Once Broken Faith (3 page)

“Come on, Dad, can I go through? Please? Pretty please? The gate looks stable, it's not going to snick me in half or anything, pleeeeease?” Chelsea turned fully to her father, expression pleading. Only the rolled-up sleeping bag under her arm spoiled the illusion of absolute need. Like Karen, she was wearing pajamas. Unlike Karen, her pajamas were patterned with spaceships and planets.

“It appears stable,” said Etienne. “First, you must ask Sir Daye for permission. It is never appropriate to use a gate to enter a knight or noble's home without their consent.”

Chelsea sighed, looking briefly like the teenage girl she was. Then she turned to me, and said, with perfect courtly grace, “Sir Daye, may I answer your invitation and cross the threshold from my halls into yours?”

It took everything I had to swallow my grin. May was less successful, but as she was out of Chelsea's line of sight, she probably wasn't trying as hard. “Yes, you may,”
I said. “Come on through. We're going to order the pizza in about half an hour.”

“Yes!” Chelsea jumped straight through her transit gate, spinning on her toes to wave at Etienne and chirp, “Bye, Daddy! I'll see you in the morning!” She waved her hand, making a closing gesture, and the gate slammed shut before Etienne could get another word in.

“I don't know whether that was slick or rude,” I said.

“It doesn't matter,” said Raj, grabbing Chelsea's wrist and hauling her out of the kitchen without leaving her time to do more than wave to the rest of us. The argument in the front room changed timbre again only a few seconds later.

I looked at May. She grinned. I grinned back.

“Okay, this was a fantastic idea and we should do it every week,” I said. As if on cue, there was a knock at the back door. I crossed the kitchen to answer it.

Dean Lorden—slightly older than the rest of our guests in chronological terms, slightly younger in terms of experience with the world outside the Undersea—was standing on my back porch, a backpack slung by one strap over his left shoulder. He was dressed in his usual Court clothes, which meant he looked a little old-fashioned, like he'd just stepped out of the 1920s and didn't understand the concept of “denim.” He looked unsettled.

“Marcia drove you, huh?” I guessed.

“She says I need to get used to riding in cars if I want to live in the human world,” he said, and stepped inside. He released the illusion making him look human as soon as he was over the threshold, adding a layer of eucalyptus and wet rock to the bizarre mix of magical scents already hanging in the air. His clothes remained the same; only his features shifted, becoming sharper and indefinably inhuman. He was a handsome kid, with his mother's sand-colored skin and his father's bronze hair, complete
with a patina of verdigris highlights. His eyes were dark blue, like the sea at night, and his ears tapered to sharp points. He'd be a heartbreaker when he got a little older.

I was just hoping the heart he chose to start with wouldn't be Quentin's. Dean and my squire had been seeing each other for a few months. I wasn't sure yet whether “dating” was the word. Dean had grown up in the Undersea, and I had no idea what their formal courtships looked like; Quentin was a pureblooded scion of the Daoine Sidhe, destined to become High King of the Westlands. He'd dated once before, a human girl named Katie. It hadn't ended well. As long as he and Dean were being careful with each other, I was fine with their relationship, but the second I felt like someone was going to get hurt, I was going to . . .

Oak and ash, I didn't know what I was going to do. This was all outside my realm of experience, and I was as confused as everyone else.

May handed Dean a plate of cookies. “Take these to the front room,” she said. “Everyone will be delighted to see you.”

He smiled shyly. “Okay,” he said. To me, he added, “You have a lovely home.” Then he was gone, following the sound of shouting toward the rest of the party.

I walked over to one of the unoccupied kitchen chairs and collapsed into it. “Five,” I said mournfully. “There are
five
teenagers in my house right now. Who thought this was a good idea? It can't have been me. I have more common sense than that.”

“No, you don't,” said May, setting a fresh-baked chocolate chip cookie down in front of me. “If you did, you wouldn't be you.”

“I hate you all,” I muttered, and reached for the cookie.

Someone knocked on the back door.

Slowly, we all turned toward the sound. Jazz spoke
first. “I thought everyone was here already,” she said warily.

