Tybalt removed his boots and unbuttoned his shirt and vest, leaving them discarded on the floor before crawling into the center of the bed. He made the motion look remarkably natural, like bipeds had always been intended to move about on all fours. He stretched, getting comfortable, and then looked at me, raising his eyebrows.
“Well?” he asked. “Time is short, and sleep is precious. I should like to think you’d be allowing the first to expedite the second.”
“Sorry.” I kicked my own shoes off, and squirmed out of my leather jacket, draping it over the bedside table. Only then did I roll over, still effectively clothed, to snuggle against him. The smell of pennyroyal and musk was comforting, and I pressed my face to his chest, breathing it in.
Tybalt chuckled, although he sounded less amused than relieved. “Times are hard, and this is a battle unlike any you have fought before. Take comfort in knowing that you do not fight alone, and allow yourself to rest.”
“I’m trying.” I tilted my head back, looking at him. “I’m not equipped for this. I’m going to screw it up.”
“My dear, your entire life has been a succession of things you were not equipped for, and while you may have, as you so charmingly say, ‘screwed some of them up,’ you have, in the main, come through spectacularly well. You are surrounded by allies, and each of us is, in our own way, uniquely suited to the challenges ahead—as are you, or you wouldn’t be here. Trust Arden to know her people. Trust us to know your needs. Trust yourself to protect your Kingdom.” He kissed my forehead. “And sleep, I beg of you. You were bad enough when you were still drowning yourself in coffee. Now, when you become overtired, you are positively unlivable.”
“I love you, too,” I said, and leaned up to kiss him.
It wasn’t the most romantic kiss. I was fully clothed, he was still wearing trousers, and we were in what was effectively the fanciest guest room bed I had ever seen, with my squire just one thin door away. But his lips were warm and tasted like pennyroyal, and I could feel the purr vibrating through his chest. Sometimes romance is of less importance than the feeling of being absolutely safe: of knowing that nothing and no one can hurt you, because the person who loves you most in all the world will destroy them if they try.
I put my head down on his arm, closed my eyes, and let the world go away for a while. If I dreamt at all, I dreamt only shallowly, and there was nothing there that could hurt me.
Tybalt pulling his arm from under my head rocked me back into wakefulness. I opened my eyes, blinking first at the canopy above me, and then, as I shifted positions enough to look at the rest of the room, at the open doorway. May was standing there, arms folded, a concerned look on her face. She was wearing a dress I’d never seen before, a sedate concoction in gray silk with blue accents, like something out of a Waterhouse painting. I sat up, blinking again.
“Are you awake?” she asked. Her voice was flat, devoid of anything that would tell me how she was feeling.
Tybalt, who had been sitting up and rubbing his face in an effort to wipe his own weariness away, stiffened. I felt him changing positions on the bed next to me, and knew he was moving into a position from which he could maneuver better.
“Yes,” I said cautiously.
“Good. I’ve prepared milady’s dress for the meal. May I enter?”
“Yes,” I said again, even more cautiously this time.
“You are gracious,” said May, and stepped into the room, pulling the door closed behind her. Her posture and expression instantly changed, going limp with relief. “Oberon’s ass, I thought I was going to pull something. It’s worse than we thought out there, and it’s a damn good thing you both got some sleep, because I don’t know when that’s going to happen again.”
“What?” I rubbed my eyes with the heels of my hands, trying to chase the sleep away. It wasn’t happening fast enough. “What’s going on?”
“Quentin needs to get up.” May strode across the room, her new gown snapping at her ankles, and pounded on Quentin’s door with the heel of her hand before shouting, “Yo! Get your ass up! We have forty-five minutes!”
Her tone did what all the eye-rubbing in the world wouldn’t have been able to do, rocketing me from groggy wakefulness into full alertness in an instant. I hadn’t heard my Fetch sound that panicked since before we’d been separated. Once—and only once—she’d thought I was about to die, taking her with me. She’d sounded like this then.
“May?” I slid off the bed, standing. “Seriously, what’s going on?”
“What’s going on is that this Kingdom is fucked up, and it’s our fault.” She rounded on me, eyes brimming with unshed tears. “We knew, Toby. We knew Silences was a puppet government, and we knew the current king got the throne because he was willing to be an asshole to changelings. We knew that meant things here were probably bad. And we ignored it. It was inconvenient, and we ignored it.”
“May, honey.” I reached out and grabbed her hands. Behind her, the door to Quentin’s temporary room swung open and my squire stepped into the room, blinking blearily underneath the tangled fringe of his hair. I ignored him, focusing on her. “You still haven’t told us what you’re talking about. We want to help, but you have to explain.”
“Almost all the staff here are changelings, Toby,” she said. There was something dull, nearly broken, about her voice. May was a pureblood, but unlike most purebloods, she had never enjoyed the privilege of that position. As a night-haunt, she had been exiled to the edges of Faerie, denied the glitter and pageantry of the courts. And when she had finally become a Fetch, she had done so with the memories of two changelings—myself, and Dare—fresh in her mind. Despite her centuries of living, she remembered growing up as a changeling more vividly than she remembered anything else about her youth.
Slow comprehension was dawning at the back of my mind, hampered by an unwillingness to accept what she was saying. But understanding is a cruel beast: it will have its hour, no matter how painful.
“No changeling would voluntarily stay in Silences,” I said. “Being part human doesn’t make you stupid.”
“No. But being born to be put into service makes you afraid to run away.” May shook her head, a tear escaping to run down her cheek, before she stalked over to the wardrobe where I’d stowed my gowns. She wrenched it open, continuing to talk. “Most of them, their parents are on the staff. They were born in the Summerlands. They never had the Choice, because Faerie was all they knew. Service is all they’ve ever known. They think . . . they said . . .” She stopped.
Quentin was staring at her, his face pale and his eyes wide. He’d been my squire for years, and most of his early ideas about changelings had faded in the face of knowing us. It’s hard to reduce people to stereotypes after actually meeting them. But in some ways, I think going from a relatively sheltered boyhood to Shadowed Hills, to me, hadn’t done him any real favors, because he’d never been forced to see the way changelings were treated in the rest of the world—and that included places like Silences, which were part of his father’s greater Kingdom, and would one day be his.
“What did they say?” I asked, stepping over to May and taking the dress gently from her hands.
She sighed, a long, shuddering sound, and said, “They said you were incredibly generous, letting me run around unsupervised when we’d just shown up here, since there was a chance I could offend someone in your absence. Then they explained what that would mean. They beat their servants, Toby. Like this was the middle ages or something. There are children working in the kitchen. Children. They’ve never seen the mortal world. They’ve never been to school. And they flinch if any adult raises their hands above shoulder level, because they’ve been here since they were born, and they know what a raised hand means.”