Once Broken Faith

FOUR

BY SEVEN IN THE MORNING all the kids except for Quentin and Raj had been collected by their guardians. They slunk home with sugar-glazed expressions and doggie bags of leftovers. Etienne was going to learn a lot about nacho cheese over the course of the next day or so. I sort of wished I could be there for that. Quentin and Raj, meanwhile, had retreated to Quentin’s room for an actual slumber party, meaning they were actually going to sleep. Raj’s tendency to sleep in feline form meant they could both fit in a single bed, which was nice. One trip to the Mattress Outlet with the family had been enough to hold me for a decade—or until the mattresses needed replacing, whichever came first.

Please let it be the decade.

I turned out the last of the lights and drew the last of the curtains before retreating to my room. The house was blissfully quiet. The air smelled like fresh-baked cookies, a combination of burnt sugar and chocolate that would linger for hours yet. Jazz had gone to bed shortly after one o’clock in the morning, pleading the fact that she was diurnal. May had gone to join her at dawn.

Now it was my turn. I shut my bedroom door and started toward the bed, unbuttoning my jeans as I walked. It was rare for me to be the only person awake in the house. I reveled in the feeling.

The smell of pennyroyal and musk cut through the scent of cookies, telling me that I wasn’t alone after all. That was all the warning I got before Tybalt’s hands grasped my waist, turning me to face him. I saw him smile, and then he was pulling me close and kissing me so fiercely that it was like we hadn’t seen each other in weeks. It had only been hours, but I wasn’t complaining. I slid my hands up his chest and linked them behind his neck, not hesitating as I kissed him back. A purr reverberated through his body, vibrating my skin and reinforcing the feeling that this, just this, was proof that I was finally home.

If someone had told me right after I stumbled out of the pond that I’d eventually fall in love again, I might have believed them. After all, the heart is a hardy organ: it heals, it moves on. If that same someone had added “with the asshole King of Cats,” I would have laughed until I threw up, and then probably started punching people. Tybalt wasn’t my friend back then, much less a potential lover. He was a bastard and a bully who took too much joy in tormenting me for me to even consider the possibility that one day I’d start keeping company with him.

It’s funny what time can do. Bit by bit, I’d come to realize that Tybalt’s barbs were less about cruelty and more about keeping me at arm’s length, where I couldn’t hurt him—something I’d never imagined I could do until I was doing it. We’d traded a few kisses almost accidentally, and then, with no real fanfare or warning, we’d been in love. Me, the changeling street rat, and him, the handsome Cait Sidhe monarch. Maybe it shouldn’t have worked, but it did, and it had become one of the rocks I put my trust in. The sun rose; the tide turned; Tybalt loved me.

He slid his hands down to cup my ass, pulling my feet off the floor. I responded by kicking my feet up and wrapping my legs around his waist, making it easier for him to carry me to the bed. There was an aggravated yowl as one of the cats protested. I didn’t look to see which one it was. I was distracted by Tybalt’s hand in my hair and Tybalt’s lips on my throat, and then I didn’t pay attention to anything but him for a little while. Who could blame me?

One major advantage to living in the Victorian, rather than my old two-bedroom apartment: much thicker walls, and much less chance of someone wandering in to see what all the fuss was about.

Afterward, naked and sweaty and pleasantly loose in that way that followed strenuous exercise, I stretched and rested my head against Tybalt’s chest, closing my eyes. He was purring again. I couldn’t think of a more comforting sound.

“I take it you missed me, little fish,” he said, playing his fingers through my tangled hair.

“Excuse me?” I rolled over, opening my eyes and squinting at him. “Who jumped who here? I ask not because I’m complaining, but because I think it’s important we keep the sequence of events as clear as possible.”

He chuckled. “Ah, but you see, had you not missed me, you wouldn’t have responded so ardently to what could have been merely a simple hello. I kiss you quite often. Most of the time, you’re capable of kissing me back without dislodging your undergarments in the process.”

“You waited until I was taking my pants off!”

“An accident of timing.” He waved a hand, dismissing my protest. “There’s no need to be ashamed. Were I fortunate enough to be engaged to me, I would take every opportunity to get me to bed.”

“You are such a cat sometimes.” I yawned, snuggling down and closing my eyes again. “Did you have a good night at Court?”

