Page 82 of When Sorrows Come

There was also a time when I would have rejected any road that wouldn’t punish me for walking it, when I would have thought a little blood—or a lot of blood—was the least I could pay for pushing my way toward a future where I could actually be happy. I was working on that. It wasn’t easy, and the urge to self-destruct was probably always going to be with me, as worked into my DNA as everything else about who I was, but I was trying. That makes all the difference.

The third road, the road that symbolized Faerie, was the only one I could legitimately take. I knew that, taking a step toward it even before I finished admitting to myself that my choice had been made before I got here. Then I paused, looking back at the other two. Last chance to change my mind.

I was standing here in a wedding dress and a thrice-damnedcorset, and I wanted to pretend the last chance to change my mind wasn’t already years behind me? I’d been given every opportunity in the world to walk away. I’d even taken a few of them. The people who loved me had never been willing to let it stick, and I can only be fetched back so many times before I start to think that maybe I’m not allowed to leave. “Sorry,” I called, hoping the two people waiting to escort me down the paths I wasn’t taking would hear me, and plunged onward, stepping onto the path that wound down the ferny bank.

“This is the road to fair Elfland, and also to my fucking wedding,” I said, as the trees closed in above me and locked away the light. Everything was darkness and silence under the branches, lit only by the dim glow of tiny white mushrooms half-hidden by fern fronds. The smell of peat and loam rose around me, kicked up by my feet. Maybe this was the wrong road after all. Maybe I’d madethe wrong choice, and now I was going to be lost in the woods forever.

Tybalt would never have approved a wedding plan, no matter how traditional, that involved losing me. He’d have given in and agreed to my increasingly broad hints about the county clerk before he would have agreed to any plan where he might not end up with a wife. So this had to be as standard as Quentin said it was. That didn’t mean I was going to wander around in the dark and lose the path. I stopped where I was instead, planting my hands on my hips, and said, “I know you’re there. I was promised an escort no matter which way I went. This is my wedding night. I don’t know how you purebloods do things, but in the human world, what the bride says during her wedding goes, and I say get your butt over here.”

A familiar voice laughed in the dark, low and warm and essentially kind, not mocking at all, before a globe of witch-light sprung into life above the outstretched palm of a pale-skinned, red-haired man in a suit identical to Quentin’s, even down to the sprig of white violets on his lapel. The light glinted sparks off of his honey-gold eyes, and for a moment—not a long one, but a bright and beautiful one—he was the man I knew he couldn’t possibly be: my liege, Sylvester.

Then he smiled, and it was Sylvester’s face, but it wasn’t, had never been, Sylvester’s smile. There was a time when I’d been able to confuse them. I couldn’t anymore.

“Hi, Simon,” I said. “I’m guessing you’re here to lead me to the next part of the wedding? How many of these weird-ass side quests do I have to do while I’m wearing a corset? Since I’m assuming you jumped through every hoop in creation when you married my mom.” His marriage to Patrick and Dianda Lorden had basically been the equivalent of “do you wanna? Cool, doyouwanna?” delivered by the Luidaeg, skipping over all the formal protocols in favor of getting things done as quickly as possible.

Dianda was a duchess, but somehow that hadn’t been enough to make her taking a second husband into a formal state wedding. Sometimes I question my life choices.

“Once upon a time, six quests, each more difficult than the last, culminating in the identification of your future spouse amongst a room of people enchanted to look exactly like them.” I must have looked appalled, because his smile softened, and he added, “Honeyand bees were a common part of the wedding ceremony in those days. A sweetened kiss was the easiest way to locate your intended. But the mortal world demands swiftness and simplicity both. I’m assuming your first escort told you that all three paths would lead to your groom?”

“He had to, or I wouldn’t have been willing to go along with it.”

“There you are.” He sounded smug. “This is your only trial, if allowing me to walk you to the ceremony is such a trial.”

“And hey, it matches up nicely with a human tradition.”

“Mmm?” Simon looked politely interested, raising an eyebrow in question.

