“I had a lot of time to learn how people work,” I said.
Cassandra laughed, and reached for her sandwich.
SIX
We finished eating, and then we finished drinking our mugs of tea, and then the kitchen staffers were looking at us with a mixture of dismay and confusion that made me think it was time to move along. They’d never tell us it was time to leave—I wasn’t sure they were allowed to tell me to leave, since it was my kitchen, my knowe, and most of all, my kingdom—but they weren’t comfortable having us here.
Cassandra moved to pick up her dishes as we stood. I raised a hand, signaling for her to stop. She looked at me, bewildered.
“We need to take our dishes to the sink,” she said.
“If I didn’t already know you lived at home, that would be enough to confirm it,” I said. “We can’t take our dishes to the sink. I mean, we could, but it would be a dire insult to my staff, and they’d either decide they’d done something wrong or that I was showing another place where I couldn’t be a proper queen.”
Cassandra blinked. “So we leave the dishes?” she ventured.
“We leave the dishes,” I said.
We left the dishes. We walked past the relieved staff—who were at least trying not to look like they were happy we were finally getting out of their space—and into the hall, where Walther was waiting. I stopped. Cassandra stopped. An awkward silence fell.
Finally, Walther said, “I looked inside, but you seemed happy with your tea and your, you know, girl talk, and I didn’t want to interrupt.”
My heart sank. Good news would have had him interrupting us without hesitation. Good news would have had him trumpeting it from the rooftops, because good news would have meant he could go home. “What is it?”
“Do you want to talk about that here?”
No. I did not. I didn’t want to talk about it anywhere. I wanted it to go away, to not exist. I wanted my brother back, and I—by Oberon—did not want to keep my composure any longer. “Let’s go back to the room.”
Walther nodded. He didn’t look relieved. If anything, he looked sad. He really didn’t want to tell me whatever he was going to say next.
We walked silently down the hall. Either the kitchen staff had sent out some alert or the knowe was between shifts, because we didn’t see anyone as we made our way to the room where Nolan slept. Madden was responsible for organizing the household staff, with assistance from Lowri; there was no reason for me to know who was going to be where, or when they were going to be there. I still felt a little bad, like I was letting my people down on some profound level by not keeping track of them.
I was deflecting, trying to turn my anxiety on a target that was less personal and less painful, than my brother. And knowing that did nothing to make me feel better. Understanding my own mind doesn’t stop it from hurting me.
Walther went into my brother’s room. Cassandra and I followed. The table next to Nolan’s bed had become a tiny alchemical laboratory, complete with a bubbling vial of pinkish liquid propped over a ball of lambent blue witch-light. It was the sort of scene that would have seemed like something out of a dream, once, but which was becoming more and more commonplace as I settled into my new life. It was the sort of scene that left little room for hope.
“What’s wrong?” I asked, eyes on my brother as Walther shut the door behind us. “Why can’t you wake him up?”
“Alchemy isn’t the solution to every problem,” said Walther. His voice was low, his words deliberate. He was trying not to upset me. Fat lot of good that was going to do him. I was already upset, and getting more upset by the second. “I can counteract most charms and potions, if I have a sample of the original potion or know the magical signature of the person who brewed it. I can ease certain spells. But I can’t change the laws of magic.”
“So?” I whirled to face Walther. “This was a charm, you said so yourself! Fix it!”
“It’s in his blood,” he said. “It spent almost a century masked by elf-shot, aging, maturing, changing. And now it’s mixed into his body, and I can’t separate it out enough to pick it apart. I don’t know who brewed it. I don’t know what I’m looking for. Give me a year and I might be able to make some headway. A night is not enough.”
“A year will be too long,” I snapped. “He’ll die.”
“Not necessarily; we can get someone in here who understands care for long-term coma patients,” said Walther. “It’s not perfect, but . . . I don’t like telling you this any more than you like hearing it. There’s nothing I can do.”
“We could elf-shoot him again.”
“I don’t know how it would interact with the awakened sleeping charm. It could kill him.”
I took a breath to answer, and stopped as I saw Cassandra’s face. She was gazing at the air above his bubbling beaker, her eyes unfocused and her lips slightly parted, like she was focusing so hard on whatever it was she saw that she couldn’t spend the energy to keep them closed. My eyes narrowed.
“Okay,” I said. “This is what’s going to happen. You’re going to tell me whatever it is you’re not telling me, and you’re going to do it right now. In exchange, I will not have you both thrown in the dungeon until I forget about you.”
Cassandra didn’t react. She kept staring at the empty air.
Walther sighed before reaching over and touching her shoulder. “Hey,” he said. “Come back. You need to come back now.”
She jumped, giving a convulsive full-body shudder as she turned to face him. “What?”
“You zoned out for a second,” said Walther, gaze darting toward me, like he was trying to assess my reaction. No, not like: that was exactly what he was doing. I’d seen that look before, usually from shoplifters who were hoping they could put one over on me.
I wasn’t a retail employee anymore, allowed to back off and let my manager handle things. I was the goddamn Queen, and they were going to listen to me. “That’s not what happened.” Keeping my voice level was a fun challenge. I was not rising to meet it. “Something is going on. Tell me what is going on.”
“Cassie,” said Walther. His hand was still on her shoulder. “It’s your call.”
“Why do people say that kind of shit?” I planted my hands on my hips. “Now I know there’s something going on. No one makes a call about saying nothing.”
Cassandra sighed, looking from Walther to me and finally, almost longingly, back to the air above the beaker. Then she looked down at her feet and said, “I was telling the truth when I said I wasn’t an oneiromancer. I can’t move through other people’s dreams or use them to tell the future.”
“But . . . ?” I prompted.
“But I wasn’t telling the whole truth.” She glanced up, searching my face before she said, “I’m an aeromancer. I read air.”
“Air,” I said flatly.
“The motion of air. Yes.”
“Air is invisible.”
“Not to me.” She turned to the beaker again. “Not when I look at it right. Light and dust and wind, they all move in the air, and they tell me the future. It’s easiest by candlelight, but I can’t light candles in my house anymore. Not after everything that happened with Blind Michael. It upsets my youngest sister too much.”
“Wait.” I dropped my hands. “I’m trying to understand. You’re a Seer. You . . . See things. And where you See things is in the way air moves.”
“Yes.”
“Your sister is a Seer, too. She Sees things in dreams.”
“Yes.”
“But you’re both changelings.” My frustration was threatening to bubble over. “That doesn’t make sense. Seers are—they’re incredibly rare! My father didn’t have a Court Seer, because he couldn’t find one! His parents had a Shyi Shuai in their Court, but she didn’t See the future as much as bend the luck to make it do what she wanted, and maybe that’s what got them killed, since Shyi Shuai always get backlash. How the hell are you and Karen Seers? You can’t be.”