Page 71 of When Sorrows Come

“I’m here, love, I’m here.” She laughed, tears rolling down her cheeks. “I’m here with you, you foolish man.”

“Told me not...” He stopped, running out of breath, and just leaned.

“Yes, I told you not to hold the interrogations in the room where you spent so much of your time. I didn’t anticipate poison—I was hoping to keep the space from being tainted by association—but I was right all the same.” Maida didn’t let him go, not even as Quentin pulled away from her to keep himself from being crushed. He glanced to me as he did, something pleading in his eyes. I couldn’t tell whether he was begging me for rescue, or to understand why he didn’t want to be saved.

Eventually, he was going to have to decide where he wanted to be on his own, and I wasn’t going to begrudge him that decision. I also wasn’t here to come between him and his family.

“You stay here,” I said, focusing on Quentin. Then I glanced back to Fiac. “Are you free to come with me? I need someone to show me the way to the library.”

Fiac blinked. “The library?”

“You said the Librarian would know the exact terms of the kingdom’s founding paperwork. I need to get a look at that.”

Fiac frowned slowly, tilting his head. “You think you know something,” he said, sounding confused.

“I suspect I may have found the start of why this is happening,” I corrected. “I don’tknowanything, except that when I get that feeling that tells me something is important, it usually is. And I feel like the wording is important in this case.”

“We already know who’s doing this,” said Quentin sourly. “Shallcross.”

“Absalom Shallcross hasn’t been seen in years,” said Maida. “Not since the 1950s at least.”

Almost seventy years of silence from a human would have meant they were no longer a concern, and we could start looking for someone else. Seventy years of silence from a Daoine Sidhe King who’d lost his throne was the equivalent of a long napfollowed by a sulk in the corner of the playroom. They think in a different time scale than the rest of us do. Sometimes it’s possible for me to forget that, to pretend they have the same number of years to plot and plan and get things right and get things wrong as I do, and I guess they do, since I could have forever if I would just go ahead and get rid of the last traces of my mortality. But in the here and now, the chances that the original King Shallcross was still out there were pretty decent.

“And I’m pretty sure no one knew where the Luidaeg was when she left the East Coast, until she resurfaced in San Francisco,” I said. “Doesn’t mean she didn’t exist while she was out of sight, or that she wasn’t doing Luidaeg things.”

“Luidaeg things?” asked Aethlin, managing to sound weak and amused at the same time.

“You know, the things she does when no one’s keeping tabs on her. Brew horrifying potions. Harass the Selkies. Eat really weird ice cream with too many ingredients listed on the carton. Cookies and cream makes sense, sure, but cookies and cream and gummi bears and chocolate peanuts and Twizzlers and strawberries and marshmallow and M&M’s and graham crackers? There are limits to how far you can push things while still having them taste even halfway decent.”

Aethlin and Maida were both staring at me by the time I finished. Maida turned to Quentin, asking delicately, “Is shealwayslike this?”

“Pretty much,” said Quentin. “Sometimes she gets a little weird.” He shrugged broadly. Given that he had turned himself into a Banshee to be able to attend my wedding in his parents’ house without getting caught, and they seemed to decorate entirely in the kind of giant uncut crystals that belonged in a New Age catalog for really wealthy Wiccans, I wasn’t sure any of the three of them got to judge how weird I was or wasn’t.

But none of that was relevant. “So yeah, we know who’s behind all this, and we know it’s Shallcross,” I said. “What we don’t know is whether it’s the original model throwing a fit because he lost his throne and thinks he deserves a consolation kingdom, or a descendant.”

“Absalom and Vesper Shallcross never had children that I’m aware of,” said Fiac. “And while Absalom was seen after the fall of Ash and Oak, Vesper was not. Most have assumed her body liesin the harbor along with so many others.” He bowed his head, expression going solemn.

I wondered if the fae of Maples thought New York had fallen along with Ash and Oak. “If she died there, either she’s joined the night-haunts, or her body was buried by the humans who still live in Manhattan,” I said delicately. “And since there wasn’t a huge blow-up about aliens or fairies or whatever moving among the humans of New York, I’m going to say the night-haunts were able to come as normal.”

Quentin looked unfazed. Maida and Aethlin both looked nervous. Which made sense; they weren’t used to casual dismissal of the death of hundreds. Quentin, on the other hand, is basically immune to terror at this point.

“Fiac, my point stands,” I said. “I need to talk to your Librarian. Please.”

“The alchemist will remain here,” he said. It wasn’t a question.

I nodded. “The alchemist and the seer will both remain here.”

“The boy?”

I glanced at Quentin. “Will go where he chooses,” I said. Maida scowled, but didn’t argue. She knew she couldn’t, not without confirming aloud what Fiac already knew.

“Can you ask my guards to return if you see them?” asked Aethlin wearily. “Caitir is an excellent guardian, but she can’t do it alone.”

Caitir smiled wanly but didn’t say anything. That wasn’t unusual; neither was the fact that she’d been silent since we arrived. Candela are terse at best, and that’s usually in times of low stress. Seeing her liege assaulted had to be stressful for her.

“We will, Your Highness,” said Fiac, and offered a shallow bow.

“If Tybalt shows up looking for me, tell him we’ve gone to the Library,” I said.

---