Page 49 of When Sorrows Come

Walther, May, and Quentin all immediately protested, their voices overlapping and rendering their words unintelligible. I put my hands up.

“Quiet,” I snapped. To my shock, they all obliged. “Fiancé with good reason to be anxious about my safety and niece who can occasionally see the future, coming with me to a controlled interview with a Doppelganger who has been securely restrained andisn’t going to be stabbing anyone else today, much less me. Right, sire?”

“Right,” said Aethlin, amused again. Glad to know I could serve as someone’s traveling comedy show. If this whole heroism thing didn’t work out, maybe I could get a new job as a court jester.

“Tell Stacy where we’ve gone, and catch her up on the decoy plan,” I said to the Luidaeg, as we moved toward the door.

“If you can call that a plan,” she said mildly though she didn’t argue otherwise.

Oberon didn’t say anything or move away from his place against the wall, where he lurked as unnoticed as ever. What was even the point of having the King of All Faerie back among us if he was just going to stand around like some sort of creeper, not helping, not contributing what had to be a considerable store of knowledge and experience to the cause of keeping the people I cared about from getting hurt?

But maybe that was the reason he’d left. I knew he’d gone voluntarily from the stories, if not from the man himself: with his queens gone, he’d been a danger to the balance of Faerie, something that made a lot of sense when I considered that he was supposed to have an amount of power that was, “as much greater than his children as His children were to their own.” With Maeve and Titania gone and most of the Firstborn either dead or missing, he could have been a god without raising his voice. Considering he’d been kind enough to leave us rather than hurt us once before, I didn’t think he wanted to be a god.

But that didn’t make it any easier to feel like we had a literal deus ex machina following us around, not doing anything, demonstrating his power only in how good he was at blending into the background. Someone as strong as he was should have been lighting up the air like a beacon, making it difficult to breathe. Instead, he was as much a part of the scenery as a courtier at a royal banquet, basically furniture that occasionally moved and refilled your water glass. I’d done that job a few times in my youth, before Sylvester had figured out that I was constitutionally unsuited for any position that required me to make nice with people who considered themselves more important than I was.

Which did nothing to explain why I was now following the High King of the Westlands through his own knowe, trailed by a King of Cats and a changeling of blended descent, whose appearanceseemed to have been cobbled together from recessive traits stolen out of all three lines. It was the only thing I could think of that explained the tufts of fur that tipped her ears, like a lynx, or the blonde-to-brown gradient of her hair.

Magical genetics means never having to say, “Dd your Mommy have an inappropriate relationship with the milkman?” I guess. Titania only knows what my own kids were going to look like, blending Dóchas Sidhe and Cait Sidhe genetics. The thought was, as always, a pleasant one; the idea of a little girl with Tybalt’s eyes, or a little boy with pale blond hair and a serious expression, could get me through a lot. I couldn’t wait to meet them.

The High King’s guard fell back as we walked, expanding their formation to surround the three of us as well as the High King himself. It was such a smooth, practiced change that I had to assume it was something they’d rehearsed as part of their training. There was a level of studied formality to their motion that made me feel like certain things were taken a lot more seriously here than they were in Shadowed Hills. As seriously as they eventually would be in Muir Woods, where Lowri was already in the process of whipping Arden’s guard into shape.

It was another pleasant thought. The idea that the Mists would be stable enough to waste time on things like teaching your guards how to expand a formation. Your relatively untried guards if the scene at Nessa’s room was anything to go by. All the training in the world isn’t a substitution for actual experience. They knew where to stand and when to draw their swords. They didn’t know how to handle actual danger.

They were going to have to learn sooner or later.

People passing in the halls either moved aside to let us go by or stopped to stare, depending on how close they were to being in the way. High King Aethlin nodded to them as we passed, but didn’t stop, didn’t acknowledge them beyond that initial bob of his head. It was like they were ghosts passing through the scene, or maybe we were, a long chain of haunting being whisked through an endless hall.

