, but a gate for four was just that much harder than a gate for three.

“Dandy,” I said, and forced myself to stand upright, grimacing as the motion set up a raucous clanging in my head. “Ow.”

“Magic-burn?” asked Walther sympathetically. His hand dipped into his pocket, coming up with a small white bottle, which he offered to me. “Here. This will help.”

“Alchemy?” I asked. I took the bottle without waiting for his answer. Magic-burn is the worst. I would have taken just about anything to make it stop.

“Close,” he said. “Aspirin.”

I laughed. Then I winced as the laughter made my head hurt worse. “Ow,” I said again, and dry-swallowed two aspirin.

Through all of this, Madden was keeping himself busy with glaring at Walther and Cassandra. “I still don’t understand why you’re here,” he said. “You could have stayed home. Safe. Let your vassals do this for you.”

“Can’t,” I said, giving him what I hoped would be a reassuring pat on the arm. “She’s going to charge for this. You know she’s going to charge for this. They’re my subjects, not my vassals—although we’re going to be talking about permanent positions after all this is finished—and I can’t ask subjects to pay in my place.”

“I would,” said Madden.

“I know you would,” I said. I smiled at him, as earnestly as the pain in my head would allow. “That’s why you don’t get to. You’re my best friend. I need us to stay as close to equal as we possibly can, under the circumstances, and that means you don’t throw yourself on any grenades for me. You’re here to make sure I get home after whatever happens. They’re here because Walther needs to get the countercharm, and Cassandra’s helping him.”

And because I might need a Seer to find the Luidaeg’s house. She was rumored to live in this part of the city, where the gentrification ran headlong into the urban decay, forming a strange band that could go from absolutely modern to crumbling and antique in the space of a single block. I liked the older parts of the City, the ones that didn’t feel like they were changing so damn fast, but this neighborhood had always unnerved me. It didn’t feel slow. It felt frozen, like time was standing still in this little slice of dockside real estate.

I looked to Cassandra. She winced. “I’m not Google Maps,” she said.

“You’re the closest thing we’ve got,” I said. “Tell me which way to go.”

“How should I know?”

“Ask the air.”

Cassandra took a deep breath, looking like she was going to argue. Then she sighed, tilted her head back, and looked at the empty, foggy air for a long moment. “That way,” she said, jabbing a finger at the nearest alley. “We need to go that way.”

“And if you’re wrong?” asked Madden.

“I guess we find out when the muggers appear,” snapped Cassandra.

Walther put a hand over his mouth to smother his laughter. I rolled my eyes.

“This is going to be a fun night,” I said.

“This has already been a fun night,” said Cassandra.

I couldn’t argue with that. We started walking.

The sidewalks here were interesting. I found myself staring at them, trying to puzzle out what about them was so off. The sound of our footsteps was the only thing breaking the silence.

The only thing. No one was tripping, or stubbing their foot on cracked pavement, or walking on broken glass. I stopped and gave a crack an experimental kick. It was there—I could feel its edges—but somehow it didn’t catch my foot. It was like the sidewalks had been enchanted to make them safer.

They probably had been. The sea witch lived here. I’d known since my days with Marianne that she wasn’t evil, just compelled to do things she didn’t want to do; I’d known since starting to deal with October that she was protecting my city and my subjects, in her own occasionally brutal way. Things had gotten pretty bad under the custodianship of the woman who’d stolen my father’s throne. Without the Luidaeg, things would have gotten even worse.

It was a sobering thought. I started walking again, catching up with the others. Cassandra hesitated from time to time, gazing off into the distance before choosing our next turn. Either we were going to get to the Luidaeg, or we were going to be attacked by mortal muggers who thought we were a bunch of foolish club kids wandering too far from the bright lights of downtown. We all had our human disguises on, and we made a motley bunch: Walther in his professor’s clothes, Cassandra the coed, Madden the barista, and me, Queen in the Mists, in my blue jeans and Borderlands Books hoodie, with my hair tucked behind my rounded human ears. If not for the fact that my brother was in trouble, it would have been almost relaxing. We were just out, walking, enjoying a beautiful night, not running a Kingdom. Not wearing a crown. We were people.

The scholars who like to have accurate notes about such things think Oleander de Merelands was the one who killed my parents; that she slit my mother’s throat and did some terrible thing to my father, using the earthquake as cover. The people who care about “who” and “why” have lots of notes, and some of them have shown up at my Court, trying to show them to me. The people who want history to make sense don’t seem to understand that it doesn’t matter who killed him; what matters is he died, and he took us all with him to the grave. The person I am now is not who I would have been, had my father lived. The person my brother would be when he woke—and he was going to wake—was not the person he would have been, either. Every death is a massacre.