“I did. Nothing of much interest happened, which is always the ideal; better a night where my people are free to make their own entertainment than a night where I must race from place to place, extinguishing fires and praying we’ll live to see the morning. Alazne is finally able to hold her human form for more than an hour at a time. Opal and Gabriel are very proud, and hope you’ll be able to come and visit soon.”

“I’d like that.”

“And you? Was your night a welter of teenage vexations and not enough quiet? I saw the kitchen when I first got home. The fridge appears to have been attacked by wild beasts.”

I couldn’t suppress the thrill that went through me when Tybalt referred to reaching the house as getting home. Eyes still closed, I said, “Oh, the kids were great. They showed Dean The Little Mermaid. I’m expecting Dianda to call it a declaration of war and slaughter us all in our sleep. Arden came by, dragged me back to Muir Woods, and used me to get Walther to go ahead and wake Madden up before the High King got here. Only just before—he’s in the Mists now, he’s holding a conclave next week to discuss how they’re going to distribute the elf-shot cure, and—oh yeah, right—I’m expected to attend. Are you going to be there? I know it’s going to involve the neighboring Kings and Queens, but I’m not sure what involvement the Cait Sidhe would have with something like this.”

Tybalt was silent. Seconds stretched out like taffy until I opened my eyes, disturbed by the sudden weight of the air. I rolled over and sat up in the same motion, gathering the sheets up around my collarbone as I turned to look at him.

He was worth looking at, under any circumstances. Most fae are either beautiful by human standards or completely alien and inhuman, covered in leaves or feathers or spines. Tybalt managed to straddle the line between the two. His face was lovely; his body was better. But his pupils were cat-slit narrow, against irises the banded color of malachite, and there were black tabby stripes in the brown of his hair. When he was distracted or distressed, as he was now, more stripes appeared on his skin. They were visible as I faced him, curving up the sides of his ribs and wrapping around his arms.

“Tybalt?” I said.

“If the conclave is to be held next week, it’s reasonable that no invitation has yet been sent to us; perhaps one was always intended and perhaps not. Now that I’m aware a conclave is to occur at all, I must attend, or take it as an insult from a Court that has often been far too willing to dismiss us,” he said. He sat up, reaching out to cup the curve of my cheek with his hand. “I love you. You know that, yes?”

I blinked. “Okay, now you’re worrying me. Of course I know that you love me.”

“Good.” He leaned in and kissed me, sweet and slow. Only the tension in his hand betrayed the fact that all was not well, that this wasn’t just some sweet gesture motivated by affection. Something was really wrong.

Because of that, I was already braced when he pulled back and said, “I have to go.”

“Why?” The question came out harsher than I’d intended. I didn’t try to take it back or temper it. I knew I had to share him with his Court, but Oberon’s teeth, I’d already done that today. He was supposed to be with me for at least a night before he left again.

“Because my Court will need to be told that so many monarchs of the Divided are coming to our territory; because you are a daughter of the Divided Courts, and until I know whether they intend to shun us or curry our favor, I mustn’t seem to have already been pacified. I must seem aloof. Because I need to prepare myself to walk among Kings and Queens who stand too much on ceremony as their equal.” His smile was brief and wry. “I am their equal, of course; I am a King. But they’ll look for any excuse to say that I’m less than they are.”

I caught his meaning. I didn’t want to. Shoulders going tight, I asked, “Excuses like arriving next to a knight who swears to the throne of the Mists? One who might have ‘pacified’ you?”

He didn’t answer me. He didn’t need to.

Irritation flared in my chest, hot and toxic as bile. I swallowed it down as best I could. “You should go, then.”

“I’ll make it up to you.” He slid from the bed, grabbed his clothes, and was gone. He didn’t bother getting dressed first. Cait Sidhe are even more casual about nudity than the rest of Faerie. Cats are technically naked under their fur, after all. Combine that with the whole “grooming with their tongues” thing, and body shyness just isn’t an option.

I stared at the place where he’d been, inhaling the mixed scents of pennyroyal and musk. Then I groaned and flopped backward into the pillows, closing my eyes. We were going to make this work. We were going to make this work. The fact that he was the monarch of an independent Court and I was tied inextricably to the Divided Courts wasn’t going to change the fact that we loved each other—and as long as we could keep loving each other, we could find a way through this. We could do it. I was a hero, after all. What was a hero, if not someone who went up against impossible odds, and won?

