Page 14 of When Sorrows Come

There are no purebloods or even strong changelings left in New York. Haven’t been since before I was born. The ones who remain are the ones weak enough to handle iron and thrive in its presence, and those who don’t want anything to do with Faerie.

I used to dream of running away to New York, back before I met Cliff and got knighted. After that, I dreamt of proving myself to Faerie, of earning the right to live a semi-human life and raise my children in peace.

I failed that time. I wasn’t going to fail again.

Following the pixies had carried us through the main valley and up the side of a hill, where hikers and tourists who refused to stay on the path had aided erosion and the questing roots of the local trees in creating a ladder of sorts to the top of the rise. Those same hikers and disobedient tourists had doubtless been finding themselves less and less inclined to wander in recent days, repelled from the path they had helped to create by the anti-human charms Arden and her court were adroitly weaving through the trees. Icould hear them whispering, if only distantly. They knew, in their unthinking way, that I was allowed to be here.

I felt a little bad about the fact that reawakening the knowe in Muir Woods was taking a part of a national forest away from the people who came to admire its beauty. Only a little bit, though. The knowe pre-dated the declaration of Muir Woods as protected territory; without fae magic making the loggers and gold-miners a little bit uncomfortable among the trees, they might have kept right on cutting until there was nothing left of the ancient redwoods but the memories of the people who’d been here before the Europeans came.

Maybe it’s hypocritical of me, as someone descended from both European humans and fae, but I’m pretty sure coming to this continent and declaring it our “new world” was the worst thing any of us has ever been a participant in. And I sometimes wonder whether Oberon locking the fae out of the deeper realms and forcing us to jockey for space on Earth and in the Summerlands, after we’d been so long accustomed to infinite room to roam, didn’t have something to do with the human push toward exploration. The fae got here first, following ocean tides and rumors, and the humans who’d been living with our presence for centuries came after us.

And we’re here now; the damage is done. If we all decamped back to Europe tomorrow, if that were even possible, it wouldn’t put things back the way they were before we crossed the ocean. The forest existed before the knowe; the park, with its endless stream of carefully lured tourists, did not. If Arden could protect the wildness that remained even a little bit with her charms, let her.

The knowe doors were standing open when we followed the pixies over the rise at the top of the hill, propped wide to show the impossible hall that extended from the middle of a towering redwood tree. Faerie’s relationship to physics is often casual at best, and sometimes it consists of Faerie promising to call when physics knows it never will. A slender Glastig woman in royal livery stood to one side of the doors, leaning on her polearm perhaps slightly more than was strictly appropriate for someone who was supposedly on duty.

In contrast, the Tuatha de Dannan man across from her was standing at a level of attention that would have impressed even Etienne, normally the most rule-abiding person I know. This manhad dark hair that held highlights of improbable blackberry purple, and he wore the royal livery like he’d never voluntarily worn anything else in his life, pride and contentment radiating quietly off of him.

Neither of them seemed to notice our approach, the woman being preoccupied with watching the pixies, the man staring appropriately and fixedly ahead on a straight line. That’s why I’ve always hated guard duty. We could make it all the way to doors of the knowe before they knew they weren’t alone.

Or we could have if I hadn’t immediately stepped on a twig, snapping it beneath my foot with a soft cracking sound. It wasn’t loud, as such things went. In the silence of the forest, it was a gunshot, and the reaction of the two sentries was immediate.

The woman, Lowri, shifted positions without straightening as she turned to face us and smiled, her face framed by the shaggy locks of her hair and the curving rise of her horns. Glastig are sort of like Satyrs, only they got less of the sturdy solidity of goats, and more of the finicky animal bits. They’re also, technically, water fae—in the old days, they supposedly hid their cloven hooves under long skirts and sawed their horns off close to their skulls so they could lure innocent people into ponds and drown them.

Before I learned how much time and energy Eira and her siblings had dedicated to demonizing the children of Maeve, I would have believed a legend like that without question. Now I had to wonder how many people the Glastig actually drowned, and how many had been dumped on the riverbank for someone to find and draw the logical conclusions about. It’s hard to say, but there aren’t many Glastig left. Their numbers got thinned before the dawn of the modern era, and the ones who are left are usually like Lowri, selling their services to any noble court that will offer them a measure of protection.