“Here,” said Cassandra, coming to a stop. I blinked. Somehow, the street had disappeared; we had wandered down the sort of narrow alley that every one of my city dweller’s instincts normally worked double-time to keep me out of. We were in front of a wooden door painted in faded, peeling blue, set back into an old brick wall, like the architect had wanted the occupant to be able to stand on the stoop and smoke without getting wet when it rained.

It wasn’t a welcoming door. It wasn’t a menacing door, either. There was nothing arcane or significant about it. It was just a door.

“Here?” I echoed.

Cassandra nodded. “That’s what the air says. We need to be here.” She looked at me expectantly. Walther and Madden did the same. All of them were waiting to see what I would do; all of them were following my lead.

Taking a deep breath, I stepped forward, and knocked.

The door was actually made of wood. That was nice. Given who we were dealing with, I’d half-expected my hand to thump against illusion-wrapped kelp, or something even less pleasant. I took a step back, folding my hands behind my back, and waited.

Seconds slithered by before the deadbolt clicked and the door swung open, revealing a girl who didn’t look like she could be more than eighteen years old. Maybe nineteen, if I assumed her attire—denim overalls over a white tank top, bare feet, and pigtails secured with black electrical tape—was making her look younger than she was. Her hair was thick, black, and curly; her eyes were pale green, like beer bottles, and her cheeks were round and pitted with shallow acne scars. Nothing about her looked even remotely fae.

The slice of apartment visible through the open door was like something out of an episode of Hoarders. Garbage spilled around her feet, and I was pretty sure I saw mold growing on the walls. No one should have been living there. The place needed to be condemned.

She didn’t say anything. She just stood there, looking at me for a long moment. Finally, she sighed.

“I guess I should have been expecting assholes tonight,” she said. “It’s been too long without them. Hello, Your Highness.” She smiled, and there were too many teeth in that expression, all serrated like a shark’s. Her mouth shouldn’t have been able to contain that many teeth.

Cassandra stepped forward. “I’m Karen’s sister, Cassie,” she said. “Karen told me you were kind to her. I’m glad there was someone in a position to be kind to her. I wish it could have been me.”

Oh, sweet Oberon, the girl’s eyes—the Luidaeg’s eyes, and I was standing in front of the sea-witch, like some sort of fool, like some sort of hero—moved to Cassandra, looking her up and down, taking her measure. Her smile faded, taking those terrible teeth with it.

“Your sister is a brave girl, and she’ll need to be, in the days ahead,” she said. “So will you. Now.” She clapped her hands, returning her attention to me. “I’m assuming that when the Queen in the Mists shows up on my porch, it’s because she wants something, not just because Cassandra wanted to show her appreciation for me taking care of Karen. Normally, I’d expect you to send Toby. Let her rack up all the debts for keeping your kingdom in one piece. I guess that means whatever brought you here is important. Tell me, little queen, are you here to pay?”

I took a deep breath. “Yes,” I said.

“Good girl.” This time, the Luidaeg’s smile was notably devoid of teeth. “Come on in.”

I stepped onto the porch. Madden moved to follow. The Luidaeg raised her hand.

“Oh, no,” she said. “I can see why you might think that, but you’d be wrong. The three of you will wait outside. What comes next is between Arden and me.” She waved for me to enter the apartment.

I looked over my shoulder. Madden was shaking his head. Walther was standing frozen. Cassandra, though . . .

Cassandra was looking at the air above me. As I watched, she nodded, fractionally.

I’d trusted her this far. I stepped through.

EIGHT

The smell inside the Luidaeg’s apartment was like the Bay at low tide: brackish and terrible and rotten and natural, necessary, even. This was what happened when the sea rushed out. It left all its scum and debris behind.

She closed the door before turning to look at me. “You had to know what you were doing when you came here.”

“I did,” I admitted.

“So why?”

“Because my brother won’t wake up.”

The Luidaeg snorted. “Didn’t we just have an entire conclave about this? Your brother’s been elf-shot. Wake him up or don’t wake him up; it’s no concern of mine.”

I damped down my growing irritation. This was the Luidaeg, and I didn’t want to spend the next hundred years as a lawn gnome. “I used the cure on him. It cleared the elf-shot from his system. He fell asleep again almost immediately. Walther found a sleeping potion in his blood, something old, that doesn’t have elf-shot’s protections on it. He’s going to die if we don’t wake him.”