Sleep claimed me while I was worrying the problem over and over in my head, like a dog with a bone. I fell into tangled, confusing dreams, and found myself looking for Karen in every corner. She could guide the things I dreamed about. Normally, it was nice to have some privacy in my own dreams, but after the day I’d had, being able to say “hey, kiddo, wanna go to the imaginary carnival and eat cotton candy until the sun goes down?” would have been a nice change.

A knock at my bedroom door pulled me back to consciousness at—I checked the clock—a little after two in the afternoon. I sat up, blinking and groggy, clutching the sheet around my chest like it would somehow transform into a nightgown if I wished hard enough. The blackout curtains over my windows kept the light from getting in. So where was the light coming from?

“Toby?”

Oh. The bedroom door was open. I turned to blink blearily in that direction. Jazz, fully dressed and looking far too alert, with the feathered band that held her fae nature tied in her hair, was standing there, grimacing apologetically.

“Huh?” I said.

“You need to get up now.”

I blinked at her again before pointing at the clock. “Nuh-uh.”

“The High King and High Queen are here,” said Jazz. “In the dining room. With May. Drinking lemonade and eating the last of the Rice Krispie treats. Please will you get up now? I’m really not equipped to deal with this.”

The words “High King and High Queen” acted like an electric shock to the part of my brain that had been trying to drag me back to sleep. I stiffened. “They’re where?”

“In the dining room. Are you up?”

“I’m up,” I confirmed. I paused. “Is Quentin?”

Jazz shook her head. “They, um, asked us to let him sleep.”

Great. So this wasn’t a social visit: it was a job evaluation. “I’ll be right down.”

“Good. Hurry.” Jazz shut the door, leaving me alone in my darkened bedroom.

Most fae are nocturnal, which means we have excellent night vision. I got up and got dressed without turning on the lights, retrieving yesterday’s jeans from the floor and digging a charcoal gray tank top out of my drawer. Most of my wardrobe is designed not to show the blood. That sort of thing was an occupational hazard for me, and I didn’t enjoy shopping, which meant that darker colors were better.

I didn’t have time for a shower, but I had time to run a brush through my hair and take a quick, critical look at myself in the mirror. There were dark circles under my eyes from the lack of sleep. Well, that was the High King’s fault. He could deal with it.

Voices drifted from the dining room when I was halfway down the stairs. They were talking quietly, presumably so as not to wake Quentin. I could have told them not to bother. He was a teenage boy. He didn’t wake up for anything short of a small explosion, and even then, he was just as likely to decide that I could take care of things, roll over, and go back to sleep.

Then I came around the corner at the bottom of the stairs, and the dining room appeared before me, and I stopped worrying about little things like that. I had much bigger problems.

High King Aethlin Sollys was settled in what was normally my seat, a tumbler of lemonade in front of him. To his left sat a woman with hair the color of molten silver and eyes like chips of blue topaz. They were both wearing human clothes—him a button-down shirt, her a Toronto Furies jersey—and neither was wearing a human disguise. I blinked, schooling my expression. They weren’t wearing cosmetic illusions, either, and the left side of the High Queen’s face was covered in small, pitted scars, like the aftermath of a bad case of acne. She was pureblooded Daoine Sidhe. Daoine Sidhe don’t get acne.

Almost as if she’d read my mind, Maida smiled, shrugged, and said, “Fae may be immune to most human skin conditions, but it turns out we’re not immune to smallpox.”

“Oh,” I said. There didn’t seem to be another good response. May, who was sitting on the other side of the table, gave me a pointed look. Right. I couldn’t stand here silently forever. “So, um, to what do we owe this not at all terrifying honor?”

“Well, as you may have noticed, we were in the neighborhood,” said Aethlin. He chuckled at his own joke. May mustered a sickly smile.

Maida sighed and planted her elbow in her husband’s ribs. He made an exaggerated “oof” noise. Rolling her eyes, she looked to me, and said, “We wanted to come and see where Quentin is living, and talk to you a bit, as his parents, rather than as the High Monarchs of the Westlands. Do you think you can try to make that separation? For me?”

She sounded so earnest—and more importantly, so sincere—that I took a deep breath and said, “I’ll try. But you have to promise not to charge me with treason or something if I complain about the way he never wants to do the dishes.”

“He’s going to be High King someday,” said Aethlin. “He’ll never have to do the dishes.”

