Page 8 of When Sorrows Come

“That is a bullshit fortune cookie proverb that I have never uttered intentionally,” I snapped. “Not unless I was drunk or woozy from blood loss. Try pulling the other one. Something Ididsay, and know for a fact I said, was ‘just tell me what to wear and when to show up, and I’ll be there.’ Well, no one’s told me what to wear, and as far as I’m concerned, dragging the date out of you in my kitchen doesn’t count!”

I turned and stormed up the stairs, leaving them staring after me. Neither one followed, and I was briefly grateful for that. Then again, Quentin’s been living with me for years, and Dean grew up dealing with his mother’s temper. When Dianda Lorden wants a few minutes to cool off, the smart thing to do is to let her have it.

The upstairs hall was still cool, dark, and empty, undisturbed by the turmoil downstairs. I stalked along it to my room, slammed the door open, and stomped inside, throwing myself onto the bed likeIwas the petulant teenager and the boys were the supposed parental figures. Just like it had when I was actually a teen and my feelings were occasionally too big for my body, the sheer overdramatic impact of my body against the mattress made me feel a little bit better. Even though it crushed the scones.

The cats, bounced out of their slumber by physics, raised their heads, opened sleepy blue eyes, and blinked at me. Cagney got to her feet, moving to sniff at my hair, before pronouncing judgment in her creaky Siamese voice with a loud and imperious meow. I rolled onto my back, automatically starting to scratch her ears.

“It’s your King I’m mad at,” I informed her. “He’s being a controlling jerk.”

She butted her head against my hand. I sighed and kept petting. Cats are good that way. They’ll care if you’re unhappy, but they won’t let it get in the way of the important things, like getting properly adored by their bipedal servants.

Sometimes I wonder if the Court of Cats, when in session, isn’t just all the Cait Sidhe taking turns having thumbs and petting each other, since that seems to be most of what the average cat wants out of life. Cait Sidhe aren’t animals. They still have a normal feline desire for cheek rubs and ear scritches, and enough dignity not to go looking for them when other people are around. That’s probably not how they do things, but it’s a way to think about a Court I’ll never belong to or properly attend without focusing on the violence that’s haunted it almost every time I’ve been allowed inside.

The Cait Sidhe live in harmony with their feline kin, which means they fight for dominance with claws and teeth, and no one with any sense gets in the way of one of those conflicts. I’ve felt Tybalt’s claws myself. Scary stuff. So it’s nice to think, sometimes, that there are beautiful aspects to their governance to go along with the terrible ones.

I sighed, watching Lacey roll over and start to groom her sister’s head with long swipes of her tongue. Maybe I was being unreasonable. Quentin and the Luidaeg were right; I had abdicated almost all decision-making aspects of wedding planning—it was understandable that people might have thought I didn’t care. But they were also wrong. I had specifically said to tell me where to show up and when, and maybe that had sounded flippant, but Isaidit, and I was supposed to be the bride. Wasn’t it standard to at least ask the bride if she was free to attend the wedding?

What if I’d taken a job? What if Arden had sent me off to fight a monster or something? What if I’d decided to take advantage of my current freedom of movement and booked that trip to Disneyland after all? I had a car. I liked to drive. I could have been just about anywhere.

Of course, all parties involved knew me pretty well, and knew the chances of me voluntarily being away from home were slim to none. I like my house. I like the part where it’s solid, and mine, and the roof doesn’t leak, and the wards all answer tome. Before we’d effectively stopped speaking to each other, Sylvester used to devote a considerable amount of time to trying to convince me to move into the knowe in Shadowed Hills. He believed the place of the fae was—and is—in Faerie, and with most of deeper Faerie sealed at Oberon’s order, what we have left is the Summerlands, where the knowes are anchored.

You know what they don’t have in the Summerlands? Cable television. Until recently, they didn’t have Internet, either, and only had sporadic phone service. No take-out Indian food. It’s no wonder that when given the choice, most of the teenagers I’ve met have chosen to take up residence in one of my spare rooms.

He did have a point, though. The fae tend to thrive more in the Summerlands, purebloods especially, blossoming in the absence of the omnipresent iron that humans like to work into their designs. Even changelings need to spend a certain amount of time on the other side of the hills to maintain our equilibrium. We don’t getsick or anything if we spend too long in the human world—and that’s a good thing, given that I spent fourteen years as a koi fish in the Japanese Tea Gardens in Golden Gate Park—but we get... faded, in a way. We do better when we maintain a balance.

