Once Broken Faith (6 page)

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.

M
UIR WOODS WAS WRAPPED in fog, transformed by the marine weather into a phantom forest, as much legend as reality. I pulled into the parking lot, squinting at seemingly empty spaces as I looked for a safe place to stow my car. At least I didn't have to deal with tourists for a change. The mortal side of the park was closed due to unsafe weather conditions, all of which had been conjured by our helpful local Leshy and Merrow. Even Dianda had gotten into the act, whipping up the kind of waves that normally appeared only in the bad CGI disaster movies Quentin was so fond of. The storm had been raging for three days, clearing out the humans and leaving the place open for the rest of us.

A few park rangers and members of the Coast Guard had probably noticed that rain was falling everywhere but on Muir Woods, which remained silent and dry, or as dry as anything could be when completely fogged in. They would have chalked it up to California's often eccentric weather patterns. When you live in a state where it can be raining on one side of the street and eighty degrees and sunny on the other side, you learn to cope.

Coping was something I could have used some help
with. In the week since I'd woken up to find the High King and Queen in my dining room, I had crammed so much etiquette into my brain that my skull throbbed, protesting the weight of seemingly useless knowledge. It was sadly necessary. I might be the only changeling at this conclave. If I wasn't, I'd still be a knight surrounded by Dukes and Countesses, Queens and Marquises, and every other part of the titled alphabet. I needed to be on my best behavior, or I was going to have a lot to answer for.

Most of the parking spaces were already filled by vehicles under don't-look-here spells, or invisibility charms, or the more blatant holes of absolute nothingness, not even mist, which looked like someone had taken a pair of scissors to the air. I drove past them, finally stopping and peering at the farthest, darkest corner of the lot. It looked empty, but . . .

I elbowed Quentin. “Hey. Is there a car there?” As a Daoine Sidhe, he was better with illusions—both casting and detecting—than I was.

“What?” He looked up. I pointed. He followed my finger, squinted, and said, “No, it's empty. Except for that big pile of dog poop. Humans don't clean up after their pets as well as they should.”

“Neither do fae,” I said, pulling forward. “Sylvester's Afanc crapped all over the walking path the last time I was at Shadowed Hills. I had to throw those shoes away.”

“Oh, yeah.” Quentin quieted again as I finished parking. He'd been quiet for the entire drive, not even objecting when I turned the radio to the local oldies station. Normally he would have argued with me about that, but not today.

I killed the engine and turned in my seat to look at him. “All right, spill,” I said. “Before we get to the knowe and have to deal with every petty noble Arden could scrape out of a crevice, you're going to tell me what's wrong.”

“I look like my parents.” Quentin didn't look at me as he spoke. His attention remained focused on his hands. “I have my dad's hair, and my mom's eyes, and her jaw. How are these people not going to know who I am? I might as well be wearing a sign.”

“Oh. I thought you were worried about something major.” I tried to keep my tone light, even informal. It was still a real concern. As the Crown Prince of the Westlands, Quentin would one day be the regent of every single person we were about to go observe. That made him something to be courted and cosseted. More, it made him a target. Take out the primary heir to the throne and maybe they'd get lucky: maybe his little sister wouldn't have been prepared for her birthright, and they could enjoy a few years of relative freedom from supervision when she took the throne. Of course, that assumed Aethlin and Maida would be stepping down any time soon, which didn't seem to be their plan, but things could change. Assassinating heirs was a good way to kick-start the process.

I was also worried about the local nobles realizing Quentin could be useful to them and trying to take him away from me. He was my squire and semi-adopted little brother, and I wasn't going to let him go without a fight. Not even if the people who were trying to remove him from my care were his parents. Not unless they had a damn good reason for doing it.

Quentin gave me a sidelong look. “This
is
something major.”

“I know. That's why it's not something you need to be worried about right now.” I indicated him with a sweep of my hand. “Look at you. The secret son of a pureblood noble line. If this were a human fantasy novel, of
course
you would be a prince in disguise. Nothing else makes sense. But this is real life, and more, this is pureblood politics. Anyone who looks at you and thinks ‘gosh, he looks a lot like the High King' is going to follow the
thought with ‘but he's squired to a changeling, which gives him no political advantage, and could actually hurt him when the time comes to take the throne; there's no way High King Sollys would be that bone-numbingly stupid. I guess he's a distant cousin or something.' Maybe you'll find yourself in a funny
Prince-and-the-Pauper
situation, where you have to try to hide the fact that you don't have a convenient identical double, but nobody's going to finger you for the prince. It just doesn't make sense. And they're used to you! They see you all the time. You're furniture to them. Annoying furniture with bad taste in friends.”

“Do you really think so?” he asked, starting to look hopeful.

“Kiddo, I know so. If you're really worried, eat a plate of salad with your fingers or something. Your absolute lack of table manners and social graces will convince anyone who happens to be watching that you
can't
be the Crown Prince.”

Quentin looked horrified. Even years of exposure to me hadn't been enough to cancel out his early socialization, which said he needed to be poised and polite at all times, or at least whenever he was in front of people who never saw him five minutes after he rolled out of bed. He was an ordinary teenage boy when we were alone, but put him in front of someone with a title and he was Martha Stewart reborn with pointy ears.

