If I remembered correctly, the gate to my right would lead to Rayseline’s quarters. I turned left, walking up to the gate and stopping, unsure how to proceed. “I don’t suppose there’s a doorbell somewhere on this thing, is there?” I asked, only half rhetorically. The gate didn’t answer me. I sighed and reached for the handle.
As soon as my fingers touched the metal of the gate it began to chime, quietly at first, but louder and faster with each passing second, until it was like I was standing in a forest of wind chimes. I yanked my hand back like I’d been burned. The chiming continued.
Then, with a final loud chord, the chiming stopped, the handle turned, and the gate swung open to reveal a tall, redheaded Daoine Sidhe in breeches and a sleeping shirt, squinting slightly in the twilight of the garden. An empty bed was partially visible behind him. I stepped forward and breathed in, catching the reassuring scent of daffodils and dogwood flowers. Only then did I allow my shoulders to unlock. I tried to settle my expression as I let out my hastily taken breath and bowed.
“Good day, my liege,” I said. “I’m sorry to disturb you, but it was genuinely important.”
“October?” He sounded confused, and when I straightened, I saw that he looked even more so. Then the confusion passed, replaced by growing wakefulness, and worry. “Of course you wouldn’t disturb me if it wasn’t genuinely important. Is someone hurt?”
I thought of Jazz. “Someone was, but I fixed it,” I said. “Sylvester . . .”
He raised a hand, cutting me off before I could finish the sentence. The worry in his expression deepened, turning slowly into a deep, burning fury. “I can smell him on you,” he said, voice honed to a razor’s edge. It could have drawn blood. “I should have known that if he ever came back here, he would come for you first.”
“My liege?” I said, reeling a little. When Oleander had come back, I hadn’t been able to convince anyone she was in the Kingdom. She’d managed to halfway convince me that I was losing my mind. It seemed almost perverse for things to be so much easier this time.
Then again, I had been throwing Simon’s spells around like they were softballs. It made sense that some of the stink of him might have clung to me, and if anyone was sensitive to the smell of the man’s magic, it was his twin brother.
Sylvester turned his cold, furious face toward me. I quailed, and he blinked, looking briefly surprised before his fury melted into resignation. “I’m sorry, October. I didn’t mean to frighten you. I just . . . I didn’t think he’d really come back. Not like this. I’m so sorry. Can you forgive me for not being there?”
“You had no idea it was going to happen today,” I said, still shaky. My headache wasn’t helping. I heal so fast these days that I had become unaccustomed to lingering pain.
Sylvester stepped through the gate, pulling it closed behind him. The glimpse of the darkened bedchamber I had seen when the door opened disappeared, replaced once more by the empty air. Without another word, he stepped forward and folded me into a hug. I made a sound that was somewhere between a sigh and a sob and simply let him hold me, enjoying the safety and comfort of his arms. I lost my mortal father when I was seven years old. Sylvester had been the closest thing I’d had ever since.
“I am so sorry,” he said again, when he finally let me go. He started down the cobblestone path, and I followed, walking with him to the first of the marble benches. He sat down, motioning for me to sit beside him.
I sat.
“I knew he’d return one day. There’s too much for him in this Kingdom for him to stay away forever, and my brother has never been anything if not stubborn. Even when we were children, when his magic still smelled like smoke and mulled cider, he would have his way no matter what the cost.” Sylvester shook his head. Something like grief was lurking in his eyes. “He should never have come near you.”
“He said he transformed me to save me,” I said hesitantly. “I think there’s something wrong with him.”
Sylvester’s laugh was thin and bitter. “Oh, I know there’s something wrong with him. There’s been something wrong with him for a very long time. But . . .” He hesitated.
I frowned, eyeing him sidelong. “I don’t like the tone of that silence.”
“You have to understand, October, that time is different for the pureblooded.”
“I know that.” I’d always known that. From my mother’s inability to remember that my birthday was something important to the sad way most purebloods looked at changelings, like the fact that we’d die someday meant we were as good as dead already.
“Yes, but . . .” Sylvester hesitated again before he said, “I admit, I’ve often wondered about the nature of what he did to you. Transforming you into a creature with a long lifespan, using a spell you could someday break yourself . . . I think he may be telling the truth, disturbing as it is to consider. He may have transformed you as he did because the alternative was killing you, and he didn’t want to be responsible for your death.”
“Why the hell not? He’d already kidnapped Luna and Rayseline. It’s not like he could have done anything to make you angrier.” And he’d laughed. I remembered that so clearly. Simon and Oleander, laughing while they watched me gasp and struggle to breathe the air that had become poisonous to my body. How could that have been an attempt to save me?
“It’s not my wrath that he was worried about. Not in that moment.” Sylvester looked at me sadly. “Did you come here alone?”
“No. Quentin and Tybalt are waiting in the hall.”
“Good. That means you’ll have someone to rant at when I finish telling you what I’m about to tell you.”
I blinked. “What are you talking about?”
Sylvester paused for a moment before he continued. “Have you never wondered why the doors in Shadowed Hills are willing to acknowledge you as family, or why Luna could enter your mother’s tower uninvited, despite the wards Amandine has put in place over the years? I know you believe the knowes are alive, and I don’t think you’re wrong, but they’re normally inclined to follow their own rules.”
A horrifying picture was starting to form at the back of my mind, assembled from things people had said to me over the years. Arden’s confusion when I said my mother was married to a human; Oleander’s visit to the tower, all those years ago, when she’d taunted Amandine with her relationship with Simon. The way Sylvester cared for me . . . and then the last piece of the awful puzzle fell into place as I recalled Simon’s own words about my mother in my kitchen only a few hours ago.
“You’re not serious,” I half-whispered.
“I’m afraid I am,” he said.
“I want to hear you say it.” My tone was suddenly challenging. I didn’t try to rein it in. “Say it! I won’t believe it if you don’t say it.”
“You are my niece, October, in the eyes of the law, if not the substance of your blood.” Sylvester looked at me solemnly. “My brother took Amandine to wife long ago. Things were different then. He was different then. And no matter how much he changes, no matter how much he has changed, I truly do believe that he still loves her.”
“You are not serious.” I jumped to my feet, beginning to pace back and forth. “Why are you telling me this now? You don’t think this is something I should have known years ago, like, I don’t know, before you sent me after him? This is not okay! This is the new dictionary definition of not okay!”