He’d said something similar the first time we met, during their visit to the Mists to confirm Arden as Queen. Believe it or not, I was much more relaxed with them now. “Which makes it all the more important that he do the dishes now, while he can still learn something from it,” I said. “Plus I’m really bad at doing the dishes, and why do I have a squire if not to make him do menial household chores?”

“Dishes build character,” said Maida. “Is he happy? Healthy? Is he eating his vegetables and making friends and having a normal life?”

I paused, looking between the two of them before I settled on Maida and said, “I’m guessing you’re the one who married into the royal family, huh?”

She smiled. “Is it that obvious?”

“Pretty sure he,” I gestured to Aethlin, “has never done the dishes voluntarily in his life, so yeah, it’s that obvious.”

“I was a Baron’s daughter in the Kingdom of Endless Skies,” she said. Kansas, in other words: a Kingdom so broad and so flat that in the end, they’d had to go with “we have no mountains” as a name. “No household to speak of, and my father didn’t want me treated differently by his staff, so he let most of them go after I was born. I did dishes. Also milked cows and fed chickens and learned how to wash my own clothes. It’s part of why I was willing to agree to the proposal that Quentin be put into a blind fosterage. It was important to me that he understand the people he would eventually be ruling from the bottom up, and not just from the top down.”

The other part of her agreement had been, of course, the fact that the request was coming from Eira Rosynhwyr, the Daoine Sidhe Firstborn, whose every wish was her descendants’ command. If Maida didn’t want to bring that up, I wasn’t going to do it either. I still paused. No household, no staff, and those scars on her face . . . “Forgive me if I’m overstepping my bounds right now, although you did promise not to have me arrested for treason, so there’s that, but . . . um . . .” I stopped, realizing I had no idea how to address the High Queen without taking us back toward the overly formal.

“Maida,” she prompted. “You can use my name when I’m talking to you as the mother of your squire. If anything, in this social context, I should be the one using your title.”

“Please don’t,” I said. “All right, um, Maida, forgive me if this is a delicate question, but I’ve never heard of a pureblood catching smallpox. It’s usually a human disease. Was your mother human, by any chance?”

She smiled radiantly. “Oh, I told you we’d found a good knight for Quentin, didn’t I?” she asked, glancing at her husband. “She’s smart, and she makes him do the dishes. Our son is in excellent hands.”

“Yes, dear,” said the High King. I swallowed a laugh. Under the circumstances, it could have been misconstrued, and I was still trying to dodge that whole “treason” thing.

Maida looked back to me. “Yes,” she said. “She was a local girl. Father had purchased her from one of the other nobles, who had snatched her to be a nursemaid for his children.”

“Ah.” I nodded. Using humans as nannies and wet nurses is an old fae tradition that thankfully never managed to get much traction on the West Coast. Grab a human girl and make her take care of your kids during those messy, inconvenient parts of childhood, then dump her fae-struck and confused back into the mortal world. Fairy ointment is used to keep the kidnapped women connected to the fae world. Wipe it from their eyes before they’re sent home and they’ll have no way of explaining what happened to them. It’s cruel. It is, in every sense of the world, inhumane. But then, everything the purebloods do is inhumane, because they were never human to begin with.

“It wasn’t like that,” she said. “He bought her so he could set her free. He didn’t think it was right to keep slaves. And she refused to leave. She’d been in the Summerlands for fifty years by that point; everything she’d ever known was dead and gone, and she was still young because of the spells she’d been under. She was happy not to be beholden to a cruel master. She didn’t want to go and live among the humans. So she took over running his household, and eventually they fell in love, and I came along. I was his first child. He made me his heir.”

“I thought changelings couldn’t inherit,” I said.

“They can’t,” said Maida. “Father didn’t care. He was going to do right by me. He fired half his staff when he realized my mother was pregnant, and he fired the rest after I was born. I grew up surrounded by the people he thought of as family, and none of them ever cared that I was a mortal child. But then the pox came.” She touched the side of her face, looking briefly self-conscious. “Mother died. I lived, but barely. Father became withdrawn and quiet. He’d found the love of his life, and while he’d always known that he’d outlive her, he’d been expecting more time. So much more time.”

“I was a United States Senator when all this happened,” said Aethlin. May and I looked at him blankly. He chuckled. “It was part of my training to be King. I had to wander the whole continent, meet all sorts of people—Quentin will be expected to do the same, once he becomes a knight errant.”

“Right,” I said. Because he was going to be High King someday. He couldn’t learn the whole country if he stayed in California forever. We were many things, but we were not absolutely representative of the people he would be expected to rule.

