The girl I should have grown up to be is never going to sit on the throne of the Mists. That girl died with our mutual mother, in the 1906 earthquake, when palaces that should never have shifted tried to shake themselves to the ground. That girl has neither grave nor night-haunt mannequin to remember her. She only has me, and I hate her sometimes, because she would have been so much better at this than I am. She would have had tutors and secret allies and an army preparing her for the pressures of queenship. She would have been a committee.
I didn’t get any of that. I got good at disposable identities and confusion charms, at lying until potential employers believed me, at moving my elf-shot brother under the cover of night, going place to place in pursuit of the lie of a safe haven. I got a bookstore and a best friend and barely time to catch my breath before October barged in like a changeling battering ram and took it all away.
I’m sure there are people who’d say it was worth it to lose everything and gain a throne, but since I stopped wanting the throne decades ago, I’m not one of them. I want to make my parents proud. I want to keep my brother safe. I can do those things better from the throne of the Mists than I could from the basement of Borderlands.
But some days, most days, that basement felt more like home than this knowe did.
The conclave—my first major political event—had been a success, and they’d left me alone, all of them after it was over and we’d finished waking the majority of the sleepers. October had walked away clinging to her squire and her alchemist and her Cait Sidhe fiancé, checking every five minutes to be sure they were all awake. It would have been funny if I hadn’t been on some level fiercely glad to see it. Sometimes it feels like she doesn’t know how to lose. Maybe it’s small and petty and human of me to want her to understand what it’s like for the rest of us, but I’ve spent more time with humans than I’ve spent with my own kind. I guess a little had to work its way in.
Waking Duchess Lorden had been a more involved process, and had involved finding a way to restrain her without hurting her. We couldn’t afford to offend her any more than she already was—I mean, being elf-shot is pretty damn offensive—but she was likely to wake up swinging, and that woman can hit. In the end, we’d resorted to binding spells to hold her down while Queen Siwan of Silences administered the cure and Dianda’s husband, Patrick Lorden, stood in full view at the foot of the bed. As we’d hoped, the sight of him stopped her from either hurting herself or figuring out how to break the bonds and hurting the rest of us.
The fact that her attacker had been elf-shot for hurting her helped. The fact that he was being left that way until she decided on his punishment helped more. She and Patrick will be enjoying the hospitality of my household for another three days while they decide what to do.
Many of the land nobles are hoping she’ll show mercy, if only so they won’t have to explain why they’d stood idly by as one of their own was dragged away to the Undersea to sleep out his sentence. Personally, I hope she’ll go for the worst punishment she can think of. I don’t want people thinking they can attack each other willy-nilly under my roof.
When did this become my roof? It’s supposed to be my father’s roof. It’s supposed to have been his for the last hundred years. I groaned and dropped my head into my hands.
“I swear, Nolan, I’m scared out of my mind here, and I don’t know what to do.”
The last remaining sleeper didn’t say anything. Hadn’t said anything, in fact, since August fifteenth, nineteen thirty-two. But who’s counting, right? Who measures the days a brother spends in an enchanted sleep, unable to comfort the sister who loves him?
I guess I do.
It doesn’t help that, hello cliché, the last things we said to each other weren’t particularly kind. He hated the false Queen sitting on our father’s throne. He wanted to raise an army and depose her and take our lives back. Maybe it was because I was older and more aware of what we had left to lose, but I wanted to stay safely under the radar, avoiding her attention. He kept saying that if I really wanted to pass unnoticed, I’d move us out of the Kingdom, to someplace where our resemblance to our lost father wouldn’t draw stares on the street, and he wasn’t wrong, and I kept not moving. I was frozen. Like a rabbit that sees the hunter coming, I was frozen.
I should have listened. I should have gotten us the hell out of the Mists. But I was afraid that anywhere we went, we’d be seized on and used as the figureheads of a revolution. Faerie loves nothing like it loves to go to war. Putting the daughter of a dead King back on the throne where she belonged? That was a lovely excuse for a slaughter. If it was going to happen no matter where we were, why should we leave the only place we’d ever called home? I was a coward, and Nolan was burning to prove himself, and it was a combination destined to end in tragedy.
These were the last words he said to me: “I don’t know why you bothered surviving if you weren’t going to live.”
I’d been on my way out the door, heading for the job that was keeping a roof over our heads and food in our mouths. I was serving as the nanny of a local mortal family, using the skills I’d copied from Marianne to support us. She was still saving us, after all those years. I’d thought it was an ordinary day. Nolan was impossible when he got into one of his moods: I hadn’t even tried to talk to him. I’d just left. I hadn’t told him I loved him. I hadn’t said I was proud of him.
I’d just left, and when I came home from work, he’d been gone.
I hadn’t worried right away. Nolan was a young man, headstrong and angry and looking for an outlet. I couldn’t keep him with me all the time, no matter how much I wanted to. But hours had gone by, and he hadn’t returned, until fear had driven me into the night to look for him. I’d gone to his favorite haunts, the places he went when he was angry with me, and I’d searched and searched and searched until I found him. The arrow had still been in his chest, pinning the message from the false Queen to his shirt.
‘Little Princess;
I hope you enjoy my gift. Take it for the opportunity it is, and walk away. I will not be so kind again, to either of you.’
It hadn’t been signed. It hadn’t needed to be. Nolan never hurt anyone in his life. The only person with a reason to attack him or threaten me was the woman holding my father’s throne. Unless I decided to raise an army against her, she couldn’t have me killed without breaking the Law. Threats and intimidation were her best tools. And oh, she used them well. So well that I dragged Nolan home to the boarding house without a word to anyone. We needed to disappear again.
And that’s exactly what we did.
Now here we were, eighty years later, and he was still asleep and I was finally the Queen he’d always wanted me to be. But the things I’d learned as a child were fuzzy and distant; I was making all this up as I went along, and I was terrified of letting him down.
If I wanted to, I could leave Nolan to sleep out the rest of his time. What was another twenty years? I’d been frantic to wake him when I thought I only had a little while before the cure was banned, but now that the cure was being openly distributed, I could afford to wait. I could give myself the time to figure things out. I could establish myself as a Queen to be feared and respected, not some untrained stranger whose butt had barely hit the throne. I could mature without him . . . and we’d wind up even farther apart than we already were. I’d turned into a different person while he slept. If I left him asleep while I turned myself into a ruler, he might not even recognize me when he finally woke up.