Realization flashed across her features, followed by a slow neutrality. “And I brewed it.”

“Yes.”

“I remember a few potions like that. The people who asked for them paid dearly, but they paid. I had to give them what they wanted.”

“Yes.”

“I’m not going to give you the antidote just because you’re pissed that I helped someone hurt your precious brother.”

“I know.”

“It’s unreasonable of you to—wait, what?” The Luidaeg turned to look at me, cocking her head to the side. “What did you say?”

“I said, I know.” I shrugged. “I know you didn’t have a choice. You have to do what people ask for, as long as they pay you.”

Her eyes seemed to darken, bottle green shifting toward pine. “You know, do you? How do you know?”

“You sold some charms to my nursemaid, to keep me and Nolan hidden from the people who would hurt us. She said . . . she said it was worth what she’d paid if it meant we stayed safe. And they worked. They worked for a long, long time, until October asked you to help her find us. It’s sort of funny, really. You hid us, and then you found us, and you didn’t do it because you wanted to either time.” I forced myself to smile. My head was still throbbing, and every nerve felt like it was on fire. If I tried to open a gate, I’d probably dump myself into the Bay, and that didn’t change the part where I desperately wanted to try. I wanted to get out of here.

I wanted to save my brother. I had to stay.

The Luidaeg’s eyes had continued to darken. “Your nursemaid,” she said. “What was her name?”

“Marianne.”

“Marianne.” She said the name like it tasted of the finest wine in Faerie. “She used me to hide you. Your brother didn’t stay within the wards, and someone else used me to hurt him. Faerie might do better if all the Firstborn were gone, don’t you think?”

“You’re the only one I’ve actually met,” I said. I paused before adding, “No, wait, that’s not true. Amandine’s Firstborn, right? And Evening Winterrose. How many of you are there?”

“Don’t ask that.” There was steel in her voice. She took a step toward me. “Here’s what’s going to happen. You’re going to tell me what you want—exactly what you want—and I’m going to tell you what it costs. You’ll pay, or not, as you see fit. If you pay, you get what you asked for, and I let you leave here unharmed. If you refuse, you get nothing, and you may not find it that easy to get away from me.”

I stiffened. “I’m Tuatha de Dannan.”

“Yes, and you stink of burnt magic and overexertion. You couldn’t teleport to the corner store right now. You’re trapped with me until I let you go, and I’m not letting you go until you do what you came for. What do you want?”

“I want my brother awake.” The words came easily. Relief followed. Until I’d been speaking, I hadn’t been certain I’d be able to. “I want him to open his eyes and look at me. I want him back in the world, unharmed, unchanged, ready to be my brother again. I want him back.”

“Is that all?” The Luidaeg raised an eyebrow. “No bone for your puppy? No three wishes and a new toaster?”

“Madden finds his own bones, and I have kitchen staff. I don’t need a toaster.”

“I see.” The Luidaeg looked at me, assessing. Finally, she said, “Wait here,” and vanished down the hall, leaving me alone in the mess.

No, not quite alone: a cockroach the length of my index finger strolled along the wall, antennae waving, apparently unbothered by the fact that I was standing less than four feet away. I wrinkled my nose, but didn’t smash the disgusting thing. It could be the Luidaeg’s familiar or something. I didn’t want to come all this way only to incur her wrath over a bug.

The smell of love-lies-bleeding and kelp drifted in from the direction the Luidaeg had gone, notable mostly because it was so much fresher than the scum around me. The Luidaeg herself appeared a few moments later, a small vial in her left hand. Its contents were pearl gray and glowing like a fallen star. She held it up, showing it to me.

“Feed this to him and any sleeping potions will be cleansed from his body,” she said. “He’ll go back to sleep. He’ll sleep for eight hours. He’ll sleep restfully, and when he wakes, he’ll be fine. Eighty years out of time, but fine. That’s what you want.”

“Yes, it is,” I said. I started to reach for the vial, catching myself and pulling back at the last moment. “What does it cost?”

“Clever girl.” She smiled, ever so slightly. “I know why you sent Toby to Silences. I know she touched you without permission. I know she did it because she was chasing you, trying to make sure you didn’t abandon your post. And that’s what I want from you. If you take this from my hand, you take your throne as well. You will not be able to step down or step aside without my permission, ever.”

I bristled. “I’m not going to be your puppet.”