I’d first met her in the service of the false Queen of the Mists, the woman who’d taken Arden’s crown and rightful place on the throne after the death of our last King, Gilad Windermere. Unlike most of the false Queen’s followers, Lowri had been doing it for protection and place, not because she believed any of the vile things that woman said about changelings and the value of purebloods in our society. And when it became clear that the Queen she served was no true monarch, Lowri had been happy to join our ramshackle revolution and throw her lot in behind the true heir.

I liked her a lot. She was nice to talk to, told absolutely filthy jokes, and didn’t take either herself or her job too seriously, although she was devoted to the monarchy. Which probably explained why she was on duty with the Crown Prince in the Mists, Nolan Windermere.

Nolan turned more slowly than she did, but his response was the same—a smile—although in his case, he did it without abandoning his rigidly proper posture. “My darling sister told me you’d be coming tonight,” he said. “I suppose congratulations are in order, and I hope His Majesty won’t take offense if I offer them first to Sir Daye?”

“Not at all,” said Tybalt.

Older purebloods can seem like travelers stranded out of time to people as young as I am: they carry the memories and mannerisms of decades, even centuries, before I was born. In Nolan’s case, that impression is accurate and very literal. He was elf-shot in the 1930s and spent roughly eighty years asleep before his sister arranged to have him woken before his hundred years were up. Maybe those last twenty years wouldn’t have made much of a difference to someone who’d already slept through the creation of the Internet, the dawn of cellphones, and the entire computer revolution, but Arden had wanted her brother back, and as Queen in the Mists, she’d had the resources to make it happen. So she did.

Nolan has been adjusting slowly to this strange new century. Arden’s been helping as much as she can, and her chatelaine, my honorary niece, Cassandra, has been doing her part. Cassie is a changeling, a grad student, and about as modern as they come. I’d be hard pressed to think of anyone better-suited to helping someone adapt to living in the present day.

When he offered me first congratulation, it wasn’t to slight Tybalt. It was to reflect the etiquette as he had learned it, where the woman, if there was one, was the first to receive appreciation of her upcoming marriage. We confused the issue a bit, what with Tybalt being a King and me being a Knight rather than a Lady, but he was trying.

“In that case.” Nolan bowed to me, so deeply it looked as if his forehead brushed his knees. “Congratulations on the occasion of your marriage, and may the blessings piled upon your house be so vast the roof is in danger of collapse before you can get the wedding party to safety.”

I blinked. Then I looked to Lowri, who was barely managing to cover her expression of delighted amusement, and then to Tybalt, who just seemed pleased. Ah. So this was another pureblood thing, then, and not something I needed to worry about.

“Cool,” I said. “And like, if the roof does fall in, we’ll be sure to have a roofer on standby.”

There was a long pause, during which I began to worry I had said something wrong or violated some ancient code of etiquette I lacked the context to understand. Then Nolan burst out laughing, loud and genuine, and I relaxed.

“You’re marrying a spitfire, and I hope you’ll enjoy her as much as both of you deserve,” he said, clapping Tybalt hard on the shoulder. Tybalt bore the impact stoically, even looking somewhat pleased. I realized this might be the most positive contact he’d ever had with an acknowledged Crown Prince of the Divided Courts—Quentin didn’t count. Even before I’d broken him, he’d been under blind fosterage and thus had no title to speak of. Thankfully.

I have no idea what the process of telling someone you have to refer to by title to wash the dishes looks like, and I honestly don’t want to know.

Tybalt smiled. “I can promise you, I intend to do precisely that,” he said, and clapped Nolan on the shoulder in turn.

That appeared to complete whatever archaic ritual of manly bonding they were playing out. Nolan straightened, almost but not quite returning to his ramrod stance, and said in a plummy, formal tone, “I congratulate you on the occasion of your marriage, Your Majesty, and for all that follows. May the Three who made us all bless your bridal bed with the rarest of rewards, and may your nights be fruitful and long.”

“As you say,” said Tybalt, and offered Nolan a shallow, almost shocking bow before starting for the open door. I blinked, then scurried after him.

Normally, I’m the one who goes striding through every open door without stopping to explain what I’m trying to accomplish, although I’m usually doing it bloody and heavily armed. This time, I was just trying to avoid mortally offending anyone before we even made it out of our home kingdom.

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