“And Tybalt doesn't knock,” said May. “He just sort of shows up. Like the plague.”

“Tybalt is busy at his court tonight,” I said, standing. Being engaged to a King of Cats has come with its share of adjustments. Getting used to the idea that sometimes he wasn't going to be available, no matter how much I wanted him to be, had been one of the bigger ones. Raj was his chosen heir. Because of that, for Raj to have an official “night off”—as opposed to all the nights he spent unofficially hogging the remote and eating all my food—Tybalt needed to be with his people. It was going to get interesting when the time came to go out of town for our wedding. Raj was going to be
livid
if he didn't get to come, but I couldn't see any way the Cait Sidhe were going to go for that.

“Should I get your sword?” asked May, eyeing the door.

“It's in the car.”

“Again?” She shifted her gaze to me, now admonishing. “A sword won't keep you safe if it's in the trunk of your car.”

“True, but it won't be used to gut me in my own home, either.” I pushed my shirt back enough to show her that I had my silver knife, and finished crossing the kitchen to the door. “Who is it?” I called.

“Um, Arden,” was the reply. “Can I come in?”

I glanced over my shoulder at May, wide-eyed. She and Jazz were staring at me, looking about as baffled as I felt. I turned back to the door and unlocked it, pulling it open to reveal Arden Windermere, Queen in the Mists, regent of Northern California, standing on my back porch. She was wearing a black T-shirt with the Borderlands Books logo on the front, along with a pair of dark jeans and battered white tennis shoes. A human disguise
blunted her features and removed the purple highlights from her hair, although her eyes remained mismatched, one brown, one gray trending into silver.

“Uh,” I said.

She mustered a faint smile. “Yeah, I know,” she said. “Can I come in?”

It abruptly hit me that I had the Queen at my back door, asking for my permission to enter. The Queen, who was Tuatha de Dannan, and hence fully capable of opening a portal into my kitchen and stepping through without so much as a by-your-leave. This was not a situation my etiquette classes had prepared me for. To be honest, it wasn't a situation I'd ever thought about. Maybe I should have.

“Sure,” I said, and stepped aside.

Like Dean, Arden released her human disguise as soon as she was inside, filling the air with the scent of redwood sap and blackberry flowers. Her hair turned the color of ripe blackberries, while her eyes lost their mortal hues, becoming pyrite and mercury instead of brown and gray. Her ears were pointed like Dean's, but the shape of them marked her as Tuatha de Dannan as clearly as a sign would have. There was no mistaking her for anything but what she was.

She waited for me to shut the door before she said, “I'm here both as a courtesy, and to request a favor. Which would you like first? And where is your, ah, squire?”

Arden had learned Quentin's true identity at the same time I had: when he convinced her that being a princess wasn't the worst thing in the world, and that she owed it to her Kingdom to take the crown. That knowledge made her one of a small circle of people who'd been trusted with who he really was. May and Jazz knew, of course, and so did Raj. Dean might or might not; that was Quentin's choice to make. But I knew Chelsea and Karen didn't. Well. Karen might. She'd walked in his
dreams, after all. “He's in the front room. Should I get him?”

“Oberon's eyes, no,” she said, her own eyes widening in alarm. “He can't hear what I'm about to say.”

I raised an eyebrow. “I know I'm a hero of
this
realm and all, but if you're here to plot sedition against the King of the Westlands, I want to be the first to say that it's probably not a good idea. Like, it's a really
bad
idea. I'm out of the king-breaking business. After getting stabbed in the heart the last time, I'm planning to stick with missing persons and the occasional murder for at least a year.”

“I'm not plotting sedition,” said Arden.

I started to relax.

“Much.”

I stiffened again.

“Maybe this is me being out of touch with the modern realities of life in Faerie, but last time I checked, you couldn't be a little bit plotting sedition,” said May. “It's like being a little bit pregnant. Sure, you think it'll be fine, but next thing you know, it's all diapers and daggers and who's your monarch.”

Arden blinked slowly at her before turning back to me. “We've been waiting for High King Sollys to approve the use of Master Davies' elf-shot cure before we woke anyone else.”

