“Your Grace,” I said, bowing to her. “Patrick.” He was technically the Ducal consort and not the Duke, which made formality a little less important with him.
Not that Dianda looked that formal. Without legs, she didn’t need pants, and her top was made of blue cotton, embroidered around the neck and cuffs with stylized green kelp. “Hello, October,” she said, sunny smile entirely at odds with her sour disposition the first time we met. Then again, at the time, her children were being held hostage, so I couldn’t blame her. “Forgive me if I don’t get up. It’s harvest season for us in the Undersea, and I’ve been in the fields every night for tides. I’m too tired to deal with having legs right now.”
“It’s cool,” I said. “Just don’t expect me to come into the water and say hello.”
“You need to get over your hydrophobia.”
“Hey. I’m standing next to the ocean, talking to a mermaid, not freaking out. I think I’m on my way to recovery.” Just to prove my point, I sat down cross-legged on the edge of the wooden dock, putting us on the same eye level. Quentin did the same. Dean, meanwhile, splashed out into the water and sat down next to his mother, not seeming to care that his jeans were getting drenched. Tybalt stayed a few feet back, well away from the shoreline.
“Dean said you wanted to talk about King Gilad.” Patrick sat down on the dock as well, although he chose the other side of his wife. We made a funny little line, like a beach party gone weirdly wrong. “I’m a little confused about why you’d need to. Gilad was a great man, and a good friend, but he’s been dead for a long time.”
“Yeah, I know. That’s why I wanted to talk to the two of you. And, well. There’s another thing.” I took a deep breath. “I’ve been banished from the Mists.”
Dianda frowned. “What?”
“The Queen banished me for trying to get her to stop distributing goblin fruit. I went to the Luidaeg, and she told me to ask about King Gilad. I don’t know what talking about the Queen’s father is supposed to accomplish, but . . .”
“It would help if he had been her father,” countered Dianda, frown fading into her more customary scowl.
I stared at her. “Wait—what?”
“Di . . .” said Patrick warningly.
“No. Don’t use your ‘honey, play nice’ voice on me. If she’s looking into Gilad because of that spindrift bitch who claimed his throne, I’m going to tell her the truth.” Dianda turned back to me. “She’s not Gilad’s daughter. I don’t know what kind of whaleshit political insanity went on up here when she stepped forward—I was busy rebuilding my own Duchy at the time—but there’s no way she’s a Windermere.”
“The earthquake did massive damage in Saltmist,” said Patrick. “Our air-breathers were trapped for months while we made repairs, and our water-breathers were busy cleaning up the gardens, rebuilding the farms, and a hundred other things. I didn’t even know Gilad was dead until after his memorial.”
“What do you mean, there’s no way she’s a Windermere?” I asked. “Is it because she’s a mixed-blood? Gilad was never married—”
“My own children are mixed-bloods,” said Dianda. “I have no issues with her heritage. Just with the fact that her heritage contains no Tuatha de Dannan. And Gilad Windermere was a pureblooded Tuatha de Dannan.”
I didn’t say anything. I just gaped at her, feeling like an idiot.
As a Dóchas Sidhe, I have a gift for determining the makeup of someone’s blood. All blood-workers can do it, to one degree or another, but I’m what you might call an untrained savant when it comes to identifying the elements of a person’s fae heritage. The Queen of the Mists had Sea Wight, Siren, and Banshee blood . . . and not a drop of Tuatha de Dannan. I should have realized that she wasn’t related to King Gilad years ago.
“Could the Tuatha have been removed from her?” asked Tybalt, before I could recover the capacity to speak. “There is at least one hope chest in the Kingdom. There is also Amandine to be considered.”
Hope chests could change the balance of an individual’s blood. So could my mother—and so could I. “Mom might have been able to, I guess,” I said slowly, “but why would anyone want to keep three different bloodlines and give up a fourth? It doesn’t make sense.” The more mixed a person’s fae heritage is, the more likely it is that they’ll become either physically or mentally unstable. Some types of fae don’t play nicely, and when you’re talking about people who can exist on the bottom of the ocean or in the heart of a volcano, the fighting can be very literal. Almost every mixed-blood I’ve ever known eventually snapped, driven to madness by the conflict living inside their own veins.
One day, I was going to offer to shift the Lorden boys all the way to either Daoine Sidhe or Merrow. One day. But Daoine Sidhe and Merrow were both descendants of Titania, which made the boys more likely to be stable than a mixture of Titania and Maeve. And once a decision like that is made, it can’t be taken back. I wanted to give them time to figure out who they were and where they wanted to be before I made them any promises.
“Amandine never laid hands on that girl,” said Dianda. “When we came to her Court to offer our regrets and our aid, she was already holding herself apart, and your mother was nowhere to be seen. She made it clear that the Undersea was not welcome in the Courts of the land. We left after that. We had our own tides to tend.”
“So if Mom didn’t mess with the Queen’s blood, there’s honestly no way she could be Gilad’s daughter.” The Queen of the Mists, my old nemesis, the woman who once tried to have me executed for murder . . . she wasn’t even rightfully our ruler?
If I was distressed, Quentin was downright distraught. “That’s not right,” he said. “She should never have been allowed to do that. The High King—”
“They never called for the High King, and he was busy elsewhere when this happened.” Patrick shrugged. “North America is large, Quentin. It’s more than one man, even a man like High King Sollys, can oversee. Sometimes he has to take the Kingdoms at their word. When the Mists said all was well here, he spent his attention where it seemed more needed.”
For a moment, Quentin looked like he was going to protest. Then he sighed, sagging, and said, “I don’t like politics.”
“Then you are a very wise boy,” said Tybalt.
“No one likes politics,” said Dianda. “On the plus side, it gives me a lot of excuses to shout at people. I like that part.”
“Mom’s great at shouting,” said Dean.
“Hang on,” I said, raising my hand in a futile signal for quiet. I was still reeling from the idea that the Queen of the Mists wasn’t our rightful ruler. If I didn’t focus on something, I was going to scream. “How can you all be so calm about this?”
“Because we’ve had a long time to deal with the knowledge,” said Dianda. “King Gilad was a good ruler, and she has done her best to undermine his legacy at every turn. He believed in maintaining strong ties with the Undersea; she cut them as soon as she could. He believed changelings had a place in fae society, that we owed them that much, since we were their parents and originals. She did her best to banish changelings from the Courts. She even took us to war against the Kingdom of Silences because they dared to protest the way the changelings here were being treated. I’m so sorry she’s banished you. You are always welcome in the Undersea.”