“Did I ask for that? I didn’t ask for that. I don’t care how you rule. I care about this kingdom having some stability. I have shit to do, and some of it includes Toby being clear-headed and focused enough to listen when I call for her. So I need you to stay on your damn throne.” The Luidaeg’s smile grew. The teeth were back. “No stepping down. No stepping aside. You die in the saddle, or you get my permission to leave.”

“What’s to stop me from breaking my word?” That might have been a bad question to ask someone like her, but I needed to know.

“You won’t be able to,” she said. “If you try to say the words, your tongue will stop in your mouth. If you try to give your crown away, your fingers won’t let go. You’ll die before you step down without my consent. But you’ll have your brother back, and I’ll never ask you to do me any favors. Not unless you ask me for something first.”

The vial in her hand continued glowing. If I took it, I could save Nolan, but I’d never be free; I’d be queen until I died, or until the Luidaeg didn’t need October’s full attention anymore. That could be centuries. No more exits, no more escapes. If I didn’t take it . . . Walther was an excellent alchemist. He might be able to find a way to save my brother. The future wasn’t set yet. I could still have my freedom and my family. It would be a risk. It would be a gamble. It wasn’t an impossibility.

It was more than I could afford to risk. Still . . . “Is there any chance you’ll give me permission in the future, when the region is stable, when I have a named heir standing ready?”

Her smile told me she understood what she was asking of me; there was mercy in her eyes, and a kindness that reminded me of Marianne’s hands moving through my hair. “Ask me in a hundred years,” she said.

I nodded once and took the vial. It was surprisingly heavy, like it was filled with liquid mercury. Her smile turned from sympathy to pleasure.

“Do we have a deal, Queen Windermere in the Mists?” she asked.

“We do,” I said.

The air turned electric around us, making the hairs on my arms and the back of my neck stand on end. The charge only lasted for a few seconds. When it passed, my headache was gone and the vial in my hand was no longer glowing. I looked at the Luidaeg, eyes wide.

Her smile continued to blossom, becoming a grin. “You did something I wanted you to do, and you didn’t whine nearly as much as I expected,” she said. “I’m allowed to do favors. Now get the fuck out of my house, and if I see you before a hundred years have passed, I reserve the right to stab you in some nonfatal spot.”

“Why nonfatal?”

“Because guaranteeing myself a stable monarchy only works if I don’t go killing the monarchs.” She pointed to the door. “Get out.”

I got out.

Madden was right outside the door. Walther and Cassandra were a short distance away, standing close together. I wasn’t sure Walther realized how close, or that he’d positioned himself to protect her from anything that might come bursting from the apartment. I swallowed a smirk. Cassandra would be pleased when she figured out how well he was picking up her signals.

“Ardy!” Madden rushed to meet me as the door slammed shut. “Are you okay?”

“Better than okay.” I held up the vial. “We have our solution, and the Luidaeg threw in a fix for my magic-burn. We’re going home.”

I started to sweep my hand through the air, and stopped when Madden grabbed my wrist. I turned. He was staring at me, clear concern in his wolfish eyes.

“Ardy, what did you pay?” he asked, voice low.

I didn’t have to think about it before I smiled at him, and said, “Only what I deserved.”

He looked confused. But he let me go and took a step back, allowing me to open the gate that would return us to Muir Woods. The smell of blackberry flowers and redwoods washed over us, and we stepped through, all four of us, leaving the shadows of San Francisco behind.

NINE

It was past sunrise by the time Walther was done verifying that Nolan was stable and feeding him the potion from the Luidaeg, one slow sip at a time. Both Walther and Cassandra availed themselves of the hospitality of my house for a few hours, sleeping until midafternoon, when they woke, showered, and left, both of them riding on a yarrow branch that Walther produced from inside his jacket. I excused myself from Nolan’s bedside long enough to wave farewell.

Cassandra hugged me before leaving, surprising us both, and whispered, “I’ll be back,” in my ear.

I was still smiling about that when I returned to the room where my brother slept and sat down next to the bed. I had a book. The kingdom could get by without its queen for a few more hours. After all, it was never going to lose me again. Not for at least a hundred years.

Time passed, seconds blending into minutes into hours. Nolan stirred. I looked up from the page, trying not to let myself hope, trying not to let myself want.

His eyes were open. He was looking at me, confusion writ large across his features.

“What in the world,” he asked, “have you done to your hair?”

I dropped the book as I fell upon him, laughing and crying in the same breath, and I gathered my brother in my arms, and we were finally, finally home.