Last chance. I could put the stopper back in, put the bottle in my pocket, and walk away. No one would question me deciding to let my brother sleep out the rest of his enchantment. Well, maybe Toby would. She doesn’t really have a lot of respect for the fact that I’m the Queen and thus technically the boss of her. I’d be upset by that, if not for the part where she doesn’t have a lot of respect for anyone, including the Luidaeg. So it’s not like I’m special. She treats me the way she treats everyone else.
After a decade or two of queening, that will probably offend me. Right now, it’s a relief. No matter how far I rise, there will always be someone standing there to laugh at me.
It didn’t have to be just one person.
“I’ve been so lonely,” I said, and lifted the bottle to Nolan’s lips, pushing down until his mouth opened enough to let me start dripping the cure through, one drop at a time. I didn’t want him to choke.
He swallowed. It was the first time I’d seen him move in decades. I pulled the bottle away and stepped back. The cure worked, I knew that—I had seen it work repeatedly, from Madden to Dianda. Nolan was special to me, but that didn’t make him special to the rules of magic that governed Faerie. If the cure worked for one, it would work for all. He was going to wake up. He was. But with every second that passed without him opening his eyes, I became a little more convinced that something had gone wrong.
Finally, I couldn’t take it anymore. I tucked the bottle into my skirt before reaching out and touching his shoulder as gently as I could, like I was afraid of waking him. But that was silly, wasn’t it? I wanted to wake him. I wanted to wake him more than I’d wanted anything in years.
“Nolan,” I said. “Hey. Can you hear me? It’s your sister. Wake up.”
He made a small noise deep in his throat; a sound of protest, a sound of displeasure. Hearing it woke a hundred “just one more minute” memories, images of a younger Nolan begging me to let him stay in bed when it was time to get up and get the night started. I smiled as tears rose in my eyes. Memory wasn’t as complicated as I’d feared. It was still there. It was all still there. It just needed to be woken up. Like my brother, it just needed to be woken up.
“Come on, Nolan. You’ve been asleep long enough. It’s time to open your eyes.”
“Ardy?”
His voice was the creak of a rusty gate, ragged and shallow and worn. I could have mistaken it for a dream, something I wanted so much that I was imagining it, if it hadn’t been followed by his lashes fluttering against his cheeks before finally—finally!—his eyes opened and he was squinting up at me.
He blinked, and frowned. “Ardy?” he whispered again. “When did you get so old?”
Laughing through my tears, I fell upon my brother and gathered him in my arms, and for the first time since our parents died, I felt like I was on my way home.
THREE
The only person left in the sleeper’s tower was Duke Michel, who had been elf-shot for committing a crime: for the first time in a hundred years, there were no innocent victims of elf-shot in the Kingdom in the Mists. We were free of Eira Rosynhwyr’s poisonous gifts—and more, I was free of the injunction not to use magic in proximity of the cure, which was somewhat unstable, according to the alchemist who’d created it. He was still tinkering, and he promised to have something more reliable by the end of the year, but that was later, and this was now. Nolan’s head resting on my left shoulder, I used my right hand to inscribe a wide arc in the air, opening a portal.
As always, using my magic openly sent a little thrill through me, like I was getting away with something. My powers had never been suppressed, although I’d considered it a few times. There were always underground alchemists working in San Francisco—lean, hungry fae who thought they were going to rival the sea witch one day. They would have been delighted to sell me blocking potions, keeping me from accessing the powers I got from my parents and hence potentially giving myself away. And they would have remembered my face, filed away the scent of my magic, maybe even gone to the Library of Stars to compare it to the census.
The fae world is an easier place to be anonymous than the human world. There’s no question of that. But that doesn’t mean it’s safe.
Nolan lifted his head, blinking at me in confusion. He only seemed to have two expressions at the moment—confused and bewildered, which were subtly different. I couldn’t have distinguished them on anyone else, but he was my brother, and his face was so much like mine that it was like looking into a mirror.
“Ardy?” he said blankly.
“Hey,” I said, smiling to cover my increasing distress. Madden had been back to normal within seconds of waking. Dianda had come to swinging and ready to murder people—which, for her, was also back to normal. So why was Nolan taking so long to recover?
He’d been asleep so much longer than they had. This was probably perfectly normal. Master Davies had just forgotten to warn me, that was all.
“Where are we?”
My smile froze, turning rigid. “Nolan, we’re home. This is home. We got it back.”
His confusion wasn’t going away. If anything, it was getting deeper. “Home?”
“Come on.” I stood, pulling him with me. He stumbled in the process of getting his feet under him, but in the end, he did it. I had to take that as a good sign. It was a good sign, wasn’t it? Wasn’t it?
Nolan let me pull him through the portal, which closed behind us with a faint pop. He looked around the new room, eyes skipping over the bed, wardrobe, and writing desk without recognition. He turned to me, and in the same blank tone, asked, “Where are we?”
“Home,” I repeated. His tone might be staying the same, but mine wasn’t: the desperation was creeping in around the edges, coloring everything I said. Something was really wrong. “This was your room when we came to visit Mother at Court, remember? That’s your bed.” Like all Coblynau furniture, it was enchanted to grow with its owner; the bed he’d slept in as a child was still long and wide enough to cradle him now that he was an adult.
“Bed,” Nolan breathed, showing his first sign of recognition since he said my name. He pulled away from me, less walking under his own power than staggering drunkenly to the bed.
I watched in horror as he collapsed onto it, falling facedown into the pillows. “Nolan?”
He didn’t respond.
“Nolan!” I ran to his side, rolling him over, so his face was turned toward the ceiling and he wouldn’t suffocate. His chest was rising and falling like a normal sleeper’s, without the slow, drugged tempo of the elf-shot. I shook him. He didn’t open his eyes. I shook him harder, and still, he didn’t open his eyes.
“Nolan?” My voice cracked, becoming young and shrill in my throat. I felt like the girl I’d been when I found him in the bushes, the arrow in his chest and blank serenity on his face. I hadn’t felt like her in years. She’d been so innocent. She’d truly believed, deep down, that we’d suffered enough; that the world would start being kinder. The world still wasn’t being kinder.
I took a step backward, my hand sculpting an arch in the air behind me and opening a portal to the veranda. Madden was there, going over the household records and trying to figure out what we had too much of versus what we didn’t have enough of. It was one of his tasks as Seneschal, at least until I hired a Chamberlain—something I’d been in no hurry to do. Madden knew me. Madden understood me, and that was something I couldn’t put a price on.