Aethlin continued: “Part of my duties involved calling on every noble with a holding large enough to offer me hospitality. I’d already visited the King of Endless Skies, and both Duchies; there were no Counties at the time, so I came to a Barony, and met the most beautiful girl I had ever seen.”

“I had pox scars on my face and chicken shit in my hair,” said Maida.

“You hit me with a broom,” said Aethlin. “No one had ever hit me with a broom before.”

“You scared my chickens,” said Maida.

I looked between them slowly, finally focusing on Maida’s hair. It was pure silver, with no hints of tarnish. Changelings could inherit a lot of things from their fae parents, but signs of mortality always showed through. I knew Quentin had no human blood. His mother didn’t appear to either. “You have a hope chest,” I said, looking back to Aethlin.

He nodded. “I do. Well, I do now. It belonged to my parents, back when I brought Maida home to meet them.”

“They told me the cost of marrying their son would be my humanity, and I was glad to pay it,” she said. “The human world held nothing for me, and the fae world was promising me everything I could have ever wanted. My father came to the wedding. He still holds his Barony. He says my mother would be proud of what I’ve become, and I believe him.”

“It’s not every human woman’s daughter who can become Queen of a continent,” I agreed. “Does Quentin know?”

“No.” Maida looked regretful. “He was too young to understand when we sent him on fosterage. He knows I was ill when I was younger. He doesn’t know with what, or that it was a disease that purebloods rarely, if ever, suffer from.”

“But he wasn’t too young to have been picking up the wrong attitudes about changelings from the ruffians at Court,” said Aethlin. “He needs to rule everyone with fae blood, no matter how thin, and he needs to do it fairly. We couldn’t tell him where his mother had come from, but we could send him out into the world and hope that he would learn the right lessons.”

“Because telling him would make it look like human blood was something to be ashamed of and concealed,” I said.

Maida nodded. “We don’t tell many people about my origins, because there are people who would take it as a reason to question my authority. I’m not ashamed. I’m not going to weaken myself in the eyes of my vassals, either.”

“No, I understand,” I said.

“Sometimes I don’t,” said Maida. “I heard what you did for the changelings of Silences. Thank you. Truly.”

I managed not to flinch at the forbidden thanks, although it was a near thing. Faerie has some pretty strong prohibitions against saying “thank you.” It implies fealty and debt, two things the fae prefer to avoid. Having the High Queen thank me wasn’t just awkward and weird, it was alarming.

May shared my sentiments. She was struggling not to stare. Suddenly, the reason Jazz wasn’t here made perfect sense. I wouldn’t have been here either, if I’d had any way of avoiding it.

“It needed to be done,” I said. “There were almost fifty of them in the knowe.” Fifty in the knowe, and another dozen in the local Court of Cats. All of them had been offered the same choice: I would shift their blood, if they wanted me to, carrying them either all the way fae or all the way human. For the ones who’d already been exposed to goblin fruit, turning human would have been a death sentence, but I’d offered it all the same, because they had the right to choose.

Some had chosen to stay as they were. None of them had chosen to be human. And the rest . . . I had burned the humanity out of them, allowing them to rise pureblooded and immortal. It had been painful for everyone involved. I still felt like I’d done the right thing. Portland’s King of Cats, a pleasant, silver-haired man named Jolgeir, had kissed my cheeks after I pulled the humanity out of his daughters, promising to give me anything I ever wanted, for the rest of my life, as thanks for what I’d done for him.

“It needed to be done, but you did it,” said Maida. “We have a hope chest and no way to make the same offer without making people feel like they should be ashamed of where they came from. Things are changing. A lot of that change is starting here, in the Mists. That’s why we’re so glad to have you teaching our son.”

“But we still miss him,” said Aethlin. “Please, is he happy? We’ve missed so much. Tell us about him.”

“He is happy,” I said, and finally sat down. “Healthy, too, and he’s even started applying himself in his lessons. He and Raj are still pretty much joined at the hip. We hosted a slumber party last night . . .”

Once I started talking about Quentin, it was surprisingly easy to keep going. I was still talking when he came stumbling down the stairs, Raj in cat-form slung over his shoulder like a hand towel. Then there was shouting and hugging and all the joys of a boy enjoying a too-rare reunion with his parents, and for a moment—just a moment—everything felt like it was going to be okay.