I caught his meaning. I didn’t want to. Shoulders going tight, I asked, “Excuses like arriving next to a knight who swears to the throne of the Mists? One who might have ‘pacified’ you?”
He didn’t answer me. He didn’t need to.
Irritation flared in my chest, hot and toxic as bile. I swallowed it down as best I could. “You should go, then.”
“I’ll make it up to you.” He slid from the bed, grabbed his clothes, and was gone. He didn’t bother getting dressed first. Cait Sidhe are even more casual about nudity than the rest of Faerie. Cats are technically naked under their fur, after all. Combine that with the whole “grooming with their tongues” thing, and body shyness just isn’t an option.
I stared at the place where he’d been, inhaling the mixed scents of pennyroyal and musk. Then I groaned and flopped backward into the pillows, closing my eyes. We were going to make this work. We were going to make this work. The fact that he was the monarch of an independent Court and I was tied inextricably to the Divided Courts wasn’t going to change the fact that we loved each other—and as long as we could keep loving each other, we could find a way through this. We could do it. I was a hero, after all. What was a hero, if not someone who went up against impossible odds, and won?
Sleep claimed me while I was worrying the problem over and over in my head, like a dog with a bone. I fell into tangled, confusing dreams, and found myself looking for Karen in every corner. She could guide the things I dreamed about. Normally, it was nice to have some privacy in my own dreams, but after the day I’d had, being able to say “hey, kiddo, wanna go to the imaginary carnival and eat cotton candy until the sun goes down?” would have been a nice change.
A knock at my bedroom door pulled me back to consciousness at—I checked the clock—a little after two in the afternoon. I sat up, blinking and groggy, clutching the sheet around my chest like it would somehow transform into a nightgown if I wished hard enough. The blackout curtains over my windows kept the light from getting in. So where was the light coming from?
“Toby?”
Oh. The bedroom door was open. I turned to blink blearily in that direction. Jazz, fully dressed and looking far too alert, with the feathered band that held her fae nature tied in her hair, was standing there, grimacing apologetically.
“Huh?” I said.
“You need to get up now.”
I blinked at her again before pointing at the clock. “Nuh-uh.”
“The High King and High Queen are here,” said Jazz. “In the dining room. With May. Drinking lemonade and eating the last of the Rice Krispie treats. Please will you get up now? I’m really not equipped to deal with this.”
The words “High King and High Queen” acted like an electric shock to the part of my brain that had been trying to drag me back to sleep. I stiffened. “They’re where?”
“In the dining room. Are you up?”
“I’m up,” I confirmed. I paused. “Is Quentin?”
Jazz shook her head. “They, um, asked us to let him sleep.”
Great. So this wasn’t a social visit: it was a job evaluation. “I’ll be right down.”
“Good. Hurry.” Jazz shut the door, leaving me alone in my darkened bedroom.
Most fae are nocturnal, which means we have excellent night vision. I got up and got dressed without turning on the lights, retrieving yesterday’s jeans from the floor and digging a charcoal gray tank top out of my drawer. Most of my wardrobe is designed not to show the blood. That sort of thing was an occupational hazard for me, and I didn’t enjoy shopping, which meant that darker colors were better.
I didn’t have time for a shower, but I had time to run a brush through my hair and take a quick, critical look at myself in the mirror. There were dark circles under my eyes from the lack of sleep. Well, that was the High King’s fault. He could deal with it.
Voices drifted from the dining room when I was halfway down the stairs. They were talking quietly, presumably so as not to wake Quentin. I could have told them not to bother. He was a teenage boy. He didn’t wake up for anything short of a small explosion, and even then, he was just as likely to decide that I could take care of things, roll over, and go back to sleep.
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.”