“I know,” I said carefully. In this context, “anyone else” meant Madden, Arden's Cu Sidhe seneschal, and Nolan, her younger brother. “Because we're trying to avoid destabilizing the region. You know. More than we already have.”

“He sent word at sundown that he won't approve use of the cure until there's been a proper conclave of local monarchs to discuss the matter. He'll be here next week.”

“. . . Oh.” Quentin's father was coming here? Quentin didn't know. Quentin
couldn't
know. He would have told me, even if he was trying not to. My squire was many
things. Good at lying to me wasn't one of them. He'd managed to keep the truth about his parentage secret for as long as he had only because there had never been any reason for the subject to come up: his being Crown Prince wasn't going to impact me for years, if ever. His dad coming to town was something else entirely.

“I need you to come back to Muir Woods with me,” said Arden. “Walther is already there, but he says he won't do anything without you.”

“Anything like what?” I asked. I knew, really. There was only one thing she could want badly enough to risk pissing off the King of the entire continent. She had come to me effectively hat in hand, dressed like the mortal she'd been living as when we met, because she wanted this so badly. And she knew that she couldn't order me to help her do it.

“I need you to come back to Muir Woods with me,” she repeated. “I need you to be there, so that Walther will wake up my brother and my best friend before the High King gets here, realizes he left a loophole in his orders, and makes it illegal.”

I glanced to May and Jazz. They both nodded silently. I looked back to Arden and sighed.

“Let me get my coat.”

A
RDEN HAD COME IN through the back door, but as soon as I got back to the kitchen, it became clear that she wasn't planning to leave that way. She inscribed a wide arc in the air with her left hand. A portal opened in the air, accompanied by the sudden, sharp smell of blackberry flowers and redwood sap. Through it, I could see the entry hall of Arden's knowe in Muir Woods.

Right. “I'll be back soon,” I said, shrugging my leather jacket on and tugging the collar into place. It was always chilly in Muir Woods. Call it a side effect of being close to the sea. “Remember to tip the pizza delivery guy, and try to avoid anything getting stuck to the ceiling.”

“On it,” said May, with a brief salute. “You crazy kids have fun now.”

I didn't have time to respond before Arden was stepping through the portal, grabbing my right wrist and hauling me with her. The world shifted, performing the dizzying dip and wheel that always seemed to accompany point-to-point transportation, especially when it involved moving between the mortal world and the Summerlands. I pulled away from Arden, bending forward to put my hands on my knees and breathe away the dizziness.

“Come on,” she said, making no effort to hide the urgency in her tone. “Get up, we have to hurry.”

“And I have to breathe, so hang on.” I pulled in a lungful of air. It went straight to my head, as Summerlands air often did. It was cleaner, purer than its mortal world equivalent: Faerie mostly skipped the industrial revolution, although we had our blacksmiths and tinkerers. Widespread air pollution just wasn't a thing in the Summerlands. Sometimes I wondered if that was the cause of my dizziness when I made the transition. My body was still too human to deal easily with the lack of toxins.

Arden stayed nearby, shifting her weight from foot to foot in a way more reminiscent of the teens currently invading my home than of a Queen in her own Kingdom. Then again, Arden didn't have much experience with Queenship, having been in the position for less than a year—ten months, at my last count. Prior to that, she'd been living a quiet mortal life, keeping her head down and concealing herself from the fae out of fear that she'd be assassinated or elf-shot by the imposter who was sitting on the throne that rightfully belonged to the Windermere line. Arden's father, King Gilad Windermere, had never married, choosing to hide his consort and heirs for their own safety. I guess he'd assumed that he'd have time to claim them publicly, when they were old enough to deal with the slings and arrows of royal life.

It hadn't worked out that way. He died, leaving them unprotected. Nolan had been elf-shot by the forces of the woman who was claiming to be Gilad's rightful heir. And Arden had gone into hiding, where she'd remained until I tracked her down and dragged her, kicking and screaming, back to her birthright. She didn't seem to be holding a grudge about that, but it was sort of hard to tell, given that since she'd taken the throne, she'd formally named me as a hero, sent me to act as a diplomatic attaché to a hostile neighboring Kingdom, and was now
asking me to help her go against the wishes of the High King.

