Page 39 of When Sorrows Come

Well, that being the case, I could find one missing woman for him.

“Got it,” said Jazz. “Andafterthey’ve defused all the traps?”

“If any of them likes to watch mortal crime dramas, they can search for clues, and I’ll be very grateful to them when I get back,” I said. “If not, just ask them to come back out into the hall and not touch anything. I’ll be back as soon as I can. Cillian, you’re with me.”

Quentin fell into step beside me as I started down the hall, chin tilted slightly up so I could keep sniffing the air for traces of Nessa’s magic. I felt like some sort of weird bloodhound, and for the first time I really appreciated how annoying Tybalt must have found my tendency to assume that because he was a cat, he could track people by smell alone. I mean, hecould, but it looked silly, and it wasn’t as easy as it sounded.

“I’m glad you’re letting me help,” said Quentin.

Oh, I didnotneed another distraction while I was trying to do something silly and kind of difficult. “Of course, kiddo,” I said. “You’re my... you’re mine. I’ll always let you help... when it doesn’t mean getting us both killed. Where’s Dean?”

I was hoping the question would distract him enough to let me focus. Instead, he huffed a sigh.

“Since his dads won’t be here until tomorrow, the Luidaeg said he didn’t have parental permission to do anything stupid and dangerous until they showed up.” He sighed heavily, looking put-upon and briefly betraying his age. “I think she just doesn’t want to deal with Dianda if something goes wrong.”

“She’s a smart one, that sea witch,” I said. “I don’t want to deal with Dianda either, honestly. Or with Patrick looking disappointed in me.” I didn’t mention Dean’s other father, who isn’t related to me at all, but is legally my father, too. Our laws are complicated and sort of stupid sometimes, which is all the more impressive considering they supposedly don’t exist.

We have one law, Oberon’s Law, which forbids us to kill each other unless it’s during a time of formally declared war. Or unless the person being killed is a changeling since the Law doesn’t protect us. It doesn’t protect humans, either, which is one of the many reasons the fae don’t make good neighbors. Now that I have actual access to Oberon—when the Luidaeg lets anyone get near him, which isn’t often—I’ll have to ask him why he set things up that way. Excluding changelings from the Law basically guaranteed that we’d never be anything more than second-class citizens in a world where we were already disadvantaged by our own mortality.

Everything else is custom and agreed-upon practice, but it’s not actuallylaw, and if you try to say it is, people get pissed. Suggesting that maybe Faerie needs a few more laws to keep us from making each other miserable all the time, and you might as well have suggested the nobility be forbidden to wear clothing when conducting formal courts.

That might not be the worst thing. Court would almost certainly be shorter.

Anyway, the small-L laws of Faerie are more like... traditions everyone has decided to treat as absolutely inviolate. Since the big-L Law says changelings don’t count as people for purposes of whether or not you’re allowed to kill them, they have no standing under those traditions, and when my mother went out and got herself knocked up by a human man, it was treated as an immaculate conception. My father, quite literally, didn’t matter to the situation. And since she was still married to Simon Torquill at the time, I was considered his daughter when I was born. We have no blood in common save for Oberon’s; he’s a distant descendant, while I’m a direct granddaughter. But if Faerie had an organ donor registry, he’d be the first person my doctor called.

Simon and I have a complicated history, to understate things so dramatically that they barely make sense. He’s my liege lord’s brother, and the man who turned me into a fish for fourteen years for the crime of getting too close after he literally kidnapped hisbrother’s wife and young daughter. I didn’t find out until years later that he’d done it because the person who was giving him his orders had wanted him to kill me to remove me from the playing field. I was more human then. He could have done it.

Instead, he had transformed me, an old pureblood technique for getting an enemy out of the way for a while, and left me to swim away a decade and a half of my life. I’d lost everything because of Simon.

I was still trying to figure out how I felt about the fact that I’d been the one to help him get everything back.

Oh, it was a new everything—he had divorced my mother and immediately remarried, this time to both the Duchess of Saltmist and her Ducal consort, a move most people seemed to be regarding as purely tactical, putting him as far outside my mother’s reach as possible while he recovered from his years of abuse, neglect, and worse in the service of Eira Rosynhwyr. Sadly for my sanity, I knew there had been nothing tactical about it, at least not for Simon and Patrick—they truly loved each other, with the deep, immutable love that sometimes rises out of the deepest friendships. It might have been partially tactical on Dianda’s part. I’ve never met a woman who was as primed to fight the world as Dianda Lorden, and the chance to poke a Firstborn she’d hated for decades in the eye may have been too much to resist.

I don’t think so, though. I think she loves Patrick enough that when he asked to bring the man he loves home, she agreed, and I think she’s learning to love him, too.

So yeah. I try not to think about the situation with Dean’s parents and my legal father more than I absolutely have to, and I dare anyone in the world to blame me.

We had continued walking while I didn’t think about Dean’s parents, following the thin, attenuated trail of Nessa’s magic. The hall ended, merging with another, wider hall, and we continued onward, until the trail led to a seemingly featureless wall. We stopped there, me still occasionally sniffing the air to keep myself from losing the trail, Quentin balling his hands helplessly.

“If we were in Shadowed Hills or Goldengreen, I’d know what signs to look for in order to open this door,” he said. “I’d know how the servants hid their comings and goings from the nobility, and I’d be able to get us in.”

“But we’re not,” I said. “We’re just in a place that has goodreason to love the person we’re looking for, and probably good reason to love you, too.”

I stroked the wall with one hand, leaning forward until my lips nearly brushed the wood. I stopped short, mostly because smearing dried blood and whatever remained of my lipstick on something clean and polished seemed unnecessarily rude. “Hi,” I said, voice pitched low. “I don’t think we’ve been introduced.”

“Oh, Maeve! Do you have to?” groaned Quentin. “It’s so embarrassing when you do this.”

I ignored him. No one was coming and even if they did, Faerie doesn’t actually have any taboos against sweet-talking buildings. Most people don’t believe knowes are alive, much less that they can have opinions about things, but they are, and they can. I’ve proven it, over and over again.

“My name’s October,” I informed the wall. “October Daye. I’m standing as knight to Quentin Sollys, who you probably remember used to live here. He’s going to live here again someday, and when he does, he’ll remember who was nice to me, and he’ll reward them.”

“Oak and ash,” muttered Quentin, putting his hand over his face. “Just hurry up and make out with the architecture before somebody sees you.”

“Sure, kid,” I said with amusement. To the wall, I added, “You can ignore him. He’s at that age where everything adults do is embarrassing. I’m looking for your seneschal. I know she came this way, and I know she didn’t go back to her room, and I’ve been in enough knowes to know there’s a door here. If you could just open it for me, I’d be able to find her, and make sure that she’s all right. I think someone may have done something bad to her, and I’m concerned...”

This was one of the rare situations where being elf-shot was the best option we could hope for. If Nessa had been elf-shot, she wouldn’t need to eat, drink, or use the bathroom. She’d just sleep for as long as it took us to find her. Up to a hundred years, if it took that long.

It wasn’t going to take that long. Elf-shot was Eira’s creation, and it used to be the best way the purebloods had to both wage war without killing each other and reassert their natural superiority. They could put each other to sleep for a hundred years and consider it a mere inconvenience! They could come back to the worldafter a century had passed and slide right back into their lives as if they had never been gone at all! Even if elf-shot hadn’t been designed to be fatal to changelings, we didn’t have that option. A hundred years of slumber would leave us stranded in a world that we couldn’t recognize, bereft of the entire mortal side of our family, with no way of ever going home.

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