Page 42 of When Sorrows Come

She sounded utterly miserable. I shook my head, wet hair slapping against my cheeks. Any curl Stacy had managed to tease into it was gone, done in by the combination of horrible things I’d done to it instead of having dinner.

“No one’s going to be tried for treason,” I said. “You had iron at your throat, you’re allowed to make some bad decisions.”

“Have you been in here this whole time?” asked Quentin.

Nessa made a small sound of distress, but there was no hint of recognition in her tone as she continued, for which I was honestly grateful. The last thing we needed right now was for her to figure out who he was somehow and rat us out to the High King. “Once the door was sealed and hidden, I had nothing to eat and no way to escape. If I wrapped myself in water, I would need nothing else. The illusion I spun at the monster’s command—it wasró-láidir. I had nothing else to give. I still...” She made a sound, a small hiccupping sound that was neither a laugh nor a sob, but something trapped in the middle. “I still have nothing more to give.”

Meaning she couldn’t cast an illusion strong enough to protect everyone else from her. Oh, this wasn’t great. “What do you need? What will make you feel better?”

“I need water from the lake where I was born,” she said. “I keep a supply in my quarters.” She raised her head a little, enough for one eye to peek through the curtain of her hair, which was already dryer than my own, as if her body was drinking in the water. “If you could...?”

I wasn’t sure anything that had been in her quarters over the last three days could be trusted, given the circumstances, but I wasn’t going to tell her that. “Hey, Cillian,” I said, voice as light as I could make it. “Can you go and find my aunt for me, please?”

We were only traveling with one person who could arguably be called my aunt, even if I wasn’t stupid enough to call her that to her face. Quentin’s eyes widened. “You think she can help?”

“Based on what she told us earlier, if anyone can help, it’s going to be her,” I said, glancing back at Nessa. “It’s worth a try.”

“All right.” He retreated to the door, where he paused. “Are you sure it’s a good idea for me to leave you alone?”

“Kid, Tybalt’s not going to kill either one of us any more than he already is.”

“Got it,” said Quentin, and nodded decisively before he ducked out the door, leaving me alone with Nessa.

It was almost a relief to be left with someone who didn’t know me or expect anything from me. I sagged where I was, and must have sighed a little, because she looked up through her hair again, a furrow marring her perfect brow.

“You do not like the boy?”

“I love the boy,” I said. “He’s my son by all but blood, and I love the boy so much it scares me, because I’m going to have to give him back to his parents eventually. They didn’t agree to lose him forever when they handed him off to me, and there’s no way for me to keep him. He’s not mine.”

Even when she didn’t know we were talking about Quentin—even when she didn’t really know me at all—it hurt to admit that I was going to lose him. No, not lose; loss implied that he was going to be taken, when anyone who knew me knew I was going to let him go.

And when he came back here, when he stopped being Squire Quentin of no particular name or bloodline and became Sir Quentin Sollys of the Westlands, named and anointed next ruler of our High Kingdom, I wouldn’t even be able to say I missed him. He’d have a place and a family and a world that didn’t have any roomleft in it for me, and Oberon damn it all, this wasn’t a problem I’d seen coming back when I could have gotten out of this. Back when he’d asked me to be his squire and I’d offered my pathetic list of reasons I was a bad choice for any sort of real responsibility, I had never thought to include “if you’re my squire, I’ll love you too much, and you’ll take a piece of me with you when you inevitably have to leave.”

I’d been so broken when I came back from my exile in the pond, so convinced that no one was ever going to really love me and I was never going to really love anyone, ever again. I’d been a fool.

Nessa’s frown deepened before she ducked her head again. “I’ve never had children,” she said. “Men of the Gwragedd Annwn are rare, and no one else can lie with us past the dawn without fear of being struck dead when the sun comes up and our illusions come down. It seems like a great challenge, to allow your heart to rove freely outside your body, and not spend all your time kept rigid by fear. If you are the woman whose marriage I was to facilitate, I know you have a child of your body, as well as this boy who is the child of your heart, yes?”

“So you do know who I am, then.”

Nessa scoffed. “As if anyone couldnotknow who you are? King-breaker and chaos-chosen, who’s been overthrowing regimes up and down the Pacific coast as if it were some sort of wild game. The High King speaks of you with both admiration and horror. I think you know where my boy is.” Her tone changed on her last sentence, becoming sterner, almost demanding. She didn’t raise her head, however. She wasn’t threatening me.

“I don’t know what you mean,” I said carefully.

“The Crown Prince was sent to the Mists for his fosterage,” she said. “I’m not meant to know that, but I knew the woman who came to make your kingdom’s case to the High King and Queen. I had seen her before, when good King Windermere died, and it was necessary to name a successor to his place.”

I blinked. I hadn’t heard about Evening actually traveling to Maples when Gilad died, and I knew the High King hadn’t come to us. He would never have placed her puppet on the throne if he had. Anyone who looked at the false Queen could tell in an instant that she wasn’t Gilad’s daughter, as she had claimed to be; she was of a completely different bloodline, for one thing, and she lookednothing like him. Also she was terrible, but if Faerie had a rule about not handing terrible people thrones, we’d have a lot fewer Kings and Queens.

“She traveled here in the aftermath of the earthquake, carrying King Windermere’s bequeathments and begging his daughter be allowed to take the throne despite the challenges against her. He had never married, you see, and her mother was of mixed blood, which carried almost as much stigma in those days as human blood. Since the hope chests have been lost, one after another, it has become more and more difficult to correct a course once it has been etched in blood and bone.”

That made sense. I nodded before realizing that she couldn’t see me with her head bowed. “Yeah, okay,” I said. “That was Evening. She’s sort of...” I paused. I couldn’t call her the worst anymore, not after dealing with my own mother over the past year or so, but I couldn’t call her anything much better. “...awful,” I finished.

Nessa laughed. “Yes, awful. She came, and she spoke to the King and Queen, and when she left, they were different than they were. The King had always been far too aware of how his own parents died, at an assassin’s hands, and he restructured his guard in the wake of her time here, dismissing the soldiers who remembered what it was to fight and replacing them with the untried children of the nobility. He seemed to care less for his own legacy. And then she came again, although I advised against allowing her, and they sent my boy into fosterage, even though they had always promised him they would never do such a thing. They took him away and left us with barely the time to say farewell. I was hoping he might accompany you to your marriage.”

“Why would you think that?”

“Sollys heirs are drawn to heroism. He would have gravitated toward you as a moth flies toward a flame, looking for his own immolation.”

I wasn’t sure how I felt about that description. Luckily, I didn’t have long to dwell on it, as voices drifted in from the hall.

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