Okay, scratch that. She was
definitely
holding a grudge.

I took another breath, getting my balance back before I stood upright again. “Okay,” I said, tugging my leather jacket straight to cover the last of my dizziness. “Where are we going?”

“This way.” She spun on her heel and stalked deeper into the knowe, gesturing for me to follow.

The knowe in Muir Woods belonged to Arden's father before his death. Someone had sealed it after he died and she disappeared, keeping it from the clutches of the false Queen. Its continued existence had been our first real clue that Arden was still out there somewhere, waiting to be found. Without a member of the Windermere line to anchor it, it should have faded back into the Summerlands, becoming inaccessible from the mortal world. Instead, it had waited, patient as a faithful hound, certain that its master would return. Now, with her in full-time residence and her people working to open, restore, and decorate the place, it was slowly returning to the majesty it must have possessed before King Gilad's death.

Which was very inspirational and all, but knowes were living things that didn't have to play by the normal rules of linear space and sensible architecture. Every time I came to visit, the place seemed to have grown larger, and half the new rooms didn't make any sense in relation to the rooms around them. The entry hall was relatively static, for which I was grateful. Everything else was anybody's guess, and I've never been a fan of guessing games.

Arden led me down the entry hall to a narrow doorway and through that doorway to a winding stairway that seemed to stretch upward for the better part of forever. On the mortal side of the knowe, the whole vast estate was just a crude door in a redwood tree, surrounded by more on every side. Here in the Summerlands, the redwoods remained, although these were fae
trees, never threatened by loggers or pollutants. Consequently, they'd grown even taller than the giants of the mortal California coast. They were interspersed with the equally tall spires of the castle battlements and towers. We were inside one of those towers; I realized that before we passed the first window and I saw the woolly red bark of the trees growing outside.

“Where are we going?” I asked.

“Patience,” said Arden, and kept climbing.

Most of the responses I wanted to offer to that would have been inappropriate, especially considering that she was the Queen and I didn't want to be banished. Again. I bit my tongue and kept climbing, following the curve of the stairs up, up, up, until we came to a short landing. The stairs continued upward. Arden ignored them, opening the door on the landing and revealing a wooden walkway wending off into the trees. I inched close enough to see that we were at least fifty feet above the ground. The forest floor was a distant, far-off dream.

“Nope,” I said, taking a step backward.

Arden turned to me, raising her eyebrows. “What?”

“I said, nope,” I said. “Not going out there. No. Would I survive a fall from that height? Sure. I've done it before. I'd just lie there screaming while I waited for my bones to knit back together. No big deal, except for the part where no way in hell am I going out on that thing. That's what, three feet across and made of untreated redwood? In this fog? That's going to be as slippery as a Merrow's ass, and I'm not going to do it.”

“I need you to come with me,” said Arden. She seemed puzzled, like she couldn't understand why I wasn't jumping to obey.

“You're getting better at this whole ‘monarch' thing, but no,” I said. “I know my sense of balance, I know how often I get hurt, and I know it's not a good idea to tempt fate. I'm not going out there.”

“Oh, for the love of Maeve,” muttered Arden. She
took a step toward me. I braced myself for the inevitable attempt to haul me through the door. Instead, she waved a hand in the air before shoving me backward, through the portal that had opened behind me. I stumbled, caught off-guard—

—and emerged in the middle of the treetop walkway. As I'd feared, the wood was slick from the fog hanging around us, and my sneakers slipped slightly before I managed to catch my balance and go still. Standing dead center, there was only about a foot of wood to either side of me. It would be so easy to fall. So very, very easy to fall.

Arden stepped through the portal, which closed behind her, and looked at me. “There,” she said. “They say the first step is the hardest, and so I've spared you that much. Now will you come
on
?”

I gaped at her. “Root and branch, you can't be serious right now.” I waved one arm as much as I dared, trying to indicate the area around us without attracting the attention of gravity. “Bridge! Very long drop! If you can teleport me
here
, why can't you just teleport us to where Walther and your brother are waiting?”