“My father escorting me to the altar,” I said, and took his arm. Maybe there wasn’t an altar—if there was anything religious about this ceremony, it was going to be a total surprise to me—but there was a wedding, and this was a cultural touchpoint I understood.

And it was worth it for the slow understanding and then acceptance on Simon’s face. He put his hand over mine, holding me in place, and began to walk along the path, leading me deeper into the tangle of trees.

“I know I’m not,” he said. “I would have liked to have been, but my own choices closed that door before it ever could have opened between us and left it to my brother to fill the place that should have been mine as much as he was willing to—which was never enough for me. On the rare occasions when I came close enough to see his interactions with you, it burned me not to be allowed to step in and offer you the support you so clearly yearned for. You have done, in the balance of things, an excellent job of raising yourself. That task should never have fallen upon your shoulders. But I was gone, and your mother...”

He paused, catching his breath. “I knew, even in August’s infancy, that your mother was no fit mother to anyone. She tried—she was better for August, I think, than she ever bothered to be for you—but she has her limitations, and I worried, when I saw you playing in my brother’s halls, that you would be heir to all of them with no one else to leaven her presence. But you have done incredibly well, and I would bear the title you offer me with pride, not only in the legality of things, if I had any right to it.”

I hugged his arm impulsively as we walked. “And that’s why you can have it for as long as you want it,” I said. “We’ve had our issues,” that was putting it incredibly mildly, “but I think we woundup in the best possible place. You’re never going to be my dad, but you can be my father for as long as you want to be. I chose your line, after all. Faerie says I’m yours.”

Simon pulled his arm away and turned me to face him, kissing my forehead before he dropped his witch-light into my hands. “Then I’m yours as well, and as your father, I tell you that your heart is waiting.”

“You don’t mean that literally, right?” Things can be periodically and ridiculously literal in Faerie. My way home—a complicated tangle of memories and motivations that binds me to the person I am now, and not any of the other people I might have been able to become—is apparently a city pigeon that sleeps somewhere behind my sternum. He could mean that my actual heart had been replaced with a stone or a lump of bread or an empty jar when I wasn’t looking, and now I’d have to fight a dragon or something to get it back.

Simon laughed. “No. it’s just one of those things you say to a woman on her wedding day when you want to sound supportive of her life choices—which, believe me, I am. I always assumed that old cat would find a way into the family one way or another, and if he couldn’t marry my sister, my daughter is just as good.” He paused. “I suppose that sounds strange, given your human roots.”

I smiled beatifically up at him. “Actually, it sounds exactly right.”

“Then go,” he said. “Get married. Be happy. You’ve earned it.”

Somehow, we had reached the end of the path. It felt like it had taken forever. It felt like it had taken no time at all. The sound of voices was louder than ever, screened off by only the last layer of the trees, and the branches that spread to block them from my view—and me from theirs. I took a deep breath.

I stepped through.

nineteen

Simon followed me outof the trees, moving toward an open seat at the front of the shallow amphitheater. It felt like every seat was filled, and most of them with people I recognized. A reasonable number of the guests were wearing the High King’s livery, which told me he’d held back a certain number of spaces for his own courtiers; that was fine, as long as they’d been vetted. It wasn’t like we’d been forced to snub anybody due to a lack of space.

The others I didn’t recognize occupied about a quarter of the seats, all clustered together. They were dressed the closest to human, in tattered and patchworked finery, leather jackets and denim vests alongside corsets and opera jackets, their faces striped and spotted, their hair much the same. The Cait Sidhe of Toronto were in attendance to see one of their own married to a knight of the Divided Courts, and that made me a little nervous, even as I was relieved to know Tybalt wasn’t doing this without the support of his own kind.

There were only a few faces I would have liked to see who weren’t present, and all of those absences were at least somewhat expected. Arden wasn’t there, being unable to leave her Kingdom; neither was Queen Siwan of Silences, or their current Crown Prince. My mother was also blessedly missing. She hadn’t been invited, I knew that much; hers was the only name I had personally struck from any possible list, and thanks to the fact that I’d chosen Simon in the divorce, she couldn’t even claim offense at herexclusion. Officially, we no longer had any relation to each other, and she had no right to expect an invitation.

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