Page 17 of When Sorrows Come

“I took the advance crew through their portal about two hours ago,” said Arden, attention on Tybalt. “By the time you get to Toronto, Stacy will have October’s toilette laid out and ready for whatever’s needed, and Kerry will be most of the way to finishing the cake.”

“How many busloads of people are we sending to Canada?” I asked.

“Only three,” said Tybalt, sounding slightly abashed. “The first, ours, and those who come later. It seemed more efficient to do it in multiple passes.”

“ ‘More efficient’ is a phrase we use for car repairs and feeding hungry teenagers, not for getting guests to our wedding,” I said.

“Too late now,” he replied.

I made a scoffing sound and turned to Walther, silently pleading for backup. He shook his head instead, brushing his hands against his linen trousers.

“Sorry, Toby, but you abdicated this throne, you don’t get to complain when the people you gave it to don’t do things exactly the way you would have done them.” He grinned as he walked over to us. “It’d be like me going back to Silences and complaining about the way Marlis is handling her duties as a princess of the court. It was my circus until I sold my shares, and now they’re not my monkeys anymore.”

“I hate you,” I informed him.

“There’s everybody’s favorite hero of the realm.” He kept smiling, intensely white teeth managing to make his eyes seem evenmore unrealistically blue. Being an alchemist meant he’d never needed to worry about whether his teeth were white enough. The eyes, in contrast, were all natural.

Many of the more similar types of fae can be distinguished by their eyes. Tylwyth Teg have eyes so blue they offend the sky, usually paired to very blonde hair. Before his hair darkened, Quentin could have passed as Tylwyth with a little extra illusion to brighten his irises. It was sort of a miracle that Walther didn’t have more issues with his students falling in love with him—or maybe he did, and he just had ethics to balance the issues out. The only person I’d ever known him to be romantically involved with was Cassie, and she wasn’t a chemistry major, keeping her safely out of his classes.

Think of the devil: Cassie came trotting back, surrounded by a fresh swirl of pixies. “Nolan is heading to the parking area to watch for your party,” she informed me. “Lowri says she doesn’t need backup. She can watch the door alone since, quote, ‘Her Majesty has seen fit to invite all the troublemakers over at the same time, so there’s no one left to ruin my night.’ She was laughing when she said it, so I don’tthinkit was intended as treason, but I can go order her to arrest herself, if you’d like.”

“No, no, that’s fine,” said Arden, with an airy wave of her hand. “She’s allowed to be a little disrespectful, as long as she’s not doing it to my face. Queens who quash petty rebellion find themselves with much bigger problems on their hands.”

“I should never have given you those etiquette books,” said Cassandra, moving to stand next to Walther, who slid an arm around her shoulders.

Of all the things I would never have imagined when I was younger, standing with the Queen in the Mists, joking about the way the Kingdom was run, and not worrying that I was going to be arrested on trumped-up charges or have my clothing transformed into something I didn’t want to wear would have been toward the top of the list. I had never realized how stressful it was to have my monarch despise me until the weight of it had been taken away.

I was contemplating the feeling when a glowing circle appeared in the air, accompanied by the scent of redwood needles and blackberry brandy, and our people started coming through. Quentin was first, still dragging my bags along with him, followed by May and Jazz, then Raj and Dean, and finally the Luidaeg and anondescript man with short, goatish horns who could probably have passed for an ordinary Glastig.

I blinked. Normally, Oberon had antlers that would have put a stag to shame, only somewhat scaled down to account for the fact that he had a human’s neck and cervical damage is not befitting for a King of Faerie. Normally, he was beautiful—terrible and forgettable in equal measure, a predator who drew and rejected the eye at the same time, like a glorious contradiction born to wear the crown. Now, he looked almost... normal. Almost like Officer Thornton, the human man he’d seemed to be until I told him that I was bringing him home and broke the ancient geas he had lain upon himself when he left us.

Still not sure how I feel about that. Both the fact that he had left us voluntarily—not compelled, like either of his queens—and the fact that I had been the one to bring him back, which was apparently the first step in some stupid-ass prophecy about my mother’s descendants. My grandmother had been responsible for breaking Maeve’s last Ride and seeing her lost to Faerie for five hundred years, if not forever, and now it was going to be my job to find her and bring her back. Bully for me.

I would have been less grumpy if the implication hadn’t been that I was also going to be recovering Titania. Given my experiences with Eira, supposedly her favorite child, I was pretty sure she and I weren’t going to get along, and I was tired of my enemies gettingharderto punch as I got better at doing my job. Give me someone who’s not immortal and infinitely powerful, please. As a treat.

Tybalt reached over and took my hand in his, squeezing tightly, before stepping forward. I followed. “Your Highness,” he said to Arden, and offered her a shallow bow. “You have done our unworthy party a great kindness by offering to begin our journey. We are ready to depart.”

He didn’t thank her. Thanks are verboten in Faerie, basically taboo save under very narrow, very specific circumstances. Arden smiled understanding, and even as Nolan stepped through his portal and allowed it to collapse behind him, she turned away from us and lifted her hands, sketching a much wider gateway in the air. It glittered and sparked, and Cassandra watched raptly, apparently able to see something in the process that wasn’t visible even to me.

A portal opened, wider than a door and taller than Danny, whohadn’t come through from the parking lot. I couldn’t blame him for not wanting to spend any more time in our company after being crammed into the car with this motley bunch of fools, and I didn’t know if he’d even been invited to the wedding.

This was all very disorienting, and that was before the portal clarified into a splash of midnight sky spangled with diamond-bright stars, and a group of strangers standing on a brick promenade. “I can only hold this for a few minutes, so don’t dawdle,” said Arden, a touch of strain in her voice.

“Oh, we’re quite done with dawdling,” said Tybalt, and stepped through, pulling me with him.

The others followed, and we were off.

five

“October!”

Kerry’s squeal was high, shrill, and almost jarring in this unfamiliar setting. It had taken us eight jumps, including one performed by Chelsea, who had joined us in Highmountain—her portal had exhausted her but carried us nearly two thousand miles in a single step—and now we were finally in Toronto, standing in the arrival hall of the royal knowe of the Westlands. Like Arden’s knowe in Muir Woods, it had no name, because it didn’t need one; when people said they were going to Court, they didn’t have to specify. Not when they were this close to the royal knowe.

The space was familiar and strange at the same time. We had stepped through the final portal in upstate New York, and emerged into a palatial, echoing room with walls of polished curly maple, inlaid with panels shaped from the largest amethyst geodes I had ever seen, their raw crystal surfaces immaculate and glittering in the light that radiated from their cores before spreading to cover and obscure the ceiling. It felt simultaneously like we were standing in a forest and in a place that had been shaped by hand. The floor was polished amethyst, more smoothed than the crystals of the walls, but still clearly natural.

The room was big enough to host a ball, and the fact that they were using it for new arrivals implied things about the rest of the knowe that made me faintly uncomfortable. I looked to Quentin. He was staring raptly at the nearest geode, a look of heartbreaking youth and nostalgia on his face, and in that moment, I wantednothing more than to gather him in my arms and tell him it was all going to be all right.

“Penny and I used to play floor hockey in here,” he said, voice low enough not to carry. “In our socks, with an orange ball. I haven’t thought about that orange ball in years...”

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