“Because Master Davies says the potion he's brewed to counter the effects of elf-shot is delicate, and if we want it to have the best shot of working, we shouldn't do any magic in the room,” said Arden. “No illusions, no gateways, nothing. I want them awake. That means we're not doing anything to endanger that.”

“If you drop me off a bridge, I'm pretty sure Walther is going to be a little reluctant to wake up your brother!” I don't have a fear of heights. I have a healthy respect for heights. I really, really respected the fact that a fall from this height would hurt like hell, even if it probably wouldn't kill me. My particular bloodline came with accelerated healing, to the point that I'd survived being stabbed in the heart, and had probably drowned on at least two occasions. That didn't mean I didn't feel pain. If
anything, it meant I felt pain
more
, since I could heal from my initial injuries before I finished receiving the next ones down the line.

“I'm not going to drop you off the bridge,” said Arden. She was starting to look seriously annoyed. “Calm down and follow me. This is a perfectly safe walkway. No one's fallen since I took over.”

“So people fell before you took over?”

She sighed. “My father had a lot of Cornish Pixies on his staff. They fell because they liked it. Look, you'll have to walk the same distance to get back to the stairs as you will to get to our destination. But if you turn and walk away from me, you'll have traveled that distance while also pissing off your regent. Do you really want to do that?”

“Dirty pool, Windermere,” I said, narrowing my eyes.

“Madden is my best friend. Nolan is my brother. Those two, those two sleeping men, they are everything I have. You're the reason I had to give up my mortal life, remember? No more job at the bookstore, no more coffee with Jude and listening to Alan grumble about cleaning up after customers. I am not,” she held out her hands, palms toward me, “running away from my responsibilities again. You said I got one shot at trying to quit, and I took it, and you were right. I can't do that again. But I have no one who
knows
me, October. Lowri is doing a fine job as my stand-in seneschal, but you know what she calls me?”

“Going to go with ‘Your Highness,'” I said cautiously.

“Sometimes she gets informal and shortens it to ‘Highness,'” said Arden. “I'm a crown to her, not a person. She doesn't know what I like to read, or care about how I made a living while I wasn't in charge. My time among the humans, it's like . . . it's like she thinks it's some weird kind of zoological expedition. I went out, I watched them, and then I came back home where I belonged. And she's the best of them! She's just about the
only person who even bothers to pay attention to things like how uncomfortable I get when Court goes for more than six hours. I'm not threatening to run again, I'm
not
, but I don't know how long I can do this without someone around here who can call me on my bullshit.”

“I'm calling you on your bullshit right now,” I said. “I really don't want to plummet to my death today.”

“You'll get better.”

“I'm still not a fan of plummeting.”

Arden sighed. “We're not friends, Toby. Maybe we can figure out a way we can be. Maybe we can't. You're always going to be the woman who hauled me back into this world.”

“And barring death, dismemberment, or abdication, you're always going to be the queen,” I said. “I get it.”

“No, you don't,” she said. “Do you have any idea what it's like to go from a life where things aren't perfect, but you're always surrounded by people who care about you, to being alone? Even when I'm surrounded, I'm
alone
.”

I went cold. “I think I have a better idea than you know,” I said.

In 1995, I was engaged to a human man named Cliff Marks. He and I had a two-year-old daughter. I was working as a private investigator, mostly taking on fae clients who wouldn't realize how little training I'd actually had. I had friends. I had a family. I had a future planned out, stretching ahead of us like a road to peace and prosperity. And I lost it all in a single moment, when Simon Torquill—my liege lord's brother, my mother's husband, and technically my stepfather—transformed me into a fish and left me in the Japanese Tea Gardens to be forgotten. He'd been trying to save my life. I'd remained there for fourteen years. Not long, by pureblood standards. Not even that long by changeling standards. But for humans like Cliff? For little girls like Gillian, who didn't even know she had fae heritage? It was forever. They had never taken me back.

Maybe the life I had now was better than the one I would've had if not for that day. There was no way of knowing, and honestly, it wasn't a question I liked to dwell on. I'd found a new family for myself, and I was happy. But before I was happy, I'd been very, very miserable.