And none of that was enough to make me give up my home in San Francisco, the City by the Bay, land of mists and hills and twenty-four–hour convenience stores. I liked where I lived and I lived how I liked, and sometimes I still struggled a little with the fact that I’d started letting other people in, and that meant I needed to take them into account when making decisions.

It still would have been nice to be included enough to pack my own suitcase.

I sighed, rolling over and burying my face in my pillow. I was sulking. I knew that. I was wallowing in my own hurt feelings, and I needed to stop and get on with my night, especially if I was going to be leaving the Kingdom in the morning. Arden was one more name on the list of people who must have known my wedding date before I did, because there was no possible way for them to take me out of the Kingdom without telling the Queen I answered to.

My eyes snapped open as I rolled over again, pushing myself into a sitting position. Tybalt didn’t like Sylvester. May liked him maybe too much—she had all my memories of a childhood in which he had been the only reliable parental figure, the only person who would bandage my skinned knees without concerns that I might be bleeding on his clothes, the only adult who seemed to reliably give a damn about my survival. Luna and Melly and Lily had all done their best, but they had also held back a little, perhaps out of respect to my mother’s role as my actual mom, perhaps because they weren’t sure what to do with me. Sylvester, though... Sylvester had always been there. He had taken care of me when no one else would.

It was Sylvester who had offered me the Changeling’s Choice that brought me fully into Faerie, when my mother had been doing her best to turn me mortal and allow me to die in the course of a natural human lifespan. It was Sylvester who had dried my tears when I wept from missing my human father, who had told me he was sorry for the hurt, but that it was all right for me to miss him, to mourn the life I’d given away when I chose Faerie over the human world.

He hadn’t told me, not for years, that because he was the one who offered me the Choice, he would have been the one to snap my neck if I’d chosen to be human rather than fae. The purebloods try to be kind when they deal with changeling children, even if many of them view us as little better than beasts, but their kindness has limits.

Tybaltwouldn’thave told him. May might still have been too hurt to tell him. Simon would have to know—one more person for the list of people who’d been keeping secrets from me, which I hate, and who was going to have to make it up to me with apologies or cake or something else small but complicated—since he was legally my father and presumably had a part to play in the ceremony, but would Simon have called his brother?

I couldn’t call Sylvester. He was always going to be my liege, but at the moment I was still semi-exiled from the Duchy that had always been my home, so calling him for anything other than an emergency would have pushed the bounds of propriety. I fumbled for my phone and dialed the only other number I could think of, flopping back onto the bed as I pressed the phone to my ear.

The phone rang. And rang. And rang again, until I started to worry about going to voicemail. Naturally, that was when it clicked and a harried female voice with the faintest faded lilt of an Irish accent said, “Bridget Ames’ phone, Bess speaking, office hours endedhoursago, tell me why I’m not taking ten percent off your grade?”

I smiled to myself. “Hi, Bess. It’s Toby.”

Her tone shifted immediately, becoming warm with delight. “October! Is that daughter of mine bothering you again? She’s supposed to be in the kitchen, getting the dishes to order after our supper, but I wouldn’t put it past her to have run off to yours. She says you have faster Internet.”

“We don’t, really. April says Shadowed Hills is her masterwork, and we’re still on San Francisco’s municipal network. Chelsea just likes that we always have snacks.” And she likes spending time with the boys. Not many people her age at Shadowed Hills.

Bridget is human. She lives in the knowe because her husband, Etienne, isn’t. Neither is their daughter, Chelsea. Bridget didn’t know she was sleeping with a Tuatha de Dannan when she started her original affair with Etienne; considering she’s a folklore professor and still teaches at UC Berkeley despite living in theSummerlands, that’s probably a good thing. It would have been hard as hell for her as an academic to resist the urge to write research papers about her sex life.

The idea was amusing. I smiled again, closing my eyes. “Anyway, as far as I know, your teleporting troublemaker is still at home. The boys just got back from an errand, and Raj is off at the Court of Cats.”

“Having a quiet night in, then?”

“Yeah, just me. Your husband around? I have a question for him.” I could have asked Bridget, but I hadn’t known her for nearly as long, and no matter how she answered, it wasn’t going to irritate me as much as Etienne had the potential to do. I wasn’t looking to make myself angry. I was trying to triangulate how angry I should be. There’s a difference.

Honest, there’s a difference.

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