In the end, I turned away, and left the dresser drawer closed. There would be a time for iron. This was not that time.
I dressed the way I always did: jeans, a tank top, and my leather jacket, which was the only armor I’d ever worn into battle, and sometimes felt like the only armor I would ever need. Then, with my hair still damp against the back of my neck, I picked up my suitcase and walked out to face my fate.
May, Tybalt, and Quentin were already in the kitchen when I came downstairs. Quentin was at the breakfast table, his face pressed against the mat. May seemed slightly more alert, but only slightly. She was wearing jeans and a brown cable-knit sweater. At least one reason for her exhaustion was immediately evident: the streaks of color were gone from her hair, leaving it the plain, no-color brown that she’d inherited from me when she took my face and form. I blinked at her before raising an eyebrow.
“What did you do to your hair?” I asked.
“I figured anything I could do to not draw attention to my appearance would be a good thing,” she said, before smothering a yawn behind her hand. “I’m not going to lie about what I am, and there’s a good chance Nameless McBitchypants will tell the King of Silences that I’m a Fetch as soon as she realizes who I am. But if we can pass me off as a changeling member of your retinue for at least a little while, that’s what we should do.”
I blinked at her again. “That’s . . . a really good idea,” I said finally. “Good thinking.”
“I was up until an hour before he,” she jerked a thumb toward Tybalt, “came to pry me out of bed. This is a terrible plan. Why can’t we sleep until six? We can prevent the war after six happens.”
“Arden wants us there before we’re expected,” I said brusquely, leaving my suitcase in the doorway as I walked to the fridge. I yanked the freezer door open and rummaged until I found my waffles. “This way we arrive while they’re all still getting ready for the day.”
“And this won’t make them shoot us on the spot?”
“That would be undiplomatic. Look, I figure they’re already going to be pissy and hard to deal with. Maybe if they’re pissy, hard to deal with, and exhausted, they’ll slip up.” I dropped my waffles into the toaster. “Or maybe we will. Hell, I don’t know. Do whatever you have to do to wake yourselves up. Swallow a bottle of No-Doze. Lick a bee. I have no useful suggestions here.”
“Nor do you have any actual nutrition in your planned meal,” observed Tybalt.
“Why mess with a good thing?” I threw the empty waffle box at the back of Quentin’s head. It hit him squarely. He sat bolt upright, twisting around to give me a betrayed look. “Up. It’s time for wakefulness and energy, not drooping like a wilted flower.”
“I hate you,” he said.
“Weren’t you enrolled in human high school at one point? They would have made you get up much earlier than this.”
“I was going to bed earlier when I did that, and fewer things were trying to kill me on a nightly basis,” he said, before yawning enormously. “Can I sleep in the car?”
“Until we get to Muir Woods, yes, you can sleep in the car,” I said. My waffles popped up, somehow managing to be soggy and burnt at the same time. I plucked them out of the toaster, juggling them from hand to hand as I waited for the hot parts to cool off and the frozen parts to warm up. “It’s not too late to back out, you know. You could stay here with Jazz. No one would blame you.”
His sleepy expression hardened into narrow-eyed suspicion. “Are we leaving this early because you don’t want me coming with you?”
“No, but it’s a good idea,” I said. I finally got both waffles settled in one hand, and walked to recover my suitcase. It was heavier than it looked. Spider-silk compacts small. It’s still heavy as hell. “My sword is in the car; this is all I need. Do the rest of you have all your things?”
“Yes,” said May.
“Yes,” said Tybalt.
“I really hate you,” said Quentin.
“Good. Get your stuff in the car.” I started for the door. Spike—having crept into the kitchen at some point when I wasn’t looking—followed, sticking close to my ankles and rattling its thorns like an angry maraca. It was almost soothing, in a weird sort of way. Here I was, diving back into the unknown, and my rose goblin was coming with me for the ride.
Quentin was asleep almost as soon as his butt hit the backseat. He put his head against the window, mouth hanging open, and fell back into the deep, slow breathing that signified a body fully at rest. May slouched into the other side of the backseat, yawning, and slumped slowly over to rest her head against his ribs. I paused in the act of opening the driver’s side door, looking at the pair of them.
“This is going to be a disaster,” I said.
“Have faith,” said Tybalt, opening his own door. “Perhaps we will all return home with our limbs intact and our souls unbowed.”
“Yeah, and maybe I’ll finally get that pony,” I said.
Spike followed me as I slid into the car. First it scrambled into my lap, and then it leaped onto the dashboard, where it paced and rattled before settling down in a catlike curl. I wasn’t worried about any of the human drivers we shared the road with seeing it: the smaller creatures of Faerie are protected from mortal eyes by almost unconscious illusions, making them seem like shadows and tricks of the light, not impossible creatures. It was a nice trick.
Sadly, it wasn’t a trick the rest of us shared. All four of us were roughly human, and could probably pass from a distance, but it wasn’t a good idea to push our luck. I reached up and grabbed a fistful of shadows and air from the roof of the car.
“I’ll do my illusion if you can put a don’t-look-here on the car,” I said to Tybalt, who nodded. He mimicked my gesture, and for a few seconds the car was filled with the mingled scents of our magic and the slightly disjointed sound of our chanting. We both chose Shakespeare: me, a passage from The Tempest, him, one of the sonnets. I couldn’t stop my own casting long enough to listen and figure out which one it was. That was a pity. Tybalt reciting Shakespeare was something that should have been savored, not ignored in favor of blunting the tips of my ears and shifting the color of my eyes to something that looked more blue, and less like the fog that hung in the early morning air.
I shouldn’t have needed a separate human disguise—not with a good don’t-look-here over the rest of the car—but someone was going to need to go and collect Walther when we got to the college, and that someone might as well be me. It was my fault that he was getting involved in all of this, after all.
My spell gathered and burst, followed by Tybalt’s a bare second later. I slid the key into the ignition and started the car, feeling it purr to life around me. Glancing at Tybalt, I asked, “So how much do you know about the Cu Sidhe?”
“The dogs?” He wrinkled his nose. “As much as I must. They’re pleasant people, for the most part, if a bit simple. Not stupid, mind: just simple. I dislike their lack of complexity. It makes every interaction feel like a trick. Why do you ask?”
“Tia,” I said. “I’ve never known one of them to get angry that fast.”
“Ah.” His expression shifted, becoming almost melancholy. “There was a time when not many Cu Sidhe lived in this Kingdom, little fish. This was cat territory, and we mostly avoid one another, when we can. They lived in Silences.”
“Until the old King fell,” I said, filling in the missing pieces.
Tybalt nodded. “They were of his Court. They came here in the aftermath, and have remained ever since.”
“So hearing that Silences had hurt her brother probably didn’t help Tia’s state of mind.” It might well have destroyed it. I shook my head. “I need to think about this. You can get some sleep, if you need to.”