Page 16 of When Sorrows Come

The smell of redwood sap wafted from behind us. I turned, andthere was Arden, now wearing a floor-length blue velvet dress that hugged her figure as it plummeted toward her feet, the color calling the purple highlights to the surface of her hair. I nodded approvingly.

“When’d you learn the quick-change trick?” I asked. “You have an army of Hobs behind a screen somewhere?”

“Hush,” she said. “It’s an illusion, but you’re not supposed to comment on it. I hope you’ll be more polite while you’re in Toronto.”

“Doubtful,” I said brightly.

“I wish I could come,” she said. “I appreciated the invitation, even if we all knew I wouldn’t be able to use it.”

“It was the polite thing to do,” said Tybalt gravely. I actually appreciated his reminding people that he’d been the one to put the guest list together. It might mean he got credit for things like sending Arden an invite—but he deserved that credit, as he’d done it, and I might well have gone “she can’t attend, why make her sad by reminding her of that fact?” and just not sent the invitation at all. More, it meant people would view the more questionable guests, like the Luidaeg and the Crown Prince in the Mists, through the lens of a King of Cats, not the lens of a known king-breaker. It was better for everyone this way.

Honestly, it was.

Arden clapped her hands together like a classroom monitor trying to clear away chalk dust. “All right, where’s the rest of your band of freaks and weirdoes? I’m ready to get this show on the road.”

“Given traffic, probably halfway across the Golden Gate Bridge,” I said. At her blink, I explained, “We had more people than we had comfortable room for in the car, so they’re all riding with Danny, while Tybalt and I took the Shadow Roads. It’ll probably be another twenty minutes before they get here.”

“...huh,” she said, after a moment’s pause. “You know, I’ve been locked up in this knowe long enough to forget traffic is a real thing, and not just something they invented for the movies to add dramatic tension to a moment that otherwise wouldn’t have any. Twenty minutes, you say?”

“Plus however long it takes them to walk across the woods,” I said.

“Right, right. Cassandra?”

“Yes, Your Highness?”

Arden made a face but didn’t say anything. A knowe has to reach a certain size before a proper chatelaine is needed—Shadowed Hills doesn’t have one, and I’m not sure the false Queen ever bothered—so when Cassandra took the job, there’d been no one standing ready to train her in what it entailed. But the Brown kids have always been resourceful, and she’d found a way to get her training, even if it was just from old books and talking to people like Etienne. She knew every rule and loophole of her position, including when it was appropriate to be irreverent and when it wasn’t. Clearly, this was one of the “wasn’t appropriate” moments.

“Please go to the gates and ask my brother to remove himself to the parking area,” said Arden. “The rest of our guests will be arriving soon and should be allowed to skip the walk.”

“Yes, Highness.” Cassandra bounced to her feet, pausing only long enough to press a kiss to Walther’s temple, then trotted toward the door, moving fast and purposefully.

Walther watched her go, not bothering to pretend he wasn’t studying the way her butt moved in her reasonably tight trousers. When he realized I was watching, he shrugged, offering me a wry smile. I shook my head.

It doesn’t come up as often as it used to, thankfully, but I spent fourteen years transformed into a koi fish and abandoned in the ponds at the Japanese Tea Garden in Golden Gate Park. That was the end of my attempt to play faerie bride and live a happy life in the mortal world; I had gone on a simple reconnaissance mission, tracking Simon Torquill in an effort to find out whether he’d been involved in the disappearances of Luna and Rayseline, and had found myself lost to the world for more than a decade. During that time, my own child had gone from a toddler who thought I hung the moon and stars to a teenager who believed I’d willingly abandoned her in order to run off and live a life of carefree childlessness.

Gillian hadn’t been the only kid I abandoned, just the only one who actually belonged with me. Cassandra had been almost five years old when I went into the pond, and part of me still had trouble accepting her as a grown adult who had the absolute right to be romantically interested in my friends. Faerie makes age gaps complicated. When you’re going to have forever, do you really care if one partner is twenty and the other is two hundred? I know that. Ialso know the age difference between me and Tybalt is much greater than the one between her and Walther, who’s roughly my age. And it doesn’t always help.

Other things that don’t help: Stacy, my best friend since childhood, and Cassandra’s mother, doesn’t approve of her dating anyone at all, age-appropriate or no. According to Cassie, Stacy doesn’t want any of her kids dating, which feels a little weird to me, since Cassandra, Karen, and Andrew are all old enough by human standards to be going out with other kids. Karen and Andrew are probably still a little young for anything more than holding hands and asking for rides to the movies, but there’s no good reason their mother should react so negatively to the very idea.

I looked around. “Where’s Madden?”

“I gave him the night off,” said Arden. I blinked at her. She shrugged. “He wasn’t invited to the wedding, and his boyfriend has been reminding him recently that working for a queen doesn’t mean neglecting his home life.”

“You know, that’s the first thing I’ve heard either of you say to imply that Madden’s boyfriend is fae.” Madden is Cu Sidhe, one of the faerie dogs as Tybalt is one of the faerie cats, and he works at a café not far from the house, keeping roughly diurnal hours for the sake of the job that pays his bills, all so he can serve in the Queen’s Court all night.

Arden pays her staff, having a better understanding of the economics of the modern world than most purebloods, thanks to having lived in it for such a long time, but Madden, like most Cu Sidhe, is loyal to a fault. He’ll stay at that café until it closes or burns to the ground, whichever comes first.

“He’s not,” said Arden, and laughed at the expression on my face. “They’re gay men living in the Castro District. Madden isn’t breaking any rules when he tells Charles he works for a queen. Chuck just assumes my queenship is a little more socially granted and involves more pancake makeup.”

Keeping Faerie secret from humanity is sometimes straightforward and sometimes really, really weird. I blinked several times before shaking my head and turning my attention to Walther.

“Were things this strange in Silences?” I asked.

He laughed. “I don’t really know,” he said. “I was still a princess when I was there, and they kept me and my sister pretty well insulated from the places where things got really weird.”

I nodded. “Right.”

Walther was never a girl, for all that people looked at him and assumed he was; he knew he was a boy from the time he was old enough to understand there was a difference between the two categories and that he was supposed to fall into the one most people didn’t put him under. He’d still been a princess, with the rules and restrictions assigned to the role by our often archaic, surprisingly functional society. There was a reason he’d been so willing to repudiate his claim to the throne, rather than insisting on his rights as an exiled member of a fallen royal family, and a further reason he hadn’t gone back to Silences when his parents retook the throne. He was happy here, with the people who loved him and did our best to understand him and had never once insisted he wear a fancy dress with lace frills to catch the eye of a neighboring prince.

---