And then it ended, giving way to a flight of stairs spiraling downward into the brightly-lit depths of the knowe. No darkness here; the amethyst spires that lined the walls made it impossible, lighting up from within with a strangely white light, ignoring the purple they should logically have been projecting. The smell of maplesyrup grew even deeper as we descended, until I couldn’t decide whether I wanted a plate of pancakes or to never eat sugar again. It was disconcerting, and my stomach grumbled, reminding me of my missed dinner and the cookies I had eaten too fast to fully appreciate them.

“Kerry said to tell you she can get us plates from the kitchen, as soon as you remembered that it’s past dinnertime and you decided it was better to get stabbed then it was to eat,” said Cassie, voice low. One of the guards still shot her a sour look for opening her mouth in the presence of the High King.

“Good,” I said. “I could really use a sandwich.”

“She remembers that blood must be replaced with actual food and cannot be generated out of the fabric of the cosmos itself,” said Tybalt, rolling his eyes toward the ceiling in exaggerated delight. “A miracle is upon us this day.”

“Don’t be sarcastic,” I said, elbowing him lightly in the side. “I know it’s your primary means of communication, but that doesn’t make it appropriate right now.”

The stairs ended at a short hall, the way forward blocked after only about eight feet by a rowan door. Rowan is standard for royal and noble dungeons: it makes it safer to keep certain tools in the knowe without hurting anyone who hasn’t already been imprisoned. It was still jarring, after all that maple, to see something made from any other wood. It was carved with a pattern of maple leaves and common loons in flight, maintaining the “yay for Canada, Canada’s cool” theme of the rest of the knowe. That helped a little.

Not enough. The feeling of not enough grew stronger as one of the guards produced a key from his pocket. It was rowan wood, like the door, but the lock wasn’t: the lock was made of pure iron, radiating quiet malice as we grew closer.

High King Aethlin looked over his shoulder at me, apparently anticipating my discomfort. “The prisoners are not bound with iron, or sealed in iron cells,” he said. “We keep only as much around as we need to dampen the magics that might allow them to escape.”

That didn’t help the way he clearly meant for it to. “Um, cool,” I said.

The guard unlocked the door. The air that rushed out was cold and stale, smelling the way all dungeons did: like wet stone androtting wood and the slow, inexorable decay of iron. The nicest dungeon in the world will still have that smell because iron degrades magic. Knowes are living magic, so if they must contain iron in order to maintain a stable dungeon, well... It’s a little pocket of infection in the body of the knowe. I can’t imagine it feels very good for the knowe, which has to keep doing everything else that’s expected of it, all with this horrible sucking wound deep in its body.

When we got home, I needed to talk to Arden about her own dungeon situation. As far as I knew, there was no iron in Muir Woods, but that didn’t mean the situation hadn’t changed. Situations change all the time.

“This way,” said the High King, gesturing for us to follow him through the door.

One of the guards stepped in front of him. The High King stopped, blinking. The rest of us did the same. “Sire, I must object,” said the guard. “The dungeon is no place for a seated monarch. The iron here could do you harm, and if someone were to take advantage of the moment—” He glanced at me as he spoke, and I managed not to snarl at him. Instead, I bared my teeth in something that could only be interpreted as a smile under the most charitable of umbrellas, shifting position slightly to lean against Tybalt. He put a hand on my shoulder, and hedidsnarl at the guard, who quailed but held his ground.

“If someone were to take advantage of the moment with both the Crown Prince and Princess absent, it could be dire for the future of the High Kingdom,” continued the guard, refusing to be intimidated.

“I understand the risks,” said Aethlin. “We need to speak to the Doppelganger. You won’t be disciplined for standing up for what you feel is right, but you need to stand aside now.”

The guard grimaced but stepped out of the way, and we continued forward, into the dimmer light on the other side of the door.

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