I was still laughing as we climbed out of the car and into the cool evening air. I wasn't wearing a human disguise: I didn't need one. Between the storms and the warding spells, no humans were going to come within a mile of Muir Woods tonight, unless they were being compelled by some outside force. I was wearing a nice pseudo-medieval blouse that May had dug out of the back of my closet in my mother's tower; it was black spider-silk and red samite, and while I felt like I was in danger of having my clothes wear me, rather than me
wearing my clothes, May had insisted. Instead of jeans, I had black spider-silk pants that clung like they were made of Saran Wrap. I wasn't sure I was comfortable with that. I wasn't sure I was comfortable with any of this. Just to gild the lily, my jewelry was tarnished silver and garnets, and all of it was real, estate sale stuff Jazz had found in the back of her store. No amount of dispelling my illusions would change a thing about my clothes.

Spider-silk is expensive. I was wearing the equivalent of more money than most changelings would see in their lifetimes. It made me seriously uncomfortable—although there was something to be said for the amusement factor of standing me next to Quentin. He was the pureblood, but he was wearing blue linen trousers, a white peasant shirt, and a vest in the pale shade of daffodil favored in Shadowed Hills. His attire was a quiet reminder of who technically held his fosterage, even as mine was a reminder that I was my mother's daughter, and bleeding around me would be unwise.

I would have felt better if May and Jazz had
been
there, rather than dressing me up like a giant Barbie and throwing me to the wolves. May was concerned that her whole “I'm a Fetch, howdy” routine might cause problems with some of the visiting nobles, and wasn't planning to come to the conclave until night two, when everyone would presumably be too preoccupied sniping at each other to notice that she wasn't supposed to exist. It was logical. It was sensible. It still left me feeling like I didn't have as much backup as I really, really wanted to have.

Quentin looked at me gloomily across the roof of the car. “I'm glad you think this is funny.”

“Somebody should,” I said. “Come on. Let's go embarrass ourselves in front of the nobility.”

He snorted, but said nothing as he followed me out of the parking lot.

The stretch of land known as Muir Woods is one of the last remaining semi-virgin redwood forests in California. The giant evergreens used to cover the entire coast, towering over anyone who stood before them. These days, they're tourist attractions and the vegetative equivalent of zoo animals, hemmed in by cities and protected by laws that do too little and started doing it too late. Mist swirled around the trunks of the ancient trees as we walked into their shadow, following the trails human rangers had cut through the underbrush. Some fae would have no need for those little wooden paths. Tybalt could have stalked across the forest floor and never disturbed a leaf. Grianne, a Candela in Sylvester's service, could have walked across the surface of the ponds without a ripple. Sadly, some of us were more limited, and some of us were very grateful to the parks service for their help.

Pixies appeared in the trees as we climbed the hill toward the entry to Arden's knowe. Some of them flew down to perform loops around us, leaving trails of glittering pixie-sweat in the air as they passed. I smiled. The pixies were no more than four inches tall—most were closer to three—and came in every color of the rainbow. They were some of the smallest members of Faerie. The health of the local pixie colonies was a good indicator of the health of the realm. Judging by the looks of this group, the Mists were thriving under Arden's rule.

Lowri was in full armor, standing beside the open doors to the knowe, with a Cornish Pixie in matching attire standing on the other side. Lowri was Arden's Captain of the Guard, and had served as temporary seneschal while Madden was asleep. Presumably, Madden had his job back now. I tensed. If she held a grudge about my helping Arden wake Madden up so early . . .

“Sir Daye,” said Lowri, smiling brightly. Her Welsh accent broadened her consonants and flattened her vowels, adding a lilt to her words. “And Quentin. You're looking awfully formal today, young master.”

“It's a conclave,” said Quentin. He looked at his feet, shoulders tense. I elbowed him. If he didn't want to blow our cover, he needed to stop acting like we were going to be caught at any moment. Lowri knew him as my squire, and a minor noble at best. She wasn't going to figure out that things were any different just because we were here.

“It is, and you're properly early,” said Lowri. Her smile faded as she turned back to me, replaced by grave concern. “You . . .
do
understand the company you're to be keeping these next few nights? There are some who won't like that you're allowed inside, much less permitted to have a voice in the proceedings.”

“I'm not here to have a voice,” I said. “I'm here because the High King of the Westlands wants me to be, and because I had something to do with the whole ‘let's cure elf-shot' thing succeeding in the first place. Which reminds me. You were sworn to the Yates family before Rhys took Silences. Are you going to go back when all this is done?”

Lowri gave a quick, decisive shake of her head. “No,” she said. “I loved my lieges when I served them, but that part of my life is over, and my oaths are sworn to Queen Windermere in the Mists. I wish the Kingdom of Silences well. Their recovery will be performed without me.”

“Good,” I said. “I'd miss you. Quentin, come on. We need to check in.” He hurried to dog my heels as I walked through the open doors into the long redwood entry hall. Carved panels on the walls around us showed stylized scenes from the history of the Mists, including Arden's crowning and a figure who looked suspiciously like Walther pressing a bowl to the lips of a man who looked like Madden. More and more, I was coming to suspect that the knowe did its own carving. Fae craftsmen were good, but I didn't see how the best of them could have finished that panel and put it in place among the others in only three days.

A new doorway opened off the end of the hall,
revealing a secondary hall that curved away from the receiving room where Arden normally held Court. We walked down it. Voices drifted back to meet us, until we stepped into a gallery as grand as any theater. I stopped dead.

“Whoa,” I said.

Quentin didn't say anything. He just blinked, his thoughts apparently mirroring my own.

The room we were now in had two stories—there was an actual balcony section, which wasn't something I'd ever expected to see in something that
wasn't
a theater. There was a stage at the far end of the room, flanked by gray velvet curtains, like someone was trying to use stagecraft to create an impression of the mist across the Bay. I couldn't be sure how many people the space would seat, but I was guessing somewhere between a hundred and fifty and two hundred, depending on how deep that balcony was.